Pasadena artist Kenton Nelson ... Hipstamatic & Instagram v News ... new voting tech via crowdsourcing ... Giant Rock = Boffo Muz Biz? ... RIP Firesign Theatre's Peter Bergman ...
Firesign Theatre co-founder Peter Bergman dies, 72.
Peter Bergman, founder of the surreal comedy group Firesign Theatre, and the man who coined the term "Love-In," died Friday morning in a Santa Monica hospital. He was 72, and had been suffering from leukemia.
Firesign grew out of a radio show Bergman hosted at KPFK in the late 1960s. The group made two dozen popular comedy records — the most popular of which included “We’re All Bozo’s on This Bus,” and “Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers” — and continued performing live into last December.
On his own, Bergman produced a political satire series for KPCC called “True Confessions of the Real World,” which ran in 2002 and 2003.
We've posted two pieces of audio, a full episode of "True Confessions of the Real World," and Off-Ramp host John Rabe's conversation with Firesign co-founder Phil Proctor.
The Pogues' James Fearnley on Celtic punk, firing Shane MacGowan, and St. Pat's
The way James Fearnley tells it, he and the rest of the Pogues were pretty uneasy about how Shane MacGowan would take being fired from the band that he'd helped make famous. But he'd become too unreliable, so in 1991, in Yokohama, they asked him to come down to the hotel room they were meeting in. MacGowan's reaction, as Fearnley tells it in our interview and his forthcoming memoir, "Here Comes Everybody," backs up Fearnley's contention that it wasn't just MacGowan's drinking that was causing his erratic behavior; it was the pressure.
The Pogues, who formed almost 30 years ago in London, a mix of Irish and English musicians who played Celtic music with a punk sensibility, were in trouble from the start. Their original name was Pogue Mahone, which means "kiss my ass" in Irish. The BBC didn't like that, so the DJ who championed them shortened it to The Pogues, which was done with MacGowan's other band, the Nips ... nee The Nipple Erectors.
Here's a spirited rendition of "If I Should Fall from Grace with God," from a 1988 performance in Japan.
Fearnley says the Celtic/punk mix "was odd, and I think galvanizing for people to listen to," and many Irish listeners were put off at first. "For some of them, it was difficult, but we quickly won them over because we were doing it honestly." In other words, it's clear from listening to the Pogues that they love this music.
Fearnley was not only a member of this seminal fusion band, but nearly joined Culture Club (!). He founded The Sweet and Low Orchestra, has played on Talking Heads and Melissa Etheridge albums, and currently plays with the Pogues and Cranky George, which plays locally on occasion. He just released his first single - Hey Ho - which we play at the end of the interview, and his Pogues memoir, "Here Comes Everybody," comes out in a few months.
You might see James Fearnley in the crowd at The Satellite in Silverlake as the East LA band performs its 10th annual Pogues tribute on Saturday, March 17th. Tickets are just $10.
(The audio: the first is the Reader's Digest broadcast version; the second is the 30+ min special podcast with much more about the formation of the band, meeting the BBC's John Peel, why Fearnley moved to California, etc.)
Classical but not kitsch, Millard Sheets' art and architecture in Pomona and Claremont
Pacific Standard Time is not just gallery and museum shows. It also includes events, like "Millard Sheets: A Legacy of Art and Architecture," which happens Sunday, March 18 in Claremont and Pomona. This tour of the work of native son Millard Sheets is put on by the L.A. Conservancy, which is fighting to preserve Sheets' work, including his many bank mosaics.
Off-Ramp host John Rabe spoke with the Conservancy's Modern Committee chair, Regina O'Brien, about the tour.
Sheets is famous for the bank mosaics O’Brien’s committee is trying to protect, murals with brightly-colored ceramic tiles puzzled together to form a massive scene. O’Brien calls it classicized modernism.
“He always used these rich materials – travertine and marble cladding, beautiful tiles and gold friezes – some have said, in talking to people who worked at his studio, that this was influenced by his trips. In WWII he worked in India. He saw these beautiful buildings and he would always come back with something,” she said. “He came back from Guatemala with a blouse and then had a terrific idea for a mural that was kind of inspired by that."
