Vin Scully on the roar of the crowd as fountain of youth ... Orel Hershiser on pitcher's nerves ... No, most of us still can't watch the Dodgers on TV ... Rabe eats a Dodger dog: still meh ... Plus: Brendon Eder and Milton Avery.
6 scenes from a laid-back Dodgers home opener
Here are some scenes from Off-Ramp's trip to Dodger Stadium Tuesday for their home opener. They lost 4-2 to the Diamondbacks, but we had a blast anyway.
Listen to the audio for all of these segments and more ... including the ritual tasting of the Dodger Dog.
1. Ushering in a new usher
Listen to the audio to hear Andrea, a veteran fan services worker at the stadium, quizzing Andrew, who was working his first game as an usher. Andrew got "nearest bathrooms," "escalator," and "smoking area," but he didn't know where to go to find the "bacon stretcher."
2. The Dodgers' season and the mystery of micheladas
Matt "Money" Smith from the Petros and Money Show on AM570 gives us his take on the Dodgers chances this season, and wonders with me how people can drink micheladas, as in who ever thought, "Hey, let's pep up this bland light beer with clam juice!"
3. Up in the Nosebleeds
I went way up in the left field reserve section to talk with Mark and Shanna, father and daughter Dodgers fans who took their seats around 1030am ... even though first pitch wasn't until after 1pm. Turns out they were late last year and didn't want to risk it.
4. Dixieland Dodgers
The Angel City Dixieland Band has been doing the home opener for half a dozen years. They give us "Blue Skies" and "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."
5. Will the Dodgers ever be on TV?
LA Times columnist Chris Erskine says 60% of fans still can't watch the Dodgers on TV, but he optimistically thinks they'll nail down a deal in the next five years.
6. The The National National Anthem Anthem Anthem Anthem...
Sam Harris, lead singer for the Brooklyn-based X Ambassadors, nailed the National Anthem at the Dodgers Home Opener. He tells us how to beat the echo: good earphones.
Get your Haitian chicken this weekend because TiGeorges' is closing
Dodgers great Orel Hershiser explains how he understands baseball
Orel Hershiser is a former Dodgers pitcher with not just one, but two Wikipedia pages. One for his biography, and a second for his record-setting 59-inning streak without allowing a single run. Today, he's a commentator on Time Warner's SportsNet LA, and a regular fixture at Dodgers home openers. He talked with us about his time pitching back in the day and how he gets ready for opening day now that he's a veteran broadcaster.
On pitching opening day
It’s not my favorite thing — it’s my favorite thing to be announced on the third base line, or the first base line. It’s my favorite thing to watch the flyover. It’s my favorite thing to see the great national anthem. It’s my favorite thing to watch the fans go nuts. It’s not always my favorite thing to slightly be delayed as a starting pitcher - to have some things kind of get in the way. It really turns out to be a playoff game when a lot of the time your body and your soul aren’t ready for it. You don’t have the 162 games of the regular season to kind of get into the whole flow of everything, to be ready for the moment. When all of the sudden they just thrust the moment on you.
As a veteran, I didn’t really get nervous. I got excited. As a young player, the nerves were energy — but you just had to make sure that you had a plan with it. Like the nerves couldn’t end up being the thing that takes over you. So it was great to be nervous — but you had to use it as energy.
On the Dodgers’ pitching going into 2016
Before they had a few rough outings, [the Dodgers] had the lowest ERA in the National League at 1.83. And then, all of the sudden, a couple rough ones and it’s not number one. I think you might be talking a little bit about also some of the bullpen at times this year. It’s a very early sample, though, and I think the arms down there are fine.
This roster is never finished — they’re always going to look to improve it. They have the assets to improve it, because of what goes on with the revenues from the ticket sales, the fans that support us, the television — all of it. It’s a fantastic place to play baseball, and it’s always going to be a roster that’s improving.
On broadcasting versus pitching
I think the hardest thing is, as a pitcher, you have to order your thoughts. That’s because you might be on natural grass, you might be on artificial turf, you might have a five-run lead in the fifth, you might have a one-run lead in third. You might be in the eighth inning and there’s a pinch hitter on deck and you’re wondering how to get this guy out, you’re wondering where your defense is, what pitch to get this hitter out, you got lots of things. But you have to prioritize them. And then you also have to kind of sift it down to exactly what you want to concentrate on at the moment. I think that’s the thing about being an analyst.
I see so many things go on in one play of baseball, or what’s coming up as a possibility, or a strategy. And sifting it down to saying “what is the most important thing? What’s the most entertaining thing? And what’s the ‘aha!’ moment for the fans?” Something maybe they haven’t heard or they haven’t really taken a look at. And that’s what’s kind of like pitching.
Song of the week: "Sunlight" by John Doe
This week's Off-Ramp song of the week is "Sunlight" by John Doe.
Doe is co-founder of the LA punk band X, but he's released over a dozen solo albums and his latest is "The Westerner," which comes out April 29. Check out the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gHuxHd4RhI
John Doe will be appearing in conversation with fellow X co-founder Exene Cervenka at the Central Library Downtown on May 1, and he'll perform songs from the new album on May 4 at the Grammy Museum.
The Brendan Eder Ensemble makes chamber music for rock clubs
Brendan Eder is a drummer, composer and a Los Angeles native. Through his group, the Brendan Eder Ensemble, he makes instrumental music with drums, bass, saxophones, clarinets, bassoons and more.
It's a combination of classical instrumentation and pop composition you'd see in artists like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and Arthur Russell. Here's the video to "Vamp," the single off Eder's new record:
The ensemble's self-titled debut is out now. Eder talked with Off-Ramp about the band's creative process.
