Remembering: Breakthrough TV with Norman Lear, Oscar de la Renta with a fashion design student, our loved ones with Caitlin Doughty and "the good death," James Brown and the TAMI concert
(Don't go) ... Into the Woods. Or: Eduardo Sanchez gives Bigfoot a heart in 'Exists'
"It's the Bigfoot movie I've been wanting to make since I was a kid and I'm very proud of it." -- Eduardo Sanchez on his new movie, "Exists"
The movie "Exists" opens this weekend in limited release in theaters, and On Demand online. It's about what happens when you piss off Bigfoot, and is based on the found footage premise of "The Blair Witch" Project. Which only makes sense: Eduardo Sanchez directed both movies.
But first things first. To check the mikes, we often ask interview subjects to tell us what they had for breakfast.
Sanchez: "Huevos rancheros with William Friedkin, the amazing director of 'The Exorcist,' which I think is the scariest movie of all time. He wants us to write a script for him."
Rabe: "So you said yes?"
Sanchez: "Of course we said yes. You want us to scrub your pool, that's fine with me too."
Found footage was such a new concept in 1999, when "Blair Witch" came out, I remember being skeptical, but having that 5 percent or 10 percent amount of suspension of disbelief, which is all you need to make a movie work. The cast of "Exists" includes a videographer intent on capturing every moment of his camping trip with four friends, so we see the movie through his cameras' eyes. You think we'd be jaded by now, but it works even better than before. Sanchez says, "Our brain is just tricked into like, okay, when I see a shaky image, and the lighting's not great, and the sound (is bad), it must be real."
RELATED: Gunnar Hansen pulls the mask off Leatherface in new "Texas Chainsaw" memoir
"Exists" is less than an hour and a half long. "Films in general are too long," Sanchez says. "Even great movies. Once the creature hits that cabin, it's a frickin' ride, and that's what I wanted to deliver. A popcorn fun film rollercoaster ride."
For much more of my interview with Eduardo Sanchez — including how he gave Bigfoot a character arc and a language — listen to the audio on this page, which is a nearly unedited version of our conversation in the Off-Ramp studio.
Norman Lear, legendary TV producer, got Americans laughing — and talking
Norman Lear — who wrote, produced and created shows like "All in the Family," "Sanford and Sons," "The Jeffersons" — told KPCC's Patt Morrison that he feels he got America to talk to each other.
"People who meet or see me and recognize me will say, 'I can't forget having spent those years looking at the show with my family, because my father was like Archie, my mother was like Edith,'" said Lear, who is promoting his new memoir. "And that's what I got, mostly. It caused people to talk together."
Lear's new book, titled "Even This I Get to Experience," chronicles his childhood, his career creating some of America's most beloved TV shows, and his history of progressive political activism. Lear spoke with Morrison at his office in Beverly Hills.
Interview Highlights:
On the lasting effect his creations had on American conversation:
You know, I think the major effect was that it helped Americans to talk to one another. People who meet or see me and recognize me will say, "I can't forget having spent those years looking at the show with my family, because my father was like Archie, my mother was like Edith." And that's what I got, mostly. It caused people to talk together.
You know, as writers, we sat about scraping the barrels of our own experience. Everybody read the newspapers, everybody paid closer attention to their children, to their wives, to their families. And that's where we got our stories. And that's why so much of it was volatile or edgy. It was current, is the way I looked at it.
On what made his shows so revolutionary for American TV:
What I used to hear before anything else was, "Listen, if you want to send messages, there's Western Union." I didn't know how to answer that until I began to realize that before "All in the Family" went on the air, the "Beverly Hillbillies" of the world — the edgiest subject they worked with was something like "the roast is ruined, and the boss is coming to dinner."
Well, if that's all you're doing on television, and that's the kind of problem families faced, then look at that statement. There is no race issue in America, there are no economic problems, we're not facing war, we love everybody that's elected to office — that's a heavy message.
On the controversial character Archie Bunker:
There was no doubt that he had bigoted attitudes. But I had a father that used to call me the laziest white kid he ever met. I would scream at him, "You're a bigot! Why do you have to put down a whole race of people to call me lazy?" "That's not what I'm doing! And you're the dumbest white kid I've ever met!"
But in terms of impact, I remember thinking constantly, where racism is concerned, "If a couple of thousand years of the Judeo-Christian ethic didn't blunt or stop racism, my little half-hour situation comedies weren't going to do the job."
