Jim Tully, rescued from obscurity; Canadian v American Thanksgiving; Getty Research Institutes World War 1 exhibit; the big (art) heroes behind "Big Hero 6"
'Thanksgivukkah': Rabbi Gross says Thanksgiving and Hanukkah aren't that far apart
Off-Ramp commentator Rabbi Marv Gross runs Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena.
What’s the hottest gift item in the Jewish world today? It’s a Hanukkah menorah in the shape of a turkey! And they’re selling like latkes.
The "Menurkey," from its Kickstarter page, where it doubled its fundraising goal.
We all know that ever since President Abraham Lincoln set the date, Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November; Nov. 28 this year, late for Thanksgiving. Hanukkah usually comes in December, but this year it’s early. For once in many lifetimes, Nov. 28 marks Thanksgiving and the start of Hanukkah.
Actually, Hanukkah only comes early in the Gregorian calendar. It always comes on the 25th of the Hebrew month of Kislev. It’s just that the Hebrew calendar is based on the movement of the moon and the sun, while the Gregorian calendar is based on the sun, and the two calendars don’t exactly parallel each other. That’s why Jewish holidays seem to fall at somewhat different times each year. It’s that old devil moon.
So what are we to make of what some are calling "Thanksgivukkah?" Thanksgiving and Hanukkah do have some aspects in common, not just this year’s shared date.
One is the idea of giving thanks for a miracle.
In the case of the Pilgrims, it was a miracle they survived that initial winter in Massachusetts when half their party perished. The first Thanksgiving was a thankful celebration they had made it through a second winter with the help of the local natives who taught them new ways to grow food.
"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal
Hanukkah, which means dedication, celebrates the miracle when a one-day supply of oil lasted an entire eight days in the Eternal Light in the Temple in Jerusalem. This was about 2,200 years ago.
Years earlier, Jerusalem had been conquered by the Seleucids who brutally defiled and desecrated the Temple. When Judah Maccabee and his Jewish warriors eventually revolted against the Seleucids, they re-took, cleansed, and re-dedicated the Temple by re-lighting the Eternal Light.
The Hanukkah miracle was not only the miracle of the oil, but also a miracle of religious freedom. And then, some 19 centuries later, the Pilgrims came to the New World seeking religious freedom, as well.
Food is another common aspect of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah. It’s not Thanksgiving without turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie. It’s not Hanukkah without latkes – potato pancakes – and sufganiyot – jelly donuts. In celebration of Thanksgivukkah, some bakeries are even cooking up turkey-stuffed donuts. I think I’ll pass.
Each year at Thanksgiving, through my work at Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena, I’ve been able to participate in a unique Thanksgiving dinner. On Thanksgiving Day, thousands of our volunteers gather in Pasadena’s Central Park to serve meals to the homeless and hungry, individuals and families, people of all ages and backgrounds. Volunteers as diverse as our guests serve delicious meals accompanied by smiles and warmth.
Thanksgiving dinner in the park. (Union Station Homeless Services)
Last Thanksgiving, we served some 5,000 meals. Imagine coordinating the preparation and serving of 300 turkeys, 500 pies and 850 pounds of mashed potatoes. The logistics are daunting, but people open their hearts to their neighbors and extend a hand in friendship and hospitality. And for at least one day, we are all brothers and sisters, some giving, some receiving, in tremendously colorful variation, unified in the experience, together as family. And, to me, that’s a miracle.
The Pilgrims would have understood such a miracle. So, too, would have Judah Maccabee. So, Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Hanukkah!
A Canadian talks turkey on American Thanksgiving
As a Canadian living in Los Angeles, I get a lot of questions about my home and native land:
What do you call your States? (Provinces)
Why is your money so colorful? (Polymer)
And do you guys have Thanksgiving? Well, as a matter of fact, we do. We already did it. I think it was October 13th or something.
I honestly don’t remember because pretty much all Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving share is a name. Canada’s version is not a $6 billion enterprise. It’s not really an enterprise at all. It's more like an earnest endeavor. The "ah, nice try" of national days off.
One of my friends, a composer named Steve London who moved to L.A. from Canada so long ago he’s apparently forgotten how to play the national anthem, says Canadian Thanksgiving is a lot like "Sunday, or a regular weekend. In the U.S., it's unbelievable. People just don't want you to be home alone. American Thanksgiving is way more fun."
RELATED: Thanksgiving music we can agree on
It's almost easier to define our Thanksgiving by what it's not. We don't do the Pilgrim hats – didn't have them. We don't do the sniping at in-laws. Okay, we sort of do that, but it's really a year-round thing. Same goes for the beer drinking. It's not our worst week to travel – Christmas has that title. And yeah, there's football on TV, but as hockey’s our religion, it’s more of a white noise machine used to mask silent parental judgment.
