Thousands of supposedly lowbrow Angelenos lined up for hours last weekend to get inside a new architectural marvel and an old icon: The Broad museum and Hollyhock House.
'Famous for being famous' icon Angelyne lets Off-Ramp hitch a ride in her pink Corvette
In 2000, when I arrived in Los Angeles from an obscure state in the Upper Midwest, people tried to explain Angelyne. "Who is she? What does she do? Why is she famous, again?" Then, after a while, you get it: She is Angelyne, and Angelyne simply is.
In an article about her new 2015 pink Corvette, Los Angeles magazine described her thus: "The enigmatic billboard legend Angelyne is famous for being famous — the original Kim Kardashian (without the sex tape) — and though her pictures have appeared above city streets for the last three decades, only her closest confidants know her original identity."
(1997 photo of an Angelyne billboard. Anthony Friedkin/LAPL/L.A. Neighborhoods Collection)
A friend in his 30s remembered in a tweet:
Such an icon. I remember her billboard was the highlight of the school bus ride for many pre-teen boys.
— Jordan Davis (@jordancdavis)
@KPCCofframp Such an icon. I remember her billboard was the highlight of the school bus ride for many pre-teen boys. #losangelesmemories
— Jordan Davis (@jordancdavis) February 8, 2015
I'd glimpsed her signature pink Corvette a few times, but until I went to an art opening at Meltdown Comics a few weekends ago, I had never seen Angelyne in the flesh. But there she was, promoting one of her acrylics — a self-portrait of her, nude but Barbie-neutered, astride a skeleton.
We can't really show the picture, but she's an artist, a singer:
Angelyne singing "My List" in a music video from the early 1980s
... and an actor:
Angelyne in "Earth Girls Are Easy" (1988)
She's also, as I was to learn, beloved by many — including a fish named Lightning at the French Market — and a very good parallel parker. I know because, after 15 years in L.A., I not only got to meet Angelyne, but ride with her in the famous car. I knew Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson would appreciate it:
I already was. (And, by the way, if Huell and Angelyne would have met, there would have been a cosmic singularity that would have destroyed the world.)
During our half-hour drive, I learned:
- Why she charges for fan photos and shields her face behind the Japanese fan: she doesn't want to "blow her wad" by giving everything away for cheap
- That she puts proceeds from her sales into a purse shaped like a chicken
- That she's happy, "because I make people happy." Although she is "questing for a pink, pain-free existence, and I'm going to find it, gods and faeries."
In all, I have to say Angelyne seems old-fashioned nowadays. Almost demure. She's sexy and sex-positive, sure. But while she shakes her silhouetted boobs in that music video, there's no sex tape of her. She's much more a Mae West than a Kim Kardashian. In an age when many famous people share everything about themselves, we still know almost nothing of Angelyne but what she wants us to know.
That moment when you realize Angelyne is in front of you at
. Too good not to share with
— Lana Rushing (@lanarushing)
That moment when you realize Angelyne is in front of you at @TheCoffeeBean. Too good not to share with #mydayinla! pic.twitter.com/cV5xuZIS6p
— Lana Rushing (@lanarushing) February 11, 2015
(Photo of Cassie reacting to Angelyne reposted courtesy Erica Fields)
And still, people get a kick out of seeing her (there were many honks as we drove around) and meeting her, and nobody balked at paying for a photo. They seem to admire her for continuing to do her own thing. "God bless America," said local historian Chris Nichols, talking that night about Angelyne.
Or as Peggy McKay, star of "Days of Our Lives," put it in the French Market parking lot as Angelyne sold T-shirts to fans, "I can't explain [Angelyne's allure], but I recognize it. I think it's an amazing legend that she has created. And I congratulate her on being Angelyne."
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.
Sketch artist Mike Sheehan discovers a magical place in the San Bernardino mountains
Sometimes when I'm in an unfamiliar area I type random words into my phone's GPS. Like "historical buildings" or "fountain pens." Don't laugh, I found the worlds greatest fountain pen store that way.
