Californium, the new PK Dick video game ... bid for a unique dinner with Russ Parsons, John Rabe, and Piero Selvaggio at Valentino in Santa Monica ... the almost-lost living room sessions of jazz pianist Forrest Westbrook ... how to make money in Hollywood AND not be a racist.
Help KPCC by dining with Russ Parsons, John Rabe, and the Garibaldi of the Food Revolution
This will never happen again!
For the KPCC Auction, I've arranged a dinner for 4 at Valentino at which James Beard Award-winning food writer Russ Parsons and I will interview Piero Selvaggio about his role in the Italian side of the Food Revolution.
As you can read and hear in my interview with Piero, he was an Italian immigrant who grew up on Mama's heavy food, never dreaming there was gourmet Italian food. Piero came back from a trip to Italy a changed man, and he changed the food Americans eat by introducing revolutionary stuff like ... radicchio. It caught on, and his success in food inspired Italian winemakers to push to make better vino. I call him "the Garibaldi of the food revolution," and it's an apt title.
For the KPCC Auction, Piero is donating the dinner, Silverlake Wine is donating the wine, and Russ is donating his deep knowledge about food and drink. The food and wine alone would be a wonderful experience, and so would the history ... but combining the two will touch on all the senses to make a night you and 3 friends will remember forever.
I'm personally asking you to bid early, often, and very generously for this one-of-a-kind experience, and show your support for Off-Ramp and KPCC.
-- Off-Ramp's John Rabe 5/12/2016
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Piero Selvaggio, owner and founder of Valentino Restaurant in Santa Monica. The 42-year old restaurant is one of the birthplaces of the Food Revolution.
Do you like good olive oil and balsamic vinegar? Buffalo mozzarella? Good Italian wine? Then thank Piero Selvaggio. Food cognoscenti agree that you can’t overstate Piero’s historic role in the modern food scene.
I talked with Selvaggio about his long career over a lunch at his Santa Monica restaurant Valentino, served by chef Nico Chessa. This is one of the things you need to understand about Selvaggio: he is not a celebrity chef who runs a restaurant.
He is a restaurateur from the old school, who loves pressing the flesh at the door, and making his guests — who can easily pay a few hundred dollars for a dinner for two — feel welcomed.
Valentino is recognized as one of Southern California's top restaurants, and for many years one of the nation's best, but when Selvaggio opened it in 1972, it was a red sauce Italian joint with checkered tablecloths and cheap Chianti in straw baskets.
From the beginning, it was popular "because the Los Angeles Times wrote very nice things about us." But eventually, as Selvaggio admits, he had "shoemakers in the kitchen," and a friend told him, "Kid, you are charming and wonderful but you are not going to go very far. People are going to say, 'Valentino, what a terrible restaurant,' and before you know it, it's too late."
Selvaggio says he really didn't know better. Valentino was serving lousy versions of the food he ate growing up in Southern Italy: "Mamma's food. Pasta with ragu. Rice balls, fried, so very heavy. On Sunday we had a big stew with sausages. Very robust food with lots of pasta."
So he wisely went back to Italy to really learn about food, and tells of being surprised by truffles, by carpaccio. He started bringing these things, plus radical (for America) stuff like really good olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and a chef back to Valentino and transformed the place and the American food scene.
As Valentino was gaining fame and influence, a similar thing happened with Italian wine. The Lambruscos and straw-basket Chianti was replaced by good wines from makers who said, "Poppa, we gotta throw away the old barrel, we gotta throw away the crappy wines that you've been making forever and ever, and we gotta make wines with more technology, finesse, intensity, and character."
Selvaggio became their champion, assembling not the largest but the best wine list in the country.
UGH: Remember Riunite? Here's a vintage commercial
Valentino is not for everybody.
Valentino ... once described in Wine Spectator magazine as lapping other Italian restaurants in America like "a Ferrari in the fast lane of the autostrada," is now honored mostly like an antique car: undeniably beautiful but an object out of the past. That air of formality — hushed room, fine china, heavy silver, a forest of crystal wine glasses that ring like chimes when you make a toast, a small army of uniformed waiters that sees to your every need — that's the vision of fine dining that Valentino embraces. — Russ Parsons in the LA Times
Selvaggio knows it: "Right now, fine dining is going through a crisis. People want casual, noisy."
But he says he believes people will eventually get tired of their smart phones and start longing for a meal where real people, real food, and real service are the focus, not a celebrity chef and Yelp! reviews. When they do, he'll be there to take their reservation on the phone and greet them at the door.
Valentino Italian Restaurant: 3115 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica CA 90405. 310-829-4313
How Hollywood can make more money: Cast women of color
Film and culture critic Tim Cogshell, of KPCC's Filmweek and Alt Film Guide, has joined Off-Ramp's team of commentators.
