An 81-year old woman riding the 67-mile trail over the Santa Monica Mountains ... The California African American Museum just announced a major grant and collaboration with the Smithsonian ... We remember Carolyn See, who once said, “When I started to write, I was relatively old, and lived in California. So I was the wrong sex, wrong age, wrong coast. Luckily, I was too ignorant to know it.” ... We'll check in with KPCC’s Mike Roe at Comic-Con to see if anybody’s actually getting work done, or if they’re all playing Pokemon Go ...
Remembering 'badass' California author Carolyn See
Author Carolyn See once said, “When I started to write, I was relatively old, and lived in California. So I was the wrong sex, wrong age, wrong coast. Luckily, I was too ignorant to know it.” See wrote many books, including "Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America," her memoir, and the novels "There Will Never Be Another You" and "Golden Days." She's also the mother of bestselling author Lisa See, who writes about the Chinese-American experience.
Carolyn See died July 13; Lisa invited us to her memorial, which was held Thursday at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica and featured 19 speakers, including Lisa, See's grandkids, and author Susan Straight. Listen to their touching eulogies with the audio player.
An octogenarian cowgirl takes on the 67-mile backbone of Santa Monica Mountains
UPDATE 7/26/2016: Great news! The National Parks Service tells us Ruth and her friends finished the ride Saturday afternoon as scheduled. -- John Rabe
It's Monday morning at a trailhead just off PCH by Point Mugu. Five women are beginning a long ride. They're taking a trail that starts here, runs north a couple of miles, then turns right and runs east for a long way, staying four to five miles from the coast, then dips south to take you down to Will Rogers State Historic Park in the Palisades.
Up, across and down, that's more than 67 miles. It's called the Backbone Trail because is traverses the bony spine of the Santa Monica Mountains, and the trail is finally open all the way from Roy Miller Trailhead to Will Rogers.
You could drive from Point Mugu to the Palisades in minutes, but then you'd miss ... well, everything.
The leader of the Backbone Trail Cowgirls is Ruth Gerson, who is replicating a horse ride she took exactly 25 years ago, when the trail wasn't all one piece, and she had to ride across private property – usually with permission, she says.
Back then, "We were all endurance riders, so we trotted and moved out. It was only three days. This ride is gonna be at a walk; we're just taking it easy, and we're taking six days to do it." Which would put them in the Palisades on Saturday.
But back then, she also wasn't 81-years-old with eight surgeries on one hip alone.
Gerson was born in Brooklyn and came to California by train "at a time when you could walk between the train cars by pulling open the heavy doors, feeling the wind as you hopped across the connections and opened the door to the next train car."
She went to Pomona College for the "tennis, fencing, swimming, skiing, shooting, flying airplanes, riding horses for Kellogg Ranch, and other pursuits," then says she got her bachelor of science in psychology from UCLA, and taught at UCLA’s Fernald Center.
After years of moving around, Gerson finally settled down to live in the Santa Monica Mountains 40 years ago, where she lives with "a 19-year-old Mustang mare, a 10-year-old Buckskin mare, a 31-year-old sorrel mare, and a 29-year-old Spanish Mustang gelding."
You won't be surprised that one of the reasons she's doing this is to prove "age is no limitation for riders or horses." Also, she wants to publicize the trail finally being open and to"remind national parks and state parks that we need some trail camps along the Backbone Trail. We're able to make arrangements (they're sleeping in their trailers, driven by friends), but the average person can't just park here and ride the trail."
The group – supported by California State Parks, National Parks Service, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council, the Recreation & Equestrian Coalition and Park Watch Report – expects to finish the ride Saturday afternoon. You can follow their progress in daily updates online.
Chicas Rockeras: A rock camp for girls in southeast LA
The rock-n-roll camp for girls movement had its start in Portland, Oregon almost 15 years ago. These day camps have spread all over the world — there are more than 55 now — including one right here in downtown Los Angeles.
But what about southeast Los Angeles?
It's a part of L.A. County between the 110, 105 and the 710 and 5 freeways, containing cities like Huntington Park, South Gate and Bell — a working class area that’s been off the radar of the arts and culture scene in L.A. But a punk rocker who goes simply by the name Marin has been trying to change that. Last year, she and other like-minded women kick-started Chicas Rockeras of Southeast Los Angeles.
“Why do folks have to go outside of southeast L.A. to access music, to access self-confidence, to be in an environment that's so positive? That's what really inspired me to bring it home,” she said.
Marin came up in South Gate and earned her punk rock chops drumming in an all-women-of-color band called Bruise Violet. She credits her participation in the punk scene with teaching her how to make things happen with whatever resources are available.
Marin and her fellow camp organizers came of age in the punk rock house party scene of South Central and Southeast L.A., and they apply their DIY approach to Chicas Rockeras in Huntington Park.
