Serving inconsistencies present issues early in men’s volleyball season

The Bruins have let it rip from the service line this season, but it has come with a cost.

No. 6 UCLA men’s volleyball (4-1) has struggled from the service line to begin the 2019 season. Despite posting a number of wins early in the schedule, service errors continue to appear in the box score.

The Bruins have logged 112 service errors through the first five games of the season. Coach John Speraw said after the game against McKendree, the frequency of the errors is something that needs to be worked on.

“It concerns me,” Speraw said. “We’re going to have to think about how we prioritize the time in the practice environment. We’re going to have to take a closer look at some of our fundamentals and really get better at (serves).”

UCLA posted a season-high 30 service errors against unranked UC San Diego, along with 29 against unranked McKendree on its road trip to the Midwest. The Bruins recorded a similar number against McKendree last season with 27.

Speraw said given the strengths of the lineup, serving should be a strength, but inconsistency has limited the Bruins’ ability to challenge opponents.

“The interesting thing is that it should be a great strength of ours as we have a number of guys that can really hit it hard,” Speraw said. “But we’re just not hitting it in the court, and then that’ll affect some of our confidence in letting it rip, so then we’re not putting as much pressure on our opponents as we have the potential to do.”

However, the Bruins have seen this issue before.

Through the same amount of games last season, the Bruins recorded 102 service errors, but had 42 service aces, seven more than the 35 posted so far this season. UCLA finished last season with 653 service errors – averaging more than 19 per match – compared to its opponents’ 483.

Redshirt junior opposite Brandon Rattray said building confidence will continue to improve serving numbers.

“(Serving) comes with confidence,” Rattray said. “It’s something we just have got to keep working on. We just have to keep knowing we’ve got to bring the service heat. We do need to keep working on our serves, as that will be huge for us going forward, getting our serves inbound at a high percentage with good velocity to keep teams out of system.”

The Bruins finished last season with 212 services aces, more than twice as many as their opponents’ 104. Junior middle blocker Daenan Gyimah said UCLA will continue to focus its serving around power.

“We just have embraced our service errors and just kept on ripping from the backline tonight,” Gyimah said. “We’re going to have a lot of errors but they’re not going to have good passes a lot of the time. Those errors will come down as the season progresses, but for now, it’s tough.”

The Bruins will face No. 12 UC Santa Barbara and No. 1 Long Beach State on Wednesday and Saturday, respectively.

Budding Los Angeles: The Cure Company’s tailored cultivation of cannabis sprouts top-shelf strains

Thirty years ago, buying cannabis was difficult, expensive and illegal. Buying cannabis in 2019 is somewhere between picking up a prescription from a pharmacy and buying beer from a liquor store. Join columnist John Tudhope each week as he visits cannabis companies in Los Angeles and discusses the budding industry.

The first time I saw a cannabis plant was at my grandma’s house in my early teens. It was lanky, hidden away and surprisingly harmless for all I’d heard about its dangers – this was the literal embodiment of “homegrown” cannabis.

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit The Cure Company’s 30,000 square foot industrial cultivation facility near Boyle Heights housing thousands of plants, and see the most technical form that cannabis production can take.

Cultivation operations are subject to some of the most stringent regulations in the legal cannabis industry. Growers must only use approved chemicals, implement a comprehensive “seed-to-sale” inventory system and are subject to extreme taxes. In spite – or maybe because of – this bureaucratic spider web, these businesses are able to produce the highest quality cannabis on a massive scale.

While rural Humboldt County in Northern California is still a cultivation hub, as seen in Netflix’s new docuseries “Murder Mountain,” legal grow operations are moving indoors and popping up throughout the state. “Ocean grown” cannabis strains once thrived in the ocean’s morning dew, but now growers make the world’s best OGs, which are widely considered to be strong cannabis strains, by crafting an indoor environment that can replicate the seaside conditions flawlessly.

The Cure Company is an uncommon business in LA because it is one of few companies permitted to cultivate, process and sell directly to consumers, especially in one facility.

