We bring you Off-Ramp greatest (recent) hits: Actor George Takei reflects on the 10th anniversary of his coming out. We dig through the cookbook authored by the late Vincent Price—frightening star of stage and screen. And if you love John William's iconic Star Wars score, New Yorker Music Critic Alex Ross says it's not just nostalgia: there's a serious, brilliant mind at work.
Composer John Williams, savior of classical film scores, conducts at the Hollwood Bowl all Labor Day weekend
UPDATE: John Williams will lead the LA Philharmonic in some of his best-loved music Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl.
John Williams received his 50th Oscar nomination for the score for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."
Williams is so ubiquitous now, as former leader of the Boston Pops and the man behind the music for so many Lucas and Spielberg films, and old-fashioned lush orchestral scores are so common, that it's hard to believe they were endangered a few decades ago. But so writes Alex Ross in The New Yorker:
Perhaps [Williams'] most crucial contribution is the role he has played in preserving the art of orchestral film music, which, in the early seventies, was losing ground to pop-song soundtracks. “Star Wars,” exuberantly blasted out by the London Symphony, made the orchestra seem essential again.
— Alex Ross, "Listening to 'Star Wars'"
I spoke with Ross about Williams for this week's Off-Ramp, and he walked me through Williams' history and some of the complexities of the "Star Wars" score. (Go ahead. Hum the main theme. Alex says you're probably humming it wrong.)
He also debunked a popular trope:
It has long been fashionable to dismiss Williams as a mere pasticheur, who assembles scores from classical spare parts. Some have gone as far as to call him a plagiarist. To accuse Williams of plagiarism, however, brings to mind the famous retort made by Brahms when it was pointed out that the big tune in the finale of his First Symphony resembled Beethoven’s Ode to Joy: “Any ass can hear that.”
— Alex Ross, "Listening to 'Star Wars'"
Make sure to click on the arrow in the audio player to hear side-by-side comparisons with Williams' music and the music that inspired it.
Meet Chaz Perea, Dodger Stadium's landscape manager
Woven into the fabric of Dodger Stadium's beauty is its plant life: the rolling hills of Elysian Park, the meticulously manicured field and the thousands of decorative plants found outside the stadium’s gates. Those are managed by one man, landscape manager and certified arborist Chaz Perea.
Perea is 29 years old, he’s worked for the Dodgers since 2009, and at any given time about 10 people are working under him. He graduated from the horticultural studies program at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, but he grew up in Arizona. He’s diplomatic when you ask him what team he roots for — he won't name his favorite team, but says, laughing "I support the Dodgers. I love the hand that feeds me. I’m very happy to be here."
Before joining the Dodgers organization, Perea worked at a country club in Whittier. The change of scenery couldn't be more different for him. "There’s not a day I don’t drive in here and [think], 'Are you kidding me?'" he says. "It’s fabulous, it’s every day, and it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around."
It’s before sunrise when I go out to meet Chaz. Already, his team is at work — overhauling the landscaping near the stadium’s Sunset Gate. Opening day is a week and a half away. We start our tour of Dodger Stadium in Perea's golf cart.
First on the agenda: blue Mediterranean fan palms — of course they’re blue. A truckload just arrived and his team dug up a fresh new planter in the middle of the stadium parking lot. Where last season there was asphalt, 2015 will see an island of flora that’s lush, pretty and — most importantly — drought-tolerant.
"This guy’s gonna love the heat," he says of the fan palm as we drive over. "It’s gonna reflect sun really well. He’s gonna have a slow to moderate growth. It’s gonna use a fraction of the water that most plants would need."
Perea says plants like these can go with as little as 12 minutes of watering each week — that’s important for one of the biggest stadiums in California.
After inspecting the fan palms — which look great, by the way — we move on. We visit the landscape management workshop. Then behind it, the garden where they keep extra plants ready to go. Every now and then fans will trample the landscaping, and Perea has a fresh batch ready to replace them in the event that happens.
We finish our interview outside the top deck at the stadium — just as the sun starts rising over downtown Los Angeles. I ask him about the future — the drought isn’t letting up any time soon, and they can’t really let the grass on the field at Dodger Stadium go brown.
Perea says it's no longer simply a matter of finding drought-tolerant plants, but ones that can survive on reclaimed water. "That’s where all this exterior irrigation is gonna be pushed in the coming years, for all of us," he says. "Reclaimed water is tricky — in the sense that it introduces a handful of salts into your soil that more or less don’t get along with your plants so much."
It’s the same story for Dodger fans. Many are digging up their lawns or letting them go brown. Or they live in apartments with no green at all. Chaz Perea and his team give fans an escape from all that — what better reason to get up before dawn?
Star Trek's George Takei came out ten years ago, and his career — and life — only got better
"You know, it’s not really coming out, which suggests opening a door and stepping through. It’s more like a long, long walk through what began as a narrow corridor that starts to widen. And then some doors are open and light comes in, and there are skylights and it widens." -- George Takei to Frontiers magazine, October 2005
Star Trek icon George Takei stayed closeted well into his 60s, he says, because he feared for his acting career. He well remembered what happened to Tab Hunter when Confidential magazine outed him.
