Creators behind Slake discuss their new magazine... actor and nude model Michael Q Schmidt literally bears all... John learns to blow the shofar for Elul ... Dinner Party Download makes you smarter ... and much more!
Slake -- new "slow lit" quarterly -- hits newsstands, hits home.
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with the founders and contributors to Slake, the new Los Angeles literary quarterly … including editors Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly, and writers Jonathan Gold, Jamie Brisick, John Powers, Jervey Tervalon, and John Albert. The LONG version of their conversation (and we mean LONG) is on iTunes as a special Off-Ramp podcast.
Actor and Nude Model Michael Q Schmidt on Art, Friendship and Decency
Michael Q Schmidt is 57 years old, and weighs about 300 pounds. You wouldn’t guess it by looking at him, but he’s made a career based solely on his looks. As an actor, you might have seen him on Cartoon Network, the Harry Potter films and dozens of music videos. Off-Ramp’s Kevin Ferguson sat down with Schmidt at his home in Placentia.
Hearing and Learning to Play the Shofar
UPDATE: We're reposting this segment for Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sunset on Wednesday, September 28.
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The Jewish month of Elul begins at sunset on Monday, August 9th. Every day during Elul, until Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, observant Jews will want to hear the shofar, the animal horn.
Michael Chusid, Angelino and author of "Hearing Shofar: The Still Small Voice of the Ram’s Horn," joins Off-Ramp host John Rabe in the Crawford Family Forum to teach us about the shofar ... and teach John how to play it.
COME INSIDE for a link to Michael's book.
Taco Trucks - $80,000 kitchens on wheels
Taco trucks used to be where you went to get … tacos. Now they serve everything from French crepes to Vietnamese sandwiches. But in everything that’s been said about taco trucks, Off-Ramp’s Bridget Read still hadn’t heard one of the most basic things about them: who makes them?
To find out, she talked with Juan Gomez, co-owner of West Coast Catering Trucks in Commerce, and spent some time inside a taco truck (instead of eating from one). Follow the link to West Coast's website for photos of some of their finished trucks.
Commentator Marc Haefele on the Cambridge Companion to LA Lit
Off-Ramp literary commentator Marc Haefele says, in general, it's another case of outsiders not getting it.
Look, there's no theoretical reason why a book 80-percent of whose contributors hail from as far outside LA as the north of England, can't deal with our sprawling literary heritage. But, considering how the field of LA history now flourishes here, that doesn't seem the easiest way to go about it, and the results in this Cambridge Companion are a mixed bag.
It opens well with Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita's appreciation our early Spanish-language literature, and the subsequent downfall of the Californio culture. Then we are running on familiar ground -- Helen Hunt Jackson to Raymond Chandler to James N. Cain. But then comes the jumble.
We have, for instance, impossibly arbitrary pairings. "British Exiles and German Exiles, 1930-1940." But the one group -- the Brits -- came over to make a buck in the movies. The other fled for their lives. As a topic, they mix like chardonnay and gasoline. Or "Asian American and Latino literature." What's the connection? On the other hand, there's nothing about Gay and Lesbian LA, the fertile and influential milieu that gave us the epochal works of Christopher Isherwood and James Rechy along with much of the shape and substance of American film.
We also have what you might call missing attribution: an essay on LA in Film covers the territory of Thom Anderson's mighty documentary "LA Plays Itself" without mentioning it. And the missing citation: How can one now write about Raymond Chandler's Phil Marlowe novels without evoking their connections with real-life LA crimes and injustice disclosed in Richard Rayner's 2008 "A Bright and Guilt Place?"
And there's this outsiderish fixation on infinite Freedom of the Freeways in the `60s classics: "The Graduate" and "Play it as it Lays."
Which will strike modern Angelinos as wanton nostalgia. Inevitably, if appropriately, "The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles" includes the usual suspects of contemporary LA Lit -- Joan Didion; Mike Davis, James Elroy. But we've heard their stories too often.
The best of the book -- which include Charles Scruggs' brilliantly researched and written "Los Angeles and the African American Imagination" and Charles Mohr's "Scenes and Movements in Southern California Poetry" -- seduces us with Southland writing that is as unfamiliar as it is innovative. Here, the guidebook really functions as a guide -- telling us what we don't already know.
Charles Scruggs says, "The artists who would dare to represent Los Angeles must connect the multiple voices of the streets, films, songs, and other forms of mass culture to reveal the palimpsest, the utopian city within." That goes for scholars, too -- and there's just not enough connection here.
Meanwhile, if you want really to know more about LA's Lit, pick up David Ulin's classic "Writing LA" anthology. And, while you're at it, Lilian Faderman and Stuart Timmon's exhaustive "Gay LA" -- to remedy "The Cambridge Guide's" biggest single omission.
For Off-Ramp, this is Marc Haefele.
The Tipping Point: Off-Ramp, Eat LA and David Lazarus on that something extra
John Rabe and Colleen Bates of Eat LA talk with David Lazarus about the controversy stirred over tipping column in Times this week: should we tip before or after tax?
Dinner Party Download
This week: Office star Rainn Wilson berates LACMA, Walt McClements of Minneapolis' Dark Dark Dark tells a pesky bartender joke, and much more!