Fifteen young musicians from L.A. are collaborating with counterparts from the Japanese region struck by disaster four years ago (pictured); Burger Records has built a mini-indie empire in Southern California; Alex Gibney's documentary about the Church of Scientology debuts on HBO.
Language barriers disappear as young musicians from LA and Japan unite
The multipurpose room of the Municipal Concert Hall in Soma, Japan was the site of some international cultural diplomacy on Thursday.
Fifteen members of the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, or YOLA — the music training program run under the aegis of the L.A. Philharmonic — are here in this small city — part of the Fukushima region — to perform with the local children's orchestra and chorus. The musicians will communicate mostly through music during the visit, but they gave old-fashioned verbal language a try.
The casually-dressed kids from L.A. sat in two rows facing an audience of around 75 Japanese student musicians and chorus members dressed in a variety of school uniforms, some of whom sported the white surgical masks commonly worn here.
The two youth orchestras were scheduled for a joint concert the following day. So, with introductions made, the world’s newest international orchestra promptly got to work.
String players rehearsed with El Sistema Japan conductor Yohei Asaoka, while brass, woodwinds and percussion rehearsed in another room with YOLA conductor Juan Felipe Molano.
While the two groups share the popular El Sistema training program developed in Venezuela, Molano says his L.A. students sometimes favor expressiveness over technique, but the Japanese group works a little differently. "They know which fingers they have to play and which bowing they have to play," he notes. "Maybe sometimes we are not so strict on that in Western countries."
Christine Witkowski, who runs YOLA at HOLA — the affiliated music program at the Heart of Los Angeles community center near MacArthur Park — sees this visit as an essential source of pride, not just for these kids but also for others from poor or marginalized communities who view them as role models.
As she explains: "I have students in my program at HOLA who have never been to the beach before. So to have the opportunity to be a world traveler and to feel valued as a person who can be an ambassador — it’s a really big sense of importance for the students."
Witkowski sees the visit as a boost for the Soma community as well, for a similar reason. "The children who’ve been affected by this nuclear disaster — a lot of people are afraid to come to Soma," she says. "This is an opportunity for those students to also realize that people care about them, that we’re not afraid to come here and share music with them."
The long-term impact of the disaster is clearly visible on a tour of Odaka, Fukishima, a town about 10 miles from the nuclear plant that suffered a meltdown after the tsunami four years ago. The town was evacuated and has since been closed to residents due to fears of radioactive contamination. The result is a ghost town.
Wall calendars in empty houses still show March, 2011. Long rows of bicycles are lined up by the train station, as if waiting for returning commuters. Yoko Okura, a journalist working with El Sistema Japan, explains: "People parked to get on the train, and then they left and they couldn’t come back. So the bicycles are still parked in front of the train station."
Okura says the government may allow residents to return to their homes sometime next year. How many of them will want to come back is unclear, as she says: "Because four years have already passed and people have already resettled, it’s a very difficult situation to see if the people would actually go back."
It’s an eerie and fascinating place, and it’s tempting to linger. But the kids are due to perform in just a few hours, so it’s back to the concert hall for final rehearsals.
At 5:30, the combined orchestras step onto the stage, under a banner decorated with Japanese and American flags.
On Sunday, these youth orchestras will be in Tokyo for a rehearsal in front of an audience, conducted by the L.A. Philharmonic's charismatic musical director, Gustavo Dudamel. So their one true performance is this one in Soma, given for their friends and families. It’s the concert the YOLA musicians have traveled across the Pacific Ocean to give.
Burger Records expands its indie music mini-empire
Burger Records is a tiny record shop in a beige business park in Fullerton. But don't let the storefront fool you. In the back of that unassuming record shop, Burger's music label is a thriving indie success.
The baby of rock 'n' roll-worshiping entrepreneurs Sean Bohrman and William Lee Rickard, the Burger label is known for its DIY, kooky sensibility. Burger releases albums on cassette, puts on a dizzying number of rock shows and has its own YouTube show, BRGRTV.
"We're still learning what we're doing," says Burger co-founder Sean Bohrman, sitting on the well-loved couch behind the record store. "But when we started, it was just to put out our music. And then we learned, Oh we can do this, so we started putting out other bands' music."
When Bohrman and Rickard decided to make Burger a full-time enterprise, it meant Bohrman had to quit his job as an art director at a boating and fishing magazine.
"I worked there for about four-and-a-half years and [Thee] Make Out Party, our band, was going to go on tour and the economy had gone bad, so they weren't going to hire a temp to take my place while I was gone. So I quit my job and cashed out my 401K and opened up Burger Records," Bohrman says.
Under the Burger Records label, Bohrman and Rickard release cassettes, CDs and vinyl albums. In the world of indie label successes, Burger is the shabby, homegrown outfit that prevailed. And Bohrman says they've accomplished all of this out of a drab business park in Orange County.
