Marc Haefele marched on Washington 50 years ago ... Kevin Ferguson takes us to Glendora's Rubel Castle ... the Western stories of Elmore Leonard ...
UPDATE: Glendora's Rubel Castle named National Historic Landmark (Photos)
UPDATE 12/26/2013: Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson got an email recently from Scott Rubel: "We got our official letter last month and I can't believe it's finally happened. We are really a National Historic Landmark now."
Made of leftover bottles, found motorcycles, rocks, concrete and countless other pieces of junk, Glendora's Rubel castle is one of Southern California's oddest buildings — designed by one man with the help of a community, it's now well on its way to becoming a state historic landmark.
In a secluded, residential part of Glendora, Rubel Castle is a triumph in do-it-yourselfness, a paean to go-it-alone outsider architecture: clock towers, cannons, and caves dot the two-acre property.
Rubel Castle is the brain child of Michael Rubel, a beloved and eccentric native Glendoran. Rubel died in 2007, but during his tenure at the castle he was interviewed by California's beloved and eccentric Huell Howser, twice:
Started in 1959, Rubelia — as it's also known — had humble origins. It was originally an orange packing farm that a then 18-year-old Michael Rubel had purchased. Michael and his family soon moved in, converting packing warehouses into sprawling people houses, where Dorothy Rubel, his socialite, actress mother, played hostess constantly, sometimes to hundreds of people.
I went on a tour of the property with Scott Rubel, Michael's nephew. The packing house was one of our first stops. It's a warehouse converted into one of longest living rooms I've ever seen.
"It's just made for storing oranges, basically, and processing them," said Scott. "And on the left side are four big refrigerators which, when my uncle moved in, those became his bedroom."
The Tin Palace, as the home was known back then, entertained guests like Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, even Dwight Eisenhower. While the parties were surely thrilling for Dorothy and her guests, Michael Rubel couldn't sleep. So away from the original houses, he built a house of his own, this one entirely out of used bottles.
"All this bottle stuff started with my grandmother's parties," said Scott Rubel. "Bottles were piling up outside, and when my uncle started to want to build inside the reservoir. He first dug this tunnel and made this wall out of bottles. And the first structure he built was the bottle house, in 1968."
Inside of a huge emptied out concrete reservoir, the house combined Michael's longing for peace and quiet with another passion of his: amateur construction. Even as a child, Rubel would make castles and forts in the junk yard near his home.
The house was just the beginning. Over the decades, Michael Rubel, along with friends and family built one of California's strangest structures. Combining manmade objects collected far and wide with thousands of river rocks and tons of concrete.
Rubel Castle sits inside that reservoir with about 60 rooms, total. We entered the castle through a tunnel made entirely of recycled bottles and concrete. Christmas lights dangled across the ceiling. After peeking inside the print and machine shops, we ended up inside the clock tower — the castle's tallest structure at about seven stories high.
"This clock came from a church in the 1890s," said Scott Rubel. "The bells up on top are 3,000 pounds, the biggest one—and the smallest is about 2,000."
How was he able to do all this?
"Back then it was a lot easier. You couldn't do it now," said Rubel. "It would cost money, for one thing, and picking up rocks is more restricted. We used to be able to go out just about anywhere and find these river rocks. And we had a little convoy of trucks where we'd pick a few truckloads of rock and then come back here and dump them."
Rubel says his uncle was a cheerful man, and did his best not to share with his friends and family the problems he faced with the city.
"The city would bring inspectors up here," said Rubel. "And they'd always go away shaking their heads, not knowing quite what to do."
But for five people on the property, the castle is more than just history — it's also home. The castle includes apartments, artist studios, printing presses, pottery studios. Artist and librarian Sandy Krause lives inside the castle.
"I had been on a tour here many years ago," she said. "And during that tour someone mentioned people lived here."
Krause says she never forgot that. She made friends at the Glendora historical society — the group that oversees the castle — and when she learned there was a vacancy, Krause did what anybody reasonable person would do: move into the castle
The Rubel family expects the castle will receive its official historical status in October. If all goes well, Rubel Castle will become a national historic landmark.
If you'd like to take a look at the castle yourself, visit the Glendora Historical Society to find out information on tours.