I’m now going to name almost all of the women of color in or on TV (or a TV-like platform). And that’s a big problem.
On the heels of #Oscarsowhite, the Nina Simone controversy, the whitewashing controversy, and every other diversity issue Hollywood is facing, it’s an important question: how many women of color are on TV and on platforms like Amazon and Netflix and Hulu? So here’s an almost complete list of women of color in the industry who are the boss, storyteller and/or hero who saves the day and gets the boy — or girl.
At the top are the one-namers — Oprah and Shonda. You know Oprah. Shonda Rhimes is the creator of "Grey’s Anatomy" and "Scandal" and executive producer of "How to Get Away with Murder" and "The Catch." She’s a black woman who owns a night of network television. Steven Bochco once owned a night of network television. And I had to say both of his names.
Then there’s Cookie on the hit series "Empire," played by the Academy Award-nominated, Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning Taraji P. Henson.
Cookie is an archetype — not a parody — of a particular type of African-American matriarch that’s seldom, if ever, portrayed on American TV: a self-made, outspoken, rich and sexy mom who will do anything for her children. Cookie is outrageous — but J.R. Ewing was outrageous, and we loved J.R. And he was a lousy father.
Let’s get back to our list.
There’s Regina King on HBO’s "The Leftovers," Uzo Aduba on "Orange is the New Black," and Danai Gurira, the sword-wielding lead in "The Walking Dead." Lucy Liu is the Chinese co-star of "Elementary." And then there’s Indian-American Mindy Kaling of "The Mindy Project," Gina Rodriguez of "Jane the Virgin," Cristela Alonzo on "Cristela," Eva Longoria in "Telenovela," and Kerry Washington and Viola Davis on the Shonda Shows.
These shows and characters are popular across a broad swath of American audiences, which puts the lie to the old myth in Hollywood greenlighting suites that women of color — as attractive leading ladies and authority figures — won’t be accepted by American audiences, that they need to be mammies, hookers, best friends … or non-existent.
I’ve always known this was a myth. I grew up watching Pam Grier above the title in major motion pictures, where she kicked ass just like Steve McQueen, and with more personality. In the early '70s, the late Teresa Graves became the first African-American woman to star in her own hour-long series, the cop drama "Get Christie Love."
To me, a black woman on TV was beautiful, tough and smart. Which was a reflection of my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother, my aunties, my big sister and ultimately my wife. All beautiful badasses not to be underestimated, like Christie Love — and Cookie.
It’s true that compared with the movies, TV is doing better. But it’s still not acceptable that I can name everybody in four minutes on the radio.
If you’re the kind of person who greenlights things in Hollywood, and you’re not investing in diversity in every possible way, you’re stupid. Because you’re not only contributing to racial and gender inequity, you’re leaving money on the table.
Dylan Brody on democracy: 'I was the Huey Long of the second grade'
If you’re surprised by anything in the ongoing interminable presidential election, you haven’t really been paying attention. I understood American politics very early. In second grade.
As an extended lesson in the democratic process, my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Nichols, decided we should have an elected class government, with a mayor, deputy mayor, treasurer, sheriff and so on. I don’t remember all the positions. Secretary of agriculture. Maybe. I don’t know.
Mrs. Nichols selected the candidates for each position alphabetically, so she ran me for mayor because - as a Brody - I came third alphabetically. I suspect she made it a three-person race rather than a two-person race because I was the brightest, most literate kid in the class and she wanted to make it possible for me to run for mayor.
She gave the candidates a deadline to come up with a platform, and on a designated day we were all expected to present our platforms and then cast our votes. I was the only person in the class who came up with anything at all to say. I had index cards. I had plans. I was going to rearrange the desks. I was going to levy a 2-cent a day tax and at the end of the year we were going to have an ice cream party with the money we’d raised. I’d done the math. If all the taxes were paid by the 22 students for the remaining 73 days of school, we would have plenty of money for a decent ice cream party in 1971 dollars. Furthermore, I promised to erase from the chalkboard the drawing of a doghouse into which the teacher wrote the names of those students who had misbehaved during the day. That suggestion brought wild applause from my 7-year-old constituency.
With a great deal of excitement and tense near-giddiness, we all cast our secret ballots and then we went to lunch. We ate soggy, square pizza slices and tater tots. When we got back, the roll-up map of America had been pulled down to cover the black board. Once we were all back in our seats, Mrs. Nichols made a little suspense-building speech and then tugged on the map so that it snap-rolled up – fffft-thpthpthpthpthp – and revealed the names of the winners.