Visit amazon.com to purchase Norman Lear's "Even This I Get to Experience."
Hit @LosFelizDayCare Twitter feed shoots down helicopter parents
If you live in or around Los Feliz and send your little person to daycare with a sack of organic carrots and a yoga mat, you might want to skip this segment. You're going to be disappointed in public radio.
If not, welcome to
, a hit Twitter feed run by comedy writer Jason Shapiro. It has 16,600 followers as of Thursday, and here's why:
Emmet was sent off on a meditation opportunity after telling Saha where the hidden cuts in Birdman are. It's all one take if you believe!
— Los Feliz Day Care (@LosFelizDayCare)
SILENT DROP OFF/PICK UP TODAY. New episode of
was released and silence is the only way to ensure that everyone feels spoiler safe.
— Los Feliz Day Care (@LosFelizDayCare)
SILENT DROP OFF/PICK UP TODAY. New episode of @serial was released and silence is the only way to ensure that everyone feels spoiler safe.
— Los Feliz Daycare (@LosFelizDaycare) October 23, 2014
Los Feliz Day Care (humanely) captures the neighborhood's helicopter parent zeitgeist, then skewers and roasts it like a tofu shish kebab — and in a way, the feed has a kind of echo of "Welcome to Nightvale."
Someone left the shed open and now we have skunks living in our cider press. Please explain that we can't name them. That's not for us to do
— Los Feliz Day Care (@LosFelizDayCare)
The kids' names are one of the best parts of the feed: Beckett, Tallulah, Ranger — but you'll have to listen to our interview to discover if little Kai is named for the handsomest man in public radio.
At LA fashion school FIDM, Oscar de la Renta's death brings tears, memories, inspiration
Oscar de la Renta did something revolutionary: he made high-fashion evening gowns for women they could actually wear for an entire evening. For that reason alone, he deserves all possible accolades — but more, he was "timeless," in the words of Barbara Bundy, the vice president for education at Los Angeles's Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising.
"He is truly the difference between fad and fashion," Bundy said. "He was truly fashion, because his style endured for many, many years. It's hard to date many of his pieces."
De la Renta's death Monday at the age of 82 brought memories and tears at FIDM when the bad news arrived. FIDM curator Kevin Jones remembers that, when he was working on a documentary recently, de la Renta delayed a flight back to Europe so he could sit for an interview with Jones. Jones oversees FIDM's vast garment collection, including many de la Renta pieces.
"He could design anything from a swimsuit you could wear on the Riviera all the way to a red carpet gown, and it would translate perfectly," Jones said. "It was always clean and bold in its statement, through silhouette and color."
Like the gown Sarah Jessica Parker famously wore to the Met gala:
(Sarah Jessica Parker in her Oscar de la Renta gown at the "Charles James: Beyond Fashion" Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 5, 2014 in New York City. Photo credit: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)
FIDM fashion student Vanessa Puccini, a Colombian, takes great inspiration from de la Renta's designs, but she began crying Tuesday when talking about his death for a different reason: de la Renta was a Dominican.
"Personally he inspired me to be proud of where I am," she said, her voice breaking and tears flowing. "And it's hard for Hispanics to be proud. He told me 'be proud of where you're from; don't ever change that.'"
Caitlin Doughty turns early trauma into a life helping bring 'the good death'
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Caitlin Doughty, author of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory."
With its taxidermy decor, Caitlin Doughty's apartment is a fitting place to discuss death. The stuffed ermine and 6-point buck are "aesthetically pleasing and they also are memento mori," Doughty said. "They're reminding us that we, too, will die."
As a practicing mortician, Doughty's become familiar with death. She's likely consumed (albeit unwittingly) the ashes from the bodies she cremated.
"It can get in strange places," Doughty said. "And it's disconcerting, but it's also kind of an interesting connection to reality and the fact that death is around us all the time."
Off-Ramp Archive: Walk through the cemetery with Caitlin Doughty
A traumatic brush with death during childhood — seeing a toddler fall from a walkway at a shopping mall — led Doughty to develop obsessive compulsive tendencies.
"I had a weird relationship with death," Doughty said. "I developed all kinds of OCD behaviors, thinking I could control death. Which didn't work, of course."
