KB Homes is building 450 homes next to the Santa Susanna Nuclear Test Lab ... Fowler Museum opens exhibit of 2,000 pieces by Chicano Movement icon Jose Montoya ... at Otium, the prices are high, but the service is slow ... Remembering Octavia Butler ...
Digging into why transgender teen Larry King was murdered
It was a story that made headlines here for months. In 2008 at a school in Oxnard, a 14-year-old named Brandon McInerney shot and killed a 15-year-old boy named Larry King who'd started identifying as a girl and calling himself "Leticia."
The prosecution called it premeditated, first degree murder; the defense said a lesser charge was deserved because King had essentially sexually harassed McInerney. After the declaration of a mistrial, McInerney pleaded guilty to lesser charges and got 21 years in prison without parole.
Ken Corbett attended the trial and writes about the case in his new book "A Murder Over a Girl." He's a clinical psychologist and has also written "Boyhoods," about masculinity.
Here's a taste, in which one of the boys' classmates takes the stand:
Moving quickly, as we would learn was her style, Ms. Fox turned to the day of the murder, February 12, 2008, and the classroom at E. O. Green Junior High School, where the murder took place. Using an aerial diagram of the school, Ms. Fox asked Mariah to identify the classroom and to confirm where she had been sitting on the morning in question.
Mariah hesitated, and Ms. Fox repeated the question. As Mariah pointed at the diagram, she began to cry. Sheriff Anton offered tissues and water. Mariah took the tissues, leaving the water bottle unopened on the edge of the witness stand.
Calmed, she went ahead to describe how twenty-eight students had started off the school day together in their homeroom, where they stayed for about fifteen minutes before walking together to the computer lab to work on research papers. Mariah's paper was about Anne Frank.
Twenty minutes after the class had settled into the computer lab, Mariah turned away from her computer to ask a friend a question.
"What did you see? What happened?" Ms. Fox asked.
What happened was that one boy shot another in front of a group of people who are now scarred forever. Why it happened is still unclear. Corbett is extremely sympathetic to both boys' highly troubled backgrounds, and critical of the U.S. practice of trying adults as teenagers, but says the scales are tipped toward the Brandons of the world... and that violence is seemingly more acceptable than expressing a non-standard gender identity.
Listen to the audio for John's in-depth conversation with Corbett, then go to Skylight books Friday to hear him talk about it in person.
Event: March 11, 2016 @ 7:30 p.m., Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027
A Martinez might have been Charlie Tuna's youngest joke writer
Charlie Tuna was a fixture on LA's radio scene - one of the disc jockeys who dominated Top 40 radio and pop music for decades. He died February 19, although the news wasn't released until this week.
Tuna was a fixture on Take Two co-host A Martinez's radio as well. Every morning, Tuna would read a joke or story written by a listener as the "Morning Wake-up Story."
When he was 11, A (then known as George) sent in a joke , and Tuna read it on the air.
And as A tells it, they were listening in the car, and his mom almost drove off the road.
The prize was this creamer; A must have been one of the youngest winners.
Listen to the audio to hear the whole story ... and what Tuna told A when he showed him the mug years later.
Remembering unsung science-fiction hero/Genius Grant winner Octavia Butler
Octavia E. Butler: Telling my Stories is now on view at the Huntington Library.
Can you guess the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “Genius Grant"? It wasn't Ray Bradbury or Philip K. Dick — it was Octavia Butler, an African-American woman who was was born and raised in Pasadena.
This year, non-profit arts organization Clockshop is observing the 10th anniversary of Butler's death with a yearlong look at the science fiction great whose work never broke through to the mainstream.
Write or die
Octavia Butler was 12 years old when she saw "Devil Girl from Mars" for the first time. She watched it on TV one lazy Saturday afternoon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOBn-g5VTfM
“When I turned off the television, I said to myself, I can write a better story than that," Butler said in a documentary. "I sat down and began writing my first science-fiction story.”
Butler wrote in a genre known for exotic dystopias and Martian landscapes — where white men created the work and starred in the narrative. Butler saw great power in the parameters of science fiction. Instead of white men exploring galaxies, she could create futures or pasts where women of color were at the center of the story.
Charlie Rose asked her on TV once why she wrote science fiction.