I think this is driven by childhood dreams I used to have of finding magical places in my neighborhood. Sometimes I get lucky and find a cool place to paint or sketch. A few years ago I did this in an unfamiliar area in the San Bernardino mountains. Driving around looking across the treetops, I saw what looked like a gold dome — like a glimpse of the Taj Mahal. It was tantalizing but I couldn't find access. When I got home, I looked it up.
Usually this stuff turns out to be a themed coffee shop or some other unremarkable mirage. But being in a forest this far off the the beaten path, it seemed really strange. It turned out it was the real thing, built by a Yogi from India in the twenties and thirties. In fact it was an entire camp, Camp Mozumdar, named for A.K. Mozumdar, with an amphitheater called the Pillars of God.
Everything I read about it made it sound like it was a heavily guarded, stay-away kind of place. I left it at that until a few days ago when I did some more research. This time, I found that the Universal Peace Federation, formerly known as the Unification Church (Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity) or, derogatively, the "Moonies," were reviving the property. Turns out the church has owned the property since the 1970s and were now reaching out to the local community. I called the director and pastor of the camp, Juan Morales, and asked if I could come by, and he immediately said yes.
I parked at the front gate off Mozumdar Drive and was greeted by barking dogs. Then Scott O'Brien, a member of the church, came up and we all walked down to the cabin where Juan lives. We sat down and talked for two hours or so.
Juan told me his journey to Camp Mozumdar, his trips to Israel — including one where he met Yasser Arafat, who he said cried when he heard Reverend Moon's teachings. He also pointed out the bedroom Reverend Moon stayed in when he was at the camp. Juan came to Camp Mozumdar from New York where he had a ministry.
After our talk, Scott and another Church member, Marvin, took me on a tour of the property. First we hit what they call "Holy Ground," a picturesque overlook with split log benches. It overlooks Silverwood Lake and beyond to Death Valley. We moved on to the Pillars of God, an amphitheater with twelve granite pillars representing Jesus' disciples circling out from a cross in the center.
Then we headed to the object of my desire, the "Temple of Christ." The Temple reveals itself in pretty spectacular fashion, and it looked bigger and in better shape than I'd imagined. It's really surreal in this setting. I love that what Mozumdar dreamed and built almost a hundred years ago is still here and imagined Mozumdar giving his talks in the temple all those years ago.
This was definitely satisfying my childhood "magical place" fantasy. It doesn't get much better than stumbling onto a mini golden domed Taj Mahal in the Southern California mountains.
We went back to the cabin and Juan had whipped up some pork mole and rice. We said a little prayer and ate. I went back for seconds.
I asked if I could hang out and they said sure, as long as I wanted. Scott and I went down to the Temple and I decided to do an oil sketch, a luxury since I don't usually have a stationary subject. Scott hung out and talked. He told me how he met members of the Church in Berkeley in the seventies, about a chance encounter with Bob Dylan and meeting the Reverend Moon himself.
I came back the next day and sketched the amphitheater and the Holy Ground. I was also enjoying the conversations with Scott.
The man who built all this, Akhoy Kumar Mozumdar, was born in India to a high caste family. Later in his life, his spiritual quest led him to a teacher that told him he was destined for teaching in America. He arrived in Seattle, Washington via tramp steamer in 1903. He began lecturing about what he called "Universal Truth," established his ministry in Spokane, wrote books and his message spread.
He's considered a part of the "New Thought Movement," a spiritual movement based on the teaching of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby that started in the 19th century. In 1919, he made his way to Los Angeles. From there, he bounced around the country teaching and healing. At one of these lectures someone mistakenly introduced him as "Prince Mozumdar," and it became a nickname that stuck the rest of his life.
Somewhere around this time, he purchased ten acres of land at what is now Camp Mozumdar. It eventually expanded to the over 100 acres it is today. He wanted a place where people of all faiths could come and worship. He lectured at the Pillars of God on Sunday afternoons in the summer. People came and camped and he never charged them.
As he got older people commented on how he didn't age, that he'd found his own "fountain of youth." But in 1953 time caught up with him like it does all of us. His camp was sold to the YMCA then to the Universal Peace Federation in 1977.
