If you need a little push to give to KPCC during our fall member drive, here are some reminders - in the form of our best pieces - of why Off-Ramp is worth supporting.
EC Comics 'Tales from the Crypt' comes to life in Los Angeles
EC Comics is known for pushing the bounds of what was acceptable in comic books — pushing them so far that the industry imposed a set of strict self-censoring guidelines in the 1950s rather than risk government sanctions, while also bringing an end to the comics of EC Comics.
But the damage was done, and a generation of creators was inspired to emulate the lurid tales they remembered in their comic books. Captured Aural Phantasy Theater, the latest entity to be corrupted by EC, is in fact the only group with permission to perform stories from the pages of the notoriously sexy and gory comic books. They're doing it at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater Oct. 29 and 30.
Listen to the audio to hear my interview with CAPT's Ben Dickow and Nicole Ortega, and their exclusive performance of an excerpt from one of the stories they'll be performing next week, "Strung Along" — selected for the Halloween show because marionettes play a key role in the truly shocking story. Let's just say they're matchmakers.
Captured Aural Phantasy Theater describes itself as "what would happen if Garrison Keillor, John Waters, and Stan Lee all hooked up after a night of hard partying." They perform as a lovably hammy radio troupe, with sound effects, music, graphics and a deep respect for the source material. So try to catch one of their shows — if you dare.
Captured Aural Phantasy Theater's Halloween Special at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. 1345 W 1st St, LA CA 90026. Thursday, Oct. 29 and Friday, Oct.30. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; show starts at 8 p.m.
What I learned being a middle school counselor zombie for a video game
"And then, when you think it can't get worse, they bring out the contact lenses — and let me tell you, having a strange woman touching your eyeballs at 7 a.m. is less fun than it sounds." — Collin Friesen on his horrifying experience as a zombie extra
Every other week, we bring you the science podcast for kids and curious adults, Brains On. But, a week before Halloween, there's no On, it's just Brains... because last Friday, Off-Ramp contributor Collin Friesen was a zombie extra.
He can't tell us what the project was, except to say it was a live-action video game production, and he says he was "a glorified extra, but I was really a gore-ified extra because they put a lot of makeup on you." To crib from David Foster Wallace, it was A Supposedly Fun Thing He'll Never Do Again.
These are the highlights of our interview — click the arrow above for much more.
Walk us through the process.
It starts the day before — they don't want you to shave, because zombies have a little scruff. You get to the set, head to wardrobe and they put clothes on you that look like they are rotting right off your body and feel like you are wearing a burlap sack. I was dressed as what I can only describe as a middle school guidance counselor... but one who wants to eat his students.
Then you have an hour and a half in makeup. They glue — with kerosene scented surgical glue — latex foam prosthetics onto your stubbly face to build out your skull, paint you up with more makeup, and more makeup, and grease up your hair, and spackle your exposed parts with a sponge. I felt like a bad home renovation project.
And then, when you think it can't get worse, they bring out the contact lenses — and let me tell you, having a strange woman touching your eyeballs at 7 a.m. is less fun than it sounds.
Did you get acting training?
I thought there would be — I had read about the Walking Dead school they have for all the zombies on that show, but people are so immersed in zombie culture that we really didn't need any training.
Everyone knows No Frankenstein Arms.
But one guy was way more into it than anyone else — he had sent in a tape of himself zombie walking for his audition, and he explained to everyone his five-point checklist for being the best zombie:
- You're brain dead, so you hang your head.
- Keep your muscles loose.
- Make guttural, primal sounds.
I forgot the other two because they had pretty good craft services and I just walked away.
So the shoot started, what was that like?
Our jobs were to be stupid on purpose. We're zombies. We were all tired, hot, itchy, and it was pretty easy to develop a real hatred for the actors we were chasing who weren't done up in all these prosthetics while we had to use a fork to scratch our faces. I was willing to bite someone.
But like most extra work, it was a lot of waiting and trying to look scary while blending into the background at the same time. It was a really unique experience that I don't need to do again.
Tor Johnson as a zombie in Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space" (1959)
What were the biggest takeaways from your day as a zombie?
