The annotated H.P. Lovecraft ... France's proud history of satire ... Oscar nods at the chosen few ... the late Taylor Negron loved Lucy
Roll out the barrel: First look inside restored Idle Hour Cafe, historic North Hollywood gem
It's called "programmatic architecture" — a building that looks like something other than a building — and examples have been common around Southern California: the Brown Derby, the giant tamale on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A., and in North Hollywood, a giant barrel.
The Idle Hour Cafe is at 4824 Vineland Avenue, and you can see it to the left in this historic photo. It was built of cedar, and according to the L.A. Public Library, was commissioned in 1941 by Universal Studios film tech Michael D. Connolly and built by Silver Lake engineer George F. Fordyk.
(Undated photo from the L.A. Public Library's Valley Times Collection)
The Idle Hour was eventually turned into a flamenco venue called La Cana — before owner Dolores Fernandez closed it in 1984 and just started living in it. When she died, the county acquired the property, and that's where L.A. historian and L.A. Magazine writer Chris Nichols comes in:
I told the story of the barrel to some folks that were experts at creating colorful and theatrical dining and drinking spots in the hope that they could breathe new life into this landmark. Bigfoot Lodge owner Bobby Green was captivated by the beauty of the barrel and signed on. — Los Angeles Magazine, 2011
In 2011, the building was sold at auction to Green and his 1933 Group, which runs seven bars across Los Angeles, including the Bigfoots West and East, Thirsty Crow, Harlow, La Cuevita and Oldfield's. $1.4 million later, Green says, and the Idle Hour Cafe will reopen in mid-February. As you can see in KPCC photographer Maya Sugarman's photos, it's been lovingly rebuilt, restored and reimagined because very few original elements remained, and the structure was not up to code.
The 1933 Group's website says it wants to transport its customers "to another era, if only for the night," and with the Idle Hour, that era will be a Los Angeles when people thought it was cool to build a bar that looked like a barrel. Green tells us the menu will be classic American, and the many beverage taps will feature 20 beers and many draft cocktails — whiskey-based, in keeping with the barrel theme. And in back, you can throw a small party in another piece of programmatic architecture: a giant dog that eerily resembles Green's pet bulldog.
You may have seen the movie 'Selma,' but this Santa Monica woman was really there
Susan Cloke looks like what she is: a Santa Monica woman involved in her community, a columnist for the Santa Monica Mirror, a mom. But this unassuming person was part of one of the most dangerous and successful civil rights efforts in history, which is dramatized in the Oscar-nominated film "Selma."
Cloke was in college in San Francisco when she started raising money for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Then, when she was just 18, SNCC asked her to go to Selma, Ala., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others were working to register blacks to vote.
Luckily for her safety, her group arrived after Bloody Sunday, when police attacked marchers on the Pettus Bridge.
WATCH the video that shocked the nation: Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge
After being turned back one time, and jailed overnight, the march to Montgomery began in earnest.
It was a different world for Cloke. "I grew up in Minnesota, I was treated well by teachers, and policemen were our friends. I went out into the world thinking, 'Well of course people will be nice to me.'"
Her understanding of the horrors of Jim Crow grew in earnest when she started driving across the country to Selma with other volunteers. People in the South took one look at them and their California license plate and knew what they were doing and where they were going. They couldn't eat in restaurants, couldn't get a room in a motel — so they slept and ate in the car.
On the march to Montgomery, "I would alternate between marching and driving a SNCC radio car. There was no security on this march. So SNCC had radio cars, and we went on a farm road parallel to the highway, looking out for danger coming toward the marchers."
The march itself was not marred by violence, and Cloke says she wasn't really scared until she and SNCC workers — four black men — drove back to Selma. On the way, they were stopped by police and taken to a spot hidden from the main road. For what happens next, and to hear about Cloke's encounters with Dr. King, listen to the whole interview on this page.
