Classical music on the Venice Beach boardwalk ... Gordon Henderson finds a Rose Bowl chaperone ... Kevin Ferguson talks with Van Dyke Parks ...
PHOTOS: Gary Leonard and Colette Miller find the better angels in our nature
UPDATE (5/8/2014): Gary Leonard's Wings photos are all together and showing at an exhibit that opens tonite at 6. "Angels on Main Street" is at the Fine Arts Building, 811 West 7th Street, downtown LA.
It's a very simple idea. Colette Miller painted wings on the pull-down security shutters at the Regent Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. Stand in front of the wings and have your photo taken and voila, you're an angel in the city of Angels.
For freelance photographer Gary Leonard, who strives to capture a broad range of LA life, it was the perfect setup. He simply emailed a bunch of his contacts and asked them to meet him last weekend in front of the wings. It turns his paradigm on its head: instead of having to travel all over LA to capture LA's diverse people and events, different people from all walks of life in LA came to him. He photographed street people, activists, Mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti, an aging public radio host, an unborn child, and many more.
And I can tell you from experience, something interesting happens when you pose in front of those wings: you stand a little taller, you feel like - maybe - you're flying a little, you turn into a slightly better person.
Another Sandy casualty: USC Song Girl Claudine Christian, who went down with The Bounty
The East Coast is still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. One family and a circle of friends is still dealing with one tiny part of the destruction it caused: the death of Claudene Christian, a former USC Song Girl who, it seemed, had found redemption before she died in the storm.
Reporter Matt White tells her story in the latest edition of Los Angeles magazine.
Claudene Christian had a waterfall of blond hair, was voluptuous without being vampish, and walked the University of Southern California campus on perfect legs. She also wore with confidence the halo of being among the school’s most iconic group of women. If you’ve seen the first ten seconds of any televised USC football game, you’ve watched the Song Girls. ... She won’t shout or clap or point or give any hint that she knows she’s on TV. She will most certainly not look at the camera. There is nothing happenstance about this moment, nothing unplanned when she stands at military attention on a sideline or twirls in perfect sync with her teammates. Her facial expression, her posture, her entire demeanor are carefully calibrated to match every Song Girl who’s gone before her in the squad’s 44-year history. The process begins with a tough selection that whittles down a hundred or more hopefuls to a number that is about a dozen today but was closer to six when Claudene tried out as a freshman in 1988.
Claudene had come to LA from Anchorage, Alaska, and not only made the squad, but soon started a business in her dorm room that would make her rich. But she didn't seem to be able to handle the pressure, the drinking, and psychological problems, and she found herself, in her 30s, back home. Then, as a member of the family that claims a lineage back to HMS Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian, she secured a place on the crew of the reconstructed Bounty used in the Marlon Brando movie.
She seemed to have found her place, but then Hurricane Sandy hit, and that's the story White tells in our Off-Ramp interview.
VIDEO: LA's great parking meter debate; will it spark Armageddon?
Few things in life are as annoying/infuriating as finding a parking ticket on your car. The only thing worse is seeing the parking cop with their hand-held computer standing behind your car, writing the ticket.
They have no mercy. And should they? After all, you’re an adult. You know how it works. You parked at a meter and let it expire. So, you get a ticket in LA, and just like that, $63 is gone. $63 someone like James Adegoke, who lives downtown, could put to better use. He says the parking meters "...a nightmare. Literally, I’ve watched these guys literally stand there and wait for the meter to expire. People get really upset. I mean, I’m talking, you can’t blink. I mean there’s not even like a 5 second grace period. That thing is red BOOM there’s a ticket on it. These people are actually oppressing the residents here."
Those parking agents do feel like vultures circling in for the kill. But “nightmare" and “oppressing?” #FirstWorldProblems.
James should be glad he doesn’t live where Steve Hoffman parks. He told us, "In Santa Monica, they’ve installed these wonderful meters that know when you’ve pulled away. So if I pay for 2 hours at a parking meter and leave after the first hour, there should be 1 hour left on that meter. However, once the car pulls away the smart meters know you’ve pulled away and they clear away that time. Also if you’ve parked for more than 2 hours, you can’t put in more money."
It’s like a treasure hunt. We all want a free space … even LA City Councilman Tom LaBonge, who says, "One of the joys in life in Los Angeles is when you find a parking meter and the space is open and the money’s still left on the clock. I want LA to be a fine city not a fine city."
State Assemblyman Mike Gatto lives in LA, and he was so bothered by a proposal to allow the city to ticket people at broken meters, he introduced a bill to stop it. "To me," he said, "it's just completely unfair to tell motorists that even though we pay all these taxes to maintain the roads and the meters that when a meter breaks down because government has not fixed it, that the motorist is going to get ticketed."