I learned three things I did not know before:
- It takes almost as long to take off the makeup as put it on, and they use a solvent on your face to make it less painful.
- The contact lenses they used to make my eyes all white and creepy — they reuse them. So I might have been using zombie contacts that had been in any number of TV shows or movies, so, I do feel connected to history in a sense, even though it's kinda gross.
- And the other thing is, if you are a fan of zombie TV shows, don't be a zombie, because it'll ruin those shows for you. I tried to watch "Walking Dead" after all this and I was just critiquing all their zombies. "OMG, that guy's just walking! Hey lady zombie, which leg's broken? You keep switching, pick one! Have some undead pride for God's sake."
No Jim Svejda's were harmed in the making of this fundraising spot
I have a dream in which all the public radio stations in town collaborate to foil people who turn off a station that's fundraising and switch over to one that isn't.
In my dream, Steve Chiotakis over at KCRW would say on the air, "Hey! If you're listening to us only because KPCC is fundraising, NOT COOL! Get back there and make a pledge!"
Steve Julian would intone, "Hey! You in the car! You can't just listen to us when K-Jazz is trying to get you to pay your fair share! Get back there and make a pledge."
And so on. It's probably against FCC rules, but I can still dream.
And hence, a little fundraising spot that lets me exercise my inner Svejda.
("But after all, they're British." -- Svejda, always. KUSC)
If you haven't given yet, seriously, your contribution matters, and it keeps Off-Ramp on the air and strong. Please give now.
Near downtown LA's Skid Row, a haven for harpsichords
If the harpsichord is truly the "enfant terrible" of the music world, as Manuel Rosales told us on Off-Ramp the other day, Curtis Berak will need two double strollers for upcoming concerts featuring four of his babies on stage.
On Thursday, Dec. 11, at Zipper Hall, and Saturday, Dec 13, at Valley Performing Arts Center, Northridge, the L.A. Chamber Orchestra will start its Baroque Conversations Series with a rare performance of Bach's Concerto for Four Harpsichords. And that means four times as much work for Curtis Berak, the region's classical harpsichord go-to man.
RELATED: We go INSIDE the Disney Hall organ, celebrating its tenth birthday
Since 1976, in the basement of a a run-down building in the southern part of downtown L.A., Curtis Berak has been building and fixing harpsichords. "I was coming from San Diego as an artist. I did abstract painting and I had the idea that I needed to be in a big city to have an art career. When you're a painter, you have a lot of time to listen to music."
And that's where harpsichords come in. Berak listened to baroque music, which often features the harpsichord, and liked it. Then he learned that you can make a harpsichord at home from a kit, "and that's what got me started," he said.
RELATED: Four free/cheap holiday events far from shopping malls
As you can hear in the audio (make sure to click and listen), we sampled a number of Berak-built harpsichords — from a small Italian; to a double-manual French; to one modeled on harpsichords made by the Stradivarius of antique harpsichords, Ruckers, in the Flemish style.
As important as their sound is the look, and Berak painstakingly decorates his instruments to appear as if they were hundreds of years old, with authentic woodwork and delicate brushwork, so make sure to look through the photos above!
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.
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.
Visiting My Friend's Place - homeless center inspired Miley Cyrus' Happy Hippie Foundation
It's easy to make fun of Miley Cyrus. Just Google "bunny costume" and "twerk."
But Cyrus is serious about her charity work. She just started the Happy Hippie Foundation, to rally "young people to fight injustice facing homeless youth, LGBT youth and other vulnerable populations." Cyrus founded HHF after a visit last summer to a homeless youth center called My Friend's Place.
(Miley Cyrus, thumbs up, with My Friend's Place staff. That's ED Heather Carmichael in the front row, hands on knees. Courtesy My Friend's Place)
Every day, 100 homeless youth between the ages of 12 and 25 - most of them products of our troubled foster care system - come through My Friend's Place, on Hollywood Blvd between Bronson and the 101 in the heart of gritty Hollywood.
KPCC Photographer Maya Sugarman and I toured the center last week, and executive director Heather Carmichael told us Cyrus' tour started a "little bit of a whirlwind" that saw one of the center's clients accept Cyrus' VMA award and make an impassioned speech, and that brought $240,000 to My Friend's Place to pay for food, clothing, and arts programming.
