Pico Union, Pico Boulevard, Pico Rivera … so who was Pico? Actors playing zombies don’t need acting classes. El Nino is bringing welcome rain, but it’s also bringing a lot of uncommon marine species to Southern California, including the highly venomous yellow bellied sea snake. The only group allowed to bring notorious, wonderful EC Comics to life on the stage. We go to the Arboretum to see if it’s finally the right time to rip out your lawn and plant drought tolerant species … but we’ll also ask how the rains of El Nino fit into the picture.
1800s watercolors at Getty Villa show an undiscovered ancient Greece
Off-Ramp contributor Marc Haefele reviews "Greece’s Enchanting Landscape: Watercolors by Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi," at the Getty Villa through February 15, 2016.
“Almost every rock, every promontory, every river, is haunted by the shadows of the mighty dead.” — Edward Dodwell
It’s like something on a cover of an old sci-fi magazine: an ancient, empty, alien landscape of a long lost civilization, fallen into a ruin of broken columns and shattered pediments.
But that was the real world of ancient Greece in early modern times — the 1800s of the Emperor Napoleon and President Jefferson, when Greece was a distant, dangerous province of the Turkish Empire, visited by few western Europeans.
What’s amazing about this is that for over half a century, Europe and even America had been worshiping the culture of old Hellas in art, music, drama and literature. Imitation Greek buildings were the rage from Saint Petersburg to Washington DC. “The only way for us to become great, yes, inimitable, if it is possible, is the imitation of the Greeks," scholar Johann Winkelman said in the 1760s.
But the classic revival architecture of the 18th and early 19th centuries was largely inspired by Roman imitations of the originals. The great Acropolis originals — like Athens’ Parthenon and Erechtheion — were almost unknown. At least until Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi arrived in 1801 and 1805.
Dodwell, a learned English classicist, was first. The Neopolitan painter Pomardi joined him four years later. Their purpose was a scientific, visual record of all that remained of the glory that was Greece. The result, now at the Getty Villa, can also be seen as great art — and as an intricately detailed peek into an almost unimaginable lost world.
Dodwell said he “intended to leave nothing unnoticed.” Which is why the pictures are so rich in details, like shepherds and their flocks, roving bands of Albanian bandits, soaring mountain backdrops. And precise images of ancient buildings exactly as they stood over 200 years ago.
(The Parthenon, Athens, after 1805, Edward Dodwell; watercolor. The Packard Humanities Institute)
After a millennium of wars, invasion and repression, Greece then was wild, forsaken and largely underpopulated. Even Athens was just a dim little town of 10,000, with a scruffy Ottoman garrison and a few monasteries, a hardscrabble village that just happened to include the remains of some of the greatest buildings in history.
One of Dodwell and Pomardi’s key historic triumphs was to show the ancient village precisely as it was then — with a tiny mosque smack in the middle of the Parthenon, which is in turn surrounded by humble Turkish shacks and shanties — a rare record of the site before the new free nation of Greece eradicated the intrusions in the 1830s.
Dodwell and Pomardi’s purpose was to give modern Europe its first solid look at the shattered, original grandeur of ancient Hellas. Of a thousand drawings and water colors the pair completed, the Getty has compiled 44 choice pictures of the greatest of the classic remains, plus historic landscapes like the Pass of Thermopylae, along with some intriguing studies of how the ancient and the merely old became intertwined with age — a prime example of which is a Roman Catholic Capuchin monastery which cuddles a small, intact Hellenistic temple. The same monastery provided Dodwell and Pomardi with the only comfortable accommodations they found in Greece.
Concluding the exhibit are two 13-foot-long panorama drawings of Athens and its c. 1805 surroundings. They both offer an unparalleled sense of place and time — the age-battered, crumbling Greek city isolated in a landscape almost bereft of human habitation, yet so real that the viewer feels almost there.
"For Dodwell and Pomardi, such juxtapositions only magnified the lost splendor of Greek antiquity,” says David Saunders, an associate Getty curator, who compiled the show.
