John talks with 35-year old Chris Thile (THEE-lee), who takes over as the new host of A Prairie Home Companion this weekend, and hopes he can bring in a younger audience, without scaring off its older listeners. ... Anthony Hernandez, who's been taking pictures for almost 50 years: Downtown LA in the ‘70s, Rodeo Drive in the ‘80s, the homeless in the ‘90s. ... For KPCC's Voter Game Plan, Meghan McCarty tells us how she’s helping voters understand the very complex Measure R transportation tax. ... We meet an Armenian-Syrian college student from Damascus juggling a full time job, night school, and the torture of knowing what his family is going through back home.
Paul McCartney surprises fans with a tiny (for him) concert at Pappy & Harriet's in Pioneertown
Why would Paul McCartney play for a few hundred people, when he's got thousands in the audience at Desert Trip? As an anonymous member of his entourage told Off-Ramp High Desert Correspondent R.H. Greene, "He loves music."
When Thursday's flash concert was announced at the legendary venue Pappy & Harriet's in Pioneertown, Greene hit the road, and brought back a tale of the joys and sorrows of superfandom.
Greene - and a superfan named Sue Weisenhaus - didn't get inside, but The Desert Sun's Bruce Fessier reported on the set:
McCartney opened with a solo number, “Save Us,” and then went into a selection of Beatles and Wings songs, including “A Hard Day's Night,” “Junior’s Farm” and “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Fans screamed and sang along, especially to his Beatles songs. When he tried to end his set with “Hey Jude” after an hour and 15 minutes, he got shrieks before most everyone began singing along. “I can’t stop this thing!” McCartney said. Then he came back for an encore of three more songs.
Fessier also says David Hockney attended, and that the gig — set up at least a few weeks ago — was designed to be as "locals only" as possible.
LA photographer Anthony Hernandez gets his first museum retrospective... in San Francisco
Anthony Hernandez is a Los Angeles photographer who's made a huge volume of work: candid, black and white shots of a midcentury Downtown LA, hypnotic color portraits of Rodeo Drive's well-heeled clientele, huge, bleak murals of abandoned homes and offices.
It's a career that's spanned decades but until now, has gone largely unrecognized. Just last month, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened Hernandez' first ever museum retrospective. Hernandez says it's there and not in LA because of his long friendship with at SFMOMA.
Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson went to Hernandez' studio in Mid-City to talk about the exhibit, and his long career photographing Los Angeles and beyond.
Interview highlights
Do you remember the first time you went out onto the streets, taking people's photos?
It's awkward because you have to find a way, in that kind of space, in Downtown LA. And I grew up, by the way, in Downtown LA. Meaning, as a kid, that's where I hung out. And then trying to photograph there, at the very beginning, I fell into this step, you might say. You might say it's a dance: so I'm walking, as I'm walking through, my camera was in my hand, and it would come up to my eye.
And you can do that with a Leica very quickly, just photograph with one hand. Always up to your eye. And you just keep moving. So I never actually asked anybody's permission to photograph them, except for a couple very early photographs. After a while, you get better and better at it.
When you talk about Los Angeles as a photography subject, a lot of the time people tend to gravitate towards the very, very high in Los Angeles: the rich and the famous, the celebrities. Or the very, very low. We could count skid row series all day.
I think that's interesting about your work is there's a lot more comprehensiveness to it, there's a lot of middle. And I think that comes because you're a Los Angeles native.
I think it has to do with, in that sense, walking everywhere. Not just Downtown LA, but walking all over Hollywood, walking Venice, walking in Beverly Hills, walking down Wilshire Boulevard carrying a camera. And if you actually walk, and I'm talking walking quite a distance every day, that's how you actually know LA. And maybe know neighborhoods most people wouldn't want to be in, or to try take pictures (of).
But I think of LA as my big studio. One day, I wake up and go to this part of my studio, and the next day I go to another part of my studio, and it's overlapping. And now it's getting to be a very large studio.