Our tour started at the "safe haven." It's a big busy room that could be the lobby of a youth hostel. A bank of microwaves heat up cheap, calorie-rich food ("We're not farm to table," Carmichael says), there's wi-fi, and dozens of young people moving around in what Carmichael calls "organized chaos."
This is the first point of contact. Carmichael says, "this is where young people come on a daily basis to get their basic needs taken care of, and to have a safe place and sense of community while they're trying to figure out how to move forward." Here, there are no cops rousting the kids and no pimps trying to prostitute them. Here, they can get a shower, four items of clothing, and food ... not to mention every type of social service you can think of, from health care to job counseling.
And here, they can also be kids. Instead of a workout room, for instance, there's a "Cirque" room, created by Cirque du Soleil and Jeunesse du Monde, where young people get exercise, and learn to trust themselves by juggling or walking a tightrope ... and it's no coincidence these are all metaphors for adult life.
My Friend's Place, which is approaching its 30th anniversary, reports that every year it provides services to 1,400 youth, serves more than 30,000 meals, gets 120 into housing and 90 into jobs.
"I leave every day feeling more filled than when I started the day," Carmichael says. "These young people have such courage and commitment and strength, which is often perceived as anger. This group of young people are way stronger than many of us, and given the right opportunity and support, can become our community leaders, and left on the streets, what would we expect to happen?"
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.
How do you teach medical students bedside manner? Hire an actor
In the world of academia, is there anything tougher than medical school? Years of math, science, anatomy, pharmacology and dissections committed to memory; tests, labs, residencies… but how do you teach what might be the most sensitive and human part of being a doctor: bedside manner?
And who do you hire to do it?
There’s a lesson plan for that, too. And when I started looking, I found out it started here in Los Angeles.
When Esther Mercado found out she had cancer, she was 66. She was an accountant and she acted in her spare time.
She'd had trouble sleeping and she didn't know why. She drove herself to the emergency room thinking she acid reflux, but they kept her.
"The doctor came in after performing some tests, and said to me, ‘we see something, and it could either be a cyst, a tumor or some kind of growth.'"
It was a surreal moment for anybody, and even stranger for Mercado. For 17 years, she'd been working as a standardized patient. About six times a year, Esther, the part-time actor, goes to USC’s Keck School of Medicine and pretends to be a cancer patient.
Like the nude model in art class, or the customer at the beauty school salon, Esther is a human learning tool. She stands in front of classes while medical students practice interviewing her. In exam rooms, she goes one-on-one in a mock patient visit, and then she'd grade the students: Was she asked about all the relevant parts of her medical history? Did they listen to her heart? Was the student compassionate?
The program she participates in at USC is one of the first in the country, founded in 1963. She’s one of a couple dozen other actors who are trained to play any number of symptoms: liver disease, terminal cancer, diabetes.
Sound familiar to you? Maybe you graduated medical school recently. Or, you've watched "Seinfeld":
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvCVg4MrhUE
Dozens of schools all over the country have standardized patient programs. The U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, a mandatory test for practicing medicine in the US, includes 12 visits with standardized patients. Los Angeles is ably equipped to staff programs like this, with over 70,000 actors — like Bob Rumnock.
Rumnock has been a standardized patient since 1999. It nets him about $15,000 a year. He says the money is good, sure, but it goes beyond that.
"It really isn’t just acting a case and improvising. It’s acting a case, improvising, remembering what went right, remember what went wrong," he says. "Remembering to phrase feedback in a way that will be positive."
Rumnock's patient characters run the gamut — at different times he’s been homeless, he’s been a businessman, he's been a cancer patient who’s run out of options.
For students, the visits are staged like real doctor visits: the student enters the room, talks briefly with the patients about their medical history and examines them. Is the patient's heart rate normal? Are they coughing?
The visits are short, and before they can be seen by another student, the standardized patients review the visit they just had. These notes will form the basis for the students' grades.
Emma Montelongo, a fourth year medical student and a veteran of standardized patient exams, says the exams can be a double edged sword — she's had real moments of connection with patients where she's found herself caught in the moment. Working with a standardized patient can become very, very real sometimes, and she finds value in that.
