A different music festival, less likely to be cancelled, comes to LA. Birding with a 15 year old expert, and how to bring a tornado to Long Beach.
A Noise Within builds new 33,000sf theatre center in East Pasadena
UPDATE: A Noise Within opened the new theatre October 29 with a joyous performance of Twelfth Night, updated to pre-Castro Cuba. The next play up is O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms," which opens November 19. Here's our sneak preview of the new space, which aired August 2011.
After 19 years in a funky but impractical space in Glendale, A Noise Within, the classical rep theatre company, is building a new home in East Pasadena with the help of a $13m capital campaign. The theatre's founders give Off-Ramp host John Rabe an exclusive tour of the beautiful new facility, which opens in late October.
Sweet and Hot Music Festival brings jazz, classic pop songwriting to LA
From September 2 through 5, the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel will host a weekend of "sweet and hot" jazz from the 1920s - 1950s, America's Golden Age of popular music.
"For me and I think most of the people that are involved with this, we feel that jazz is music that swings," said Wally Holmes, director of the festival. "And it's not swinging just if the band is swinging, the people have got to be swinging, too."
The Sweet and Hot Music Festival has been swinging every labor day weekend in Los Angeles since 1984. This year's lineup includes performances by Barbara Morrison, the Mills Brothers and 98 year-old legend Herb Jeffries, best known for a hit single he performed with Duke Ellington. In total, over 50 artists will gather to perform in a wide variety of musical styles.
"Come and see them and you decide whether it swings or not," said Holmes.
Audio: Off-Ramp's Brian Watt talks with Wally Holmes, who wrote the 1970s hit song "Rock The Boat" and is now the director of the Sweet and Hot Music Festival.
Checking out local fauna with a 15-year-old birding expert
For most kids, summer means going to camp, taking a vacation or hanging out at the beach. But for 15-year-old Jose Luis Sandoval of Wilmington, summer is for the birds, literally: Jose spends his summers scoping out Los Angeles' top birding destinations, and he does it all using public transit. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson met up with him just outside KPCC headquarters in Pasadena to begin the long hike to Ken Malloy's Regional Harbor Park in Wilmington.
Ashford and Simpson on a lifetime of keeping it real
Over the last few weeks, we've been hearing excerpts from a concert at the Grammy Museum. It was held to break in the new Songwriters Hall of Fame Gallery, and they gathered some of the greatest living songwriters to sing their most famous tunes. The emcee was songwriter Paul Williams, and we now hear from Ashford and Simpson.
CSI Art Director turns quiet Long Beach park into Tornado disaster zone
Brian Watt talks with Mark Walters, art director of CSI Miami, while his crew turns a Long Beach parking lot into a tornado-stricken trailer park.
Mayme A. Clayton Library Commemorates 50 years of Freedom Rides with an LA focus
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the historic Freedom Rides: where activists of all stripes took the struggle for civil rights directly to the South. In Culver City, the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum is commemorating the anniversary by bringing a new local focus to the historic rides. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Museum Director Larry Earl about the exhibit, called "Get on Board."
In 1961, Los Angeles was an epicenter for the civil rights movement: both religious and secular groups held regular rallies in the greater LA region, and Martin Luther King was known to visit the city often. Of the approximately 400 freedom riders that went South to fight for civil rights in 1961, 100 were from California. Get on Board: Stories of the Los Angeles to Houston Freedom Ride focuses primarily on one ride that was to take a large group of UCLA students to Jackson Mississippi. The bus never made it there, though. Instead, the troupe was arrested in Houston, Texas. The students had attempted to desegregate the lunch counter at Houston's Union Station.
Get On Board tells their story in the context of the civil rights movement using photographs, video, and several life size installations that help visitors experience the Freedom Rides for themselves. One of the strongest installations is also the first one visitors see: a shocking reproduction of a burned, wrecked Greyhound bus. On Mother's Day, 1961 another Freedom Ride was driving through Alabama when members of the Klu Klux Klan firebombed the bus. The Riders made it out alive, but barely. It's a painstakingly accurate reproduction, and museum director Larry Earl says that's no coincidence:
"We have the luxury of being in Los Angeles, the movie capital of the world" he said. "Instead of hiring simply exhibit designers, we hired set designers. We wanted people to see what was it that motivated over 400 people to risk life and limb to go down to the South."
