EatLA talks perfect pizza and LA's best Chinese food ... Highland Park reactivates a neighborhood treasure ... Hard Times ...
Highland Park celebrates relighting of iconic theater sign
For more than a decade, the large sign over Highland Park’s only movie theater was hard to see at night. A ceremony recently shed light on the neighborhood’s resurgence.
The Highland Theatre sign has risen a few stories above Figueroa Street since 1924. But nobody’s changed its lightbulbs in a long time. Local organizations, businesses and the National Park Service finally teamed up to raise money to restore its former glow.
Los Angeles City Councilman Ed Reyes bought enough bulbs to light the very last “E” in “THEATRE.” "You’re going to see this illuminated and you’ll watch it from all over Highland Park. It’s a landmark. It’s kind of like the lighthouse effect."
Seconds before the clock struck 8, the countdown began. At 8, the sign lit up and the crowd cheered.
It’s a beacon to guide visitors toward, for instance, dinner at the nearby Italian restaurant, a $6 first-run movie and a warm drink afterwards at the Antigua Bread Café.
Eat-LA: Pizza, Underground Restaurants, and the Best Chinese Food
Colleen Bates hosts another episode of EatLA, checking out a Neapolitan pizza joint and talking with LA Magazine's (James Beard Award-winning) Patric Kuh about the top Chinese restaurants in LA. Plus, Jenn Garbee on the problem with "underground" restaurants.
The first (TOP) audio file is this week's EAT:LA segment. The second (BOTTOM) segment is the full, lightly-edited interview between Patric Kuh and Colleen Bates.
Hard Times: Monty Phillips and Kai Schmoll
Here's another installment of our Hard Times series, where Off-Ramp talks to everyday people and ask them how they're faring, since the recession ended, supposedly. This time, Kevin Ferguson talks with a Mt Washington couple whose plans have changed drastically: they've lost their jobs, possibly their house, but that might not be a bad thing.
KPCC video looks at the Arab Spring in the Southland
On December 17, a Tunisian street vendor set himself alight and sparked protests that engulfed the Middle East. Six months and six countries later, the Arab Spring has swept from Tunisia to Cairo. And to California. The majority of California's nearly quarter-million Arab Americans live in the Southland. That portion alone is more than in any other U.S. state. KPCC found out what it's like for them to watch a revolution from 8,000 miles away. It's our Arab Spring in the Southland project, check it out, and CLICK THROUGH to see a video.
CyberFrequencies takes a highly skeptical look at Google’s Chrome Netbook
CyberFrequencies takes a highly skeptical look at Google’s Chrome Netbook, which saves your data remotely, and the company’s proposal for self-driving cars in Nevada.
Neo-Nazi father murder: Did a violent life lead to a violent death at the hands of his 10-year-old?
For the next month, psychiatrists will evaluate a 10-year-old Riverside boy accused of murdering his father. Authorities say the young boy confessed to the killing during an interview with detectives.
The father was Jeff Hall, the leader of a local white supremacist group. His son had been steeped in his violent, neo-Nazi rhetoric. But there could have been a more basic motive: an attempt to stop beatings in the Hall home.
Authorities say that early on May 1, the boy took a loaded revolver from his parents’ bedroom, crept downstairs where his father was dozing on a sofa, and fired a single shot that killed him. Court documents say the boy told a detective that he shot his dad to stop him from beating him and his stepmother.
“When we’re talking about a juvenile, especially one that is this young, we take into account the understanding that a 10-year old may not have the same ability to comprehend what his actions have done than an 18-year-old and so forth," said Riverside County prosecutor Ambrosio Rodriguez.
The boy had been thrown out of public school, apparently for his violent tendencies. Those tendencies, and the murder, might be the product of the father’s violent lifestyle. Jeff Hall led the West Coast chapter of the National Socialist Movement, an international neo-Nazi group, and Rodriguez expects the group's hate-filled cause to be part of the case.
