Jeffrey Vallance's new show, "The Medium is the Message" ... Brains On! explores kids and language ... are robot underpants the next fitness trend? ... Factchecking "True Detective's" bullet train plotline ... Tired of lists separated by elipses?
Go inside SoCal's Rainforest Flora: One of the world’s largest growers of air plants
Paul T. Isley knows a lot about tillandsias, or "air plants" as they’re sometimes called. He’s written two books about them and says he regularly helps researchers at the Huntington Botanical Gardens.
“What’s cool about tillandsias is that so many of them are true epiphytes, which means that they can grow with no soil,” Isley says. “They’ve mastered the trick of being able to get their water and nutrients through their leaves, which allows them to grow literally on anything.”
After visiting a friend's house and seeing some tillandsias on his patio, Isley fell in love with the flora.
“They looked like they were from outer space or from the bottom of the ocean,” Isley says. “But I saw those plants and I just couldn’t believe that those could be real, that life could do something like that.”
(Alien-like tillandsias cling to a rock face at Rainforest Flora in Torrance. Photo: Katherine Garrova)
Isley and a couple partners started Rainforest Flora in 1976. At his retail space in Torrance, Isley built an indoor garden with waterfalls, koi ponds and thousands of tillandsias that hang from the ceiling and cling to rock faces.
According to Isley, Rainforest Flora is now one of the world’s largest growers of tillandsias. When he first started out though, his weird-looking plants weren’t in high demand.
“In the beginning, there really wasn’t that much interest and there wasn’t anybody selling them. For two years I did arts and crafts fairs,” Isley says.
But Isley doesn’t sit at craft fairs much anymore. Home Depot is now his biggest customer.
“The plants are starting to hit the mainstream now,” he says. “More and more people are discovering how cool they are.”
And it’s not only big retailers that have caught on. Lovisa Staffland, a regular customer at Rainforest Flora, works for an outdoor living boutique in the Abbott Kinney neighborhood called Ilan Dei, where they sell tillandsia arrangements.
“We have noticed an increase in sales when it comes to air plants, definitely,” Staffland says. She says the increase in popularity of tillandsias might be because many people want plants in their house, but not everybody has the space. Isley agrees.
“As we go more and more towards urban environments and people live in smaller places, especially in Asia and in urban environments in our city — where you have apartments and stuff — they’re perfect because they don’t grow and take over, they’re so easy and you can put them on anything,” Isley says.
There’s a California-specific reason to collect tillandsias too.
“They’re drought tolerant,” Isley says. “They can go long periods without getting water because they have big hypodermal storage cells inside their leaves.” A dried-out tillandsia will even re-hydrate if left under water overnight.
In his 5,500-square-foot nursery, Isley explains that they keep up with demand by growing the vast majority of the tillandsias they sell in-house.
(Germinating tillandsia seeds at Rainforest Flora in Torrance; Photo: Katherine Garrova.)
Once the seeds germinate, the young tillandsias have to be separated by hand. “That’s kind of what I do at night when I’m sitting there watching Netflix,” Isley says jokingly.
Some of the tillandsias that start their lives inside Isley’s nursery will be around for decades to come. Much like the orchid, tillandsias offer thousands of distinct varieties and a very long lifespan.
“One of the really interesting things people can do with tillandsias is that they can keep them over the course of their lives,” Isley says. “People go through families, they go through wives and husbands and kids and jobs and all this stuff, but to have plants you can keep with you all those years is pretty special... They’re there with you over all the years.”
Are robot underpants the next big fitness craze?
If you’ve ever seen a late-night infomercial for some new fitness program, or a product that’ll give you six-pack abs in six weeks, or even driven past a parking lot where people are pulling tires and heaving weighted balls at each other, you may have asked yourself: who the heck comes up with this stuff? There's a convention for that — it was last week in Los Angeles. I went to look for the next big thing in the world of sweating on purpose.
(Did this ad start the abs thing?)