(Explorer Martin Frobisher, in what would become Canada, celebrated Thanksgiving for Not Freezing to Death in 1578)
So why are we so blasé about this holiday? One guess is that since we’ve been doing it since the 1500's, maybe we’re just over it. Yes, we did it first in Canada, so if you want to make the argument that we do it on the wrong day, sorry.
“In our family we celebrate both, says Alan Thicke, America’s favorite dad and Canadian icon.
(Alan Thicke and the cast of "Hope & Gloria," featuring future Off-Ramp intern Robert Garrova)
"But Canadians tend to be a little humbler, a little less ostentatious. We celebrate the settler, the Indians who kept us warm in beaver pelts and roasted turkeys or whatever the hell they did back then."
Thicke told me from the set of his new show, "Unusually Thicke," that the reason the holidays are so different comes down to the fundamental difference between our two countries. "They're doing things in a big splashy way that maximizes the opportunity for commercialization," he says. "All of the things America puts into its commercial exploitation, we tend not to do in Canada, we tend to think it’s a little gaudy, excessive, but that’s why they’re our big brother."
There might also be a touch of that Canadian pride thing. We grow up with a flood of U.S. TV shows and holiday specials coming over the border, and we’ve seen the Norman Rockwell-esque depictions of what Hollywood says the holiday is supposed to look like. For example, you guys have "It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown" where Snoopy dances with bunnies and people learn and share.
In Canada, we have the cartoon "Easter Fever," in which a bat auditions to replace the Easter Bunny, and flies into a tree.
So, maybe Canadian Thanksgiving is a just a chance to proclaim how different we are. Which is not to criticize the American version. The one you copied from us. I’ve never not been invited to several dinners, and it's moving to watch my friends, as they go around around the table naming things they're thankful for, reflect on how small their First World Problems really are.
So as your holiday approaches, and mine fades in the rearview, I will wish you all the best and hope that however we do or don’t celebrate on whichever day we so choose, we can all agree that gratitude is a gift, and whoever came up with Black Friday should be used as a welcome mat at Best Buy.
Jim Tully, father of hardboiled fiction, was the 'most hated man in Hollywood'
In the '20s and '30s, Jim Tully was a national celebrity, known as a pioneering novelist, Charlie Chaplin's wingman and publicist — and for punching a major movie star in the face at the Brown Derby. Tully was a top contributor to "Vanity Fair" and H.L. Mencken's "American Mercury," but by the late 1940s, he was forgotten.
"I lived in many a brothel where the dregs of life found shelter. I fraternized with human wrecks whose hands shook as if with palsy, ... with degenerates and perverts, greasy and lousy, with dope fiends who would shoot needles of water into their arms to relieve the wild aching."
— Jim Tully
In 1992 in Kent, Ohio, a man walked into bookseller Paul Bauer's shop and asked for a book by Jim Tully, "the father of hardboiled fiction." Bauer was abashed. He'd never heard of Tully, and so he called his friend Mark Dawidziak, then a columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal.
Dawidziak found Tully's book "Shanty Irish" in another store for $2.50, then searched out all 12 of Tully's novels and scoured libraries for any mention of Tully. In his own newspaper's archives, Dawidziak discovered that Tully had been a reporter for the paper. It was a sign, and the two men decided to write Tully's biography.
A librarian informed them that Tully's personal papers were at the UCLA library.
(Credit: UCLA Jim Tully archive)
They flew out to Los Angeles and found 117 boxes of letters, articles and newspaper clippings. "That really was the treasure trove," they say, that let them piece together Tully's incredible life.
(St. Mary's, Ohio, in the late 1880s. Credit: ridertown.com)
Tully was born in 1886 in St. Mary's, Ohio. His father was a ditch digger, and his mother died when he was 6. Tully's childhood was spent in an orphanage — then, at 12, his father gave him to an abusive farmer as a farmhand.
At 13, Tully escaped back to St. Mary's, where he heard road stories from hobos. At 14, Tully joined them, becoming a "road kid," or "junior hobo," says Dawidziak. The rest of his adolescence was spent jumping trains and in the company of hobos, prostitutes and carnies.
UCLA archivist Alisa Monheim says, "One of the few things that you can do in that situation, places you can go to get out of the heat or out of the cold, is go to libraries." That's where Tully apparently taught himself to read and write.
In 1906, at 20 years old, Tully took up boxing as an occupation.
"I staggered from an overhand right and rattled the teeth in Tierney's jaw in return. I tried to get under the eaves. Tierney was wise. His rigid arm met my attack. Our gloves were now blood-and-water soaked. My kidneys ached with pain."
