We meet one of the hundreds of party princesses who work in Southern California; Patt Morrison remembers her friendship with Marlon Brando; Brains On!, the science podcast for kids; LA's secret tunnels.
John Rabe interviews the actor who plays him in 'The End of the Tour,' David Foster Wallace biopic
At "The End of the Tour," of course someone else winds up becoming yourself.
Near the beginning of "The End of the Tour," the David Foster Wallace biopic based on David Lipsky's memoir "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," you can hear the actual voice of NPR's Robert Siegel introducing an appreciation of the author on "All Things Considered."
Then, toward the middle of the film (reviewed here by MPR's Stephanie Curtis), Wallace is interviewed in a Minnesota Public Radio studio by a tall, dark man with a lovely voice. That's me. (Click the bonus audio to hear that 1996 interview from the MPR archives.) Well, it was me, in 1996, in real life.
But in the movie, it's Dan John Miller.
I have no gripe with Miller. In "Walk The Line," which won an Oscar, he played Johnny Cash's guitarist and best friend, Luther Perkins; he's won a bunch of awards for narrating audio books; and he's the leader of the band Blanche.
I am truly grateful they picked an accomplished, good-looking actor to portray me. I am possibly even more grateful they picked someone from Detroit, like me, to play me, not someone who sounds like a male counterpart to Joan Cusack's pitch-perfect Minnesotan.
But I do wish they had picked me to play me. I really liked me for that part.
It was one thing when there was a movie with my name in 2010:
I can't really get mad that German filmmaker Florian Gallenberger didn't pick a C-list public radio celebrity to play the Oskar Schindler of China. I couldn't have pulled off the role of a man who saved something like a hundred-thousand lives during the infamous Japanese Rape of Nanking.
But for the 15 seconds "NPR Host" (me) is in "The End of the Tour," I would have been so perfect in that role you would have thought it was me. You could say I was born to play that part.
In any case, listen to my interview with Dan John Miller — click that little arrow above — and when they're making a movie about Miller, send a letter to the director telling them you know someone who'd be perfect to play him.
The costumed princesses of Los Angeles, at a kids party near you
They’re glamorous, they’re exhausted and they’re hoping to be invited to your kid’s next birthday party. They are the costumed princesses of Los Angeles and, according to Jennifer Michele of the Los Angeles Princess Company, their ranks are increasing.
“It has blown up so much in the last year or so,” Michele says from behind the wheel of her used Prius.
Michele got into the princess game five years ago. Not long after, she started her own company, which she runs out of her North Hollywood apartment. From costumes and wigs to booking gigs, Michele is her own boss – and her company’s only employee.
She says that about a year ago — also around the time a certain animated snow queen took the minds and hearts of children everywhere (cough "Frozen" cough) — the number of working princesses exploded.
“All the princesses know each other,” Michele says. “There are always others that, for whatever reason, want to be competitive or territorial over their area of Los Angeles.”
A search on Yelp for “party princesses” in the Los Angeles area returns 56 different princess party companies, some with over a dozen actors in their ranks. While Michele says that there’s enough room for all the dedicated snow queens and little mermaids, some have brought down the standard of quality.
As evidence, Michele points to the “Elsa Twerking" video on YouTube – a brief video of a party princess really letting it go.
“There are a lot of people out there making it hard for us legit princesses,” Michele says.
There's a lot to worry about in the big, bad world of a professional princess — such as traffic, competition... and copyright law.
“There are certain rules to play by, to make sure clients are aware you aren’t associated with [companies like Disney] or aren’t using copyrighted names, but you can’t really copyright a likeness,” Michele says — dressed as the Little Mermaid, whose name is in the public domain.
For Michele, being a princess isn’t a part-time gig. She pays her bills, and for all her costumes and wigs, from being a princess.
“I actually had plans of working in entertainment,” Michele says. “I quickly found that [princess acting] was the thing that people were willing to pay for. ... You can make your living doing this, but you really have to put in what you expect to get out of it.”
One thing working princesses can expect to get out of it is tough questions from young clients.
When she’s at a gig as the snow queen, Michele says kids have questioned how it can be so hot in L.A. if the famous "Frozen" royalty is here.
“My answer to that is: Here in California it doesn’t snow, so I’m not allowed to do my ice magic,” Michele says.