My wife and I have a place in Idaho. And since 1991 we've been going back and forth. So because of going back and forth, leaving LA means that when you come back to LA after leaving it for months, you get a fresh feeling for LA. For me, LA is always new.
To listen to the rest of the interview, click the play button above.
New host Chris Thile brings 'A Prairie Home Companion' to Pasadena, talks about the transition
UPDATE 1/17/17: Now you can decide for yourself if Thile has saved the show! He's bringing A Prairie Home Companion to the Pasadena Civic Center Saturday, with guests Ryan Adams, Kacey Musgraves, and Kevin Nealon. The Chicago Trib sure loves the change:
Maybe you wandered away from the show in the later years of founding host Garrison Keillor, who handed his headset to Thile in October. Maybe you never much visited in the first place. But while you weren't listening, this enduring homage to old-time music-comedy radio variety programs, which still draws more than 2 million listeners a week, Thile said, has become must-hear radio for any music fan whose tastes haven't ossified, whose pleasures come from surprise rather than repetition. -- Chicago Tribune 1/5/2017
Chris Thile, singer, mandolin virtuoso, and frequent guest on A Prairie Home Companion, becomes the host of the show October 15, taking over from its creator, Garrison Keillor. His first guests are Jack White, Lake Street Dive, and Maeve Higgins. Thile talked about the creative challenges of his new job with Off-Ramp host John Rabe.
Here you stand on the precipice. I can’t imagine what’s going through your head right now.
The nice thing is that I don’t have to become the next Garrison Keillor – no one can do that. Garrison is such a titan, such a brilliant creative man. And the ways in which he is brilliant and creative are inimitable. There is no one that can be like that. Now he created a show that is every bit as brilliant and creative as he is. The show, I think can live beyond his direct involvement. I think it’s like a piece of music that can live through all kinds of development and all manner of various interpretations.
What is your job as a host?
My job is presenting people with the most compelling two hours of entertainment and art that I am capable of presenting. For me this is a two hour trading post, on air trading post for people who make beautiful things for other people.
What’s your job? What’s your role in it?
Just saying, “Hey, look over here this person made a beautiful thing. Hey, would you share your beautiful thing with us. Excellent!” Then I’m going to sit back and listen to them deliver that beautiful thing. I’m going to try to make some beautiful things myself.
And how much should you be doing of that in an ideal show?
Chances are I’ll be responsible for about the same amount of music that Garrison was responsible for –maybe a tiny bit more. He came up with most of the ideas as far as what the house band and he delivered. He did a lot of that, and I’ll be doing that too. Certainly a lot more hands-on in the development of that music. That’s right in my wheelhouse.
What were the consultations with Garrison like? How often did you meet him? Where did you meet him?
I was on tour with the bassist Edgar Meyer, when Garrison called me first to say, “Hey, I’m thinking about getting out of radio.” He presented the idea as out of the blue as it came, also struck me as somehow exactly what I want to do. That sounds perfect. I called him the next morning to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. We have been in fairly regular touch ever since. I’m going to call him tomorrow; I have some questions that have built up in the last month or so.
Like what?
I want to pick his brain about how he would structure the week in terms of content generation and traffic directing. You know to what extent he has his ear to the ground for time or place specific material. So, one of the things I’m most excited about is this deadline. I have to come up with a certain amount of material – including roughly four or five minutes of brand new music every week, no matter what! And it’s so fun to sit there on Sunday or Monday, and go “Okay, what’s it going to be?” But I want to pick his brain about how he approached it.
Like when he started to worry?
I’ve never seen him worry. I don’t think. I have never seen him visibly concerned by anything. I’ll try to learn from that as well. He has this thing, and I feel like I have this as well – at a certain point you know a show is going to happen, you have to do it. There is not another option. Which is the wonderful thing about live performance. Something is going to happen, it has to. Here we are, here we all are… Putting on a show is what I love to do more than anything in the world. I have been doing it since I was seven. I love it.