So when Takei came out as gay in Frontiers magazine in 2005, he was prepared to kiss his career goodbye in exchange for speaking out about an issue he cared deeply about. But what happened next is one of the best second acts in American show business history: his career blossomed and his life expanded in ways he could never have imagined ... from innumerable roles and cameos in movies and tv, to viral videos, to a recurring guest role on Howard Stern, to - this week - his debut on Broadway in "Allegiance," the musical about the Japanese-American internment camps.
Listen to George Takei's Off-Ramp interview on getting "Allegiance" to Broadway
Coming out has brought him respect and fulfillment from unexpected corners, and as he told me in a long interview at his home in Hancock Park, it all started with being himself ... being Takei.
Vincent Price's very Off-Rampy cookbook, 'A Treasury of Great Recipes,' is back!
UPDATE: Come hear Elina Shatkin interview Victoria Price about her folks' cookbook at Samuel Freeman Gallery on Tuesday, Dec. 8, at 7pm. As a bonus, see Martin Mull's newest paintings in an unsettling but beautiful show called "The Edge of Town." The gallery is at 2639 South La Cienega Blvd, LA CA 90034.
Mary and Vincent Price loved food, but they weren't snooty. Their "A Treasury of Great Recipes" turns 50 this year and has been lovingly re-released in all its calorific glory. Off-Ramp contributor Elina Shatkin gets the backstory with daughter Victoria Price.
"I don't think my parents really saw themselves as culinary experts. I think they really thought of themselves as cultural ambassadors. They knew that they had been allowed to have experiences that other people didn't have. So I think what they wanted to do was show people what was possible." — Victoria Price
In "Theatre of Blood," Vincent Price plays a deranged actor so enraged by a bad review that he murders the critic's poodles, bakes them into a pie and force feeds them to the critic until he dies. Worst. Dinner party. Ever.
In real life, Vincent Price was elegant and erudite. He was a traveler. He was an art collector who now has a university museum named for him. And he loved to eat.
"My dad, I think, was not only the original American foodie — he was kind of a metrosexual before there was even such a thing," says his daughter, Victoria Price.
In 1965, her parents published a cookbook. The 500-page "A Treasury of Great Recipes" was heavy and ornate. The bronze cover was etched with gold lettering. Everything about it screamed "keepsake." And it was. The book was a hit.
"I was kind of blown away when Saveur magazine named it one of the 100 most important culinary events of the 20th century," Victoria Price says. "It was more than just a cookbook that was about food. It was experiential."
Its recipes came from the Prices' favorite restaurants around the world. Tre Scalini in Rome, La Boule d'Or in Paris, the Ivy in London, Antoine's in New Orleans, the Pump Room in Chicago and dozens of others. But the Prices weren’t snobs.
The book includes this tribute to a classic American snack: "No hot dog ever tastes as good as the ones at the ballpark. It is a question of being just the right thing at the right time and place. So we have included Chavez Ravine, the Los Angeles Dodgers' magnificent new ballpark, among our favorite eating places in the world."
According to Victoria Price, "the philosophy of the cookbook was gourmet is where you find it and ambiance makes the occasion. And from growing up, I knew that what that meant was gourmet is not the province of the elite. It's not something you get when you go to a five-star restaurant."
That's partly why the book was so popular. It was all about making the world of haute cuisine accessible.
"My favorite memory of my childhood, foodwise for sure with my dad, was one day he woke up and he said: 'Today we're going to go find the best taquito in Los Angeles,'" Victoria Price recalls. "In those kind of pre-food truck days, the best taquitos were found at the little huts that were attached to car washes. We must have driven 200 miles that day. And it wasn't just about eating the taquitos, but you had to try the amazing sauces to dip the taquitos in, the salsas. So we tried all of them. And we had so much fun 'cause we talked about it. It was sharing what we loved about them. It was engaging, it wasn't just shoving something in your mouth."
But then, tastes changed. "I like to say that you could have a heart attack after three bites of some of those recipes," Price says. "Heavy cream and butter..." The book fell out of style and out of print. But it became a cult classic. Which is why, on its 50th anniversary, it has been reissued in a glossy new edition.
It's a time machine, with recipes from a handful of classic, long-shuttered L.A. restaurants. Here's the cold cucumber soup from Scandia on the Sunset Strip and the veal cutlets Cordon Bleu from Perino's.
And it's a world tour. If you couldn't jet off to Mexico City to eat at the Rivoli, you can make their chilies poblanos rellenos at home. Can't make it to Sardi's in New York? Here's their chicken tetrazzini, frogs' legs polonaise and asparagus milanese.
"I think what they wanted to do was show people what was possible," Victoria Price says.
As much as Vincent Price loved food and art and acting, he loved people more.
Thanks to Piotr Michael, who impersonated Vincent Price's voice for the radio story.