Celebrate the 50th birthday of the sexy, muscular Mustang; remember the mix-tape you made for your high school sweetheart; come to a rare Getty doubleheader; and look for Easter eggs in animated movies.
Invasive brown widow spiders are pushing out black widows
Spider expert Rick Vetter at UC Riverside reports a suprising finding: Black widows, the legendary poisonous spider that lives in your water-heater shed or in the garage by the light switch, are being pushed out by their less-venomous cousin, the brown widow spider.
There's good reason to believe they're being pushed out from the city to the country by brown widows, an African native that came to us via Florida, probably in landscaping pots, Vetter says. He's getting anecdotal evidence that people are seeing far fewer black widows and many more brown widows.
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When they meet, there's no brown on black violence. "They're not physically attacking them," Vetter says of the invasive brown widow spiders. "They just get in, flood an area, and the next generation (of black widows) can't establish."
(Not a black widow spider in Cypress Park in 2011. John Rabe)
Is this hurting the ecosystem? "The brown widows are probably doing the same ecological task as the black widows," Vetter says, "so I don't think you're going to see a great ecological Armageddon happening. But we never like to see a native displaced by a non-native."
NOT REALLY RELATED BUT FUN: "The Giant Spider Invasion" (1975)
But that does not mean black widows are through in SoCal, and that the brown widows have totally taken over. The black widow population, Vetter says, "has probably taken a hit from the brown widows, but the black widows are still very common in agricultural areas, where the brown widow does not seem to establish."
The good news for humans? While to their tiny prey, the difference between black widow and brown widow venom is moot, for humans, the brown widow's bite stings, then goes away; but the black widow's bite can be serious for humans.
Dylan Brody, a comedy icon, and a jerk. Hey! You're reading it wrong!
Off-Ramp commentator Dylan Brody is the author of Laughs Last, and performs Saturday, April 26, at Muse on 8th.
I went to an uncomfortable, schmoozy event in Hollywood a couple of years ago. It was the kind of event at which I park a block away and walk to the entrance because I’m afraid even the valet parking guys may be judging me and my car may give me away as a fraud.
This event was a screening of a film put together about a comedy icon whom I had never met and whose work, frankly, I’ve never liked that much. Still, it was a big deal and there was a likelihood that the whole pantheon of comedy would be in the room to honor this man, so I went. It was everything I had hoped it would be. Phyllis Diller waved vaguely at me as she was wheeled by and I wondered if she remembered having met me years earlier or if she just habitually waved smilingly at anyone who made eye contact.
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I ran into an old acquaintance at the after-party. I had once thought of him as a friend. In the late eighties we worked some of the same stand-up clubs, hung out, talked, got high together, dreamt big. Then he became the head writer on a successful sitcom and wouldn’t take my calls. A few years after the show was cancelled we seemed to be close again when we ran into each other at the clubs. He apologized for his treatment of me when he could have offered me a job. Then he sold a sitcom of his own and stopped talking to me again. I was a bit guarded when I ran into him at this party. We stood at the edge of the room, sipping drinks and he did not actually look at me as we made conversation. He scanned the crowd and said, “You’ll have to forgive me. I know a lot of people here and I have to figure out who I’ll need to greet first.”
I didn’t find it surprising. It was that kind of party and he is the kind of guy whose car was chosen specifically for the effect it would have on people who saw it when he valet parked.
As we chatted cautiously, Carl Reiner walked past us on his way to the hors d’oeuvres. He grinned at me and waved off-handedly. I said, “Hello, Carl Reiner. May I call you ‘Carl Reiner?’” a friendly conversational gambit I often use in radio interviews and dealings with celebrities. I wasn’t at all certain he would remember me. He said, “Dylan Brody, you can call me whatever you like, as long as you keep us laughing.” And he walked on toward the tiny foods.
The man with whom I had been speaking turned toward me for the first time. He gazed at me with the intensity of a young woman on a third date with a hot prospect. He said, showing interest in me for the first time all evening, “So. What have you been up to?”
I shrugged and said, “You’ll have to forgive me. There’s someone I have to talk to.”
