Encina High School Stars

Charles Stone Warner '64, renowned high school art teacher

Richard Montoya, co-founder of the satirical theater troupe Culture Clash, has gone deep into film noir with two long-in-development yet timely films. Both are showing soon in his hometown.

Montoya’s film-directing debut, “Water & Power,” will screen Wednesday at the Tower Theatre. The film follows two East Los Angeles brothers – one a cop, one a state senator, nicknamed Power and Water by their utilities-department worker father – who have been corrupted by power and are experiencing a dark night of the soul in a run-down motel.

The Tower screening, which Montoya will attend, is sold out. But “Water & Power,” based on a 2006 play that debuted at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum, is available for streaming on Netflix and Amazon.

Montoya also co-wrote “The Other Barrio,” directed by Dante Betteo and based on a 2005 short story by San Francisco poet laureate Alejandro Murguía.

Montoya, son of the late poet and activist José Montoya, left Sacramento as a young man. His current films reflect his history-hungry dives into the cities to which he relocated – San Francisco, where he helped start Culture Clash in 1984, and L.A., home since the early 1990s.

When he first moved to L.A., “I was just fascinated with all the James Ellroy novels and Raymond Chandler novels,” Montoya said by phone. “I liked opening a book and then going and finding that hotel in Echo Park (from a book), or that seedy Hollywood hotel on the eastern edge of Sunset Boulevard. I just drenched myself in that sort of cinematic lore. Then I ended up moving right next to the apartment house where the girl gets killed in ‘Chinatown.’”

That building was in Angelino Heights, near Dodger Stadium. Much of “Water,” filmed over 12 nights, was shot in a real-life motel close to both landmarks.

It’s where Los Angeles police officer Power (Nicholas Gonzalez) holes up, snorting cocaine and waiting for the blowback from a murder he has just committed. Water (Enrique Murciano), the senator, tries to assist his brother. As the film unfolds, various misdeeds by both come to light.

Newbie film director Montoya said he felt “glee” at trying a new medium. But directing for the screen required adjustment.

“Luis Valdez said it long ago: The beauty and the frustration of theater is it is one permanent long shot,” Montoya said. “You never get up close in someone’s eyes. And that kind of blew me away (while shooting) a close-up. That was all new storytelling for me, and I had to figure it out on a very fast learning curve.”

The play sprang from Montoya’s interest in the 1990s LAPD Rampart scandal and from being “drunk in love with the first (L.A.) Chicano mayor in 100 years, Antonio Villaraigosa,” Montoya said. Montoya also took inspiration from a wall at his favorite Sacramento haunt, Simon’s on 16th Street.

“Water” is “a hard look at corruption and power,” Montoya said. “And a lot of it goes back to Simon’s bar with all the pictures of the politicos – of which ones made it, and which ones didn’t.”

The film arrives amid high-profile corruption scandals involving Latino lawmakers, including recently indicted U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and, closer to the world of “Water,” Southern California’s Calderon brothers.

“The idea of power is relatively new” to Southern California Latinos, Montoya said. “True, elected power. We haven’t had it for more than 75 years. … As a result, there are slip-ups all over the place.”

“Barrio” seems of the moment as well. “It is based on the rise of rents in San Francisco, and how pertinent is that now?” Montoya asked.

Murguía has said he based his story on lore surrounding the 1975 Gartland Hotel fire, which many believe to be an inside job meant to oust tenants.

In January, fire tore through a Mission District building holding apartments and businesses. One man died and more than 40 people were displaced. Arson is not suspected in that fire, authorities said. But the fire intensified the spotlight on skyrocketing rents in the Mission, where Google buses now seem to outnumber murals and where tenants in rent-controlled buildings like the one that burned hold little chance of finding similar arrangements.

Montoya said the “cultural tourism” at work in the Mission also has occurred in Los Angeles neighborhoods such as Echo Park.

“It is a desirable area that has the charm and flavor but none of the people in it who actually created the area,” he said.
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Frenchman, American win Nobel for quantum physics

By KARL RITTER and LOUISE NORDSTROM
Associated Press

STOCKHOLM -- A French-American duo shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for inventing methods to observe the bizarre properties of the quantum world, research that has led to the construction of extremely precise clocks and helped scientists take the first steps toward building superfast computers.

Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland, who grew up in Sacramento and graduated from Encina High School, opened the door to new experiments in quantum physics by showing how to observe individual quantum particles while preserving their quantum properties.

Wineland received a bachelor of science in physics from University of California, Berkeley,

A quantum particle is one that is isolated from everything else. In this situation, an atom or electron or photon takes on strange properties. It can be in two places at once, for example. It behaves in some ways like a wave. But these properties are instantly changed when it interacts with something else, such as when somebody observes it.

Working separately, the two scientists, both 68, developed "ingenious laboratory methods" that allowed them to manage and measure and control fragile quantum states, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

"Their ground-breaking methods have enabled this field of research to take the very first steps towards building a new type of superfast computer based on quantum physics," the academy said. "The research has also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time."