A more sensitive question: were you worried at all that he was going to interfere in the production and did you have a conversation about him about that?
Whenever you collaborate when any strong artist you are going to have to establish a give and take kind of relationship. You need to have wide-open ears, and conversely you need to feel like you are being heard. Sure, I worried about that. Garrison is the formidable creator of things, but Garrison has said from the very beginning, “You have to make this yours, you have to make it the way you hear it.”
And he has told me, “Look I’ll weigh in when I feel like you might be going astray – but if you think I’m wrong about that give it a try, and we’ll talk.”
I did an interview with Bill Kling and Garrison Keillor, and I asked Garrison what his involvement was going to be, and he said “I’m going to be a grey eminence, and just interject every once in a while.” And I asked Bill about that and he said, “Yeah, right!”
Any critique of his so far has been him worrying that I’m doing my best Garrison Keillor imitation.
How aware are you thinking about the audience question? You’re the new host of his show. You don’t want to tick off the people who absolutely loved Garrison, but you want to do your own thing. Also the numbers for Prairie Home have not been as strong as they used to be. We want new listeners. We want you to be bringing in people with new music.
It’s going to be tricky, of course, people want their cake and they want to eat their cake. They want things that are comfortable and familiar. The show has had a steadying influence on people’s lives – I know it has on mine. Almost a church-like experience for people – I want to make people don’t lose that aspect of the show.
I adore public radio. It’s been such a huge part of my life, and I feel like a lot of people my age don’t feel spoken to almost as if they feel that’s just not their life that is being discussed. Having a 35-year-old host of Prairie Home Companion, will certainly be a step toward them being spoken to, but by no means do I want to stop speaking to someone born and raised in Minnesota who is 65.
Can he do it? Listen for A Prairie Home Companion with new host Chris Thile Saturdays at 6p and Sundays at noon on 89.3-KPCC
#VoterGamePlan: Does Measure M stand for KPCC's Meghan McCarty?
Measure M is essentially a one-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects in LA County, raising up to $860 million dollars a year for freeways and public transit. The official ballot measure is 36 pages long, and KPCC's Take Two just spent twenty minutes digging into all the things the proposal could do.
But for KPCC's Voter Game Plan, we wanted to not only make sure you have all the info you need, but feel empowered to vote, not beaten down by the ugliness of this election season and the complexity of the ballot.
So with that in mind, Off-Ramp host John Rabe and Meghan McCarty, who covers commuting and mobility issues for KPCC, met where the Gold Line crosses California Blvd., and talked about how Meghan keeps the listener in mind when tackling such a deep and far-reaching topic ... in other words, how Meghan and the rest of KPCC's journalists have your back during election season.
"We're actually kind of in a laboratory," Meghan says, "for what Measure M could look like in the future. We have something that's pretty similar that we can gauge the results of (in Measure R, the 2008 transit tax). So part of what I've been doing is reporting on the fruits of Measure R, these new rail openings, these changes in our urban landscape that we have been seeing in the last five to six years, and asking what they're doing to Los Angeles, how they're serving people, are Angelinos going to get on these trains, how much is it costing us?"
In other words, she's been taking something listeners most of us have experienced - like the completion of the Expo Line - and looking for lessons for Measure M. It makes sense, and it's a great way to tackle a complicated issue.
For much more of our conversation, listen to the audio in the player above. And if you have any election questions, ask us in the comments section, or tweet them to us @kpcc and flag it with #VoterGamePlan.
Song of the week: Deepakalypse - "Drummers"
This week's Off-Ramp song of the week is "Drummers" by Deepakalypse.
Deepakalypse is the solo project of singer/songwriter Deepak Krasner, a native of Ventura, California.
In his bio, Deepakalypse cites folk punk icons like Billy Bragg and Jonathan Richman as huge influences, but "Drummers"is a laid back, unpretentious, politically charged tune with bare bones production and a plainspoken directness last seen in the rare moments when the Minutemen would give their drummer a break and GO acoustic.