— Jim Tully on his bout with Chicago Jack Tierney.
"He was an untrained boxer, to be sure, but he was fearless," Bauer says. "He was willing to take punches, to take punishment, all to get inside and score hits." Despite having some success, "He had seen men die in the ring. He had seen 'em blinded in the ring. And I think he realized that this was not a career he was going to carry into middle age."
Tully married his first wife in 1911. They had two children, Alton and Trilby, and moved to Los Angeles.
(Tully and family in L.A.)
He spent 10 years traveling as a tree trimmer and working on his first novel, "Emmett Lawler." He also submitted poetry to newspapers and articles on hoboing and boxing to various magazines.
Recognition for Tully's work grew among writers and editors he sought out for advice: Jack
London, Upton Sinclair and H.L. Mencken. When Tully came to L.A., he made notable friends, including Lon Chaney and Erich von Stroheim.
One of Tully's best friends was Paul Bern, a producer at MGM, who invited Tully to a party, knowing Charlie Chaplin would be there, and that they'd hit it off. In 1923, Charlie Chaplin made Jim Tully his all-purpose PR writer.
During this time, Tully started his second novel, "Beggars of Life."
"Beggars" was published in 1924 to great success, giving Tully the means to leave Chaplin and write more articles, novels and a series of movie star profiles.
"He was known as 'the man Hollywood most loved to hate,' because he was one of the first reporters to ever cover Hollywood as a beat," says UCLA's Monheim. "He really didn't care who he pissed off in the slightest."
Bauer says Tully's profile of former silent film icon John Gilbert was "so harsh that, reportedly, when Gilbert read it, he threw up." In 1930, Gilbert called Tully out at the Brown Derby.
Dawidziak breaks down the scuffle: "Tully is up, and he is in a boxer's stance. Gilbert comes at him, and he throws two wild punches. Misses with both. Tully, a trained boxer, steps into the gap and snaps a right uppercut. Knocks him cold with one punch."
(Gilbert v. Tully at the Brown Derby. Courtesy Mark Dawidziak)
Tully's career was declining by the mid-to-late '30s. He attempted comebacks with "The Bruiser" (1936) and "Biddy Brogan's Boy" (1942), but neither were successful in his lifetime.
On June 22, 1947, Tully's heart failed. He was 61 years old. He's buried at Glendale's Forest Lawn, on the same hill as John Gilbert. A last ignominy for Jim Tully, whom Dawidziak calls "the missing link between Jack London and Jack Kerouac": His grave marker gets his birth year wrong.
Chris Greenspon thanks: Voice actors Jennifer Miller and Christopher Murray, documentary filmmaker Mark Wade Stone for clips from "Way for a Sailor," and WKSU's Joe Gunderman.
Dylan Brody talks turkey (read this if you hate Thanksgiving)
(Dylan Brody is a writer and performer.)
Thanksgiving is always a difficult time for me because I am, by nature and by habit, an ingrate. For years I avoided Thanksgiving get-togethers and I believed it was because I did not like turkey. It was only well into adulthood that I realized I just didn't like what my grandmother used to do to turkey.
Every year my family would pile into the station wagon and drive to Lakewood New Jersey where my grandmother would turn a Butterball into bird-shaped particle board. I remember hours of chewing and I remember thinking that holiday food was supposed to make one salivate, not absorb all the moisture from one's mouth. A slab of my grandmother's turkey could have been used to dehumidify the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
At the end of the holiday weekend, we'd all get back into the car and as we pulled away my father would say, "Well. That was relatively painless." Halfway home we would stop somewhere for lunch and, after days of politely rejecting Grandma's offers of left-over turkey shard sandwiches, I would have a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup. It was my favorite meal of the year.
A few years ago, I went to a holiday gathering I thought it might be good for my career to attend. That's right. I'm that guy. While everyone else is hip-deep in holiday spirit, I'm just hoping to book some gigs for after the New Year. In any case, there was turkey at this party and in an attempt to look like a civilized human, I ate some and found out that I don't hate it. I had seconds.
Just as I was beginning to think I was getting the hang of the whole Thanksgiving deal, my host introduced the highlight of his evening. Everybody present would take a moment to state what he or she was thankful for. I hate audience participation. I don't sing-along. I don't clap on two and four. When I was a kid and we went to a State Theater production of Peter Pan, I wouldn't pretend my applause could help save Tinkerbell's cloying, shimmery, fictitious life. I was perfectly happy to let her darken and die.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not bitter. I just don't believe in artificial sweeteners. There are things in the world I feel thankful for, but they are personal things that I don't feel like telling a roomful of acquaintances just because somebody's turned basic human gratitude into a holiday-specific party game. So after a few people shared their saccharine feelings about health and the love of their families or whatever idiocy they spouted, it got to be my turn; I said, "I'm thankful that at that very first Thanksgiving everybody ignored the one wise, old Native American woman who kept saying, 'don't feed them. If you feed them, they'll never leave.'"
