We tour the district with outgoing City Councilman Tom LaBonge; we get a preview of an exciting new podcast; we get a distaff view of "Inside Out;" and hear what it was like to be a kid on the set of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"
Lake Fire: Evacuating Camp de Benneville Pines, refuge from LA for 50-plus years
This week the Lake Fire forced the evacuation of nearly 200 campers, most of them kids, from campgrounds in the San Bernardino National Forest.
That includes 120 kids in a theater arts group who were at Camp de Benneville Pines, a retreat and conference center in Barton Flats, 90 miles east of LA and 6,800 up in the mountains. The camp is run by the Unitarian-Universalist Association, and is open to all people.
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talked with Janet James, the camp's executive director, about the fire, the nature-centered philosophy of the camp, and camp dog Daisy Doodle.
(James and Daisy Doodle)
Stay up to date on the Lake Fire and all the other wildfires in the area using our Fire Tracker tool.
Song of the week: 'I Wanna Lose Control' by Gary Wilson
This week’s Off-Ramp song of the week dates back all the way to 1977. It’s called “I Wanna Lose Control” and it’s by Gary Wilson. Gary Wilson is a singer and songwriter born in upstate New York with a penchant for funk, soul and avant-garde classical music.
Wilson lives in San Diego now and he’s playing a rare live show Sunday, June 28 at the Echo in Los Angeles. Find out how to get tickets here.
You can listen to "I Wanna Lose Control" here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIbzENbzPKc
The last hurrah of Tom LaBonge
Guess what song was on the radio when I got into Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge’s car for his exit interview?
Of course it was Randy Newman's "I Love L.A." And love LaBonge or hate him, nobody loves L.A.. more than LaBonge, and nobody better knows his district, which stretches from Sherman Oaks to Toluca Lake to the Silver Lake Reservoir to Olympic Boulevard, and includes Hollywood, Griffith Park, and the Miracle Mile.
(Council District 4 is highlighted in yellow. City of Los Angeles graphic)
But now, after decades as a council aide, then 15 years as city councilman, Tom LaBonge is in his final month in office (his official last day in office is June 30). He's termed out and will be replaced by David Ryu, who will be the city's first Korean-American council member.
"When I was serving the city, I wasn't writing legislation. You know, sometimes I get criticized, and they say I'm not a visionary. I'm an absolute visionary, and the vision comes from people, and how people feel about their city." — L.A. City Councilman Tom LaBonge
The idea for the interview was that we'd drive all over his district, but President Obama was in town, so we stayed in the Los Feliz-Silverlake area. Still, there were plenty of signature LaBonge moments: he handed out maps of Griffith Park to tourists at the Observatory and gave one of his photo calendars to a constituent, chastised smokers in the park, opened a gate to a maintenance yard for a worker who'd forgotten his key (of course, LaBonge has one), and negotiated with a resident whose retaining wall and sewer are being ruined by a street tree.
The only thing he didn't do was fill a pothole or clear a storm drain, both of which I can confirm he's done, even when nobody was looking.
"Jon Stewart, when he announced (he was quitting "The Daily Show"), he said I'm told I have a great family. And everybody laughed. My family, my wife Brigid, my children, Mary-Catherine and Charles, they don't like going out with me; they want to go out with me when I'm just Dad, and that's something I've got to do better at. This is not a family job." — L.A. City Councilman Tom LaBonge
Some kids start cooking when they're kids and become chefs. Some kids are loudmouths and become radio journalists. The way LaBonge tells it, as a kid he was "infatuated" with the city itself and the people who made it run: the hospitals, the firefighters, the high school teachers, the architects and garbage men. He even knows which street lights in his district were the first to be wired underground, decades ago. So it was natural for him to become a public servant.
Either LaBonge truly doesn't know what his next job will be, or he wouldn't say. But in an age of term limits, when every politician seems to be positioning themselves for the next gig, LaBonge stands apart. This is the job he wanted, and this is the job he loved, in the city he loves.
Director Mel Stuart's kids tell stories from the making of the original 'Willy Wonka'
Madeline Stuart says, "I couldn't imagine a kid who wouldn't want to finish school every day" and come hang out on the movie set.