“Because there are no closed doors, no walls," she told him. "The only rule is, if you use science, you should use it accurately. You can look at, examine, play with anything. Absolutely anything."
Octavia Estelle Butler was born June 22, 1947. Her dad died when she was a young girl. She was raised by her mother, a housemaid.
She was a shy kid, and social situations made her anxious. In the hulking, mission-style main branch of the Pasadena Library, 6-year-old Butler found refuge, starting a lifelong obsession with storytelling.
"I had two choices," she told Rose. "I could become a writer or I could die really young, because there wasn’t anything else that I wanted."
She went to Pasadena City College to study writing. In the spring of her freshman year she wrote a short story called “To The Victor." She entered it into a campuswide writing contest and won, taking in $15 in prize money.
Over the course of her life, she would write 15 novels and two collections of short stories. She won dozens of awards, but even her most successful books sold fractions compared to genre giants like Frank Herbert and Kurt Vonnegut.
So for an author who was not widely read during her lifetime, who or what will perpetuate her legacy?
A legacy re-examined
Julia Meltzer directs Clockshop, a non-profit arts organization that helps artists collaborate with large institutions in California. The project Meltzer is working on now is called Radio Imagination. Meltzer has organized a group of 12 artists and writers to celebrate and interpret Butler's work. They've each been given access to Butler’s archives, which are housed at the Huntington Library.
"We are doing this project because I was interested in bringing artists and writers to the Huntington Library who most likely wouldn’t have a reader’s pass there," said Meltzer. "[Who] wouldn’t maybe have the time to spend with her papers and to see what they produce as a result of their time and research."
The new work created by these artists and writers will show up online and at the Armory in Pasadena this year. Meltzer said she finds in Butler's books a world totally unique in science fiction.
"I think it’s interesting to look at her work and think about her perspective, because she just carved out this space for herself in a field that was dominated by white men," she said. "And I think it’s fascinating looking at her perspective on Los Angeles and race, class, gender and imagination and how she saw the world."
Connie Samaras is one of the artists working on the project — she works mainly in photography and video. Samaras said she thinks Butler deserves a place among the best American writers of the 20th century.
"Butler’s stories were very different," she said. "First of all, the protagonist is a young, sometimes adolescent black girl or black woman. She’s not the typical hero, she doesn’t solve everything and resolve everything."
Tisa Bryant is also involved in the project — she's a writer living in L.A. As a longtime fan of Butler, Bryant sees the deep dive into the archive as way to re-animate Butler, to almost have a conversation with her.
"She’s an amazing plotter and she’s incredibly economical. And that’s like a hallmark of the genre — you don’t waste a lot of time. Some writers might be a little more florid or prettier or more detail-oriented than others, but for the most part, genre fiction, you keep it moving," said Bryant. "It’s about the plot. And she’s a champ with that."
Butler won her Genius Grant in 1995, when she was in her late 40s. She died in 2006 following complications from a stroke and a fall. Although she never enjoyed the transcendent popularity of other genre writers like George R.R. Martin or Kurt Vonnegut, Bryant hopes her work with Clockshop will change that.
You can find the grave of Octavia Butler at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena. Under a small tree, there's her tombstone, with a simple quote written on it:
“All that you touch you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. Change is God.”
They're the first lines of “Parable of the Sower,” a novel set in a dystopian future California where water is scarce. As also the final sentence in Butler's story, the quote takes on new life.
Butler died young, but she took control of her destiny, not only forging the world she wanted to see but creating the life she wanted to live.
On Wednesday, June 7 at 4:30, there will be a curator tour for the exhibit. Click here for details.
State discounted tests showing contamination at Simi Valley home development
Would you spend at least $700,000 for a beautiful new home in a canyon in Simi Valley? Sounds reasonable, right?
Here's the lead of the latest installment of L.A.'s Nuclear Secret, the investigative series by KPCC's media partner, NBC4,:
Families are flocking to get a look at brand new model homes in a beautiful canyon west of Los Angeles. What some buyers might not realize is that the development, called Arroyo Vista at the Woodlands, is right next to one of the most contaminated sites in California — the former Santa Susana Field Lab.
The site at Runkle Canyon is being developed by KB Homes, and would eventually feature 450 homes that start around $700,000, surrounded by nature. And, according to several studies, elevated levels of contamination.
