Off-Ramp is on Christmas vacation and won't be airing December 26 and 27. See you in the New Year!
5 Every Week: Swirling dolphins at LACMA, public radio sandwiches, the ideal record store and more!
Behold: five great things you should do in Southern California this week, from art to food to music to an adventure we'll call the Wild Card from the makers of the 5 Every Day app. Get this as a new podcast in iTunes. If you want five hand-picked things to do in Los Angeles every day, download the free 5 Every Day from the App Store.
ART: Diana Thater at LACMA
Imagine seeing a pod of dolphins in an art museum.
Well, seeing video of them, at least. Four video projections, each featuring dizzying footage of dolphins swirling, swimming, and colliding in an open sea, each splayed across gallery walls at odd angles, overlapping in places.
It's so immersive and beautiful that it's practically a peak experience.
The dolphin films and 21 other video works make up "The Sympathetic Imagination," the first (ever) US retrospective by LA-based artist Diana Thater, on view at LACMA right now. Her work, as you can imagine, brings the flora and fauna of the outside world into gallery spaces, making even the whitest-walled museum feel like biosphere. It's magnificent, and it's also the museum's largest solo exhibition ever by a woman.
Kind of a big deal.
CITY: Baldwin Hills Stairs
https://www.instagram.com/p/4anZEuQlNl/?tagged=baldwinhillsstairs
The New Year is upon us, and with it the usual platitudes about self-improvement.
The dreaded... resolutions.
If you're like most Angelenos, you may be interested in a more rigorous fitness routine in the coming year.
Or at least for the first few weeks of the coming year.
If you want to get a jump on it all, or just work out so hard before New Year's Eve that you'll be set for the year, we recommend some good old-fashioned stair climbing.
Los Angeles is weirdly rich in outdoor staircases, but the ultimate stair workout are 282 jumbo steps leading from Culver City to the peak of Baldwin Hills. It's a workout any way you slice it.
While slackers like us just mosey our way up there to cop the most expansively educational view on the West Side, where the sea, oil rigs, and the mountains can all be taken it at once.
FOOD: Wax Paper
https://www.instagram.com/p/_Sen1BS1Oh/?taken-at=1013933510
They say that the way to test a chef's mettle is to ask them to prepare an egg.
Wouldn't a sandwich be a more satisfying yardstick? Because while it's pretty easy to make a good sandwich, the perfect sandwich is actually a good deal more elusive.
Right off the LA River bike path in Frogtown, Wax Paper might have hit on the sandwich ideal. Housed in repurposed shipping container, it's a classy lunch counter with a menu only five sandwiches deep.
Of particular interest to this audience, we'd imagine, is how they name their sandwiches: each is named for a public radio personality.
The parallels between sandwich and radio host make a weird kind of sense. Like the Kai Ryssdal, a fancy tuna with black olive aioli and pickled celery — casual and serious at once, like the man himself.
There's the Larry Mantle, an Italian on sesame roll. And the Audie Cornish, named for the cornichon pickles on this elegant ham and cheese.
We rode off with a pair of veggie options: the Lakshmi Singh — shaved veggies, balsamic and pesto on a baguette — and the Ira Glass, an avocado melt with all the trimmings.
MUSIC: Permanent Records
https://www.instagram.com/p/_N1mPFrkYF/?taken-by=permanentrecordsla
It takes a certain kind of person to traffic in wax for a living. You're part curator, part librarian, part swap meet hustler, and pretty much all pathological hoarder.
It's a modest profession, but a noble one. If you're lucky, you earn the patronage of a broad class of people as meticulous and committed as yourself.
Record store lifers Lance Barresi and Liz Tooley inspire this kind of rabid devotion.
Two-thirds of trash rock band Endless Bummer, Lance & Liz came to Los Angeles a few years back to break ground on the West Coast branch of Permanent Records, a record shop they started in Chicago. They're in Highland Park now.
Permanent represents our platonic ideal when it comes to record store setups: two long rows of well-curated records on either wall, separated by a wide, church-like center aisle. Which means you can flip through the whole store before fatigue sets in.
The killer-to-filler ratio is in the 98th percentile, and the shop boasts a refreshingly Midwestern warmth.
WILDCARD: Los Alamos Rolodex
https://www.instagram.com/p/_i6e5LtfN-/?taken-at=5537746
The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a hole-in-the-wall museum that's the spiritual cousin (and neighbor) to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City.
If those names don't mean anything to you, no worries. Frankly we're kinda jealous that you get to experience it blind.
The Center — which goes by CLUI for short — strives to understand "the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface."
Think of it as a pocket museum of land, art, and bureaucracy.
Currently on view is a show called Los Alamos Rolodex, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a small collection of seven rolodexes once owned by Los Alamos National Laboratory employee Ed Grothus, who later became an anti-nuclear activist.
