Taschen exhibit obsesses on old school fetish artists - Off-Ramp for April 4, 2015

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Batters and Stanton, plain brown envelope artists; Abe Lincoln and California; Grandma Nazimova had a trunk, and inside ...; Bogart's son on Film Noir

Taschen exhibit obsesses on old school fetish artists - Off-Ramp for April 4, 2015

Batters and Stanton, plain brown envelope artists; Abe Lincoln and California; Grandma Nazimova had a trunk, and inside ...; Bogart's son on Film Noir

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Batters and Stanton, plain brown envelope artists; Abe Lincoln and California; Grandma Nazimova had a trunk, and inside ...; Bogart's son on Film Noir

New GM Farhan Zaidi says new LA Dodgers will build consensus

The Los Angeles Dodgers open the 2015 season Monday, hosting the San Diego Padres at Chavez Ravine. There are many new players (KPCC's A Martínez analyzes the team's "new spine" in our bonus audio), a new president of baseball operations, and a new general manager, Farhan Zaidi.

And if L.A. is a melting pot of religions, cultures and ethnicities, Zaidi is as L.A. as you can get: born in Canada, raised in the Philippines, observant Muslim, of Pakistanti heritage, numbers cruncher and former player ("light-hitting first baseman"). The Dodgers hired Zaidi from Oakland in November to replace Ned Colletti after the team crumbled in the playoffs.

Off-Ramp's John Rabe talked at length with Zaidi during spring training; here's some of their conversation:

What does Opening Day mean for you?

As GM, do you have the final say on player personnel?

How important to you is happiness in the clubhouse? (In the off-season, the Dodgers traded Matt Kemp and Hanley Ramirez, reportedly two of the most team's most difficult personalities.)

You're the only Muslim GM in any sports franchise. Are you very observant? ("I am," he says.) And does your faith come into play at work?

Have you faced discrimination in baseball because of your religion?

With all the different aspects of your makeup, you'll fit in well in L.A.

Do you think the Dodgers' TV dispute needs to be resolved so that people can, you know, watch the Dodgers on TV?

Hear much more of their conversation — including Zaidi's thoughts on the team's strengths and  weaknesses, baseball in the Philippines, and pastrami — in our featured audio segment. And listen Saturday at noon to Off-Ramp, when we'll spend the entire show at Opening Day in Dodger Stadium.

Bogart and Bacall's son Stephen Bogart on Film Noir, making movies and making gin

This weekend marks the start of the American Cinematheque's 17th annual Film Noir festival. Over two weeks, they're showing 26 movies, bringing in 100-year old Patricia Morison to talk about acting in "Fallen Sparrow," and showing noir films from Britain and Argentina you probably haven't seen.

Saturday, it's a Bogart double-feature, with "Dark Passage," starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and then "This Last Lonely Place," produced by the Bogart estate's Santana Films.

Stephen Bogart, the son of Bogart and Bacall, joined Off-Ramp host John Rabe to talk noir, making movies, and the estate's latest effort: Bogart's Gin, which will be premiered at the festival's wrap party.

Interview Highlights

What are the hallmarks of a noir film? What does it have to have? How does it have to make you feel?

I think you’ve also have had to have some tragedy in your life to really get a noir film.

“Dark Passage” has everything. Not just your parents but a script that comes from a David Goodis story... But I do think the relationship between the two of them [Bogart and Bacall] helped sell this idea. In all their movies. There’s that wonderful warmth.

Why did you decide to start making movies?

The Bogart Estate has done a really good job of keeping itself current. You’re on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram... And you’re selling gin.

Getty to stay open late this weekend for last days of JMW Turner exhibit

UPDATE: The Getty Center will be open until 9pm this Saturday and Sunday to give more people a chance to see the Turner exhibit, which ends Sunday.

The Getty Center’s new exhibit, "J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free," displays an incredible number of works — 35 oils, 27 watercolors — by the man many people now think of as the greatest English painter of all time.

The day I went to the Turner show at the Getty, looking out toward the Pacific, there were  layers of cloud and mist rising up toward the Santa Monica foothills in all the grays, whites and blues of typical Southern California spring landscape. I asked Getty co-curator Julian Brooks if Turner would have enjoyed living and working here.

"Turner loved dramatic scenery," Brooks said. "And I think he would have loved the canyons and the mountains. He also loved the ocean, and he probably would have lived on the coast in Santa Monica or somewhere, and would have enjoyed painting the atmosphere over the ocean, painting the changing light."

