Our black widow spiders v. their brown widow spiders. Sex on the radio with Mimi Pond, author of Over Easy, graphic novel. An old friend shows another side of Ruben Salazar.
Cool dinner theatre show for fans of Old Time Radio and sordid banned comic books
Sunday, May 4th, is a perfect storm for fans of Old Time Radio, child-corrupting banned comic books, booze, food, and faux Spanish castles.
It's a dinner theater put on by Captured Aural Phantasy at El Cid, the venerable restaurant on Sunset, featuring "live multi-media, old radio show-style performances of vintage, pre-code crime comic book stories," the kind of comic books from the 1940s and 1950s that censorious adults thought would poison the minds of Young Americans.
Paul Coates' 1955 KTTV report on horror comic books
We're featuring an excerpt of one of their productions on Off-Ramp, but CAP has generously agreed to let us post an entire dramatization - “The Mad Hate of Dr. Zart" - as it appeared on the Darkest Radio podcast.
Sunday, May 4. El Cid restaurant, 4212 W. Sunset Blvd. LA CA 90029, food and drinks at 7:30pm, show starts at 8:30. Tickets available online.
Mimi Pond's new graphic novel 'Over Easy': Sex, drugs and gourmet omelets
John Rabe talks with Mimi Pond about her new graphic novel, "Over Easy," which paints a vivid picture of the 1970s and a crazy diner that changed her life.
"I don't know that I ever worked quite that hard before. I think it's good for everyone to suffer when they're young. I think waiting on people is excellent training for life in general. I think everyone should be forced through national service to wait on tables; there'd be a lot more sympathy for the human condition." — Mimi Pond
"Over Easy" is about artist Mimi Pond's early years, including the diner that saved her after she lost her student aid at art school. She walked into the Imperial Cafe in Oakland and immediately felt at home. The staff was quirky and mostly welcoming, the food was delicious and the vibe was artsy, and later punky.
"In the mid-to-late '70s, you just didn't stumble across restaurants that served really truly fresh ingredients for breakfast. You had basic diner fare with greasy spoon food like frozen hash browns and Styrofoam white bread toast. This place had real cream and real butter. It was right up there with Chez Panisse." — Mimi Pond
RELATED: Mimi Pond reads at Skylight Books in Los Feliz on Wed. Apr. 30 at 730pm
Mimi, who now lives and works in LA, says she knew from the minute she walked in the door that the story of the diner was a story she'd have to tell. The graphic novel took her 15 years, from when her kids were still kids. Now they're grown and out of the house.
Mimi says the most important thing she learned was that it was worth the sacrifice to be a mom and an artist; that it was important for her kids to see hat she had a creative life apart from them; and besides, she laughs, "If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy."
RELATED: NPR 95% loves Mimi's "Over Easy"
There's much more in our audio interview, including what Mimi thinks about the scenes in "Over Easy" in which she draws herself having sex with "a bad boyfriend." She says it's a long tradition in graphic novels.
LA's Union Station at 75: A look back at the landmark's history
It doesn't sound like much of a name — Union Station — but when the grand Spanish-deco train station opened 75 years ago in downtown L.A., it was a very big deal.
Since the end of the Civil War, nearly 200 railroad companies were formed in L.A. County. Only a handful lasted, of course, and those fought hammer and tongs to wipe out the competition.
For a few hours one day in 1887, railroads charged a dollar fare — one dollar — from Kansas to LA. They also fought in the newspapers, they fought in the courts, and sometimes they fought outside the law.
RELATED: View restored footage of Union Station's 1939 opening parade
Early one Sunday in 1888, while the courts were closed, a Southern Pacific crew started to lay track illicitly on the Irvine Ranch, but the ranch hands were already there, with guns at the ready.
Each line had its own train station, like the Central Station, and the Arcade Station, with gardens like a park. The Salt Lake line depot in Pasadena was designed in the Mission style, and the Santa Fe depot, in what is now downtown L.A.'s arts district, was a marvel of Moorish domes and turrets.
One result of this clash of competition, not surprisingly, were a lot of train versus trolley accidents, a lot of train versus car accidents, and a lot of dead Angelenos. In 1915, the city filed a complaint: It wanted one single train terminal.
It took 24 more years, a citywide vote and the complete destruction of L.A.'s original Chinatown for the big three railroads to make nice and make the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal come to pass.
May 3, 1939 — the day the Andrews Sisters recorded "Beer Barrel Polka" and Hungary approved anti-Jewish laws — a half-million Angelenos showed up to take a gander at the "mission moderne" style, the 52-foot-high ceilings, the array of antique railroad cars. Some of them on loan from director Cecil B. DeMille.
Every first was duly noted: the first tickets sold — L.A. to Glendale, 28 cents — the first pickpocket arrested; the first little kid lost and found.