Everybody at the party glared at me. Apparently the gratitude game, when played properly, is utterly humorless. My wife squeezed my hand reassuringly and I knew that none of these people was going to be calling to offer a job over the next couple of months.
Yesterday I got an e-mail invitation to a big Thanksgiving dinner party in the Hollywood hills. I asked my wife if she wanted to go eat turkey with some Network and Studio executives this year. She said she'd rather just stay in, watch a movie and have grilled cheese. I nearly wept with gratitude.
Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film: 'Big Hero 6'
UPDATE 1/15/2015: Disney's "Big Hero 6" is nominated for Best Animated Film Oscar. Here's our Off-Ramp interview with two of the people who helped make it a hit.
Off-Ramp animation expert Charles Solomon goes to Disney to talk about the look of the Disney animated blockbuster "Big Hero 6" with production designer Paul Felix and Scott Watanabe, art director, environments.
"John (Lasseter) believes your story's going to change over the course of the years it takes to do these movies. But your world is something you're going to live with the whole time." — Director Don Hall, LA Times
Virtually every review of Disney’s animated hit "Big Hero 6" — which has brought in $112 million domestic and $148 million worldwide through this weekend — praises the imaginary city where the story unfolds: San Fransokyo, which blends famous San Francisco landmarks with elements of Tokyo's iconic skyline into a metropolis that feels both familiar and alien:
(Image: Disney)
Two of the artists most responsible for that look are production designer Paul Felix and Scott Watanabe, art director, environments. Felix was production designer on "Lilo & Stitch" and "The Emperor's New Groove," but his credits go back to the 1980s, when he did storyboard cleanup on "ALF." "Big Hero 6" is Watanabe's first film as art director.
RELATED: Meet Disney and "Fat Albert" animator Floyd Norman
First, why combine Tokyo and San Francisco?
"Initially," Watanabe says, " we wanted to have the freedom to create a new environment (not) tied down to reality, plus I think everybody just thinks it's cool."
"I think, too," Felix says, "Marvel (which originated the characters) wanted to make sure that this film was distinct from the Marvel Universe, so you wouldn't expect Iron Man to drop in, so it had to become our own story."
The team blended two very different cities. Says Solomon, "I wouldn't say Tokyo is oppressive, but it's kind of omnipresent, whereas in San Francisco you can look up at the sky." Felix says they had a graphic designer working for two years just to capture the signage needed. To get the quality of light right, Felix says they photographed from atop a skyscraper from dawn to dusk. And Watanabe recounts how, during the production, he'd joke "put a roof on it," when they tried to make a San Francisco icon look more Japanese, referring to iconic Japanese-style roofs.
(Image: Disney)
For the interiors, the two say it was essential to get the clutter right. It was a real challenge," says Felix, "to try to populate those sets with enough detail to conform with some of the research we saw." They took trips to robotics labs at Carnegie-Mellon and MIT, "and that clutter is there." Watanabe says he took inspiration from his Disney colleagues, many of whom have accumulated layers of mementos in their work spaces, and from home: "Just visiting my Japanese grandparents' homes, and they have clutter everywhere!"
Watanabe says one of the concepts animators developed was to let the clutter grow throughout the film, like plants, "Which worked out well for some things," Felix interjects, but in some scenes, "it started looking very much like cat or rat poop, so we had to dial back on where you actually see it."
Felix says their job is to create environments that give context to the characters, to make the experience richer and more immersive. "You're world-building from scratch," says Watanabe, "and that could come off as really cheap if you don't a true-to-life job."
Easter Egg for KPCC junkies: Did Rabe find a Lasseter/Miyazaki Easter egg in some early "Big Hero 6" art? Check out our photo slideshow.
Off-Ramp Web Special: Foodies on Thanksgiving
UPDATE 11-20-2010: Thanksgiving comes every year, so we're serving the most delicious MEMORY leftovers, from Off-Ramp 2009.
The great chefs of Los Angeles tell us what's on their Thanksgiving menu this year, plus Pigtails & Sauerkraut, a Wiley Family tradition.
Get people talking about Thanksgiving and even folks who spend every day with food get a little mist in their eye. For Thanksgiving this year, Off-Ramp host John Rabe (above, with his family) is talking with a bunch of foodies. Here are the first few with more to come...