Roger Corman tells us about his original 1994 'Fantastic Four' that was never released
This week, Fox releases its latest reboot of Marvel’s "Fantastic Four." It cost a reported $122 million to make, but it wouldn't exist if it weren’t for a million-dollar movie made two decades ago by a legend of low budget cinema.
Quick. You're a creature so powerful you consume entire universes. Which Marvel supervillain are you? Answer: You’re Galactus, the sworn enemy of Marvel's mutant supersquad the Fantastic Four.
(Galactus in promotional art by Mitch Breitweiser. Wikipedia Commons)
But the real world has its Galactus too. He's a jovial grey eminence, who sits behind a big desk in a posh and airy office on the edge of Beverly Hills, and whose latest production is called "Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf."
And until I tell him, he doesn't even realize he — Roger Corman — personally destroyed the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Universe.
(R.H. Greene and producer Roger Corman. Courtesy R.H. Greene)
"'The Fantastic Four' was one of the most fantastic projects I was ever involved in," Corman says with a laugh. "I'm a little amazed that what we did in '92 is still in the news in '15."
Corman is now 89. His low-budget filmmaking career goes back more than 60 years and includes more than 400 producer credits and 50 directing credits. Films like "Attack of the Crab Monsters," "Attack of the Giant Leeches," "The Terror," "The Raven," "Little Shop of Horrors," "Rock 'n' Roll High School" and "Death Race 2000." Corman is often discussed in terms of the younger talents he discovered: Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Gale Ann Hurd, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese and more.
In the 1970s and '80s, Corman alums dominated studio filmmaking, and Corman could have been a studio filmmaker too. He directed a couple of films for 20th Century Fox, but decided he liked life better back on the outside.
"By 1992 I had a studio in Venice and I was producing about 10 pictures a year. We had our own distribution arm, and as we used to say, we had to feed the dinosaur. We had to make enough films so that the distribution arm could function," Corman says.
Nobody in Hollywood had more independence than Corman, nor could make more movies for less money. Which is why producer Bernd Eichinger, who died in 2011, called Corman when he got into a jam.
"He had an option to produce 'The Fantastic Four' on a 30 million dollar budget. But the option was going to expire on December 31st and he didn't have the 30 million dollars. So he came to me and said, 'Roger, I've got this 30 million dollar picture. Could you make it for 1 million dollars?' I said, 'We can do a pretty good job, I think, for a million dollars.'"
The main purpose behind "The Fantastic Four" was to keep Eichinger from losing his film rights. But Corman and company still tried to make a real movie. In 1992, there may have been a few other producers foolhardy enough to tackle a $30 million movie on a $1 million budget — but only Roger Corman could have pulled it off. His "Fantastic Four" is actually pretty good.
It's brisk, for one thing — 90 minutes flat. That's 71 minutes shorter than the butt-battering "Avengers: Age of Ultron," a film that cost $280 million to make.
Corman's film is also true to its source. The Human Torch has to cry "Flame on!" to control his powers. Reed Richards, the elastic team leader known as Mr. Fantastic, has a spit curl worthy of Bob's Big Boy. And the lavaman superhero called the Thing shouts out his comic book catchphrase "It's clobberin' time!" no fewer than three times.
That's not to say "Fantastic Four" isn't textbook Corman too — space scenes are a blend of NASA stock shots and the rocketship from a Soviet-era science fiction movie Corman's been plundering since the 1960s. And when Dr. Doom fires his death ray, Corman shows us '50s atomic test footage of exploding houses.
There's even a blown line reading, with the Human Torch saying, "I gotta make sure nothing here happens to sis."
Corman laughs warmly when some of the film's more obvious shortcomings are pointed out to him. "Those were some of the compromises we had to make in order to trim 29 million dollars off the budget."
"Fantastic Four" is a farewell address from a less pretentious time. When the Hulk was still a bodybuilder painted green, and the Thing was an actor in an orange rubber suit. It's a B movie for sure, but everybody brought their A game.
"We took the film very seriously as a challenge," says Corman, "an attempt to do something beyond what we'd been doing before. Everybody was really up for this."
"Fantastic Four" stands as one of the better Corman productions of the 1990s. It's also one of the few Corman films to never get released.
"We were ready to distribute the film when Bernd told us he'd made the deal with Fox. I said to Bernd, 'OK, you're now going to make the 30 million dollar picture.' He made it, and I think it came to 60 million or something like that. I said, 'What are you going to do with the 1 million dollar picture?' Fox said, 'If you want to continue with us, you're not going to distribute the 1 million dollar picture.' When Bernd told me that he'd sold it to Fox, I cashed the check, but I was somewhat disappointed."