I found a lot of this info on a site run by David E. Howard. I contacted him about the current level of interest in Mozumdar's teachings, and he wrote back, "I wish I could tell you that interest in AKM's teachings was white hot and growing but from my perspective that's not the case. I've never followed statistics about activity on our website but I can report that occasionally a reader will write an email of appreciation or make a donation or share an experience from long ago at Camp Mozumdar.
I hope they get Mozumdar's dream back to its full glory. That it's still sitting there more than 80 years on, surviving fires or demolition by shortsighted people, is a miracle in itself. I wish I could thank him for the magical little adventure it brought me.
Night owls wait hours for peek at Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House
"Built between 1919 and 1921, it represents his earliest efforts to develop a regionally appropriate style of architecture for Southern California. Wright himself referred to it as California Romanza, using a musical term meaning 'freedom to make one’s own form.'"
— Barnsdall Art Park website
For 24 hours from Friday the 13th into Valentine's Day, thousands of lucky people toured the architectural icon they love, Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House.
The home, built almost 100 years ago, had been closed for years for a restoration, and as Off-Ramp contributor and night owl Elina Shatkin discovered, pent-up demand continued all through the night.
(Elina Shatkin's Instagram feed)
One woman put her love for the 20th century architecturally iconic place in distinctly 21st century terms: "I wouldn't wait in line for an iPhone all night, but I would wait in line to see something as special as the Hollyhock House."
One acknowledged a Wright "geek" convinced his girlfriend to get out of bed to come see it. She was all warm and in her jammies, she said.
So, how much convincing did it take? He had to promise a nice Valentine's Day. (Off-Ramp does not know if he came through.)
Another woman thought coming late was the key to avoiding a line, "but it's still a three-hour wait right now."
Was it worth the wait? One attendee remembered a tour years ago when the place looked run down and smelled musty. She raved about the restoration.
Hollyhock House is now open Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. — as opposed to the one-time only nighttime tour.
Professional sneaker cleaner sets up shop in Little Tokyo
Little Tokyo recently became home to the first brick-and-mortar location of Jason Markk, a company that specializes in cleaning products for sneakers. Now, the store is taking the concept one step further: on-site sneaker cleaning.
The store’s "sneaker care technicians" scrub, polish and deodorize for anywhere from $15 to $32 per pair.
Jason Mark Angsuvarn, the company’s founder and near namesake, says the business combines two of his obsessions: sneakers and cleanliness.
“I do remember my first pair of sneakers. They were a pair of black Flight 89’s and I loved them. I wore them everywhere," says Jason. "And I've always been a clean freak."
Even as a teen, Jason says he got frustrated with the generic shoe cleaning products you find at a mall or drugstore. He found them often too abrasive and potentially damaging to shoes.
So, he started creating cleaning mixtures and methods of his own.
“I’d use a mixture of household items. My thing was OxiClean, a little bit of dishwashing soap and that was it. If I had white laces, I’d use laundry detergent and a little bit of bleach,” says Jason. “That’s how the idea came about. I was just cleaning my shoes one night and I was thinking, ‘Man, there’s got to be something better.’”
Jason started asking around about how other people cleaned their sneakers, at shoe stores and in online forums. He said it was like asking people about their favorite hangover cure — everybody had their own home remedy.
Jason decided to create a cleaning product designed specifically for sneakers and the people who love them. After going through a handful of chemists and exhaustive testing, he was ready to start selling his cleaning kits online.
Sneaker connoisseurs took to it immediately, and seven years later, Jason’s company was doing so well that he opened up a flagship store location.
(Inside Jason Markk's flagship store in Little Tokyo. Photo courtesy of Jason Markk.)
Jason added the drop-off sneaker cleaning service to his plans for the store at the last minute, and to his surprise, it’s turned out to be the main attraction.
“We get everyone from, like, your super hardcore collector, to the soccer mom. In the location we’re in in Little Tokyo, there’s so much foot traffic,” says Jason.
Jason’s not kidding about his diverse clientele. Two on-duty cops came in to drop off sneakers while I was there.
“There are so many return customers now, it’s like an errand now. It’s not a special thing. It’s just like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go to the groceries. I gotta go to the dry cleaners. I gotta go to Jason Markk,’” says Jason.
