A Ground Zero volunteer tells his story ... kids tell us how they learned about 9-11 ... a shark tank diver at the County Fair ... Van Dyke Parks on helping the Beach Boys make "Smile" ... nude debate in San Francisco ...
What can't he do? "Drive" writer James Sallis goes in-depth
UPDATE: "Drive" opens Friday, September 16. Here's the Off-Ramp interview with the man who wrote the novella the movie's based on. Translator of French obscurata, poet, sci-fi author and editor, bluegrass musician, noir novelist, musicologist, Friend of Haefele. James Sallis, writer for almost 50 years, is finally a bit famous because he wrote the novel "Drive," which the new Ryan Gosling movie is based on. In a special Off-Ramp podcast, KPCC's John Rabe talked with Sallis about his long career.
James Sallis says a few years ago, long before Drive drew such advance praise at this year's Cannes, he was flying back from Europe with his wife after a book festival. "I was revered and I was asked very intelligent questions, and everyone treated me like I mattered," Sallis remembered. "Halfway through the flight, my wife, Karen, leans over and she says, 'You know, with every mile we go, you're getting less and less important.'" Sallis appreciates the new attention, but it's not like he was moping before Hollywood optioned Drive. He's been too busy writing. Back in the 1960s, he wrote for an edited the English sci-fi magazine New Worlds, and he can argue the roots of modern French poetry. He told me in an email that he's written "a truckload of poetry, a hundred short stories, and three volumes of musicology." Plus, he wrote the definitive biography of Chester Himes, who wrote the Harlem Detective novels and was also revered in France. As if that weren't enough, Sallis is in a band, Three Legged Dog. That's him on the right, with banjo.
Sallis says Drive, starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Nicolas Winding Refen, is the best noir picture he's seen. He says the filmmakers treated his book well, making necessary changes but working to stay close to the book. Driver, the main character in the book, is a bit of a sociopath, with some humanity. Sallis says he's more violent in the movie. "The violence in the film bothered me a bit. I shouldn't say it bothered me. It affected me, and it usually doesn't." Download our special Off-Ramp podcast, and you'll also discover Sallis's connection to Off-Ramp's resident literary and arts correspondent, Marc Haefele.
Marc Haefele: the Arab roots of Ground Zero
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele lived in New York City for many years, so he wasn't shocked that Muslims wanted to build a community center, and perhaps a mosque, near Ground Zero. After all, he knew they'd been a major part of that neighborhood since -- are you sitting down? -- 1870. UPDATE: Commentator Marc Haefele filed this commentary last year, when the controversy of the day was the fight over building a Muslim community center a few blocks from Ground Zero. The controversy seems to be simmering now, with any construction in the old Burlington Coat Factory building probably years away. The controversy struck Marc as odd, because he remembered what the Ground Zero site used to be long before the Twin Towers were built.
The Return of Little Syria
By Marc Haefele
In all the discussions and arguments brought regarding the proposed P51 Islamic Community Center's proximity to the city of the World Trade Center in downtown New York, I'm astonished to see that one important historical fact hasn't turned up. It's about time that it did.
It's that the controversial cultural center (not a mosque, although it may include one) is close to another important historical site, obliterated when the WTC was begun in 1967.
It was Manhattan's old Arab District, which flourished for nearly a century. Yes, much of the region the P51's denigrators defend as sacred American ground, was, from about 1870 on, the home of many thousands of Middle Eastern immigrants -- largely Muslim.
This was "Little Syria," both an Arab ghetto and a popular tourist zone, which the Los Angeles Herald proclaimed in April 11, 1909 as having "the mystery of the Orient upon it."
(Photo: "A man, wearing a fez, selling drinks from an ornate, portable, samovar-like dispenser in the Syrian Quarter of New York City." US Library of Congress.)
Little Syria was frequented by the humble and the celebrities--including actor John Barrymore, who loved to eat at a place he'd persuaded the owner to rename "The Sheik," after the Valentino film. Other popular restaurants included "The Nile," "Little Egypt," and "Lebanon." The coffee houses were renowned for their dense, aromatic brews. In 1941, the New York Times reported Little Syrians as "friendly; they readily enter into conversation with the visitor, to talk about their native lands and customs."