On composing music for the ensemble
I typically compose on a melodica. Maybe just a simple riff repeating, and then imagining another voice on top and just jotting it down. Or sometimes I'll use voice notes on my phone. You kind of use a linear approach to writing music as opposed to having a form or anything in mind. So the piece doesn't really repeat itself it just kind of flows into different movements freely.
Lately I've been experimenting more with sampling. A lot of the music that inspires me is sample-based music. So I've been sampling music like classical or jazz or whatever and finding little samples I like, and then transcribing that to paper and then spitting it back into the ensemble and refining it and building off of someone else's idea.
On bringing composed songs to life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzwKiVupVsE
It's really rewarding after you spend a ton of time notating, writing music, when you hear it actually performed by musicians. It's pretty amazing. It also can be shocking and not work, and sometimes you gotta just move on. There was a lot of work that went into the music of the ensemble before it existed — probably 3 or 4 months of writing music before I heard it performed by anyone.
It was great to hear people's reactions, too. I remember the bassoonist was like "Oh, I never felt cooler playing bassoon!" And I was like "I'm on to something here."
On performing live with woodwinds
I really enjoy playing at rock venues. It's a little challenging sometimes to get good sounds. Lately we've been having pretty good luck, got a bassoon pickup installed in the regular bassoonist's bocal piece. I feel probably more connected to the indie kind of local music scene than the classical music scene, or jazz.
The Brendan Eder Ensemble is performing live at the Hi-Hat in Highland Park on Friday, April 22. Check out the event page for more info.
Meet Milton Avery, America's 'most famous unknown artist'
He was so good at color, he wowed Mark Rothko. But Milton Avery’s been criminally underrepresented in local museums. Until now.
Sometimes museum acquisitions are international news — like when the Met bought Rembrandt’s “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.” But when the Huntington acquired an important, unusual picture by a major American painter, it generated about two lines of copy in the local press.
The painting is “Burlesque Show,” the first Avery to be permanently displayed in L.A. County. Obtained from an unnamed dealer at an unspecified price, it hangs in the Huntington’s Virginia Steele Scott Galleries.
Curator Jessica Todd Smith says Avery, who lived from 1885 to 1965, didn’t get the respect he deserved in his lifetime. "In his day," she says, "he was pushing the envelope of abstraction while maintaining these representational subjects, so people considered him a little too out there, too crazy. When abstract expressionism came to the fore, he wasn’t abstract enough."
But critic Hilton Kramer called Avery “… without question, our greatest colorist” and said he beat out all Europeans except Matisse. Mark Rothko claimed him as a major influence. Some called him America’s most famous unknown artist.
He was known for landscapes, seascapes and brightly hued interiors filled with the clashing fields of color that so impressed abstract painters. But the Huntington’s acquisition is as far as possible from Avery’s placid, deeply hued works, and it memorializes an extinct American art form.
“Burlesque Show,” from 1936, portrays the old Palace Theater, just before all New York burlesque houses fell victim to reform Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
"Burlesque of the day really consisted of performances that included stand-up comedy, some song and dance, and then striptease that was meant to be sort of classy … made more elegant by costumes and stage sets," Todd Smith says.
On stage, the stripper fronts a nude chorus line. A black feather surmounts her blonde coiffure, which Todd Smith notes is meticulously delineated with strokes from the artist’s brush handle. She has just removed a black wrap. There is pink in her cheeks and her thick black eyebrows arch in an expression of not quite convincing shame. Her arms don’t quite cover her nude bosom.
Says Smith Todd, "Art historically, this fits into a long tradition, the Venus Putica, or the modest Venus. So it goes back to classical representations of Aphrodite. Perhaps the most famous example of this pose would be Botticelli’s Venus, where she is somewhat covered, so it’s a gesture of what in this case I think we could call feigned modesty."
Great strippers like Sally Rand, who fan danced at the 1939 World’s Fair, and Gypsy Rose Lee, who became a popular mystery novelist and TV celebrity, were immensely talented women who used their sexuality as a resource against the man-dominated entertainment world. Burlesque also had its clowns and comics: the notorious Top Banana in his preposterous plaid floppy cap and yellow windowpane-check suit, telling jokes far too gamey for vaudeville. Great top bananas like Phil Silvers throttled down their raunch to dominate '50s TV.
And Milton Avery left us this perfect keepsake of what it all felt like at its peak, from the first row of the Palace Theater, way back in 1936.
Check it out in person: part of the Huntington's Virginia Steele Scott Galleries are closed for renovation, but the Avery is still up for you to see.
LA renames road to Dodger Stadium 'Vin Scully Avenue' to honor announcer
Elysian Park Ave, the road that leads from Sunset Blvd. to Gate A of Dodger Stadium, was christened "Vin Scully Ave" today in a ceremony the baseball broadcasting legend said "overwhelmed" him.
88-years old and famously self-deprecating Scully, whose 67 seasons calling Dodger games goes back to their years in Brooklyn, refused the honor a few years ago but finally relented.
At today's ceremony, held in front of Gate A, Dodger President Stan Kasten highlighted Scully's status as a piece of living baseball history, saying, "Vin Scully used to talk baseball with people who had been playing baseball in 1905, and every year since. Is there anyone on the planet who has been talking baseball with people who played in 1905 and yesterday?"
A crowd of several hundred fans showed up to celebrate the change, and Scully said they were what he'd miss. "The roar of the crowd," he said. "That's what I'm going to miss the most." The crowd then roared, on cue. "I don't know you, and I miss you, each and every one of you."
Listen to the audio for an extended version of Vin Scully's remarks today.