The LA Chamber Orchestra's Jeffrey Kahane gives us a Bach master class; Ruth Reichl says she was scared to write her first novel; and hit-and-run victim Damian Kevitt finished his ride.
Getty gives $5M — first round of grants for next PST on Latino art
John Rabe talks with LA Mayor Eric Garcetti and others about Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, an art exhibit that begins September of 2017 and is organized and largely funded by the Getty Foundation.
"I think the last Pacific Standard Time was the envy of cities around the world. They looked to us, and they said, 'Wow! Los Angeles actually did that? A place that's known for its silos and its multiple cities and its divisions, was actually unified.'"— LA Mayor Eric Garcetti
In 2011, dozens of cultural institutions, big and small, took part in the first Pacific Standard Time, which focused on the LA art scene and reportedly gave a $280m boost to LA's economy. Tuesday, the Getty Foundation announced $5 million in grants to help fund research for the research stage of the next PST event: Pacific Standard Time LA/LA.
"(Pacific Standard Time) LA/LA will encompass exhibitions about the artistic connections between Los Angeles and Latin America, about the relationships between Latin America and the rest of the world, about the history of exchange among Latin American countries, or about the Latin American diaspora." — The Getty Foundation website
There are 41 recipients, from the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena ($140,000) to the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College ($150,000), to dozens of smaller and larger institutions in between.
RELATED: See all $5m in grants the Getty Foundation has given out for PST LA/LA
At Tuesday's event, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said he hopes PST LA/LA will surpass the first version in terms of art and impact on the local economy:
"You know, we have an embarrassment of cultural riches in Los Angeles, probably more great museums than anywhere else on the face of the earth. But in the past, we haven't stitched them together. The first Pacific Standard Time actually brought all these institutions together, and I said, 'We've got to keep doing this.' This second iteration is going to be great because it's going to celebrate Latin American and Latino art here in what is the international art capital, but also the northernmost capital of Latin America. This is good for jobs, tourists, art, and culture."
Garcetti is something of an artist himself — he has a very popular Instagram photo account — and since he is Latino, I asked if his photos will be in Pacific Standard Time LA/LA.
Yes, he replied tongue-in-cheek, "at the Getty ... in whatever their main gallery is, and probably all over the city. This stuff is going for a lot of money these days."
RELATED: John Rabe's Instagram photos
Listen to the audio to hear Mayor Garcetti and a host of other movers and shakers in the art world tell us about PST LA/LA, including MOCA's Philippe Vergne, MoLAA's Stewart Ashman, the Getty Foundation's Debroah Marrow, LACMA's director Michael Govan and curator Howard Fox, the Vincent Price Museum's Karen Rapp, and LA Times' art critic Christopher Knight.
LA Chamber Orchestra's Jeffrey Kahane on stepping down, Bach, and the Clippers
KPCC's John Rabe talks with LA Chamber Orchestra's Jeffrey Kahane about his decision to step down as LACO's musical director, and Thursday's solo concert: Bach's "Goldberg Variations."
It's going to be a long goodbye: In announcing its new concert season last week, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra also announced that Jeffrey Kahane will step down as music director at the end of the 2016-2017 season, when Kahane will mark 20 years in the job.
Maestro Kahane has helped turn LACO back into a world class institution, known for its mastery of the classical repertoire, support of new compositions, and innovative programming.
Go see LACO's Westside Connections concert May 15 with Arthur Rubinstein's son
But he took over the orchestra in the mid-1990s during some very dark days, just after it emerged from bankruptcy. The players then had to deal with distracting, dispiriting outside pressures ... just like another professional team of players did in the last few days: The LA Clippers.
"I really like the fact that you draw the analogy between the a sports team and a chamber orchestra, particularly a chamber orchestra, because the kind of communication, cooperation, commitment to absolutele, ferocious standards of excellent, those are all things we share with a great sports team. And the other thing we share is that whatever is going on off the court, outside the concert hall, we leave it behind, once we get out there."
The orchestra is light on its feet in another way: it solves LA's traffic problem by performing its concerts at half a dozen venues across the Southland. People on the West Side don't want to go to Disney Hall because of the traffic. People on the East side don't want to go to the Geffen Playhouse because traffic is a mess. But LACO performs regularly in Pasadena, Glendale, UCLA, downtown, and Santa Monica.
(An early Bach selfie.)