Doughty eventually moved past the experience, but her interest in death lingered.
"When I started to work at the crematory, I was really trying to be an anthropologist," Doughty explained. "I was really trying to go in there and see what the real people working with real death right now in America looked like."
I brought up how businesses like Forest Lawn and Vitas, in their radio ads, encourage people to "start the conversation." Doughty responds, "They are using something that, in reality, is very important — the idea that a lot of people die without having advance directives in place, without people knowing what their family member who's dying really wants."
The way Doughty sees it, having a plan is an essential part of grieving. "People say, 'Oh, don't worry about me... my body doesn't mean anything,'" she said. "And that's fine. But the family can often want something tangible to do and be a part of. They don't want you to say it doesn't matter, 'cause they're left behind. They have to mourn."
Doughty directly address this thought in her book:
"A corpse doesn't need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn't need anything anymore — it's more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life. Looking at the body you see yourself, and you know that you, too, will die. The visual is a call to self-awareness. It is the beginning of wisdom."
When Doughty's cat died, she applied the same philosophy.
"We buried her in Topanga in a natural grave," Doughty said. "It was practicing what I would preach for humans — with my cat. And I have to say that it's been months now since she's died and I feel pretty good. I feel sorrow and I miss her but I feel like I did right by her."
Doughty prefers this natural route over embalming.
"All the body wants to do biologically is decompose," she explained. "Once you die, it's, 'Let me out here! I'm ready to shoot my atoms back into the universe!'"
Don't expect a similar sort of transcendence to occur come Halloween.
"It's gotten more and more American, I would argue, as the years have gone on," Doughty said. "To the point that we say our true engagement with death is Halloween just shows how broken our relationship with death in America is."
With the advent of modern medicine, people lost touch with the reality of death. "You had to be much more accepting of death as something that's going to happen, because it happened so much more frequently," Doughty said. "Now you have people who are 40, 50, 60 who have been to one funeral."
Naturally, Doughty has given some thought to her own death.
"Right now, if I died in the next 10 years, I would like to be naturally buried," Doughty said. "If it's made legal, I would love to be consumed by animals. I would like to be able to give my own body back to the cycle."
Caitlin Doughty will appear at the Santa Monica Public Library Nov. 25 as part of her book tour. Visit the Order of the Good Death for more information on her work.
Sunday Assembly, new atheist 'church' in LA, celebrates 'the one life we know we have'
The Sunday Assembly is a godless congregation that celebrates life. Our motto: live better, help often, wonder more. Our mission: to help everyone find and fulfill their full potential. Our vision: a godless congregation in every town, city and village that wants one.
— Sunday Assembly website
On September 28th, 2014, an international organization founded in England less than two years ago doubled in size when it launched 35 new affiliates in a single day.
It's called Sunday Assembly, and it has a lot in common with the mainline churches its name calls to mind. It was founded as a place for the like-minded to meet and support each other — to sing songs, hold hands and do good works. It has almost everything people turn to organized religion for — except the God part.
WATCH: Sunday Assembly LA's YouTube channel
Sunday Assembly is an atheist organization, one that's riding a huge wave of secularism in the US. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 1 in 5 Americans are now unaffiliated with any religion — a number that rises to 1 in 3 for people under 30.
Still, it's never exactly been easy to be an atheist in America.
Ian Dodd, a co-director of the LA Branch of Sunday Assembly, which meets this Sunday in LA, was raised in a secular-humanist household. He remembers the topic of religion as a fraught one. "I got threatened [by] the neighborhood kids that I would burn in hell," Dodd says. "Fourth grade? The teacher, in violation of the law, asked each student to recite the Lord's Prayer before we started each school day. This was in a public school. "Eventually it came to be my day, and she said, 'Would you like to lead us in the Lord's Prayer.' I said 'No.' She looked aghast and said 'Why?' And I said, 'Because I don't know it.'"
(Amy Boyle, RH Greene, and Ian Boyle. Credit: RH Greene)
At 50ish, Ian's a child of the Cold War era, when the word "Godless" often seemed like a first name for the word "Communism." The Atheist as morally bankrupt.
According to Amy Boyle, co-director of LA's Sunday Assembly, the Cold War may be over, but the stereotype remains. Boyle says people who find out she's an atheist ask her how she can be good "all the time. And I think that idea, it's condescending. We're social people. We feel good when we help people. We feel bad when we hurt people. I didn't learn that from any ancient text. And I don't think we need an ancient text to tell us that we can build great things and make great projects when we build things, and that it's hard to do that if we're all killing each other and running red lights."
