You want an Only-in-LA story? Try this: a 78-year old Japanese-Brazilian-American artist who works in Compton, was Marlon Brando's gardener, and got his first big break at the Hammer Museum last year. ... How would you feel about living in a murder house? How about a house where the wife’s lover – who lived in the attic – shot the husband? It's in Silver Lake. ... We ride the elevator 71 floors to the top of the US Bank Tower to talk with the owner and chef of the tallest restaurant in the West. Take a virtual tour inside Elizabeth Taylor’s home with photographer Catherine Opie, who got exclusive access to Taylor’s house at 700 Nimes Road.
Song of the Week: Queer girl group MUNA's 'Crying On the Bathroom Floor'
Self-proclaimed "queer girl group" MUNA is beginning their first headlining U.S. tour at the Teragram Ballroom February 1, to support their debut LP.
The trio are Los Angeles-based and began to garner national attention with their premiere single "Loudspeaker", what Out Magazine calls an "LGBTQ anthem" of 2016.
Though their debut LP won't be out until February 3rd, the group has been leaking instant hits in anticipation of the release. Their dark-pop sound is clear on their latest single "Crying On the Bathroom Floor," making it our song of the week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=257&v=pUmk2Hr6sZw
After the song's release, critics hailed the track as "an ode to self-love." The band
on crying on the bathroom floor and the presidential inauguration @Spotify https://t.co/QuzKmgEKBT @AppleMusic https://t.co/335bgoiUrS pic.twitter.com/vhfVPxOYUT
— MUNA (@whereisMUNA) January 20, 2017
to talk about the lyrics: "The lyrics refer to a moment of insight from a particularly dark place. We see ourselves in the bathroom mirror, in shambles after another night gone awry, and recognize this isn't what love looks like." In the message to listeners, the group puts abusive relationships side-by-side with their thoughts on President Trump's administration, pushing for action in both personal and national issues.
MUNA uses the contrast of danceable music with introspective lyrics, noticeably influenced by other queer dance icons like Robyn and La Roux. The group will play a series of Southern California shows before they take off on their first big tour, which will feature opening acts LO MOON and Urban Cone. The tour will end in New York at the Governor's Ball festival, headlined by Tool and Chance the Rapper.
There are still tickets available for the Teragram Ballroom show and they are only $16. Also, fans have access to free tickets to see the band perform a mini-set for Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Hidden History of LA: The murderous lover who lived in a Silver Lake attic
Robert Petersen produces the podcast The Hidden History of Los Angeles and shares it with KPCC's Off-Ramp. This time: the weirdest love story you've ever heard. Make sure to listen to the audio — we knock on the door of the murder house!
“If there is any sympathy to be felt in this case, do not waste it on this woman. All your sympathy should be with the dead man who wanted a home and a loving wife and who was shot down in his own home when he discovered the lover of his unfaithful wife in his own living room.”
In 1922, police were called to a home in Silver Lake after there were reports of gunshots. When the police arrived, they found a man lying dead in the living room with multiple gunshot wounds, including one to the back of the head. The dead man’s wife, Dolly Oesterreich, was found alive, locked in the closet. Dolly told the police that there was a robbery, and that the robber locked her in closet. But the police were suspicious of Dolly, and her story.
Dolly told the detective that she and her husband never fought. Not even once. The intensity of her denial made the detective skeptical. What married couple doesn’t fight? Plus, her husband was killed with a .25 caliber pistol, a very small caliber, generally considered a woman’s gun. What kind of robber carries a woman’s gun? But the police could not figure out how Dolly could have killed her husband when she was locked in the closet. They would later learn that there was much more to this L.A. housewife than anyone could have expected.
The story behind the murder actually started in Milwaukee a decade earlier, when, in 1913, Dolly met a 17-year-old boy named Otto Sanhuber.
At the time Dolly was in her thirties and young Otto worked as a sewing machine repairman. One day Dolly called her husband at work and told him that her sewing machine was broken. When Otto arrived to fix the machine, Dolly answered the door wearing nothing but stockings and a silk robe. The two became lovers and soon Otto, who had become fixated with Dolly, moved into her attic so he could be close to her.
Dolly’s husband had no idea what was going on inside his own home. Dolly would let Otto out of the attic during the day while her husband was at work so he could do household chores and perform his duties as a lover, before being stowed away back in the attic at night when Dolly’s husband returned home. Otto would later describe himself as Dolly’s sex slave.
This routine continued year after year, after year.
