John spends a day in studio with Petros Papadakis; Kevin Ferguson tells us the story of the Glassell family; and "Tom Explores Los Angeles" takes us deep inside Bronson Canyon and Cave.
New PMCA exhibit rediscovers a lost generation of San Francisco artists
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele reviews "An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and their Circle," at the Pasadena Museum of California Art through Jan. 11.
Between the Beat Generation and the Summer of Love, San Francisco saw a singular decade of breakaway art, theater and poetry that’s now largely forgotten.
Walk into the new show at the PMCA, and you walk into a glorious old row house in San Francisco’s Mission District, with an amazing library that ranged from Ezra Pound’s poetry to every volume of the Wizard of Oz series. It’s a home lit by stained glass windows and Tiffany lamps, whose multicolored glow suffused much of the art of Robert Duncan and his longtime companion, Jess Collins, who went professionally by "Jess."
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A video of Jess and Duncan’s home — in which they reached their fullest creative flowering, a place jammed with their own works, and those of their circle of friends, shown as it was before Jess’ 2004 death — is an essential beginning to the exhibit.
(Jess Collins, The Enamord Mage: Translation #6, 1965, © Collection of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.)
Robert Duncan was a nationally famed poet, as well as an artist.
LISTEN: Robert Duncan reading his own poetry in rare recordings, now online
Jess came to art late — after a traumatizing career as a chemist with the Manhattan Project, he rejected science as “Black Magic” and became a painter. Soon after they found one another, Jess and Duncan's work blended, as Jess illustrated Duncan’s poems and Duncan attached his verse to Jess’s creations, which ranged from pioneering collages to vivid oil-paint expressionism.
But there is much more to the PMCA show than Jess and Duncan. The other artists in it prove the great and gifted diversity of their circle, which included not just painters like Helen Adam, Virginia Admiral (who happens to be actor Robert de Niro’s mother)...
(Roberts Senior and Junior flanking Virginia Admiral. Credit: HBO)
... James Broughton and R.B. Kitaj, but poets like Jack Spicer and Denise Levertov, artist-actor Dean Stockwell, rising film scholar Pauline Kael and Bay Area polymath Michael McClure, still remembered for reading his poems to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo.
WATCH: McClure read to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo
A warm social penumbra seems to have pervaded their milieu; you infer that everyone cared for everyone and that everyone was close friends or at least friends, helped with each others’ shows, put each other up in their homes, etc. What a contrast with so much of the New York '50s and '60s art scene.
This broad circle of San Francisco talent influenced generations of Bay Area creativity. For instance, Jess’s hand-wrought movie posters for Kael’s little cinema foreshadow Wes Wilson and his peers’ psychedelic wall hoardings for the late '60s rock shows at Bill Graham’s Fillmore auditorium, featuring the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane.
Sadly, Jess and Duncan’s wonderful, stuffed-with-marvels home in the Mission District has been dispersed. What an astounding museum of that time and place it might have made. How you wish you had known them. But at least we have this show, in which Jess, Duncan and their circle feel like an all -mbracing family you never got to meet — and you can’t stop wishing you’d been a part of it.
"An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and their Circle" is curated by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff. It's at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 East Union Street, Pasadena, CA 91101 from Sept. 14 - Jan. 11.
Hearing and Learning to Play the Shofar
UPDATE: We're reposting this segment for Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sunset on Wednesday, September 28.
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The Jewish month of Elul begins at sunset on Monday, August 9th. Every day during Elul, until Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, observant Jews will want to hear the shofar, the animal horn.
Michael Chusid, Angelino and author of "Hearing Shofar: The Still Small Voice of the Ram’s Horn," joins Off-Ramp host John Rabe in the Crawford Family Forum to teach us about the shofar ... and teach John how to play it.
COME INSIDE for a link to Michael's book.
The story behind Glassell Park: The strange, fascinating lives of the Glassell family, Los Angeles pioneers
There's L.A.'s Glassell Park, near Mount Washington; there's Glassell Street, in Orange. So, who or what was Glassell?
You can find the answer at West Adams' Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. Among the buried Civil War veterans, movie producers and even the occasional pyramid, there's a giant obelisk bearing the Glassell name.
One of the first Glassells buried at Angelus Rosedale cemetery is Andrew Glassell — a lawyer and land developer, and one of the many tycoons who made Los Angeles the metropolis it is today. He was born on a plantation in 1827 to a large, wealthy family. His place of birth was Orange County… Virginia.
