The Parks Service needs your help to figure out how urban coyotes survive ... remembering the infamous Atomic Cafe ... the existential angst of Laurel & Hardy, restored and remembered ... Can Pershing Square be made into a beautiful park?
Remembering the long lost Atomic Cafe, Little Tokyo’s punk haven
Opened in 1946 in the heart of Little Tokyo, the Atomic Cafe was owned and operated by the Japanese-American Matoba family. For decades, the cafe served chashu ramen, fried rice and other dishes to locals until founders Ito and Minoru Matoba handed the business over to their daughter, Nancy Sekizawa, in the late 1970s.
Under "Atomic" Nancy's ownership, the cafe transformed into a new wave and punk haven frequented by the likes of Devo, Blondie, Sid Vicious, X and David Bowie. The business closed in 1989 and the building was razed last year. The space is now an actual hole in the ground, the site of a future Metro station, but the stories of its past remain.
“You could describe the Atomic Cafe as a Japanese-American, weird restaurant where punk people used to hang out — and Japanese gangsters,” said Zen Sekizawa, Nancy's daughter.
"It was like a place for us: the misfits, the rebels, the undesirables," said Nancy Sekizawa.
Dublab's Mark "Frosty" McNeill talked with Nancy and Zen about food fights with Sid Vicious, kicking Andy Warhol out and one of the first punk rock jukeboxes in all of Los Angeles. Bonus fact: all of the songs heard in this story came from the Atomic Cafe’s iconic jukebox. Nancy saved the 45's and still occasionally pulls them out for DJ gigs like this dublab radio show.
Review: Curation makes new Getty mosaic exhibit rock solid
Off-Ramp's Marc Haefele reviews Roman Mosaics Across the Empire, at the Getty Villa through mid–September 12.
The current show of Roman Imperial mosaics at the Getty Villa is strong, not spectacular. Some of it has been seen before, here and at LACMA. But what makes this show more than just "worth seeing" is the artful, even revelatory arrangement of objects by curator Alexis Belis. It's the how and why behind these ancient artworks.
There's certainly no “Alexander of the House of the Faun,” that stupendous battle scene now on the wall of the National Museum in Naples. But what is here is "yuuuuge," as they say these days. The biggest piece weighs eight tons — and it’s only part of the original, which, if it were all laid down, would fracture the museum floor. The show demonstrates the spread of the mosaic all over the Roman Empire and how intricate a part of life it became during those imperial centuries.
But it also does the opposite, showing how by 300 AD or so, rogue outside influences were sending tendrils into the practice of classical art, turning it into something else, representing stylized ideas and beliefs, rather than realities. Although the subjects generally remained classical figures, you sense a distant but perceptible reach toward what we now think of as medieval art.
The showier virtues of the great mosaics of the Republic and early Empire were eventually mitigated by the organizing principles of less artistically advanced folk. Their perceptions seemed to intrude into Italian practice by the 4th century. The bear-hunt mosaic from Baeae, near Naples, seems twilight Roman Imperial work. The old artifices and standards of figurative representation, the intricate detail and overwhelming perspectives of the great Pompeiian panoramas, are by now diluted. So are some of the pieces from what is now the South of France. The subjects are Greco-Roman myths but the artistic perceptions include geometric motifs strongly suggesting the art of outlier societies, which were also strongly influencing the twilit empire’s social and political culture.
Jean Louis Robert, the little mayor of the French village of Villelure, visited the show opening, complete with his red-white-and blue ceremonial sash. He said he was extremely proud of his history-rich little town and its major contributions to the show. These included some of the most vivid story-pictures on display, including a singular piece portraying two legendary boxers from Vergil’s “Aeneid.”
But the great accomplishment of the show is to flaunt the central cultural role of the art form itself. Mosaics go back more than 3,000 years, about as far as tapestry and fresco remnants. They are another Bronze age invention enhancing daily life. It seems that as soon as mankind invented walled and roofed dwellings, men and woman wanted to cover the walls and floors of their homes with beautiful pictures of their favorite stories.
Somehow, that idea of making pictures from little tiles of glass and stone evolved for 3,400 years all the way down to our local mid-20th-Century Home Savings mosaics of SoCal artist and master mosaicist Millard Sheets.
The Getty show also stresses how much classical mosaic art is probably still out there, undiscovered. And how important and sometimes difficult it is to conserve and even to preserve these great ancient works, which have the unfortunate habit of turning up in some of the world’s most troubled spots, like Libya and Syria.
Despite that, mosaics have endured far better than any other form of ancient representational art. Only mosaics are literally set in stone.
(This story has been edited to correct the misidentification of Mayor Robert, his town, and its mosaic.)