In 1918, Dolly and her husband decided to leave Milwaukee and move to Los Angeles. Dolly had only one condition for the move — the new house had to have an attic. A suitable house with an attic was located in Silver Lake, and Otto also made the trip to LA.
The routine continued in Los Angeles for several more years, and Otto stayed in the attic until one night in 1922. That night, Dolly and her husband got into a loud argument. Otto listened as the argument became more heated. Fearing Dolly was in danger of physical harm, Otto rushed out of the attic with a .25 caliber pistol.
When Dolly’s husband saw Otto, he became enraged and rushed toward him. During the struggle, Dolly’s husband was shot three times, and he died. In a panic, Dolly and Otto staged the scene to look like a robbery. Otto took the husband’s watch and Dolly hid herself in the closet. Otto locked the closet door from the outside and returned to the attic. The police never found Otto and therefore could not explain how Dolly could have killed her husband and then lock herself in the closet.
After her husband’s death, Dolly moved into a different house, which also had an attic. Otto moved in as well. But Otto was not enough for Dolly, and she started having affairs with multiple other men.
The murder of her husband finally caught up to Dolly after she gave her dead husband’s watch to a lover, the same watch that was allegedly stolen during the robbery. Then she asked a different lover to dispose of the .25 caliber gun. He threw it into the La Brea Tar Pits. She even asked one of her lovers, who was also her attorney, to bring groceries to Otto in the attic. When these men started telling the police what Dolly had asked from them, the police finally started to piece together what really happened the night of the murder.
Eight years after the death of her husband, Dolly was charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Otto was charged with murder.
Otto initially confessed and told the police the whole story. He told investigators that he had an overpowering love for Dolly. On that fateful night, he explained, he believed Dolly was going to be killed, and he shot the husband to protect her. He even took officers to the house and showed them where he hid in the attic.
Later, when the case progressed to trial, Otto recanted. But law enforcement had already put the pieces of the puzzle together. The case became a media sensation and was referred to as the love slave murder, or the "bat man" case.
During trial, Dolly admitted that Otto shot her husband and covered it up to look like a robbery, but contended that she took no part in either, and only lied to the police to protect Otto.
“I didn’t believe he meant to do it, and I didn’t want to expose my life to the world — having him in the house," she said.
Dolly testified that she loved her husband, despite the fact that she hid Otto in the attic for ten years.
However, the prosecutor painted her as a cold-blooded murderer who aided and abetted the “garret ghost” lover in perpetrating the murder.
“If there is any sympathy to be felt in this case, do not waste it on this woman," the prosecutor said. "All your sympathy should be with the dead man who wanted a home and a loving wife and who was shot down in his own home when he discovered the lover of his unfaithful wife in his own living room.”
The prosecutor's final words to the jury were simple: “Hang this woman.”
Otto was found guilty of manslaughter but was released because the statute of limitations for manslaughter had expired. The case against Dolly ended with a hung jury, and she was also released.
After the trial, Dolly found a new lover with whom she actually ended up staying with for 30 years. Dolly died in 1961 at the age of 75. We don’t know what happened to Otto.
The street name is changed, but the house where Dolly’s husband was killed and Otto lived in the attic still stands.
Listen to the audio as we talk with two of the current tenants, and check in with a Realtor to find out whether new owners would have to be told about this episode in the Hidden History of Los Angeles.
From dancing to dodgeball, Off-Ramp recommends: Night on Broadway
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Fun fact: the Broadway Theater District in Downtown is the first and largest theater district in the country, according to the Register of Historic Places. To this day it is the only large concentration of movie palaces left in the United States, with 12 theaters in a six block radius.
Night on Broadway is a free arts and music street festival, dedicated to educating and enjoying the city's historic neighborhood. This year's festival will open the doors of 6 historic theaters and provide 11 venues in total to enjoy dance parties, comedy, art installations, docent-led tours, and lectures. There will even be a dodgeball competition with open sign-ups.
The event sprang from LA councilmember José Huizar's "Bringing Back Broadway" economic development initiative. In 2008, Huizar said he wanted to share the historic corridor with younger Angelenos who did not have the chance to see the theaters during their peak. In 2015, Night on Broadway was born as a street festival to excite the community about the neighborhood's history and potential. Over 35,000 attended the first celebration. In 2016, over 60,000 attended. Organizers are expecting to nearly double attendance again this year.
Fig4All.org hails the event as a "love letter to the history, culture, and future of Los Angeles."
The event runs along Broadway from 3rd street to Olympic from 4pm to 11pm. Organizers are recommending public transit for the event, as parking is very limited. The Red Line Pershing Square stop is very close to the event area. More info can be found on the Night on Broadway website.
