Lisa See on "Dreams of Joy," the sequel to "Shanghai Girls ... "Leftover Cuties" live on KPCC's Jam and Banter ... Dinner Party Download makes you 15% smarter, 12% more attractive ... RIP Magu (Gilbert Luhan, founder of Los Four) ...
Memorial Day, WWII a family affair for Kevin Ferguson
8/1/2011 - A SAD UPDATE: Kevin's Grandmother passed away early Sunday morning. She was 87. Team Off-Ramp and all of KPCC send condolences to Kevin's family.
For most historians, there are few stories more compelling than that of the USS Indianapolis: a heavy cruiser that had seen battle for nearly all of World War Two. Its final voyage was one of the most integral, yet disastrous missions in the history of the US Navy. And for Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson, it’s a story that hits very close to home.
LA Jewish Symphony Exalts at Ford Amphitheatre Aug 14
Sunday, August 14, the LA Jewish Symphony will be performing a program called Exaltation!, with the symphony and special guests playing music that tells Bible stories. The program features the group's usual mix of classical and pops, instrumental and vocal. Off-Ramp's John Rabe talked with the LA Jewish Symphony's founder and artistic director, Maestra Noreen Green.
NEWS RELEASE FROM LA JEWISH SYMPHONY
The Los Angeles Jewish Symphony (LAJS), lauded for its exploration of Jewish culture, presents
EXALTATION! BIBLICAL STORIES THROUGH MUSIC, a performance celebrating music inspired by the
Bible’s rich literary heritage, on Sunday, August 14, 2011, 7:30 pm, under the stars at the Ford Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. The concert, led by Artistic Director Noreen Green, features a variety of classical, film and musical theatre works. Among the guest artists are celebrated vocalist and two-time Grammy nominee Amick Byram and fifteen-year-old violin virtuoso Stephen Waarts, described by critics as “poetic,” “engaging” and “something special.”
“The Bible is a source of inspiration and tradition for many of the world’s religions,” says Green, who has brought neglected as well as new and familiar orchestral works on Jewish themes to the concert stage. “Our program celebrates the commonality of the Bible’s timeless and heroic stories of love and betrayal, of prophets and people, of kings and shepherds and of good and evil, which serve to link different religions and cultures together.”
The evening includes music from Franz Waxman and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, two film composers among the elite group of European émigrés that immeasurably enriched the cultural life of Los Angeles. On the program are Waxman’s lushly romantic film score, The Story of Ruth, a stirring depiction of loyalty, romance, faith and devotion; and Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s brilliant and seldom-played Violin Concerto #2, subtitled The Prophets, a musical portrait of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Elijah, featuring Waarts. Additionally, Byram performs music from stage and screen ranging from Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Steven Schwartz’s Prince of Egypt to Jerry Bock’s The Apple Tree, Alan Menken’s King David and Shuki Levy’s Masada The Musical Saga. Byram was in the original cast of Masada The Musical Saga, which was presented in Israel for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the state.
DATE/TIME: Sunday, August 14, 2011, 7:30 pm
PLACE: Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood, CA 90068
PARKING: On-site, stacked parking costs $5 per vehicle. FREE non-stacked parking serviced by a FREE shuttle to the Ford is available at the Universal City Metro Station lot at Lankershim Blvd. and Campo de Cahuenga. The shuttle, which cycles every 15-20 minutes, stops in the "kiss and ride" area.
INFORMATION:
www.FordTheatres.org or (323) 461-3673 or www.lajewishsymphony.org
Lisa See's "Shanghai Girls" sequel, "Dreams of Joy" ... or "Joy Has Two Mommies"
UPDATE: "Dreams of Joy" comes out in paperback Tuesday, and See will be touring to support the book. Here's our interview from July, 2011.
If you read Lisa See's "Shanghai Girls" and couldn't believe the NYT bestselling author would leave you with such a cliffhanger - Joy running away to Communist China leaving her mother and aunt in anguish - it's payback time. And payback is the historically rich and impossible to put down See-quel, "Dreams of Joy," which follows Joy and Pearl to China during the so- called Great Leap Forward.
Off-Ramp host John Rabe went to Chinatown to talk with See about the new book, and about the movie version of her novel "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan."
