We pay tribute to Lynne Westmore Bloom, who died last week. In 1966, her giant pink naked lady appeared over the Malibu Canyon tunnel, delighting many, and pissing off local officials. ... Sanden Totten, of the science podcast Brains On, takes us to Joshua Tree and explains how its shrubs, animals, and Joshua Trees survive. ... The Formosa Café just closed, so we'll talk about its role as a creative touchstone, a shorthand when you need to evoke the glamour of Old Hollywood. ... 8-Bit music is the sound of old school video games, and it’s now a genre for musicians who like its simplicity and the era it evokes. We’ll tell you about an 8-bit music festival happening this weekend in LA.
Garrison Keillor calls impressionist Jim Meskimen and forgets the question
The words "incautiously," "rhubarb," and "behind" figure prominently in the latest celebrity interview by Off-Ramp's favorite impressionist, Jim Meskimen:
By the way, Garrison's successor, Chris Thile, brings A Prairie Home Companion to the Pasadena Civic this Saturday. If you were wondering about this new fellow, now's your chance to see what the fuss is about. And if you weren't that into Garrison, Thile has freshened up the show without losing its essence. Here's my Off-Ramp interview with Thile.
3 ways to remember Dr. King on Monday
Monday is MLK Day, and in honor of Dr. King's legacy, LA is hosting a lot of free, family friendly celebrations.
Dr. Martin Luther King left a lasting impact on Angelenos when he came to Los Angeles in 1965 to give a press conferenceon growing racial violence in Watts. From there he battled journalists and protestors to speak across the city, spreading the message of unification, including a speech at Temple Beth Israel at which he said, “"Our destinies are tied together. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be." Off-Ramp has audio from that rarely heard speech.
This year, the California African-American Museum in Exposition Park is hosting a Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration featuring musicians, food, and readings of King's lesser known speeches. There will also be crafting station, like making buttons and decorating crowns, for the family to enjoy. The celebration, from 10am-5pm, is free and open to the public.
In South Central, it’s the 32rd annual Kingdom Day Parade. It steps off at 11am at the corner of Western and MLK Jr. Blvd and marches down Crenshaw Blvd. ABC7 will be televising the event if you can’t make it in person. After the parade, there’s a festival with the motto: "Now more than ever, we must work together."
Also, admission is free at LACMA on Martin Luther King Day.
Lynne Westmore Bloom, 81, the 'man' who painted Malibu's Pink Lady
Early one late October morning in 1966, Stephen Seemayer remembers, he saw his mom come in the door, dressed like a ninja. Hair back, black jeans, black hoodie. "Where have you been? What have you been doing?" the 12-year old asked.
What Lynne Westmore Bloom had been doing - and, in fact, what she had been doing for months - was executing of the best art pranks in Southern California history. She'd been painting a 60-foot naked, frolicking pink lady on the cliff above the Malibu Canyon tunnel.
Bloom died Friday at her home in Encinitas after an illness, just short of her 82d birthday, and so Stephen and I drove out to sight of her early triumph to talk about his mom and her legacy.
Seemayer says when he was a kid, the family made the drive from the Valley to the beach many times, and saw graffiti on the cliff. "She thought that one of her paintings, enlarged, that she had at home, would be the perfect thing to put on the side of that mountain, because it was a big, flat, kind of a canvas."
So after spending months of nights prepping the surface, chipping off rock and tagging, and pulling out a few trees, she painted it there, using bright pink Sears exterior paint. A lot of people loved it, Seemayer says, but city and county officials didn't. One county supervisor called it pornography. "That's because you can actually see a little pubic hair in the painting, and in 1966, I don't even think Playboy magazine was showing a little pubic hair." (Fact check: Not true. Tish Howard, July 1966.)
When their first efforts to wash off the paint failed, "the supervisor said, 'we would like the man who painted this to come forward and tell us what kind of paint he used.' We were watching television at home, and my mom became furious that they assumed it was a man. My mom was practically pulling her hair out and she said, 'Oh that tears it! That's it! I should signed it but I didn't because I wasn't trying to claim any fame.'"