But the world wasn't done with "The Fantastic Four." A bootleg version has a million views on YouTube. But the film's most lasting legacy — the one Corman himself was mostly unaware of — is as a butterfly effect.
Because of Roger Corman, Eichinger kept the rights to "The Fantastic Four," and then partnered with the Fox film studio for a couple of mega-productions. This severed the Fantastic Four from the rest of the Marvel movie universe, which now belongs to Disney. As a result, Marvel has discontinued the "Fantastic Four" comic book, and Disney has written the characters out of the upcoming "Infinity War" movies.
This shift is tectonic for true fans — because the Fantastic Four aren't just any characters. They're the first superhero creations from the team of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, themselves two foundational figures on the Mount Rushmore of comic books. Cutting the Fanastic Four out of the official Marvel Universe is like cutting Moses out of the Bible.
"I'm amazed to hear that Marvel has done that," Corman says. "I understand their reasoning — Fox controls that one project. Nevertheless, it seems to me they could work together with Fox. There's no reason why they couldn't collaborate in some way. But egos sometimes get in people's ways."
The feud between Marvel and Fox has gotten so bad that one Marvel artist recently drew the cast of Fox's new Fantastic Four reboot into a Punisher comic book. And then blew them up.
Because Roger Corman knows how to make a movie for a million dollars, the corporate histories of two of the largest media conglomerates the world has ever seen have been altered irrevocably, and decisions worth billions are being taken in what reports describe as an atmosphere of bitterness and acrimony.
While Roger Corman just sits in his comfortable office, planning out his next production.
"You can't predict what is going to happen," Corman says. "You go forward, you do the best you can, you have your plan, and the plan never works out exactly the way you thought it would."
A partial cast and crew reunion and a special screening of "DOOMED!," a new documentary about the Corman production of "The Fantastic Four," will be featured at the American Cinematheque's Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on Thursday, Aug. 13 at 7:30 p.m.
Abraham, Isaac and del Sarto at the Getty Museum
“God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Abe said 'God, you must be puttin’ me on.'”
— Bob Dylan
There are a lot of things to like about the Getty’s ongoing show of works of late Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto, including a bevy of rare red-chalk working drawings of figures that went into his greatest paintings. Seeing these is like having a scan of the mind of the great painter himself as he accomplishes his mighty work.
But to me the most arresting work there was one of three extant versions of del Sarto’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac.” It’s a subject that’s inspired artists as various as Rembrandt, Caravaggio and — as we shall see — sculptor George Segal. But no one ever did it better than del Sarto.
It’s an incomplete picture, with some brown underpainting clearly visible. But you don’t notice things like that. What you notice is an old man with a big knife about to kill a buff naked teenager. It’s the facial expressions that come out at you as much as the horrible action.
Old Abraham’s is that of a farmer somehow compelled to kill a favorite animal, but eager to get it over with as quickly as possible. Isaac’s is a wonderful compilation of horrified wide-eyed disbelief. "My beloved father, the man I care for most in this entire world, is about to cut my throat!"
The details are enthralling: Isaac cowers in his helpless nudity. As Abraham leaps to his vile, divine task, his superhero’s red cloak billows like Captain Marvel’s.
And then, bang right there in the middle — for though this is a flat painting, its genius creator makes it seem like a kind of animated sequence — there is this little winged cupid touching Abraham on the left shoulder. It’s an angel, God’s little sock puppet, saying "No, Abe, God’s just been messing with you.’’
“Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.’’
— God
An unfortunate ram is found nearby and sacrificed in Issac’s stead. And this weird tale becomes a narrative of faith and love in the three global monotheistic religions — because of his faith, Abraham’s vast progeny spread all over the world, as Genesis hurries on to describe. But if Abraham and God ever talked to one another again, the Bible doesn’t mention it.
Del Sarto has his own doubts. In his great painting, what you take away is the lifelong trauma both men would experience: Dad wanted to kill me, I nearly killed my own son. It’s in their faces for us to see — not in the form of love or faith, but as enduring, eternal horror. They may trust in God, but they can never again trust one another.
A great artist of our own time did his own rendering of the same scripture, and this work’s history shows how deep within us the trauma of murdering our children remains. Almost 40 years ago, sculptor George Segal did simple life-size bronze of the story — with Isaac in chains, kneeling in wait for his father’s knife.
