A Pogues founder explains why Shane MacGowan had to go - The Negro Problem couple's very public breakup - What does that graffiti mean? - GeoCache with Zorro
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.)
Off-Ramp retracts CyberFrequencies that focused on Daisey's Apple story
On March 26, 2011, we aired an episode of CyberFrequencies about Mike Daisey's one-man-show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" and his trip to China to report on poor working conditions at the factories that make Apple products.
After an investigation by Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, Daisey has admitted that he lied about many of the details, so we're retracting that episode of CyberFrequencies.
Daisey also duped This American Life, which aired a much longer segment about the supposed story. This American Life is spending all of this weekend's show on the issue, and Marketplace is also reporting in-depth on the story.
With Zorro's help, geocaching is the new frontier for Long Beach's libraries
When's the last time you checked out a book from the library? Exactly.
The city of Long Beach is trying to engage their community to read more actively with an annual citywide book club called Long Beach Reads One Book. The program encourages everyone in Long Beach to read the same book at the same time. It builds community, and also -- they hope -- increases literacy.
This year the program chose Isabel Allende's novel "Zorro," a retelling of the masked bandit's origin story. The book begins in Southern California, where Zorro was born in the late 18th century. He was raised in the area where Long Beach is now. To help immerse kids in the story, organizers used Geocaching.
Geocaching is treasure hunting for the digital age. Di LaPlume, a CSULB English major, arranged the event single-handedly, taking inspiration from the book to hide treasures in areas around Zorro's old stomping grounds: Rancho Los Alamitos and Rancho Los Cerritos.
LaPlume made sure that it wouldn't be just a walk in the park. One treasure was so hard to find that a family gave up only inches away from it. LaPlume eventually told them they were "hot" and they finally found it ... carved inside one of the books in the library.
Susan Redfield, the chair of the program, believes the success of the Zorro Geocaching event shows a step towards the right direction. "Libraries are going to be different, the way that education in general is different than when I went to school or your Mom went to school. And engaging young people in this way is the start of seeing libraries and what they can be for our communities."
To find out more about Long Beach Reads One Book and upcoming events, visit its website.
The Negro Problem's new CD, "Making It," details the couple's breakup during "Passing Strange."
I first heard about Mark Stewart and Heidi Rodewald’s amazing band The Negro Problem in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was living just off the Silver Lake reservoir, two minutes from a club called Spaceland. I drove past the Spaceland marquee regularly, and it seemed like The Negro Problem had a virtual residency in that small but sassy venue. Friends whose taste I respected kept telling me to see them, that their writerly and tuneful songs were right up my alley. But somehow I never got around to it. What a putz!
Cut to Sundance 2009. Spike Lee has a new movie, and a magazine has assigned me to say something intelligent about it. I’m a weirdo, and I try hard to go into every single screening at film festivals knowing nothing at all if possible -- no buzz, no synopsis, no nothing -- so I can have a totally fresh response. The film was called "Passing Strange," it was a musical, and that was pretty much all I knew.
But it was a lot more than a musical. It was a brilliant visual transcription of an even more brilliant piece of -- what can I call it? Musical literature. And the underlying work was by, starring, and about Stew and (more covertly) Heidi, another LA native who rejected her world as she’d known it in the name of rock and roll. "Passing Strange" was amazing and unique, worthy of comparison thematically to Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" and James Baldwin’s "Another Country."
To find out with the release of The Negro Problem's new album, "Making It," that romantic turmoil was the backstage subtext to "Passing Strange" blows my mind even more, though Heidi and Stew have faced that fact squarely and with the full force of their artistry in their latest work. "Making It" is a brave conceptual piece, simultaneously characteristic and a great leap forward musically, and one of the more heartbreaking great albums you’ll hear this year. And Heidi and Stew are just as unflinching in our Off-Ramp interview as they are in their new songs.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that "Passing Strange" -- a celebrated American stage productions, created by and starring LA natives -- has never played LA. Stew and Heidi are too gracious to say this, but I think this is a disgrace. LA artists shouldn’t have to go to New York to win Tony's and find glory. But if they do, it seems to me their hometown (which seems greedy to mount a roadshow production of a whole lot of anything else if it comes out of New York) ought to kill the fatted calf for their prodigals -- or at least lend them the use of the hall down at the Mark Taper Forum.
Confessions of a panhandler
Did you ever wonder about the panhandlers who work the off-ramps of Southern California's freeways, with their sometimes heartfelt, funny or remarkably sad messages written on scraps of cardboard?
I did. Do they have schedules? Do they coordinate with other panhandlers? How much do they make?
I finally decided to ask one of them, a man I always see at the bottom of my exit, the eastbound 210 off-ramp for Hill Avenue.
His name is Randy and he says he's been "flying sign" since 2000, panhandling from Minneapolis to the Pacific Northwest, down to his present location in Pasadena. He says he led a white collar life as an applications engineer in the early 1990's until mental health problems -- schizophrenia -- began to affect his ability to work. Every day he "flies sign," and seems to work as hard as any tax-paying, gas pumping, hot blooded American citizen. Randy says he stays sober, but it's not easy.
A banner day? "I was panhandling in Glendale about four years ago, and a African-American gentleman pulled up and he rolled down his window and he gave me an envelope and said, 'Have a great day!' and there were three $100 bills in the envelope."
Pasadena, he says, is very friendly. Much more so than Anaheim Hills, for instance, where people are too worried about their own problems to help him out.