She held a news conference and claimed responsibility, and while she gained fame, she also gained even more negative attention, including death threats against her and Stephen and his little brother. Stephen remembers the FBI tapped their phone and sat in the kitchen to monitor the calls.
What did it teach Stephen, who became an artist and filmmaker? "I appreciated the painting, but I knew it was an incredibly cool thing to do. It was one of the first things that I knew that my mom was not just a regular mom; that she was totally cool. She always said 'there's nothing that you can't do. She proved it in her daily life."
Bloom's memorial service is 1pm, Tuesday, Jan. 17, at Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth.
8BitLA: Using the tech from old video game themes to make modern music
The hottest video game item of the holiday season was without a doubt the Nintendo NES Classic Edition. And the reason was simple – nostalgia. The 8-Bit sounds from old school video games are now nostalgia, and for the past six years these type of tunes have been celebrated at Freq.Fest at the Smell in downtown Los Angeles, which returns this week.
Jesse Avila is co-organizer of 8BitLA, and lead vocalist for the band Paladin Shield, one of the bands performing the fest, says “What you are listening to are simple and basic oscillators that create pulse waves, which are very rudimentary sound waves. Think of the oscillators in an alarm clock. They essentially use the same technology. We take this thing that sounds alien and awkward and try to make something beautiful out of it.”
Some of the best classic video game soundtracks tell stories without words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEf8gPFFZ58
"The soundtrack fit the backstory so well of the game. Mega Man has to kill these other bad robots, but what many people don’t know is that most of these robots are his brothers… And so he is really out to kill his brothers who were corrupted by Dr.Wily. If you listen to the soundtrack of Mega Man it’s heroic and adventurous, but there are hints of sadness."
And sometimes the music can really become a character of its own:
"Popular protagonists in old school video games like Mario or Link are not your typical buff-guy machismo heroes. They are these underdog type heroes… The awkwardness of the 8-Bit fits so well with characters that typically wouldn't be considered the savior of the day."
Freq.Fest runs Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the Smell in downtown Los Angeles. To learn more about 8BitLA and Freq.Fest visit the groups’ websites. And don’t forget to listen to the story above so you can hear some 8-Bit music for yourself.
RIP Formosa Cafe: Hollywood watering hole, creative touchstone for generations
The Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Blvd had been in decline for a long time. The drinks and food were pretty universally reviled. It was run down. The feng shui was way off and weird. It had started to look and feel like one of those open air tourist bars on Hollywood Blvd.
But you didn't go there for the food or the drinks. You went there because the Formosa was woven into the fabric of Hollywood History. Or, as crime writer Denise Hamilton says, "when you're sitting in those red banquette booths and getting sloshed because everyone from Frank Sinatra's to Orson Welles' to Marilyn's fanny has warmed that exact leatherette and sipped from those exact highball glasses with the red maraschino cherry, and therein lies the magic."
But for the time being, you'll have to warm your fanny elsewhere, because the Formosa closed last week.
As Chris Nichols reports in LA Magazine, there is hope for a rehab:
“My goal is to find someone that wants to bring back the history,” said Gabe Kadosh, vice president of leasing firm Colliers International. “This is not going to turn into a Sharky’s or something." Kadosh has assembled a group of candidates who have rehabilitated historic buildings and crafted elaborate theme bars, including the Houston Brothers of La Descarga and No Vacancy, Jared Meisler and Sean MacPherson of the Pikey and Jones Hollywood, and Bobby Green, Dimitri Komarov and Dima Liberman of the 1933 Group, who recently restored the Highland Park Bowl and the Idle Hour. “Those are the kind of caliber of people I’m talking to,” said Kadosh. “They have a history and a nostalgic feel, and they can bring it back. I think these days people want an experience.”
But in the meantime, I met Denise outside the Formosa ...
