We go to Bakersfield to sample a few gems in a city with a bad rap; Jim Tully, "the most hated man in Hollywood;" Brains On and living with a volcano.
New bill from Assemblyman Gatto aims at expense and delay of probate
Say your folks own a nice house like this one. If they put it into a trust, that speeds its transfer to the heirs (you) but costs thousands of dollars to set up. If it goes to probate, that's tens of thousands in costs and months, maybe years, of delay.
There are some advantages to probate: you get formal proceedings overseen by the court, and a cutoff to claims that creditors can make. But Glendale Assemblyman Mike Gatto's AB 139, which has passed the Assembly Judiciary Committee and now heads to Appropriations, would let homeowners treat a home like most any other asset, and avoid the torturous, expensive probate process.
AB 139 would create a “Revocable Transfer on Death (TOD) Deed” in California to let the homeowner specify to whom their house should be deeded to when they die.
“It is illogical and unfair to allow someone to pass a $250,000 retirement account and a $50,000 classic car easily, but then to force our constituents into probate if that same individual owns a $150,000 house." -- Assemblyman Mike Gatto
Gatto says 25 other states have this system, without a single instance of abuse.
LAST CHANCE: MOCA's huge American flag exhibit will blow you away
UPDATE: This is the last week to see trinket; the exhibit's last day is Sunday, June 28. Saturday and Sunday hours: 11-6.
Take a 55 x 16-foot American flag, add a few spotlights and four huge movie wind fans, and you have an unexpectedly overwhelming and moving art exhibit.
"Trinket," by William Pope.L (pronounced poh-PELL) is the centerpiece of a show of the same name at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown L.A.'s Little Tokyo. It's wonderful in its simplicity, and bewildering in its complexity. It's just a flag in the wind, but it's so much more.
WATCH Off-Ramp's special slo-mo video of William Pope.L's "Trinket" at MOCA
The noise and the wind from the fans, plus the ever-changing shape of the flag in the lights, create an immersive experience even before you start thinking about what "Trinket" means to you — especially in the context of the Tunis museum attack, the baby cradled in a flag, Rudy Giuliani's claim that President Obama doesn't love America, U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.
"People need to see it," said MOCA chief curator Bennett Simpson as we stood downwind, like CNN anchors covering a hurricane. "But, more than that, they need to feel it. The artist Pope.L says people should physically feel their democracy, and not just understand it as an abstract symbol, and with this work, yeah, you are physically enveloped in the work."
William Pope.L's Trinket is at the Geffen Contemporary through June 28.
KPCC photog's priceless reaction to UCLA goaltending call - in slo-mo!
UCLA beat SMU 60-59 yesterday on a rare goaltending call with 13 seconds remaining, to push 11th-seeded UCLA to the upset.
Nobody was more surprised than KPCC photographer Maya Sugarman, but nobody was more prepared than her colleague, KPCC reporter Jed Kim, who not only caught the whole thing on his iPhone, but had it in slo-mo mode to capture Maya's jubilant, ponytail-flying victory dance.
Watch the video here! And then listen to Maya tell Off-Ramp host John Rabe about the moment.
Song of the week: 'Circles' by Dunes
Off-Ramp's song of the week is "Circles" by the LA band Dunes.
https://soundcloud.com/dunesband/circles
Dunes is made up of former members of Mika Miko and Abe Vigoda. "Circles" is off Dunes' upcoming, yet-to-be titled album. You can see them live at the Purple Room in Palm Springs on March 28 and at Pixels in Downtown Riverside on March 29. Here's a video from Dunes' 2011 song "Tied Together:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaYjWwYvXs4
Bakersfield Confidential: How antiques saved one Woolworth's
It's Tiki Tuesday at one of my local haunts, and while I'm there, wearing a vintage Hawaiian shirt I picked up for $20, I'll be thinking of Woolworth's and Bakersfield.
My friend Chris and I drove up to Bakersfield yesterday to take photos to illustrate Marc Haefele's "Bakersfield Confidential," a series of broadcast and online pieces on the gems of what Marc calls one of California's "most-avoided places."
Yes, we saw the meth-heads, the vacant lots, and the vacant storefronts. But we also stumbled across the Five & Dime Antique Mall, which inhabits the old Woolworth's store in downtown Bakersfield, across from the old Kress department store.
We met Evelyn Merriman as we walked in. The Bakersfield native says she retired as manager of the place a few years ago, and is just working a few days a week now. She told us the story: Woolworth's closed in 1994, and within a few months, the antique mall moved in. And they didn't wreck anything. The exterior is absolutely pristine, from the plastic sign above the door to the entrance terrazzo that spells out "Woolworth's." Inside, the same story, down to the luncheonette, which is still serving food.
