KPCC photog Maya Sugarman lets a king snake slither around her neck, and John lets a reasonably friendly tarantula crawl up his arm ... It’s done by hand, is quite painful, and is very expensive. We'll take you to a Garden Grove shop that is one of the few places in the US approved by one of the ruling Samoan tattoo families ... John brings in pop culture experts to evaluate the new Godzilla reboot, "Shin Godzilla," which sets the Godzilla story in modern-day Japan .... The story of Bobbi Bratt, a punk rocker from Southern California whose life was cut short by cancer almost thirty years ago.
Off-Ramp's critics roar about 'Shin Godzilla,' a monster of a reboot
The new Godzilla movie, "Shin* Godzilla," also known as "Godzilla Resurgence," is dominating the Japanese box office, but it's only showing in the US from Oct. 11-18, so we wanted to make sure you knew about it ... and that it's worth rushing out to see.
Oh, yes. It's worth seeing.
I brought Filmweek and Off-Ramp film critic Tim Cogshell and KPCC pop culture blogger Mike Roe together in one of our little conference rooms and watched an annoyingly watermarked streaming screener of "Shin Godzilla," and it still blew us away.
Listen to the audio for deeper thoughts on the film, but we liked "Shin Godzilla's" mix of kick-ass Godzilla scenes and deadly serious social and cultural commentary, which touches on the Fukishima and Chernobyl disasters, government process for good and bad, Japan's enforced post-war pacifism, international relations, nuclear power and weapons, and just good old morality v. pragmatism.
If you had high hopes for 2014's "Godzilla" but were disappointed by the myriad distracting sub-plots and the lack of ... you know ... actual Godzilla scenes, this one has tons of Godzilla, and -- SPOILER ALERT -- focuses like the laser beam coming out of our hero's mouth and spines on the themes above. There are no children rescued at the last minute, no separated lovers, and only the briefest "A giant monster? That's impossible!" moment.
How much did Tim like it?
He says, 'If we consider that the original 1954 film ("Gojira"), the one without Raymond Burr, ranks as #1 in terms of monster movies, I'm gonna put this as #3, in terms of monster movies. #2 is "Frankenstein."' So that's high praise indeed.
Personally, I think you could argue it's better than "Gojira." Of the 30+ Godzilla movies made so far, I'd rank them:
- "Shin Godzilla" (2016)
- "Gojira" (1954)
- "Godzilla Final Wars" (2004)
- "Mothra v. Godzilla" (1964)
Feel free to take issue in the comments section!
(*Shin means "new" in Japanese. So, yes, saying 'The new Godzilla movie, "Shin Godzilla,"' is like saying "the La Brea Tar Pits.")
This Garden Grove tattoo shop is one of the only places to get a proper Samoan tattoo
David DeMarco is laying on the floor of A-Town Tattoo in Garden Grove.
Si’i Liufau, the owner, is sitting beside him cross-legged in a sarong-like skirt. Two other men flank DeMarco’s sides, stretching his skin. Liufau is dipping the tip of a wooden instrument in black ink and methodically tapping it into Demarco’s skin.
DeMarco is getting his pe’a. He’s on his ninth session and is about two-thirds done.
The pe’a is a traditional Samoan tattoo – or “tatau” – and is a rite of passage for men of the Samoan Islands.
It goes from the mid-back all the way down to the knees – covering much of the body in blocks of black ink and complex linear designs.
It’s incredibly painful, and expensive: Demarco will have dropped about $4,000 by the end.
Recalling his first sitting, he said: “The first strike, when he hit me, I thought to myself, 'Ah, I’m in for it.' It definitely did not feel like anything I’ve felt before in my life. It’s consistent pain. It doesn’t numb or dull away.”
A-Town is one of the only places in the United States where you can get a traditional Samoan tatau: done by hand with traditional tools instead of modern tattoo machines.
“In the U.S., you can probably count the number of hand tattooers who have been given the right to be a hand tattooist – you can probably count it on one hand,” said Takahiro Kitamura, a tattoo artist and author who recently curated an exhibit on Samoan tatau at the Japanese American National Museum. “It’s an extremely rare privilege.”
The honor to do tatau is given to a tattoo artist by one of Samoa’s ruling tattoo families. One of the most well-known families is the Sulu’ape, who gave their blessing to Liufau last year.
He now carries their name as his, as an official member of their family.
“This is something that’s been able to be a blessing in my life and helped me understand the connections I have myself, being an American Samoan, with the Samoan culture,” said Liufau, who is half Samoan. He has a pe’a himself with western-style tattoos.
