What do you call a 125-pound mountain lion? Anything he wants! Plus, we unmask @LosAngelesRain and visit a small perfume center in Koreatown.
Help us date and translate a trove of LA picture postcards
My colleague Gordon Henderson recently bought a packet of picture postcards at the Pasadena City College flea market. It appears that they were originally purchased at Kennedy's Card Shop in Los Angeles.
(Google Street View of the building that would have included 331 W. 5th St, LA 13)
The cards show scenes from across L.A.: An Easter sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl, downtown's sparkling new Civic Center and Hollywood Boulevard.
Some also have writing on the back.
Scroll through the slideshow above. Can you help us date and translate the cards?
Also, let us know what's changed, what still remains, and any memories or thoughts of the time these postcards capture. The paper bag is a time capsule that you can help us unlock.
(And make sure to check out Loyola Marymount's massive postcard collection online!)
Robert Henri’s California at Laguna Art Museum
“Westward Ho! I am now quite convinced that San Diego is one of the most interesting and beautiful places in the world and we shall head that way and will not be convinced otherwise until we have seen the place and have been turned away” -- Robert Henri in a 1914 letter to former student Alice Klauber
Supposing your father had killed a man; you might well expect to grow up on the run: fleeing from town to town, state to state, your family’s identity concealed under a cloud of aliases.
Painter Robert Henri was baptized Robert Cozad in 1865. After a fatal shooting in Nebraska, his family fled and kept moving, every member under a different name, until they dropped anchor in Atlantic City, where Robert "Henri" began to seriously paint at 18.
Probably, the family’s furtive, compulsive travels implanted in Henri — he liked to pronounce it “Hen-Rye” -- his own lifelong urge to stay on the go, even once he’d become one of America’s most treasured artists, famous for his nurturing an entire generation of artists called the “Ashcan School,’’ as well as his own sensual nudes and evocative streetscapes.
(L-R Ashcan School artists Everett Shinn, Robert Henri and John Sloan, c. 1896. Unknown photographer)
Henri worked in France, Spain, Holland, Ireland, New York, New Mexico, Philadelphia and Maine before friends urged him to Southern California just over a century ago. He loved the light and the climate, liked the people too, even in those peak days of Golden State developers’ hype.
Although he visited the state repeatedly, he never managed to settle here, but he did some impressive and singular painting, much of it on display now at the Laguna Art Museum. LAM Executive Director Malcolm Warner suggests that Henri’s California experience strongly influenced his work for the decade that followed.
(Montage of Henri portraits. Credit: LAM)
Certainly, the works here — mostly portraits — show an ethnic diversity never before apparent in Henri’s oeuvre. The people of San Diego’s various barrios were all members of something Henri called the “Great American Race.” His “race” was vastly inclusive: Native Americans, Chinese, blacks, Mexican Americans.
Unlike nearly every white American of his time, Robert Henri saw native-born people of color as inheritors of American civilization. He said: "I am looking at each individual with the eager hope of finding there something of the dignity of life, the humor, the humanity, the kindness … that will rescue the race and the nation.” Because this nation was then a land of Jim Crow laws and anti-Asian laws, his vision seems astounding to us now. In his months in San Diego between 1914 and 1915, he produced about 100 pictures. Those of the local minorities are the highlights of the little Laguna show, curated by Derrick Cartwright.
Although Henri had always delighted in painting children, here his portrayals of the young seem both more serious and more joyful than ever before. Serious, in that he tried to share the feelings of his subjects, and joyful in a sense of discovery of literally the faces of other cultures.
"Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is not an outside, extra thing. When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. . .Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, the artist opens it, shows there are still more pages possible." -- Robert Henri, "The Art Spirit" (1923)
The Chinese pictures seem the most successful; in them, Henri, who had put in years as a society portraitist, cut loose from such formalism. In his studies “Mukie” and “Jim Lee,” Henri’s long-discarded expressionism returns in wonderful full force with powerful, precisely-broad brush strokes, against abstract, yellow-mottled backgrounds. The other Chinese portraits are also powerful, if more conventional.
As it happened, Henri first visited San Diego just as the city was ramping up to its 1915 Panama California Exhibition commemorating the completion of the Panama Canal. As part of the exhibit, the promoters brought families of Native Americans from New Mexico to live in a specially constructed pueblo as a human exhibit. Henri rendered full-size portraits of two of them, Tom Po Qui and Po Tse.