Their enormous headquarters, a few miles east of Downtown LA, has eight grow rooms, each housing 400 to 600 plants, producing cannabis on a massive scale. They represent the future of recreational cannabis, which will be, like it or not, mass-produced.

I was permitted rare access to the entirety of their facility, and observed what goes into producing cannabis on a commercial level. While most people don’t see cannabis as much more than dried green leaves in a baggie or canister, this tour gave me an in-depth look at the transformation of an unassuming shrub into a consumable product that people have fought for decades to consume, buy and sell legally.

The plants begin life as seeds or are rooted from a cutting taken from a mature plant. Seedlings at The Cure Company begin their life in a nursery housed in one of the eight grow rooms. The plants are moved into other grow rooms as they reach maturity so that the environment and nutrients can be tailored to the specific needs of each cannabis variety.

I walked from room to room with master grower Joe Bermejo, and as I stepped into the fluorescent blue and dim orange grow rooms, each space had a distinct and pungent aroma. The first grow room we entered had a wooden, earthy scent, while another smelled particularly sweet. Bermejo said the terpenes, compounds in each cannabis strain, are responsible for giving the plants a distinctive smell, though each strain has a wildly different odor profile.

As Bermejo spoke about the properties of the plants under his care, he reminded me most of a sommelier, both in a scientific and imaginative way. He brought the cannabis to his nose in the same way a seasoned wine drinker would, inhaled deeply and analyzed the sweet scent or the skunky odor.

As we walked through the facility, I saw employees pruning plants for harvest, sifting through piles of dried cannabis and interacting with customers in the company store. The retail space had a variety of in-house products alongside cannabis from the company’s competitors. Gloria Chavez, an administrator at The Cure Company, says that while companies compete at the cultivation level, they must carry the range of products that consumers are looking for in order to succeed in retail.

Throughout the tour, it was obvious that both Chavez and Bermejo were extremely proud of the cultivation system set up at The Cure Company, as well as the full legal compliance of each and every minute detail of their operation. Coming from an industry that has been largely illegal, unregulated and underground, it seemed to me that The Cure Company was particularly fond of representing a new type of fully compliant and technically advanced cannabis business.

Now, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t given an opportunity to try the product, and I would be lying if I didn’t say it was of the highest quality. Chavez mentioned that their cannabis is testing at 34 percent THC levels, which is unprecedented for a high-THC cannabis strain. The atmosphere of this operation was professional, industrial and nothing like the hippies that grew your uncle’s weed.

California lawyer hopefuls disadvantaged by unnecessarily high cut score

The bar is set too high for law students trying to pass the California bar exam. And the reasons are bafflingly pointless.

In order to be a practicing lawyer in California, one must pass the bar exam, a multiday test consisting of multiple choice and essay questions, to be licensed by the state. Students typically take the bar exam upon graduating law school, often with job offers from law firms in hand, expecting to pass and become newly minted lawyers.

Those expectations are cut short by the staggeringly low pass rate of the California bar exam.

The score required to pass the bar – called the cut score – determines whether a student can start their law career, and varies from state to state. California imposes a stricter cut score than any other state except Delaware, requiring a score of 1,440 out of 2,000, while most states’ average around 1,350. Put differently, nearly six out of 10 prospective lawyers failed the July California bar exam, resulting in a pass rate of 40.7 percent – a 67-year low for the summer test in California. Just five months before, the pass rate hit an all-time low of 27.3 percent.

There are serious consequences to this. As Raquel Aldana, associate vice chancellor for academic diversity at UC Davis, wrote in an article on the campus’ Equity and Inclusion site, when would-be lawyers fail the California bar exam, their lives are upset and many lose their jobs or have to delay their legal professional lives.

Following the July exam, deans from 19 out of California’s 20 American Bar Association-accredited law schools pleaded for the State Bar of California to lower the cut score. And this isn’t the first time deans and law students have complained.

These concerns have often gone ignored, with the state bar insisting on maintaining the exclusivity of being a lawyer in California.

