Luke Zamperini and Off-Ramp fly in the last B-24; Temple Grandin and an ABC journalist consider autism; we tour a homeless camp along the Arroyo Seco.
Tiki Ti to reopen after "indefinitely" turns into two weeks
UPDATE 5/22: The LA Times says the Tiki Ti is reopening today. Vicky Buhen told the paper, "We are definitely coming back Friday." I told you guys not to worry.
The owners of the Tiki Ti on Sunset say they're closing indefinitely, but will return.
So until the Buhen family can custom craft your Jet Pilot or Painkiller again, come back with us to 2007, when Off-Ramp took you inside the Tiki Ti on Sunset Boulevard and the owners made you a virtual tiki drink.
(This piece was part of a three part Off-Ramp tiki extravaganza, including a visit to the now-gone Trader Vic's and a fabulous home tiki bar.)
This weekend, Van Dyke Parks sings at the piano one last time
"I peaked in the '50s. At age nine, I boarded at the Columbus Boychoir School (now the American Boychoir) near Princeton, New Jersey ... In town, I sang 'Stille Nacht' for Einstein, who returned to the porch and played a lilting obligato ... Although I'd met a real genius, simply bright and gifted people (like Brian Wilson, for whom I wrote lyrics for Smile) are given equal civility. Acting in over eighty live television shows (The Honeymooners, Studio One, Philco Playhouse, Mr Peepers, Kraft Theater), it all helped pay my tuition at music school." -- Van Dyke Parks, 2011
An era passes this weekend, heralded by a Tweet.
Get tix for
at
on May 8 & 9! His last performances at the piano, ever. Be there! http://t.co/O0wohtSXX2
— Richard Parks III (@reechardparks)
Van Dyke Parks is the venerable, prolific, charming composer and performer who met and/or worked with pretty much everyone. He's always reminded me of a straight, more sober, civil and musical Truman Capote: courtly but acute, full of stories, with talent pouring from his fingers, and a voice that reminds me of lemonade on a shady porch on a 95-degree day.
Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson profiled Parks for Off-Ramp in 2013 for the release of his new album "Songs Cycled," after originally talking with Parks about his life and career in 2010. So if you can't see him at Largo at the Coronet this weekend, check out the interviews; they're the next best thing.
Louis Zamperini's son flies in an 'Unbroken' B-24 bomber
On May 27, 1943, Louis Zamperini - the Olympian and hero of the movie "Unbroken" - was flying in a B-24 bomber on a mission over the Pacific. The plane had mechanical difficulties and went down about 800 miles south of Oahu. Zamperini was adrift for almost 50 days before he made it to land, where he was captured by the Japanese and held and tortured until the end of the war.
About 19,000 B-24s were built, but only one -- owned by the Collings Foundation -- is still flying, and it's in Southern California as part of the foundation's Wings of Freedom tour. It flew from Santa Barbara to the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance yesterday, with Louie's son Luke Zamperini - and Off-Ramp - aboard.
It was Luke Zamperini's second trip. "I only saw one once before," about 3 years ago, he said. "I took my dad for a visit and he crawled inside the plane and got in the bombardier's seat, and then I followed him through the plane as he starting reliving the battle above Nauru. By the time we got to the back of the airplane, he was exhausted, and he said to me, 'I tell you. In my memory, the plane was larger.'"
(B-24 above Nauru, April 1943. Office of Chief of Military History)
The plane is built for war, not comfort. Equipment is packed into every available space. The windows are tiny, and the gun ports are huge. Oxygen comes from big yellow tanks. The plane's skinny ribs and thin shell are clear to see. "You get in there," Zamperini says." It starts to taxi and you get the idea that you're kind of in this flying jalopy. You just have this wind blowing through the plane, and I suddenly realized what kind of men that generation was to get inside something like this and fly eight or ten hours over the ocean. There's nothing in between you and a bullet except a little tiny bit of aluminum."
The Collings Foundation spent years renovating the plane, now flown by Jim "Pappy" Goolsby, a retired airline pilot who was looking for something to do to keep him busy after he retired. He knows he has a plum job. There aren't many openings to fly B-24s. Of course not; he flies the only one left.
The plane is also the one used by the sound geniuses who worked on "Unbroken" for their Oscar-nominated sound effects. We talked with them on Off-Ramp at Oscar time.