"It already is," Rodriguez said. "It’s hateful vitriol and raising five children with such unmitigated hate, I don’t see how that doesn’t become an issue when we’re talking about a 10-year old boy."
The five Hall children were thrust into the maelstrom of the neo-Nazi movement. The boy joined his father on militia-style border patrols with armed white supremacists. He and a sister were trained how to shoot. The parents hosted monthly National Socialist Movement meetings and kept loaded guns in the house.
“It feels like a normal home. I walked in on a Saturday and the mom had bunny rabbit ears on and she was jumping around with the two little girls," said photographer Julie Platner, who had been documenting the family.
Platner spent a year following Hall, his family and his acolytes. Authorities say the family lived in squalor in a house unfit for children. On the two days Platner visited the house, the family put on a sunny face.
"They are lovely children, you know?" she said. "They also have a swastika hanging in their living room. They were exposed to way too much, obviously. They’re the casualties of all this.”
Brian Levin, a criminologist at Cal State San Bernardino, has monitored the National Socialist Movement and other neo-Nazi hate groups for years. He says the movement is full of emotionally troubled people masquerading as political activists.
"It’s an unhappy individual existence for many of these people because it is a veneer that covers up a lot of deep pain and shortcomings and that’s part of the story that you don’t see," he said. "It’s beyond debilitating, and in some ways it’s even worse, as we’ve seen here.”
Hall’s death is a blow to the neo-Nazi movement. The burly, media-savvy skinhead founded the group's West Coast chapter three years ago. Within months, he’d assembled a band of young, swastika-waving supporters to march against a Riverside synagogue and day labor sites — events that drew scores of counter protestors and sometimes turned bloody.
“He was someone who was reliable, who could articulately or semi-articulately speak to the media. Certainly to the NSM in California, it is going to disable the movement for the immediate future,” Levin said.
Hall seemed to relish the chaos triggered by the group's street actions. But in a 2009 interview with KPCC, he tried to portray the group as a non-violent, pro-family organization trying to better the nation with white supremacist ideology.
“We have intelligent people with intelligent things to say who’re focused on positive actions, you know, and we have play groups. Their children are playing with children they can relate to. We give ‘em hope. And we remind our guys we’re not gonna change the world overnight. We’re not gonna change the nation overnight. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time," said Hall.
Hall’s hope is over. It was ended, investigators say, by the son he wanted to follow in his footsteps. The boy — a wiry, shaggy haired child in a baggy orange jumpsuit and shackles — appeared briefly in a Riverside County juvenile courtroom this week. His stepmother has been charged with keeping guns and ammunition in reach of children. His attorney will enter a plea on his behalf in July.
Theatricum Botanicum teaches stagecraft to schoolkids
UPDATE 5-20-2011: The Theatricum Botanicum, a 3-hundred seat outdoor amphitheater nestled in unspoiled Topanga Canyon, opens its season the first weekend of June with two Shakespeare plays - The Merry Wives of Windsor and A Midsummer Night's Dream. They'll be joined over the summer by four other plays in repertory. The Theatricum Botanicum was founded by noted actor and liberal Will Geer, and it's still run by his daughter Ellen Geer. The plays are just part of the story. Thousands of schoolkids also come to the compound every year on field trips, to learn about the stage and stagecraft. Here's a piece from the Off-Ramp archives.
Steve Julian Makes It Easy
As a journalist and host, it's my job to generalize from the specific, and often to generalize from the personally specific, so: Every time I go to a local theatre production, I say to myself, "Self, that was good! I need to do this more often." Then, it takes me months to get out again, and I repeat the whole process. Since I'm not an extrordinary person, I'm going to assume, like me, that a reasonable amount of you need a kick in the pants to see more local theatre. KPCC Morning Edition host Steve Julian, in his non-work capacity, is delivering just such a kick ... not to your pants, but to your e-mail in-box. He writes:
A little over a year ago it occured to me, as a theater major, avocational actor, and public radio host, I knew few of the theater companies that sent me press releases. I'd visited fewer still. I was inspired to start blogging about local theater companies, actors, directors and playwrights. Within a couple months, LAStageAlliance invited me to write for their website and I have since interviewed Marsha Mason, Kathleen Turner, Tim Robbins, and many others.
