The view from the 69th floor of the Wilshire Grand ... Brains On, the science podcast for kids ... our first look inside the Highand Park Bowl ... the Norton Simon summons up a triumph from the 1960s ...
Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, the Getty and me
Off-Ramp cultural correspondent Marc Haefele reviews "An Evening with Patti Smith" at The Getty Museum, staged in connection with retrospectives of the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe — with whom she began a relationship at 20 — at the Getty and LACMA.
Patti Smith, more beautiful than ever in her sexy flowing white hair, sang, read and recited gloriously for us at the Getty last weekend. It is generous of her to live for us in the shadow of Robert Mapplethorpe, now in his moment of total discovery.
His drawings and photos, which also fill a nearby Getty gallery, were back-projected on her little Getty stage. His youth-frozen face and pale eyes dominated the auditorium as she spoke and sang. She’s had 27 very tough years since Mapplethorpe died in 1989: years of loss — her brother and her husband in the 1990s — and accomplishment — about a dozen albums, two children, a grandchild. She's also gone from pioneer of punk to world priestess of pop. And while she was at it, she picked up a National Book Award for the bestselling 2010 memoir “Just Kids,” from which she read to us.
She wears her accomplishments modestly. She is far more famous now than Mapplethorpe ever was in his lifetime. Songs like “Because the Night” and “People Have the Power" inhabit our ears. But so does her central story, her inspirational, life-informing legend, really, of the two young lover/kindred souls on the cusp of 1970, advancing and creating as one spirit. Wandering the welcoming, long-lost streets of Mayor John Lindsay’s luminous New York, among the citizens, junkies, hippies, students, tourists and, it would seem, more than a few substantial artists. (Her story about how Alan Ginsburg tried to pick her up in an Automat restaurant “Because I mistook you for a very pretty boy” is without price.)
She gives it all back to us now with a hard-earned maturity and a musicianship that far exceeds what she could deliver in her proto-punk “Horses” days, 40 years ago. She is entitled to the Mapplethorpe legend of her choice. And now she is promoting his fame as he long ago promoted hers. There is justice in this.
That said, for anyone who knew her even slightly in 1970, “Just Kids” seems as selective a narrative as Lillian Hellman’s memoirs. It elides what were likely the enormous pains from her loss of Mapplethorpe to his gay destiny. Someday, a biographer may give us a better idea of all that happened in those few vital years when she and Mapplethorpe shared one another in Brooklyn and the Hotel Chelsea.
When she called me in 1970, asking for a favor, she was not at the Chelsea. She said she was living on a couch in a famous Manhattan club — Steve Paul’s The Scene — where the Doors and Jimi Hendrix made breakout appearances. She wanted, of all things, a set of review proofs for a novel I edited at Doubleday, the problematic masterpiece of a much acclaimed (in France) author who called himself Blaise Cendrars. Cendrars and his most famous novel, “Moravagine,” however, were so unknown in the U.S. that my colleagues thought I was committing career suicide by publishing it.
But Smith knew about it. She said that she wanted to read Cendrars, even before he was published, because he was strongly influenced by her favorite poet, Arthur Rimbaud. I’d never encountered a common reader who felt empowered to ask for an advance proof. I looked to the shelf where “Moravagine” review proofs lay in big yellowish bundles. A few had gone to major reviewers who’d ignored them, but we still had plenty to spare.
I messengered the proofs to 301 W. 46th St.; I had never sent a book to a nightclub before, either. A few days later, she mailed me a note, which I wish I still had:
Dear Mr. Haefele,
Thanks so much for “Moravagine.” I loved it.
And just you wait. You’re going to hear about me one of these days.
— Patti Smith
As the hotel prepares to open, a look from the top —almost — of the Wilshire Grand
UPDATE 6/22/2017: The Wilshire Grand hotel in downtown LA, the tallest building in the West if you include the spire, opens officially July 2. In April of 2016, Off-Ramp got a sneak peek. Do not look at the photos if you have vertigo. By the way, Hal Bastian, the unofficial mayor of Downtown LA, is billed as the hotel's first paying guest.
