Visit the youth homeless center that inspired Miley Cyrus's Happy Hippie Foundation ... The Cactus Store, the garden store for the drought-conscious ... Ride with Angelyne!
Tiki Ti to reopen after "indefinitely" turns into two weeks
UPDATE 5/22: The LA Times says the Tiki Ti is reopening today. Vicky Buhen told the paper, "We are definitely coming back Friday." I told you guys not to worry.
The owners of the Tiki Ti on Sunset say they're closing indefinitely, but will return.
So until the Buhen family can custom craft your Jet Pilot or Painkiller again, come back with us to 2007, when Off-Ramp took you inside the Tiki Ti on Sunset Boulevard and the owners made you a virtual tiki drink.
(This piece was part of a three part Off-Ramp tiki extravaganza, including a visit to the now-gone Trader Vic's and a fabulous home tiki bar.)
A look inside Echo Park's enigmatic Cactus Store
There’s a tiny storefront in Echo Park that glows red and orange at night. Inside, there are dozens and dozens of cactuses.
The Cactus Store opened its doors this past December. It's home to some of Los Angeles’ rarest and most bizarre cactuses. Carlos Morera and his uncle John Morera make up half the team that runs the store.
Why cactus? John Morera is a lifelong plant fan — he's collected bonsai and rare succulents for decades. He passed that interest along to his nephew. "They're these plants that basically survive the harshest conditions in the world. And they grow magnificently at the same time — with such little resources," said Carlos, who has a background in design. "They're incredibly intelligent plants."
The cactus is sourced from different collectors around the world. Carlos and his uncle regularly make trips to remote farms in the California desert near the United States-Mexico border to stock their inventory. The result is cactuses of all stripes — bizarre genetic mutants, small flowering succulents, and cactuses older than disco.
Carlos reaches for one of the smaller cactuses from the copiapoa genus — he estimates it to be about 40 years old. "It looks like a shriveled, sort of Jabba the Hutt sea urchin with fur on top that looks like it's sort of melting into the ground," Carlos said. "And then [it] has dead and alive flowers on top of it, as attractive as that sounds."
Cactuses pack the roughly 200 square foot space, and a false move can risk getting pricked by a needle. Carlos and John both admit to getting stabbed or scratched almost daily. Carlos's worst injury came from a large ferocactus.
"I walked backwards into it when I was moving a larger cactus," he said. "And it went into the back of my leg, it sort of got lodged there." For a time, the hooked needles started to hurt his nerves. And while the pain's gone, the two spines are still in his leg.
The Moreras believe that when you buy a potted cactus, you buy more than a plant. You buy something that can stay in a family for generations, something with years of history behind it. "If you're in here at night, they definitely have a presence to them. There's a lot of people that think cactus have a consciousness," he said. "They're such intelligent plants, and they've been around for so long."
We rode with Angelyne in her hot pink Corvette, and now you can, too!
Earlier this year, I had a surreal experience, when Angelyne - the most famous person to be famous for being famous -- took me for a ride in her hot pink Corvette. Angelyne turned out to be a great interview, as Off-Ramp listeners heard.
It turned out Angelyne was already a big fan of public radio, and offered to help us during the next fundraiser. I suggested she let a listener have the same experience I had, and she readily agreed.
(Anthony Friedkin/LAPL L.A. Neighborhoods Collection)
So, we've put together a unique KPCC auction experience.
Angelyne will give a ride to the winner in her 2015 Corvette (there's just room for one passenger), and then meet the winner's companion and me for drinks and dinner, compliments of Group 1933, which has established a long list of "refined drinking locations" across Los Angeles in the last few years.
Most recently, Group 1933 rehabbed the historic La Cana in North Hollywood. It was a restaurant built in the shape of a giant barrel; now, after sitting derelict for decades, it's the very popular Idle Hour bar. We gave listeners the first look at the Idle Hour after the renovation in a piece that went viral on the internet.
You and your friend will have drinks and dinner on the house with Angelyne and me at Harlowe at 7321 Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood, "a place out of time, a floor-to-ceiling tribute to Hollywood's Golden Age."
(Harlowe interior. Image courtesy Group 1933)
Big thanks to Angelyne and Group 1933's Bobby Green for generously supporting the KPCC Auction! Every dollar you bid goes right back into KPCC, so Off-Ramp can give you fabulous experiences on the radio, so please be generous, bid high and often, and don't miss out on this unique Only in LA, quintessential Off-Ramp evening.
Visiting My Friend's Place - homeless center inspired Miley Cyrus' Happy Hippie Foundation
It's easy to make fun of Miley Cyrus. Just Google "bunny costume" and "twerk."