O’Brien revealed that though the architect has designed over 50 bank branches, he was never licensed to do any of it.
“He always had to have someone else put their stamp on any official documents. And he had a couple of collaborators, David Underwood among them, who would serve that purpose," said O'Brien. "Basically, Millard had a very holistic idea about what he wanted, and very meticulously designed every single part of the building – the light fixtures inside, the staircase, the mosaic."
The architect’s work is also extremely sculptural. “When I was talking to Brian Worley, he worked on a lot of the mosaics with Millard, he was explaining to me that it’s not only in the selection of the colors for shading, but also in the cut,” O’Brien recalled. “Sometimes he'd see something that was looking flat and he'd, say, every foot, randomly drop in a lavender tile, and that would pop the whole thing to life."
Sheets’ fame had grown by 1963, so the city of Pomona was happy to let him experiment with other ventures. He designed the first pedestrian mall west of the Mississippi with the idea of bringing people together, a motif in his buildings.
“Every single one of the Home Savings of America [banks] and almost every project that Millard undertook was done with a great sense of the community, so if you're passing by any Home Savings branch, it will have something to do with the community,” O’Brien explained. “The one in Hollywood is all about the history of Hollywood. The original Beverly Hills branch has a beautiful stained glass that’s all about the history of banking."
O’Brien said that after Home Savings closed, the property was passed to Washington Mutual. Now that Chase owns all the buildings, their futures are uncertain.
“Chase had mentioned that they were thinking of tearing the building down,” O’Brien said. “Now we are hoping that Chase will do an about face on this and recognize what a wonderful resource they have."
CyberFrequencies and the meme man Lil B
Queena Kim and Tanya Jo Miller report on Lil B, one of an emerging group of rappers who got famous by making themselves an Internet meme, then learning to rap.
Pasadena painter Kenton Nelson wraps nostalgia with surrealism, precision with mystery
Painter Kenton Nelson's work can be seen in galleries and homes all over the world, in museums as far as Austria and on five New Yorker covers. He paints brilliant, strange scenes of ordinary California life with a meticulous attention to detail, and he lives right here in Pasadena. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson met up with Nelson at his studio.
Nelson has wanted to be an artist for as long as he can remember.
"My great-uncle was a muralist, a Mexican muralist. His name was Roberto Montenegro. My first name is Robert; I was named after him," he said. "I grew up hearing stories of his murals and getting to see them. We grew up with his friend’s artwork and his artwork in the house, and so I wanted to be an artist growing up."
After pursuing a short career as a musician, he worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for 18 years. Then, in the early '90s, he decided to try and live out his childhood dream.
"I had always wanted to learn how to paint, I had never taken painting, so I went and bought some paints. I’ve been painting ever since," he explained.
Nelson was heavily influenced by American scene painters like Edward Hopper, a pre-war American artist. "I loved that they took a European medium and turned it their own," he added.
Brushstrokes are invisible in Nelson's works. According to Nelson, that's because he was looking at smaller-sized photos of Hopper's paintings in books as he first learned to paint.
"That really influenced how I worked, well, not until I saw his show at the Whitney back in the ‘90s that I realized his work is very expressive and had a lot of paint strokes in it. By that time the damage had been done, and I had my style," he joked.
During our visit to Nelson's studio, he described a painting of a woman gardening. His paintings are nostalgic for the 1950s – his childhood.
"I grew up in the ‘50s, an ideal time. I’d get up and my mom’s watching all the movies on the TV from the ‘30s. I had an appreciation for that era, and I loved the period of time that I grew in—the promise of the future," he recalled.
The woman depicted works with a flower pot, dressed more formally than necessary for the task at hand. According to Nelson, she was inspired by his grandfather.
"My grandfather gardened in a necktie," he said. "I’d go over there and he’d be in his white shirt, sleeves rolled up, and so I did this. And always, the people are dressed more from my youth. More from the 1950s. To me, I guess it’s the charitable deceptions and nostalgia where I’m thinking back about how perfect everything was and all of that."
