Turns out the goofball we made fun of was the guy we really loved ... and we hope he knew it.
RIP Jeanne Manford, PFLAG founder, early parent to march with gay son in NYC pride parade
Jeanne Manford died Tuesday in Daly City CA. She was 92. Manford was one of the heroes of the gay rights movement because she founded PFLAG: Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. P-Flag is now an international group, with 200,000 and 350 chapters, and has dedicated the front page of its website to Manford:
It is truly humbling to imagine in 1972 - just 40 years ago - a simple schoolteacher started this movement of family and ally support, without benefit of any of the technology that today makes a grassroots movement so easy to organize. No Internet. No cellphones. Just a deep love for her son and a sign reading “Parents of Gays: Unite in Support for Our Children.”
I spoke with Manford in 1997 when she was living in Rochester, Minnesota. She told me it all started for her when her gay son Morty got beat up -- as police stood by -- when he was protesting for gay rights, and she wrote an angry letter to the New York Post.
There's much more of her story, including video, over at Frontiers LA.
Off-Ramp's full tribute to Huell Howser
Huell Howser said he loved Off-Ramp, and Off-Ramp certainly loved Huell Howser.
Here's the full twenty-minute-plus tribute to him from this week's episode, including thoughts from John Rabe, Kevin Ferguson, Queena Kim, Phil Noyes, Christopher Peake, Tom Labonge, and the President and Vice-President of Chapman University. Not to mention Huell himself ... and a certain pet pig.
Huell Howser, RIP
Huell Howser — the longtime California TV personality and host of "California's Gold," who died early Monday — was an icon, and — as he told me in 2011 — something of an iconoclast.
"Whatever success I have found in this business," he said, "I have done it without doing any of the things that people said I had to do in order to be successful." No agent, no manager, no public relations staff, no private parking space.
His TV shows were essentially Huell with a mike and a camera ... you traveled with Huell as he met the Lint Lady, as he shouted over the noise at the only drag strip in the city of LA, and as he wowed over a dog eating an avocado in an avocado grove (view the video below). You can hear him say it: "I've never seen a dog eat avocados before."
Share your favorite memories of Huell Howser and his TV shows on KPCC's Facebook page.
Related: Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson on Huell Howser's passing
Related: AirTalk: Remembering Huell Howser
Related: Huell Howser is retiring: An Off-Ramp remembrance
Related: Simpsons creator Matt Groening on Huell Howser
Related: Huell Howser's golden moments: The lessons Huell taught Southern Californians
Simpsons' Creator Matt Groening on Huell Howser's retirement
Just last month, public TV host Huell Howser announced his retirement. You and I know him as the man who loves California more than any other TV personality. But did you know Matt Groening--the man who created The Simpsons--is one of Huell's biggest fans? In fact, he's had Huell on the show twice. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Groening to hear more.
Matt Groening doesn't remember when he first saw Huell Howser. But the Portland-born, proud adopted son of California says it's always been a part of his TV watching since he moved to California. "Any time I come across an episode, I have to watch," said Groening.
Groening — who has TiVoed his favorite California's Gold episodes — says his favorite Huell moment is from an obscure episode about a giant catfish. "He follows a guy who bought a tiny fish at an aquarium store, and the fish grew way too big for his tank," said Groening. "And he finally, at the end of the show, donates this fish — which grew up be kind of a giant catfish — to the Self Realization Fellowship."
Groening said was so touched by the episode, he said, he's gone repeatedly to the garden to see the fish with his own eyes.
Behind the scenes at the Simpsons, Groening said, Huell enjoys the respect of the show's entire writing staff. In 2005, an effervescent, twang-y TV host named Howell Huser appeared on the show and name Springfield the "Worst Town Ever." The real life Huell was so delighted by the homage, he later played himself in a 2009 episode.
Groening is a fan of Howser because of his optimism, of course; that Howser can get genuinely and completely enthused by an artichoke festival. He loves the show's production requres minimal editing and even fewer cuts--a refeshing change. But most of all, said Groening, Huell is an irreplaceable California icon: "He's beloved. And people like to say that, 'yeah, he's beloved.' But he's even more beloved than that."