With his great clouds of diffuse colors and self-conceived techniques that involved blurring and smearing paint, it's no wonder that for decades, he was seen as an artistic influence wildly ahead of his time.

In most of his pictures, Turner’s architecture and landscapes loom hugely and even threateningly over the diminished figures of human beings. For all the brightness of his hues and liveliness of his vistas, Turner often seemed to have a grim outlook on the world and the universe.

As a companion to his pictures, Turner’s wrote a serial poetic narrative he called "The Fallacies of Hope," about the insignificance of human aspiration. It includes the lines, "False hope! as fatal when the end denies, As when it yields the long-expected prize." In other words, win or lose, you feel awful.

"J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free" is at the Getty Center through May 24. The Getty says this exhibit is Turner's first major exhibition on the West Coast, and the first devoted to his later years. It was organized by Tate Britain in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Taschen's adults-only exhibit 'Bizarre Life' obsesses over 2 pioneers of fetish art

Warning: This content contains adult themes and may be considered NSFW (not safe for work).

At the intersection of Beverly and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles, there's a billboard of a topless woman adjusting her stockings , her toes curled over her car's dashboard. The image is the perfect emblem for Taschen Gallery's new fetish art show, "Bizarre Life - The Art of Elmer Batters and Eric Stanton" (link NSFW).

(Caption: A billboard advertises Taschen's latest show at the corner of Beverly and Crescent Heights boulevards. Photo: Chris Greenspon)

"A fetish is a substitute for 'natural,' procreative sex," says Taschen Publishing's Sexy Book Editor, Dian Hanson. "Something that symbolizes sex that becomes the center of your sex life."

Photographer Elmer Batters was obsessed with women's feet. Illustrator Eric Stanton's thing was "big, strong women who would wrestle him down to the ground," Hanson says.

Both men were World War II veterans. Batters apparently realized he had a foot fetish on board a submarine, discovering he was the only sailor who liked feet more than the other parts of a woman's body, Hanson says.

(Caption: In the mid-60s, Eric Stanton illustrated hundreds of sexploitation book covers. Photo: Chris Greenspon)

Batters self-published his photos, by necessity. "The Sneaker World of Elmer Batters," "Leg Language," "Thigh High" and "Skirts that Flirt" were magazines sold through mail order in the 50s and 60s. Batters' models were not merely Playboy bunnies trying on shoes; he often photographed them performing lesbian sex acts.

Stanton's illustrations were sold under the counter in Times Square. After making a name for himself as a fantasy-artist-for-hire in pulp magazine ads, he was commissioned by booksellers Stanley Malkin and Eddie Mishkin to illustrate sexploitation novels. Four cover paintings a month paid Stanton's rent at a flat in Manhattan in the mid-60s. The bookstores that carried these novels were protected by organized crime, according to Hanson.

One of Stanton's creations made it onto drug store racks, though. Richard Perez, Stanton's biographer, says Spiderman creator Steve Ditko shared a studio with Stanton in the 1950s, and credited Stanton with Spidey's full-face mask. "There was no such thing before that. There was only a half-mask. You'd see the nose and the mouth. The full-face mask was a fetish inspiration."

The market for fetish art was deflated by the first explicit porn film to get wide distribution in the U.S.: 1970's "Mona the Virgin Nymph," according to Perez.  The movie made moot the simulated or suggested sex of Batters' erotica and Stanton's sexploitation, and led to a decline in their careers.

Cartoonist Jack Enyart isn't sure whether Batters and Stanton's work qualifies as pornography.

"The borderline keeps changing," he says. "If someone makes an issue, then that's pornography, or that's awful, and that's something we can't do, but you don't know where it is these days. It's a matter of what special interest group decides 'this is pornographic' or not."

Adult film actress and director April Flores is grateful for their work. She calls Batters' models brave and Stanton's sexual imagination "progressive."

(Caption: Eric Stanton's cover art for "A Lesson In Eros," 1964. The female figure was inspired by '60s screen goddess Ursula Andress. Image courtesy of TASCHEN)

Foot fetishists, submissives, and transvestites were shown that "they're not alone" by Batters and Stanton's work. More importantly, because women were shown participating in their fantasies, it showed young men that "the women liked it and wanted it," Hanson says.

Taschen's "Bizarre Life" runs to May 24 at The Taschen Gallery at 8070 Beverly Blvd, LA CA 90048.

Long thought lost, costumes of silent film star Alla Nazimova found in trunk

Late last year, college freshman Jack Raines was helping his grandmother move into a house she’d just purchased in Columbus, Georgia, when he came across some old trunks that caught his eye. They had the mysterious name Nazimova written on them.

