Celebrating the 1-year anniversary of Shuttle Endeavour's triumphal arrival at the California Science Center ... the Cyrus Cylinder comes to the Getty Villa ... the Mediterranean house gecko and you ...
'The War of the Worlds' at 75: Listen to it again on KPCC along with George Takei
Orson Welles' classic science fiction radio broadcast “The War of the Worlds” turns 75 this year, and to celebrate, KPCC will re-air the show and distribute it internationally along with a companion documentary, introduced by "Star Trek" actor and sci-fi icon George Takei, just before Halloween.
The show — based on H.G. Wells' 1898 novel — will air at 8p.m. Oct. 30 on KPCC, as well as on the BBC and Minnesota Public Radio, among other broadcast entities. You can also attend a companion live event in KPCC's Crawford Family Forum that night or view it on streaming video here on KPCC.org.
It's been nearly eight decades since the Oct. 30, 1938, airing of "War of the Worlds" to millions of listeners on the CBS radio network, which famously panicked audiences into believing Martians were actually invading the town of Grover's Mill, N.J.
Now — as stock markets move by fake Tweets, viewers flock to TV shows that re-imagine current events and breaking news alerts ping on all platforms — the lessons of the hysterical reaction to the broadcast remain vital.
“I was only 1 when the ‘War of the Worlds’ was first broadcast,” recalls Takei, a Japanese-American who was interned with his family during World War II. “But I remember my parents and their friends talking about it."
Takei added: "When you think about how many Americans honestly believed the Martians were invading, it’s not hard to understand why Americans would – just a few years later – be so paranoid as to think Japanese-American citizens — who’d lived here for generations — could suddenly become America’s enemy simply because they happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.”
While many listeners to "War of the Worlds" thought it chronicled an actual invasion, many others simply drew closer to their radios to hear a chilling tale told with all the realism of a live news event. It had never been done before, and “The War of the Worlds” changed mass media forever. In many ways, it was the blueprint for Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” released three years later.
Screenwriter Howard Koch (“Casablanca”) adapted Wells’ novel for the Mercury Theatre production. Many members of the Mercury Theatre made significant contributions to the broadcast, but only Orson Welles – known chiefly until then as the voice of “The Shadow” – could pull it all together, like a great conductor leading an orchestra.
As a companion to “The War of the Worlds,” KPCC is also distributing a new documentary on the radio production, “War of the Welles,” by R.H. Greene.
Greene’s work includes “Airborne: A Life in Radio with Orson Welles,” the first radio documentary to assess Welles’ full radio career. With new interviews — including Welles expert Leonard Maltin — plus archival sound from his vast collection, “War of the Welles,” which will be broadcast Saturday, October 26 and Sunday, October 27, in lieu of Off-Ramp, tells the backstory of “The War of the Worlds,” shows why it works so effectively as a radio show, and debunks myths about the production.
In "War of the Welles," Greene writes, “We remain fascinated not only because of the broadcast's dramatic impact, but because of the story behind the story. By sending terrified masses into the streets convinced a Martian attack had been launched, the Mercury ‘War of the Worlds’ taught us something deeply disturbing about ourselves: That no matter how sophisticated the tools of communication become, the trust we place in them, and the limitations of human perception, can make people susceptible to believing just about anything.”
Both the 1938 rebroadcast and "The War of the Welles" are being distributed through PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, free of charge to any station - public or commercial.
SCPR's 75th anniversary celebration of the broadcast, including the rebroadcast, "War of the Welles," and our Crawford Family Forum event, is produced by KPCC's John Rabe, host of KPCC's Off-Ramp program and producer of the NPR/ARW documentary "Walking Out of History," which told the story of Ernest Shackleton's "Endurance" voyage.
(Pierre Guillaud/AFP/Getty Images)
PHOTOS: Shuttle Endeavour - One year ago, LA was one big party
"It was just a phenomenal experience. To see everybody celebrating positive, patriotic, and all about science."
