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e0103cab5e9b44b13c73719bbe9eada5
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9819-story.html
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One for the Road: Raise a Glass to the Class of ’90
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One for the Road: Raise a Glass to the Class of ’90
A look back at places where we had a few in 1990:
Vern’s Cornhusker Club and Suds Pub, 645 S. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Open daily 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. (714) 526-5428. Pitchers of beer, shoestring potatoes, pool and a juke that gives you three for a quarter. Don’t bother changing out of your work shirt.
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1fc5c2d6328defd0b4cf9aced09a32d2
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9820-story.html
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El Mexi-Rock Cafe, 28411 Marguerite Parkway, Mission...
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El Mexi-Rock Cafe, 28411 Marguerite Parkway, Mission...
El Mexi-Rock Cafe, 28411 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Open Monday through Saturday 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. (714) 364-6674. By day it’s just another pastel-colored Mexican restaurant. But after 9 p.m., the rather small dance floor is generally packed with a youthful mix ranging from long-haired rockers to close-shaved hip-hoppers. The sound system is good, meaning that the only place for intimate conversation is out in the parking lot.
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2131547d6e883e83b7bc76071e19db2b
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9821-story.html
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The Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams Ave....
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The Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams Ave....
The Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams Ave. (at Manchester Avenue), Anaheim. Open Monday through Saturday, 1 p.m. to 2 a.m. (714) 533-1286. Top 40 is strictly prohibited, it’s too loud and cramped to ever be a pickup joint, and its grunge-over-glitz motif is the antithesis of all those peach-stucco and neon yuppie hangouts. It’s also the best place in O.C. to hear avant-rock, drink Guinness and shoot pool.
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757c20a882bc74d740b6a4b17fb9adf1
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9822-story.html
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The Royal Hawaiian, 331 N. Coast Highway,...
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The Royal Hawaiian, 331 N. Coast Highway,...
The Royal Hawaiian, 331 N. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. Open Tuesday through Saturday from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. (714) 494-8001. Blowfish lamps, mahala mats and potent exotic drinks make this the next best thing to a tropical vacation. Go early (it’s a popular spot) and sip slowly, some concoctions are lethal. Cannons, 34344 Street of the Green Lantern, Dana Point. Open Monday through Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays till 11 p.m., Sundays from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. (714) 496-6146. Perched on sandstone bluffs high above Dana Point Harbor and Capistrano Bay, Cannons restaurant is known for its spectacular view. In the bar--choose either the tiled, outside patio or an inside lounge with lots of windows--drinks are a bit pricey, but on a clear day a visit here is more like a field trip than a pub crawl.--F.M.
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836f6c5c91713015267af72e5f20dfe4
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9823-story.html
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Birraporetti’s, 3333 Bristol St. (in South Coast...
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Birraporetti’s, 3333 Bristol St. (in South Coast...
Birraporetti’s, 3333 Bristol St. (in South Coast Plaza, near Sears), Costa Mesa. Open daily from 11 a.m. Last call is 1:30 a.m. (714) 860-9090. A gleaming, upscale watering hole with lots of room to stretch out and a hassle-free environment. It attracts a somewhat cosmopolitan clientele, but if your idea of a bar is to jockey for room along with lots of vivacious, talkative people, well . . . have you thought of moving to Chicago?
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425c7a9d164e5713ff61211aa087fea2
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9824-story.html
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The Place (Mike’s Sports Bar), 2920 E....
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The Place (Mike’s Sports Bar), 2920 E....
The Place (Mike’s Sports Bar), 2920 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar. Open daily, 10 a.m. to midnight. (714) 644-0210. Three satellite dishes, seven small TV screens, sports memorabilia on the walls and famous athletes dropping by for a visit. Make no mistake, this is an all-sports bar.
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6c40f8c0a9af7b14d7de89b7479a0fcf
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9829-story.html
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Cook’s Corner, 19122 El Toro Road, El...
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Cook’s Corner, 19122 El Toro Road, El...
Cook’s Corner, 19122 El Toro Road, El Toro. Open daily 8 a.m. (bar opens at 9:30 a.m.) to 2 a.m. (714) 858-0266. If you’re looking for ferns and mineral water, don’t come here. It’s strictly beer, wine and pool at this, one of the few remaining country bars in O.C., suitably rough around the edges but with an endearing simplicity. Just don’t be frightened off by the swarm of Harley-Davidsons parked near the patio.
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0e73a389788fea8fec79809b0a045df3
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9831-story.html
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The Sunrise, 701 N. El Camino Real,...
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The Sunrise, 701 N. El Camino Real,...
The Sunrise, 701 N. El Camino Real, San Clemente. Open daily from 6 a.m., Monday and Tuesday till 7 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday till 8 p.m., Sunday till 4:30 p.m. (714) 498-6379. Huge helpings, continual coffee refills, prompt and friendly service and a menu that features, but certainly isn’t limited to, 20 omelet combos help make this the brunch house of choice in South County. Sonny’s Pizza & Pasta, 429 N. El Camino Real, San Clemente. Open daily 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. (714) 498-2540. Perfect for a Sunday dinner with the kids, or a see-the-neighborhood visit with out-of-town relatives. Service is fast, helpings are large and pretty much everything is inexpensive and tasty. Pizza, pasta dishes and sandwiches are supplemented by such daily specials as lasagna, seafood tortellini and tortellini Alfredo.
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372379b57657c7e84202a8f5721ff74c
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9835-story.html
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Chelsea’s Choice, 777 S. Main St. 125,...
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Chelsea’s Choice, 777 S. Main St. 125,...
Chelsea’s Choice, 777 S. Main St. 125, Santa Ana. Open Monday through Friday 6:15 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday 7:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. (714) 972-9171. 3025 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar. Open daily 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday from 7 a.m.. (714) 675-7870. A cheerful place to sit awhile with a good cup of coffee, a newspaper and a tasty muffin. No day that starts here can be all bad.
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df5b145fc5ed6b1d68394c451460e770
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9838-story.html
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“Hope and Glory” (1987), directed by John...
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“Hope and Glory” (1987), directed by John...
“Hope and Glory” (1987), directed by John Boorman. 113 minutes. Rated PG-13. War from the perspective of an awe-struck youth, a 7-year-old London boy roaming like a terrier, sniffing out fresh shrapnel to add to his collection, escaping his basement shelter to see the bombs exploding--the best fireworks ever. Yet Boorman never turns war into something flip or trivial.
“Things Change” (1988), directed by David Mamet. 100 minutes. Rated R. An Italian shoemaker (Don Ameche) agrees to take the rap for a mob hit, but gets one last fling with the low-level Mafioso (Joe Mantegna) assigned to protect him. It’s a comic tarantella with a soft-shoe style, and lots of little moments that make up for sentimental excesses.
“The Thing” (1951), directed by Christian Nyby. 87 minutes. No rating. Among the first in a spate of ‘50s sci-fi films, this black-and-white movie is said to have inspired many contemporary filmmakers and movies. It’s intentionally spare and direct, but there’s wit in the script: the alien turns out to be a vegetable, of all things.
“Vampire’s Kiss” (1989), directed by Robert Bierman. 96 minutes. Rated R. A contemporary spin on the vampire fantasy, with Nicolas Cage as a neurotic New Yorker who thinks a one-night stand (Jennifer Beals) has turned him into Dracula. May be too offbeat for devoted horror fans, but this clever, cartoon-ish metaphor has bite.
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e14c53c1ba14e485fc1d993399d52b5e
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9841-story.html
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“Manhunter” (1986), directed by Michael Mann. 120...
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“Manhunter” (1986), directed by Michael Mann. 120...
“Manhunter” (1986), directed by Michael Mann. 120 minutes. Rated R. A stylish, intensely suspenseful psycho-thriller (from the director of “Miami Vice " and “Crime Story”) about a cop tracking a bizarre serial killer by discovering the killer instinct within himself. With “Crime Story’s” Dennis Farina and Stephen Lang.
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1dd006fd748b92e98c5317770da8be18
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9844-story.html
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Cinematic Plums Ripe for the Plucking on the Store Shelves
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Cinematic Plums Ripe for the Plucking on the Store Shelves
A look back at videos we checked out in 1990:
“The Tin Drum” (1979), directed by Volker Schlondorff. 142 minutes. Rated R. An often quirky look at a society gone mad (Nazi Germany) and a child’s way of coping through incessant drumming and high-pitched screams.
“Fandango” (1985), directed by Kevin Reynolds, 91 minutes. Rated PG. Critics panned this, one of Kevin Costner’s first movies, because they said it went nowhere. But who says a movie has to go anywhere? This tale of five graduating Texas college students contemplating their futures is poignant and adventurous.
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b2c42929a3d724e4f4f40cd730d3ca3f
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-ol-9848-story.html
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Bar and Grill Opens With Varied Menu and Sunset Vistas
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Bar and Grill Opens With Varied Menu and Sunset Vistas
Just in time for New Year’s, the Main Street Bar and Grill is open in the Pierside Pavilion at Huntington Beach. Located on the second floor, the restaurant offers plenty of terrace seating and stunning sunset views. There’s a contemporary grill ambience with marble floors, granite tables and an exhibition kitchen with counter seating. The eclectic menu ranges from appetizers, soups, salads and sandwiches to seafood and other main courses. And because the menu is served all day, you can have a dinner entree at noon or a salad in the evening. A la carte prices range from $6.95 for a salad to $29.95 for a certified Black Angus steak (the average price is about $15). Open daily for lunch, dinner and late supper at Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway. (714) 840-6518.
Meanwhile, Maxwell’s, just across PCH, remains open during the removal of the Huntington Beach Pier; it, too, offers a grandstand view. (714) 536-2555.
Splashes has made a splash right on the beach at the Surf and Sand Hotel in Laguna Beach. Less expensive and more casual (but no beachwear, please) than the hotel’s glamorous Towers restaurant, Splashes accents contemporary Mediterranean cuisine. The a la carte menu includes such starters as shrimp and mushrooms wrapped in phyllo crust with arugula salad. Entrees include roast lamb with vegetable tart and tomato-coriander sauce, roast striped bass with fennel, and grilled rib-eye steak with Banyuls (a sweet fortified wine) sauce. There are 40 wines from the smaller wineries of Italy, France and California. Currently open nightly for dinner, Splashes will soon add breakfast and lunch. 1555 S. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. (714) 497-4477.
The popular Kim Wu, former chef at the now-defunct La Chinoise in Lake Forest, is now chef at Fortune in South Coast Plaza Village, Santa Ana. Does this mean we can go into Fortune and order Peking duck without giving 24 hours’ notice, as we did in the old days at Wu’s Peking Duck restaurant in Orange? “Absolutely,” he says. Reservations: (714) 850-9008.
Here’s consolation for devotees who miss Showley-Wrightson, which closed in Newport Beach last spring. Your favorite S-W salads now are available at Sgt. Pepperoni’s Pizza Store in Newport Beach. Sgt. Pep’s gourmand owners, Eastbluff residents Dave and Vivian Patterson, were fans and friends of the Showleys and they enticed Delia Hernandez, who made S-W’s salads for nine years, to join them. Four different salads are available daily from a repertoire of 11 (examples: Thai chicken salad, lemon basil pasta, Tex Mex potato) by the scoop or by the pound. Or order a deli salad platter--your choice of any three for $5.45.
Incidentally, the Pattersons (who recently sold their Irvine and Tustin stores to concentrate on the Newport location) also have introduced “California-style” pizzas to the restaurant: Thai chicken, goat cheese and Gorgonzola/walnut, to name a few. 2300 Bristol St. (714) 852-9500.
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21b61cd4158b8f12b846dbdcdf910ce4
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10016-story.html
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Football
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Football
The Cleveland Browns have placed running back Brent Fullwood on waivers, making him free to sign with any NFL team. The Browns traded a low pick in the 1991 draft to Green Bay on Oct. 9 for Fullwood, who was the featured running back in the Packers’ offense last season. The former Auburn star was with the Browns for 10 games and never had a carry.
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60efabee132dd47b994e988dd965da5a
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10019-story.html
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LPGA’s Farr Has a Recurrence of Cancer, to Undergo Treatment
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LPGA’s Farr Has a Recurrence of Cancer, to Undergo Treatment
Heather Farr, who tried to make a comeback on the LPGA Tour this year after breast cancer surgery in 1989, has had a recurrence of the disease and will undergo chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.
