We go to the corner of Hollywood and LaBrea as Stevie Wonder helps Shotgun Tom Kelly get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, talk with a photographer of very small things, explore the Rolling Stones' San Bernardino roots, and reconsider the New Hollywood's "flops."
Inside the lab of electron microscope photographer David Scharf
David Scharf is a buddhist, a guitarist, a scientist and artist who works nocturnally. He's also one of the world's leading names in electron microscope photography: those giant, luminescent photos of incredibly small things like bugs, dust, and nerves. His art's appeared in books, galleries, universities -- and the covers of Newsweek and National Geographic.
Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson visited Scharf and toured his Echo Park home laboratory.
See more of Scharf's photos and take a tour of his lab on our new visual blog, Audiovision.
Reich on the brain: Minimalist music and your mind
Minimalist composer Steve Reich is coming to LACMA's Bing Theatre next week, where the Lyris Quartet will perform his works Different Trains and Piano Counterpoint.
In the 60s, American composer Reich began changing Western music. He incorporated repetition and loops in a way that classical music typically didn't. Instead of relying on linear melodies, Reich's pieces pulse with subtle harmonies. Minimalist composers like Reich and his contemporaries Philip Glass and Terry Riley were changing what we think of as classical music.
When I need to work, I put on Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. It helps me focus and think in a way other music just doesn't.
Lisa Margulis, who directs the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, uses behavioral studies and neuro-imaging to look at the way we engage with music and has a book coming out this fall called On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. Margulis says there's actually some science behind my experience.
"One of the things that happens when you're listening to music that repeats, is that you form a kind of connection to it that mimics a state of social understanding and of social cohesion. So when you're having a good conversation with someone, often there's these subtle forms of entrainment that happen where your timing get in sync with each other and this is one of these subtle cues that can tell you how high quality a particular social interaction is. So when music is really repetitive, you can get in sync with it and entrained with it in a way that feels pleasing," Margulis says.
But it's not necessarily the case that one type of music makes you think better than another. Margulis cites one of the classic findings in Music Cognition, the so-called "Mozart Effect."
"So this is this paper that showed that if you play people recordings of Mozart -- two piano sonatas before they did a spatial reasoning task -- they score higher on the task. Now this finding wa interpreted to mean all of these grand things that it turned out not to mean at all. So for example it's not a Mozart effect, because you can get the same thing by playing people Lynyrd Skynyrd or Lucinda Williams or whatever you play them, as long as it's kind of positively valenced and arousing. So really it's an arousal effect."
Whatever your listening preference, Margulis says what music does to your brain mostly comes down to arousal. She mentions a study conducted by Alf Gabrielsson and his colleagues in Sweden. Margulis says the researchers in Sweden "...examined thousands and thousands of responses to describe this kind of (musical) experience and found these interesting commonalities across them. Where often people had a sense of even an out of body experience, or of being transported and all of these things that seem to have to deal with a virtual embodiment of the sound. A sense of shared agency with what the sounds are doing."
And while everyone's interaction with music is different, Margulis says minimalist music may just get the brain to react faster. "You really know how the music is going and can be right there with it and have this kind of unmediated experience with it that other music you might need to listen to several times before you could engage with it quite in that way," she says.
So maybe it's minimalist music that helps you think. Or maybe it's heavy metal. Whatever it is, it's a safe bet that your playlist is helping you think when you need it most.
RH Greene reevaluates Wm Friedkin's 'flop,' 'Sorcerer'
UPDATE 4/7/2014: Cinefamily is showing a restored version of "Sorcerer" April 16 - 24, with a special appearance from Friedkin himself on April 16.
(A new revival of director William Friedkin's notorious 1977 box office failure Sorcerer has contributor RH Greene thinking about other ambitious cinematic flops from the "New Hollywood" era, and how time has been kind to them. Sorcerer screens May 9 at the American Cinematheque's Aero Theatre. Greene says a first-ever DVD and Blu-Ray release is currently rumored to be in the works.)
