A pristine fallout shelter in the Valley ... the Channel Island Fox makes a comeback from extinction ... the USS Indianapolis ... a time machine in LA City Hall: the mayoral portrait gallery.
The Los Angeles Mayoral portrait gallery prepares for Villaraigosa
Twenty six stories up in City Hall, you’ll find the mayors of Los Angeles. Not a surprise to find mayors in City Hall, but you’ll find not one of them, but almost all of them -- more than 150 years of Hizzoners, all painted in oils and hanging in the mayors’ portrait gallery.
Soon, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s portrait will join the rest – minus three mayors whose faces no one evidently bothered to record.
Patt Morrison visits City Hall to find out how the paintings came to be here and why.
Can free photos save the art business? One gallerist hopes so.
The economy is slowly recovering, or so they say. But that doesn't mean people aren't having a hard time selling certain things. Take, for example, art. Just this past month a gallery owner named Jennifer Schwartz drove from her home in Atlanta to Los Angeles in a 1977 blue Volkswagen bus so that she could literally give away art.
Off-Ramp contributor Lilly Fowler visited Schwartz to find out why.
On a warm, sunny afternoon, 37-year-old Jennifer Schwartz made her first West Coast stop for a nationwide tour she's dubbed "The Crusade for Art," camping out on the streets of Venice's Abbot Kinney neighborhood. Alongside busy shops and restaurants, Schwartz and a handful of local artists vied for the attention of passersby. "Free photos," she shouted. "Artwork for your walls!"
Schwartz said she's giving away art to lure everyday consumers into art collecting. "We're seekers and we're curious and we care where our food came from and how our coffee is roasted," said Schwartz. "Art is a natural fit into that."
For Schwartz, getting people interested in fine art is a battle against the ordinary. "If I could stand at the register of every IKEA, when someone came up with a big gallery wrapped canvas of a tulip that matched their throw pillows, I could say, well, here's an original piece of art that also matches your throw pillows," she said. "I really felt that most people would choose the original, all things being equal, and since I couldn't stand at the register of every IKEA, I was like 'I'll just drive a bus around the country and talk about it.'"
Schwartz says that while the photography focused gallery she left behind in Atlanta is doing well--not everyone is that lucky. Outside the top tier of artists and collectors, many artists and galleries are still struggling, especially those stuck somewhere in the middle of the art market. So people like Schwartz keep thinking of more and more inventive ways to push art.
Local photographer Aline Smithson says she's seen that struggle first hand. "What's been successful in the last few years are sites that are selling their photographs at greatly discounted prices" she said. "I think it's just a really hard time to sell art."
At the boardwalk, Long Beach artist Jeff Rau hands a prospective patron a print. "The series that I have a print from today is from a project where I photographed the LA Basin from Signal Hill down near Long Beach, which is where I live, every day for a year," he said. "And then I would take each month's worth of images, so 30 days worth of images for each month, and splice them together into singular landscape to show the variation in the kind of smog cover and the way the city is kinda appearing and disappearing into the smog day after day."
Artists like Rau talked to people on the street about art, hoping that just maybe, maybe, they would gain a new fan or two. Ruzica Vuskovic, a visitor from Croatia, was stunned "It's amazing, stunning, so cool. LA is just an amazing city," she said. "This was such an uplifting, surprising cool thing starting with this cool van."
Schwartz says she tries to be realistic about what a road trip like hers can do. The folks she encounters on tour might not turn to art collecting the very next day. But Schwartz hopes by having the opportunity to connect with artists personally, they may more clearly see the value of art, which could lead to art buying. Someday at least.
Schwartz just rounded out the West Coast portion of her tour. She heads out East after that before returning home, and to her gallery, in June.
Santa Cruz Island foxes back from the brink of extinction (Photos)
Nestled among California's Channel Islands you'll find Santa Cruz Island, home to pristine chaparral, sea caves and the island fox: a small, fuzzy relative of the gray fox found only on the Channel Islands. But just 15 years ago you'd have a hard time tracking one down — fewer than 100 foxes lived on the island in 2000.
Today there are more than 1,300 foxes roaming Santa Cruz Island. KPCC's Kevin Ferguson reports on the animal’s comeback.
On a Monday morning, a dozen reporters and I boarded a boat headed for Santa Cruz Island. The Nature Conservancy and National Park Service — the island's two landowners — were taking a victory lap celebrating the conservancy's five-year effort to bring back the tiny island fox.
The island — just 20 miles off the coast — is the largest of California's Channel Islands, roughly three times the size of Manhattan. Although it's largely uninhabited today, that wasn't always the case. In fact, as recently as 1984, the island was home to several farms and ranches. Today it’s home to a few rangers, researchers and the occasional hiking group.