“My breast cancer has returned inside the bone,” Farr, 25, said Wednesday. “There is a spot in the back of my skull and a spot in a back vertebrae.”
The former Arizona State player was coming off her most successful year on the LPGA Tour when her condition was diagnosed as breast cancer in July of 1989, and she underwent a mastectomy. She received a clean bill of health this summer, but she had to stop golfing in November because of a pain in her back. Now she finds that even common chores are becoming difficult. Still she is hopeful.
“They caught it at such an early stage that all my organs are functioning perfectly and have no traces of disease,” she said.
Farr will begin chemotherapy, probably next week, at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for about six weeks and then will move on to the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver for the bone marrow transplant.
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69f8380dbd64c2329437a2b849de36a4
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10024-story.html
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BOWL REPORT : CITRUS BOWL : Nebraska to Start Grant at Quarterback
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BOWL REPORT : CITRUS BOWL : Nebraska to Start Grant at Quarterback
Nebraska Coach Tom Osborne named Mike Grant as his starting quarterback for the Citrus Bowl game Tuesday in Orlando, Fla., against Georgia Tech. Osborne chose Grant over Tom Haase after Mickey Joseph suffered a severe leg laceration in the last game of the regular season against Oklahoma.
Grant was Nebraska’s starter in the season opener against Baylor but had a bruised knee that cost him the next two games. He returned as the starter in the fourth and fifth games but was then replaced by Joseph the rest of the regular season.
“It doesn’t matter who the quarterback is, you’ve still got to stop their offense,” Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Ross said. “He’s (Grant) a great football player and has a good arm. He’s a better thrower than Joseph.”
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d910c1cc40ff868409c71c7e6120edc4
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10029-story.html
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PRO FOOTBALL REPORT : WEEKDAY UPDATE : Around the NFL : Montana Gets Clearance to Start
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PRO FOOTBALL REPORT : WEEKDAY UPDATE : Around the NFL : Montana Gets Clearance to Start
Quarterback Joe Montana has been given medical clearance to start for the San Francisco 49ers Sunday at the Metrodome against the Minnesota Vikings.
Montana, who aggravated a groin injury before last Sunday’s 13-10 loss to the Saints, returned to practice Wednesday.
“I feel we will go with same plan we had going into the last ballgame,” Coach George Seifert said. “He’ll start the game and play about a half, followed by Steve Young.
“Now if something came up and we didn’t like what was taking place, for whatever reasons, then we could limit that. By tomorrow I might change my mind, but that’s the way I feel right now. He’s OK . . . He can go.”
Montana hinted that his not suiting up last Sunday was more a precautionary measure than anything else.
“I can move, throw and do just about everything,” he said. “They (medical experts) were just making sure what it was cleared before I did anything (to cause further damage). I was only going to play a half anyway, so why take a chance?”
The Washington Redskins said running back Gerald Riggs and perhaps another player would be activated to fill the gaps created by the absence of three players sidelined by injuries for Sunday’s home game against Buffalo.
Running back Kelvin Bryant, defensive lineman Eric Williams, and cornerback Sidney Johnson will sit out, and defensive end Markus Koch is listed as questionable.
The loss of Williams and Koch would cost the Redskins half of their starting defensive line. Tackle Tracy Rocker might be activated in their absence. Defensive end Charles Mann also sat out practice Wednesday with a sore knee but is expected to play. Wide receiver Art Monk and linebacker Kurt Gouveia also did not practice but are expected to play.
Bryant’s sprained knee appears to be the most serious of the injuries, and Riggs, who practiced Wednesday for the first time since spraining a foot arch Nov. 12, may take his place. Bryant may go to the injured list.
“Gerald looked good,” Gibbs said. “My guess is (activating him) is what we’d do.”
Injuries also forced assistant coach Jim Hanifan to shuffle players along the offensive line, as he has all but one week this season. Guards Mark Schlereth and Raleigh McKenzie have sprained ankles, so Mark Adickes and Russ Grimm may take their place as blockers.
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403d5b1f782c3d67f3e9d4303fe569cf
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10030-story.html
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PRO FOOTBALL REPORT : WEEKDAY UPDATE : RAIDERS : Henning Defends Quarterback Move
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PRO FOOTBALL REPORT : WEEKDAY UPDATE : RAIDERS : Henning Defends Quarterback Move
Kansas City Chief fans no doubt are upset that the San Diego Chargers have chosen to start rookie quarterback John Friesz against the Raiders this Sunday at the Coliseum.
If the Chiefs beat Chicago on Saturday, they can win the AFC West title with a victory by San Diego over the Raiders. Why would the Chiefs be steamed? Friesz (pronounced freeze, as in deep) had not taken a snap with the first-team offense all season before this week. He threw four passes in the exhibition season, completing one.
Charger Coach Dan Henning said Wednesday that he may have been doing the Chiefs a favor with his benching of quarterback Billy Joe Tolliver.
“If they feel like he (Tolliver) has been the reason we’re not winning, then Kansas City ought to be happy we’re replacing him with someone else,” Henning said.
The Raiders are listing linebacker Jerry Robinson, with a broken left hand, and cornerback Lionel Washington, with a hamstring injury, as probable for Sunday’s game. For San Diego, fullback Marion Butts (foot) and defensive lineman Burt Grossman (ribs) are listed as doubtful, and receiver Nate Lewis (wrist), safety Lester Lyles (knee), tackle Joel Patten (neck), receiver Walter Wilson (thigh), defensive end Gerald Robinson (elbow) and linebacker Billy Ray Smith (elbow) are questionable.
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a94eccceaeea4fe1d89a9a18024ea381
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10048-story.html
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PRO FOOTBALL REPORT / WEEKDAY UPDATE : CHARGERS : Tolliver Decides He’ll Just Pout
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PRO FOOTBALL REPORT / WEEKDAY UPDATE : CHARGERS : Tolliver Decides He’ll Just Pout
Quarterback Billy Joe Tolliver, who refused comment after Sunday’s 24-21 loss to Kansas City, continued his vow of silence Wednesday--for a while.
“I’m not talking to you guys,” Tolliver said. “I’m mad at you guys, so I’m going to pout.
“It doesn’t matter what I feel about it; it doesn’t change anything. So I’ve got nothing to say except I don’t need to be a distraction right now. I’ll help Mel (John Friesz) as much as I can help Mel, and then I’ll pout in my own time.”
Tolliver later relented and offered a few remarks to reporters on being replaced by Friesz as the team’s starting quarterback.
Asked if this was eating him up, Tolliver said, “Let’s just say I didn’t buy a house.”
Tolliver was handed the starting job in training camp, but Coach Dan Henning gave it to Mark Vlasic for the season opener. Tolliver said he will not soon forget how he felt after losing the starting assignment for the regular-season opener in Dallas.
“It wasn’t any great thrill to be benched going back to my home state,” Tolliver said. “That one may be the one I remember the most. I guess maybe Dan’s disgusted in my play and he decides to make a move. All I can do is raise my level next training camp.
“I play to win, that’s all I can say. Things happen that don’t go in my favor, but I’m not the first guy they’ve ever happened to.”
Asked if this move was indication that club has lost faith in him, Tolliver said, “Let’s hope not. All this does is maybe I lose a little face with my boys, the guys I’m in the huddle with. Maybe I drop a little respect from them, who knows.
“When it’s time to get the competition going again, I’ll throw my hat in the ring and go from there. As a player you want to be a team guy, but there is a little selfishness going on where you want to play. And I want to play.”
Vlasic, who opened the season as the Chargers’ starting quarterback, said there are two ways to look at the promotion of Friesz.
“You can look at it and say I’m written off and they don’t want anything to do with me,” Vlasic said. “Or let’s see what John can do.”
Vlasic has been Tolliver’s backup throughout the season, but the team leapfrogged over Vlasic to use Friesz.
“I’m disappointed. If you go through and take the starter out, the obvious situation is to have the next guy in line go in,” Vlasic said. “I just have to do all I can to support Friesz.”
After his first practice with the team, Henning said Friesz “was naturally a little rusty.
“He threw the ball well some, and he has some natural questions that come when you haven’t been in there running the team. But he was alert and anxious.”
Tolliver worked behind Friesz on Wednesday and Vlasic will work as his backup today.
Friesz is still on the team’s injured reserve list, but is expected to take the roster spot of defensive end Burt Grossman, who has three fractured ribs.
“I’m real excited because I get the opportunity to do something Sunday that I’ve dreamt about forever,” Friesz said, “and just about every kid in America has dreamt, and that’s to start in the NFL.”
The Chargers are eight-point underdogs to the Raiders, who already have qualified to advance to the playoffs for the 16th time in the last 24 years.
“In time, it’s (progress) going to be there for them,” Raider Coach Art Shell said. “They’re close. There’s a lot of talent there and they’re doing a lot of good things. In time, it’s going to get done for them.”
The Chargers listed running back Marion Butts (foot) as doubtful. They listed wide receiver Nate Lewis (wrist), safety Lester Lyles (knee), tackle Joel Patten (neck) and wide receiver Walter Wilson (thigh) as questionable and defensive end Gerald Robinson (elbow) and linebacker Billy Ray Smith (elbow) as probable.
Butts didn’t practice, and Henning said he does not expect him to play. He said the club may place him on injured reserve later this week and might try to sign an additional defensive lineman.
Running back Ronnie Harmon, tackle Leo Goeas and cornerback Gill Byrd were not on the injury report, but did not practice. Henning said someone had stepped on Harmon’s toe, and he said Goeas will have arthroscopic surgery on his knee either this week or after Sunday’s game.
Henning attributed Byrd’s problem to an assortment of bumps and bruises and said he expects Byrd to be ready Sunday.
The Raiders announced linebacker Jerry Robinson (hand) and cornerback Lionel Washington (hamstring) as probable.
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8737c7b280204fe13b0dc7198706476a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10093-story.html
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HIGH SCHOOL ROUNDUP : Cleveland Continues to Prosper
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HIGH SCHOOL ROUNDUP : Cleveland Continues to Prosper
Cleveland High, fresh off last week’s L. A. Invitational basketball championship, continued its winning ways with an 82-66 victory over Bosco Tech in the first round of the Artesia tournament Wednesday at Artesia High.
The Cavaliers (9-2), led by Brandon Martin with a game-high 33 points, outscored Bosco Tech, 26-13, in the third period to take a 59-41 lead. The win was the eighth in a row for Cleveland, which will meet Paramount in a quarterfinal game today.
Kenny Collins, Martin’s backcourt mate, had 18 points and forward Mike Scovell added 12.
In other boys’ basketball games:
Santa Clara 56, Fountain Valley 38--Santa Clara held Fountain Valley to 12 points in the second half of a first-round game of the Orange tournament.
In the second half, Santa Clara (11-2) shut down Fountain Valley’s perimeter game, which had produced five three-point baskets to stay within 27-26 at halftime. Fountain Valley did not make a three-point shot in the second half.
Steve Amar scored 17 points for Santa Clara and teammates Art Barron (15 points), Isaiah Mustafa (10) and Anthony Maestas (14) also reached double figures.
South Bakersfield 61, Canyon 54--Jermaine Nixon scored a team-high 15 points for Canyon (6-4), which made just eight of 35 shots from the field in the second half of the first-round Anaheim Canyon tournament game.
Hamilton 105, Crespi 80--Despite 20 points and 12 rebounds from Rasaan Hall, Crespi fell in a first-round game of the Palisades tournament at Pepperdine.
Hamilton outscored Crespi, 35-18, in the first quarter. Randy Coleman added 15 points and nine rebounds for the Celts (4-6), who have lost four consecutive games.
Crespi committed 29 turnovers.
St. Genevieve 81, Masada 60--Patrick Rodriguez scored 25 points and Victor Dionisio added 23 to lead the Valiants (7-3) past Masada in the first round of the Ribet Academy tournament.
GIRLS’ BASKETBALL
Alemany 58, Lakewood 22--Sarah Duziel scored 16 points to help the Indians (7-5) in a first-round game of the Gahr tournament.
North Hollywood 69, Leuzinger 42--Karma Goodman scored a game-high 22 points to lead North Hollywood (9-2) in a first-round game of the L.A. Invitational.
GIRLS’ SOCCER
Royal 9, Nogales 0--Wende Brown scored three goals and Staci Blough and Heather Anderson each had two for Royal (10-0-1) in the first-round of the Alta Loma tournament.
