The sounds of Santa Monica's Pacific Ocean Park; the most powerful man in LA you never heard of; sci-fi tv and movies becomes real life; the Huntington's new American galleries
Kenturah Davis weaves words into art in Leimert Park
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with LA artist Kenturah Davis about her exhibit of drawings, "Narratives and Meditations," at Papillion Art in Leimert Park in South LA.
A lot of artists incorporate words into their art. Only a few succeed. A painter like Wayne White can plaster cartoony block letters across a thrift store landscape and somehow make it feel right. Kenturah Davis, who has a new show at Papillion Art in Leimert Park, takes the opposite approach, subtly integrating repeated phrases into her huge pencil portraits of African-Americans.
She starts by writing the phrase over and over to form the background of a given drawing, then adds layers of the phrase — perhaps dozens for dark places on the paper, perhaps only one of two more layers for lighter areas. Here's a time-lapse video that shows her process:
Watch her work: Kenturah Davis Draws Troy Davis: "Terminated with Extreme Prejudice"
Davis, 33, told me that she was born and raised in Altadena, "a quiet little neighborhood that's still accessible to the rest of L.A., and a good place to come from." She's the daughter of two accomplished artists: Her father is a portraitist and was an artist for the studios ("Tron" is among his credits) and her mother is a quilter, among other things. Kenturah studied painting at Occidental. ("Go Tigers!")
But Davis came to realize painting was wrong for her, and after quitting all art for a couple years, she began to write and draw in her sketchbooks. One day, she had an epiphany. "Language is so integral to who we are, and experimenting with language and words led me to making drawings a different way." Hence the drawings that seamlessly interweave image and language.
RELATED: Another artist making her own way against type: actor/comedian Charlyne Yi
Her subjects gaze straight at the camera with neutral expressions that let you imagine what they're thinking. They're a mix of men and women, and almost all are African-Americans.
"I start with what I know, and I feel that part of my responsibility as a black artist is to put forth better images of black people, at a time when media doesn't always portray black people in a good light," she said.
What she winds up with are honest, compelling, intriguing portraits of... people.
What does a defunct amusement park sound like? The lost sounds of Pacific Ocean Park
Gary Nissley works at Poo-Bah Records in Pasadena. He's also a former DJ with KPCC when the station played music out of the Pasadena City College basement.
Nissley has been collecting music his entire life, and among the thousands of records he owns is a collection of sounds made for Santa Monica's Pacific Ocean Park — the now defunct seaside amusement park.
Built in 1958, Pacific Ocean Park was a recreation destination until it shut down for repairs in 1967, never to reopen.
Writers Christopher Merritt and Domenic Priore give a beautiful account of the park's rise and fall in "Pacific Ocean Park: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles' Space-Age Nautical Pleasure Pier," incorporating photos, concept drawings and first person accounts of the amusement park.
Nissley's sounds don't just show what the park sounded like, but also how technicians with limited access to technology made amazing innovations with sound.
Nissley was working at Holmquist Sound at the time, a company that made sound effects and narration tapes for amusement parks. Pacific Ocean Park had been their main client.
In the early 1980s, after Holmquist was bought out and their offices moved from Arcadia to Santa Ana, Nissley discovered a box of reel-to-reel tape with the name and address of Pacific Ocean Park. Holmquist had recorded the sounds on acetate — one of the cheapest materials available at the time.
The tapes were already decaying badly. Nissley got to work digitizing them right away
"When I would copy them off, the tape was brown," said Nissley. "As you saw it come off the capstan, what was going up was clear. And there was a little puddle of dust."
The brown dust was the backing falling off the tape — rendering it unplayable.
Nissley recovered dozens of sounds from the tapes. You hear ride safety warnings, sound effects and the goony bird — a fan favorite from the park's glory days. The bird awaited visitors at the end of the park's Banana Boat ride.
"It was a ride at the very end of the pier — kind of like you were almost going through a jungle," said Nissley. "And when the ride's over, everybody that I talked about this — they said I remember the goony bird!"
The goony bird bid farewell to riders, laughing maniacally and saying "thank you for riding with us!"
Nissley has the sounds digitized. You can hear them by clicking the play button on the left and listening to Gary's interview with KPCC. Also, come Halloween, you'll hear some of the spookier Pacific Ocean Park sounds on Nissley's podcast, which is produced by Poo-Bah Records in Pasadena.
LA historian discovers treasure trove of historic photos, now online
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talked with Anna Sklar about the 8,000 rare historical images of Los Angeles she found, hundreds of which are now online.