But how do you grade for something like compassion?
"It’s pretty subjective, how you’re being graded. And you can feel, as a student, like 'I asked all these questions, and I felt as though I was being sympathetic, or as though I was being really thorough,'" she says. "But, on the other hand, how patients assess you in the real world isn't necessarily a fair assessment, either."
In peer-reviewed journals, papers have found programs like these can be effective in certain areas. Esther Mercado, the actor with real-life cancer, insists it makes a difference. She's seen real doctors working the field who examined her as med students at USC.
"I feel I’m doing something for the community at large. These are future doctors," she says.
Esther's in remission now. When she found out she had cancer, she didn’t let it stop her from being a patient actor. It made her more present and available as a standardized patient, because sometimes she isn't acting.
Meet Richard Turner: magician, expert card shark, and blind (Video)
Richard Turner’s stage name is The Cheat, and for good reason: you could never beat him in a card game unless he let you. For him, it’s just a footnote that he’s completely blind.
“I started losing my sight when I was nine. Then during my teens and twenties, my vision was what’s called 20/400. Legally blind is 20/200, so I was twice as low as what’s considered legally blind in the State of California and then the degeneration continued until the point where the retinas were completely destroyed,” says Turner. “And so now I have no actual vision.”
But losing his sight didn’t slow down Turner at all. He started practicing with cards obsessively in his teens — often for 10 to 20 hours in a single day — and never stopped.
“Obsessed is an understatement,” says Turner. “When I’m in a car, my card table’s on my lap. When I’m walking around, I always have cards in my hand. So I was able to practice in just about every scene and situation that you could imagine, because cards are small.”
Now, he’s considered one of the best card mechanics in the world. He’s performed all over the world, on television, and was inducted in The Magical Castle’s Hall of Fame.
When Turner was first sent to a school for the visually impaired, he was rebellious. He refused to learn braille and never has. Instead of using a cane, he holds hands with his wife or has others place a hand on his shoulder so that he can be discretely guided. It works so well, he says, that people often don’t notice he’s blind.
“He’ll do shows and people will have no idea that he can’t see. I know a lot of that’s skill because they’re in awe and a good portion of that is that he’s an excellent performer, and he knows how to draw the people in, and he knows how to manipulate them to where he wants their attention to go,” says Turner’s wife, Kim. When people finally do realize he’s blind, she says, “they’re just flabbergasted.”
Now, Turner says that losing his sight is what drove him to become such a skilled card performer. If working with cards hadn’t become such an enormous challenge, he probably would have taken a different path.
“When I first thought of losing my sight, I was mad, but it turned out to be a gift from above,” says Turner. “When I look at my life, sixty years later, I realize that provided me the ability to reach my goal of becoming a card performer, card shark, card mechanic, card magician, whatever you want to call it.”
A documentary about Turner’s life called “Dealt” is scheduled for release next spring. Visit the film’s website for more information.
Camp de Benneville Pines to reopen after Lake Fire
"In our geographic area, there are 20 camps — the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and church organizations and YMCA's — and they're all going through what we're going through. We've been closed four weeks now, so we've missed four weeks of income, so you can do the math." — Janet James, Camp De Benneville Pines
The Lake Fire didn't just burn 31,000 acres of the San Bernardino National Forest. It involved 355 firefighters, seven water-dropping choppers and destroyed one structure. It also forced the closure of twenty camps run by groups like the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, ruining part of the summer for many kids (and probably some adults). Reopening the camps after a fire is a very complicated process.
A couple of weeks ago, we called up Janet James, the director of Camp De Benneville Pines, run by the Unitarian-Universalists and one of the oldest camps in the area. We went back Tuesday to meet Janet in person, along with Steve, a camp vet who works in the kitchen, and Daisy Doodle, the camp dog.
Camp De Benneville Pines is where the fire started. You can see the line of demarcation between burned and unburned land. James told me with relief that all of her campers were accounted for around the time the fire started, so that's one less headache.
