Money Changes Everything

They were tired of being shut out, it was born out of frustration. You have a situation here in this city, right now, where upwards of 60% -almost 70%- of the population is Latino, overwhelmingly Mexican. [The Los Angeles County Museum of Art] derives 35% of its funds from coffers of a city which is 70% Latino and [Latinos] were being shut out of the Museum, they weren't being talked to, they were being stone-walled. "You don't exist, you're not artists, we're not talking to you, we're not hanging pictures of your culture on the wall, we're not doing shows by you."

--Cheech Marin

Los Angeles' art scene has come a long way from when 70s art collective ASCO had to spray paint the front wall of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in order to "show" there. Today that same museum is home to two well-regarded Chicano-themed exhibits, Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, and Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections from the Cheech Marin Collection.

See art from Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections from the Cheech Marin Collection

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1:51 PM ET | 06-30-2008 | permalink

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The Future Began Yesterday

First, a confession: I'm a Baby Boomer born in the mid-Fifties who came of age watching the "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" (albeit in black and white).

Now, a disclaimer: as my NPR colleague Sara Sarasohn puts it, "I was born here, so I don't have a California Dream!"

But I grabbed the opportunity to take a look the history of Watts for this series because I've long analyzed and investigated what happened to my home state between 1954 and 1970. I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area so the magical realm of Disney and Disneyland seemed like a foreign country to me. By age ten, I was aware of the civil rights struggle and the campus unrest at nearby UC Berkeley. The Black Panthers had a stronghold near my junior high school in Richmond, California. I was too young to have a ringside seat for Watts, the Summer of Love, Altamont, and the rise of Ronald Reagan, but I knew that the California ground was shaking in more ways than one.

History's first draft take on Watts read a little differently back then:

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11:32 AM ET | 06-30-2008 | permalink

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The Most Dangerous Game

This week, OPEC's president said oil prices could easily rise to $150-to-$170 a barrel in the next few months. Because of that comment, oil futures went crazy, hitting a new record of $142 dollars a barrel.

According to the Los Angeles Times' Steve Hymon, the cost of gas isn't the only thing pushing record. In the spirit of the Seinfeld episode, The Dealership, where Kramer gets a rush from driving a car while the gas gauge is on empty, Southern California motorists are ignoring that pesky gas light and experiencing the thrill of driving on fumes. As every high comes with a low, though, AAA claims that they've seen a 7% increase in calls from motorists who have run out of gas in SoCal over last summer.

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12:48 PM ET | 06-27-2008 | permalink

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Count the Priuses

My son Jackson just turned 10. For about a year now, we've been playing a game, mostly of his design, while riding in the car. We count Priuses. That's, of course, the Toyota hybrid that's become enormously popular in our Los Angeles neighborhood. According to Wired Magazine, hybrid sales were up 38% last year, and Toyota can't make enough cars to meet demand. All the same, hybrids still only account for 2.3% of the market. Counting them on the roads is still child's-play.

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12:00 PM ET | 06-27-2008 | permalink

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My Father's California Gold

LONDON - APRIL 26: A Gold Disc belonging to Stevie Nicks is displayed at Christies before auction on April 26, 2007 in London, England.

Photo by Stuart Wilson/Getty Images

Reading about Shereen and Madeleine's trip to the pawnshop reminded me that gold had something to do with getting me to California--gold records, that is.

Though I like to consider myself a California girl, the truth of the matter is I was born in Manhattan. When I was about 8 months old, my parents took me on a trip to the beach in Key Biscayne, FL. As my mom recalls it, "we were sitting on the beach and I was watching you play. I realized that it was winter and I didn't have to stuff you into a snowsuit and then into an elevator and down to the street where you'd be eye-to-eye with the winos along Broadway & 72nd street. The realization that there were places that didn't have winter or elevators became really appealing."

As luck would have it, there was a job for my Dad at A & M records in Hollywood. Thinking that the warmer weather and safer environments of southern California would be a better place to raise me, my parents packed up all their stuff (including several cats and a St. Bernard) and headed west.

Some of my earliest memories are going to the office with my Dad and all of the crazy folks he worked with in the record industry. My dad did A&R and he fared pretty well at it. Over the years he amassed quite a collection of RIAA Gold Records.

