We spend a few minutes in the Idle Hour; talk bars with atmosphere with 1933 Group's Bobby Green; talk judges' robes with Kevin's dad; and meet radical quilters.
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.
See one of the 'greatest marine painters' at Pasadena Museum of California Art
At the center of his work was the sea. Armin Hansen was one of greatest marine painters ever born in this state. But while most of his turbulent seascapes were singular and memorable, it was his portrayals of the men who worked on the oceans off Monterey that brought him lasting fame.
It’s intriguing that Hansen was putting on canvas and paper an impressionistic rendering of the same sort of people his contemporary, John Steinbeck, was then describing in his literature. Gatherings of work-aged men in shabby hats with red sunburnt noses, who bear their histories in their faces, gray-blue figures shouldering their oars against a cloudy sky as they slog to work. And though later in life he dressed like a hunting squire in tweeds, vest, and tie whenever he went out into the Central Coast sunlight to paint these subjects, they must have known he had shared their life, working as a deck hand on a North Sea trawler in the years before World War One.
(Armin Hansen on a Monterey beach, n.d. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of California Views Photo Archive, copyright/courtesy Pomegranate Communications)
Nearly 100 of Hansen’s pictures and other works are on display at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in a show called the Artful Voyage. For decades before his death in 1957, Hansen worked and taught in Monterey and Carmel. While he was appreciated by a broad public and revered by his students as one of the greatest art teachers in the West, Armin seems to have lived through prolonged rough times after the Great Crash of 1929. He made some of his family’s own furniture, including a fine dining room table on display at the show, but complained that they ate mostly “beans and bread” off of it. He may even have been self-conscious about not living up to the commercial success of his late father, Herman Hansen, a Danish immigrant who in the 1870s and 1880s established himself as a famous illustrator, as well one of America’s pioneer painters of the Cowboy West.
The San Francisco-based Herman had taught his son to paint, and sent him to study art in Munich, as though foreseeing his son’s work might eventually overshadow his own. Indeed it does: the younger Hansen’s work overflows with Impressionist colors that give it a life and emotional depth that even his father’s frontier action paintings, with their mid-1800s formality, lacked.
Armin Hansen’s seascapes vibrate with their deep blues and frothy beige grays. Oddly, he seems mostly to favor as subjects the sailing ships of the century before his—rust-streaked, weather-beaten square-riggers from the end of the sailing era, scudding sedately into the present. In contrast, most of his shipwreck paintings are of modern vessels, hopelessly ground ashore on the Monterey coast, sometimes surveyed from the shore by landsmen spectators whom he terms “Storm Birds.”
Exhibit curator Scott Shields suggests Armin Hansen’s financial hardships inclined him toward new directions, such as his midlife still lifes. Perhaps, but I am more impressed with his turn towards his father’s finest work with his wonderful rodeo tableaus. His riders and horses can be bright splotches of color, or simply tan manifestations of the dust of the Salinas arena, all in impressionist precision.
(Armin Hansen, Cowboy Sport. Monterey Museum of Art. Gift of Jane and Justin Dart. Image protected by copyright and courtesy Pomegranate Communications)
His father would have been proud. “Like me,” old Herman Hansen might have said, “only so much better.”
Armin Hansen: The Artful Voyage is at the Pasadena Museum of California Art through May 31. 490 East Union Street, Pasadena, CA 91101
What 2 veterans think about 'American Sniper' and war in the movies
Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper" is breaking box office records, but it's also getting Americans to talk about how Hollywood portrays the military. We wanted to hear what people who have actually been to war think, so we sent Off-Ramp contributor Robert Garrova to his local American Legion - Post 280 in East Pasadena.
Erik Quiros served with the Unite States Army in Iraq. He says Hollywood's portrayal of the military often mirrors society's view of war.
"In this latest rendition of Chris Kyle and American Sniper I've been hearing that he's an American hero. And people are saying things to the contrary and that kind of bothers me when I hear that."
Quiros says he doesn't really agree with pegging "American Sniper" as a propaganda film, as some have chosen to do. "It can't be a propaganda film because it shows the negative consequences of being a veteran," he says. "I feel that any movie that essentially shows a consequence to combat and to war really does a good job."
Mark Castanon served 13 years in the active duty army, with two tours in Iraq and one tour in Afghanistan. "You gotta understand Hollywood," he says. "Hollywood's all about entertainment value, so I take what Hollywood puts out about the military with a grain of salt."
Castanon says he hasn't seen a movie that accurately portrays the experience he had in Iraq, but he agrees everyone's time there was different. "But I think everyone will agree, when you're out there, it's not about politics, it's not about anything else. It's about your brothers and sisters to your left and your right."