The rolodexes contain thousands of business cards kept by an office in the lab over the 1960s and 1970s. The dog-eared cards are a physical record of major military contractors, obscure software companies and hardware suppliers — basically everyone who did, or wanted to do, business with Los Alamos.
As a display, they're underwhelming. But what they represent is the nuclear arms race trapped in amber — the now-forgotten names and faces it took to build the most powerful national defense technology in the world.
Getty Center's 'Woven Gold' centers on Louis XIV's tapestry masterpieces
Tapestries are what we too often hurry past in a museum to get to the paintings. In the past, however, these woven masterpieces seemed at least as important to the ruling elites as anything on canvas. They portrayed in the showiest possible way mythology, history, the daily life and even the teachings of Christianity in great works that often combined blatant propaganda with deep and engrossing artistic content.
Fourteen choice examples of the greatest tapestries surviving have now turned up at the Getty Center. The "Woven Gold" show is centered on works collected by the one of the greatest accumulators of all time: Louis XIV, otherwise known as the Sun King of France.
In his long reign from 1661 to 1715, Louis XIV collected over 2,000 tapestries, a small fraction of which still exist. (There is also a tapestry that belonged to the 20th century media king, William Randolph Hearst).
Tapestry is based on the archaic Greek word "tapis" — a word that's much older than the alphabet itself. The great architect Le Corbusier called them "Nomadic Murals." You can fold them up and carry them with you wherever you go. The oldest extant examples go back to 300 BC or so, but it seems likely that the medium originated at least a thousand years earlier — both as one of mankind's earliest artistic forms and one that demands one of the highest levels of skill to accomplish. They can be given humble use by insulating walls in drafty castles or covering bad cracks on plaster. And they can also dazzle the mind.
What famous tapestries, real and fictional, there are!: The famous "Hunt for the Unicorn" series at the New York Cloisters, the Penelope tapestry in the Illiad, the presumed Elsinore tapestry behind which poor old Polonius is slain by Hamlet. Often, as at the Hearst castle, they are hung above our direct line of sight.
But here, curated by the Getty's affable, learned Charissa David-Bremer, they come into their own at eye level, flaunting their artistry.
What do they most resemble in our culture? What modern visual medium demands a huge number of skilled artists patiently to produce it from multiform ingredients of detail and color?
Film animation comes readily to mind. Even in its cyber version, it's enormously labor intensive. Imagine doing something like that in 1661, and that your pixels are tiny strands of yarn of wool and silk and even silver and gold. As many as 40 highly skilled craftsmen assembled each of them on mighty looms in factories that spread out like small towns.
The primary audiences of these tapestries were the aristocracy and a few very rich commoners who showed them in their homes. But on special occasions — like royal weddings and birthdays — they'd be gathered together in great buildings for all to see.
Often they were copies of great paintings. Sometimes great painters — such as Raphael and Charles Le Brun — originated the designs (some of them on display at the Getty) over which the craftsmen (they were all men) wove their colored yarns into the vivid fantasies of ancient rulers, gods and goddesses and idealized renderings of princes at work and play.
For Louis, who was styled "the great monarch of the universe himself," there was an agenda to many of the stories the tapestries told. "Piety, Magnanimity, Goodness and Valour" were the ideals Louis proclaimed. The legendary autocrats portrayed in the tapestries were shown on their best behavior: Alexander the Great's clemency to various defeated enemies, for instance, or Roman General Scipio Africanus' mercy to the conquered Carthaginians.
In reality, Louis XIV perpetrated some of the major wars of his century, destroyed Brussels apparently just for the hell of it, and came himself to regret his bellicose career on his deathbed.
"I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity," he said then.
But if his tapestries show the world as it ought to have been, rather than as it was, they do so with a profound beauty and vision that helped make Louis XIV and his culture the envy of the Western World.
"Woven Gold" goes a long way to showing how that came to be.
"Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis XIV" is on display at the Getty Center through May 1, 2016.
Gladys Knight breaks down 'Midnight Train,' intros new single 'Just a Little'
Motown legend Gladys Knight will ring in 2016 at the Disney Concert Hall and she says she expects people to come ready to celebrate.
I will be on stage when the new year rolls in and we’re gonna be having some fun. And we’re going to do our typical “Auld Lang Syne” welcoming in the New Year — and that’s always a good thing, because we’re blessed to be able to see another one.
Knight — or “The Empress of Soul,” as she’s known — also has a new single out called “Just a Little,” and she spoke with Off-Ramp’s John Rabe about signing with Motown, her 1973 number-one hit “Midnight Train to Georgia” and how she’s managed to keep the same singing voice she had in the ‘60s.
