New documentary Young Turks ... rebutting the Disney myths in The Perfect American ... Richard Thompson in conversation with Kevin Ferguson ... Gordon and the Flea Market ... counting the homeless in LA and Venice.
Charles Solomon debunks Disney myths, Philip Glass opera 'The Perfect American'
"Disney had his own private torments and is reputed to have railed against unions, blacks and Jews. At least that is part of the 21st century Disney legend, and it is necessarily part of Philip Glass' new opera, "The Perfect American." Far from sterilized yet also disarmingly affectionate, it looks at Disney the myth, the artist and the man. The work contrasts between the America that formed Walt Disney and the America he formed for the rest of us." (Mark Swed, LA Times, 1/24/2013)
The premiere of Philip Glass' new opera "The Perfect American," in Madrid last month, and Mark Swed's front page review in the LA Times, reminded me of the bizarre falsehoods people seem willing to believe about Walt Disney.
Based on Peter Stephan Jungk's novel--which I found unreadable--"Perfect American" depicts Walt as an untalented, alcoholic, anti-Semitic racist, carrying on an affair with nurse Hazel George.
I've spent decades researching Walt Disney and his films; I've interviewed dozens of artists who worked with and for him, from his first days as an animator in Kansas City to his last weeks in Burbank. This misbegotten portrait is as bogus as the rumor Walt's body was frozen and is stored somewhere under Disneyland.
Walt Disney was born in 1901, and it's unrealistic to expect him to have held only opinions that feel correct more than a century later. After the bitterly fought strike of 1941, Walt grew increasingly conservative politically. He appeared before the notorious HUAC as a friendly witness, but there's no evidence he served as an FBI stoolie.
But an anti-Semite? Many of his top artists were Jewish, notably Marc Davis and Joe Grant, who worked closely with him. And he must rank as the only anti-semite ever to be chosen Man of the Year by the B'nai Brith. As for being a racist, designer Iwao Takamoto said that a few weeks after coming home from Manzanar, he applied at the Disney Studio because friends told him, "if you can draw well enough, they don't care what color you are." Someone examined Iwao's hastily assembled sketches, showed them to the animators--and hired him in less than hour.
I think story artist Dick Huemer correctly summed up Disney's attitude when he said, "I think Walt would have hired the devil himself if he were a good enough animator."
I have yet to talk to an artist who saw Walt drunk or even tipsy. After work, he enjoyed a Scotch Mist, a drink that's mostly ice. Hazel George used to massage his neck at the end of the day to ease the pain of the vertebrae that had been damaged in a polo accident back in the '30s.
Walt was never an exceptional animator and draftsman, but he was good enough to support himself for several years before his studio took off. More importantly, he was a genius, who conceived a vision of what animation could be, and inspired his artists to go beyond what they thought possible to realize that vision.
Was he angel? No, he was a man with a temper and faults and virtues. His worst vice was chain smoking. All the artists remembered his signature cough as he came down the hall. And the resulting lung cancer ended his life when far too many of his projects were unfinished.
Much as I like Glass' music, I doubt I'll see "The Perfect American." After writing intriguing, respectful operas about Muybridge, Einstein, Gandhi, Anknaten and Kepler, I don't understand why he'd want to trash another genius.
Oh, and just for the record, Walt Disney was cremated and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn.
(Charles Solomon is author of The Toy Story Films: An Animated Journey and The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation.)
'Young Turks' shows downtown LA arts scene when 'the rent was cheap, the streets were tough, and the beer was warm'
UPDATE 12/12/2013: Tuesday, Dec. 17, “Young Turks” is being released on cable
video on demand, including Comcast, Cox, Frontier and Verizon FIOS; and iTunes, GooglePlay, XBox, Playstation and Vudu.
When I moved to LA, Al's bar, the old center of the downtown LA arts and punk music scene, had only a few months to live. But back in the 1980's, it was the spot to gather, and a number of artists who helped make the scene lived in Al's building, the American Hotel. So it was natural for me to meet Pamela Wilson and Stephen Seemayer at the old Al's Bar site to talk about their new/old documentary, Young Turks.
Young Turks is the kind of doc I like. It's short, meaning the filmmakers respect our time and don't force us to watch every should-be outtake they think is essential to understanding their vision of life. And, it doesn't pretend to unlock the mysteries of the universe. It's about a particular group of people who lived in a particular place for a while. It shows how they lived, where they lived, and what and who they lived among.
Specifically, Young Turks is about Wilson and Seemayer's friends, artists and art-associated people who lived and worked downtown c. 1980, including Bob & Bob, Linda Frye Burnham, sculptors Woods Davy, Coleen Sterritt, John Schroeder, Jon Petersen, and James Croak, "action critic" Randy Johnsen, Al's Bar owner Marc Kreisel, conceptualist Monique Safford, and painter Andrew Wilf. It also includes interviews/vignettes with various homeless people, who become the real stars of the film.
Seemayer shot Young Turks c 1980 on 8mm, and could only manage a very rough cut, which got two showings. Then it sat in his and Pamela's closet for thirty years. Then, partly fueled by being pissed off that Pacific Standard Time ignored their downtown scene, they remastered it digitally and added footage that didn't make the initial cut.
The result is a thought-provoking portrait of a time, with, as Wilson points out, more similarities than differences from today's downtown arts scene.
It's worth going to see it at the Downtown Independent ... where you can drink cold beer in your seat.