It’s been a rough couple of hours for team Athos, the people marketing a new line of fitness gear at the Idea World Fitness and Nutrition Expo. The PA system for their presentation on the mainstage isn’t working right, and over at their table, the only thing announcing their presence is a very small black-and-white sign. Athos’s Luis Nordmann says there was a shipping issue.
“We were at the NSCA conference last week,” says Nordmann. “And we’re still waiting on our booth. There’s supposed to be more here.”
Athos was just one of several hundred exhibitors on the Convention Center floor, pushing products and fighting for attention. In the meeting rooms upstairs, instructors from around the world were teaching other instructors new ways to keep the rest of us fit.
Kathie Davis, who’s been running this show since the '80s, says, “That first convention, we had high-impact aerobics, and that was all 33 years ago. Well now, the variety and number of fitness classes is just… staggering.”
Coming up with the new hot fitness thing can mean big money. A woman who was using a milk crate to rehab her knee came up with what would become known as the Reebok Step.
A Navy Seal invented TRX straps, and CrossFit went from members puking on Youtube videos to its own Olympic-style games on ESPN. But walking the floor at this year’s convention, you get the impression that there’s nothing really all that new in the fitness-verse. But there are new ways to do old things.
Like putting an elliptical trainer on a bike you can ride outside. Or adding a video game component to an indoor cycling class so you can race your pals. Or adding weights to a hula-hoop. Or mixing Pilates with boxing to form something called "piloxing." Or modifying those long heavy ropes people wave in the gym. And, of course, yoga shoes.
“I’ve taught freestyle, water aerobics, spin, double step, boxing, Viper…” says Amy Dixon, who was named fitness instructor of the year at this year’s convention, as she tries to remember all the different classes she’s ever taught. Dixon says fitness trends come in cycles. And come to think of it, when was the last the last time you saw a Jazzercise studio, a Thighmaster, or a "Buns of Steel" DVD?
But with all this variety, I had to ask, is any one fitness program — pros call them modalities — really better than the rest?
“I don’t think that any of these modalities are bad if people love doing them,” says Dixon. “We know that people need to move and eat less — the reality is people don’t want to hear that that's why we have trends that make no sense.”
Back at the stage, Athos finally has their presentation up and running. And as my goal was to find the next big fitness thing, I think this might be it. Athos workout gear has built-in Bluetooth sensors that let you know, on your smartphone, how hard and evenly you’re working each muscle group. Seriously, it lights up on a little diagram, turning your body into a video game.
(Athos' fitness clothing)
Now, will the general public spend a couple hundred dollars for these robot underpants? (Which would have been a way better name by the way.) It’s a little early to tell. But if my time here has taught me anything, it’s this — if robot underpants do take off, so to speak, you can bet a few years down the road someone’ll be out here with a new and slightly improved version.
Like maybe they’ll find a way to put sand in them. We’ll call them sandies. Or maybe sundies.
Jeffrey Vallance channels famous dead artists for ‘The Medium is the Message’
Art prankster Jeffrey Vallance’s new show “The Medium is the Message” opens at downtown L.A.'s CB1 Gallery on July 25. A mix of large prints and small objects, Vallance says the inspiration for the show came from a séance he held in London a few years ago.
For the séance, Vallance hired five psychics to channel famous dead artists — Frida Kahlo, Leonardo DaVinci, Marcel Duchamp, Vincent Van Gogh, and Jackson Pollock. A Fortean at heart, Vallance doesn't necessarily believe in a contactable spirit realm, but just wanted to observe the phenomena — and make some art.
John Rabe interviewed Vallance at the gallery to talk about “The Medium is the Message” and why it’s good not to take contemporary art too seriously.
Tell us more about the prints inspired by the séance.
"This was kind of a funny program because it wasn’t very spooky, I didn’t want it to be that way. I set the thing up as kind of an academic panel. So I had the channeled artists sitting in chairs so you could ask them questions. I didn’t know what they were going to say, so I asked them questions like, 'Is there art in the afterlife?' The funny thing is, like, they were pretty right on. They were saying that, like, they can look into the minds of some of the artists and sometimes all they can see is dollar signs. Well, it kind of made sense.”
