David Dean Bottrell of "Boston Legal" in person ... getting to the bottom of Echo Park Lake ... Edith Head Lives! ... A Noise Within's new home ... the Magic Castle's Medium ... first CD of Disney Hall organ ... Cambodian-American rapper Prach Ly of Long Beach ... Hard-edge painter Karl Benjamin ...
20 years after Magic: a new face of AIDS
Twenty years ago, Magic Johnson announced publicly that he was HIV-positive. That was the year a young woman named Temper Goldie was born in Oceanside. Like Magic, Goldie is HIV-positive, but because of what Magic did, she can be open about it. KPCC’s John Rabe spoke with Goldie at Occupy LA.
Temper Goldie has been at Occupy LA for 37 days, and you might be surprised to learn that she credits the disease as part of the reason she's there. She's led a tough life: homeless since she was 13, epilepsy, hepatitis-C through drug use, and HIV (transmitted, she says, when she was raped) a year and a half ago.
Without the diagnosis, Goldie says, she wouldn't have been forced to get clean and sober. She's been at Occupy LA for 37 days, and is shocked to find herself as part of a political movement.
Goldie says the story of Magic Johnson's heroism twenty years ago, "makes it a lot easier for me to live with it, and a lot easier to be out and open about it." And the chain continues. Goldie says, "Some people are just like, 'Oh my God, thank you so much for being out and honest about it. Now I understand what my mother is going through, or my brother's going through.'"
But it's still not easy. "Part of the reason I'm here (at Occupy LA) is because my healthcare is crap." She says nobody is willing to treat her her because of her multiple diagnoses. She laughs, "I like to call myself an eclectic disease bag."
Jazz at the A Frame - great jazz in Betty Hoover's livingroom
UPDATE: Jazz at the A Frame, Betty Hoover's delightful home, might be LA's best jazz club. It's probably the best place to hear jazz ... not cell-phones, talkers, or clinking glasses and plates. Sunday, January 13, Betty's bringing in singer Stephanie Nakasian and bop pianist Hod O'Brien. Rounding out the group: Allen Mezquida, alto sax; Jim DeJulio, bass; Paul Kreibich, drums. An excellent opportunity for us to bring back an Off-Ramp favorite.
The new release from jazz sax player Bruce Babad - A Tribute to Paul Desmond - wasn't recorded in a studio or a local jazz club, but in a private home. It happened in an A-Frame high in the Hollywood Hills, whose owner, a Texan named Betty Hoover, hosts Sunday afternoon concerts every month. For $40 or $50, you get wine, a light lunch, and a couple hours of what some consider some of the best jazz in LA. Off-Ramp went to the CD release party last Sunday.
David Dean Bottrell, TV's favorite psychopath, makes love, life, laughs
UPDATE: "David Dean Bottrell Makes Love" has two performances at the Outlaugh Festival, part of the Hollywod Frings Festival. Sunday, June 10, at 7p; and Saturday, June 23, at 10p. Off-Ramp talked with Bottrell in 2011.
David Dean Bottrell, the screenwriter and actor, is back with another run of his one-man show "David Dean Bottrell Makes Love." The show is a collection of stories about Bottrell's life experiences with love.
Bottrell says he never wanted to do a one-man show, much less an autobiographical one, but the idea came to him after he did a show in which he told a short story about his ex. He felt the idea had potential and began writing and piecing together stories about all his major experiences with love since the age of six.
Bottrell called his first performance at the Comedy Central Stage “like being shot out of a canon.” The show consists of Bottrell alone onstage with a few props and minimal music and lighting. Although the show has been successful, Bottrell describes it as “the single most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.”
“It’s a very mixed bag kind of show,” Bottrell says. Alongside the racy and appropriately vulgar anecdotes are stories of the actor being in love, getting his first date and meeting his first girlfriend. Bottrell reveals much about his life through the course of the show, including his 10-year relationship with his ex, an alcoholic Irish performer whom he calls “the one big love of my life.” Still on the lookout for love, Bottrell says, “I don’t think I’ve had problems finding love. I’ve had problems keeping love.”
The actor also talks about his relationship with a distant father. Bottrell says his father came from a world where men did not express affection. “At one point in my life, I just decided I kinda didn’t want to go to my grave without trying to say to my dad, ‘I love you,’” Bottrell said. He cites the show as his effort to accomplish this task.
Bottrell grew up in a working-class family in Kentucky and said storytelling was a big part of his upbringing. After moving to New York to pursue acting, his mother wrote him letters about recent happenings, which Bottrell says consisted of mostly bad news. “In between the stories of people’s miscarriages or getting in and out of jail would be a paragraph about how many tomatoes that garden had produced,” he says. One “unintentionally hilarious” letter he received became the basis of the first script he ever wrote.