Volunteers needed to collect and analyze coyote poop
If you're coprophobic — afraid of feces — stop reading now. And do NOT listen to the audio. It will seriously disturb you. But if poop's not a problem for you, the National Park Service needs you.
From 1996 to 2004, National Park Service researchers from the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area studied coyotes in the suburban Conejo Valley — Agoura Hills, Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park, etc. — and discovered they ate lots of rabbits (appropriately), mice, backyard fruit, and the rare pet cat. But now, as part of their urban coyote study, they're turning to a much more habitat-fragmented swath of urban LA that runs from Boyle Heights to Beverly Hills, including East L.A., Echo Park, El Sereno, Hollywood, Lincoln Heights, Los Feliz, Mount Washington, and Westlake.
NPS biologist Justin Brown says "there's been a lot of work done in a lot of suburban settings," where coyotes move back and forth from natural areas into urban areas, but there really hasn't been much work done at all on coyotes that live completely within the urban matrix, in little parks and vacant lots, and places like that."
Brown says researchers need to know how these urban coyotes survive, and so they need to know what the animals eat, which can be determined from the coyotes' scat. "Is it fruit from people's trees, rats, possums, skunks, raccoons, people's cats?" Brown asked.
And that's where you come in.
"We are looking for around 20 volunteers to help collect poop," Brown said, "and then we're looking for another 10 to 20 volunteers to help us analyze what's in the poop."
It's a commitment of a few days a month, for up to two years. "And we're basically looking to collect as many samples as we can get. The more the merrier." And yes, he really said that.
From the NPS news release on the Coyote Scat Team:
No experience is required, but these citizen scientists must attend a training on Saturday, June 4, to learn proper scat collection procedures, and will perform walking surveys on a monthly basis starting in June. They can also volunteer for the analysis team to help examine scat contents, a 1-3 day commitment per month. A 6-month commitment is required; the project is expected to last a minimum of 2 years. Training and analysis workshops for L.A. teams will be held at the Audubon Center at Debs Park.
If you want to be part of the Coyote Scat Team working the Beverly Hills to Boyle Heights beat, email samo_superintendent@nps.gov. If you live in the Conejo Valley, they'll be looking for scat analysts there, too, in the future.
And if you want to know how to tell coyote poop from dog poop, listen to the audio!
Despite new law, California lags in personal finance education
Vote on the 4 finalists for the Pershing Square redesign
NBC4 investigation questions popular summer camp's contamination study
We've been following our media partner NBC4's ongoing investigative series, LA's Nuclear Secret, which has been looking into the effects of fallout and runoff from the secret Santa Susanna Test Lab in Simi Valley.
The latest report, which aired Wednesday night, looks at questions of contamination at a popular kids summer camp, Camp Alonim, run by American Jewish University at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley.
NBC4 and some parents have asked AJU to release all tests they’ve ever done on soil and water on the Brandeis-Bardin property, and the lab reports that go with those tests. It appears AJU officials have released some but not all of the tests. Now AJU is trying to assuage worried parents with a new test.
In a letter to families, American Jewish University (AJU), which owns the camp and paid for the report, said this new study "definitively confirms the safety" of the 2,800 acre campus and finds there is "no unacceptable human health risk" from contamination at the Field Lab. The AJU says as part of the study, "extensive additional testing" was conducted at the camp in February 2016. — NBC4
Experts consulted by KNBC found big problems with the new test, conducted by Pasadena-based Tetra Tech, including:
- Tetra Tech only took 14 soil and sediment samples on the 2,800-acre plot. That's one sample per 200 acres.
- It didn't do further testing when elevated levels of strontium-90 showed up in one sample.
- Cutting-edge gamma testing touted by AJU doesn't identify other forms of radiation that could have come from the contaminated Field Lab site.
NBC4 also refutes AJU's claim that the EPA has OK'd the site:
In a letter to NBC4, the AJU says the number of samples "was done primarily for verification purposes" on "the highest use areas of the site" because "past studies uniformly found the site to be safe" including two done by the U.S. EPA. But EPA spokesperson Margot Perez-Sullivan told NBC4 "we'd never certify an area of land as safe or unsafe." Two other EPA officials told NBC4 the agency has made no such determination about the safety of the entire Brandeis property. — NBC4
Furthermore, a federal investigation found that Tetra Tech faked test results in a study of a nuclear research lab site in San Francisco that was proposed for home development. AJU told NBC4 it didn't know this before hiring Tetra Tech.
Song of the Week: "Wonderful" by Cate Le Bon
This week’s Off-Ramp song of the week is “Wonderful” by Cate Le Bon.
