George Takei couldn't be happier he made the leap ten years ago this month ... a new exhibit at the Skirball Center explores the Japanese-American internment camps through sketches and photos by Ansel Adams and others ... Dodgers v Mets ... YACHT fits in an Uber
This Mets fan promised WHAT if the Dodgers win the playoffs?
Baseball’s postseason is underway again, and for the third year in a row, the Dodgers won their division and are in the playoffs. Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw throws the first pitch for Game 1 of the National League Division Series Friday at 6:45pm.
Tens of thousands of fans will head to Dodger Stadium to watch. They will clap. They will drink beer. They will eat a lot of Dodger dogs.
And if the team does well, the stadium will need even more Dodger dogs, right?
So how does that work?
Casey Regan is the Senior Brand Manager for Farmer John and the grandson of the company's founder. Regan's in charge of dinner meats, which includes hot dogs, smoked sausages and the beloved Dodger dog.
"Everyone thinks it's a twelve-inch hot dog," he said. "It's actually ten inches."
Regan says Farmer John has prepped for the Dodgers postseason run for weeks now and is stocked with enough hot dogs to serve fans all the way to the World Series, should the Dodgers be so fortunate.
"Filling the Dodger orders are never a big issue for us, because we're produced locally," said Regan. "The retail business right now is slow, so we're able to devote more time to our food service product."
A friendly wager
You know when mayors and governors make bets when their respective sports teams are in the playoffs — like when LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck bet NYPD’s William Bratton a pastrami sandwich at Langer’s, or how California Gov. Jerry Brown bet New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo a bag of rice cakes (really?) over last year's Stanley Cup Final?
It's called a friendly political wager, apparently — there's even a Wikipedia entry for it — and we're getting in the fray: Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson has put a note pad from the Los Angeles County Coroner's gift shop on the line if the Mets win.
And if the Dodgers win, WNYC's Jay Cowit will send Los Angeles what we maybe need more than anything: a bottle of water.
Star Trek's George Takei came out ten years ago, and his career — and life — only got better
"You know, it’s not really coming out, which suggests opening a door and stepping through. It’s more like a long, long walk through what began as a narrow corridor that starts to widen. And then some doors are open and light comes in, and there are skylights and it widens." -- George Takei to Frontiers magazine, October 2005
Star Trek icon George Takei stayed closeted well into his 60s, he says, because he feared for his acting career. He well remembered what happened to Tab Hunter when Confidential magazine outed him.
So when Takei came out as gay in Frontiers magazine in 2005, he was prepared to kiss his career goodbye in exchange for speaking out about an issue he cared deeply about. But what happened next is one of the best second acts in American show business history: his career blossomed and his life expanded in ways he could never have imagined ... from innumerable roles and cameos in movies and tv, to viral videos, to a recurring guest role on Howard Stern, to - this week - his debut on Broadway in "Allegiance," the musical about the Japanese-American internment camps.
Listen to George Takei's Off-Ramp interview on getting "Allegiance" to Broadway
Coming out has brought him respect and fulfillment from unexpected corners, and as he told me in a long interview at his home in Hancock Park, it all started with being himself ... being Takei.
Skirball Center's exhibit on Japanese internment goes beyond Ansel Adams photos
Even J. Edgar Hoover thought it was a terrible idea: In 1942, he told United Press that by locking up 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans, America was depriving the war effort of productive workers and wasting valuable manpower by keeping them under guard.
But even the FBI’s near-omnipotent czar couldn’t dissuade FDR from issuing Executive Order 9066, one of America’s most dastardly deeds. Roosevelt had a lot of support, particularly from a hysterical west coast white population which, after Pearl Harbor, fantasized about Japan’s troops hitting the beaches from Oceanside to Half Moon Bay, with disloyal Japanese-Americans blowing up bridges and sabotaging factories to help them on their way. Even California’s liberal Governor Earl Warren — who later, as Chief Justice, ruled for school integration — was carried away by the hysteria. The military commander of the West Coast put it succinctly: “A Jap is a Jap.”
The result was, in early 1942, that tens of thousands of loyal Americans who happened to be of Japanese descent were taken from their homes, farms and businesses and sent away to spend the war in improvised “relocation” camps in various desolate inland areas in the Western states, under heavy guard by U.S. Army military police. Many were held until 13 months after the war was over.