Kahane often leads the chamber orchestra from the piano, his first love, and Thursday night he performs a solo work, Bach's "Goldberg Variations," at Zipper Hall in downtown LA's Colburn School. Listen to our interview as he "breaks it down," showing us at the piano how Bach constructed this masterpiece ... and hear Rabe play three notes with Kahane.
After the 2016-17 season, Kahane becomes LACO's Music Director Laureate.
Brown widow v. black widow: Listener says our interview didn't make Spidey sense
Last week, I ran an interview with Rick Vetter, a spider expert at UC Riverside, who told us how the brown widow spider, an invasive species, is pushing the native black widow spider out of Southern California's urban areas.
Listener Dennis McCoy called to complain. You never asked about the webs of the two spiders, he said. Are they different? Is the brown widow's web as sticky as the black widow's?
True enough. I didn't ask and I should have. After all, a web is to a spider like a muffin recipe is to Susan Stamberg. So, we put the question to Rick Vetter and he said ...
Well, listen to the audio to hear Mr. McCoy's question and Vetter's answer.
Mexican Ranchera singer and pop superstar Pepe Aguilar gets his due at The Grammy Museum
UPDATE: On May 20, 2014, Pepe Aguilar gets his due at The Grammy Museum at LA Live, with a new exhibit called "Pepe Aguilar…La Leyenda Contunúa." The exhibit includes the charro suit and saddle he used as a kid when he made his Madison Square Garden debut; family photos; and letters written by his late father, Don Antonio Aguilar. And on May 21, he'll be onstage for an interview in the Museum’s Clive Davis Theater.
For a fifth of our audience, he needs no introduction, but the rest of you have been missing out.
Pepe Aguilar sings Mexican ranchera music, and has sold more than 12-million records. He was born in San Antonio, Texas, 45 years ago, but he was brought up on tour.
BELOW: Listen to Pepe Aguilar's favorite tribute songs
His father was the late Antonio Aguilar, one of the greats of ranchera music, and his mother is Flor Silvestre, a singer and actor from Mexico's golden age of cinema. Last year, he got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Pepe Aguilar's new album — his 24th — is a tribute to yet another of the greats, his father's rival Vicente Fernández. It debuted on iTunes at #1, and is called "Lástima Que Sean Ajenas," a joking reference to the Vicente Fernández song, "Lástima Que Seas Ajena," which translates roughly as "it's too bad she doesn't belong to me." The album's title, switching out "they" for "she," could be read as "I wish those were my songs."
"If you have grown up in the last three decades and you are a ranchera singer like me, Vicente Fernández has to be one of your idols," said Aguilar. "It's the Last of the Mohicans, that guy. It's a different story. People listen to many genres, not only one or two. For me it was important to close that era with my tribute to the last of the Mohicans."
Many children of stars who follow their parents' footsteps are tormented because they can never measure up. You can hear in that quote that Pepe Aguilar doesn't seem to have that problem. If anyone is allowed to close a door, it's him.
Aguilar says music is all he ever wanted to do, whether or not he made money from it. And if changing times means he may never experience the cultural dominance his parents enjoyed, 12-million records and a #1 debut on iTunes — coming in his 13th year as an independent artist — is nothing to sneeze at. And, in my opinion, where his father's voice had character, Aguilar's is fuller, more soaring and beautiful.
Aguilar says he strives to make music that has no boundaries, and there's no good reason more Anglos shouldn't buy his albums, even though they're sung in Spanish. The voice, the arrangements, the production values, the pure romance — they're all irresistible.
Frankly, isn't it better to not speak the language when you put a make-out album on the turntable? (Barry White's lyrics are distracting.)
Pepe Aguilar puts on a hell of a show, in charro costume, with a full band, and he has two concerts coming up. Thursday, Nov 21, at San Manuel Casino in Highland and Friday, Nov 22, at Valley View Casino Center in San Diego.
Aguilar shared his favorite tribute songs with KPCC. Listen to his Spotify playlist and tell us who else deserves a tribute album on Twitter using #PepeAguilarKPCC — or in the comments below.
Hit-and-run victim Damian Kevitt finishes his bike ride
Whether you're riding a bike to work, scaling a mountain or on a Sunday ride in the park, bicycling has its risks. In L.A., officials have struggled to find ways to make the road more friendly to pedal powered transit. Chief among those issues are hit and run crashes, which have killed or maimed dozens of Los Angeles cyclists each year.
Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson went to a bike ride last weekend that aims to put a stop to hit and run collisions.
It's a cool Sunday morning in LA's Griffith Park, just across the street from the Zoo. Cyclists cross the finish line for a charity event called "Finish the Ride."
There are food trucks, live music, a silent auction, but most of crowd is focused on one rider: Damian Kevitt, the guest of honor and organizer.
"It was very nerve-wracking at the very beginning moments, and then at a certain point it just… it all fell together," he said. "It was just awesome."
Damian, 37, has on his helmet, of course, a red shirt, bike shorts and just below his right knee—a prosthetic leg.
Damian lost his leg last February. It was a Sunday pretty much like this one, less than a mile from where I spoke with him.
He and his wife had just gotten groceries and were biking around Griffith Park before lunch. There was a huge backup of cars. One of them—a light colored minivan — swerved into the opposing traffic lane to get ahead, colliding with Damian.
"The actual impact itself wasn't that bad," said Kevitt. "I saw him a split second beforehand and tried to get out of the way… but I ended up on the hood of his car, briefly. He definitely saw me. There was no way he didn't see me. He stopped at that point, just enough so that I slid down into the front, right in front of him, and he took off."
Damian was pinned under the car. He told me he could hear his ribs cracking, that the crash left his ankle "filleted." And then he blacked out.
The minivan took off. Even though the accident was in broad daylight, none of the onlookers got a license plate number. Damian spent four months in the hospital and the minivan driver still hasn't been caught.
Hit-and-Runs A Pervasive Problem In Los Angeles
Talk to enough people at Finish the Ride and you'll inevitably hear similar stories. Like Don Ward, who lives in nearby Los Feliz. One evening in 2009, he was riding near Echo Park Lake when he said he saw a car swerving and speeding behind him.
"I panicked and tried to steer to the right and bail, but I didn't even have a chance," said Ward. "I was just lucky enough to have landed with my head facing the left side where the car driver drove around me and managed to get six of the seven numbers. The guy took off, of course."
Hit-and-run crashes have been called an epidemic lately.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, between 2009 and 2011, deaths from all types of hit and run accidents went up 13 percent nationwide. The Los Angeles Police Department says 20,000 hit run crashes are reported each year, it's estimated that about 80 percent of those go unsolved.
If a driver flees the scene of the crash, not only are they unlikely to get caught, but the punishment is usually pretty lenient. The driver who hit Don Ward in 2009 was eventually tracked down—he did 30 days of community service and paid a $500 fine.
California State Assemblyman Mike Gatto wants to change that. He's introduced A.B. 1532 to the state legislature, which would mandate that hit and run drivers lose their license for at least six months if another person was involved in the crash.
"They're not treated as seriously as other crimes," said Gatto. "If you're driving under the influence, for example — and you're caught — there's always a license suspension as part of it."
Cycling advocates say it's more than just a sentencing issue, that historically car-centric cities like Los Angeles need a change in mindset.
"I think the main thing is the streets aren't designed for us," said Eric Bruins, who works for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. "It feels like we're not welcome there. And drivers get the sense that that cyclist in front of me doesn't belong there or isn't supposed to be there and they do just crazy things, they honk, they swerve, they yell, they throw things."
The city's responded by building bike paths and making streets more friendly for cyclists.
Damian Kevitt plans to keep doing as many events like Finish the Ride as he can. The goal, he said, is to create a safer city for pedestrians, bicycles and cars, too. He doesn't want to vilify the drivers who hit and run. In fact, he isn't angry at the driver who hit him.
"I pity him," said Kevitt. "I lost months of my life, but I'm able to bounce back and move forward. This guy — unless he comes forward — he'll never be able to close on that particular incident. That's gotta be, probably more painful than what I have to go through."
Kevitt says the next Finish the Ride is in the works, but if you want to see him up and at it again, he's training to run the Los Angeles Marathon next March.
'Delicious!': Ruth Reichl's time at Gourmet mag inspires her first novel
KPCC's John Rabe talks in-depth with food writer Ruth Reichl about her debut novel, "Delicious!," in which a food prodigy from Santa Barbara comes of age at the ideal food magazine, called "Delicious!" Reichl says it's an amalgam of her former workplaces: the LA Times, the New York Times, and Gourmet Magazine. Here's a taste of their conversation:
Interview Highlights:
You've said that you kept writing memoirs because you were afraid to write a novel.