One Yelper begins their five-star review of Jason Markk like this: “If you laughed, appreciated and/or understood that scene in Do The Right Thing when Larry Bird runs over the ‘the brand new white Air Jordans’ then you need to bring your kicks here.”
(A before and after shot from Jason Markk's drop-off sneaker cleaning service. Photo courtesy of Jason Markk.)
Of course, as their customer base grows, the weird stories get weirder:
“This is kind of gory, but we had this pair of Bapes come in and they were just covered in blood,” says Jason. “The guy had almost blown his hand off during Fourth of July. It was really nasty. My guys are fearless. They just threw the gloves on and went at it. And they did a great job. They looked brand new.”
The hand healed fine, too.
Jason Markk's flagship sneaker cleaning store is located at 329 E. 2nd Street in Little Tokyo.
Barefoot in Libya: Photographer Lynsey Addario recalls kidnapping
Photojournalist Lynsey Addario's new memoir, "It's What I Do," details her experiences as a veteran war photographer covering violence in Afghanistan and Libya.
On March 16, 2011, the early days of the uprising in Libya, Addario and three other journalists were taken hostage in Libya. They spent six days in captivity.
She said the rebels she photographed were clearly outgunned. "We were with fighters who were not trained fighters; they were doctors, engineers, teachers. People who were literally learning how to use weapons."
Before she was captured, Addario gave her fellow war photographer Brian Denton a hard drive with all of her photos of Libya in case she was kidnapped or killed. Two weeks after Addario's release, Denton returned to the scene of her capture to search for the body of Addario's driver. The body was never found, but Denton did find her shoe. Addario talked about seeing the photo for the first time:
"I know what I went through, but there's no evidence of what I went through because a lot of what we experienced was psychological trauma. Yes, we were beaten up. I was punched in the face. We were tied up. I was groped. All of those things...but sometimes I think maybe I was imagining things, or maybe it was worse than it was, or maybe it was better than it was. So when I received that picture of my little shoe with the shoe laces that had been pulled out to tie me up, it was almost like evidence."
To corroborate her kidnapping experiences, Addario had to dig deep: she cross-referenced her journals from Libya with her colleagues and even hired a fact checker to interview her.
The Broad Museum's sneak peek brings in 3,500
Sunday, Angelenos lined up by the thousands to get inside an empty art museum.
The Broad museum in downtown L.A. doesn’t open for seven months, but when it announced it would let people get a sneak peek, the $10 tickets sold out immediately. The Broad said by the end of the day 3,547 people had toured the building ... an art museum that, for the time being, is void of art.
What they saw — and what seemingly 99 percent of them photographed on their cameras and phones — was a huge empty room. That's not quite accurate. It was filled with light, sound and people: 35,000 square feet without columns, suffused with warm sunlight filtering through the building’s web-like concrete exoskeleton, bathing Angelenos delighted to be let in on the secret — that is: what's that cool building look like inside?
Having the public appreciate the design of a building without any walls or art to get in the way is every architect’s dream. But remember that the Broad stands next to Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall. That prospect, says architect Liz Diller, was a nightmare. "That’s the first thing we thought," Diller said. "'Oh, s—, how can we possibly talk to that building, being next to that building?' It is one of the great buildings in the world. And so we decided we weren’t even going to try to compete. It had to work on its own merit."
(Rabe interviewing Eli Broad at The Broad as former LA Mayor Richard Riordan looks on. Credit: Dinner Party Download's Rico Gagliano)
The Broad is named for billionaire Eli Broad, who has also been deeply involved at the Museum of Contemporary Art across the street. The art in the Broad will come from his massive collection of contemporary art. At the sneak peak, where he greeted anyone who wanted to say hello, Broad said, "We’ve got art of the last 40 years, essentially, but if you combine our collection with that of our neighbor MOCA, no one in the world has a better collection of art since 1945."
Most cultural institutions have two big problems: getting the general public interested and bringing in younger audiences. Sunday’s event seemed to address both issues. Or as Edythe Broad, Eli’s wife and the museum’s co-founder, noted, "Not only do I love seeing the people, I love seeing that they brought their children. That’s the future art audience."
