Surkus plants pretty party people for perfect PR. Does The Broad museum on Grand Avenue match expectations? The music of Quitapenas. Brains On - the science podcast for kids. Making a living paying tribute to The Bob Dylan of Mexico.
100k people have reserved tickets to see The Broad, LA's newest museum
This Sunday, L.A.'s newest art museum, The Broad, opens to the public, just across the street from Disney Hall. For the first time, the public can see the blue-chip art collection of one of the city's biggest philanthropists in one place. Admission is free, and so far, more than 100,000 people have gone online for a free ticket.
The media was offered a sneak preview Wednesday. I went so I could give you a sense of what to expect and what to watch for in the future. But the story of The Broad actually begins more than 40 years ago when a young married couple — homebuilding mogul Eli Broad and his wife Edythe — were out visiting.
"We had a good friend who had a beautiful art collection," Edythe says. "And we were at his house and Eli said to him, 'My wife likes this and I don't know why.'"
Edythe Broad says Eli started reading up on art, they started buying it, and soon their house was filled … so they started a foundation to lend their art to museums. The Broad Foundation was run by the woman who became the $140-million museum's first director, Joanne Heyler.
At the press event, Heyler sought to establish the new museum's bona fides: "It's true that we have an extraordinary new architectural landmark of a home. It's true that we're offering the collection to the public for free admission. We're embarking on a profound new beginning. But the Broad collection has had a public purpose for over 30 years."
Jori Finkel, a reporter who covers art for The New York Times, says the big question about The Broad is "whether the collection will feel alive. We don't want this to be a portrait of a collector who has finished building his collection."
In her remarks at the press opening, museum director and chief curator Joanne Hyler did address Finkel's concern, saying the 2,000 work collection — by Post-War and Contemporary artists like Jeff Koons, Cy Twombley, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger — is growing by an average of one piece every week.
And if current events are any indication, it'll keep on growing. At the press opening, Broad said, "I'm often asked why it's important for people to have access to contemporary art. The answer is simple: contemporary art is the art of our time. It reflects an important social, political, and cultural commentary on the world in which we live." Then he referred to Ferguson, feminism and Elvis … all represented in the first exhibit of 250 works from the Broad collection.
Jon Regardie, Off-Ramp commentator and executive editor of the Los Angeles Downtown News, says it's a big day for L.A.: "This is the biggest thing to hit downtown in a dozen years. You have to go back to the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall to find something as big. There was a mini-bump about five years ago with the opening of the Ralph's supermarket, but some would say this is bigger," he laughs. It'll draw international attention to downtown.
When the doors finally open to the public Sunday, you should look for a tall gray-haired man named Ric Scofidio, who's with the architecture firm that designed the building with its criss-cross exoskeleton, amusement park escalator, peekaboo art vault and main gallery floor bathed in wonderful natural light. The art — especially some huge pieces, like Kara Walker's full wall-size silhouettes of U.S. slavery scenes — benefits from all the room it's given to breathe.
If you're watching for Scofidio, he's watching for you. "I really want to come back on Sunday," he said Wednesday, "when the public is here. That will tell me much more about how the building is used."
Let's give the last word to the man whose name is on the building. I asked Eli Broad how he thought the new building was working with his art. "It works exceptionally well. Better than anything we deserved."
Power, pathos, and a punch-drunk boxer: Meet the bronze people at The Getty Center
"They're usually shown in splendid isolation. But in antiquity, they were much more common, and they populated city squares, sanctuaries, they spoke to each other, people could interact with them. And our idea was, why don't we bring them together, and show them together? Many of these statues haven't seen each other since they left the workshop." -- Getty curator Ken Lapatin
Not too long before Bette Midler and her young pals discovered the place, I’d sweat off many an overindulgent lunch at New York’s famed Luxor steam baths. Most of the men there were bulging, sagging and ancient … but one stood out.
He was former welterweight contender named Irv. He had a perfect boxer physique, but he’d slowed to the point where getting up and sitting down were a bit problematic.
While other bathers dozed torpid under their sheets in the steam room, Irv held court on the Sweet Science of boxing to his audience of obese senior accountants and jewelry merchants. “Keep your fists up, keep moving, and don’t get hit.” ... Advice he hadn’t taken a couple of times, according to his broken nose and busted left cheek.
