Largest Vivian Maier photography show in LA ... Chris Butler uses film ... speech analysis computer can (usually) tell if you're drunk ...
Pacific Standard Time: Conceptual art at OCMA
Conceptual art is as much, or more, about the process of experiencing (making, looking at, thinking about, documenting) art as the art object itself. And SoCal, not weighed down by the strictures and structures of the art establishment, was a hotbed of conceptual art. It's the focus of the Orange County Museum of Art's Pacific Standard Time entry, State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970. Off-Ramp host John Rabe talked with artist Al Ruppersberg, a surprise guest, and OCMA's co-curator, Karen Moss. (The exhibit closes January 22d, so go see it now!)
More photos by outsider icon Vivian Maier come to LA gallery
UPDATE 12/26/2013: Merry Karnowsky Gallery is bringing in new Vivian Maier prints from the Maloof Collection for an exhibit that runs through Jan. 25. On Jan. 11, for one of the first times ever, one of Vivian Maier's home movies will be shown in public, projected onto an exterior wall next to the gallery.
Vivian Maier (1926-2009) was a nanny for most of her life in Chicago. But on her time off, she took pictures. Of everything. John Maloof stumbled across her work at auction, and now owns 100,000 negatives taken over decades by Maier, who has become one of the world's biggest art stories. Merry Karnowsky Gallery, with support from actor Tim Roth, is hosting LA's biggest showing of Maier's photos. Off-Ramp host John Rabe spoke with Maloof about Vivian Maier, and spoke with her many fans - including director Wim Wenders - at a preview of the exhibit.
Maier is considered an "outsider artist." That can mean the artist is mentally disturbed, like Henry Darger, or it can mean that they're simply not accepted by the mainstream art world, like Simon Rodia, creator of the Watts Towers.
In Maier's case, it doesn't seem like she ever tried to get acceptance for her art, which was street photography. Instead, she traveled the world, then worked as a domestic, all the while amassing roomfuls of negatives. John Maloof, who discovered her work when he was looking for photos to illustrate a local history book, says maybe she wasn't secure enough in her work - like so many artists - to subject it to public or critical scrutiny.
Her work can stand the strain. Maier's photos have now been shown and printed in the U.S. and Europe, and are gathered in the book, "Vivian Maier: Street Photographer." The book is good, but can't match seeing more than 100 full-size prints at Karnowsky's gallery. They give you a sense of Maier's biggest gift, her acceptance by her subjects. At a preview for the exhibit, director Wim Wenders, who calls them "gorgeous," told us Maier has a loving eye. "She loves people, you sense that."
Scott Hicks, director of "Shine" and "Snow Falling on Cedars," was buying a copy of Maier's book for his production designer, and finds it hard to believe a "nanny on her time off" had such an educated eye. "It's a feast," he says. He says he does have a certain amount of ambivalence about someone making money from Maier's work after her death.
In our Off-Ramp interview, Maloof says he he's not "making money," that he's spent $200,000 in scanning, archiving, and printing so far, costs that haven't been recouped. He says he feels a little guilty that he's selling prints, "knowing she could have some level of success while she was alive." But, he says, "What do you want me to do? I could just leave it in my basement and let it collect dust? I could do nothing, or get money to get this out there."
Looking at Maier's work, it's hard to argue that it shouldn't be accessible, and it's tantalizing to fantasize about what's on the 90,000+ negatives Maloof hasn't even looked at yet.
"Vivian Maier - A Life Discovered," is at Merry Karnowsky Gallery through January 28, at 170 S. LaBrea Ave, LA CA 90036.
Was Rick Perry actually drunk? A computer says it knows
Last October, Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry delivered a bizarre speech in New Hampshire during which he bounced on his heels, giggled, and struggled to stay on point. Many people thought that he was drunk, and the claims became so widespread that Perry had to publicly deny them. But short of going back in time and taking a blood sample, there was no way to be sure. That is, until a team of researchers from USC came along.
Professor Shri Narayanan and his team designed the winning entry in the latest challenge from the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). The challenge asked participants to design a computer system that could identify drunk people from their speech patterns. The team's winning system could tell if someone was drunk about 70 percent of the time.
Narayanan said the topic isn't exactly what their lab is known for.
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"It wasn't a core problem in our lab, that we are interested in the state of inebriation of people."
What they are interested in is speech. The researchers in Professor Narayanan’s lab have developed computer programs that dissect speech patterns and then tie them to hidden states, like emotions or diseases such as autism.
“Let’s consider the example of a child with autism," said Narayanan. "A prototypical way of characterizing that is to say that their intonation sounds atypical. We are interested in how to quantify this atypicality in intonation."
Many doctors currently use the way he or she talks as an indicator for autism. Narayanan thinks his computer programs will soon be able to do it better.