I moved away from him with feigned purpose and melted into the crowd. I found myself hoping that the cut of my suit, from behind, hinted at the lines of a Lexus.
Pasadena company still puts music on cassette tape. Really
Cassette tapes may seem to have been buried by the Internet, but they’re still spinning along, and they even outsell CDs at some underground concerts. As Off-Ramp contributor CJ Greenspon reports, one of America's biggest cassette producers is a small business in Pasadena.
It’s true that cassettes are still common in many parts of the world, and for some music genres here in America. But by and large, mainstream America keeps its cassettes in a box under the house. But turn back the clock to when Memorex hired Ella Fitzgerald to show what cassette tapes could do.
Remember "Is it live? Or is it Memorex?"
That was 1974. Within 10 years, cassettes were outselling LPs. But then came CDs, and then mp3s.
But Nick Dolezal, who co-owns a cassette-only record label called Kerchow! Records, doesn’t care.
"The root of my love begins with recording my own music when I was 16. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I stole my mom's karaoke machine, and I was recording with LOTS of reverb on that thing, and trading those tapes with my friends. What I wanna hear when I listen to a tape is authenticity. I'm not worried about how good the depth of the sound quality is. I'm just worried about hearing it all together in one place that I can fit in my pocket." —Ker-Chow Tapes co-owner Nick Dolezal.
And it’s a sentiment that’s become very common in the do-it-yourself music scenes. Talk to any band-on-a-budget about how much luck they’ve had moving CDs lately, like Alex Aguilar from the band Great Ghosts, who says, "Selling CDs at shows next to bands who are selling CDs and tapes, it just doesn't really compete. Tapes just work more with crowds, and our CDs don't compete the same way."
And what’s a band to do if they want their album to have that warm sound and chunky-tape feel? That’s where M2 Communications of Pasadena comes in. M2 Com presses cassettes, CDs, and DVDs.
It was founded by Mike McKinney in 1980, who recalls: "Back then we were doing a lot of spoken word, we did very little music on cassette. And then as the quality of the tape improved, we started doing more music cassettes, and they were able to get the tape noise way down and the fidelity much higher, so we did a lot of music ... and some voice, but now almost exclusively music."
M2COM takes the client’s master recording and puts it into a machine that creates an endless digital loop. That loop is then transferred to a reel with two miles of cassette tape on it, and then precisely separated and fed into plastic cassette shells. It takes McKinney a week to fill an order, and he makes up to 15,000 cassettes a month.
RELATED: The illustrated history of the cassette
"It's funny," McKinney says. "I thought cassettes were over and done with. We had a few clients who still offered it, but we were basically doing CDs and DVDs. And then Sean Bohrman from Burger Records called me one day and said, 'Could you do a couple hundred cassettes for us?' and I was like 'WOW!? Cassettes? Are you sure you don't mean CDs?'"
Burger Records’ catalog has grown to over 500 releases with bands from all over the world. Co-founder Lee Rickard says, "M2Com has helped create a business for us, because we were just doing this as a hobby, putting out tapes. And then it just snowballed."
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I asked McKinney why cassettes bounced back.
"Well, it's hard to say. Like I said, I thought they were dead but, the thing about a cassette that's kind of nice is, a cassette you could just stop, and it would stay right where you left it until you went back and did it again, or you could take it out, put it in a different machine. And it was always where you left it." —Mike McKinney, M2Com
And that’s the cassette’s nature. They never went away; we just had to pick them up again and do something new with them.
Some recent "pressings" by M2COM:
- Mac DeMarco tapes for Captured Tracks, the American indie label that New Zealand's legendary Flying Nun Records has oft collaborated with on international reissues.
- West Covina folk-favorite MATH with the avant-garde label Juniper Tree Songs.
- And Fullerton's up and coming garage punks Audacity's unreleased high school album Juvajive will finally be put out thanks to M2COM partnering with Cut-Rate Records.
'Sarkisian and Sarkisian' opens at OC Museum of Art
The Orange County Museum of Art's new exhibit, Sarkisian and Sarkisian, deals with the famous father/son artists Paul and Peter Sarkisian. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson toured the show with Orange County Museum of Art acting director and curator Dan Cameron.