Cate Le Bon was born and raised in Wales but lives in Highland Park today. She's worked with musicians like Richard James, Perfume Genius, and the Chemical Brothers. “Wonderful” is off her record “Crab Day,” which was released last month. Check out the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnZh4E0_7KM
If you have another 12 minutes to spare, there's also a weird and fascinating short film for "Crab Day" shot in Berlin on Le Bon's Youtube.
For Latinos with cancer, one support group seeks recovery among friends
Getting a cancer diagnosis is scary. But getting a cancer diagnosis without being able to understand your doctor is even worse.
Maybe that's why, according to the American Cancer Society, cancer is the leading cause of death for Latinos in the United States. And why, once a month on Thursday nights, Spanish speakers gather inside a conference room in St. Joseph's Cancer Center, Orange.
The group's name, Entre Amigos, comes from the Spanish for "among friends." It's a cancer support group by and for Spanish speakers. Each meeting brings a different doctor and dozens of patients across L.A. and Orange counties, who often stay until late into the night asking questions.
Angela Acevedo Malouf, a nurse at St. Joseph's who has been running Entre Amigos for five years, says Latino patients are more likely to take an active role in their care if they feel understood.
"It’s nice when you are talking to people that knows your culture, that knows the language, that are able to understand the feeling and the thoughts that they have to process," Malouf said.
For Angela, time spent in Entre Amigos is a necessity born out of pain. She says she's seen far too many Latino patients come to St. Joseph's Cancer Center, often when it's too late.
"I cannot tell you how many times I see ladies coming, are all Latinas coming — stage four. And I cannot feel more depressed, knowing that there is so much out there," Angela said. "They are afraid to say they are in need of this because they don't think they will be entitled to receive any help."
One of those patients afraid to speak up was Rosa Hernandez, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 and comes to Entre Amigos meetings with her husband.
"The first time I came, I was silent, I didn’t talk. But then I saw everyone talking, and I began to speak, and I got support. It's really beautiful," Rosa said.
Yes, hospitals are required to offer translators, and yes, in many ways California leads the nation in programs designed to help patients like Rosa. But despite healthcare programs for low-income and undocumented patients, Angela says many Latinos remain fearful and alienated in the process of cancer treatment.
At Entre Amigos, patients talk candidly about their process and ask questions about the healthcare they need. Many come with children and spouses who have questions of their own.
Except for Maria Sanchez Lona, who lives in Anaheim, and has been coming to the group by herself for two years. The day she found out she had cancer started like any other work day, until she felt dizzy.
"I didn’t feel any other symptoms, and after, about half an hour later, the dizziness returned, and I fell on my back," Maria said. "When I came to my senses; they lifted me up and sent me home. I didn’t go home. I went straight to the emergency room."
It was there that Maria learned she had a cerebral tumor, and that it was terminal. Doctors gave her six months to live. To make matters more difficult, Maria is a single mom, supporting four kids back in Mexico.
"My family is not here because I came here by myself to find a better life for my children," she said. "And when an opportunity presented itself, I made the decision to come here."
What Maria didn't expect was cancer. Needing rigorous treatment, Maria had to put off returning to Mexico. It's been 11 years since she's seen her family.
"My family doesn’t know… They know that I have a cerebral tumor, but they don’t know it’s terminal," Maria said.
When she was first diagnosed, Maria says she wanted to give up. But after coming to Entre Amigos, she felt empowered to fight. Today, after chemotherapy, surgery and 38 staples in her head, Maria's cancer is in remission.
"I’ve come here tonight with happiness to share my triumph over cancer. I'm gonna keep moving, and I’m gonna stand on my own two feet. This disease isn't the last stop," Maria said. "One day I will see my children again. Just like I am overcoming cancer, I am going to see my kids."
Entre Amigos doesn't keep data about which patients survive. In fact, many patients don't have the success Maria had. But for Angela, Maria's story reminds her how, with outreach and empowerment, more lives like Maria’s could be saved.
"They come because they want to provide for their families, they come because they want to look for a better way to live and succeed. But they never think they are going to be at risk of getting sick," Angela said. "But there is always, every day, need for education and need for more information to our Latinos."
Laurel and Hardy never looked so good: film fest unveils restorations of comedy classics
This weekend, the American Cinematheque is celebrating the masterful restoration of seminal comedy films.
The series, called "Another Nice Mess: The Restored Laurel and Hardy," screens a dozen shorts and two features, all restored from the original nitrate elements and cleaned digitally.
It's the work of archivist Jeff Joseph, the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Library of Congress, which required painstaking reconstructions from elements found in diverse archives. You can read all about the restoration process here.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy pair made 107 films together between 1927 and 1950 and have inspired countless performers, including actor and comedian Mike McShane.