The Skirball Center is hosting an exhibit that deeply probes this miserable episode in our national history.
Billed as “Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams,” the show is actually far more comprehensive than its title implies. It includes artifacts and works of art created by the camp dwellers, camp-produced newspapers and magazines, public documents, and notices intended for the inmates — all of them depicting both the hard lives lived in the camps and the bold social culture their exiled people created — including schools, libraries, sports teams, all uniting American and Japanese traditions. There seems even to have been an informal American Legion post.
The show includes work from Manzanar by Ansel Adams and by another great American photographer, Dorothea Lange, whose bleak vision of camp life caused her work to be suppressed until the war ended. Lange and Adams share space with a lesser-known photographer, Toyo Miyatake, a camp inmate who, working with a home-made camera, left us what is probably the most complete photographic record of one of the most deplorable times and places in U.S. history.
But there is another, even more arresting record of the Relocation that has its own gallery at the show at the Skirball. That’s Mine Okubo’s “Citizen 13660.” Okubo, a brilliant young artist who worked with Diego Rivera and studied with Fernand Leger, was interned with her brother in April 1942 as she was working on murals for an Army installation in Oakland. The siblings ended up in the Topaz camp in Utah, where Okubo did around 2,000 sketches and paintings of the relocation life in the middle of a hostile alkali desert.
Two hundred of the sketches appear in her 1946 book “Citizen 13660.” It’s all there — the distress and disorganization of the forced evacuations; the tumultuous arrivals at their terrible and filthy accommodations, which the exiles set to work rehabilitating; the high morale broken by occasional outbreaks of sheer despair; the constant battle with bureaucracy and its irrational laws; the struggle to normalize their existence as much as possible. There are celebrations of Easter and Buddha’s birthday. There is even a 150-student High School graduation, complete with rented robes and mortarboards. There are dances and picnics, scenes of people busy in laundries and kitchens.
It’s a day-by-day account, done with much subtle humor and not a trace of bitterness. It’s no wonder it’s been in print for almost 70 years. The Skirball exhibit shows many of the illustrations and selections from Okubo’s later work, but one of her quotes underlines the importance — particularly now — of her 1946 accomplishment:
"I am a realist with a creative mind," she said. "I hope that things can be learned from this tragic episode, for I believe it could happen again."
"Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams" is at the Skirball center through Feb. 21, 2016. Listen to the audio to hear Mark Pampanin's interview with Skirball assistant curator Linde Lehtinen.
High-concept LA band YACHT takes on traffic, technology and the future
If you're a fan of electronic pop band YACHT — headed by Claire Evans and Jona Bechtolt — think back to when you first discovered them.
Maybe it was one of their high concept/high production videos, like 2009's Psychic City:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI6xNf4tMcs
Or maybe it's the Los Angeles events app the two designed. Or the KPCC produced podcast hosted by Evans and collaborator Zac Pennington.
Your point of entry could easily have been non-musical, and that's not an accident. Originally the work of just Bechtolt—YACHT is technically an acronym, standing for "Young Americans Challenging High Technology." And the term works on a couple levels.
YACHT uses high technology in their music—midi controllers, synthesizers, MacBooks, etc. Evans and Bechtolt both have a graphic design background, which shows up on their sleek website. The band's reachable and engaged on almost every new web platform out there—Instagram, Periscope, Buzzfeed. They've even annotated their own songs on Genius, the lyric website.
But YACHT goes beyond just using technology; it challenges it in lyrics and in concept. Their new record is called "I Thought the Future Would be Cooler" — out October 16 on Downtown Records — and its lyrics critique all of the above platforms and more: Facebook, crowdfunding, smart phones, virtual reality.
One of independent music's most futuristic, tech-savvy bands just made an album critiquing the very mediums they use. Why?
"We think it's interesting, and maybe it's a goal of ours—to be the first band to use technology to critique itself," says Bechtolt. "There's something there about that that seems interesting to us. And, like, all of these new platforms are mostly dumb and humor is a big part of our band, too."
YACHT's also a Los Angeles band. They've lived here for five years, having grown up and started in Portland, Oregon. When asked about how Los Angeles informs the band's music, you get a rush of answers.
"We're very sensitive to place," says Evans. "And we chose to live in Los Angeles because it's a city that's in a constant state of transition and change."
"It's our favorite city," Bechtolt adds. "There's no way to see everything. There's no way to do everything on a daily basis."
