The case for keeping the Figueroa Bridge; the Obscura Society; Queena Victoria's selfies; George Pal's Puppetoons in glorious Blu-ray.
Meet East LA's El Haru Kuroi
Grammy winner La Santa Cecilia is not the only socially conscious, female-fronted, Latino band out of East L.A. El Haru Kuroi is fronted by Mexican-American Eddika Organista, with bassist Michael Ibarra and drummer/percussionist Dominique "Chief" Rodriguez. Their sound is a mix of Mexican, Brazilian and African, and they've built a strong following in L.A.
El Haru Kuroi has a gig Sunday night at The Continental Room in Fullerton, so I commandeered their rehearsal last night and turned it into an Off-Ramp interview, talking with Eddika and listening to a few of their songs.
Eddika's cross-cultural story is a familiar one in Southern California: her mother crossed the Mexican border when she was pregnant with Eddika and was deported when her daughter was about six. Eddika returned to the U.S. in elementary school and then during high school went back to Mexico with her father. Eddika says she got her musical start from her father, a conservatory-trained guitarist, and from her training at Pasadena City College under Professor Bobby Bradford.
Their sound? As one reviewer puts it:
The influence of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement weighs heavy on them, yet much like those artists involved in that movement, El Haru Kuroi adapted the music they grew up on and took the essence. The result is a haunting mixture of Bossa Nova and Boleros mixed with urgency of post-punk groups like Gang Of Four and Fugazi.
Just one question remains. That name. El Haru Kuroi. Eddika explained to Afroxander of Remezcla Musica:
I was on the bus. My dad had just returned from Japan and he gave me his English-Japanese dictionary. I wanted it not to be in Spanish or English or in Portuguese and I was looking for words that described us in a way. I looked up dark, black, and spring. I was born in the spring. I felt like our music could have beauty but it could [also] have a lot of darkness in it. We could be playing something really beautiful and sweet but the lyrics are really dark. And we added “El” because a friend of ours was like “you guys should do something in Spanish. Your stuff’s in Spanish.”
Video: El Haru Kuroi performing Sin Saber
Hammer Museum announces Made in LA 2014 artists
This week the Hammer Museum announced the 35 artists who will be in Made in LA for 2014. Reporter Jori Finkel joins us to talk about the goal of the biennial event and some of the artists and groups selected.
Here's the full list of artists: Juan Capistrán, Danielle Dean, Harry Dodge, Lecia Dole-Recio, Kim Fisher, Judy Fiskin, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess & Michael Frimkess, Mariah Garnett, Gerard & Kelly, Tony Greene, Samara Golden, Piero Golia, Marcia Hafif, Channing Hansen, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, James Kidd Studio, Barry Johnston, Kchung, Devin Kenny, Gabriel Kuri, Caitlin Lonegan, Los Angeles Museum of Art, Tala Madani, Max Maslansky, Emily Mast, Jennifer Moon, Brian O’Connell, Harsh Patel, Marina Pinsky, Public Fiction, Sarah Rara, A.L. Steiner, Ricky Swallow, Clarissa Tossin, Wu Tsang.
Reviews of the first Made in LA were generally positive. But Finkel points this this one, from Artforum, by Michael Ned Holte, who, interestingly, helped curate the current Made In LA.
"...Overall, one was left wondering what, exactly, made this exhibition “LA” beyond the mailing addresses of its artists. Would the stamp of the region be so readily visible on these works if they were shown elsewhere? ... The first edition of Made in L.A. left open the question of whether the city really needs such a determinedly local biennial. But either way, the exhibition may be considered prime evidence for the Hammer’s increasing importance at a notoriously tumultuous moment for this city’s institutions. It has already begun scripting a sequel. -- Michael Ned Holte in Artforum, 2012.
Full disclosure: the Mohn family, which helped build KPCC's Mohn Broadcast Center, is again giving a $100,000 prize for best artist at the biennial.
UPDATE: Mayor Garcetti won't back Figueroa Landbridge
UPDATE 3/14/14: In an editorial meeting with KPCC this week, Mayor Eric Garcetti said he likes the idea of the land bridge -- "I hate bringing down a bridge. It's a cool idea." -- but there isn't enough density in that neighborhood to make the land bridge project worthwhile. Listen to the audio at left for details.
After Mariano Rivera and any random snowplow driver, the High Line might be the most popular thing in New York City. It's the former elevated rail line that was turned into a park.