(Firefighters at Camp de Benneville Pines during the Lake Fire. Credit: Janet James)
The fire trucks and fire crews are gone now, as is the charred smell (mostly). But Janet, her crew and contractors had a lot of work to do before they could welcome the public back in.
"First of all, there are many government agencies involved, and the top of the pile is the U.S. Forest Service," Janet said Tuesday. "The burn has to be assessed for where the water will run if we get a heavy rain, and what will it bring with it, and where will it land and whose yard will it end up in. And of course, we're very interested in not bringing children up to an area that might end up under mud. So all the camps in our area are waiting to hear if they're going to open the area 100 percent to the camping business, or if they're just going to open certain camps and keep other camps closed."
(Charismatic mega fauna Daisy Doodle, the camp dog. She developed a huge crush on one of the firefighters, and you can hear about it by listening to the audio above. Credit: Janet James)
They also had to have their water tested (it passed) and get rid of any smoke damage. "So we're wiping off mattresses, wiping down walls, shampooing carpets."
And good news came from the USFS Wednesday: Camp de Benneville Pines can open this Sunday. But the camp right next door, James says, has to stay closed for the time being.
James says people have been asking how they can help, and she says the best way is to simply come stay at the camp in August and the fall months when they're not filled up with groups of kids. That includes a social justice camp, a camp for retirees, a choir camp for adults who love to sing, and an art camp — even a Thanksgiving Family Camp. All the details are on the camp website.
Neighbors of San Pedro's Sunken City fight to turn fallen town into city park
More than 80 years ago, a neighborhood in San Pedro started falling toward the sea, and Sunken City was born. Today, the 6-acre slide area is full of broken road and street art. An 8-foot fence went up in the ‘80s, but it hasn’t kept people out. Neighbors say it’s drawing the right and wrong kind of people, including a lot of late-night partiers. Now, they want Sunken City to return to the people of San Pedro as a well-regulated city park.
One of those neighbors is Graham Robertson, who built his ocean-view house at the very edge of Sunken City. “I’ve been in many times,” Robertson said. “I think just about everyone who lives around here has been in.”
(Archive photo: 'Two hundred tons of earth at Point Fermin are shown ready to topple into the sea at San Pedro. It is part of the 6-acre area atop the 90-foot bluff that started to slip toward the sea in 1939 (sic). The heavy weekend rains loosened the big chunk and it is liable to become an avalanche at any moment. The site is commonly known as the "Sunken City." Photo dated: February 17, 1941.' LA Public Library/Herald-Examiner Collection)
Robertson, who taught high school physics and engineering before retiring a few years ago, closely studied Sunken City when he moved to the area. He had to know if he was building a house on shaky ground. He wasn't, but he learned the story of Sunken City goes back a lot longer than you might think.
“There was a volcano in Palos Verdes about 10 million years ago, and it blew ash everywhere,” Robertson said. The ash that landed underneath where Sunken City is now was deep and thick – and subject to change. It seems that, when they built a hotel, beach bungalows, and Red Car tracks here in the early 1900s, land developers didn’t know this.
But they found out in 1929. That’s when the land started to move – slowly, but surely – toward the ocean. There was enough time to move out and demolish most of the buildings and homes, but by the early '30s, the road, rails, and foundations had all dropped 80 to 90 feet closer to sea level.
“The road was so well built that you can still see it. You can still see the curb, the sidewalks, and the street trees are still here. And, where the concrete blocks are, they’re protecting the soft rock underneath – just like the Grand Canyon has the cap rock — so wherever the pieces of road are, they’re higher,” Robertson said.
Today, despite the fence, Sunken City has become one of L.A.'s top spots for street art, with tags seen on remnants of road, palm trees, and the cliff face. Robertson and his fellow neighbors of Sunken City say they don’t mind the street art, as long as it remains in Sunken City. What they do mind is late-night bonfires and parties that disturb this otherwise tranquil neighborhood.
“What our group wants is for Sunken City to become a part of Point Fermin Park, administered by Recreation and Parks,” Robertson said. He and his group of 18 neighbors, called the Sunken City Watch, have confronted the coastal commission, filled city council meetings and circulated petitions to make the park legally open during the day and closed – with enforcement – at night. In May, Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino, who represents San Pedro, asked city attorneys to consider Robertson and his neighbors’ request to open Sunken City.