To McShane, best known for appearing in the British "Whose Line is it Anyway?," watching the duo is like getting an improv masters class: "They speak to me because of their specificity in movement and their handoff. Complimenting each other, making the other person look good, taking the backseat when you need to and then taking the front seat when you have to. That exchange keeps a duality in a performance relationship fresh."
I met McShane in Silver Lake...
... on the spot where Laurel and Hardy filmed one of the shorts being screened this weekend, "The Music Box."
In "The Music Box," Laurel and Hardy are workmen facing a ridiculous task: Dragging a full-size piano up an endless flight of stairs. McShane says the bit has all the duo's hallmarks: "Diversion, collapse, mayhem, disappointment, anger, recrimination and just laugh-out-loud slapstick physical comedy."
Laurel and Hardy hold up when other comedy from the same era often doesn't, because their work compresses the entirety of human suffering into a few reels of black and white film. "The Music Box," McShane says, "is Sisyphean in its scope. That's why Samuel Beckett was a huge fan of Laurel and Hardy. It's existential candy."
Or you can just sit back and laugh.
"Another Nice Mess: The Restored Laurel and Hardy" runs Friday, May 6 through Sunday, May 8 at the American Cinematheque's Aero and Egyptian Theatres in Santa Monica and Hollywood. "The Music Box" screens Friday night at the Egyptian.
Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, the Getty and me
Off-Ramp cultural correspondent Marc Haefele reviews "An Evening with Patti Smith" at The Getty Museum, staged in connection with retrospectives of the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe — with whom she began a relationship at 20 — at the Getty and LACMA.
Patti Smith, more beautiful than ever in her sexy flowing white hair, sang, read and recited gloriously for us at the Getty last weekend. It is generous of her to live for us in the shadow of Robert Mapplethorpe, now in his moment of total discovery.
His drawings and photos, which also fill a nearby Getty gallery, were back-projected on her little Getty stage. His youth-frozen face and pale eyes dominated the auditorium as she spoke and sang. She’s had 27 very tough years since Mapplethorpe died in 1989: years of loss — her brother and her husband in the 1990s — and accomplishment — about a dozen albums, two children, a grandchild. She's also gone from pioneer of punk to world priestess of pop. And while she was at it, she picked up a National Book Award for the bestselling 2010 memoir “Just Kids,” from which she read to us.
She wears her accomplishments modestly. She is far more famous now than Mapplethorpe ever was in his lifetime. Songs like “Because the Night” and “People Have the Power" inhabit our ears. But so does her central story, her inspirational, life-informing legend, really, of the two young lover/kindred souls on the cusp of 1970, advancing and creating as one spirit. Wandering the welcoming, long-lost streets of Mayor John Lindsay’s luminous New York, among the citizens, junkies, hippies, students, tourists and, it would seem, more than a few substantial artists. (Her story about how Alan Ginsburg tried to pick her up in an Automat restaurant “Because I mistook you for a very pretty boy” is without price.)
She gives it all back to us now with a hard-earned maturity and a musicianship that far exceeds what she could deliver in her proto-punk “Horses” days, 40 years ago. She is entitled to the Mapplethorpe legend of her choice. And now she is promoting his fame as he long ago promoted hers. There is justice in this.
That said, for anyone who knew her even slightly in 1970, “Just Kids” seems as selective a narrative as Lillian Hellman’s memoirs. It elides what were likely the enormous pains from her loss of Mapplethorpe to his gay destiny. Someday, a biographer may give us a better idea of all that happened in those few vital years when she and Mapplethorpe shared one another in Brooklyn and the Hotel Chelsea.
When she called me in 1970, asking for a favor, she was not at the Chelsea. She said she was living on a couch in a famous Manhattan club — Steve Paul’s The Scene — where the Doors and Jimi Hendrix made breakout appearances. She wanted, of all things, a set of review proofs for a novel I edited at Doubleday, the problematic masterpiece of a much acclaimed (in France) author who called himself Blaise Cendrars. Cendrars and his most famous novel, “Moravagine,” however, were so unknown in the U.S. that my colleagues thought I was committing career suicide by publishing it.
But Smith knew about it. She said that she wanted to read Cendrars, even before he was published, because he was strongly influenced by her favorite poet, Arthur Rimbaud. I’d never encountered a common reader who felt empowered to ask for an advance proof. I looked to the shelf where “Moravagine” review proofs lay in big yellowish bundles. A few had gone to major reviewers who’d ignored them, but we still had plenty to spare.
I messengered the proofs to 301 W. 46th St.; I had never sent a book to a nightclub before, either. A few days later, she mailed me a note, which I wish I still had:
Dear Mr. Haefele,
Thanks so much for “Moravagine.” I loved it.
And just you wait. You’re going to hear about me one of these days.
— Patti Smith