Castanon believes that many people who comment on war in movies have never served, so it would be hard for them to fully understand what he and his fellow soldiers went through. "One thing we did fight for, we fight for the Constitution, so I happily give everyone the right to say whatever they want, and I have the right to not listen," Castanon says. "That's the best thing about America right?"
The art of finding art for TV shows
Have you ever been watching your favorite TV show and suddenly notice the painting hanging in the suspect’s home, and you think, "Huh, pretty good taste for a serial killer, I wonder where that came from?"
It happens more than you think, and thanks to Hollywood’s fear of lawsuits, artists and galleries are starting to cash in.
“Every week we have a police station, morgue, no art there…”
Set Decorator KC Fox is walking the set of "Criminal Minds." Near the back there’s a massive wall covered in art — hundreds of paintings and photos her team will use to decorate the show’s fake offices and homes this season. All of it cleared for use on the show.
(Every piece of art you can see on the wall in "Criminal Minds," like the artwork circled in this screenshot, has been cleared for use on TV.)
“You used to be able to go to thrift stores, get paint by numbers or macaroni art,” says the industry veteran. “Now unless I know the provenance, I can’t use it.”
What changed the way Fox and others had to do their jobs was a movie called "The Devil’s Advocate." The story goes that the people behind that film wanted to use a big bas-relief sculpture for Satan’s office. The artist said no, so the studio just went out and made one — which the artist said was a little too similar to his. Cue the lawyers.
There are rumors of a million-dollar settlement, but what for sure happened was a newfound insistence that everything you see on TV or in the movies be cleared, licensed and not sueable-over.
“If it’s on TV or the theater or possibly your phone, someone’s looking for it… and lawyers are after their clients' share,” says Fox.
Valda Lake runs the Wallspace gallery on La Brea. She estimates one-third of her business is renting or selling to Hollywood productions and commercials, which in turn leads to viewers tracking down her and the artists she represents.
“One man from the TV show 'Mad Men,' he had tracked down the artist, he was calling, emailing all the way from Germany,” says Lake. “It’s smart of an artist to think of this as a business, make the work work for you.”
One of her artists, who goes by "Muncho 1929," has sold or rented to so many shows and commercials it’s tough for him to remember. “For me, as an artist, I like ... more people to see my work, other than a gallery or even a mural on the street.”
When asked if he’s ever had any second thoughts about being on TV, he says he trusts his gallery will never put his work on a show that goes against his beliefs.
Galleries normally take around half of the sale price of an artwork. With rentals, the split can go as high as 75/25, with the gallery taking the big share. There’s also a market for kids art — some of which is done by children, but a lot is cut and glued together by enterprising adults.
It can all make for some strange bedfellows. According to the Set Dresser’s Society, what’s the number one show that has people emailing wondering where they can buy the art they see?
"Two and a Half Men."
(Art is featured prominently in many scenes in "Two and a Half Men")
Fox says she has been turned down by some who feel TV would be beneath them, including her artist neighbor. But for more and more artists who have grown up seeing their screens as just as valid as any gallery wall, it’s an opportunity too good — and lucrative — to pass up.
Men who quilt: Sci-fi scenes and cement blocks
We make a lot of assumptions about quilts — that they're not art, that only women make them. The Craft & Folk Art Museum's answer to these outdated ideas is an exhibition featuring the work of male quilters. It’s called “Man-Made: Contemporary Male Quilters” and it’s a far cry from your grandma’s sewing circle.
“We wanted men who really make quilts as part of their main practice,” says Suzanne Isken, the exhibition’s curator and the executive director of the Craft & Folk Art Museum. “They identify as quilters. Not all of them only quilt, but quilting is something that they come by because they’re serious quilters."
The eight men featured in the exhibition quilt not just professionally, but as artists. Isken says they have a long history of female quilters — who turned a domestic chore into art — to thank for this.
“If it was such a chore, then why did women spend so much time making it harder and harder to do? The patterns become more and more intricate, and more and more challenging,” says Isken. “So, in fact, men can take it on now because women really elevated it into an art form.”
And this history comes across in most of the quilters’ work. Most of them learned to quilt from a woman — either a family member or a mentor — and say that gender plays a role in their work.
“We asked the quilters themselves, ‘Does being a male quilter really affect your work?’ and most of them said, ‘Yes, definitely,’” says Isken.
Some of the artists address their gender by quilting typically masculine imagery. Ben Venom’s quilts evoke motorcycle gangs and heavy metal. Jimmy McBride quilts sci-fi scenes based on Hubble telescope images.
