Answered on this episode: What happens to your old mattress? What moves comedian Eddie Pepitone? What are the best pop melodies? Can humans breathe in the Funkmosphere?
Where do old mattresses go when they die?
Like so many bus benches, street sweeping signs, and abandoned TVs, discarded mattresses and box springs are a fixture of the Los Angeles street-scape. But a bill in the state legislature would force mattress retailers to recycle all mattresses.
When you buy a mattress, the recycling fee would be added to the cost. But today, what happens to mattresses that get picked up off the street, or by the crews that deliver your new one? KPCC's Kevin Ferguson has the answer.
Most of the time, a mattress's life starts with metal. At a factory in Orange, dozens of mattress-shaped inner springs are tucked into shelves like giant wire books—I’m on a tour of Custom Comfort, a mattress manufacturer and retailer with about half a dozen stores in and around LA. Jeremy Solis, the director of operations, is my guide.
"Inner springs in a mattress are really designed to create the difference between the firmness and softness of a mattress, not necessarily the quality," he says. "So they're gonna be the strongest thing in any mattress you buy."
The springs are then upholstered, stuffed with cotton, and shot with a giant air powered staple gun to fasten everything on. All told, it takes just a couple hours to go from springs to bed. Then the mattress is trucked to a store, and eventually, your bedroom.
But if you're replacing an old mattress with a new one, where does the discarded mattress end up?
Out With The Old? Dial 311
In his apartment in Santa Monica, Adam Rakunas has been waiting three hours. The company said Adam could expect his family's brand new, organic cotton and foam mattress to show up today between 9 and noon. It's 11:55.
In the living room, the old mattress waits. For Adam and his family, this has been a long time coming. They went to stores all over the city, laid on countless floor models, and then waited six weeks for their mattress to be made and delivered. And even though they've been married since 2004 and have a 3-year-old, Adam says this feels like one of their first grown up couple purchases; the mattress has been his wife's since 1993.
"This was her first real bed after starting her job," says Rakunas. "And she brought it with her to Kuala Lumpur, and then to Singapore and then to L.A. and then to here, when we moved in together. It’s been our bed for the past nine years. 20 years is a good time to use a mattress, and now I think it’s time for something new."
Finally, a knock on the door. In come two deliverymen with the foam mattress in three pieces. They rush into the bedroom, tear off the plastic wrap and assemble the mattress. Adam signs a paper and they're gone. The whole process takes less than five minutes.
But the deliverymen didn't pick up the old mattress—it’s still in the living room. Luckily, Adam’s family found a neighbor happy to take it. But say you bought a new mattress and you're stuck with the old one. You don't want to dump it on the street, looking sad, dirty and alone in the rain. So what do you do?
Cora Jackson, spokesperson for Los Angeles' Department of Sanitation, says to call 311.
"We offer a free service to the residents of Los Angeles and that is our bulky item pick up service," she says. "We will come and collect that mattress and arrange to pick it up as soon as possible. Usually on the collection day that we already pick up your bin."
And a trash truck will take your mattress to its final resting place: a landfill. The city says it hopes to start recycling mattresses soon, but that's under negotiation.
Sometimes, the deliverymen will pick it up for you. Companies like Sears, Sit N Sleep, and Macys will deliver your new mattress and take your old one, sometimes for a small fee. Jeremy Solis says Custom Comfort does that, too.
"Typically, what we do is we have a trailer outside," says Solis. "We store all the old mattresses in the trailer. And we've got a guy that comes by and picks them up every night."
Where Old Mattresses Get A Second Chance
There’s a good chance your old mattress will end up in the capable hands of Don Franco. The president of Gateway Mattress company in Montebello, California.
Standing in a huge outdoor storage yard with Franco, I point out the hundreds of mattresses we're surrounded by.
Franco corrects me. "Thousands," he says. "There's thousands of mattresses out here. All in storage, ready to either be stripped down, to be recycled, or to be rebuilt depending on the condition of the old bed."