That kid was Madeline (and her brother Peter), and the film was 1971's "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," based on Roald Dahl's book, directed by their father Mel Stuart.
Stuart worked in TV and film, directing "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium," the documentary "Wattstax," and more than a hundred other projects. "But there's no question," Madeline says, "that Willy Wonka is what endeared him to so many millions of people."
Madeline and Peter Stuart will be joining me onstage at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown L.A. on Wednesday, June 24, at 8 p.m., to introduce a screening of "Willy Wonka" with stories and photos from their time on the set. It's part of the L.A. Conservancy's Last Remaining Seats series.
"This was my favorite book," she says. "I brought the book to my father and said, 'Dad, I'd like you to make a movie out of my favorite book.' Granted not every little girl's father is a director, and not every little girl's father is inclined to listen to a little girl, but my father wisely did."
So, they lived in Germany, where the film was shot, and every day after school at a U.S. military base they would take the tram to the studio. "For us, it was like walking into the pages of your favorite book," but not just for the few hours when you watch a movie or read a book, but for days and days during the shoot.
She and Peter have small roles in the film, and she says she delights in the dark tone that startled many moviegoers. "We all have a dark side to our nature, and children are evil little creatures. And the book and the film really capture that, that children can be spoiled, bratty, obnoxious, and the film outs kids for their own bad behavior." And they get their comeuppance ... except for Charlie.
For much more, listen to the audio of our interview.
Many critics love Pixar's 'Inside Out.' Not this guy.
Every time a Pixar Animation feature comes out, I know the entire world is about to go crazy over something that will only fill me with dread and disgust. It happened again the other night. I saw an advance screening of "Inside Out." People all around me cooed with pleasure. I sat there punching my knee.
To my eye, "Inside Out" is the single most hideously ugly animated movie ever made. It’s so garish you feel like you've been swallowed by a jelly bean and are watching the world through a candy coated stomach. The character designs could have been cooked up by a Montessori preschool: giant eyes, monochromatic color, and extreme poses that never deviate from the promotional posters.
We are locked inside a young girl's head as she deals with the emotional trauma of a family move and adolescent pressures about her role in a new social setting. The emotions themselves are the characters we're tracking. Joy. Sadness. Anger. Fear. Disgust. They left out Grumpy and Doc.
Like "Up" before it, "Inside Out" will be praised by a lot of people for its emotional honesty, which is code for "it made me cry." But to me it’s designed to tamp down human behaviors and desires into shapes so flat the movie should have come wrapped in a fortune cookie.
Did you know that Happiness and Sadness are both part of life? Or that parents are sometimes preoccupied by things other than their kids?
Whew. Devastating.
And because this is Pixar, we are asked — no, make that forced — to weep for childhood as some sort of thumb-sucking "Paradise Lost." The nostalgia for a simpler time of diapers and fluffy pillows is fetishistic.
"But it's so original!" you say. It’s not. Disney nearly won an Oscar in 1943 for the propaganda short called "Reason and Emotion," which takes place in the cockpit of a human skull, where competing impulses wrestle for control of the steering wheel.
But "Reason and Emotion" sought to personify the intellect as well as the id. "Inside Out" is all id, all the time. People are just bundles of emotion lurching from one experience to the next based on which of their buttons is being pushed. And if that doesn't sound like a modern studio's idea of its audience, nothing does.
A rare visit inside the Eames House, hallowed ground for designers
Charles and Ray Eames were pioneering American designers whose most famous work is the Eames Recliner. The Eames were so famous, the chair got its own unveiling on NBC's Today Show in 1956.
They also designed the Case Study House #8 in the Pacific Palisades, then lived in it from Christmas Day, 1949, until they died. On the outside, the house resembles a stark, modernist home with no soft lines. But go inside, and everything changes, and Off-Ramp got a rare and privileged peek when we interviewed Daniel Ostroff, editor of the new "An Eames Anthology," and Charles and Ray's grandson Eames Demetrios, chair of The Eames Foundation.
If you've been inside your friend's Mid-Century Modern home, where the coffee table holds either a stack of Dwell magazines or nothing — but never a cup of coffee or the TV remote — you're relieved to walk into #8. It's filled with carpets, plants, art, books and soft places to sit.