The B-24, as well as a B-17 Flying Fortress, a B-25, and a P-51 Mustang, are all at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance until Wednesday at noon for tours and rides. The rides are expensive - from $400-$450 per person - but you'll never forget it. "What a gas it was," said Zamperini when we arrived at Zamperini Field in Torrance, named for his dad. "I coulda stayed another couple hours in that thing."
Journalist and autism watchdog Robert Moran, working at ABC with Asperger's
One of the most consistently sharp and intriguing accounts in my Twitter feed is
, who works at ABC News in L.A.
Along with the day's hard and soft news, Moran Tweets about the cognitive dissonance we all experience:
I am never going to understand drivers who get into the carpool lane and drive slow.
— Robert Moran (@Journautism) May 2, 2015
But often it's more personal.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have autism.
— Robert Moran (@Journautism) May 3, 2015
Moran has Asperger's syndrome, and he's one of the few journalists who've "come out" about their autism. So when he sees the media making false statements or assumptions about people with autism or mental illness in general, it bothers him.
When the media covered the Newtown shooting and kept connecting autism to violence, he says among autistics, "It was like, 'Arrrgh. Why are you doing this!?'" Moran and others called them out on it, and he was overjoyed when Sanjay Gupta did an Autism 101 on CNN, and pointed out that autistics are not prone to violence.
After many dead ends and wrong treatment, Moran was diagnosed with Asperger's, which he says, in short, affects how he interacts with others. "I don't make eye contact. I struggle with satire and understanding sarcasm. Sometimes I'll interrupt because I don't know when to read the pauses." And his routine is extremely important to him. When he makes a plan, he gets very upset when he has to break it."
In truth, during our interview over lunch at LeRoy's in Monrovia, he made eye contact, shook my hand, laughed at my jokes, and didn't freak out when his bus made him late. How much of an effort this cost him, I don't know, but years of therapy have helped him deal better with these manifestations of Asperger's.
I put to Moran that people on the whole seem to know how to think about kids with autism, but we don't know what to do with adults, which is borne out in employment stats showing young people with autism have the highest rates of unemployment of all people with mental disability.
Moran said, "Absolutely. All of the focus, all of the research, all of the treatment, all of the therapies, and all of the programs are designed for kids. Twenty-two is the cutoff date in most states for services, so it's literally like after the age of 22, you're no longer autistic, which is complete boloney. It's a lifelong disorder."
Moran is an exception. At ABC News (the network, not ABC7), where he works two days a week as a digital news associate, he says he was upfront about his autism. He says his ability to focus on detail (an Asperger's trait) is helpful, because he's thorough. "But that can also be hurtful because if you're working in television news, it's a team effort. So if you're tunnel vision, you may forget the social niceties."
One of the most eye-opening things Moran Tweets about is having to adapt to living with people who don't have autism, or "neurotypicals."
I know a lot of autistics who feel disenfranchised from the neurotypicals and their world. It is your world. We just live in it.
— Robert Moran (@Journautism) April 30, 2015
"We spend a lot of our time trying to understand neurotypicals and why neurotypicals do certain things, or at least try to mimic neurotypical behavior," Moran says. "Yet, neurotypicals do almost absolutely nothing to try to understand us."
So, for a start, you could follow him on Twitter to start listening to the other side of the conversation.
Note: The tweets included above have been deleted.
Temple Grandin: Don't shelter autistic children, limit video games
"I'm seeing too many kids that in the 1950s, they just called them geeks and nerds, and today they own businesses." — Temple Grandin
According to a survey by the Institute for Community Inclusion and the University of Massachusetts, only a third of people aged 22-30 with any mental disability have a job ... less than half the rate for people with no disability, and young people with autism fared worst of all, according to a study by the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute.
Reversing that trend is the goal of an event on May 20th at Club Nokia. It's called "Temple Grandin and Friends," and features the animal behavioralist who is the face of autism for many of us, American Idol's James Durbin, and others.
In a phone interview, Temple Grandin told us overprotective parenting is one part of the problem.