Wanted: Chaperone for the Gordon Henderson family for their next Rose Bowl Flea Market jaunt
For more than 40 years, people have been buying things at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, from pure crap to useful items, from trash to treasures, from stuff they need to stuff they wind up selling at their next garage sale ... if they're lucky.
According to the company that oragnizes the flea market - RG Canning Attractions - the monthly flea market features 2,500 vendors and up to 20,000 buyers every month. That has included, on and off over the decades, Off-Ramp contributor Gordon Henderson.
Problem is, according to Gordon, when he goes to the flea market with his daughter and wife, they invariably buy something huge that they don't need. Like a giant chess set, or a big blue couch. Once, they brought a drunk neighbor, who heckled vendors and started a fight.
Obviously, the Henderson's need professional help, preferably someone who is not only qualified as a family counsellor, but who appraises items for Antiques Roadshow.
Prospective chaperones, please get in touch with us through the Comments section below. The Henderson's will provide transportation, admission to the Rose Bowl, and a modest lunch.
PHOTOS: 'Frozen wing' of downtown LA's Alexandria Hotel to be opened after almost 75 years
If you go into business with someone, make sure you have an exit plan. And an entrance plan. William Chick didn't have either, and it probably cost him millions. The hotel wing he built in downtown LA has been closed off for 74 years; only now is a developer working on unsealing this time capsule from 1938.
Chick, according to the LA Times, ran a livery stable next to the grand Alexandria Hotel. He knew a good business opportunity, and built a fully integrated wing onto the hotel, circled below in this photo of Spring and Fifth Streets.
It made a lot of sense. After all, the Alexandria was LA's grand hotel, where Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, and Caruso stayed.
It retained some of its grandeur for some years ...
...before becoming the SRO it is now. You can now rent rooms there for as low as $575 per month.
But back to Chick's wing. According to the Times, by 1938, the hotel and the wing were in new hands. Movie producer Phil Goldstone owned The Alexandria, and Chick's daughter Lee Roddie owned the wing. After a rent dispute, Goldstone walled off his part of the Alexandria from Roddie's wing. That wouldn't have been a problem except that Roddie's father had never built stairs or an elevator to the guest rooms in his wing. "Father made a terrible decision," Roddie told the Times in 1967 ... when the wing had only been "frozen" for 29 years. In the ensuing years, while the ground floor shops have been rented out, no owner has spent the money to fix the problem, and the upper floors have been the realm of pigeons, taggers, and perhaps a squatter or two. They're locked in time, as they were when Goldstone started building his personal Cask of Amontillado in 1938.
When I heard about the frozen wing, my mind started racing. I wanted to breathe air last breathed when FDR was in the White House, to thumb through postcards and letters left by rushed correspondents dead now for 50 years, to sit on a bed where ... well, I imagine a man and a woman-not-his-wife, sleeping late after making love, woken simultaneously by the manager's brisk knock and the sound of bricks being piled up across the hallway. If I can't live in the 1930s, this would be the next best thing.
A little over a year from now, you might be able to sleep with those same ghosts. Culver City-based developer Nick Hadim says a group of anonymous investors has purchased the building and is reportedly spending $3-million to make the upper floors usable. He's heading up the project, and met KPCC photog Mae Ryan and me at the corner of Spring and Fifth a few days ago.
Hadim, a slim, handsome Iranian, says, "A year ago, walking down Fifth Street, I noticed it. Why are the windows open, why are they shattered, why are they dirty? One part of the building looks good, the other part doesn't." So he started asking questions and learned the sad story. His plan is to turn the wing into a luxury apartment building, The Chelsea, with a lounge in the deep sub-basement and suites above designed to retain the charm and the mystery of the time capsule they are. (Target opening: December 2013.)
But here's the catch: Hadim, the man spending his time and treasure, hasn't even been into the whole wing. You can get into the basement through the leather goods store on the ground floor. You can climb onto the roof of the ground level stores and then into the first floor of hotel rooms. And you can get into the top floor of rooms from the roof of the wing. But with no stairs, no fire escape, and no elevator, the middle floors, 3-6, are inaccessible. Who knows what's in there? Hadim says he saw some furniture on one of his excursions, but later in the day, when Hadim had left us and we climbed on our own to the lowest level of rooms, there was nothing but a few bathtubs and toilets, crumbled wallpaper, old phone lines, and floors, ceilings, and woodwork in surprisingly good shape. There isn't even as much pigeon poop as you'd imagine.
Still hopeful, I climbed a fire escape across the street and peered into the upper floors through a pair of binoculars. I'd like to say I saw an Underwood typewriter, a feather boa, a chintz bedspread, and a skeleton in a fedora in the tub ... a cigarette in its teeth and a bottle of burbon in its hand ... But I didn't.
The light was wrong and the remaining windows are too grimy to see much, but it looks just like the rest. Stripped bare and waiting for an exit plan.
Archival photos: LA Public Library online photo archive.
Singer, songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson on 'Electric' new album, old folk and playing for big crowds
Richard Thompson is a guitarist, singer and songwriter. Getting his start in Fairport Convention, the legendary British folk rock band, his songs have been performed by REM, Loudon Wainwright and Los Lobos. He's also a solo artist with almost two dozen albums in his discography.
His newest album, Electric, gives his sound to a more straight forward rock focus designed to cater to a three piece band. Thompson talked with Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson about the old days, his new album and more.