But lowering the cut score would not be making the test any easier for students – it would simply make it reasonable. California students on average tend to do better on the exam than students in other states. Besides, most students who fail the first time simply take the exam again, meaning the tight threshold does nothing but force those who do not meet the cutoff to spend exorbitant amounts of money until they do.

Making students jump through hoops does not evaluate their ability to practice law. And the current cut score does not produce better lawyers but excludes perfectly capable ones.

In response, the California State Bar launched four investigations into the exam, reaching conclusions that make little sense and seem to allow it to avoid making changes to the status quo. The state bar found law schools were admitting students with lower LSAT scores and lower GPAs, possibly explaining the subsequently lower scores on the bar exam and the decline in pass rates.

But as Jennifer Mnookin, the dean of the UCLA School of Law, wrote in a UCLA Newsroom opinion piece, this finding can only explain a fraction of the problem – which isn’t unique to California – and does not explain the state’s abnormally low pass rate and the state bar’s insistence on keeping the threshold out of reach. The state bar has concluded that further studies are necessary before any changes can be made.

It might seem that there are too many lawyers in California and keeping the bar exam pass rate low is an effort to ensure that only the best of the best make it into the field. But the bar exam does not even weed out bad lawyers effectively, Aldana writes.

For example, in New York, where there are 177,035 practicing lawyers – outnumbering California’s 170,044 – the pass rate was 63 percent in July, much higher than California’s 40.7 percent at the time.

“This result might make sense if the California bar exam actually did a good job of excluding incompetent lawyers from the profession,” Aldana wrote. “Unfortunately, especially in California, the bar exam largely fails in this important task.”

Moreover, if California had a cut score of 1,350, which is comparable to that of other states, it would have nearly double the number of African-American lawyers – in a field desperately seeking diversity. Keeping the cut score arbitrarily high does not serve anyone, especially when the same people failing the exam in California would be deemed competent lawyers by any other state.

Tests themselves are shaky measures of future career performance. Law school alone is an undertaking. If students can graduate from it and perform well enough on the exam to be considered a lawyer in any other state, there is no reason California test-takers should be penalized.

The Golden State’s cut score is pushing out graduates who would make perfectly capable lawyers. And prolonging students’ entry into the workforce while they wait to retake the exam does little, if anything, to produce better lawyers.

Until that changes, students planning on taking the bar exam will be better off planning their argument with the state bar instead.

Public transportation in for a bumpy ride, needs to adapt to modern needs

Public transportation’s days are numbered.

The Los Angeles International Airport announced last week it would reduce hours for its FlyAway bus services in Westwood due to low ridership numbers. But all signs of blame point to the service itself. The FlyAway service has hourly rides from Westwood to LAX with set locations for riders to get picked up and dropped off.

A great number of UCLA students choose to call on ride-hailing services, such as Uber or Lyft, to get to LAX when traveling home for the holidays, largely due to a lack of clarity about how the FlyAway service works and the inconveniences that come with using it. Although the FlyAway shuttle boasts an enticing price, students find the complicated nature of the times and places to be too confusing, and are discouraged by the prospect of having to carry their luggage to specified locations to use the service. The added headaches that come with public transportation make the convenience of ride-hailing and ride-sharing services extremely attractive, which many justify despite the added cost.

Ride-sharing services’ willingness to adapt to suit the needs of consumers will always prevail in the long term. LAX and other city wings that provide public transport need to work harder to spread knowledge and information about their services, as well as compete with ride-hailing companies in the categories of convenience and pricing to avoid growing obsolete among younger Angelenos. Students in college towns like Westwood are more likely to use alternative methods to get around, and public transportation needs to be shown as a worthwhile option.

Students have positively voiced their preference for ride-hailing apps over public transportation because everything is confined to an app. All the information about the driver, the route and the estimated time of arrival is clearly indicated. Nothing about the experience is left up to question. Most city- or state-provided bus service apps, however, are painfully outdated and don’t have the live route-tracking that ride-hailing apps use, making people unfamiliar with the area unsure of where to get off.

