RTNA: "Off-Ramp is best damn local public affairs show" ... the tragic backstory of nylon's inventor ... Ray Greene reports from Sundance 2013 ... Rabe's sister gives Rabe's brother a kidney ... Mexi-Cali Biennial theme: cannibalism
'20 Feet from Stardom' wins documentary Oscar, was first film to sell at Sundance
UPDATE 3/2/2014: "20 Feet from Stardom" won the Documentary Feature Oscar tonite! Here's our piece from Sundance 2013, and congratulations to all involved.
They can really make or break a record, but throughout the history of recorded music, they've been -- mostly -- kept out of the spotlight. They're background singers.
Director Morgan Neville tells their story in the inspiring new documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, which became the first film to sell at Sundance 2013. The Weinstein Company snapped up the North American rights and it'll reportedly screen in theatres this summer.
Off-Ramp contributor and documentarian Ray Greene talked with Neville at Sundance soon after the director heard the good news. Neville told him, "It's the kind of thing you fantasize about for years when you're making films. My head's spinning. It's a huge relief. And it means I get to go see movies" at Sundance.
Neville told Greene former A&M Records president Gil Friesen approached him about making the film, and they started -- since they didn't really know anything about background singers -- by simply interviewing fifty of them. Then, the doc took shape.
Friesen, the film's producer, died last month. Neville says Friesen saw the final cut, and was in the hospital when he heard the news it was accepted at Sundance. "It's just added a whole other layer of emotion to beign here at Sundance with his wife, and his kids, and his friends, and knowing it was his dream, too."
John Rabe's siblings & the kidney transplant that brought them closer than ever
To feel like absolute garbage and have several episodes beforehand where you really thought you were going to die, to go to feeling as though nothing could kill you, is nothing short of miraculous.
That's how my younger brother James, 45, put it Friday when I talked with him about the kidney transplant -- from my sister Joan, 58 -- that's given him a new lease on life.
James, a commercial DJ in Twin Falls ID, has a degenerative kidney disease called Alport syndrome. In 2007, his doctor told him his kidney function was dropping fast, and a transplant wasn't far in the future. In 2012, when skin started peeling off the insides of James' cheeks and his red blood cell count fell dangerously low, the doc told him the future is now.
The transplant happened December 21 at The Mayo Clinic in Rochester MN and was, as the docs described it, "textbook." James was holding court in his hospital room the day after - it was so noisy my sister Clare (who came to Rochester with her husband Larry) had to shelter in the bathroom to talk with me on the phone. My brother Karl and his wife Patty drove from Detroit to be there. My sister Kate Forgach sent prayers from Fort Collins CO and followed his progress online and over the phone, as I did.
The donor was my sister Joan, 58, a retired IBM employee who lives in Rochester MN just fifteen minutes from Mayo. "When she called and told me she was a hundred-percent match," James said, "I had to pull my car over and cry for a while; I was very very happy."
Joan told me, "There's a few times in life the you get the opportunity that, there's no question about it, it's the right thing to do. And it's fun to be able to do something that is absolutely good. You know, every other thing, you have choices -- Is this the right thing? Is that the right thing? -- Pff! No question about it, this was the right thing to do."
I couldn't be there for the transplant itself, but I did visit them last week to see how they were doing. James and Joan are recovering remarkably well: James still gets tired and takes a nap every day, but Joan seems to be entirely back to normal.
Joan and her husband Jay have two cocker spaniels, and since James (yes, I know, lots of J's) is allergic, he's staying at his old friend
house, in her (furnished) basement. The family calls him "The Man in the Basement." That's where I recorded the interview you can hear here.
Now, a word about donating your organs:
Please consider registering to become a organ donor, if you aren't already. You can enroll enroll online. It's quick and easy and may save someone's life. Need a little convincing? Take a minute to watch "Donate Life: Become an Organ Donor"... a video my sister Clare DeBoever produced with 13 Baylor Health Care System transplant patients explaining why they think organ donation is important.
Marvel Comics writer Sam Humphries brings X-Men to Los Angeles in 'Uncanny X-Force'
Marvel Comics writer Sam Humphries walks in with wild hair and rocking a T-shirt with one of the characters from his new comic wielding an equally unwieldy hairdo — X-Men member Storm with the iconic ’80s look of a mohawk. Humphries is currently writing “Uncanny X-Force,” “The Ultimates” and “Sacrifice.”