(Jimmy McBride, Phobos V2, 2010, handmade and hand-and-machine quilted, hand-embroidered, 48” x 48”. Courtesy of the artist.)
Others use the materials and techniques they quilt with as an expression of their gender. Joel Otterson says he asked himself, “How would a man make a quilt?” And his answer was a cement “quilt.”
(Joel Otterson, The Garden Floor (Concrete Crazy Quilt), 2002 - 2012, glazed ceramic, stone, marble, and concrete, 87 !” x 87” overall (20 "” each panel). Courtesy of the artist and Maloney Fine Art, Los Angeles.)
Isken says many of these quilters struggle with skepticism that their quilts are in fact art.
“Joe Cunningham tells a story of going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and seeing Rauschenberg’s ‘Bed’ on the wall. And apparently when he went, there was a label at the time that said something about Rauschenberg elevating the ‘humble quilt’ into an artwork through the painting, and that was always offensive to him,” says Isken. “A quilt is a work of art.”
(Joe Cunningham, Some Dumb Old Painting, 2013, machine pieced, appliquéd, and quilted cotton fabric and batting, 71” x 69”. Courtesy of the artist.)
An opening reception for "Man-Made: Contemporary Male Quilters" will be held on Jan. 24 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., and the exhibition will run until May 3rd. Visit the Craft & Folk Art Museum’s website for more information.
Where do judges get their robes? A factory in Chatsworth, usually
This month, 27 new judges have been sworn into state courts all across California. The newly elected jurists raised their right hand, were given assignments to courtrooms, and — for the first time — donned their robes. But where do the robes come from? Turns out, my dad had the answer.
After over 30 years working as a prosecutor in Orange County, my dad got a new job. It took years of planning, fundraising, the occasional family fight and dozens of community meetings, but on June 3, 2014, Jeffrey Malcolm Ferguson was elected a superior court judge in Orange County, California.
"I was getting close to retiring, but I'm not prepared to retire," he said. "And the law has been my life, so I decided one of the most interesting things would be to become a judge, and take a different seat in the same courtroom that I've spent the last 31 years in."
At 64, my Dad became the first person in my family to run and get elected to public office.
And when you're elected judge, the state doesn't just hand you a courtroom and a gavel. There are orientations and classes (most of them in San Francisco), ceremonies and financial affairs to get in order.
And then there's the robe — a custom-made, $324 garment paid for out of pocket. Judges buy one robe at a time, generally, and the measurement details get more specific than you might think. I met my dad a few weeks ago when he was being fitted for the robe at home.
"These little factors, actually make a difference in the comfort level," he said. "You're not just standing in it, you're sitting in it all day. And you're sweeping your arms around the bench — gesticulating, I imagine."
Like most local judges' robes, my dad's came from Academic Apparel in Chatsworth. They do robes of all kinds: judicial robes, choir robes and, like the name implies, graduation robes. The company has contracts with about a third of LAUSD schools.
Academic is the only business of its kind in Los Angeles. It employs a little over two dozen people and has been in business for almost 70 years. Evelyn Cronan co-owns Academic. She said my dad's robe might look a little like the one I wore at graduation — but there's a world of difference between the two.
Whereas most graduation gowns come to Academic from China, the Cronan family makes their judicial robes from scratch. It starts out as a giant sheet of plain back fabric that gets measured, cut, sewn, pleated and measured — over and over again until it looks perfect. The process takes an entire day.
Academic manufactures robes for judges all over the place — all sizes, shapes and even colors. Judges sometimes order pink, purple and green robes, where those kinds of robes are allowed.
Special requests usually aren't a problem: extra pockets, a gun holster... a magician once asked for a rabbit pocket. "That was probably the most unusual, a rabbit," said Cronan. "How big does an opening have to be for a rabbit?"
A bulletproof vest company once approached Academic about making bulletproof judges robes — none have been made, but Academic remains interested.
They've designed robes for Judge Judy (she's ordered about 10), almost every other TV judge, and remember the OJ Simpson trial? Judge Lance Ito wore an Academic robe — almost giving the company its big break on a major network TV show.
"When they had the trial, the OJ trial, they were looking for stories on anything they could. So they were gonna do a story on Judge Ito's robe," said Cronan. "They came in here and filmed everything and interviewed us, filmed everything — it would've been our big moment on television except that the jury came in!"
And what about the final product? My dad says it was well worth the money spent.
"The robe fits great. The measurements were great," he said. "When I put on the robe, I haven't noticed any change in my personality, yet."
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.