(Marc Haefele's Irv: “The Terme Boxer” (detail). Photo © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY)
Imagine my surprise when Irv turned up at the Getty Center the other day, complete with broken nose and busted cheek … and stark naked in a full beard. But this Irv was 2,000 years old, in blackened bronze instead of steam bath pink. And he was a statue. Still, I wanted to say, “Irv, how you been all these years?”
You want to ask that of most of the dozens of Bronze people inhabiting the Getty Center’s exhibition hall in "Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World," on display through October. They’re from what you might well call the Golden Age of Bronze.
Never again in human history would this metal sculpture be so superbly practiced over such a wide area, from present day Yemen to what is now Portugal. They’re all from the Hellenistic period—spanning from Alexander the Great in about 330 BC to the fall of Cleopatra in 31 BC. That’s the long period when Greece declined from being a military to a cultural power, a power of art and learning, exporting painting and poetry, literature, drama and, yes, sculpture all over the known and even the so-called unknown worlds — through India to what is now Pakistan.
How many bronze Irvs and Irmas there were then no one knows. Maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. They lined the streets of Mediterranean cities and the ports of the Arabian Sea. The conquering Romans bought them by the shipload. They were the way in which ancient urban culture celebrated itself — representing its heroes, gods and goddesses, leaders and tradesmen, children and even animals, everywhere there was public and even private space. Most of these bronzes were melted down for coins and cooking pots, or otherwise destroyed, and now scarcely 200 are known to survive. Fully fifty of these are now at the Getty Center.
We tend to idealize the sculpture of Greece’s great era, from 500-350 BC. But these works were themselves idealizations, not based on reality. It was the Hellenistic Era that followed that invented portraiture: its images looked like actual people, with human expressions, peculiarities, even flaws. Like Irv the Boxer’s broken nose.
The statues that venerate leaders, heroes and gods — particularly the athletes called apoxymenos — the naked men with the perfect hair — have ordinary, if handsome, faces. But some of the other faces, especially those whose glass and jeweled simulated eyes survive, are so alive that they’re unnerving to look at. Because they stare back at you with expressions that range from the totally involved to the utterly deranged. Take that head of a man from Delos, for instance, who seems astonished just to see you.
(Portrait of a Man, 300-200 B.C., bronze, copper, glass, and stone. Image © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund)
These statues at the Getty stir stories in the viewers’ mind. Who’s the naked boy riding the lion? That spoiled-looking teenager? Why does that armored Minerva seem to be smiling at some secret?
And how can you be sharing the emotions of someone gone from the earth for over 2,000 years? Ah, but you do.
The greatness of most of these pieces is their molding into forever the rages, delights, and puzzlements of a period so far gone from us. And yet as close as Irv the punch-drunk boxer.
Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, is at the Getty Center through November 1, 2015. Listen to the bonus audio to hear John Rabe's interview with the Getty Museum curator Kenneth Lapatin, who curated the show with colleague Jens Daehner.
Sketches with wolves: Artist Mike Sheehan visits Wolf Mountain Sanctuary
When Wolf Mountain Sanctuary, a place I’d never heard of before, popped up on my Facebook page one day, I looked to see where it was. Turns out, it’s been out in the Lucerne Valley desert for almost 30 years. I don’t know how I’ve missed it all this time.
I drove around the backside of Big Bear and dropped down from the forest into the desert. Lucerne Valley is a character unto itself.
It really feels like the middle of nowhere, just like the local cafe proclaims on their T-shirts. I like the middle of nowhere.
I drove down a dirt road off the main highway with squirrels darting across it. Jake, one of the caretakers, opened the gate. I met Tonya Littlewolf, the half-Apache, half-Sicilian founder of Wolf Mountain, and the first thing she did was give me a present: A fold-up chair with wolves printed on it. Perfect for sketching.
I told her the chance way Wolf Mountain had landed on my radar. She replied, “it was supposed to be.”