“Uncanny X-Force” is an X-Men book that also happens to be one of the rare Marvel comics set on the West Coast — right here in Los Angeles.
“There’s no better place to set a noir story than Los Angeles,” Humphries says.
Humphries has lived in L.A. for 14 years; he says that’s had an effect on him.
“The atmosphere, the personal space that you get in Los Angeles can affect your psyche in such a way that it can’t help but have an impact on your writing.”
“L.A. is a place historically where people come to make their name, to make their fortune,” Humphries says. “You can look at the history of noir stories in Los Angeles as people grasping for riches or power or the girl, and getting too caught up in the conflicting desires of strong personalities in Los Angeles.”
Humphries thinks that link goes back through noir history. “All the way back to ‘Double Indemnity’ and ‘Maltese Falcon’ and ‘The Big Sleep.’ These are all classic stories. They don’t just take place in Los Angeles, but in a very subtextual way, they are about Los Angeles.”
“Uncanny X-Force,” which just launched this week, was pitched by Humphries as James Bond directed by David Lynch.
“I see noir in the context of ‘Uncanny X-Force’ as about characters who have a secret. Characters who are together, they’re in the same room, they may be allies, they may be pledged to each other, they may be on the same team, but they don’t necessarily, in their heads, they’re not necessarily thinking about the team first,” Humphries says.
“That’s something you get in the Avengers. With the Avengers, you have a bunch of characters who come together, and they think about the team first. It’s real American-like. It’s like a sports team. There’s no I in team — there’s a lot of I’s in ‘Uncanny X-Force.’”
He’s writing a book about outcasts. “They’re all looking for a place to be, a place to belong. They’re all looking for the next phase in their lives. And I think that search drives people to desperation in the wrong situation, and that’s when you get a lot of noir situations. A lot of people pulling guns on each other, people pulling double crosses.”
Humphries wants to leave his imprint on the Marvel characters he’s writing, but he also has a reverence for what’s come before.
“These are characters I grew up reading. These are characters, it may seem kind of silly, but I learned the beginnings of a moral code from. Loyalty, and sticking up for the weak, and not discriminating or judging other people. These are all things that you can find in the X-Men. These are valuable, powerful things.”
Time travel, Aztecs and epilepsy
They’re facing a time-traveling enemy, but in another of Humphries’ books, the initially self-published “Sacrifice,” we have a time-traveling protagonist. In that book, 21st century man Hector is hurtled back in time to the Aztec Empire. (I’m getting hives just thinking about not having access to my iPhone.)
What is it that makes time travel so appealing?
“Part of it is wish fulfillment. I’m obsessed with the Aztecs. I would love to spend some time in the early 1500s in what is now Mexico City. And who doesn’t want to go into the future and see what we achieve or see how we spectacularly destroy ourselves?”
Humphries funneled that Aztec obsession into “Sacrifice,” using his own knowledge and research to tell a story about that culture.
“What we really wanted to do was remain true to the spirit of the Aztec story — their story themselves, and not the distorted prejudiced story that the Spaniards told about the Aztecs. This is a story that survived unchallenged for hundreds of years, and it’s very self-serving to a culture that crossed an ocean to ruthlessly dominate two continents.”
The main character of “Sacrifice” also shares something with Humphries — they’re both epileptic.
“In the Aztec culture, as in many cultures around the world, if you are epileptic, if you have seizures, you are automatically regarded as a holy person. You are regarded as sacred, as a priest. You can travel back and forth between the spirit world and the real world. That gives you value.”
Things weren’t so easy for Humphries growing up.
“There is absolutely nothing cool about being the epileptic as a kid. There’s nothing cool about being the spaz in class,” Humphries says. “Part of me just wanted to create a story where having epilepsy was a really cool plus and not a really stupid negative.”
Still, Humphries says there is some separation with the character.
“He’s not a thinly veiled Sam Humphries. This is not the story of what I would do. But as an epileptic, it’s a story that you don’t see a lot represented in popular culture, just the way you don’t see the story of the Aztecs represented in popular culture.”
The lead character is also a Joy Division fan. Joy Division and the Aztec Empire? Sounds like the perfect book for a public radio fan. Humphries says he wants to do more Aztec stories that are thematic sequels to “Sacrifice,” but knows that it can be hard to get stories like that told.