Impressionist Jim Meskimen's 'America's Got Talent' Odyssey
It was very interesting to go from my 70-seat venue at the Acting Center to a 6,000 seat, iconic venue – Radio City Music Hall -- in the space of three years. -- Jim Meskimen
His mike cut out and he had to make Ben Franklin jokes and take notes from Howard Stern, but LA impressionist Jim Meskimen says he's delighted by his performance in America's Got Talent this month.
Meskimen made it through the vetting process, and was named one of the dozen most talented people in the US -- something Off-Ramp already knew -- but he didn't make it to the final four, which is okay, he says, since he isn't really a Vegas kind of guy. (That's the grand prize.)
He charted the whole process on his blog, including the final week in New York.
But it was like being on HIGH ALERT for seven straight days, culminating in a suspense-filled evaluation of my ability to be on HIGH ALERT. The last thing I’ll say before I crash into bed is this: I had a BLAST. Being able to do my impressions, to a full house at Radio City Music Hall, on live television, to hear the validation of the judges, to a standing ovation with my mom in the audience, with my beautiful wife in the audience, KNOWING that YOU and a thousand other friends were out there pulling for me… was just indescribable. It was worth all the struggle and the sleepless nights, and the bother of being part of a “reality show.”
Then, he came into the Off-Ramp studio to tell us about it, including - listen to the interview - playing Jesus Movie with me.
You don't have to go to New York to see Jim perform. He's bringing his one-man show back to The Acting Center (5514 Hollywood Blvd LA CA 90028) starting Friday, September 6.
Claire Evans of YACHT on her new book, OMNI Reboot and the NSA
Claire L. Evans is LA's own renaissance woman. She has a new book out called "High Frontiers," she's the singer in a band called YACHT and she's the editor of OMNI Reboot, a new online science / sci-fi magazine.
But for Evans, it's not just about being interdisciplinary. "It's important for me to find a place between science and science fiction and culture," she says, "a place where those intersecting disciplines can feed each other..."
Evans' fascination with science -- and one out-of-print science magazine in particular -- make her perfect for her newest role as editor of OMNI Reboot.
As a lover of the original OMNI magazine, the out-of-print "gonzo science" magazine published by Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, Evans was thrilled when she got the chance to go to New Jersey to view the "long lost OMNI archives." One thing led to another and Jeremy Frommer, the owner of the archives, asked Evans to head up the OMNI comeback.
"It's the most terrifying thing I've ever done," Evans says. And her fear is understandable, as the original OMNI had a range of now legendary contributors, from William S. Burroughs and William Gibson to George R. R. Martin. But, Evans believes re-envisioning OMNI for the the web is a worthy cause. "I absolutely believe that there's a gaping void where OMNI was and hopefully we'll help to fill that void," she says. Evans plans to showcase the fiction and non-fiction work of writers and artists -- both beginners and the well- established.
According to Evans though, the new OMNI will be a little different.
"I think that the way that we talk about the future has changed since the days of OMNI," Evans says.
"OMNI was very much published in the days of the computer age, there was a lot of utopian idealism and hopefulness about the future. And I think that the discourse has really changed and we don't really have that starry eyed, slick, dreamy point of view anymore."
Evans says there's "a self-reflexive paranoid undertone to conversation about technology now." But that doesn't mean she's given up on the future. With her band YACHT, Evans just released "Party at the NSA," a song she calls a "party protest anthem." A sharp (but catchy) commentary on NSA surveillance, "Party at the NSA," comes complete with a guitar solo by comedian Marc Maron.
Pros and cons: Echo Park's proposed gang injunction
Why, when there's been minimal opposition to the almost 50 gang injunctions put in place in other parts of the city of Los Angeles, is there such vocal opposition to the one proposed for Echo Park?
It's a good question, which may go to the heart of the conflict in Echo Park between some longtime Latino residents and newcomers who are gentrifying the neighborhood, and driving up home values and rents.
Listen as KPCC reporter Erika Aguilar and I discuss the pros and cons of the gang injunction that's in-process for the neighborhood, and please leave your comments below.
Elmore Leonard's first gig: writing Western fiction
" I only got one hero. I just keep writing about the same person." -- Elmore Leonard
You know Elmore Leonard for his screenplay-perfect crime novels, including Get Shorty, but when "Dutch" started writing, around 1950, what paid (2 cents a word) was Western fiction, and the dozens of short stories and novels he penned in that under-appreciated genre bear all the Leonard hallmarks.
