Take THAT, Ira! RH Greene's Off-Ramp doc "Vampira and Me" is now a movie. Plus, the man who pitched a foetus, Crenshaw kids' summer plans, and Jerry's junk.
R.H. Greene's "Vampira and Me" Off-Ramp documentary is now a major motion picture
In 1954, Maila Nurmi shocked the world as sexy horror host Vampira on KABC. She rocketed to national, then worldwide stardom, then quickly faded. She died in 2008. A couple of years ago, R.H. Greene, who became friends with Nurmi in her later years, told her story for Off-Ramp in a documentary called "Vampira and Me." That radio documentary is now a film up for "Best Documentary" at the LA Film Festival. There's one more showing: Saturday, Jun 23, at 7:30 pm, at Regal Cinemas L.A.
When we aired the radio doc, Greene wrote:
'In the interviews I conducted with Maila when we were friends back in the 1990s, she made it clear again and again how completely uninterested and even hostile she was to the conformity and largesse that were universal priorities of her era and every era since. "I don't like to do wholesome people," she said to me when describing the inspiration for the giddily unwholesome Vampira. "I don't like to dwell on their very existence, let alone pretend to be one."'
'Vampira became an enduring icon because she offered a place to stand for all the misfits who hear a stifled scream beneath the smiley face pasted over so much of modern life. And she was empowered to do this by the fact that the woman who created her meant it with every molecule of her being.
'The goth kids suiting up on Halloween weekend may not even know whose crest they're wearing when they slip into their black fishnets, cinch their waists, and press on their long red fingernails. But the momentary exhilaration they feel -- that sense of danger, and the cool breeze of freedom wafting like oxygen though the stale air of the everyday -- has been blown to them like a kiss from Maila's ruby red lips. It's a cliche, but freedom isn't free -- especially not for the pioneers. In the end, it cost Maila a lot to maintain that stance for so long, but I don't know if there was another one available to her.'
(There's one more showing of "Vampira and Me" in the LA Film Festival. It's Saturday, Jun 23, at 7:30 pm, at Regal Cinemas L.A.)
Jon Regardie: candidate Kevin James should hope for "King Ralph II"
(Jon Regardie is an Off-Ramp commentator and the executive editor of the LA Downtown News.)
When it comes to the 2013 Los Angeles mayor’s race, there are three top contenders: City Council members Jan Perry and Eric Garcetti and City Controller Wendy Greuel. Then there’s Kevin James, an attorney, former AM talk show host, and a onetime college football cheerleader. That’s not necessarily germane to his qualifications—it’s just an amusing fact.
At first glance, and probably at second glance too, James is a long shot to win the race against candidates with serious advantages in name recognition, experience and fundraising. One school of thought — mine — holds that the only way James wins is if he echoes the terrible 1991 movie "King Ralph," in which a few dozen members of the British royal family are electrocuted when they gather for a group photo. The next person in line for the throne is a slovenly Las Vegas lounge singer. It wasn’t a documentary.
James doesn’t think it’ll take mass electrocution for him to ascend to the highest office in City Hall. Instead, the only Republican of the four primary candidates thinks he’ll get there by building a coalition of GOP voters, his former radio listeners, those tired of the status quo, and what he terms the “pitchfork and torch” crowd, people who won’t vote for anyone inside City Hall.
None of this will be easy. Although James’ campaign manager, John Thomas, helped take down Carmen Trutanich in the DA’s race, Greuel, Garcetti and Perry all raised roughly a million dollars by the last campaign reporting deadline. James just hit $200,000.
Still, there are a few reasons it’s worth paying attention to James. Although he was treated like a gadfly when he first announced his candidacy, and was sometimes ignored by reporters in stories, he and Thomas threw elbows at every sin of omission. James has behaved like a candidate and has released more detailed plans and position papers than his establishment competitors. His years on the radio have made him a persuasive but occasionally long-winded orator—he has the potential to do damage once the debates begin.
Some think that, come Election Day, James’ only role will be spoiler, that he’ll suck votes from one or two other candidates. Maybe so, but there’s one other reason not to completely discount this long shot.
That reason is Trutanich. As late as June 4, the current LA City Attorney was considered the shoo-in to be the next district attorney. But, in an outcome absolutely no one predicted, Trutanich finished third in the June 5 election—the dude with a greater than half-million dollar fundraising advantage over his closest competitors didn’t even make the runoff.
