Occupy LA with Sam Slovick ... Pigeon Fanciers ... "David Dean Bottrell Makes Love" and "Boston Legal" ... ride a dung beetle at LA Zoo's new carousel ... Jazz at the A Frame: great jazz in a livingroom ... Artist Ed Moses picks 3 favorite spots for Pacific Standard Time ...
Occupy LA - the scene at City Hall on Monday and Tuesday
Sam Slovick, a trans-platform journalist, guides Off-Ramp host John Rabe through Occupy LA's encampment at LA City Hall on Monday and Tuesday, November 7 and 8, 2011.
Sam Slovick talks with kids and Bill Maher.
Check out the link below for Sam's video of the arrest of two handsome young nude protestors.
The video contains -- yes -- nudity.
(Image: Sam Slovick)
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.
Barry Cutler and the Crystal Cathedral
UPDATE 11/18/2011: (AP) The Crystal Cathedral will sell its iconic, gleaming glass building to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. The move was approved Thursday by a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge after a bidding war between the diocese and Orange County's Chapman University for the sprawling 40-acre property, and was opposed by many Crystal Cathedral congregants who fear it will be the end of their church. The diocese will pay $57.5 million to use the building in Garden Grove, made of 10,000 panes of glass, as a long-sought countywide cathedral.
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The reputation of the Crystal Cathedral, in Garden Grove, has taken a big hit lately, after declaring bankruptcy last year, with fifty-million dollars of debt. The Diocese of Orange ($57.5 million) and Chapman University ($51.5 million) are in a bidding war for the 40-acre property. How far the Crystal Cathedral has fallen since Robert Schuller founded the ministry more than fifty years ago! Actor and Off-Ramp commentator Barry Cutler remembers the happier years.
Every year, the Crystal Cathedral put on two shows, The Glory of Easter and The Glory of Christmas. These were huge expensive productions, and, when I was involved, they used Equity actors. I played the role of Judas in two productions of The Glory of Easter, which would have made God or even Cecil B. DeMille jealous, which a cast of more than 300, plus a dozen Equity actors and dozens of farm animals, birds, horses and large cats.
Most of the major roles -- the disciples and Pharisees and such -- were filled with Jews like me. The major exception to this was the role of Jesus, played by Miles, a blond and blue eyed goy. He later moved back East and became a carpenter.
My audition for Judas was odd. While a pretty important character, Judas actually had very little to say. After I read the few lines I had, one of the directors asked if I could lurk. "Excuse me" I said, not sure I'd heard correctly. "Would you lurk for us, please?" So, versatile talent that I am, I lurked about the audition room and won the role.
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Much of the time, I felt as if I had run away and joined the circus. All those animals, fireworks (inside the Cathedral!), magic, a Sensaround earthquake, flying angels. At one of the early rehearsals, I was sitting in a pew while one of the techs worked with the flying angels. He was having some trouble with the mechanisms which flew the angels and, as I watched, one pretty, young angel slid lower and lower above me, nearly sitting on my face. Just thinking about an angel in that way while sitting in a Cathedral made me feel closer to the role of Judas.
At various times we had genuine Hollywood stars playing Pilate and Herod. While we other professional actors were very well paid for the time – $600 a week -- I was told the stars received about $60,000 a week. But Michael York, one of our Pilates, assured us that the money wasn't important to him. It was the message.
While it was a very professional production team, there were a few problems. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the actors was navigating the numerous steps and scurrying from one location to another, without slipping, sliding and sprawling in the abundance of holy ... dung. Once, when Herod appeared with a peacock on either side of his throne, the special effect flames sent one of the poor birds rising like the phoenix ... before descending in ashes.
Overall, it was great fun and a great success with the audiences, as well as very profitable. And the members of the church, many of whom played extras in the production, were wonderfully supportive and friendly. After each performance, most flocked around Miles/Jesus, for attention/healing, but one sweet woman always thanked me for taking on the burden of Judas … just before I went off to collect my silver/paycheck.
We did two shows each day, without curtain calls. Since, as Judas, I hanged myself about midway through each show, I would sit in my car in the parking lot and drink a beer as the first show wound down. Toward the end of each show, there was a spectacular effect in which Jesus rose to Heaven. Miles stood on a platform in front of two of the tall Cathedral windows. The windows opened to the night sky - and the parking lot where I sat - a laser beam shot up, smoke rose, and Jesus vanished … having been lowered beneath the stage while hidden by the smoke. I was always tempted to climb out of my car, mount the platform, and appear as Judas triumphant when the smoke cleared. But I preferred the silver.
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."
Three Places: Pacific Standard Time artist Ed Moses
Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson has been asking artists featured in Pacific Standard Time to show us three places in LA important them. It can be a gallery, a house, a park--anywhere local. This time, he talked with painter Ed Moses.
For Pacific Standard Time, you can see Ed Moses' work at the Natural History Museum, Pepperdine University, Pomona College, the Norton Simon and MOCA.
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.
Los Angeles Pigeon Club celebrates 100 years of fancy pigeon breeding
Founded in 1911, the Los Angeles Pigeon Club has made a name for itself by celebrating, elevating and exhibiting one of the most ordinary, unavoidable birds in the world. But after one look at the kind of fowl that the LA pigeon club exhibits, and you'll see these birds are anything but ordinary. Just this past week the group held their 100th annual Pageant of Pigeons event in Riverside. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson went to the club's monthly meeting in El Monte last year.
