Transgender TV chopper pilot flies again! Off-Ramp for February 7, 2015

Listen 48:30

Apple

Spotify

Zoey Tur gets back in the chopper for her groundbreaking new job on Inside Edition; the head of WET in Burbank explains how to make a really cool fountain; a retro video game arcade in Old Town Pasadena lets you play on cultural artifacts.

Transgender TV chopper pilot flies again! Off-Ramp for February 7, 2015

Zoey Tur gets back in the chopper for her groundbreaking new job on Inside Edition; the head of WET in Burbank explains how to make a really cool fountain; a retro video game arcade in Old Town Pasadena lets you play on cultural artifacts.

Subscribe

• Apple
• Spotify

Zoey Tur gets back in the chopper for her groundbreaking new job on Inside Edition; the head of WET in Burbank explains how to make a really cool fountain; a retro video game arcade in Old Town Pasadena lets you play on cultural artifacts.

Mardi Gras jambalaya recipe: Dominick's chef Brandon Boudet shows how to make iconic dish

The calendar says it's still 12 days until Mardi Gras, but that's only for outsiders. Chef Brandon Boudet, owner of the venerable West Hollywood restaurant Dominick's, says growing up in New Orleans, Mardi Gras season started a couple weeks before, and his mom would take him out of school to go watch parades here and there.

Which is a long way of saying that you don't have to wait until Tuesday, Feb. 17, to make jambalaya, one of the traditional dishes of Mardi Gras. And it's easier and more convenient than you might think, as I learned at Dominick's a few days ago under Boudet's tutelage.

Fry up something tasty and fatty, like andouille sausage; add sofrito (chopped green pepper, celery, and onion, with parsley and garlic); a generous amount of Creole seasoning, like ...

... stir in long grained rice, then as much stock as rice; let the rice cook, covered; then when it's cooked, toss in the shrimp and let that sit for 10 minutes. Then: eat.

"Jambalaya is like one of those things: 'My mama makes the best jambalaya that way, my mama's jambalaya is better than your mama's jambalaya,'" says Boudet.

Which is to say, follow the basics just outlined, and you'll be good. The secret, Boudet says? "I think you definitely want some nice fatty pork product in there to really start that flavor early on." Can you get away with chorizo? "There's no wrong when it comes to making jambalaya." Just don't overcook the rice.

Boudet says jambalaya is the Creole culture's one-pot rice dish, like paella or arroz con pollo, perfect for making ahead of time, and serving to a big crowd as they watch the big game, or the parade, or just sit around talking about the last big game or parade.

Listeners: Obviously, Boudet makes it all wrong! Because your mama made it right. So please, share your jambalaya methods and recipes in the comments section below.

And as they say in New Orleans, happy Mardi Gras!

Game NOT Over: Pasadena couple resurrects Monster Bash, other retro arcade games

For many of us, the sound of an old video game brings back memories of sticky floors, crummy pizza and talking trash with your older brother. At Neon Retro Arcade in Old Town Pasadena, these machines are treated like cultural artifacts, for their innovative graphics and physical game play.

Neon Retro Arcade is run by Mia Mazadiego and Mark Guenther. Guenther's love of arcade games began as a child in Chicago, when he discovered a pinball machine in the basement of his family's new home. In college, Guenther tracked down the same machine and started fixing pinball tables as a hobby. His met his future wife, Mazadiego, over a game of Street Fighter II pinball.

(Neon Retro Arcade owners Mia Mazadiego and Mark Guenther. Credit: Maya Sugarman/KPCC)

Since marrying in 2008, Guenther and Mazadiego's collection of arcade machines has grown into the dozens. Mazadiego says her husband has worked hard to restore these games. "It's a mix of three different disciplines. There's sort of the carpentry work of the cabinets themselves. There's also the electronics component, which is very important of course, and then there's also an art component," says Guenther.

The cabinet art implies a story to go along with the simple graphics. Guenther explains the vector graphics for the Atari classic, Gravitar. "Vector graphics work almost like an Etch A Sketch," says Guenther. "So it's actually creating a line as it goes, instead of creating a constant pattern the line only burns into the screen as needed."