(A "Spirit Photo" of Jeffrey Vallance, by Jeffrey Vallance)
... and then, in the tradition of Victorian Spirit photography, you made these prints.
“Yeah, as I was listening to the spirits talk, I was trying to imagine what it would look like if you could see them in the spirit. Obviously we were just seeing the psychics that were channeling them. But I was trying to imagine what it would look like if you could get a photograph of them at that time. So I was looking at the spirit photos from the turn of the century. And if you look at those they look very fake. They have superimposed imagery and certain photo tricks that look to our eye very naive and I sort of like that. So I try to do things that look like the spirit photos, but they’re all digital.”
I checked with one of your friends from 30, 40 years ago — Michael Uhlenkott — and I said ‘Does Jeffrey actually believe in séances?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’
"I would say I’m a Fortean, which is one of the followers of Charles Fort. Basically, I observe; I don’t judge. So I don’t believe but also I don’t disbelieve as well. So I’m kind of neutral. I just want to bring these events about and see how they go and how I can learn from them. But I wouldn’t say I’m, like, a follower of spiritualism and that whole thing."
Did it change your mind about anything?
“I don’t think so. But it just made me realize that the world is a lot weirder than I would have thought."
There’s a table full of smaller items here, including a little plywood box, the Kahlo Spirit Crystal... What’s this?
“Frida, when she was channeled, she was talking a lot about the afterlife. And she sort of saw the afterlife as sort of being this huge kind of shattered crystal that went into all these rainbows and these colors. And then she said something like, ‘And that is art.’ So I thought, okay, that is art. So I will make that, I’ll make the Frida Kahlo Spirit Crystal.”
(Kahlo Spirit Crystal, by Jeffrey Vallance)
I want you to tell the outlet cover story, going back to your first show at LACMA.
"That was in 1977 and I was a student. I wanted to have an art show and I couldn’t wait, I couldn’t wait until I graduated. So I was looking around and I went to LACMA one day and I noticed that under the paintings along these walls they had the wall sockets. And I took note of that and I thought, oh, I can buy the same exact outlet covers... So I did that. I bought the same kind of outlet covers. And then I painted these dopey little scenes on it that made no sense really. And then I went back to LACMA and I was dressed in, like, a janitor’s outfit. I had, like, a name tag and a tool box. And walked in and unscrewed their wall sockets and put mine on with these little scenes on it. And no one said anything because it looked like I was doing my job, in a way. And then for years, every time LACMA would have a show, I would have a show at the same time. I would send out invitations, but in my show you would just look a little lower."
On Saturday, Aug. 8, at 8pm, Vallance will hold a séance at the gallery in which psychic Joseph Ross will channel dead art critics. According to gallerist Clyde Beswick, "a telepathic call will be sent out to art critics in the afterlife willing to speak out about Vallance’s artwork. And heaven only knows who might manifest!"
"Jeffrey Vallance: The Medium is the Message" and "Emily Davis Adams: Painting of Levitated Mass" are on view from July 25 through Sept. 5 at CB1 Gallery, 1923 S. Santa Fe Ave. 90021. Meet the artists at a reception Saturday, July 25, 3 - 6pm.
Sweet smoking Jesus! Vern Evans' amazing cosplay photos from San Diego Comic-Con 2015
Vern Evans, who works out of Los Angeles, has been shooting for a long time and can make anybody look great, even a cranky artist and a cranky public radio host:
(Artist Llyn Foulkes with KPCC's John Rabe at The Hammer. Credit: Vern Evans)
So I guess it's no surprise Evans managed to find something fresh at the most photographed event in the history of the known universe: this year's Comic-Con in San Diego.
Check out Vern Evans' complete photoset from SDCC 2015.
