Ben and Ellen Harper's new album and the Claremont link, Pacific Standard Time focuses on Latinos, and Jeffrey Kahane is a classical music rebel
'The Fifth Beatle': Bringing Beatles manager Brian Epstein's story to life
"The Fifth Beatle" is a lushly illustrated graphic novel telling the story of the man who discovered the Beatles in a Liverpool basement club and managed the Fab Four on their rise to fame: Brian Epstein.
We spoke with "Fifth Beatle" writer Vivek J. Tiwary recently at the WonderCon comic book and pop culture convention in Anaheim. Tiwary says he connected with Epstein's outsider status.
"He was gay at a time where it was against the law. He was Jewish at a period of pervasive antisemitism."
That danger was something that continued to haunt Epstein up until his death at 32 from a sleeping pill overdose.
"Brian picked a career in managing the Beatles that was dangerous for him. Because it thrust him into the public limelight. With every success they had, there was a greater chance of it coming out in the public that he was gay," which would have gotten him thrown in jail, Tiwary said.
It's a story Tiwary has connected with for decades.
"I've been researching it literally for 21 years, so I am a historian when it comes to Brian Epstein-related Beatles stuff. I don't know if I'd call myself a Beatles historian, but I would call myself a Brian Epstein historian."
Tiwary says he never had to face the struggles Epstein did, but related to what Tiwary calls the "emotional beats" of his life.
"I can understand what it was like to feel like an outsider in your chosen field. I'm a first-generation American. My family's from Guyana, South America by way of India, and you just don't see a lot of people of my ethnicity having the kind of dreams I have, pursuing the kind of things I pursue: Writing graphic novels, producing Broadway. We're steered towards engineering, or technology, or medicine."
Tiwary says Epstein inspired him to chase his own dreams, "and to believe that, no matter how wild those dreams may be, if I'm really passionate about it, and really persistent, and quite frankly, willing to work my ass off in the face of everybody telling me I shouldn't do it or I couldn't do it, then I could realize those dreams, spectacularly, the way that Brian did."
Tiwary says he set out to tell Epstein's story, like how he got them a record deal, convinced Ed Sullivan to let a British band on his show and even designed their suits and came up with their iconic haircuts — but he also took some creative liberties, because he wanted to tell the poetry of Epstein's life.
Tiwary says he wanted to capture what it felt like when Epstein first saw the band, and doing it in a graphic novel let him focus on the emotions and details like how his feelings were reflected in his facial features.
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"The Fifth Beatle" was nominated for two Eisner awards, the comics industry's awards, including for Best Reality-Based Work and Best Painter/Multimeia Artist (interior art) for artist Andrew Robinson.
"Andrew and I talked at length about [the sequence where he sees the Beatles] and what it should look like. We spent a lot of time on that. But as writer, there're very little words there! And I believe that Andrew's artwork in those three pages will tell you more about what it was like when Brian discovered the band than any prose biography ever could."
That meeting plays a pivotal role in the graphic novel, and in Epstein's relationship with the band.
"What attracted him to the Beatles was that he believed that in the Beatles he saw a group whose message was all about love," Tiwary said, "and that that was a worthy message to share with the world."
Tiwary says that when he sat down with Robinson, he knew he was the guy to draw this book because Robinson was a Beatles fan who understood that it was Brian's story, not the Beatles' story. Tiwary also knew that Robinson had experience in comics and could help him along with his first graphic novel.
"There were moments when I knew exactly what I wanted, and I said this is what I want it to look like, and the script was very descriptive, and a panel here, a panel there, this kind of angle, this sort of tone — and then there were moments where I knew the dialogue, and I knew the emotions, and the mood, but I had no idea how to tell it in sequential art, and Andrew would take those scenes and run with it."
Artist Kyle Baker also does a sequence in the book to depict a wild time in the history of the Beatles, bringing a cartoonier style to contrast the painted elegance of the rest of the book.
The book topped the New York Times' hardcover graphic novel list and is set to move to another medium: film, directed by Peyton Reed.
"I wrote the screenplay myself, so hopefully I've done my job in taking the heart of the graphic novel and translating it into a film script. The film — we say it's an adaptation of the graphic novel, because that's an easy way to kind of wrap your head around it, but really I think of it more as an expansion of the graphic novel, because there are a number of sequences in the film that don't exist in the book, and vice versa."