So what is Sunday Assembly, exactly? Well, it was created by British comedians for one thing. Which only seems odd until you think about it. Because, what is comedy if not scepticism with a laugh track?
Mel Brooks and the 15, whoops, 10 Commandments
"The genesis of Sunday Assembly," says Ian Dodd, "is that it was the brainchild of two stand-up comedians, Pippa Evans and Saunderson Jones. They were driving to a gig. And they started talking about this idea that 'Gosh, isn't it great when people get together and sing and celebrate. Why do they have to bring all of the superstition along with it?'"
That celebratory aspect sets Sunday Assembly apart from the so-called New Atheists, who have dominated the conversation about unbelief for the past decade or so. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens, engaged in showy debates with clerics and other symbols of religious authority.
WATCH: Richard Dawkins on organized religion
The New Atheists embraced the Culture Wars. Sunday Assembly shuns them, controversially at times.
At Sunday Assembly LA's monthly meetings, there's singing. There's dancing. And there are guest speakers who discourse on brainy scientific and social topics in friendly, everyman terms. Where the New Atheism of the 2000s delighted in confrontation, this is Ted Talk Atheism. And if that sounds disparaging, it isn't meant to be. Molotov cocktails offer one kind of fire. A sing-a-long around a hearth offers quite another, and is probably more suited to a movement attempting to go mainstream.
According to Amy Boyle, "there are all these new [Sunday Assemblies] starting. And they're starting all over. They're starting in Brussels. There's a new Sunday Assembly that wants to start in China. There are Sunday Assemblies blossoming in places where it is not yet legal to leave the religion of the state, where 'apostasy' is still punishable by death."
"It isn't about celebrating atheism. It's about having like values, and finding greater meaning in the world, without mentioning the 'God' word."
Hmmm. A transformative philosophical movement whose acolytes are willing to spread their beliefs under pain of death. That reminds me of a story I heard once...
ATTEND this weekend's Sunday Assembly in LA
Sunday Assembly assembles this Sunday in LA. The host is Brian Keith Dalton, aka, "Mr. Deity," and the guest speaker is Dr. Clifford Johnson, theoretical physicist at USC, with a presentation called "The Origin Has Its Own Origin Story."
'Gertie the Dinosaur,' animation watershed, deserved a bigger 100th birthday party
On September 14, 1914, a man named Winsor McCay stepped onto the stage of the Palace Theater in Chicago and changed the history of animation and popular culture forever.
McCay was a cartoonist, a pioneer animator and a vaudeville star. That night at the Palace, he introduced his latest film, "Gertie the Dinosaur."
RELATED: Go behind the scenes at "The Simpson's" animation studio
It was only 12 minutes long, but no one had seen anything like it. Because there hadn’t been anything like it.
Three years earlier, McCay had made Little Nemo, using characters from his magnificent comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland.”
Earlier animated films by other artists had shown simple line figures performing elementary motions, but McCay's characters moved so smoothly and realistically in three-dimensional space, audiences assumed he had made Nemo with live actors and trick photography.
WATCH: Winsor McCay's groundbreaking "Little Nemo" (1911)
For his third film McCay chose a subject that couldn't be faked.
"Gertie the Dinosaur" was arguably his greatest achievement — and a watershed in the history of animation. On stage, McCay would give a command and the projected Gertie would respond. When McCay coaxed, she shyly emerged from her cave to bow to the audience.
WATCH: The even more groundbreaking "Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914)
In "Gertie the Dinosaur," McCay laid the foundations of character animation, which is the art of delineating a character's personality through an individual style of movement.
Viewers understood Gertie’s endearing, somewhat childish personality from the angle at which she cocked her head while listening to a command — and the impudence with which she flicked her tail while disobeying it.
Audiences finally realized they were seeing something new: a film comprised of drawings. Nearly 20 years would pass before anyone did more polished animation.
For a character who represents both the prehistory of life and the prehistory of animation, Gertie wears her years very lightly: the audience acted with surprise and delight when historian and animator John Canemaker recreated McCay’s vaudeville routine in a lecture at LACMA.