Evans was raised in Texas and, "spellbound with images taken by Arbus, Frank, Capa, Avedon, Lange and Cartier-Bresson," attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
(Vern Evans at SDCC with Evel Knievel cosplayer. Credit: Myles Pettengill)
When he's shooting, Evans says he asks the same thing of every subject: "Tell me your story," and the photo becomes "like a dream interpreted for its true meaning."
Separating California high speed rail fact and fiction True Detective's second season
Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson is producing a podcast about Southern California and the new season of "True Detective." Subscribe to it on iTunes and Stitcher. We're also mapping the show's significant and lesser-known locations.
California's high-speed rail route continues to generate lots of debate this year. But in "True Detective," it might be the MacGuffin for show's second season.
Without the train, the mayor of fictional "Vinci, California" doesn't have a reason to drive up and down the state dumping hazardous waste. Frank Semyon, the scheming developer played by Vince Vaughn, would still be living in his pristine hilltop mansion if not for bad business dealings around the rail route. And the detectives would never have gotten in the mess they're in now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvrdRRHRrpk
The presentation given by Semyon in the first episode sets up the bullet train's role in Season 2. He's gambled his livelihood to go legitimate and buy up land near an imminent high speed rail train.
Now, Semyon's business partner is dead, his money is lost and he's struggling to regain control of his life.
The train is a real life thing. Back in 2008, California voters approved a bond (Proposition 1A, not 1) that would fund construction a high speed rail line that would link up San Francisco and Los Angeles in a matter of hours.
But can you, like Semyon said, make a fortune off of buying up land and building developments like that? Did the federal government ever really "guarantee cost overages?"
"[Semyon's] scheme appears to be: buy land near one these stations and develop it, and maybe sell the land, maybe just own it but make a lot of money," says LA Weekly's Hillel Aron, who dug into the topic.
To do that, Aron says, Semyon would need inside information about where the stations would go. Could that actually happen?
"They're figuring out the route now, in this long series of public meetings, and it's all done in the open. Everyone is angry about it," he says. "The idea that there would be inside information about the stations is questionable."
And the guaranteed cost overruns from the Federal Government? Ridiculous, says Aron.
"The federal government is subsidizing a small part of the actual construction of the rail line. And it is conceivable that a local government would give a tax break to local development," he said. "If the federal government guaranteed cost overages, developers would just build the most monstrous, ridiculous thing they could—knowing the federal government is going to pay for anything over what they said it was going to cost."
Beyond Los Angeles
This season of "True Detective" doesn't limit itself to Los Angeles and Vinci, of course. As the plot has unraveled, its characters have driven further and further away from the bustling hubs of commerce in the LA Metro area into weirder, more remote corners. Land where the train goes, probably.
Semyon never says where he plans on developing all this rail adjacent land, but a good guess might be Fresno and the Central Valley, home to Valley Public Radio. Reporters Jeffrey Hess and Ezra Romero have been covering the rail project.
"By virtue of California being the size of the state that it is, this is a project that you could describe as the state dreaming big," says Hess. "Fresno and the central valley are between LA and San Francisco, which have — for the most part — built out as much as they can go. Those two big cities need a way to connect."
Romero says the project has started plenty of speculation on the part of developers in cities like Fresno. "If you ask a supporter of high speed rail in Fresno, they'd say it means a rejuvenated downtown. They're saying [Fresno] can be a regional hub. People can live in Fresno and take a forty five minute train to San Francisco, and I think that would change the lifestyle of someone in Fresno."
Opponents of the project worry about cost overruns, unrealistically optimistic travel times and environmental impact.
What's Hess' take on Semyon's get rich quick scheme?
"It's going to be years and years and years before developers of that sort end up making money," he says. "They have ten years before the first leg gets built. It's several years after that before it connects Los Angeles and San Francisco."