The point is, sometimes in local elections the unexpected happens. Sometimes, the royal family gets electrocuted.
Dylan Brody pitches a show to a fetus, gets nowhere
I have lived in Los Angeles for too long, now, to thrive anywhere else. I was performing down in Santa Monica and I was asked for money by a one-legged homeless man with a three legged dog. My first response was, “Nah. If you were a three legged guy with a one-legged dog, then you’d have something.” Clearly I’ve become tainted by the city’s culture beyond redemption when I see a disabled, impoverished person and my first thought is to offer a quick punch-up on his circumstance. It burrows its way into you slowly, this callousness, this readiness to rewrite the very fabric of reality for greater impact.
A few years ago, I pitched a very cool show to a fetus at Buena Vista Television. When I say “a very cool show,” I mean a reality television show set in an adventure fantasy world. And when I say that I pitched it to a fetus, I exaggerate, but the truth is, this television development executive was sponging amniotic fluid from his brow as his assistant escorted me into the room, asking if would like water or coffee. I declined.
I won’t go through all the details of the show, but it was called Castle Quest, and the general overview was this: we find the twelve greatest swordsmen in the world – martial artists, fencers, fight directors, reenactors, what-have-you. We move them all into a castle together. Each week they learn to use a different period weapon. They undergo skill challenges. Two of them fight using safety protocols created by the Society for Creative Anachronism. One of the two is eliminated. At the end of the season, the winner gets to keep the castle.
The toddler heard the pitch and said, “Interesting. What’s the hook?”
I said, “They – they’re sword fighting to win a castle.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I don’t see why that’s compelling.” He thought for a moment and then said, “Maybe if they could win a girl, you’d have something.”
I said, “I don’t think that’s legal in modern America.”
He said, “Well, remember, we don’t have to shoot it in the States.”
I was a little confused by that response, not because I didn’t understand his premise but because it was truly not what I had expected to hear just then.
He said, “Look. Maybe this is a little too on-the-nose but, I mean . . . maybe if someone gets hung in the final episode you’d have something worth watching.”
Thinking he was joking with me, I said, “Well, sure. But then we’d have to take it to Fox.”
He was not joking with me. He said, “No. This is Buena Vista. We’re Disney.”
We sat for a moment and I wished that I had asked for coffee because it would have been a very good time to sip nonchalantly.
He said, “Do you have any other ideas?”
I said, “Yeah. What if, instead of an infant with a desk, you were an extraterrestrial who thrived on creativity, crushing the spirits of artists and devouring their muses.”
He said, “What? I don’t understand.”
I said, “Yeah. Probably a little too on-the-nose.”
See Dylan Brody and friends in Thinking Allowed. June 23 at 8pm at The Fake Gallery, 4319 Melrose (just East of Heliotrope). For reservations e-mail fakegallery (at) earthlink.net.
David Palos: A junk collector who turned his hobby into an art
When you go to a flea market or a swap meet, you try to find things that aren’t all worn out. You want the Stanley plane that looks like new, a penguin ice bucket whose chrome isn’t scarred with rust, a Pendleton wool shirt that hasn’t been shrunk in the wash from Extra Large to Small.
But not David Palos. His one condition as a collector – be it clothes, furniture, machinery, you name it – is that it’s been adequately warped by time. He says it all started the first time he went to a flea market, which he says was "pretty heavy. "I thought it was amazing, and I loved everything. I remember thinking that I wanted to have a store."
Palos remembers marveling at an endless sea of rusty souvenirs, feeling time whooshing through every tent. So he started going to flea markets every week, and soon after, to local estate sales and auctions. Before long he was scavenging on his own.
First it was little things like old clothes, rubber stamps, and clipboards. But soon he found himself prying into factories and warehouses and haggling for old machine parts. He was salvaging pipes and valves and using them to build furniture. He didn't really have a plan, but he was slowly carving out an aesthetic, and his finds were piling up.
"I was doing it at my Dad’s shop in Alhambra," says Palos. "I was storing stuff and cleaning it off. I finally had to get my own spot - I just had too much stuff."
Palos has arranged his best collection at a garage in Vernon. It's part showroom and part art installation, but it mostly feels like a flea market that's been frozen in a state of platonic perfection.
His favorite piece is a 4-foot cast-iron spinner he found at a textile mill.