But as a takeaway for everyday life, here's a lesson from Dr. King that Cloke wrote about in the Santa Monica Mirror:
It was at the church [in Selma] that I first heard Rev. King speak. I have long remembered, and thought about a particular speech, which I can’t find and so this is not an exact quote, but what he said, much more eloquently than I can, was, “Morality is like a muscle. If you don’t use it to make small decisions then, when you need it, it won’t be strong enough to do what needs to be done.” —Susan Cloke, Santa Monica Mirror
Editor's Note: In our audio interview, Susan Cloke says SNCC would have contacted U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy if there was violence along the march route. She misspoke: Kennedy was not A.G. at the time of the march.
Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film: 'Big Hero 6'
UPDATE 1/15/2015: Disney's "Big Hero 6" is nominated for Best Animated Film Oscar. Here's our Off-Ramp interview with two of the people who helped make it a hit.
Off-Ramp animation expert Charles Solomon goes to Disney to talk about the look of the Disney animated blockbuster "Big Hero 6" with production designer Paul Felix and Scott Watanabe, art director, environments.
"John (Lasseter) believes your story's going to change over the course of the years it takes to do these movies. But your world is something you're going to live with the whole time." — Director Don Hall, LA Times
Virtually every review of Disney’s animated hit "Big Hero 6" — which has brought in $112 million domestic and $148 million worldwide through this weekend — praises the imaginary city where the story unfolds: San Fransokyo, which blends famous San Francisco landmarks with elements of Tokyo's iconic skyline into a metropolis that feels both familiar and alien:
(Image: Disney)
Two of the artists most responsible for that look are production designer Paul Felix and Scott Watanabe, art director, environments. Felix was production designer on "Lilo & Stitch" and "The Emperor's New Groove," but his credits go back to the 1980s, when he did storyboard cleanup on "ALF." "Big Hero 6" is Watanabe's first film as art director.
RELATED: Meet Disney and "Fat Albert" animator Floyd Norman
First, why combine Tokyo and San Francisco?
"Initially," Watanabe says, " we wanted to have the freedom to create a new environment (not) tied down to reality, plus I think everybody just thinks it's cool."
"I think, too," Felix says, "Marvel (which originated the characters) wanted to make sure that this film was distinct from the Marvel Universe, so you wouldn't expect Iron Man to drop in, so it had to become our own story."
The team blended two very different cities. Says Solomon, "I wouldn't say Tokyo is oppressive, but it's kind of omnipresent, whereas in San Francisco you can look up at the sky." Felix says they had a graphic designer working for two years just to capture the signage needed. To get the quality of light right, Felix says they photographed from atop a skyscraper from dawn to dusk. And Watanabe recounts how, during the production, he'd joke "put a roof on it," when they tried to make a San Francisco icon look more Japanese, referring to iconic Japanese-style roofs.
(Image: Disney)
For the interiors, the two say it was essential to get the clutter right. It was a real challenge," says Felix, "to try to populate those sets with enough detail to conform with some of the research we saw." They took trips to robotics labs at Carnegie-Mellon and MIT, "and that clutter is there." Watanabe says he took inspiration from his Disney colleagues, many of whom have accumulated layers of mementos in their work spaces, and from home: "Just visiting my Japanese grandparents' homes, and they have clutter everywhere!"
Watanabe says one of the concepts animators developed was to let the clutter grow throughout the film, like plants, "Which worked out well for some things," Felix interjects, but in some scenes, "it started looking very much like cat or rat poop, so we had to dial back on where you actually see it."
Felix says their job is to create environments that give context to the characters, to make the experience richer and more immersive. "You're world-building from scratch," says Watanabe, "and that could come off as really cheap if you don't a true-to-life job."
Easter Egg for KPCC junkies: Did Rabe find a Lasseter/Miyazaki Easter egg in some early "Big Hero 6" art? Check out our photo slideshow.
HP Lovecraft: Horrible man, great writer, now collected in annotated edition
"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests." — HP Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," 1931
He wrote like nobody before him, and no one since. Stephen King called him “the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” He was HP Lovecraft, whose works are now collected and curated by scholar Leslie Klinger in "The New Annotated HP Lovecraft," with an introduction by Alan Moore.