(Photo: Syrian children playing in New York street. US Library of Congress.)
A 1905 Baltimore Sun reporter noted, "troops of black-haired, olive-skinned children play in the streets, and lithe, slender and generally pretty mothers gossip in the doorways; the fruit stalls, bakeries and groceries are stocked with many things unfamiliar to the American eye and palate." Little Syria was so important a part of the New York ethnic scene for so long that it now seems incredible it's so completely forgotten.
The district ran down the Lower West Side, along Washington Street south to what is now Battery Park City. Unfortunately, it flourished before poor neighborhoods had any standing in urban planning. In 1940, the Brooklyn Battery tunnel erased much of it. By 1950, the West Side Highway (long since torn down) destroyed more of Little Syria.
When I showed up in the early 1960s, just a block or two remained--including Sahadi's market at 195 Washington Street, which had the best baklava and apricot leather in the city. As well as some wonderfully crafted musical instruments -- ouds and hourglass drums. In 1967 it vanished under the WTC jackhammers -- even the original streets are now gone. The old businesses moved to Brooklyn or died. And I moved away too.
(Sahadi's today. Flikr/Rachael Ash.)
Now, in another century, the tragedy of 9-11 is offered as an excuse to refuse some 700,000 New York Moslems their right to observe and celebrate their faith where they please. Freedom of Religion means
nothing, of course, if it only applies to religions everyone approves of.
But there's another reason for P51 to be built where it's planned. It's that the location is so close to New York's lost but once vital Islamic-Middle Eastern past ... which the new center for an emerging new Islamic population cannot but serve to commemorate and recall to us.
(Marc Haefele is a literary and cultural commentator for KPCC's Off-Ramp.)
SF nudists decry attempts at cover-up
You know the phrase, “Only in L.A.?” It goes for San Francisco, too, where officials are debating whether to make nudists sit on towels when they’re out in public. KPCC’s John Rabe spoke with the L.A. Times’ Maria LaGanga for details.
You can be a lot of things on a park bench in Los Angeles, as Rose Queen Dorothy Edwards demonstrated in 1933, but you can't be naked.
That's not the case in San Francisco, where public nudity, if not yet compulsory – it is, after all, rather chilly there, and nobody wants to experience Constanza Shrinkage Syndrome – is a growing trend, which raises a sticky issue. As the L.A. Times reports, San Francisco is considering forcing nudists to put a towel between their butts and the park bench, or any other public chair.
Most nudists I know already do this. Carrying your personal sitting towel is de riguer even at nudist colonies. But exactly what is the issue?
As Supervisor Scott Wiener told the Chronicle, "What this does do is require that people show some basic courtesy and decency toward their fellow citizens when they are naked."
Part of Wiener's proposal is to require nudists to cover up when they're in restaurants. (Even in San Francisco, I can't believe a restaurant owner would be required to allow a nude person in the door.) I get this. But Wiener also told the Times, "It's about basic public health."
Eczema? Poo? Sweat? Hair? I'm sorry to be graphic*, but any and all of these things could already be on any public surface, and probably are. People are, in general, disgusting. Trust me; I used to be a public health reporter. If you touch anything, and then touch any of your mucous membranes, you're taking your life in your hands, because people cough and spew all over everything, and as the trailer to Contagion reminds us, people touch their faces about a million times a minute.
So, we're basically doomed.
Doomed, that is, unless we take a simple, inexpensive step. Yes, what I'm saying is that all public places should be
equipped with these:
Charge a quarter apiece and every city's coffers would be filled in no time.
*Not really
Volunteering at Ground Zero
Tad Daley is a former speechwriter and policy analyst for Congressman Dennis Kucinich and the late U.S. Senator from California, Alan Cranston. He’d gone to New York to speak at the United Nations. This story, special for Off-Ramp, is about what he wound up doing instead. (Tad is also author of Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World.)