"There's this scrapper that told me about this place in downtown, this old textile mill that's been around since the early 1900's. They're pretty much clearing everything out to turn into lofts. I found this piece in one of the closets. It’s pretty much to wind up fabric in spools. I think it’s one of the sickest things I’ve ever seen. It’s a piece of art to me. They were probably going to throw it away."
Palos then points to the far wall, to a jet-black, 10-foot-long chest of drawers.
"This piece, actually, is from the same mill. It was on the 4th floor, and it was a nightmare to get down. It was full of machine parts, and we had to empty out some 100 drawers, and carry it down 4 flights of stairs. I'll never sell it, mostly because it still has all the drawers on it. I can't believe it still has all 100 or something drawers."
His shop is also speckled with faded rags, laundry bags, and crusty, sweat-stained t-shirts. Palos says he found the shirts in a trashcan. "They were completely rusted out and deteriorating," he says, "but they're the coolest things I've seen. It takes so much time to make it look like that. Imagine if it took a person 30 years to make a painting - imagine what that might look like, or how valuable it might be. This takes years 50 years to look like it does. That's why it's valuable."
Valuable to him. But he won’t sell most of it.
"If it's anything that I found myself, or in the field," he says, "I never sell. I sell furniture that I buy from the middleman, that I have no attachments to. And the stuff we make."
His shop makes and sells furniture, mostly to retails stores looking for a vintage vibe. For instance, they'll make a table whose legs come from an old machine, or lights cobbled together from different parts. Palos gets his stuff everywhere: machine shops, old factories, salvage yards, and garage sales.
While Palos spends a lot of his time cruising around L.A. looking for junk, he says many people he runs into aren't always amused.
"We knock on doors," he says, "and everyone thinks we're trying to get stuff for free. They're scared, like we're trying to get one over on them. So they don't want to sell. And a few times I've gotten in trouble for going into yards that I wasn't really supposed to. There was this yard that was pretty much open and we thought it was free game and took it."
"Pretty much open." "Free game." Right. Somebody saw them trespassing and stealing and called the police. Palos was lucky the charges were dropped from a grand felony to a misdemeanor, and he's gotten a second chance at doing what he loves.
"The thrill is finding it, the hunt. That's the best part."
David Palos sells his wares at major L.A. flea markets throughout the year, and his shop in Vernon is called Irons and Duck. He's also curating an exhibit this evening (June 21), at The Holding Company, 104 Robertson Street.
Crenshaw High graduates talk about the future, and they don't think it's bleak
One’s writing a book about a war between Heaven and Hell … one’s joining the Marines as a computer tech … one’s off to study psych and business at UC-Irvine … another’s biggest fear is being a bum.
These aren't pampered West Side high school graduates.
These are kids who just graduated from Crenshaw High:
"My biggest fear is, sad to say, is to be a bum. That's my biggest fear right there. I just want to be successful. I see myself with a family, a wife, and everything."
"After graduation, I'm going to have ten days of leave before I go off to Marines boot camp. I'll be in Afghanistan or Iraq, but I won't be fighting. I'll be fixing computers."
"I'm leaving for Moscow University for college. I got a sports scholarship out there for rugby. I'll go to engineering school, too."
Good luck from Off-Ramp!
Eat LA: Home cooked coffee beans, raw meat, and what's an Aeropress?
This week we're finding new ways to cook--and not cook--some of our favorite foods. We'll learn about a relatively new way to brew coffee, and we'll travel to the home of a writer who's learning how to roast her own beans using nothing more than a stovetop popcorn popper.