“He was very much a stylist, a craftsman, and I think writers like Neil Gaiman, Robert Bloch, Clive Barker and Dean Koontz — they all absorbed that and realized that’s how you write scary stuff," says Klinger. "You don’t start with something that has blood and gore. You write an atmosphere. You build it up.”
While he was alive, Lovecraft was unknown and made very little money from his writing. He had a few stories published before he died at the age of 46, but not much else. “He had only a single book published in his lifetime,” says Klinger. “He was clearly a commercial failure and sort of the quintessential starving artist.”
Now, Lovecraft is regarded as one of the most important horror writers of the twentieth century. Authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and Dean Koontz name him as an influence. But there’s a side to Lovecraft that’s hard for fans to ignore: he was a horrible bigot.
“He liked the idea that Germany should be a single race nation,” says Klinger. “I don’t think he was in favor of genocide, but he’d like to be able to have a country where all you had to see was white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from Providence.”
Klinger says that Lovecraft’s bigotry isn’t obvious in most of his work, but if you dig deep enough, you can see how it shapes his stories.
“There isn’t overt anti-semitism or racism in 99 percent of the stories,” says Klinger. “But it also empowers the stories. His stories are completely about outsiders - humans, that are the minority in the galaxy - so I think that if you take away that terrible, deluded racism and bigotry from his personality, you’d also take away the guts of his stories.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Lovecraft's age at the time of his death. KPCC regrets the error.
Oscars 2015: Is 'Whiplash' really an adaptation?
Academy Award nominations were announced this past Thursday, including a few for "Whiplash" — the psychological thriller about a jazz student and his teacher. On top of being included in the Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor categories, the Academy nominated "Whiplash" for Best Adapted Screenplay.
But Damian Chazelle, the film's writer and director, insists the screenplay is original, and based on his real-life experience in music school. So where does the confusion come in?
Pete Hammond, awards columnist for Deadline, says it all starts with a short film made by the same team before "Whiplash" had secured enough funding to make it a feature. "It was a short film only because they were looking for financing to make the movie in the first place," says Hammond. "So they took an 18-minute scene from the script and shot it."
The short film did well — so well it won a prize in the 2012 Sundance film festival. The Academy argues that since the short film came out first, "Whiplash" has to be an adaptation.
Not everyone agrees with the definition. The Writers Guild Awards and the British Academy both nominated "Whiplash" for best original screenplay. "I was shocked, like a lot of people were," Hammond adds.
With the nominations set and announced, will the film's category affect its chances at winning an award for its script? Hammond says it might. "It might get some resentment from some people in the Academy. And should it win, it's a classic example of something that should really have an asterisk next to it."
Charlie Hebdo: French people — and their leaders — have long taken their satire seriously
Long before the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks, Paris was a place where satire — especially satirical cartoons — has been taken very seriously, both by its people and their leaders.
In 1726, Voltaire, the author of the satirical novella "Candide," who had already been sent to the Bastille and exiled from Paris three times for his writings, was beaten by thugs hired by Chevalier de Rohan, a nobleman he’d mocked. The great writer had changed his name from Arouet to Voltaire, prompting Rohan to ask him, "Monsieur de Voltaire, Monsieur Arouet, exactly what is your name?" To which he’d replied, "I myself do not bear a great name, but I know how to honor the one I carry."
(Caption: Voltaire, at 70)
In some versions of the story, Rohan tells his toughs not to strike Voltaire’s head, “as something good may yet come out of it,” but Rohan wasn’t that clever.
In 1832, Honoré Daumier, “the Michelangelo of caricature,” was fined and jailed for a caricature of King Louis Philippe. As a young man, Daumier began working at La Caricature, a satirical magazine run by Charles Philipon and his brother-in-law Gabriel Aubert.
Daumier quickly developed a powerful, personal drawing style, which he used to ridicule the follies of the bourgeoisie and the corruption and ineptitude of the restored Bourbon monarchy.