What most can't tell from seeing the painting is that it's a piece about infertility.
"I always have a subtext to the paintings. No one needs to know, or no one will ever hear the story about, but this is how I started painting. I think of something, a scene I’d like to see, and that’s it," he laughed.
Often, his paintings are open to many interpretations. In his piece, "Curiosity," a woman is hunched over on the floor, looking towards the viewer. It's ambiguous whether she's listening to someone on the floor below, or looking under a bed for something. Nelson said he likes leaving it up to the viewer. He also does this by painting only parts of a person.
"I started doing that based on bad photographs, and bad photos that people would take of their family. And I loved the cropping of those. And also I found, over doing it for several years and all that, that it really leaves for an open ended narrative. If I crop somebody below their nose, than that person becomes every man," he noted.
Nelson said the most important aspect of his paintings is that they each tell a story.
"Before I even picked up a paintbrush and learned how, I was reading a lot of short stories by Fitzgerald and John Cheever," he said. "I loved that these guys could take me away from wherever I was, and I’d get completely lost in this five- or ten-page story, and I literally wrote in my journal before I started painting that if I could do that with a painting, maybe my job was done."
Watch this video of Kenton Nelson completing his painting, "Big Shoes":
Everything needs an origin story, even 340-ton sculptures
If all went according to plan this Saturday morning, the L.A. County Museum of Art received its newest and largest acquisition: a 340-ton granite boulder, which will sit on top of a 456-foot-long concrete slot – walkable by museum visitors – in LACMA’s north lawn. Known as “Levitated Mass,” it's the result of over 40 years of work by artist Michael Heizer and a slow, eleven-day journey winding along dozens of Greater LA surface streets. But where did it come from? And why *that* rock?
“They claim we went to the moon, but they didn’t have to go through thirteen, fourteen cities in Southern California to get there. That’s the only reason they made it.”
So says Danny Johnston, a retired rock salesman and project coordinator for Paul Hubbs Construction, which operated Riverside’s Stone Valley Quarry at the time that artist Michael Heizer found the boulder. Heizer started as an artist in the 1960s as part of the land art movement, using earth and stone as his medium. Most of his work can’t be seen in a museum but in remote parts of the Nevada and California desert.
Heizer first visited the Stone Valley Quarry early last decade. According to Johnston, Heizer started “small,” selecting 8- to 10-ton rocks, and then moved on to 60-and 70-ton rocks, which he relocated to Nevada.
“And as time went on he told me about this one deal he’d always been looking for a big enough rock to do...” Heizer had originally sketched out “Levitated Mass” in 1968, but failed to find the backing. And his vision hadn’t gotten smaller – with memories of trips to ancient Egyptian and Mexican ruins with his father, an anthropological archeologist, Heizer “was wanting a 1000-ton rock.”
And then one day in 2005, after a mostly routine blast in the quarry, the rock appeared.
“Well, it kind of reminded me of a big chocolate kiss, you know, the little ones? The shape is similar to that, it sat right down on the bottom of the big part and went up pretty much to a point, you know. I thought it was a neat-looking rock because it had different faces, you know, it wasn’t square or round – it looked like a cut stone, almost.”
Johnston immediately called Heizer.
“And sure enough, as soon as he seen it, he knew which one I was talking about.” The next thing Johnston said? “I told ‘em, I said the thing is, Mike – it’s huge. You can’t move it, it’s too big. There’s no way that one’s going to go.”
They auditioned company after company for the job.
“We had a guy, and I won’t mention any names, but they had two D-11’s and a 992, that’s the largest Caterpillar loader and the two largest dozers; all three of them hooked to that, trying to pull it away from the face, so it wouldn’t be damaged, and they moved it six inches. All day long. Five hours on it. That’s how massive and heavy this rock is.”
Four years later, LACMA finally found a suitor for the rock in Emmert International. Emmert employee Rick Albrecht supervised the move. Albrecht said the company had to design a trailer specifically for the job—one of the largest of its kind.