“I actually had no idea who Nazimova was,” Raines says. “I researched it all and saw all Nazimova has accomplished and done. I actually was shocked and thought it was something huge and learned something.”

Raines did some Googling and was led to Martin Turnbull, a novelist living in Los Angeles.

“Out of the blue came an email from a family in Columbus, Georgia,” Turnbull says.

Turnbull co-founded the Alla Nazimova Society in order to preserve the memory of the silent era actress, who died in 1945. Turnbull was anxious to learn what was inside the trunks.

In the 1920s, Alla Nazimovah was a household name in the U.S. A Russian immigrant, she was one of the first actresses to bring the plays of Chekhov and Ibsen to American audiences. In the early days of cinema, she was one of the highest paid actresses, earning $13,000 a week at one point.

“A lot of women like Nazimova who weren’t satisfied with just being a wife and mother, the typing pool, or maybe standing behind the makeup counter at Bullocks department store. If your ambitions went further than that, Hollywood offered you a career path,” Turnbull says.  

But Nazimova was more than just a high paid actress, she was a businesswoman. In 1926, she converted her property on Sunset Blvd. into a hotel consisting of 25 villas. Known as The Garden of Allah, the hotel was a hub for early Hollywood-era creatives. Harpo Marx, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall were all guests at the Garden of Allah.

from

on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, you can’t check in to the Garden of Allah today. Turnbull says it was torn down and replaced by a mini mall. But the hotel wasn’t Nazimova’s only entrepreneurial venture. She was also one of Hollywood’s first female filmmakers.

“Her initial movie career was very successful and she was a very big household name,” says Turnbull. “And she took a look around and she thought, ‘I’m earning a lot of money, but the real money is in producing.’ I suspect she thought, ‘Well if these bozos can make movies, I can make movies.”

Nazimova backed a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “Salomé” for the screen in 1922, which she also starred in.

In the film, Nazimova wears a headdress decorated with pearl-like beads that shimmer under the lights of the elaborate set.

“Nazimova wearing her Salomé headdress is kind of one of the iconic images of silent cinema because it was so striking,” Turnbull says.  

Which brings us back to those old trunks Jack Raines found at his grandma’s house in Georgia. The Raines family were nice enough to carefully remove what was inside and send Turnbull pictures.

Turnbull was amazed at what he saw.

Photo © 2015 Jack Raines 

“Lo and behold, the first photo that we opened was of Nazimova’s wig from 'Salomé,'” he says. “And this is something we thought had been lost to the sands of time for decades only to find it had been sitting in a trunk in Columbus, Georgia for the last 60 years.”

It’s not clear yet what the Raines family will do with Nazimova’s Salomé headdress and the 20 or so other pieces found in the trunks. But Turnbull is hopeful that the discovery of these Nazimova artifacts will revive interest in a long forgotten talent.

“Nazimova’s legacy in my opinion should recognize her intelligence and her bravery but especially her feminism," Turnbull says. "She was working in a very, very male-dominated industry but didn’t think twice about creating her own production company and steering her own future towards the films she wanted to make."

If you'd like to check out "Salomé" on a big screen (accompanied by a Mighty Wurlitzer organ) The Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo will screen the film July 10 & 11. 

Patt Morrison on Abraham Lincoln's SoCal legacy

Abraham Lincoln loved the idea of California, that far away place, the terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad he helped to create but never lived to see.

When he heard that a friend was heading back to California, Lincoln wrote:

Only a handful of hours before he was assassinated, he spoke to his wife Mary about journeying to California when they left the White House. And on that very same day, Lincoln buttonholed the Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax, who was leaving for the Golden State, and asked him to tell California's miners:

Lincoln, like Moses, envisioned the promised land yet was destined never to see it. 

But California remembered him. All sorts of Golden State spots like roads and schools are named for Honest Abe. Lincoln Boulevard, for one, is a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway that runs alongside Los Angeles International Airport and into Santa Monica. It's only about eight miles long compared to Washington Blvd.'s 27 miles, but George Washington had a big head start. He died 10 years before Lincoln was even born.

But the paradox is that, during the Civil War, Los Angeles was a Confederate town. 

Of its 5,000 residents, as many as half had come from the South. In the presidential election of 1860, Lincoln got barely 25 percent of the vote. As the war was underway, Confederate troops advanced into Arizona with an eye on the California gold fields.

Then, a couple of pro-Union businessmen — one of them the grandfather of General George S. Patton — handed over a piece of land to the Union Army. Dixie sympathy and state secession talk didn't disappear from L.A., but it held its tongue.