Artists & fans raising money for Stan Sakai, creator of iconic rabbit samurai Usagi Yojimbo
Since 1984, Pasadena artist Stan Sakai has been drawing "Usagi Yojimbo," a comic book about the adventures of a rabbit samurai. His work has drawn countless awards, international acclaim and sales, and even this Off-Ramp audio profile by Charles Solomon.
But Sakai is still an independent artist and is now faced with paying medical bills for his wife Sharon, who has a brain tumor.
The good news is he's not alone in the fight: his colleagues from the worlds of comics and animation have been raising money, including the release of "The Sakai Project" by Dark Horse, with dozens of artists contributing their take on the rabbit hero.
All proceeds from the sales go to the Sakai's, and it was so popular at Comic Con that it sold out ... twice!
There are two events in LA where you can buy the book and get it signed by many of the artists it features, and help Stan and Sharon.
- Saturday, August 2, at the Frank & Son Collectible Show in City of Industry, from 10:30am - 5pm. Some artists who'll be there: Jeff Keane (Family Circus), Ricardo Delgado, Rubèn Procopio, Steven E. Gordon, Wil Panganiban, Mark Dos Santos, Brad Rader, Mike Kunkel, Jonathan Marks, Stephen Silver, Stan Sakai, Scott Shaw!, Tone Rodriguez, Aidan Casserly, Benton Jew, Anson Jew, Chad Frye.
- Saturday, August 16, Meltdown Comics on Sunset Blvd, time and artists TBA.
The fantastic and freaky films of Sion Sono
Japanese cult writer-director Sion Sono started out as prolific poet until he took up filmmaking. He earned worldwide critical acclaim for his film "Love Exposure" — a four-hour epic that tackles life's biggest issues: love, death, sex, revenge, religion and up-skirt panty photography. His latest is "Cold Fish," which screens at Cinefamily on Aug. 6 and 7. It's a tale of a tropical fish salesman who’s drawn into the dark orbit of a charismatic, middle-aged serial killer, based on a true story. He talked with Off-Ramp’s Lainna Fader on his last trip to L.A.
I was first introduced to Sono's films when I worked at Cinefamily a few years ago. Cinefamily's programmers received a handful of screeners from the New York Asian Film Festival to review and I hung out with them and watched them all. "Love Exposure" was my favorite by far. Since then, I've watched every Sono film I could find—including now cult classic "Suicide Club" — and "Love Exposure" is probably still my favorite of his, though I love all his work.
"'Amanojaku' in Japanese is exactly what I am," Sono said. "How shall I put it in English? I can think of it only in Japanese. If the content of "Suicide Club" was something people would like—if everyone else was making movies similar to "Suicide Club," I would have been making love romance movies. I just like to do things contrary to others."
Sono pushes forward with his perverse sense of humor, tales of brutal murders—you'll find many scenes of human flesh being gleefully diced up in "Cold Fish" — and more nutjob characters than ever.
The controversial director has also called Yasujiro Ozu — one of Japan's most revered filmmakers — the anti-Christ, the anti-God. "He is too much of a "god" in Japanese movie history, and the history cannot be refreshed unless we become anti-Ozu. I have nothing personal against him, but I have to declare I am anti-Ozu in order to move forward," he said.
Cold Fish:
Love Exposure:
Suicide Club:
Isamu Noguchi: California Legend
The Laguna Art museum is currently celebrating the legendary, late artist Isamu Noguchi, who was born in Los Angeles. They're showing two exhibitions at the museum and giving a special focus to California Scenario, a garden in Costa Mesa and one of Noguchi's last public pieces. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson met with curator Grace Kook-Anderson at the site of California Scenario.
Noguchi: California Legacy is on display through October 2. Next Sunday, August 7, the museum hosts lecture from one of the country's leading Noguchi experts
Jam and Banter with LA's Leftover Cuties
In a world where making a living in music gets harder every day, LA's Leftover Cuties has it down pat: you can hear their music on TV, iTunes and in venues all over LA. Just this past week, they appeared at our very own Crawford Family Forum for a performance and a talk about how to make it in today's changing music industry. The event was moderated by Joe Armstrong, of Airtalk and Pasadena City College's Lancer Radio.