Remembering the long lost Atomic Cafe, Little Tokyo’s punk haven
Opened in 1946 in the heart of Little Tokyo, the Atomic Cafe was owned and operated by the Japanese-American Matoba family. For decades, the cafe served chashu ramen, fried rice and other dishes to locals until founders Ito and Minoru Matoba handed the business over to their daughter, Nancy Sekizawa, in the late 1970s.
Under "Atomic" Nancy's ownership, the cafe transformed into a new wave and punk haven frequented by the likes of Devo, Blondie, Sid Vicious, X and David Bowie. The business closed in 1989 and the building was razed last year. The space is now an actual hole in the ground, the site of a future Metro station, but the stories of its past remain.
“You could describe the Atomic Cafe as a Japanese-American, weird restaurant where punk people used to hang out — and Japanese gangsters,” said Zen Sekizawa, Nancy's daughter.
"It was like a place for us: the misfits, the rebels, the undesirables," said Nancy Sekizawa.
Dublab's Mark "Frosty" McNeill talked with Nancy and Zen about food fights with Sid Vicious, kicking Andy Warhol out and one of the first punk rock jukeboxes in all of Los Angeles. Bonus fact: all of the songs heard in this story came from the Atomic Cafe’s iconic jukebox. Nancy saved the 45's and still occasionally pulls them out for DJ gigs like this dublab radio show.
Punk icon John Doe has a book about the old days and an album of new music
UPDATE: Like what you're hearing? John Doe plays with Exene Cervenka at The Regent in downtown LA on Thursday, Sept. 15. Tickets run from $17.50 to $27.50. Cheap!
In the multi-author memoir "Under the Big Black Sun, a personal history of LA Punk," John Doe and other seminal voices tell stories about the scene that electrified LA in the late 1970s. Doe joined Off-Ramp host John Rabe to talk about the book and also play a couple tunes from his new album.
Doe starts his portion of "Under the Big Black Sun" by giving us in our armchairs a taste of walking onto the stage of the Whiskey-A-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip in the late 1970s.
When we walked down those stairs, I knew it would go from zero to a hundred in a blink, cymbals would crash & DJ Bonebrake would hit his drums so hard that he’d probably knock something over or snap a hi-hat pedal in two. I might pull the cord out of my guitar & stop the giant, rumbling bass. And we would forget about the a--hole soundman who said we were too loud.
After all the nights of rehearsals & learning songs, bad equipment at the Masque & other DIY shows, this would be louder than hell & there would be sounds hurtling past & swirling around us all & somewhere amidst that mayhem, there would be a moment when everything would slow down & I would see things slo-mo.
I’d catch someone’s face distorted by a shoulder or the palm of another’s hand. Or Exene’s hair would rise into a fan as she flipped it into or out of her face. I would glimpse her dark red lips making wonderful sounds that I knew were the only sound that could be made at that moment. She would tell the truth to all these people who knew she would tell the truth. There would be flashing lights & sharp, piercing guitar notes & monstrous chords & Billy would look like he was straddling a wide creek ...
There would be sweat and DJ would have no shirt on. He would shine w/ the power of his driving hands & arms & legs & his eyes would roll back in his head & his chin would tilt upward and sometimes steam would rise from his back.
And we knew then that we were unstoppable & that we had power. And that something was definitely happening here.
-- John Doe, "Under the Big Black Sun"
In our interview, Doe talks about the angst and emptiness of America in the 1970s that led him and the other punks to get onstage and belt it out.
But he and his coauthors – including his X-wife Exene Cervenka, Chris D., Robert "El Vez" Lopez, Dave Alvin and Jane Wiedlin – also tell stories that, in composite, show these were much more than angry young people in revolt: They led real lives, hung out with friends, decorated their apartments, and collaborated with each other in a way that created a real era that still matters today.
We also talk in-depth about his new album, "The Westerner," and we have to say it was a real treat to sit two feet from stardom as Doe belted a couple tunes from it in the Mohn Broadcast Center.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-FoNuam6HQ
You can hear all of our interview – including "Sunlight" and "Get On Board" – just by clicking the audio player.
Marlon Brando's former gardener, now 78, gets big break at The Hammer
UPDATE 8/16/2016: The Hammer just announced that Kenzi Shiokava has won one of the Mohn Awards, given to artists in the Made in LA biennial. Using kiosks around the museum, visitors named Kenzi their favorite artist, and he's getting the $25,000 Public Recognition Award. (Disclosure: Jarl Mohn, now the head of NPR, is a longtime board member and supporter of KPCC.)