Earlier this year, rail officials said they were as much as a year behind schedule in buying the land needed to start construction on the first 29-mile stretch in the Central Valley,
Still, developers are already on the move, at least in Downtown Fresno. "I talked to a guy a couple months ago who said if you haven't gotten your chips down on this, then you're too late. You've already missed the boat," Hess says.
And if a dead city manager ran off with every last penny you saved up? That boat might be up a creek.
Doyle estate wins again — against 'Mr Holmes' — despite SCOTUS ruling in SoCal case
Back in November, Off-Ramp interviewed local author Leslie Klinger about his victory in the US Supreme Court against the estate of Conan Doyle.
Klinger co-edited "In the Company of Sherlock Holmes," a new series of short stories about the detective, and was then sued by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The estate claimed the new stories used copyrighted details of the Doyle stories.
In the Klinger case, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that said, "it appears that the Doyle estate is concerned not with specific alterations in the depiction of Holmes or Watson ... but with any such story that is published without payment to the estate of a licensing fee." As Klinger put it, that lower court ruling said the estate was "basically extortionist."
At the time, Klinger expressed hope that creative artists would be able to stand up to the estate's future efforts "to threaten creators."
"On the film industry side," he said, "It's been the practice for motion picture producers to just pay the estate, because it's fast and relatively inexpensive, compared to going to court."
The next test was when the estate sued Mitch Cullin, who wrote the book "Mr Holmes," starring Ian McKellen, is based on, claiming he used elements of the original Doyle stories that were protected by copyright, including the fact that Holmes retired to the countryside in his old age.
In online remarks ... the writer called it “an extortion attempt pure and simple, brought on by the desire to make money once the film version of the book came to their attention.”
— Santa Fe New Mexican, 7/17/2015
But, as the newspaper reported, the Doyle estate has again reached an undisclosed settlement, and you're able to see "Mr Holmes" in your local theater.
The website I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere is tracking the Doyle estate's various efforts, under the #FreeSherlock hashtag.
Song of the week: ‘I Forgive You’ by OOFJ (SHHHH! the J is silent)
Off-Ramp’s song of the week is “I Forgive You” by Los Angeles-based duo OOFJ (the J is silent). OOFJ is Danish composer Jenno Bjørnkjær and South African vocalist Katherine Mills-Rymer. “I Forgive You” is on OOFJ’s sophomore album, “Acute Feast,” out now via Ring the Alarm Records.
OOFJ will play Thursday, July 30 at the Echoplex.
A rare North Korean in Los Angeles says she just wants to blend in
The United States is home to more Korean migrants than any other country. According to the Migration Policy Institute, 1.1m live in the U.S., followed by Japan (699,000), and China (222,000). Some 226,000 have settled in the L.A. area. Most came from South Korea, but there's also a small but growing number who defected from North Korea in the last 10 years — people like "Elise Park," who doesn't usually tell people she's from North Korea.
Like many of the few hundred North Korean immigrants living in the U.S., Park hides in plain sight within the larger Korean-American community. Park, who asked us to use a pseudonym to protect her two brothers who still live in the North, says she doesn't want to stick out — and that Korean-Americans make false assumptions, asking too many inappropriate questions about her personal life.
She says people ask, “'How did you come? How did you get enough money to be here?’ I think, why are you so curious? You don’t ask others, just people from North Korea. I just want to be treated like everyone else.”
Park left North Korea in 2004 because she lost hope for building a life there — her family background prevented her from attending the best schools or getting a good job. She lived in the northernmost province of the country, making it easier to cross the Tumen River into China. Then she went to South Korea, then L.A.
While in South Korea, she got interested in real estate and realized she needed to learn English. So she worked three jobs, saved enough money and got help from church pastors to come to the U.S. in 2011. Park now attends a local community college and says she prefers it here.
“This is a land of immigrants,” she says. “At work, this person is a Mexican immigrant, this person is an Italian immigrant. That’s what’s comfortable for me.”
