How strong are the Watts Towers? Do you know the Natural History Museum's newest taxidermist? And military erotic fiction: 50 Shades of Khaki?
PHOTOS: A look inside the taxidermy lab at The Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum is celebrating its 100th year this summer. They’ll celebrate with two new exhibits, Becoming LA and Nature Gardens which will feature dozens of taxidermy animals including birds, possums, and cows.
Off-Ramp’s Mukta Mohan talked with taxidermist Allis Markham to find out what it’s like behind the scenes at the museum and to learn about the art of taxidermy.
In the North American Mammal Hall at The Natural History Museum, families gather around dioramas and watch rare animals in their natural habitats. There are jaguars, bison… even polar bears. But unlike at zoos where the animals roam around, all of the animals here are preserved and made to look alive through taxidermy. Allis Markham is the newest member of the museum’s taxidermy team.
Markham describes taxidermy as “science meets art.” She says, “At the end of the day, we’re artists. We’re creating sculpture. It’s model making. You’re just working with this organic material that is essentially an animal.”
On the fourth floor of the museum is a temperature controlled taxidermy lab with no windows—that keeps the skins from fading in the sunlight. Death masks line the walls. Thousands of reference photos lie in drawers, and a full-sized Corriente cow stands in the middle of the room.
All of the museum’s animals either were donated or found dead in the wild by staff members like Markham. The space is cluttered with tools used for taxidermy — steel brushes, thread, glass eyes. Markham uses scalpels to skin animals and prepare them for mounting.
“I mean it’s like the old phrase, ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat,'" said Markham. "I can tell you first hand, that there is. There’s several different types of incisions.”
In her lab, a parrot lies on a tray with its wings spread out. All of the bird’s insides have been removed, revealing the slimy skin underneath the feathers.
Markham gently holds the parrot skin up to a fleshing wheel, a rotating wire brush that shaves off the fat from animals.
“It’s almost weird for me that people are like, 'oh grossed out, that’s dead.' Well, it ceased living, but it’s still very much organic and there are things happening with it, and I’ll make it look alive again,” says Markham. “It’s all just science, and it’s all anatomy and nature, and I think that’s beautiful.”
To view some of Markham’s recent work, visit the new Nature Gardens exhibit opening in June and the Becoming LA exhibit which opens in July at The Natural History Museum.
LeVar Burton's Kickstarter campaign for Reading Rainbow is a runaway best-seller
UPDATE 5/29/2014: Reading Rainbow's Kickstarter campaign to get the long-running show on the web and into classrooms was an immediate success. As I write this, LeVar Burton's request for $1m in funding has been almost doubled.
First, not all families have access to tablets. Our goal is to cultivate a love of reading in all children, not just those that have tablets. To reach kids everywhere, we need to be everywhere: we need to be on the web.
Second, a resounding number of teachers have told me that they want Reading Rainbow in their classrooms, where they know it can make a difference. We will provide it, along with the tools that teachers need, including teacher guides, leveling, and dashboards. And in disadvantaged classrooms, we'll provide it for free.
-- Reading Rainbow Kickstarter campaign
I spoke with LeVar Burton in 2012, soon after he and business partner Mark Wolfe launched the Reading Rainbow app, and you can hear the passion in his voice as we talk about using books to connect kids with ideas and the world around them. We also spoke about "Roots," "Star Trek," and his childhood in Germany.
(Full disclosure: Off-Ramp believes reading is, as they used to say, fundamental.)
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"It must have been an incredible burden for you as an actor," I said, "to be the son of Richard Burton." Without batting an eye, LeVar Burton responds, "Well, he is what we referred to as the white sheep of the family, and so we don't talk about him."
But then, LeVar Burton goes immediately into a story about how, growing up without a father, he'd pretend his father was Peter O'Toole, one of those actors who at that time (the 1960s), embodied civilization.
Burton has added a lot to civilization. He played Kunta Kinte in Roots, the epic miniseries. He brought depth and humor to the role of Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But the thing he's most proud of is hosting Reading Rainbow for some 25 years, a show that's become a cultural touchstone for generations. It explored books and connected lit to the real world.
The show went off the air a few years ago, the victim, Burton says, of No Child Left Behind, which favored teaching the fundamentals over engaging them further in literature.