It was one of the most joyous long weekends in LA history. Shuttle Endeavour crawled from LAX to the California Science Center. To mark the 1-year anniversary, and look at the center's plans for Endeavour, I talked with Jeff Rudolph, president of the science center, who remembered that weekend well. "It was just a phenomenal experience. To see everybody celebrating positive, patriotic, and all about science."
More than a million people lined up along the parade route, and everybody was on their best behavior, from the police to the populace. There were no arrests among the spectators. "No arrests, not a single negative incident." Rudolph says. "You know, we took Endeavour through the streets, and if people had wanted to harm it, it really was impossible to fully protect it, but nobody wanted to create any harm, nobody wanted to do anything but celebrate."
The shuttle went on display in a temporary facility within a couple weeks, and Rudolph says 2.7 million people have viewed so far, more than a million more than usually visit the center in a year, an increase in numbers LACMA, the LA Phil, and even the Dodgers would kill for. It's as if Maestro Dudamel threw a no- hitter with the Levitated Mass. Every day.
Next, by 2018, the shuttle will be moved to a new location at the center, and set upright, attached to solid rocket boosters. This is a bigger engineering feat, Rudolph says, than bringing the shuttle from the airport. The new building will have to be more than 185-feet high, and inside, Endeavour will sit on a huge pad to isolate it from earthquakes. Just finding the nuts and bolts to attach the shuttle to the boosters took a long time. (See our slideshow.)
It's not just a tourist attraction; it's a true inspiration. Rudolph gave us just one example of many. A teacher noticed a 5th grader named Richard crying when the shuttle flew over. "I want to be an astronaut!" he said. Long story short, he and his friends won a scholarship to Space Camp, and their grades skyrocketed, not just in science. "Kids are smart," Rudolph says, "kids start with this great interest in science, and if we can maintain and build on that, they'll learn."
After 2,500 years, the Cyrus Cylinder makes its Los Angeles debut
Thousands of years ago in ancient Persia, King Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in Mesopotamia. Afterwards, in ancient cuneiform, his court documented the peaceful conquest in a clay cylinder.
The Cyrus Cylinder is one of the oldest and most important documents in the history of humankind. For over a century it's been on display at the British Museum in London. But now, for the first ever, you can see it yourself right here in Los Angeles.
KPCC's Kevin Ferguson went to the Getty Villa in Malibu, where the Cyrus Cylinder is on display now through December. He talked with Dr. Timothy Potts, director of the Getty and the British Museum's John Curtis.
Book burning anyone? A look at LA's comic book ban of 1948
UPDATE: Next week is Banned Books Week, and on Tuesday, Sept. 23, there's a free performance at the Central Library by Captured Aural Phantasy Theater bringing some banned comics to life. CAPT's Ben Dickow tells us the show will include a discussion about the ban, which was sparked by some pretty adult fare making its way into kids' hands.
"The performance focuses on the April 21, 1954, U.S. Senate hearings into the bad influence of comic books. It was after these hearings that many comics were censored and banned. Captured Aural Phantasy Theater will perform excerpts of the actual transcripts from the hearings, a few of the stories that were mentioned by the Senators and some historical material that puts the hearings in the context of the times. Includes live music and short comedic bits much like a variety show." -- Captured Aural Phantasy Theater
The event reminds us of this fine piece Robert Garrova filed last year telling us about LA County's 1948 comic book ban.
Today, 'crime' video games are violent enough to scare away plenty of parents, but back in the '40s, it was crime comic books that filled the violent media role. Comics of the era were getting more and more violent too, and, in September 1948, L.A. County passed a ban on comic books.
Benjamin Dickow lectures on comics history at Otis College. He says the penalties for putting comics in the hands of minors were harsh. "Basically the ordinance said it was punishable up to a $500 fine and six months in jail if an adult gave or sold a comic to kids," Dickow says.
According to Dickow, some of these banned comics were never really meant for kids in the first place. "In WWII, GIs were reading comic books and when they got back they were still reading comic books. A lot of the comic book writers had been in the war," he says. "These were never totally meant for kids."
But, available at the grocery stores and five and dimes of the day, theses increasingly sensational comics provoked plenty of parents, and led to huge comic book burnings on the East Coast. Dickow says he can't help but see the comic book burnings of the '40s as a little paradoxical, as they happened just a few years after we defeated the book-burning Nazis.