Tiwary's also secured music rights for the movie.
"Because we have access to that music, you can be sure we're going to use it," Tiwary said, noting that the film will have many more musical sequences than the book.
The film will still preserve the book's fantastical tone, Tiwary said. As far as what's next, Tiwary says he wants to keep telling stories, whether those be graphic novels, film or television. He also has experience as a Broadway producer, so that raises one obvious question.
"There are no plans for a Broadway adaptation, but being a Broadway guy, I'm always thinking about that kind of stuff. I already have ideas on who should direct, and who should music supervise, and what it could look like — but one thing at a time."
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Ben Harper and his mom on 'Childhood Home' and growing up in Claremont
Did you know that Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Ben Harper was born and raised in the Inland Empire?
Harper is actually the third generation in a family of musicians who have owned and operated Claremont's Folk Music Center on Yale Street since 1967. This May, Ben Harper celebrated that history by joining his mother Ellen in their first ever collaboration, just in time for Mother's Day.
The album, "Childhood Home," is a collection of 10 original songs written by the pair.
Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson went inside the Folk Music Center in Claremont and talked with Ben and Ellen Harper.
On how the album came together:
Ellen Harper: We'd talked about this over the years. And it just hadn't worked out—his schedule, mine, it just hadn't come together. And I was writing song, and doing some demos of them. Ben said 'well what are you going to do with those songs?' I said 'Well, record them with you eventually!'
RELATED: Sheehan's Sketchbook: Claremont's Folk Music Center
Ben Harper: And that's also what lent itself to the record going not only so smoothly but pretty quick. I mean, the whole record was recorded in not too long of a time. That was mainly because we had done not only a good number of years of preproduction—I had been setting songs aside as I'd been talking about doing a record with my mom for fifteen years.
On their history with Claremont:
EH: Ben grew up in Claremont. I grew up on the East Coast. In 1957, we picked up stakes and moved west. They always gathered music. My mother had been involved in folk music for decades. So they immediately started playing and attracted people to them, there was a little group out in Redlands/Riverside and LA... and people just gathered. And the music grew, enormously, very quickly. So they opened up this store.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXQCHQkBK-w
On growing up in a musical family:
BH: It's always a great, exciting way, to absorb what you love to do. Having seen your parents do it, or being around their energy and their commitment to music. So being around my grandparents' commitment to music any my mom's commitment to music—for me, there was nothing more I could have possibly wanted to do with my life.
EH: I grew up with music, my mother always played. My first recollection of me and music was going up and just putting my hand on the banjo strings to get her attention. Stopping her from playing. And I'll tell you, that works!
"Childhood Home" is out now. For tour dates and more info, check out Ben Harper's website.
Burn him at the stave! LA Chamber Orchestra maestro says it's OK to clap between movements
Off-Ramp host John Rabe continues his long piano-bench interview with maestro Jeffrey Kahane, who has announced he'll step down as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in 2017.
Hold on to your collapsible opera hats, and get out the tar and feathers: Jeffrey Kahane says it's OK to applaud between movements of classical pieces.
Which, today, makes him a heretic, a rebel. Actually, it makes him a conservative, in the true sense of the word.
RELATED: Kahane plays & explains Goldberg Variations, explains decision to step down
Sitting at the piano at a hall at the Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles, I was talking with Kahane about his approach as the leader of the orchestra. I said I loved it that he often speaks to the audience before the performances. Was LACO doing that when he took over in the mid-1990s?
His two predecessors were distinguished musicians and good friends and colleagues, "but I don't think either of them ever said a word to the audience in their whole tenure. They came from a different tradition."
Until the 1880s, Kahane says, classical music in America was a, "democratic phenomenon." Then, the concert hall became "a temple to art" and classical music became "stifled" ... including adopting the rule that audience members aren't supposed to clap until the end of a piece.
"That was not the way concerts were conceived of initially. That was not how it was supposed to be. And Mozart would have been shocked, dismayed, and furious to get to the end of a movement of one of his compositions and had the audience sit there in silence. To him, it would meant it was a failure."
