Granted, the homeless make it hard to run a business near downtown LA’s Skid Row. But one man’s solution is raising eyebrows: spraying water on the sidewalk overnight. ... One of the local pianists in The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is already famous as the Video Game Pianist on YouTube. ... We visit the Alf Museum in Claremont where most of the fossils – some of them extremely significant to science -- were dug up by kids. ... Richard Simmons has gone from being the most accessible celebrity in LA to disappeared. A new podcast “Missing Richard Simmons" asks what happened. ... And we visit Beth Goodnight -- self-proclaimed "mad scientist" of set building -- to see the last of her Oscar sets before they’re sent off for this weekend’s show.
Skid Row dilemma: Is it wrong to use sprinklers to keep the homeless away?
Let's say you're a long-time business owner in downtown LA. Let's say you not only pay your taxes, but support programs that try to help the homeless.
Let's also say you've tried time and again to get the city to keep the sidewalks around your buildings clear of homeless encampments, because they hurt business.
It hasn't worked, so you use an old technique: install sprinklers that go off and make it unpleasant to camp and hang out on that particular sidewalk. Are you cringing, with images of water hoses turned on prisoners and protestors?
Okay, let's up the ante of this moral dilemma: Let's say you lease the building in question to a nonprofit center that - among other services - offers drug counseling to people just released from jail ... and there was drug dealing going on in the encampments on the sidewalk.
That's what's happening on LA's Skid Row at 470 E. Third St and Crocker. The business owner is Steve Lee. Eddie Kim broke the story in the Los Angeles Downtown News:
Lee acknowledged that he installed the sprinklers and turns them on every night with the goal of clearing the sidewalks of homeless encampments. Despite that, Lee rejects the notion that he is inhumane for literally soaking homeless individuals on what is technically public property. He points to a record of trying to help the poor and struggling, including taking on county and city departments and nonprofits as tenants. Lee also has his own charitable nonprofit: The Steve and SoHyun Park Lee Foundation, which offers school grants and other assistance to low-income communities.
He is also unapologetic about his use of sprinklers as a deterrent to homeless encampments, blaming the city for allowing the homelessness crisis to spiral “out of control” and for not helping property owners keep the public spaces around their business clean and safe. “I don’t want to use sprinklers,” Lee said. “The thing is, it works. Because people get wet, and they don’t need to deal with that. You know what those homeless guys told me when I didn’t have sprinklers and asked them to please move? They told me to go [expletive] myself.”
Listen to the audio player to hear my conversation with Eddie Kim and with Raymond, a homeless man who sets up camp just down the sidewalk from Lee's building. Raymond says he uses the sprinklers to refill his water containers (he actually prefers DWP water, after the chlorine decants away), and doesn't blame Lee: "it's a no-win situation."
By the way, yes, we're in a severe drought, but Lee told Kim the increase in his water bill is cheaper than hiring a security guard.
Daily Show alum's new podcast 'Missing Richard Simmons' seeks disappeared fitness magnate
Once, fitness guru Richard Simmons was the most accessible star in Los Angeles. He'd come out of his house to greet tour buses. He led regular workout classes at his gym. He reached out on the phone to untold numbers of people who needed his brand of compassion and encouragement. He even did an interview with Off-Ramp's Kevin Ferguson.
But then, the day after Valentines Day 2014, he stopped it all. And now, according to Dan Taberski, only a handful of people hear from him. Not even half a dozen. So Taberski, who used to produce field segments on the Daily Show, who had struck up his own friendship with Simmons and was negotiating to make a documentary about him, started a limited-run podcast - Missing Richard Simmons - he says is specifically designed to convince Simmons to reach out and explain what's been going on to the people who love and miss him.
In the meantime, he and his team are exploring possible answers. "It goes in really surprising ways. Some of them are pretty basic - did things happen before he disappeared that may have sent him into a bit of a depression? We explore that and end up going down a lot of different roads. We end up in New Orleans, we go to small towns in the middle of nowhere. It really takes a lot of twists and turns. And it's still ongoing; we don't know the answer of why Richard Simmons would ghost the world."
Listen to the audio to hear much more of my long conversation with Taberski. But first, two things: Taberski is clearly not trying to make fun of Simmons. He respects Simmons' generous, unique personality, and business acumen. And he also says he's been assured repeatedly that Simmons doesn't have some sort of mystery illness or other deep dark thing that he has a right to keep private. In which case, Taberski says, he'd back off.
James Kim's new podcast 'The Competition' explores wild world of Van Cliburn contestants
James Kim is fascinated by competition. What drives people to want to be the best at whatever they do. And he also loves radio; spinning stories for your ears. (Check out his Off-Ramp piece exploring how he lost his Korean fluency as a kid.)
So it's natural that James' first podcast, "The Competition," is not only about competition, but focuses its first season on the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
"Every season is going to be a different competition," he says. "The first season I chose piano because it's audio, and I wanted to choose something that's so sound rich, and can do so well in the audio format." So we hear two young Southern California-based Cliburn competitors playing piano for James, demonstrating how they approach their art ... including Martin Leung, best known as the viral Video Game Pianist on YouTube:
"The Competition" is supported by Performance Today, which must please James because -- and this is secret -- James himself is very competitive, but it makes him beet-red-embarrassed to talk about it.