Ford Mustang turns 50: A used Mustang salesman reflects on the iconic car's legacy
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Ford Mustang on April 17, Off-Ramp host John Rabe interviews Jim Hangley, the owner of Mustangs Only! Hangley's been selling used Mustangs from the same address — 5863 Washington Blvd. in Culver City — since he opened the shop in 1969, just five years after the Mustang first rolled off assembly lines in Detroit and California.
Ford had a hit on its hands — even bigger than the Model A — the instant the Mustang came out. By now, 9 million Mustangs have been sold, from the sexy fastback to the California-perfect convertible, to the admittedly crappy Mustang II, to the bland boxiness of the 1980s, to the recent return to muscularity.
First Mustang commercial, shown simultaneously on all three (!) networks in 1964
Jim Hangley has seen them all from the same Presidential corner, Washington and Adams, in Culver City, where he decided, in 1969, that he could make a living selling used Mustangs. Back then, they went for about $2,000 new. Now, he can get $50,000 for a restored old fastback or convertible.
"Mustangs. The only car I've used for 45 years. Never owned a new car. Always a classic Mustang. How come? 70 options. Could order anything that I needed. Never dropped me in the street. Never dropped anyone else in the street. And they're sexy. Oh, yeah. Long hood, short deck, low to the ground. A real sporty little car." - Mustangs Only! owner Jim Hangley
Since Jim admitted to me that he's 83, and he's a car guy, I asked the obvious question. Is he one of those men who want to be buried in one of their cars?
"No, not necessarily," he said. "But I've certainly enjoyed the fact that I've been able to carry this on for this long."
I remember scrunching into the back of Parker M's Mach One at Soo High, with a bunch of us who were in "Pillow Talk." And I remember girlfriend Kay G.'s Mustang II, which had a floor so rusted that when we drove in a rainstorm on the way to a Gatemouth Brown concert in Mount Pleasant, I had to hold down a piece of plywood with my feet to keep the waves from coming in.
Did you or do you currently own a Mustang? If so, we'd love to hear your memories/stories/thoughts in the comments on this iconic car.
What if a Chilean surrealist filmmaker had directed 'Dune?'
"Dune" was a weird, sprawling movie made by David Lynch in 1984. But if an eccentric and iconic Chilean-French filmmaker had had his way, it would have been weirder and more sprawling, and quite possibly, better.
In the mid-1970s, Alejandro Jodorowsky, best known for the bizarre cult film "El Topo," started planning to film sci-fi author Frank Herbert's classic, "Dune." It never got made, but it turned out to be influential anyway. And Jodorowsky's plans for the film were bizarre, wonderful, grandiose, and probably ruinous.
Although shooting never began, Jodorowsky's creative team drew storyboards for the entire film and estimated the running time to be between 12 and 20 hours.
A new documentary called "Jodorowsky's Dune" is playing at Cinefamily in LA, and filmmaker Frank Pavich talked with John Rabe from his home in Geneva.
On why Jodorowsky decided to make "Dune"
"If you ask him, I think it was divine intervention. He had not read the book when he came up with the idea to make the film. But a French producer named Michel Seydoux asked him 'what do you want to do next?' And this was after Jodorowsky had made 'El Topo' and 'The Holy Mountain.'
"Alejandro just said 'Dune.' A friend of his at one point told him that it was a very good book and that's how he got the ball rolling."
On how Jodorowsky cast "Dune"
"He was going to have a cast that included his own 12-year old son, whom he put into training for two full years to learn how to fight, sword fight, karate, jiu-jitsu. And he was trained every day, six hours a day, seven days a week. In his cast he had Orson Welles, David Carradine, Mick Jagger, he had Salvador Dalí, who was going to play a character called the Mad Emperor of the Universe. And this was all going to be set to the score of Pink Floyd."
On how Salvador Dalí was brought into the film
"It took a long time, and they basically had to chase Dalí around the globe. But it basically came down where at the very end, Dalí said 'Yes, I will be in your film.' But Dalí wanted to be the highest paid actor in Hollywood. So he was demanding $100,000 an hour.