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ba5aac9f95e7e1e980eb922d0116f74a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10098-story.html
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CSUN Basketball Team Might Feel Effects of USIU’s Fiscal Woes
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CSUN Basketball Team Might Feel Effects of USIU’s Fiscal Woes
U. S. International University in San Diego filed for bankruptcy Dec. 21 and Cal State Northridge could lose the chance to play two of its basketball games this season if USIU drops its program.
The fate of basketball and the school’s other athletic programs will be decided Friday by the school’s board of trustees. The Gulls’ last game could be against Baylor on Saturday.
It is doubtful that CSUN, which is scheduled to play USIU on Jan. 28 at Matador Gymnasium and Feb. 14 in San Diego, could find another team to play on those dates. “The only way is if someone on (USIU’s) schedule without two dates matches dates with us,” CSUN assistant Tom McCollum said.
“In January, February and March we pick up games with conference schools that have a bye, and that won’t happen on a night we play each other. It would require some logistics gymnastics, but it might be worth a try.”
USIU has six games scheduled on dates that CSUN does not play and is in town. All but one of those games is in the Southern California area--the exception being a game Feb. 18 at Missouri-Kansas City, which, like CSUN and USIU, is a Division I Independent.
The most intriguing opponent aside from Missouri-Kansas City, which plays at USIU on March 4--an open date for CSUN--is Western Athletic Conference member San Diego State, which is scheduled to play USIU on March 27 at the Sports Arena in San Diego.
Woman for all seasons: After an All-Western State Conference volleyball campaign, Ventura freshman Vanessa Hackett has easily made the move to the larger boundaries of the basketball court.
Hackett, a 5-foot-9 forward-center from Hueneme High, leads the basketball team in scoring after four games. “I didn’t think she would contribute as much as she has as quickly as she did,” Coach Ned Mircetic said. “She helps our inside game quite a bit.”
Hackett is averaging more than 16 points and 12 rebounds a game for the Pirates (8-5).
No place like home: With a 2-0 record at Matador Gymnasium and an 0-6 record on the road it is no surprise that CSUN’s basketball players know the differences.
“The shots are going to go down playing here every day in practice,” swingman David Swanson said, “plus, having your own fans yelling for you, the volleyball players and baseball players. It gives us a tremendous boost.
“At home you look up at a wall behind the basket, but on the road you look up at hundreds of fans screaming at you. And that is not counting the calls. On the road they go against you. At home, you get a break.”
Hindsight is 20-20: When 6-8 freshman Peter Micelli came to Cassidy’s office last month and told Cassidy that he was reconsidering his decision to redshirt, it seemed like a wise and unselfish move.
At the time, two of the team’s other big men weren’t playing. Percy Fisher, a 6-7 sophomore, was academically ineligible and 6-7 junior college transfer Brian Kilian was suffering from a back injury that forced him to miss parts of practice for three weeks.
Although Fisher has been declared ineligible for the rest of the season, Kilian is returning to health and he is playing regularly in a reserve role.
Consequently, Micelli, a Beverly Hills High product, has been limited to 4.3 minutes a game. He did not play in CSUN’s win over San Diego.
“It may be a tough situation for Peter if everybody stays healthy,” Cassidy said. “But we do have the option of redshirting him next season. He is still only 17 years old. At least he is traveling with us, seeing the places we play. With a weight training and running program, we can really develop him.”
Nothing for something: During the spate of early-season junior college tournaments, some host schools turn to armed forces teams in order to fill out anemic fields.
Valley and Ventura have beaten such teams--Valley pounded Los Angeles Air Force, 107-67, in the recent East Los Angeles tournament, for example--but neither will get credit for a victory when state tournament seedings are made.
“The first thing they do is draw lines through these and adjust overall records,” Valley Coach Jim Stephens said.
Although a loss would be similarly erased, it would not be ignored by a seeding committee. Outside of the benefits of simply playing a game, matchups with armed forces squads are virtually no-win propositions.
Stephens said in the future he will enter his team in only the tournaments that guarantee no armed forces teams in the field and that he dropped his own tournament because he could not make that guarantee.
Keep an eye on . . .: David Swanson, the CSUN swingman from Glendale College and Alemany High, has provided the Matadors with a spark off the bench, particularly in the past two games.
Against Cal State Long Beach he had 13 points, six rebounds and two assists in 21 minutes. Against San Diego, he made four of five shots for nine points, pulled down five rebounds and made a key blocked shot. “I feel Coach Cassidy is showing a little more confidence and it is allowing me to be more confident,” Swanson said.
HOME SWEET HOME
The Cal State Northridge men’s basketball team is enjoying mixed results in its first season at the NCAA Division 1 level, but in games at Matador Gymnasium and on the road there are definite trends.
At home
Opponent FG% 3-point % Result Northern Arizona 42.2 45.4 109-90 win Univ. of San Diego 50.0 50.0 83-73 win On the road Opponent FG% 3-point % Result Colorado 37.1 36.4 113-89 loss Colorado State 38.9 32.0 104-79 loss New Mexico State 32.1 19.0 120-62 loss Montana 34.2 26.5 108-73 loss Montana State 41.1 31.3 107-78 loss Cal State Long Beach 40.5 23.5 88-73 loss Totals At home 45.2 47.2 2 wins On the road 37.2 29.2 6 losses
Staff writers Theresa Munoz and Brendan Healey contributed to this notebook.
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9fd5eef7b809af7289f4b6f6a3eca87a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10240-story.html
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COLLEGE DIVISION NOTEBOOK : Christ College Irvine Finally Finds Its Way
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COLLEGE DIVISION NOTEBOOK : Christ College Irvine Finally Finds Its Way
It has been a struggle, but the Christ College Irvine men’s basketball team seems to be on the right track after a dismal start.
After losing their first four games and six of their first seven, the Eagles (5-8) have won four of their past five entering their holiday tournament this weekend.
“We’ve been talking a lot about expecting to win,” said Greg Marshall, the Eagles’ first-year coach. “It’s a small difference but that expectation to succeed is hard to teach. I think we’ve made some headway in buying into that.”
After one loss in November, in which Christian Heritage attempted 47 free throws, Marshall called his defense a “Texas Chain Saw defense” but he has since been seeing better play. CCI opponents are shooting only 40% from the field and 59% from the line this season.
Marshall, who took the CCI job last spring, said it has taken the players awhile to get used to his system. Also, Marshall has had to juggle newcomers and veterans from the team that went 11-20 last season and deal with the loss of two key players, one for the season and the other for all but six games so far.
Corey Smith, a freshman from Glendora High, and Ian Donnelly, a junior transfer from Cypress College--are leading the Eagles in scoring at 14.3 and 13.8 points, but the returning players who were expected to contribute have struggled.
Jamie McShan, a senior guard who led the team in scoring with an 18-point average last season, has moved to point guard and has only recently begun to score as much as expected. He is third on the team, averaging 12.6 points.
Keith Rogers, a 6-6 senior forward who was among the top three-point shooters in the NAIA District 3 last season, was ineligible for the first four games of the season. After averaging eight points in his first six games, Rogers has missed the past three games with tonsillitis.
Marshall had expected Mike Rogers (no relation to Keith) to be the starting point guard but Rogers didn’t complete enough units in the fall quarter to become eligible for his senior season.
Marshall tried Smith at the point early in the season before moving McShan into the position.
"(McShan is) just now starting to find his way,” Marshall said. “I feel like we just keep getting better. We’ve made a major improvement from where we started and that’s what you like to see.”
The basketball rivalries may not be up to the caliber of UCLA versus Notre Dame, but within the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the CCI Christmas Tournament this weekend is no less important, Marshall said.
After a game at 6 p.m. Friday between Concordia St. Paul and Concordia Portland, CCI will play Concordia River Forest at 8. The winners will play for the championship at 8 p.m. Saturday.
“These games may be more important than the district playoff games for us,” Marshall said. “It’s for bragging rights within the church.”
After playing teams from each end of the college basketball spectrum last week, the Chapman men’s team returns to action on Friday against opponents its own size at the Cal State Chico tournament.
As expected, the Panthers (6-5) had no trouble beating Pacific Christian of the National Christian College Athletic Assn. Thursday and lost to Division I Cal State Fullerton Saturday.
Chapman opens the eight-team Chico tournament at 2 p.m. Friday against Division II Humboldt State.
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e4d37eb6a0650add5540c3b6641849f8
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10312-story.html
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Ex-Tiger Aguirre Makes a Pitch to Buy Club
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Ex-Tiger Aguirre Makes a Pitch to Buy Club
Former Tigers pitcher Hank Aguirre said today that he has a group of investors willing to buy the Detroit Tigers, but a club spokesman said the American League club is not for sale.
Aguirre held a news conference today but refused to reveal names of his other investors or detail any offer for the club, which is owned by Domino’s Pizza Inc. owner Tom Monaghan.
Aguirre said the firing of longtime broadcaster Ernie Harwell and the possibility of moving the Tigers out of Detroit prompted him to submit a proposal to Monaghan.
“How much heat can one guy take?” Aguirre asked. “He might want out. He’s a pretty big man. I don’t think he has to stand the heat.”
Aguirre said he had not heard from the Tigers owner. A woman who answered the telephone at Monaghan’s office at Domino’s headquarters said he and his staff were on vacation and unavailable for comment.
“I did talk to Tom Monaghan today, and he said the club is not for sale, and that’s the only statement that will be issued,” Dan Ewald, Tigers public relations director, said when reached at home after the news conference. Asked if Monaghan would refuse to even consider any offer, Ewald said, “The club is not for sale, so I guess that would indicate no.”
Aguirre has tried to get major-league ownership before. He was part of a group that bid on a franchise for Denver.
Aguirre said the group’s interest was piqued by the outcry over the Tigers organization’s decision to look in the suburbs for a new location for Tiger Stadium. The club hasn’t ruled out a Detroit location.
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410685098edb84538e2bcb8bab62a3b5
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10319-story.html
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USC Disciplines Foley After Alcohol Arrest : Football: Backup QB loses chance to start bowl game after being taken in on a public intoxication charge.
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USC Disciplines Foley After Alcohol Arrest : Football: Backup QB loses chance to start bowl game after being taken in on a public intoxication charge.
Shane Foley, a backup quarterback for the USC Trojans, was arrested early on Christmas Eve on a public intoxication charge after he allegedly kicked a window on a taxi cab without provocation, police said today.
Foley and the rest of the USC team are currently in El Paso, Texas, preparing for the John Hancock Bowl on Monday against Michigan State.
USC coach Larry Smith said today that as a result of the incident, Foley will not start in the game and is confined to the team hotel. Smith said that if Foley breaks any team rules he will be sent home.
There had been a chance that Foley would have started against Michigan State because Todd Marinovich has been battling an ear infection.
Foley, 22, a former star player at Newport Harbor High School, allegedly emerged from the Village Inn on Marine Avenue on Balboa Island along with a former Loyola Marymount University basketball player, walked up to the cab and kicked at it repeatedly, said police Lt. Tim Newman.
The quarterback was arrested at 2:30 a.m. Monday by a police officer who “smelled a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage on the breath and person of Mr. Foley,” according to the police report. Foley spent six hours in custody before he was released on his own recognizance, Newman said.
Police reports stated that Foley came out of the Village Inn at 2:15 a.m. along with Jeff Fryer--a former point guard for Corona del Mar High School and Loyola Marymount--and a woman identified as Elizabeth Clock and approached a cab driven by Robert Excell of Fountain Valley. Foley then allegedly kicked the cab’s right rear window repeatedly.
“When asked about the taxi incident, (Foley) said he kicked the taxi window, but he couldn’t tell the (arresting) officer why,” Newman said.
Foley then left the scene in a car driven by Clock, who Newman said met Foley in the bar and agreed to drive him and Fryer to a friend’s house. Police stopped the car several blocks away and Excell identified Foley, Newman said.
Neither Clock nor Fryer was charged in the incident. Excell declined to press charges against Foley, Newman said.
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5c0a8176ad1a73b50774309ed60375da
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-10327-story.html
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Strawfly Special, Way Maker Head Up Friday’s Derby Field
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Strawfly Special, Way Maker Head Up Friday’s Derby Field
Strawfly Special and Way Maker, the two fastest qualifiers from time trials on Dec. 18, will return for the final of the $167,000 Southern California Derby Friday night at Los Alamitos. A $70,640 check awaits the winning owner.
Strawfly Special brings the fastest qualifying time into the final. He won his trial heat very easily while covering the 440 yards in 21.77 seconds.