On singing with Motown
We were friends with everybody at Motown, but we were independent of the company. I mean Smokey [Robinson], every time I saw him, he was in my ear talking about ‘You should come to Motown. You should come to Motown.’ So we were saying, ‘Yeah, we know you guys over there, you’re our sisters and our brothers. But we’re used to being independent. We pick up our own money, make our own shots.’ And that kind of thing. And that was all-inclusive when you went to the company. They managed you, they told you where to go, they picked up your money. They did all that kind of stuff. And we didn’t know if we’d be liking that kind of structure, OK. But what we did know was that they were the number 1 hit producers in the country at that time. And all the other record companies that came after them, you know, saw that it was very viable. And we ended up going [to Motown] because we had done everything other than having that nationwide, worldwide big record.
Breaking down “Midnight Train to Georgia”
Well I have to give a lot of that to my brother, Bubba, because he’s one of the Pips, my brother Bubba. He and I were most of the time — most of the time — instrumental in creating the background vocals... We really enjoyed that part of recording. And I even give him credit for my ad-libs on the end of “Midnight Train to Georgia,” because I’m not a good ad-libber. And so, he would be in my ear. When we would get to the end of the song, for some reason, I would just freeze. And when I got to that part I just kept freezing... So I just started mimicking whatever he was doing, and that’s how I got the fade on “Midnight Train.” I can’t take credit for that.
Gladys Knight: Midnight Train To Georgia
On keeping her voice
I know my mentors taught me how to take care of myself. I don’t party, per se. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. I’m not rubbing that in anybody’s face — you live the life that you want to — but that’s how I chose to follow their direction.
Help KPCC's Steve Julian by ... eating a sandwich!
The silver lining in the news that KPCC Morning Edition host Steve Julian is battling brain cancer is the outpouring of good will that is buoying Steve and his wife Felicia in this really tough time.
Financial donations to cover his medical costs are pouring in at Give Forward from Steve's friends and colleagues, but now you can also help Steve by simply buying a sandwich.
In the Frogtown neighborhood of Northeast LA, there's a little sandwich shop named Wax Paper whose menu looks like a Who's Who of public radio - they've got sandwiches named for Larry Mantle, Kai Ryssdal, Ira Glass, and Lakshmi Singh.
Now, there's the "Steve Julian," and half the price of every sandwich will go to his medical care.
And how appropriate! As Felicia writes, "One of Steve's favorite foods is a well crafted sandwich ... When he has a good sandwich, his eyes roll back in his head and he nods as though agreeing with some unheard response to a question about the meaning of life. He can find God in a sandwich."
The Steve Julian is smoked pork loin, jalapeno vinaigrette, pickled carrots and daikon, cilantro, and bacon fat miso aioli.
Felicia says it perfectly, 'Love is a sandwich. And this one is so very Steve. An umami bomb that will make you say, "Praise the lard!" Huge thanks to Peter and Lauren Lemos for being the best kind of public radio nerds. I don't care if it makes any money. The smile on Steve's face when he heard about this was priceless.'
Our thanks to Peter and Lauren Lemos for their thoughtfulness, and for being such great members of the KPCC family. Click the arrow in the audio player to hear my interview with Peter at the shop this week.
Taylor Orci feels the power of sewing her own wedding dress
UPDATE: The wedding has been called off, but Taylor learned a lot in the run-up to the wedding that didn't happen.
Off-Ramp commentator Taylor Orci is blogging her progress in sewing her own wedding dress. Here's the backstory.
Some girls think of their wedding day their entire life. That was definitely not me. But now I’m sewing my own wedding dress.
In preschool, when girls would dress up and play bride, I was busy pasting things together, then trying to eat the paste, or making things out of flour dough, and trying to eat the flour dough, or painting with tempera paints and… well the tempera paints stank so I knew they didn't taste good, but I never learned and ate them anyway. This is more or less how things went with me until…
Last spring I got engaged. And I panicked. Not because I'm not ready or anything, but because, I didn't know how to get married. I haven't been to very many weddings, but more importantly, I didn't know what my wedding was supposed to mean to me. Getting married is a great time to have an existential panic around so much glitter and cursive.
I'm also not the kind of girl who can just say "to hell with it!" and go elope somewhere, or exchange vows in a tree, or an igloo, or a fort made of tires. To those who make it work, I salute you, I admire you, I envy you, but I am not one of you.
I land somewhere in the middle, conflicted about all the baubles and details and the meaning behind them, but, I still do want them — at least some of them. Holler if you're with me, I swear I will feel your knowing voice.
All of these anxieties came to a head when I started looking at (GULP) wedding dresses. The most expensive and symbol-laden garment you may ever wear, should you choose to. And again, I was conflicted.
On the one hand, I did want a wedding dress, a nice one. But the last time I was in a wedding dress showroom (is that what they're called?) I heard an argument between two women about whose breast implants cost more.