The first, better known as Ramoncita, was a famous potter, an artist in her own right. The pictures, while gorgeous exercises in color, have less feeling than many of the other works here. It was as if Henri admired the pair more than he was able to understand them.
There are also some very fine and expressive portraits illustrating his California days, and a bit sadly, 10 years after he first arrived here. For on his last trip to California (just four years before his 1919 death), he abandoned the singular humble people of the state and concentrated on the rich and powerful and their wives and children. The ripest, most interesting period of his portrait creativity was over.
But from the show in Laguna, we can fully see what a remarkable period that was.
"Robert Henri’s California: Realism, Race, and Region, 1914-1925" is at the Laguna Art Museum through May 31
And P-22 the mountain lion's 'new' name, selected by listeners, is...
Apparently, if the people who vote in internet polls mirror the makeup of the 100,000 people who listen to Off-Ramp every week, most of you disagreed with our assertion that "P-22 is a lousy name for a mountain lion."
The votes in our poll show that you guys think "P-22" is a very good name.
So, sorry all of you who supported "Felix," "Yossarian," "Tukuurot," "Pete Puma," "Pounce de Leon," "Huell," and "Puma Thurman." Keeping P-22 "P-22" was the clear winner, with 592 votes. "Pounce de Leon" made a strong challenge last night, but fell short at 479 votes. "Huell" was a distant third at 153 votes. Check the final vote tally here.
Kat (!) Talley-Jones commented that "P-22" is "a science-y name," and Seth Riley, wildlife ecologist with the National Park Service, one of those who tracks P-22, agrees.
"Lots of people think it'd be valuable to have something more personal. (But) for us "P-22" is pretty personal. We get pretty attached to all the animals, including him, just from studying them for many years. We really appreciate the fact that people are interested in the science."
Why is P-22 named "P-22"? Riley says "P" is for puma (part of the mountain lion's scientific name). Grey foxes are "GF," coyotes are "C," and bobcats are "B." And "22" means he's the 22nd to get a tracking collar and is part of the study.
Riley says P-22 is back in Griffith Park, by the way, and missed all the hullabaloo over his name. Maybe all the publicity will help him find a mate at last.
But in the meantime, listener Beth Pratt is glad she won't have to get a new tattoo.
(Image courtesy Beth Pratt)
Hear more of my interview with Seth Riley by clicking the play button above.
Song of the Week: B.O.N.I.Z.H.E.A.R.T. by Big Whup
The song you're listening to know is called B.O.N.I.Z H.E.A.R.T by the LA band Big Whup. Big Whup is fronted by Drew Denny, now an LA filmmaker. The band started in 2007 and hasn't played a show in almost five years. They're reuniting for one more show at Pehrspace. The show is Saturday, April 25th.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry54UNoF-H0
Koreatown's Institute for Art and Olfaction — perfume for the people
The ads are absurd. Filled with glamorous locales, women in mid-orgasm and, back in the 1980s, some of the best (or maybe worst) jingles in commercial history.
Despite the glamorous imagery, almost all of the world's perfumes are created in a decidedly unglamorous setting: a large, antiseptic, industrial chemistry lab. Probably in New Jersey or perhaps Geneva. Alongside scents for detergents, deodorants, snacks, and thousands of household products.
But that system didn't pass the smell test for a Los Angeles woman.
Inside a small Koreatown storefront with a small neon bird in the window, you'll find a dozen people, eyedroppers in hand, carefully combining liquids in glass vials and smelling the results. It's not a meetup for mad chemists. It's a gathering of DIY perfumers. Some are novices who come to experiment for the fun of it. Others are serious students of scent.
They're all welcome at the Institute for Art and Olfaction, the best smelling arts organization in Los Angeles, where a man was busy over little bottles and pipettes.
"What's in it," I ask? "We got some vanilla," he says. "We got some chocolate. We got some cognac, some clove, sandalwood, cedar and bergamot. I'm making it for my girlfriend," but "I don't know whether I should marinate some chicken in it first."