But Pomardi and Dodwell also witnessed one of history’s great acts of vandalism — and recorded that too. This was Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin’s pilfering of nearly half of the statuary off Athens’ Parthenon, the Propylea and the Erechtheion. One of Pomardi’s pictures traps the Englishman’s crew in the very act of tearing friezes off the Parthenon and lowering them to a crew below.
Elgin, then the English ambassador to Constantinople, made a deal with the ruling Turks for the ancient art. Elgin spent a huge amount of his young wife’s fortune on the project: he eventually sold the collection to the British Museum where it now sits, although Greece has demanded it back.
Dodwell himself wrote a fiery denunciation of this robbery, but the most famous attack was by Lord Byron:
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics ne'er to be restored.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatch'd thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!
— Lord Byron, "Childe Harold"
Pio Pico: A life as big as the 2-time governor's needs 2 graves
"What are we to do then? Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing us? Shall these incursions go on unchecked, until we shall become strangers in our own land?" -- Pio Pico
Rags-to-riches-to-rags stories are common in the fabric of Southern California history. They're"quintessential," says Carolyn Christian of the Friends of Pio Pico.
Pio Pico, the last governor of Alta California under Mexican rule, was a revolutionary who at one point made the missions forfeit their land. He also bet tens of thousands of dollars on horse races, but at the time of his death, couldn't afford his own grave.
Pio de Jesus Pico was born on May 5, 1801 at the mission San Gabriel Arcángel. California in this era had a tightly stratified caste system with indigenous people at the bottom, Mestizos (Mexicans with European blood) in the middle, and Spanish rancheros at the top, making up a mere 3% of Alta California's total population, according to historian Paul Bryan Gray. Pico himself came from Spanish, African, Native American, and Italian descent, but thanks to his father's service in the Spanish army, he had the potential to be part of the landowning class.
(Pio Pico, 1858. UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)
"The elite became the elite because they were the descendants of the original soldiers sent to California in 1769," says Gray. "The way things worked was that if you had an ancestor who did military service, or if you did military service yourself, you would get a land grant."
Eligibility was important, but availability came first. The Catholic Church controlled most of California's arable land through the missions. By the 1830s, upheaval was fomenting throughout the ranchero class, who were eager to expand their holdings by secularizing the mission lands for use by civilians. Pio Pico found himself at the head of a small rebellion and met the anti-secular Governor Manuel Victoria in combat at the Battle of Cahuenga Pass on Dec. 5, 1831.
Victoria was one of the very few injured in the battle, and didn’t return to his post. Pico "was elected to the Assemblea, what we'd call the state Assembly today," says Gray. He held office for 20 days in 1831 until the Mexican government pushed him out. The popular movement of secularization had taken hold though, and Pico and his brother Andres secured massive tracts of land in the San Diego and San Fernando areas, and after the Mexican-American War, in the San Gabriel Valley.
Pico married his wife, Maria Ygnacia Alvarado, in 1834. The two never had children together, but adopted two daughters. Carolyn Christian says that Pico fathered these children with other women, and legitimized them through adoption. Maria Ygnacia was the niece of Juan Bautista Alvarado, the Monterrey-born governor from the north who held office from 1836 to 1842. When Alvarado was succeeded by Mexico’s Manuel Micheltorena, Alvarado and Pico joined forces with another former governor, Jose Castro, in an uprising that culminated in the Battle of La Providencia in 1845.
Governor Micheltorena was overthrown and Pico retook the governor’s mansion, this time with Mexico’s blessing. One year later, the United States declared the Mexican-American War, and Gray says Pico accomplished little in this time. Pico had written about the increasing throngs of settlers from the Southern states coming to California leading up to the war:
"What are we to do then? Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing us? Shall these incursions go on unchecked, until we shall become strangers in our own land?"
"Pio Pico actually left California, went down to Mexico, and there are a couple stories why," says Christian. "Some people say he was a coward and he was running away. Other people say, no, he was going to down to Mexico to get reinforcements to come up and fight the Americans. The other reason why people think that he left is because if you have a head of government, and they're captured, you have a lot of negotiating power. So if they're gone and they can't be captured, that helps from having something leveraged against you."