Watch Homer Simpson give a brief tribute to Huell Howser for his 25 years with KCET:
Charles Solomon reviews The Animation Show of Shows
Almost since the art form began, there's been a split between animation as a studio product and animation as a vehicle for individual expression.
The enormous success of animated features and TV shows has kept the work of the major animation studios uppermost in the minds of American audiences recently. But beginning with the pioneer cartoonist and filmmaker Winsor McCay -- back in the early 1900's -- independent artists have treated animation as an art as personal, flexible and immediate as painting or sculpture.
Their work is an entirely different vision of what an animated film can be, as the new DVD box set The Animation Show of Shows richly proves. Volume 3 just came out.
The artists who create these films may teach or support themselves with other jobs or work at a government-sponsored body, like the National Film Board of Canada. Some are students, and some are professionals pursuing their visions in their spare time. They're united by a commitment to the art of animation.
Many of the films in Show of Shows use techniques that are too impractical or personal for large scale production. In The Street, Carolyn Leaf uses the masochistically difficult medium of paint on glass--which she invented--to present a story by Mordecai Richler. She begins with a painting, then slightly alters it between frames to create movement in perspective and an illusion of life. (It's also impossible to imagine a Hollywood studio greenlighting an animated feature about a lower-middle class Jewish family in Montreal.)
In the same way, Wild Life by Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, and The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by William Joyce capture the highly individual art styles of the filmmakers. Other animators are more focused on telling stories. In La Maison en Petits Cubes, Kunio Kato recounts an aged widower's battle with loneliness as he struggles against an inexorable flood. Rubicon by Gil Alkabetz offers an off-the-wall spin on the old puzzle about how can a man get a sheep, a wolf, and a cabbage across a river in a small row boat.
Some of these films are even educational. The hilarious Hot Stuff is actually a fire safety film: the gods give man fire, only to discover it was a mistake to do so.
Let's Pollute pokes fun at our slovenly habits. And the Oscar-winning Every Child present the rights children are guaranteed by the United Nations.
Two Oscar-winning films by Frederic Back, Crac! and The Man Who Planted Trees combine all these qualities. His stories are pleas for ecological sanity, told through exquisite colored pencil drawings on frosted acetate. It's visual poetry.
The shorts in The Show of Shows are not superior to features from Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, or Sony, any more than a solo piano recital is better or worse than an orchestral performance. They're just a different approach.
Not every film in the DVD set is a gem: a few will leave you scratching your head, wondering what the artists (and awards committees) were thinking of. But they're all reminders of the extraordinarily diverse visuals animation can produce, a diversity more than a century of filmmaking has yet to exhaust.
(Charles Solomon is author of The Toy Story Films: An Animated Journey and The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation.)
Larry Davis: tears in his beer led to singing career - at 74
1/6/2014: UPDATE: Larry Davis, profiled on Off-Ramp in 2012, is out with his second album, "Larry Davis Too," available on iTunes and CD Baby, and I'm delighted that Larry chose to use my photo of him for the CD cover.
First of all, Larry Davis always smells great. It's some sort of cedar cologne. And looking at him, you'd never guess he's almost 75.
As he takes a break from recording his second album at Miles Recording and Mix, near the Capitol Records building, he laughs and refers to the old, probably offensive, saying. "I'm just not going to show you the parts that cracked."
Larry captivated me from the first time I heard him sing at The Other Side, the late lamented gay piano bar in Silverlake. His voice is a little rough-edged, which grabs your attention, and he almost speaks many of the lyrics of his songs - whether it's "It Isn't Easy Being Green," "Lush Life," or one of the highly suggestive (dirty) songs the crowd always loved to hear.
Larry sings like he's been doing it all his life. But his is another of those stories that prove F. Scott Fitzgerald was drunk when he said, "There are no second acts in American lives." Larry is on his third act ... at least.
Larry was born in Modesto, and raised in Iowa. There was a stint in the Air Force where his desire (and undoubtedly talent) in the area of modern interpretive dance was not fully appreciated. To say the least. Instead, he sang with the combo that played the Officers Club and enjoyed it. But not enough to seek out gigs when he left the service and started work as a graphic artist for ABC-TV in LA.