The Broad opens for real September 20.
Oscars 2015: 3 Best Foreign Film nominees tell fables of the New Cold War
Moviemaking is often at its best when practiced in the context of social catastrophe. To me, the two greatest and most daring periods of American sound cinema were the 1930s and 1960s — the first prefaced by the Great Depression and the second by the Civil Rights era and Vietnam. In post-World War II Italy and Japan, filmmakers made masterpieces that completely re-imagined the nature, purpose and even the basic grammar of filmmaking.
Putin's Russia is an ideological midget compared to what the Soviets imposed on half of Europe for more than four decades. Perhaps the filmmakers of the old Eastern Bloc are still probing for meanings in the debris of a system that was supposed to mark the end of history, and perhaps that's what makes so many of their films so stirring.
The Oscars have certainly taken notice. In a superb field of Best Foreign Language Film nominees, three of five titles hail from countries in the former Soviet Union.
Ida
Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski's "Ida" has been mistakenly characterized as a Holocaust drama by some because it deals with the collective guilt of Occupied Poland for the wartime fate of Poland's Jews. Dense and difficult but also as simple as a fable, "Ida" is a road movie set in the Communist Poland of the early 1960s, in which a novice nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) leaves the convent on the eve of her vows after being told she was born a Jew. To reclaim her past, Ida visits with her only surviving relative — a boozy, prodigal party hack nicknamed "Red Wanda" (Agata Kulesza), a state prosecutor during Poland's post-war Stalinist purges.
Wanda's empty hedonism only thinly masks her despair. When Ida's acute resemblance to Wanda's dead sister reawakens Wanda to the brutal losses in their shared past, the two women embark on an odyssey that, to varying degrees, consumes them both.
Pawlikowski gave up a thriving career in Britain to return to Poland for "Ida," in part because he says he had grown suspicious of contemporary cinema's many "tricks." His achievement here is the way "Ida" so intricately balances the burdens history places on its characters against the burdens they make for themselves. Agata Kulesza's Wanda is easily the most tragic film character I encountered in the past year — a dead-eyed victim of Hitler who transforms herself into Stalin's enforcer. Wanda fascinates Ida the way a snake fascinates a wounded bird.
Leviathan
Like J.C. Chandor's terrific and inexplicably under-nominated "A Most Violent Year," "Leviathan" is a drama of municipal intrigue that plays like a mafia movie.
Director and co-writer Andrey Zvyaginstev claims his saga of eminent domain run amok was inspired by the Marvin Heemeyer "Killdozer" rampage, which took place in Granby, Colorado in 2004. But although Zvyaginstev's protagonist shares a profession with Heemeyer (both are low-rent auto repair entrepreneurs), "Leviathan" is clearly a very Russian parable about governmental corruption — and the tactics a crooked system uses to help the strong devour the weak.
"Leviathan" starts out as a sort of Russian "Erin Brockovich," with crusading attorney Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) helping his hotheaded old army buddy Kolya (Alexei Serebriakov) fight Vadim (Roman Madyanov), the bloated provincial mayor who tries to take possession of Kolya's riverside home and the valuable land it sits on.
Dmitri soon blunders his way into an affair with Kolya's restless wife Lilia (Elena Lyadova). When the corrupt local courts rule against Kolya, Dmitri attempts to fight fire with fire by blackmailing Vadim with a dossier chronicling years of murderous corruption. Dmitri has cornered the beast, and the beast must now strike back or perish.
It's remarkable that "Leviathan" was even created in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Like "A Most Violent Year," "Leviathan's" unusual public-sector setting adds a great deal of unpredictability and suspense; though the characters are clearly capable of violence, we are unsure how far they are willing to go in their attacks on each other, since they technically operate in broad daylight rather than in some shaded underworld. And like the gangster films it resembles without imitating, "Leviathan" is a broad allegory on human greed and frailty, one that renders justice as a capricious and situational ethic, if it exits at all.
Tangerines
Based on the critics' groups and the Golden Globes, either "Ida" or "Leviathan" ought to be the Oscar winner in the foreign language category. I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect both films may be rejected in favor of the fine but somewhat schematic Estonian movie "Tangerines."