I flew into New York from L.A. very late at night. On the Supershuttle from JFK, it seemed like every bus shelter had an ad for a show on the Sci-Fi Channel called "Crossing Over with John Edward." The tagline was, "What if you could talk to a lost loved one just one more time?"
It was September 10, 2001.
I slept through the attack. My wife, KPCC's Kitty Felde, called from L.A. with the news, and as soon as she learned I was intact, she put me to work as the station’s eyes and ears on the streets of New York.
I’ll never forget the first thing I saw: No traffic on Second Avenue. Instead, I saw a vast exodus of people walking right up the middle of the street, away from the cataclysm, several covered with a fine gray dust. They were headed north. I walked south, trying to do “man on the street” interviews for Kitty.
I asked people to tell me about their day. Many couldn’t keep themselves from talking about the scenes they had witnessed: People hanging out of windows, faced with the choice of plummeting 90 stories or burning alive. One man elaborately explained to me the difference between a voluntary "jump" and an involuntary "flight." "If you touch a hot stove," he asked me, "do you ‘choose’ to pull your hand away?"
As I headed further south, I got choked up for the first time. It was a cheap little Italian restaurant, bright neon lights inside, surrounded by locked-up, dark businesses. The owner had put up a big handwritten sign. "We refuse to give in to terrorism. We are open for business. God Bless America." An NYU dorm had another sign on butcher paper: “Free hugs, 6th floor lounge.” “Call mom and dad to tell them you are O.K.”
People kept looking up – at American fighter planes streaking overhead engaged in high alert air defense of Manhattan Island. One man waited for the aircraft’s noise to subside, then looked at me and said: "Sort of like locking the barn door after the horse is stolen, huh?"
From everywhere we could see the smoke column – big, gray, dynamic, a great rising column of spark and ash, constantly churning out new ruin.
That was Tuesday, 9/11. First thing Wednesday, I hiked a couple of miles across Manhattan over to the Jacob Javits Convention Center, the major staging area for supplies and volunteers, and they put me to work unloading trucks and vans and cars, filled with drinks, gloves, flashlights, socks, hot food, goggles, and “javaboxes” of hot coffee.
I told a few people I was visiting from L.A. They reacted with intense gratitude, as if 9/11 was something that had happened to them, not me; to their community, not mine. They were astonished when I mentioned something Kitty told me, that the lines to give blood in L.A. were even longer than the lines in New York.
Rumors were rampant among the volunteers. That the Air Force had actually shot down four other hijacked airliners on Tuesday. The space needle in Seattle had been one of their targets. JFK Airport had opened on Wednesday, then immediately closed – four men had shown up for a Los Angeles-bound flight carrying box cutters, "ready to do the same thing all over again." At news of this the next guy over in the hauling chain looked at me, and said quietly: "Hey, California, if I were you, I’d drive back."
The other thing all the volunteers at the Javits Center were talking about was how to get ourselves to "Ground Zero." The criteria for determining who got on the busses that headed down every few hours was ill-defined, and all of us wanted to climb aboard.
I’m a bit ashamed, even now, of how intensely I craved making this journey. I told myself that I’m a policy wonk, that I’ll be writing and speaking about 9/11 for many years to come, that my advocacy can only be enhanced by firsthand experience. But the truth was more primal. And selfish. It was a big, monumental, historic event … and I really wanted to get to the center of the action. It was, I felt certain, a horrific, cataclysmic, apocalyptic scene … and I really wanted to see it.
Saturday morning, I talked my way onto a bus with my CPR certification card and an exaggerated story about clearing rubble after the Northridge earthquake. “All right, all right,” said the lady in the orange vest, “pipe down and get on.”
The bus full of welders, ironworkers, and me arrived next to the East River shortly before noon – exactly 99 hours after the first plane hit the first tower. We all got goggles, buckets, shovels and heavy-duty masks. We walked carefully through the shattered but still-standing World Financial Center building, through water and the ubiquitous gray concrete dust.
