James Franco's collaborative USC film class winds up with real movies ... a jazz pianist who uses sci-fi movies to inspire music about Mars ... Damian Kevitt runs the LA Marathon.
Hit-and-run victim, amputee Damian Kevitt to run the Los Angeles Marathon
Damian Kevitt was riding his bike through Griffith Park when, two years ago, he lost his leg in a hit-and-run crash. Now, after organizing a charity ride and advocating for changes to California's hit-and-run laws, Damian plans to turn a lifelong goal into reality: running in the Los Angeles Marathon.
Kevitt went on a warm-up run this week and talked with KPCC's Sharon McNary about how he's prepared for the marathon.
Kevitt didn't do much running before the crash — he bicycled, mostly. "It was purely a decision to do the marathon after my accident. The second day," says Kevitt. After he learned he'd lose most of his right leg, but keep his left, Kevitt says he vowed to run the marathon.
How do you prepare for a marathon when you're missing part of your leg? Pretty much the same way anyone else would: lots of running, though he sometimes prefers to train on an elliptical midweek. Even though Damian lost his right leg, his left ankle was badly hurt in the crash, too. He says he tries to avoid putting too much stress on it.
Kevitt acknowledges that running with a prosthetic leg will slow him down some — during long runs he'll have to take his prosthetic off occasionally to drain the sweat — but his main goal is to finish. "I'm not to do a speed race," he says. "I don't care if I lose 30 seconds or a minute."
Damian hopes that by competing in the L.A. Marathon he'll raise awareness for his campaign to make streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians.
Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to Damian Kevitt by the wrong name in one instance. KPCC regrets the error.
The 2 friends who helped integrate Charlie Brown and the 'Peanuts' gang in 1968
UPDATE 3/12/2015: Harriet Glickman and Ken Kelly have been the toast of Little Rock, Arkansas this week, after an invitation from the Clinton Presidential Center to come talk about their work to integrate "Peanuts."
(Harriet Glickman being interviewed by a Little Rock TV station at the Clinton Presidential Center. Image: Katherine Moore)
On the one hand, there's Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges. On the other, there's Harriet Glickman and Ken Kelly. All took part in the Civil Rights struggle. Glickman and Kelly's role was smaller — in an era before the controversy of Ferguson, they helped bring on the creation of a boy named Franklin.
In a conversation over chocolate chip cookies and coffee in the dining room of the house she's lived in for half a century, Glickman, an 88-year old retired schoolteacher, and Kelly, an 86-year-old retired JPL microwave communications engineer from Sherman Oaks, told how they convinced "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz to integrate his strip. Through their polite and candid exchange of letters and ideas, Franklin, a black kid with a father serving in Vietnam, was born.
Franklin was unspectacular as a character, but he made a huge splash. "It was 1968," Glickman said. "I was living here in Sherman Oaks with three children (including KPCC Senior Editor Paul Glickman), and the idea came to me to write the letter to Charles Schulz, asking if he would put a then-Negro [the common usage] child into his strip."
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Her longtime friend Ken Kelly, an African-American who later fought to integrate local housing developments, picks up the story. "It was so common in the total media picture — movies, newspapers — the absence of Negro people was extreme, but worse, negative situations always got covered." But he liked Peanuts on the whole. "The characters and situations were beautiful."
Glickman made the first move, asking Schulz to add a black character. Schulz responded in a letter, saying of he and fellow artists, "We all would like very much to be able to do this, but each of us is afraid that it would look like we were patronizing our Negro friends. I don't know what the solution is."
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But Glickman knew. She shared Schulz's letter with Kelly and another black parent, and asked them to write Schulz with their ideas. Kelly suggested Schulz create a black character as a "supernumerary" — not a hero, just a regular kid. And that's what Schulz did.
"He did it so smoothly," Kelly says. "He wasn't rocking anyone's boat, except there are those they felt the boat was being rocked."
There was a letter of protest from a newspaper editor in the Deep South, upset about the depiction of an integrated school. But there was also the letter of thanks from then-City Councilman Tom Bradley.