1. Michael Cimarusti (above, in the pink shirt, with friends) runs the two-Michelin star Providence restaurant in Los Angeles. The food there is very fancy, but at Thanksgiving, he looks forward to his sister-in-law’s broccoli casserole.
2. Russ Parsons, Food editor at the LA Times and frequent Off-Ramp guest (Off-Ramp is thankful that he never bills us!) says Thanksgiving is special because it’s America’s only ritual meal … and by the way, learn to carve a turkey before going to your in-laws at Thanksgiving.
3. Mark Peel, owner/chef of Campanile, remembers a Thanksgiving water-balloon fight from his childhood that proves that Thanksgiving is not really about the food – although the food can be very tasty. Like the sinfully creamy mashed potatoes that are featured in his new cookbook, New Classic Family Dinners, which you can buy, with part of the proceeds benefitting KPCC.
4. With due respect to Linda, Julian, Sian, Jay, and many other damn fine cooks, Marcie Page (who hails from Paris, Tennessee) is probably the best civilian cook I know. Not many people make cassoulet in LA, for just one example, let alone make their own duck confit for the cassoulet. Marcie is a typical Southern Californian -- she's a Tennessee transplant, in a mixed household, and she borrows from all their traditions and adds her own.
5. Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam (above, approximately 10% life-size) have gained a national rep for spotting new food trends on their show Dinner Party Download. For their Thanksgiving memories and recipes, click on the last audio item up at the top.
-- PIGTAILS&SAUERKRAUT - A WILEY FAMILY HOLIDAY TRADITION --
This summer, I met Malcolm Wiley, who works back East with my cousin Megan. (Above, after a delicious Tuesday night dinner at Little Dom's.) Over dinner, we started talking about holiday meals and he mentioned a dish that MUST be at every Thanksgiving, Pigtails and Sauerkraut.
He writes, "My family is from Baltimore, Maryland, though I grew up in Washington, D.C. It was always thought that this recipe combined the influences of the African-American and German influences there. I’ve been eating this as part of the Thanksgiving meal since I was a child. As a matter of fact, it’s not the holidays without it. I’m one of the few in the family who still makes it every year, so I’ve got a REALLY BIG POT."
I hadn't heard of this dish before, but he assured me it's very real and very tasty, and to prove it, he sent the recipe.
Ingredients:
-- Pigtails. Preferably corned or smoked - if you can't find them, fresh will have to do. Hint - the farmer's market where black folk shop during the holidays will always have them. The number of tails you buy will depend on how many people you want to feed. Three or four is a good starting point.
-- Salt
-- Black Pepper
-- Season All
-- A big sweet onion, like a Vidalia
-- Sauerkraut in a bag - Hebrew National is one brand.
Recipe:
Wash off the pigtails. You don't have to scrub them like chitterlings or anything, just wash 'em off.
Cut the onion into big chunks.
Throw everything in a big pot.
Cover with water to an inch or two above the pigtails.
Season with salt, black pepper, and Season All. Don't go really crazy with the salt. The Season All has salt in it too and will help with the flavor.
Mix everything with a big 'ole spoon.
Cover the pot.
Bring it to a rolling boil and allow it to boil for 5-10 minutes.
Stir.
Turn the heat down low and let the pot simmer (covered). It takes a long time for the tails to break down to the consistency you want. It could be four to six hours or longer. Every half hour, stir the pot. Toward the end of the process, break apart any tails that are hanging on for dear life.
When the tails have completely broken down and all you see in the pot is bone, pulled pork, and bits of skin, you've simmered long enough.
Cut the corner off a bag of kraut. Let the liquid drain out. You don't have to squeeze every drop of liquid out, just let most of it go.
Dump the kraut in the pot.
Cook the whole thing another 30 minutes or so on medium-low heat. You just don't want the kraut to be crunchy when you eat it.
Once everything is all mixed up and smellin' good, it's time to eat.
(Courtesy of the Wiley Family of Baltimore, Md.)
The art of World War I comes to life at the Getty Research Institute
You probably heard it a dozen times in high school: World War I was the first industrial war. Armies used planes, tanks, mines, and chemical weapons in unprecedented numbers. The casualties were catastrophic.
But World War I was also one of the first that modern art had to reckon with. This week, the Getty Research Institute debuted World War 1: War of Images, Images of War. The exhibit takes original propaganda posters and journal articles from the war and shows them alongside how artists from the age interpreted it — the result is fascinating, strange and sometimes chilling.
Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson went to the Getty Research Institute and talked with the Getty's Nancy Perloff and Philipp Blom.