I am telling you my secret shame. I am smart in real life, I swear it. I am a self-actualized woman with goals and dreams that have nothing to do with this lovey dovey crap. But I have watched hours upon hours of "Say Yes to the Dress" and — Lord help me, my favorite, "My Fair Wedding" with David Tutera. And cried!
I've watched in awe as women with tears in their eyes popped a bottle of Champagne with their loved ones in a white hall with rows of dresses hung immaculately swathed in jackets of plastic. I've cried tears of happiness for TV strangers, fully knowing this life of cupcake bling is not for me.
So I braved Pinterest and Etsy and after reading some blogs of other girls that had done the same, I said "Yes" to sewing my own dress.
Up until then, I had made one garment. With my mom. It was a magenta jumper and I was eight. I can't even really say I made it because she did all the boring parts like pinning and cutting. I watched her sew most of it.
Okay wait, thinking about it, I did have one dress I sewed. It was with my friend Sarah a few years back and it was a simple shift dress, but it still took watching the entire "Back to the Future" trilogy to make it. And she showed me how to do the techniques, and when I messed up, she helped me sew it… Okay I didn't sew that one really either.
So up until this project my experience with sewing is: I've watched two different people sew stuff for me. But I'm good at research, and I figured, how hard could it be?
I mean… it's not building a bridge or building a rocket to space, but it's pretty technical. But I'm better for it, if only by learning this: Sewing for your own body is by definition, couture. Couture is all about the dress fitting the body, not the body fitting the dress. How liberating is that!? By teaching myself how to sew, I now had this power over my clothes I never had before. I didn't have to worry about my irregular butt or my chest that is junior high-level small. Because now clothes could fit me no matter what, and I could look awesome in them no matter what.
I began holding my head higher in the clothes I sewed. I actually took a (ANOTHER GULP) selfie in a skirt I sewed, and I don't really take those. I had stormed the castle walls of fashion and returned triumphant with words like "stay stitch" and "turn the lining" and "on the bias." Way more useful over time than "cupcake" and "bling."
I will spare you the technical in between, the imperfect garments I barely finished or cut up and threw away. Fifty dollars of silk charmeuse wasted because of a crooked invisible zipper. But last week I finished my dress’s first muslin (that's sewing speak for my first draft) and you know what? It looks pretty good! I tried it on in front of my mom and she checked the hemline and her Rottweiler sat on the train. I let the dog stay. In my mom's living room, my muslin covered in dog hair. This is my kind of bridal showroom.
Peering into the workshop of stained glass makers in LA
In his office, David Judson reads from a ledger that was once owned by his great-great-grandfather William Lees Judson: “This is dated July of 1876 and he’s got an entry here that says, 'The English Church, leading 21 lights,' which would have been windows. Small windows."
The price of a stained glass window has certainly changed since the 1800s — that small window cost a mere $2.10 in 1876, according to Judson's ledger — but the family has not. David Judson is the fifth-generation owner of the Judson Studios, which has made stained glass by hand in Los Angeles for more than a century.
William Lees Judson became a key figure in California’s Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the century. In 1920, he moved his studio to Highland Park from downtown Los Angeles. The studio is headquartered in the same building overlooking the Arroyo that once housed the USC School of Fine Arts.
“The building which was the school is basically our workshops now,” David Judson says. “Different things happen in different rooms based on the production of the stained glass and things haven’t really changed since we moved in in 1920.”
Every stop in the labyrinthine Judson Studios presents a new gift for the eyes. The glass room, as Judson calls it, is bathed in red, green and blue light: “We have about 600 different colors of glass that we keep in stock. We categorize it by color and put it up in the windows for natural light."
Tables that are backlit allow the light to shine through the glass as artisans work. Computers help with the designs, too. But not all of the tools are so modern. Artisan Robert Youngman uses the same kind of lead knife that was used in stained glass making back in the 12th century. “All of my tools are archaic except for the soldering iron and these lead dykes,” he says.
Many of Judson’s clients are churches. But today, craftsman Alex Cordova is assembling a window featuring a mouse from “Cinderella” for a Walt Disney park in Florida. In one room, craftsmen are restoring hundreds of panels that have been shipped to L.A. from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. In another, they’re preserving a window from one of the oldest Episcopal churches in Los Angeles. Judson Studios has also made stained glass for Wright’s Hollyhock House in Hollywood and has poached stained glass artisans from Louis Comfort Tiffany.
In the studio basement, Judson and his team are also giving the old art of stained glass an update by using a technique called fusing. “We’re combining the traditional glass painting with a more contemporary use of the glass where we can combine multiple colors of glass in layers and then put it in a kiln to actually become one piece. In essence, we’re painting with glass as opposed to just painting with paint,” he says.