Of her role, Glickman says, "When I was at the museum, somebody said, 'It took courage.' No it didn't. It didn't take courage to sit in Sherman Oaks, in my comfortable home, and type a letter. Courage was little Ruby Bridges," a black girl who integrated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans. "That was courage."
(A study in courage: Ruby Bridges being escorted to school. Credit: U.S. Department of Justice)
And, Harriet Glickman says, "What we're seeing today, some of the hatred, some of the anger, the racism that still exists, it's not going to be fixed by putting a little character in a 'Peanuts' strip."
The 46-year old letters between Schulz and his gently prodding fans in L.A. are now part of the collection at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, and you can read more of them in this Mashable article.
Pianist Josh Nelson on "Exploring Mars," performing live
What does Mars sound like on a piano? Pianist Josh Nelson came up with one answer on his latest album: Exploring Mars.
Nelson has performed and collaborated with musicians like Jeff Hamilton, Peter Erskine and vocalist Natalie Cole. When performing live, the pianist and composer often includes a live videographer to collaborate with his band.
Off-Ramp contributor Sean J. O'Connell went to Nelson's home to talk about the newest album. Here are some highlights:
On writing an album about Mars
Mars is awesome, lets just start with that. Second, it's been in the news quite a lot. For me, it was the landing of the Curiosity rover in August 2012 that kind of seeded the project. And then with all of the Space X stuff going on, with trials of people hopefully populating that planet someday... it seemed like an apropos time to release something with that subject matter.
It all started with "Martian Chronicles" — Ray Bradbury and his vision for the Martian fantasy world definitely got me going before that.
I really love the romanticism, the idea of musically reflecting upon the planet. But at the same time, paying homage to someone like Gustav Holst, who took Mars and the astrological meaning of the planets, and putting my own spin on it.
On translating the concept of Mars to music
For this record, I would take other records — or also films, like "Invaders from Mars" from the 1950s — and just put it on and just start playing. Solo piano wise, [it sounds] romantic and kind of other worldly. But I really love the idea of just kind of improvising, especially with the films of Mars, or the JPL/NASA stuff that they've been putting out from the Curiosity rover landing — that's super inspirational to me as well.
On performing live with a videographer
I love film, I love theater, and I just wanted to marry the two with my music. Growing up a Disney kid, my dad was an Imagineer with Disney. My brother and I got to be the first guys to ride on a lot of rides at Disneyland, testing them out. And we were fascinated by the theatrics that go into it. And the mechanics, but also the resulting art — the feeling that you get from seeing something like this.
So, yeah. We have the Discovery Project. I'm surprised more jazz artists don't do it, actually. Because there's a serious visual component that I think a lot of them deal with. It's really fun for the band. It's fun for the audience. It's a really fun journey from beginning to end.
On the impact video has on the musicians' performance
Absolutely, there's different performances, yeah. They respond visually and then it manifests different sonically when they perform it. I actually like really hearing the tunes performed with video and without to see how they're different and to see if the guys are, in fact, reacting.
EVENT: Gary Leonard to take us deep into LA's punk music scene
"We were all extremely powerful (even if that meant a particular, sensitive stupidity that led to jail), we were all young or young at heart, we were all flirting with death and laughing at life."--Exene Cervenka
Given the extremes of LA's punk era, it's a miracle any of the icons -- like Exene, the Urinals, Mike Watt -- are left. But luckily, Gary Leonard was there with his camera, and he'll be giving a talk about that time Saturday at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.
(Phil Alvin and Exene Cervenka at MOCA in 2012. Credit: LAPL/Gary Leonard.)
Gary, who runs Take My Picture Gary Leonard gallery in downtown LA, will be narrating images from the book Make The Music Go Bang!: The Early L.A. Punk Scene, edited by Don Snowden, featuring Gary's photos. He'll also be showing some of his new photos of the musicians from the era.
And, it's free!
L.A. in Focus: Gary Leonard and the Los Angeles Music Scene: Sat. March 14. 2pm. LAPL Central Library, 630 W. 5th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071.