Glassell studied law at the University of Alabama before he joined the federal government as a U.S. attorney. Then, the Civil War happened. The government asked lawyers to sign an oath pledging loyalty to the Union. For the child of plantation owners, things got complicated.
"There was a lot of Southern sentiment in California," said Phil Brigandi, an Orange County historian who's studied the Glassell family. "Being in San Francisco, if he had decided to sign the loyalty oath, he probably could have retained a lot of his practice. If he'd been down south in Los Angeles by then, where there was a much stronger Southern sentiment, it would have been pretty rough for him personally and professionally — much less what the family would think about it."
Andrew Glassell rejected the oath and lost his law license. He went into business, eventually ending up on the small roster of wealthy American settlers who bought up land, sold it and whose names are scattered across maps of California and L.A. He lived in what's now Northeast L.A. — the "Glassell Park" neighborhood sits on what used to be his sprawling farm.
Glassell's biggest undertaking was about 30 miles south, though. He and a colleague named Alfred Chapman founded the town of Orange, California — Glassell Street near Orange's downtown is named for him.
"It's interesting, this whole notion of not just subdividing and selling land, but founding a town," said Brigandi. "And you get very different approaches to it: you have Chapman and the Glassell brothers founding Orange, right nearby at about the same time you get William Spurgeon founding Santa Ana, and Columbus Tustin founding Tustin. And where Spurgeon and Tustin were very much hands on, living in the towns, right in the middle of this — Chapman and Glassell are essentially absentee landlords. They don't live down here. They don't have have their own businesses here."
Brigandi said that had a huge impact on the way these early cities developed.
"Orange, Santa Ana and Tustin all start at about the same time with about the same assets in terms of location, climate, soil, water —all those things," he said. "Within a very short number of years, Santa Ana has really taken off as the boss town of the area."
Another Glassell buried at Rosedale is Andrew's brother, William T. Glassell. William helped lay out plots and sell real estate in Orange — but before that, he fought for the Confederate Army, as a crewmember in a primitive 19th century submarine.
Coincidentally, William's and Andrew's sister Susan is the grandmother of a more famous military figure: George S. Patton.
Stories of tycoons like William and Andrew Glassell help give us context to where street, city and neighborhood names come from, but they also unearth morbid and fascinating tales. Buried alongside William and Andrew in the Glassell plot is Philip Glassell, Andrew's son.
Philip was born in 1867 and didn't appear to have his father's ambition for fame and fortune — his name didn't really appear in the papers until 1901, just six months after his father died. I met Don Lynch, a member of the West Adams Heritage Association, at the grave of Philip. Lynch found Philip's story in an archived edition of the Los Angeles Herald.
"Philip started living with a young lady around 1900; her name was Rhoda Eddo and she was the daughter of a local artist," said Lynch. "She was described as somewhat lame and that she needed a crutch to walk with. And when she was about 19 they moved in together and pretty much lived as husband and wife in various boarding houses and renting homes."
Things went south not long after Andrew Glassell's death. Philip's drinking got worse, and despite his promise to marry, Philip disappeared — hiding in his uncle's house near MacArthur Park.
After searching for days, Eddo drove her buggy to the house Philip was staying at. The Herald provided a grim description of what happened next.
"Suddenly, Miss Eddo drew from the folds of her dress a long, block black pistol, and, pointing the barrel to her head, fired a bullet Into her right temple. She fell to the ground, dead. "
Eddo was just 19 when she died. Her tombstone, if she ever had one, has long since vanished. Her suicide note, however, made the paper:
Dear Sweetheart Philip: I will do as you have heard. You asked me to pray for you, that you would come back that night, and this is the way you came back. Well, dear, I hope we will meet at home or hell — which It is I don't know, but it sure cannot be worse, dear. I love you, and I cannot live without you. Please see that my body gets into the ground.
As ever, your wife, as you must always call me.
Mrs. P. H. Glassell
Rhoda W. Eddo
Clear across Angelus Rosedale cemetery — maybe a couple hundred feet from her lover's body — you'll find the unmarked grave of Rhoda Eddo. The characters in the Glassell drama are long since dead, but at Angelus Rosedale, their story lives on.
The nation's first marijuana raid likely happened in Los Angeles
As California and the rest of the nation ponder how government should handle marijuana, an important anniversary came and went recently: 100 years ago this month, the nation's very first marijuana raid took place here in Los Angeles.