But Burton isn't wallowing in the past. Just as there probably won't be another Roots, a nation-uniting media event, he's embraced the idea that maybe Reading Rainbow can thrive best in the new media atmosphere. To that end, this year, Burton and business partner Mark Wolfe revived Reading Rainbow as an app, where it quickly became the fastest growing educational application.
In our wide ranging conversation, Burton and I talk about early influences, his respect for St Augustine, what he learned from comic books, and much more, including "Magical Negroes."
Lou Adler Part 1: Tapestry, Cooke, Wonderful World, Jan & Dean, and Talent
In the first part of Alex Ben Block's interview with Lou Adler, the entertainment legend talks about how he recognized Carole King's talent (easy) and won a Grammy for producing "Tapestry." Plus, Jan & Dean, Sam Cooke, and his association with Herb Alpert.
(Alex is a Hollywood historian, frequent Off-Ramp guest, and senior editor at The Hollywood Reporter.)
Military wives answer to "Fifty Shades of Grey"
Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover – at least this kind of cover. The devilishly handsome man with the unbuttoned shirt and manly biceps … the comely woman a-swoon in his arms, her dress cut perilously low … it’s the bodice-ripper, the romance novel. Sometimes it’s a very explicit romance novel. “Fifty Shades of Grey” has upped the ante in the genre, but there’s also what you might call “Fifty Shades of … Khaki.” Military romantic erotica is about men and women in and out of uniform, and Patt Morrison speaks with Cat Johnson, one of the authors in the anthology called “Duty and Desire” about the very particular audience for this fiction.
Alonzo Bodden on donating a kidney to his brother and finding humor in the process
On March 26th, comedian and Comedy Congress regular Alonzo Bodden underwent kidney surgery. Only his kidney was fine, he was donating one of his to his older brother.
Bodden talks about the misconceptions of transplant surgery and what he learned during the process.
Interview Highlights
Tell me a little bit about your brother:
"He's my older brother, three years older, and he used to beat me up, which I respected. That was his job. I reminded him that it's a good thing that he never hit me in the kidney. But we've always been close. His kidney problems started about 10 or 12 years ago. So, last summer he got down to about 15 percent kidney function and he told me he was going to have to go on dialysis. I told him, well, I'll give you a kidney. I had to undergo a whole battery of tests, which kind of bothered me because, obviously my kidney is better than his. The doctor was actually raving about how big my kidney was. He said we actually had to clear space inside your brother to fit it in."
What are the risks for family members donating kidneys?
"I think it's easier with family. The risk, of course, is rejection, and I think the rejection rate is much lower for a family member. I've tried to come up with a word to describe it. The best I can say is that it's an inconvenience. I went into the hospital Tuesday morning, they took out my kidney. Tuesday afternoon I was able to get out of the hospital be and walk around. By Friday I was out of the hospital and on the following Thursday I was back on stage."
Have you been able to use any of this in your material on stage?
"Oh, absolutely. I get a ton of material out of this. Fortunately I had a doctor with a sense of humor. He said that he and his partner have been together forever, they're like Jordan and Pippen, and I told him he better be Jordan."
What have you learned about kidney disease and transplants?
"There's a low donation rate compared to those who could donate. I know people are afraid, but once I spoke to the doctor and he explained what they were doing and how they do it, it's literally a few days in the hospital and then you're good to go. The other thing was that I didn't know about the causes of kidney disease. Hypertension and diabetes are two things that lead to kidney disease, and I just think that if you're diabetic watching your sugar is a pain, but watching your sugar when you're hooked up to a dialysis machine is a much bigger pain."
Celebrating and preserving the Watts Towers
For more than 30 years, a man who stood scarcely five feet tall built a kind of skyscraper in his back yard. The Watts Towers is a soaring cluster of edifices, a supreme example of outsider art. The tallest of them stands nearly a hundred feet high, fanciful pieces of tile and glass and china and seashells covering a steel framework that has proven to be surprisingly durable. The city had condemned the towers to demolition, but when they passed a stress test one Sunday morning in 1959, a crowd of several hundred people began cheering – and the city inspector tore down the “condemned” sign and declared that now he was on the Towers’ side.
They are treasures, listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and as a national historic landmark, but they are also nearly 90 years old in places, and heat and moisture can take a toll. So UCLA and LACMA experts are working to stabilize them so that they will last into the next century. The unlikely spires of Watts – have a listen.