Happy Labor Day! Today's show is on tape because of the holiday.
Will America Intervene in Syria?
President Obama meets with Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham at the White House, today, in a bid to sell the foreign policy hawks on the idea of military intervention in Syria.
This past weekend, Obama argued that a limited strike on Assad's regime for the use of chemical weapons is justified.
However a Congressional vote won't take place until lawmakers return to the Hill next Monday.
In the meantime, there's a lot of debate to the extent of what America might do, if it plans to take any action at all.
To explain are Sebastian Usher, the BBC's Middle East regional editor, and Seung Min Kim, Politico's Congressional reporter.
'LA Adventures': Finding hidden treasures and day tripping by train in LA
It takes just $1.50 per ride to see L.A. by Metro, and as the system expands there are more hidden treasures you can reach in the city.
David Madsen and Elisa Makunga, co-authors of "L.A. Adventures: Eclectic Day Trips by Metro Rail Through Los Angeles and Beyond," took KPCC's Leo Duran on a tour of a few things you can see by train.
Free organ concerts every Thursday at 12:10 at the First Congregational Church of LA.
How To Get There: Take the red or purple line to the Wilshire/Vermont station. Walk five minutes to the church at the corner of W 6th St and S Commonwealth Av.
The Great Organs of First Church is host to free recitals every week. The massive instrument is considered one of the biggest church organs in the world.
"Sometimes it’s really frightening, sometimes it’s beautiful classical, and it’ll be broadcast through those 20000 pipes, which are all around the church," says Madsen.
The Grammy Museum at L.A. Live
How To Get There: Take either the blue, red, purple, or Expo lines to the 7th and Metro station in downtown LA. Then walk 10 minutes to the museum at S Figueroa St and W Olympic Blvd
Opened in 2008, you can check out a collection of Michael Jackson’s sequined jackets, test out your music skills in recording booths, and watch videos of great performances from past Grammy awards.
The Space Shuttle Endeavor at the California Science Center
How To Get There: Take the Expo line to the Expo Park/USC station, and walk 5 minutes through the rose garden to the California Science Center.
After making 25 missions to space, the retired shuttle docked in the center in 2012. Madsen says, "This is one of the single biggest tourist attractions in Los Angeles now."
Do you know a hidden L.A. gem you can get to by train? Tell us about it in the comments!
Looking into the life and music of Myron Glasper
Over the past five years there's been a resurgence of Soul as a musical genre, with some of the more notable acts including Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.
But there's a retro soul album with a uniquely California sound that came out this week from two natives of the state — Myron and E.
Myron Glasper joined Take Two recently to talk about his career, and about growing up in South Central from a musical standpoint.
In 'The World's End,' director Edgar Wright laughs off the apocalypse
By now it's clear that British director Edgar Wright has a knack for making cult films, with "Shaun of the Dead," "Hot Fuzz" and "Scott Pilgrim Versus the World," to name a few.
His latest effort, "The World's End," is about five childhood friends who reunite as middle-aged men to re-live a notorious pub crawl from their school days. But, this being an Edgar Wright movie, nothing is quite as it seems.
By the end of the night, the quest to down 12 pints becomes a quest to save humanity.
The film marks the third of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy that started with "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz." The name is something of an inside joke: in each film a different flavor of Cornetto ice cream novelty appears, along with other repeated themes.
"If we wanted to get really pretentious, ... it's more of a triptych than a trilogy," said Wright on Take Two. "They're three standalone films, and you don't have to have seen the other two to enjoy 'The World's End.'"
Wright joined Take Two to talk about how he came up with this pub-crawling adventure, why we're obsessed with the apocalypse, and how Delta Airlines may have inspired his next film.
Interview Highlights:
On how he came up with the idea for "The World's End":
"I was 19. It's worth pointing out that the drinking age in the UK is 18. In my hometown, there were about 15 pubs, and the town is about a mile wide. I had the stupid idea — I was the instigator of the crawl that we should drink a pint at every one. I saw it as proving myself ... being a man, and I could take on the town and drink it dry. I managed a pathetic six out of those 15 pubs. Unlike in the movie, the pub crawl just stopped after pub six. I wandered off into the night to try and find the girl that I was seeing at the time. It was a spectacularly messy night, and it stuck with me enough that, when I was 21, I wrote a script about it, about teenagers going out drinking, which I never did anything with."
On the main theme of the film:
"In a way the whole theme of the film is you've got somebody who wants to be a teenager forever, who sees himself as a rebel, and sees his friends who have grown up as being sellouts."
On our obsession with the apocalypse:
"I think its been a thing that has been on people's minds since the millennium. What's interesting, I think, is that it comes from a general pessimism about our future as a race, that we are eating ourselves as a planet. I always attribute it to, when I was younger, sci-fi would be about going out there and exploring. I feel like a part of that died when the space race died. When you realize there is no space program anymore, and we're never going to live on another planet, and the aliens are not going to come to us, this is it. We've got to sort of figure it out for ourselves on Earth."
On balancing humor with dark themes, zombies and the end of the world:
"The characters can die, and they don't have to come back, but you want people to care about them. And so I think that's what makes the films work. There are real stakes in them. Most of the comedy comes from what we would think would be naturalistic reactions to extraordinary circumstances. One of the things in 'Shaun of the Dead,' we wanted the whole thing to have this sort of hungover feel to it, that the characters are hung over, so there's not nonchalance, but there's this delayed reaction."
On what connects the three films as a trilogy:
"I guess essentially if we wanted to get really pretentious, ... it's more of a triptych than a trilogy. They're three standalone films, and you don't have to have seen the other two to enjoy "The World's End.' But I think it came from the fact that we never wanted to do a sequel to 'Shaun of the Dead.' So the surface-level connections that people like to latch onto — the sillier things, like ice cream cropping up in all three of them, or fence jumping — in a way, when we were writing this movie, we had the idea for the story, and we realized that it actually tied up some themes that are in all three of them. Because all three of them are about growing up. All three of them are about perpetual adolescence and the dangers of that, and all of them are about an individual versus a collective."
On whether the team will be back with another film:
"One of the things we've tried to do with the three movies is get older onscreen, because I see so many comedies where people pretend to be 26 forever and pretend to be single, slacker guys when in truth they're husbands and fathers. I liked the idea with our movies that we play our own age. Usually we start talking about new ideas when we're waiting for a delayed domestic flight, so thanks, Delta Airlines, for helping us come up with our new movie."
Web Extra
Edgar Wright on how the film "Bugsy Malone" and the music of Paul Williams influenced his work:
"I love it, because I thought when I was a little kid, it seemed like the film I wanted to be in. There was a school production of 'Bugsy Malone' that I was in when I was 12, and I was one of Fat Sam's gang. The thing that I love about it still is that Paul Williams' songs are amazing.
"I've often thought, weirdly, when you get asked that morbid question, 'What would you like to have played at your funeral?' I always say, 'I'd like to have "So You Wanna Be A Boxer" play,' because I think when I'm dead it will be clear that I was never a boxer. So I think that's the song I'd like to have play at my funeral."
Summer Dish: How to make northern Thai 'hick food' aka Thai ceviche
This is the first in our series on summer dishes in Los Angeles. Listen to Take Two for more recipes on summertime eating in the coming weeks.
"It's like Thai hick food," says Night + Market chef Kris Yenbamroong about his favorite summer dish, koi tuna.
It's a mix of fresh tuna with fish sauce, sugar, chili and other pungeant ingredients, making it stinky, spicy, salty and sour. It won't cool you down during a hot summer's day, but Yenbamroong likes to embrace the sweat.
If you don't have a chance to join Kris for Dine LA, where he'll be serving the dish at his restaurant Night + Market in West Hollywood, you'll have a chance to make it yourself using the recipe below.
When you make this at home, make sure to mind the process. The layering of ingredients is important in Thai food, according to Yenbamroong.
The sweet and savory base provided by the sugar and fish sauce is accented by the sour of the lime and topped with little bursts of heat in the roughly chopped birds eye chilis. Pair it with warm coconut rice and an extra cold bud light or a light Beerlao.
Recipe:
Koi Tuna by Kris Yenbamroong from Night + Market in West Hollywood
Serves: 1-3 people
In a bowl add:
3/4 cup minced sashimi grade tuna
1 tbsp white table sugar
1 tbsp fish sauce
Thoroughly mix
Then add:
1 tbsp ground birds eye chili
1/2 cup roughly chopped cilantro
1/2 cup chopped scallions
Thoroughly mix
Then add:
1.5 tbsp of lime juice
1.5 tbsp of plara (fermented fish sauce)
2 tbsp roughly chopped lemon grass
2 tbsp roughly chopped kafir lime leaves
Finally, add:
A sprinkle of roughly chopped birds eye chili to taste
1 tbsp of rice powder
Lightly mix
Serve with warm coconut rice and a cold bud light or light beerlao.
Night + Market is located at 9041 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069. They're also participating in Dine LA - where you can pick up freshly made koi tuna, not found on their normal menu.
Foraging for food right in your own backyard
Instead of rushing off to the market, have you ever thought about the food growing all around you? Producer Meghan McCarty set out on a foraging expedition to find out which edible plants (and creatures) may be found right in our backyards.
Mugwort, hemlock and deadly nightshade sound like the ingredients for one of Harry Potter’s spells, but they’re actually all plants that grow wild right here in Southern California.
“Southern California is loaded with edible plants at every time of the year. So it’s like a real playground for flavors,” said Pascal Baudard, an expert at seeking out those flavors.
He’s a professional forager — he actually makes a living at it — collecting wild ingredients for L.A. chefs like Ludo Lefebvre and Michael Voltaggio. He also guides occasional classes on foraging in the L.A. area.
Baudard is no survivalist chomping on dried out twigs and berries. He’s actually quite the gourmet. He‘s teamed up with his partner, chef Mia Wasilevich, to put together a sophisticated menu of dishes to showcase the edibles we find while out collecting.
But before we eat, we’ve got to work up an appetite. So we head down the trail to look for food. We barely travel 100 feet before Baudard is off in the bushes, plucking off leaves and bending the boughs of trees to inspect their bounty.