(A screenshot of the north planet in second universe of Gravitar. Copyright Atari 1982.)

The frustrating difficulty of these games might be their biggest charm. Guenther recalls a group of patrons gathered around The Simpsons Arcade Game on opening night, "They finally beat it just at the end as we were closing down, and I've never seen the closing credits on that machine."

(A still from The Simpsons arcade game. Copyright Konami 1991.)

Guenther says you won't have to worry about quarters or tokens, just an hourly rate. He and his wife want to take people back to the time of family fun centers and preserve what Mazadiego calls a "part of American history."

Harlem Globetrotters come to Los Angeles

The Harlem Globetrotters are back in town. The internationally famous team, founded in 1926, has games scheduled all over Los Angeles this month. 

Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with two Globetrotters — Wun "The Shot" Versher and Jermaine "Stretch" Middleton — on Thursday after they hosted an assembly on bullying at a school in Culver City.

The Globetrotters are going to be in Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange County through mid-February. Check their website for specific dates and ticket into. 

Patt Morrison on the death of Los Angeles city hall reporter Rick Orlov

Rick Orlov — city hall reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News — died this past Monday. He was 66.

In a place full of chatterers, Rick Orlov was a listener.

Orlov was the Daily News’ city hall reporter for decades, and in him, the politicians and bureaucrats and lobbyists found a ready ear and tough brain.

Rick covered five mayors in his decades of reporting — five. It’s a good thing there’s no term limits for reporters, because Rick’s knowledge, his reporting and interviewing and writing, made him an indispensable source for his readers — and the people he covered.

Some of his obituaries were calling him a journalist. Talking heads and TV gasbags who have never so much as covered a fire or interviewed a crime victim like to call themselves “journalists.” I suspect Rick would have preferred the honorable word “reporter,” for the guy who actually calls the sources and plows through the paperwork and knows his stuff backwards and forwards.

A reporter like Rick didn’t need Google — he was Google; his brain was chock-full of the information that other people had to look up. And much of the time, what they’d find would have Rick’s byline at the top.

Rick could be a funny guy, tossing out asides that everyone strained to hear. There was a rasp in his voice, a voice that you could imagine coming out from under a fedora, through a haze of smoke at a poker table or holding forth at a newspaperman’s favorite bar. Which, except for the fedora, is how a lot of us heard some of Rick’s best stories. 

In the years before cell phone video and Twitter tended to dismantle that useful gentlemen’s agreement called "off the record," Rick made his City Hall office a quote-free zone where everyone, pols and press, could open up a little, with tips and a tipple, about the workings of government.

His in-the-room reporting took readers deep inside that tall white granite tower, and made City Hall a real place full of real people, not just names in press releases. Here’s a bit from his column of a couple of years ago:

City Hall isn’t the glamor beat here that it is in Chicago, where Rick was born; L.A. city government gets cast in the shade by Hollywood.

But it’s vital to Angelenos, and Rick knew it. He knew that we live from pothole to pothole, and tax bill to tax bill,  and even though we might not know about the civic mysteries behind broken building codes and untrimmed trees and higher sewer taxes, Rick did, and he could be counted on to tell us. He wasn’t about the clicks. He was about the news.

Documentary celebrates the impossible dream of LA's first black mayor

A screening of the documentary "Tom Bradley's Impossible Dream,"  will take place on Feb. 12 at LA's First AME Church. 

Bradley was mayor of Los Angeles for five terms, starting in 1973. The documentary was funded by Cal Humanities through the California Documentary Project.

Tom Bradley's Impossible Dream: Sample Clip

Lyn Goldfarb and Alison Sotomayor, who made the film, as well as Bradley's daughter, Lorraine Bradley, will attend the First AME screening and Q&A. More screenings TBA.

First AME Church, 2270 South Harvard Blvd.,  LA CA 90018. Thursday, February 12, 6 pm.

Inside Edition's Zoey Tur, first transgender TV reporter, flies again

When last we spoke with Zoey Tur about her gender reassignment, she said her goal was to become the nation's first transgender TV reporter.

With a turn this month as a special correspondent for Inside Edition, Zoey Tur, the former macho TV chopper reporter Bob Tur, became the nation's first transgender TV reporter, and -- as far as she knows -- only the third in the world.