In 1914 not many Angelenos had heard of marijuana and probably even fewer were aware the state of California outlawed cannabis just the year before.
When the Los Angeles Times reported a raid on two “dream gardens” on September 10, 1914, they had to explain exactly what this drug was to its readers.
This article was dug up from the newspaper's archives by Dale Gieringer, Director of California NORML, an organization that lobbies for marijuana legalization. He organized a press conference on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall on the 100th anniversary of what was likely the nation's first marijuana raid.
"We’re actually here to celebrate, or commemorate, the 100th anniversary of the nation’s first known marijuana bust, which happened here in the then-Mexican district of Sonoratown of Los Angeles, on New High Street, not that far from City Hall," says Gieringer.
"Hardly anybody had heard of marijuana outside of the Mexican community when this happened. In fact, the law did not even mention marijuana. The law mentioned 'Indian hemp.' Marijuana is a Mexican word that specifically refers to cigarettes of cannabis," says Gieringer. "That had not been the way cannabis was usually used prior to then in California."
Marijuana was outlawed the year before the first raid. And according to Gieringer, it doesn’t seem like anyone really noticed.
"They did it very quietly in a technical amendment, and that was not reported anywhere in the press — that happened in 1913. The first arrests though were actually here in Los Angeles. And this is the first time you see marijuana on the front page," says Gieringer. "They had to explain what it is."
Even though few seemed to be using marijuana as a recreational drug at the time, it got swept up in the beginnings of the temperance movement.
A 1913 amendment to an earlier law called The Poison Act made possession of “extracts, tinctures, or other narcotic preparations of hemp or loco-weed” a misdemeanor. A year later, Inspector Roy Jones of the State Board of Pharmacy confiscated a $500 “wagonload” of Indian hemp from two “dream gardens” in downtown Los Angeles.
Inspector Jones explained to Los Angeles Times readers what it might feel like to smoke marijuana, saying “one cigarette of the stuff puts one in a dreamy state of beatitude.”
"And of course, the entirety of the public experience and awareness and use of marijuana came after the law that was intended to prevent it," says Gieringer.
Artist Alan Wolfson's exquisite miniature towns
Off-Ramp contributor Collin Friesen reports on Alan Wolfson, who makes miniature street scenes and has a retrospective coming up in Lyon, France.
Some artists go big. Think Kent Twitchell’s huge mural of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra by the Harbor Freeway. Others shrink the world into something you can fit in a briefcase — that's L.A. artist Alan Wolfson.
(Wolfson at work in his workshop. Credit: Alan Wolfson)
At his workshop in Sunland, inside, on various benches, are what you might call the fulfillment of this 66-year-old’s childhood dream.
“When I was a kid I always built things,” says Wolfson. “Like in elementary school I’d build dioramas in shoe boxes — police stations, grocery stores, I always got off on that. My dad was an artist, so I was lucky, I was encouraged to do this. I never thought I’d be able to do this as a livelihood.”
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Wolfson is talking about his miniature street models. They provide extremely — and I mean extremely — detailed looks at the way cities like New York and L.A. used to be in the '70s and '80s. There’s Peepland, a gritty adult theater and sex shop that's about the size of two Kleenex boxes.
From the marquee, advertising “Hot Biker Girls,” to the burnt out bulbs on the Peepshow sign, the details are perfect. Looking at it is like entering a time machine, and it's so well done you feel like you need a shower afterward.
Bend down and look inside, past the adult magazine rack, and notice the tiny dildos on the wall.
“I focus in interiors. I like it when people walk up, glance at the whole piece, and then they realize there’s a view into that… I like it when they find the hidden details.”
I ask him if those “finds” are like Easter eggs. In a way they are, he admits, although he considers it a part of a yet unwritten narrative.
“What I’m trying to do is, I’m trying to give you scenery, lighting and enough props so you can come up with your own narrative…so you can put on your own show.”
Wolfson’s work has a post-Rapture feel. He never features people, except in the shrunken ads and movie posters. He says putting miniature humans in the scenes just advertises that they’re not real, pulling focus from the overall experience of the piece.
Each sculpture takes from three months to a year and half, and Wolfson makes everything, from the smallest brick to the theater napkin dispenser with a single napkin pulled a third of the way out, that sits next to the stack of cups leaning precariously from the counter of the concession stand. It’s art by the millimeter. Not photorealism per se, but a slightly heightened, condensed version of how things used to look and feel.