"Let's say you go to a restaurant, the parents order the meal for them, instead of having the child order the meal. They do not know how to shake hands with people. Kids used to have paper routes in my generation, and I know those are all gone, but we need to figure out paper route substitutes for middle school kids — like at a church or a community center. They could be ushers, they could set up chairs, they could help with the food ... volunteer at animal shelters ... as long as it's outside the home and it's on a schedule." — Temple Grandin
Grandin says parents also need to help their kids find comfortable niches — away from video games. "I am hearing too often," she says, "'He's 21 and I can't get him out the basement.'" She recalls that in "high school I was teased horribly and bullied, and the only place I was not teased was shared interests like horseback riding, electronics, and model rockets ... That's where I got peers."
Grandin, a subject of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks' "An Anthropologist on Mars," says that all she wants is "to see kids like me be successful ... stay out of trouble with the law, go out and get a career and a job that you're really gonna like."
Visiting the Arroyo Seco homeless camps
If you’ve driven to Pasadena in the last year, you’ve probably seen them, just to the right of the 110 Freeway: tents, tarps and camps along the banks of the Arroyo Seco. Several times, crews have cleared the camps only to have them reappear later.
But what’s it like living there, between a freeway and a creek?
Walking down the Arroyo, you notice right away that some of the campsites look more elaborate than others. There are huge tents like you’d find at an REI, and there are tarps pulled over piles of metal. There are landscaped gardens and pet chickens.
Some people keep rugs out front, and they sweep them. Michelle Mendez lives underneath a big blue tarp with her husband, Mike. The two have lived along the Arroyo just over a year. In that time, the camps have been cleaned out twice — Michelle says she remembers them both.
"Actually, they were really kind of cool about it," she said. "'Cause they let us get all our stuff and they loaded all our stuff into the big shovel, and put it on this side of the river for us. But I figure, better us be here than up there on the streets, you know?"
Michelle and her husband make ends meet by dumpster diving: they find and fix up discarded items around Northeast Los Angeles and turn in recyclables for cash. They also find jewelry, which Michelle wears in spades:
"Most of this — all of this — came from out of somebody’s dumpster," she said.
"Yeah, every time I go out to recycle, I’m always finding my wife some part of jewelry," Michael, her husband, said. "Some kind of ring, necklace, bracelet, earrings, every single time."
The Arroyo winds through a gauntlet of municipal jurisdictions: on one side, there's a city-owned park, on the other there's a freeway maintained by Caltrans. Parts are in L.A. City Council District 1, others are in 14.
The camps, which have grown steadily since they were last cleared out in February, are a perennial issue for Los Angeles City Councilman Gil Cedillo, who represents the first council district.
"It’s just so glaring," Cedillo said. "That you come down the 110 and you see these encampments and you’re like 'Well, how can this be?'"
Residents have worried about crime and public safety around the Arroyo, and campers like Michelle sympathize. "The way I figure it, you can’t be running around here acting like somebody pays your rent," she said. "And you can’t be rude to the neighbors, 'cause they paid their rent."
Mendez said officials have asked that she and her neighbors keep the bike paths clear and leave joggers and residents alone, but there's been trouble with that. Not too far from Michelle's place, there’s a bunch of stuff on the edge of the path. It looks like trash, but she says it belongs to her neighbor.
Further down the Arroyo, there’s a big yellow tent. Ronald Armijo lives there with his wife, Peggy and their two baby turtles, Bonnie and Clyde. They’ve lived on the streets for a year and by the Arroyo for 6 months.
"Everybody here is actually pretty much — 80 percent to 90 percent is a family. If you ain’t got something, we got something. If you need something, we have something," Armijo said. "Like the old story, I guess with the Osmonds: 'One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch.'"
Ronald’s gone to community meetings to speak on behalf of his family and neighbors. He remembers the last time the camps were cleared and doesn’t have as warm of a memory as Michelle. He said after the camps were cleared out, he and other homeless moved down into the creek bed.
"It started raining the first night they threw us down there," said Armijo. "That made it even worse, 'cause now the water’s rising and we’re living there."
So what will become of the tents along the Arroyo? Why are they allowed to stay?
Councilman Cedillo said the plan for now is to provide as much housing and services as the city can — he stressed that homelessness is a citywide problem. The goal isn’t to keep clearing out the camps, but until there’s a long-term solution, there’s no guarantee they won't continue. Past cleanups have included social workers and homeless service providers to help as many people living in the Arroyo as they can.