Haroche is a professor at the College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Wineland is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.

The two researchers use opposite approaches to examine, control and count quantum particles, the academy said.

Wineland traps ions - electrically charged atoms - and measures them with light, while Haroche controls and measures photons, or light particles.

Haroche said he was out walking with his wife when he got the call from the Nobel judges.

"I was in the street and passing a bench so I was able to sit down," Haroche told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone. "It's very overwhelming."

He said his work in the realm of quantum physics could ultimately lead to unimaginably fast computers.

"You can do things which are prohibited by the laws of classical physics," he told The Associated Press.

Haroche also said quantum research could help make GPS navigating systems more accurate.

NIST spokesman Jim Burrus said Wineland was asleep at home in Boulder when the call came in early Tuesday notifying him that he won; his wife answered the phone.

Burrus said Wineland described the news as overwhelming and wonderful.

He described Wineland as a humble person who never expected to win prizes. He also doesn't take himself very seriously: Wineland once played first base on a NIST softball team called "Field of Dweebs."

Christopher Monroe, who does similar work at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, said the awarding of the prize to the two men "is not a big surprise to me ... It was sort of obvious that they were a package."

Monroe said that thanks to the bizarre properties of the quantum world, when he and Wineland worked together in the 1990s, they were able to put a single atom in two places simultaneously.

At that time, it wasn't clear that trapping single atoms could help pave the way to superfast quantum computers, he said. That whole field "just fell into our laps,'" Monroe said.

In an ordinary computer, information is represented in bits, each of which is either a zero or a one. But in a quantum computer, an individual particle can essentially represent a zero and a one at the same time. If scientists can make such particles work together, certain kinds of calculations could be done with blazing speed.

One example is the factoring, the process of discovering what numbers can be multiplied together to produce a given number. That has implications for breaking codes, Monroe said.

Quantum computers could radically change people's lives in the way that classical computers did last century, but a full-scale quantum computer is still decades away, the Nobel judges said.

"The calculations would be incredibly much faster and exact and you would be able to use it for areas like metrology and for measuring the climate of the earth," said Lars Bergstrom, the secretary of the prize committee.

The physics prize was the second of the 2012 Nobel Prizes to be announced, with the medicine award going Monday to stem cell pioneers John Gurdon of Britain and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka. Each award is worth 8 million kronor, or about $1.2 million.

Only two women have won the physics prize since it was first awarded in 1901: Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963.

The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Stars of San Juan to be inducted into school district's Hall of Fame

Timothy B. Schmit stared intently through colored glasses as he watched students sing Thursday.

Most of the kids in the music class at Encina High School had never heard of Schmit – who has sold out stadiums during his career with Poco and then the Eagles – until their teacher filled them in recently.

The 1965 Encina graduate told the students about his first performance in the school cafeteria during the prom. He told them how he started a band called the Contenders with three of his classmates, earned a record contract and eventually joined one of the most successful rock bands in the country.

"I owe a lot to this community and school," Schmit told The Bee after meeting with students. "This is where I started."

Schmit is one of four celebrities who will be inducted tonight into San Juan Unified's Science, Technology, Art and Reading Hall of Fame. Journalist Joan Lunden (born Joan Blunden), a Bella Vista High graduate; Olympic swimmer Debbie Meyer, a Rio Americano High graduate and local resident; and Hollywood car customizerGeorge Barris, a San Juan High graduate, also will be honored.

The money from the event will benefit the San Juan Education Foundation, which helps fund school programs.

The annual event, in its fifth year, typically generates $30,000 to $40,000 for the foundation, said Pamela Lapinski, executive director.

"The nice thing about it is it's an opportunity to let our students know how successful others have been, going through the school system, and what they can aspire to," Lapinski said.

Barris and Schmit came to town a few days early to share their experiences with students from their alma maters.

Barris is expected to tour the new shop facility today at San Juan High and speak about his career as Hollywood's "King of Kustomizers." Barris is best known for creating the Bat Mobile, Munster Koach and other custom cars for movies.

He has challenged the students to take part in a contest to design a car, Lapinski said.

Schmit wasn't in any hurry to leave Encina High after talking to students Thursday. He passed out guitar picks, signed a guitar held out by a gray-haired man and reminisced about his days in Sacramento.

"It's kind of eerie in a way," he said, as walked the halls of the school after talking to students. "It's a lot more boarded up."

The guitarist remembers when the halls weren't lined with chain-link fences, a time when he played "surfing" music with his friends.

Schmit's family settled in Sacramento after years of traveling from town to town in a 28-foot trailer, following his father's band – the Tune Mixers – on the club circuit. He was 10.

He considers Sacramento home.

"My mother lives five minutes from here," he said.

The lifelong musician said he's lucky to have been able to make a living doing what he loves. He encouraged the Encina music students to keep performing, saying: "Keep it an enjoyment thing. Keep it fun."