How did she get the gig? Inside Edition kept calling her for an interview about her transition.

"And I felt like if I'm good enough to interview, I'm good enough to be on the air. So I called up Charles Lachman [Executive Producer of Inside Edition], left a message, and he called back three minutes later. And I said, 'Do you want to make history?' And he said, 'How so?" And I said, 'There's not a single trans person anywhere on the air as a television reporter.' And he said, 'I get it; you're hired.'"

Zoey Tur says she'll be reporting both hard news and stories about transgender issues. "It's a real gig." And she has hopes for the job with Inside Edition to continue past this month.

What does Zoey think about Bruce Jenner, who's been undergoing his own very public transformation as a transgender person? "To have the world's greatest athlete on the team is phenomenal. On the other hand, I feel she's gone about this so wrong, because she's lost control of her narrative, which has been told by the tabloid press."

Zoey says she's adapting to the lack of male privilege. She likes that the AAA mechanic fixed her dead battery and called her "dear." She doesn't like that one of her (male) doctors started condescending to her.

And she's adapting to another change with an old friend: After Zoey returned from her three-week trip for her surgery, her dog Laika didn't recognize her smell. It took a while, which made Zoey sad. Laika eventually realized Zoey is the former Bob, and they're friends again, but now Laika has become dominant, for instance, growling when Zoey tries to take back the covers in bed, which the dog never did before. 

Burbank's WET made the Bellagio Fountains and other water artworks you love

You probably haven't heard of the Burbank company WET, but if you've been to Vegas, you know their work. 

WATCH: Even the Bellagio Fountains have their own official trailer

Mark Fuller, the energetic, 63-year-old owner of WET, says the Bellagio Fountains “started as an icon for the hotel and became an icon for the city." These fountains, plus dozens of other fountains in hotels, shopping plazas, and other venues around the world were all designed and built by WET, which started in a church basement and now employs 375 engineers, metal workers, animators, carpenters, receptionists, computer programmers ... and one full time fitness instructor, because Hollywood.

Asked if he’s ever calculate the number of times WET's fountains have appeared on TV or the movies, Fuller responds “Only when it pops up on TV and my wife says, 'why don’t we get a royalty for that?' ... that number I know.” You also might have seen their spouting talent in Sochi at the Winter Olympics. While closer to home WET did the fountain at the Americana shopping mall in Glendale and Universal CityWalk.

The basic idea is always the same, instead of water running over a sculpture, the water is the sculpture. And thanks to any number of combinations of pumps, nozzles, lights and computers, they can make H2O do pretty much anything.

Fuller, a former theater nerd turned engineer, makes it sound almost philosophical: “People are drawn to water, it is both an antagonist, and protagonist… supreme.”

Heading into the chemistry room, there are large flypaper like strips on the floor to clean the dirt off the bottom of your shoes. There’s a drum kit and grand piano in the common area, a laser bench, a 3-D printer or two and a full time teacher who leads classes in Fluid Mechanics and Comedy Improv to improve employee communications skills.

Andrea Silva, a Senior Project designer at WET, says, “Five years into the job I was sitting in a pump room in Japan at 2AM. I was wondering what I had done to get here…” It’s like walking onto the set of what you think the perfect office might look like. But with the low-end fountain running a million dollars and the big jobs clocking in north of $200m, they can afford it.

Silva says part of the challenge is finding a way to make their foreign fountains culturally relevant. “Even with Dubai fountain…our choreographers are there, they come out and this is how you move to this piece of music, this is the dance you do, so we incorporate those specific… whether that’s a hand gesture, we incorporate that into the actual choreography.”

Outside on the lawn, we pass a squeaking underwater multi-axis robot, then enter what they call Area 9…which is where all the cool stuff is: Fuller designed a way to make water shoot like it’s encased in a clear plastic tube, without the tube. Something about having all the molecules moving at the same speed. There’s also fire that burns under a mushroom shaped ball of water and what they call water on fire, a column of water with a flame inside. (It’s a display you can stick your hand into if you’re careful, and the feeling is something other-worldly.)