Tonya is known as “Mama Wolf." She’s been called that, she says, since she was small. Her grandfather had a rescue. They helped “anything that got hurt in the wild. We had wolves, all the way to squirrels, cougars, bobcats. And then we let ‘em run free. Because they got better and we relocated them back. My grandfather said that was my summons in life. I was to take care of and protect the wolf.”
She has been around them since she was 2. She believes in their healing power and has lots of stories of them helping people, including soldiers with PTSD.
We talked for a while. I found out that some of the wolves had been filmed for the Twilight movies, and found out some of their individual personality quirks. Then we went outside to see the wolves — they are amazing.
Some visitors were there to take a tour, so Holan came out to hang with them. He’s sort of the Wolf Mountain greeter. He’s really friendly and seems to like the attention. I hung out with him after — he climbed all over me checking me out. I think I passed his inspection.
(Mike Sheehan and Holan. Credit: Tonya Littlewolf)
Wolves seem to always be fighting so many misconceptions about them, which has bred an irrational hatred of them in some places. But they are amazingly complex social animals, and beautiful.
On the second day, all the wolves howled (check out the audio in the player above) when I arrived in the morning. Prophet, a more recent arrival, growled at me for some reason. I think I might have been a little early for him.
I went and hung out with Holan. I got some color sketches of him as he walked by. Later in the day I found out Prophet could be a ham, and he would sit and pose for a while then walk around, but he came back every now and then and hit his pose again. It felt a little like a conversation.
That’s when it gets interesting, when it’s quiet and they get comfortable with me being there. We’d both sit and look at each other trying to figure each other out. At least I was; Prophet might have already figured me out.
Why are the wolves here? Some are failed pets and illegal breeding. Some come from the movie industry. Some have sad stories.
Balto has the manner of a wolf that hasn’t been treated very well. He was malnourished, dehydrated, stressed and had worms when he got here. He was skittish when I held my palm out offering him some treats. He finally took them, but quickly backed off to eat them. Tonya spends a lot of time out here with him and all the wolves. She is teaching Balto that some people actually love him.
I would ask Tonya each one's story, then be sorry I asked. But she gives them lots of love and they love her back. She also lectures at various organizations. A lot of her education efforts are teaching people that wolves are not pets, and that they are not villains — that they should be wild.
She spends a lot of her day raising money, a constant battle. It costs over $1,500 in red meat and $800 in chicken every week, and that's just some of the food costs. She has two wolves now that need to be fixed, and then there are other costs involved.
Wolf Mountain is completely reliant on donations and tours. There is also the effort to move them to Colorado, where there is more land and the climate is more to the wolves' liking.
She said she wanted to be outside with the wolves whenever she was in the office, and always made time go out and sit with them. I went out one day with her — she wanted me to see how peaceful it was. I did have to calm down as I entered their space, and sit on the ground so I didn't seem like a threat. It is truly amazing to see their movements and get to interact with them.
I went Friday for my last visit. I had gotten used to seeing them every day, and I was a little sad that I wouldn’t be sitting with them anymore. I was starting to see their distinct personalities. It's funny how fast you can feel bonded to something — but I have a feeling I’ll see them again soon.
Surkus: The app that pays people to party
Venture into Hollywood, Venice, Downtown on any given night and you'll find some of Los Angeles' most fashionable, of-the-moment night spots. If the place is fashionable and trendy enough, you'll probably find yourself surrounded by hip young people looking to network, drink, maybe hook up.
Except now, thanks to a new app called SURKUS, some of the Angelenos in attendance are literally paid to party.
Take the W Hotel in Hollywood. It's Sunday Jazz Night, around midnight. And for a school night, it's way busier than you'd think.
The speakers pump house music, not jazz. The cocktails are $15. But the crowds of 20 and 30 somethings crowding the rooftop bar don't seem to mind.
Out by the pool, a big group clusters around a fire pit, chatting, drinking, vaping. Good looking and dressed to impress, they embody the late-night scene like they've been sent over from Central Casting. Which, in a way, they have.