Appropriately, the video for "Drummers" shows Deepak on a skateboard, guitar in hand, gliding downhill around Southern California. Check it out above.
"Drummers" comes off "Floating on a Sphere," Deepakalypse's latest record, and it's out now on Everloving Records.
A Syrian refugee navigates a new life in Los Angeles
Allison Wolfe is a writer, musician and English teacher. She writes about one student, Shahan Sanosian, whose story starts in Damascus, Syria.
I've taught English to a group of international students for a few years now. I try to make class fun, but it’s not easy for them.
A lot of the students are here on visas that require them to come to my class. Many have already gone through a lot to get here and have a hard time adjusting. I’ve seen students cry, pass out, come to class with injuries, or just sit there in numb silence.
Despite their exhaustion, most of my students laugh a lot in class and go out together on weekends. But one student stood out. A shorter guy with glasses and a constant five o’clock shadow, Shahan Sanosian was quiet, serious and fluent in English. Sometimes, he even corrected me.
I couldn’t figure out why he was at our school. He usually sat on the edges, intensely observing the classroom, kind of like he knew something the rest of us didn’t. Shahan seemed like he was hiding something. It turned out he was.
An Armenian-Syrian college graduate from Damascus, Shahan came to Los Angeles to escape the war in Syria.
“Honestly, I was really shocked that I was even granted a visa to come to the United States. Especially the fact that I'm from Syria, a country that always has question marks,” says Shahan. “Sometimes, when I meet people, I don't tell them where I come from. But if they ask, I just tell them I'm Armenian. So maybe they'll think I’m Armenian-American or something.”
It’s one thing to hear about war on the news, something which rarely touches our soil, and quite another to hear from someone who has experienced it. Shahan says he remembers collecting bullets back home. "Even stray bullets, they're just flying by," he says. "Probably, they weren't targeting us directly, but still — you can't study. You're sitting at home, you hear gunfire, you hear bombs. Sometimes you leave home, and you can't tell if you're coming back alive or not.”
Shahan’s parents sent him to Los Angeles to escape the war. They stayed behind to care for his grandparents, who have since died.
Today, though, with the Syrian refugee crisis looming large around the world, it’s become even harder for his parents to get out — his parents have tried to immigrate to the U.S., but he says their visas were denied.
Today, Shahan talks with his parents over Skype every weekend.
"I try to concentrate on the good things, just joke around, tell them something that's happening here so they can forget," he says. "Although, they just tell me the horrible stories of what's happening over there. Nowadays it's always the same thing: shelling and gunfire, the prices are really high, the water problem, electricity.”
He feels survivor’s guilt and knows he’s lucky that he got out of Syria when so many people are still stuck there.
“I'm not seeing any form of light or hope. I'm here and they're back there,” he says. “You're always feeling like, what's going to happen? Are they safe? How would they get out of there?”
Shahan is safe here, but his life isn’t easy. He works a full-time job, goes to school, is getting used to a new country and thinks constantly about his family. It's a stressful place to be in.
“I don’t feel like I’m going toward something. Especially with someone like me, who's struggling not just with work. I have my immigration papers. I have my parents to worry about. I want to start my own life, but I feel like I can't do that right now,” he says.
The kind of psychic trauma Shahan seems to be going through reminds me that it’s not enough to just survive, as his parents want. People also have an emotional need to be happy, to thrive.
I ask him what, even small things, could bring him joy. Music is his answer, and he plays me his favorite song by Opeth, a Swedish, progressive death metal band. Shahan says it helps him cope and relax.
“It's a mixture of love and hate. It's helping me face these situations," he says. "Music is an imaginary place where you can go. Like a wonderland, you just get lost in there. It gets me out of this world."
I get that. But, as resilient as Shahan seems, I wonder if it’s possible to ever escape what he’s been through. I asked him if he really believes that everything will be okay.
“I don’t know,” says Shahan. “But I wish, and that's just a wish, that I would be able to find peace of mind.”