(The High Line in Manhattan. Image: Beyond My Ken/Wikipedia Commons)
And New York's High Line has a lot of fans here in LA, many of whom say the same thing could be done with the bridge that connects Figueroa Street with Riverside Drive, at the Confluence of the Arroyo Seco and the LA River.
"It's actually Monument 908," says Tomas O'Grady, who runs EnrichLA, part of the multi-group coalition calling for the old bridge to be repurposed. The coalition includes architect Kevin Mulcahy, Los Angeles Walks, and several neighborhood councils.
"The piece that's over the river is the last remaining steel truss bridge in the city of Los Angeles," O'Grady says, "So, we actually think it's worth saving. There's no reason to take out the old one because the new one is being built just north of the old one."
Here's a diagram from EnrichLA that shows what's being called The Landbridge:
The curving white bridge at the center of the image is the new Figueroa Bridge, currently under construction. The green bridge to the left of it is the old bridge, turned into a foot and bicycle bridge and park.
The LA Bureau of Engineering's Deborah Weintraub told the LA Times it's "very late" to change course, and that it could cost up to $5m over budget, not including the redesign. She told the paper, "We admire the passion of these preservationists. They've put their heart and soul into this campaign, but we're past the point of no return on this project." All in all, Weintraub told KPCC, the city's total investment could be $15m to $25m. "Anything's possible with money," she says, but so far policy hasn't been changed and the funding source hasn't been identified.
To counter the claim that it's too late, O'Grady points to the fact that the old bridge is still standing, is still being used, and he counters that activists like him have been lobbying the city for months but have been rebuffed. He also says he believes the redesign could be paid for out of savings realized by not demolishing the old bridge in April, as scheduled.
(The Figueroa Street Bridge in 1937. No Home Depot, no 5 Freeway, almost no cars!Image: LAPL/Herald-Examiner Collection.)
The new bridge, Weintraub explained to KPCC, is no slouch. There were many meetings with stakeholders in the nearby community, she says, and besides the lanes for cars, "it has very decent pedestrian and bicycle amenities," including a 12-foot wide bike lane, an 8-foot wide pedestrian sidewalk, and three big "Belvedere" bump-outs "to give views up and down the river."
For much more, listen to our Off-Ramp interviews with O'Grady and Weintraub.
Review: Celebrate George Pal and his Puppetoons with new DVD set
Off-Ramp and Filmweek animation expert Charles Solomon reviews "The Puppetoon Movie," by Arnold Leibovit, now available on Blu-ray.
Before Wallace and Gromit, or Jack Skellington, or Gumby, there was George Pal and his Puppetoons.
Today, most people only know George Pal as a reference in the opening song in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show:"
But when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride
I’m going to give you some terrible thrills,
Like a science fiction double feature.
But in America, where animation invariably meant drawn animation, Pal was a maverick, making the 1940s' only stop-motion cartoon series. "The Puppetoon Movie," by Arnie Leibovit and now out on BluRay, is a warmly nostalgic look at Pal and his three-dimensional creations.
Born in Hungary, Pal worked in Berlin, then Holland. His early films caught the attention of Hollywood — including Walt Disney — and Pal came to the U.S. just ahead of the Nazi invasion. It was an event he depicted in his Oscar-nominated short "Tulips Shall Grow," in which the Screwball Army, a stand-in for the Nazis, is defeated and tulips blossom once again in the free land.
An early George Pal film for Philips in 1938
With their dowel fingers, snub noses and painted eyes, Pal’s wooden puppets suggest folk art sculptures. Instead of manipulating the figures like as most stop-motion animators, Pal sculpted a series of puppets in slightly different positions. He’d place one on a miniature set, photograph it, and then switch that puppet out for the next one. This system created stylized movements that match the ingenious charm of the figures.
During his long career, Pal was nominated for seven Oscars, and in 1943 received a special Academy Award. Many of Pal’s films retain the appeal: "Tubby the Tuba" tells the story of about a little horn who wants to be heard; "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins" was one of the first adaptations of a Dr. Seuss story.
But not all Pal’s creations have aged gracefully. His most popular character was Jasper, a stereotypical African-American boy who was lured into mischief by a wily Scarecrow. When civil rights groups complained, Pal made "John Henry and the Inky-Poo," a re-telling of the legend of the steel-driving man, with an African-American cast.