Raw Meat
Eat LA's Linda Burum talks about Los Angeles's new fascination with raw meat. There are plenty of new restaurants bringing raw meat to their patrons--but Burum says that's nothing new. Korean and Lebanese restaurants, for example, have served Angelenos uncooked meat for decades now. Here's a list of some of Linda Burum's favorites:
Mainstream and Hip
Freddy Smalls
11520 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, 90064
(310) 479-3000
Seared tartare with smoked egg yolk
Gusto
8432 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles, 90048
(323) 782-1778
Beef heart tartare
Red Medicine
8400 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, 90211
(323) 651-5500
Vietnamese flavor with fresh herbs and fish sauce
Ink
8360 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, 90069
(323) 651-5866
Tartare with sea bean chimichuri sauce
Petrossian
321 North Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, 90048
(310) 271-6300
Tartare layered with caviar
The Grill on the Alley
9560 Dayton Way Beverly Hills, 90210
(310) 276-0615
Classic American tartare
Korean
Laon Dining
1145 S. Western Ave., Los Angeles, 90006
(323) 373-0700
Modern Korean tartare (yook hwe)
Oo-Kook
3385 W. Eighth St., Los Angeles, 90006
(213) 385-5665
tartare bibim bap
Lebanese
Hayat’s Kitchen
1109 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood, 91601
(818) 761-4656
"Our favorite" with pungent garlic sauce
Ethiopian
Messob
1041 S. Fairfax Ave.,90019
(323) 938-8827
Tartare tossed with berbere and other Ethiopian spices
Home Coffee Roasting
Now from something you don't want to cook, to something you do: coffee beans. Eat Los Angeles contributing editor Jean Barrett talked with professional roaster Ian Riley, who roasts beans for Plow and Gun Coffee. Did you know you can roast your own coffee beans at home using nothing more than a stovetop popcorn maker? Ian shows Jean how it's done.
Ian and Joseph Shuldiner of the Institute of Domestic Technology (and Eat LA) offer regular classes on the specifics of home roasting: where to buy green beans, what to look and listen for when roasting and you'll get a free pound of beans to get started.
The Aeropress
Speaking of coffee, Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson stops by to show off the Aeropress. It's a relatively new coffee maker that's portable, cheap, easy to clean, and makes a surprisingly tasty cup of brew. Want to know how it works? Take a look at the video below for a demonstration from Kevin and the KPCC digital team:
You can pick up the new Eat Los Angeles 2012 book at your local bookstore, or you can download the e-book so you can keep it in your pocket.
Radio Ambulante: This Latin American Life?
Many years ago, writer Daniel Alarcón went to his parent's country and was mesmerized by the stories he heard on a Peruvian radio show. It featured relatives searching for loved ones who'd disappeared. That became the subject of his novel "Lost City Radio."
KPCC's Adolfo Guzman Lopez talked with Alarcón about his newest project: Radio Ambulante, a podcast of This American Life-style stories, in Spanish, from all corners of Latin America.
Daniel Alarcón grew up in Alabama. "We had to speak Spanish at home, in the house, and my father heard my sisters speaking English with a Southern twang and was sort of horrified," he said. "And then we started listening to NPR."
But Daniel's connection to radio came years before that--from his father. "His first job as a kid was as an announcer, calling soccer games in Arequipa, Peru," said Alarcón. "My sisters and I would gather on Sunday mornings in our parents bedroom and we would do these basically, now I think of them as radio programs, recorded onto cassettes where my dad would interview us and my mom would ask us what we've been doing in school and we would record our answers and we would mail them to Lima and our cousins in Lima would do the same thing."
Last year, Alarcón and his wife, who both live in Oakland, and several other US and Latin American collaborators began producing public radio style stories in Spanish. Soccer was the inspiration for one of the most powerful.
Last year, 110-year-old team River Plate, basically the Red Sox of Argentinian soccer, was demoted to the minor league after it found itself in the bottom of league.
In the last minutes of the last game, the team's announcer lost it, and in between calling the game, lashed out with profanities against River Plate's owners and managers. "That audio of Costa Fevre losing his mind on the air, live started making the rounds, and I was hooked," said Alarcón. "The voice is incredible, the passion behind it is incredible, the pathos."
The announcer sat down with a Radioambulante producer to reflect on what he'd done.
In another story, a South American teenage immigrant arrives at a South Carolina high school and befriends the African American kids. The teenager hears his new friends call each other the N word, and there's nothing he'd like to do more to belong than to say it too.
Daniel Alarcón says the introspective, Spanish-speaker point of view is largely absent in US media.
Alarcón's 2007 novel Lost City Radio was critically acclaimed. With Radio Ambulante, he says, he's trying to approach through radio, the magic of reading a novel. "You have that voice in your ear, you have someone whispering a story to you," he said. "It's intimate that way, it relies on your imagination to fill in the blanks, just like a novel does, just like a story does."
Adolfo Guzman Lopez joins Alarcón downtown at the LA Public Library Tuesday, June 26 for a conversation as part of the Aloud series.
Music for Off-Ramp on June 23, 2012
Heard a song you liked on this week's show and can't figure out the name? Check out this playlist for your answer:
Also featured on this week's show was Harumi Hosono's "Rose & Beast" off his formidable Hosono House: