Is the LA mayor gunning for the 2020 presidential candidacy? How will the LA Philharmonic's new CEO influence the organization? Hey Arnold! returns.
Sexual misconduct allegations plague California politicians
On Monday, Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra announced he will resign next year and not seek reelection. The announcement came after Bocanegra was accused of groping a woman in 2009 when he was a legislative staff member.
Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon has since removed Bocanegra from his position as majority whip. Rendon also said he said he will move to expel Bocanegra before next year if the sexual misconduct allegations are confirmed.
It's the latest take down in a string of sexual harassment complaints against high-profile politicians and celebrities. The news is prompting many local jurisdictions to reexamine their own practices for handling complaints.
"On the county level there have been about 27,000 complaints since 2011," said KPCC's senior politics reporter Mary Plummer. "This includes more than sexual harassment. But sexual harassment, I'm told, is among the top complaints categories."
To read more about LA County sexual harassment complaints, read Plummer's full report here.
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player above.
Will LA Mayor Eric Garcetti run for US president in 2020?
In U.S. history, there have been few presidents who served as mayors and then went on to become elected to the nation's highest office. The almost-impeached Andrew Johnson was mayor of a small town in Greenville, Tenn., before becoming president. If you want to get technical, Calvin Coolidge served as mayor in Northampton, Mass., before ascending to the office of vice president in 1920, then president in 1923 after Warren G. Harding's death.
Now, though, it seems Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti might also attempt to make that leap.
The Los Angeles Times has been keeping a close eye on the L.A. Mayor's national tour, and the paper's assistant managing editor for politics, Christina Bellantoni, spoke to A Martinez about some of the evidence pointing to a possible 2020 run.
"Whenever anybody goes to places like New Hampshire and Iowa, which are the traditional early nominating states, they're testing the waters. Here's someone who has a fairly high profile as mayor of one of the nation's largest cities, someone who is fairly young and clearly ambitious."
[This post was corrected on December 22, 2017 at 10:50 a.m. A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Grover Cleveland was mayor of Buffalo, N.Y., when he was elected U.S. president. He served as governor.]
LA Phil announces new CEO
Deborah Borda sent shock waves through the LA Arts community when she announced this spring she was leaving her role as CEO and President at the LA Philharmonic.
In her almost 20 year tenure, she transformed the organization into one of the most financially sound and well respected arts institutions in the world. Needless to say, the new CEO has some pretty big shoes to fill.
Who exactly will fill those shoes has been the subject of much speculation until the LA Phil announced Thursday last week that it Simon Woods, the current president and CEO of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, will become its new leader. Take Two spoke with the LA Times’ classical music critic Mark Swed about Borda’s accomplishments and the challenges that await the new CEO.
TO HEAR THE FULL CONVERSATION WITH MARK SWED, CLICK THE BLUE PLAYER ABOVE.
Big Sunday charity prepares for big holiday help
For many people, the holidays are a time to enjoy food with family and friends. But that is not possible for many others, who aren't even sure where their next meal is coming from. To help with that, charity organizations like Big Sunday are holding events to assist those in need.
"We connect people through helping," said David Levinson, founder and executive director of Big Sunday. "The idea is that absolutely everyone has some way that they can help somebody else. We see the world not as haves and have-nots but as haves and have-mores."
On the Thanksgiving Stuffing event, happening Wednesday, Nov. 22.
We're going to fill a couple bags full of Thanksgiving food for people who are struggling this holiday season. They're distributed to about 75 different nonprofits and they bring them out to clients that afternoon. And they can enjoy Thanksgiving the next day. We're doing about 15 more different service projects right at the same time in the same place.
Other ways to help out through Big Sunday:
- Sponsor a bag of food (scroll down to "I'd like to sponsor bags" at $35 each)
- Sign up to get involved on volunteer days
- Donate on their funding page to support their general efforts
To hear more about Big Sunday's charity outreach, click the blue player above.
How kids of the '90s saved 'Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie'
The oldest millennials are in their 30s, but already they're starting to feel nostalgic for their youth. That's why Nickelodeon is bringing back 'Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie' 13 years after the animated show ended.
Craig Bartlett is the creator of 'Hey Arnold.' "He's this calm center around in which everything happens," Bartlett says, explaining his initial pitch to the studio."He always tries to help people, whether they deserved it or not."
Bartlett says there were campaigns on Facebook with tens of thousands of signatures asking Nickelodeon to save the show, which ended on a cliffhanger back in 2004. With so much demand building online, Nickelodeon decided to bring 'Hey Arnold!' back. There's a new actor playing Arnold, but fans will hear some familiar voices too.
Francesca Marie Smith was nine years old when she first played the part of Helga Pataki. She's the girl who seems to hate Arnold but is secretly in love with him.
Being a voice actor as a child inspired Smith to pursue a PhD in media theory at USC's Annenberg School. "The Jungle Movie' obviously was a direct response to and very much integrated into the fan community and the fan response," Smith says.
Justin Shenkarow also returns from the original. He plays Herald Bergman, a bully with a soft side. "In real life, I'm the opposite of a nerd. I was teased growing up for having a big fro, so I really channeled that energy into portraying a vulnerable, almost lovable bully," Shenkarow says.
Now Shenkarow is an established actor, with credits on franchise films like 'Avatar' and 'Ice Age.' He's also put a positive spin on his hair by naming his production company "Shake That Fro."
Even he feels nostalgic toward 'Hey Arnold!' "I think millennials really long for that incredible time period in their life. With all the instability in the world, economically and politically, it's a bit scary," Shenkarow says. "Hey Arnold!' really represents their youth, just the fact that we were in a much happier world at that point."
There's a lot at stake for fans, and some wonder if the new movie will live up to their old memories.
'Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie' premieres Friday, Nov. 24, from 7:00-9:00 p.m. (ET/PT) and is available for download on Saturday, Nov. 25.
Notoriously hard-to-open homeless shelter welcomes people out of extreme weather
Tuesday Reviewsday: LA's Alex Rose, The Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart and rocker Selene Vigil
Alex Rose was born in LA, reared in Austin, and is now singing full time back in her birth city.
And, man, can she sing.
The opening song, "Ty," on her album “Arcadian Pages,” is an ode to a mystical cowboy (or the image of one) and it starts out with just her voice and nothing else. It's a bold and confident introduction, and an effective one. It’s power without screaming, impact through restraint, emotional probings through beauty, strength through vulnerability.
She then crafts only the sparest accompaniment — spartan bass figures (she loves and makes great use of the contrast/complement of her pure voice with low-register sounds), near-subliminal keyboard or guitar atmospheres, the subtlest percussion punctuation.
Though this music was recorded in Texas, the album is really about her journey back to L.A. as she enters a new phase in her life. The eight songs were written and developed out on the road on that journey — in hotel rooms, cars, wherever she was — and carry both that sense of searching and that intimacy.
Her song “Grandmothers” is in some ways the most direct song of the bunch. In this piece, her thoughts flit around feelings and reflections, centering on the essence that “our grandmothers were first to know.” Here she reveals her strong voice in the other sense of that word, matching that of her literal voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvMmXs6Nu1c&feature=youtu.be
Mickey Hart
If you expect Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s solo work to sound like the Dead, then you don’t know much about Mickey Hart. Through the decades, Hart has consistently, exuberantly hungered for new music experiences, new sounds, new combinations, new ideas, new routes to explore. With the album “RAMU” (which stands for “Random Access Musical Universe”), Hart has given the computerized database of music and nature sounds he’s been collecting for nearly 50 years now. He’s shown all that off with delightful flair.
There's some world music in here and even some of the Dead, via a piece of a previously unreleased recording of Jerry Garcia. But the core of “RAMU” is in Hart’s work with two new, younger partners - one a very natural choice, the other perhaps a more surprising one. The former is Avey Tare, of the band Animal Collective, which has long embraced a love of the Dead in its own eccentric music. The latter is Tarriana Ball — Tank of New Orleans’ funk/hip-hop/jazz/rock dynamo Tank & the Bangas, winners of this year’s NPR Tiny Desk Contest.
With three songs each, half of the album in total, they provide in their own distinctive ways some structure to the relatively amorphous rhythmic layers. Among the highlights, Tare nicely anchors the global wanderings of the song “Wayward Son,” and Ball brings her freestyle verve to the Afro-Indian flow of the piece “Big Bad Wolf,” which also features a spoken part by actor Peter Coyote.
The blend sounds natural, organic, and rooted in a playful spirit Tare, Ball and Hart share. That grounding provides solid foundations for other guest contributions from Hussain, California jazz legend Charles Lloyd and former Allman Brothers bassist Oteil Burbridge.
Ultimately, in a mysticism-tinged essay in the liner notes, Hart writes that the album to him is “a collection of different cultures and music that range from California to Mumbai, Bali to Kentucky and Lagos to New Orleans, recorded between 1944 and 2017.”
Selene Vigil
"There were a lot of things in Never Never Land that I never really wanted to know..." And so begins the first song, "Sha La La," on Selene Vigil's new mini-album, “Tough Dance.”
Known for her taut, no-nonsense, unsentimental gaze, Vigil got her start in the '90s when her band, 7 Year Bitch, was rightfully touted by some as one of the most dynamic forces in post-Nirvana rock. She had the makings of a superstar, prowling the stage as she spat out words both cut to, and cutting the listener to, the bone, but that stardom never quite happened.
But with the six songs here, she has not lost one bit of her power and impact from the raspy howl at the end of the song “Down in Flames” to the horror-film piano-chords midway in the haunted “My Nightmare.”
In the accompanying press bio, she cites Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” With music crafted by her longtime Seattle friend Ben London (of the band Alcohol Funnycar) and a tight, lean band of guitarist Ryan Leyva, bassist Drew Church and drummer Davey Brozowsky, all veterans of that old scene, that’s exactly what it sounds like.