A money management class at a homeless shelter ... Jon Bon Jovi supports LAMP with a tour ... Russ Parsons: how to bbq without stress ... MUST READ: Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" ... Queena Kim says goodbye ... Lisa See on her latest: "Shanghai Girls" ... a violin master class with Jennifer Frautschi.
Marketplace Money visits LAMP homeless shelter's money management class
It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Along with getting homeless people the help they need to deal with their mental illness and addiction issues, there are also a lot of homeless who -- whether or not they have those other problems to deal with -- need a lot of help learning how to manage money.
When I visited LAMP Community with Jon Bon Jovi (below), I learned that the shelter runs a bank for its clients and holds regular money management courses for them. I told Tess Vigeland, host of Marketplace Money (SUNDAYS AT 2PM), about it, and she thought it was a great idea for a story.
Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Lopez, and Rabe visit LAMP homeless center
(THIS PIECE ORIGINALLY RAN IN MARCH ON OFF-RAMP)
Most people know Jon Bon Jovi as a rock hero. But for the last six years, he’s used his fame and money to fight homelessness. The Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation has built 250 units of affordable housing around the country. When he’s on tour, Bon Jovi makes fact-finding visits to the poor parts of town to learn more about the causes and cures of homelessness.
Ahead of his gig at Staples Center (Thursday, March 4), on Monday he toured LAMP Community, the homeless center on Skid Row. Steve Lopez, the LA Times columnist who has chronicled the recovery of homeless musician Nathaniel Ayers, brought Bon Jovi to LAMP and was impressed with the work he's done.
(L-R: LAMP Interim Executive Director Shannon Murray, Jon Bon Jovi, LA Times columnist Steve Lopez, KPCC’s John Rabe.)
If you’re a big Bon Jovi fan, you know that Jon Bon Jovi’s Soul Foundation does a lot for homeless people. If you’re a former 1980s DJ who played Bon Jovi back then but wasn’t really into their music all that much, it might come as a surprise.
I’m in the latter camp, and now my eyes are open. The LA Times’ Steve Lopez (read his Skid Row stories here) got me invited to Jon’s tour of LAMP Monday afternoon. (Bon Jovi is in SoCal for the band’s big concert tour, and plays Staples Center Thursday.) Turns out Bon Jovi has been seriously working on the issue for years, since a day he saw a homeless man asleep in front of Philly’s city hall and said to himself, “I can do something about this.”
(Of this photo, Steve Lopez said, “While I am several years older than Jon, it’s interesting that we have exactly the same hair.”)
For the fans: JBJ is a really good looking 48-year old (DOB: 3/2/1962). Medium height, good hair, lean like Montgomery Clift, but with better arms. And best of all, smart and well-spoken. Here he is outside LAMP:
What I also liked: he wouldn’t sign some non-homeless jerk’s guitar, which was obviously destined for e-Bay, but he gladly and graciously signed autographs for homeless guys.
Queena Kim talks with Father Greg Boyle
...and a farewell (of sorts) as Queena heads north to the Bay Area for new opportunities.
New PMCA exhibit: Explore the LA River without getting your feet wet.
The concrete, channelized Los Angeles River has inspired rallies to clean it up, naturalize it, and improve it. An exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art makes a different argument ... for beauty in the graffiti, debris, and nature, that already thrive there. KPCC's Molly Peterson talked with the curators. One piece, above, is made of Plexglas and fish.
The river exhibit,The Ulysses Guide to the LA River, is up through July 3.
Dandelion Wine Rewound
KPCC's Molly Peterson, assigned to test Kindle, rediscovers a classic of summer.
Molly Peterson, KPCC's Environment Reporter, writes:
I owe John a debt of thanks this week.
I'm reviewing the KindleDX for CyberFrequencies. Adrift in the sea of Amazon's Kindle store, I Tweeted for help. The float John tossed me was Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine." Queena Kim (Off-Ramp and CF producer) tells me he re-reads it every year.* (An aside: I approve wholeheartedly of re-reading things every year; mine is "Harriet the Spy," "Hamlet," "The Odyssey," Julian Barnes' "A History of the World in 10½ Chapters," and Gatsby. Rereading helps me mark my own changes. You should try it, too.)
Anyway, I hadn't read "Dandelion Wine" in a dozen years, a dozen and a half.