I think of fiction as the highest calling. I'm kind of addicted to it. It's the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life. Once, years ago, I had a long conversation with M.F.K. Fisher who said, "Well of course I always wanted to write fiction but I couldn't." So I always had this feeling of "Well, wait a minute, if Mary Francis can't write fiction, what makes me think that I can do it?" And I've always been terrified of doing it but I sort of put it off by saying, "I have a day job, so I really can't write fiction. But if I didn't have a day job, that's what I'd do." And then Gourmet closed and I didn't have a day job.
RELATED: NYT's Dwight Garner hates hates hates "Delicious!" ... except for the recipe.
In the "Delicious!" test kitchen, every once and a while, one of the test cooks will yell, "Taste!" and then all the other test cooks rush in to taste the food, and comment. Is that something that really happens in a test kitchen?
That is absolutely real. I mean, what does happen in Gourmet, we had eight test kitchens and at any given time there were like ten or twelve test cooks. And whenever anybody finished something, they would yell, "Taste!" and everyone would go running towards it, and then taste, and then brutally deconstruct the dish. I mean it was about everybody weighing in. And so the scenes where that's happening and people are saying, "Too much salt," "What's that thing that's closing my throat," "Why'd you put fenugreek (see below) in there," I mean that's a very real depiction of what happens in a large test kitchen.
Are you a fan of (early 20th Century author) Christopher Morley? Because the beginning of "Delicious!" has the feel of "The Haunted Bookshop."
It's so funny that you say that because my mother had a bookshop and one of the things that I have is a long correspondence between her and Christopher Morley. He had wonderful handwriting. I wasn't thinking of that. If it's there it's unconscious. But there is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you're open to them.
There's much more in our audio interview, including Ruth Reichl reading an extended excerpt from "Delicious!"
Ruth Reichl will be at Vroman's in Pasadena May 17 to sign and talk about "Delicious!"
The Library Journal says "Delicious!" "...will have readers salivating, and an insider's look at life at a food magazine is fascinating." Reviewers for Booklist praised it for having "Rich characterization, a bright New York setting, and transcendent discussions of taste and food." For a list of Reichl's favorite food memoirs, check out this episode of Morning Edition. Reichl also talks about her time at Gourmet in an episode of Fresh Air.
(Fenugreek, Wikipedia Commons)
Exclusive preview of Sci-Fest: chilling performance of an Ursula LeGuin classic
Sci-Fest is the short name for the 1st Annual Los Angeles Science Fiction One-Act Play Festival, which opens May 6 and features two rotating evenings of 9 short plays performed by actors from science fiction movies and TV shows.
As the organizer, David Dean Bottrell, puts it, "Sci-Fest is a unique festival. Unlike the fan conventions, Sci-Fest is committed to creating new sci-fi content. It is our hope to grow the festival and establish it as an annual destination event for Sci-Fi fans from around the world."
Check the full Sci-Fest schedule
I was joined in the studio by Philippe Mora, director of “Communion,” “The Beast Within,” and two installments of “The Howling" franchise; and actor L. Scott Caldwell, who won a Tony for August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and who also plays “Rose” on TV's “Lost.”
Mora directs Caldwell in “The Wife’s Story,” which, Caldwell says, Ursula LeGuin agreed to allow into the festival if they changed not one word of it. Caldwell reads an excerpt for us.
The festival's centerpiece is a revival of Ray Bradbury’s “Kaleidoscope,” - "seven astronauts’ mission turns deadly when their craft is destroyed, leaving them adrift in space" - and there are also three late-night sci-fi comedy shows.
Other actors include Nelson Ascencio (“The Hunger Games”), David Blue ("Stargate: Universe"), David Dean Bottrell ("True Blood"), Dean Haglund ("The X-Files"), James Kyson (“Heroes”), David H. Lawrence, XVII (“Heroes”), Madison McLaughlin (“Supernatural”), Julie McNiven (“Stargate: Universe” & “Supernatural”), Jasika Nicole (“Fringe”), Philip Anthony-Rodriguez (“Grimm”), Tim Russ (“Star Trek: Voyager), Armin Shimerman (“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” & “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) and Patricia Tallman (“Babylon 5”).
Logistics: Sci-Fest runs May 6 – June 1 at The ACME Theater, 135 N. La Brea Avenue (South of Beverly Blvd), Los Angeles, CA 90036.