At the time, King Louis Philippe received more than 18 million francs a year, paid with taxes levied on the citizens of France. Daumier drew the indolent “Citizen King” as Gargantua, a giant being fed great sacks of money that the tattered poor of Paris are compelled to fill.
As part of their escalating campaign against the press, the Paris police seized all the copies they could find of “Gargantua” and the original lithograph stone. When Philipon published an article in the La Caricature ridiculing the decision to censor Daumier’s picture, he, Aubert, and Daumier were tried, convicted, fined 500 francs — plus legal fees — and sentenced to six months in prison. That didn’t stop the satirists. It didn’t even slow them up: by 1834, the offices of La Caricature had been raided 27 times.
Two years later, Daumier produced the lithograph, “Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834,” depicting the butchered victims of a massacre in that street during the riots of 1834.
“Rue Transnonain" was drawn for a special publication created to promote freedom of the press. Once again, the police seized all the copies they could find and the litho stones.
But it was pointless, as are all attacks on cartoonists, satirists, and other creators. While artists are flesh and blood and can be beaten, imprisoned and even murdered, their work cannot. So, centuries later, Rohan is largely forgotten; Louis Philippe is a minor figure in French history courses. But Voltaire and Daumier are remembered and honored. And “Garganuta” and “Rue Transnonain” are proudly displayed in the collections of major museums.
Remembering Taylor Negron and Lucille Ball
UPDATE 1/12/15: Performer Taylor Negron died Saturday of cancer at the age of 57. In 2007, he recorded this story, about Lucille Ball giving acting and life lessons, for Off-Ramp.
Mystery Pier Books is West Hollywood's bookseller to the stars
Mystery Pier is a book lover's dream. There's an 1876 copy of "Leaves of Grass" signed by Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Princeton yearbook, and a copy of "Hell House" autographed by "Twilight Zone" writer -- and former customer -- Richard Matheson.
Owner Harvey Jason, who's been running Mystery Pier in West Hollywood for 16 years, says books can be big business:
Books, which a lot of people don't realize, books escalate at a much more rapid rate than art. Books escalate quicker than paintings do... These things escalate like crazy. 'Catcher in the Rye,' you could've gotten a good 'Catcher' ten years ago for $3,000. We just sold a perfect copy for $20,000.
Harvey's business partner is his son Louis, who says their business isn't as simple as just selling old books: "The only value is in first edition, first printing, and that's crucial."
Harvey says the value of a book doesn't always lie in its age. Sometimes, they turn big profits on freshly printed books, like the time they unknowingly came across a signed Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling) while they were in London.
Harvey was an actor who worked steadily from the original "Batman" TV series to "Jurassic Park" to "Star Trek." But then something snapped:
It was always a pipe dream. I remember walking down the street on the backlot of Universal with the director of this picture. And I said to the director, 'Steve' -- it was Steven Spielberg -- and I said 'Steven, you know what, when we wrap this picture, it's four months, and I'm in the book business.' He laughed and said, 'You can't do that, you're one of the stars of this movie.' And I said I've had it. I've had it with the egos, I've had it with the whole business. I never want to do this again, I really don't. Not long thereafter we opened the shop.
Even though Harvey isn't in the movie business anymore, his store feels like the set for a magical bookshop, with priceless books bursting out of glass cases, teetering on the edges of wooden tables or even stacked on the floor. Set off the Sunset Strip by way of a narrow passageway, Mystery Pier's location in an unassuming bungalow makes it a favorite spot for paparazzi-wary celebrities with a taste for the finest in antiquarian books and literature-related collectibles.
Harvey says he's sold books and collectibles to Natalie Portman, Flea, Guillermo del Toro, Patti Smith, and many other celebrities. But it's still the books that steal the show at Mystery Pier. Harvey says they keep getting approached to make a Mystery Pier reality TV show. But that's not really their style.
"We're just quite happy being the humble booksellers and that's fine, that's great," Harvey says.