Get up early any morning and stand where Wilshire crosses the 110 Freeway, and you'll see a parade of men and women carrying lunch boxes, wearing Carhart and Dickies, steel-toed Red Wings and hard hats, safety glasses and gloves, all them converging on the Wilshire Grand, which is rising inexorably over downtown Los Angeles.
In 10 months, it'll eclipse the U.S. Bank Tower as the highest building west of the Mississippi. Nine hundred fifty people work there every day now; before long it'll be 1,000, skimming drywall, painting, installing fixtures, laying tile and hardwood, checking level and plumb, and — hopefully — measuring twice and cutting once.
And then, when it's done, as Mayor Garcetti told a crowd of workers at the weekly safety meeting Monday, parents will point to the building and tell their kids, "Your mom (or dad) built that."
That's a very Eric Garcetti thing to say, but I can verify that every time we see the U.S. Bank Tower, my crazy father-in-law, who was a carpenter on that skyscraper, does exactly that.
Garcetti says the Wilshire Grand represents 2.669 million man- and woman-hours of construction work, with a total of 11,000 jobs in the building phase, and 2,000 permanent jobs. "And that's not even counting the city bureaucracy that supports this," he laughs.
How a nasty winter brought revolutionary art to SoCal
In 1962, a little museum in Pasadena held an exhibit that rocked the art world. One of those participants is featured in a new show at the Norton Simon Museum. But as Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele discovered, he wouldn’t have been in either show if it hadn’t … snowed.
Joe Goode is 79 and still painting vigorously in his studio near the Santa Monica Airport, but back in the early 1960s, he was sitting in a car in Oklahoma City with an old high school buddy. Artist Jerry McMillan was trying to convince him to join him in California.
"I was saying 'Oh, man, I don't know,'" Goode recalled. "When I opened the door I couldn't get it open, I thought 'Woah, what's wrong with your door?' and then I saw there was this much snow on the ground. And so I shut it back and said "OK, come and get me. I'll go with you."
When Goode got to L.A., he worked part time jobs and spent 18 months at LA's famed Chouinard Institute. He had a hard time making a living off his paintings. "At that time, there were maybe 100 artists in the whole city of Los Angeles, and there were very few galleries," Goode said. "But the advantage of a scene like that is you could do anything you wanted."
Then, in 1962, at what was then called the Pasadena Art Museum, a young genius curator named Walter Hopps organized an exhibit called “New Painting of Common Objects.” The works were by revolutionary young artists from all over America, reacting to the '50s popular culture of advertising, movies, TV and cartoons. They rejected the deeply established post-WWII New York tradition of abstract art. Hopps’ show included artists who’d become known as Pop painters: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, Ed Ruscha … and Joe Goode, who suddenly had himself a career.
"It helped everybody out, because prior to that time, there had never been a museum show of pop art int he United States. So that means even Andy Warhol and those people had never been in a museum show before," Goode said.
"New Painting of Common Objects was a huge national hit. The following year, Hopps created a show for the man who could be called the avant garde godfather of Pop Art, Marcel Duchamp, the man who put the mustache on the Mona Lisa and the urinal in the art gallery.
Duchamp’s work was still revolutionary to Goode and his generation of artists. The retrospective both revived Duchamp’s global reputation and authenticated the young American artists who followed in his steps,
At the Pasadena Art Museum exhibit, the artists mingled with their spiritual mentor, who turned out to be, in his 70's, far from the zany revolutionary you’d hope for. "He was very kind of quiet, gentle man," Goode said. "He's what you'd expect out of a dignified Frenchman."
Now, more than 50 years later at the Norton Simon, the successor to the Pasadena Art Museum, Tom Norris has curated “Duchamp to Pop,” which combines the two landmark 1960s shows, with works of the French master and his successors, including Goode.
Duchamp and the Pop artists changed the way we look at art and common objects, like urinals, comics, cakes and pies, soup cans and, for Goode, crystalline, old-fashioned, rectilinear milk bottles.