Fuller says recent projects have included a solar power component that uses gray or undrinkable water and cleans it in the process. He likes the fact that anyone, rich or poor, can enjoy the work they do at WET. And as for his definition of what makes a successful project, this former Disney Imagineer says that’s pretty simple too.

“So we’ll take a lake or pond and treat it like a screen, a fantastic visual instrument on which we can create endless visual performances. If you and I were walking by a creation, and we didn’t stop in this interview and say hold that thought, then I would think we failed.”

Presidents' Day Organ Festival - an 'organ crawl' in San Marino and South Pasadena

I just got a an invitation from Manuel Rosales, who built the Disney Hall organ, for a fun, easy, and free event on Monday, Feb. 16. It's an organ crawl in San Marino and South Pasadena. And honestly, when was the last time you went on an organ crawl?

The Presidents' Day Organ Festival, presented by the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, includes four churches and four organs played by five organists:  Jaebon Hwang of Westwood United Methodist Church in LA; Aaron David Miller of House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, MN; Tom Mueller, Assistant Professor of Music and University Organist at Concordia University in Irvine; Richard Unfried, Professor of Music Emeritus at Biola University in La Mirada; and James Welch of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Palo Alto.

It starts with sweet rolls in front of the Colonial Kitchen on Huntington, then moves to First Church of Christ, Scientist; Community Presbyterian Church; Calvary Presbyterian Church; and Holy Family Catholic Church.

President's Day Organ Festival

Off-Ramp and FilmWeek animation critic Charles Solomon nabs Annie award

A big congratulations from all of us at KPCC to Charles Solomon for winning an Annie award this weekend!

The International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood, gives out the Annies. "How to Train Your Dragon 2" won best animated film at the 42nd Annie Awards Saturday, held at UCLA's Royce Hall. Charles Solomon was awarded the Annies' June Foray Award, "for his significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation."

(Solomon interviewing Disney's Scott Watanabe and Paul Felix about "Big Hero 6." Credit: John Rabe)

Charles, a veteran of Airtalk's Filmweek as well as Off-Ramp, penned “Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation” in 1989, which was the first film book nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award.

One of his recent books was a lavishly illustrated tribute to Disney's Golden Books.

In 2008, with Queena Kim, Charles won an L.A. Press Club award for a profile of animation artist Tyrus Wong. He's also a lecturer in animation at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and has been involved in many fundraisers for  animators in need.

Watch a zoetrope demonstration

By the way, the award, which you can see Charles holding in the photo, is in the shape of a zoetrope, an early animation device. To use it, you put a strip of drawings inside the cylinder, spin it, then view from the outside, through the slits. The Annie award is a working model.

The story behind LA's mysterious yellow and black filming location signs

Base Camp. Bully. Anonymous. Heima. 

Nonsense written on yellow and black signs all over Los Angeles, each with a giant arrow. Where do they come from? What do they mean? 

If you've lived in Los Angeles for more than a couple years, you probably know the basics already: TV and film production companies use the yellow and black signs you see on the side of the road as directions to film sets.

But it's 2015. The age of the smartphone, the built in navigation system, Waze. Why do the cast and crew need yellow and black signs pointing the way?

Byll Williams is a location manager who works in Los Angeles, and he says it isn't that simple. "Everybody, when they're an individual, is very intelligent," he says. "When they're a group, for some reason, intelligence goes out the window. And they get lost on one way streets."

When I met Byll he was preparing for a Ford car commercial near the L.A. Times building Downtown. As if to prove his point, his phone rings midway through our interview—a crew member needed directions.

Location Managers are a crucial part of the filmmaking industry in Los Angeles. Byll and his colleagues with the Location Managers Guild coordinate logistics for the crew, talk with local officials and, of course, put up the signs.

Location managers are often the first on set and the last to leave. When I met Byll downtown, it was 7:30 a.m. And he hadn’t gotten to bed until 4 a.m. the night before.

He sets up signs pointing to a couple different parking lots—things like TRUCKS and CREW are written on top of the sign, and inside the black arrow it says "Anonymous"  — Anonymous Content is the production company.