(Princeton University Art Museum)
The work was to commemorate the 1970 tragedy of Kent State, where National Guard troops fatally shot four protesting students. After much hypocritical blathering, the university rejected the statue as too controversial. Nothing could better show how powerful the ancient story remains to this day, that Midwestern officialdom still cannot look its powerful lesson in the face.
If you want to see Segal’s take on Abe and Ike, it’s on display at Princeton University. But del Sarto’s masterpiece , on loan from the Cleveland Museum, is still there on the Getty’s hill in Brentwood.
"Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action" is at the Getty Center through Sept. 13.
Happy Art Laboe Day! And happy 90th, Art!
Radio legend Art Laboe turns 90 on Friday, August 7. He's been playing music and talking on the radio in Southern California for 60 years.
To celebrate -- a few days early -- the LA County Board of Supervisors is declaring today "Art Laboe Day" in LA County. The City of LA did the same 34 years ago when Art got his star on the Walk of Fame:
Art recently returned to LA radio after a brief hiatus, but other stations in the region kept carrying his show, including a Monday-Friday 9-midnight gig on Old School 104.7FM (KQIE) in San Bernardino, plus Bakersfield, Barstow, Phoenix, Oxnard, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Tuscon.
Here's what Art does: He genuinely loves connecting with his listeners. That's why they love him; that's why he's still on the air. As KPCC's Vanessa Romo put it in 2012:
Art Laboe's face may not be instantly recognizable, but his warm voice is. For more than half a century, Laboe’s been a conduit for lovers dedicating love songs to each other.
He’s a purveyor of rhythm & blues since the time when L.A.’s airwaves were segregated. An Armenian DJ without a drop of Latino blood, who’s now the adopted godfather to L.A.’s Chicano youth. He also coined the phrase “oldies but goodies." They were oldies and definitely goodies in 1955 when Laboe started broadcasting live from Scrivener’s Drive-In burger joint in Hollywood.
"It just blew up. I mean, kids, only music they were hearing were these schmaltzy love songs and all of a sudden, here’s this afternoon program and the microphone is live, you hear girls giggling, horns honking, 'Hey Joe!' You hear all this background going on," said Laboe. "It sounds like a party. They’d never heard anything like that on the air. Neither had I."
Here's how USC's Josh Kun put it in an L.A. Times article:
"He has always treated people with respect and taken them very seriously — not as a marketing demographic, not a source of potential advertising revenue, but he has taken them seriously as a community, and as individuals. When folks call in to his radio show, he listens to them. He doesn't rush them off the air." -- Josh Kun, LA Times
And that's why -- even though his Sunday night show on KDAY 93.5 FM competes with the Sunday night broadcast of Off-Ramp -- you ought to give him a listen, give him a salute today, and raise a glass to him Friday on his 90th.
You can help L.A. County celebrate Laboe. Show up this morning at 10am at Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, 500 W. Temple Street, Room 381B,Los Angeles, CA 90012, to see Art get his proclamation.
Alan Cheuse: My cousin, my best friend
Alan Cheuse, who died last Friday at the age of 75, was more than the man who delivered something like 1,200 pitch-perfect book reviews for NPR for more than a quarter of a century. Alan was my first cousin and a best friend.
I miss Alan's laughter, his wit, his good-natured gossip, and his bear hugs. A big Russian bear, but to be sure, a teddy bear, defying our raw Russian roots. Alan was the elder child of my father’s younger brother, but he took the name Cheuse, our grandmother’s maiden name, rather than Kaplan, because our paternal grandfather had abandoned the family in the turmoil of a roiling anti-Semitic Russia.
My father was subsequently swept up into the Czar’s army, World War One, followed by the revolution, but come the red-white civil war he had enough, deserted, and wandered west to Paris, where he became a tailor.
Meanwhile, his brother, Alan’s father Fishal, became in time a captain in the Red Air Force, but in the 1930s crashed his fighter into the hostile Sea of Japan and was saved. But instead of returning to a Stalinist Russia where our family was being purged, he ended up in Shanghai, flying air mail for the nationalists, until the Japanese attacked China .
To his rescue came my father, then relatively safe in New York City. He sponsored Alan’s father’s immigration to the United States. But his flying days were over, for the FBI deemed him a security risk. So he scraped by working as a radio repairman in New Jersey, and got married. Into this hard-edged world came Alan in 1940, five years my junior.