As a kid who grew up in small town America - Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan - and spent a good deal of time and money in our Woolworth's, it was a relief and a pleasure to see a reminder of my childhood so lovingly cared for.
(Woolworth's in downtown Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.)
And you have to wonder: if Bakersfield hadn't been economically depressed, wouldn't someone have snapped up the Woolworth's and ruined it? It's a small silver lining, but I'll take it.
Meantime, we're having a conversation about Bakersfield on the KPCC Off-Ramp page:
"Did you know that in the late sixties and early seventies there were at least 3 active theatre groups in Bakersfield along with the Kern Philharmonic? We had upscale clothing boutiques that rivaled anything down in LA. In fact, Brock's Tea Room on the Mezzanine was every bit as swanky in it's day as Bullock's Tea Room on Wilshire Blvd in the Miracle Mile of Los Angeles. And all this artsy-snooty sophisticated culture existed side-by-side with Country Music greats who topped the charts. It was a wonderful crazy mix that gave Bakersfield its own unique personality." -- Bakersfield native Cindra Lee Henry
Share your stories and thoughts, too.
Bakersfield Confidential: The city's unique natural history museum documents the San Joaquin Valley
It doesn’t look like any natural history museum you ever saw before. First, it doesn’t stand in the middle of a big park-like lawn. And it’s not a fantastic piece of Victorian architecture. Instead, it’s a pastel-painted former JC Penney store in the middle of a tired downtown block in good old Bakersfield, California.
The Buena Vista Museum of Natural History is the only museum anywhere that documents the geology, zoology and paleontology of California’s great San Joaquin Valley, which extends from the Tehachapis to Sacramento. At the Buena Vista, there's everything from dinosaurs, large and small, down to an amazing collection of dinosaur eggs and even dinosaur fetuses.
The Valley as it is now began to form about the time those dinosaurs became extinct, leaving behind the sprawling petroleum resources that gave Kern County some of the nation’s richest oil fields, and also leaving a rich fossil record.
Then came the flood, as museum board member Tim Elam explains. "Kern County," he says, "is where Northern California geology meets Southern California geology, so we've got a variety of rocks, and we are an area that was once covered by the Pacific Ocean, and that is why we tend to find marine fossils."
A primal sea lion skeleton does broad-pawed breaststrokes over the museum's display cases. The Buena Vista also has an astounding hoard of shark remains, ranging from huge, menacing maws to a flourish of shark teeth excavated at the nearby Sharktooth Hill. The museum staff takes members on regular tooth digs on the hill.
Two million years ago, the ocean was replaced by a freshwater lake, which had shrunk to three separate lakes by the time the first Native Americans showed up. The Yokuts were just one of the local tribes the lakes nourished. Once Anglo settlers began farming the Valley in the 19th century, the big lakes disappeared into their irrigation ditches.
Then all that oil was found at the dawn of the 20th century, and the story of modern Kern County began.
In its wall charts and specimen cases, the museum tells this story to around 14,000 people a year, many or most of them children. But I suspect that what excites the kids even more than the geology and the dino remnants is the thoroughly non-PC but incredible collection of taxidermied animals. These come from a benefactor who traveled and hunted in Africa, Asia and Australia.
There used to be other museums like this in Central California, but the Buena Vista is the last one left. It’s mostly volunteer run, and functions without government funding apart from some local grants. Elam says they’re nearly halfway into a $300,000 campaign to buy the old JC Penney building that houses them.
The Buena Vista Museum of Natural History is at 2018 Chester Avenue in Bakersfield. It's open Thursday through Saturday, 10 to 4, and Sunday noon to 4.
Make sure to check out the rest of Marc Haefele's writing on Bakersfield, which he says is worth more than a day trip.
Bakersfield Confidential: The Bakersfield Museum of Art
The handsome, 20-year-old Bakersfield Museum of Art is perfectly situated in the town’s Central Park, which includes a walkway along a fast-flowing stream, full of ducks and geese, called Mill Creek. On its far shore stands the United States Courthouse, with some paintings of its own. This de facto campus, a long walk from downtown, may be the most attractive green space in the city proper. It is well worth a stroll in itself.
("2011 Bakersfield Museum of Art Sign" Skyman9999/Wikipedia Commons)
So what kind of art museum does Bako possess? A very decent one, but not one that suggests a long local artistic tradition; no donated heirloom Utrillos or Picassos here. Unlike Monterey and Laguna, Bakersfield has apparently attracted few artists in the past.