The way Sunken City is now, the neighbors argue, is anything but closed. “They pretend they can keep teenagers out, and all it does is keep older people out. The kids are there just — in fact now that we’re on social media, there are more kids than there ever have been,” Robertson said.
One older person who could not be kept out and recently entered Sunken City through a hole in the fence was Mike Watt, punk-rock bassist and founding member of the Minutemen. Watt still lives in San Pedro and still visits Sunken City, just as he did growing up in the '60s and '70s. Then, there was no fence and fewer people.
“It was like — this is where the squares ain’t. No square Johns,” Watt said. “Before we got to the concert to see The Blue Oyster Cult at the Long Beach arena. This was our piece of Pedro that we kind of owned.”
Sunken City made enough of an impression for Watt to write about it in “O’er the town of Pedro,” a song performed by fIREHOSE.
It’s inspired many others, too, including hundreds of street artists, selfie-takers and now, community activists, fighting to bring back Sunken City.
Sketches with wolves: Artist Mike Sheehan visits Wolf Mountain Sanctuary
When Wolf Mountain Sanctuary, a place I’d never heard of before, popped up on my Facebook page one day, I looked to see where it was. Turns out, it’s been out in the Lucerne Valley desert for almost 30 years. I don’t know how I’ve missed it all this time.
I drove around the backside of Big Bear and dropped down from the forest into the desert. Lucerne Valley is a character unto itself.
It really feels like the middle of nowhere, just like the local cafe proclaims on their T-shirts. I like the middle of nowhere.
I drove down a dirt road off the main highway with squirrels darting across it. Jake, one of the caretakers, opened the gate. I met Tonya Littlewolf, the half-Apache, half-Sicilian founder of Wolf Mountain, and the first thing she did was give me a present: A fold-up chair with wolves printed on it. Perfect for sketching.
I told her the chance way Wolf Mountain had landed on my radar. She replied, “it was supposed to be.”
Tonya is known as “Mama Wolf." She’s been called that, she says, since she was small. Her grandfather had a rescue. They helped “anything that got hurt in the wild. We had wolves, all the way to squirrels, cougars, bobcats. And then we let ‘em run free. Because they got better and we relocated them back. My grandfather said that was my summons in life. I was to take care of and protect the wolf.”
She has been around them since she was 2. She believes in their healing power and has lots of stories of them helping people, including soldiers with PTSD.
We talked for a while. I found out that some of the wolves had been filmed for the Twilight movies, and found out some of their individual personality quirks. Then we went outside to see the wolves — they are amazing.
Some visitors were there to take a tour, so Holan came out to hang with them. He’s sort of the Wolf Mountain greeter. He’s really friendly and seems to like the attention. I hung out with him after — he climbed all over me checking me out. I think I passed his inspection.
(Mike Sheehan and Holan. Credit: Tonya Littlewolf)
Wolves seem to always be fighting so many misconceptions about them, which has bred an irrational hatred of them in some places. But they are amazingly complex social animals, and beautiful.
On the second day, all the wolves howled (check out the audio in the player above) when I arrived in the morning. Prophet, a more recent arrival, growled at me for some reason. I think I might have been a little early for him.
I went and hung out with Holan. I got some color sketches of him as he walked by. Later in the day I found out Prophet could be a ham, and he would sit and pose for a while then walk around, but he came back every now and then and hit his pose again. It felt a little like a conversation.
That’s when it gets interesting, when it’s quiet and they get comfortable with me being there. We’d both sit and look at each other trying to figure each other out. At least I was; Prophet might have already figured me out.
Why are the wolves here? Some are failed pets and illegal breeding. Some come from the movie industry. Some have sad stories.
Balto has the manner of a wolf that hasn’t been treated very well. He was malnourished, dehydrated, stressed and had worms when he got here. He was skittish when I held my palm out offering him some treats. He finally took them, but quickly backed off to eat them. Tonya spends a lot of time out here with him and all the wolves. She is teaching Balto that some people actually love him.