"We work non-stop, constantly," Bohrman says "From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed at 4 a.m. or whatever. It's just non-stop Burger all the time."
Bohrman says there are about 800 Burger bands right now, working in one way or another with their label, which is known globally. "We've sold tapes and records to almost every single continent," he says. "Except Antarctica."
Bohrman and Rickard were early supporters of acts such as Ty Segall, Bleached and Cherry Glazerr— all of which have released albums on labels other than Burger. But Rickard says that's okay.
"It's surreal, our friends [are] growing — as they should," Rickard says. "We believe in all of our artists and really think that they're stars and have a lot of charisma and character. That's our jobs is, you know, to find the gems."
And the Burger universe is expanding. Just this month, Bohrman and Rickard opened a new outpost in L.A.'s Cypress Park neighborhood. The shop is called Gnarburger and it's a partnership between Burger and another indie label originally based in Portland called Gnar Tapes.
Bohrman says it's about time they expanded up north: "We knew that if we did open a shop in L.A. that it would get a good response, because a lot of people don't want to drive all the way down to Orange County."
L.A.-based Burger fans will be driving to Orange County soon though. This weekend Burger puts on its yearly music festival, Burgerama, at The Observatory in Santa Ana.
"It's our biggest show we've ever done, we've ever conceived," Bohrman says.
Bands performing this year include Burger staples Cherry Glazerr and Ty Segall, but also rock veterans Roky Erickson and Weezer.
"When Sean and I were both kids we had Weezer's 'Blue Album' on cassette and CD," Rickard says. "We got to make a tape just this last year of their new album. And that was a dream come true to be able to get Weezer on Burger."
But after this weekend's festival is over, Bohrman and Rickard will keep cheering on bands, whether in the O.C., L.A., or Australia for that matter. It's an important part of what they do at Burger, and the importance isn't lost on Rickard.
"It turns us on and it keeps us excited just bringing like-minded people together to create a community and a family and stuff like that," he says. "In the future I hope we have a cool spot ... a landmark that people can come [to] ... The Burgerland or the Burgertown or the Burger joint."
Bohrman and Rickard don't have any set plans for Burgerland just yet. But, gauging by the rate of their expansion, who knows?
'Going Clear': Scientology doc director Alex Gibney says drones are 'God's Louma crane'
HBO will air Alex Gibney’s documentary Sunday about The Church of Scientology: It’s titled "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.”
The film, which is based on a book by Lawrence Wright, made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It was an event that had a massive turnout and generated public shaming by the Church, namely through full page ads in the New York Times and L.A. Times. You can go back and hear part one of our interview with Gibney on The Frame website.
In part two of our interview, Gibney talks with The Frame host John Horn about the importance that drones played in the filming of his documentary, and he describes finding a long-lost piece of archival footage featuring Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
The Church of Scientology has released the following statement in response to Alex Gibney's film.
Full Interview Q&A
I want to ask about the archival footage that you found. There’s a lot of footage of David Miscavige at what looked to be — I think, to a lay person — they looked like a sales meeting at Herbalife. They are these rallies, these pep rallies. Was that something that you found pretty early or what did you think was kind of your great find in terms of tracking down archival footage?
Some of that we found early, but we kept finding more and more of that material, sometimes even on the Russian Internet. The other great find for us was there had been out in the ether, a black and white interview with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, conducted by a guy from Granada TV. What nobody knew until we finally reached this person was that there were outtakes of that interview and we were able to get those outtakes, which contained some rather really interesting stuff. And so, that was also a great find for us.
This is where L. Ron Hubbard thinks he’s off the record?
Yes, and confesses that there were abuses in the church, which I think everybody will find interesting, particularly those devout members.
One of your fellow documentarians, Laura Poitras, was talking to us not that long ago about making "Citizenfour" and the degree to which she had to safeguard her film to protect it from people who she thought would try to meddle with it. Did you have similar concerns or issues in the making of this film and what did you do?
We did. And we employed safeguards in the cutting room in terms of the way we were or were not connected to the Internet and also in terms of how we conducted our business and emails and so forth and so on. So, yeah. I don’t think we were as assiduous as Laura has been, but we certainly took precautions.
Two of your previous films were about Lance Armstrong and Julian Assange and they were both very preoccupied with their image, probably about as much about their image as their work and their lives. Is the Church of Scientology in some way similar to Lance Armstrong and Julian Assange in terms of the way they wanted to manage and manipulate their image?
Yes, and it’s particularly important to them not so much for how the outside world sees them, but how their declining membership sees them. It’s terribly important that they keep their membership inside the Scientology bubble and also terribly important that they convince their membership they’re doing everything they can to attack these scurrilous critics, so that the membership never becomes disillusioned.