One study, done by Foster Wheeler Environmental consultants, took 58 soil samples from different areas in Runkle Canyon. All 58 samples showed elevated levels of radiation, between two and 165 times higher than what the United States EPA says is normal for that area. "You can't just throw out those samples and pick the lowest ones," said former Energy Department advisor Robert Alvarez, who also looked at the data.
In approving development at the site, a state agency — the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) — disregarded those results in favor of other tests that showed no elevated risk.
KB Homes responded to NBC4's report by saying, in part: "Under no circumstances would we have ever built on this land if it posed potential health issues for our homeowners and neighbors." It also said KNBC was irresponsible for doing the story.
Listen to the audio for my conversation with NBC4's Joel Grover at The Woodlands for much more on the story ... including how the DTSC recently botched its job at a housing development in Riverside that turned out to have high levels of PCBs.
Says Grover, "The DTSC has time and again said certain pieces of land in California are safe for people to live on, only to find out later that those pieces of land are very contaminated."
Song of the week: "Let's Be Happy" by Fire Chief Charlie
This week’s Off-Ramp song of the week is “Let’s be Happy” by the Los Angeles band Fire Chief Charlie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wot8kn1Q52c
Fire Chief Charlie is a folk group fronted by Eagle Rock resident Jonah Malarsky and his wife Jamie. They have an enormous selection of music on their Bandcamp page and a show coming up Friday, April 15 at the Hotel Cafe.
Is downtown Los Angeles' Otium restaurant a disappointment?
In downtown Los Angeles, there’s the Broad Museum — maybe one of the most anticipated art institutions to open in California in the last decade. Right next to it, you’ll find Otium — a restaurant that opened just last month and has created almost as much buzz in the food world as the Broad did in art.
It’s a gorgeous building - glass, steel, wood, on one wall there’s a giant Damien Hirst mural, even. The L.A. Times’ Jonathan Gold called Otium "L.A.’s most ambitious new restaurant." But not everyone loves Otium. In a review titled The Excitement and Arrogance of Downtown’s Otium L.A. Weekly restaurant critic Besha Rodell took issue with the restaurant’s sometimes aloof service, its prices, and — maybe worst of all — its ordinary falafel:
There's a certain arrogance to the uncaring service, to the unacknowledged cooking mistakes and to the falafel dish, which consists of three modest balls over a smear of chickpea with pretty pickled condiments and costs $16 and tastes like ... falafel. Not stunningly good falafel, not bad falafel, just falafel. Walking through the kitchen is nice, it's fun, but it has the downside of allowing you to see that those falafel balls are cooked far ahead of time rather than to order and are sitting out beside the fryer.
We talked with Besha about her review, Otium's place in Los Angeles' culinary landscape, and the restaurant's wine program—which apparently includes two separate wine lists, one she's never seen.
Review: LA Opera turns 'The Magic Flute' into Mickey Mozart with plot, design changes
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele reviews "The Magic Flute" by L.A. Opera, which has its final performance Sunday.
Raoul Ruiz, the late, great Chilean filmmaker, had this idea for a 3-D stage play. Half the actors would wear pale red costumes and makeup, while the other half would wear pale blue costumes and makeup — and the audience would wear special glasses. You get the drift.
Ruiz was kidding, I hope — but unfortunately production designers Paul Baritt, Susan Andrade and Barrie Kosky had a theatrical idea that was just as silly and is now actualized on the operatic stage. That idea: Why not turn one of the greatest operas of all time into a full-length, live animated feature?
This production of Mozart’s "The Magic Flute," now at the L.A. Opera, originated at the Komische Oper Berlin. (I take it that the word “komisch” here is used in its secondary German dictionary meaning of “strange.”) Kosky calls it “quite an adventure.” I call it "a transgression against everything Mozart accomplished in his mystic and magical Masonic masterpiece," which has here been flattened into a two-dimensional cartoon phantasmagoria you might call "Mickey Mozart."
It runs counter to much of what the opera’s words tell us in a basic simple story of a quest for true love in a fantasy land: Papageno, the man of birds, has a pet cat instead. Tamino, the hero, instead of fleeing a snake, is dressed like a lounge lizard — running on a treadmill from what appears to be a giant puffer fish. The benign wizard Sorastro dresses like P.T. Barnum in a plug hat. Tamino’s love Pamina is intended to look like vamp actress Louise Brooks, but resembles Betty Boop.