You want an only-in-L.A. story?
Try Kenzi Shiokava, a Japanese-Brazilian-American artist who works in Compton, was Marlon Brando's gardener, and is getting his big break at the Hammer Museum — at 78!
Kenzi was born in Brazil in 1938 of Japanese parents and came to California in 1964.
"Art was something like sacred to me," he says. "Even when I was in grammar school or whatever, I always liked to draw, but I never felt I was going to be an artist." He thought to himself, "Maybe in 20 years I'll do something that really comes from me."
Kenzi went to Chouinard and Otis art schools, but he says it wasn't until the final semester, in 1972, that he found his medium. He'd been doing two-dimensional work — drawing and painting — but then had to take a sculpture class and was lost. "I had no ideas. I was like a vacuum, nothing there," he says.
But then at home he went outside and started cleaning a piece of wood he was going to use in his garden. And it hit him: "That was the most wonderful afternoon in my life," he says, laughing at the memory. "I said that was what I was going to use. That was the material, the wood, and from that moment, I worked day and night, and said nothing bothers me anymore, everything's going to be OK."
Kenzi is about 5 feet tall, with long arms and powerful, knotted hands, and a stooping gait from arthritis. He works in an enormous warehouse studio in Compton that is neatly packed with artworks and materials to make artworks.
Since he's a woodcarver, there are stacks of wood everywhere. Not the chunks of beautiful hardwood you'd find at a good lumberyard, but driftwood, found wood, plain old boards he's salvaged.
And since he also makes assemblages, there are things everywhere — saws, knickknacks, a headless turtle incense burner, strings of beads, hand drills — all waiting to find their way into a work of art when inspiration strikes.
360 Panorama inside Kenzi Shiokava's Compton Studio
Thousands of books on tall shelves divide the cavernous space into human-sized rooms.
Kenzi says after all this time in relative obscurity — other artists knew him but not the public or the art establishment — being picked for the Hammer's Made in LA 2016 biennial gives him peace of mind, confidence that his legacy of art is secure, and that he can pay the rent.
"Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only," at the Hammer Museum through Aug. 28, features works by 28 artists, including a career retrospective of Kenzi Shiokava.
Butch meets hyperfeminine as Catherine Opie photographs Elizabeth Taylor's home
Catherine Opie, one of today's most sought-after and collectable photographers, is very comfortable in her skin, which happens to be the skin of a lesbian who generally wears jeans and a T-shirt and no makeup and isn't a size zero. But even she admits her identity was challenged when she photographed the home of Elizabeth Taylor, the "ultimate" of femininity.
"Even in photographing her house, as a butch identified lesbian, I'd put my scuffed tennis shoe next to her silvery pump and I'd be like, 'How did she do it?!'" — Catherine Opie
Opie's photos also challenge us and our perceptions by showing a realness to Taylor that gets lost too easily: the many photos of Richard Burton and Michael Jackson show those were real relationships, a photo of Bill Clinton between Taylor and Sophia Loren shows her sense of humor, the easy comfort of the home shows her classiness.
Opie's new show, at MOCA's Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, is called 700 Nimes Road, for the Bel Air address of the ranch-style home Elizabeth Taylor lived in for decades.
Opie walked me through the show, then sat down for an in-depth interview. Click the audio above for the full Q&A. Here are some highlights.
Catherine, why did you want to photograph Elizabeth Taylor’s home?
Well I think that it’s about a challenge and about different ways that we perceive ideas of portraiture, and it just so happened that we shared the same accountant — Derek Lee — and he asked me if I would like to do anything with Elizabeth. It took me a few years to wrap my head around it, and kind of entered it thinking about William Eggleston’s Graceland photographs that he made about Elvis’ estate. And I thought, "Well, how interesting would it be to try to take somebody as iconic as Elizabeth Taylor and truly make a portrait of her home?!"
You started working on this when Elizabeth Taylor was still alive — she was alive for a few weeks while you were in the house with her. Did you ever think about trying to get her into a photograph?
No, that was never really my intention. I felt like that would probably be asking a lot. I knew that her health wasn’t in top shape, and I really wanted to actually try to grapple with that idea of how to represent somebody through their belongings, versus photographing somebody who is utterly so iconic, so can you make a more humanistic and more truthful portrait to a certain extent by the observation of making images in one's home.
What did her house say about her?
I think it said that she was a very passionate person who really enjoyed entertaining, but really loved having family and people around her.
You write that you were this butch woman photographing this "ultimate femininity." You say (her femininity, as seen in movies) frightened you as a child, and challenged your adult identity. Why?
I don’t know if I would use "frightened" to this day ... I probably said that at one point, but I am not scared of femininity. I’m more I guess frightened in relationship to something that I would never want to achieve, or the absolute inability to achieve ... Although recently I did buy a dress! (LAUGHING) It’s a post Caitlyn world we’re living in.
Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road is at MOCA Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069 through May 8, 2016.
Through May 22, The Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024) is showing Catherine Opie: Portraits, including Opie's photos of Jonathan Franzen, Kate & Laura Mulleavy, Mary Kelly, Matthew Barney, Glenn Ligon, John Baldessari, Kara Walker, Miranda July, Raymond Pettibon, Ron Athey, and Ryan McGinness.
71Above: Everything at LA's tallest restaurant (even the chef) started at the bottom
Talk about haute cuisine. 71Above is the round restaurant on the 71st floor of the US Bank Tower in downtown LA, the tallest restaurant West of the Mississippi, so it's as haute as cuisine gets, with a view from Laguna to Malibu.
As chef and partner Vartan Abgaryan (pronounced VAR-tun ab-GAR-ee-yun) looks out the bank of windows that ring 71Above, he says, "If someone calls and says 'I'm running late, there's traffic,' I'm gonna go, 'Where are you?' I'm gonna look down on the street and say, 'I don't see traffic there. Why are you lying? Where are you?' They'll be like, 'Oh, I'm on the Ten, there's traffic.' And I can see the Ten, there's no traffic on the Ten. I'm looking there right now!"
KPCC photographer Maya Sugarman and I visited 71Above Thursday, spending an hour with Abgaryan. (Make sure to listen to the entire interview in the audio player above!) It was supposed to just be a half-hour, but ...
Being at the top of the skyscraper brings a unique set of problems for a restaurant. It's a little like Hawaii or Alaska. Everything needs to be brought up to the 71st floor, from toothpicks to cooks' coats to whole fish. And while guests whizz up to the restaurant on two banks of elevators that get there in two minutes and have TV sets in them, there are only a few freight elevators and they are much more busy and much slower.
That in mind, we started our interview in the ground level storeroom, off the loading dock, and indeed, it took us twenty minutes to get to the 71st floor. "When did this occur to you?" I asked Vartan, who left Cliff's Edge in Silverlake to open 71Above? "Not at the beginning," he laughs. "Definitely not at the beginning. In my mind, everything was going to be so easy, and then after a couple days of coming down here consistently, I realized we had to have a porter because I couldn't make that trip every day."
So he hired Christian Rojas, whose job is to see to bring goods up from the storeroom and bring down trash and laundry and bottles and anything else that can't pile up upstairs. And the kicker: Rojas, who spends so much of his day in an elevator, is a claustrophobe. But that's okay; his boss is afraid of heights!
When we arrive at 71Above, the first thing I do is ask Abgaryan to stand with me and check out the view. "I'm okay now, but in the beginning I would stand a good six, seven, eight feet (away), and I'd have to hold on. But now I'm comfortable." "Do you enjoy it yet," I ask? "It's not enjoyable, no."
But we're doing what the guests do, and it's something Abgaryan has to fight. The view, he says, is his main competition. So, "there's a lot of attention paid to the restaurant itself. The design, the thought behind everything. The chairs, the tabletops, the handmade pottery that we put on the table, the plates, our style of service, our style of presenting food. I'm very visual, so a lot of the food is, for lack of a better word, pretty. We do a lot of things at the table, we sauce things at the table, so people's attentions are focused back onto the food." And, to deliver a complete experience and keep the focus on the foo, the dinner menu is $70 prix fixe, with three fixed courses and a couple extra from the kitchen.
It's been a long but quick climb for the 34-year old Abgaryan. He came to the US in 1991 from Armenia. His first restaurant job was at an Outback Steakhouse, which he says he admires for its organization and success ("a chain that successful, obviously they've done things correctly"), if not its food. Then he leaped straight to Lutece in Vegas, a branch of one of New York's top restaurants, and there he learned attention to detail. He spent 2-1/2 years at executive chef at Cliff's Edge (another metaphor), and then started 71Above this year, with a 30-year lease.
"Thirty years is thirty years," he says. "I don't know how I'm going to deal with that since I've never had a job longer than three years."
I dunno. Is there a good restaurant in Death Valley?