Despite its mystique, the perfume industry is controlled by a half-dozen conglomerates that generally turn up their noses at sharing their trade secrets. Which is precisely why Saskia Wilson-Brown launched the Institute in 2012:
I chose Koreatown intentionally for the Institute because I felt that perfumery needed to be taken away from the sort of metaphorical Beverly Hills milieu that it typically sits in. I think in California, in particular, we've seen a strong scene around independent and artisan perfumery because we haven't had access to this industry. You know, we're sort of the end of the world as far as perfumery is concerned.
At weekly open sessions or monthly meetings of the Smelly Vials Perfume Club, budding perfumers can choose from the Institute's more than 250 scents — not all of which are pleasant.
Saskia pulls out a bottle "that'll knock your socks off."
I take a deep whiff. Hmmm. Smells like a British explorer's library in the 1800s in London.
(Explorer Sir Richard Burton smelled like camels, curry, and opium)
"I could see that," Saskia says. "It's got that sort of dusty, booky, thing. This is cade. Cade is, I believe it's a burnt juniper."
When you have a floral that doesn't have something, for instance, called Indolene in it, your floral's going to smell tinny and fake. Indolene is the smell, for lack of a better description, of flowers rotting. But without that, the flowers are completely pointless. I always say it's like the salt in the cookie. You need a little salt in your chocolate chip cookie. It makes it more interesting. — IAO founder Saskia Wilson-Brown
In addition to hosting smell-o-rific events like an annual awards ceremony, a Valentine's Day mixer where singles were paired up by scent preferences, and a concert in which audience members were blindfolded for an olfactory journey, the organization collaborates with artists who use scent in creative ways.
The institute worked with Zoe Crosher to create 10 custom perfumes for Manifest Destiny, which saw the installation of 10 billboards along the highway between Los Angeles and Tucson.
(Construction workers, Calabasas, 1964. Bob Miller/LAPL Valley Times collection)
Wilson-Brown also collaborated with L.A. artist Bettina Hubby on a unique concept. Our dialogue went like this:
BETTINA: An idea came along when I first met Saskia. I wanted to develop a cologne for construction workers. I knew I wasn't going to really market a cologne that would be on the shelves in every store. I wanted to do a limited run. It was part of a bigger art project about celebrating the construction worker and what they actually do to build the city. So we developed the cologne called "Dig" by interviewing a lot of construction workers about what they'd like to smell like at the end of a hard day.
ELINA: Sweaty, slightly dusty but maybe a little bit musky?
BETTINA: Absolutely not. They want to smell like fresh laundry, rain, lavender, coffee, a little bit of chocolate and musk.
If only we had Smell-O-Vision.
Bobby Short rescues a perfume commercial from silliness
Revealed: The KPCC producer behind Twitter's @LosAngelesRain
Never underestimate a corny idea's potential to take off.
A little over a year ago, I set up a Twitter account called
(the pithier @LARain was taken). I figured that during all the talk of our nefarious drought, L.A.'s Twitter community could take comfort in talking with the object of our collective desire: rain.
The idea caught on, leading to a nomination for a national award. (More on that later.)
I'm not good at Twitter — my
has a fraction of the followers @LosAngelesRain does. But the idea somehow took off. I even got a reply from Jonathan Gold, the L.A. Times food critic:
Uh-oh. RT @LosAngelesRain Not until @thejgold reviews the Cheesecake Factory.
— jonathan gold (@thejgold) January 29, 2014
Marc Brown, the ABC7 anchor loved the idea:
@LosAngelesRain, we see you coming. You cannot outflank our team coverage. @ABC7Dallas is carbo-loading. The Doppler is firing up
— Marc Brown (@abc7marc) February 26, 2014
Mayor Garcetti donned a mustache:
Not until @ericgarcetti grows a mustache.
— Los Angeles Rain (@LosAngelesRain) January 30, 2014
@LosAngelesRain does this count? pic.twitter.com/OxUEgh0y9L
— Eric Garcetti (@ericgarcetti) January 30, 2014
"The Office" actor
followed me for a little while. B.J. Novak! And then he unfollowed me. Oh, well.
Then, just under a year after I started tweeting, another notification popped up: LosAngelesRain was nominated for a Shorty Award—which, I learned, are basically the Oscars of social media. I and 6 other Twitter accounts got the nod in the Weird category.
