Meet Mack Robinson, Jesse's brother ... Milton Love does not love books like Hooty the Owl Who Couldn’t Fly or Gretchen the Bed Bug with an Attitude ... Bob Boilen and the songs that changed our lives
Expo Line opens, and former Mayor Villaraigosa could be saying, 'I told you so'
The Expo Line, which now winds all the way from downtown LA to Santa Monica, opens Friday (with free rides Friday and Saturday). And if anyone deserves to say, "I told you so," it's former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Endorsed by many of the key subway opponents, including Waxman and Yaroslavsky, Villaraigosa talked of a “subway to the sea” during the campaign and staked a big chunk of his political capital on a promise to expand the rail system. “It would be the most utilized subway in the nation, maybe the world,” the mayor recently said. “It would also be the most cost-effective public-transportation project in America.” Villaraigosa took the first step by assuming the helm of the MTA. Now, the question is whether he will have the clout to move the political mountains required to get Los Angeles the transit system it deserves.
— LA Weekly, 8/18/2005
Villaraigosa pushed it when few thought it would really happen, including me. I specifically remember chiding him in person and on the radio over his predictions that there would be this line.
I wasn't alone. As Metro blogger Steve Hymon writes, there were transit activists pushing for the Expo line as far back as the 1980s, but there was a lot of resistance and no money. Even he says he was skeptical, that there was a “better chance of planetary takeover by apes.”
The money problem changed in 2008 with the passage of Measure R, and now we have this vital link in the transit grid.
I spoke with Villaraigosa Wednesday at the Santa Monica station; listen to the audio to see if he says a well-deserved, "I told you so."
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
Song of the week: "L.A. Freeway" by Guy Clark
This week’s song of the week is “L.A. Freeway” by Guy Clark, who died this week. He was 74. Clark was born in Texas and was a prominent singer and songwriter in the state’s outlaw country scene, calling Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle his peers. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and couldn’t wait to get out — that’s where he wrote "L.A. Freeway."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa7EkXpy8jE
Perhaps best known as a songwriter, Clark's music was performed by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill and more. He appeared in the acclaimed 1976 documentary Heartworn Highways, here's a video of Clark performing "Old Time Feeling" in the film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X_nl1v9x8Y
Hidden History: Mack Robinson, Jackie's long overlooked brother
Robert Petersen hosts and produces the podcast The Hidden History of Los Angeles, and shares it with Off-Ramp.
In Pasadena, in a little park across Garfield Avenue from the iconic City Hall, the sun is shining on a huge statue of a man’s head. This bronze went up in 1997, decades later than it should have. The man it represents is part of LA’s hidden history.
At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Jesse Owens crushed Hitler’s Aryan dreams. But look closely. The runner who took silver in the 200-meter sprint was also a black American. He was Mack Robinson, from Pasadena.
Watch Owens and Robinson at the 1936 Summer Olympics
Pasadena was incorporated in 1886, and as long as it’s been a city, it’s had a black community. There were black political clubs in the late 1890s, and in 1902, a black paper, The Enterprise. In 1909, when congregants of Pasadena’s first black church began building a new church, there were threats to burn it down, so they took turns standing guard at night with rifles.
In 1914, the city opened a whites-only swimming pool, called Brookside Plunge. After black protests, they allowed blacks to use it once a week. Then the city drained it and refilled it with fresh water.
This is the Pasadena that Mack Robinson and his family found when they arrived from Georgia in 1920.
Deserted by her husband and providing for five children, Mack’s mother worked as a maid, and by 1923 saved enough money to buy a home. But the home was in a white neighborhood. Some neighbors proposed buying them out, but Mack’s sister later recalled the plan died out when a white resident declared that the Robinsons were good neighbors.
In the early 1930s, Mack Robinson went to Muir High School, but didn’t take part in sports right away because of a heart problem. His mother signed a waiver, and Mack persevered, helping Muir win the state championship in 1934.
Mack had one year at Pasadena Junior College — now PCC — before he won a regional Olympic qualifying. But it seemed unlikely that Mack would even make it to the final trials, because they were in New York. Mack recalled, “No one paid an athlete’s way in those days. The trials were in New York, and Pasadena Junior College didn’t have any money to send me. And I didn’t have a dime to make a trip like that on my own.”
A group of Pasadena businessmen stepped in and raised the money, and this unknown kid from Pasadena knocked out pre-race favorites Foy Draper of USC and 1932 silver medalist Ralph Metcalfe to secure a spot for the 1936 Olympics.
“After I made the team, " Mack said, "I thought I’d get at least a pair of new shoes, or some coaching. But I was ignored. The coaches all hung around Owens and the USC guys because their coach was one of the team coaches. The only coaches I’d ever had, Al Walton and Otto Anderson, were back home in Pasadena.”