The New Hollywood Directors of the 1970s are remembered for making great movies, including The Godfather, Jaws, Taxi Driver, The French Connection, and Annie Hall. Their failures were equally legendary. In 1980, Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino made a Marxist western called Heaven's Gate. The film flopped so mightily it took down a studio.
Two years later, Francis Coppola released One from the Heart, a small romantic comedy that somehow metastasized into one of the most costly failures of all time. But if there's one New Hollywood movie that has hubris written all over it, William Friedkin's Sorcerer might be it.
The title is oblique, but suggested to audiences a follow-up to Friedkin's mega-hit The Exorcist, which Sorcerer emphatically is not. It's an existential parable about four desperate criminal anti-heroes hired to haul decomposing dynamite through a jungle, and there is nothing like a hero to root for.
Sorcerer was a runaway production; Friedkin overspent his approved budget by around 700%. It's also a remake of a French masterpiece, and it therefore virtually invited critics to make invidious comparisons.
Last but not least: the film's first 20 minutes are in various foreign languages. With subtitles. And oh yeah. Sorcerer is also one of the great American films of its time.
Released in 1977 during the summer of Star Wars, Sorcerer was chased out of theaters to give Luke Skywalker more screens. In a sense, Star Wars never relinquished those movie houses, because Sorcerer is exactly the kind of challenging studio fare the Star Wars phenomenon rendered all but obsolete.
Star Wars is pure escapism, while Sorcerer is a riveting cinematic essay about the futility of human purpose -- an anxious spectacle of emptied men caught in postures of jeopardy and despair. It's a film about Purgatory, not even Hell, about lost men who expiate their crimes through suffering. Or try to, anyway.
The audacious bleakness of the vision is matched to riveting, hallucinatory imagery, including: a broken-nosed bride, reciting her vows beneath two black eyes. Two oversized trucks slow-rolling across a rope bridge while it heaves beneath them like a wakening monster; and Roy Scheider's unraveling gangster Jackie Scanlon, ranting like Ahab as he veers through a dead volcanic landscape weirder than the Moon.
In Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd., forgotten silent movie star Norma Desmond grieves for a lost era saying, "I'm still big. It's the pictures that got small." Sorcerer is still big too. As is Heaven's Gate, by the way. And Warren Beatty's Reds. And Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. And many another alleged fiascoes perpetrated by the screen lions of a bygone time.
Say what you will: the blunders of the New Hollywood era took raw risks in the name of art and originality, claiming what Orson Welles called a primary right of the artist, which is the right to fail. How riveting they seem in the time of John Carter and Battleship. And how remarkable that directors like William Friedkin occasionally failed themselves all the way to a masterpiece.
Say it fast: Listeners help Off-Ramp win twin Twain awards
“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”
So said Mark Twain. Nevertheless, we are pleased and proud that the Associated Press Television-Radio Association awarded Off-Ramp two of its coveted Mark Twain Awards this week, out of the six that went to KPCC.
Molly Peterson won the Bill Stout Enterprise award for her piece on Prop 37. Best Coverage of an Ongoing Story went to Airtalk for its coverage of the Newtown shooting. Sanden Totten won the "best writing" Twain for his piece on Levitated Masss (the big rock) at LACMA. And Steve Proffitt's piece on the Aurora shooting won for best use of sound.
Off-Ramp's twin Twain's came for our special on the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King Riots, and for James Kim's touching piece on losing his native Korean, and its affect on his relationship with his Korean-born parents.
It can't be said enough that since this station is, in the greatest part, funded by listeners, you deserve the credit for these awards. Your contributions pay for salaries, recording equipment, even the electricity that powers our transmitter up on Mt Wilson. It's all you. Thanks to all who contributed ... and if you haven't, why not do it now and help us win some 2014 Mark Twain Awards!
K-Earth 101's Shotgun Tom Kelly retiring, but not shy
UPDATE 8/26/2015: After almost twenty years on the job, Shotgun Tom Kelly is retiring from afternoon drive on K-Earth 101 to become a community ambassador. He'll reportedly be moving back home to El Cajon and is working on a TV pilot. In the latest Arbitron ratings book, Kelly was #4 in the LA market in afternoon drive with a 4.7 share and about 1.3m weekly listeners.