"And they came up with this idea of figuring out how many minutes would Dalí be in the film—and Alejandro though 'oh, maybe three, maybe five minutes." And so they went back to Dalí and they said we will pay you $100,000 per used minute and that allowed Dalí to kind of stand from the rooftops of Paris, or Spain, or New York, and say that he is the highest paid actor in the world."
On "Dune's" influence on filmmaking
"It's really the greatest film never made, and it's also the most influential movie never made. He hired this team of artists — fine artists — painters, comic book artists, most notably there was his core group of three: Moebius, who was probably the most famous French comic book artist. There was Chris Foss, who was the British science fiction pulp paperback cover designer. And then he had H. R. Giger, who's this sort of dark, surrealistic Swiss artist that we all now know as being the man to create the look for 'Alien.' And those three guys all went to go work on 'Alien' because Jodorowsky's special effects person, Dan O'Bannon, wrote Alien."
On "Dune's" potential success
"Going into the film, we didn't know what it was going to be. All we knew is that we wanted to see his 'Dune.' And I would still love to see his 'Dune.' There would have been nothing like it, for sure. And people sort of laugh at him, and people sort of laugh at 'Oh, your film would have been 12 or 20 hours. Who wants to watch something like that?'
"But now we're an era where there's six Star Wars films, soon there's gonna be three more. How many Harry Potter movies are there? Six or seven? We love to stream. How many people do you know that will sit and watch an entire season of Breaking Bad? How many hours is that?
"I think that the public wants to be involved and wants to be immersed in worlds like Alejandro Jodorowsky can create."
"Jodorowsky's Dune" is at Cinefamily this week; for times and tickets, check their website.
5 classic Easter eggs from your favorite animated movies
On Easter Sunday, little kids will be searching under bushes and inside closets for hard-boiled, chocolate, and marshmallow Easter eggs. But Off-Ramp animation expert Charles Solomon says animation fans can find Easter eggs every day of the year — provided they know where to look in their favorite movies.
"The beauty of these films is we try to layer them. We try to make them very thick … you know, like a very good deli sandwich. So that audiences won’t just watch it once and then forget about it. They’ll go back and look at it again, and again, and again. And every time they look at it, they see something else; they spot something new." —Disney Animator Tom Sito
For animators, an Easter egg is an in-joke, a caricature, or some other surprise hidden in a movie. Disney animator Eric Goldberg says the practice goes back at least to the 1930s: "You can look at 'Ferdinand the Bull,' for example, from 1938, and there’s a scene where all the characters are caricatures of staffers. There’s Ward Kimball, there’s Art Babbitt, there’s Freddie Moore, and at the end, the matador himself is Walt Disney. If Walt can take a joke, then so can we."
(Walt Disney himself was caricatured in the 1938 short "Ferdinand the Bull.")
1. In the classic Warner Brothers cartoon "Rabbit of Seville," the cast is listed on a sign at the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl: Eduardo Selzeri, Michele Maltese and Carlo Jonzi. That is: producer Eddy Selzer, writer Mike Maltese and director Chuck Jones.
Watch "Rabbit of Seville," set at the Hollywood Bowl, complete with crickets!
2. At the end of "One Froggy Evening," the demolished building whose cornerstone holds the box with the singing frog is named for sound effects artist Tregoweth Brown.
(In this scene from Warner Bros.' classic "One Froggy Evening," great sound effects are timed to occur as the Easter egg pays tribute to the short's Foley artist.)
3. When animation artists are designing minor characters for a film, it’s easy and fun to draw family members, the boss, or the guy in the next cubicle. In "Aladdin," Disney animator Tom Sito was assigned to animate himself.
Sito is Crazy Hakim, the discount fertilizer dealer seen at the end of the song “One Jump Ahead.”
John Musker, who co-directed "The Great Mouse Detective," "The Little Mermaid," and "Aladdin," calls Easter eggs “the spice in the soup.”
(L-R: Co-directors John Musker and Ron Clements always put themselves in their movies, as in this scene from "Hercules.")