“Despite ‘Downton Abbey’ or what-have-you, it’s tough to sell period pieces.”
Doing it yourself and dolphin sex
Humphries first made his name in comics through self-publishing. In 2011, “I realized that I was about to have a dead year in the second year of my career. … It was going to be the death of my career before I even really got started. So I made this decision, I made this vow to myself, that I was going to take my career into my own hands. … I was going to stop waiting for anyone else’s permission to make comic books.”
He said he wanted to make sure that the stories he told through self-publishing weren’t the same thing you could get from the major publishers.
“I wasn’t just going to take my Spider-Man idea, for example, and name him Wasp Man and just change the name slightly and just publish something that could find a home somewhere else.”
So he took the ideas for “Sacrifice” and for “Our Love Is Real,” a one-shot about a society where people develop romantic feelings for animals, vegetables and minerals.
“Almost everyone had the same reaction, which is ‘Wow, this is really cool, and I personally would love to read it, but it just doesn’t make sense for us as a company.’”
Humphries says that reaction makes sense, and it’s what spurred him on to make those comics himself.
“It’s that kind of looking over the cliff, that sense of finality, that sense of responsibility that drives you in those late nights. It’s 4 a.m. and you’re watching you’re twelfth episode of Cheers and you run out of tape, and you just want to go to bed, but you have two more boxes of comics to get out. That’s what it takes to be a self-publisher.”
The inspiration for “Our Love Is Real” came from a sadly defunct (or not-so-sadly, depending how you look at it) website, DolphinSex.org.
“It was just one man’s story about his love affair with a dolphin,” Humphries says. “He was very emphatic that this was a romantic relationship. It was a romantic, consensual, two-way relationship between two intelligent mammals. And that was a perspective I had never considered before. It’s certainly not something I identified with, it’s certainly not something I could endorse, but it was a point of view that was so foreign to me that it opened up this whole new world.”
Humphries got his first major Marvel comics work with an adaption of something far less controversial — one of the John Carter stories (which recently became a much maligned film). He says it was the perfect first project.
“If I blew it, I wouldn’t have millions of angry Spider-Man fans cursing my name until I die,” Humphries says (alluding to the recent controversial Spider-Man comic written by Dan Slott where Spidey secret identity Peter Parker was killed off). “There was a lot of confidence in having Edgar Rice Burroughs as my copilot.”
President Captain America
Outside of “Uncanny X-Force” and “Sacrifice,” Humphries has also been writing “The Ultimates,” a take on the Avengers that takes place in an alternate universe.
“It’s like the Avengers on HBO, because you don’t have as many restrictions in terms of the kinds of stories you can tell.”
In that book, he offered a brand new take on Captain America: He made him president of the United States. Marvel wanted to make sure Cap wasn’t just sitting behind a desk, and figuring out how to use Steve Rogers in this new world opened things up for Humphries.
“It really freed me to let Cap be Cap. And Cap is a soldier. He’s from the ’40s. He was frozen in ice for decades. He’s a symbol. He’s not someone who is going to want to negotiate. He is not someone who is going to want to maneuver around a fillibuster. He is not someone who’s going to want to sit behind a desk. He is going to make the presidency his own. He is not going to be changed by the presidency.”
Humphries got his start on the book co-writing with critically acclaimed comics writer Jonathan Hickman, before taking it over himself.
“[Jonathan Hickman] said, don’t worry about trying to write a Jonathan Hickman book. Don’t write what I would write. Don’t write what anybody else would write. Just write what you would write.”
Making your dreams come true
Before any of his own comics work, Humphries worked for MySpace.
“I like to think I take a spirit of innovation and risk-taking from the Silicon Valley atmosphere, where innovation and failure is celebrated.”
Humphries says that the only way to get something done is to just go do it.
“If you want to make comic books, you cannot sit around waiting for someone else to make comic books. … In any industry, your job is not just to do the job, but to enjoy doing the job, to fall in love with your job and stay in love with your job, and if you can’t do that at the beginning, you’re going to have a long road ahead of you,” Humphries says.
“You have your own goals. You have your own aspirations, your own dreams. And focus on the techniques and the methodology that will get you there. Don’t worry about what anybody else is doing. Just focus on what’s fun and enjoyable for you, and what’s going to make your dreams come true.”
Humphries looks well on his way to making his own dreams come true.