Officially, there are fewer than 200 North Korean refugees who’ve come directly from China. But many more come as South Korean citizens after resettling in the South. They’re often referred as “double defectors,” because they left both countries. These North Koreans often leave the South because of the discrimination and disrespect they experience: They’re accused of being spies — and they earn less than their Southern counterparts.
(Pastor Young Gu Kim at his church in Torrance. Credit: Kyung Jin Lee)
Pastor Young Gu Kim runs "North Koreans in America," a grassroots support group based in L.A.’s Koreatown. He says all North Koreans need a lot of support once they get here.
“The hard thing is that those who left North Korea… they wander in China for three to four years. Those who are lucky meet missionaries right away, but the rest are sold to Chinese people. Those years in China were really difficult. So that’s how they have diseases and trauma," Kim says.
Kim started working with North Koreans around 15 years ago. Like many South Korean Christians aiding Northerners, his work with defectors is a way to fulfill a larger dream of starting a church in the North. He spends his days driving people to and from appointments. He translates for them, helping them find jobs and enroll kids in school. He recently started a tutoring class every Saturday for kids of North Korean immigrants in Fullerton.
Kim says it’s important to build an infrastructure of support for young people, since their parents don’t know the language or culture here. Whether you’re a kid or an adult, he says there’s a lot of differences and misunderstandings between Korean immigrants from the North and South. And they need to be seen as different cultures now, since North and South Korea have been divided for more than 60 years.
“They don’t trust anyone,” Kim says. “And they don’t say thank you. Even if they do something wrong, they don’t say sorry. Because if they said it in North Korea, they were already dead. If I do something wrong, I have to grab someone and have them take the blame for them, to survive.”
Pastor Kim calls it a "small reunification" of North and South right here in the U.S. But, “Becoming one family does not mean living together and taking responsibility for them. It’s about making a phone call, showing interest — like during holidays, sharing a turkey. It’s not that hard.”
But Elise Park is more interested in getting her degree than "reuniting" immigrants from North and South. After dinner, Park sits down to do her homework. She stays up until 3 a.m. to complete her oceanography assignment — the technical jargon is tough to understand. But she’s working hard to become an international real estate appraiser and dreams of returning to North Korea one day.
“My brothers are there,” she says. “Also, there’s no real estate in North Korea. They don’t know the concept. I want people to know how the world works.”
Pastor Kim says North Koreans are like onions — if you keep peeling, there are more layers to discover of their history, culture and politics.
But most North Korean immigrants want the same thing as the rest of us: to fit in.
Note: We've corrected the lead paragraph to reflect that there are more migrant Koreans in the United States - not Southern California - than anywhere outside Korea.
By women, for women: History and California's drought collide at Rockhaven Sanitarium
Behind the stone wall of the old Rockhaven Sanitarium in Montrose, engineer David Gould shows off one of the Crescenta Valley Water District’s latest projects: A well that will pull water from under an out-of-use women’s mental health facility that was opened in the 1920s.
(The water well on the old Rockhaven Sanitarium site)
"It goes down 385 feet into the ground and produces groundwater from our local Verdugo basin," Gould explains.
As part of a joint project with the City of Glendale, the Crescenta Valley Water District plans to tap an estimated 450 gallons of water per minute, which would supply about 1,200 homes a year.
The water is high in nitrates, so it will have to be treated at a nearby facility, and that requires the construction of an underground pipeline. In the past, water agencies might not have bothered to take such steps, but California's drought is changing that.
"Prior to the year 2000, there hadn’t been a well drilled in the Crescenta Valley since 1954," says Gould. "We are turning over rocks."
Gould says the plan is to have the Rockhaven well online and providing local water by the middle of October.
"We’re not taking imported water from the Colorado River or the state project, which is up in the Sacramento area," he says.
The project is getting assistance in the form of Prop 84 California drought relief funds. "Seventy-five percent of the cost of this project, or about $900,000, is being paid for by the state," he says.
So why aren’t more wells like this springing up? It’s because even though the water may be under ground, you need some space above ground in order to build the well.