When Anna Sklar digs into history, she really digs. A few years ago, it was a book about L.A.'s sewers, and she took Off-Ramp into a sewer to talk about it ...
(Sklar in 2010 with Off-Ramp in an L.A. sewer. Image: John Rabe)
Now, she's working on a project that charts many of the big digs in Los Angeles dating back to the 1890s. Sklar discovered an archive of thousands of photos taken by the city engineer's office and has put hundreds of them online in a searchable database at the Los Angeles City Historical Society's website.
"I accidentally found them when I was doing my research on the sewer book. An engineer had given me four CDs, with some .jpegs, and I was looking for sewage photos. But then last December I got a little bored, and I picked up one of the CDs, and I'm looking at them, and I'm thinking, 'Oh. My. Goodness. These are amazing! This is a project that really needs to be put online so people can see these images that have never been seen before.'"
RELATED: LA City Archivist Michael Holland on LA's prep for nuclear attack
And with the L.A. City Historical Society, the L.A. City Archive and the Haynes Foundation, she did just that, and you can browse them or hit the "random search" and let the website give you a tour of historical L.A.
(Historian Anna Sklar at the Baldwin Hills Rec Center, site of a years-long peat bog fire. Image: John Rabe)
The photos were all taken either by or for L.A.'s City Engineer to document work it was doing, like sewers, bridges and road improvements, as well as to illustrate engineering problems, like congestion, safety issues, floods, fires and landslides.
As you can see in our slideshow, the photos incidentally wind up telling the history of L.A.'s places and people. One such person was one of the most powerful in the city's history, but you probably wouldn't know his name: Lloyd Aldrich, the city's engineer for an unsurpassed 22 years.
(A tribute photo to Lloyd Aldrich on the LADWP website.)
Aldrich wielded enormous power because he had a pipeline to some $55 million in WPA funds, which is something like $960 million today (using 1935 as a nominal date in the Bureau of Labor Statistics online calculator). For instance, he got the Slauson Avenue storm drain built from Crenshaw to Ballona Creek. "Daily," Sklar says, "they had 5,700 men digging by hand, because that was the purpose of the WPA, to put men to work."
(Los Angeles City Archives Public Works Department Bureau of Engineering)
Actress/musician/comedian Charlyne Yi takes risks, goes her own way
Off-Ramp contributor Chris Greenspon profiles comedian and actor Charlyne Yi. Some of the language in this piece is a little strong.
Maybe you’ve seen ex-stand-up-comedienne Charlyne Yi as the dorky Dr. Park on "House," or as one of Seth Rogen's stoned roommates in "Knocked Up."
These small roles might be her best known work, but Yi became a performer to take risks, not to get famous.
Charlyne Yi's humor has always made people uneasy. Besides being recognized as "the awkward character" from "House," Yi has always tested her audience: by getting her head shaved onstage at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre while singing a Sinead O' Connor song, announcing her boyfriend dumped her on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" or making audience members play the dating game in a comedy club. However uncomfortable or emotional one of her appearances is, she doesn't do things half-heartedly.
Charlyne Yi shaves her head onstage
Yi's stand-up career began at 18, when she sneaked into UC Riverside classes that she couldn't afford. She decided then that she would move to Los Angeles and pursue comedy. It was a rough start at first. Audiences were often hostile to her during performances, which sometimes consisted of her lip-syncing to her own voice. However, she was determined to be her own kind of performer, or nothing else.
"One of my best friends from childhood was like, 'Isn't that a little irrational, you're gonna go do comedy? What's your back up plan?'" recalls Yi, "And I was like, 'I don't know about that! Isn't it more irrational to fight for something that you hate, than that you love?'"
In 2007, she briefly appeared in the Judd Apatow film "Knocked Up." She co-wrote and starred in the mockumentary "Paper Hearts" in 2009, and was cast as Chi Park in 2011 for the final season of the medical drama "House."
Her art took a definitive curve after the season finale of "House" in 2012. Yi volunteered at an orphanage in Sri Lanka, and while there she collaborated with a group of orphans on a short album called "Mr. Sunset."
Charlyne Yi's Sri Lanka highlight video
Since then, passion and introspection have been a mainstay of Yi's work. She's moved away from television and stand-up and has focused more on producing short films, is on her way to becoming a published poet (with a book on the way through Harper Collins) and has curated memorable concerts like the series "Let's Get Emotional" at the Steve Allen Theatre.