The exhibit features art used for state-sponsored propaganda, but also art produced as a reaction to World War 1. With propaganda, the objective was clear: news journals in places like France and Germany would draw covers with caricatures of their enemy's culture: drawings of Kaiser Wilhelm II executing children, or the French Gallic Rooster looking sick, weak and forlorn.
When artists looked at the war, the perspective was very different. Philipp Blom, a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, points to the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, an artist who served briefly in the German military before suffering a nervous breakdown and being committed. "He drew pictures of the apocalypse," said Blom. "And he drew them on the back of cigarette packs, because he had no other paper available. So they're very small, and there's this cycle of drawings that shows you different stages of the apocalypse."
Nancy Perloff — a curator with the Institute — said she hopes visitors will walk away from the exhibit with a sense of the power of images to wage war. "Look at how differently each country responded," she said. "France, the object of its propaganda was largely Germany. Germany, not entirely, but largely against the United Kingdom. And you'll see that through and through."
Philip Blom said he agreed, and added that the exhibit also shows visitors the disparity between how nations depict war through art versus independent artists. "You hardly see any specific uniforms," said Blom. "You hardly see any national attributes. You see people suffering. So the propaganda shows you all the nationalist attributions, all the negative stereotyping. And when it them comes to the real experience, you see pure and naked human suffering."
World War I: War of Images, Images of War is on display at the Getty Research Institute now through April 19. Head to the Getty's websitefor visiting information.
We go inside the living, breathing Disney Hall organ as it turns 10
I raised some eyebrows when I asked the L.A. Phil's Joanne Pearce Martin to play "Happy Birthday" on the Disney Hall organ. But she did so with gusto, as you can hear if you'll click the Listen Now button on the left.
And why not?! The orchestra is marking the tenth birthday of its signature pipe organ this month, with those huge wooden pipes that look like a box of french fries.
The organ is a work of art and a musical instrument, but it's also a huge machine, one you can walk around the inside of, and from the inside — way up above the Disney Hall stage, above the organist's perch — you can see the pipes and fully appreciate the way they work together.
That's where I talked with Manuel Rosales who built the organ (with German company Glatter-Gotz Orgelbau), and who demonstrated it with help from organ conservator Philip Smith, who played the organ from a console way down on stage.
Interview Highlights:
The organ is a living, breathing object?
It's complicated and each pipe is like its own musical instrument. And each pipe ages in its own way. Yet it has to be commingled with over 6,000 other pipes. So the way they sound today isn't the way they sounded 10 years ago. We can't say it's like fine wine that gets better with age; the molecules in the pipes soften and the tone mellows. But they don't lose their shimmer or their power.
Do other instruments have the organ's personality points?
A piano does, but it's very subtle. A harpsichord does. Harpsichords are the enfant terrible of the keyboard world. They change overnight — they can change in an hour. Organs are not quite that temperamental. But unlike an instrument that you can pick up and walk away with ... this has to all be done here. So we come to the organ on its terms, and we have to make the decisions of how we take care of it.
Do other concert halls have purpose-built organs like Disney Hall?
Some go back to the 1920s or so when those concert halls were first built. Some got rid of their organs or didn't maintain them and they just walled them up, like the Cleveland Orchestra. There are new concert halls — the one in Dallas has a beautiful organ, the one in Philadelphia; down in Orange County there's an instrument in the Segerstrom Hall.
So it's become popular again to have organs. And people like coming to concert halls because there are fewer restrictions on the kinds of music that you can play.
He built it; is he proud as the organ turns 10?
I'm real lucky to be here. That's the main thing. Many organ builders get to build organs in nice halls or nice churches, but they're a thousand or three thousand miles away. I'm 15 minutes away. So this is like my other living room.
The L.A. Phil has several upcoming concerts to celebrate the organ's tenth anniversary, including:
- Stephen Hartke’s and Saint-Saens’ “Organ” symphonies. (Nov. 20 at 8 p.m., Nov. 21 at 8 p.m., and Nov. 22 at 2 p.m.)
- “Happy Birthday ‘Hurricane Mama’: Pulling Out All The Stops” (Nov. 23 at 7:30 p.m.)
- The Holiday Organ Spectacular (Dec. 19 at 8 p.m.)
- Holiday Sing-Along (Dec. 20 at 11:30am and 2 p.m.)
- A continuing Organ Recital series in 2015 featuring Anthony Newman (January 11th) and Olivier Latry (April 19th)
And check out the extra audio: My first piece on the Disney Hall organ, when it was a "newborn" in 2004.
Attorney General Eric Holder tours the Actors Gang Prison Project
The Actors Gang is Tim Robbins’ experimental theater company. It’s based in Culver City, where the troupe recently mounted a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
But the Actors Gang also spends a lot of time in local correctional facilities, where it teaches improvisational theater techniques — they look a little bit like Commedia dell'arte — to inmates.