"We’ve known that the water is here for a long time," Gould says. "The complications that come up is finding land. The Crescenta Valley is 99 percent built out."
Which makes the 3.5-acre Rockhaven Sanitarium site, purchased by the City of Glendale in 2008, more than just a patch of land with some historic buildings on it.
"This provided an opportunity for us, because this Rockhaven site has been kept in the state it’s had since 1929," Gould says.
So what happens to the sanitarium?
The group Friends of Rockhaven wants to see the site in Montrose preserved.
Built in the 1920s by Agnes Richards, Rockhaven was one of many facilities that sprouted up in the Crescenta Valley in order to provide a place of healing.
Being an abandoned sanitarium, the place now has its share of ghost stories, says docent Phaedra Walton. But Rockhaven wasn't exactly Arkham Asylum, either. Friends of Rockhaven founding member Joanna Linkchorst says if there are spirits haunting the buildings that were home to patients for so many years, they’re most likely happy ones.
(Rockhaven Sanitarium founder Agnes Richards)
"[Richards] was absolutely appalled at the treatment of mental patients at the time," Linkchorst says.
After serving with the Red Cross during WWI, Richards ended up at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino. But she didn’t stay.
"The pictures of Patton State Hospital — it’s this big gothic-like castle and it would be incredibly intimidating to be in there, and Agnes decided that something needed to be different," says Linkchorst.
Instead of gothic dormitories, Richards built stand-alone cottages with names like The Willows and The Pines, while towering oak trees and meticulously landscaped rose gardens made Rockhaven a place where patients wanted to venture outdoors.
Linkchorst points to a statue that sits in the middle of the Rockhaven property that’s become a mascot for the place.
('The Lady of Rockhaven' Credit: Maya Sugarman/KPCC)
"This is a lady that we call The Lady of Rockhaven. It was a Gladding McBean statue that was designed in 1921 and named simply reclining nude," Linkchorst says. "The way that she’s drinking in the sun and looking up and that beautiful faint smile gives you the feeling that you feel here: this is a place to relax and breathe and recover and become yourself again."
The groundbreaking style of care and beautiful surroundings at Rockhaven attracted Hollywood types too. Billie Burke — who played Glinda the Good Witch in "The Wizard of Oz" — was once a resident. So was Clark Gable’s first wife, Josephine Dillon. And then there was Gladys — Marilyn Monroe’s mom.
"Gladys felt the need to wander. She is our most infamous resident. And there were a couple of times that she attempted to escape," Linkchorst says. "She managed to get out a couple of times. One of them, she tied her bedsheets together and made a dramatic escape through a tiny window in her closet."
(The closet window through which Gladys escaped Rockhaven. Credit: Maya Sugarman/KPCC)
But most Rockhaven patients were in no hurry to leave. Some women stayed until their deaths, leaving behind their most treasured belongings. On the second floor of The Willows cottage, Linkchorst reveals some of the forgotten items she’s hoping to archive: souvenir photos, fur coats, hatboxes full of cards.
(A Paris Inn souvenir card left behind by a former Rockhaven resident. Credit: Maya Sugarman/KPCC)
"Agnes came from a background of running statewide insane asylums that are kind of the true atrocious sort of places that you see like in American Horror Story," says Emily Lanigan, who is also with the Friends of Rockhaven. "And so she really worked to created a place of serenity, of beautiful surroundings, where women were treated with dignity."
But Lanigan thinks Rockhaven should be remembered not just for its serenity but for its pioneering founder.
"This was a woman-run facility. It was run by women, it was for women. And this was in 1923," says Lanigan. "And this was a time when a woman-owned business in general was kind of a rarity. But especially a woman-owned medical facility. A health facility? A mental health facility? That was unheard of."
It’s not clear yet what the City of Glendale will do with the sanitarium land. But Linkchorst hopes Rockhaven will one day be reopened as a respite for all.