For the new record, YACHT recorded a song calls "L.A. Plays Itself." The title, a reference to a documentary of the same name produced by CalArts professor Thom Andersen. Both the song and the documentary look at Los Angeles and its sense of place in TV and film.
"When you live in Los Angeles, you're constantly surrounded by kind of ghosting and trailing visions of the city's representation in film and television throughout history," says Evans. "Even if you're new here, there's still this sensation that things are a bit familiar just because the light is familiar, and the city itself is familiar."
The band made a website for the song where you can watch the video. In it, the band uses film location signs like these:
...to spell out the song lyrics.
But the website has a catch: the video is only made available when demand is so high for Uber that the car transit service raises its rates. "We wanted to tie it directly to pulse of L.A. traffic," says Evans. "So a really useful metric for that is the Uber API, which — among other things — indicates when traffic is peaking through surge pricing."
Literally, Evans said, Los Angeles becomes the play button to the song and YACHT again challenges technology, and their audience, to think more about the world we live in. What could be cooler than that?
YACHT's new album "I Thought the Future would be Cooler" is out October 16 on Downtown Records. The band plays the Teragram Ballroom in downtown Los Angeles on October 22.
New Objectivity show at LACMA as scary as any Wes Craven movie
It contains some of the cruelest art you will ever see. Rape, murder, death in its many variants and all the horrors of war. Blatant sexuality — straight, gay and transgender in all their forms, minus even a tiny trace of eroticism. And over it all, a towering sense of impending doom. For this is the art that underlay the tragically destined German Weimar Republic, which in 1933 became the first nation to fall to Nazi brutality.
It’s the New Objectivity show at LACMA. And it is as scary as any Wes Craven movie.
In 1925, the "New Objectivity" movement debuted in Mannheim, Germany with a show that was an attempt to break away from the expressionism of the pre-WWI period. You could almost better translate the German original title, "Neue Sachlichkeit," as “The Way Things are Now.”
To the 21st century, the difference between New Objectivity and late expressionism isn’t as obvious as it was 90 years ago. Some of the top creators are the same in both movements — Otto Dix, Max Beckman, Georg Grosz — and there are stylistic similarities. But something huge had happened since expressionism sprouted early in the last century: the Germans has lost the worst war in human history and its aftermath was defeat, economic collapse and general public despair. The streets were full of mendicant mutilated war veterans and women driven to prostitution.
This was followed by a few years of sudden, disruptive prosperity that affected relatively few and left the majority poor. Then came the dark passage of the Great Depression. The "light" at the end of that tunnel turned out to be the fires of the Third Reich. It’s a world we think that we know from the musical “Cabaret.” But the LACMA show tells us how little we really knew.
While expressionism could offer grim fantasy (like Kokoschka’s 1908 ”Murder, the Salvation of Woman”), New Objectivity was ghastly reality — it portrayed sex murders, rapists and the profiteers, crooked industrialists and senior army officers that were planning to lead Germany once more into war. Otto Dix’s WWI sketches of skulls crawling with worms, stormtroopers attacking in ghostly gas masks and the endless piles of the dead and dying are among the powerful anti-war works ever rendered.
"I told myself," Dix said, "that life is not colorful at all. It is much darker, quieter in its tonality, much simpler. I wanted to depict things as they really are."
(Otto Dix, Sex Murder, 1922. Karsch/Gallerie Nierendorf/(c)ARS)
Postwar, Dix drew the smiling whore with the syphilitic facial lesions alongside the impoverished veteran with half his face shot away. Again and again, there are the terrible sexual images: The woman stabbed to death in her bed, the rape in progress; in the New Objectivity, only terrible things happen in bed. The straight and LGBT parties are the kind of parties where the morning after begins the night before. It was a time and place when everything — and everyone — was for sale.
Even the portraits exude foreboding. H.M. Davringhausen's smooth-faced profiteer poses over his ledger in a skyscraper office whose walls are a satanic red. In his self-portrait, clad in a tux, Max Beckman glowers over the entire LACMA gallery like a stone-faced ringmaster. In George Grosz’s “Eclipse of the Sun,” chancellor-to-be Paul Hindenburg poses doltishly in a surrealistically disarrayed office, surrounded by headless advisors, as if anticipating his moment when he turns his nation over to Hitler.