Meanwhile, residents in the area worry about crime and about fires spreading to the parched brush at nearby Debs Park. When it rains, like it did Thursday night, the park might get greener, the Arroyo might get wider, and underneath the trees, the tents and the tarp, dozens of people will sit out the rain, hoping their shelters will hold.
Join Tom of 'Tom Explores Los Angeles' for a walk down Wilshire Boulevard
Named in 1895, Wilshire Boulevard is one of Southern California's oldest streets, and we know it all too well: we've visited the Tar Pits, eaten BBQ in Koreatown, people-watched at Palisades Park, been stuck in traffic along the Miracle Mile.
Now, in partnership with Good Magazine, Tom Carroll of YouTube's "Tom Explores Los Angeles" is organizing a walk down Wilshire Boulevard — all 16 miles of it — on Wednesday, May 6.
"I've wanted to walk Wilshire for a long while now," says Carroll. "Just as a way to understand how large Los Angeles is, I guess."
"Originally I wanted to walk Sunset," says Caroll. "But that's 26 miles and a good chunk of which — on the Westside — has absolutely no sidewalks. It's life-threatening to walk all of Sunset!"
But it's for the best: there's plenty of fascinating stuff along Wilshire. For example, Wilshire Boulevard drives right through MacArthur Park in Westlake. Originally Wilshire ended at the park — then known as Westlake Park. It wasn't until 1934 that city officials built a road through MacArthur Park, draining half the lake in the process. You can find photos of the original park here.
Interested in going? There's no need to sign up — just meet at the corner of Wilshire and Grand in Downtown Los Angeles at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, May 6. Carroll says the trip should take 8 hours, and that's at a leisurely pace. Just make sure to bring comfortable shoes and lots of water.
Don't tear out your lawn NOW, and other counterintuitive drought advice
It's Frank McDonough's job as "Botanical Information Consultant" at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden to field questions from residents, and he's getting three to five questions every day about the drought.
His answers may surprise you:
1. "I'm tearing my lawn out, what do I do?"
The answer is, don't tear your lawn out. Don't do anything ... yet. Now is the time to plan. It's too hot to plant most plants. It looks like we're having a really early hot spring. Trying to get a plant established right now you risk losing it. You most definitely have to water more frequently, and with the water restrictions that are on in some cities, that's not possible.
2. Should I use natives?
Natives aren't bad. There's a lot of great selections for natives, but the problem with natives here is that natives tend to be specific to microclimates in and around the area ... for instance, there's ceanothus that only grow on certain sides of hills; there's other plants that rather grow in mountains than flatlands, and vice versa. What it boils down to is, if you were to nativize your yard with the correct plants for that area, you wouldn't have a lot of choices.
Instead, McDonough says, consider plants from South Africa, Australia and the Canary Islands that are drought tolerant and work well in many more microclimates. Many of those are on display at the Arboretum, and have been since the late 1950s.
3. What about drip irrigation?
You have to be very careful with drip irrigation. The technology has been ramping up. It's getting better. But it does have a lot of problems. One of them is that the old-fashioned drip irrigation would rot out within two years from ultraviolet light. And in the old days, if you tried to bury it, the roots would go and block it up.
Instead, try copper-coated drip irrigation lines that keep out the roots.
There's much more in our interview, including a loud interruption by the peacock above, which McDonough says is one of the most prolific breeders of all known peacocks.
And at the end of June, McDonough is giving a walking tour of some of the weirdest plants at the Arboretum.
Song of the week: 'I'm History' by Van Dyke Parks
This weekend, songwriter, composer, singer, legendary producer and Off-Ramp favorite Van Dyke Parks performs what he says will be his last ever shows behind a piano. To mark it, we're featuring his newest song — "I'm history" — as this week's Off-Ramp song of the week.
Tickets to both shows are sold out, but there might be a few available at the box office the night of. You never know!
Here's a video of Van Dyke performing the song in Atlanta in 2012:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvifW0pxvo0
The sub-cult of Billy the Mime, an actual good mime. No, really.
To Steven Banks, mime is an "art form that has been justly ridiculed due to untrained and amateur practitioners performing pretentious and self-indulgent work. There's a good reason to hate mimes. Most of them are awful."
Ouch.
And he's a mime!