The idea is that by hiding their identity, often through makeup, the inmates can somehow reveal themselves. As the Actors Gang puts it, that can "unlock human potential in the interest of effective rehabilitation."
On a recent morning at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, a group of prisoners were preparing for rehearsal. Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder had been invited to experience an Actors Gang Prison Project, but he hadn't arrived yet.
The prisoners had meditated. They had done vocal exercises. Sabra Williams, an actor who runs the Prison Project, was directing the group — sort of.
"Whatever might be stopping you, it's not important enough," Williams said. "Put it in that river beside you, let it float downstream, and dig in!"
The warmups looked a lot like what you'd see in a college theater class: the students lock eyes, laugh in unison, move in slow motion. Williams sat the actor-prisoners down and asked each to share his story.
"I'd like to be remembered as somebody who was a contributor. And who was not a taker," said Christopher Bisbano. "I was a taker most of my life, and now at this point I want to give back. And it feels like I've found my purpose here, in this program."
Bisbano has been incarcerated for 17 years and in the Prison Project for four. He’s even started his own theater program, modeled after the Actors Gang process.
"I get a front row view to watching these big bad asses — if I can say that — want to play women, and get into character as women," Bisbano said. "When they get fully engaged, it breaks them down. And it's helped a lot of men realize that their self-worth still is intact — and that they still are human beings."
Michael Dunn has been in the program for just four months but said he's already found practical applications in the prison. In the past, if another inmate, say, stepped on his foot, he would "jump in their face and threaten them in a physical manner," Dunn said.
"But now I'm able to not only control my reactions, but respond in a more healthier way. It definitely makes things easier in here, because in prison you deal with an assortment of different personalities and with this, this kind of work kind of anchors me," he said.
"It gets them in touch with how they have control over their emotional choices," said actor Tim Robbins, the artistic director for the program. "Through improvisation and through theater exercises they discover that they can make a choice. They can choose whether to be angry, or sad, or happy, or fearful. If one character comes on stage approaching another character in an improvisation in a state of anger, we encourage the other player to respond in a state of emotion other than anger."
At last Holder arrived.
"We have to really ask ourselves new questions all the time: are we doing the right thing by the people who are incarcerated? And the larger question: are we doing the right things by our nation?" Holder said before the program.
"If we simply warehouse people and forget them, put them back in situations from which they came without any kind of intervention — why would we expect a different result?" Holder said.
The federal criminal justice system is looking for creative ways to educate and rehabilitate prisoners in hopes to reduce recidivism, said Holder. So — to that end — does the Prison Project work?
Cynthia Tampkins, the warden at NORCO, acknowledged there's no research on the program's effectiveness outside prison. But on the inside, she said, the change is remarkable. "If you look at the outcome from the inmates being in this program, the disciplinary rule violations have been reduced, there's better behavior in the dorms," she said. "My director said it best: you launch how you fly."
After the performance was over, the VIPs filed out. The inmates went to wash off their makeup and then walked, single file, back to their cells.
Downtown LA gets another restored theater: The Regent
Downtown Los Angeles's renaissance continues with the restoration of yet another theater: The Regent has been brought back by club owner Mitchell Frank.
But if you live in L.A. and go to concerts, chances are you've already been to one of Frank's clubs. Frank and his partners made venues like the Echo, Echoplex and Spaceland into L.A. music mainstays.
Last weekend, Frank opened The Regent. But what will set it apart from his other L.A. spots?
"Because it is so much larger, you can't just do a small local band and expect to fill the room with 200 people," Frank said.
He sees the Regent as stop number three for bands that work their way up from playing the Echo and Spaceland.
Situated in downtown's rapidly revitalizing Historic Core, Frank says the Regent will serve as more of a downtown-centric stage, distinguishing it from his other venues in Silver Lake and Echo Park.
Built in 1914, the Regent came with plenty of history — and cleanup work.
"Ended up downtown crawling through rat crap and pigeon crap and dead rats... I pretty much went through every theater downtown and this was my favorite," Frank said.
Up until the '90s, the Regent served as a grindhouse theater — a detail Frank playfully pays homage to in the bathrooms, which have semi-nudes pasted on the walls.
But putting aside Frank's love of the old place, does it make business sense to restore a decaying theater like the Regent?
"I'm hoping it does. My partners are for sure hoping it does," said Frank. "But I feel like the problem is, if you just kill all the old buildings and build these monstrosities... there is no art, you've killed the art of downtown Los Angeles."