The dialogue is tight, the plots are spare, and his heroes, according to Loren D. Estleman, author and past president of the Western Writers of America, are "somebody who looks like an ordinary guy or woman, but there's something extraordinary in his past that only we the reader knows about. The villains push him into the corner, and he explodes in their faces. And I told that to Dutch and he said, 'I can do you one better. I only got one hero. I just keep writing about the same person.'"
Estleman also says Leonard was one of a group of writers who dealt directly and realistically about the racism white settlers had for Mexicans and Native Americans, as in the story Hombre, about a white man raised by Apaches, who is scorned by a group of whites until they need him to protect them from a group of outlaws.
"You have to understand Dutch's background," says Estleman, who counted Leonard as a friend of 30 years standing. "He was raised in New Orleans and he divided his adult life equally between Detroit and Florida, so he was always around minorities, and I think when you're brought up in that kind of environment, you tend to have a more cosmopolitan outlook on other races, other creeds."
Interested in sampling Leonard's Western tales? You can't do better than The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, with 30 complete stories. For an introduction to Loren D. Estleman's Western stories, I recommend The Master Executioner. Estleman told me he likes to take characters who only show up in one scene in a movie, and tell their story, and this he does here to great effect. His latest book is the historical novel The Confessions of Al Capone.
Fifty years later, Off-Ramp's Marc Haefele remembers the 'March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom'
What an odd lot we were, the Lower Eastsiders who boarded a chartered train for Washington on August 28, 1963 … fifty years ago next Wednesday.
First, there were the grandmothers with the food: Fay Lucia, a blonded Italian lady in her 50s from the projects, who brought a huge lasagna; and Nicolasa Benitez, the Puerto Rican firebrand of Hester Street, with a cargo of empanadas. There was Nicolasa’s gorgeous granddaughter, Aura, whose presence perhaps determined mine, except of course she spoke no English and I no Spanish.
There was a conservative rabbi from the big shul on East Broadway who wore a small straw fedora on the back of his head. There was our token black Republican, (who voted for Eisenhower, but not Nixon), and New Englander Peter Stanford and his Italian-American wife. There was someone who had a portrait of the man who invented Esperanto on her living room wall. Then there was me, a college junior. We all lived in the Five Points barrio under the Manhattan Bridge that was once turf to the old Gangs of New York.
We called ourselves Reform Democrats. To the Democratic regulars, we were outsiders trying to steal patronage. Actually we were discontents out to make America a fairer place. And so somehow we, a majority non-black liberal group, found ourselves rattling off to Washington to march for civil rights fifty years ago … simply because going seemed the right thing to do.
It was the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. But Jim Crow still reigned. Non-violent protest had been met by violence, arson, fire hoses, incarceration and murder all over the South. The Kennedy administration had broken its promises to move the Civil Rights agenda. The Democratic Party was shackled by its deeply racist Dixie caucus and its sympathizers throughout White America. It was a time when one prominent LA jurist proclaimed that blacks weren’t ready for the rights they’d been denied since the Declaration of Independence, when conservative Republicans marched in ideological lockstep with the Klan.
And when major newspapers editorialized that blacks could only wait patiently for the justice that would never come in their lifetimes. It was a time, in short, for a mass affirmation of justice that America could not ignore.
Civil Rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin had been planning the march since December. It’s important to remember now that this was a march for both jobs and freedom. Many activists wanted civil disobedience, mass arrests, perhaps, to show the desperation faced by America’s black population. But the leaders declared for peace. Malcolm X called it the Farce on Washington. Many predicted a city-wide riot.
Some wanted an all-black march. But in the end, blacks and whites -- and some browns, who weren’t counted then -- marched together, in harmonic accord with Dr. King’s most famous speech. The organization was rigorous but unobtrusive. A 1963 state of the art sound system brought us King’s “I have a dream” in perfect clarity from the distant memorial, as we sat perhaps half a mile away. Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson sang, and so did Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Young firebrand John Lewis forthrightly demanded overdue action, but most of the words were peaceful.
A quarter of a million of us sat down there by the reflecting pool that day, and heard the words of justice, many of us not noticing that no women were speaking from the Freedom platform. Then we got up and walked to the station and went home. I’m not sure if any of us noticed that our lives had changed, but they had. So had America.
The next year, following the torment of a presidential assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … Whose voting rights provisions, thanks to our Supreme Court, we find ourselves fighting for once again, 49 years later.
Meanwhile, about those jobs…