Banks, a 60-year-old actor and writer in real life, puts on infrequent shows as Billy the Mime, a mime unlike any other you've seen, and one that changed my impression of the art.
"Well, a lot of people don't get it," he agrees, "and for good reasons. There are so many people who are bad practitioners. They have no technique, or they have great technique but they're not doing anything. They're just smelling flowers and getting trapped in boxes. Which Marcel Marceau did great, but you know, do some new stuff."
Banks performed Monday night at the Upright Citizens Brigade space on Sunset at Western, for which the $5 tickets sold out rapidly.
The hand-lettered title cards he uses tell you it's not a show for kids.
In "The Abortion, 1963," Banks pantomimes a woman getting a coat-hanger abortion. In "Drinks with Bill Cosby," a young woman visits Cosby's hotel room, he drugs and rapes her, then watches one of his TV shows. In "Whitney Houston's Last Bath," we see the singer undressing after a gig, wistfully examining herself in the bathroom mirror, taking drugs to counter what she sees in the mirror, drowning, then flying away to a happier place.
In our interview, Banks seemed to avoid saying why these sketches are so deeply effecting — he says he loves that audience members react to them differently — so I'll say that, for me, his performances strip these tropes down to the pure physicality of the acts depicted. It's one thing to know backroom abortions happen, it's another to see the cruelly casual doctor and the shattered woman. Billy the Mime acting out a reported rape — in a performance with darkly humorous moments — underscores the enormity of the accusations against Cosby. And in the Whitney sketch, a woman who starts as a tabloid character becomes a human being again.
Banks has been performing as Billy the Mime for about 10 years. His most notable moment came when he pantomimed the joke "The Aristocrats" for the documentary about the dirty joke. He says he's been friends with the movie's producers, Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza, for years (he was on his honeymoon in San Francisco 36 years ago when he met Gillette) and they insisted he perform the joke in mime. The first take, Banks says, was ruined because Provenza laughed so hard during filming.
But Billy the Mime doesn't perform much because, as he admits, there's not much of a market for mime.
#ISeeChange - Milton Love, tropical fish, and global warming
Milton Love is Off-Ramp's resident marine biologist. From his post at UC Santa Barbara, he's told us about the love lives of fishes, the ugliest fish in the Pacific, and how the video game Survive! Mola Mola is, on the whole, a good thing.
Today he turns his expertise to our project, #ISeeChange, which tries to help people who are trying to figure out global warming, and if the things they're seeing around them — like the Great California Drought or early-blooming jacarandas — are evidence of climate change.
"This last year," Love says, "the ocean has been relatively warm, and there have been a lot of subtropical and even tropical fishes that we now see in California ... in one case, for the very first time. So, the first impulse is to say, 'There it is! Global warming!'"
"But go back into the historical records," Love says. "In about 1855, the U.S. Army came out and started doing early surveys off California. The icthyologist who was with them caught some tropical fish in Monterey that have never been caught since in California. So is that global warming? Well, probably not. The ocean off California goes through cycles. Sometimes it's warm, sometimes it's cold. So it's very hard to fractionate the warm/cold cycles from something bigger and grander."
This doesn't prove or disprove global warming. It just means that new tropical fish don't prove or disprove it.
#ISeeChange is a national effort to track how climate change is affecting our daily lives.
Notice any bugs in your backyard lately? Wondering why you're seeing coyotes where you don't expect? Seen changes in your favorite tide pool? Snap a picture and tag it @KPCC and #ISeeChange on Twitter or Instagram, let us know through our Public Insight Network, or post your questions on www.iSeeChange.org. Then see what others have found and observed in their environment.
Help us date and translate a trove of LA picture postcards
My colleague Gordon Henderson recently bought a packet of picture postcards at the Pasadena City College flea market. It appears that they were originally purchased at Kennedy's Card Shop in Los Angeles.
(Google Street View of the building that would have included 331 W. 5th St, LA 13)
The cards show scenes from across L.A.: An Easter sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl, downtown's sparkling new Civic Center and Hollywood Boulevard.
Some also have writing on the back.
Scroll through the slideshow above. Can you help us date and translate the cards?
Also, let us know what's changed, what still remains, and any memories or thoughts of the time these postcards capture. The paper bag is a time capsule that you can help us unlock.
(And make sure to check out Loyola Marymount's massive postcard collection online!)