Sometimes, though, the production company doesn't want to reveal its name, or the project it's working on. Signs for "The Dark Knight Rises" read "Magnus Rex." "We Bought a Zoo," the Cameron Crowe movie, had the code word "Heima" — Icelandic for home. It keeps the super fans and paparazzi away. Williams says commercial shoots are starting to use the signs, too.

If you need one of the signs yourself, your best bet is to hit up JCL Traffic—one of the leading manufacturers. In their Arts District warehouse, they make traffic signs for every occasion: no parking, road work ahead, lane closed and the humble, yellow-and-black set location signs. 

Jim Morris, JCL's general manager, is a former location manager and says the "location directional" signs, now printed on a durable corrugated plastic, came about as an idea from another scout. Before that, it was the dark ages.

"People would use foam core, which was very expensive," said Morris. "The sheets cost like about $10 a sign. And then if it rained, they would fall apart. They would use old posting signs — anything you could find — paper plates."

Here's how they're made: First comes the message — it's typed out on a computer and then etched in vinyl. Then the message is "weeded out" from the vinyl:

Then—in another part of the building—employees pull out unmarked yellow signs with the black arrow preprinted on them. Like a bumper sticker, the vinyl is rolled out and applied to the sign:

Then, voila! The vinyl writing gets peeled from the sign, and filmmakers now can find their set: 

One employee at JCL estimates he makes about 80 to 100 signs per day and ships them anywhere.

JCL also wants to do more than just location signs and traffic control. In another part of the factory, they have dozens of street signs designed for the city of South El Monte. If you want to buy a sign for yourself, you're in luck: JCL is open to the public.

See one of the 'greatest marine painters' at Pasadena Museum of California Art

At the center of his work was the sea. Armin Hansen was one of greatest marine painters ever born in this state. But while most of his turbulent seascapes were singular and memorable, it was his portrayals of the men who worked on the oceans off Monterey that brought him lasting fame.

It’s intriguing that Hansen was putting on canvas and paper an impressionistic rendering of the same sort of people his contemporary, John Steinbeck, was then describing in his literature.  Gatherings of work-aged men in shabby hats with red sunburnt noses, who bear their histories in their faces, gray-blue figures shouldering their oars against a cloudy sky as they slog to work.  And though later in life he dressed like a hunting squire in tweeds, vest, and tie whenever he went out into the Central Coast sunlight to paint these subjects, they must have known he had shared their life, working as a deck hand on a North Sea trawler in the years before World War One.

(Armin Hansen on a Monterey beach, n.d. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of California Views Photo Archive, copyright/courtesy Pomegranate Communications)

Nearly 100 of Hansen’s pictures and other works are on display at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in a show called the Artful Voyage.  For decades before his death in 1957, Hansen worked and taught in Monterey and Carmel. While he was appreciated by a broad public and revered by his students as one of the greatest art teachers in the West, Armin seems to have lived through prolonged rough times after the Great Crash of 1929.  He made some of his family’s own furniture, including a fine dining room table on display at the show, but complained that they ate mostly “beans and bread” off of it. He may even have been self-conscious about not living up to the commercial success of his late father, Herman Hansen, a Danish immigrant who in the 1870s and 1880s established himself as a famous illustrator, as well one of America’s pioneer painters of the Cowboy West.

The San Francisco-based Herman had taught his son to paint, and sent him to study art in Munich, as though foreseeing his son’s work might eventually overshadow his own.  Indeed it does: the younger Hansen’s work overflows with Impressionist colors that give it a life and emotional depth that even his father’s frontier action paintings, with their mid-1800s formality, lacked.

Armin Hansen’s seascapes vibrate with their deep blues and frothy beige grays. Oddly, he seems mostly to favor as subjects the sailing ships of the century before his—rust-streaked, weather-beaten square-riggers from the end of the sailing era, scudding sedately into the present. In contrast, most of his shipwreck paintings are of modern vessels, hopelessly ground ashore on the Monterey coast, sometimes surveyed from the shore by landsmen spectators whom he terms “Storm Birds.”

Exhibit curator Scott Shields suggests Armin Hansen’s financial hardships inclined him toward new directions, such as his midlife still lifes.  Perhaps, but I am more impressed with his turn towards his father’s finest work with his wonderful rodeo tableaus. His riders and horses can be bright splotches of color, or simply tan manifestations of the dust of the Salinas arena, all in impressionist precision.