While I still write feature stories for my site and for LAStageTimes, I also compile each week a list of upcoming and extended shows, so readers can plan their ticket purchases. After all, I have to do something with all the press releases I get! Anyone can receive it via e-blast at stevejulian@live.com or on Facebook.
Steve is currently playing Ernie in Neil Simon's Rumors at the Covina Center for the Performing Arts through June 12; and on June 1, he appears as Carl the bus driver in William Inge's Bus Stop at the Candlelight Pavilion in Claremont, an IVRT production.
Remember the knock-down dragout between Carl and Beau in the movie version of Bus Stop, starring Don Murray as Beau? Sorry Steve, but if you played Carl and Don reprised his role, even though he's 80+, Don would win this time. I'm just saying...
Marc Haefele on novelist Theodore Dreiser: his work, his women, & his love affair with LA
In 1900, in the last months of Queen Victoria's reign, a young man from Indiana published "Sister Carrie,” a book that blew away the Victorian literary era. The man was Theodore Dreiser. Off-Ramp literary commentator Marc Haefele says he was the greatest author ever to live in Los Angeles.
In every possible way, "Sister Carrie" was against the morality of the 19th-century. It's the story of a small-town girl who goes to the big city and, after failing as a factory worker, becomes a kept woman, a show girl, then a famous actress … all without a shred of compunction. Overreacting to public outrage, the publisher -- for whom I was to work, 60 years later -- suppressed the novel, leaving Dreiser unable to benefit from its notoriety and in near-suicidal poverty.
So his career went for 25 years; "The Genius;" a novelization of his love life, brought more scandal than success. "The Financier," first volume of a trilogy he'd spend his life completing, was assailed as Un-American. Not until the publication of "An American Tragedy," which you could subtitle: "How to succeed in business by drowning your pregnant girlfriend," did he win both popular and critical success. A lot of us still remember Shelley Winters as that young victim in George Stevens' Oscar-winning 1951 movie version, "A Place in the Sun," with Montgomery Clift as her confused young killer and Elizabeth Taylor as the rich girl he pined for.
Dreiser said that what rules us is our insatiable desires. He said: "I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is."
Similar uncertainties infected his love life and his politics. He had so many affairs that when he moved here in 1929, he used a PO box to keep the discards away from his doorstep.
Toward the end, he married longtime-flame Helen Richardson secretly, so as not to alarm another amour, Marguerite Tjader, who was busy editing his manuscripts in a bungalow near his West Hollywood home. But after he died in 1945 -- Charlie Chaplin was a pallbearer -- Helen was buried next to him at Forest Lawn in Glendale.
His politics were kinkier than his love life. A self-described Bolshevik, who joined the Communist Party, he defended the poor and downtrodden, including the famous Scottsboro Boys of Alabama. He advocated gay rights. Yet he hated Britain and railed against America going to war against Hitler -- making a public fool of himself just before Pearl Harbor.
Most film writers despised LA. But Dreiser fell in love with the Southland. He wrote:
"It did not make any difference to me that there was very little intellectually doing in Los Angeles ... I was lost in contemplating the velvety brown mountains, the amazing flowers, and the relaxed mood in which everyone took the perpetual and to me stimulating and restoring sunshine. As a matter of fact, I owe Southern California a debt -- a romantic one to be sure, but nevertheless one I shall never be able to pay."
There are no heroes, no villains in Dreiser, just victims of the desires the world both instills in us and cannot satisfy. And debts we cannot pay.
For Off-Ramp, this is Marc Haefele.