I think my personal favorite was Styx's Return to Paradise... "Come sail away! Come sail away! Come sail away with meeeeeeeeeeee!" (Remember folks, this WAS the 1970s!) But mostly I just loved the way those records looked.

But eventually Dad grew weary of the record business--and of the gold records, too. One weekend we had a garage sale and he sold them to a guy who owned a record store in the San Fernando Valley. A collectible gold record can fetch over a $1000 today, but my father's all went for just a few hundred bucks.

To this day, I just wish I had been old enough to convince them to hold on to the gold records. Not to sell; I would have gladly hung them in my house.

--Alex Cohen

10:38 AM ET | 06-27-2008 | permalink

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The Economics of Hairlessness

The first ten pages of L.A. Weekly provide an excellent crash course in the economics of the California Dream. Page after page of the free alternative news weekly are generally crowded with images of nearly naked people promoting cosmetic and laser procedures. Although we may be too broke to buy a real newspaper, advertisers are still willing to bank on the fact that we can dish out a few thousand dollars for age-defying beautification.

With the price of a tank of gas reaching toward (half) a laser dermabrasion procedure, however, I wondered -- are beauty budgets shrinking? And if the plastic surgery heartland - four of America's "10 vainest cities" are in California - starts letting itself go, will the epidermises, tummies and chins of the rest of country follow?

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5:41 PM ET | 06-26-2008 | permalink

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Youtubing the CA Dream

When NPR interns aren't scouring the internets, airwaves, cable channels and print headlines for news of the day and important cultural developments, they're scouring the internets, airwaves, cable channels and print headlines for kicks and LOLCATS. We sent NPR intern Sarah Whites-Koditschek to the intern's natural habitat (Youtube) in order to find us images of the California Dream, and this is what she brought back.

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1:21 PM ET | 06-25-2008 | permalink

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The Serbian Taxi... of Gold!

Photo by Madeleine Brand, NPR

I don't think he'd be offended if I told you that my husband is a weirdo. Ok, maybe that's a bit strong. He's an iconoclast.

When we first moved out to LA from New York, he wanted to live in a shipping container. I thought maybe it would be a bit cramped. A bit freezing/boiling in the winter/summer. I was pregnant at the time, and not into experimental nesting. Of course, within a year, it would be uber-hip to have your home made out of shipping containers from here to China.

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11:59 AM ET | 06-25-2008 | permalink

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Sharon Rosen Leib's California Dream

Over the last several weeks, we've asked Day to Day listeners to share their vision of the California Dream. Fame, health, satisfaction, blue sky or innovation--what defines your California Dream? Is the economy forcing that dream to change?

We'll be sharing your responses both on-air and here on Daydreaming. In this installment, Sharon Rosen Leib dreams of a California where hot pink cactus flowers bloom on Joshua Tree's harsh desert floor, where the morning mist in Ojai carries the sweet scent of orange blossoms, and where the whisper of a San Francisco Indian summer wind warms the skin.

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6:42 PM ET | 06-24-2008 | permalink

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Kim Alexander's California Dream

Over the last several weeks, we've asked Day to Day listeners to share their California Dream with us. Fame, health, satisfaction, blue sky or innovation -- what defines your version of the California Dream? Is the economy forcing that dream to change? Every Tuesday we'll be sharing your responses both on-air and here on Daydreaming. In this installment, Kim Alexander writes in to say: My California dream is freedom.

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12:43 PM ET | 06-24-2008 | permalink

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Jay Castillo's California Dream

Over the last several weeks, we've asked Day to Day listeners to share their California Dream with us. Fame, health, satisfaction, blue sky or innovation -- what defines your version of the California Dream? Is the economy forcing that dream to change? Every Tuesday we'll be sharing your responses both on-air and here on Daydreaming. First up, listener Jay Castillo: Me and my wife are first generation immigrants from the Philippines who came to the US back in 1982.

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12:32 PM ET | 06-24-2008 | permalink

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Shereen's Sparkly Gold

A Day to Day reenactment

Nihar Patel, NPR

I'm Shereen Meraji and I'm producing our California Dreaming series. In case you were wondering, when you're a radio producer you do just about everything: find stories, research, interview lots of people who never make it into the actual stories you found, drive, take dictation, edit audio, bring the hosts coffee and light reading.

(All of that is true, except for the coffee part. GET YOUR OWN COFFEE, MADELEINE!)