Sadly, beyond the Motion Picture Academy’s presentation of Canemaker’s talk, no one did much to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this landmark film that blazed the trail for Walt Disney, Chuck Jones, John Lasseter and countless other animators.
There’s no Gertie commemorative stamp. President Obama is awarding Jeffrey Katzenberg the Presidential Medal for the Arts, but the President has never spoken McCay’s name in public. In Paris, the rue Méliès honors that French pioneer of animation, but there’s no Winsor McCay Boulevard in Los Angeles or New York.
WATCH: The trippy "A Trip to the Moon" from the Méliès brothers
It’s another example how shabbily America treats the films that influence the art of animation and pop culture around the world. Despite that neglect, "Gertie the Dinosaur" continues to entertain and inspire audiences — and will for another 100 years.
Charles Solomon latest books are "The Art of the Disney Golden Books" and "Once Upon a Dream: From Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty to Maleficent."
'Mickey' singer/dancer Toni Basil on the 50th anniversary of the biggest rock concert ever
On Oct. 28 and 29, 1964, 50 years ago this month, thousands of screaming teenagers flocked to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to witness one of the most famous concerts in the history of American music. The T.A.M.I. show — short for "Teenage Awards Music International" or just "Teen Age Music International" — was a variety show featuring performances from some of the most important acts in pop music at the time: Jan and Dean, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Rolling Stones and James Brown, who gave a genre-defining performance.
On top of all the musicians, the shows' producers recruited some of Hollywood's best dancers to accompany the musicians, and that included 21-year-old assistant choreographer Toni Basil. Basil would later go on to record "Mickey," the 1982 hit single. But as she tells "Off-Ramp" contributor Sean J. O'Connell that the T.A.M.I. show was one of the most important moments of her career.
For Basil, the highlight from the two nights was James Brown's performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_jqhXNF98A
"James was just amazing that night. He did, what, how long? How long did he do? At least 15 minutes? My god! Nothing short of Shakespearian.
"If you really think about what he did with that cape, falling to his knees, and Bobby Burnett and putting that cape around him, and getting him up. And walking him off in this extremely dramatic, theatrical way. And James threw the cape off and came back and dropped to his knees again!
"I remember when I saw James hit those steps, I was so perplexed by them I actually ran up to the second floor, where there was a full mirror in the ladies room. And I tried to do the step. And then I'd run back downstairs and look at the step — because he was on forever, doing that step. You know, there was no video like now where you rewind and look at it!"
Basil says the performance changed her dance career completely. "I look back at it and I see how fun and interesting and what a change dance was taking," she says.
If you haven't seen the T.A.M.I. Show in its entirety, it's worth a look. You can buy the DVD on Amazon or watch a less-than-ideally recorded version on YouTube:
Del Casher invented the wah-wah pedal and changed rock and roll history
Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, George Harrison — none of them would sound quite like they do without Del Casher. In the mid-'60s, Casher helped develop a device he envisioned as the new voice of the guitar. He called it the wah-wah pedal.
The wah made it possible to take the electric guitar from a harsh sound to a softer one with a simple rock of the foot. Here's a demonstration of a wah-wah pedal in action:
Dunlop GCB95F Crybaby Classic Wah Pedal Demo - Sweetwater Sound
Now in his 70s, the pedal's inventor runs a studio in Burbank and still writes and performs. But before Casher came to California, he was an Indiana kid fascinated with musicians like Django Reinhardt and Les Paul.
Casher's dad bought him a Sears Roebuck guitar for $9.95 Casher got to work modifying his electric guitars just like Les Paul. It was also Casher's father who suggested he go to Los Angeles to pursue music further — but like so many who come to Southern California to pursue a dream, Casher wasn't thinking realistically.
His big plan was to ask Lawrence Welk (of "The Lawrence Welk Show") if he had a job for him during an autograph signing.
"As I approached him I said, 'Mr. Welk I'm not here for an autograph, I'd like to play guitar in your orchestra, because I'm from Hammond, Indiana and I play really great guitar," Casher said. "And he looked at me and he said 'Absolutely not!'"
After Welk turned him down, Casher landed a job playing with the Three Suns at L.A.'s hottest night club: The Coconut Grove. Before long, it was Welk who was calling Casher to solo with his orchestra.