Marc Haefele: Wallace Hume Carothers and the tragic backstory of the inventor of nylon
Tonight, as you brush your teeth, you'll be scrubbing them with the same material that goes into stockings, combs, parachutes, spaceships, car engines -- the list seems infinite. That stuff turned 75 this year, but it's tragic human back story is rarely told.
It was a decade when chemistry was the most exotic of sciences -- exotic fluids percolating through mysterious mazes of stop-cocked glassware, phallic retorts, flasks, and beakers. It was the era when chemistry was doing for the public imagination what computer science has done much more recently -- stimulating wonderment and flooding the world with life-changing products ... while edging knowledge closer toward a more complete understanding of the nature of life itself.
We are talking about 75 years ago. In Wilmington, Delaware, Dupont's laboratories are about to market a product that will transform the world: It's called nylon.
Nylon was initially sold as toothbrush bristles. Then in 1940, it was made into its most famous application --- women's stockings. In World War Two, it exploded as a synthetic replacement for many vital materials: replacing silk in parachutes, cotton in uniforms and rain gear. It went into tires and radio dials and washers and hundreds of other applications. In its day, it was an outstanding miracle of modern science -- which called it the first successful synthetic polymer. Today, it replaces metals in nuts, screws and bolts, and steel in high-temperature auto engine parts like exhaust manifolds.
But the man who thought it all up simply was trying to understand the nature of chemical polymers in order to invent synthetic silk. He was one of the greatest chemists who ever lived, pioneering modern organic chemistry with dozens of major research papers and patents. Nylon was his last contribution to science.
At the moment of his triumph, at age 41, Wallace Hume Carothers succumbed to the mental diseases that had dogged him since his 20s --severe depression and alcoholism. In 1937, he killed himself in a hotel room. His young wife was pregnant with their first child.
That's not the way the achievement of the American Dream is supposed to work. Maybe that's why since the1930s, Carothers' triumphant, tragic career has been largely ignored. AP's 1980s business feature on nylon's 50th anniversary didn't mention Carothers at all.
But in the ranks of the world's top research chemists, Carothers was never forgotten. In the early `60s, as a fresh-fledged young Ph. D at Dupont, Matthew Hermes heard tales of Carothers' greatness from famous, former colleagues of the great researcher. In 1996, he wrote the first full biography of Carothers, "Enough for One Lifetime." This was the phrase Carothers himself used to describe his accomplishments before he killed himself.
Hermes, who is still working at Clemson, recalls the love he and Carothers shared for what some have called "the science of stinks."
"As recently as 50 years ago, when I was first working," he recalls, "there was none of the technology you'd presume to be in a chem lab, today. No mass spectrographs. No computers. No Infrared. Just your sense of vision, scent, and even taste." And, of course, a whole lot of wonderful glassware.
"The stink of bromine, those pickled chemical smells that stick in the old lab tabletops," Hermes adds: ``It's a very sensual thing." And then there are the joys of the great discovery itself, making some process that is infinitesimally microscopic visible and even useful to the macro world "It is so marvelous to see it happen," he says. "That is the extreme drama in the chem lab."
In his book, Dr. Hermes shares this drama with us, along with the tragic dramatic life of one of the last century's greatest scientists--whose greatest and most familiar invention turns 75 this year.
Feast on the MexiCali Biennial at Vincent Price Art Museum. This year: Cannibalism
As the non-profit group that runs the MexiCali Biennial describes it, "The cannibal is a creature that threatens the collapse of identity and ethics, and instills anarchy in the social order" and "can change our relationship with art, and perhaps with the world itself."
Cannibalism is the theme for the latest biennial. That's more than two dozen artists taking, consuming, and gaining the power of the thing or the person consumed.
We talked with curators Ed Gomez, Luis Hernandez, and Amy Pederson about the show, which includes work by Fred Alvarado, Natalia Anciso, Marycarmen Arroyo Macias, Ana Baranda, Juan Bastardo, Sergio Bromberg, Helen Cahng, Matthew Carter, Carolyn Castaño, Enrique Castrejon, Tony de los Reyes, Deborah Diehl & Arzu Arda Kosar, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza, Veronica Duarte, Roni Feldman, Kio Griffith & Carmina Escobar, Zoè Gruni, HELL- (0) featuring: Michael Dee, Martin Durazo and Ichiro Irie, Daniel Lara, Candice Lin, Juan Luna-Avin, Matt MacFarland, Dominic Paul Miller, Flavia Monteiro, Nancy Popp, Peter Bo Rappmund, Christopher Reynolds, Cindy Santos Bravo, and Fidelius X.