Proudly, smugly, as the new mayor, I went up to the blackboard and erased the doghouse. The other kids applauded and whistled and cheered me most heartily.
About a month later, Mrs. Nichols became angry with one of the students for misbehavior of some sort. She redrew the doghouse. I did nothing to stop her. I was the mayor, but she was still the teacher and I was in second grade.
At the end of the year, it turned out I had done very bad second-grade multiplication; we had more than enough money saved for our ice cream party. I suggested that we spend the extra money to expand the party and invite Mrs. Weed’s class in from across the hall because we had always done recess and lunch with them.
The treasurer suggested we divide the extra money up amongst the kids in class, offering a big, end of the year tax rebate … clearly a young Republican. The deputy mayor thought we should put it up to a vote. I insisted: I had been elected mayor, the whole idea of taking up a tax had been mine to begin with and I had made the decision. We would share with Mrs. Weed’s class, dammit, because it was the right thing to do. Also, there was a girl over there in Room 7 with one arm that I sort of liked but never had the guts to actually talk to.
So, we had a party with the kids from Room 7 and I got to have ice cream with Kate Carney and her alluringly empty left sleeve.
And so Mrs. Nichols gave us a basic but highly accurate introduction to the American democratic system.
- Candidates are selected; they are not elected.
- The election process is a ritual of spectacle and suspense designed to mask the machinery of political appointment.
- Elected officials enjoy applause for taking actions that can easily be undone later in silence by the people with the real power.
- And in the face of dissent, a noble, thoughtful, democratically elected leader will resort to the convenience of totalitarianism to protect a private agenda and to indulge personal perversities.
This rich, nuanced insight into a complex political system is a rare and wonderful gift that I hate having every election year, when everyone else is engaged in magical thinking.
Thank you, Mrs. Nichols.
Off-Ramp commentator Dylan Brody is an actor and comedian, and author of the semi-autobiographical novel Laughs Last.
Song of the week: "Believers" by Dam Funk
This week's Off-Ramp song of the week is called “Believer” by Pasadena native and Off-Ramp favorite Dam Funk.
https://soundcloud.com/k7-records/dam-funk-believer-dj-kicks-exclusive
"Believer" comes from Dam Funk’s upcoming DJ Kicks album, out later this month. If you want to see him live, he’ll host his famous Funkmosphere night Friday, May 27 at The Echo.
Review: After death, pianist Forrest Westbrook finds his audience
Off-Ramp Jazz Correspondent
There is a small, disorganized box of CDs squeezed into the back of my garage labeled: “Demos, 2000s.” The box isn’t so much for me. I know what’s on those CDs because I played piano on every track. The box is for my daughter.
Long after I’m gone, crushed by a shipping container on the 710 or mistaken for a koala bear by a famished mountain lion, that box will be proof to her that Dada was hip for at least a little while. Two fantastic new albums featuring the late jazz pianist Forrest Westbrook provide a glimmer of hope for any artist who has ever felt a little under appreciated.
Forrest Westbrook was barely a household name in his own house. The hard-working musician played battered pianos across Southern California, often leaving his best ideas among the clouds of cigarette smoke and two drink minimums. He died two years ago at the age of 86, overlooked and under-recorded.
But when his daughter Leslie sorted through his possessions, she found swinging reel-to-reel tapes of sessions he had masterfully engineered in his Hollywood apartment dating back to the late 1950s and early 1960s. She knew they had to be heard and through a partnership with the Spanish jazz label Blue Sounds, Forrest Westbrook is finally finding a bit of recognition.
Last year, the first of the Westbrook trove was released as the Carmell Jones Quartet featuring Forrest Westbrook. Recorded in 1960, the cuts were intended as an audition tape for Jones for Pacific Jazz records, a local tastemaker that launched the careers of musicians Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Les McCann.
At the time of the recording, Carmell Jones was an explosive, 24 year old hard-bop trumpeter from Kansas City. He arrived on the West Coast looking for fame, fortune and a record contract. Less than a year later, he crossed one of those goals off the list: releasing the first of three engaging but underselling albums. Within five years he had moved on to New York and eventually Europe. He made his most widely-heard recording alongside saxophonist Joe Henderson on Horace Silver's Song For My Father, a cornerstone of mid-60s Blue Note soul.
On Jones’ session, the quartet eases into the heat with a simmering “Willow Weep for Me.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQGjnplRA-g
On it, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Bill Schwemmer work on a subdued groove while Jones slides in on buttered valves. A double-time piano solo briefly enters into the finger-popping realm but the grooves reach their peak later on “For Every Man There’s A Woman.”
There, Jones’ fanfare unfurls over a blues march, leaving the Earth’s atmosphere with a precise jolt. Westbrook is equally forceful, twisting around the confines of the piano’s lower register.