Benjamin Dickow is part of a group called Captured Aural Phantasy Theater that brings comics and other culture to life monthly at El Cid. Captured Aural is celebrating their fifth anniversary of programming this year -- their next show is November 3. More info here.
Roz Wyman, the woman who brought the Dodgers to LA
Sixty years ago, Roz Wyman became the youngest person and only the second woman to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council.
One of her first moves in office was to promote a handful of amateur baseball games to be played at the L.A. Coliseum — she wanted to prove that the stadium was fit for a major league team. Five years later the Dodgers played their first game in LA, and it couldn't have been done without her.
Off-Ramp's Jerry Gorin asked Wyman why she felt so strongly about bringing baseball west, and how hard it was to pluck the Dodgers from Brooklyn.
JG: You were pro-active in courting a baseball team to LA from the moment you were elected to city council. Why did LA need a baseball team?
Wyman: "I thought it was important for Los Angeles to have major league sports. I looked at New York with the Yankees and Giants, and I thought, 'How could we be major league in a city like LA if we don't have major league baseball?'
"Now to tell you the truth, I didn't know any of the baseball rules at that point. I didn't know about minor league territory, who owned it, and how you got it-- I just thought you wrote a letter to somebody and asked them to come to Los Angeles."
JG: So how did you go from being totally in over your head to championing the Dodgers' move?
Wyman: "I wrote a letter to Walter O'Malley, it's a famous letter nowadays, and we'd heard he wanted to move from Ebbetts Field. The Dodgers were considered one of the best franchises of any sports in America at the time, and I thought 'What the heck? I'm not sure I could get the Dodgers, but let's so interest in getting a team.'
"We really went at it all together, all the sports people in LA. So I wrote that letter to Walter, and he thought I was just a politician using him. He wrote me back that he was too busy, but I continued to look around to see who else might be available. And almost to the day that we voted, I really never thought that we would get the Dodgers."
JG: At the time you were the youngest person ever elected to city council, and only the second woman to that point to have been on the council. Why do you think people listened to you?
Wyman: "Well I could prove it was good investment for the city. We were a growing city, and if you were going to grow, sports were huge. And I had such support with the sportswriters, and the chambers of commerces, and the downtown business people. Everybody participated! And when the Dodgers came, it was the first time that everybody in L.A. pulled together. They saw the battle to get them, they saw what was involved in it, they saw the vote."
"It was an interesting thing, the day we voted, that day the mayor came running to me asking 'Are you sure they're coming?' And I said, 'Well we've negotiated, his people have been here.' I was very pregnant, by the way, and the mayor asked me if I'd talked to Mr. O'Malley, and I hadn't. I'd only talked to his people. So the mayor told me to come down to his office, he said, 'We have to call him! We have to call him.'
"He was very nervous, Norrie Paulson, great guy. So I finally went to his office and we finally got on the phone with Mr. O'Malley, and he thanked me and the mayor, and he said the contract was fair. But he also said he wasn't sure, because baseball was never big in L.A. So I started thinking of all the good arguments that we had — it was important for the community, for business, for recruiting-— and yet the only thing I said to him was, 'Mr. O'Malley, there'll be very few rain outs. Because double-headers cost you money. That was the actual thing that I sid! And what do you know, and we've only had 16 since they've been here!"
Natural History Museum enlists local citizens to discover new species
In one of the hidden back rooms of the Natural History Museum you'll find the museum's herpetology collection: that means they've got reptiles-- snakes, lizards, turtles-- and amphibians like frogs, salamanders, and these legless creatures called sicilians. The collection features holdings from Africa, Australia and Costa Rica, and includes roughly 184,000 specimens, making it the 10th largest herpetology collection in the country.
Recently, though, curator Greg Pauly has made his focus very local. He's interested in LA's introduced species, particularly geckos, that travel long distances to Los Angeles through no fault of their own. Maybe they get trapped in a suitcase on a plane, or accidentally hitch a ride in the back of a truck, but soon enough these geckos make it to L.A. and then find suitable places to live.