James Franco's USC filmmaking class breaks ground by, you know, making a movie
Actor and filmmaker James Franco is noted, and at times mocked, for treating his life and career as a kind of ongoing art project, but one of his projects might change the way you think of him, and the future of filmmaking.
Our story starts at the Palm Springs Film Festival in January of this year. One of the festival premieres was "Don Quixote: The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha." In movie terms, "Don Quixote" is a cursed text. Failed adaptations of the literary classic about a delusional Spanish knight nearly ended the careers of both Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam.
WATCH the trailer for Franco's "Don Quixote"
Who'd be crazy enough to attempt that one? James Franco. Make that professor James Franco, because the "Don Quixote" that premiered at Palm Springs was co-directed by 11 USC students. All professor Franco did was teach the class, fund the project, and co-star in the movie as a brutal highwayman.
"I like to explore alternative approaches to filmmaking," he says. "And maybe one could say teaching is also a new approach, where I am bringing resources to young filmmakers, I am bringing a source text to be adapted, and then after that, I'm trying to take my hands off the final product, turning it over to my students."
But a premiere is the third act of a production process. To understand the Franco/Watson student production model, you'd really have to start over, from Act One, the preproduction phase. Or, the start of class. Veteran producer John Watson co-teaches Franco's class. He says, "My first rule I say to them is leave your ego at the door. This is a joint project." And they leave accepted wisdom for student films at the door, too. "We broke all the rules. They say you don't do period. You don't do horses and animals and children. You don't do stunts. And you certainly don't do massive complicated effects sequences." But they HAD to do windmills, right?
When I visited the class in late February, they were on to the next project. A fresh group of actors, directors and support crew were assembled in a small theatre on the USC campus for a read-through of a script in progress. The script is called "Actor's Anonymous," adapted by student screenwriters from Franco's blackly comic Hollywood novel.
In "Actor's Anonymous," Franco will have a small, self-mocking role as a pontificating actor/celebrity with a dark side. It's a role that mirrors both Franco's status in Hollywood and his passion for teaching. There are 12 student directors this time, 13 including the AD. They are male and female, multi-ethnic. And two days before the start of principal photography, their emotions run the gamut, from chomping at the bit to quietly terrified.
At the end of the class, Professor Franco gives his student filmmakers some last-minute script notes. His comments are solid. Practical. And scanning all the young faces in the room, it's hard not to root for them. Fresh and eager, and watching a shared dream come to life. In class after class, Franco's students aren't creating resume pieces to prove they can make a feature film later. They're making real movies — now — that people are paying to see.
Meet LA's Destiny Rodriguez, 14-year old star of latest BrainsOn! science podcast
Every other week on Off-Ramp, we play an excerpt from BrainsOn!, the new science podcast from KPCC's Sanden Totten and MPR's Molly Bloom. Over the months, we've heard how sound works, why roller coasters make us sick, and why dogs sniff each others' butts.
This time, BrainsOn! looks at the science of volcanos, and the co-host of the show is Destiny Rodriguez, a 14-year old at St. Helen Catholic School in South Gate.
Destiny plans to be a mechanical engineer. What's that? "They innovate the future," she says. "Everything from toasters to cars to even space ships. They make them better, they find problems, and they fix them. All engineers, whether you're a biomechanical, medical, any type of engineeer ... they're problem solvers."
Destiny's father Albert says, "She broke the news to me about three years ago and I was totally surprised because I am so removed from that. I'm an artist. For a living, what pays the bills is graphics, but I do tattoos, airbrush, you name it." Like this:
(One of Albert Rodriguez's apparel designs.)
"I've been doing (art) since I was 13," Albert says, "So I can relate to Destiny's fortitude, as far as being driven to her goal. I just opened my eyes to the field (of mechanical engineering) through the eyes of my child."