Studio artist Tim Carey likes fusing because it involves lots of color: "Instead of using dark black paint, we’re using blues and reds and greens all within the composition — sort of like an impressionist painting in glass.”
Blues fade into pinks and greens into reds here, making for a spectacular display and range. Judson is currently at work on a new window for the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, a project for which his studio beat out 60 other bidders from around the world. When finished, the piece will be 100 feet wide and 40 feet high, and one of the biggest stained glass windows in the world. All of them made with the fusing technique. “If the window ends up being really good and if it ends up really reaching and inspiring people, it can kind of launch us into different areas,” says Carey.
On a balcony overlooking the Arroyo, David Judson talks about why stained glass is such a captivating art form and why he’s hoping to push it even further.
What you’re dealing with is light, this aspect of light that we’re constantly experiencing throughout the day. When you can harness the light and create a setting with colored light, not only are you viewing a window but it casts color through a room. It’s changing throughout the day... it allows you to kind of just observe and enjoy without all of these technological things we deal with on a day-to-day basis.
5 Every Week: A concert for dogs, Christmas caroling on wheels, Moog music at The Ace and more!
Behold: five great things you should do in Southern California this week, from art to food to music to an adventure we'll call the Wild Card from the makers of the 5 Every Day app. Get this as a new podcast in iTunes. If you want five hand-picked things to do in Los Angeles every day, download the free 5 Every Day from the App Store.
ART: Laurie Anderson's concert for Dogs
"Wouldn't it be great if you're playing a concert and you look out and everyone's a dog?"
That's a quote from Laurie Anderson, the people's performance artist. For the better part of four decades now, she's been crafting sound and performance pieces that have somehow translated into hit singles and pretty much universal acclaim.
This Sunday at Cinefamily, Anderson realizes her doggy dream with "Concert For Dogs" — an afternoon concert designed with man's best friend in mind.
Well-behaved dogs get priority seating in the Very Important Dog section for a set of canine-friendly, high frequency music, followed by her latest film, "Heart of a Dog," a requiem for her rat terrier, and a kaleidoscopic meditation on life, death, and the joys between the two.
All dogs subject to pre-approval — visit Cinefamily's website for more details.
CITY: Magical Christmas Caroling Truck
https://www.instagram.com/p/-5bAJVPF2x/?tagged=magicalchristmascarolingtruck
If you live in North Hollywood, you undoubtedly already know about the Magical Christmas Caroling Truck, because how could you not?
The Magical Christmas Caroling Truck is basically an annual public nuisance. It's a sixty-two foot tractor trailer, built like a big dumb winter pageant set piece and blaring 20,000 watts of goodwill to any and all within its ten mile radius.
The Truck has circled Toluca Lake for 30 years, garish with its 10,000 twinkling lights. A small army of fur-fringed carolers and dancers follows in its tracks. It's a glorious, wholly American storm of holiday cheer: oppressive muzak eerily Doppler-ing through the avenues for a full seven hours every Christmas eve.
It's inescapable, inevitable, unassailable.
Just like the holidays themselves.
FOOD: Fine Garden Vegetarian
https://www.instagram.com/p/1CutuCR15v/?taken-at=6006983
Listen, we don't usually play into the whole New York vs. LA thing. It's apples and oranges.
And besides, in an increasingly homogenous world, the standard signifiers are starting to collapse. Like, you can definitely get really great New York-style pizza in LA. And there's probably a decent burrito in the five boroughs somewhere.
But we will give New York this very specific point in its favor: they've got some great vegetarian dim-sum in their Chinatown. Tons of places with very long menus full of fake shark fin and soy-based General Tso's.
We've always longed for an equivalent here.
Which we believe we have found.
Fine Garden Vegetarian is as good, if not better, than those NYC dumpling places. And it's in Alhambra, so no need to burn your frequent flyer points.
The menu is extensive and meat-free. There's lovely faux-shrimp shu-mai, little lotus seed buns, pan-fried turnip cakes, and sesame-speckled, crispy pork buns that feel like the real thing. They even, somehow, serve vegetarian sea cucumber.
Which we can't vouch for.
MUSIC: Moogfest Dialtones
https://www.instagram.com/p/_U1hOKTM6u/?tagged=moogfestdialtones
In the mid-1950s, an electrical engineer from Queens named Robert Moog started making musical instruments. His first products were Theremins, made in his garage with the help of his father.
They sold for $50 a pop.
As he grew older, he started connecting the electronic components in the family garage — oscillators and amplifiers — with controllers and keyboards. The result was an instrument that would change music forever: the modular analog synthesizer.
Moog synthesizers have gone on to be used in countless recordings, by every band from Kraftwerk to the Beach Boys. Remember those "switched-on" classical albums, like Switched-On Bach?
All Moog.