The ceremony was Monday, April 20. I got on a plane to New York: the land of lakes and rivers a plenty... and countless New York writers who've waxed poetic about how we Angelenos are handling our drought: we eat too many almonds, we have too many lawns, there's so little water we shouldn't even live here.
The New York Times recently ran a feature with a photo of a home in Rancho Mirage - a beautiful lawn surrounded by arid desert. Is that how New York sees us? An unsustainable island in the middle of nowhere?
I went to Washington Square Park for answers:
"I just read an article in the Times about Coachella," said Sarah Abramson, who was relaxing at the park with her family. "You couldn't see that there was a drought in Coachella."
"You guys haven't gotten water in like four years, I think, right?" asked Sophie Silverman, who was picnicking on the lawn—yes, a lawn—at the park.
"I mean I read that experts were giving it like a year before it's basically, I don't know, Mad Max?" Brooklyn's Joey Yamine asked me. "Maybe that's hyperbolic," he added.
"Listen, there is a long history of East Coast media writing stories that kind of make fun of California," said Adam Nagourney — the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He co-wrote the article with that photo of the desert lawn, but he says obviously there's a lot more nuance to our drought.
"I could see where people might sort of sense that people back on the east coast are looking down their nose at how we use water here. I think the main drought shaming, that I've seen — which is quite legitimate -- is neighbor to neighbor, community to community.
If anything, my Twitter account - @LosAngelesRain - which does, occasionally call out Angelenos for running sprinklers or washing their cars before a storm, is just as complicit in this self-righteous drought shaming.
That could be bad, or maybe that'll improve my chances to win an award?
Finally, the big night came. Rachel Dratch hosted. A Jonas brother showed up. Bill Nye pointed at me and gave me a thumbs up. When it came time for my category, though, I lost.
got the nod.
As cliche as it sounds, it was an honor to be nominated. Even though I’d never heard of the Shorty Awards. Our drought isn’t letting up any time soon: we’re going to need to talk about it, and I take comfort knowing the rest of social media is paying attention to us, even if it’s a little gray cloud named Los Angeles Rain.
True crime, doomed love, and death doo-wop: 21 years with musician Gabriel Hart
Drug deals, stalkers, and urban decay are the makings of a great gangster movie. They also make good doo-wop and girl group songs.
For over 20 years, Gabriel Hart has been writing songs about the "nightmarish underbelly" of Southern California for punk bands The Starvations and Jail Weddings.
"The last time you had to fight to be a punk" was 1994, says Hart, who formed The Starvations in Laguna Beach at 16. Bad Religion and Green Day had just released the records that would put them on world tours. But Hart says he and his bandmates were on the Laguna Beach Police Department's gang file.
(The Starvations at 924 Gilman in Berkeley, 2001. Courtesy Gabriel Hart)
The "Orange Country Methamphetamine Renaissance" brought teens together in the 90s, according to Hart. The same kids Hart fought at school would get high at The Starvations' practice house. And not even the "nerds" or "dungeons and dragons crowd" were immune to the drug's popularity in the community.
Hart and Starvations' bassist Jean-Paul Garnier moved to L.A. in 1999, and over the next six years released three albums laden with songs about overdoses, funerals and home invasions. Hart says he's tried to let The Starvations' true stories "live under a rock." You can see excerpts of some of their shows on Youtube.
The Starvations' final show in 2005 sold out the El Cid restaurant in Silver Lake, but the band was forced to sweep the venue after the punks smashed hundreds of glasses on the floor to the beat of "Not Me This Time."
Hart reformed the band on different instruments as a short-lived outfit called Fortune's Flesh. Only a brief demo exists, but the band's dramatic, romantic ballads paved the way for Jail Weddings in 2007.
(Jail Weddings in New York City, 2014. Courtesy Gabriel Hart)
Jail Weddings began as a 10-piece "death doo-wop" pop ensemble. Hart had dreamed of starting such a band for years, and felt the time was ripe, as he noticed a "bearded cancer" of neo-psychedelic garage rock taking over Echo Park.