Del Casher "Dark Eyes" - The Lawrence Welk Show
Casher says he always tinkered with his sound, looked for ways to make his guitar do new things. His biggest idea came while he was playing guitar with a traveling group of musicians' Vox amplifiers put together in order to show off their products.
"I turned a knob. And I turned the wrong knob because that knob went 'wow.' And I said, 'That's the sound I've been looking for!' So I went to Stan Cutler, who was head of engineering, and I said 'Stan, you know that little knob over there on that amplifier, could you put that in a pedal?'"
The wah-wah pedal was born. Now Casher keeps the original in a bright red case
But to Casher's surprise, the people at Vox didn't get it. Casher got Joe Banaran, the chairman of Vox, to take a listen. But, according to Casher, Banaran saw the wah-wah pedal for trumpets and trombones — not guitars.
Casher knew he had to sell people on the wah-wah for guitar, so he got creative. He made a Vox Wah-Wah demo record in his own garage studio. Casher even tried showing the pedal off for James Brown, but Brown wasn't interested either.
It wasn't looking good for the wah.
"I got nobody on my side," Casher said. "I'm thinking I'll call up my friend Frank Zappa. I told Frank, 'The wah-wah pedal is really something you should consider, because I can't get anyone else to go for it.'"
Zappa found plenty of uses for the wah — and Casher says that's how Jimi Hendrix got turned on to it.
"The biggest fame that Jimi had got with the wah pedal was playing Woodstock, which was 1969," Casher said. "Everybody said, 'how's he getting that magical sound?' Well, just call me up, I'll tell you how to do it, I already been doing it for two years."
Once you start listening for the wah, you'll hear it everywhere. From Funkadelic solos, to Led Zeppelin licks, to Isaac Hayes' Academy Award-winning theme for "Shaft."
George Harrison even wrote a song called "Wah-Wah" and in it gave the pedal plenty of playing time.
"The wah-wah pedal was a device that was allowing him to express a particular feeling," said Casher. "That was exactly my vision for the pedal. Everybody has whatever they want it to be and the wah-wah enables them to do that."
Tommy Lasorda's favorite restaurant is Paul's Kitchen, a hole in the wall in the Fashion District
As America gears up to watch the World Series, one thing is certain: once again, the Dodgers won't be there. For Dodgers fans still in mourning we have one small consolation: lunch with Tommy Lasorda, the team's hall of fame former manager at his favorite place. Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson met Lasorda at Paul's Kitchen, a small and storied Chinese restaurant in downtown L.A.'s Fashion District.
On how he heard about Paul's Kitchen:
"Well about 50 years ago I came here for the first time. A friend of mine, Abe Goldman, he brought me here. And of course, I've been coming here ever since. I had just arrived here. I'd arrived here from Pennsylvania. I was a scout. After I'd quit playing, I became a scout for the Dodgers in Pennsylvania and then Al Campanis asked me to move out here [Los Angeles], to help scouting out here. And that's when I moved out here, in 1963.
"I can remember inviting Kirk Douglas and Jack Valenti to come and eat here with me, when it was at night. And Kirk Douglas said 'Are we eating here?' and I said 'No, we're eating inside!'"
On why he keeps coming back to Paul Kitchen"
"The food is so good, naturally! I come back here because these people are friends of mine. We've been friends for years. And I come here all the time to eat. This place has been here for years, even years before I came here. When you come in here with me, nobody orders. They bring the food."
On his signature dish, the Tommy Lasorda Special:
"Kirk Douglas said 'What are we eating here?' I said, 'What you're eating, is the Tommy Lasorda Special.'
"Now, they've named tunnels after people, they've named buildings after people, they've named highways after people... but I told him you'd be happier eating the Tommy Lasorda special than driving through the Lincoln Tunnel!
"I can't even explain it. All it is is a lot of food, and it's good!"
LA punk experimentalists The Flesh Eaters remember eclectic album 'A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die'
Long a sought-after collector's item, the Flesh Eaters iconic album has finally been reissued on LP and CD by Superior Viaduct.
"A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die" is an album with a reputation. The music is a whacked mix R&B, jazz, rockabilly, and African chants, pulled through the caustic strainer of 1980s L.A. punk.
Flesh Eaters' musicians came from some of the best bands of the genre and the era: D.J. Bonebrake and John Doe from X, The Blasters' Dave Alvin and Bill Bateman, and Los Lobos' Steve Berlin, along with singer Chris Desjardins.