Now, after years of trying her hand in different mediums, Yi has found her place in L.A.'s art and music scene. She still acts in comedy shorts from time to time with other aspiring performers, as well as headliners like Fred Armisen and Channing Tatum.
Currently, her primary outlet is songwriting. She just recorded an album titled "Reincarnation," and she's due to tour the Midwest in late September.
Listen to Chris' piece for much more, including Yi's story of an exchange with her sister that taught her the true power of words, and for her impressions of working with Hugh Laurie as an actor and director.
New galleries highlight the 'whippersnapper' part of the Huntington
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele reviews the new show "More American Art," shown in the new galleries at the Huntington.
The sergeant in his sun-faded uniform raises the sharply bayoneted World War II rifle against a black, stormy sky. But this is no recruiting poster — the man’s dark, gnarled, aged face is deeply seamed, as resigned as it is hardened to the soul-destroying fact of combat.
(Larny Mack/Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens)
“The Soldier” is just one of the astonishments at the Huntington’s new show. It’s brought the American 20th century to the traditional home of “The Blue Boy” and its hallowed halls of classic European Old Masters.
"Blue Boy," a Gutenberg Bible — that’s how most of us still think about that unique culture and garden spot. But almost from its start, the Huntington has included American art, albeit from colonial and early post-colonial times. Gilbert Stuart’s Washington portraits, antique silver tankards and furniture, and some fine Copleys and Benjamin Wests are familiar if ancient Americana. But now there’s 5,400 square feet of new galleries dedicated to 20th century art of the USA.
“Soldier” is an extraordinary painting by Charles White, an African-American artist few Americans have heard of, but it’s not the only such work. Just as impressive, and from the same period, is a gorgeous sculptured screen by versatile African-American artist Sargent Claude Johnson. It hangs on the back wall of the new hall, but it used to mask a pipe organ in the state school for the blind in Berkeley. At one point, the three-part creation was sold for $164. It’s valued in the hundreds of thousands now, and is worth the trip to see all by itself.
Johnson and White’s works hang in illustrious company. There’s some splendid stuff by Reginald Marsh, like his wondrous steam locomotive portrait — a study in fresco-like surface textures that is also anatomically correct, so you could almost re-invent the steam engine from its details.
By contrast, there’s “Summer Fantasy,” a joyous sunset landscape reverie as far as possible from the brutal boxing pictures that made artist G. W. Bellows famous. George Luks’ “The Breaker Boys” shows another form of brutality: children working in the coal mine, sorting the rocks from the coal.
And what is this? An entire room of 1960s modern icon Robert Rauschenberg’s work? How did this happen? Curator Jessica Todd Smith explains, "As we've begun to dip a toe into the Post-War period, we can tell so many more stories with the American collection in the galleries. We're the sort of young whippersnapper part of the Huntington collections."
Smith says that, back when Rauschenberg was in the Navy at the end of World War II, he made a visit to the Huntington that first exposed him to great art and he decided to become a painter. The room contains a wide variety of his work, but it is also a form of tribute to the deep and terrific experience and influence that the gallery has brought to millions of visitors over so many years.
Meet the man who hand-painted hundreds of signs at Disneyland
Take a walk through Disneyland and you'll find a variety of signs. From the rustic posts in Frontierland to the hometown charm of Main Street, each sign is different. For seven years, it was Patrick Smith's job to guide visitors through Disneyland — as a sign painter. You probably never saw him, but his work welcomed you into the park.
Patrick's career in sign painting began with a "Speedball" lettering book. He later majored in drafting in college, learning how to make the drawings used in the design and construction of buildings.
(Ross F. George's Speedball Text Book, a periodical manual containing lettering samples.)
At the height of the Vietnam War, Patrick was drafted into the army. "I knew that my chances of survival were kind of low," he says. "But at the same time, I accepted my fate and when I got to Vietnam, I was actually held back on a temporary basis at the 22nd Replacement Battalion."
This intervention of fate gave Patrick his first job as a sign painter. "The sergeant had asked if anybody could do drafting," he says. "Nobody volunteered, but when they picked me for KP, I went over to the guy and said, 'Hey, I'm your man for the drafting job.'"
The Army Post Office became his first sign shop. Following the war, Patrick worked independently. He roamed around California and operated his own traveling sign shop.
After settling in Rancho Cucamonga, Patrick learned of a job opening as Disneyland's Senior Sign Painter. "As a boy, I had always wanted to work for Walt Disney," he says. "I think every kid that grew up in that era that was into art had that kind of a thought. It was kind of like a dream come true for me to go there for work."