“What we built is a carrier beam trailer. The main frame is 132 foot long, or 27 foot wide. The piece is suspended inside the carrier, and it’s holding the weight of the rock and stabilizing it, and this is what we’ll use to transport down the road. Our overall length will be 274 feet from bumper to bumper, from pull truck to push truck, and we basically will just roll down the road and we’ll get there in 10 days.”
Michael Govan is the director of LACMA and a longtime friend of Heizer’s. Part of his vision for LACMA is to anchor the museum with large-scale sculptures like “Levitated Mass.”
“There’s something very magical about a large stone – so many ancient cultures made large-scale architectonic sculptures because it has such emotional power. I think that’s what the sculpture is intended to inspire in the viewer.”
Govan added, “I know the press has given a lot of attention to this 340-ton megalith, but the sculpture is the marriage and the contrast of two forms: a found object in nature – the rock, which is incredibly beautiful California granite – and the supergeometric, crystalline, modern-looking slot. One is very long, one is concentrated in weight. One is sort of human – made of concrete – one is nature-made. One is sleek and geometric, one is rough. One is very empty (the slot) and one is very weighty (the rock).”
We asked, “Was the title always “Levitated Mass?”
“Yes, Levitated Mass, because – it’s what art is, is to levitate the weight of something of our culture, of history. You levitate something so it can be seen, so it can be light.”
The arrival of rock at LACMA is just the beginning for “Levitated Mass”—the museum has to place and secure the rock, as well as finish landscaping the area around the slot. LACMA says they’re shooting for early summer.
LA County crowdsources ideas for new voting system
Los Angeles County is by far the biggest election jurisdiction in the U.S.. With over 4.5 million registered voters, County Registrar Dean Logan says recent years have called for up to 5,000 polling places and 25,000 poll workers on election day.
"Election day is equivalent to a military operation," says Logan. "We literally have helicopters bringing the ballots back to our headquarters, we have people deployed all over the county — it's a mega operation."
Logan says the voting technology has also become a big problem in recent years; those ballots sprayed with ink dots, the infrared scanners, the tally machines – they aren’t cutting it. The software is outdated, and its hard to find parts for the aging machines. “The issue is not that the software is bad," says Logan, "but that it isn’t flexible."
Logan knew about this problem long before he became Registrar, but he could never have anticipated his biggest obstacle: there isn’t a voting system on the market that L.A. County can adapt. Most counties across the U.S. use large-sized optical scan ballots, a system that's not scalable to Los Angeles. The printing and storage costs would be too high.
So in 2009 Logan decided to start thinking about a new system, made from scratch. He began by talking to thousands of people, from longtime voters to soon-to-be voters still in high school, to figure out what an ideal voting experience might look like. He asked people whether they'd be more likely to vote if it was available at multiple locations, or during a longer period of time. He asked people if they'd like to be able to access information about candidates and measures online through some app.
The answers helped Logan draft a set of guiding principles for a new system, but he didn’t have the money for research and design. So instead he partnered up with a Bay Area company called OpenIDEO, which does design-oriented crowd-sourcing. IDEO co-director Nicholas Waterhouse describes it as a global network of users who share stories and experiences, pitch ideas, give each other feedback, and eventually collaborate to develop the stronger ideas into full-fledged designs.
“We’ve got university professors, students, farmers, nurses, doctors, a broad range of society," says Waterhouse. "The one thing they really share in common is that they’re passionate about these causes.”
OpenIDEO's website is currently dedicated to the voting system challenge, and it is teeming with activity. There are over a hundred concepts so far. One of them outlines an easy voting app for smart-phones. Another suggests coupling polling places with banks or healthcare centers, and still another offers a plan to improve the voting lines by offering pre-booking vote time and informational videos in the wait area. Some ideas will grow, others will not, but it’s all up to the people.
“It’s a very self-selecting process." says Waterhouse. "Bad ideas kind of get ignored."
Apparently it’s also a lot of fun.