Alan always found comfort in books, and excelled at Rutgers. At graduation, he turned down a job with the New York Times where I was, to travel and write. We all envied his confidence, although taking exception to the depiction of the family in his memoir, “Fall Out Of Heaven,” which traced his Dad’s life in Russia and after.
Alan continued to write, more and more, and to teach. His workshops were legend. There also were friendships with writers -- I remember us hanging out with Bernard Malamud and Richard Ford, and would-be writers, too. And he did those NPR reviews, somehow capturing the essence of a complex book in exactly two minutes and twenty seconds on the nose, every time, for which Alan was justly proud.
As the years went on, we talked less and less about the family’s thorny past, and more about our present families and current projects, and what was for dinner. This adhered to the family adage that the mark of a survivor was not to look back, but to live in the moment.
Alan did just that. He lived every day. He was immortal ... until he was not.
Sam Hall Kaplan is an architecture and design critic, formerly of Fox 11, the LA Times, and the New York Times.
Marlon and me: Patt Morrison remembers a decade-long conversation with Marlon Brando
Just like Elvis Presley, there’s an old Marlon Brando and a young Marlon Brando.
Old Marlon muttered.
"I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."
Young Marlon bellowed.
"Hey, Stellllllllaaaaaaa!"
But those are the onscreen Brandos. The offscreen Marlon was something else. The new documentary “Listen to Me Marlon” gets a lot closer to the real man, in his own voice, in the personal recordings he made over 40-plus years. For those of us who knew him -- as I did, for most of the last decade of his life – the film's another reminder of what a brilliant, quirky, infuriating, tender-hearted, complex, and comical man he was.
The voice on those tapes is the same voice that came over my phone, midday or midnight. “It’s Mar,” he would say, or sometimes he’d just begin talking, because of course you knew who it was.
The playwright Tennessee Williams liked to tell about the time young Marlon came to his house to audition for Stanley Kowalski in the Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” When Marlon got there, the plumbing was backed up and the lights were out. So he fixed them. And then got the part.
Many years of renown later, when men showed up at Marlon’s house on Mulholland Drive to work on the pipes or fix the electrical system, Marlon was right there, asking them all about how it was done. When he decided to become an actor, I told him, the world lost a great plumber.
And boy, did he love his gizmos. Offer him a choice between a Rolex and a new magic trick -- he’d take the magic. Any kind of electronic device enthralled him, from ham radio to Tivo, reel to reel to CD. He even gave me my first cell phone. Once, he summoned me over urgently, and when I got there, he showed off his brand new miniature voice memo recorder, as tickled as if it were Christmas Day, and he was nine years old.
He’d watched me on television, it turned out, sizing me up long before he called me up. We bonded over dogs and books – anything but acting. He didn’t want to talk about acting. He didn't read "People" magazine; he read "Popular Mechanics." He wanted to talk about astronomy and archaeology, about Japanese culture and the Sand Creek Massacre.
Marlon may have had to scribble out his movie lines somewhere that he could see them as the camera rolled … but he knew by heart whole poems by Elinor Wylie and Matthew Arnold, long soliloquies from Shakespeare.
Sometimes, he’d let me have a go at reciting: maybe he’d forgotten, or maybe he was just checking to see whether I remembered as well as he did.
Perhaps even more than poetry, he loved music – Ellington’s “Satin Doll,” songs of Celia Cruz, and the folk tunes of the Auvergne. Harry Dean Stanton singing “Danny Boy” to him unfailingly brought him to tears.
But Marlon hated – hated – novelty songs. If I wanted him to hang up the phone so I could go to sleep, all I had to do was start singing something like “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?” and … click!
“Listen to Me Marlon” introduces the world to a man a few of us were fortunate enough to know. Ours was not always an easy friendship but it was, to the last, a true one.
Is there such a thing as a trust-funded surf gang? It's Palos Verdes' Bay Boys
Lunada Bay is a small, rocky, U-shaped beach on the northwest end of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The surf spot is legendary for the 20-foot waves that its winter swell brings in — waves that apparently belong to "locals only," according to a group of surfers called the Bay Boys.
Surfing "localism" is the practice of scaring newcomers away from a beach. Surfers may become locals by enduring hazing from current locals in a process that can take years.
Lunada's localism has been in the news on and off for decades, and cropped up again in the Guardian this May, via a hidden camera video of surfers boasting about fights and intimidation.