Around 1930, the show material makes a strange transition to chilly, unpopulated paintings and photos of factories, street scenes, industrial machines, mighty ships, amazingly still landscapes. It is as though New Objectivity was averting its collective eyes from the Hitler catastrophe that violently swept it away and cast its surviving artists on faraway shores where many of them adopted new styles, new philosophies.
The show misses a few beats — the contemporary and equally bitter poetry and drama of Brecht, the acrid music of Weill, Eisner and Schrecker could be floating through the galleries. But curator Stephanie Barron had the sense to run a generous helping of New Objectivity-era film in an adjoining gallery. I sat through a reel of G.W. Pabst’s 1929 “Pandora’s Box,’’ starring the astonishing Louise Brooks, who invented the bobbed hairdo. She was the only gorgeous thing in the entire LACMA show. Actually, by then, she looked like the most gorgeous thing in the world.
New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933, is at LACMA's BCAM, Level 2, through Jan. 18, 2016.
Vincent Price's very Off-Rampy cookbook, 'A Treasury of Great Recipes,' is back!
UPDATE: Come hear Elina Shatkin interview Victoria Price about her folks' cookbook at Samuel Freeman Gallery on Tuesday, Dec. 8, at 7pm. As a bonus, see Martin Mull's newest paintings in an unsettling but beautiful show called "The Edge of Town." The gallery is at 2639 South La Cienega Blvd, LA CA 90034.
Mary and Vincent Price loved food, but they weren't snooty. Their "A Treasury of Great Recipes" turns 50 this year and has been lovingly re-released in all its calorific glory. Off-Ramp contributor Elina Shatkin gets the backstory with daughter Victoria Price.
"I don't think my parents really saw themselves as culinary experts. I think they really thought of themselves as cultural ambassadors. They knew that they had been allowed to have experiences that other people didn't have. So I think what they wanted to do was show people what was possible." — Victoria Price
In "Theatre of Blood," Vincent Price plays a deranged actor so enraged by a bad review that he murders the critic's poodles, bakes them into a pie and force feeds them to the critic until he dies. Worst. Dinner party. Ever.
In real life, Vincent Price was elegant and erudite. He was a traveler. He was an art collector who now has a university museum named for him. And he loved to eat.
"My dad, I think, was not only the original American foodie — he was kind of a metrosexual before there was even such a thing," says his daughter, Victoria Price.
In 1965, her parents published a cookbook. The 500-page "A Treasury of Great Recipes" was heavy and ornate. The bronze cover was etched with gold lettering. Everything about it screamed "keepsake." And it was. The book was a hit.
"I was kind of blown away when Saveur magazine named it one of the 100 most important culinary events of the 20th century," Victoria Price says. "It was more than just a cookbook that was about food. It was experiential."
Its recipes came from the Prices' favorite restaurants around the world. Tre Scalini in Rome, La Boule d'Or in Paris, the Ivy in London, Antoine's in New Orleans, the Pump Room in Chicago and dozens of others. But the Prices weren’t snobs.
The book includes this tribute to a classic American snack: "No hot dog ever tastes as good as the ones at the ballpark. It is a question of being just the right thing at the right time and place. So we have included Chavez Ravine, the Los Angeles Dodgers' magnificent new ballpark, among our favorite eating places in the world."
According to Victoria Price, "the philosophy of the cookbook was gourmet is where you find it and ambiance makes the occasion. And from growing up, I knew that what that meant was gourmet is not the province of the elite. It's not something you get when you go to a five-star restaurant."
That's partly why the book was so popular. It was all about making the world of haute cuisine accessible.
"My favorite memory of my childhood, foodwise for sure with my dad, was one day he woke up and he said: 'Today we're going to go find the best taquito in Los Angeles,'" Victoria Price recalls. "In those kind of pre-food truck days, the best taquitos were found at the little huts that were attached to car washes. We must have driven 200 miles that day. And it wasn't just about eating the taquitos, but you had to try the amazing sauces to dip the taquitos in, the salsas. So we tried all of them. And we had so much fun 'cause we talked about it. It was sharing what we loved about them. It was engaging, it wasn't just shoving something in your mouth."
But then, tastes changed. "I like to say that you could have a heart attack after three bites of some of those recipes," Price says. "Heavy cream and butter..." The book fell out of style and out of print. But it became a cult classic. Which is why, on its 50th anniversary, it has been reissued in a glossy new edition.