These days Moog's company still makes instruments in the USA and throws a music festival every couple of years in Durham, North Carolina. And in the leadup to this year's Moogfest, the synth company is descending on the Ace Hotel Los Angeles for a day of drones, modular tinkering, and switched-on partying.
It's called Dial-Tones, and it features a stellar of LA musicians, producers, and DJs performing a collaborative, back-to-back, improvised performance using Moog synths.
Entry is limited, but if you can't make the improvised noodling session you can certainly hit the afterparty on the Ace rooftop, for a breezy evening of DJ sets by YACHT, Jerome LOL, Lovefingers, Heidi, and M. Geddes Gengras.
It's all free.
WILDCARD: It's a Wonderful Life
https://www.instagram.com/p/6ug4Pamr-D/?tagged=itsawonderfullifemovie
It's a Wonderful Life is super dark. It's like the "Born In the USA" of Christmas movies: the story of a good man's slow, tempered descent into suicidal despair that's usually interpreted as a saccharine Christmas miracle.
But what about the redemptive socialist ending? And Zuzu's petals, and "every time a bell rings" and all that?
Okay, sure, but before that it's all about the death of dreams, adult resignation, and George Bailey knuckling under the pressure of a life half-lived.
Whichever way you wanna read it, it still makes us weepy despite of ourselves, because it stirs up all that's bittersweet about the holiday season: life is wonderful and impossible, and that's okay.
It's a Wonderful Life will be leaving everybody misty-eyed at half dozen different revival houses this week, including the Echo Park Film Center, the Aero, the Egyptian, and Cinefamily.
The Year In Documentaries: Many great films but no blockbusters
With awards season upon us, here's a look at the documentary films of 2015. Documentarian and Off-Ramp contributor R. H. Greene recently spoke with some of the most celebrated filmmakers in this mixed bag of a year.
It's a warm December night on the Paramount backlot, where the cream of the documentary film community crop has assembled for the annual International Documentary Association awards ceremony.
"I can't remember a year where there've been as many really good, strong films come out. The creativity behind them is fantastic," says the association's Simon Kilmurry.
By one metric, 2015 was exceptional: 139 documentary features were exhibited commercially. That's down from 151 last year, but still the fourth largest number of docs ever released in a single year.
However, there were no box-office blockbusters — no "March of the Penguins," no "Fahrenheit 9/11." And docs aren't making money — more than half of distributed documentaries grossed less than $40,000 at the box office. Overall, documentary market share was an abysmal 0.64 percent of total theatrical gross, which is a 75 percent drop since 2004.
Amy
"Amy," an intimate biography of the late British soul singer Amy Winehouse, was the year's most commercially successful "cultural" documentary and is an Oscar front-runner. The documentary's director, Asif Kapadia, says "Amy" might be the first documentary about a pop icon that fully embraces the age of the selfie.
"A lot of the footage is shown by people very close to Amy," Kapadia says. "And then it becomes Amy holding a camera. But what that means is that Amy's looking straight down the lens — talking to her friends, talking to her first manager, talking to her boyfriend — and therefore talking to us, the audience. There's a very different kind of relationship, and we, the audience, become all these different people in Amy's life."
Kapadia says the audience even becomes complicit in her tragic death.
"What I found uncomfortable making the film was the way we treat people who are on the way down, people who are not well. We, as the audience, maybe played a little bit of a part in it."
The Look of Silence
Director Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Look of Silence" is on the Oscars' 2015 documentary shortlist. Oppenheimer's two films about the Indonesian genocide of the mid-1960s are among the most acclaimed works of 21st-century cinema. In "The Act of Killing," aging death squad leaders proudly re-enacted old massacres for Oppenheimer's cameras. "The Look of Silence" is a quieter film — it is the portrait of a shy Indonesian optometrist who uses his trade to gain access to and confront the men who killed his brother. He's an eye doctor forcing murderers to see.
"Again and again in the film we hear, 'Let the past be past,'" Oppenheimer says. "But survivors always say it out of fear. Perpetrators always say it as a threat, which means the past isn't past. It's right there keeping the survivors afraid and silent, keeping the perpetrators empowered to threaten. And until the past is addressed, there will be no lasting assurance of peace."
The IDA's 2015 award for Best Documentary Feature went to "The Look of Silence." If the film does grab an Oscar, the acceptance speech could be a barnburner.
"This is not just Indonesian history," Oppenheimer says. "This is American history. The United States participated in this genocide. We provided weapons, money, lists which we gave to the Indonesian army, essentially saying, 'Kill these people. Check off the names as you kill them.'"
(T)error
Perhaps no narrative or nonfiction film this year was more timely than "(T)error," the documentary by filmmakers Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe. "(T)error" infiltrates an active terrorism investigation by getting close to an FBI informant, and the supposed terrorist the informant is trying to entrap. The problem is the "informant" is inept, the suspect doesn’t appear to be a terrorist — and they figure out what’s going on.