What the other party people here don't know is that with the help of a new tech company called Surkus, the event organizer is paying each of these attendees $8 and giving them free drinks all night. Their job? Be here, look good, have a good time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_qndIKuUEg
Surkus calls it "crowdcasting" — providing clubs, restaurants and events in New York and Los Angeles with bodies to fill the room, order drinks, and liven the place up. Promoters and bar owners tell the company how many people needed — what age, sex, lifestyle, and what you'll pay — and they hook you up with people like Chuli Joy:
"Going out and getting to talk to the pretty girls, that's cool, you know?," said the 28-year-old actor. "But to get paid to talk to pretty girls? I'm like, hey, you can't beat it."
"I only thought celebrities got paid to party," said Myriah Klingler, a 23-year-old production assistant. "But nope, anyone can. I guess that's part of L.A."
Some of these so-called "Surkus-goers" say they've made as much as 30 to 50 bucks at other events, just by being there. But what about the clients? Paying people to come and drink free booze seems like a good way to go out of business, fast.
"People find crowds interesting," said Robert Menendez, the company's president and co-founder. "Why is that crowd there? What is happening there? This is just human nature. I mean, nobody walks by a crowd and goes, 'eh.' People are curious."
Surkus pitches its value also as a matter of timing. People who show up right when the doors open keep the place from feeling dead. Their presence is a kind of kindling for the raging party bonfire to come.
Jin Yu has been running Jazz Night at the W for five years with a fashionably-late arriving crowd in attendance. Surkus changed that, he said.
"Most of my guests get here around 11 p.m. Surkus-goers get here at 10 p.m. and it's an immediate energy burst right before all my guests get here," said Yu. "So the moment they walk in they say, 'Wow! This is amazing!'"
Yu was so amazed by Surkus, he said, he joined the company—Yu is Surkus' Chief Creative Officer now.
But there's another word for this job: they're plants. Right? If paying customers don't know their fellow partiers are drinking for free, isn't that unfair? Or a little bit dishonest?
"I'm not telling a guy that loves country rock music to show up at a hip-hop event and pretend he's into hip-hop," said Menendez. "We're nudging people into doing things that they were probably going to do anyway sooner than later."
Surkus says more than 30,000 people have downloaded the app, and the company is looking for investors to expand that number. Potential "Surkus-goers" are asked to fill out a personal profile and then give the company access to some of their Facebook data — how else will you know if someone would enjoy a hip-hop event if you don't know what they publicly like?
Surkus also looks at how many followers its users have have, on Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram. Surkus says it sells more than just bodies to its clients, it sells influence, too—what Surkus-goers Instagram, their followers see.
"You have a digital agency that kind of aggregates everybody's social, pulls it together," said Jin Yu, the Chief Creative Officer. "You categorize them. You profile them. You know exactly who they are and you send them to events that they want to go to."
Surkus' high tech arsenal includes a digital geofence that automatically checks-in their invitees when they arrive at an event. And the company doesn't just know your location. They can also track your altitude.
That means if a Surkus-goer leaves the rooftop at the W for a quiet drink in the lobby—Surkus knows.
In a time where people worry openly about the way our personal information intersects with brands and marketers, Surkus pushes the envelope.
But to Robert Menendez, Surkus' co-founder, it's the future. Why pay thousands for a billboard when you can target and pay potential customers to come to a showroom or open house, or take a test drive?
"This is what happens when big data comes into existence," said Mendendez. "I know people are like 'Well, I'm not into it.' But you're into it. You're there. You're online, you have a cell phone, you have a free app, you're part of it."
Quitapenas is the Inland Empire's newest, sincerest, crate-diggingest Afro-Latin band
Emerging out of San Bernardino and Riverside is Quitapenas, a band playing a kind of Afro-Latin music that spans continents with their sound — there's Mexico, Angola, Colombia, Guatemala — but they do it with the eyes and ears of musicologists, or DJs. Finding and blending sounds from bands and artists that were breakthroughs in their genres — people like Abelardo Carbonó, Juaneco y su Combo or Papi Brandao.
Behind congas and percussion is Eduardo Valencia, while Daniel Gomez sings and plays guitar. The two were neighbors growing up in San Bernardino.
"I remember, when I first started playing music, just kind of playing in a little rock band, our parents always telling us to make songs in Spanish and play Spanish music," said Gomez. "It was just kind of a really farfetched idea at the time."
It's a time-honored tradition: teenage you spurning the music your parents love, only to embrace it less than a decade later.