"The Friends of Rockhaven are working with the city and we are hoping one day to be able to open this up to the public as a historic park," Linkchorst says. "We hope to be able to have a museum for the Crescenta Valley in here. And just park space where people can come and rest and recover just as they have been able for almost a century."
How Guggenheim turned the Dodgers into 'The Best Team Money Can Buy'
"The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse" is author Molly Knight's chronicle of how far down Frank McCourt dragged the Dodgers, and how far up the new owners want to take it.
John Rabe met with Knight at Dodger Stadium to talk about the book — as they watched the Phillies pummel the Dodgers from seats on the first base line.
Interview Highlights
Can you imagine, if Frank McCourt (Dodgers owner from 2004-2012) managed to make it through bankruptcy and still owned the Dodgers, what Dodger Stadium would be like today?
"Well, it would be a pretty depressing place. He would still be in litigation with his wife, because she would be appealing to get what she felt was rightfully hers, the team would probably have a payroll like the Mets, we wouldn't be looking at these beautiful scoreboards with high definition color, our feet would be sticking to the ground from the beer and the gum. I'm going to be able to find my car later and not worry about what happens in dark parking lots."
How did the Guggenheim group manage to win the secret auction [for ownership of the Dodgers]?
"Frank [McCourt], in his infinite shadiness, decided, instead of having the auction, he was going to terrify the bidders the night before and sort of meet with them separately, and figure out what their bid was going to be. And he met with [hedge fund billionaire] Steve Cohen, and according to other people who saw the piece of paper with the offer Cohen made, Cohen offered Frank $2 billion for the Dodgers. Frank then went to the Guggenheim group and slid that piece of paper across the table to Mark Walter and said, 'Can you meet this?' And [Walter] said 'I can, but I'm going to make you an offer, and if I make you this offer, that's it, we have a deal, there is no auction tomorrow.' And Frank said 'OK.'"
The Guggenheim group had a ton of money, but their president, the guy they hired to run the Dodgers, Stan Kasten, is known for wanting to have a clean slate.
“He hates paying players. He hates it. It’s almost like he feels it’s coming from his own wallet. He just feels like, as soon as you give them that big money, nothing but problems. They get hurt, they lose motivation. Your team is hurt because of it.”
But Mark Walter, the owner, wanted to make sure that the fans came back. The fans that had left in droves because Frank McCourt was such a jerk.
“And [Walter] didn’t want to have a rebuilding era like the Cubs are coming out of, like the Mets are hoping to come out of. No, no, that wasn’t acceptable. They wanted to win immediately. Or at the very least they wanted to have superstars who would draw fans and who would light up their television network. It’s sort of the reason why the team was worth $2 billion. And to their credit, they’re trying to rebuild the major league team and the minor league system at the same time. And they’re spending through the nose to do that, but they’re backing it up.”
One of the key examples of the rebuilding is how you start your book, when you met Clayton Kershaw at his house in Texas.
"That was the most fortuitous day of my life. Clayton is a very private person, it took years to build his trust. He's a great, great man, he's just very protective of his private life, which I can understand, being the best pitcher on the planet. I landed in Dallas and I saw that there were contract extension rumors, and I texted him like, 'Uh, are we still on?' and he was like 'Yeah!' I got to his house the next day at 3 o'clock on the dot, and his agent called at, I believe, 3:06 or 3:05 to tell him that his deal was done, and it was just me and him alone in his house, just sitting there. I believe I was definitely more freaked out than he was."
How big was this deal?
"$215 million for seven years, the largest contract for a pitcher in major league history and the largest average annual contract for a professional athlete in U.S. history."
And you offered him the chance to cut the interview short and deal with this stuff. And he said, no, he was going to do the interview. What did that tell you about his character?
“So, Clayton’s phone is going off like crazy, vibrating the hell out of the table. I turned my recorder off because I was getting nervous that he was missing a text message from his mother, from his wife, from his best friend. And he’s like, ‘Oh, no, let’s just knock out this interview right now.' He is a person who has this insane ability to be focused and be present where he is.”