Bauhaus Beauty - Marc Haefele on the Getty's "Lyonel Feininger’s Photographic Vision"
So stuffed full of creativity was Lyonel Feininger’s life that even its 84 years seem too short. So says Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele about the life and work of one of America and Germany’s most prolific and enigmatic artists, whose little known photographs are now showing at the Getty.
Feininger took up the camera late in late, at the age of 57-- after decades of avant garde work as a print maker, painter, sculptor, musician and even, just over a century ago, a featured Sunday cartoonist in the Chicago Tribune.
He had a peculiar binationality. He was born in New York of German and American parents, but they sent him to Germany for school and he stayed there until Hitler forced him out nearly 50 years later. Trained as a musician, he found his fulfillment in the amazingly innovative world of turn of the century French and German art — the world of Kandinsky and Franz Marc and the movement called Expressionism. And he found fame as an illustrator for major publications on two continents. And sired two families, one of whose members, his son Lux, died at age 101 this July. Some of Lux’s pictures, taken when he was a teenager, are on show here too. The one of the Bauhaus movement’s official jazz band, just rocking out, is to die for.
Lyonel took a huge number of photographs, most of which we’re just beginning to see due to the diligent research here and in Germany. Many of those at the Getty are from his days (and nights) at the Bauhaus, the pioneering 1920s avant garde institute, whose stark architectural novelty has since become a fundamental cliché of Southern California buildings. But Feininger’s pictures of the structure, many of them by night, make the Bauhaus seem unworldly, even ethereal—shadow plays of brilliant light, gloom and utter darkness, they make you feel the strangeness this new style had 80 years ago.
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These light-and-dark photos influenced Feininger’s later style paintings … the ones most familiar to us today — geometric building shapes overlaid in mysterious dark colors and angular flashes of light. As Curator Laura Muir points out, “He painted all day; he took photographs at night.” When did he sleep? We don’t know—but he did take pictures during the day on family outings to a German Baltic town called Deep—now the Polish resort hamlet of Mrzezyno.
Over the peaceful antiquity of these beautifully composed shots, though, you get a strong sense of dread. It was the early 1930s, and Hitler’s shadow lies long across the landscape. The blackness closing in around the Bauhaus in Feininger’s pictures seems to connote Naziism, closing in on Weimar Germany’s progress and freedom. A few years later, Feininger took his family to the New York he’d left 50 years before—whose soaring architecture of the 1930s he eagerly captured, perhaps emblematically, in the urban daylight.
The show at the Getty wisely intersperses drawings and watercolors of Feininger among the photos, so you can better grasp the multiferous directions in which his art was taking him. And as Muir points out, this alluring show is just the tip of the Feininger photo pyramid. Thousands of his later slides and negatives are filed away unseen, awaiting another splendid show like this. Maybe it can include those alluring 1900s comic strips—The Kin-der Kids and Wee Willie Winky.
New Conservation Carousel finds home at LA Zoo
The Los Angeles Zoo’s newest attraction is jam-packed with animals saddled up and ready to ride. It’s a carousel. Zoo officials hope the new Tom Mankiewicz Conservation Carousel will offer visitors more than just a pleasant spin.
A short walk past the flamingo habitat, a small, lively crowd gathered for the carousel’s unveiling. Greater L.A. Zoo Association president Connie Morgan emphasized that the brand new ride behind her would offer a fun diversion and important lesson.
"We wanted to do something that really would provide a lasting family memory for generations of Angelenos, and we also wanted to do something that would have a conservation message in it," said Morgan.
Children and adults may ride aboard exotic animals - cheetahs, clown fish and even a dung beetle. Designers in Ohio crafted the carousel specifically for the zoo. Much of its $2.5 million price tag was paid by board members Ann and Jerry Moss. The duo added their own touch in the carousel’s design; visitors can ride replicas of the their prize-winning horses as the loudspeaker plays pop classics from A & M records – the label Jerry Moss founded in 1962 with Herb Alpert.
But one person who won't be able to ride the newest attraction is Tom Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz headed the Zoo Association board until he died of cancer last year. Jerry Moss, Mankiewicz's dear friend, made sure not to forget the carousel’s namesake.
"Tom would be so happy to have seen this completed. He was a great guy and we’re thrilled to have done anything to have continued his place in this wonderful zoo," said Moss.
After the Thursday ribbon-cutting, 65 fourth graders rushed the carousel, ready to ride their favorite animals. An 8-year-old Sunny Sands Elementary student Debra and her classmates rode two hours from Cathedral City so they could be the first kids on board. She sat atop a big horn sheep and was eager to go again after her first ride.
"I would pick the snake on a log, because I like snakes," she said.
As the carousel wound down, so did the commotion: kids lined up to board their bus back to Cathedral City, the camera crews packed up to head home.
Rides cost $3 a ticket and wil support the zoo's mission of conservation and education.
What was that song? Off-Ramp music for Nov 12, 2011
Wondering what music you heard on Off-Ramp this week? Take a look and see:
Not found in Grooveshark: we also played two tracks from Bruce Babad's A Tribute to Paul Desmond, "Line for Lyons" and "When Sunny Gets Blue." You can find the album on CD Baby and iTunes.