Christie Boser, a biologist for Santa Cruz Island with the Nature Conservancy, is guiding us to demonstrate what's become a routine part of life here on the island: the capturing, monitoring and examination of island foxes. She set out traps the night before. About a half mile inland we find our first fox.
"So I'm holding [him] around the neck. These foxes are pretty docile when they're in hand," said Boser.
RELATED: Higher-resolution slideshow of photos from this story on AudioVision
Boser takes the fox out of the trap; it's a male just about a year old. He's brown, gray and orange, with a bushy tail and a tiny head. Weighing in at about four pounds — he's smaller than my cat. Boser covers the fox's eyes with a blindfold to calm him down. She checks for scratches, weighs him, examines his teeth, combs his fur for fleas.
"He has some fleas, which is normal for these guys out here," said Boser. "So far I've only seen one; we give them three little brushes."
After a few more tests, she takes the blindfold off, lets go of the fox's neck, and he runs off into the brush to join his 1,300 other fox friends.
So what happened to make the island fox go nearly extinct in the first place?
Feral pigs
"No one suspected that feral pigs on this island could indirectly cause the near extinction of island foxes, but that's exactly what happened," said Tim Coonan, a biologist with the National Park Service.
Feral pigs — holdovers from the islands first western settlers — used to run wild. They ruined archaeological sites, displaced the island foxes and, to make matters even worse, golden eagles arrived.
"Golden eagles had never bred on the islands before the 1990s," said Coonan. "They arrived out here, and they found prey items that did not exist out here naturally."
The giant birds dined on pork and soon developed a taste for fox until the fox population on nearby Santa Rosa Island shrunk to just 15. Fewer than 100 lived on Santa Cruz. That's when the Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service had to take action.
Since there was nowhere to go where they couldn't do damage, time was up for the pigs. The two organizations contracted a professional hunting firm in 2005, and helicopters swept across the island with snipers aboard. Traps were set, and crews hunted the feral pigs on foot.
The porcine bloodbath lasted until 2008, when the island was officially declared pig-free. The golden eagles, no longer with a food source, moved back to the mainland. Once the island was cleared of the invasive animals, the native fox came back.
"So we're standing here 10-12 years after the fox decline started," said Coonan. "They were listed as endangered in 2004, and they're pretty much ready to come off that list of endangered species at this point, which makes it one of the fastest recoveries of an endangered species in the history of the act."
The National Parks Service and Nature Conservancy say the island’s transformed completely, and the foxes' coming back is just one part of that. Travis Longcore, an environment professor at USC, agrees.
"When I was out there, there were still pigs out there, and you could see these vast areas that were rototilled up by the pigs," said Longcore. "When they say it was a big impact, they're not kidding. It was serious and severe."
In the last couple years, maintaining the fox population has been more about keeping an eye than getting involved directly, work like what we saw Christie Boser do. The National Parks Service's Tim Coonan says the biggest threat to the fox today comes in a much, much smaller package.
"We fear pathogens, disease like canine distemper virus or rabies. And we have no idea what global climate change to do to island foxes," said Coonan.
He says they're dealing with that in a pretty straightforward method for now: If you plan on bringing any other kind of animals to the island, like, say a dog, or a pig … don't.
Memorial Day, WWII a family affair for Kevin Ferguson
8/1/2011 - A SAD UPDATE: Kevin's Grandmother passed away early Sunday morning. She was 87. Team Off-Ramp and all of KPCC send condolences to Kevin's family.
For most historians, there are few stories more compelling than that of the USS Indianapolis: a heavy cruiser that had seen battle for nearly all of World War Two. Its final voyage was one of the most integral, yet disastrous missions in the history of the US Navy. And for Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson, it’s a story that hits very close to home.
PHOTOS: New Woodland Hills homeowners find fully stocked fallout shelter in their backyard
A few weeks ago, my friend Chris Murray wrote:
Chris and Colleen recently closed on a Charles DuBois Ranch House and the bomb shelter is an absolute time capsule: still stocked with old magazines, bunks, sleeping bags and medications. I told them to keep it in case of imminent Zombie Apocalypse. You're more than welcome to visit...
He didn't need to ask twice. Chris and Colleen Otcasek immediately agreed to let Off-Ramp into their time capsule, or time machine, and didn't flinch when I showed up with shop lights, a 100-foot extension cord, historian Charles Phoenix, and KPCC photographer Mae Ryan. Chris and Colleen even made a relish tray and served Arnold Palmers.
It's really not a bomb shelter; it would never withstand a blast directed at the Valley's aerospace industry. It's a fallout shelter, designed to keep the radiation away for a few weeks, like in this cheery movie, which I'm sure comforted millions of Americans.