But another piece of L.A. real estate would give Lincoln a posthumous triumph. It's probably the city's oldest suburb, more than 150-years-old, and situated on the bluffs of the L.A. River. It was called East Los Angeles, and the man who helped to develop it into a fine neighborhood called it Enchanted Hill.

He was John Griffin and his brother-in-law was Albert Sidney Johnston — General Johnston — until 1861 the commander of the U.S. Army Department of the Pacific. Johnston was living with his relatives on the Enchanted Hill when war began. He quit the U.S. Army, joined the Confederacy and escaped from L.A. before he could be arrested.

Today, that neighborhood where a top Confederate general once lived is called Lincoln Heights. In 1917, residents voted unanimously to rename their neighborhood for the assassinated president and for the new high school already bearing his name. East Lake Park became Lincoln Park and the Eastside police station became Lincoln Heights police station.

Washington was the nation's first president. But Lincoln became the first to leave a lasting mark on the state he never got to see. 

104-year old animator Tyrus Wong to headline Otis College annual kite festival

UPDATE: On Saturday, April 11, Otis College of Art and Design holds its 4th annual Otis Kite Festival on the beach adjacent the Santa Monica Pier. The event runs from 10am - 4pm and is free, and it includes an appearance by Otis alum Tyrus Wong, who designed the look of Disney's "Bambi" (see below), and in his later years has been designing, building, and flying kites.

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The new Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco beat Los Angeles to the punch, and is staging a career retrospective for Tyrus Wong, the man who gave Disney's animated film "Bambi" its look.

As we told you in a 2007 Off-Ramp profile, produced by Queena Kim and featuring animation expert Charles Solomon, Wong, now 102 and still very active (somehow, he gets younger looking every year), took his cue for Bambi from the simplicity of Chinese painting.

(Wong painting at home in the 1950s. Courtesy Tyrus Wong)

Here's what the museum says about Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong, which is up until February 3, 2014:

LAST CHANCE: MOCA's huge American flag exhibit will blow you away

UPDATE: This is the last week to see trinket; the exhibit's last day is Sunday, June 28. Saturday and Sunday hours: 11-6.

Take a 55 x 16-foot American flag, add a few spotlights and four huge movie wind fans, and you have an unexpectedly overwhelming and moving art exhibit.

"Trinket," by William Pope.L (pronounced poh-PELL) is the centerpiece of a show of the same name at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown L.A.'s Little Tokyo. It's wonderful in its simplicity, and bewildering in its complexity. It's just a flag in the wind, but it's so much more.

WATCH Off-Ramp's special slo-mo video of William Pope.L's "Trinket" at MOCA

The noise and the wind from the fans, plus the ever-changing shape of the flag in the lights, create an immersive experience even before you start thinking about what "Trinket" means to you — especially in the context of the Tunis museum attack, the baby cradled in a flag, Rudy Giuliani's claim that President Obama doesn't love America, U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.

"People need to see it," said MOCA chief curator Bennett Simpson as we stood downwind, like CNN anchors covering a hurricane. "But, more than that, they need to feel it. The artist Pope.L says people should physically feel their democracy, and not just understand it as an abstract symbol, and with this work, yeah, you are physically enveloped in the work."

William Pope.L's Trinket is at the Geffen Contemporary through June 28.

Song of the week: 'Down into the Sea' by Charlyne Yi

Off-Ramp's song of the week is "Down into the Sea," by Charlyne Yi.

"Live from Hell" is Charlyne Yi's debut solo album. Yi recorded and mixed her album with the defunct L.A. band Wide Streets, and the limited release cassette is available through Folktale Records, alongside label mates Whitman and Bouquet.

Here's a video for "Down into the Sea."

Charlyne Yi - Down into the Sea (music video)

New bill from Assemblyman Gatto aims at expense and delay of probate

Say your folks own a nice house like this one. If they put it into a trust, that speeds its transfer to the heirs (you) but costs thousands of dollars to set up. If it goes to probate, that's tens of thousands in costs and months, maybe years, of delay.

There are some advantages to probate: you get formal proceedings overseen by the court, and a cutoff to claims that creditors can make. But Glendale Assemblyman Mike Gatto's  AB 139, which has passed the Assembly Judiciary Committee and now heads to Appropriations, would let homeowners treat a home like most any other asset, and avoid the torturous, expensive probate process.

AB 139 would create a “Revocable Transfer on Death (TOD) Deed” in California to let the homeowner specify to whom their house should be deeded to when they die. 

Gatto says 25 other states have this system, without a single instance of abuse.