Despite the cost and the pain, people who bear the pe’a – or the female version called the malu – say it’s worth it.
“I have to get it before I die, that’s how I felt,” said Tiffany Niumata, 30, who had Liufau finish hers.
She cries remembering her blessing ceremony, which happens when it’s finished.
“(My brothers) were really proud of me,” she said. “They were saying like, ‘We respect you so much.’ It makes me so emotional.”
The malu is simpler than the pe’a. It’s done as a sign of respect because women already experience pain with childbirth.
“I would probably give birth a million times than to get it again,” said Marie Tautua, 30, who also finished hers with Liufau. “It’s my identity. It’s who I am. I think it’s something all women should do in my culture.”
Liufau, and others like him, are keeping a part of Samoan culture alive for the roughly 500,000 Samoans outside of the islands, Kitamura says.
“For those people, how do they connect with their culture? How do they do those rituals?” he said. “I think Si’i is filling an important cultural void.”
And that brings us back to DeMarco, a special education teacher from Garden Grove.
He’s not Samoan. He’s Mexican and Italian.
“People outside my immediate friends and family don’t really get it,” he said. “They say you’re not Samoan…you’re pretending to be Samoan.”
He grew up with close Samoan friends. He wants to get it out of respect for the culture. And he wasn't sure he wanted to get the pe'a until an incident three years ago that pushed him over the edge:
He was walking across the street at about 1:35 a.m. in Newport Beach when he was hit by a taxi. He was in a coma for two weeks, in the hospital for two months and has had 25 surgeries since. Scars cover his body.
“Surviving that accident, and all the other things that happened in my life, it came to a point and I said, ‘It’s now or never’,” he said.
It’s up to the tattooist to determine if the person is fit for tatau. Liufau saw DeMarco was.
"I really felt like it something he had earned,” Liufau said. “He really understood the meaning and depth of it. The task in front of him – it’s not just physical (but) it’s emotional at times and it’s financial. It’s a hardship on your life until you finish it."
The late, great Bobbi Brat, unsung heroine of LA punk
Bobbi Brat was the quintessential L.A. punk singer. She left the San Fernando Valley at 18 to live in abandoned buildings in Hollywood. She was a biker, a fighter and a Hello Kitty fanatic. In her time, she was a star of the scene, having two infamous bands, Red Scare and the Bobbi Brat Band. She died unexpectedly in 1988 just as her career was picking up steam. She was 26.
Born Debbie Brown in 1962, she grew up with her mother and half-sister, Kathy, in a condo in Agoura Hills. Kathy remembers Bobbi as a “super tomboy-ass kicker” who worked at a gas station and wore her hair like Elvis. She was a big fan of horror movies and kids shows, and loved swimming and skateboarding.
“She had saved all of her money from working at the gas station and bought this car without telling my mom,” said Kathy, “and I remember her showing it to me one day. She had parked it around the corner, and it blew my mind. I was like, ‘You have a car?! What?!’”
She moved out of her home at 18. The car became the singer's ticket to Hollywood and L.A.'s growing punk scene.
At 19, she met Ohio expat Rudy Matchinga at the Oxford House, a punk crash pad in Hollywood. Bobbi and Rudy wanted to start a band, and with fellow Oxford resident Lad Bak (a Czechoslovakian drummer) they put a simple ad in the Recycler for a “punk guitarist.” Valley kid Gene Lipin was the third person they tried out in the Oxford’s mattress-lined garage.
1982 was the heyday for L.A. hardcore bands like Black Flag, TSOL and the Circle Jerks — the music was fast, brutal and nowhere near the sound Red Scare crafted.
On stage, Bobbi was tough and charismatic. Lipin said she had a way of connecting with the audiences in downtown and Hollywood’s punk dives, even if it was by trading barbs. Her sister Kathy, was too young to attend most of Red Scare’s shows, but Bobbi still made sure to stay connected to her.
“There was one time, I was probably like 15, and my sister called and said, ‘We’re playing at the Whisky! Come sing back-up!’ And I was like, ‘What?!’” she said.
Today, Kathy Brown runs a tribute website for Bobbi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOhOmolecWE
1984 was a big year for Red Scare. They put out their only record, "Then There Were None," released on Upstart Records. Today, it’s out of print. The band haphazardly booked a national tour that summer. Lipin and Matchinga remember the van breaking down constantly, members were “being stacked on top of each other,” trying to sleep in laundromats, campgrounds, and stairwells. The band broke up after they got home. Nevertheless, Lipin looks back on the tour as one of the best times of his life.