The anthology is as thick as a 2TB external hard drive, but it collects just a small portion of the Eames' writings that, as Ostroff explains, illuminates their process, a process that valued evolution above revolution. "They used to say, 'innovate as a last resort,'" says Demetrios. "And what they meant is that when you innovate for its own sake, little bits of knowledge and wisdom that have been accumulated almost unconsciously by people can be easily lost. For example, I can make an innovative car tomorrow. It'll have 23 wheels and there'll be absolutely no point to it. What they tried to do with their designs was have a quality called 'way it should be-ness,' so if something was really well designed, the idea of it having been designed at all would not be apparent."
The anthology includes the narration for the Eames' movie explaining the molded plywood chair, in which they say instead of designing a chair for how people should sit, they designed one for how people do sit. It's revolutionary, alas, in some design circles. "It might sound revolutionary," Ostroff says, "but it's actually consistent with the overall Eames message. They were living it a time when there were far more choices than man had ever been faced with before, and Charles and Ray said that when you're a designer, you're on safe ground if what you focus on are people, the people who use your designs. And the fact that they didn't go beyond that is one of their gifts."
Members Appreciation Day, the one day a year you can go inside the Eames House, is June 20, but you need to sign up by June 15. Daniel Ostroff will be there, too, signing copies of "An Eames Anthology."
5 things you didn't know about the brown recluse spider
Richard Vetter, who has set listeners straight on black and brown widows, and who co-wrote "The PCT Field Guide for the Management of Urban Spiders," has written the first comprehensive book about possibly the most unfairly maligned spider of all: the brown recluse.
(Spider expert Richard Vetter. Image: UCR)
The retired UC Riverside researcher talked with Off-Ramp host John Rabe about his new book, "The Brown Recluse Spider."
From their interview, here are five things you probably didn't know about brown recluse spiders.
1. You weren't bitten by the brown recluse spider and neither was that guy you heard about.
If you live in Southern California, it wasn't a brown recluse that bit you (or that guy) — if you were even bitten — because they simply don't live here (see below).
[Doctors ] would say, "Well, of course there are brown recluses here, we diagnose the bites all the time." The problem is there are many things that can cause skin lesions that look like recluse bites, about 40 different conditions that we currently know.
Plus, Vetter says they avoid human beings.
People think that if they just have one recluse in their house that this thing is going to be running around like the shark from Jaws, running around chomping on them. I did a study with a woman in Kansas, and she collected, in six months, 2,055 brown recluse spiders in her house. Most of these were babies, and about 400 were of a size big enough to bite, yet it took 11 years before these people had one registered bite in their house.
2. They can slow down their metabolism and live up to 5 years.
They are sit-and-wait predators and can survive without feeding for quite awhile. They just lower their heart rate and they just sit there, if they're sitting away from predators, so they're not going to be running around to get out. They just wait there.
3. They didn't have a bad reputation until the Eisenhower years.
Actually, for years there had been conjecture that these little brown spiders were causing problems. Farmers knew very well that there were some problems in their barns, and they had a pretty good idea that it was a spider that was doing it, but it wasn't until 1957 that it was proven scientifically.
Whenever there is a new spider that is thought to be toxic, the media just jump on this all over the place and everyone gets really excited about things. So what happened after 1957, there was a rush to provide a lot of information to people, just like when the West Nile virus started or Lyme disease, 1977.
4. There aren't any brown recluse spiders in Southern California.
The brown recluse is one species of spider, which is found in the Midwest. There are no populations of the brown recluse spiders known in Southern California.
We do have the Chilean recluse in a few buildings in L.A. County. They are usually in the basements of municipal or commercial buildings. They are not biting people, and the Department of Health doesn't consider them a concern.
And we also have the desert recluse out in the deserts — Palmdale, Victorville, Blythe, China Lake, Indio — not in the L.A. Basin at all.
5. Richard Vetter's "The Brown Recluse Spider" is the first book about the brown recluse spider.
There really was no source for a lot of people who were not sure of what was going on. This is a book based on scientific information and I think it's going to convince a lot of folks.
But as Vetter admits, we do love our legends. Listen to the audio for much more on the much maligned brown recluse spider.