"It was Walt Disney who wanted a sign shop at the park — no ifs, ands, or buts," says Patrick. Main Street was inspired by Disney's Missouri hometown, where all the storefronts had homemade signs.
Working behind the scenes might destroy the magic for some, but not Patrick. "It enhanced the magic, I will say that. I don't think there's a place in Disneyland that I haven't been."
At Disneyland, Patrick repaired a phony dentistry sign on Center Street and lettered new ones above Main Street. A job hand-lettering some basketballs took him inside the Matterhorn. "There's a basketball court in the Matterhorn and I actually have signed my name on one of the beams in there. "
"There's a whole psychology to fonts," he explains. "I mean, we know this because Coca-Cola has a font they've made a trademark and that's all they have to have. They could even put another word there and the first thing you're gonna see is Coca-Cola."
Patrick left Disneyland in 2007 and now works out of his house in Orange, California. The freedom to move around was what first drew him to sign painting. "That was one of the things I really thought about it: 'I can go anyplace. I don't have to stay here. I can go, I can make a living, wander around, support my family and myself — and this is a great thing.'"
To see more of Patrick's work or to hire him — he's always looking for work — check out his website.
'Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide,' the final edition. It's a death in the family
Since 1969, film historian Leonard Maltin has put out a guide to movies on TV. The cover has changed — you could watch Leonard’s hair get grayer and grayer in his cover photo — but the guts of the book have not changed: pithy capsule reviews of new and old movies, plus credits, format, and running time. Except for this year, when Leonard’s introduction starts with this horrible sentence: "This is the final edition of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide." Off-Ramp contributor R.H. Greene has this obituary for an old family friend.
"You know, I actually went through my mourning process when I saw this coming. That this book that has been a constant in my life since I was 17 years old (I'm now 63), that it might not be there anymore." — Leonard Maltin to R.H. Greene
Gather ’round, for the story of a birth and a death, a rise and a fall... of a time before everyone had a computer in their pocket. When data was something you had to look up by hand. And when those family arguments about whether Harvey Keitel is in "Taxi Driver" or who played Pippi Longstocking erupted at dinner time, nobody whipped out a phone or asked Siri.
They ran to the living room, grabbed the thickest paperback they were ever going to own from the top of a square TV, and said out loud, "Let's check with Leonard Maltin."
(A scan of the cover of Leonard Maltin's personal copy of the first edition of his guide, published in 1969.)
The book variously known as "TV Movies," "Movie and Video Guide," and "Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide," has been losing money the last few years, according to Maltin. But it was a yearly bestseller, taking off when Maltin started appearing on Entertainment Tonight.
Watch Leonard Maltin -- with dark hair in 1985! -- review "Fletch" on ET
"I got a call from my editor in New York," Maltin said. "He said, 'We want to put your name above the title, and your picture on the cover.' It was the most satisfying phone call that I've ever had, because it meant that my new, budding television career was having an impact on my longtime publishing career."
Its latest edition holds around 16,000 capsule film reviews, all of them edited by Maltin, many of them written by him. But reference books are buggy whips now, because they cost money to produce, you can't talk back to them, and they don't glow in your hand. The Encyclopedia Britannica itself — the gold standard of reference for over two centuries — ceased print publication in 2010, and not that many people noticed. It's no mean feat that Maltin's guide kept publishing for four more years with that kind of writing on the wall.
RELATED: Beverly Hills police defend arrest of black film producer
Still, the death of the guide wasn't unexpected. In 2011 he foretold its demise on Off-Ramp.
Rabe: How long can you keep doing a paper book guide to the movies when we’ve got apps that can do something like this same thing?
Maltin: We have an app, but I hope we can keep going for a while longer.
What Maltin didn’t expect was the outpouring of affection, and in some cases, real grief, that has followed his announcement.
Robert Abele reviews films for the L.A. Times. At the age of 12, he bought his first Maltin. That 1979 edition still occupies a place of honor in Abele's library. It’s worn but well-preserved, showing it’s been both used and loved. Today, Abele numbers Maltin among his professional acquaintances. For Abele, Maltin's congenial personality, coupled with his unaffected love of movies, makes the guide something special.
As a global guide to cinema in a time before Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, the Maltin Guide's influence on criticism was profound. As important was its impact on filmmakers, especially those who came of age in the 80s and 90s, when the guide was at its peak.
Will it matter that there was a Maltin Movie Guide? That it inspired dozens and maybe even hundreds of kids who went on to become actors, directors, costume designers, and film critics themselves? Sure. Especially if you believe in the idea of popular culture as an endless conversation between eras, ideas, and artifacts both tacky and profound.