For both the campers and the volunteers, the idea behind rock camp has never been about professionalism in music. The goal is to encourage self-esteem and self-empowerment in young girls through music.
In just one week, girls ages 8 to 17 learn an instrument, form a band, write an original song and perform it at a concert in front of their families, friends and rock camp community. Most adult musicians don’t work this quickly. Campers also learn life skills and community-building through workshops, skits, guest speakers and performers.
“Girls are often made to feel small, to not be loud, to not take up space,” Marin said. “So imagine being 10, coming into camp, and being told ‘Yes you can’ over and over again, being celebrated for your mistakes, given a high-five, or even being encouraged to yell into a mic. Some girls, they have a breakdown, but they also have a breakthrough.”
The infectious energy of rock camp also has the power to change the lives of the adult volunteers, many of whom confess to learning a lot about themselves in the process. More often than not, they say they wish they’d had something encouraging and validating like rock camp growing up.
“If I had someone showing me or explaining to me what it is to be a person of color, what it is to be gender queer,” Marin said. “I would've been more comfortable in my skin. Instead, it took me so long to come out, because I didn't have these conversations with anybody.”
Every aspect of this camp is tailored to both confronting and embracing the realities of girls growing up in Southeast L.A. From the bilingual theme song and instruction to the separation of the campers into age-divided groups called the “Bidi Bidis” and the “Bom Boms,” this rock camp provides an accessible, affordable (100 percent sliding scale), safe space for girls to explore and express their identities.
The beauty, said Marin, is that these young girls can take the energy and pride generated from camp home to their own lives and communities. As Chicas Rockeras SELA wraps up their second year of summer camp, Marin shouts: “We’re trying to take over the world one rock camp at a time!”
You can catch Chicas Rockeras SELA’s public showcase concert of camper bands on Saturday, July 30, at Aspire Ollin University Prep, 2540 E. 58th St., Huntington Park, CA 90255. The show kicks off at 1pm. Click here for event details.
Song of the week: Ramones events galore in Los Angeles!
This week’s Off-Ramp song of the week is “California Sun” by the Ramones. Their 1977 version of the Riveria's hit is a classic for sure - but the Ramones hail from the East Coast. What's that got to do with Los Angeles?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjCa8i5JDF4
We’re seeing a lot of California Sun this weekend. It’s supposed to hit 103 degrees on Saturday. But also there’s two Ramones related events going on in LA right now:
On Sunday, July 24 The Hollywood Forever Cemetery is hosting a tribute to guitarist Johnny Ramone - there’ll be a pop up gallery with Ramones photos, and a screening of 1979’s "Rock N’ Roll High School," which stars the band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1001xArPVk
Or maybe you’d rather head Downtown, where the Bootleg Theater is hosting “Four Chords and a Gun,” a play that tells the real life story of the harrowing, insane time the band recorded an album with Phil Spector as producer.
The California African American Museum is now a Smithsonian affiliate
Opened in 1981 at Exposition Park in Los Angeles, the California African American Museum is one of the smallest museums in a place that houses institutional giants like the California Science Center and the Natural History Museum. But the museum's collection just got a lot bigger — sort of.
In a ceremony Wednesday morning, CAAM staff announced the museum is now formally affiliated with the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
What does that mean?
The affiliation gives CAAM easier and cheaper access to items in the Smithsonian's huge permanent collection, and means it can share exhibitions with other museums in the affiliate network.
"We know that the Smithsonian has over 8 million objects in their permanent collection," said Naima Keith, the museum's deputy director. "The ability to be able to loan and borrow those things for the museum to be on view here in California is a huge accomplishment."
The move is yet another step in the museum's push to become more visible and more relevant. CAAM is a state-run institution that over the last five years has struggled to bring in private donations. But the museum has taken steps to change that, making a few big new hires, including Keith and George Davis, who has served as executive director for a little over a year.
Davis hopes that as Exposition Park becomes more visible in the coming years, so will CAAM:
We have been around for 30 years. I tell people all the time that we are blessed and cursed by being a state museum. I mean we're blessed to get the appropriation, but sometimes we haven’t really hustled and really kind of taken things for granted. And also there's a lot of changes in Expo Park, there's great changes in the city with The Broad and a lot of the cultural institutions, L.A. is becoming more a global contemporary arts headquarters for the world.
And so we have some new leadership coming with a fresh pair of eyes – I was on the board here years ago — but we just really wanted to look at things differently, tackle some things that have always been done the same way. The museums and cultural institutions in the United State and the world just cannot stay stagnant. They have to change and be more relevant to younger people and attract new audiences. We just can’t attract only attract, for example, an African-American audience – 40 percent of our attendance is Latino. So we just have to evolve.
The museum currently has a handful of exhibits showing through September 2016, including one focused on photography in West Coast hip hop, but no future exhibitions have been announced.