Allen Wang, a first-year electrical engineering student, flew home for winter break and said the FlyAway bus service was too confusing to figure out.

“I considered taking the FlyAway bus, but I was pressed for time, and it looked complicated to figure out the timing of the pickup, so I just called a Lyft,” Wang said.

Uber and Lyft both hold top-ten spots in CNBC’s 2018 Disruptor 50, an annual list highlighting private companies that disrupt and transform traditional industries for interfering with public transportation. Both companies have seen steady growth in ridership while also directly competing with each other for market shares, but the healthy competition has only benefited them by increasing their brand awareness and availability throughout the country.

For example, Archi Bhattacharyaa, a first-year physics student, said he prefers the convenience of being dropped off exactly where he needs to be.

“For places like Santa Monica, which are offered on the BruinBus routes, I’d take the bus, but if it’s some place more specific, then an Uber is more convenient for me,” Bhattacharyaa said.

People are constantly on the move and don’t have the time to navigate convoluted bus schedules and times. LAX had to reduce the hours of its FlyAway bus services because people didn’t know how to access it. A better understanding of how the system works could prevent any further cutbacks.

A significantly discounted price can’t be public transportation’s only claim to fame anymore – it needs to coexist alongside adaptations and improvements that fit consumer needs. If services like the FlyAway bus want to continue operating, they need to take consumer concerns into account by providing clear information, better advertisement and more convenient stops.

For example, UCLA’s BruinBus transit service has shown fight in light of the rising competition from ride-hailing services, adding new routes and stops in 2018 in response to consumer demands and complaints. This kind of attitude toward fulfilling consumer needs will keep public transportation services alive and useful to consumers – accommodating them rather than remaining stagnant and wondering why ridership numbers are so low. City services like the FlyAway bus should tap into the reach universities like UCLA have and make students aware of – and interested in – the more affordable services available to them.

Some might say public transportation is on its way out and trying to improve it isn’t necessary, but many students still use it as their way of getting around. It’s a very affordable option and is increasingly reliable in traffic-laden Los Angeles. City officials should work to improve the messaging surrounding these services so students don’t feel they have to sacrifice a quality experience just to save a few dollars. There’s room for both ride-hailing and public transportation services to exist, and both should be dedicated to providing consumers with the best experience possible.

But every day that passes by is another win for ride-hailing services and another day closer to bringing out the casket for public transportation.

Festival showcases klezmer to restore interest in Yiddish culture

Klezmer originated in Eastern Europe but finds its future in a new generation of American Jewish youth.

UClezLA, which took place Sunday at Schoenberg Hall, is a Yiddish culture festival which included workshops on klezmer, a musical genre containing Jewish influences and a mixture of sounds from Romani music and Polish folk music. When translated from its Hebraic roots, “klezmer” means “instruments of melody,” and the style goes back to 16th century Eastern Europe. Miri Koral, a lecturer of Yiddish language and culture at UCLA, said the festival worked toward a revival of public knowledge of Yiddish language and the art of klezmer.

“(Klezmer) was extremely popular in Europe. It was very popular here in America, but not so much today, because music is a fad in a way,” Koral said. “Young people don’t know enough about it; they don’t know enough about pursuing it. So, it is always a struggle to keep everything except what’s on the radio in the public eye.”

Teaching students and the public to play klezmer at UClezLA helped to revive the once-fading genre and give the public insight into how this music was used in daily prayers, holidays and other songs in Jewish culture, Koral said.

Hankus Netsky, co-chair of contemporary improvisation at the New England Conservatory in Boston, led one of the workshops on the roots of klezmer at the event. Netsky said teaching music today is usually just done by looking at notes on a paper, but he and the other workshop leaders teach klezmer by starting off with singing and then transferring those same qualities to the instruments. Koral said klezmer instruments – such as the clarinet and the fiddle – are played in ways that resemble the human singing voice by mimicking the ululation in Jewish songs.

Learning about klezmer took a lot of effort in the past because there was no access to it online and in recordings, Netsky said, and he wants to be a resource so younger people can learn about their cultural past. Netsky said he incorporates Jewish cultural background into his teachings of klezmer to aid musicians in connecting with the songs they perform.