Gateway is the state's largest mattress refurbisher. For 53 years, it’s been turning old mattresses into new ones. This huge storage area is at least as large as a football field, and it's easy to imagine that nearly every old mattress in Los Angeles ends up here. Some look dirty, some as good as new, but they all go through the same tearing down and rebuilding process.
Inside, Gateway looks a lot like a typical mattress factory, you'd only notice a difference at the end of the mattress' journey:
"At that point, then it has to go through an oven, which runs for 205 degrees for an hour and a half," says Franco. "It takes all the impurities out of the bed. And we have six ovens that run roughly 16 hours a day, sanitizing these mattresses."
The ovens, which kill bacteria and bugs, are a state requirement. They're off to places like discount stores, motels, or convalescent homes.
You probably already figured out the problem with mattress rebuilding: it's kind of an unsettling thought. Retailers won't admit they sell refurbished mattresses and because of that, it's hard to know what kind you're buying. An unmarked, tagless mattress could have come from a place like Gateway or an unlicensed refurbisher.
Harvested For Parts
If the state law requiring mattresses recycling passes, you'll probably see more mattresses end up at places like Blue Marble Materials, just a ten minute drive from Gateway in Commerce, run by Tchad Robinson.
When a mattress arrives at a plant like Tchad's, instead of being rebuilt, it's taken apart piece by piece: the metal springs are melted down, the wood is turned into chips. Robinson says the possibilities are endless:
"The polyurethane foam is a valuable material in there. The cotton that can come out of a mattress, is very valuable," he says. "The shoddy, which is sort of a thick dense wool, multicolored wool material that can be used for sound insulation, for thermal insulations, quite a few applications for that that, and also the outside cover."
Right now, Robinson takes in over 300 mattresses a day. If a recycling law passes, businesses like his stand to see a huge windfall.
But the future for rebuilders like Don Franco is more uncertain. More mattresses getting recycled could easily mean fewer mattresses getting refurbished. His company makes mattresses from scratch, but that's only 30 percent of the business.
Unfortunately, there are other rebuilders, not only in California but in other states that don't really follow the rules and regulations. "We do," says Franco. "I can understand if they're not following the law and they're not in compliance, absolutely. But why would you want to take and close down Gateway mattress or try to cut them down and put 70, 80 people out of work by eliminating rebuilt beds?"
Franco says he's trying to make sure licensed refurbishers like Gateway will have a voice at the table, and that your old mattress can have a few more years of life.
Comic Eddie Pepitone's big heart goes bitter-patter
Most comics use the F-word in their live acts like it's an article. But when Eddie Pepitone uses it, it comes from the heart, or maybe his ample gut.
The 54-year old actor (Law and Order: Criminal Intent, The Beat, Now and Again) and comedian, who lives in North Hollywood, is finally seeing a glimpse of the fame his friends and colleagues have wished for him for years. He's a regular on the club circuit, gained fame through appearances on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, and is the star of the documentary Eddie Pepitone: The Bitter Buddha, by Steven Feinartz, which is now out on DVD.
I sat on a blanket with him at his favorite park in North Hollywood where he meditates and feeds the squirrels with his wife Karen. "And we're a little pedantic to other people in the park," he says, "because we see them feeding squirrels things like bread and even peanuts, and we're like 'No, no, no! Walnuts are the best for them because the shell works their teeth.' So we've gotten this reputation for being the squirrel pains in the asses."
A minute later, as he's explaining why his reputation for being an angry guy is inaccurate, he breaks off to yell at an imaginary person, "Get the f--- away from that squirrel!" I have no idea what the joggers thought; maybe they're used to him.
Pepitone's comedy stems from what he describes as an ever present feeling of unease, and a deep sensitivity to how horrible the world is for many people. One of his signature bits is to tell how he failed an audition for a laundry softener ad because he kept prefacing the line "Honey, how do you get these shirts so fresh" with variations of, "When the world is falling apart ..."