Way Maker covered 440 yards in 21.86 seconds under jockey Danny Cardoza.
The remainder of the field includes Shake Six, Prayers Are Answered, Becks Bolero, Dish Dsh, Highs And Lows, La Valentina, El Roco, and Spencerian.
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16d9ca26c61dc9364aeef308372f2817
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-9873-story.html
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Dodgers Won’t Shrink From Positive Deeds
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Dodgers Won’t Shrink From Positive Deeds
In “Damn Yankees,” Richard Adler and Jerry Ross taught us, “You Gotta Have Heart.”
But if it were up to the Dodgers’ new psychiatrist, Dr. Herndon P. Harding Jr., the song would be, “You’re Gonna Have Heart.”
Ira Dreyfuss of the Associated Press wrote: “Harding figures that, if you can make it to the pros, you’ve probably learned to handle stress fairly well. But the way he sees it, counseling can make you even better.
“For instance, he said, a pitcher may concentrate on ‘I gotta throw this fastball’ instead of ‘I’m gonna burn this thing down the middle.’ ”
“The ‘gotta’ is a negative thought that shows fear of failure and, if you concentrate on failure, you’ll find it, Harding said. On the other hand, Harding said, the ‘gonna’ assumes that you’ll like doing it, and encourages success.”
Trivia time: Name the four members of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins who have been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Take’s take: A thought for the new year, as Santa Anita begins its winter-spring meeting: Tokyo’s Kyodo News Service reported Wednesday that Yutaka Take, 21, Japan’s leading jockey, won $17.45 million in 1990. America’s best was Gary Stevens, $4.34 million below Take.
Piercing the uprights: In front of 58,000 fans at the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis Saturday night, Mike Pierce of Darlington, Ind., had his moment.
Pierce, a former high school defensive end, was picked to take part in a promotion between halves of the Indianapolis-Washington game. He made three of three field-goal attempts--the third a 40-yarder--and won a pizza for everyone in the Dome and pizza for a year for himself.
Said Pierce, paraphrasing artist Andy Warhol: “I felt important for 15 minutes of my life.”
Signoff: A wave of protest followed the Detroit Tigers’ firing of radio announcer Ernie Harwell, 72, last week.
Sunday, Brian K. Wingeroth, pastor of the Farmington Hills Baptist Church, asked Harwell, a member of the congregation, to speak “because we want people to know the source of this man’s strength and character. It is his faith.”
Harwell told his fellow churchgoers that the end of his 30-year run with the Tigers is “just an old announcer saying he’s not going to work another year. It’s not life or death or war.”
Gridlockbusters: This might be the ultimate in bowl game hospitality.
In response to concerns voiced by Penn State Coach Joe Paterno, the Blockbuster Bowl assigned a staff member with binoculars to monitor the digital timer on Ft. Lauderdale’s 17th Street Causeway drawbridge, located near the hotel where the Nittany Lions are quartered.
Paterno was worried that delays created by the the drawbridge during the holiday rush would tie up his team on its way to and from practice.
Said Paterno: “I was concerned we’d be on the bus for hours, but these people have really knocked themselves out to make it nice.”
Add Blockbuster: Paterno might have been grateful for the traffic control, but he politely declined when the Blockbuster Bowl invited the Nittany Lions to join Florida State players on an ocean cruise Christmas night.
Paterno was concerned because the cruise was scheduled from 6 p.m. to midnight.
Keith Tribble, executive director of the Blockbuster Bowl, said: “We want the teams to have a good time. We want them to be prepared to compete. That’s his decision. Obviously, we respect that.”
Meanwhile, Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden told his players the cruise was optional.
Trivia answer: Running back Larry Csonka, quarterback Bob Griese, center Jim Langer and wide receiver Paul Warfield.
Quotebook: Detroit Piston guard Isiah Thomas, when asked what it would take for the Pistons to return to championship form: “A different attitude. Or different people.”
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475a6be1571dfb9a9e95f70422b8a968
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-9878-story.html
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A Year of Playgirls, Playboys and Boy Plays Girl
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A Year of Playgirls, Playboys and Boy Plays Girl
Lowlights, dark nights and weird sights of football, 1990, as culled from the Dead Season Scrolls:
HIGH SCHOOLS
A 5-foot-8 member of the girls’ cheerleading team at Coronado High (Colo.), whose “great legs” drew admiring comments from one player on the football team, turned out to be a 26-year-old man.
THE COLLEGES
Hofstra quarterback Rhory Moss admitted he used steroids but only because he was going to spend “spring break in the Bahamas last April and I wanted to put on a few pounds to look good.”
Spike Dykes, Texas Tech football coach, who suffered his worst season this year at 4-7, was given a 10-year contract extension.
Ready for a Naked Reverse: Arizona defensive back McCann Utu posed nude in Playgirl magazine.
Planning a Naked Reverse: An Oregon State player was accused of shoplifting Penthouse magazine.
All the University of Maine had to show for a 10,340 mile trip was a 3-44 loss to Hawaii.
Miami fans enraged by the upset loss to Brigham Young pelted the Hurricane players’ dorms with bottles.
Passages: Bo Schembechler began the year by coaching Michigan to a Rose Bowl loss against USC and ended the year, as Detroit Tiger president, by firing Hall of Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell.
Colorado led the nation in fifth-down efficiency.
Winner of the annual Most-Outrageous-Lou-Holtz-Statement-of-the-Year competition: "(Coach) Frank Leahy was here three years and went to war. I think sometimes that would be a welcome relief to get away from the pressure.”
Does Playgirl magazine know about this?: Trudi Marinovich, mother of USC quarterback/art major Todd Marinovich, laughingly told the Orange County media that her son had fashioned drawings of the Trojan coaches during the season, “some of them . . . R-rated.”
THE PROS
Denver receiver Vance Johnson claimed he was injured when his tongue was grabbed by Seattle’s Melvin Jenkins.
Minnesota held a preseason camp in New Mexico to foster togetherness, then lost six of its first seven games. General Manager Mike Lynn announced he was leaving to join the new international football league to foster togetherness there.
After the uproar over admitting female reporters to the locker rooms, the NFL took immediate action, announcing it would market officially licensed bathrobes and wraparound towels.
Two male disc jockeys from a Milwaukee radio station stripped to their athletic supporters and socks to interview players after a Green Bay-Chicago game.
Minnesota defensive players squirted water on the ball against Green Bay, causing it to slip from the grasp of quarterback Anthony Dilweg on the next play as he rolled out.
Angered by comments Washington quarterback Gary Hogeboom had made about Phoenix, Cardinal Coach Joe Bugel offered to fight him on the 50-yard-line before one game.
During a 7-30 loss to Buffalo, New York Jet Coach Bruce Coslet motioned for a heckler in the stands to come down on the field to fight. It wasn’t Gary Hogeboom.
After eating a huge pregame meal of eggs and spaghetti, Brent Fullwood, then a Green Bay Packer, claimed he was sick at halftime of a game against the Bears and insisted on remaining in the locker room. He was spotted that night dancing in a nightclub.
Against New Orleans, 300-pound San Francisco tackle Bubba Paris was observed off-sides, holding and grabbing a face mask--all on the same play.
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0b7743406be3d968ce0f662cc7f2e041
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-9880-story.html
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BETTING WITH JANICE : SANTA ANITA SHOWDOWN
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BETTING WITH JANICE : SANTA ANITA SHOWDOWN
Despite starting off with a victory when Linda Card won the seventh race and payed $4.60, I find myself in second place after opening day as Bob Mieszerski also hit on his wager in the second.
Janice’s Wed. Bankroll $2,000
Wednesday’s Profit $45
Current Bankroll $2,045
Bob Mieszerski, continuing his sharp Hollywood Park form, posted a $114 profit Wednesday when Treat Tobeatyafeet won the second race and paid $5.80.
Bob’s Wed. Bankroll $2,000
Wednesday’s Profit $114
Current Bankroll $2,114
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2fc47b138b6c733e21446fb2f2eff33f
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-9939-story.html
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Knee Injuries Now Hurt Less Thanks to Modern Medicine
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Knee Injuries Now Hurt Less Thanks to Modern Medicine
Falling linemen rolled up the left knee of the Washington Redskins’ Joe Jacoby during a field-goal attempt in Philadelphia last year, dislocating his kneecap and ending his season. The game before, teammate Mark May blew out his right knee during a home game against the Cowboys.
In the third game this season, tumbling players bent Redskins quarterback Mark Rypien’s left knee backward, knocking him out of that and subsequent games. Three games later, Eagles defensive end Reggie White took down backup Redskins quarterback Stan Humphries, spraining his right knee in the process.
Some of the carnage even comes in the offseason. A. J. Johnson, who had a successful season last year as a rookie defensive back, locked up his right knee just getting up off the floor at home, ultimately leading to surgery.
“Knee injuries are the biggest injury that we have,” said Redskins Coach Joe Gibbs. “It is a major problem for us all the time.”
Small wonder. Unlike hips and shoulders, where ball-shaped ends on the bones fit into sockets to form a solid joint, the knees are like two abutting broomsticks, with rubber pads between the ends, held together by four ropes. When a player runs, the forces flowing through the knees exceed five times body weight; when a blow or a sudden direction change stretches one of the four cable-like ligaments by more than 10 or 15 percent, that ligament can tear, causing extreme pain and joint instability.
Damaged knees make up between 20 and 25 percent of the injuries that cause football players to miss games, said Redskins trainer Bubba Tyer. “And that’s compared to everything else: fingers, hands, wrists, shoulders, necks, backs, hamstrings, (quadriceps) and ankles.”
But players are coming back from major knee injuries faster and more frequently than ever. All five key Redskins recently felled by serious knee problems are either back on the field or physically ready to resume playing.
“These players are neuromuscular geniuses,” Tyer said. “They are highly motivated. Strong. Tough. They have all the qualities you want in a patient. That is one reason we get them back.”
Technical advances also have made a difference, including a new approach to reconstructive knee surgery, the widespread use of the arthroscope, a viewing device that allows doctors to see inside the knee without cutting it open, and more aggressive rehabilitation programs to restore strength and flexibility.
The arthroscope has made the biggest impact, said Redskins orthopedic surgeon Charles Jackson. The device has a hollow steel barrel, not much thicker than a pen, that can be poked through the skin. Inside the barrel are glass fibers for viewing the knee’s internal anatomy, hollow tubes for squirting in fluids and flushing out bone chips and other debris, and tiny cutters for trimming rough cartilage.
“We used to feel that we had only one crack at a knee,” Jackson said. “The arthroscope makes it possible to look at the knee repeatedly, do what you have to do, and get out. Before that, washing out a knee or trimming cartilage would have been a major procedure.”
Because the knee is not cut wide during an arthroscopic exam, healing takes less time. Rypien is a classic example.
“I had a partial tear of the posterior cruciate ligament and the capsule of the joint,” Rypien said.
The posterior cruciate is the strongest ligament in the knee and rarely torn. Rupturing the sac that encases the knee joint caused blood to leak down into Rypien’s calf, painfully swelling the muscle.
In the past, this would have looked serious enough to open the knee. Instead Jackson used the arthroscope the next day and found it wasn’t all that bad.
“It was just a basic tear,” Rypien said. “There wasn’t any cartilage tearing. They did not have to clean any of that out.”
Jackson decided that the tear could heal on its own without reconstructive surgery, but that would take a month or so. Two days after the exam, Rypien was back at Redskin Park, icing the joint and starting rehabilitation.
The injury to Humphries was so minor, Tyer said, that “we didn’t scope Stan.” He sprained a ligament on the inner portion of the knee that recovered on its own. “Stan has been well for a good while,” Tyer said.
Too often, however, the injuries are not so minor.
Late in his rookie season last year, A. J. Johnson sprained his knee, primarily stretching the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). The anterior cruciate and the posterior cruciate, which Rypien injured, crisscross inside the knee joint, giving it rotation, as well as backward and forward stability. If knee injuries are the most common killer of football careers, destruction of the anterior cruciate ligament is the most common kind of serious knee injury.
For a 23-year-old player with a promising career, the idea of a knee injury was terrifying, and Johnson wanted to have nothing to do with it. But the injury had loosened his joint, allowing the meniscus, a cartilage pad that keeps the ends of the bones from rubbing together, to slip out of place.
“A couple of time my meniscus popped out and got lodged between my two bones, so I couldn’t straighten my knee out,” Johnson said. “It hurt.”