... to talk about the Formosa's role as a cultural touchstone, a creative shortcut, and the inspiration so many have drawn from it ... like Curtis Hanson, who filmed this scene in "L.A. Confidential" there:
Denise says the Formosa was a Hollywood elite watering-hole, "Today if you want to see movie stars, they are cloistered away behind gates in Malibu or in restaurants where the hoi polloi can't get reservations." This is what made the Formosa so magical, she says. "The Formosa was one of these very old Hollywood eateries where it didn't cost a fortune, you didn't have to be famous to get in ... and you might see Cher, Bono, or Jack Nicholson."
The Formosa also appeared in the hit film musical "La La Land," with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, and Denise says "When you see that montage and you see the lit up neon sign. You don't have to say anything else. Everybody knows that is one of the quintessential, archetypal places."
Listen to the audio player for much more of our conversation.
Song of the Week: This Charming Man stumbles into a Dirty Old Town
Something about the opening riff of The Smiths' "This Charming Man," Off-Ramp's song of the week, has a way of making you want to grab a handful of flowers and unbutton your dress shirt just a bit further than normal.
The Sweet and Tender Hooligans - "This Charming Man"
This weekend, famed Smiths cover band the Sweet & Tender Hooligans are teaming up with Pogues's tribute group "Dirty Old Town" for a night of 80's reverie.
The S&TH's may be the greatest Smiths and Morrissey tribute group on the market, and they headline monthly shows throughout LA. Dirty Old Town bills themselves as a "sincere" tribute to the 80's Celtic Punk icons, The Pogues. The group used to do one tribute show a year but garnered so much attention, they began touring as a cover band.
The two groups are coming together Saturday at 8pm at The Observatory in Santa Ana for a night of 1980's reveling.
S&TH frontman Jose Maldonado also hosts SiriusXM show "Breakfast with the Smiths," discussing where the 80's group and Los Angeles culture meet. The band has gone on to satisfy Morrissey purists since their 1992 formation- and even get the big man himself on stage with them!
An alliance: Martin Luther King, Jr and Los Angeles Jews
(To mark the 44th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., here's a piece from the 2008 Off-Ramp archives.)
In 1965, during the height of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King gave a sermon at Temple Israel in Hollywood at the invitation of Rabbi Max Nussbaum. It was tape recorded, but forgotten in a pile of other recordings. The rabbi’s widow Ruth unearthed it more than a decade ago but the digital age has now let the Temple make King’s sermon public.
95-year-old Ruth Nussbaum says her husband, who was born in Eastern Europe, knew from his earliest days about the persecution of all minorities, so it was natural for King to speak at his temple.
Speaking to the congregation, King said, "Our destinies are tied together. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be."
The words ring true today.
Luther and LACMA: An amazing response from an Off-Ramp listener
To bring you up to date if you haven't been following the minor saga ... In a piece that aired at the end of November, Off-Ramp arts commentator Marc Haefele criticized the LA County Museum of Art for omitting mention of Martin Luther's anti-Semitism in its celebration of the Reformation.
The art is glorious, but the tone of the show uncomfortably exults the Reformation. ... For one thing, the religious battles that followed the Reformation killed off 40% of Germany’s population alone. ... For another, the great Martin Luther, simply by being the most prominent Anti-Semite of the 16th Century, inspired the centuries of German bigotry against Jewish people that culminated in Hitler.
On December 14, LACMA changed the exhibit's audio tour and that main didactic to say, in part:
This exhibition is a celebration of the Reformation and of its impact on European culture. Martin Luther was the key figure in the Reformation. His ideas and actions were marked by controversy, and his writings could be particularly virulent to groups beyond the Roman Catholic Church. Particularly unacceptable were his anti-Semitic feelings, which he expressed in several pamphlets. Although Lutheran churches have over the years distanced themselves from Luther's positions on the subject, there is no denying that Luther's anti-Semitism was used by the Nazis to foster their own.