It's odd to call "Tangerines" Estonian, since it takes place in the Georgian Caucases during the civil war of the early 1990s, it was written and directed by Georgian filmmaker Zaza Urushadze and it was shot in Guria, Georgia. But the funding was through the Estonian company Allfilm, and if "Tangerines" wins an Oscar it will be the first "Estonian" production to do so. It also deals in part with an Estonian diaspora. Like the post-Soviet era itself, it all gets rather complicated.
No matter. "Tangerines" is a timely and nuanced pacifist drama that feels a bit like a play, albeit one punctuated by sudden bursts of military violence. Two Estonian citrus farmers come upon the aftermath of a skirmish between Niko (Mikheil Meskhi), a Georgian fighter, and Ahemed (Giorgi Nakhashidze), a Chechen mercenary fighting on the Abkhazian side. The two soldiers are mortally wounded, and the farmers nurse them back to health, despite each man's vow to slaughter the other as soon as strength returns. Meanwhile, the wider war inches closer with every sunrise, with unsurprisingly destructive results.
"Tangerines" is a meticulous work that achieves everything it sets out to do. It's also a bit obvious in its messaging, and at times seems to be working itself out with the predictability of a math equation. But "Tangerines" quivers with exactly the kind of unalloyed humanist sentimentality the Academy is often a sucker for (watch "Life is Beautiful" or "Cinema Paradiso" again if you want to see what I mean). That makes it a contender, even without the wind of the L.A. Critics or the Golden Globes at its back.
Off-Ramp contributor R.H. Greene will look at the last two nominees for Best Foreign Film Oscars, "Wild Tales" and "Timbuktu," in his next post.
Oscars 2015: Foreign Film noms 'Wild Tales' and 'Timbuktu'
Read the first part of R.H. Greene's look at this year's foreign film nominees here.
Timbuktu
The bland horror of Abderrahmane Sissako's "Timbuktu" is a bit like watching a muscle atrophy. It’s a step-by-step dramatization of the real-life jihadist takeover of the Malian village of Timbuktu.
The film's Islamic fundamentalists are not of the genocidal ISIS or Boko Haram variety, but these jihadists do share ISIS’s respect for the power of the video camera and a strong belief in Sharia-fueled torture and execution. But the religious invasion of this easygoing African town has a solemn, ascetic and almost civil service quality that is stealthier than ISIS, but no less inhumane.
The film begins with a gazelle, racing away from a jeep filled with turbaned men and guns. "We must tire it out first," the men say to each other, in a metaphor for the war of moral attrition they will wage on the city they're about to take over. Totemic, bare-breasted wooden statues — emblematic of the culture the jihadists will displace — are blown to pieces by machine guns. It's the only image in the entire film of anything that could be called "war."
When the action proper begins, the jihadists have already won on the battlefield, virtually without casualties. Sissako's purpose isn't to dramatize a civil conflict, but to show in an escalating arc how the jihadist's single-minded devotion to an uncompromising authoritarian idea slowly squeezes all joy, spontaneity and humanity from whatever it touches.
There is a special emphasis on fundamentalist Islam's well-documented misogyny and fear of the female body. Women are imprisoned for refusing to wear gloves, and whipped into unconsciousness for singing. They are kidnapped and then married off without parental consent. A young couple is buried to the neck and then stoned to death for committing adultery, but only the woman's arrest is shown.
There are Kafka-esque touches too, as when a perhaps overly romanticized nomadic herdsman is detained in connection with a murder that was arguably an act of self defense, and the focus is not on the crime but on the number of cows that must be provided to expunge guilt.
Strangely, it wasn’t the (rather discreet) violence that haunted me after watching this film. It was Sissako's surreal and almost farcical imagery of armed men on moonlit rooftops, stumbling around in the dark for the source of some raucous singing, as joyous melody ricochets around them, bashing like an alarm bell against Timbuktu's walled casbah. Much more so than headline-grabbing acts of brutality and suppression, this seems to me to be the essence of the modern jihadists: it is a war on culture and anything that can serve as a rival definition of human purpose.