But Cyrus is serious about her charity work. She just started the Happy Hippie Foundation, to rally "young people to fight injustice facing homeless youth, LGBT youth and other vulnerable populations." Cyrus founded HHF after a visit last summer to a homeless youth center called My Friend's Place.
(Miley Cyrus, thumbs up, with My Friend's Place staff. That's ED Heather Carmichael in the front row, hands on knees. Courtesy My Friend's Place)
Every day, 100 homeless youth between the ages of 12 and 25 - most of them products of our troubled foster care system - come through My Friend's Place, on Hollywood Blvd between Bronson and the 101 in the heart of gritty Hollywood.
KPCC Photographer Maya Sugarman and I toured the center last week, and executive director Heather Carmichael told us Cyrus' tour started a "little bit of a whirlwind" that saw one of the center's clients accept Cyrus' VMA award and make an impassioned speech, and that brought $240,000 to My Friend's Place to pay for food, clothing, and arts programming.
Our tour started at the "safe haven." It's a big busy room that could be the lobby of a youth hostel. A bank of microwaves heat up cheap, calorie-rich food ("We're not farm to table," Carmichael says), there's wi-fi, and dozens of young people moving around in what Carmichael calls "organized chaos."
This is the first point of contact. Carmichael says, "this is where young people come on a daily basis to get their basic needs taken care of, and to have a safe place and sense of community while they're trying to figure out how to move forward." Here, there are no cops rousting the kids and no pimps trying to prostitute them. Here, they can get a shower, four items of clothing, and food ... not to mention every type of social service you can think of, from health care to job counseling.
And here, they can also be kids. Instead of a workout room, for instance, there's a "Cirque" room, created by Cirque du Soleil and Jeunesse du Monde, where young people get exercise, and learn to trust themselves by juggling or walking a tightrope ... and it's no coincidence these are all metaphors for adult life.
My Friend's Place, which is approaching its 30th anniversary, reports that every year it provides services to 1,400 youth, serves more than 30,000 meals, gets 120 into housing and 90 into jobs.
"I leave every day feeling more filled than when I started the day," Carmichael says. "These young people have such courage and commitment and strength, which is often perceived as anger. This group of young people are way stronger than many of us, and given the right opportunity and support, can become our community leaders, and left on the streets, what would we expect to happen?"
Getty to stay open late this weekend for last days of JMW Turner exhibit
UPDATE: The Getty Center will be open until 9pm this Saturday and Sunday to give more people a chance to see the Turner exhibit, which ends Sunday.
The Getty Center’s new exhibit, "J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free," displays an incredible number of works — 35 oils, 27 watercolors — by the man many people now think of as the greatest English painter of all time.
The day I went to the Turner show at the Getty, looking out toward the Pacific, there were layers of cloud and mist rising up toward the Santa Monica foothills in all the grays, whites and blues of typical Southern California spring landscape. I asked Getty co-curator Julian Brooks if Turner would have enjoyed living and working here.
"Turner loved dramatic scenery," Brooks said. "And I think he would have loved the canyons and the mountains. He also loved the ocean, and he probably would have lived on the coast in Santa Monica or somewhere, and would have enjoyed painting the atmosphere over the ocean, painting the changing light."
With his great clouds of diffuse colors and self-conceived techniques that involved blurring and smearing paint, it's no wonder that for decades, he was seen as an artistic influence wildly ahead of his time.
In most of his pictures, Turner’s architecture and landscapes loom hugely and even threateningly over the diminished figures of human beings. For all the brightness of his hues and liveliness of his vistas, Turner often seemed to have a grim outlook on the world and the universe.
As a companion to his pictures, Turner’s wrote a serial poetic narrative he called "The Fallacies of Hope," about the insignificance of human aspiration. It includes the lines, "False hope! as fatal when the end denies, As when it yields the long-expected prize." In other words, win or lose, you feel awful.
"J. M. W. Turner: Painting Set Free" is at the Getty Center through May 24. The Getty says this exhibit is Turner's first major exhibition on the West Coast, and the first devoted to his later years. It was organized by Tate Britain in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
'Don't Think I've Forgotten' opens in Los Angeles, tells story of lost Cambodian rock music
For almost 25 years, Cambodia and its capital, Phnom Penh were a hub for one of the most vibrant and progressive music scenes in the world. Prolific bands and singers made hundreds of records, fusing rock and roll, folk, psychedelic, Afro–Cuban and traditional Cambodian music into a compelling and vivid new genre.
It all came crashing down in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh. Record collections were burned, clubs were shut down, and the famous faces and voices of Cambodian pop music were silenced — some killed, others vanished.
The documentary Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten looks at the rise and fall of Cambodia’s music scene. It’s open now in Los Angeles, and Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with the film’s director, John Pirozzi.
“Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten” is playing until May 21 at the Laemmle theater in North Hollywood.
Temple Grandin: Don't shelter autistic children, limit video games
"I'm seeing too many kids that in the 1950s, they just called them geeks and nerds, and today they own businesses." — Temple Grandin
According to a survey by the Institute for Community Inclusion and the University of Massachusetts, only a third of people aged 22-30 with any mental disability have a job ... less than half the rate for people with no disability, and young people with autism fared worst of all, according to a study by the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute.
Reversing that trend is the goal of an event on May 20th at Club Nokia. It's called "Temple Grandin and Friends," and features the animal behavioralist who is the face of autism for many of us, American Idol's James Durbin, and others.
In a phone interview, Temple Grandin told us overprotective parenting is one part of the problem.
"Let's say you go to a restaurant, the parents order the meal for them, instead of having the child order the meal. They do not know how to shake hands with people. Kids used to have paper routes in my generation, and I know those are all gone, but we need to figure out paper route substitutes for middle school kids — like at a church or a community center. They could be ushers, they could set up chairs, they could help with the food ... volunteer at animal shelters ... as long as it's outside the home and it's on a schedule." — Temple Grandin
Grandin says parents also need to help their kids find comfortable niches — away from video games. "I am hearing too often," she says, "'He's 21 and I can't get him out the basement.'" She recalls that in "high school I was teased horribly and bullied, and the only place I was not teased was shared interests like horseback riding, electronics, and model rockets ... That's where I got peers."
Grandin, a subject of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks' "An Anthropologist on Mars," says that all she wants is "to see kids like me be successful ... stay out of trouble with the law, go out and get a career and a job that you're really gonna like."
Journalist and autism watchdog Robert Moran, working at ABC with Asperger's
One of the most consistently sharp and intriguing accounts in my Twitter feed is
, who works at ABC News in L.A.
Along with the day's hard and soft news, Moran Tweets about the cognitive dissonance we all experience:
I am never going to understand drivers who get into the carpool lane and drive slow.
— Robert Moran (@Journautism) May 2, 2015
But often it's more personal.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have autism.
— Robert Moran (@Journautism) May 3, 2015
Moran has Asperger's syndrome, and he's one of the few journalists who've "come out" about their autism. So when he sees the media making false statements or assumptions about people with autism or mental illness in general, it bothers him.
When the media covered the Newtown shooting and kept connecting autism to violence, he says among autistics, "It was like, 'Arrrgh. Why are you doing this!?'" Moran and others called them out on it, and he was overjoyed when Sanjay Gupta did an Autism 101 on CNN, and pointed out that autistics are not prone to violence.
After many dead ends and wrong treatment, Moran was diagnosed with Asperger's, which he says, in short, affects how he interacts with others. "I don't make eye contact. I struggle with satire and understanding sarcasm. Sometimes I'll interrupt because I don't know when to read the pauses." And his routine is extremely important to him. When he makes a plan, he gets very upset when he has to break it."
In truth, during our interview over lunch at LeRoy's in Monrovia, he made eye contact, shook my hand, laughed at my jokes, and didn't freak out when his bus made him late. How much of an effort this cost him, I don't know, but years of therapy have helped him deal better with these manifestations of Asperger's.
I put to Moran that people on the whole seem to know how to think about kids with autism, but we don't know what to do with adults, which is borne out in employment stats showing young people with autism have the highest rates of unemployment of all people with mental disability.
Moran said, "Absolutely. All of the focus, all of the research, all of the treatment, all of the therapies, and all of the programs are designed for kids. Twenty-two is the cutoff date in most states for services, so it's literally like after the age of 22, you're no longer autistic, which is complete boloney. It's a lifelong disorder."
Moran is an exception. At ABC News (the network, not ABC7), where he works two days a week as a digital news associate, he says he was upfront about his autism. He says his ability to focus on detail (an Asperger's trait) is helpful, because he's thorough. "But that can also be hurtful because if you're working in television news, it's a team effort. So if you're tunnel vision, you may forget the social niceties."
One of the most eye-opening things Moran Tweets about is having to adapt to living with people who don't have autism, or "neurotypicals."
I know a lot of autistics who feel disenfranchised from the neurotypicals and their world. It is your world. We just live in it.
— Robert Moran (@Journautism) April 30, 2015
"We spend a lot of our time trying to understand neurotypicals and why neurotypicals do certain things, or at least try to mimic neurotypical behavior," Moran says. "Yet, neurotypicals do almost absolutely nothing to try to understand us."
So, for a start, you could follow him on Twitter to start listening to the other side of the conversation.
Note: The tweets included above have been deleted.