"A lot of these old pop songs are obsessive to a scary degree," says Hart, who found inspiration in The Shangri-La's, Gene Pitney, and Johnnie Ray. Jail Weddings pay tribute to the "psychosis" of vintage love songs, he says. When he hears Little Peggy March's 1963 ballad "I Will Follow Him," Hart says he thinks of a gang of girls running after him, with knives.
Jail Weddings' music video for "Somebody Lonely"
Hart still lives in Echo Park, and says that for all the changes the neighborhood has undergone in the last decade, the area is still dangerous, citing a fatal drive-by shooting in his driveway. But just as L.A. fosters gangsters, it fosters artists.
"I think L.A. — I've always viewed it as an escapist's cradle. It's paradise in a way... it was marketed that way since it first started. People have been coming here for decades to move to a place where they could be whoever they wanted to be, where previously they couldn't... It's always cradled the dispossessed." — Gabriel Hart
Jail Weddings are currently working on their third album, "Blood Moon Blue." You can hear them on Bandcamp and follow them on Facebook.
LACMA's 50 at 50 celebration brings in art, raises money and questions
A broken wineglass perched on a curb and a half-smoked luxury cigar in the plants were among the leavings of the big weekend LACMA high-roller blowout that were still visible at the Monday press conference at the museum.
At that conference, with its cold, morning-after air, LACMA director Michael Govan confirmed that the museum’s 750-celebrity, $160-a-bottle-champagne-fueled and Patina-catered 50th-birthday gala had netted the museum $5 million in donations.
More importantly, from the art-lover’s point of view, the media got a preview of the 50 generally very substantial works of art simultaneously offered as birthday honors from big time donors. Actually, many of them were "promised" donations. This generally means, according to LACMA Senior Communications Manager Stephanie Sykes, that they will be given to the museum on the owners’ passing. Of course one knows not when that will be.
So if you want to encounter all of these works of art in the proximate future, the time is now, in the Resnick Pavilion, where they can be seen starting April 26. It will be very much worth the effort.
An ad hoc collection if ever there was one, the 50-50 assembly consists of work in several media created over seven centuries, ending up just about now. There are some real surprises here — it’s not all Old Masters and Impressionists by any means.
There’s a fine collection of circa-1400 Ethiopian iron and bronze crosses, and a roughly contemporary crucifixion by the Florentine Taddeo Gaddi that shines with inner light. There is a powerful 1600s Bernini bust of a gentleman that somehow evokes the swank and swagger of an 1800s railroad tycoon.
There is a giddy Boucher of Leda and the Swan and an unusual Ingres portrayal of the Madonna (both offered by LACMA stalwarts Lynda and Stewart Resnick), a terrific septet of Whistler engravings, and collections of early Hawaiian photographs and mid-20th-century L.A. posters.
On the modern-classic side of things, there are works by Rosenquist, Klein, Lichtenstein, Segal, Warhol and Hockney. And a vast, transparent red lens by Dewain Valentine.
When was the last time one had seen so solidly a disparate assortment of intriguing to great artworks? Probably never. The LACMA Nifty 50, whenever they all do go on display officially, will not only augment the present museum collection but also increase its breadth and depth and suggest new acquisitional directions in its future.
But a question of that future hung over six of the finest things on display. These included a Toulouse Lautrec, a Vuillard, and Degas’s delectable nude primary study for his famous young ballerina statue. These were offerings from Malibu magnate A. Jerrold Perenchio, representing the 50 works he’s offered LACMA under one condition: that his works be housed in the proposed new Peter Zumthor LACMA building, a 700-foot-long Wilshire-Boulevard-hopping amoeba that'd cost LACMA $650 million.
And where that money will come from is a question that still hangs in the air. It amounts to another 130 of these $5 million fundraisers.
The Archivist Files: How LA handled the 1918 flu pandemic
The recent outbreak of measles that started at Disneyland and the ongoing debate about vaccination reminded me of a pandemic that scarred Los Angeles almost 100 years ago. The historic evidence is preserved at the L.A. City Archive, inside Box B-1059. It has the details of how L.A. city officials and its citizens coped with the great influenza outbreak of 1918.
The city’s Department of Health released an annual report beginning in the 1870s covering food, sanitation, health inspections in the city jail, even advocating public toilets for the indigent population. Every illness and death was recorded as the city size and population increased over time.