Most of the permanent collection consists of solid works by modern California painters, mostly from the last 20 years or so. They include crowd pleasers like Dennis Zieminski’s “Giant Orange,” a glowing, glaring portrait of a pre-World War II California juice stand, as well as some surprises — like a gorgeous egg tempera landscape called “Abandoned Olive Trees” by nonagenarian late-blooming Martinez surrealist Sylvia Fine, and a 1950 expressionist satire of the capitalist marketplace: “Buyers and Sellers” by maverick Daily Worker illustrator William Gropper. Most of the rest of the permanent collection seems to me to be on the conservative side.
But there’s also a very interesting and unusual show going on there right now by San Bernardino County painter Dennis Hare: his first retrospective. His work falls into two categories — what he calls “figurative assemblages” and “abstract assemblages.” The two overlap — basically, Hare does subdued-colored abstract compilations of found objects like tires, toys, fabrics and many other objects.
He also creates what might pass for conventional, figurative paintings in bright intense colors that include interacting groups of people, whether children at play, men in hats waiting in a union hall or folks just waltzing on the shore. The found-object canvases demand some intellectualization from us — like his "Route 5," with discarded objects from along that interstate stuck to the canvas. The figurative work, however, seems more to jump out at the viewer — and bring them in.
(Dennis Hare, from the artist's official website)
Hare brings an unusual resume to his work: for decades, he was a serious beach volleyball player, a top-rated pioneer in that activity. Then he had his first serious look at a Van Gogh painting. Although he’s assiduously self-taught as a painter, it’s said that his involvement in the sport brought him to great familiarity with the human figure, as his earliest work — fast sketches of volleyball matches — shows.
He uses the palette knife virtuoso-style, piling on the bright colors in thick layers. Oddly, his conventional work seems to me more original somehow than his abstractions. He’s worth a trip to Bako to see, along with two other smaller shows: Kusan Ogg’s “Rev Zero” and an absorbing three-artist display of drawings by Scott Hassell, Anne Marie Rousseau and Pamela Diaz Martinez.
And then there is the park with its river rambles, its geese and its wild ducks. Even the nearby new low-income housing is attractive, more like something you’d find in a New England town than you might expect from a small-city California community redevelopment agency.
The well-designed museum building also contains expansive classrooms for art students from age 3 and up. If Bakersfield doesn’t yet have its own school of painting, it’s certainly taking the right steps toward creating one.
Be sure to check out the rest of Marc's "Bakersfield Confidential."
Bakersfield Confidential: A few gems in a town with a bad rap
A 100-mile plus mile drive from Los Angeles will take you to Santa Barbara. It will also take you to Encinitas, or Big Bear Lake. Or it can take you to Bakersfield. And why should it do that, you ask? Even for 24 hours?
Because under the rugged surface, it contains enough attractions and surprises to easily fill 24 hours. Despite its having 364,000 people, Bako, as it is locally known, is one of the Golden State’s most avoided places. Its commonplace superlatives are dubious: the most obese, the most conservative, the least college-educated population. The air quality is below L.A.'s.
(Buck Owens in the early years. Image: BuckOwens.com)
On the other hand, it’s got its own worldwide country sound, courtesy of the likes of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, who left us his landmark Crystal Palace, the only combination museum, dance hall and restaurant I can think of anywhere. There is the county museum, which features acres of real life-displays of the area's agricultural and oil-drilling history. It has a sizable community college and a CSU campus, which provide some cultural underpinnings. It has several famous Basque restaurants — like the James Beard-awarded Noriega Hotel — that feed you fiercely.
But even if you skip these, you can get right to the heart of the city via bus from downtown L.A., which at this time of year passes through the Grapevine at its green spring finest. (Trust me, the trip is much more enjoyable when you aren’t driving.) And have an enjoyable, fulfilling day’s stay on foot.
You can also check into the nicest hotel in town a block or two away from the bus station. This is the Padre, an eight-story 1928 hostelry, recently restored in slightly odd deco-steampunk style within walking distance from some art galleries, antique shops, restaurants and two singular museums you've never heard of.
Plus a great music store, a formidable-looking steampunk department store and several tattoo parlors. What is called the downtown arts district seems to be growing, but it still has a ways to go. But there are a number of expansive restos around the Padre, along with a serious-looking club scene that seemed to switch on around our bedtime, so we didn’t sample it.
We picked Mama Roomba (1814 Eye Street) for late lunch purely because of its colorful exterior. Inside, it’s like an old Caribbean café with a South American menu. Peruvian ceviche and Chilean ground beef empanadas were perfect and our salad was the most beautiful thing we'd seen in the city. An impressive variety of wine was on hand. Service was indulgent, prompt and friendly. “Take your time,” our server told us. “We don’t close until 9:45 p.m.”
Uricchio’s Trattoria (1400 17th Street) is big and generally crowded, but, even minus a reservation, we didn't have to wait at 7 p.m. Thursday. No spa cuisine here. There were tables of as many as 20 people, chowing down on lasagna, spaghetti Alfredo, cannelloni, manicotti — recalling that local obesity statistic. Despite the crowd, our server was pleasant and fast. West L.A. prices, but the portions were larger.
The wine list, on the other hand, had some premium selections at bottom-level prices. I had the manicotti marinara, my wife the chicken piccata. The portions were so big we were sure that we’d take something home, but were so excellent that we finished every little bit. The house sourdough bread was good too. We skipped dessert and resolved to take it easy on breakfast.
The Padre Hotel has a handful of eating and drinking places, including a bar that was hosting “PaintNite,” a hard-drinking watercolor class that convened the evening of our arrival. Dozens of aspiring painters clutched wine glasses and brushes as they copied a Van Gogh starscape off a vast flat-screen monitor. Other Padre offerings include the relatively costly Belvedere Room restaurant, fancy enough for Beverly Hills.
But we breakfasted at the Brimstone Bar, whose only satanic detail was a red-felt pool table. I had a somewhat bland rendition of huevos rancheros with an excellent side order of roasted potatoes, my wife a big bowl of oatmeal with a few strawberries and, by request, a lot of walnuts and soy milk. With good coffee, the whole thing came to about $20 with tip. Then we were off in time for the opening of the Buena Vista Natural History Museum, then the Bakersfield Museum of Art, a last stroll in the park and then over the greening mountains towards home.
Check out the rest of Marc's "Bakersfield Confidential" and plan your own trip to Kern County.
Patt Morrison interviews nearly 100-year-old actress Patricia Morison
UPDATE: Thursday, March 19, is Broadway icon Patricia Morison's 100th birthday. Please leave your birthday greetings for her in the comments section below!
On Sunday, March 15, veteran Broadway actress Patricia Morison will perform one more time. The 99-year-old star of shows like "Kiss Me Kate" and "The King and I" will take part in a live conversation at the University Club in Pasadena. She'll even sing a few of her favorite songs.
We at Off-Ramp believe strongly that anyone a century old deserves to be on the radio, and with Patricia Morison about to turn 100 on March 19, we knew the perfect person person to interview her: KPCC's own Patt Morrison. Interview highlights are below:
On getting started in acting
I wanted an arts scholarship. I was in Washington Irving High School in New York. And they were doing a play called "Growing Pains" about teenagers and I got a part in it. And I was so bad they fired me. And I cried so hard they gave me a walk on! That was my first experience.
[Then], they were auditioning for a British musical called "The Two Bouquets" — it's sort of a spoof of Victorian operettas. They took me — all these women were auditioning — and I was terrified! I'd never auditioned. And they put me up on the stage and said "Now, don't worry, be comfortable!"
I got the part. And Alfred Drake was my leading man.
On playing on Broadway and on screen opposite Yul Brynner
It was a big adventure, a lot of fun. I have to tell you, when I first was going to be interviewed — going to meet him — somebody had asked him what he thought of me. He said "I don't know, I haven't been to bed with her yet!"
I made up my mind that was not going to be. So I go to his dressing room — knock the door of his dressing room — he said "come in," and he's sitting in front of the mirror nude! I looked him in the eyes and I said "Mr. Brynner, you wished to speak to me?"
He said, "Well, you know I have stay in my body." I said "Oh, I understand."
We ended up the best of friends.
On her first appearance on-screen
I enjoyed my first movie — "Persons in Hiding" — in which I played Kitty Kelly, the actual wife of Machine Gun Kelly. She made him public enemy No. 1 because she liked perfume. Perfume and furs, things like that.
And the way she was caught — [Machine Gun Kelly] had been caught, and she was on the run. Well, she couldn't resist going in and buying a bottle of perfume from the perfume shop.
Jim Tully, father of hardboiled fiction, was the 'most hated man in Hollywood'
In the '20s and '30s, Jim Tully was a national celebrity, known as a pioneering novelist, Charlie Chaplin's wingman and publicist — and for punching a major movie star in the face at the Brown Derby. Tully was a top contributor to "Vanity Fair" and H.L. Mencken's "American Mercury," but by the late 1940s, he was forgotten.
"I lived in many a brothel where the dregs of life found shelter. I fraternized with human wrecks whose hands shook as if with palsy, ... with degenerates and perverts, greasy and lousy, with dope fiends who would shoot needles of water into their arms to relieve the wild aching."