There’s been a lot of talk on many different levels about the use of drones —militarily, for Amazon to drop packages. Your film uses drones. "Prophet's’ Prey," Amy Berg’s film uses drones. "Cartel Land" uses drones. How important are drones to documentary filmmaking right now?
Well, right now, they’re the flavor of the month. I think people will get tired of them, but they do afford you a rather unique opportunity. It’s almost like God’s Louma crane. Suddenly, you come up over a tree as we have done to show the blue building of Scientology and it’s a pretty dramatic shot and then you can fly over it. You know, Spanky Taylor, who’s one of the women interviewed in the film, talks about how they used to have to sleep on these wet mattresses on the roof of the building and we can glide over the roof. So, it’s pretty dramatic and it can be very, very useful in a lot of instances.
And if you had knocked on the front door of the Church of Scientology and said, ‘We want to fly over, can we get some shots of the inside,’ it probably would have said no?
Probably. And otherwise, in another environment without drones, we would have been limited to a tripod on the street, which is not nearly as exciting as God’s Louma crane.
There were a number of very prominent former members of the Church who are in the documentary. What were the conversations that you had with them to convince them to go on camera and is there now kind of a wave of people, is there a kind of group momentum about people finally willing to tell the story?
I think there is a tipping point on account of [Lawrence Wright’s] book and also the film and we’re starting to hear from more and more former members. In terms of my conversations with some of the people who agreed to appear, I think they wanted to be assured that I was going to treat them as smart, sentient human beings, not as wingnuts and just doing a deep dive into the wild stuff that happens in the Church. Because I think one of the things about the film is it tracks their journey and all of them are pretty smart people. And that’s what’s interesting about it is how did they and by extension all of us fall into these belief systems. So that was, I think, the key for them, to know that I was going to treat them with a degree of empathy.
When you were making your film about Lance Armstrong, "The Armstrong Lie," you were working with a couple of producers — Frank Marshall and Matt Tolmach — who had, I think it’s fair to say, slightly different opinions about how heroic or unheroic Lance Armstrong is. On this film, you’re working with Lawrence Wright, who’s very close to the subject; how did you resolve any differences of opinion that you had with Lawrence Wright about the direction of the film since he’s really your right hand man in the making of this film?
I think, like in anything, once you get into making a film, the film ultimately has to have a logic and a kind of momentum, narrative momentum, of its own. And so while I relied on Larry a lot, particularly because he did such a thorough job of research, nevertheless in terms of making the film we had to go on our own journey. And I think, frankly, the film started out as a sort of simple abuse-of-power film and then became a film that was kind of a portrait of these people and how they got in and also how they got out. Because by the end of the film, what’s really interesting is you see this momentum where some of them get out and then they reach other people who are out and they say, ‘We gotta do something about this to let other people know of the horrible things that are going on inside.’
And getting out is not easy, I mean, there’s a scene where somebody is actually chased down the street by a security guard as she’s trying to escape the Church.
That’s right. The Church has a practice of disconnection whereby if you decide to leave the Church, particularly on terms that the Church doesn’t like, you go out as a critic, they try to ensure that you’re disconnected from all those who are close to you, particularly family members. And that is a really terrifying thing for people. I mean, imagine a world where you know that if you walk out, if you take an action, that suddenly none of your family members are going to talk to you anymore, and it keeps a lot of people in. So, it’s very hard to break free of that. One of the people in the film, Mike Rinder, who used to be the spokesperson from the Church, talks about how he lost his entire family.
The Church is famously litigious, famously litigious with the Internal Revenue Service. Were there any people that you tried to get to or footage you tried to get where the Church was successful in blocking those people or that footage from getting into your film?
In the case of people, there were a lot of people who were afraid that the Church might come after them. And they were afraid often because they had signed these NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, that the Church often pressures people to sign. I think they’re not legally enforceable, but many people fear that the Church will come after them and ruin their lives. So, in the case of people in particular, that was a real concern, and that’s why I hope that this film will encourage other people to come out and start speaking up.
Is that what you hope the takeaway from the film is, that people who are in the Church will be able to leave? Is that your goal or what is your goal for this film?
Yeah, I think there are particular abuses that the Church is responsible for that need to be highlighted and they should be stopped. And the best way of stopping them is to have many, many more people speaking out. And there’s this issue of the fact that we’re all paying, in effect, for the Church because they’re a tax-exempt organization, which seems to be — that tax exemption seems to be supporting these abuses and that should be a concern for all of us. So, those are two big things. But I think also more broadly, I hope the film focuses all of us, in a period of time where you can see more and more kind of intense fanaticism, focuses all of us on the need for healthy doubt so that none of us end up aiding and abetting the kind of abuses that the Church of Scientology is responsible for.