I DO remember balefully looking out my suburban window and wishing it were a cupola, once I looked that word up, and wishing the world would do what I told it to, like Douglas Spaulding. I've never forgotten Mr. Sanderson and the Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes. But it was Off-Ramp, and Rabe, who taught me to claim Ray Bradbury for Los Angeles. (I'm getting an education in the library here, like Bradbury did, though far less diligently, and probably with more late fees.) And it is in Los Angeles, this year, that I did a story about TreePeople's demonstration cistern, and the idea that people should have rain barrels. So this passage struck a different chord this time 'round:
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"Ready now, the rain barrel!"
Nothing else in the world would do but the pure waters which had been summoned from the lakes far away and the sweet fields of grassy dew on early morning, lifted to the open sky, carried in laundered clusters nine hundred miles, brushed with wind, electrified with high voltage, and condensed upon cool air. This water, falling, raining, gathered yet more of the heavens in its crystals. Taking something of the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south, the water made rain and the rain, within this hour of rituals, would be well on its way to wine.
Douglas ran with the dipper. He plunged it deep in the rain barrel. "Here we go!"
The water was silk in the cup; clear, faintly blue silk. It softened the lip and the throat and the heart, if drunk. This water must be carried in dipper and bucket to the cellar, there to be leavened in freshets, in mountain streams, upon the dandelion harvest.
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I wondered, as I read it, what else would fall from the sky now in Los Angeles. Our rain picks up nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide before making its way into the barrels (and I'll be visiting some barrels in Mar Vista later this month, I hope). Those nasty gases are in the atmosphere courtesy my car, and yours, and other polluters regulated by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. I'm conscious of that now in a way I wasn't last time. Does it wreck the book? Nope. Bradbury's vivid writing lets me imagine my way into the skies, where the east wind and the west wind and the north and south give something to the blue-silk water that will be leavened in freshets (a wonderful word, freshets). And my imagination gives life to that water; makes it true, if only for an instant, if only in my mind. But something that feels that true, that way, might become true, for more than a minute, another way. Maybe that's why Dandelion Wine seems less sad, this time. (And dandelion wine seems more drinkable.) Maybe this is how I'm different THIS rereading.
I've got no cream-sponge tennis shoes. But as I thought about rain barrels, and Los Angeles, and Bradbury, my feet rocked back and forth in my sandals.
"Tom...does everyone in the world...know he's alive?" "Sure. Heck, yes!" The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow. "I hope they do," whispered Douglas. "Oh I sure hope they know."
So: thanks Rabe. And, Ray B.
*Note: I TRY to re-read it every summer, on advice from my old friend Bob. I'd be a better person if I did. -- John
THE VIDEO BELOW:
Ray Bradbury giving a talk before Saturday's performance of his three-act play, "Yestermorrows," taken from three short stories: A Device Out of Time, The Cistern, and The Meadow. It's at the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena until September 5th.
Before the talk, they showed a video from July 20, 1969 in which Walter Cronkite introduced Mike Wallace, who interviewed Ray the evening Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
(Note to sensitive persons: Bradbury is a little salty in the video, but he's in great form.)
Thanks to John King Tarpinian who sent us the video link.
LA Times Food editor Russ Parsons on Barbecuing: calm down, plan ahead, don't show off
A few years ago, after hosting a barbecue and not enjoying myself at all, then going to Russ Parson's house -- he's the James Beard Award-winning food writer and edits the LA Times Food section -- and noting how he stayed calm as a fluted cucumber, I asked Russ for advice on throwing as barbecue and not throwing a skewer through someone.
Violin Wisdom from the Master
Jennifer Frautschi—a professional concert violinist—has performed with the LA Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and more. She's also a Pasadena native. Recently Jennifer was back in town to perform Beethoven's violin concerto with the Pasadena Symphony. She stopped by KPCC's Crawford Family Forum to hold a master class for two very lucky student violinists.
The Beer Float
Off-Ramp producer Queena Kim has been hanging out at Golden State on Fairfax lately. They’re known for their burgers and beer, but they also make a delicious ... beer float. Don't gag. Queena talked with co-owner Jason Bernstein, and tried one.
Come inside for the Beer Float movie and a link to Golden State. If you can't make it to Golden State yourself, have a virtual beer float with Queena below.
Lisa See's "Shanghai Girls" on sisterhood and the immigrant experience
UPDATE: We're reposting this 2010 interview so you're not left with a pre-cliffhanger!
Southern Californian Lisa See is touring the country with the paperback edition of "Shanghai Girls," a meticulously researched novel about two young Chinese women who flee Shanghai in the late 1930s. It's a harrowing journey as they face the Japanese, race laws, and the Red Scare. Off-Ramp host John Rabe met See in Chinatown -- one of LA's four historic Chinatowns -- to talk about the book.