The department was overseen by Dr. Luther M. Powers — the Dr. Jonathan Fielding of his time — and he was the man everyone turned to when the flu hit. Powers said, “This disease was introduced into Los Angeles by an infected training ship after September 15, 1918 and also from infected tourists.”
The Health Department was unprepared for the first patients arriving at the General Receiving Hospital a week later, but soon, two emergency hospitals were staffed and equipped in San Pedro and Mount Washington.
(Unidentified newspaper headline, 1918.)
Local residents complained about the close proximity of the flu to their homes, but there was something in the emergency measures for everybody to hate. On October 10, 1918, the city council passed Ordinance 38522 imposing a quarantine of schools, theaters and other public gatherings. Poolrooms were closed, and public funerals were banned. Factory schedules were staggered to prevent crowding on streetcars.
(Bowling alley and billiard parlor on the Santa Monica Pier, 1917. Credit: LAPL/Security Pacific National Bank Collection)
As you’d expect, business interests pushed back. The Theater Owners Association petitioned the Council to re-open the theaters and require audiences to wear face masks instead. The Health Department tried to find a middle ground. For instance, the quarantine meant cafés couldn’t have live music. But could they play phonographs? Were music teachers allowed to give private lessons when the schools were closed? One official said, “We sought at all times to avoid discrimination and to enforce the ban with as little discomfort and financial loss as possible.”
A drop in flu cases in early December allowed a conditional rescission of the quarantine, but it was reinstated within days when a new surge of infections filled the hospitals again. It was up to the police and badge wielding health inspectors to protect the public. They were the ones who inspected both streetcars and taxi cabs before and after their disinfection.
The inspectors monitored passengers in the railway station and separated people who appeared to be sick into quarantine. They also ran errands in over a hundred neighborhoods because residents couldn’t do it themselves. They were the unlucky ones who were under quarantine in their own homes – unable to enter or leave for any reason.
In total, 29 people were taken to court over violations such as leaving their homes during the quarantine or failure to report an illness. A $25 fine and up to 30 days in jail was possible.
The statistics in the quarantine report sum up the epidemic and the damage it did. Between October 1918 and July 1919, over 13,000 buildings were locked down, confining over 50,000 Angelenos. The average casualty of the flu was a married white male between 20 and 45. The total number of flu-related deaths was 3,482, out of a reported total of over 57,000 reported cases — a number Dr. Powers believed to be greatly underreported.
Flu was the cause in about 20 percent of all deaths throughout Los Angeles, but the worst was over by April 1919.
There are always little tidbits of irony in research like this. One was that the statistics of deaths during 1918-1919 did not have a single measles death. Another was the reported death of an LAPD officer recently returned from France and WWI who died of the flu while on quarantine detail.
It is estimated that influenza killed nearly 50 million people around the world within about two years. This was in a much slower time of ships and trains before air travel made the world smaller. So, do us all a favor. Get the damn flu shot so we don't have to relive this history lesson.
LA City Archivist Michael Holland's stories from the city archive are a regular feature of KPCC's Off-Ramp. They first appeared in longer form in the city employee newspaper "Alive!"
Director of '1915' on growing up with Armenian genocide as family history
Turkey was on the defensive Wednesday, lashing out at both Pope Francis and the European Union's legislature for their descriptions of the Ottoman-era killing of Armenians as genocide. Turkey's prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that the pontiff has joined "an evil front" plotting against Turkey... Later Wednesday, the European Parliament triggered more Turkish ire by passing a non-binding resolution to commemorate "the centenary of the Armenian genocide." In a quick response, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said the resolution was an attempt to rewrite history and threatens to harm bilateral relations between the EU and Turkey. — Associated Press, April 15, 2015
This month, most of the world commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, in which the Turks killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. This weekend marks the opening of a new movie that tells the story again, but through a production of a play staged at the historic Los Angeles Theatre in downtown LA.
Alec Mouhibian and Garin Hovannisian's "1915" opens this weekend in Southern California and next weekend in New York, and Hovannisian came to the Off-Ramp studio to talk with host John Rabe about the film.
(Filmmaker Garin Hovannisian at the Mohn Broadcast Center. Credit: John Rabe)
How did you first learn of the genocide?