While we don't think this is the biggest art story ever, it is a victory for a intelligent, nuanced art criticism, and I said as much in Off-Ramp's weekly email newsletter. And got this passionate, intelligent, nuanced reply, from the Rev. Dr. Tom Eggebeen, a retired Presbyterian minister, which I've only edited slightly, with permission:
Well, yes, and maybe some questions …
Luther had plenty of issues, especially toward the end of a most difficult life, beset with illness and depression, the death of two of his children, and the constant state of siege under which he lived since 1517 - an outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire - though safe in Wittenburg under the watchful eye of Elector Frederick.
From the tone of this note, it’s as if Luther was mostly a monster … I fear that this is the result of trying to impose upon him the sensibilities and paradigms of 2017 … which can only result in two things: 1) missing the whole point of the Reformation and the Renaissance and Luther’s role in setting his world free in ways that you and I can only dimly, if at all, imagine; 2) walking away with pride that we’ve scolded LACMA and now have set things right with the world.
And, for many folks reared in 20 Century Roman Catholicism, Luther was a monster, as were Catholics for many a Protestant.
Yes, Luther’s writing were marked with controversy, but so was the Renaissance as a whole. The debates of the Middle Ages, often limited by the power of the papacy, which along with various princes, suppressed freedom of thought and faith on every hand - the papacy held the threat of hell over everyone’s head, by denying the person the sacrament (excommunication) or denying it to an entire region as punishment (if they deemed the prince in violation of the church, and so the prince would relent under pressure from the people), and did so while raising huge sums of money to build lavish palaces and sustain a life style that both the likes of Erasmus and Luther came to despise, and so did much of the population, but what could they do.
Nor was Luther alone - preceded, as he was, by Huss and Wycliffe … their efforts were quickly lost amidst the vicious attack of the papacy … Luther, too, would have lost, if it were not for two things: 1) the printing press (movable type) and 2) the threat of “the Turks” pushing into Europe from the east and France in the west, distracting the Holy Roman Emperor, and causing the Emperor to rely upon the German princes, a number of whom were sympathetic to Luther, less for his religious beliefs, and more for his opposition to papal influence over Germany. These princes offered their help to Charles in exchange for their local freedom.
But it wasn’t just political - all along the way, Luther, who received a first-rate education, was counseled by brilliant men, many of whom came to stand with him … he wasn't alone, any more than Martin Luther King, Jr., was alone in his struggle for Civil Rights.
To suggest that 40% of Europe’s death toll in the wars that followed was the result of Luther alone is ludicrous … the wars of Europe were bitter and bloody affairs, and no doubt they would have found plenty of reasons to keep on killing one another.
Nor did it birth the original scurrilous mass media … that was already well in place in the Western World - this was opponents labeled one another … it was, however, the printing press that enabled the wide-spread dissemination of such ideas.
Anti-semitism has its roots, not in Luther, but in Western Christianity for a thousand years before the Reformation - but it was in Spain where the fateful shift was made from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism (1492) … after large numbers of Jews, under threat of death, converted to Christianity, but that still wasn’t enough for the church; after this point in time, then, it no longer about religion, but about blood.
Marc Haefele’s article is rather well balanced ... but I think your email note is a bit heavy handed on the matter. Yes, if LACMA failed to mention such things, that’s an oversight that needs to be corrected. But if folks fail to grasp Luther’s genius, and the brilliance of those who lived with him in the struggle to free Germany from the clutches of Rome and religious superstition, then the exhibit will have truly failed. It’s not just about the art, but the ideas that drove that art to give expression to human longing.
It’s our task to understand history, neither whitewashing it nor getting uppity about it. They did their best, and it's our task to be both encouraged by Luther’s courage and humbled by his frailties and his errors.
And I quite agree with the curator’s assessment - the Reformation changed the world for the better … nothing is pure and clean … but the Reformation and the Renaissance brought about the modern world, with all of its ills, certainly, and all of its scientific and political achievements.
BTW, some of my energy on this comes from my current reading on a new bio of Luther, "Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer."
Thanks.
Keep up the good work.
Happy New Year.