"I came home from working at Chouinard one day... and there's this milk bottle sitting on the steps. I saw that as an image, and the reason it struck me so much - and this is the part that a lot of people don't understand about my work, but it's what guides me - the idea of being able to see something by looking up, looking down, looking in and looking out. And so here I see this milk bottle, this transparent milk bottle, sitting on the steps that goes up and down... and it just totally formed the way I started thinking about paintings after that." -- Joe Goode to Marc Haefele
“Duchamp to Pop” is at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena through August 29, 2016.
First Look: Highland Park Bowl restored to its 1927 splendor
The Highland Park Bowl, at 5621 North Figueroa Street LA CA 90042, is scheduled to open to the public Friday, April 29.
The 1933 Group, which refurbished the historic Idle Hour in North Hollywood and runs other evocative bars across like the Bigfoot Lodge in Atwater Village and Harlowe in West Hollywood, is re-opening the historic Highland Park Bowl on Figueroa Street in Northeast Los Angeles.
Most neighbors know the space at 5621 North Figueroa St. as Mr. T's Bowl, named for the man that bought the bowling alley in 1966 and mid-century-modernized it with a new facade, wall coverings and drop ceilings. Bowling was eventually pushed into the gutter and it became a well-known punk rock venue.
That's when entrepreneur Bobby Green, one of the 1933 Group partners, first heard of it. "I used to go to music shows there in the mid to late-'90s," he says. "I know I saw a lot of great punk rock bands there back in the day." He laughs that he didn't even think it was a bowling alley because it was so well disguised by that point, with a huge black curtain that blocked off the lanes.
The 1933 Group has been working on the restoration, Green says, for a year and a half. "1927 is pretty much what you're going to see when you come in. We were able to strip back all the years of remodel. It's a gorgeous space with a bow-truss ceiling, a forest mural that was hidden on the back wall (painted by the Arts&Craft Anderson Brothers) and eight skylights that were boarded up when we took it over." (Mr. T's was not known for being well-lit.)
Green says Joseph "Mr. T" Theresa didn't do too much damage. His additions were mostly cosmetic, including a thin metal facade on the building that protected its original Spanish Revival front.
"A 1927 newspaper article we dug up called it 'the most beautiful building on Figueroa,'" Green says. "And sure enough, after that metal came off, there was the original building, the beautiful windows, and 'The Highland Park Bowl' was still painted on the stucco in the front."
Not that the restoration wasn't costly. Green says his group has spent about $2-million so far, about what they spent to restore the Idle Hour in NoHo. For example, restoring each of the eight bowling lanes cost $30,ooo, spent mostly on wood and machinery.
The 1933 Group isn't new to the gentrified neighborhood of Highland Park. In 2002 it bought the notorious Richard's Hofbrau just down the street from The Highland Park Bowl and turned it into The Little Cave, now La Cuevita.
As at all 1933 Group establishments, there will be food (wood-fired pizzas, sandwiches and salads under executive chef Richie Lopez) and cocktails like The Dude Abides, a take on the White Russian.
Listen to the audio for John's full interview with Bobby Green, which includes more stories about bowling equipment, the notorious Hofbrau, and when Bobby knows a neighborhood is ready for a new bar. Hint: follow the artists.
Song of the Week: "Wednesday Night Melody" by Bleached
This week’s Off-Ramp song of the week is "Wednesday Night Melody" by the LA band Bleached.
Bleached is a three piece band fronted by Jennifer Claivin and her sister Jessie, both Los Angeles natives and veterans of the city's independent music scene. "Wednesday Night Melody" is off their latest album, Welcome the Worms, which was just released on Dead Oceans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hFYgMBDPFE
Want to see them live? Bleached is playing the Teragram Ballroom in Downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, May 5.
Bankruptcy and alleged embezzlement roil LA's blue chip art world
Off-Ramp host John Rabe speaks with Jori Finkel, who covers art for The New York Times and The Art Newspaper, about two big cases shaking up LA's high-stakes blue chip art world.