The restaurant could serve 800 people an hour, and in very short order, it had to, as World War II soon drafted Union Station into service. A hundred trains a day brought throngs of thousands — soldiers, sailors, defense workers, civilians. By the war's end, the passengers were refugees and returning troops.
Peace, as it turned out, was hell, at least for the passenger train business. Angelenos now wanted to ride in their own cars, not railway cars.
The day before Union Station had opened, Los Angeles had voted down a bond measure for a municipal airport. Bad call. In 1939, only seven long distance travelers in a hundred went by air. Less than 20 years later, those numbers had flipped.
And by the time Union Station was named a national historic site in 1980, its glory days, like long-distance train travel's, were history.
Moviemakers, eager for authentic period locations, help keep Union Station going. It played a sinister hangout in "The Hustler," a police station in "Blade Runner" and a kangaroo courthouse in "The Dark Knight Rises."
Union Station had the noir chops to star in a 1950 crime thriller called "Union Station," with William Holden and Nancy Olson, who had just co-starred in a film featuring another LA landmark, "Sunset Boulevard."
Just like in the movies, rescue can come in the last reel. For Union Station, it has, after a fashion. Riding the rails is back in vogue, and 75 years after glamorous, transcontinental passengers once boarded for New York, commuters now throng the concourses to take the Red Line or Metrolink — all aboard for Covina, Pomona and Rancho Cucamonga.
Made in America Festival Los Angeles: What was it like in Philadelphia?
Last week, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and rapper Jay Z announced plans to bring 50,000 fans to Downtown's Grand Park. The Made In America Festival, set to take place over Labor Day weekend will be the new park's first time playing host to a concert this big, and that has Downtown residents worried.
City councilman Jose Huizar, whose district contains Grand Park, has argued the festival might disrupt traffic, hurt businesses and damage Grand Park irreparably.
But the city of Philadelphia will host its third Made in America, or MIA festival this year, during the same time as LA's. Mayor Garcetti has argued Philadelphia's economy enjoyed a $10 million bump as a result. But what was the festival like for locals?
To find out, Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson called Bill Chenevert, senior music writer for the Philadelphia Weekly.
Chenevert said it started with a press conference held at the Philadelphia Art Museum steps, the same steps featured in Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky." Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter appeared alongside Jay Z and Philadelphia rapper Freeway. The city was to host a weekend long concert inside the Philadelphia's iconic Benjamin Franklin parkway.
"Jay Z and Kanye [West] were slated as the primary headliners. We were purely pumped," said Chenevert. "From a music standpoint, I thought this is gonna be awesome, I can't wait to go."
As it's been with Downtown LA, Philadelphia residents worried about damage the parkway could suffer from foot traffic and garbage.
"Most of the concern and questions were about not only the sanctity of the park and the public spaces nearby the festival," said Chenevert.
But he was surprised to see how the recovery went. "There was a lot of parts of grass in Fairmount Park that were totally beat down into dust and dirt," he said. "Within a week, I rode my bike passed it and thought 'can you believe that perhaps 100,000 people were stampeding all over this square footage just last weekend?'"
Overall, while Chenevert acknowledged that the Made in America festival's disruption might have been minimal, he doesn't plan to go to anymore. Like a lot of festivals, the beer's expensive, the crowds are rowdy and, to him, the great music isn't worth it.
"At the end of last Summer's Made in America, I told my music editor I'm never doing that again," he said.
RIP Mike Atta: Hardcore punk founder, guitarist for OC band The Middle Class
Off-Ramp host John Rabe speaks with LA Record's Chris Ziegler about Mike Atta, the guitarist for the pioneering hardcore punk band The Middle Class, who died on Easter Sunday of cancer.
(Mike Atta, c. 2013, from the "Help Mike Atta Battle Cancer" Facebook page.)
The Middle Class may have invented hardcore punk, an important genre of punk, but to say they invented it implies intent.
"It's not like The Middle Class guys, who were all teenagers at the time, like 15-17, who had barely discovered punk, and kinda taught themselves to play. What they had heard was that punk was loud and fast, and be kind of crazy. So with that in their heads, they just started playing loud and fast, there was nobody around to tell them, 'Hey, you're playing too loud and too fast!'" -- Chris Ziegler, editor and publisher of LA Record.
In any case, this group of teens from Santa Ana was doing something nobody else was doing, and they were successful and influential.
The band lasted only a few years, and then Atta opened a vintage store in Fullerton called Out of Vogue, where Ziegler says he sold cool vintage furniture and talked patiently with all the kids who came around asking about The Middle Class.
Watch The Middle Class at a c.2013 gig
Mike Atta had been fighting cancer for about four years; he was in his early 50s when he died.
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.
RELATED: Scientists mix spider DNA with goat embyros to produce special silk proteins
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.
RELATED: Dylan probably won't work in community theater ever again
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.