After moving west and finding success as a screenwriter, a casting director from “Boston Legal” approached Bottrell to play the part of oddball Lincoln Meyer in the third season of the show. “I’ve never been a lead man,” Bottrell says, “I’ve always been the odd guy and that’s always suited me fine because they’re the more interesting roles for me.”
"David Dean Bottrell Makes Love" is at Rogue Machine Theatre, 5041 W. Pico Blvd., Nov. 16 to Dec. 15 on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.
Content advisory: The show is cathartic and uplifting, but there is vulgarity and some funny but disgusting descriptions of bodily functions.
What's at the bottom of Echo Park Lake?
Now that it's almost been drained completely, we can find out. And why did we empty it in the first place? Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson got to the bottom of things, literally: he met local councilman Eric Garcetti at the newly dried-out lake to find out.
Garcetti said the goal of the $65 million project is to clean the polluted lake, calling it "a complete change in the way this city approaches its water." He said water in L.A. is littered with trash, which ultimately washes out in bodies of water like the lake. As a result, bacteria grows in the water rendering it unsafe for people to use.
Part of the project includes creating a wetland around the island in the north end of the lake, which will feed nutrients into the water. The wetland will reduce the amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus, which contribute to the growth of algae and the depletion of oxygen in the water.
But most importantly: what did they find at the bottom of the lake? Hubcabs, traffic cones, shopping carts, pay telephones, toys, trashcans, even a few firearms, long since out of commission.
In addition to the lake clean up, the city is spending $1.5 million on the restoration of the Echo Park Boathouse. The landmark, built in 1932, will undergo a complete structural retrofit and historical preservation rehabilitation. Garcetti hopes the restoration will bring boating back to the lake.
The project will take two years, but the councilman said it couldn't wait any longer. "We've polluted this lake, it's lost its character," Garcetti said, "It's time to bring it back to something that's healthy for the next hundred years."
RIP Karl Benjamin, art trailblazer, "hard-edge" but happy
UPDATE: Karl Benjamin died July 26, 2012, at the age of 86.
Pacific Standard Time is the huge art project that tells the story of Southern California's rightful place as a leader in Modern Art. One of the featured post-war trailblazers is Karl Benjamin, who lives in Claremont and who painted in what came to be called the Hard Edge style.
Hard Edge sounds harsh, but Benjamin's works are riots of colors getting along very well; it's just the borders between them that are hard. One art critic, Dave Hickey, wrote "I can think of no other artist whose paintings exude the joy and pleasure of being an artist with more intensity than Karl Benjamin."
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talked with Karl Benjamin at the Orange County Museum of Art's "Birth of the Cool" exhibit in 2007, where he learned he wasn't just a painter, but an enlightened teacher, too.
A Noise Within builds new 33,000sf theatre center in East Pasadena
UPDATE: A Noise Within opened the new theatre October 29 with a joyous performance of Twelfth Night, updated to pre-Castro Cuba. The next play up is O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms," which opens November 19. Here's our sneak preview of the new space, which aired August 2011.
After 19 years in a funky but impractical space in Glendale, A Noise Within, the classical rep theatre company, is building a new home in East Pasadena with the help of a $13m capital campaign. The theatre's founders give Off-Ramp host John Rabe an exclusive tour of the beautiful new facility, which opens in late October.
Mapping your memories at UCLA
Dr. Moran Cerf — former Israeli Defense Forces intelligence analyst, filmmaker, pilot, Moth GrandSLAM storytelling winner — is a neuroscientist at UCLA in his latest incarnation. There, he maps the brain’s thoughts, memories, and emotions, working with epilepsy patients who already have their brains exposed for surgery and treatment.
Off-Ramp's Raghu Manavalan joins Dr. Cerf during one of his visits to the UCLA Lab, to talk about what Moran had found so far and where he hopes the future of research can go.
Magic Castle Medium on fire
It was a scary day in Hollywood Monday, when a fire started at the Magic Castle. The Magic Castle is the hundred-year old Victorian house that in 1963 was turned into a world famous club for magicians and magic enthusiasts. Luckily, damage from the fire was minimal, although a fire closing the Magic Castle on Halloween is like a florist being shut down on Mothers Day. KPCC's Brian Watt went to the scene, and talked with Leo Kostka, the Magic Castle's resident medium for more than thirty years.
"First & Grand," Disney Hall organ's first recording, with virtuoso Christoph Bull
Just out, the premiere recording of the Walt Disney Concert Hall's magnificent 6,134-pipe pipe organ. It's "First & Grand," from the rock star of the organ world, Christoph Bull. Here's the piece Off-Ramp host John Rabe produced in 2004, when he got a behind-the-pipes tour of the organ as the final touches were still being done.