If you check out a show at the Regent, you won't have to go far to eat and drink. Frank christened the Prufrock Pizzeria and Love Song Bar last weekend, and you can grab a drink next to an old piano which was discovered at the theater during the restoration. Prufrock? Love Song? Who's the T.S. Eliot fan? That would be Mitchell Frank.
"This is kind of like our way to be able to dedicate the space and the name to all the frustrated poets turned musicians and singer-songwriters," he said.
Bars, beers, baristas, boba in brand new beverage book 'Drink: Los Angeles'
When Eat: Los Angeles shut down, it was a sad day. We lost a valuable "Off-Ramp" contributor, and residents lost a smart guide to all the places you can get food and drink in Southern California. So we were glad to hear that Colleen Dunn Bates and her Prospect Parks Books team revived a part of Eat: L.A. in a pocket-sized book, "Drink: Los Angeles."
"We realized," says Bates, Drink L.A.'s editor, "that the city has become a locus for great drinking. And that did not used to be the case for L.A. We were outshone in many departments: there were better cities for beer, better cities to drink wine. There were certainly better cities for bars, and better cities for coffee. But now L.A. is holding its own if not leading in many of those categories."
BUY: "Drink: Los Angeles" from Vroman's
What happened? Contributing editor Garrett Snyder says, "One of the main strengths for L.A.'s drinking culture is what you'll find in arts, architecture, food, things like that, is that there's a lack of tradition. That used to be a negative, but I feel like now it allows — whether you're in beer, coffee, cocktails — to kind of strip things down and not have a dogmatic view of what you should have. It's produced a lot of things that are exciting, and aren't going on in the rest of the country."
"Drink: Los Angeles" includes more than 500 listings for great booze and juice bars, beer taprooms, wine stores, coffee houses, even boba shops. What you won't find: chain shops and eateries, and places that suck. They prefer to simply focus on the good and ignore the bad.
The guide also breaks down Southern California by region, and includes do-it-yourself pub-crawls in various hip neighborhoods. And for those of us who are getting increasingly crotchety about the noise level at many bars, look for the "ear" symbol, which denotes a place where you can hold a (reasonably) quiet conversation.
In Napa and beyond, winemaking depends on witches
How do you find water in California's drought stricken wine country? You can pay thousands for a scientific survey or — for about $500 — hire a "water witch."
Damian Grindley, a two decade veteran of wine-making recently bought a winery of his own in Paso Robles. The property came with one water well, but soon needed another, so he got on the phone with the local well driller — who referred him to the local water witch.
Water witches, or dowsers, usually use a pair of L-shaped metal rods to find water. They'll walk the property holding the rods, and once they find what they're looking for, the rods will cross. Totally on their own, they say.
Dowsers are surprisingly popular in modern agriculture — Grindley says at least half of the winemakers in his part of Paso Robles use them.
One of California's most prominent dowsers is Napa's Marc Mondavi — a member of the famed winemaking Mondavi family. He offers his services for $500, a fraction of what a geologist would charge to survey the land.
"I’m referred to by most of the well drillers here in the valley, when people call them to drill a well. They would rather have a spot marked by a dowser than just randomly pick a spot, because there’s not water everywhere," says Mondavi. "And with today’s drought here in California, I’ve been very busy."
Mondavi claims a success rate of over 95 percent and says he keeps logbooks to prove it. When I ask him about skeptics, he doesn’t get defensive or worked up. Like most of the dowsers I’ve talked to, Mondavi doesn’t seem to mind that science is not on his side.
Allen Christensen with the U.S. Geological Survey says that geologists have some high-tech methods for finding underground water, but for the most part, they’re making educated guesses. They look at the shape and height of the land, the levels of nearby wells and other clues, like plants. Sometimes, though, you really just have to drill to find out.
Christensen says there's no scientific proof that dowsing works. So why do dowsers still get work? Even huge wine companies, like Mondavi and Bronco — the producers of Trader Joe's Charles Shaw — use dowsers to find water.
Christensen has a theory:
"I still think it’s more of a person who really understands the lay of the land more than it is an actual fact. They have similar experiences to drillers. So they already have a very good knowledge of how water is and where water is gonna be. So generally, a dowser won’t dowse in an area where he clearly doesn’t think there’s gonna be water."
If he's right, then dowsers are using the same clues a geologist would – they just don’t realize they’re doing it.
Damian Grindley, the Paso Robles winemaker, seems ambivalent about the practice. "Wine’s got a lot of art to it as well," he says. "Planting your vineyard, and developing your property, and looking for water — you know, maybe there’s a little bit of art and little bit of science in it too. I mean, there’s winemakers out there who will only pick their fruit by a full moon and they swear by it. There’s no scientific evidence, but a lot of them make great wine."