“[Computers] can look at micro-variations and intonations in the beginning of my sentence now and compare it with [my voice] three minutes later," he explained. "That’s difficult for humans to do, or maybe even impossible, but computers can build analytic tools to try to measure these things."
Professor Narayanan's laboratory focuses mostly on debilitating speech in order to help physicians better diagnose their patients. But the drunken detection challenge was no gimmick. Since there's a reliable way to measure drunkenness (blood-alcohol content) the challenge gave researchers a concrete way to see whether their systems were any good. So his team signed up.
The data they used came from researchers in Germany, who collected sober speech recordings from recruited subjects. Then they gave them a few beers and recorded their speech again.
Narayanan said they also measured their blood alcohol content to determine which ones were legitimately drunk.
The professor's six-man team included recent Ph.D. Matt Black and third-year doctoral candidate Daniel Bone, who showed Off-Ramp the system. Black queued up an example of a sober German utterance - a banal statement where the speaker asks his car to play a CD. He then played an utterance from the same speaker, with the same prompt, but after drinking lots of beer.
It didn't sound like the first.
"He adds an extra 'gut' at the end," said Bone, laughing. "I think that means 'good'".
Black said they started with the speaking rate. They thought that it would be an intuitive thing to measure because they expected that drunk speakers would speak slower. But the computers didn't think it was such a useful measurement.
"We found that the rate features weren’t very helpful," said Black, "but then we found other features that were less interpretable that ended up allowing us to win the competition.”
Black said that the most important thing was to build a system that was robust and could measure thousands of different features, regardless of whether the research team could hear them.
“How these happen sometimes is beyond human interpretability," said Narayanan. "And that’s what we refer to as black box. We really can’t interpret the internals of these algorithms and how they choose data, how they slice them and dice them, and it’s not often nicely packaged to listen to. But what we can see with certainty are outcomes.”
At a computer station in the back of the laboratory, the team was eager to finally show off its new system. Black put on a headset and sat in the pilot’s seat, where he began saying commands to familiarize the program with his voice.
He uttered three "sober" sentences, three "drunk" sentences and then a test sentence.
"Now it’s going through and training the system," said Narayanan. “It’s extracting spectral voice quality features, extracting prosodic features, intonation and so on, it’s now crunching, organizing it in order of importance.”
A few minutes later the results were in. The computer came up with a score of five out of seven, or about 70 percent. Narayanan said it was a pretty good score - about on par with human accuracy, in fact - and said it was time to try a clip from Rick Perry's speech.
They ran the audio and waited. The results appeared. Perry was sober.
Narayanan didn’t want to speculate whether the computer got that one wrong, but he said hopefully by the time the next presidential election rolls along, they'll be absolutely sure.
More from USC News: The Computer Says He Sounds Drunk
Cactus County Cowboys exclusive Off-Ramp performance
Will Ryan, leader of the Cactus County Cowboys, calls their brand of music "Cowboy Skiffle." They entertained Mickey Rooney, Margaret O'Brien, Rose Marie, and the rest of the crowd at the Southern California Motion Picture Council's annual holiday banquet, but Off-Ramp host John Rabe got a special preview as they were warming up. In this iteration, Ryan -- the voice of Tigger for 16 years -- is joined by Westy Westenhofer, John "Presto" Reynolds, "Chaparall Katie" Cavera, "Buckaroo Benny" Brydern, and "Cactus Chloe" Feoranzo.
Eagle Rock Yacht Club gives gift of dodgeball to local kids
And now, Dodgeball: the 600 year old sport so loved by elementary and middle schoolers has become not only an ironic trend for adults, but a way to do good here in Los Angeles.
Formed in 2008, The Eagle Rock Yacht Club organizes competitive Dodgeball games in Glassell Park, Venice and North Hollywood for neighborhood kids. According to yacht club co-founder Craig Fowler, the games started out with only a turnout of 10. He said that many kids, mostly from lower income families, now gladly give up their Friday nights to play.
"It's a very safe, fun atmosphere on a Friday night, which is something that I don't think that’s very prevalent around here, so we really try and foster that kind of thing," he said.
Ellie Schob, 12, said she looks forward to dodgeball because it's a fun way to exercise. "There are a lot of things on TV that promote kids to sit on the couch all day, but this group really helps us stay active," she said. Schob added that if she wasn't at the yacht club playing Dodgeball, she would either be watching television or doing homework.
"My dad always tells me, 'Do your homework and then you can go to Dodgeball.' So, he's kind of bribing me sometimes," Schob said.
Jesus Ramirez, 13, echoes Schob’s enthusiasm for the game even though he sometimes gets hit by a ball. “It hurts, because if you don’t catch it then you're out, and it kind of gives you a bruise after a day," he said. According to Ramirez, Dodgeball is a healthy alternative to what he would usually be doing – playing video games.