Councilwoman’s Jan Perry voted against it - the sole no vote. "I just felt that we should invest our energy in fixing the meters—that’s how you generate revenue." But the city has already done that, and the debate may be moot.
Dan Mitchell, a senior engineer with LA’s Department of Transportation, says before the city bought almost 40,000 new meters, one out of every ten meters was broken at any given time. "Meter vandalism was rampant in this city," he said. "And unfortunately with the old policy that allowed free parking at broken meters, it created an incentive for many folks to disable the meter in order to park for free."
Now, Mitchell says, on average there are only 5 broken meters at any given time in the city. And when they break, he says, they’re fixed in hours, now, not days. In other words, you’re not going to find a broken meter in LA. And Mitchell says that's meant a lot more money. "The annual meter revenue has increased from $34-million to $49-million a year."
For most of us, paying for a meter - or even writing the check three bucks isn’t a lot of money for most of us, and we can even absorb the occasional parking ticket. It’s annoying, but it’s not the end of the world. For most of us. But I did witness one scene where it was a really big deal. The city of LA towed the RV John Rumpf and Maria Delarosa live in because they had a bunch of unpaid parking tickets.
Rumpf said, "A motor home. Come on man. She’s been living in that thing for 4 years now. Everything she owns is in that thing. What they did was totally inhumane."
PHOTO SLIDESHOW: You need a chaperone for the Rose Bowl Flea Market
Careful listeners will remember that Off-Ramp contributor Gordon Henderson made a confession a couple weeks ago: when he and his wife go to the Rose Bowl Flea Market, they tend buy buy huge, impractical things.
At the end of the segment, announced that we were looking for a chaperone, who could steer Gordon and his family to sound deals, and away from the flim-flammery (rusty penguin ice buckets) their magpie hearts are attracted to.
From the many responses, Gordon picked Pam Johnson, who runs Belle Antiques in Westlake Village. It was a good match, as you can hear.
The group visited the flea market last weekend, and while Gordon and his family were tempted, they held back. In fact, it was Pam bought something she just had to have.
"The chaperone," as Gordon says, "needs a chaperone."
Nathan Pino plays classical music on the Venice Beach Boardwalk
Every day from 9 a.m. until sunset, Nathan Pino can be found at his piano playing classical pieces by Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, and Chopin on Venice Beach Boardwalk. Pino talked with Off Ramp’s Mukta Mohan about the bands performed with, why he plays on the boardwalk, and shares some of his own compositions.
Pino, the child of Italian immigrants, grew up in San Francisco and started playing piano at seven years old. “I was playing pipe organ in the church, and my mother wanted me to play the piano," he says. "Because she thought the organ was too funeral sounding."
Before playing on the boardwalk, Pino was a professional musician. He played keys for psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly on their Canadian tour, and was a session musician. However, that felt too much like a job for him. Pino says he prefers to have creative freedom. "I try to play things that are unusual. I don’t want to be a ballroom piano player, or somebody that’s just doing it for a job," he said.
When a teenage Pino saw Venice's boardwalk peformers, he vowed to come back if he ever fell into financial straits. Now you'll find him playing his wooden piano in front of The Sidewalk Café every day with a cat named Baby Girl at his side.
Things have change since he first arrived. He says the environment has become oppressive and that he has received several tickets for playing the piano after dark. “It seems like they’re trying to save the financial situation of Los Angeles by giving all these tickets out in Venice.”
When asked about being successful, Pino replied with, “Success is an elusive thing. As far as financially, no I don’t think I’m successful. As far as being the pianist that I want to be, yeah, I’m always happy when I’m playing - as long as there’s fire in the furnace!”
Pino says as long as he’s happy, he'll continue to play on the boardwalk. “Some people come every year. They want me to know that they come just to hear me play. That’s very flattering, especially when they’re musicians themselves," said Pino. "As long as it remains that way, I’ll still do it.”
Van Dyke Parks on new album, 'Songs Cycled' and South Pasadena's 125th Anniversary
Van Dyke Parks is the lyricist behind the Beach Boys' Smile, the producer and arranger for Phil Ochs, Joanna Newsom and Rufus Wainwright and the creator of albums like Song Cycle and Discover America. For the first time in decades, Parks has a new album--12 tracks first released on 7" singles and are now in one CD, Songs Cycled, to be released this Spring.
But before that--on Wednesday, February 27--Van Dyke Parks will celebrate the city of South Pasadena's 125th anniversary with a performance at the city's library. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Parks about the performance, politics, and the new album.