Ebony magazine said, "Miracle of miracles, it is that rarest of Hollywood products that has no Negro stereotypes, but rather treats the Negro with dignity, imagination, poetry and love."
Pal abandoned shorts in the late 40’s, and used his stop motion expertise to create special effects in his popular science fiction and fantasy films: "War of the Worlds," "The Time Machine," "When Worlds Collide," "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm," and "Tom Thumb."
The new two-disc Blu-Ray set offers interviews with friends and coworkers like Ray Bradbury, Gene Roddenberry, Ray Harryhausen, and Roy Disney. But the real fun is the large selection of Puppetoons shorts, including the rarely seen "Jasper and the Beanstalk" — with a Lena Horne-esque singing harp — and "Date with Duke," with rare footage of Duke Ellington playing his “Perfume Suite” for a group of animated scent bottles.
If you’re a fan of "The Wrong Trousers," "The Nightmare Before Christmas," "Corpse Bride," or "Paranorman," watch "The Puppetoon Movie" to meet the ancestors of your favorite characters, and re-discover the legacy of George Pal.
Obscura Society brings you face to face with Los Angeles' weird history
Atlas Obscura is a travel website for stuff that you won't see in Lonely Planet: offbeat museums, haunted houses and morbid bits of history. You can find where Paris' Guillotines were stationed, or tour the now-infamous abandoned Nazi bunkers at Murphy Ranch.
Atlas Obscura can also take you there: the Obscura Society guides Angelenos all over Los Angeles and beyond: visiting the Templo Santa Muerte on Melrose, or hanging out with a falconer. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson went with the Society's Matt Blitz to a bucolic park near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that's home to the Devil's Gate.
The Devil's Gate is a flood gate carved into a giant rock formation on the border of Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge. Originally, the rock had an ominous look to it that has since given way to erosion and construction—you can still see what looks like a horn towards the top.
The Gate was also a stomping ground for Jack Parsons, one of the founding members of JPL. Parsons helped design some of the very first rockets and paved the way for America's space program. He also had an intense fascination with the Occult.
Parsons would visit the Devil's Gate, usually in the company of L. Ron Hubbard — the writer would go on later to found the Church of Scientology. Hubbard and Parsons were business partners and friends. "They would perform ceremonious, religious rituals in the gate," said the Obscura Society's Matt Blitz. "Such as believing they could conceive an Anti-Christ."
Blitz said he and the Obscura Society found about this through biographies of Parsons and letters shared between the two men.
"They would put a blanket down—some sort of ceremonial blanket. And Hubbard would ask Jack Parsons to masturbate onto the blanket," said Blitz. "They thought that would be used by the Goddess of Babylon and then in nine months, some Virgin Mary type woman would conceive the Anti-Christ."
Though the story is unsettling, the setting is beautiful. And its story combines a narrative many Angelenos already know about (Pasadena's involvement in space travel, Scientology's roots) with a darker, more ephemeral tale that shows how histories can intersect—a trademark of Atlas Obscura and the Obscura Society.
Correction: in the audio segment, producer Kevin Ferguson refers to Aleister Crowley as the founder of the Church of Satan, which is incorrect. Mr. Crowley was not a Satanist, but an occultist.
Queen Victoria's private family photos on display in new Getty exhibit
A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography is on display at the Getty Center through June 8, 2014.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert sat before the camera for many photographers. The royal portrait was realized in different mediums ranging from daguerreotype to calotype to albumen silver print, but they all had one thing in common: the photographs were private and not for public distribution. In these intimate views of Victoria as loving wife and caring mother, her vitality and youthful appearance is in contrast to the later, imperial portraits. -- From "A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography," at the Getty Center
We have our iPhones. Queen Victoria never learned to use a camera, but she had every important photographer in the realm on-call. The result in both cases was the same: a whole lot of pictures. Now we can see Victoria’s family album in an intriguing new show at the Getty Center.
It’s hard now to imagine just how startling photography was when it was introduced in 1839. For 17,000 years, creating an image of something had required a human artist. Now, light and the object (or landscape, or person) could passively create a picture more accurate than the world’s greatest artist could paint.
Spectators marveled at the precise likenesses of their loved ones. Photos became a key part of western civilization’s personal connection: To say back then that you had someone’s tintype on your mantelpiece meant that this someone had won your heart.
The only tintype on Queen Victoria’s mantel was that of her beloved consort, Prince Albert, father of her nine children. Pictures of her and her Beloved center the Getty Center’s worthwhile “Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography” show.