Matt the mattress got recycled (and we've launched a #sadmattress Tumblr)
KPCC's Environment Correspondent Molly Peterson and Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson left a mattress in front of a house in Silver Lake. It was Thursday, August 14. Inside the mattress, we installed a GPS tracker. We named the mattress Matt, because that's what you do when you care that much about a mattress' whereabouts.
We wanted to see where Matt would go once we left him on the curb — would the city pick it up? Would an unlicensed refurbisher take it to their workshop and try to turn it into a new mattress? You can find out more about the story here.
On Monday afternoon around 12:07 p.m., we got a text alert from the GPS tracker: motion detected!
Soon after that, we followed the mattress through Silver Lake and down the 5 Freeway into Lincoln Heights. Its destination? The Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation's North Central District Yard on San Fernando road. We drove to the area to confirm — there's a few industrial and nonprofit buildings that might've caught Matt.
Sure enough, Matt was in the hands of the city. After a sheepish phone call to the Bureau of Sanitation, they graciously allowed us to retrieve the GPS tracker from inside Matt. The photo above was taken at about 7 in the morning Tuesday, just before workers with the city helped bring down the mattress from the top of Mount Trashpile.
Where does Matt go from here? According to the Bureau of Sanitation, he'll avoid the landfill for now and instead head to Blue Marble Materials — a mattress recycling factory in Commerce. From there, Matt can become any number of things: his springs can be melted down into scrap metal; the foam inside turned into insulation for carpet. But his days as a mattress are over.
This is not the end.
We've started a Tumblr showing sad, abandoned mattresses of California, and we want you to share your sad mattress photos with us. You can tweet at us using the hashtag #sadmattress or submit your own directly. We may even choose your found mattress to track next!
Meet the pair who ignite the Hollywood Bowl's fireworks show
Some come for the music, some for the picnic. But for many Angelenos, Summer at the Hollywood Bowl is all about the fireworks. Setting off fireworks to live music is a performance in itself — helmed by pyrotechnician Eric Elias and score reader Sara Hiner.
On a weekday night in Hollywood, Eric Elias and Sara Hiner rehearse their score: Aaron Copland's "Hoedown." Elias counts out loud, as each number signals when he'll push a button that fires off the fireworks with the music.
While Hiner marks the score, Elias works out the cues to go with the fireworks display he has in his head.
"That's 40... well, whenever he starts up again, that's 41," Elias says to Hiner.
Eric's remote firing device is about the size of a desk phone. It’s linked to a bigger, refrigerator-sized box backstage that blasts the fireworks skyward. It's all controlled by a red button, of course.
Hiner, a classically trained bassoonist, both reads the score and watches the conductor in order to call out the cues. But with live music, there can always be surprises.
"I've sort of jokingly had this argument with a few conductors over the years," says Elias. "No matter what they tell you, if he has one cup of coffee for rehearsal and two cups of coffee before the show, they play faster."
That's where Hiner comes in.
"I can follow the conductor. Where it gets interesting is where we bring in collaboration concerts. When rock and roll bands come in, and somebody decides to take an extra solo, or forgets a line, or completely changes what they're doing midstream," says Hiner, "then we have to get a little creative."
Hiner's debut as a score reader was like a scene from a movie. It was during a 2008 Bowl show. Hiner was backstage, managing the musicians for the Los Angeles Philharmonic when Elias came in, panicking. The original score reader had just gotten sick and Elias scrambled for a replacement.
In a hurry, Hiner started learning the entire score to "Not the Messiah," a musical by comedian Eric Idle.
"It's not something that's in the standard repertoire for musicians, so I was pretty much sight-reading," Hiner says. "And I guess the closest thing you can describe is stage fright."
Hiner and Elias have been working side by side ever since. "The score reader I work with is invaluable to us being able to get the job done that we do," says Elias. "There are no computers involved — it's my score reader and I, and she keeps me on track."
Because fireworks only get deployed once, Elias designs every program completely in his head. And he looks forward to watching the show as much as anyone else.
"For most of the concerts, other than "1812," that night, the entire audience, along with me are seeing that fireworks show to that music for the very first time in the world anywhere — except in my head," he says. "So our work literally goes up in smoke."
If you want to see the fireworks for yourself, there's still a chance: the Los Angeles Philharmonic will perform Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring Suite" and more at the Hollywood Bowl this Thursday evening, Sept. 4.