The first involves an infamous art dealer: after nearly 50 years of selling art and being sued, Doug Chrismas has lost control of Ace Gallery.
"Lawsuits by artists and collectors, seeking the return of consigned works, demanding profits, or both, have never stopped Douglas Chrismas, the founder of Ace Gallery, from doing business. An early champion of trailblazers like Robert Irwin, Richard Serra and Michael Heizer, Mr. Chrismas has spent nearly 50 years helping to start or jump-start the careers of artists here, even as he was scrutinized for sometimes failing to pay when works sold. But on April 6, Mr. Chrismas lost the keys to his gallery, after failing to make a $17.5 million court-ordered payment to settle his debts in a long-running Chapter 11 bankruptcy case." -- Jori Finkel, NYT
As Jori points out, decades ago, in his diaries, Andy Warhol, wrote "the check is late ... the check is late ... Doug Chrismas is so awful."
The second case, the arrest of Perry Rubenstein:
"When the veteran art dealer Perry Rubenstein moved his art gallery here from New York four years ago, he boldly declared that Los Angeles had become the country’s most exciting art scene, and he wanted to be part of it. Instead, Mr. Rubenstein’s life quickly collapsed: He was hit with a string of lawsuits for breach of contract; he and his wife divorced in early 2014; and his gallery filed for bankruptcy protection soon after, with prominent Los Angeles artists like Shepard Fairey and Zoe Crosher among his creditors." --Ian Lovett, NYT
And, it was revealed, Michael Ovitz was among the clients claiming Rubenstein ripped them off.
As Finkel tells us, the art world's secrecy and discretion makes a fertile field for these kinds of cases. Make sure to listen to our interview, held outside Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills.
What if the OJ Simpson trial happened in 2016? Marcia Clark weighs in
The last time you found yourself talking about Marcia Clark, it was probably after the moving finale of FX's "American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson" this month.
Sarah Paulson's portrayal of Clark, the lead prosecutor in the Simpson trial, was nuanced, sympathetic and compelling. Even the real life Marcia Clark agrees: "I was really, up until the very last minute, thinking 'I don't want to relive this nightmare.' That was 15 months of hell," said Clark. "But the performances were phenomenal. Sarah Paulson — unbelievable! She's so incredibly talented."
Clark, for her part, has kept busy since the trial. She wrote a tell-all memoir, appeared on TV more times than she can count, and since 2012 has found a new career: crime fiction novelist.
Clark's latest book, "Blood Defense," looks at the murder of a beloved but troubled Hollywood starlet through the eyes of criminal defense attorney Samantha Brinkman. "This is a woman with a tortured past," said Clark. "And kind of a twisted, warped view of justice."
"I wanted to write a book that incorporated all of my experience as a criminal lawyer," said Clark. "I used to be a defense lawyer before I was a prosecutor."
Clark tells a tale of murder, fame and family that's both familiar and new: social media and tech play a crucial role in every character's life. So we asked Clark: if the Simpson trial, one of the most covered trials in American history, happened today, how would the case be different?
Race would still play a factor
The trial of O.J. Simpson raised questions not just about the defendant, but also the Los Angeles Police Department and race in America. Clark believes there's still no avoiding a topic like that today.
The factor, to me, the biggest one and what was the biggest influence on the case, was the subject of race. And the fact that it happened just a couple years after the Rodney King riots, which was huge. And the tension — especially in downtown Los Angeles and the criminal courts building — was enormous.
But nowadays, we've just had a spate of police shootings. We've seen Ferguson, we've seen Laquan McDonald, we've seen Trayvon Martin, in a way, although the shooter was not a cop. They weren't even going to arrest Zimmerman! That was shocking to me.
We've seen it in a visceral form in all this footage: body cam, dash cam. I think that has really brought the issue to the forefront again. So we might be confronting a very similar feeling.
Social media would be unavoidable, obviously
"We didn't have to deal with [social media] — I'm so grateful for that," said Clark. "Can you imagine?"
