Glendale's Coyote squatters get reprieve ... Pictures of a Revolucion ... Calista Flockhart's new radio role ... James Sallis, "Drive" novelist ... Denise Hamilton's new LA thriller ... New library in Compton stirs old memories for Kitty Felde ...
Reprieve for Glendale's coyote squatters
L.A. County now says euthanizing coyotes squatting in a burned-out house in north Glendale was never anything but the last resort. Better to let them be scared off, it says, when the house finally gets demolished. Off-Ramp host John Rabe speaks with county PIO Ken Pellman and Cathy Molloy, who lives next to the home.
The mayor of Glendale, Lisa Friedman, lives right next door to the burned-out house on Brockmont Drive. And the woman who lives on the other side, Cathy Molloy, says these are some good-looking coyotes. Sleek and beautiful, not scrawny like the ones in Griffith Park.
Molloy and Friedman are on the same side when it comes to the coyotes' future. Friedman told KABC, “We’ve chosen to live in the hillsides. We should be living with these animals and not try to kill them just because we see them.”
Earlier media reports said the county was going to trap and kill the animals, but Ken Pellman, a county spokesman, wrote in a news release, "The County of Los Angeles Department of Agriculture only addresses situations with aggressive coyotes posing a danger to human life. Trapping is a last resort."
When I called him, Pellman said the coyotes will probably leave on their own when the owners start to demolish the house.
“From what we understand, the conditions of the property are going to be addressed and if that happens, then the situation will likely resolve itself. If work begins on the property, coyotes will likely not want to be around all that work. We want them out there in the wild, in the foothills, eating the rats, eating the snakes, keeping the ecosystem in balance,"
The story broke big Monday, with news trucks and animal rights activists descending on the hilly neighborhood. That may have proven Pellman's point. The coyotes used to come and go on a regular basis, but says Molloy, after all the hubub, "Lo and behold, they did not show. I haven’t seen them since.”
A few more points of interest:
• The whole neighborhood might want to get together to throw a goodbye party for the coyotes. They seem to have accomplished something that's needed to be done for almost a year: The demolition process for the dangerous derelict house seems to be moving forward.
• It's nice to know that the mayor of Glendale — who lives immediately adjacent the charred shell — didn't pull strings to get the house bulldozed. You couldn't blame her if she was tempted.
• When I was checking out the neighborhood, I ran into a woman who rescues coyotes. She says she offered to scare them away, using strobe lights and a radio. I asked "What station do you tune it to? We've got a fundraiser coming up in a couple weeks. That should work."
New library brings back Dodgers, Hank Aaron memories for KPCC reporter
The last time residents of east Compton got a new library, Dwight Eisenhower was President. The Dodgers still played in Brooklyn. Thursday, LA County broke ground on a new branch. It brings back memories for KPCC's Washington correspondent Kitty Felde.
This was my library, back when it used to be called the East Compton Branch Library. Now it’s called the East Rancho Dominguez branch. The names are practically bigger than the building, which is just 5,000 square feet.
Libraries were so important to my family, my folks moved us to a house just down the street so we could walk here. I’d check out 10 books at a time, the maximum allowed. When I was 15, I got a job here, shelving books. Books! The old branch has more than a dozen computers. The new one being built around the corner will have nearly twice that number.
Back when I worked at the library, my boss was Mrs. Hughes, a young African-American woman from Atlanta. Back then, female black bosses were rare, even in a city like Compton where blacks had just become the new majority. On April 8, 1974, we both were working the late shift. It was a very important night for African- Americans, for Atlanta, and for baseball fans.
Atlanta Braves slugger Henry Aaron had shrugged off hate mail, racist comments, and even death threats in his quest to break Babe Ruth's sacred home run record. Four days earlier, he'd tied Ruth at 714. That night, Atlanta played the L.A. Dodgers.
Mrs. Hughes brought the tiny black and white TV set from the back room and set it up on the front desk. The library was empty, just the two of us watching in the bottom of the 4th when Aaron stepped to the plate to face the Dodger pitcher, "Gentleman" Al Downing.