Mexico ceded California and the rest of the Southwest with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848, signed at the Cahuenga Pass — the very site of both of Pico’s rises to governance. Pico returned to Los Angeles the same year.
"When he returned to California, he announced, 'I'm back, I'm governor of California.' And of course he was immediately thrown in jail," laughs Christian. Pico was bailed out by William Workman, says Christian, and became a proud member of the new Californian society. He was elected to the L.A. City Council, but never took office, says Gray. He continued building up a fortune in land holdings and gained a windfall from cattle raising because of the Gold Rush's high beef demands.
Maria Ygnacia Pico died in 1854, but Pio Pico would live on for another 40 years. In the 1860s and '70s he had two more children — sons — and in 1870 he made his last grand business venture: The Pico House. It was L.A.'s first three-story building and luxury hotel, with 33 suites, designed by architect Ezra Kysor, and still stands at El Pueblo de Los Angeles. Pico lost the hotel to the San Francisco Savings and Loan Company in 1876.
(L: Pico House, est. 1870, 400 block of LA's Main Street. R: Merced Theatre, erected 1870, L.A's first playhouse. Konrad Summers/Flickr Creative Commons)
Pico’s resources dwindled swiftly in the 1880s. His ranch was damaged by floods, he gambled away as much as $25,000 on a single race, and his son and translator Ranulfo was murdered for leaving a woman at the altar.
"He never bothered to learn English, so he couldn't read the deeds and mortgages and other documents given to him," says Gray, and Christian adds, "There was a lawyer by the name of Bernard Cohn, who actually swindled a lot of the Californios out of their land. He did it by presenting them with what they thought were loans, and they were actually signing over their ranchos... It went all the way to the California Supreme Court." Gray calls this the last in a long string of risk-taking by the ex-governor, "and as a result he lost all his land in Whittier and finally died in total poverty because of his negligence."
Pico died on Sept. 11, 1894 at 93 years old. He was buried at the first Calvary Cemetery, L.A.'s original Catholic cemetery, which was founded in 1844 and condemned due to massive disrepair in 1920. Pico and Maria Ygnacia Alvarado were interred in an above-ground tomb with cast iron markers, and at one point Alvarado's skeleton was grave-robbed and left strewn some 50 feet away, according to the L.A. Downtown News. The cemetery and most of its occupants were relocated to Calvary's current location in East L.A. in the '20s.
(Pico Family tomb at Old Calvary Cemetery. LAPL/Security Pacific National Bank Collection)
Cathedral High School now occupies the site the original Calvary Cemetery stood on. Pio Pico was moved not to East L.A., but to the Workman-Temple Homestead in what was known as Rancho La Puente. Pico had granted William Workman massive land tracts for serving in the Mexican military during the Mexican-American War, and when his great grandson Thomas Temple found oil on his family's property, Workman's grandson Walter Temple built a mausoleum for friends and family — which is Pio Pico's final resting place.
Visit Pio Pico's tomb at the Homestead Museum, which is giving a special presentation and tour at the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum on Sunday, Oct. 25.
Meet the neighbors: The tropical sea creatures El Niño is bringing to SoCal shores
There's something new in the water.
We know a strong El Niño means rain this winter, but scientists at the Natural History Museum say that's not the only thing the seasonal storm will bring. As warm El Niño water moves into the Southern California coast, it's bringing a whole new slate of tropical marine species with it.
How does that work? Unlike "The Blob," its water warming cousin to the North, El Niño warms waters across the Pacific. "Some species were responding to warming from before," said Rick Feeney, fish collections manager at the NHM. "But lately there's been much more, and a variety of species."
So meet Southern California's new exotic neighbors, coming to a beach near you:
1. Yellow-bellied sea snake
(Mark Pampanin/KPCC)
Last reported: Oct. 16, Oxnard. The last time before that was on San Clemente Beach in 1972. The second yellow-bellied sea snake ever found in California, pictured here, was found on the coast of Oxnard last Friday. Though they are highly venomous, Dr. Greg Pauly, herpetologist at the Natural History Museum, says their jaw and fangs are very small, and there have been no known human deaths from a yellow-bellied sea snake bite.