Palm Springs Film Fest: Chaz Ebert on Life with Roger and Ebertfest
The late film critic Roger Ebert loved film festivals so much he created one of his own--the Ebertfest, which is still held each April at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign IL. Off-Ramp contributor R. H. Greene saw this side of Ebert's personality up close when he worked with Ebert at the Sundance Film Festival in both 2000 and 2001. This week, as he covers the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Greene has been thinking about Ebert a lot.
"The thing that to me is going to stand the test of time is what Roger said about movies being a machine that generates empathy. It allows us to put ourselves in someone else's shoes for two hours. That is his legacy to me, not so much his writing about movies, but the underlying reason for his love of movies is that they helped you develop compassion for other people."
-- Chaz Ebert on her late husband, the film critic and fan, Roger Ebert
The Palm Springs International Film Festival is a bustling place, full of stars and premieres, Oscar hopefuls and first-time filmmakers. A good time, even when you're haunted by a ghost. I never go to a film festival without thinking of Roger Ebert. I worked Sundance with Roger twice--once as a web producer, and a second time as his TV cameraman. He was memorable and intellectually stimulating company.
Roger was ubiquitous at places like Sundance -- walking the streets, greeting his fans, posing for selfies long before they had a name. Festivals seemed to activate the newspaperman in Roger, and he loved the action. He filed copy, broke stories, took his own photos. You saw him everywhere.
Roger's gone now, but the robust health of the festival circuit -- it's importance as a pathway for difficult and visionary movie product -- is a big part of his legacy. Roger's widow Chaz continues to carry that torch. She was at Palm Springs this year ... as a participant not an onlooker. It's almost the end of her year-long promotional run for "Life Itself," director Steve James' moving chronicle of Roger's life and death.
Official trailer for "Life Itself"
For those who know Roger as a public intellectual, the film's intimate glimpse of his life with Chaz is a revelation. It was clearly a great romance, the kind everybody hopes for and few achieve. It's tempting to call theirs a kind of movie love. But "Life Itself" unflinchingly shows it was realer than that. Real as cancer. As real as the grave. "Life Itself" is on the shortlist for this year's documentary Oscar. Chaz admits she thinks about the prospect of a nomination.
The Eberts loved film festivals so much they created one of their own. It used to be the Overlooked Film Festival. It's Ebertfest now. And it's in its 17th year. As Chaz describes it, it was a place where Roger was very much alive.
"At Ebertfest, Roger used to introduce every single film, and after it was over, he'd go onstage, conduct the Q & A, and after watching the films all day with the filmmakers, he would take them out to Steak and Shake at the end of the evening, and we'd be out til 2 in the morning," said Chaz. "He was an only child, and he loved being surrounded by family."
Ebertfest endures. And Roger -- for now at least -- is still here too, working the circuit, if from the other side of the movie screen.
Patt Morrison on Jerry Brown's fourth term as California governor
He’s been in public office for 30 years, and in the public eye even longer.
At the age of 76, he is starting his fourth term as California’s governor — older, even, than Ronald Reagan when he entered his final term as president.
And California’s still trying to figure out the puzzle that is Jerry Brown.
This man, who was a pallbearer at Cesar Chavez’s funeral and a volunteer with Mother Teresa, is also as wily a politician as they come. His fellow Democrats have called him selfish, self-absorbed, self-serving. Ten years ago, Brown admitted, “I’ve been in office and I’ve been out of office, and if I were to choose, I’d rather be in office.”
Brown is the only man who ever has been and now ever can be elected to four terms as California governor. What is it he wants?
Closure? Legacy? Maybe doing one better than his dad, a two-term governor of California?
Pat Brown built the state water system — Jerry Brown faces an epochal drought. The father governed in fat times, the son in lean times. As a family friend once said, the father reaches out — the son reaches in.
And yet Jerry Brown conveys a confident offhandedness that’s appealed to California voters, as if he could take the job or leave it. But he’s cultivated those symbols: the pinchpenny Democrat, the man who, 40 years ago, stopped the official giveaway of free briefcases to civil servants to end “the blizzard of paperwork.”