The Vincent Price Art Museum is at East LA College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, CA 91754-6099. The MexiCali Biennial is showing through April 13.
Merry Lepper, first American woman to run a marathon: 1963, Culver City
12/9/2013 UPDATE: Tonight at 7, the Culver City City Council will honor Merry Lepper for her accomplishment, which came 50 years ago this month. Lepper will be on hand to accept her commendation. We'll have more on this weekend's Off-Ramp.
In "Marathon Crasher," a great longread on Kindle released today, LA-based sports journalist David Davis tells a story few people know, about a woman everyone should know about. "Marathon Crasher" is about the day in 1963 that Merry Lepper became the first American woman to run a marathon. His story is also about the absurdity that patronizing, un-scientific, misogynist (pick one or all) track and field officials kept women from participating in all but the easiest races for decades. Here's an excerpt that takes us to December, 1963 (Merry's friend Lyn Carman had planned to become the first woman to run a marathon and trained with her husband Bob):
Merry dressed in clothes that were more appropriate for a day at the beach: a light-green blouse, with half sleeves, buttons and a collar, and a pair of white shorts. Over that she pulled on grey warm-up sweats. She had a new pair of white sneakers, flimsy compared to today's cushiony models.
In her haste she forgot to have breakfast. En route, she ate a Baby Ruth candy-bar. That would serve as her fuel—her protein and carbs--for the 26.2-mile race.
Outside Veterans Memorial Park in Culver City, the smallest Western Hemisphere field in years–just 67 men--bunched together by the starting line, stretching their legs, rotating their necks, windmilling their arms, and eyeing the competition.
Bob Carman was a last-minute scratch. Days before the race, he had suffered a fractured skull after tripping and falling inside their home. He had been discharged from the hospital, but he was unable to run or provide his usual support.
Merry and Lyn did not linger at the starting line. After removing their sweats, they hid in the bushes across the street, out of sight from the officials.
Merry felt nervous. "What have we got ourselves into?" she whispered to herself. "They don't want us here, we're not supposed to be here."
She took a deep breath and drew strength from Lyn's grim determination. At the gun, the pair hesitated for a moment as the men began their journey. Then, they jumped from the bushes and took off after them, chasing the field down Overland Boulevard.
Today, Merry lives along the border between Arizona and New Mexico, and Lyn lives in Northern California. They had lost touch until David reached them for his story. As Culver City continues its revitalization, perhaps it's time for a statue commemorating the city's place in history, and Merry Lepper's.
Jeanne Cooper, RIP: 'Not Young, Still Restless' — Off-Ramp's tell-all interview
We got the sad news Wednesday that beloved soap star Jeanne Cooper had died. In her memory, we're rerunning host John Rabe's August 2012 interview with the daytime TV legend.
Oh, who knows if everything in 83-year old "The Young and the Restless" legend Jeanne Cooper's memoir, "Not Young, Still Restless" is true?
It's plainly labeled "memoir," and Cooper has paid her dues over 70 years in showbiz, dating back to her first school play.
Cooper was born in Taft, California and lived all over California. Her friends in Stockton - where she was happily ensconced in the local theater scene, a big fish in a little pond - kidnapped her and brought her to Hollywood. In 1953, she made her first movie, but she shot her first television episodes that same year, and it was in TV that she made her career.
"The Young and the Restless" debuted in 1973 and since the 1987-88 season has been the #1 daytime drama. And for all but a few months, Cooper has played Katherine Chancellor, the matriarch of Genoa City, Wisconsin.
"Not Young, Still Restless" is biting, frank, charming, bitchy, and immensely enjoyable. You find out about her parents, a strong, wonderful couple; her love life; her battle with booze; the famous on-air facelift; and her thoughts about the slow death of the soap opera. "It's not dying; they're killing it." And she feels the networks' treatment of soap operas is a slap in the face to the millions of people who have been loyal to the soaps - and the products advertized on them - for decades.
Her voice is a little ragged in our interview, because of all the talking she's done on the book tour, but her will is strong, and her personality is irresistible.