Sissako seems unnerved by the thought that, for the many people befuddled by the grey uncertainties of self-determined freedom, simplicity has a wide appeal.
Wild Tales
The rowdy Argentine black comedy "Wild Tales" might be the funniest movie of the year, as well as the most giddily cinematic. Reminiscent of late-period Bunuel in its ruthless, wry assessment that humanity is driven solely by anger, greed and lust, this is a Looney Tunes cartoon re-imagined as anthology film.
Written and directed by Damian Szifron, "Wild Tales" was produced by Pedro Almodovar with his brother Augustin. While the debt Szifron owes to Pedro Almodovar is transparent in his skill at farce and camera movement, the comedy of "Wild Tales" is darker and more unsparing than anything Almodovar has served up in recent times.
Segment One is "Pasternak," a tour-de-force of comic unease that could have run on the old "Twilight Zone" TV series. Across an airplane aisle, a model and a music critic flirt to pass time. It turns out they're connected via Pasternak, her ex-boyfriend, whose mediocre symphony the critic destroyed while judging student compositions.
One by one, everyone on the plane chimes in. "Pasternak? But I was his therapist" "I was his teacher!" "His co-worker!" Their testimonials sketch in the story of a perennial loser, who has been stepped on or betrayed by everyone on board. Then the plane begins to shudder and a stewardess screams that Pasternak has drugged the pilots and locked himself in the cockpit. The horrifically funny final shot has the compact clarity of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati.
Suspense also figures into Segment Two: "The Rats," a Hitchcockian comedy about a waitress who recognizes a customer as the petty Mafioso who drove her father to suicide and her mother to madness. Shaken, the waitress grows enraged when the mobster reveals he's running for mayor of her old hometown. Meanwhile, a maniacal cook in the kitchen is so moved by the waitress' suffering that she remembers there's some rat poison in the cupboard.
"Road to Hell" (Segment Three) is an apocalyptic two-character farce about the road rage between a smug businessman and the rural redneck he flips off for driving too slowly. Its rising line of action is worthy of the Laurel and Hardy pie-fight epic "Battle of the Century." Szifron's mastery of cinematic grammar, particularly camera placement and editorial rhythm, delivers the punch lines graphically, allowing his actors to play it deadpan, and making his outrageous figures of misrule into people recognizably like ourselves.
Probably the weakest and most predictable segment of "Wild Tales" is Segment Four: "Bombita," about an easily angered demolitions expert who gets a parking ticket. And yes, you did just guess the ending.
One of the interesting things about an anthology film by a single director is the way it can change tones while retaining a unified voice. "The Bill" (Segment Five) is about a rich family trying to bribe its groundskeeper into taking the fall for their son, who has just killed a pregnant woman in a car accident. More serious in tone, "The Bill" fully embraces the nihilism percolating beneath the rest of "Wild Tales." Corruption becomes the unifying principle of all human actions. Tempt anyone with a reward for vile behavior and their response will be to haggle over price.
Szifron brings it all home with "'Til Death Do Us Part," a pinnacle of cinematic farce about a bride who uncovers her groom's infidelity in the midst of their joyous wedding party, and then transforms the "happiest day of her life" into a savage epic of vengeance and despair. Anchored by a simultaneously vicious and sympathetic performance from Erica Rivas as the woman wronged, "'Til Death" is a high comedy of ill manners, made all the funnier by the unleashing of Sziforn's comedic jackals in a rom-com's sanctum sanctorum of bridal bliss.
Will "Wild Tales" win an Oscar? Probably not, for the simple reason that Academy members may see its grim but side-splitting merriment as a strange bedfellow next to the supreme seriousness of every other Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee.
New Getty exhibit 'Zeitgeist' highlights anti-sensual German artists
A few years ago, on a wall along West Venice Boulevard, someone painted a simple inscription: “Kasper David Friedrich, 1774-1840.’’ Millions must have seen this great German romantic painter’s name as they drove to work. I never knew who painted the name, but whoever you are, the Getty has a new exhibition just for you. It's “Zeitgeist: Art in the Germanic World 1800–1900,” at the Getty Center through May 17.