It's a time machine, with recipes from a handful of classic, long-shuttered L.A. restaurants. Here's the cold cucumber soup from Scandia on the Sunset Strip and the veal cutlets Cordon Bleu from Perino's.
And it's a world tour. If you couldn't jet off to Mexico City to eat at the Rivoli, you can make their chilies poblanos rellenos at home. Can't make it to Sardi's in New York? Here's their chicken tetrazzini, frogs' legs polonaise and asparagus milanese.
"I think what they wanted to do was show people what was possible," Victoria Price says.
As much as Vincent Price loved food and art and acting, he loved people more.
Thanks to Piotr Michael, who impersonated Vincent Price's voice for the radio story.
Song of the Week: “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Gun Hill Royals
This week’s Off-Ramp Song of the Week is “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by the Los Angeles country/Americana band Gun Hill Royals.
Gun Hill Royals are playing Saturday, October 10 at The Frog Spot, a community center off the Los Angeles River supported by Friends of the LA River.
Here's the homey music video for "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm4Rj4SH9hU
Got 'kilture'? Go inside SoCal’s first retail kilt store
The kilt. That pleated skirt of old may seem like a garment specific to bagpipe players and the Scottish.
But thousands of miles from Scotland there’s a community of daily kilt wearers — or kilters as they’re known — right here in California. After all, Kanye wore one, and H&M sold them for a while. And now, on East Colorado Blvd, there’s Off Kilter Kilts, SoCal’s first multi-brand retail kilt store.
Owner J.T. Centonze knows all about kilt culture.
“We like to refer to it as Kilture,” Centonze says.
There are a surprisingly large number of guys out there wearing kilts, according to Centonze.
“It was only really horseback riding and the industrial age that got us into long pants,” says Centonze. “Skirts, kilts, however you want to look at them, are generally easier to make and considerably more comfortable to wear, so we’re just trying to bring it back.”
Off Kilter Kilts is a one-stop shop. Centonze sells the traditional pouch called the sporran that’s worn like an ancient fanny pack, and he has kilts for toddlers, too. He even sells the music you should listen to while wearing a kilt.
“We carry a selection of Irish, Celtic and Faire music,” Centonze says. “We’re really the only place you can get them unless you’re at the faire or seeing the band in a show.”
But as a daily kilt wearer, Centonze wasn’t content with shopping for his bottom half at local Renaissance Faires or Highland Games. The modern kilts he carries in the shop are not costumes.
“We can put you in a kilt for construction work, we can put you in a kilt for office work, we can put you in a kilt for the golf course or basically anything in between,” says Centonze.
And that means Centonze is also a purveyor of what’s known as a utility kilt, a sort of mix of pleated skirt and cargo pant, some of which can carry almost a 12-pack of beer. “That’s their claim to fame,” Centonze says.
But, if you do want to go with a traditional kilt, you’ll have to pick out a tartan — that’s the criss-crossed pattern seen on Scottish kilts. Luckily, Off Kilter Kilts has Stefanie Harbeson, resident tartan maven.
Harbeson says Off Kilter carries the common Wallace Clan tartan and the Blackwatch tartan, which the Scottish army has been using for almost 200 years. They even have the official tartan for the State of California.
“It’s really pretty,” Harbeson says. “It’s got blue, which is representative of the Pacific Ocean and all the lakes and the rivers we have. The green is for our state parks and a lot of the iconic forests. And then we’ve got the red, yellow and blue stripes which are symbolic of the arts, science and industry that are very important to California’s culture.”
California's official tartan pattern.
Harbeson can also help you pick out a tartan that can be traced back to your Scottish roots. But what are you supposed to wear underneath a kilt?
“We get this question a lot actually,” Centonze says. “And the truth of the matter is you wear what you want. If you think about it, Scotland, generally cooler weather, nice green pastures and what not. Southern California, blazing hot, nice reflective concrete — you don’t want to get sunburned in places you don’t want to get sunburned in.”
Centonze admits he still has work to do when it comes to convincing men to ditch their pants. “Because, quite frankly, they’re still a little worried about it,” he says.
But tartan expert Harbeson offered one incentive.
A lot of women, myself included, think men in kilts are pretty sexy,” Harbeson says. “There’s just something about a guy in a kilt that screams confidence and he knows who he is and he’s not afraid of anything and there’s so many women who have come in and totally swoon when they see their guy in a kilt.”