"I came from a very special family that was connected directly with the Armenian genocide. My grandfather, Richard Hovannisian, who has taught history at UCLA for the past 50 years, and who is one of the founding scholars of Armenian studies in the United States, made it no option for me not to know. The way he came to discover it from his own father, who was a survivor, was very different. His father survived, escaped, moved to the San Joaquin Valley, and the instinct of many people of his generation was to forget, to overcome the past. But many nights, Kaspar, my great-grandfather, could be heard screaming in his sleep."
How did they describe the genocide to a child?
"There was this mythic land called Armenia, with a wonderful mountain called Ararat, where the Bible says Noah's arc landed, a land where Christianity first proclaimed. But for some reason, that land didn't exist, that land was destroyed, it was a land of ruined churches, it was a ghost land. And so the stories that my father would tell me deep into the night always began with 'there was this land called Armenia.' To me, it was the place of my dreams. It was the place that, having been born in Los Angeles, growing up in Los Angeles, we would return to."
Tell us about "1915," your movie.
"This movie follows a mysterious, intense theater director, who on one day, April 24, 2015, which happens to be the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, believes that if he brings the right cast together, and if he stages this play to perfection, he can actually bring the ghosts of the Armenian genocide back to life. So in an age when nobody believes in the theater anymore, this one theater director is on the mission of his life."
For much more from our interview with Garin Hovannisian, listen to the audio interview near the top of the screen.
"1915" opens Friday in Hollywood, Glendale, Beverly Hills, Encino, Pasadena, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Rancho Palos Verdes, and Whittier; and April 25 at the Moscow Cinema in Yerevan, Armenia.
In 'The Musician's Secret,' blackmail, music, all haunted by the Armenian genocide
Writer Litty Mathew set her debut novel — “The Musician’s Secret” — in Glendale, the heart of the nation's Armenian American population. It tells the story of Rupen Najarian, an aging musician who was his family’s sole survivor of the Armenian genocide in 1915. Rupen plays the duduk, a traditionally Armenian wind instrument with a 5,000 year history.
As Rupen slides gracefully intro retirement, he’s confronted by a young Armenian immigrant who blackmails Ruben, threatening to expose a decades-old secret. KPCC’s Patt Morrison talked with Mathew about the book, Armenian traditions, and the 5,000 year old instrument that plays a central role in “The Musician’s Secret.”
On setting the novel in Glendale:
I think of Glendale as being really exotic. It's a destination. It's also my home — I've lived in Glendale for more than 20 years, and I've actually married into the fold.
In very old cultures, like the Armenian culture, sometimes you don't understand. Or you don't think about where the actions, or why you follow certain cultural rules. But they've been there for thousands of years. And there are all these myths and traditions that are attached to it. And I was just fascinated by it, because of my own culture. I'm South Indian — I'm Syrian Christian — we have also those tendencies where, you know, it's so a part of our daily routine. But you don't stop to ask yourself: why do we do the things that we do?
On learning about the duduk — the instrument played by the novel's protagonist:
There are some things you just can't forget. And for me it's the sound of the duduk. In 2005, I wrote a story for the LA Times calendar section. My husband, Melkon, was noticing the sound showing up in all these Hollywood scores. And every time it would come on, he'd say "Hey, listen to this. That's an Armenian instrument!"
So I asked my editor at the Times "Hey, there's this musical instrument, it's taking over all these scores, I'd love to find out more." I interviewed some very famous duduk players, including Djivan Gasparian, who is the most notable duduk player. And I interviewed several composers in Hollywood, who wrote these great compositions.
After the story was done, I just kept thinking about the instrument. I couldn't get it out of my head. It got to be such an obsession that I wrote a whole book about it!
On weaving culture and the immigrant experience into the novel's plot:
I think when we're talking about an old culture, like the Armenians, you can't get away with it: why you do certain things. Every time a piece of bread falls, an Armenian relative will be like "Hey! Don't feed the spirits. Pick it up!"
Or if a child misbehaves, the thing to say is "Hey! Do you want the Turks to be happy with your bad behavior?"
I think Los Angeles, more than any other big city in the U.S., is such an interesting place to be when you're from somewhere else. Because Los Angeles doesn't judge you. That's what I love about the city, is that you can actually come here and choose your future, as opposed to your past.