BrainsOn co-creator Sanden Totten, KPCC's science correspondent, says the podcast uses kids as co-hosts because kids have such great, basic questions about things. Plus, if a scientist is being interviewed by an adult, their answers are often too complicated for kids (and adults). But if they're talking to kids, they make it understandable to kids (and adults). Totten calls the kid co-hosts the show's "secret weapon."
For the episode, Sanden took Destiny to JPL where she met everybody, saw lots of scientific equipment, a few deer on the grounds, and cool cars in the parking lot. She's into cars, too, and recently helped Albert fix his '64 Impala. And she's running her own business, designing and selling bows to her classmates.
Song of the week: 'Stacks on Stacks' by Bouquet
This week's Off-Ramp song of the week is "Stacks on Stacks" by Bouquet — a duo from Los Angeles featuring Max Foreman and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs (formerly of The Finches).
It's off "In a Dream," Bouquet's new EP, which comes out this month on Folktale Records. The band plays its record release show on Sunday, March 29 at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock.
Here's the dreamy video for "Stacks on Stacks:"
Ferguson, fire, Mexico City protests ignite LA artist’s creativity
Images of fire, protests, and tear gas from Ferguson, Missouri, Mexico City, and downtown Los Angeles have circled the globe through social media the last six months. They landed in the inbox of painter Sandy Rodriguez, who works out of a studio in South L.A.'s Leimert Park.
Sandy Rodriguez has a 9-to-5 job at the Getty’s education department. During her off hours she paints at a former hair salon converted into an artist studio.
"I'm one of three artists in residence with Art+Practice Foundation here in Leimert Park. This is the first year of the program. It is a 14 month residency so I get to create and just work here for 14 months, started in August of 2014," Rodriguez says.
When she started the residency, she proposed a dozen paintings about Leimert Park’s revitalization. She painted a 1920s home, a street scene, and the nighttime fog of nearby Mar Vista.
(Fog in Mar Vista, a painting by Sandy Rodriguez. Image: KPCC/Maya Sugarman)
And then Ferguson, Missouri happened.
One of her paintings includes an image of a McDonald's restaurant.
"A number of reporters and people had been arrested inside a McDonald's in Ferguson during the first few days of the demonstrations, and they were being accused of trespassing in a public space. You hope that you include just a little bit of information, that it’ll jog recent memory and conversations and think about a lot of topics that come up, right?" Rodriguez says.
(Ferguson, Missouri, in a painting by Sandy Rodriguez. Image: KPCC/Maya Sugarman)
The first time she painted fire? "I remember it was ’92," Rodriguez says. "It was the civil unrest, and it was only through the front page of the LA Times. And I still have old, crumbled LA Times front page images from various kinds of moments that I’ve painted."
It’s a process of mentally cutting and pasting, editing the found images, and channeling the results through her hand, paint brush, and onto the canvas.
Sandy Rodriguez is a Chicana. She grew up in L.A. and Tijuana in a family with three generations of artists and painters. Next to the Ferguson works are paintings of an overturned car bathed in fire and a nighttime scene of Mexico City’s national palace, with crowds circling a burning effigy of the president. The paintings are reactions to the November protests in Mexico over the police killing of 43 young teachers.
What moved her?
“My empathy to the cause and to the work that they were doing, the work that they had hoped to be able to do of educating rural Mexican students that didn’t have the opportunities that they had, right? And there was an absolute sadness and outrage, powerlessness over the scenario, over the scene, and what could I do. Then you’re reading the newspaper. Then you've got tears coming down your face. You’re trying to have breakfast and reading the sources and you’re like, 'Well, what can I do?' I can go to the studio and I can make a painting about this moment so that it’s not forgotten, so that as more news and more horrific, awful things happen, people don’t just forget.”
Sandy Rodriguez is fascinated by fire and the rebirth that follows. Friends know this and send her pictures of fires. She got one of these pictures in the middle of the night in December. It was of Geoff Palmer's massive apartment complex on fire in downtown L.A.
“It was one of those moments, you’re like, 'This is a historic fire. I can’t believe this is happening in my lifetime.' I know it’s not a good thing when a whole entire block goes up in flames, but hopefully they’ll rethink what happens in that same plot of land next.”