James says, in fact, this was an issue he has in common with every one of the pianists he interviewed. They don't like talking about competitiveness. They would immediately evade the subject. But I pressed and he admits that in developing this podcast, he is exploring this side of himself. "I don't know what it is that people don't really want to open up about their competitive side. I think it has a stigma. But it's human nature. Every single person, no matter how small it is ... even when you're playing Words with Friends .. you're competing with someone."
Find - and listen to - "The Competition" on iTunes or Soundcloud.
By the way, Team Off-Ramp is pretty proud of James. He was a former Off-Ramp intern, as was "The Competition" producer Elyssa Dudley. Cameron Kell also produces the podcast.
See dinosaur bones found by kids at Alf Museum in Claremont
There's another place to see dinosaurs in LA County besides Exposition Park: the Raymond Alf Museum at the Webb Schools in Claremont, an intimate museum dedicated to fossils discovered by kids. For almost 80 years, Webb students have been contributing to paleontology, thanks to an ambitious track star who came to the school in 1929 and wound up taking Webb students on field trips that unearthed over 70,000 fossils.
Raymond Manfred Alf was born in 1905 in Canton, China, and lived there with his missionary parents until he was 11. The Alf family relocated to Nebraska, and by the late 1920's, Alf was a prominent sprinter who almost qualified for the Olympics.
According to Don Lofgren, director of the museum and Alf's biographer, Alf came to run for a Los Angeles track club in 1929, but after the track season, needed a job. He had taught math before, and took a tutoring position at the Webb boarding school for boys in then-rural Claremont. Alf soon became a full time biology teacher.
In the mid-1930's, Alf happened upon a fossil horse jaw at a photo shop in Claremont Village, and the clerk told him it came from Barstow. Alf arranged a field trip for a few boys from the school in 1935. In the summer of 1936, Alf was leading a trip to Barstow, and the headmaster's son, Bill Webb, found a skull. As it turned out, the skull was from an undiscovered Miocene-age peccary, Dyseohys fricki.
Thus cemented the tradition Alf called "The Peccary Trips." From 1936 to 1976, Alf took students to fossil sites around the US, including museum board member Dick Lynas, who graduated from Webb in 1955, and went on a Peccary Trip in 1953.
(Raymond Alf and the Chevy Suburban he drove on Peccary Trips. Courtesy the Webb Schools)
"It was a six week trip in a Chevrolet Suburban with no air conditioning, with hot plastic seats, and all the kids would be sliding around in the heat. We'd go to Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota," remembers Lynas, who found two Brontothere skulls in Nebraska. Brontotheres belong to the same order as the rhinoceros, lived in the late Eocene era, and had two large horns protruding from their snouts. Lynas says that the ranch they prospected for fossils at in Nebraska was so "littered with bone, you couldn't walk in a straight line without stepping on something."
Other notable exhibits include the skull of Purussaurus, a forty foot long crocodilian from Brazil; a skeletal cast of an Amphicyon (sometimes called a "bear-dog") mounted above the only known footprints belonging to the species, and "Baby Joe," the young Parasaurolophus discovered by Webb senior Kevin Terris in 2009.
Much of "Baby Joe's" skeleton is still encased in rock, to avoid breaking. Credit: Maya Sugarman/KPCC
Lofgren notes that the Alf museum's dinosaur fossils are mostly discovered in other states, and that Southern California contains far more mammals than dinosaur fossils in its rocks. Today, the Alf Museum's collection numbers about 165,ooo specimens from around the world. 95 percent of them were found by students, says Lofgren.
The Museum began in the basement of the school library, which was also Alf's classroom. By 1968, the basement was overflowing with bones, and it was then that the building that currently houses the Museum was built and has since been accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, making it the only such museum on a high school campus. Alf, who died in 1999 at age 93, lived on the Webb campus for almost 70 years.
The Raymond M. Alf Museum is located at 1175 W Baseline Rd, Claremont CA 91711, and is open 8am-4pm Monday-Friday.
Off-Ramp Recommends: Celebrate the spirit of puppeteer Bob Baker
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Many long-time Angelenos will remember field trips, family excursions, and free intermission ice cream cups at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Downtown LA. Baker's colorful, handcrafted puppets captured the hearts of audiences from TV viewers ...
... to naval families during Baker's base tours, to attendees of his hometown performances. This weekend the theater, which is among the oldest puppet theaters in the country, is celebrating its late creator on the weekend of what would have beenhis 93rd birthday. (He died in 2014.)
The non-profit theater is hosting a weekend of puppet shows, music, and comedy suitable for all ages. On Saturday, there will be a carnival spilling from the theater out onto First Street. The carnival features midway games, puppet making workshops with the LA Guild of Puppetry, food trucks, local artists, and of course round-the-clock puppet shows.
On Sunday the celebration heads back indoors to commemorate the history of the theater with screenings of Bob Baker's television appearances, a discussion of the significance of the theater with KPCC's own Alex Cohen. Finally, the night will end with a birthday party for Baker's spirit ... which is still going strong.
February 25th and 26th at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater at 1345 W. First Street in Downtown LA. Tickets for the various events range from $20-$30. Visit the website for more information.