I would ask Tonya each one's story, then be sorry I asked. But she gives them lots of love and they love her back. She also lectures at various organizations. A lot of her education efforts are teaching people that wolves are not pets, and that they are not villains — that they should be wild.
She spends a lot of her day raising money, a constant battle. It costs over $1,500 in red meat and $800 in chicken every week, and that's just some of the food costs. She has two wolves now that need to be fixed, and then there are other costs involved.
Wolf Mountain is completely reliant on donations and tours. There is also the effort to move them to Colorado, where there is more land and the climate is more to the wolves' liking.
She said she wanted to be outside with the wolves whenever she was in the office, and always made time go out and sit with them. I went out one day with her — she wanted me to see how peaceful it was. I did have to calm down as I entered their space, and sit on the ground so I didn't seem like a threat. It is truly amazing to see their movements and get to interact with them.
I went Friday for my last visit. I had gotten used to seeing them every day, and I was a little sad that I wouldn’t be sitting with them anymore. I was starting to see their distinct personalities. It's funny how fast you can feel bonded to something — but I have a feeling I’ll see them again soon.
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.
Erin Corwin's death hurt one of her last refuges: White Rock Ranch Horse Rescue
Off-Ramp contributor R.H. Greene has been spending a lot of time in the High Desert recently, where he became obsessed by a story of unsung kindness lurking behind one of last summer's grimmest tabloid headlines: The murder of Marine wife Erin Corwin.
(A photo of Erin Corwin released by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.)
White Rock Ranch Horse Rescue is a charity for horses, still surviving, but changed forever by a brush with evil. It’s a non-profit orphanage for unwanted horses near Yucca Valley, at the end of a long dirt road so pocked by the wind it threatens to shake a car to pieces at speeds above 10 miles per hour.
It's feeding time for the 53 horses who live here. Isabella Megli, co-founder and currently White Rock's sole proprietor, tosses armloads of hay from a golf cart, as unfettered horses canter by. Carol Davison is a weathered retiree who has worked and lived on the ranch for over six years. She hovers by Isabella's side, protectively.
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On the other side of a picket fence, a trim, middle-aged "people doctor" who won’t give her name is bandaging a horse's leg wound with practiced hands. Inside the big corral, some two dozen horses frolic and snort, attended by a pair of young-looking military wives, in for the day from the Marine base at Twentynine Palms.
Davison says most of the animals have been through some combination of abuse and loss.
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There's Gemeni, a pharmaceutical industry castoff, nameless when she arrived except for the large inventory number "605" branded onto her side. There's Mystic, a quarterhorse, with a raw and permanent knee injury on her right hind-leg, and a rigid leg muscle that dangles in the wrong place. She was lamed by "horse-tripping," an antique roping practice still popular at rodeos and Mexican charreadas.
And then there's Cassy, the horse I came to see. Lexie Marks, one of the visiting Marine wives, is "sponsoring" Cassy, a big step on the road to adopting her. But there are complications, "because her owner recently died." Cassy is skittish and has trust issues. And no wonder — the horse’s story is almost entirely about loss.
Isabella told me Cassy came to the ranch from an abusive household, run by a hoarder. For months, she was too skittish to make a friend. Then a shy 19-year-old newlywed named Erin Corwin relocated to Twentynine Palms with her Marine corporal husband and visited the White Rock ranch. The bond between Erin Corwin and Cassy was instant and profound.
Isabel said, "Erin picked her out of 30 (horses). I don't know why or how, and she says, 'I want this one.' But she walked in and caught her. She rode her bareback without a bit, and those two were just one."
Later, when the microphone has been turned off, Isabella broke down talking about Erin, and blamed herself for all the signs of trouble she did and didn't see. But as we spoke of Erin and stared at the horse she once loved, the 19 year old girl seems present… maybe like the wind in the distance.
With the negative publicity surrounding Erin Corwin's murder, White Rock ranch, a 501(c)(3) relying heavily on charitable contributions, has taken a major financial hit. Volunteers have been harder to come by, and donations are down.
Right now, she says they're trying to raise money to dig a well, because every one of the dozens of horses there needs to drink 62 gallons of water a day. Then, she turns briskly to attend to the myriad chores she has left to do — and as magnets go to pull us through our days, it's enough.