Westbrook only ever released one album under his name, a 1970 free jazz LP called This Is Their Time, Oh Yes. But these new tapes prove that a decade prior he had a unique voice — linked equally to then-contemporary pianists like Lennie Tristano, Red Garland and Errol Garner. He had a deep well of nimble flourishes far hipper than many of the so-called West Coast jazz pianists.
Recorded two years earlier than the Jones session, the Forrest Westbrook Trio & Quintet finds Westbrook in a knottier bag, doubling back on rumbling lines on a crisp “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” and evoking Dave Brubeck with a mid-tempo “In Your Own Sweet Way.” Following a particularly exuberant solo on the Charlie Parker blues “Buzzy” it is either bassist Bill Plummer or drummer Maurice Miller who can be heard shouting “Yeah, Forrest,” an affectionate encouragement that exemplifies the homespun charm of Westbrook’s tapes.
These albums are a delight, but the pleasure is bittersweet. Westbrook was a great talent unearthed a little too late. If it wasn’t for his daughter’s determination, much of the record-buying public would never have even known his name. I’m sure her Dada would be proud.
Californium: This weird new video game takes you inside Philip K. Dick's head
Fans of Philip K. Dick know him as the reality-bending author who helped elevate mid-century science fiction from pulp to respectable literature.
His visions of artificial intelligence were scripted for the screen with "Blade Runner," he foreshadowed the rise of the modern surveillance state in "A Scanner Darkly," he wrote the book that inspired "Total Recall."
Now, there's a new video game which the makers say was inspired by the life and work of Dick.
The game's called "Californium." It's available on PC and Mac computers through Steam. In it, you play strung-out, deadline-skipping science fiction author Elvin Green. Here's a trailer from the game's creators:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcatGSYtzQ0
You begin the game exploring an apartment — a voice coming through a static-filled television gives you instructions. Eerie ambient music plays in the background. Walls melt away to reveal portals to alternate realities. Menacing figures stare up at you from the street below. It's all very Philip K. Dickian.
"It's kind of a trick we tried to do with this game. Because we can experience it like a story, but there is also some uncomfortable mood that is raising when you play," said Olivier Bonhomme, who worked with Arte, a European company, in crafting the look of the game.
Readers of Dick's sometimes chemically-enhanced, paranoid novels will feel right at home in the world Bonhomme has created. But the game doesn't pull its aesthetic from any one novel or movie adaptation.
"I didn't want to be, how you say, 'over-brained' by the already existing adaptations," said Bonhomme. "So I had to create something new. The idea was to be quite opposite of science fiction fans, and Philip K. Dick fans used to see when there is an adaptation about one of his books or his world."
For Bonhomme and the rest of the game designers in France, "Californium" is less about a particular storyline than it is a PKD state of mind.
"We grew up with his mind and his inspiration, and Philip K. Dick is very, very famous in France and in Europe," said Bonhomme. "We felt this making the game. That Philip K. Dick was a big part of our cultural inspiration all along our childhood, when we began to play video games and watch American science fiction movies and to read his books."
Dedicated fans will quickly realize that your avatar in "Californium" isn't so much one of the writer's characters, but the author IRL. The game takes place in Berkeley, where Dick once lived and wrote.
Your avatar is confronted with relationships that recall the writer's failed marriages, the landlord yells at you for your drug habit and paranoia seeps into every corner of your world — all aspects of Dick's own life.
The game even resonates with people who knew Dick. Marc Haefele worked at Doubleday in the early 1960s, one of Dick's early publishers — there, he edited "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and "Ubik."
"You know, in every Philip K. Dick novel, there's a character that is Phil," Haefele said. "It's not necessarily like the Phil we know from his personal history, but Phil as he saw himself. It's a regular guy who does a regular but maybe oddball, not-that-distinguished job and who tries to be as honest as he can."
Bonhomme admits the idea of making a PKD video game was daunting at first, but he also says — only half-jokingly — that maybe there was a little something magical going on during the process. Maybe we're all a little haunted by the spirit of Dick.
"It's like a big, big supernova with a lot of stars who are on the circle around his mind," said Bonhomme. "Something with a lot of possible inspirations, possible ways to explore, and we had to choose one."
The world's been without Philip K. Dick for over 30 years now. He can't play "Californium," we can't ask him what he thinks of it. But if the universe created in the game is familiar to his friends and fans, it must be doing something right.
"We are living in a computer-programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs," Dick once said at a 1977 science fiction conference in France. "We would have the overwhelming impression that we were re-living the present. Deja vu."
Maybe we've all been characters in a PKD video game all along.