"It was mostly young to middle-aged white guys," says Rory Carroll, the Guardian's west coast correspondent in the United States. Carroll and fellow journalist Noah Smith climbed down Lunada's bluffs with surfboards and a camera in tow.
"The reason there's a lot of space is because we keep it like that. We f---ing hassle people... There's still fights down here. People will just f---ing duke it out, f---ing work your car," one surfer was caught on tape saying. The same voice goes on to say that he's been sued in the process of fighting outsiders off his beach, "You have to f---ing get a lawyer... that's gonna cost you ten grand. I don't wanna go through that s--- again."
(A map of Palos Verdes Estates. Lunada Bay is at the west-most point on the map. Credit: City of Palos Verdes Estates)
Repeated assault cases led Torrance-based attorney Michael Sisson to sue the City of Palos Verdes Estates (in addition to bringing lawsuits against nine Lunada surfers) for failing to "protect his clients' civil rights."
One of Sisson's clients was pushed off of an eight-foot cliff and shattered his knee on the rocks below at the hands of eight surfers known as the "Dirty Underwear Gang," at the Indicator, a surf spot one block from Lunada Bay. The city's response? A proclamation, denouncing localism.
"We were unsuccessful in getting an injunction," Sisson said regarding his lawsuit against the city. "They said that they couldn't identify the exact gang members. They didn't have a gang list, like LAPD would have with the Crips or the Blood[s]."
When Carroll and Smith returned to their car after gathering footage, the word "Kooks" (amateur surfers) was scrawled on the windshield in surf wax. They went to the Palos Verdes Police Department to report the vandalism.
"We know all of them... They're infamous around here. They're pretty much grown men in little men's mindset... It literally is like a game with kids on a schoolyard to them," said one officer who was recorded on the Guardian's hidden camera. Carroll says the police told them that if they were assaulted, they would respond to a distress call.
Sisson's solution? Have the police monitor surfing websites for big incoming swells, and then set up patrols around the small bay during the forecasted timeframes to catch Lunada when there are the most surfers there.
Every time the Bay Boys are in the news, says Sisson, they pull back on their aggression and lay low for a while. But even when we were there, there were still several men sitting atop the bluffs. Sisson returned their "stink eye."
Carroll admitted he would not try to surf there again until the city or the locals' attitudes change the way outsiders are treated at Lunada Bay.
A man who grew up on Bunker Hill says 'Get Angels Flight running again!'
"Angels Flight has been closed almost two years now, and it just breaks our heart every time we go by." — Richard Schave
The two cars of the Angels Flight funicular railway in downtown Los Angeles have been stuck for years, figuratively and in reality. What looks like a good old-fashioned bureaucratic impasse has kept the historic railway from being reopened to the public for two-plus years now, and boosters are trying a second-order solution.
In a Change.org petition, the Angels Flight Friends and Neighbors Society is asking Mayor Eric Garcetti to nudge Sacramento politicians into switching the agency that oversees Angels Flight from the PUC to CalOSHA.
"Angels Flight is one of the great historic attractions of our city, a palpable link between the lost Victorian neighborhood of Bunker Hill and the vibrant new Downtown below. It is heartbreaking to see the cars and track structure as they are today, dusty and tagged with graffiti. Please, will you step in personally to help cut the red tape in Sacramento and San Francisco so that a pathway to a solution can be identified?" — Angels Flight Friends and Neighbors Society petition
Last week, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) voted to look into getting Angels Flight going again.
(In an undated photo, Angels Flight in its original location, next to the Third Street tunnel at Hill Street. Credit: LAPL/Security Pacific National Bank Collection)
Angels Flight ran without a hitch from 1901 to 1969, when it was dismantled as part of the remaking of Bunker Hill, when the run-down neighborhood was razed in the name of progress.
(1969: Working at night, the archway for Angels Flight at Hill Street is being prepared for moving day when it will be put in storage for future use. LAPL/Herald-Examiner Collection)
In 1996, it was moved down the street and ran again until a fatal accident in 2001 — the first in its history. It reopened again in 2010, and ran until 2013, when a mechanical problem occurred that led an investigator to shut it down.
Gordon Pattison, 69, remembers riding Angels Flight every day as a child — he even had a favorite seat that he still considers "his seat," and he claims what he calls "effective ownership" of the railway. "Effective ownership," he says, "really gets down to who gets to decide the fate of a neighborhood. Is it the people that own the property, the politicians, the business owners? And what I say is that the people who live in the area who make use of the facilities every day, those people have part ownership in it, too, and should have a say in the fate of that neighborhood and the fate of things like Angels Flight."