2. Spotfin burrfish
(Credit: Tam Warner Minton/Flickr Creative Commons)
Last reported: August, Santa Monica Bay. The spotfin burrfish gets it's name from the immovable spines on it's inflatable body. Different kinds of burrfish are found from the West Indies to Florida, but are exclusive to the tropics. That is, of course, except for during a strong El Niño, when they hang out just off of Los Angeles's coast.
3. Various sport fish species
(A blue-striped marlin. Credit: Jackie Mora/Wikimedia Creative Commons)
Last reported: All over Southern California throughout fall 2015. Dorado, yellowfin tuna, blue-striped marlin, wahoo and more sport fish species known to be native to Mexico are being caught off the coast of San Diego, Orange County and Catalina Island. Rick Feeney, fish collections manager at the museum, calls it a "boon" for the sport fishing industry. No need to travel down to Baja California for sport fishing, because here in Southern California, "there are so many marlin, they are being caught and released routinely," Feeney says. "They say there are more sport fish up here now then there is at Cabo San Lucas."
4. Hammerhead shark
https://instagram.com/p/73t_-Pqf_E/
Last reported: Oct. 19, Newport Beach. These sharks live throughout the world, but prefer warm water. Which is why there have been at least 30 sightings of hammerhead sharks off the coast of San Diego and Orange County beaches this year, and one attack, as opposed to zero sightings in non-Niño years. Still, Feeney says, the numbers of hammerheads off Southern California's shores is low enough that it doesn't pose a huge risk for beachgoers. That won't stop them from closing local beaches, however.
5. Oarfish
(An oarfish washed up on Catalina's Emerald Bay this past June. Credit: Tyler Dvorak/Catalina Island Conservancy)
Last reported: Sept. 14, La Jolla. Also called a sea serpent for its massive size and slithery demeanor, the oarfish is the longest-known bony fish species alive today. Human encounters are uncommon, which makes the four oarfish that have washed up on Southern California beaches in 2015 all the weirder. Before 2015, two oarfish washed up on Southern California beaches in 2013, and zero in 2014.
6. Red-footed booby
(Red-footed booby at the International Bird Rescue seabird rehabilitation facility in San Pedro.)
Last reported: September 2015, Orange County. Kimball Garrett, bird collections manager at the Natural History Museum, has a record of six red-footed boobies in Southern California so far this year. Before 2015, there have only been 19 records of red-footed boobies ever in California. Garrett believes the tropical birds are following warmer water north, but many are having trouble finding food, with many in Southern California found dead or starving.
7. Butterfly fish
(Credit: Nathan Rupert/Flickr Creative Commons)
Not yet reported. However, based on previous El Niño events, Feeney expects we'll see the butterfly fish, as well as an array of tropical fish species, on the Southern California coastline this winter. Our coast will have "things that you can only find on a tropical reef," Feeney says. "This might be a good time to go snorkeling."
8. El Niño's biggest loser: Sea lions
(Credit: Gloria Hillard/NPR)
There have been a record amount of abandoned sea lion pups this year, says Jim Dines, mammalogy collections manager at the Natural History Museum, creating a problem with Southern California's local sea lion population. The problem starts with, unsurprisingly, El Niño. The warm waters have pushed sea lions' natural prey, like anchovies, further away from Southern California's coast. This forces mother sea lions to search further for food, and many young sea lions are forced to begin searching on their own. Just like their mothers, they rarely find anything, which may be why one brave pup tried a Balboa Peninsula bar and grill.
How do you plant a drought-tolerant garden during an El Niño?
For gardeners, the weather's only seemed to get stranger here in Southern California. We all know about the historic drought by now, that goes without saying. But now there's an El Niño on the horizon, and with it a record-breaking rainy season is also on the horizon. What's an Angeleno gardener to do?