Jackson scoped the knee and recommended reconstructive surgery on the anterior cruciate ligament. Johnson refused. “I know other people who had played with stretched ligaments,” said Johnson. “Some people don’t ever have” surgery.
But the knee locked up again, and a second surgeon also urged reconstructive surgery. Johnson relented and was operated on last June.
Until recently, said Jackson, “we did not have a good operation” for the anterior cruciate. The revolution has been a sort of transplant: Surgeon’s take about one-third of the long tendon that holds the kneecap in place, complete with wedges of bone where the kneecap tendon originally was attached. Holes are drilled in the leg bones where the transplanted tendon will be situated. The bone wedges on the tendon are then jammed into the holes and held in place by screws.
Recovery can begin immediately. “I was moving when I woke up,” said Johnson. In his hospital bed, he immediately began working with a machine that helps restore flexibility in the knee. “I was real aggressive,” he said. “I was not holding back.” A month and a half after surgery, he was jogging.
Offensive lineman Mark May, 31, had the same surgery as Johnson, but his recovery was slower, Tyer said, in part because the transplanted tendon began rubbing over a bony prominence.
“It was clicking when he moved,” Tyer said. “It didn’t hurt him, but it was irritating. So we scoped him (to grind down the bone) and that set us back about a month.” Still, May, who has declined to talk about his injury, has been practicing since November.
Sometimes injuries that look the worst are not so difficult to repair.
Jacoby missed the final six weeks of last season after a pile-up of bodies -- with him on the bottom -- ruptured the tough sac that surrounds the knee. His kneecap was pushed off to the side of his leg.
“I knew it was major because I could feel everything going,” Jacoby said. “My first reaction was yelling for them to get off. After that, you just lay there. I couldn’t move.”
When they got Jacoby off the field, the doctor “had to push the kneecap back over,” Jacoby said. “It felt fine after that.”
It wasn’t fine. It took reconstructive surgery and five weeks in a cast just to put Jacoby’s knee back together again. It took months of determined rehabilitation to make it function.
Aggressive rehabilitation after reconstruction has become as sophisticated as surgery. Tyer and his trainers start the rehab programs with a host of machines sooner than ever before, attempting to quickly restore joint flexibility and to prevent the muscles from weakening.
Still, rehab in the weight room and workouts on the practice field are not the same as being in the game.
“Playing,” said Tyer, “is the final stage of rehabilitation. They have to play to reach full confidence.”
The players agree.
“I think my worst concern was how would it would feel like after taking a shot,” Rypien said. After the first hit, “you kind of like just pop up and wiggle it a little bit, see if everything is still connected.” He laughed, a little nervously. “And then get back to work.”
Even with the advances, reconstructed knees are not as good as the original equipment. “I still cannot get full flexion,” Rypien said. “To do a deep knee bend is probably going to take awhile.”
Although Jacoby denies that players worry about their knees at age 55 or 60, defensive-line coach Torgy Torgeson is a constant reminder that years in the football trenches can leave lasting damage. Torgeson, a former linebacker and center for the Detroit Lions, plans to have artificial knees implanted in both legs during the offseason.
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7308beb1b844a64bc5ad11fa6e51e95e
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-9943-story.html
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BOYS’ ROUNDUP : Irvine Wins at Estancia on Molle’s Fast Start
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BOYS’ ROUNDUP : Irvine Wins at Estancia on Molle’s Fast Start
John Molle scored 29 points in Irvine High School’s 72-47 victory over Los Angeles Banning in the first round of the Coast holiday tournament Wednesday at Estancia High School.
The senior forward scored 13 points in the first quarter when Irvine took an 18-7 lead. Molle was 13 of 17 on free-throw attempts and made two three-pointers.
Irvine plays Edison at 8:40 p.m. tonight in one quarterfinal game.
In other Coast games:
Edison 67, Glendale Hoover 62 (OT)--Brandon Jessie scored 28 points for Edison. Dave Deck had nine points, including three free throws, in overtime as Edison outscored Glendale, 9-4.
Huntington Beach 67, Mission Viejo 61--Mustapha Abdi scored 26 points for Huntington Beach, which advances to play Tustin in the second round.
Tustin 69, Estancia Reserves 38--Thomas Clayton had 15 points for Tustin, the top-ranked team in Orange County.
Estancia 61, Alaska Service 52--Matt Fuerbringer scored 16 for host Estancia. The teams were tied, 17-17, after the first quarter but Estancia outscored Service, 15-4, in the second quarter.
Estancia will play Dana Hills in one quarterfinal game at 7 p.m.
Dana Hills 68, Righetti 51--Keith Barnett scored 23 points to lead Dana Hills in the first round. Dana Hills trailed, 28-27, at the half but outscored Righetti, 22-15, in the third quarter and 19-8 in the final quarter.
In the Brea-Olinda tournament:
Brea-Olinda 74, Los Altos 63--Doug Yeo scored 21 points, Drew Hubbard 14 and Mike Ryan 13 for host Brea-Olinda (3-6).
Montclair 84, El Dorado 72--Brian Loyd scored 20 and Brett Tomko had 19 for El Dorado (4-5), which fell behind, 30-16, after one quarter and 52-24 at the half.
St. John Bosco 70, Sonora 58--Wilson Huang scored 16 points and Chris St. Clair 15 for Sonora. Dashon Quiette scored 16 for St. John Bosco.
La Mirada 62, Whittier Christian 52--Mark Berokoff scored 17 for Whittier Christian. Todd Koenig scored 24 for La Mirada, which took a three-point lead after three quarters and outscored Whittier Christian, 18-11, in the fourth.
In the Ribet Academy tournament:
Brethren Christian 62, Salesian 54--Forward Brandon Stott scored 26 points to lead Brethren Christian (7-1) in the first round. Chris Fry scored 12 points also for Brethren Christian.
St. Margaret’s 58, Bethel Christian 48--Aaron Wright scored 19 points and grabbed 14 rebounds, Ryan Westendorf scored 15 and Ravi Mruthyunjaya scored 14 and had seven assists to lead St. Margaret’s (6-3).
In the Rockford (Ill.) Tournament:
Esperanza 56, Guilford 47--Joe Foss scored 19 points, Fabien Ziegler 13 and Matt Kordik 12 for Esperanza (8-4) in a first round game.
In the La Vegas tournament:
Ballard 86, Ocean View 71--Ryan Martin scored 28 points and Marcel TenBerge scored 14 for Ocean View in a first-round game.
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e0c9edc7f3cf3c4ccef96f1b1c597c63
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-sp-9944-story.html
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ORANGE TOURNAMENT : Mater Dei Continues to Roll
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ORANGE TOURNAMENT : Mater Dei Continues to Roll
Those who predicted that Mater Dei High School would become the best boys’ basketball team in Orange County by the end of January may have been a month off.
Mater Dei (7-3) continued to show improvement since its disappointing performance in the Trabuco Hills tournament two weeks ago, defeating Laguna Beach, 83-51, Wednesday in the Orange Holiday Tournament at Chapman College’s Hutton Sports Center.
The Monarchs rolled to their fifth victory in the past six games.
Granted, the game matched the smallest public high school in the county against the best collection of all-stars this side of Artesia High.
And, of course, Mater Dei Coach Gary McKnight did his best to downplay his team’s victory, even calling a timeout early in the first quarter with the Monarchs leading, 9-2, to scold his team for a few defensive lapses.
Afterward, McKnight said the Monarchs have improved because of better perimeter shooting by guards J.J. Ballesteros, Reggie Geary and DeJuan Matthews and the inside play of center Terence Wilborn.
“Earlier, we were thinking instead of reacting,” McKnight said. “When we lost two games at Trabuco Hills, I couldn’t walk the streets of Mission Viejo without someone asking me, ‘What’s wrong?’ I can only use the excuse of inexperience for so long.”
Laguna Beach (5-4) managed to keep the game respectable by making five three-point shots, but the Artists’ top player, Josh Borrella, was never a factor.
Borrella picked up his fourth foul with 4:56 remaining in the third quarter and his team trailing, 49-30. He fouled out with 5:40 left to play, finishing with 12 points, 16 below his season average.
Mater Dei forward Jason Janeski was the benefactor of some fine passes by Geary and point guard Kamran Sufi, converting layups for most of his 22 points. Janeski had 20 points in the first half and missed only one shot.
Wilborn has played the biggest role in Mater Dei’s turnaround. He had 13 points and 10 rebounds Wednesday night.
“Terence has given us a lift,” McKnight said. “Every game, he gains more confidence.”
In other tournament games:
Capistrano Valley 76, Carlsbad 41--Center Brett McCorkle scored 25 points and had 16 rebounds to lead Capistrano Valley (11-1). McCorkle had 17 points in the first half as the Cougars built a 37-20 lead.
San Diego Morse 92, Saddleback 88 (OT)--Forwards Darnell Cherry and Maurice Vickers scored four points each in the three-minute overtime period to lead San Diego Morse.
Orange 70, Orange Lutheran 53--Three-year starting guard Carlos Duran scored 19 points and teammate Thu Huynh added 18 for Orange.
Kennedy 65, Long Beach Wilson 60--Junior center Jermaine Galloway scored 26 points and guard Brian Cline added 17 to lead Kennedy.
Santa Clara 56, Fountain Valley 38--Junior forward Isiah Mustafa scored 20 points to lead Santa Clara (11-2).
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efb7ee455c58962b8a9d0898743004ae
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9908-story.html
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Dancing the Year Away
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Dancing the Year Away
If your entertainment dance card for Dec. 31 is empty and it is your intention to revel in a New Year’s Eve celebration, you may want to consider joining the Santa Paula Theater Center’s wining, dining and dancing fund-raiser.
Ed Roina & Company will lead the celebration with their brand of entertainment. “They’re a dance band playing tunes from the Big Band era,” a theater spokeswoman said.
Festivities begin at 8 p.m. and participants are offered a full buffet of appetizers and dinner entrees, desserts, beer and wine and a no-host bar. Party favors are also included.
Those who do a little too much reveling can return home safely. The theater center will provide courtesy transportation.
Proceeds will help subsidize the operating costs of the theater. Admission is $50 and includes everything mentioned above.
The theater center is at 125 S. 7th St., Santa Paula. For more information, call 525-4645.
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a0130417d32eaa83323f2324e69b9049
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9909-story.html
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Another Midnight Bash
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Another Midnight Bash
Don’t be left out in the cold on New Year’s Eve. Clubs throughout Ventura County will be teeming with celebrants partying and dancing into the evening--and 1991. If the thought of waiting in a long line only to be turned away at the door dampens your mood, there is hope.
Tickets are still available to attend the Ventura Theatre’s New Year’s Eve Bash. Featured entertainers will be The Coz Band, playing Top 40 dance tunes, and a deejay spinning rock, funk, R&B; favorites and more.
Participants will be served a complimentary glass of champagne and given party favors.
The entertainment will kick off at 8 p.m. and continue well into the night. Tickets are $15. The Ventura Theatre is at 26 S. Chestnut St., Ventura.
For more information or reservations, call 648-1888.
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fbd892a94d2a40ee5eb1b86d0714aead
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9910-story.html
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FLICKS FILM AND VIDEO NOTES : A Cool Cinema : The Conejo Village Twin Theater, home of admitted butter flavor and the Dinosaur Tray.
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FLICKS FILM AND VIDEO NOTES : A Cool Cinema : The Conejo Village Twin Theater, home of admitted butter flavor and the Dinosaur Tray.
After spending the past couple of weeks watching holiday videos, you’ll probably want to be getting out. So, if it’s of any help, here is No. 10 in our series of Ventura County movie theater reviews.
This time we visited the Conejo Village Twin Theater in the Janss Mall in Thousand Oaks.
Food: It was refreshing to hear the guy behind the counter ask, “Would you like butter flavor with your popcorn?” Finally, an honest man, willing to admit that that stuff isn’t butter. Regardless, I said “no.” I had the popcorn plain. It was fresh and tasty. As for the quality of the hot dog, I can’t say. They were out of them the day I visited because the hot dog company forgot to make the delivery the previous night.
For the kids there is something cute called the Dinosaur Tray, which comes with popcorn, beverage and a picture of a dinosaur on the tray.
Restroom: Clean. Nice color coordination. Just one design problem--at least in the men’s room. It’s a very tight squeeze between the stalls and the wall. Some people could have a problem fitting through that space.