“The Magic Flute” has a basic plot swerve whereby a protagonist introduced as good turns evil in the end, so it’s crucial that the Queen of Night be introduced as a sympathetic character. After all, her servants save Tamino from the snake, she gives him the magic flute (here represented as a nude, soaring animated nymph) of the title and his three boy spirit guides (whose perfect little voices were unfortunate casualties of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s abstruse acoustics). It normally takes a lot of plot to turn her into the villain of the piece — but not here, where she shows up as a six-story black widow spider, looking like the steampunk war machine from “Wild Wild West.” We know that she’s a wrongo from the get-go, and there goes that storyline.
Perhaps each opera critic ought to carry around a black velvet blindfold. That way, when attending a production whose staging destroys the very drama it ought to be assisting, he or she can slip it on and relax into the wonderful music — and the music here was indeed wonderfully performed.
The Queen of Night vengeance aria from So Young Park was the high point of the entire evening. Marita Salberg sang Pamina with a resonant precision. Her character carries most of the opera’s true passion and feeling (as opposed to its masculinist philosophy) and she bears her burden brilliantly. Ben Bliss’s Tamino was warm and often enthralling.
Ben Bliss behind the scenes video
Jonathan Michie was a winning Papageno, but the production’s weird demands sometimes wounded his performance. Stacey Tappen, Summer Hassan and Peabody Southwell were excellent as the Queen’s helpful Three Ladies. Brenton Ryan’s Monostatos was good enough to give this puzzling character some real substance. Wilhelm Schwinghammer brought depth and gravitas, along with some lovely singing, to the role of Sarastro. Grant Gershon’s chorus was the production’s sturdy backbone. And, of course, there was James Conlon’s capable conducting.
But the production even managed to besmirch the musical landscape. “The Magic Flute” is an opera with spoken dialogue — which admittedly can challenge some singers’ acting skills. Andrade, Kosky and Barritt replaced this dialogue with silent film titles. These they chose to accompany with snippets of piano music, a la a 1920s movie theater. Unfortunately, they picked snippets of perhaps Mozart’s greatest single piano piece — the C-minor "Fantasia." It was like chopping up a Chippendale table for firewood. For this "Magic Flute’" reduction production, even a blindfold couldn’t help.
Chicano Movement leader Jose Montoya's art gets a show at UCLA's Fowler Museum
"José Montoya’s Abundant Harvest: Works on Paper/Works on Life" is at the Fowler Museum at UCLA through July 17. Off-Ramp contributor Marc Haefele spoke with the artist's son, Richard Montoya.
"He would lament that he was a lazy farmworker," says Richard Montoya of his father Jose, one of the icons of the Chicano Movement. "But I say thank goodness, because he was reflecting and chronicling and 82 years later giving us this abundant harvest."
That abundant harvest of art is sampled at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in a comprehensive survey of his works on paper, with 2,000 pieces arranged in grape trays that symbolize Jose Montoya's roots. Jose Montoya (1932–2013) began working in the California farm fields with his father at the age of 9. As his son Richard, one of the founders of the political satire performance group Culture Clash ("Water and Power," "Chavez Ravine"), said, he did more than work — he was sketching and writing even then.
People populate his works and gave shape to the show. "We were inundated and overwhelmed." Jose Montoya was prolific and diverse, and Richard Montoya and co-curator Selene Preciado finally hit on the right organizing principle: "Let's put all the mountains here, and let's put all the landscapes here, and let's put the Navy men there, let's put the women there, let's put the pachucos here."
"We're sort of wondering," says Richard Montoya, looking at all the artwork, "when did he raise us, have time to teach and write poetry, and to lead not just one movement, but several movements — United Farm Workers movement, Chicano Moratorium, the walkouts, and the Civil Rights movement."
What did Richard bring to Culture Clash that he got from his father? A sort of democracy: "It's evident in our work like 'Water and Power,' where the hero of the play might be a homeboy in a wheelchair. This idea of heroes and villains and saints and sinners ... it's a room full of them (in the exhibit) and my dad leaves it up to the viewer to make up their mind."
Listen to the audio to hear Off-Ramp contributor Marc Haefele's full interview with Richard Montoya about "Abundant Harvest" at the Fowler Museum.