As most on-air radio veterans will tell you, it's better than working for a living. Our job is to talk into a microphone. It may be all we know how to do, it may be all we ever dreamed of doing. In any case, it's all that Shotgun Tom Kelly has done since he was a teenager, and today he received his reward.
At the corner of LaBrea and Hollywood, with hundreds of his fans watching - many from San Diego, where he got his start - K-Earth 101's afternoon drive DJ got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Kelly started working in radio as a teenager when his mom urged him to go see a DJ broadcasting live from a shopping center. After stints at several stations in San Diego, plus Oxnard, Bakersfield, Phoenix, and San Francisco, he moved to LA in 1997 to take over for "The Real" Don Steele, who had died of lung cancer. He's been at K-Earth ever since,and sounds like he's been there forever.
His nickname comes from his dad, who dubbed him "Shotgun" because he always wanted to ride in the front seat. His trademark hat goes back to those days as well. His family went camping, and he loved the park rangers and their hats. It stuck as a visual trademark that, he says, worked especially well when he hosted kids shows on TV.
Standing over his star today, I asked if he'd ever thought this could happen. "No," he said. "You know I never did. It was distant dream, but I didn't know if it would be realized or not."
It's easy to dismiss the importance of a radio DJ. But you have to remember that people who like music aren't tricked into liking that music. For the Boomers, Oldies are an integral part of their lives, connecting them to old schools, old friends, and old loves, and - given all the technological changes that have happened in the last couple decades, it's a miracle that the Oldies, which so many of us first heard on a radio, are still being played on the radio.
Shotgun Tom Kelly knew this when he told me, "The most important thing to me are the people that love this music, and I want to keep them entertained; I want to keep them happy."
First Language Attrition: Why my parents and I don't speak the same language
UPDATE: James Kim's Off-Ramp piece received a 2013 Mark Twain Award by the Associated Press Television-Radio Association for best light feature. Congratulations, James! -- John Rabe
I have always had a tough time understanding my parents. Not because we’re from different generations, or born and raised in different countries; it’s that we don’t speak the same language. Growing up, I remembered that my Korean was actually pretty good. My mom said that I “spoke Korean very well for seven years.” But afterwards, I “stopped speaking Korean and only spoke English.”
This has made my relationship with my parents difficult to cultivate. We always are easily irritated with each other because we constantly misunderstand what each of us is saying. We can hardly explain a movie’s plot line to one another, let alone express what we’re going through. The only time I talk with my parents is when I’m asking them “what’s for dinner?” I wanted to try and fix this problem by taking the first initial step; that is to figure out if my condition is common or not.
I talked to Linda Light, a Linguistics professor at Cal State Long Beach, who assured me that I wasn’t a screw up and that the condition is called First Language Attrition. Light says “there’s a tendency across all minority groups of a three-generation thing.” The first generation of immigrants speaks their native language; the second generation tends to be bilingual, while the third generation loses the native language. “But Koreans especially often lose it in the second generation, not the third.” It was a relief to find out that my ineptness towards speaking Korean was actually common in my immigrant generation. Yet, I still couldn’t help but feel guilty for not being able to communicate with my parents.
I decided that the only thing to do was to take initiative and have a one-on-one personal conversation with my parents. Of course, I brought my friend along to help translate the conversation. Going into the interview, I thought that the only thing I had to improve was my Korean language. After doing that, all our problems would be fixed. Wrong. My Dad believes that my “apathy towards Korean culture” is what caused our relationship to tear apart. My mom replied that not only should I express myself to them, but I also need to listen to how they used to live in Korea to understand them better.
My lack of Korean language wasn’t the problem; it was my attitude towards Korean culture. This whole time I thought the solution was as simple as taking some courses at a Korean language school. Instead, I learned that my whole demeanor towards my native culture needs a revision.