Rodriguez doesn’t create alone. She opens up her studio to visitors to hear what they have to say about her work. “There’s an idea that there’s a lone artistic creator, toiling away by themselves in a space, and it’s not in a vacuum. That process is about being a part of a larger community, a larger dialogue, a larger history.”
In June, a curator will pick some of Sandy Rodriguez’s paintings for a group show at the Art + Practice space in L.A.’s Leimert Park. She'll be talking about the art she's created on March 18.
LA artist Charles Gaines makes meaning with grids and numbers
The first thing you'll see at "Charles Gaines: Gridwork, 1974-1989" is a walnut tree. There are dozens of them.
It starts out with a triptych — an artwork made up of three panels. There's a photo of a tree, an outline of the tree’s silhouette on a grid, and then a third drawing, in which the tree’s outline has been filled in with numbers. It looks kind of like a needlepoint pattern.
Move on to the second piece, and it's another triptych — a photo of a different tree, the outline of that tree on a grid, but in the third panel, he's drawn the second tree on top of the first. Gaines repeats these steps 27 times altogether, using a different color for each new tree.
The final drawing in the series is a colorful explosion of numbers on a grid, all 27 trees layered on top of each other. You’re seeing an entire orchard in just one drawing. Hence the name of the series: "Walnut Tree Orchard."
This process and variations on it have defined Gaines’ career. He’s used it on different subjects, like human faces and dance.
(From Charles Gaines' "Motion: Trisha Brown Dance" series (1980–81). Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer)
Gaines was born in Charleston, South Carolina and studied art at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He started teaching at CalArts in 1989 and has lived in Los Angeles ever since. Charles is African American, but he says that despite coming of age as an artist in the 1970s — when the art world was interested in what he called "discernibly black art" — his work never fit the bill.
Yet Gaines says his career has always been driven by his identity as a black man. Conceptual art let him experiment with the idea of arbitrary systems, which he relates to the racism he’s experienced from a young age.
"As a three or four-year-old, I always wondered about Jim Crow laws in the South and why these laws existed," says Gaines. "I was really confused about the laws of chance where you’re born into a minority group, and what’s at stake and how do you get out of that kind of identification. So my interest in representation grows out of my experience as a black person."
Being a conceptual artist also allowed him to separate himself from his work. When you look at one of his grid-based drawings, you don’t see Gaines. You see the system he invented to make it.
(From Charles Gaines' "Motion: Trisha Brown Dance" series (1980–81). Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.)
"Nobody knew I was a black artist. So when I was introduced in social situations, people were always surprised," says Gaines. "Which is to say that people are surprised when they meet a black artist."
One encounter with racism stands out to him in particular. He was part of a traveling show at the Leo Castelli Gallery and one of the places it stopped was Dartmouth College. Gaines just happened to be driving through the area and decided to drop in for the opening.
"The curator of the show and the director of the gallery there came up to me and said how wonderful it was for me to come," says Gaines. "There was problem — they’re all going out to a dinner reception at a restaurant and they can’t invite me because they don’t serve black people there. And this was like Dartmouth, in 1979. It’s not that long ago."
It was a catch-22. He often faced discrimination from white critics and curators, but other African American artists didn’t consider him a part of their community at the time either. So when The Studio Museum in Harlem, which focuses on African American artists, proposed a retrospective to Charles in 2014, he was thrilled.
Now, it's here at the Hammer Museum. Curator Anne Ellegood, who organized the exhibition’s visit, says it makes sense for it to come to Los Angeles, where Gaines has been making art and teaching for over 25 years.
"The show focuses on his work from the 1970s and 80s, a fifteen-year period in which he was very productive. He made a lot of work, but also, it was a very formative part of his career," says Ellegood. "For audiences in Los Angeles, I think it will be very eye-opening for them to see this incredibly important Los Angeles artist at a pivotal point in his career."
The exhibition, "Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989," runs until May 24th at the Hammer Museum.