Bobbi started a country-influenced bar band. First, it was called Bobbi and the Boneyard Brats, and then just The Bobbi Brat Band. The band was starting to enjoy its first taste of success when, in 1987, Bobbi had a tubal pregnancy — where an egg becomes fertilized in a fallopian tube.
Doctors discovered what they thought was a blood clot during Bobbi’s tubal pregnancy, so they inserted a tube into her stomach to drain it.
Bobbi and the band kept going. They played their regular slot at the Coconut Teaszer, and according to the club’s booker Len Fagan, they were getting offers from record companies, but Bobbi was performing with a hole in her side. Here's a live recording from that era:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhqFP0DzSJM
Over the course of 15 months, Bobbi hadn't improved at all. Doctors resorted to surgery. “Once they did, they realized they had made a mistake," said Kathy.
"The doctor described it as finding crystals everywhere. There was cancer everywhere. That was kind of the beginning of the end,” she said.
During this time, Red Scare had reunited. They'd started to record a new EP with a wholly different sound. Bobby was only able to record vocals for half the songs.
“We did go to visit her probably weeks before she passed away, and that’s when the reality kicked in," said Lipin, the guitarist. "She was in an apartment with a [hospital] bed in the apartment. The hair was gone, she was emaciated. Prior to that, she kept her look and her attitude, but at the end it was a slap in the face.”
Bobbi Brat died on November 30th, 1988. She was 26. Kathy wasn’t at her side when she died, but through a happy accident years before, she was able to grant Bobbi her last request: to be buried in Westwood Village Cemetery. You can find out how to visit the grave here.
Why Westwood? Kathy said it's an early memory from Bobbi, during happier times when she visited the cemetery with her boyfriend.
"They hopped the fence of that cemetery because she wanted to see Marilyn Monroe’s grave," said Kathy. "She said, ‘If I ever died, this is where I’d want to be buried.’ This was 10 years before she died! And so then we were just hell bent on her being buried there. In that weird space that you’re in at that time, you just want the best, ‘the blackest casket.’ Now you look back, and did any of that matter? But somehow, you wanted to do right by her in that moment.”
This Palestinian-American family in Anaheim wants to bring their falafel to you
Achieving the American dream can mean different things to different people: owning a house, climbing the career ladder — or making falafel an American household name.
Kareem Hawari and his family, owners of Kareem's Restaurant in Anaheim, hope to see their name in your freezer.
"What I have in my head is falafel, falafel, falafel … and how to make it, how to anything, you know," he says.
The restaurant is homey — 10 tables, a small patio out front. The Palestinian-American family has been serving falafel — zesty green chickpea fried to a peppery brown crisp — for 20 years.
"My father and my mother came into the United States, and my father had a passion for cooking, and my mother had a passion for teaching," he says. "And apparently his overpowered hers."
Nesrine Omari, Kareem's mom, greets everyone with a big hug. As the restaurant’s chef — and a mom — she’ll ask if you’ve eaten.
"The best thing that people say: 'Oh, my gosh, I was here 10 years ago and it’s the same taste. Never, never change,'" she says. "This is a big thing, yeah. It has to be the same taste, because I am the cook. I am the one who makes it all the time."
But the family’s humble success came to a halt in 2012 when Kareem’s father, Mike Hawari, died of lung cancer.
"It was like, he was here, we started together, and it was not easy for me to come back," she says. She put the shop up for sale, and the place was shuttered for two months.
After years of cooking together with her husband, Nesrine couldn’t go back to the restaurant alone. But with her kids, she could. So they reopened and renewed a focus on their father’s falafel.
"In 2012, when he passed away, I realized that this is more than just an appetizer, or it’s more than just a recipe," Kareem says. "It’s something that was really important to him. And so I really wanted to push it out into the world."
They weren’t just serving falafel at their restaurant. They were selling the falafel mix to other restaurants.
If we could do this, Kareem thought, why not sell to supermarkets, too?
So he did.
A few Orange County supermarkets now sell Kareem’s falafel — Ansar Gallery in Tustin is one of them. Most are ethnic grocery stores. It's a small start, but he’s got plans to sell to big American chains like Whole Foods.
"It’s really cool, especially my friends that go shopping in supermarkets," says Kareem. "They’ll send me pictures, like, 'Oh, I see your falafel in the freezer.' And, I’m like, 'Woo!'"
Can they open a falafel factory? Be among the first American-made falafel factories? He knows it’s a steady game, but he’s got a playbook.