(From the LA Public Library's Herald-Examiner collection: "Mr. and Mrs. Edward A. Dickson are enthusiastic opera fans. They hold tickets for the season and are among the many social leaders who attend nearly every night during opera week." October 26, 1951)
Before any of you fans of the classical arts get on your high horse (or your high keyboard), consider this additional point: ballet audiences routinely applaud great dance moves in the middle of performances, and opera fans cheer well-sung arias.
In fact, a young tenor was forced to perform an encore at the Met just the other day. So how can you argue that classical music, which provides the score to opera and ballet, is different? If it's good enough for Mozart and Jeffrey Kahane, it's good enough for Off-Ramp.
Make sure to listen to this week's interview to hear Kahane play a Mozart excerpt, and a Gershwin show tune. Next time, as our piano bench interview continues, Jeffrey Kahane debunks another musical myth: that minor chords make you sad and major chords make you happy.
The LA Chamber Orchestra continues its "Westside Connections" series Thursday, May 15, at 7:30pm at the Moss Theater, Santa Monica. Actor John Rubinstein (Bob Fosse's "Pippen") and "From the Top" host Christopher O’Riley are the special guests.
Getty gives $5M — first round of grants for next PST on Latino art
John Rabe talks with LA Mayor Eric Garcetti and others about Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, an art exhibit that begins September of 2017 and is organized and largely funded by the Getty Foundation.
"I think the last Pacific Standard Time was the envy of cities around the world. They looked to us, and they said, 'Wow! Los Angeles actually did that? A place that's known for its silos and its multiple cities and its divisions, was actually unified.'"— LA Mayor Eric Garcetti
In 2011, dozens of cultural institutions, big and small, took part in the first Pacific Standard Time, which focused on the LA art scene and reportedly gave a $280m boost to LA's economy. Tuesday, the Getty Foundation announced $5 million in grants to help fund research for the research stage of the next PST event: Pacific Standard Time LA/LA.
"(Pacific Standard Time) LA/LA will encompass exhibitions about the artistic connections between Los Angeles and Latin America, about the relationships between Latin America and the rest of the world, about the history of exchange among Latin American countries, or about the Latin American diaspora." — The Getty Foundation website
There are 41 recipients, from the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena ($140,000) to the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College ($150,000), to dozens of smaller and larger institutions in between.
RELATED: See all $5m in grants the Getty Foundation has given out for PST LA/LA
At Tuesday's event, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said he hopes PST LA/LA will surpass the first version in terms of art and impact on the local economy:
"You know, we have an embarrassment of cultural riches in Los Angeles, probably more great museums than anywhere else on the face of the earth. But in the past, we haven't stitched them together. The first Pacific Standard Time actually brought all these institutions together, and I said, 'We've got to keep doing this.' This second iteration is going to be great because it's going to celebrate Latin American and Latino art here in what is the international art capital, but also the northernmost capital of Latin America. This is good for jobs, tourists, art, and culture."
Garcetti is something of an artist himself — he has a very popular Instagram photo account — and since he is Latino, I asked if his photos will be in Pacific Standard Time LA/LA.
Yes, he replied tongue-in-cheek, "at the Getty ... in whatever their main gallery is, and probably all over the city. This stuff is going for a lot of money these days."
RELATED: John Rabe's Instagram photos
Listen to the audio to hear Mayor Garcetti and a host of other movers and shakers in the art world tell us about PST LA/LA, including MOCA's Philippe Vergne, MoLAA's Stewart Ashman, the Getty Foundation's Debroah Marrow, LACMA's director Michael Govan and curator Howard Fox, the Vincent Price Museum's Karen Rapp, and LA Times' art critic Christopher Knight.
What was the pilot of an SR-71 thinking as he prepared to eject? Paperwork
Last week, there were major delays at LAX that disrupted flights across the country. NBC reports the culprit may have been a U-2 spy plane that wreaked havoc with airport computer systems. But it shouldn’t be a surprise: Southern California has a long history with spy planes.
Off-Ramp contributor Robert Garrova reports from the Blackbird Airpark in Palmdale.
50 years ago, the United States Air Force made aviation history in California with a covert flight. On December 22, 1964 the SR-71 Blackbird made its first test flight high above Palmdale.