Off-Ramp's made a habit of checking in with Frank McDonough, botanical information consultant at the Los Angeles County Arboretum — here are some of his tips for cultivating a sustainable garden in the coming year.
Remember how you were supposed to wait until October to rip out your lawn? That was before El Niño.
I'd still wait if you can. We've got an El Niño coming. If you tear your lawn out, or a great deal of your landscaping, and all your neighbors do the same... yeah it's a good time to plant, but what happens when El Niño comes? We're talking a huge amount of flooding. It just happened in Boyle Heights.
If you must rip out your lawn now, replace it with sod.
Sod's gonna be absorptive right off the bat, so you should be OK with sod. There are certain sods that people have already been using that are actually quite drought tolerant, like good old Bermuda grass. But there are — it's now available — buffalo grass. The UC Verde Buffalo Grass is available as sod — you can put it down all at once and you won't have a problem with a large area of dirt that's gonna get washed down into the storm drains.
You can try to capture water, but it'll cost you.
Water capture is a tricky thing. Water capturing systems are things that have to be excavated to install. And anytime you're doing any excavation and it's open to a rain storm, you're looking at a major mess, and the same problem — the excess water goes flowing out in the storm drain. So wait for that, as well. But there are many good water-catching systems – for instance, buried pipes underneath permeable stepping stones.
These water collection systems are great, they can collect up to 10- to 20,000 gallons of water. That'll give you a lot of water to do a lot of things for a long time.
Avoid big chain nurseries, if you can.
Make sure that when you buy your seed, you're getting the correct seed. There's several great mixes out there that are water-saving mixes, a lot of them contain red fescue, which is a California native. They're pretty good for partially shaded areas, to half-day sun.
But make sure when you go to get these mixes, you get the right mixes. If you go to a box store or any of these large chains that purchase for the entire country, and they have a water-saving mix, it may not contain the grasses that will do well here.
A lot of the water-saving seed mixes are out on the Web. Just type "California native drought tolerant grass" and you'll get a lot of hits.
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.
The DWP's 'binary star' relationship with the city of Los Angeles
If you're new to Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power might seem like any other municipal utility. But it has a long history that gets more fascinating the deeper you dig ... ehich is what Off-Ramp contributor Marc Haefele did for the latest issue of Los Angeles Magazine.
In his story, Marc writes that back in the 1980s, when he briefly worked for DWP doing PR for the agency, he discovered that "DWP employees were proud..."
"They were better paid than other city workers. They had better benefits. They had their luxury cafeteria with the big grand piano, the deep green carpets, the terrace dining. While City Hall workers pushed paper, went the thinking, DWP workers kept Los Angeles alive a magic the DWP pioneers had conjured out of the rugged Sierra early in the last century."
The DWP and the city, Marc says, are like a binary star system. They rotate around one another rather than working in sync. The DWP, while officially a department of the City of Los Angeles, wants to be as independent as possible. But since Mayor Riordan stepped in to replace a DWP GM who wasn’t doing what he wanted him to do in 1994, twelve GM's have come and gone over 20 years. The ensuing years haven't been great for the utility: a major power outage, the Fleishman Hillard scandal, the computerized billing fiasco, and the trust fund controversy.
Listen to my interview with Marc for much more ... including a DWP legend about a councilman, his aide, a cabin, and a tour bus.
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."
Song of the week: "Quiet Time" by Roses
Fans of jangly 80's pop rock (Stone Roses, New Order, Orange Juice) can find a new, exciting band to follow in Los Angeles' Roses. Their single "Quiet Time" is the Off-Ramp song of the week:
https://soundcloud.com/rosesla/quiet-time/s-1YXoq
Roses is made up of Victor Herrera on bass, singer and synth player Marc Steinberg and guitarist Juan Velasquez, formerly of LA's Abe Vigoda. Roses plays the Smell on Friday, October 30 and the Echoplex on Thursday, November 12.
Here's a video of Roses playing the song live for Seattle's KEXP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7PRedGAm_Q
Vincent Price's very Off-Rampy cookbook, 'A Treasury of Great Recipes,' is back!