We stepped through a broken doorway, and there it was, the pile, as big as Dodger Stadium, the site of a political mass murder. I thought about my grandmother, who graduated from secretarial college at this very address in 1916, then went to work – as a secretary – in the North Tower on the day it opened in 1972. I looked at the elegant Woolworth Building still standing just blocks away– the tallest building in the world when it was built – and thought about my parents, both dead, who had met inside almost exactly 50 years earlier. I headed toward the bucket line.
I was wearing Bermuda shorts I’d packed to wear around my hotel room, a T-shirt, casual hiking shoes, and a long pair of knee socks which made me look like an 18th century Swiss yodeler … plus kneepads, gloves, respirator mask, goggles, and hard hat. I moved in between two big sturdy fellows with sharp Brooklyn accents, one a copy, one a fireman. They looked me over. I hesitated. Then the firefighter said, “You know, there’s not a lotta guys who could pull off an outfit like that.” I got in line.
We were working bucket lines, clearing rubble twenty- to thirty-pounds at a time. It took me awhile to figure out the point. The reason we were using buckets instead of bulldozers was because we were searching for bodies, and body parts, and – only 100 hours after the attack – for survivors. One guy told me his brother, a firefighter, was under there somewhere. “I'm hoping to find him alive today."
About a third of the buckets, although already sorted through for body parts, smelled powerfully like rotting fruit.
Requests got shouted down from the very front toward the back of the line. “Torch! Gasoline! Burning Gloves!” Sawz-All! Batteries!” Then, “Dog!” “K-9!” The dog and her handler slowly made their way up the mountain of rubble and steel.
Then – after the dog had done her work – we got a call for something different. "Bodybag!" I’d heard this term as a kid watching coverage of the Vietnam War, but I’d never seen one before. It was folded tightly, sort of like a heavy-duty rubber flag. We passed it up.
Now, there were probably a thousand women and men at the site, running twenty or thirty bucket lines like mine. There were cranes, idling trucks, power tools, lots of noise. Then the next call came. “Quiet! Quiet. Quiet.”
The machinery stopped. The women and men stopped. The noise stopped. And we all stood silent, watching the coroners work their way back down the pile, as they carried the remains.
I don’t know who this person was. All I know is he or she was one of the 2,600 who died in the towers, was. But I imagine it was a 33-year old woman, who had been minding her own business at 8:45 a.m. on Tuesday September 11th, who’d had a fabulously fun day of bicycling with her two teenage nieces at the New Jersey shore the previous Sunday, who’d had five dates now with a new guy who had a good job and was wondering if she should bring up the "exclusivity" question, whose mother had died 5 years earlier and whose father had never really pulled out of his funk, who’d been reading Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation on the subway an hour earlier and had almost gotten through the entire seven volume series, who voted every election because it had mattered to her mother but who had never really paid much attention to politics, who had never heard of Osama bin Laden – let alone Mohammed Atta – and who, if you’d asked her at that moment if there was anyone or anything anywhere on planet Earth that merited her "hatred," would have likely replied: "Gee – I dunno. Nobody comes to mind."
Frank Stoltze tours the GOP spin room
The eight Republican candidates for president gathered for a debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley this week. Hundreds of reporters also showed up, including KPCC’s Frank Stoltze….who takes us now into a place well known to political reporters.
Forget Food on a Stick - Check out the Shark Tank at the LA County Fair
Phillip Peters has brought his 5,000 gallon shark tank trailer to the LA County Fair, where it's on display -- with him in it -- every day for the run of the fair. He tells Ashley Bailey why he does it, where the sharks come from, where he takes them, and which shark is his favorite.
Van Dyke Parks talks Beach Boys' Smile
More than 45 years after it was recorded, the Beach Boys are finally officially releasing "Smile" – one of the band's most notoriously challenging, but influential, records. The album was written by Brian Wilson in collaboration with Van Dyke Parks - a composer whose name you might not have heard, but whose music you certain have. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Parks about "Smile" and his solo career.