Patt Morrison's birthday wishes for the Arroyo Parkway ... 5 Every Week preps you for movie awards season ... Brains On, the science podcast for kids ... the film response to Birth of a Nation ...
Happy 75th Birthday, Arroyo Seco Parkway!
75 years ago today, December 30, 1940, the first Freeway in the United States opened to cars, changing the way Los Angeles would get around forever.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, would design one like it today. It’s curvy and it’s swervy. Its entrances and exits are fubsy little five-mile-an-hour kiddie-car ramps.
The median is so narrow you feel you could stick your hand out the car window and high-five the drivers going the other way.
In its day, the Pasadena freeway was hot stuff. Imagine – finally being able to drive all the way from Pasadena to downtown LA in the time it took to smoke a cigarette.
On New Year’s Eve 1940, the Rose Parade queen and the governor of California tugged at opposite ends of a red silk ribbon, and, voila. The first freeway in the west was open and running.
But not very fast. The speed limit was 45 miles an hour, the lanes were a foot narrower than modern freeway lanes, and the whole concept of a freeway was so unfamiliar that early on, people actually stopped their cars right there on the freeway to pick up passengers and let them out.
Teddy Roosevelt had visited the beautiful, wild Arroyo Seco in 1911 and said it would make “one of the greatest parks in the world.”
Well, it ended up not as a park, but a parkway. You still drive it the way Fred and Ginger danced – gracefully, dipping and gliding and weaving along. The urban critic Reyner Banham got it right on this one when he wrote about freeway driving as a kind of exalted awareness that some of us find almost mystical.
Long before it was a freeway, it was briefly a two-wheeled route, an elevated wooden bikeway maybe a couple of miles long, which opened on New Year’s Day in 1900.
A couple of days before the Arroyo Seco Parkway opened for cars 40 years later, the chief of the Kawies tribe, which had lived in the arroyo for centuries, smoked a goodwill peace pipe with the head of the state’s public works department.
Less than a year after the freeway opened, we were at war. A fake airfield was built alongside the parkway, using logs for airplanes, in hopes that enemy bombers – which in fact never materialized – would bomb that instead of real defense plants.
Seventy-five years on, the original name, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, is back. It evokes another time, and a pioneering roadway that was built for looks, not so much for speed -- a leisurely, scenic journey.
Which is good, because on a roadway built for 27,000 cars a day, not the 122,000 it now carries, sometimes that’s just about the only way you can drive it.
Frustrated on the 110? Slow down and enjoy the parkway!
To help celebrate the 75th birthday of the Arroyo Parkway, we reach into the Off-Ramp archives for this gem: in 2008, we drove with then-LA Times automobile columnist Ralph Vartabedian up and down the venerable highway to prove a point.
The reason traffic can be so frustrating on the 100 is that it was not meant to be a expressway; it was designed as a parkway ... a pleasant way to get from downtown LA to Pasadena that was somewhat faster than surface streets.
So Ralph and I drove North, angrily. Then back South, slowly in the slow lane, happily.
Give it a try! You'll lose about two minutes, and gain peace of mind.
Song of the week: "Hole in my wall" by Litronix
Kevin Litrow fronts Litronix, the electronic two piece that pairs Litrow's synth virtuosity and vocals with the guitar work of Avi Zahner-Isenberg, who also sings in Sub Pop's Avi Buffalo.
Litronix's 2015 single "Hole in my Wall" is this week's Off-Ramp song of the week. Take a listen here:
https://soundcloud.com/litronix1/hole-in-the-wall
You can see Litronix live at Pehrspace in Echo Park on Sunday, January 3.
5 Every Week: Awards Season, haunted mansions and the Smell turns 18
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. You can also 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: Contenders at The Hammer
Well, 2015 is officially donezo, but in L.A. at least, its ghost carries over through the end of February. That’s right — we’re now knee deep in Awards Season, which means Hollywood’s about to be a mess of street closures, DVD screeners and For-Your-Considerations for at least a couple more months.
We recognize that this might be a confusing time even for cinephiles, but we’ve got a hot tip for getting caught up: This week, the Hammer kicks off its eighth annual Contenders series — a program of semi-mainstream films from the past year that the museum’s curators deem to possess "lasting historical significance".
It starts Wednesday with a screening of "Beasts of No Nation," with director Cary Fukunaga in attendance, followed by Thursday’s screening of "The Hateful Eight" with Quentin Tarantino, a cast-and-crew packed presentation of "Room" on Friday, plus a ton more throughout the following week.
CITY: Greystone Mansion
https://www.instagram.com/p/_6JxzWin-C/
Built by oil baron and Teapot Dome conspirator Edward L. Doheny in 1928, Greystone Mansion is one of the more recognizable landmarks of decadence in Beverly Hills. It's lived some lives, and ghosts hang heavy around there.
Greystone was a gift from Doheny to his son Ned, his wife and their five kids, and was christened with the noir-ready murder/suicide of Ned and his secretary Hugh Plunkett just four months after the family moved in.
It traded hands after that until it was finally handed over to the city in the mid-'60s, which graciously opened its 16 acres of gardens and parks to the rest of us.