“Those are wild cherries, and how do I find out if it is wild cherries? I’m gonna take the leaves and smell it. If it smells like almond, I know there is cyanide in the leaves.”
It seems every plant we pass has some culinary application, from white sage to elderflowers, to the storied deadly nightshade, which incidentally is not all that deadly
“It tastes like wild tomato … once it turns black,” says Baudard. “Like this, completely green it is poisonous … what do I do with it? I make spaghetti sauce”
It’s not just plants you can forage a meal from. Baudard clues us in on a special ingredient that is usually unwelcome at the dinner table: Ants.
“Did you know that we have 240 different species of ants? Some of them have floral quality to them some of them taste like lemon,” said Baudard.
But before you head for the hills and start stuffing your face with every insect and shrub you see, you should beware that nature can also be cruel.
“This is poison hemlock the most deadly plant in California,” said Baudard. “How much will kill you? A mouthful will kill you, maybe half a mouthful.”
After that sobering lesson it’s time to wind our way back to the picnic table for lunch, where Wasilevich has prepared quite a spread.
“So what we have today we have some little empanadas, or hand pies, that I made with some wild spinach, and a little bit of onion and garlic,” said Wasilevich. “Then we have some little roasted potatoes that we use our foothills spice blend. Over there is a watercress gazpacho and it has habanero salt. It’s survival food, fancy survival food.”
'The Drunken Botanist' and the plants behind your favorite drinks
If you've ever wondered what's in your stiff drink, author Amy Stewart may have an answer for you. In her new book, "The Drunken Botanist," Stewart writes about the fruits, flowers and herbs that go into our favorite alcoholic drinks.
Finding peace and quiet in South LA can be a challenge
South LA has one of the highest population densities in the county, and as more people get squeezed into an urban area, the less room there is to breathe and relax.
Not having a place to escape can sometimes lead to real health problems. KPCC's Jose Martinez reports.
'Fairyland': Memoir of a girl raised in San Francisco's gay community
In 1973, when she was just two years old, Alysia Abbott's mother was killed in a car accident. Her father, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott, decided to raise her on his own in San Francisco as a single parent in the midst of a cultural revolution.
Alysia Abbott writes about their relationship and what it was like growing up in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis in her new book, "Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father."
Abbott joins the show to talk about how she first learned her father was gay, what it was like growing up with a single gay father and why she chose that particular image for the cover of her book.
Interview Highlights:
On the photo on the cover of her book:
"It reminds me a bit of Tatum and Ryan O'Neal from 'Paper Moon,'" a father-daughter story. He takes her and they live on the road pulling schemes. I felt that was a little bit like my father and I. We were living outside the rules of society in our own private relationship and romance. So I see that romance in the photograph."
On when she first understood that her father was gay:
"Once I entered school, I started really taking notice of what families looked like and how they looked on television and how they looked in magazines. This is what a family looked like. I knew that I didn't have a mother, which I really wanted, so I, even at some points as a child, asked my dad why he couldn't date girls. He said that he had friends who were girls but he was more interested in boys, and that was a little hard for me...felt that I wanted a family that mirrored the families I saw around me.
On her parents' relationship:
"It was difficult for me when I found the journals showing the last year of my mother's life…I was too young when she died. So here I had this opportunity to see her living, but what I was seeing was a lot of tension between my parents. That he was in love with another man, and they were still together, but this love he had for this other man was so profound for my father that he would write love letters and poems to him. I think in my mind, growing up I had believed that my mother was the one he was madly in love with. Somehow, as a child, I foolishly believed that he was so in love with her that it turned him gay. He couldn't be with another woman because my mother died and it broke his heart so much."
On imagining what her live would've been like had her mother lived:
"I spent a lot of time imagining that as a child because I believed that it was more convenient for me to imagine an alternative world where my mother had lived, my parents would stay together, my father wouldn't be gay…But if she had lived, they may have divorced. If they had divorced, I may have lived with her…I wouldn't have lived with my father, and so much of who I am today is a product of being raised by my father. And I'm happy. It was a wonderful world that he created and brought me into."
On taking care of her father after he got AIDS:
"That chapter in our lives was coming off of my spending three and-a-half years abroad…I wasn't watching him decline, so by the time he wanted me to move out, I had a very hard time processing the reality that he was so sick he could die within six months to a year, because he was my everything. He was my mother, my father, my brother, my sister, he was my whole family. Ultimately, I'm really glad I had that opportunity."
Grand Performances: Why 21st Century libraries are anything but dull
L.A.'s library system is huge. Really huge. There are more than 70 branches, which are home to nearly 6.5 million publications, 3 million photographs and 30,000 electronic volumes.
For the past year now, John Szabo has been the man in charge of all those libraries. The chief librarian has received a lot of help though from Ken Brecher, president of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.
To many, the notion of librarians may bring to mind fastidious, pedantic sorts, or book nerds. And though John Szabo and Ken Brecher do love books, they are anything but dull.
Alex Cohen recently had the chance to spend some time chatting with the two of them as part of the Grand Performances series in downtown LA. She began the conversation with John Szabo, who told me about his earliest memories of the library.