Mrs. Hughes was a tough boss who smoked elegant cigarettes on her breaks. She was very proper, very formal, and did her best to show me how to act like an adult on the job. Not that it worked. And certainly not on that night.
When that ball flew over the fence, both of us threw our arms into the air, dancing behind the counter, shouting in our not-so-proper library voices, an African-American woman from Atlanta, and a white kid from Compton, celebrating not just the home run that broke a record, but a moment in American history we shared in that tiny library.
Hank Aaron retired with 755 home runs. He lost the title to Barry Bonds in 2007. Mrs. Hughes has been gone for years. And in just 18 months, this branch of the LA County library will close its doors. But for me, that one night in this special place lives on.
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.
New Getty exhibit examines Mexican Revolution's impact
Just last week the Getty opened its newest exhibit at Downtown L.A.'s Central Library. It's called "A Nation Emerges" and it examines the 100-year-old Mexican Revolution through photographs, posters and timelines. Off-Ramp toured the exhibit with Getty Curator Beth Guynn, who assembled the exhibition.
The Mexican Revolution began with the election of reformer Francisco Madero to the presidency, and ended with over 2 million lives lost. It was a 10-year struggle where power constantly shifted hands, allegiances redefined and slowly, a nation emerged. But to the Guynn, the exhibit is even more than that:
"To me this is really the first major example of war photography," she said. "There was a major presence of journalists and photojournalists. This is what--as Susan Sontag called--the first instance of our 'camera mediated knowledge of war.'"
Guynn believes that unlike the Civil War, where many battle photos were staged, photographers during the Mexican Revolution recorded some of the first real-time war photography. The exhibition features work from photographers both professional and amateur. One of the first photos is a postcard taken by a tourist from Maine — postcards were a popular way to print photos in that time — of a battle near Matamoros.
The exhibit features more than just photographs: Along one wall you can find a Broadside: one-sided sheets of paper sometimes posted on walls. They often carried a political connotation, like "El Mosquito Americano," which -- through insect allegory -- indicts American investors as exploitive and allegiance-less opportunists taking advantage of Mexico's vast natural resources and infrastructure.
President Francisco Madero lost power in 1913 during a bloody coup in Mexico City now known as "La decena tragica." Civilians and soldiers alike lost their lives in the battle: evidence of the horror is seen in shots of dead on the streets, bedrooms blown out by firearms and multitudes of Mexicans displaced by the fighting and traveling with their mattresses on their back.
The exhibit also includes photographs of women and children who fought in the struggles, little known snapshots of icons like Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, classic and contemporary posters. You can see it for free at the
Central Library in Downtown L.A. The exhibit is open through June 3, 2012.
Haefele on Mexican Revolution Exhibit
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele writes: The two decades of strife and misery that are generally called the Mexican Revolution were really Mexico’s Great Civil War. Nearly a million people died in the glorious ghastly years from 1910 to 1929 —about one eighth of the population of what was, for its time, a large nation. The vivid Getty-donated show at the Downtown Main Library functions not only as visual history of the Revolution, but as a display of its resonance from the 1960s to today.
It was probably the Mexican government’s 1968 mass murder of a still uncertain number of young demonstrators just a few days before the opening of the Mexico City Olympics that revived the Revolucion’s imagery in the late 20th Century. As the show demonstrates in photographs, posters and broadsides, to the Mexican Left, Emiliano Zapata, with his emblematic saber and carbine, became the central image and symbol of dissent against the oddly named Mexican political monopoly called the Institutional Revolutionary party.
Zapata’s ghost slipped across the border and was also incarnated by the rising Chicano movimiento of the Southeast US. In the `70s, he inspired the Zapatista movement in rural Chiapas, still a potent if elusive force in the area’s politics … Where his fundamental principal of giving the land to those who work it still retains a deep appeal … Even in a land where 87% of the population now works in manufacturing and service industries.