Mm-hmm, that worked.
He gets away with remarks like accusing select legislators of believing that “taxes are like some kind of sexually transmitted disease.” He didn’t get married until he was old enough for Social Security. He throws out remarks in Latin, quotes an Irish poet and a French philosopher in the same speech, and if he’s ever kissed a baby on the campaign trail or hugged a disaster victim, I can’t remember it.
He’s run for president three times, and the Beltway pundits would dearly love it if he ran again. But there’s plenty for him to do here:
He plans to end his governorship as he began it — as an environmental warrior. Brown’s fourth inaugural speech was about putting the brakes on climate change, about ending greenhouse gas emissions, maybe one solar rooftop at a time. Forty years ago, in his first term, he devised a tax incentive for solar rooftops.
And Brown says he also intends to see that high-speed rail actually comes to pass. The day after his fourth inaugural, he went to Fresno for the groundbreaking.
Maybe he’ll still be around when it’s finished, to drive in the 21st century’s Golden State golden spike. I wouldn’t put it past him.
Cameroon's Pascale Tayou 'coaxes poetry' out of mundane objects at Fowler Museum exhibit
I went to an art exhibit at UCLA’s Fowler Museum the other day, and the first piece that really grabbed me was a wall of over 500 prefab, blue-gray birdhouses, separated by wads of straw. Sometimes they tweet recorded bird calls, sometimes they play the sounds of the human voices in the world’s favelas.
The exhibit is called World Share, and it’s the nation-state of artist Pascale Marthine Tayou. The piece with the birdhouses is called “Favelas,” a crowded habitat randomly stacked much like Moishe Safti’s 1967 Montreal Worlds Fair apartments, only for birds.
We are all in this world together, he’s saying: birds and people, audible, invisible. Both free and tied to the earth. It’s a willful, wistful and marvelously artistic accumulation of the world’s discards, animated by an African creator spirit.
Fowler Curator Gemma Rodrigues told me how the show happened: A few days before the opening, the cargo container containing the exhibit had not yet arrived in LA. So Tayou, with the help of the Fowler staff, decided to create a new show of art made from scratch, based on humble and locally available materials you might find at a hardware store, trash bin or recycling center. Tayou being a great improviser and inspirer, the project went quickly, and some of the show’s most remarkable and sizeable installations were thus made in LA. But then the container arrived just before the opening. So half the show is old Tayou, and half brand new works, locally sourced, never seen before.
Tayou considers himself a world artist, a cosmopolitan nomad, with so many influences that it’s hard to count them. But first, there is his native central African nation of Cameroon, one of ultra-diverse Africa’s most diverse countries.
(Pascale Marthine Tayou/UCLA Fowler Museum)
You see this influence most strongly in his tumescent blown glass sculptures that resemble strongly Cameroonian folk statuary, but they’re also festooned with all sorts of things: feathers, plastic toy snakes, wires, even flattened beer cans. Then there are the animals, particularly the birds that recur in his work. “A powerful metaphor for freedom,” Rodrigues says.
And then there is the art from all the waste materials that get tossed out by our transnational world, then fall from the rich nations into the poor ones ... everything from old razor blades and pizza boxes to the white plastic pipe that circles the gallery in a convoluted time line, indicating man’s abuse of the world’s resources.
Rodrigues says Tayou takes the most mundane humble objects and puts them together in utterly unexpected ways. “He coaxes the poetry out of them,’’ she says.
Or the sorry truth. I was struck by the common bicycles, stacked with almost two stories of tethered cardboard boxes. That’s the way things get moved around in Cameroon. But the overburdened cycle sculptures also show the way developed nations lay huge burdens on the peoples of Earth’s developing lands.
It’s a theme that emerges in Tayou’s poetry:
Yesterday,
After a long and difficult routine battle,
The strongest prevailed over the weakest,
The same places were still in hell and the keys to paradise have not changed pockets.
World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou, is at the Fowler Museum through Mar. 1, 2015.