CyberFrequencies on Palin enemies list ... Wayne White, artist, banjoist, new Oldham book ... last silent movie organist dies ... living Chicano rock history ... Dinner Party Download on Ali
CyberFrequencies
An Alaskan blogger feels the heat and fears for her safety when Sarah Palin singles her out.
To The Moon, in Miniature
I remember building and launching a Saturn V model rocket from a kit when I was a kid in the 1970s. it was the same rocket that pushed the astronauts to the moon 40 years ago. The kit was made by Estes, a Colorado-based company. Back then, I was more concerned with the difficulty of the model than the historic magnitude of the Saturn V. But keep reading for ... the rest of the story.
In truth, I'm not 100% sure now, thirty years after the fact, that I actually built the Saturn V.
It's entirely possible I just dreamed about building it. I certainly stared at the catalogue enough and looked long enough at the unbuilt kit at our local hobby store (Pinnacle Paints!) to have etched that model rocket into my brain as mine.
Have I committed my own Capricorn One hoax, but on myself? (The movie about a Mars expedition that didn't go off, so they lied about it.)
I know for sure I made a Mercury Redstone and a Lunar Lander -- the latter of which had cool spring-loaded feet and was supposed to land upright ... a moot point when it's coming down as fast as it did.
But did I just fantasize taking it the next step and building the complicated, beautiful, massive Saturn V? Perhaps my brothers Karl or James will remember correctly. Boys?
-- John Rabe
We're on Twitter
The five members of Team Off-Ramp are now Tweeting. Follow Us and John Rabe, Queena Kim, Jackson Musker, Andrea Domanick, and Kevin Ferguson will be your eyes and ears in Southern California.
The Chief on the King
LAPD Comissioner Bill Bratton doesn't like smooth criminals or smooth jazz. And he's never watched Thriller ... as he confesses to KPCC's Frank Stolze.
A Way With Words
Meet artist Wayne White, set designer for "Pee Wee's Playhouse" and art director for Peter Gabriel's video "Big Time." Now he's best known for painting big words on dime store landscape prints.
Bob Mitchell Silenced
The last surviving organist from the Silent Film Era died at 96. KPCC's Patricia Nazario reports.
The note from the Silent Movie Theatre:
I have sad news. Our organist, Bob Mitchell, has passed on at the age of 96.
Mr. Mitchell, who started playing at the Pasadena Playhouse at the age of only 12, had actually played for silent films in the '20s.
It was a pleasure and a privilege to witness someone who wasn't just a master at his craft, but was a human portal to another time. There will be wonderful musicians continuing the tradition of live, improvised accompaniment, but there was a certain unforgeable authenticity that comes from not simply recreating another time, but being of it.
Bob's entire musical background and earliest memories lent a unique texture to his performance; his musical quotations, his sense of humour, his reference points were all of the era. He knew and remembered the songs and themes that were contemporaneous with the films he accompanied, and would weave them into the scores at natural points. If you were watching William Hart's silent western Tumbleweeds -- sure enough, he would play the hit song "Tumbleweeds" as the credits rolled.
Gerald Wilson, El Chicano, and 'Viva Tirado'
LA and the jazz world are mourning Gerald Wilson, a worldwide jazz giant who lived in LA and who died Monday at the age of 96. Gerald Wilson was a jazz trumpeter who played in the big bands, he was a bandleader, and he was a venerated teacher.
RELATED: Gerald Wilson's son talks about his dad on KPCC's Airtalk.
But Wilson was also a composer, and he wrote the song "Viva Tirado," which became a huge hit for a band out of East LA called El Chicano, and was later sampled by Kid Frost. As Oliver Wang wrote a few years ago on his blog:
"Viva Tirado" is at the center of a rather remarkable, multi-generational conversation between L.A.'s Black and Brown communities. After all, here's a song, originally written by a Black composer in honor of a Mexican bullfighter, covered by a Chicano band steeped in Black R&B and jazz, then sampled by the first major Chicano rap artist. It seems no matter where the song goes, it's always a bridge between cultures. -- Oliver Wang
Just how big Gerald Wilson's composition (he always called them "numbers") was comes through loud and clear in this 2009 Off-Ramp interview between Jesus Velo of the band Los Illegals, and one of his heroes: the late Bobby Espinosa of the band El Chicano, who remembered when "Viva Tirado" hit it big in 1970.
Watch El Chicano perform "Viva Tirado" live in 1971
Billboard Art
John checks out an exhibit of glorious Kodachrome photos of LA billboards from the 1950s and 1960s, assembled by LA's preeminent photojournalist Gary Leonard. The photos (and billboards) are like time capsules of another era.
Dinner Party Download
This week: 80's metal band Anvil forges ahead...Muhammad Ali KO's the U.S. Army.... and Brendan has designs on David Bowie.
RIP J.G. Ballard
Literary commentator Marc Haefele remembers the late Sci-Fi master James (J.G.) Ballard, author of The Empire of the Sun, Crash, and many dystopian classics. Ballard gave Marc "a life's supply of healthy pessimism."
World's Smallest Horde Waits for MJ
Off-Ramp host John Rabe was part of the tiny crowd (including this believer in the End Days) outside Staples Center Tuesday ... the one that was outnumbered by police. John's pics inside ...
... along with others taken by diligent KPCC listeners. Click on the link over of the left. No, down there. That's it!
MJ Media Circus
Just a few members of the worldwide media circus that descended on Staples Center Tuesday introduce themselves to KPCC's Frank Stoltze.