In his pictures, you sense Zapata’s power and grace, but also his innate sadness, as if he foresaw his coming fate via the assassins of another revolutionary hero, Venustiano Carranza. Eventually, nearly all these “Revolutionary” generals and presidents, who rose up against the 30-year foreign dominated dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, fell by one another’s hands. Only Zapata and Villa are remembered in this country. But it was the grim, toweringly humorless Carranza who presided over the creation of the 1917 Mexican Constitution that survives today. He has his own museum in Mexico City, but you’ll never see his face on the wall of any Southland taquerias.
Today, Mexico is beset by an insurrection unimaginable to Villa, Zapata, Obragon, and Carranza. Again we have the pointless mass murders, the vast quantities of money and arms flowing from the United States. But these bring no pretense of hope for the future. One who was there — the late mother of my friend and local broadcaster Luis Torres -- remembered the revolutionaries of 90 years ago as “stealing the chickens, stealing the horses, stealing the corn and stealing the beans. Robbing the people they were supposed to be fighting to protect.”
The Mexican Civil War was indeed terrible to the poor. But so is the Mexican present. Besides the 40,000 victims of narcoterrorism, the political opposition charges that the number of poor has grown in 5 years by more than 10 million, working income has dropped by a third, and 3 million more have become jobless. Opposition leader Lopez Obrador says, “the fight for equality is not even on the national agenda”—as it is now in the vast majority of Mexico’s Latin American neighbors. But the nation keeps getting richer, as its poverty rate approaches 50-percent.
Will Mexico again face a revolution turning into a vast Civil War? Of course that Civil War is already raging. But this time, unlike a hundred years ago, our nation is not able to stand on the sidelines.
(Commentary by Marc Haefele)
Marc Haefele's Mexican Revolution Recommendations
Marc writes, "Here are some classic, Post WW II non-Mexican movies about the Mexican Revolution. The list is by no means comprehensive..."
Viva Zapata (1952). Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn. Elia Kazan directed it and John Steinbeck shares script credit. To me, it's the classic liberal Yanqui vision of the event.
Viva Maria (1965). Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Revolucion with a French touch -- to say the least.
Villa Rides (1968) Yul Brynner in a wig as Pancho Villa.
The Wild Bunch (1969). Peckenpah's vision. Everyone likes it but me.
A Fist Full of Dynamite (1971). Sergio Leone's version of the above. I like it much better. James Coburn and his famous teeth.
And here are some classic Mexican films about the Revolution and its period. They are available with English subtitles but not easy to find that way.
El Principio (1972) Director: Gonzalo Martinez Ortega
Cananea (1976) director: Marcela Fernandez Violante
La Casta Divina (1976) Director: Julian Pastor
Cuartelazo (1976) Director: Alberto Isaac
The library of books on the subject is too huge to cover. But my favorite primer is "El Revolucioncita Mexicana" by the Mexican graphic artist Rius. It's a little cartooned paperback in Spanish, but readable by 2nd year Spanish dropouts.
Denise Hamilton does "Damage Control" in new novel
Eve Diamond is not dead, she's just taking a breather while author Denise Hamilton explores the world of PR firms that mop up messes (and the politicians who need them) in "Damage Control." Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Hamilton about the new book.
Denise Hamilton is appearing at Vromans in Pasadena at 7pm on Wednesday, Sept 21, and at Book 'Em in South Pasadena at 2pm on Sunday, Sept 25.
Eat:LA celebrates as Santa Monica Farmers Market turns 30
Every Wednesday morning for the last 30 years, the Santa Monica Farmer's Market has been a destination for chefs of all stripes: home cooks, the hungry in search of a snack, and celebrity chefs like Suzanne Goin (Lucques, AOC, Tavern). Eat:LA's Colleen Bates talked with Goin about the market and what it means to her.
Calista Flockhart on new radio play role
LA Theatre Works kicks off its new season Thursday with a production Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House. This production of the play stars Calista Flockhart as Nora. KPCC's Steve Julian talked with Flockhart about the new production, and about what it's like moving from the small screen to theater.
Before you write in to correct, the man who did the new translation of the 130-year old play says A Doll House makes more sense than the traditional but confusing A Doll's House. You'll be able to hear the play on KPCC later this year.
You can also check out an article on Ms. Flockhart by KPCC's Steve Julian this Tuesday in LA Stage Times.