And inside we found a Kresge's worth of items: Kleenex, sanitary napkins, canned food, sleeping bags, magazines -- which delighted Med, Charles, Chris, and I ... and pills and a writing tablet hanging on the wall with a 30-year calendar, which made Chris Otcasek, the most somber of the group, ask, "What would you write on this? A suicide note? Anyone who built a shelter in their backyard would have to be pretty optimitistic."
Chris had just coincidentally seen a Twilight Zone episode in which a Cold War backyard fallout shelter doesn't do anything but drive neighbors apart when they think they're under nuclear attack.
Unlike many homeowners, Chris and Colleen don't plan to fill in their shelter. They say they'll leave it as it is, undisturbed for the next owners.
Dylan Brody learns something during a trip down South
I don’t like visiting my in-laws in Georgia. When an Atheist Jew wanders amongst Fundamentalist Christians awkward hilarity and mutually derisive judgment ensue. But my wife asked me to accompany her to her parents’ fiftieth anniversary party, and I couldn’t refuse. I sailed blithely through it … Up to a point.
The scenes in my parents in-law’s mobile home, my sister in-law’s farm house, and the Cracker Barrel restaurant had the soft feel of well worn coveralls. We made easy conversation and took self-deprecating pot-shots at our own cultural idiosyncrasies.
Over a breakfast spread out of a Paula Deen fantasy sequence, my father-in-law made snarky comments about California being the land of fruits and nuts. I kept bringing up Jesus and deliberately getting things wrong. I asked what Jesus’ super powers were. He said, “He fed the masses on fishes and loaves.” I said, “Sandwich making isn’t a super power.” He said, “It wasn’t a super-power. It was a miracle.” I said, “Really? Sandwich-making.” He chuckled and then his wife decided it was okay if she laughed too. We pretended to find common ground in protective humor but the subtext was about remaining comfortably entrenched.
Then came the big anniversary party.
It had not occurred to me until guests started arriving for the party that the friends and family of people celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary tend to be really, really old.
Many old people can’t hear very well and my fancy New England education left me ill-equipped to understand and be understood in Chickamauga, GA, to begin with so I quickly resorted to nodding and smiling as ancient Southerners shouted words distorted beyond my comprehension by both elongation and, simultaneously, abbreviation.
Ordinarily, when I am forced to endure the slowly-turning thumb-screw of polite conversation, I dose myself liberally with decent Scotch, putting up a light barrier of warm amber liquid between me and those I encounter. But this party was held in the meeting room of the Southern Baptist church that my in-laws attend. No alcohol, no music, no dancing, no buffer.
An octogenarian aunt latched on to me for a conversation and worked hard to minimize her accent. She was small and thin but projected not the slightest hint of frailty. She gripped my arm, not for balance but to convey intimacy and keep me engaged. Her grip was birdlike only if one thinks of a hard-taloned eagle lifting heavy prey.
She told me first of how small my wife had been when last they’d met, how her husband had adored her. She told me her husband had died eleven years ago.
A 50th anniversary will get you thinking about things like that. Time. Love. Tenacity.
I said that I was sorry for her loss.
She said, “Oh, that’s all right. After sixty-some years, ah’d hayud enough o’ him.”
I was startled enough to be uncertain whether I should laugh, though I did hear the distant laughter of my own, ever-present unseen audience filtering through from another dimensional plane.
She went on in a careful whisper, “Ah don’ wanna talk dirty to you in a church but he got the penis cancer. You know what that is?”
I nodded.
“They wanted to cut the thing off but ah sayud, ‘no. If it’s gonna be lahk that, jus’ let ‘im go.”
I considered saying, “this is my new favorite story,” but the person I was talking to deserved better. I said, “Good for you. That must have been incredibly difficult.”
She said, “Not really. He had that tube thing in his mouth, so I didn’t have to listen to his opinions on the matter.” Then she grinned mischievously at me and I smiled back.
I like to believe it was an instinctive understanding of the rules of comedic delivery and not an awareness of our holy surroundings that made her work so hard to hold back her own laughter as she added, “His name was Peter.”
Suddenly my sharp, sober perspective shifted. This wasn’t about my awkwardness as a city boy in the south. It was about this funny, sad woman, this unexpected encounter. This wasn’t about easy comedy. It was about sweet, unconventional pathos. It was about long lingering romance and human beings and the universally common need to unburden oneself through confidential confession and protective humor.
I found, abruptly, that I didn’t resent my wife for needing me to go to Georgia with her, for taking me away from my comfort zone, my condo, my safe home office with the cluttered shelves and the snoring, gassy dogs, for taking me to a party in a church where no dancing was allowed, no drinking, nothing I really think of as partying at all, just oddly intimate conversations with ancient strangers.
It seemed small sacrifice to make in exchange for a connection that might take us well into the age of difficult decisions.