("A Walk at Dusk," about 1830–35, Caspar David Friedrich, oil on canvas. Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum)
To appreciate the Getty’s new show, it helps to recall just how far behind the rest of Europe Germany had fallen by 1800. A bundle of separate countries, it had no national art school. Its single greatest artist, Kasper Friedrich, was just beginning his creation of dark moody tableaux showing nature vanquishing all else.
But there was no German painting that corresponded to the music of Haydn or Beethoven, the literature of Goethe and Schiller, the poetry of Heine — products of that great romantic age.
Then suddenly, there emerged German painters who became famous and influential even in France and England. One major sect of such artists featured at the Getty called themselves Nazarenes — and seemed determined, like the Pre-Raphaelites in Britain, to distance themselves from all art since the Renaissance.
(1835 portrait of Peter Cornelius. Credit: Public domain/Wikipedia Commons)
Painters like Peter Cornelius, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Johann Friedrich Overbeck saw themselves as a chaste creative elite, resistant to sensuality and feeling. Important French critics called them “pure artists,” but young composer Felix Mendelssohn was less impressed.
“They sit around on benches with their wide-brimmed hats on their heads and huge mastiffs beside them; their throats and cheeks and their entire faces sprout hair, and they puff fearful clouds of smoke and hurl abuse at one another.” — Mendelssohn on the Nazarenes
Most of the work in the Getty’s new exhibit are drawings loaned by a philanthropist couple — therapist Fiona Chalom and plastic surgeon Joel Aronowitz. Their drawings are rare works and their like is seldom seen in America — to modern eyes, they’re sometimes fascinating, sometimes banal.
(Head of a Man; Friedrich Overbeck; Germany; about 1820 - 1825; Graphite on brownish paper. J. Paul Getty Museum )
But it isn’t fair to judge an entire body of work based just on these drawings — particularly Overbeck’s, who is best known for his amazing murals. There is originality in the landscapes, but much of Schnorr and Runge’s other work seems overdecorative; brilliant illustration rather than art. What was to these artists an avoidance of the Renaissance and modern traditions now makes their works seem to be of no period whatsoever.
And yet, of course, they are of the period when artists tried to refute their own era, only to be tsunamied by far more vital movements like impressionism. In the history of art, they are 19th century painting's Neanderthals, a culture that disappeared as the modern leapt forth.
(View of the Residence of Archduke Johann in Gastein Hot Springs, about 1829–32, Thomas Ender, watercolor over graphite. Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum)
Apart from Caspar David Friedrich, who understood that "A painter should paint not only what he sees in front of him, but what he sees within,” the only artists in this show who brim over with excitement stand apart from the Nazarenes. They are Gustav Klimt and Alphonse Mucha, not Germans at all but Austro-Hungarian geniuses who poured into their art all the sensuality and feeling that these Germans scrupulously avoided.
Remembering Gary Owens, the voice
In 2008, I met one of my heroes, Gary Owens, at Jerry's Diner in Encino.
It was a long interview and covered his life and career, and the power of the announcer.
After it aired, I'd call on Gary for a favor now and then, and he always called back, and whether he was leaving a message or speaking to me in person, he'd always say, "Hi, John. It's Gary Owens."
Yes, Gary, I knew it was you. How could that remarkable voice be anybody else?
I'm terribly sad that phone call will never come again. Gary died Thursday; he was 80.
Here's the whole interview, from the Off-Ramp archive.
Tourists: This is not the Harrison Ford star you're looking for
At Musso & Frank, the oldest restaurant in Hollywood. you'll find a star for an actor named Harrison Ford. The story goes that when Harrison Ford, star of "Indiana Jones" and "Star Wars" learned he was going to get a star on the Walk of Fame, he was surprised because he thought he already had one: the one in front of Musso's.
But in fact, the star out front is for Harrison Ford the silent star, who was born in 1884 and died in 1957.
Ford started making films in 1915 and was leading man opposite Norma Talmadge, Marion Davies, Clara Bow and others. He only made one talkie, Love in High Gear, in 1932. He was hit by a car in 1951 and never fully recovered.