"Those informants are being used to create cases which reinforce in the public imagination the ever-present and local threat of terrorism," says Sutcliffe. "Upon seeing the film, you see that that threat is being fabricated on a regular basis by the FBI."
Interviewed just days after the San Bernardino massacre, Cabral and Sutcliffe say they believe their movie has something vital to contribute to the national dialogue.
"In the wake of the shootings in San Bernardino, I think that was the 365th mass shooting [this year]," Cabral says. "There have been two mass shootings that have been associated with terrorism. And that is the one committed by Nidal Hasan, and then the suspects in San Bernardino, who also are Muslim. And so I think what our film illustrates is the disproportionate toll that surveillance — that FBI surveillance, particularly the use of informants — has taken on the Muslim community, post-9/11. When we look at this shooting, this is sort of the most catastrophic event imaginable. This is the terrorism we all seek to prevent and the FBI seeks to prevent every day. But unfortunately, it's only looking for terrorism in the Muslim community."
'The Long Christmas Dinner': An opera for before, not during, your feast
Bridge Records is an independent record label that, along with the usual classical repertoire, focuses on classical music from the 1900s and 2000s. The label has just put out the first recording in English of “The Long Christmas Dinner,” a short opera written in the 1960s. It's a collaboration between two titans. Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele says it is the perfect recording to provide some perspective on your holiday gatherings.
It’s the big Bayard family holiday and nine people sit at the long Christmas dinner table. The table is decked with holly. There are doors stage left and right. One door is surrounded by birds and flowers, another by black crepe.
We soon realize that this meal is not a finite event. As matters proceed, we understand that this 49-minute opera contains 90 years of family history — multiple generations who will repeat the same banal phrases about the food, the weather and the holiday church service.
Eventually most of the diners walk through the black door of death. Others emerge from the door of birth. A baby is wheeled right out of the bright door and across the stage to the dark one. The holiday camaraderie gradually gives way to conflict, and estrangement disperses all the Bayards from the old family home.
The story has been told and the music stops. The dinner is over and so are the Bayards. The audience is shaken. Merry Christmas to all.
“The Long Christmas Dinner” is a collaboration between two of the most extraordinary creators of the 20th century: German-born composer Paul Hindemith and Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder wrote “Our Town” and “The Merchant of Yonkers,” which inspired the musical “Hello Dolly!”
It is hard to categorize Hindemith’s overall musical style. "Music, despite its tendency toward abstraction, is basically a means of communication," Hindemith said. "Composers and performers have a social responsibility to be comprehensible."
“The Long Christmas Dinner” is comprehensible in part because Wilder is able to say a great deal in very few words. As in all great Greek drama, Wilder’s big events happen offstage — as in the death of Emily in “Our Town.” The characters’ reaction is the story, which is taut, surprising, scary and deeply affecting. It could almost be an episode of "The Twilight Zone."
Hindemith’s music is lyrical and gently foreboding. The optimism of the words of the men’s holiday trio — “Here’s to the Health and Here’s to the Wealth” — is belied by a creepy, minor-key accompaniment from the orchestra. In just a moment, the Bayard family patriarch will exit death’s door — as would Hindemith himself, nine months after the opera’s premiere.
Gradually, the others disperse. “There are no more children,” says one diner. Finally, a distant cousin is left alone by what Wilder called “the great mill-wheel of life and death.” Before she too fades, she is consoled by a letter from Bayard descendants who have moved far, far away.
As much as I like this opera, I’m not suggesting you use the score as dinner music at your holiday table. Instead, pay attention to the family and friends around you — some of them may not be at the table next year.
The opera was first performed in English in 1963. It was revived last December in sold-out, widely-applauded performances at New York’s Alice Tully Hall by Leon Botstein, the polymath Bard University president who also conducts the American Symphony Orchestra. This is the fine performance Bridge Records has released on CD.
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I asked CSU Bakersfield music professor and Hindemith enthusiast Joel Haney if "The Long Christmas Dinner" might work well on one of L.A. Opera's short-opera double bills, like in last year’s program of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas’’ and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle.” Haney, who wrote the notes for the Bridge Records "Dinner” recording, responded: "An L.A. Opera performance would be great! I don't have any immediate thoughts for what might go on the other half.’’ Neither do I, but I’d prefer that it not be "Cavalleria Rusticana" or "Pagliacci.”
Rachel Bloom joins Mantle, Carolla, Poggioli and more in our All Star Night Before Christmas
Rachel Bloom of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" was in the The Frame studio today, and after she was done, I asked if she'd lend her voice to our annual audio holiday card to listeners, the All Star Night Before Christmas.