RELATED: Watch DJ Bonebreak play some of the riffs from "A Minute to Die..."
This line-up of The Flesh Eaters came together in 1981 in the midst of what's now looked back on as the "Roots Punk Revival." Legendary SoCal bands X, The Blasters, and Los Lobos were all exploring the music they grew up with — and so were many of their contemporaries, including The Gun Club, Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs, and The Cramps.
Slash Records, the fanzine turned label, was producing the debut albums of X and the Blasters. Lead singer Chris Desjardins, a Slash employee, was put in charge of the label's subsidiary, Ruby Records. His band, the Flesh Eaters, had existed in various line-ups since 1977, releasing a 45 and an LP of surfy LA minute-long hardcore on Desjardins' own Upsetter Records.
A big fan of R&B, Country, and the blues, Desjardins wanted to get in on what all his friends were doing. He recorded himself singing along to cassettes of African chanting while driving around the city. He then asked Dave Alvin (guitarist) and John Doe (bassist) if they could figure out chords to go with his vocals.
Desjardins is also a pop culture historian, and an expert in Japanese gangster films. Here's one of his lines from "A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die," a good one for Halloween:
Half of my kingdom is about to disappear,
sinking with no mercy in a glassful of beer
The clip joint boss bolted bronze to human lips,
but he made out the words, "I can still feel Jesus' kiss"
Bill Bateman was brought in on drums, Steve Berlin on saxophone, and DJ Bonebrake on marimba and other percussion.
It didn't take long for all of the songs to come together — Alvin remembers something like eight practice sessions. They recorded their album almost totally live, though you can hear raspy vocal overdubs here and there to skin crawling effect. It was released the same year. They played fewer than 10 live shows.
"It's an odd little collection of songs," Alvin remarks. No two tracks sound quite alike. There's "Digging My Grave", the Sonics-style garage rock rave up. "Satan's Stomp," a one-chord, jazzy meditation with Bonebrake on snare drum and Berlin wailing his lungs out.
Audio: 'Satan's Stomp' by the Flesh Eaters
Then there's "So Long," which transitions from African rhythm in the verse to rockabilly in the bridge, to a psych rock freakout reprise of the African rhythm.
"It was Chris's vision," Alvin concedes. "We were just there for the beer."
This isn't a band trying to fit a style or concept. They're simple songs, all revolving around some kind of R&B groove, that play to the strengths and musical knowledge of the band.
Everyone has their moment on the record. It sounds very spur of the moment, and when you listen to the live recordings, you can tell they never quite came out the same way twice.
Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the date the Flesh Eaters were formed. The story has been changed to correct the band's chronology.
Why does the LADWP building have a giant reflecting pool in the middle of a drought?
This past Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced an ambitious new plan to combat the drought in L.A. He wants the L.A. Department of Water and Power to reduce its dependence on imported water by 50 percent before 2024, for starters. The mayor also called for the city to reduce its water consumption 20 percent by 2017.
"The global metropolis that we have here today has been a leader on water conservation. I couldn't be prouder of my city," said Garcetti. "But current measures are simply not enough."
Garcetti made the announcement in front of the John Ferraro Building, the headquarters for the LADWP. The John Ferraro Building is a beautiful, mid-century structure surrounded almost entirely by a 1.2 million-gallon reflecting pool.
Which begs the question — if Angelenos are being asked to reduce their water use by 20 percent, why does the department that provides the water and collects the bills have a giant pool of water surrounding their headquarters?
Guy Lipa, LADWP chief of staff, provided an answer.
"It's easy to look at the reflecting pool and just see it purely as a reflecting pool and think it's a waste of water. But in fact, it's a core function of our building," said Lipa. "The water in our reflecting pools actually represent the ability for us to cool our data center in an emergency situation. So this water can actually get pumped up through cooling towers if the power goes out or during scheduled outages."
In addition, Lipa said the reflecting pool is filled with filtered, recirculated water, including some of the water from the building's air conditioning system.
And while Lipa acknowledges that 1.2 million gallons is a lot of water — it's all relative. It takes just a day for 13,000-14,000 Angelenos to use up that much.
"It's a vision of sort of green building and efficient water use in a building, and I think people should look at it and think about it as opportunities to think about how they can incorporate some of this stuff into other parts of the city," Lipa said.