Theater: The best feature about the theater is the seats. They are comfortable, yet firm, so you don’t get that sinking feeling when you sit down.
Film quality: No problems.
Sound quality: Very clear, even in the back row.
Pre-movie ads: Zero.
Previews: Zero.
Comfort tip: Bring a coat, particularly if the weather is chilly. It was cold inside the theater.
Coming up: Keep an eye out for the third annual Film Festival at the Thousand Oaks Library beginning Jan. 12. It will feature three films: “Cry Freedom” (1987), “Black Like Me” (1964) and “A World Apart” (1988).
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402ff1da2cfa34a5dc8ed9ad45186054
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9911-story.html
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JUGGLING : This Club Is a Tossup : Weekly meetings are the answer to many closet jugglers’ wildest dreams.
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JUGGLING : This Club Is a Tossup : Weekly meetings are the answer to many closet jugglers’ wildest dreams.
It was compulsion that brought them to the gym. They had always wanted to do it; they had even gone off and practiced secretly, oblivious to ridicule. Their spouses shrugged it off. Only the occasional fellow addict recognized their need.
“Where could a grown man go and learn to do this?” said Dallas Taylor, 28, of Santa Paula.
Where indeed? Until the ad appeared: “Juggling club to meet from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday at Westpark Recreation Center, Ventura.”
So there they were: a dozen men and women, with an inspired look in their eyes, all holding odd-shaped drawstring bags. Within minutes, the bags were opened and out came balls, beanbags and elongated clubs all brought to order through such rituals as the star, the claw, the yo-yo and the giraffe.
This was all Bill Robinson’s and Leslyn Keith’s idea. They had met several years before through an interest in basketball, and only later discovered their common roots in juggling. Hers was a teen-age fascination from a decade before, his from an even earlier phase.
“The kind of people who juggle are not mainstream people. It’s a real small group because it takes absolute dedication,” said Robinson, an accountant.
In July, Robinson and Keith, a teacher at Camarillo State Hospital, discovered the International Jugglers Assn., a group that draws from a worldwide pool of jugglers. They attended its festival in Los Angeles.
More than 800 jugglers came. It was inspiring. It made them want to practice with a group regularly. They tossed ideas as well as beanbags around. And the ad went into the paper.
It has drawn people such as Taylor and Calvin Reeves--irrepressible, if undisciplined, jugglers. The two had met just out of high school, when employed as laborers in local citrus groves. Lunch breaks tended to drag, and the pair used oranges to work up a juggling routine.
Now technicians at General Electric in Oxnard, they have found that faulty plastic resin strands make passable juggling balls. Break time is again filled with challenge.
On their first night at the gym, they had six beanbags in the air between them, holding them in orbits of three while they chanted softly, “Self, self, pass!” whereupon two bags interchanged expertly between their circles, and the orbits resumed.
Along the wall were people not yet ready for the passing lane. Sally McNeilar, a realtor from Ventura, had mastered two balls and was striving for a third.
“I can get the first one back in the air before everything goes to pieces,” she said, retrieving the escaping balls.
Working next to her, Jack Warwick, an insurance agent from Camarillo, also tried to master his threes. Warwick said he was motivated by watching his 25-year-old son juggle.
On the opposite side of the room, half a dozen veterans were flinging armfuls of clubs at one another across a wide pattern, sometimes with jugglers changing places while everything stayed in the air. They called out suggestions and switched routines at will.
Richard Lewis, 26, was probably the only person in the room who aspires to juggle full time. Lewis spends afternoons practicing his art in Orange County, which he says is a hotbed of juggling. No slouch, he regularly hits the Ventura session on the way back to his home in Goleta.
In between runs, Lewis practices with his brother, David, who is almost as serious about juggling as he is, and works graveyard shift as an aircraft mechanic.
“You have to juggle every day,” Richard Lewis said, complaining that most jugglers he practices with have to hold down jobs during the day.
Another participant in the fast workout was Robinson, who winds down afterward with solo routines.
Robinson appears to be a man who prefers a laid-back image--at least where juggling is concerned. He said the newly formed club has no purpose, no business meetings, no rules and no membership fees. Attendees pay a $1 a night gym fee and are welcome to join the association if it interests them.
Meanwhile, the lack of organization seems to appeal to locals.
“We didn’t know anybody else in Ventura who juggled, and people have been coming out of the woodwork,” Robinson said.
WHERE AND WHEN
Jugglers and aspiring jugglers can meet every Saturday from 7 to 9 p.m. at Westpark Recreation Center, Ventura. For information on the meetings or the International Jugglers Assn., call 642-9612.
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5964fa0e52277b7abda84c883f80911c
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9916-story.html
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SERVING SUGGESTION PETIT ABALONE
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SERVING SUGGESTION PETIT ABALONE
“The taste of abalone really depends on how it’s prepared and what it’s prepared with,” Michael Machuzak said. The pricey gourmet specialty works as an appetizer or dinner entree. Machuzak provided us with this entree recipe.
Petit Abalone Santa Barbara (serves 6)
18-24 farmed abalone
1 Tbs. parsley, chopped
3 lemons, julienned and poached
2 Tbs. lemon juice
3 ripe avocados, sliced
6 tomatoes, wedged
3 red sweet peppers, peeled, seeded and julienned
1 1/2 cups flour
6 eggs, beaten
parsley sprigs for garnish
warm Beurre Blanc (see recipe below)
Run small knife between meat and shell to free abalone. Remove intestines and cut off head, located on the front. Place abalone between two moist towels and lightly pound to even and tenderize meat. Season abalone by dredging in flour and dipping into beaten eggs. Saute 5 to 10 seconds on each side in Beurre Blanc . Remove from pan and blot excess butter on paper towels. Place 4 to 6 slices of avocado onto each plate, in fan shape. Warm gently in oven. Place sauteed abalone on avocado, add julienned peppers, lemon and chopped parsley to sauce and spoon around abalone. Garnish with tomato and parsley sprigs.
Beurre Blanc
6 shallots, peeled and chopped
2 cups dry white wine
1 cup whipping cream
1 1/2 pound unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
salt to taste
freshly ground white pepper to taste
Reduce wine and shallots until almost dry in sauce pot. Add cream and reduce by one-half. Whisk butter into reduction over medium heat. Do not boil. Add seasonings and lemon juice; strain.
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ee309666c00c473a4af7931d8d8d99c2
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9917-story.html
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FROM THE SEA ABALONE : Prized Harvest : As abalone grows scarce in its natural habitat, a marine biologist farms the delicacy in tanks.
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FROM THE SEA ABALONE : Prized Harvest : As abalone grows scarce in its natural habitat, a marine biologist farms the delicacy in tanks.
Of all the ocean’s delicacies--lobster, salmon, caviar and the like--abalone, is the favorite of many gourmet seafood enthusiasts.
And it isn’t just the meat of this shelled mollusk that makes it so prized. The ear-shaped armor is the basis for mother-of-pearl jewelry and gift items that can be found in seaside communities the world over.
The abalone’s popularity has just about done it in. Over-harvesting, coupled with pollution, has vastly decreased abalone numbers in our waters over the years.
A Port Hueneme marine biologist took notice of the decline.
With the hope of bolstering populations, Jim McMullen created a laboratory that would farm abalone for the purpose of transplanting them to the deep blue.
“That’s how Ab Lab originally started,” manager Michael Machuzak said. “Sixteen years ago it was a small project to provide for reseeding.”
Today, Ab Lab, located on the Naval Civil Engineering Base in Port Hueneme, has branched out. Though they continue to supply the Department of Fish and Game with occasional seed abalone, Ab Lab’s customers now include restaurateurs and anyone else wanting to purchase the seafood treat.
“We produce the red abalone,” Machuzak said, “which is the fastest growing and easiest to farm.” There are about eight varieties of abalone that can be found along the California coast, he said.
Ab Lab’s culture methods allow it to produce annually upwards of 3 million seed abalone.
The propagation starts with spawning.
Immersed in seawater-filled tanks, each female blows millions of pinhead-sized eggs through a small respiratory pore in its shell. “The eggs shoot right through,” Machuzak said.
Eggs gathered, Ab Lab then bathes them in a wash of male sperm, collected through a procedure that induces release.
“In the wild, the male simply broadcasts his sperm over the eggs,” he said, “whereas our method eliminates the by-chance fertilization.”
Machuzak said wild abalone “are lucky to fertilize even 1% of the eggs.” Ab Lab’s technique, he said, ensures about a 30% survival rate.
A remarkably short 24 hours later, eggs that were fertilized begin to hatch. “The larvae look like little round, light or dark green circular things with cilia,” he said. The cilia--rhythmically beating, hairlike growths--provide the larvae locomotion.
“They have the ability to swim for seven days,” he said. And after just two days, the larvae “have a shell that looks like that of a garden snail.”
After the larvae’s seven-day frolic, they are moved to one of Ab Lab’s 700 60-gallon tanks, each holding 30,000 to 50,000 larvae.
“When they reach 10 millimeters, they’re either sold to other growers or allowed to grow another 28 months in our tanks,” Machuzak said. Ab Lab sells to other wholesalers and restaurants across the nation.
It will take the red abalone about 3 years to grow 3 inches, or “roughly an inch a year,” he said.
Abalone, “sea snails,” have basic eyes that sense light and a snout, Machuzak said, and feed on kelp and brown algae. “Their mouth is like a raspy tongue, sort of like a cat’s, and they just munch away on the kelp.”
Ab Lab sells its red abalone to the wholesale and retail seafood markets upon reaching two sizes; 2 1/4- and 2 3/4-inches.
The legal size to take red abalone in the ocean is 7 3/4-inches, Machuzak said, “but it just takes too long to culture that large.”
Bad luck for the poor little devil who ends up covered in lemon butter sauce when still so young, but Machuzak reminded us, “The sale of cultured abalone doesn’t endanger the depleted wild stock.”
Most chefs, as well as retail customers, prefer the smaller sizes anyway, he said, because they are more tender and easier to handle during preparation.
“Restaurateurs also like to have farmed product,” Machuzak said, “because it’s a more reliable source, whereas fishermen are dependent upon such things as weather conditions that can hamper their daily take.”
Ab Lab, the only one of its kind in Southern California, takes requests for its cultured abalone via telephone and offers only live-in-shell product. “There’s no processing,” Machuzak said, “it’s never frozen.”
The abalone can be specially packaged and shipped to the customer. “Red abalone is about $2.25 per piece,” he said. Tours of the facility are conducted occasionally. For more information, call 488-6137.
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a2af910a18c62d52ea86706202ad8030
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9918-story.html
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The Wreck and the Reckoning : U.S. Park Service Wins Its Case Against Undersea Treasure Hunters in the Country’s Largest-Ever Archeological Protection Venture
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The Wreck and the Reckoning : U.S. Park Service Wins Its Case Against Undersea Treasure Hunters in the Country’s Largest-Ever Archeological Protection Venture
On a Wednesday afternoon in September, 1987, the United States Park Service called the California Wreck Divers Club and told a small lie.
Now, after 38 months, 63 civil and criminal charges and a small fortune in legal fees, federal authorities say the largest archeological protection case in U.S. history is finally over.
A boat owner, a captain and 18 divers have been punished for their roles in scavenging from four protected shipwreck sites at the Channel Islands National Park and Marine Sanctuary Area.
Mark Senning and Yvonne Menard, the husband-and-wife ranger team who posed as amateur divers, gathered evidence undercover and underwater for three days--and then were barred from discussing the experience with each other for more than two years--are again on unrestricted speaking terms.
And the wreck of the Winfield Scott, principal scene of the crimes, lies slowly disintegrating into the Pacific, presumably free from scavengers’ hammers and drills.
But this was an unusual case from the beginning, and for some it’s not over yet.
The prize artifact of the case--a lone 1853 gold coin locked away in a Park Service evidence closet--is probably not the same one rangers saw during their sting operation.
Wreck diver Cliff Craft is clinging to his last legal possibilities, vowing that “I’m not going to be abused by the system when I never did anything wrong.”
And Jack Ferguson, outlaw divemaster and target of an extraordinary $100,000 fine from a federal judge, has dropped out of sight.
As a working 225-foot steamship bound from San Francisco to Panama in late 1853, the Winfield Scott must have left a substantial wake. As a federal case 137 years later, the Winfield Scott affair has stirred a new set of ripples.
For the Park Service, the case is part of a more aggressive enforcement strategy that often puts rangers into risky roles to police public property.