On race day in Berlin, Mack found himself in front of thousands of Germans, and just 15 feet from Adolf Hitler. In the 200-meter, Mack finished less than a half second behind Jesse Owens. And it’s even more impressive given the fact that Mack was wearing old worn down spikes — the same shoes he’d worn all season long in junior college in Pasadena. Jesse Owens was wearing brand new spikes from Adidas, in the first sponsorship for a male black athlete.
Said Mack, “Jesse got the coaching. I didn’t. I saw his television program, about his return to Berlin. He said that he and his coaches studied the styles of every runner… I always thought if I’d had some help I could have beaten Jesse, or made it even closer than it was.”
After Mack won his silver medal, you’d think Pasadena would have welcomed its new hero. Gold medalist Jesse Owens got a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan and $10,000 in cash. The winner of the bronze was recognized as a hero in the Netherlands, where he was honored across the nation as the “best sprinter of the white race.”
But Mack? “If anybody in Pasadena was proud of me, other than my family and close friends, they never showed it. I was totally ignored – the way I was ignored in Berlin – when I got home. The only time I got noticed was when somebody asked me if I’d race against a horse during an assembly at school.”
Mack won national collegiate and Amateur Athletic Union track titles at the University of Oregon, but quit school to go home and support his family. He got a job with the City of Pasadena as a street sweeper and later dug ditches and sewer lines. Many — like Mack’s wife Delano — were surprised Mack wasn’t offered a more prestigious job with the city.
“I really believe that if he were a white silver medalist coming home from Germany," Delano said, "he wouldn’t be digging ditches or asphalt. He would not be getting pennies for that type of job.”
Mack sometimes swept the streets in his Olympic sweatshirt, his silver medal around his neck.
During this time, Pasadena’s blacks pushed for and won some civil rights victories, but some allege the city retaliated by firing black employees, including Mack.
In 1970, Pasadena earned the dubious distinction of being the first non-Southern city ordered to desegregate its schools. And Pasadena’s public schools are where Mack Robinson found his true calling. He became a truant officer at Muir and an activist against blight and crime in northwest Pasadena. An LA Times article from 1983 referred to Mack as a “crusader for law, order, decency, small children, good neighborhoods and good government.”
For example, Mack went after a local liquor store where neighbors were being accosted. He stopped a den of gambling and prostitution, and led a crusade to fix streets, sidewalks and gutters. Mack could often be seen at Pasadena Board of City Directors meetings. “I’m a thorn in their side," he said. "I’m a squeaky wheel that gets the grease, but what I’m trying to get is lubricant for a lifetime.”
The 1980s saw Pasadena get its first black mayor and Rose Queen, and Mack finally began to receive some recognition for his athletic accomplishments. In 1984, he helped carry the Olympic flag into the LA Coliseum for the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics.
Mack’s legacy was cemented in Pasadena when, in 1997, the city honored him with this nine-foot-high bronze sculpture in Centennial Square. He died at 85 in 2000, the same year a post office and PCC’s stadium were named after him.
His statue spends half its time in shadow, just as he was overshadowed by Jesse Owens in 1936, by Pasadena’s discriminatory policies when he got back home, and by the man whose statue is next to his in this little park across from City Hall … Mack Robinson’s brother, Jackie Robinson.
Commentary: Enough with the dead animal books!
Remember "Ring of Bright Water"? Did you read "H is for Hawk"? Those memoirs that talk about the wisdom and love animals shared with the authors? Milton Love, a regular Off-Ramp commentator and UC Santa Barbara marine biologist, has had it with all of them.
Because I am a biologist people often ask me if I have read the latest human-meets-animal book. Hell no.
You know the type, books like "Hooty: the Owl Who Couldn’t Fly," "Gretchen: the Bed Bug with an Attitude," or "Charlene: the Anaconda in My Bidet."
I have not read any of these books.
They're all basically the same. The author picks up some random animal, the more random the better, takes it home, and starts taking copious notes.
For the animals don’t just live in the house – no. Through their mischievous and endearing behaviors, Hooty or Gretchen or Charlene preternaturally enrich these authors’ lives, teaching their owners the kind of wisdom that in the past could only be gained by wearing hair-lined jockey shorts and perching on a cactus in the desert.
Seriously, most of these books are so heart-warming that by page 59 your ticker melts right through its pericardial sac and singes your pancreas.
Never after reading one of these tomes do you say to yourself, “Gee, I’m really glad I don’t have an anaconda living in my bidet.”
No! What you really say is “Hey Madge, you know what we really need? I know, after some weather stripping around the back door. Yep, what we really need is an anaconda in the bidet, because anacondas are so… very wise.”
So why don’t I read these books? It’s because the animal always dies at the end. Yep, the story arcs are always: wild animal falls in with author; animal’s behavior teaches author many life lessons; animal croaks; book ends.