Visitors will be able to sit inside a mock jail cell the riders were thrown into, and they'll encounter a replica of the Houston lunch counter--they're even free to sit, but like the riders, they won't be able to get a meal.
Alfred Adkins on life in a 1985 school bus
Venice and other Westside neighborhoods have grappled for years with people who live in their vehicles – RVs, vans, buses. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority launched a program to help people move out of their vehicles and into permanent homes. One of the program’s first participants is 65-year-old Alfred Adkins. Last week, he moved into a one-bedroom apartment, settling inside a home for the first time in more than a decade. But first, Adkins gave Off-Ramp's Brian Watt the nickel tour of his old home.
Adkins worked for years cutting meat in grocery stores, but says he couldn’t save enough money to put down a deposit on an apartment.
He says it costs more to live outside than it does inside. To make his point, Adkins compared buying eggs and cooking them at home to eating at fast food restaurants.
A dozen eggs, he pointed out, costs the average consumer $2. "For me to eat the same amount of protein that you eat, I gotta go to McDonalds or something, to spend at least $1 for every time I want a hamburger."
"You bought theoretically six breakfasts for two bucks," he said. It's an equation that's contributed to keeping him on the streets.
There are other costs too. "And then you gotta move your vehicle all the the time. That’s a [lot of] gas, you know."
For years, Venice and other areas of West L.A. have contended with people who live in RVs, vans and buses parked on neighborhood streets. Earlier this year, Los Angeles City Coucilman Bill Rosendahl and the L.A. Homeless Services Authority launched a program that tries to move people out of vehicles and into more permanent homes. The program hasn’t worked exactly as planned, but the first participants began to move from the streets into homes this week.
During a quick tour, the 65-year-old Adkins proudly showed the bed, sofa and armchairs inside his old home: a 1985 GMC school bus he bought a year and a half ago from the government for $500. It was parked right across California Avenue from his new home: a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment: his first in 12 years.
Then it was time for a lease-signing ceremony: a photo op with L.A. City Councilman Bill Rosendahl. Rosendahl offered a housewarming gift that recalled Adkins' earlier economics lesson: A half dozen eggs.
Before the school bus, Adkins said he lived in a van and before that, another van.
"Police keep taking your vehicle," he said. "It’s cheaper to just get another vehicle than it is to get it out of that jail."
A new Los Angeles city and county program helped him land a subsidized apartment. It’s doing the same for about 40 others who are ready to move out of their vehicles. The program, "Roadmap to Housing" is administered by a group called People Assisting The Homeless (PATH), who contracted with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. PATH CEO Joel John Roberts says it's about more than housing.
"We help them move in, and even after they move in, this is supportive housing," Roberts says. "So we actually support them and meet with and make sure they’re okay and develop relationships and help them connect in the community and all of that."
Linda Lucks, president of the Venice Neighborhood Council, says the six-month-old program has fallen short on a goal many of her constituents had counted on: providing safe overnight parking lots for the people enrolled in the program.
"So if you enrolled and you’re being processed for vouchers, you would have a safe overnight place to park so that you wouldn’t be harassed," Lucks said.
Lucks is disappointed that it’s become politically tricky to secure those parking lots. But she added that any day a homeless man can move indoors is a good day.
Summer Night Lights: a youth perspective
Summer Night Lights is an initiative implemented in last year aimed at reducing gang violence in LA. How to do it? Give kids a place to go during Summer nights by keeping city parks open and patrolled late. Los Angeles' Brian Watt talked with South LA's Michael Leslie, a youth coordinator with Summer Night Lights who says the program has had a huge impact on his community.
CyberFrequencies on September 11 from a Pakistani perspective
Today CyberFrequecies continues its Decade911 series by talking to Fauzia Kasuri to get the Pakistani perspective on the last decade of global change since 9/11. Kazuri's the president of the woman's wing of the Pakistani political party Tehreek-e-Insaf.