"Quitapenas is all the dimensions of the music that we like," said Valencia. "Our parents relate to it, young people our age relate to it, older folks than our parents relate to it, just because I feel like it's reaching to something."
"Quitapenas" literally means "to remove worries" in Spanish. And, indeed, there are songs about relaxing on a Vietnamese beach, lazily waking up with a hangover in Colombia. But the band hits close on social commentary, too: "Valle Moreno" comes off the band's self-titled debut record. It's an ode to their hometown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV_TKQU5gxY
You can see Quitapenas live this week as they kick off a tour up the West Coast. They're performing a record release party on Friday, Sept. 25 at Mission Tobacco Lounge in Riverside, and at Los Globos in Echo Park on Sept. 26.
Song of the week: "A Beautiful Woman" by Deradoorian
This week's Off-Ramp song of the week is “A Beautiful Woman” by Deradoorian. Deradoorian is the solo project of Los Angeles bassist and singer Angel Deradoorian, she’s performed with artists like the Dirty Projectors and Avey Tare. “A Beautiful Woman” is off her new album, "The Expanding Flowering Planet." Listen to it here:
https://soundcloud.com/anticon/deradoorian-a-beautiful-woman-1
Deradoorian plays live at the Echo on Tuesday. September 22. Here's a video of Angel Deradoorian performing "A Beautiful Woman" with her sister, Arlene:
Natural History Museum's new mummies exhibit has unopened caskets, 3D printing and mummified beer mugs
To a kid visiting a museum, is there anything more fascinating than mummies?
A new, continent spanning exhibit of mummies arrived this month at the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park. In a traveling exhibit from Chicago's Field Museum, visitors get the chance to look into the rituals around mummification: how they were preserved, what they were buried with. But this exhibit also takes visitors inside caskets that are unopened — and probably never will be.
"We were loaned a portable CT scanner, and we've gotten very high resolution data about what's wrapped in these bundles," says Field Curator Ryan Williams, who specializes in South American anthropology. "We can tell things about the individuals who were buried — their age, their gender; we can tell about diseases that they had."
The exhibit features several mummies in the flesh — so to speak — ensconced in thick glass for security and temperature control, but the real draw in the exhibit might be its interactive, approachable side. There are several interactive touch screens that let visitors explore the inside of sarcophagi and coffins, piece by piece.
Some of the artifacts can even be touched, kind of. The CT scans of some of the mummies produced enough info to allow them to be 3D-printed in resin. Williams points to one scan from a bundle of a young child buried in Peru.
"We see three figurines and a gourd bowl," says Williams. "And what this is telling us is a bit about the burial traditions of these people. Each of these figurines is a female figurine. So it tells us, perhaps, this was a young girl — we aren't really sure. And these figurines were probably tokens of importance to the individual. They were placed there after she died by her family members. And maybe they were meant to guide her."
Some ancient Egyptians, on the other hand, preferred to go to the grave with their beer mugs. James Phillips, a curator specializing in Egyptology, points to a woman unintentionally mummified by the reeds and goat fur she was covered in, about 7,000 years ago.
"The Egyptians who worked on the building of the pyramids were paid in measures of beer," he says. "So beer was very important in Egypt."
Mummies: New Secrets from the Tombs is open at the Natural History Museum from Sept. 18 to Jan. 18, 2016. Check the exhibit website for tickets and more info.
George Takei on how he took his internment camp musical, 'Allegiance,' to Broadway
UPDATE: “Allegiance” will be performed Feb. 21-April 1, 2018, at the Aratani Theater at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center in downtown L.A.'s Little Tokyo.
ORIGINAL STORY: In an intimate interview, George Takei tells Off-Ramp host John Rabe about crafting the Japanese-American internment camp history into compelling Broadway musical theater. "Allegiance," with Takei, Lea Salonga and Telly Leung, played at the Longacre Theater.
George Takei and his husband Brad were putting their house in mothballs when I arrived for our interview in August. They'd already been spending a lot of time in New York because of George's recurring role on "The Howard Stern Show," but now, with the Broadway opening of "Allegiance" just a couple months away, they were preparing to move for as long as the musical brings in the crowds.