(1969: "The Castle" and "The Saltbox," historic Bunker Hill homes owned by Pattison's family, sit on blocks awaiting their removal to Montecito Heights. They later burned in arson fires at the Heritage Square site. LAPL/Herald-Examiner Collection)
Listen to the audio above to hear Angels Flight booster Richard Schave (of Esotouric Tours, and a founder of the Downtown Art Walk) and Pattison talk about the need to get Angels Flight moving again — not only as a link in the city's mass transit system, but as a vital link in L.A.'s history — and to hear Pattison's memories of growing up on the Bunker Hill. It's a history fewer and fewer people are living witnesses to.
Song of the week: 'Stonefist' by HEALTH
Off-Ramp's song of the week is "Stonefist" by Los Angeles-based noise rockers HEALTH. "Stonefist" is off HEALTH's forthcoming album "Death Magic," which will be released August 7 via Loma Vista.
HEALTH will play at this year's FYF Fest in Exposition Park which happens August 22nd and 23rd.
Here's what Hua Hsu recently had to say about the band for The New Yorker:
"Their songs are aggressive and turbulent, as though all four were competing to conjure the most impressive racket."
Restaurant menu exhibit 'To Live and Dine in LA' tells Los Angeles's real history
"To Live and Dine in L.A." is a Los Angeles Public Library exhibit and book from Angel City Press that tells the story of L.A. through selections from the library's huge collection of restaurant menus.
The book was written and edited by USC Annenberg Professor Josh Kun and includes a foreword by Roy Choi, the chef and restaurateur who, through the kogi taco, is essentially responsible for the food truck boom.
KPCC's Patt Morrison met Choi at the restaurant of the Line Hotel in Koreatown to talk about what menus tell us about the growth of L.A. into the most diverse and interesting metropolis on the face of the Earth. Click the audio button above to listen to the long version of their conversation, or read excerpts below.
The library has more than 9,000 menus in its collection. Themes emerge: highbrow, lowbrow, classes and fusions of food before we even used the word "fusion."
The book travels from the late 1800s all the way until the '80s. So you saw a city almost transform through these menus. You saw two war times. You saw a city that was basically dirt and dust into opulence. You saw Hollywood emerge. You saw racism, mainly during World War 2, saying ... "A portion of your meal will be donated back to keeping the Japs out of the city." And then also through indirect racism... The early Chinese menus using stereotypical figures and Charlie Chan-type figures, broadcast as "These are kind of subhuman people, we can kind of go look at them like at a zoo, and experience their life and be exotic for a day."
(KPCC's Patt Morrison at Roy Choi's Commissary. Credit: Robert Garrova)
How important are these pieces of paper?
It's really like a novella on one piece of paper, because if you really study everything from the way it's laid out to the choices in which the food is being cooked, to the pictures, the graphic design and the fonts, it really tells you a lot about what these people were trying to say. Some were creating distant lands, and in some you could feel the energy of them being in a new land, enjoying the freedom of Los Angeles. There was this really innocent, kind of naive freedom to say, "You know what, I could put teriyaki on this burger, and it's OK. There's nobody I need to ask."
But L.A. had a reputation as a food desert!
You saw how much food that L.A. kind of invented. The first hamburger, the French dip, Cobb salad, tiki drinks. In many cases L.A. gets the short end of the stick, where people think we didn't create anything or we didn't have any influence on art or culture.
What now-closed restaurants in this book would you like to be able to eat at?
I would have loved to eat at some of these restaurants where they had a certain sense of humor to make their menu look like what they're serving. I'm looking at the Buffalo Steak menu, the whole menu is shaped like a buffalo. Zamboanga, which is a menu that's cut out as the shape of a chimpanzee, smoking a corncob pipe... The salad menu of The Old Drug Company, which is cut out as a bowl of salad.
"To Live and Dine in L.A." is at the Central Library's Getty Gallery until Friday, Nov. 13, 2015. All menu images come from the L.A. Public Library.
That song you're wondering about ...
The song you're wondering about in this week's show — trust me, this is the one — is "Forgotten Dreams," written by a true Renaissance man, Leroy Anderson, who also wrote "The Typewriter," "Sleighride" and "Trumpeter's Holiday."
Here's a link to many of his tunes, and here is a lovely home performance of this 1954 Top ten hit by Brian Jones.