“We’re bringing it back, and we’re saying there’s an entire world here that we didn’t learn about when we were really young but that we’re making available for a new generation,” Netsky said. “We want them to take away consciousness about this culture, and how they can have access to it.”

Klezmer offers a connection to a past Yiddish-speaking civilization that survives in part through music, said Peter Rushefsky, executive director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York City. Rushefsky said by leading a workshop teaching people to play instrumental klezmer at UClezLA, he hoped to show a new generation of people how music can connect them to the rich history of Jewish civilization. As a result of events like the Holocaust and Jewish migration into America, much of the historic relevance of klezmer was lost as Jewish immigrants assimilated into American culture, Netsky said.

“Music is an amazing gateway into any culture,” Koral said. “Learning or being drawn to music is a way of getting a taste of the culture, so that you want to pursue it a little more and learn more because Yiddish culture was murdered in the Holocaust.”

Jewish immigrants to America in the 1880s brought new cultural influences to the traditional music. Klezmer was associated with the daily lives of the Ashkenazi Jewish people in Eastern Europe, but it became more Americanized through a jazz influence that developed with the introduction of music recording, Rushefsky said. Although the genre lost popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, passing on the knowledge of it to younger people allows for a revitalization and evolution of the culture’s music, he said. Showing students how to play klezmer gives them exposure to the style in hopes that they will carry on its history but continue to transform klezmer so it does not fade away, Rushefsky said.

“You can breathe life into (the songs), you could reinterpret them, you can really get into them in a way that really gives a lot of meaning in our contemporary lives,” Rushefsky said. “It really enriched my life, and I think it has enriched a lot of the lives of people that have been part of the klezmer and the Yiddish music scene for decades now.”

The instructors at UClezLA planned to teach attendees how klezmer evolved to fit into the world that surrounded it. Rushefsky said klezmer is not simply the music of the past, but one that people can continue to learn, evolve and pass on for the future to come.

“I don’t see this as a one-day workshop where we all forget about it and go on with our lives,” Rushefsky said. “I see (the workshop) as opening people’s eyes and ears to klezmer and Yiddish culture, and how it can be a part of their contemporary lives and open the door to deeper exploration of it.”

Author examines shades of grief, aftermath of tragedy in new book at Hammer Museum

Evgenia Citkowitz met Mona Simpson around 35 years ago – she was the latter’s summer intern at The Paris Review.

On Tuesday, Simpson, a novelist and English professor at UCLA, will moderate a book talk at the Hammer Museum centered around Citkowitz’s new fictional novel “The Shades,” which was released June 19. Citkowitz is the latest author to be featured in the series “Some Favorite Writers,” in which Simpson invites writers to present their novels at the museum. Citkowitz will read an excerpt from her book, as well as answer questions from Simpson and the audience about her writing process and the book as a whole. “The Shades,” Citkowitz’s first full-length novel, explores the anguish of a family following the death of their 16-year-old daughter. Citkowitz said she hopes readers are moved by the portrait of grief.

“I really wanted to speak to the fragility of human existence,” Citkowitz said. “It’s about people surviving and trying to make sense of life in the aftermath of tragedy, and the survival mechanisms they employ or sometimes don’t employ.”

Citkowitz said the novel began with a simple idea: someone returning to their childhood home. She started asking herself questions to build the story around, such as who was returning to the house and who used to live in the house. She decided a young woman named Keira would be the character who returns to the home where the grieving couple now live, claiming it is the house in which she grew up.

She constructed the story out of the answers to the questions and decided to incorporate tragedy as one of the main driving forces of the plot. The result was a meditation on the effects of grief on a family, she said.

Simpson said a potential topic of conversation for the book talk is Citkowitz’s decision to focus on the aftermath of a tragic event rather than the event itself – an element that distinguishes “The Shades” from other novels. For instance, Simpson said one of the ways grief impacts Catherine, the mother, is by influencing her instincts as an art gallery owner. While she normally prides herself in her ability to quickly assess art, after the tragedy, she no longer trusts her judgment.