Kareem says you die twice. The first time is when you die physically. The second time is the last time your name is heard. Turning Kareem’s falafel into a household name is his way of keeping his father’s legacy alive.
Photos! Video! KPCC journos face their fears at the LA Zoo's Boo at the Zoo
Really, the pictures tell the story here.
Every year, the LA Zoo celebrates Halloween with Boo at the Zoo with all kinds of scary and creepy events, including the opportunity to touch a snake, which freaks out a lot of people. Like KPCC photographer Maya Sugarman:
Now, I'm not scared of snakes. But I am afraid of spiders. So I figured this was a good chance to face my fear.
Make sure to listen to the audio to hear Senior Keeper Chris Rodriguez give us the 411 on the snake and spider we were handling.
Boo at the Zoo is happening at the LA Zoo through Oct. 31.
Review: Helen Frankenthaler (at Gagosian Gallery) danced with Travolta, painted with beauty
Off-Ramp arts contributor Marc Haefele reviews "Line into Color, Color into Line: Helen Frankenthaler, Paintings, 1962–1987," at Gagosian Gallery through October 29.
Walking into the Gagosian Gallery on Camden Drive in Beverly Hills, my eyes are whammed, seized, grabbed by the first Helen Frankenthaler painting I see: "Milkwood Arcade,’’ a suggested, flattened pilot-house shape of wan, paneled blue, encircled by cocoa brown and embraced by actinic yellow.
Why is this picture so immediately arresting? The colors and the implicit shapes that lie beneath and deep within them, writhing away with sub-representational significance are things being shown to us, but we are the assemblers of the meanings in our minds.
That is the way Helen Frankenthaler’s art works on us.
Frankenthaler died in 2011 at 83. She had a public career lasting nearly 60 years, from the accomplishment of her first great painting, “Mountains and Sea” in 1952. Influenced strongly by Jackson Pollack, she created her own techniques, her own modality in this first, great piece. Instead of doing more pictures like it, she moved on and kept moving on to new ideas almost to the end of her life. Her key innovation was called “Color Field,” which spread all over modern painting via her artistic debtors Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
Hers is a very rich and generous form of abstract expressionism. It is abstract expressionism for people who do not like abstract expressionism, yes, but much more than that. Her language of art expresses what’s been called the fidelity of her vision. There are the things that she did with her canvases, like her trademark up-bubbling paint formations and her “soak-stain’’ washes of dilute paint on unprepared canvases). And there was her agility and work ethic, spending endless hours to show us what at first only she could see.
Frankenthaler often used the word “beautiful” to describe her works. And, often, they are, but in a hard-won way that belies critics who saw the attractiveness of her paintings as a kind of softness. Very little of what she paints could be called “accidental.” But the amount of energy that goes into her paintings percolates right out at you. The 17-painting Gagosian show includes 25 of the most important years of her work, but avoids the painting she did in the 1990s, as well as the print work that followed, like her magnificent wood-block-print tour-de-force “Madame Butterfly’’ of 2000. Examples of her post-80s lithographs, that embody so much of her last decades’ development, would have fitted well in this show.
As it is, here are 17 magisterial pieces ranging from the vital verticalities of “Rapunzel” to the rugged browns of “Mineral Kingdom.” “Grey Fireworks” spatters implausible snatches of colors on mixed neutral backgrounds—suggesting echoing depths.
And “Burnt Norton” recalls the T.S. Eliot poem of that name:
"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.’’
The gallery says the works have been selected to show the relationship between line and color in this period of her painting. According to Frankenthaler, “A line is a line, but it is (also) a color.’’ And of course a boundary of two colors is the thinnest possible line. There is “no formula” for great art, she told the New York Times in 2003. “There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.”
Her life led her to some interesting places, too. A favorite story was how, at age 57, she twirled the night through at a 1985 White House ball with a young man she said was the greatest dancer she ever met. His name meant nothing to her until a friend explained who John Travolta was.
Song of the week: "Lyk Dis" by NxWorries
This week's Off-Ramp song of the week is "Lyk Dis" by NxWorries.
NxWorries (pronounced "No Worries") is a collaboration between Los Angeles based producer Knxwledge and singer Anderson .Paak. Paak's also a local, his most recent solo effort, "Malibu," was named "Best New Music" by Pitchfork.
Listen here (warning: explicit language):
https://soundcloud.com/stonesthrow/nxworries-anderson-paak-knxwledge-lyk-dis
"Lyk Dis" comes off "Yes Lawd!" — the pair's upcoming 2nd album. It'll be out October 21 on Los Angeles' own Stones Throw Records.