"I'd love to!" she said. "Our family reads this every year at Christmas!"
And thirty seconds later, she'd nailed:
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
And now Rachel joins the ranks of celebs and KPCC hosts who hammed it up for us, including A Martinez, Alex Cohen, Larry Mantle, John Horn, Adam Carolla, Salman Rushdie, Kathleen Turner, NPR's Sylvia Poggioli, Ted ("Isaac" on the Love Boat) Lange, and John ("Q" on Star Trek) de Lancie. Patt Morrison specifically asked to read the reindeer names, so she say Donder, not Donner. (I'm sure she's right.)
The late great Steve Julian corralled many of the voices a few years ago in his local theater work, so of course I couldn't take his velvety voice out of there. And neither could I switch out Huell Howser, who closes out the poem in signature Huell fashion.
But there's no need. After all, it's at Christmas that we remember old and new friends, those with us in the flesh, and those with us in our hearts.
Looking for a good Hanukkah TV special? Try 'Santa Claus is Comin' to Town'
I used to feel sorry for my Jewish friends at Christmastime, and not just during the slightly sad Christmas dinners we sometimes shared down in Chinatown.
What got to me more was the sense of encirclement I was sure they felt, as White Christmas, Silent Night, Adeste Fidelis and all the usual suspects erupted from every speaker in America, while Rudolph, Charlie Brown, and the Grinch invaded every TV screen. I was raised a Catholic, and sometimes all that makes me feel encircled too.
On TV, there was virtually nothing Hanukkah-related to compare to the annual Christmas hits. And when I thought about Jewish families, and especially their kids, this seemed like a serious lack. Because TV? It's still our communal hearth this time of year, and the essence of community is inclusion.
Well, despair not, children of Abraham, because I'm here to share an epiphany I had maybe 15 years ago, when I watched the big holiday specials with similar thoughts in mind. It turns out Hanukkah has its own annual TV celebration. A richly beloved program that's a cultural institution, and easily the coolest holiday show of all -- because it's gently subversive, and it hides in plain sight.
Ladies and (merry) gentlemen, I give you: Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass' 1970 masterwork Santa Claus is Comin' to Town: an origin myth for Santa, and almost as Jewish thematically as the annual Chabad telethon.
To begin with--the villains. They're Nazis, okay? They wear Kaiser Wilhelm Pickelhaube helmets, and their leader is called Burgermesiter Meisterburger, and the accent it straight out of Stalag 17.
The scariest moments in the special are when the Burgermeister's minions gather up Santa's first toys just after they're delivered and then burn them in front of the children they were meant for, the way the Nazis burned books at Wartburg.
By this point in the film, here's what we know about Santa: he's a foundling, who was delivered to his destiny on a winter wind the way Moses was carried by the Nile in the bulrushes. The elves who adopted him are ruled by a matriarch: Tante Kringle -- the Yiddish word for "aunt."
So Santa? He's a Jew.
And he's increasingly a freedom fighter, bringing toys to the children despite the Burgermeister's anti-toy decrees.
Important to note: the Burgermeister is one of the few villains ever created by teleplay writer Romeo Mueller who isn't redeemed in some way. Mueller wrote the script for the Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer special too, and you probably remember what a softie the abominable snowman turned out to be. But even cartoon Nazis couldn't be forgiven so easily. So it's only when time marches on and history rounds a few more bends that the Burgermeister is forgotten.
And Santa and his ragged band? Why, they leave the land of their sorrows and trials, and make what can only be called an Exodus, across trackless wastes, to found their own Promised Land at the North Pole.
Call it Santa's Village, or call it Israel. What I call it is an ingenious exploration of one religious community's core foundation myths, using the syntax of another's.
It makes Santa Claus is Comin' to Town a rich, cross-cultural experience if you know where to look.
Just like a good Christmas dinner.
In Chinatown.
(RH Greene is a writer and filmmaker. His latest film is Vampira and Me.)
Song of the week: 'I've Got Your Number' by Larry Davis
Off-Ramp’s song of the week is “I’ve Got Your Number,” from Larry Davis’ new album “Hush.”
In 2012, Off-Ramp profiled Davis. The dancer turned graphic artist turned musician got his start crooning with a combo at the Air Force’s Officers’ Club, but didn’t truly pick up singing again until he was in his seventies. A recurring performer at The Other Side, a now closed gay piano bar in Silver Lake, Davis was discovered by recording artist Annie Miles and has put out a steady offering of albums since, including “Close Your Eyes” and “Larry Davis Too.”
From Off-Ramp’s 2012 profile:
Larry sings like he's been doing it all his life. But his is another of those stories that prove F. Scott Fitzgerald was drunk when he said, "There are no second acts in American lives." Larry is on his third act ... at least.
You can read and listen to the full profile here.