He stayed at ABC for forty years, retiring at 69. A few years later, his partner broke his back in a freak accident, and Larry found himself crying in his beer at The Other Side. He asked the piano player to sing Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady." "I will," he said, "if you'll sing 'Lush Life.'"
"I was just drunk enough," Larry says, "and just sad enough, to do it." He was asked to come back and sing again and became a crowd favorite. Eventually, recording artist Annie Miles heard him and took up "the personal challenge of getting an authentic version of his live performance into an excellent recording."
"Close Your Eyes," now out on iTunes, features Larry swinging on the title track and a couple others, updating "The Coffee Song" in a way we can't explain on the radio, and breaking your heart with "It Isn't Easy Being Green," which Larry says has become kind of an anthem for his younger gay fans.
"My whole approach is to have a conversation with the listeners. The words have to mean something to me." His style has changed since he sang in the Air Force, when he used to imitate Johnny Mathis. Then, he says, "I was singing words, and not really knowing the words." At 74, he has lived, and then some, and he knows the words.
KPCC + IGLA's Instagram challenge winner likes to keep it weird
Chris Rivera is one imaginative Instagrammer. His feed is filled with multiple limbed friends, vampires, flying books and cyborgs.
He is also the winner of our fourth Instagram challenge with IGLA (Instagram Lovers Anonymous) called "Double Exposed." His winning photo is a self-portrait collaged with the LA skyline and a few of his signature bird silhouettes.
Rivera first got interested in photography in high-school where he started off as many photographers do -- taking photos of flowers, close ups of water drops and a few friends. Then he started experimenting with Photoshop and putting his creations on Instagram.
Even though he puts out his images through a mobile medium, all his photos are taken on his trusty Canon Rebel T2i then run through a gamut of apps and Photoshop.
Yes, some instagrammers would say this isn't in the spirit of mobile photography, but for a while Rivera didn't have any other way of shooting.
His first forays into Instagram were on his camera-less iPod and once he started experimenting with the many megapixels on his DSLR camera he couldn't give into only shooting on his phone.
Method aside, Rivera is attracting quite a few followers and his subjects are all too happy to oblige to his strange requests.
"I'm thankful for my models," says Rivera, "because I tell them to do crazy stuff and they're like, yeah sure why not?"
He's inspired by fashion and editorial photographers like Annie Leibowitz and one day hopes to make his splash into the professional photo world.
Right now, his next step is joining the Air Force as a combat photographer this year.
"I think it's an honorable way to build my portfolio," says Rivera.
Rivera plans on keeping his military portfolio more reserved than his surrealistic Instagram feed, but he may work in a little art project on the side to keep his followers happy.
You can follow Chris at @xxcrjxx and be sure to follow @kpcc for our next contest!
Civil War 'Death, Mourning and Memory' on display at Huntington Library
The American Civil War raged mercilessly for four years, from 1861 to 1865, and even today, 151 years after the start of the war, its legacy is still palpable throughout the country. It was also one of the first wars to be covered by photography.
This weekend marks the last chance visitors to the Huntington Library will be able to see the exhibit Strange And Fearful Interest: Death, Morning, and Memory In The American Civil War. The exhibit is based solely on imagery of the war, from the gruesome battlefields to the funeral of Abraham Lincoln.
The American Civil War was the bloodiest war in history, and thanks to new photo technology, it was the first time in history that American homes could see the actual devastation of the battlefield.
"This is the very first war in which American battle-dead are shown," Watts told Patt Morrison. "Antietam occurs, [where] you have 23,000 casualties, and one of the photographers at the time is able to get onto the battlefield and show the human devastation. For people to see this type of carnage was truly horrifying ... I think to be able to show this graphically, photographically, was such a shock [to families]."
According to Watts, approximately 750,000 Americans died during the Civil War, more than all other major conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the present, and the equivalent of 7-million Americans today.
"That's one of the reasons why the Civil War is such a powerful moment," Watts said. "It affected everyone. It didn't matter if you were slave or free, union or confederate, death touched every single person in this country."