(Armin Hansen, Cowboy Sport. Monterey Museum of Art. Gift of Jane and Justin Dart. Image protected by copyright and courtesy Pomegranate Communications)

His father would have been proud. “Like me,” old Herman Hansen might have said, “only so much better.”

Armin Hansen: The Artful Voyage is at the Pasadena Museum of California Art through May 31. 490 East Union Street, Pasadena, CA 91101

Roll out the barrel: First look inside restored Idle Hour Cafe, historic North Hollywood gem

It's called "programmatic architecture" — a building that looks like something other than a building — and examples have been common around Southern California: the Brown Derby, the giant tamale on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A., and in North Hollywood, a giant barrel.

The Idle Hour Cafe is at 4824 Vineland Avenue, and you  can see it to the left in this historic photo. It was built of cedar, and according to the L.A. Public Library, was commissioned in 1941 by Universal Studios film tech Michael D. Connolly and built by Silver Lake engineer George F. Fordyk.

(Undated photo from the L.A. Public Library's Valley Times Collection)

The Idle Hour was eventually turned into a flamenco venue called La Cana — before owner Dolores Fernandez closed it in 1984 and just started living in it. When she died, the county acquired the property, and that's where L.A. historian and L.A. Magazine writer Chris Nichols comes in:

In 2011, the building was sold at auction to Green and his 1933 Group, which runs seven bars across Los Angeles, including the Bigfoots West and East, Thirsty Crow, Harlow, La Cuevita and Oldfield's. $1.4 million later, Green says, and the Idle Hour Cafe will reopen in mid-February. As you can see in KPCC photographer Maya Sugarman's photos, it's been lovingly rebuilt, restored and reimagined because very few original elements remained, and the structure was not up to code.

The 1933 Group's website says it wants to transport its customers "to another era, if only for the night," and with the Idle Hour, that era will be a Los Angeles when people thought it was cool to build a bar that looked like a barrel. Green tells us the menu will be classic American, and the many beverage taps will feature 20 beers and many draft cocktails — whiskey-based, in keeping with the barrel theme. And in back, you can throw a small party in another piece of programmatic architecture: a giant dog that eerily resembles Green's pet bulldog.

UPDATED: The night VA chief McDonald made his now infamous 'special forces' claim

UPDATE 2/24/2015:

VA Secy Bob McDonald has come under fire for claiming to be a member of US Special Forces as he was walking through Skid Row, talking with a homeless man who claimed  to be a Special Forces veteran.

WATCH the CBS report. KPCC's Rabe appears in black, with umbrella in pocket

I elected not to use that exchange because there was no way to prove whether the homeless man was a veteran (McDonald himself doubted the claim), and the homeless man seemed highly uncomfortable; he obviously felt ambushed by the media hoarde. 

15 seconds into the audio for this Off-Ramp segment, as we talk about flashlights, McDonald does say, "I was a Ranger." According to a VA spokesperson: "As a graduate of the US Army Ranger school, Secretary McDonald was entitled to wear the Ranger tab on his uniform throughout his career." 

-- John Rabe

The day after vowing to end veterans homelessness in a landmark settlement, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Bob McDonald sought to underline his commitment to the issue by taking part in L.A.'s annual homeless count.

McDonald walked the streets of L.A.'s Skid Row for a couple of hours, looking for homeless people, and Off-Ramp went with him.

One of the most poignant and symbolic moments came as we passed a homeless encampment, and McDonald was learning the rules for the survey: Count each individual you see. If you only see a tent, put down "tent." But if there are people outside of it, don't count the tent and the person, and if "there's a foot sticking out, that's one person."

That brings it home, McDonald said, "Particularly when you think that that person could have been in Iraq or Afghanistan, sleeping on the ground. Vietnam. Korea. Waking up and going out to fight."

McDonald didn't find any confirmed vets for sure during his walk around Skid Row. The volunteers are told specifically not to poke into tents and ask invasive questions of the homeless during the census, and McDonald abided by those guidelines.