A bit about me. I'm a California native: born in Fresno, raised in Sacramento, educated in San Francisco and I live in Los Angeles. I've been with Day to Day from the beginning, the very first broadcast from right here in our Culver City studios.

Madeleine already told you why we chose California as a backdrop for this series and now you know why I'm the producer. "From Oakland to Sactown / the Bay Area and backdown / Cali's where I put my MACK down / GIVE ME LOVE!" (An NPR car window sticker goes to the first reader to tell me where that's from, no googling.)

Now let's talk gold.

All that glitters

Shereen Meraji, NPR

I think it's pretty obvious why we decided to go with gold for our first story. The Golden State has been Cali's official nickname since 1968, gold was discovered here more than a century before that, and the golden poppy is our state flower. On a personal note, because I'm half Puerto Rican and half Iranian, it's in my genetic make-up to buy lots of tacky gold accessories-- thanks mom and dad. So gold is something very close to my heart.

Research for this story started in my cubicle. We knew that gold prices were high...about 900 an ounce (depending on the day), and I had heard that people were starting to throw "gold parties." Gold parties are like old fashioned Tupperware parties where a host invites all their friends over and tells them to bring their unwanted gold to sell. A gold dealer comes to test and weigh the jewelry and everyone chomps on cheese and crackers (or carrot sticks and ranch?) while they wait to see how much their gold is worth, cash on the spot.

People are cash strapped right now in the Golden State because of gas prices, rising mortgages and high unemployment, so I set out to find a gold party. On my quest, which involved cold calling people from my cubicle, I came across Joseph Shamir, the gold buyer profiled in our story.

Linda Gray

Shereen Meraji, NPR

Joe didn't have a gold party scheduled in time for our broadcast, but he had an incredible story -- he was in the real estate loan business and when his business collapsed late last year, he was desperate for money. Joe sold more than $40,000 of his wife's jewelry and in the process realized that real estate was the wrong business. Now he owns a tiny shop called "Joe's Gold and Silver," where he buys peoples gold, silver and platinum and sells it for scrap.

And then Madeleine suggested pawn shops. (Thanks a lot, Madeleine!) I was hung up on more than a dozen times while trying to find a pawn shop owner willing to talk to me. I was even accused of being a telemarketer, and was hung up on.

I finally found a shop in Riverside, California, where the owner graciously gave us a tour and let us talk with his customers.

We met Linda Gray.

Day to Day's Kiss Army

Shereen Meraji, NPR

Linda was paying the interest on the gold jewelry her mom pawned to pay her Adjustable Rate Mortgage, which jumped from $1500 to $2400 dollars. She told us that she had pawned the gold necklace she was wearing a few times, to pay some of her own bills.

In the end, Madeleine and I agreed that the best thing about the pawn shop was the complete set of collector's edition KISS dolls on sale. I know they have nothing to do with gold, but they were priceless!

--Shereen Meraji

1:52 PM ET | 06-23-2008 | permalink

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Welcome to Daydreaming

Awesome!

Welcome to Daydreaming, the companion blog to our radio series, "California Dreamin'." It's where you and I can talk about our California dreams, and how they're being affected by this crazy economy.

Why are we doing this radio series? Here's a little peek behind the NPR curtain. One day in an editorial meeting we were brainstorming about how to cover the economic trouble people are in, and someone wondered aloud, "How is this going to affect people in the long term; how will it mess with their American Dream?"

"What if we narrowed it to California?" I suggested. After all, this state more than any other is a repository for people's dreams, even if all they know about California is that Jeff Spicoli went to high school here.

And then we noted practically that a) it was summer and the news is usually sparse, so a series would be good to rely on and b) NPR has also been affected by the economy and has no money to send to us on fancy remotes like the ones I took last summer here and here.

So my first story is based in more humble environs. Riverside, California, home to one of the nation's highest foreclosure rates.

We hope you dig the series and weigh in here at the blog about the status of your California dream. Remember, your California Dream doesn't have to be based in California.

--Madeleine Brand

9:35 AM ET | 06-23-2008 | permalink

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Daydreaming FAQ

Everything you ever wanted to know about Daydreaming, but were afraid to ask.

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8:10 AM ET | 06-23-2008 | permalink

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Discussion Guidelines

Every website has its own rules, and these are ours. If you break these rules, please don't be surprised if we block your comments.

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4:54 AM ET | 06-23-2008 | permalink

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