While Brad went off to deal with the mundane domestic tasks around the move, I sat with George in their living room to talk about turning one of America's most shameful episodes — the internment of some 120,000 loyal Japanese-Americans during World War II — into a musical that could make it on the Broadway stage.
George, you just sent an email to your fans with the subject line: "I've Waited 7 Years to Send You this Email. Seven years!" Inside, you wrote: "Few things are as difficult and complex as taking a show to Broadway. It's both thrilling and terrifying." What was terrifying?
"The terrifying part is, you've poured your passion, your energy, your resources ... you make all that investment in that project, and then you're hoping the seats are going to be filled.That 'what if' is terrifying. But in San Diego, we had a sold-out run and broke their 77-year record. But now we're going to Broadway, and that same fear is there. Will they come? What will the critics say? Because it's life or death."
It took a long time just to get a Broadway theater.
"It took a long time to get a theater.You think there are a lot of Broadway theaters, but there are even more productions that want those chunks of New York real estate. So we thought we'd get in line. But then the other discovery we made is that the theater owners have relationships with grizzled old producers who have brought them a vast fortune with enormous hits, and they can cut in line. They have a track record. And so, 'will we ever get a theater' became a big question. But we have this time now — let's use it creatively, productively."
So, Takei says, the team tweaked the show, removing parts that didn't work didn't advance the story, inserting numbers that worked better and kept the story moving. They doubled down on social media, building and proving demand in the show.
"We have a Shubert theater (the Longacre), and Bob Wankel is head guy there, and I remember pouring my heart out, telling the story of my parents, hoping that touches. And he was understanding, but I understood his problem, too. Everybody is trying to get a theater and he has to make a good business decision and was initially skeptical. An internment camp musical? But music has the power to make an anguished painful situation even more moving, even more powerful. It hits you in the heart."
This is your Broadway debut, right? Are you petrified?
"Yes, yes. I've done a lot of stage work, and I've done a lot of public speaking, but it's Broadway, and I'm a debutante... at 78 years old! And it's the critics, too. The New York Times, Ben Brantley. That's who I'm going to be facing, and so it's both exciting and absolutely filling me with ecstasy, but what makes it ecstatic is the fear."
For much more of our interview with George Takei, listen to the audio by clicking the arrow in the player at the top of the page ... and hear George Takei and John Rabe's duet of "Tiny Bubbles."
4 ways you can help the dwindling monarch butterfly
We all love monarchs.
Well, yes, but I'm talking about the monarch butterfly, which is not only beautiful, but makes one of the most stupendous migrations — and is dwindling in numbers.
Off-Ramp animation expert Charles Solomon has long been interested in butterflies, which make regular appearances in anime.
"They're beautiful," he says. "The wings have patterns the artists can play with that excite the designers, so butterflies turn up in everything from old Molly Moo-Cow films to Disney's Silly Symphonies, to just being the background element that suggests nature."
(A screengrab from "
Charles knew monarchs need milkweed to survive, and wanted to plant some in the backyard of his house near Griffith Park. But what kind should he plant, where could he get it and how should he take care of it?
The Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants to the rescue! The foundation's director of horticulture, Madena Asbell, met us at Charles's house with four milkweed plants — one of which had a monarch caterpillar on it — and a wealth of monarch and milkweed knowledge.
So here's how you, like Charles, can help the monarch, according to Asbell:
1. Plant milkweed
"Monarchs are what we call 'host specific,' which means that they depend entirely on milkweed for their reproductive cycle. The caterpillar of the monarch consume only milkweed and no other plant. Fortunately, the caterpillars don't have to find the milkweed — it's the adults who find it. The females have very sensitive chemical receptors on their feet, and they're able to locate the milkweed. They lay their eggs directly on the milkweed leaves, the eggs hatch, the caterpillars emerge, and then begin to feed."
2. ... But make sure to plant the right kind of milkweed (the like California native narrow-leaf milkweed, which went into Charles's yard)
"We're really strongly encouraging people to plant native milkweeds right now. Tropical milkweed is very common in most nurseries, and people are wanting to do the right thing for the monarchs and putting it into their gardens, but current research shows the non-native tropical milkweed actually helps a pathogen of the monarch, a protozoan parasite."