The two young kids seem to grasp the club's goal for providing the sport: getting kids active. "Every kid loves Dodgeball. I think we can all remember when we were kids, how excited we would get on rainy days, and that was an opportunity to play dodgeball," said the Yacht Club’s Chris Alves. "We're definitely trying to use that and spin that off into leadership programs, and getting the kids involved in either photography, or screen printing, or nutrition and cooking classes."
Margaret O'Brien, then and now
Margaret O'Brien -- "Journey for Margaret," "Meet Me in St Louis," "Our Vines Have Tender Grapes" -- was one of the biggest stars of her time. But Hollywood didn't believe that a delightful, spunky, preternaturally talented child actor could make it as an adult. But O'Brien, who turns 75 on January 15, is still as smart, fun, and youthful (she wears diamonds in her nose piercing!) as she ever was. Off-Ramp host John Rabe spoke with her at the annual holiday banquet of the Southern California Motion Picture Council, one of O'Brien's favorite causes.
LA writer Richard Lange takes us on a tour of his MacArthur Park
Richard Lange is an L.A. author who revels in the unglamorous side of the city. He's published a novel, "This Wicked World", a collection of short stories, "Dead Boys," and been published in Slake Magazine and the "Best American Mystery Stories of 2011".
Los Angeles author Richard Lange has published a novel, multiple short stories and a collected works titled "Dead Boys" that embody the sights, smells, triumphs and defeat of living in Los Angeles.
"There's so many different types of people coming here to fulfill their dreams and they all get broken in so many unique ways, that it's perfect fodder for a writer," Lange said.
An Angeleno transplant via Oakland and multiple small Central California cities, Lange landed in L.A. at the age of 17 and never left. After a short stint at USC film school, Lange realized he wasn't suited for the movies because it was "a little too collaborative" for him. He liked working alone, so he began to pursue a career in writing.
"Everyone seems to come here with a dream, which makes for a great city. There's a lot of energy," Lange said. "There's this strange hopefulness here because everybody seems to be striving for something, for these goals."
Lange was encouraged by the writing classes he took from T.C. Boyle and he landed his first big job working for Larry Flynt at Flynt Publications. Lange was the managing editor of a heavy metal magazine before going on to edit textbooks and work for a trade magazine. For 10 years, Lange did what most writers do; struggle to get published and write on late nights after they finish working their day jobs.
Lange said living in neighborhoods such as Echo Park, Koreatown and South Central, as well as coming from a working class family, greatly influenced the subject matter and characters in his stories.
He writes about the aspiring actress looking for fame, the chef looking to open his first restaurant or the first-generation immigrant trying to make money to send home to family; hard-working, everyday people that make L.A. the city that it is.
Lange writes with an intimate sense of detail that demonstrates an authentic understanding of L.A. culture. He didn't have a car until he was 34-years-old, and said that walking and riding buses helped him experience the city in a visceral way many don't.
Lange has literally walked miles in his characters' shoes; he's traced the same littered path around the MacArthur Park lake, drank Bud Lights at the same dive bars and felt the burst of heat from a metro buses' exhaust.
Many of Lange's storylines exist within the margins of society, and many completely delve into the crime underworld. He attributes his vivid depictions of both to decades of reading the Los Angeles Times and paying acute attention to the stories coming out of his own community. If all else fails, he does some good old-fashioned Internet research.
"To this day I walk out of my house, I live in Echo Park, and I walk out of my house and I hit Sunset Boulevard and there's 20 stories between my house and the coffee shop up the street," Lange said.
Betty White Shocker: "I Have a Loving Relationship with a Tapir!"
1/7/2012 UPDATE: The LA Zoo is celebrating Betty White's 90th birthday this month with a cake for the first 900 people through the gate and a special scavenger hunt. Betty won't be there; she's too busy! We taped this interview last summer.
It's true, and when she's petting the tapir, she's thinking about the koala, and possibly the elephant. Betty White, America's sweetheart and author of the memoir "If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't)," talks with KPCC's John Rabe about the LA Zoo (and its upcoming Beastly Ball fundraiser), acting in "Advise and Consent" under Otto Preminger, and about looking like a grandma.
How Green Was My Valley?
UPDATE: The state of California may close Los Encinos State Historic Park, at Balboa and Ventura Blvd. in Encino, once "the hub of human habitation in the Southern San Fernando Valley," because it doesn't make enough money. No, it's not a moneymaker, but it's tranquil, fun, and rich in history. Off-Ramp talked with local historian Kevin Roderick about the park a few years ago.
Chris Butler's point-and-shoot delays Rabe's gratification
At Merry Karnowsky Gallery's Vivian Maier exhibit, Off-Ramp host John Rabe ran into photographic revolutionary Chris Butler. He took Rabe's photo on an old-fashioned point-and-shoot and won't process the film for MONTHS.