No remote pilots and joysticks here though -- the Blackbird actually had someone in the cockpit when it first reached speeds of more than 1,000 miles-per-hour.
VIDEO: Watch an SR-71 flying at an airshow in England
Robert Gilliland was the first to take the Blackbird to the skies in ‘64, but while pilots were achieving Mach 3, there were people on the ground looking up too, like Chris Spicher, who's lived in the Antelope Valley pretty much his whole life.
"Well, you know, when I was a little kid, I remember being out on the playground at school and I’d see things go over and I’d hear things. They would break windows when the sonic booms happened -- It was just an amazing place to grow up and live in. There were classified missions, like the dad that lived across the street he’d jump in his car in the morning and nobody knew where he was going. He’d come back that day or the next day... It was like, what is that guy doing?"
Who knows? Maybe it was Bill "Flaps" Flanagan, a retired USAF Lt. Colonel, who says he flew in the back seat of the SR-71 for 5 years, out of Palmdale. Now, he's a docent at the Blackbird Airpark, "the only place on Earth you can see an A-12, which was the secret CIA single seat version of the Blackbird."
(Blackbirds at the Flight Test Historical Foundation. Credit: FTHF)
Flanagan has a lot of respect for these old Cold War era planes.
"Sitting over there in the corner there’s an ejection seat. My ejection seat. I actually had my hand on the handle preparing to eject because we were doing an edge of the envelope test... we flamed out both engines. So I have about five minutes of supersonic gilder time because our engines had quit. We fly so high that it takes us six minutes to fall down to 16,000 ft., which is where normally you separate from the seat and your parachute opens. So every time I look at that ejection seat, I think about the time I had my hand on that handle, ready to finally bail out of an airplane. I figured, I’m gonna be okay, but the paperwork I’m gonna have to fill out, when we don’t bring the plane back, is gonna be staggering."
Flanagan calls the Blackbird, made over 50 years ago, "the height of aeronautical engineering."
"These airplanes were the only airplanes designed to cruise at three times the speed of sound -- in the history of aviation. I was lucky enough to host Senator John Glenn back in 1983, who was very interested in the airplane. I remember as he walked away he looked at the airplanes and said, ‘You know, this is really the Mona Lisa of aeronautical engineering. We’ll probably never do anything like this again.’ And thus far he’s been proven right."
See for yourself: The Blackbird AirPark is open Friday through Sunday, 11-4, and admission is free. 2503 E Avenue P, Palmdale, CA (661-274-0884).
Artist Fritz Haeg's 'Wildflowering LA' blooms across the city
Next time you're stuck in L.A. traffic, take a look around. You might see bright, colorful wildflower fields covering the front yards of schools and houses.
It may be a part of Wildflowering L.A., a project by artist Fritz Haeg, organized and produced by LAND.
Haeg chose 50 people to plant wildflower gardens throughout L.A. County. As the flowers are reaching peak bloom right about now, he hopes people will think about California's lost wildflower legacy and names like Theodore Payne — the legendary plant landscape architect and native plant advocate.
Haeg caught the gardening bug after moving to L.A. 15 years ago. He found an outlet in the Theodore Payne Foundation, a nonprofit nursery that sustains and sells California native plants.
"Theodore Payne did a very similar project over a hundred years ago, if you can believe it. He was already concerned about urbanization and a loss of native wildlife and landscape here," said Haeg. "He would do these walks and he would gather wildflower seeds in the hills around Los Angeles and create these mixes and try to sell them to urban residents to get them to plant them in the city."
Using these simple plants, Haeg said he can talk about the ecological implications of how we're living today.
"These sites have a future that each person, individually, can decide what they want to do on this land," said Haeg. "The seed bank of all these sites has been enriched with this wide diversity of wildflower seeds."
The flowers have already attracted native wildlife, too, including the exotic moth caterpillar.
"I think when you see that, you understand that there's a much more complex ecology at work here than just simple flowers," said Haeg. "They're part of a much bigger, interconnected story of our unique ecology in Southern California."
Haeg marked each Wildflowering site with large, rustic and wooden with big yellow lettering — very similar to the kind you'd see in State Parks around California.