"The Mediterranean House Gecko was introduced in Florida in 1910," says Pauly. " It hung out there until the 50's and then spread rapidly. The thought is that as Eisenhower's highways got up and running, you see this increase in interstate shipping. In 1954 they showed up in Texas, and they've continued to march their way, mostly along highway corridors. We just learned of the first population in LA County just a few years ago."
But how'd they find them? There's no natural environment that geckos gravitate to in the area, and Pauly couldn't really do a sweep of backyards and patios across southern California. Instead, it fell upon one young naturalist and his father, Reese and Will Bernstein of Chatsworth, to first record the Mediterranean House Gecko in Los Angeles.
"We were at a friend's house for a barbeque," says Will, "and I noticed something go scurrying across behind me. I knew it was a lizard. I said, 'Reese, there's a baby lizard over here.' And of course he came shooting over and he started reaching underneath the screen and using his lizard catching expertise, and then he caught it."
"My dad said, 'It's a baby lizard'," says Reese. "And I said, 'No. It's not a baby lizard.' I said it was a gecko because its feet were different from all the other lizards that live here."
Reese was right. He and his dad flipped through an old family reptile book and thought they might have caught a Banded Gecko, but something didn't add up. Reese, who says his friends all know him as the reptile expert, had never seen any Banded Geckos in Chatsworth. So he and his dad took a photo and sent it to the Natural History museum to find out what it was.
"He (former Herpetology researcher Bob Espinoza) immediately wrote back, and he said, 'That's a Mediterranean House Gecko! Where did you say you caught it?'"
Chatsworth. In an unassuming residential neighborhood, just along one block or so, Mediterranean House Geckos are everywhere. Once the sun goes down, Reese sets out to prove it. He and his dad, with help from Greg Pauly, set out with flashlights and look like trick-or-treaters, except they're inspecting people's porch lights and side gutters. Geckos like places that are warm and near water. At first they have trouble because-- the weather's just gotten cooler and geckos are seeking shelter-- but soon enough they come to what Reese calls "ground zero." There are geckos left and right.
"I found one!" shouts Reese. "Right there, this little guy."
Reese isn't the only one finding geckos these days. In April this year Glen Yoshida of Torrance discovered an Indo-Pacific gecko in his neighborhood, and Bob Worrell of Lake Forest discovered the same species, the first population spotted in Orange County.
"With these citizen science programs, we're learning about these populations at a rapid rate. Every couple of weeks I get a new e-mail, a new observation. It's shocking how often this is happening right now."
And the prize? On top of catching a gecko that'd never been seen in Los Angeles, just this month Reese was published in the Herpetological Review, a peer reviewed scientific journal
If you happen to spot a creature you've never seen, take a picture and upload it to RASCals, it's the Natural History Museum's citizen science platform. If you've got something interesting, Greg Pauly will be at your house in no time.
Also, come check out the Mediterranean House Geckos and lots more on Sunday October 20th, when the Natural History Museum hosts its annual Reptile and Amphibian Appreciation Day.
Dodger Clayton Kershaw and wife Ellen help African orphans; new book "Arise" tells their story
UPDATE 10/9/2013: This seems a pretty good time to bring back a story from 2012 that reminds us that not only is Clayton Kershaw a preternatural pitcher, but he seems to be a hell of a guy with his priorities straight. -- John Rabe
This guy is only 23?
At a news conference at Dodger Stadium this morning, somebody asked why Clayton Kershaw has made repeated trips to Africa with his wife Ellen, to help orphans there.
The Cy Young Award winner replied, in full earnest, ‘Ellen always asked me, “What do you want your legacy to be when you’re done playing baseball?”’ There are always going to be people better than you, he said, who will break your records, “So you want to be remembered for doing something other than baseball.”
The two work through the Dallas-based non-profit Arise Africa, and are building housing for orphans. The details are in their new book “Arise: Live Out Your Faith and Dreams on Whatever Field You Find Yourself.”