Coverage of the trial made celebrities out of nearly everyone involved in the case. Factor in Twitter, Facebook and the pursuit of celebrities on social media, and their online privacy could vanish.
But social media could have impacted the trial, too. Anything posted online by the victim, suspect or witnesses could potentially be used as evidence. Clark says that could have helped with Mark Fuhrman's testimony: "That was, to me, one of the things that was so horrible and painful, was that he never told us about the tapes that existed, about this writer that he spoke to. If we'd known, yeah, it would've been horrible. But I could've put it out there right to begin with and dealt with it."
Technology could have made it easier for the prosecution
Any fan of Serial remembers that cell phone usage can tell you a lot about a murder case — not just who a person called, but where they were when they made the call. "So you can access the cell towers and tell where [O.J.] was, where [Nicole Brown Simpson] was, where Ron [Goldman] was," said Clark. "Not to mention where Mark Fuhrman was."
The defense might bring up Simpson's concussion history in the NFL
The fallout after the TV series brought in new speculation that Simpson, a five-time Pro Bowl running back, might have suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. While Clark doesn't doubt that's a possibility, would it have changed the circumstances of the case?
"There is — to my knowledge — it does not promote the kind of planning behavior that you see in him. Getting the knife, getting the gloves — the knit cap. This was a warm Summer night — you're not going to have these items with you," said Clark. "I've never heard that CTE causes that kind of behavior, I've heard that it causes explosive rage."
On 'Frogtown,' guitarist Anthony Wilson tackles love, loss and lyrics
If there’s such thing as royalty in the Los Angeles jazz scene, Anthony Wilson is a prince. He’s a guitarist who’s worked with Paul McCartney, Leon Russell and Willie Nelson. For a day job, he plays guitar with singer Diana Krall. His father is the late Gerald Wilson, a trumpeter and big band leader who arranged for musicians like Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and more.
Anthony Wilson’s also a solo artist, with a handful of albums under his belt. For his latest record, "Frogtown," Wilson explored personal themes like love, death and family. "Frogtown" also marks the first time the guitarist has picked up a vocal mic.
Off-Ramp jazz correspondent Sean J O’Connell met Wilson in his Arts District apartment to talk about how he made the transition.
https://soundcloud.com/wilsonthecurator/01-she-wont-look-back
On "Frogtown," his latest album
It's named after a neighborhood here in Los Angeles between the 5 Freeway and the L.A. River. I used to live nearby there and I walked quite a bit through the neighborhood. It's sort of an odd place that feels a little bit lost in time. The album itself, I consider it to be a collection of musical depictions of very specific moods, or feelings, or stories. That door opens and we keep you there.
On singing live for the first time
Just to begin to open my mouth, and begin singing after years and years of not doing it, and being identified with purely instrumental music... to sort of go to the first gig and sing the first song that I had written in front of that audience — it was like jumping off a cliff.
Some of the songs on the record definitely touch on quite tender emotions, stories. The one I'm thinking of right at this moment is a song called "Our Affair" — which was definitely not easy to write or to sing. It's about my mother and my father, they met while he was married and had a family. They had an affair, which lead to me being born.
On the legacy of his father, bandleader Gerald Wilson
My father moved to Los Angeles to 1944, I believe, and started his first big band. He loved this city. I heard him speak so many times about what it was like for him to see L.A. for the first time, and experience it for the first time. And I put myself in his shoes and imagined what kind of feelings he must have experienced, being on Central Avenue within the whole black community in Los Angeles at that time.
It echoes of him constantly in other peoples' work, though you might not always hear the credit given.
On transitioning out of instrumental jazz and into vocal pop music
I love that. I mean, in a sense that has been one of my kind of building frustrations with playing instrumental music only. What if songs could be more specific?
Jazz musicians will play a song, and they'll say "this is my song, titled 'X' and it's about X." But Instrumental music can never be about X, really. Instrumental music is simply sound being played. As much as people who play instrumental music want to say that their songs are about something, it's actually not quite true.