Greystone's eerily still common spaces have a weird, uneasy calm about them — a graveyardy kind of serenity, creepily singular to vestiges of old Beverly.
FOOD: Szechuan Impression
https://www.instagram.com/p/_moJLDIElS/
Here’s the deal with the authentic Szechuan food of San Gabriel Valley: there is something borderline psychotropic in Szechuan peppercorns. Those spicy little bullets encrusting many foods east of Monterey Park numb your mouth into tingly oblivion.
And it feels good.
That is why there are lines, even on weeknights, out the door of every decent Szechuan place on Valley Boulevard, and Szechuan Impression, which caters to a younger, hipper SGV crowd than the old standbys, is no exception.
That spice? It's mind-altering. Pro tips: The cumin-encrusted toothpick lamb is a winner, and the crinkle-cut fried potatoes tossed in peppercorn, chili and cilantro — Chinese street food — are unreal.
You'll wait, and you'll get your fix, and you'll be grateful.
MUSIC: The Smell Turns 18
Can you even imagine this city without the Smell? We wouldn’t want to.
The mythical all-ages venue that helped make this city livable for so many of us now-old people at the turn-of-the-century is legal this year — they’ve been at it for a full 18 years! Meaning that there's a whole generation filling its steamy brick walls who weren't even born when the Smell moved to South Main Street downtown.
Man, we're old.
Starting this Friday, Jim Smith and Co. celebrate the greatest all-ages venue in the world with two epic nights of family from both sides of the generational divide, featuring sets from Ty Segall, together with Pangea, Sex Stains, No Parents and many more, plus the promise of all kinds of surprises.
Bless you, the Smell — may you continue to do God's work for years to come.
WILD CARD: The Meltdown
https://www.instagram.com/p/_Dpg2aQdFZ/
Of all the hole-in-the-wall stand-up reviews in town competing for your laughs, there are few tickets more categorically reliable than the Meltdown.
Always packed to standing room in the back theater of Meltdown Comics, clandestine pop-ins from big-name comedians are basically a given. But even on its less glamorous nights, Kumail Nanjiani and Jonah Ray's joke machine can vanquish nearly all comers.
David Koechner, Kate Berlant and Thomas Middleditch are all officially on the docket for this Wednesday’s show, and though technically sold out, they always hold a few rush tickets at the door.
Go early and read comics, hobnob in line with the fans, people-watch — it's half the fun.
'Clueless' director Amy Heckerling on the teen classic's 20th birthday
"Clueless" was more than the source for "as if" and "whatever." It was more than a movie about L.A. — "Everywhere in L.A takes 20 minutes." It was more than the precursor to "Legally Blonde," with its pretty, somewhat ditzy, but highly intelligent blonde heroine.
It was, in fact, a rare accurate movie about teenagers and their world. On the whole, they're good kids who try to get along with each other, and the adults in their lives try to do the same. For my money, that's why we're still watching it, and quoting it, 20 years later.
"Clueless" was released July 19, 1995. It starred Alicia Silverstone, the late Brittany Murphy and Stacey Dash — along with Jeremy Sisto, Wallace Shawn and the star of this weekend's "Ant-Man," Paul Rudd.
"Clueless" was written and directed by Amy Heckerling, who had previously directed "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and the first two "Look Who's Talking" movies. She based it on Jane Austen's "Emma," which coincidentally marks its 200th anniversary this year. I reached her in New York for an in-depth conversation.
How she got involved in making "Clueless":
I was involved because I thought of it. So, I liked me for it, so I said, "How 'bout you do it?" I wanted to do a project with a character that would be incredibly happy. That always kind of confused me that people were very positive and happy. I don't know how people could be positive. For the most part, I don't know what it is that makes people think that everything will go their way, or that things will work out right.
"Emma," the movie's template, and Jane Austen:
She's obviously got an incredibly huge heart, but there's also like a wicked little funny way of mocking people that's just great. I just gave ["Emma"] to my mother, and she read just a few pages and was hooked. There's absolutely nothing that's dated about it.
The roots of her dialogue in "Clueless:"
Your handicaps in life are what you work out in what you're doing. I'm not a great speaker. I'm very insecure about even doing something like this, and from the time I was a kid, girls and boys would be in groups and they'd be talking to each other, and I just was going, "How the hell do they know what to say to each other? What are they talking about? And how do they know which words to be using?" But I've been scribbling down slang since I could write, taking down little snippets of what people are saying.
(Dash and Silverstone in 2012)
Unlike a lot of teen movies, these kids aren't jerks:
They're not jerks, and a lot of times in youth-oriented movies, grown-ups are all caricatures. That's not the world I want to live in. I like the idea that there's a very intelligent teacher like Wally Shawn, and he does care about them. I created a happy world that I'd like to live in.
Good news for fans: a jukebox musical version of "Clueless" is in the works. Heckerling wrote the book, Kristin Hanggi ("Rock of Ages") is directing and the Dodgers group ("Urinetown," "Tommy") is producing. Also, Laemmle's Music Hall 3 is showing the original "Clueless" Thursday night at 7:30 p.m.