Wolfson has built more than 100 dioramas in his career. They can sell for tens of thousands of dollars, but he says that’s actually not why exhibitors need to beef up security when they show his work.
“The museum in New York had a security detail,” he laughs. “And the show I’m doing in France, they’re aware of the fact that groups of school children go through. They find it interesting and they want to stick their fingers in there.”
Nineteen of his works will be shown at his career retrospective later this month in Lyon, France at the Musée Cinéma et Miniature.
Erin Corwin's death hurt one of her last refuges: White Rock Ranch Horse Rescue
Off-Ramp contributor R.H. Greene has been spending a lot of time in the High Desert recently, where he became obsessed by a story of unsung kindness lurking behind one of last summer's grimmest tabloid headlines: The murder of Marine wife Erin Corwin.
(A photo of Erin Corwin released by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.)
White Rock Ranch Horse Rescue is a charity for horses, still surviving, but changed forever by a brush with evil. It’s a non-profit orphanage for unwanted horses near Yucca Valley, at the end of a long dirt road so pocked by the wind it threatens to shake a car to pieces at speeds above 10 miles per hour.
It's feeding time for the 53 horses who live here. Isabella Megli, co-founder and currently White Rock's sole proprietor, tosses armloads of hay from a golf cart, as unfettered horses canter by. Carol Davison is a weathered retiree who has worked and lived on the ranch for over six years. She hovers by Isabella's side, protectively.
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On the other side of a picket fence, a trim, middle-aged "people doctor" who won’t give her name is bandaging a horse's leg wound with practiced hands. Inside the big corral, some two dozen horses frolic and snort, attended by a pair of young-looking military wives, in for the day from the Marine base at Twentynine Palms.
Davison says most of the animals have been through some combination of abuse and loss.
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There's Gemeni, a pharmaceutical industry castoff, nameless when she arrived except for the large inventory number "605" branded onto her side. There's Mystic, a quarterhorse, with a raw and permanent knee injury on her right hind-leg, and a rigid leg muscle that dangles in the wrong place. She was lamed by "horse-tripping," an antique roping practice still popular at rodeos and Mexican charreadas.
And then there's Cassy, the horse I came to see. Lexie Marks, one of the visiting Marine wives, is "sponsoring" Cassy, a big step on the road to adopting her. But there are complications, "because her owner recently died." Cassy is skittish and has trust issues. And no wonder — the horse’s story is almost entirely about loss.
Isabella told me Cassy came to the ranch from an abusive household, run by a hoarder. For months, she was too skittish to make a friend. Then a shy 19-year-old newlywed named Erin Corwin relocated to Twentynine Palms with her Marine corporal husband and visited the White Rock ranch. The bond between Erin Corwin and Cassy was instant and profound.
Isabel said, "Erin picked her out of 30 (horses). I don't know why or how, and she says, 'I want this one.' But she walked in and caught her. She rode her bareback without a bit, and those two were just one."
Later, when the microphone has been turned off, Isabella broke down talking about Erin, and blamed herself for all the signs of trouble she did and didn't see. But as we spoke of Erin and stared at the horse she once loved, the 19 year old girl seems present… maybe like the wind in the distance.
With the negative publicity surrounding Erin Corwin's murder, White Rock ranch, a 501(c)(3) relying heavily on charitable contributions, has taken a major financial hit. Volunteers have been harder to come by, and donations are down.
Right now, she says they're trying to raise money to dig a well, because every one of the dozens of horses there needs to drink 62 gallons of water a day. Then, she turns briskly to attend to the myriad chores she has left to do — and as magnets go to pull us through our days, it's enough.
Those notes passed in junior high are just clutter
Off-Ramp commentator Taylor Orci on the things you keep, and shouldn't.
I was cleaning out my closet and came across three Ziploc bags of handwritten notes I passed in junior high. Some of the notes were from friends, some were from crushes. Some were very tiny and on lavender paper addressed to Frog 1 from Frog 2. I do not remember who Frog 2 was.
Hey Taylz. Mind if I call you Taylz? I'm in Algebra eating Pez. I think it's cool you like Dave even thought Cindy went out with him.
Out of habit, I put all of the notes in my "to keep" pile. But then, I wondered what exactly I was holding on to. I opened a note and read it. Whoever wrote it to me was bored in a class she hated. She talked about a boy she liked. She swore a lot. She made an inside joke I forget the meaning of, she used a code name for a boy I have forgotten about. Why was I doing this?
