Off-Ramp

Rabe’s "Vast Wasteland Project" takes shape. Guggenheim app to come to document abandoned TV sets.

By John Rabe | March 2, 2010 | 5 comments

WARNING: By reading this blog, you are participating in an art project.

As you may know if you’ve read this blog at all regularly, I’ve been looking for some traction for my ongoing photo essay on the abandoned television sets of Lincoln Heights and Cypress Park.

On Monday I wrote, “So far, no calls from Taschen or the Annenberg photo center. Maybe because of the glaring lack on conflict or even the vaugest narrative thread. No arc, as they say.”

So when Kevin Roderick charitably linked to the blog on LA Observed, I took it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a sign to get a move on.

I e-mailed Mark, a professional grant-writing friend, about how I might take this further. Mark wrote back:

“A Guggenheim Fellowship, I think: an artist transplanted from the Midwest to LA wants a grant to drive around California to document the state's love/hate relationship with television, as expressed through a certain physicality, an undeniable confrontation with the physical reality of television: when you hate more than just what television represents, but the structure itself and what it represents in your living space. What is it, exactly, we're kicking to the curb here?”

Eureka! And other California towns!

In other words, Mr. Guggenheim, how did we get from here …

(“A small child stands with his hand on one of the new Hoffman TV sets.” LA Public Library photo archive.)

… in which the television set becomes a part of the family, trusted with our children, the nation’s future … and here …

(“Picture of a console model of a Hoffman 19" TV set in a living room setting, with blonde wood. This is Model 896. A picture of a girl with a horse is shown on the screen. LA Public Library photo archive.)

... in which the television becomes an integral part of The American Home, the "blonde wood" of the set mirroring the American ideal of beauty … to here ...

(March, 2010. Cypress Park, abandoned television. Vast Wasteland Project, (C) 2010 John Rabe.)

... where the beloved televisions of the past are so much trash, have themselves become, in essence, the “vast wasteland” that Newton Minnow bemoaned in his famous oration on the evils of television so many years ago. Indeed, “What is it, exactly, we're kicking to the curb here?”

The Guggenheim application period doesn’t open for a few more months, so I’ll keep you posted.

(Check out John's weekly show Off-Ramp.)

Power Trio: Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Lopez, and John Rabe tour LAMP, talk homelessness.

By John Rabe | March 2, 2010

(L-R: LAMP Interim Executive Director Shannon Murray, Jon Bon Jovi, LA Times columnist Steve Lopez, KPCC’s John Rabe. I know it’s blurry. I didn’t take the picture.)

If you’re a big Bon Jovi fan, you know that Jon Bon Jovi’s Soul Foundation does a lot for homeless people. If you’re a former 1980s DJ who played Bon Jovi back then but wasn’t really into their music all that much, it might come as a surprise.

I’m in the latter camp, and now my eyes are open. The LA Times’ Steve Lopez (read his Skid Row stories here) got me invited to Jon’s tour of LAMP Monday afternoon. (Bon Jovi is in SoCal for the band’s big concert tour, and plays Staples Center Thursday.) Turns out Bon Jovi has been seriously working on the issue for years, since a day he saw a homeless man asleep in front of Philly’s city hall and said to himself, “I can do something about this.”

We’ll have audio of the tour later this week on Morning Edition and All Thing Considered, and then much more this weekend on Off-Ramp.

(Of this photo, Steve Lopez said, “While I am several years older than Jon, it’s interesting that we have exactly the same hair.”)

For the fans: JBJ is a really good looking 48-year old (DOB: 3/2/1962). Medium height, good hair, lean like Montgomery Clift, but with better arms. And best of all, smart and well-spoken. Here he is outside LAMP:

What I also liked: he wouldn’t sign some non-homeless jerk’s guitar, which was obviously destined for e-Bay, but he gladly and graciously signed autographs for homeless guys.

(Check out John's weekly show Off-Ramp.)