“Facebook and Twitter are addictive because of the constant social interaction," he says. "When you receive an e-mail on OpenIDEO that someone’s just built off your inspiration, people describe the response of wanting to get back on the platform as being addictive.”
It’s hard to know whether a highbrow social network can solve a major metropolitan issue, but OpenIdeo has tackled big ones before. One of their most recent projects asked users to design cheap sanitation for a poor city in Ghana. They designed a prototype, and now their sponsor, Unilever, expects to see up 10,000 sold by the end of next year.
Registrar Dean Logan would love to see a prototype emerge over the next few months. But he's also just happy to get the creative juices flowing.
“What’s great about this is that traditionally in the procurement world you have to pick 1 concept, whereas in this crowd-sourcing environment we can pick and choose. If there’s a nugget of an idea in one concept that goes really well with another piece of a concept, we can partner those people together and refine that concept.”
Within the next week Logan and OpenIdeo will have evaluated the concepts and on March 22, a winner — and likely more than one — will be announced. And hopefully they won’t need to do any recounts, either.
Freelance photog Nick Stern calls out news orgs that use Hipstamatic and Instagram
UPDATE: I wrote the blog item below last week, in defense of Hipstamatic (which I have used for years) and Instagram. Nick immediately agreed to an in-depth interview, which you can hear here, and noted that the edit of his CNN column removed a lot of context, and made him seem a bit grumpier than he really was. (And c'mon, look at his dog, and the cool tattoo.) I also took a black and white film photo of Nick, which I'll post if it turned out. In the interview, Nick also gives us some good insight into the economic perils of war photography, and tells a story about Robert Capa's D-Day photos that many of you probably haven't heard. -- John
Nick Stern may be a great photographer, but today he wins the Old Man on the Front Porch Award for his column on Instagram and Hipstamatic images, in which he says, "Every time a news organization uses a Hipstamatic or Instagram-style picture in a news report, they are cheating us all."
It's not as easy as he makes it out to be to make moving, beautiful pictures with them. Stern implies the camera does all the work. Foo. Just look at the 1-billion awful Instagram and Hipstamatic photos posted on the web. Good photographers make good pictures. I know my settings and my setup and I work hard to make my pics come out the way I want them to. Most of them don't, and get deleted. I like this one:
(Credit: John Rabe)
The only "fakery" perpetrated is if someone posts a photo and pretends it's an old Polaroid or pinhole shot when it's not.
News organizations manipulate photos all the time, and thank God they do. Nick writes, "Any news photographer worth his or her salt will tell you that the best camera is one that lets you take the photo unencumbered by the technicalities of the process. A camera that lets you record the scene with the light and shadows as it lies before you, and to produce an image that brings the emotion of the scene to the viewer -- one that lets you take the photograph naked."
Nick, you mean you never change the depth of field or use a wide angle or telephoto lens, and never print anything but the full frame of the negative? You don't use Photoshop to adjust your colors or increase the contrast? All of those techniques clothe a naked photo in the garments you choose for it. I wouldn't expect you ignore these options in the name of purity any more than I'd insist you should use glass plates or tintype technology. There were plenty of .200 hitters in 1927, and plenty of old guys who smelled like hypo and were also lousy photographers. You go with the new tech and you make it work - as you do - and I trust you and your colleagues to manipulate the photo - before or after you take it - just enough to clarify what I need to see, without crossing the boundaries of journalistic integrity.
(The photo. AP/Nick Ut.)
And in case you're wondering ... I don't know if I respect any journalists more than photojournalists. It's damn hard work. I grew up amidst some of the best photographers in the world. Joe Clark and his son Junebug Clark, Snuffy McGill, Tony Spina, Joe Polomini, Roy Bash. I love Gary Leonard, the Watsons, Boris Yaro, Nick Ut, Ted Soqui, and Heidi Bradner. And my dad was a pro who lugged around a Mamiya double lens reflex, but bought a compact 35mm as soon as it came out and left the DLR at home. He'd have gone digital in a second if he'd have lived long enough, and would have loved the Hipstamatic app.
So, come on off the front porch and let me buy you a beer.