Keeping these notes didn't make me feel good. In fact, they made me feel more anxious than anything, because I hated junior high. In junior high a group of girls tackled me, pulled up my shirt and took a picture of my bra because who knows why — and those were my friends.
I remember being 12, 13... and saving these notes in freezer bags with all the pride of an archivist. Like I would read them when I was grown, and they would have in them some wisdom, some childhood spark of imagination I had since lost, and reading them would help me remember something great.
But the notes weren't great; they were all about buying jeans and saying the word “crap” a lot. I guess I thought time was the thing that transformed a friend lamenting about French fries into the kind of letter a dying Civil War soldier would write to his fiancée with his one good arm.
Dear Taylor, wazzup? How's life? Eat any pie lately? Caught any pie thieves? Just kidding, I was trying to be funny. Or funny-la. That's what I'm gonna say from now on, I'm gonna make it my thing, funny-la. Do you remember Sublime? Bradley Nowell is my God.
I do remember having big thoughts as a kid, thoughts about isolation, death, how many hours Jimi Hendrix practiced guitar when he was my age and if I was missing out on greatness because I didn't really practice anything. It's just that, those weren't the things I wrote about to my friends.
I came across a note full of quotes from the movie "Clueless," the greatest movie ever made:
"Clueless," the greatest movie ever made
And I remembered this was the summer my school forced me to go to therapy. I had started cutting myself for a number of reasons, mostly because I didn't really like me very much. All I wanted to do was go to the mall and some swanky new place I'd heard about called Louise's Trattoria with the girl who wrote the “Clueless” note.
So I lied to the therapist and told him I was hurting myself for attention because I hadn't accepted my stepdad as a positive male role model. Do I think that makes sense? No. But sure enough, it got me out of therapy.
But there was nothing so on-the-nose in that note I wrote to that girl, or in anything I wrote to anyone. So I took the three bags of notes, and I threw them away.
At first, I felt like I was betraying my kid self. I imagined little 12-year-old Taylor, confused and upset that what she worked so hard to save never actually became all that important. She probably would call adult me a dumbass, and journal about me all night. But adult me knows that junior high sucked, and I don't need three freezer bags full of kid notes to remind me of that.
After I threw out the notes, I felt lighter. And I'll never have to come up with some lame explanation to my kids why this was so important to me and why they should care about it, too.
I should add I was inspired to clean out my closet because I just helped clean out my grandparents’ house, and tumbling out of every closet were bags and bags of similar things. Not notes passed in junior high, but skeins of synthetic yarn with a quarter of a bright orange sweater attached, commemorative coins you looked at to remember the tenth anniversary of the moon landing. A limited edition jar of cologne inside a ceramic figurine of Betsy Ross. These things were waiting for a day that they had value, but value wasn't something time alone could give those things. So they sat in closets, waiting.
Tintin on acid: Charles Burns ends his dark trilogy with 'Sugar Skull'
Graphic novelist Charles Burns stopped by the Mohn Broadcast Center to talk with Off-Ramp host John Rabe about "Sugar Skull," which completes the trilogy that includes "X'ed Out" and "The Hive." He's doing a signing tonight (Thurday, Sept. 18) at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz.
Why the trilogy? Burns says, "I had finished another book, "Black Hole," which was this very long graphic novel, all in black and white, and I wanted to do something in color, so I conceived a series of books, based on a series of my life, late '70s, the Punk Era. It started that way, and then it turned into something else."
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The look of Burns' books:
... is drawn from one of his childhood favorites, the Belgian Tintin, who had all sorts of politically incorrect adventures:
"It's called the clear-line school of comics. And it's exactly what it sounds like: very clear lines, but perfectly rendered in color."
If there's more shadow in Burns' books than in Herge's, that's because the lines between good and bad, dark and light, reality and unreality are blurrier in Burns. The trilogy moves back and forth in time and place, including between the normal world and a bizarre world in which a character named Johnny 23 struggles with many of the same issues the protagonist in the real world, Doug, faces... including a pregnant girlfriend.
(From Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns. )
Are they two separate stories or Doug's subconscious world? Burns won't say. "That's for the reader to figure out. I don't really ever clearly explain those things at all, and I like to leave those things open. Interpretation is great, as far as I'm concerned."
Burns turns 59 on Sept. 27. How does he like approaching 60? "As far as the day-to-day landscape, things are more settled in. But as far as my sweltering, swelling, itching brain, that hasn't changed at all unfortunately."