(Portrait of Queen Victoria Holding Portrait of Prince Albert, negative July 1854; print 1889, Bryan Edward Duppa and Gustav William Henry Mullins, carbon print. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013)
She’d been fascinated early by the new invention, and had Albert’s first picture taken about 1842. Then the floodgates opened. By the time she died in 1901, she had collected 20,000 photographs, many of her husband, herself, and her nine children, resembling, in their group portraits, a small, well-behaved crowd waiting for a bus.
The Victorian Royals became the most photographed rulers of the 19th Century. Their pictures show a surprising and pleasing informality. Yet for more than a decade, the collection was kept in the family; a private matter. Finally, the Royals realized that broadcasting portraits of the Queen and her family was a perfect means of humanizing and promoting a monarchy that was rapidly becoming irrelevant in the Age of Steam and Electricity.
Photography also kept the queen informed about her global empire. The great new steamships, the mighty imperial exhibitions, the explorations of Africa and Asia, the dark, satanic mines and factories that produced the wealth, and the workers they oppressed -- all are on show here.
And so are some of the era’s ugliest manifestations. Mid-19th-century cameras were too slow to capture the action of battle, but could record the bleak aftermath: mutilated soldiers; devastated landscapes, and pure colonial genocide — as with a courtyard in India, thickly strewn with the bones of massacred rebels from the 1858 Indian uprising.
No, the pictures aren’t all pretty, but the Victoria show gives an age in full, with all the warts and wonderment.
(Roofline of Lacock Abbey, circa 1835-1839, 2008, Hiroshi Sugimoto, toned gelatin silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum, gift of the artist. © Hiroshi Sugimoto)
The Getty’s also displaying the work of modern Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, which frames past representations of reality with discrete modern techniques that make them seem even older.
Like museum dioramas of ancient landscapes, and, for that matter, a life-size picture of a formidable waxwork of Victoria herself that glowers like an ancient Chinese potentate. Sugimoto provides an eerie, resonating comment on the 19th century show his work accompanies.
New owners see light; Rufus the carrot-eating pacu to stay at former Bahooka
If you've been following the story of Rufus the pacu and the efforts to find him a new home, then you'll want to know about a major update Monday.
But first, to bring you up to speed ... Rufus is a 37-year old pacu, a relative of the piranha, except instead of eating people, he ate carrots in his tank at Bahooka, the tiki restaurant in Rosemead. He was the restaurant's mascot, a sentimental favorite.
When the restaurant closed last March, his fans were worried. Where would he go? Where could he go? It's not like you can just truck around a fish that old, who has never been out of his tank. But the new owners of Bahooka, who wanted to turn it into a Chinese restaurant, wanted Rufus out, and this weekend, we reported that it was 95 percent sure that Rufus would be moved to Damon's, the venerable tiki-themed restaurant in Glendale, through the hard work and fundraising of HiddenLA.
But yesterday, HiddenLA's Lynn Garrett posted a melancholy note on Facebook:
Hey guys. So, I'm sitting here at Damon's, drinking a sad mai tai. It's sad because we had a meeting with the people leasing Bahooka today, and although a week ago they wanted Rufus The Fish out in a week, the press attention changed their minds. Rufus is safe and will stay in the same place, and we're trying to focus on that.
So, instead of undergoing the rigors of moving, which could well kill him, Rufus will once again be the center of attention. As reported in the LA Times:
Charles Ye, a spokesman for the owners, said they decided to keep Rufus to help decorate the restaurant. They also feared moving him would be harmful to his health. "He's 37 years old already," Ye said. "We want to take care of him."
The owners are reportedly fundraising to build Rufus a huge new tank, and bring in a few more pacu to keep him company. But meantime, Garrett says she's not abandoning the idea of bringing him to Glendale, just shelving it.
If they change their mind again when the dust settles, we will still be very happy to buy Rufus. We will still be happy to pick up the phone and arrange his move. Also, we ADORE Damon's in Glendale and hope you will support their business for going through all of this brouhaha over a carrot-eating fish. If the opportunity arises, Rufus has a home there.
If you donated to HiddenLA to help with the move, Garrett says they're trying to figure out how to handle the money that came in.
Let's close with a toast to Rufus, possibly the world's most popular piranha.
(LA Magazine's Chris Nichols, at Bahooka before it closed in March of 2013. Credit: John Rabe)