For many wreck divers--who say the long-salvaged Winfield Scott still has artifacts left that are worth protecting--the main lesson here is that the government wants to roll back maritime tradition and rob them of their freedom to bring home what civilization has left to rot on the sea floor.
“We’re going to be made to look like bad guys,” Cliff Craft says, “and it’s bull.”
The Set-Up
Three years ago, on Sept. 30, Channel Islands National Park Ranger Jack Fitzgerald came across a flyer advertising a three-day scuba diving trip.
Truth Aquatics of Santa Barbara owned the boat, and the California Wreck Divers Club, based in Los Angeles, had chartered it. From his days as ranger in charge of Anacapa Island, Fitzgerald knew some of the wreck divers, and he suspected that the weekend would include more than innocent exploration. Fitzgerald took the flyer to Tim Setnicka, then the park’s chief ranger.
“Within 30 minutes of him coming in,” says Setnicka, “the plan was concocted. We didn’t think about who was going to find funding and all that . . . it was an opportunity.”
If they pursued the opportunity, the rangers knew, they would be knocking up against popular seafaring sentiments. Most adventure literature, many generations of admiralty law, and hundreds of recreational divers embrace souvenir-seeking as fair game. There are plenty of commercial success stories, as well: the discovery of the Titanic in 1985, for instance, and treasure-hunter Mel Fisher’s 1986 salvaging of a gold and silver trove in the 17th-Century wreckage of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha off Florida.
“We love to dive on shipwrecks,” says Jim Dunn, president of the California Wreck Divers Club and a commercial diver from San Pedro. “There’s a fascination to it, and it’s not the loot . . . . You’re going through the water and there’s this huge thing. What is it? It’s a wreck. And there’s holes and fish . . . . And if you don’t know the ship, you ask, ‘What wreck was it? Why did it sink? What was the story?’ ”
The California Wreck Divers Club, a nonprofit group based in Los Angeles, counts about 200 dues-paying members and associates and sponsors monthly dives up and down the coast. The club’s motto is “to perpetuate nautical history through organized research, recovery, restoration and display,” and members are quick to note their contributions to school programs and maritime museums from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Many of those divers are “an untapped resource,” says San Jose State University anthropology Prof. Thomas Layton. Layton is studying an 1850 wreck near Ft. Bragg, and says interested divers have donated 1,200 artifacts gathered from the wreck over the years.
“I found a commitment to doing something with the past,” Layton says, “a desire to be part of something respectable.”
Wreck divers point out the Park Service does little to reclaim undersea artifacts, leaving them to corrode and disintegrate. And many wreck divers find National Park rangers very possessive.
“If I find a $20 gold piece on the floor in the national park, and Ricky Ranger isn’t looking, I’m gonna take it,” Dunn adds. “Is the next guy going to leave it for the next generation?”
But for the last 30 years, this nation’s public agencies have been battening legal hatches against wreck divers. Government agencies have barred removal of items from public sites on land and underwater, widened the legal definition of protected property and stepped up enforcement efforts.
Channel Islands wrecks have been protected under federal law since before World War II, and those restrictions were tightened in 1980, when the islands gained status as both a National Park and a National Marine Sanctuary.
The sanctuary territory, which bars disturbances of the seabed, reaches six nautical miles from each island. The popular Park Service slogan is “Take only photographs, leave only bubbles.”
But through years of lax enforcement, many divers have been taking more. For the Channel Islands rangers, the October, 1987, voyage of the California Wreck Divers stood out as an opportunity to build a high-profile archeological protection case. The rangers resolved to plant two of their own on the boat.
“We had first talked about two males,” recalls Setnicka, “and then, I think I said, ‘Hey, what about using Mark and Yvonne?’ ”
Mark Senning and Yvonne Menard were two of the park’s newest rangers, having arrived five months before from other National Park Service assignments in Hawaii. Neither had ever gone undercover, but Setnicka had worked with them in Hawaii, and hired them in Ventura.
“Two guys together, it’s easy to think ‘cop,’ ” explains Setnicka. Senning and Menard, he continues, “looked like classic yuppies. A guy and his wife, money to burn, interested in diving.”
Fitzgerald and Setnicka phoned the dive trip organizers, gave Mark Senning’s name and made a pair of reservations. Then they called Senning and Menard to tell them how they would be spending the weekend.
The Sting
At 10:30 p.m. on Thursday night, Senning and Menard arrived at the Santa Barbara Marina, found their way to the Vision and stepped aboard. There they introduced themselves to Jack Ferguson, divemaster for the California Wreck Divers Club, and handed over a $550 check to cover their participation in the dive.
“I found him to be a real friendly guy,” says Senning. “He was very into his club--he was definitely a club officer type . . . . And he definitely believed in what he was doing.”
Mark Senning, then 35, had started diving at 13, and began working for the Park Service in 1981. From 1984 to 1987 he worked on a research project in the wreckage of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. For the purpose of this trip, he would pretend to be a paramedic.
Yvonne Menard, 31 at the time, had begun her Park Service career as a 20-year-old volunteer at the Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego. Since then, she had dived extensively in the Arizona wreckage and worked as a ranger in Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park. For the weekend, she would be a teacher.
“We were going along as people who were new to California and California diving,” says Senning. “And if shipwrecks were part of the history here--wow, what a neat way to go scuba diving!”
“They seemed like a nice, personable couple,” recalls wreck diver Steve Lawson, later the target of $925 in state and federal fines. “The woman seemed more talkative than the guy . . . . I never suspected anything.”
Since the early 1970s, U.S. park rangers have regularly assumed false identities in pursuit of lawbreakers.
The Park Service employs about 3,200 rangers, an estimated 1,200 of whom hold regular law enforcement duties. Dozens of generalist rangers take part in undercover operations every year over drugs, poaching or archeological protection. Those operations are on the increase, rangers say. This was the first one in California waters.
In a report that formed the bedrock of the government’s prosecution, Senning and Menard gave their account of what came next:
At about 4 a.m. Friday, the boat puttered out of the marina, bound for a day of diving at a shipwreck outside the sanctuary area. There were more than 30 passengers, and many knew each other from previous trips.
One was Ferguson, a jack-of-many-trades who lived in Bellflower, but these days has no listed phone number. Frank Farmer, a 55-year-old Van Nuys actor, writer and past president of the wreck divers’ club, was along with his daughter. Cliff Craft, a 42-year-old building inspector from Whittier, was there as well.
“They were clowns,” Craft says of the rangers now, his voice rising.
“I’m covered with tattoos from the waist up--all over my body,” he continues. “They identified me as ‘tattooed on right arm and balding.’ I’m not balding, mister. I am baldheaded.”
As the rangers planned, Menard carried a pastel-colored notebook, bought at a Ventura supermarket with the idea that she would pretend to be writing letters. But, she recalls, “I tried that the first day and felt uncomfortable doing it.”
Instead, she and Senning settled into a routine of note-scribbling in the cabin late at night. Senning kept a two-way radio in his bag.
On Saturday morning, the Vision arrived at the site of the Golden Horn, which lies inside the marine sanctuary area. Before long, the rangers’ report says, four divers were underwater in tanks, masks and wetsuits, hammering at wreckage. Four others were soon back aboard, displaying souvenirs from below.
“The law enforcement officers said nothing during the entire trip, thus encouraging the divers to pursue their activities,” complained Skin Diver magazine later in an editorial written by Paul J. Tzimoulis. “They even photographed the divers proudly displaying their worthless souvenirs. Is this entrapment or what?”
Before the day was over, at least a few divers had grown suspicious of the undercover rangers. At one point, Ferguson confronted Menard and Senning.
“He asked me if I was a state commissioner,” Menard says. “And that was an easy question to answer. I said I wasn’t a state commissioner.”
Several times after that, Ferguson announced that removing objects from the ocean floor was illegal--announcements, a judge later concluded, that “were made in mocking derision . . . . It is clear that many divers, including Ferguson, had no respect for the sanctuary and its regulations.”
On Saturday afternoon, the boat moved on to the Crown of England wreck, just off Santa Rosa Island, and the Jane L. Stanford wreck not far away. At each site, several divers made their way onto the island, which is closed to the public, and several more small items were raised from the water. Reports noted a brass bolt, small nails and some bones.
Senning and Menard admired their fellow divers’ finds, and at one point Senning fanned and sifted through debris while another diver excavated nearby. But neither ranger, the two are quick to say, removed anything from the sea floor.
Early Sunday morning, Senning slipped into the bathroom with his two-way radio and quietly dictated a message to his Park Service colleagues on land.
“I think I said, ‘For dinner, we’ll bring in seven or eight abalone,’ ” he recalls. That, under their pre-arranged code, meant Senning expected to have seven or eight violations to report upon landing.
But later that day, when the boat arrived at the spare wreckage of the Winfield Scott inside the marine sanctuary area, the violations began to multiply.
Ferguson warned divers he would sound an underwater alarm if park rangers drew near the boat, court papers say. Then came another dive, with more hammering and sifting, and the removal of a brass dowel along with various nails and copper fragments. Afterward, Dan Purdie, a 36-year-old commercial welder and longtime sport diver from Buena Park, displayed an old $2.50 coin “which he admitted taking from the wreckage,” Menard wrote.
The case now would have several new violations--more than federal officials can recall in any other such case, leading them to label this the largest archeological protection case in U.S. history. And the coin would be the case’s prize artifact.
“It was like gold fever,” recalls Senning. “When the thing came up, and Mr. Purdie showed it, and people were taking pictures of it, the excitement was so tangible in the air--it was like you could grab it.”
“You hold something like that up,” says Farmer, “and people’s judgment tends to go out the window.”
In a declaration for the court, Menard described the coin as a $2.50 gold piece from 1843.
As part of his sentence, Purdie was ordered to turn the coin over, and Park Service officials say they have held it since then. But the coin in their evidence closet is an 1853 $2.50 gold piece--not the same coin Menard described. Still, the court and the Park Service accepted it at the time.
The authorities “seem to be satisfied,” says Purdie, declining to say more.
“It’s not the coin that was found,” says Craft, declining to offer details.
Dick Adams, proprietor of Ventura Coins, estimates that the coin the Park Service has would probably sell for about $250, and that an 1843 $2.50 piece might bring $50 more.
In any event, rangers say, they can never be sure where their coin came from, and it’s probably too late to do anything about it.
“They snookered us,” confesses Setnicka, now the Channel Islands National Park’s chief of operations. But the coin is “meaningless,” since its worth is relatively modest and none of the prosecutions depended upon it, Setnicka says. Still, he adds, “it’s embarrassing.”
The Bust
It was 4:45 on Sunday afternoon when the Vision returned to Santa Barbara. On the marina stood a team of six law enforcement officials--two each from the National Park Service, the National Marine Fisheries and the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department.
Menard had taken 26 pages of notes. She stepped up to the law enforcement team, she remembers, and handed over a passenger list.
“The boat’s being boarded at this time,” Senning remembers saying, “I’m a park ranger, and we’re asking everyone to stay where they are.”
The reaction, he recalls, was “pretty derogatory and caustic.”
“There were some angry people. It was real uncomfortable for me, personally,” says Menard. “Moments before, one of the individuals on the boat was opening their home to me.”
Informed of the gold coin, Jack Fitzgerald and the two Santa Barbara sheriff’s deputies took Daniel Purdie below deck and strip-searched him, but came up with nothing.
“They were very sloppy,” Frank Farmer says. “Some stuff was allowed to go right off, and other stuff was searched.”
Once the investigation went to the courts, a judge noted that Senning and Menard were each witnesses in criminal and civil cases, and forbade them from discussing the undercover assignment with each other. That restriction was lifted Oct. 17.
“We still haven’t really sat down and compared notes,” Menard says.
“There are plenty of other things to talk about,” Senning says. “We’ve had a kid since then.”
The Ripples
Authorities knew the legal case would be complicated. No one, however, bargained for what it became. One complication was geography, since the case took place in two counties and a federally protected area. Another was the deep-seated animosity between rangers and wreck divers.
The divers’ lawyers challenged the constitutionality of the case, the rangers’ ability to identify people in bulky diving gear, the expertise of the Park Service’s experts and the historical value of the Winfield Scott. Cliff Craft, determined to prevail over penalties that amounted to less than $2,000, spent $30,000.
“I haven’t had anything like it before or since,” says Eric Hanson, senior deputy district attorney for Santa Barbara County. “I’ve done murder cases, and this was just as intellectually challenging as that.”