Asbell says native milkweed plants are also drought tolerant, so they're a better choice for that reason, too.
3. Go up to Santa Barbara, to see many monarchs
"We actually have two monarch populations in North America that are divided by the Rockies. The eastern population overwinters in Mexico, and the western population overwinters along the Central Coast of California, and you can go see them beginning in November, through the winter. One of the sites is just north of Santa Barbara."
4. Love butterflies, but don't disparage moths
Moths actually make up 80 percent of lepidoptera, and although they're generally not as glam as the butterflies, they perform some very important roles, including pollination. Charles points out that in the arts, butterflies are often the good guys, like frogs, while moths, like toads, are the villains. But don't tell that to Mothra.
Immigration, refugees, politics, and betrayal — it's Greek drama at the Getty Villa
It's a very old story, as Euripides told it some 2,400 years ago: Jason (leader of the Argonauts) leaves his wife Medea when Creon, the king of Corinth, offers to let him marry his daughter. Bad move. Medea gets her revenge by killing their children.
"It is a bitter thing to be a woman," she says. "Men boast their battles, but it is easier to stand in battle three times in the front lines in the stabbing fury than to bear one child."
("Medea (about to murder her children)," Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1862), Credit: Wikipedia Commons.)
In "Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles," MacArthur Fellow Luis Alfaro has made Medea an undocumented Mexican seamstress, fighting assimilation and her husband Hason's ambition. Hason cannot resist the power offered him by a fully assimilated and childless woman developer, and when Medea discovers that he's married her rival, and will lose her child, the caca hits the ventilador.
Although it's set in Boyle Heights, Alfaro's play, directed by Jessica Kubzansky and produced by The Theatre @ Boston Court, is in performance in the ancient outdoor amphitheater at the Getty Villa, adding yet another layer to the reworking of the classic text.
Listen to the audio to hear my conversation with Alfaro after the premiere Wednesday night.
"Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles," plays Thur. – Sat. through Oct. 3 at 8pm at the Getty Villa. tickets from $36 - $45.
Rob Cohen's new doc 'Being Canadian' tries to explain our neighbors to the north
Canada, also known as America’s winter hat, is misunderstood, maligned and ignored ... or at least that’s the theory of “Being Canadian,” a new documentary by L.A. TV comedy writer Rob Cohen. Rob recently traveled cross country -- theirs not ours -- to see if he could pin down what makes a Canadian a Canadian.
It took eight years to get Rob Cohen and his team’s movie to the big screen, but only about five minutes to make this the most Canadian interview ever -- when they say, “Sincere apologies, Saskatchewan, we love you,” it demonstrates how Cohen’s politeness bonafides are established by saying "sorry" to the provinces that didn’t make the final cut of the movie.
(Canadian PM Mackenzie King, who owned several Irish terriers, all of them named Pat.)
Rob explained how frustration with his fellow TV writers in Hollywood inspired his "Roger and Me"-like journey.
“Like most Canadians living outside of Canada, I think you're constantly under attack because people don’t know or care about Canada and you constantly hear comments that make no sense,” says Cohen. “We would get along great and then I’d say 'borrow' or 'sorry' and the jig was up. They would freeze like they’d caught a spy.”
His goal was a movie that explained Canada to Americans by asking random Canadians to explain what it means to be ... well ... them. Pretty simple task, eh? As producers Colin Gray and Megan Raney Aarons learned, not so much.
“We actually had scheduled meet ups in each cities, we had T-shirts and placards and tried to get people to share their comment was an ongoing challenge going across Canada,” says Gray. Raney Aarons chimes in:- “One park where we tried to organize a meet up, we had two people show up: One guy in a mullet wig, one Brazilian dude. Those were the people who showed up and wanted to talk about Canada.”
Now there are lots of famous talking Canadians in the movie, such as Martin Short, Alanis Morissette and Paul Shaffer, but most make their homes down here. Why? Because if you’re too chatty in Canada, they deport you.
Ha, kidding. They’d just ask you to go.
But just for fun, imagine what it would be like to ask Americans what it means to be American. Americans will talk about anything. In fact, the movie features two drunk-sh geography majors who were asked if they knew the capital of Canada: “Let’s guess Arkansas!” they agreed.