Ellen Kershaw , 24, has been going to Zambia since she was 18. She felt drawn to, she says, in the 8th grade, after seeing a tv show. But she didn’t think she could do any good. “There’s plenty of people who spend their entire lives trying to change that country, and what could I do as an 18-year old?! But finally, it almost caused me more anxiety not going than actually getting on a plane and going over there.”
It took her husband a little longer. But he’s made two trips with her now, the first right after their marriage -- they were high school sweethearts – and it’s changed him for the good. “Going to Zambia last year I think was a huge leap of faith for him, and it stretched him in more ways than I’ve ever seen.”
Speaking of stretching, Ellen says the kids hang off the 6-3 pitcher “like he’s a jungle gym.” They know nothing about baseball, the Dodgers, or the Cy Young. “If I played soccer,” he joked, “that would be a different story.”
It might seem counter-intuitive, in a sport like baseball where concentration and total devotion are key, but Clayon and Ellen both say their Africa project, and Kershaw’s challenge, in which he donated $100 for every batter he struck out, made him a better pitcher, because the goal was bigger than baseball.
The two speak easily about serving their God, but they don’t present as evangelical. He was raised Methodist, she Presbyterian. Not the rivival tent types. This seems to be more about what they say it is: giving back, doing what they can. As Ellen says, “To whom much is given, much is expected.”
If we want a power couple running the Dodgers, somebody ought to give the Dodgers to these two.
Watch the Kershaws talk about Africa in this YouTube video:
Cheech Marin: getting Chicano art the respect it deserves will mean Chicanos opening their wallets
On Wednesday, May 29 at the Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City, Cheech Marin, the comedian, actor, and Chicano art advocate, led a fascinating and provocative panel discussion about the tidal wave that is Chicano art. It included Dr. Susana Smith Bautista and artists Einar & Jamex de la Torre, Shizu Saldamando, John Valadez, and Harry Gamboa Jr.
We'll be airing an excerpt this weekend on Off-Ramp, but meantime, here's the whole recording, plus an essay on the exhibition by Dr. Bautista. Artifex is up through July 6.
Five Latino artists that come from different generations, geographic conditions and cultural influences, but all with one thing in common; a commitment to artistically explore cultural artifacts that signify identity. These artifacts can be anonymous remnants from second-hand stores, found and used by Einar and Jamex de la Torre, or more personal artifacts such as the clothing, jewelry, and tattoos on the figures drawn by Shizu Saldamando, or John Valadez’s cautious use of Chicano artifacts like the low-rider car and the Virgin.
Harry Gamboa Jr.’s characters in his photographs, films, and performances have become artifacts of a new Chicano culture that is being constantly (re)created through the organic evolution of Chicano artists themselves. These five artists both appropriate cultural artifacts and create new ones through their artistic vision that reflects their immersion in contemporary culture as well as their desire to contribute to the global visual discourse.
Notions of identity, culture, and community emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s during the civil rights movement with the Brown Berets and the Chicano Moratorium. Today in 2013 the world has changed. Artists are no less conscious of their identity, but that identity is a much larger assemblage of where they were born, where they have lived, where they exhibit, where they travel, and who they meet.
To say that the de la Torre brothers are Mexican artists says nothing about their formative years in Orange County or their current experience of the U.S./Mexico border region that they cross regularly between their San Diego studio and their home in Ensenada. Younger artists like Saldamando don’t approach identity as monolithic, but rather as a remix of pop culture, fine arts, west side, east side, Mexican, Asian, and more. Gamboa Jr. started to use his camera in the 1970s to document the urban Chicano experience in his subversive style, and continues to do so as that same experience changes, even as means of subversion and assumptions of normalcy change. Valadez created a cultural iconography drawn from his neglected world to empower Chicanos, but today that world is no longer confused and angry, and creates its own iconographies.
Latino culture in the 21st century is about reflection, creation, and contribution of new ways of thinking, new ideas, and new media. The artists participate concurrently in a local and a global world, on a Latino and an American field, and in high and low cultural spaces. We cannot negate the continued presence of identity, social issues, ethnicity, history, and culture, but we can try to go beyond to focus on what really matters; the work as contemporary arte factum.