— Jim Tully
In 1992 in Kent, Ohio, a man walked into bookseller Paul Bauer's shop and asked for a book by Jim Tully, "the father of hardboiled fiction." Bauer was abashed. He'd never heard of Tully, and so he called his friend Mark Dawidziak, then a columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal.
Dawidziak found Tully's book "Shanty Irish" in another store for $2.50, then searched out all 12 of Tully's novels and scoured libraries for any mention of Tully. In his own newspaper's archives, Dawidziak discovered that Tully had been a reporter for the paper. It was a sign, and the two men decided to write Tully's biography.
A librarian informed them that Tully's personal papers were at the UCLA library.
(Credit: UCLA Jim Tully archive)
They flew out to Los Angeles and found 117 boxes of letters, articles and newspaper clippings. "That really was the treasure trove," they say, that let them piece together Tully's incredible life.
(St. Mary's, Ohio, in the late 1880s. Credit: ridertown.com)
Tully was born in 1886 in St. Mary's, Ohio. His father was a ditch digger, and his mother died when he was 6. Tully's childhood was spent in an orphanage — then, at 12, his father gave him to an abusive farmer as a farmhand.
At 13, Tully escaped back to St. Mary's, where he heard road stories from hobos. At 14, Tully joined them, becoming a "road kid," or "junior hobo," says Dawidziak. The rest of his adolescence was spent jumping trains and in the company of hobos, prostitutes and carnies.
UCLA archivist Alisa Monheim says, "One of the few things that you can do in that situation, places you can go to get out of the heat or out of the cold, is go to libraries." That's where Tully apparently taught himself to read and write.
In 1906, at 20 years old, Tully took up boxing as an occupation.
"I staggered from an overhand right and rattled the teeth in Tierney's jaw in return. I tried to get under the eaves. Tierney was wise. His rigid arm met my attack. Our gloves were now blood-and-water soaked. My kidneys ached with pain."
— Jim Tully on his bout with Chicago Jack Tierney.
"He was an untrained boxer, to be sure, but he was fearless," Bauer says. "He was willing to take punches, to take punishment, all to get inside and score hits." Despite having some success, "He had seen men die in the ring. He had seen 'em blinded in the ring. And I think he realized that this was not a career he was going to carry into middle age."
Tully married his first wife in 1911. They had two children, Alton and Trilby, and moved to Los Angeles.
(Tully and family in L.A.)
He spent 10 years traveling as a tree trimmer and working on his first novel, "Emmett Lawler." He also submitted poetry to newspapers and articles on hoboing and boxing to various magazines.
Recognition for Tully's work grew among writers and editors he sought out for advice: Jack
London, Upton Sinclair and H.L. Mencken. When Tully came to L.A., he made notable friends, including Lon Chaney and Erich von Stroheim.
One of Tully's best friends was Paul Bern, a producer at MGM, who invited Tully to a party, knowing Charlie Chaplin would be there, and that they'd hit it off. In 1923, Charlie Chaplin made Jim Tully his all-purpose PR writer.
During this time, Tully started his second novel, "Beggars of Life."
"Beggars" was published in 1924 to great success, giving Tully the means to leave Chaplin and write more articles, novels and a series of movie star profiles.
"He was known as 'the man Hollywood most loved to hate,' because he was one of the first reporters to ever cover Hollywood as a beat," says UCLA's Monheim. "He really didn't care who he pissed off in the slightest."
Bauer says Tully's profile of former silent film icon John Gilbert was "so harsh that, reportedly, when Gilbert read it, he threw up." In 1930, Gilbert called Tully out at the Brown Derby.
Dawidziak breaks down the scuffle: "Tully is up, and he is in a boxer's stance. Gilbert comes at him, and he throws two wild punches. Misses with both. Tully, a trained boxer, steps into the gap and snaps a right uppercut. Knocks him cold with one punch."
(Gilbert v. Tully at the Brown Derby. Courtesy Mark Dawidziak)
Tully's career was declining by the mid-to-late '30s. He attempted comebacks with "The Bruiser" (1936) and "Biddy Brogan's Boy" (1942), but neither were successful in his lifetime.
On June 22, 1947, Tully's heart failed. He was 61 years old. He's buried at Glendale's Forest Lawn, on the same hill as John Gilbert. A last ignominy for Jim Tully, whom Dawidziak calls "the missing link between Jack London and Jack Kerouac": His grave marker gets his birth year wrong.
Chris Greenspon thanks: Voice actors Jennifer Miller and Christopher Murray, documentary filmmaker Mark Wade Stone for clips from "Way for a Sailor," and WKSU's Joe Gunderman.
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.
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.