It’s like only through its death will we understand what the animal is trying to relate to us.
And while we are on the subject, doesn’t this remind you of that other book genre: Wisdom That Only Random Truly Old People Can Teach Us?
Here the pattern is basically the same and let’s look at the structure of a future blockbuster: Old Charlie, retired postal worker, has hemorrhoids; old Charlie goes to a proctologist every week; while being examined old Charlie utters words of wisdom that would make Confucius rend his garments; proctologist takes copious notes; old Charlie dies; proctologist gets three-book deal with first book, titled Nothing is Left Behind, optioned by Martin Scorsese.
Hm. In thinking about it, I just might read that book if it ended with: “And, today, if you come over to Charlie’s house, why there he will be, perched on his bidet, trading words of wisdom with Charlene the Anaconda.”
'Your Song Changed My Life': NPR's Bob Boilen's stories of musicians' inspirations
Off-Ramp host John Rabe interviews Bob Boilen about his book "Your Song Changed My Life," which blends Bob's personal musical memoir with his interviews with 35 musicians who explain how a single piece of music changed them forever. Boilen created and hosts All Songs Considered and Tiny Desk Concerts for NPR.
Your book is about the big question, what music means to people and how it works.
Right, right. And often it works deep into the emotion. It's often a catalyst, it often happens that, that moment of inspiration, hearing a song often happens somewhere in the pre-pubescent or early pubescence — you know, 13, 14, 15, sometimes later. But something hits you. You hear words, or a sound, that makes, in this case, the 35 musicians in this book to pick up a pen or pick up an instrument.
Maybe the weirdest one is Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam. You asked "What's the song that changed your life?" And it wasn't some mystical tune.
Yeah, he picked a rock 'n' roller, the Beatles doing that Isley Brothers tune "Twist and Shout," and it was like, "OK... what do you mean?" Some of these musicians, the conversations are windy; some musicians know exactly what they want. Cat Stevens, he talked about "West Side Story" — he grew up on a street where back alleys were theaters, but what made him want to pick up a guitar was the Beatles. It was simple, it was easy chords and he could somehow figure it out.
And there's a sense of accomplishment, when you want to play music, when you love it and you want to play it and you start to play on an instrument, be it a piano that may be in the family, or somebody's guitar, and it's frustrating, and there's a moment when you pick up an instrument. And it happened with me, where if you can't do it, you think you'll never do it.
Carrie Brownstein, from Sleater-Kinney and the TV show "Portlandia." What's her story?
Carrie's story is about finding something to belong to. Kids grow up, and sometimes you feel like the outsider, and Carrie's one of those kids. And often, the people who join bands, especially bands that play more brash, in-your-face music are often the odd ducks, and Carrie wanted to belong to something.
She was schooled by going to record stores, and finding people to be like, "If you like Nirvana, you should listen to Shocking Blue," you know — Nirvana did a cover of their song. Or, "You should listen to early Television, or Ramones," and Carrie was this sort of completist; she liked to find one thing, and then find its thread.
And she loved doing that. She fell in love with a song by the Replacements.
... A song called "Bastards of Young." You quoted her in "Your Song Changed My Life," saying, "It was that sort of endless struggle to be understood and have the people you want to love you, love you. That made so much sense to me in high school. And we are the sons of no one, 'Bastards of Young,' it was so important to me at the time, it seemed an anthem of wanting to be claimed."
And if you ever read her book, "Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl," so much of it is about wanting to be claimed, wanting to be connected to something. Wanting to find a place in life, a purpose and meaning. Carrie early on realized that she didn't want to be an observer, she wanted to be a participant, and that's how she came to what she came to — as a great musician, as a writer of script and comedy, all sorts of stuff.
What was the song that changed Smokey Robinson's life?
There was a moment in the Smokey Robinson interview where I was sure it was going to be an old R&B tune from the '50s, that's what he grew up on. But the song that changed his life was his own song, which was "Shop Around."
And it makes perfect sense — I mean here's a guy who, he and Berry Gordy were sort of getting a label going, and all of sudden they had this monster hit, and it gave them all the money to do what he wanted to do in life, so the song that changed Smokey Robinson's life was a song that Smokey Robinson wrote!
You interviewed 35 people, you put this book together, you interwove your musical experience with theirs. What did you learn?
The main thing I learned is that people love what they love, it was a mix of timing — of, maybe, fate — and we're very impressionable when we're in our teens. And folks who follow their heart are the happiest, so, you hear something, you love it, you want to do it, and you wind up doing it, and that was a story that happened quite a bit.
You're right. If you want to sing out, sing out.
Yeah, exactly.
For much more — including a mercifully short rendition of "Folsom Prison Blues" by Boilen and Rabe — listen to the audio.