John Rabe
Off-Ramp host John Rabe shares his thoughts on arts, culture, and life in L.A.
Latest Entries
FOO (Friend of Off-Ramp) Michael Sigman working to connect you and me in new community building project
6:00 a.m.|John Rabe|0 comments
I got an e-mail from my friend Michael Sigman, the former LA Weekly Publisher, announcing he’s starting a series blogs on a "Creating Community In Los Angeles" project he’s working on in conjunction with HuffPost.
“Alienation and rootlessness are so deeply ingrained in Angelenos' psyches -- partly because so many of us are transplants -- as to be almost a badge of honor. … But there's nothing cool about the isolating ripple effects of massive unemployment and the shuttering of hundreds of community-oriented government programs and non-profits. … Throw in long-term trends -- like ever-increasing traffic congestion; technologies like Facebook, Twitter and texting that discourage actual human contact and allow people to work at home; and the conversion of locally-owned shops to one-size-fits-all chain franchises -- and you've got a city where finding community is tougher than ever.”
Michael is advocating using the technology for good – to set up stuff like neighborhood emergency plans.
My only quibble with Michael is the use of the heinous term “random acts of kindness.” We need to be more deliberate than ever to get everyone out of the slump – or at least let us survive it.
(Check out John's weekly show Off-Ramp.)
Feb. 8, 2010|John Rabe|0 comments
We’re moving to a new building, so I’m cleaning out my office at KPCC’s downtown Los Angeles bureau.
Besides shoveling a year’s worth of paper off the desktop, I threw out six or seven trees worth of paper files – including the one I made for my 2001 interview with John Adams, the minimalist composer with the close relationship with the LA Philharmonic, who is also the world’s most-performed living composer.
Back then, he was in town to conduct “Nixon in China” and a new composition, the piano concerto “Century Rolls.” I had utterly forgotten that he voiced a promo for us for broadcast, but I’d also forgotten that he wrote the promo in his own hand! (I must have dictated it to him; I recognize my spare style.)
It says, in case you don’t read Composer:
“Hi, I’m J A. On the next All Things Considered on KPCC I’ll be talking about Los Angeles Phil featuring Nixon in China and my new piano concerto, “Century Rolls.”
(Check out John's weekly show Off-Ramp.)
Feb. 8, 2010|John Rabe|0 comments
Don't let this happen to you!
This week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine led to another in my long series of letters to the editor that will never be published … in the New York Times.
A bunch of people wrote in to the paper to respond to James Patterson Inc., an article about James Patterson, whose publisher has permanently assigned him an entire staff because he cranks out a lot of books that make a lot of money.
Some excerpts from the reaction:
-- Is this “literature”? No. (Joan Larsen, Park Forest, Ill.)
-- James Patterson may be many things … but he is not a writer. (Wheeler Winston Dixon, Film Studies Professor, University of Nebraska)
-- Calling James Patterson an author is like calling Fox News news. Technically true, but certainly disingenuous. (Scott Schilling, Fairfield, Conn.)
My response to the paper:
I know you don't usually print letters about letters, but one aspect of the response to James Patterson demands response. It's disheartening to see people proclaim that Patterson "is not a writer," that it's "disingenuous" to call him an author, and that his work isn't "literature."
These comments sound suspiciously like "rap isn't music." They said the same things about Impressionism and jazz and a billion other things ... including the movies, Professor Dixon.
Patterson is an author, and he is a writer. Now, maybe he's not a good writer, or an author whose work will be around in 2110. History will judge, or critics are welcome to weigh in today. But in the meantime, such absolutist statements do nothing to further the understanding of culture and the people who avail themselves of it, which is the real job of Academia and arts journalism - not building a protective and exclusionary wall around the Culture Canon that happens to be your field of expertise.
Perversely, this kind of attitude runs the risk of driving fans of pop lit from ever considering books deemed "literature," whatever that means.
Furthermore, I'd like to hear from somebody who has proof that excluding anyone in a creative field from being considered a "true artist" has ever been helpful. Has it ever fostered greater understanding among people, or led to a greater understanding of a genre or movement, or won somebody a Pulitzer or Nobel?
All it does is make you the grumpy old man on the front porch, yelling at kids who cut across your lawn.
(Check out John's weekly show Off-Ramp.)
Feb. 7, 2010|John Rabe|0 comments
I still don’t know what to make of the junked tv’s. (See previous blog entry.) In my neighborhood, if something still works, people leave it gently by the curb, which discounts the theory that people are replacing their old tube tv’s with LCD or plasma models and tossing the old ones. The question remains: why so many broken tv’s?
This one graces an already problem area - the old Cypress Park library, which has been boarded up for about ten years now:
This one is on the way to the Bilingual Center for the Arts on Avenue 19:
And my neighbor Oscar is pretty pissed about this one, on the verge fronting the lot he uses for a garden. This is just the latest junk others have dumped here:
Check out John's weekly show Off-Ramp.
Feb. 6, 2010|John Rabe|0 comments
We headed out after the big rain Saturday morning, stopping at Egret Park off Riverside Drive. The river was really a river, and in an angry mood.
Here’s the movie:
And here’s the movie on YouTube for those of you with iPhones.
Check out John's weekly show Off-Ramp.
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