But despite his success, he doesn't always get his way. "In 'Aladdin,'" Musker says, "when Jafar was opening the Cave of Wonders, he originally said, 'Rasoul Azadani!,' which was the name of one of our layout supervisors; he’s Iranian. And one of our creative executives said, 'No, no. You can’t put his name in the film.'”
4. Easter eggs can also serve as homages. Brad Bird put his mentors Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” in both "The Iron Giant" and "The Incredibles."
The trick is to place Easter eggs where they won’t distract regular audience members, but where fans can find them and get the reward.
5. The “Rhapsody in Blue” segment of "Fantasia 2000" is a whole basket of Easter eggs. If you single-frame through the sequence where a crowd pours through the revolving door of a posh apartment building — named The Goldberg — you’ll see caricatures of director Eric Goldberg, his wife Susan, other artists who worked on the film … and a bustling bearded character who resembles a certain animation critic.
(A scene from Disney's "Fantasia 2000." That's Charles Solomon on the far right. Animator Eric Goldberg is the small man wearing a bow-tie whose head is obscured by the purse.)
Listen to our bonus audio for exclusive interviews with Tom Sito, John Musker and Eric Goldberg as they talk about Easter eggs and the art of animation.
Editor's Note: In the first version of the audio segment, Rabe used an excerpt of "Long Hair Hare," instead of "Rabbit of Seville." We regret the error.
Byzantium: Heaven and Earth and Constantinople, too—at both Gettys
Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections, is at the Getty Villa through August 25. Heaven and Earth: Byzantine Illumination at the Cultural Crossroads, is at the Getty Center through June 22.
What civilization lasted 1,100 years, almost into Columbus’ time, that hardly anyone thinks of as a civilization? Byzantium. It was a Yelp-5-star civilization that bridged Ancient times to Modernity, and it’s now showing at both of the Gettys.
First the Romans took over the Greeks. Then 800 years later, the Greeks took over the Romans. Christianity came into the mix and the result was the magnificent Byzantine Empire, which once spread from North Africa all the way to Crimea. While Western Europe was foundering in the Dark Ages, Byzantium was a world center of art, literature and culture. And its story is largely forgotten in the deep dark gap in history between the ancient and the modern.
RELATED: Read up on Byzantium after seeing new double Getty exhibits
In a bid to remedy this, the Getty is hosting a rare doubleheader called Heaven and Earth. The art from several Greek museums is on display at the Getty Villa, while the manuscripts are at the Getty Center. This has never happened before. Nor has any art of the past millennium ever before been shown at the classically dedicated Getty Villa.
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Why now? Not that the recovery of the civilization of the Greeks who called themselves Romans isn’t much overdue. But the new consciousness or awareness of this rich and tumultuous Byzantine culture seems to spring from Greece itself.
“It was always there,” said Peter Poulos, an American-born official of the Bernaki Museum. “There are wonderful Byzantine churches all over Athens, built over almost every ancient pagan temple.”
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But in recent years, modern Greece has rediscovered this mighty culture that endured far longer than the glory that was Classical Greece. Byzantium continued that glory. That’s one reason Modern Greece wants to share this heritage to the world.
(Photo: Head of Aphrodite; Greek, 1st century; National Archaeological Museum, Athens)
The Getty Villa has on show more than 160 ikons, sculptures, and other works of art, many of which illustrate Byzantine art’s connection to the end of the Classical period. Classical art, the exhibit shows, didn’t dead-end with the Christianizing of the Roman Empire. It metamorphosed into the ideological emblem of Eastern Christianity—the Icon—the painted or mosaic symbol of the divine that developed over a millennium into a direct parent of European painting.
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One thinks of icons as compact. But the late 14th and 15th century icons on display here really are paintings, large pieces, oil on board, 40 and 50 inches high. And they use techniques that to me somewhat resemble the early International Gothic of Europe.
The intricate passages of this great art through the medieval world were indeed truly byzantine. Some of the most fascinating stuff here shows the Byzantine effects on the art of Central Asia and even East Africa—Armenian religious art and Christian Art of Medieval Ethiopia.
Oh, and did I mention that the Byzantines seem to have invented the fork?