"I've never been a comedian who can say things like, 'Oh, isn't it crazy where socks go?!' I find it appalling that people want their comedians to be tepid morons." Yes, that means he's not into Seinfeld. "I feel like, hey, Jerry, how about you say something relevant!?"
Listen to our interview for much more of the Bitter Buddha - including his relationship with the famously crazy New York Yankee Joey Pepitone, whose name, in Japan, means "goof off."
If you want smaller bites, check out Pepitone's Twitter feed: @eddiepepitone.
Dam Funk on 'Higher': New album with Slave's Steve Arrington
Pasadena born musician Damon Riddick, better known as Dam Funk, has a bio that proclaims him "LA's ambassador of boogie funk," a genre of keyboard-heavy funk and soul heard in artists like Kool and the Gang, Prince and Slave, a hugely influential Ohio funk group.
Dam Funk's newest album is a collaboration with Steve Arrington, Slave's former drummer and vocalist. It's called "Higher," and it's a departure from Dam Funk's solo material. Dam talked with Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson about the new album and how he first discovered boogie funk.
Listen to "Good Feeling" from "Higher"
Musicologist Michael Sigman picks the best pop melodies
Michael Sigman, blogger for the Huffington Post, knows music.
Michael was publisher of the LA Weekly for many years, and before that wrote the seminal piece on Bruce Springsteen. Before that, as we told you on Off-Ramp, he was the son of Carl Sigman, one of the world's great lyricists, from Ebb Tide to It's All in the Game to What Now, My Love.
Last week, he emailed me:
I’m doing a blog for The Huffington Port on the best melodies in pop music over the past 50 years. I’m asking people whose opinions I value to choose a favorite tune - not lyric, not record.
I was honored to be asked and wrote back:
That's a hard one.
Best record might be Smokey Robinson's Cruisin', which is a masterpiece of composition, arrangement, and vocal and instrumental performance. (Smokey told Off-Ramp listeners how he wrote it and what it means.) Best lyrics might be something by Stevie Wonder. Sir Duke or Superstition or Living for the City. He reaches me. If I could go back to 1947, for melody I might pick Nature Boy - instantly recognizable, crazy evocative, lovely and haunting.
But for melody in the last 50 years …
I was all set to go with MacArthur Park. I love the main theme, but even more the exciting instrumental interludes or whatever they are properly called. I like all the various versions, but now the one that will stick with me is Jimmy Webb himself performing it at Levitt Pavilion MacArthur Park.
However, then I remembered Johnny Mandel's The Shadow of Your Smile. I can whistle it in 20 seconds and get the feeling (conjuring Jack Sheldon's trumpet line - in the original, or just a few years ago at Colombo's jazz club) of melancholy, beauty, regret. The song would feel the same even, would mean the same, even without the perfect title. A shadow of something sweet.
Michael has posted some of the results of his survey on his Huffpo blog...
A few confident souls responded instantly, as though they'd been waiting years to be asked. The great Dion Dimucci says Pomus/Shuman's This Magic Moment is "a perfect song -- it's beautiful, wonderful, powerful, amazing and yet distinctive and memorable." Screenwriter/lyricist Jerry Leichtling chose Paul Simon's towering Bridge Over Troubled Water and theater producer Susan Dietz, still stuck on the cute Beatle, picked Yesterday.
... with more to come soon.
I love that pretty much everybody picked a different melody, which says something about how music reaches us at different times and places in our lives, and says different things to us.
Michael will be joining us this weekend on Off-Ramp to talk about his survey, which is an excellent excuse to play a bunch of great songs. Meantime, in the comments section below, why not nominate your own picks for the Best Melody since 1963?
NYC versus LA: Patt Morrison & WNYC's Jim O'Grady continue the debate
It’s the Big Apple versus the Big Orange, the big city bustle New York versus the allure of Los Angeles and Southern California.
Usually people argue over which city is superior, but Patt Morrison and WNYC’s Jim O’Grady decided to debate whose got it worse. From the weather and the sports teams, to the civic leadership of San Diego mayor Bob Filner and New York mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner, Patt and Jim go head to head.