“There’s often tragedy in novels … but I don’t think I’ve read many novels in which grief is itself a project in the novel,” Simpson said. “In this novel, we actually see grief develop and see how it changes the characters.”

Given the heavy subject matter, Citkowitz said she hopes to have created characters that elicit empathy from the reader. She said it was important for her to accurately portray the process of grieving. Nevertheless, she said the fact that grief is an individual experience gave her some artistic leeway.

In addition to the portrayal of grief, Citkowitz said she wanted the story to revolve around characters who felt authentic as people. In order to breathe life into her characters and write truthfully about their lives, Citkowitz said she did research on their specific hobbies and interests. For instance, Catherine is the daughter of a potter in the book, so Citkowitz spent a day with professional potter Yassi Mazandi to get a full understanding of the art form. Mazandi said Citkowitz asked questions about the process of pottery making and even made her own pottery. Citkowitz tried to broaden her own knowledge of pottery through personal experience in order to incorporate that into her character, Mazandi said.

“(Pottery) is a very personal way of using your hands and literally getting dirty with the earth and creating something with it,” Mazandi said. “I think that process is what she was trying to understand for her book and her characters.”

Citkowitz said she incorporated aspects of herself into the novel, like her love for art. Yet, the story is completely separate from her own life. Ultimately, Citkowitz said she hopes the portrait of grief after losing a loved one resonates with people as a universal experience. She said she welcomes all reactions to her novel and simply hopes readers feel as though the depiction of grief seems authentic to the audience.

“I strongly believe that reading is a creative act and that the book becomes the reader’s,” Citkowitz said. “There’s no right way to read a book.”

UCLA track and field launches indoor season with eight top-four finishes

UCLA track and field’s throwers opened the indoor season by recording eight top-four finishes.

Competing Jan. 11 at the NAU Friday Night Duals in Flagstaff, Arizona, the Bruins were led by sophomore Alyssa Wilson. Wilson competed in the women’s shot put and weight throw, events in which she earned First-Team All-American honors in her debut season, and brought home first-place finishes in both events.

Redshirt senior Ashlie Blake was the only other member of the women’s team to compete on Friday, and she finished third in the shot put with a throw of 16.51m.

“My performance in my eyes was very (mixed),” Blake said. “It was very good by some standards because I opened up at about the same distance that I did last year, and this meet is (nine days) earlier than when we opened last year; at the same time though, it’s disappointing because I know there was more there.”

Blake finished the 2018 indoor season with a seventh-place finish at the NCAA Championship in the shot put, which earned her First-Team All-American honors.

“I’m very confident in the throw team going into this season,” Blake said. “We have a good mix of an older group like me, (redshirt senior Dotun Ogundeji) and (senior Justin Stafford) who have all been to the national meets; with (redshirt freshman Jacob Wilson) and (Alyssa Wilson), they bring a new talent into the team and push us upperclassmen to keep up with them because they are so phenomenal.”

Jacob Wilson began his career as a Bruin by recording two personal bests in the men’s shot put and weight throw en route to third and fourth-place finishes, respectively.

“You can never have a perfect first meet, something will always go wrong,” Jacob Wilson said. “It’s just something to build on for me; the marks weren’t amazing but a PR is a PR and I’m looking forward to improving on it every week.”

Assistant coach John Frazier, who is entering his sixth season coaching UCLA’s throwers, said he doesn’t try to pressure his athletes too much with his expectations.

“The athletes will pressure themselves,” Frazier said. “I try to back off on my end so they can really focus on what they need to do in terms of throwing, rather than just hitting a mark.”

Jacob Wilson said Frazier’s coaching style has been conducive to helping the throwing team succeed.

“Coach Frazier is almost like a father figure for most people on the team,” Wilson said. “He’s almost more than a coach; we have fun with him all the time and it’s just really great working with him.”

The Bruins will compete at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Collegiate Invitational in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from Jan. 18-19.