Is it any wonder that Canadians define themselves, in part, as not being from the USA?
That is long held belief in Canada, but not everyone thinks it’s true. David Frum is dual citizen and former White House speech writer who’s now an editor with The Atlantic magazine. He is not in the movie.
“If you take all of North America," he says, "and delete all of the South and delete Quebec, what you find is what’s in between those two zones, is a place where culturally there are a lot of similarities.”
So why then, don’t Canadians jump up and down yelling about how Canadian they are? To hear Frum tell it, with Eastern and Western Canada not liking each other, not to mention the French-English divide, they just don’t want to rock the boat. “Canada has a challenging difficult project to hold together, and that has made Canadians worry about too much self assertion.”
By the way, his definition of what it means to be a Canadian was pretty spot on: “Every time a Canadian votes in a parliamentary election, every time a Canadian reacts to criminal attack by calling a police officer instead of reaching for a gun, over time they bump into someone on the street and say 'sorry', they are doing what it means to be a Canadian.” Frum, by the way, is the son of the late Barbara Frum, a beloved CBC host and essentially the Susan Stamberg of Canada, but even cooler.
And filmmaker Andy Cohen’s conclusion? “My summation would be Canada is a much hipper place than when I left and I think they love being ballsy about it in a Canadian way.”
Cohen spends a lot of the movie interviewing American celebrities about what they think of Canada, which boils down to ... they don’t, really. And frankly, who doesn’t already know that? But the film really finds its feet when it deals with the maple syrup theft crisis, flag design and psychotherapy.
And if that weren’t incentive enough to watch, this flick has also been certified 100% Celine Dion free. “She was an early 'no' so we took her at her word and moved on,” says Cohen. When asked in what official language he was turned down, he answered “Her managers.”
Which is to say, if you want to know what being Canadian is all about, “Being Canadian” is a good place to start. And being Canadian myself, I can say “Being Canadian” might just teach you a few things about ... well, you know.
"Being Canadian" opens Sept. 18 and will be in limited release in L.A., including at the Crest Westwood. Full disclosure: Off-Ramp contributor Collin Friesen is an actual Canadian.
Downtown's Bar 107 defies landlord, refuses to leave
UPDATE 9/14/2015: This just in.
Also, Bar 107 in the
is officially closed and locked up. Goodbye cheap bears, weird people and rockin' music.
— Eddie Kim (@eddiekimx)
Also, Bar 107 in the @HistoricCore is officially closed and locked up. Goodbye cheap bears, weird people and rockin' music.
— Eddie Kim (@eddiekimx) September 14, 2015
For almost ten years, Bar 107 has thrived in the growing downtown Los Angeles bar scene. It's one of the few places in America you can go for gong karaoke. It gives out free pizza during happy hour.
May 31 was supposed to be Bar 107's last day — its landlord stopped renewing the month-to-month lease. But the bar defied the order, and — as of this posting — is still open today.
On the evening of May 31, DJ Morgan Higby Night read from a prepared statement by the ownership, saying the bar would stay open until forced to leave. It complained of downtown changing and becoming less inclusive. "Bars with personality and reasonable drink prices have been replaced by sterile, safe s---holes with ridiculous prices and even more ridiculous ice cubes."
Bar 107 sits near the corner of 4th and Main Streets downtown. It's in the same building as the historic Hotel Barclay. When reached for comment on Monday, property manager Victor Vasquez said he was "very disappointed" to have seen the announcement.
Vasquez said he'd made numerous attempts to provide Bar 107 with a long-term, multi-year lease but the two sides couldn't come to an agreement. Management, he said, made the call to talk with prospective new tenants around March. He said the two sides are back at the negotiating table now and he hopes they'll reach an amicable agreement.
Eddie Kim, a senior writer for LA Downtown News, said stories like this aren't uncommon in downtown nowadays. "It's one instance out of many where there's changes happening," he said. When Bar 107 opened its doors nearly 10 years ago, it replaced Score, a well-liked gay bar.
"The people who love Bar 107 are losing a place to love," Kim added. "It's part of the identity of this neighborhood, right?"
Ownership from Bar 107 couldn't be reached for a response at the time of posting, we'll update if we hear back.