"We, as Americans, have this internal trigger," said Haeg. "When we see a wood sign that's carved with yellow lettering, we pay attention. It's like something special is happening in the landscape. And I think part of the idea of the project was to bring that way of looking at things that we typically reserve for a state park into the city."
Visit the map page to find a Wildflowering bed near you. Information on the seed mixes is available on the resources page.
KPCC hosts, reporters share their favorite family food traditions
Mother's Day is coming up next weekend. It's a time when a lot of people take mom out for dinner, but how do Southern Californians honor their moms through food? What cooking traditions do we pass on?
This Thursday, May 8, Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson is going to moderate a panel of LA chefs and food writers at KPCC's Crawford Family Forum. But he got the conversation kicked off this week with some noteworthy names right here at KPCC.
Larry Mantle, Host of Airtalk
Let me just first say about my mother, the most amazing thing when it came to food is she could have a houseful of people come over for dinner. She's out entertaining the people, having a full-on conversation. Somehow the dinner would get done with her just popping in every now and then into the kitchen. And it'd be great! I don't know quite know how she did it. She was just totally connected with people as she makes things.
My favorite dish that she makes actually originated with her second husband, my step-father, and it's chicken piccata. It's just absolutely great; wonderful flavor to it. And when I go to her house for a birthday dinner, that's almost always my choice: chicken piccata, a pesto pasta that she makes that's just terrific. And that's my favorite things.
Wendy Lee, Business & Economics Reporter
My mom was a stay at home mom, so every night it was a home-cooked meal. To me, even though it wasn't a special occasion, anytime she made lumpia, that was a totally special occasion. I could smell the lumpia sizzling on the stove, and the smell of pork would kind of waft through the air. And I would be working on homework in my room, and I would think "Is that lumpia?" And I would run over to the kitchen and be like, "Lumpia! Lumpia!" And my mom would be cooking it, and she'd be like "No, don't touch that, because that one's hot." And so she'd leave one set aside for me so I could eat before dinner.
Adrian Florido, Community Health Reporter
I think probably one of my favorite food memories is of my mom heating up tortillas in the kitchen, while my dad was sitting at the dining room table. She would be standing at the stove, over the comal, which is this flat griddle that most Mexican families use to heat up tortillas. They'd get really hot, and she wouldn't want to hold them in her hands too long so she'd just fling them across the kitchen, and across the dining room to my dad, like a frisbee. And he would catch them, and set them on his plate and eat them.
I just remember it being a really funny scene to always watch — because you would just see this mass of corn dough flying across the room.
Alex Cohen, Host of Take Two
When it comes to favorite dishes growing up, I can't say that any of them actually came from my mother. I love my mom dearly, she's very talented in many ways. Cooking is not one of them. She and my dad actually made an agreement when they got married: she would take care of the cleaning, she would do most of the child rearing, but it was really up to my dad to cook. He is and was a fabulous cook — my mom, not so much.
Her one dish was scrambled eggs, which she could never manage to pull off without getting shells in them. Which we still joke about to this day. But — she did actually — once when I was in college, I got mono. A really terrible case of it, my tonsils swelled up so big I could barely swallow. And she made eggplant lasagna, which she then proceeded to put in a blender so I could drink it out of a straw. And as disgusting as it sounds, it was actually really good at the time.
PHOTOS: Gary Leonard and Colette Miller find the better angels in our nature
UPDATE (5/8/2014): Gary Leonard's Wings photos are all together and showing at an exhibit that opens tonite at 6. "Angels on Main Street" is at the Fine Arts Building, 811 West 7th Street, downtown LA.
It's a very simple idea. Colette Miller painted wings on the pull-down security shutters at the Regent Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. Stand in front of the wings and have your photo taken and voila, you're an angel in the city of Angels.
For freelance photographer Gary Leonard, who strives to capture a broad range of LA life, it was the perfect setup. He simply emailed a bunch of his contacts and asked them to meet him last weekend in front of the wings. It turns his paradigm on its head: instead of having to travel all over LA to capture LA's diverse people and events, different people from all walks of life in LA came to him. He photographed street people, activists, Mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti, an aging public radio host, an unborn child, and many more.
And I can tell you from experience, something interesting happens when you pose in front of those wings: you stand a little taller, you feel like - maybe - you're flying a little, you turn into a slightly better person.