Pioneer LA Chicano artist Gilbert 'Magu' Lujan's legacy
Los Angeles-based visual artist Gilbert “Magu” Lujan died last Sunday. He was 70 years old. In a career that spanned five decades, Lujan worked to open established galleries to emerging Chicano artists, and to spark discussions about the direction of the art.
A typical Gilbert Lujan painting includes bright, chubby cars with lowrider paint jobs driven by Aztec warriors – or, sometimes, by dogs behind dark shades. The style’s on view every day in the art he created for the Hollywood and Vine Metro Red Line station.
It may look pretty, he told Latinopia.com recently, but politics inform its aesthetic.
"Everything I do is about humans," says Lujan, "so I make the car a human being, but for me making them these cartoon characters is a subterfuge for something else. This way I could deal with racism in a different way, to counter a lot of these anti-Mexican feelings by hiding behind whimsy, color, innocence, folky."
Lujan was born in the San Joaquin Valley. He lived in Guadalajara with his mother’s family for a while, and grew up in East L.A. During the late 1960s activism of the United Farm Workers and civil rights protests in L.A. he proudly claimed the identity of a politicized Mexican-American, a Chicano.
In 1974 he took that barrio aesthetic to the hallowed and very un-Chicano-friendly galleries of the L.A. County Museum of Art. Lujan, recently out of UC Irvine with an art degree, and three fellow artists were the first Chicanos to exhibit at LACMA.
For that era, the exhibit of Los Four, as they called themselves, was monumental, says independent curator Pilar Tompkins-Rivas. "Magu’s approach was one of art school experience and understanding," says Tompkins-Rivas, "but also bringing in the imagery and icons and approach to art that reflected his background.
Tompkins-Rivas is working on an exhibit of Lujan’s work that’ll be part of the comprehensive October-to-April series of Southland art shows called "Pacific Standard Time." UCLA’s Chon Noriega announced that the coordinated exhibits would include Lujan works two days before Gilbert Lujan’s death.
"The university art gallery at UC Irvine will provide a closer look at Gilbert 'Magu' Lujan," said Noriega, "who helped define Chicano art as a founder of Los Four and who organized the first exhibition of Chicano artists at a major art museum at LACMA, in 1974."
A second exhibit salutes Lujan’s pugnacious persistence to get people talking about art. In the audience, fellow Chicano artist Wayne Healy remembered those efforts.
"He does things like his famous mental menudos," said Healy. "And it’s just like this impromptu roundtable of questions about what is Chicano art."
"Mental Menudo" was Lujan’s reference to the hearty, spicy Mexican stew with a hodgepodge of ingredients. Gallery owner Kathy Gallegos attended enough of those events to know they weren’t all polite salon discussions about art.
"And I think a couple of people were kicked out and weren’t allowed to come back to the mental menudos because he tried to say, ‘You have to be respectful here, and we have to respect each other’s opinions,’" says Gallegos. "That’s easy to say, but when you start talking about what is Chicano art and someone doesn’t agree with you, it can get heated."
Gallegos says some discussions got heated when Lujan didn’t acknowledge that some of his viewpoints tended to dismiss the women in the room. She and others remember Gilbert Lujan as a prolific artist and even tempered man. In recent years, she adds, Lujan came around and expanded his narrow definition of Chicano art to include work by Central American artists in the U.S
Doctors diagnosed Gilbert Lujan with prostate cancer three years ago. He was carrying out his usual schedule until earlier this year, says his son, Otoño Lujan, and in his final months his three adult children spent more time with him.
"We were fortunate over the last several months to get a lot closer to him," says Otoño Lujan. "That was one of the silver linings of that, is that all our lives slowed down to be able to create a stronger relationship and really connected deeper."
The younger Lujan says plans for a public memorial are in the works. A benefit to pay for medical costs, organized before the elder Lujan’s death, will go forward at the da Center in Pomona next month.
Dinner Party Download honors the Civil War, red light runners, and the writers of Another Earth
Hosts Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam give you your weekly dose of history, culture, and booze. On this week's show, Miranda July tells a joke, explore some little known Civil War history and talk with writers Mike Cahill and Brit Marling--they wrote the new film Another Earth.