Photographer Vince Gonzales gives new life to vintage film equipment
(UPDATE: Vince has just opened a show at the Pickford Center that focuses on film projectors, and includes not just photos, but the vintage equipment itself. Check the link for details.) You can debate the merits of film versus digital (feel free, in the comments section below), but nothing beats the look of the old movie cameras, tripods, editing stations ... as photographer Vince Gonzales has discovered. Off-Ramp host John Rabe talked with Gonzales at a photo shoot at USC's film school.
COME INSIDE to see the photo Vince took of a beautiful old Arriflex especially for Off-Ramp ... and look one item down to see who John met during the shoot -- a man who worked on one of the best films of the century.
(Image: Vince Gonzales)
Graffiti in South LA: The story behind the spray
In South Los Angeles, graffiti is as commonplace as storefront churches, sidewalk peddlers and foreclosed homes. Because it's so ubiquitous, it rarely warrants more than a knowing glance from locals.
But graffiti tells a story in a code that's constantly changing. And although it's not always gang-related, in the Los Angeles Police Department's Newton Division in South Central L.A., there's a good chance it is.
Officers Brandon Barron and Jonathan Rocha are part of Newton's Gang Enforcement Detail, and they took me along for one of their patrol shifts. They're old hands at distinguishing between the different types of graffiti.
"We have about a nine-square mile area within Newton, and there's approximately 50-60 gangs within Newton itself, which is usually a lot more than the average division here in Los Angeles," said Barron.
First, there are the artists, who Barron says are just trying to show off. Their graffiti usually jumps out because it's so colorful. It might be in bubbly letter style and look well thought-out. Artistic graffiti looks like it takes time, and that's because it does.
"They look at it as art," said Barron. "They look at it as art and they don't think they're doing anything wrong. They're throwing it up there because they want people to see their artistic side."
Tagging, on the other hand, is a lot less – well, pretty.
"There's no rule or artistic flow to it, really," said Rocha. "Just writing their name. Usually what'll happen is they'll write their crew and then their name, or a moniker."
And then there are the gangs. With so many gangs in such a compact area, you can imagine the problems that arise – tension, turf wars and outright violence. Neither officer wanted to answer which of the colorfully-named gangs – like the Playboys, or the Pueblo Bishop Bloods, or the Five-Deuce Broadway Gangster Crips – was considered the most dangerous. They both said all of them are capable of the same thing: vandalism, selling drugs, beating people up and murder.
With so many gangs comes lots of graffiti, and gangster tagging is generally practical above all else, said Barron.
"A lot of times, gang members want you to be able to read it and see what they wrote," he said. That's because it's a claiming of territory, and one that can quickly turn deadly if a rival gang member finds himself tagging on the wrong block.
Take the Loco Park gang, for example. One of the simpler ways Loco Park gang members will claim their territory is spraying an "LP," or writing out "Loco Park." That leaves them open to disrespect – or "disses" – from rival gangs, said Rocha.
"Loco Park will put an 'LP', throw it up there," said Rocha. "If a rival gang comes through, one thing they'll definitely do is they'll spray paint over it, cross it out and then put theirs up right next to it."
This "war on the walls" can escalate quickly. One gang member, speaking under the condition of anonymity, said that rival gangs' tagging in his territory was like him "going to your house and stepping all over the couch."
And so gangsters have graffiti codes that warn rivals to get out – codes, Rocha said, that are often accompanied by a threat of death. On one wall the Primera Flats gang had tagged up, they wrote a "G" – representing a rival gang, the Ghetto Boyz – then crossed it out and tagged a "K" right next to it.
"The K at the end of it signifies killer," said Rocha. "So the 'G' in the middle, is for Ghetto Boyz – Ghetto Boy Killer. So that's why it's crossed out."
And in more concrete terms? Barron spelled it out.
"They're going to go out and they'll kill anybody from that rival gang on the spot," he said. "Just like they know if they happen to drive into Ghetto Boyz' neighborhood, same thing – they can be shot at any minute if seen by a Ghetto Boyz gang member."
The Pueblo Bishop Bloods had made a similar threat on their turf at the Pueblo Del Rio projects between Long Beach Avenue and Alameda Street. Barron said the Pueblo Bishops have that area locked down so tightly that there's hardly any graffiti – there's no need, since almost all locals know the Pueblo Bishops run that place.
On one wall, the Pueblo Bishops had threatened three rival gangs: the Crips, the 38th Street Gang and the Blood Stone Villains, Rocha said.
"'C' is crossed out for Crips, because they're a Blood gang," said Rocha. "38th Street is another gang in the area, a Hispanic gang. That's been crossed out. Blood Stone Villains, they're also a Blood gang, but the Pueblo Bishops have a feud with the Blood Stone Villains. So even though they're Bloods, they don't get along. So essentially they're killers of the Crips, 38th Street and Blood Stone Villains."
The graffiti code is incredibly intricate. On one liquor store wall, the Hang Out Boyz gang had tagged their name. Barron explained what a seemingly innocuous cluster of dots and dashes meant.
"You have the Hang Out Boyz, the gang," he said, pointing to the wall. "The thing that stands out too, I noticed, is the three dots with the two lines. That stands for the Mexican Mafia. So HOB has some sort of affiliation with the Mexican Mafia."
And you don't put that symbol up if you're not truly affiliated with the Mexican Mafia, Rocha said – unless you have a death wish.
No matter how artful the tag or skillful the spray, vandalizing someone's property, both officers said, is still a crime. There's a world of meaning behind the writing on the wall, though, and whether it's gang-related or the handiwork of some troublemaking kids, it's on Newton Gang Enforcement Detail's radar. Like the artists, vandals and gangsters, they know their graffiti.
You can read the three-part Know Your Graffiti series in its entirety on KPCC's OnCentral blog: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3