UPDATE: Come hear Elina Shatkin interview Victoria Price about her folks' cookbook at Samuel Freeman Gallery on Tuesday, Dec. 8, at 7pm. As a bonus, see Martin Mull's newest paintings in an unsettling but beautiful show called "The Edge of Town." The gallery is at 2639 South La Cienega Blvd, LA CA 90034.
Mary and Vincent Price loved food, but they weren't snooty. Their "A Treasury of Great Recipes" turns 50 this year and has been lovingly re-released in all its calorific glory. Off-Ramp contributor Elina Shatkin gets the backstory with daughter Victoria Price.
"I don't think my parents really saw themselves as culinary experts. I think they really thought of themselves as cultural ambassadors. They knew that they had been allowed to have experiences that other people didn't have. So I think what they wanted to do was show people what was possible." — Victoria Price
In "Theatre of Blood," Vincent Price plays a deranged actor so enraged by a bad review that he murders the critic's poodles, bakes them into a pie and force feeds them to the critic until he dies. Worst. Dinner party. Ever.
In real life, Vincent Price was elegant and erudite. He was a traveler. He was an art collector who now has a university museum named for him. And he loved to eat.
"My dad, I think, was not only the original American foodie — he was kind of a metrosexual before there was even such a thing," says his daughter, Victoria Price.
In 1965, her parents published a cookbook. The 500-page "A Treasury of Great Recipes" was heavy and ornate. The bronze cover was etched with gold lettering. Everything about it screamed "keepsake." And it was. The book was a hit.
"I was kind of blown away when Saveur magazine named it one of the 100 most important culinary events of the 20th century," Victoria Price says. "It was more than just a cookbook that was about food. It was experiential."
Its recipes came from the Prices' favorite restaurants around the world. Tre Scalini in Rome, La Boule d'Or in Paris, the Ivy in London, Antoine's in New Orleans, the Pump Room in Chicago and dozens of others. But the Prices weren’t snobs.
The book includes this tribute to a classic American snack: "No hot dog ever tastes as good as the ones at the ballpark. It is a question of being just the right thing at the right time and place. So we have included Chavez Ravine, the Los Angeles Dodgers' magnificent new ballpark, among our favorite eating places in the world."
According to Victoria Price, "the philosophy of the cookbook was gourmet is where you find it and ambiance makes the occasion. And from growing up, I knew that what that meant was gourmet is not the province of the elite. It's not something you get when you go to a five-star restaurant."
That's partly why the book was so popular. It was all about making the world of haute cuisine accessible.
"My favorite memory of my childhood, foodwise for sure with my dad, was one day he woke up and he said: 'Today we're going to go find the best taquito in Los Angeles,'" Victoria Price recalls. "In those kind of pre-food truck days, the best taquitos were found at the little huts that were attached to car washes. We must have driven 200 miles that day. And it wasn't just about eating the taquitos, but you had to try the amazing sauces to dip the taquitos in, the salsas. So we tried all of them. And we had so much fun 'cause we talked about it. It was sharing what we loved about them. It was engaging, it wasn't just shoving something in your mouth."
But then, tastes changed. "I like to say that you could have a heart attack after three bites of some of those recipes," Price says. "Heavy cream and butter..." The book fell out of style and out of print. But it became a cult classic. Which is why, on its 50th anniversary, it has been reissued in a glossy new edition.
It's a time machine, with recipes from a handful of classic, long-shuttered L.A. restaurants. Here's the cold cucumber soup from Scandia on the Sunset Strip and the veal cutlets Cordon Bleu from Perino's.
And it's a world tour. If you couldn't jet off to Mexico City to eat at the Rivoli, you can make their chilies poblanos rellenos at home. Can't make it to Sardi's in New York? Here's their chicken tetrazzini, frogs' legs polonaise and asparagus milanese.
"I think what they wanted to do was show people what was possible," Victoria Price says.
As much as Vincent Price loved food and art and acting, he loved people more.
Thanks to Piotr Michael, who impersonated Vincent Price's voice for the radio story.
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)
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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.