All told, the Park Service went after 20 people, pursuing 32 misdemeanor criminal charges in Ventura County and Santa Barbara County courts, and 31 civil charges before a federal administrative law judge through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Fifty-six of the 63 charges stuck.
In the criminal cases, most of the divers accepted $750 fines, along with three years’ probation and a requirement that they notify Channel Islands rangers before entering the national park. In the first batch of civil cases, 10 divers, the ship captain and the ship owner accepted fines up to $21,500.
“It was huge overkill,” Farmer says. He was never charged. “I know what the club has done over the years, and I hate like hell to see it damaged this way.”
“Yes, if you want to go by the strict letter of the law, they broke the law,” Craft acknowledges. “But there were people charged with doing things who did not do them . . . . I am not the person that they claimed was me.”
Craft, who wasn’t charged in Santa Barbara, took his case to trial in Ventura County and a mistrial was declared in June, 1990. In the federal case, he drew a $1,000 fine for disturbing a protected seabed.
Dan Purdie, fined $10,000 for removing artifacts from three wreck sites and illegally altering the seabed, gave up the legal fight and paid.
“I’m not going to say that we were totally right and they were totally wrong,” Purdie says. But, he continues, former automobile executive John “DeLorean got off, and he was videotaped with cocaine . . . . Now I’m a taxpayer, and I go to church-- not as often as I should, but I go . . . . And I feel we took it in the shorts on this.”
If all the government fines are paid--which remains in doubt, given Ferguson’s uncertain status--park service officials say the government will recoup just over $200,000 from the case. It cost more than that to prosecute it, federal officials acknowledge. But the outcome, they say, made it a bargain.
“It was never a question of sending anybody to jail,” says Hanson in the Santa Barbara district attorney’s office. “It was to make a point: You can’t go out and steal from these protected wreck sites.”
The last cases were resolved on Oct. 17, when federal Administrative Law Judge Hugh J. Dolan ended a two-year silence and assessed fines against seven divers. Most of the fines were from $1,000 to $6,000.
Craft, fined $1,000, has appealed, and says he will fight “if they fine me 5 cents. It’s wrong.”
The seventh case was Jack Ferguson. The judge looked at the prosecutors’ request for a $6,000 fine, then bumped it to $100,000. Back at the Channel Islands National Park ranger headquarters in Ventura, Jack Fitzgerald read a fax transmission of the judge’s decision and marveled.
“Mr. Ferguson is a special case,” Dolan wrote. “He mocked the law and by actions and words encouraged all of the violations committed.”
Ferguson, said to be working and living in the Los Angeles area, could not be reached. He didn’t seek an appeal within the usual 30 days of the judge’s ruling, and one former diving companion noted at the time that “a lot of people are looking for Jack. . . .They’ll be lucky to find him.”
But on Dec. 19, an attorney representing Ferguson and two other divers asked for a chance to appeal, saying his clients weren’t properly notified of the ruling. A decision could take weeks, and the next step after that could take longer. Ferguson’s next move is unclear.
“If I were him,” says California Wreck Divers President Jim Dunn, “I’d be in Brazil.”
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aaa5bcffa8ffbb464eea9953d437103c
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9920-story.html
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NEIGHBORS : The Coupon Queen : A Newbury Park shopper cuts her grocery bill in half and uses the money to start a business.
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NEIGHBORS : The Coupon Queen : A Newbury Park shopper cuts her grocery bill in half and uses the money to start a business.
Stephanie Nardoni of Newbury Park did her holiday grocery shopping last week. So what, you say? Consider this: She bought $228 worth of groceries--including three turkeys--and the store paid her $4.
She did it all with coupons.
“I’ve made $500 in cash and gotten $500 in free products since July,” said Nardoni, who shops for a family of four. “I always save 50% of the bill--40% is a bad day.”
It started when Nardoni decided that she wanted to cut the weekly grocery bill of $150. She began by collecting coupons and soon discovered some fascinating things.
For instance: “Say a laundry detergent is on sale somewhere for $3.79. I have a coupon for $1 and the store will double it. Then it would cost me $1.79,” she said. “If the company offers a refund I send a proof of purchase in and they send me back a check for $3.79. I made $2.”
Nardoni saved enough to start her own business, making and selling crystal bracelets. “There will be no coupons for the bracelets,” she said. “No, no. Only cash.”
Special delivery: Jan. 1 is approaching and that means a whole new batch of New Year’s babies. I caught up with the mother of a previous Ventura County New Year’s baby to see how things were going.
Andrea Goldberg of Thousand Oaks gave birth to daughter Alyssa on Jan. 1, 1989. Goldberg reports that her daughter has her “moments” but is otherwise doing great.
Alyssa wasn’t due until the end of January, 1989, Goldberg said.
“My husband and I were out on New Year’s Eve with 12 other couples. The whole night the jokes were about what would happen if the baby arrived early. But there were no indications,” she said. “We got home at about 3:30 a.m. and at 6 a.m. it was time. The people we went out with were quite surprised the next day.”
What does Goldberg have planned for this year’s celebration? “We’re just going to take it quiet,” she said.
It may not be Strawberry Fields Forever for Marisa Vasquez. The 23-year-old Vasquez is the current Miss Oxnard, and as such makes appearances at special functions. Last week she attended her first official event, a ceremony in Camarillo kicking off the strawberry season in Ventura County.
Vasquez came in a fancy dress and high-heeled shoes, but it wasn’t long before she figured out that it wasn’t the most appropriate attire for a day in the strawberry field.
“The dress was a little awkward for walking around in the mud,” she said. “But I did have a spare pair of flat shoes in the car.”
The high winds last week brought a case of deja vu to Rene Henderson of Self Image Hairstyling in Ventura.
It was a windy morning back in 1987. Henderson was asleep, dreaming that something had fallen on her car. Suddenly, she said, she was rudely awakened by a noise that “sounded like a locomotive coming through the house.”
She was about to check outside when the telephone rang. It was a co-worker. Henderson told her to hold, ran outside and discovered that a divider her husband had built in the driveway had fallen on her car. “It dented my hood,” she said.
Henderson came back to the phone and began talking. Her friend, hearing a loud crash of her own, put Henderson on hold. “A palm tree across the street from the shop had fallen on her car,” Henderson said. “It was like a sardine can.”
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497d5511d397f3a1fe0b316fc338b885
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9922-story.html
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FOR THE KIDS NEW YEAR’S : Child’s Play : Youngsters 5 to 11 can party all night as Oxnard’s parks department baby-sits.
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FOR THE KIDS NEW YEAR’S : Child’s Play : Youngsters 5 to 11 can party all night as Oxnard’s parks department baby-sits.
New Year’s Eve isn’t just for grown-ups. Kids like to stay up until that magical hour, if only to blast in the new year with all the ear-splitting noise they can muster.
They can do just that at the New Year’s Eve slumber party sponsored by the Oxnard Parks and Recreation Department. For the fourth year in a row the city is holding the all-night party for kids aged 5 to 11.
The one-of-a-kind party is a boon to kids as well as parents.
The kids can party until they drop into their sleeping bags, and the parents can go out on the town without worrying about rushing home to relieve the baby-sitter.
“Parents can rest assured their children are being cared for by a trained staff and that they are having a good time,” said Silvia Mathews, recreation coordinator for the city.
The giant slumber party is held in Oxnard Community Center, 800 Hobson Way. The party begins at 7 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and ends at 9 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The cost is $20. Parents can sign up their children at the recreation department, 325 South A St. There is space for 30 children.
The kids need to bring only a sleeping bag, pillow, pajamas and a toothbrush. The fun begins as soon as they get there.
In past years the staff has staged relay races--everything from carrying water in a spoon to extracting one’s shoes from a pile of shoes and putting them on.
“We made sure they had a good time,” said Deanna Rodriguez, who has helped chaperon two of the parties. The kids can also listen to music, watch videos or play board games. They can make craft items out of wood and paint them. They can gorge on snacks all night too.
As midnight approaches, the real fun begins. The kids are given noisemakers and hats. The staff holds a countdown and soon the place is alive with confetti, streamers and balloons--and noise.
“They just go wild,” Rodriguez said.
The kids are allowed to stay up as long as they want. Rodriguez remembers one 11-year-old boy who watched movie after movie, determined to make it until morning. The kids are served breakfast before their parents pick them up.
High school kids can whoop it up on New Year’s Eve with a trip to Knott’s Berry Farm.
Tim MacKenzie, youth pastor at Ventura Missionary Church, is busing kids to the amusement park for a special celebration.
The bus leaves Ventura at 5 p.m. for the two-hour trip. The midnight countdown is accompanied by fireworks.
The park will be open until 1 a.m. with rides operating and several bands performing. Buses return to Ventura at 3 a.m.
MacKenzie expects 75 to 80 youths to make the trip in a bus and two vans. To reserve a spot, call the church, 656-0500. The cost is $18.
For older kids who want to dance the night away, the Conejo Recreation and Park District is sponsoring a New Year’s Eve Dance in the Teen Center, 1375 E. Janss Road, Thousand Oaks.
Music will be provided by the band Audio Fetish. Tickets are $4 at the door. The dance, for kids 13 to 18, runs from 8:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.
WHERE AND WHEN
The Oxnard Parks and Recreation Department’s New Year’s Eve slumber party for kids 5 to 11 years will be at the Oxnard Community Center, 800 Hobson Way. For more information call 984-4643.
Ventura Missionary Church is offering high school kids a New Year’s Eve excursion to Knott’s Berry Farm. For information and reservations call 656-0500.
A New Year’s Eve dance for teens, sponsored by the Conejo Recreation and Park District, will be at the new teen center, 1375 E. Janss Road, Thousand Oaks. For more information call 496-2463.
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121f171098c6a27a0256ea20debfd7a8
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9924-story.html
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GOINGS ON SANTA BARBARA : Toasts for 1991 : Celebrants have plenty of choices for greeting the new year in whatever way suits their style.
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GOINGS ON SANTA BARBARA : Toasts for 1991 : Celebrants have plenty of choices for greeting the new year in whatever way suits their style.
Santa Barbara isn’t presenting its usual ample array of performances, exhibits and special events this week.
But with New Year’s Eve around the corner, who has energy for anything else anyway?
To help ring in the new year:
* Folks will be waltzing, fox-trotting, and cha-chaing their way to 1991 as the Santa Barbara Recreation Center at 100 E. Carrillo St. holds its 20th annual New Year’s Eve dance, Monday 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. $10 per person. 965-3813.
Music will be performed by Special Delivery, a five-piece ballroom band led by Michael Mortilla of the University of California at Santa Barbara’s music department. The expected average age for the event is between 55 and 60, but people in their 30s and even 20s have attended in past years.
“The crowds are getting younger and younger each year,” said 66-year-old Mary Lou Houser, who has been going to the New Year’s dance since it began.
Houser said she likes to see the new faces but the young set does create a few problems: “You can be 50 and the man can be 60, and he’ll still be looking at the young girls with their young pretty faces and skinny legs and flashy bodies.”
And although the holiday spirit gets into everyone’s blood--a few of the elderly gentlemen have been known to try to imitate some of the more seductive moves from the film “Dirty Dancing"--the event is “good clean fun,” Houser added.
* The traditional New Year’s favorites of food, champagne, music and some good laughs will be provided at Carnaval restaurant/nightclub, 634 State St., 962-9991.
Stand-up comedians Jeff Wayne and Danny Harrigan will perform 8 to 10 p.m. Monday. Dancing to deejays spinning the tunes follows the show. Tickets, $20 in advance and $25 at the door, include comedy, hors d’oeuvres, desserts, party favors and a glass of champagne. Tennis shoes and jeans are discouraged. Average age is expected to be about 25.
* A down-home country-western New Year is in the works for The Graduate, 935 Embarcadero del Norte, in Goleta, close to UCSB. 685-3112.
For $15, Vernon Snow and Tulsa will provide the music and everyone gets a bottle of champagne plus party favors. Add $10 for a special steak dinner. No dress code.
* The Long Bar, 111 State St., will be offering a special menu plus the dance music of the Flashbacks.
The $17.95 charge includes dinner, party favors and a champagne toast. $5 admission after 10 p.m. (no dinner). Casual dress. 564-1215.
* See’s Coffee Co. is providing an alternative to the bar scene by offering toasts of sparkling apple cider.
A lineup of local musicians will provide the free entertainment. 1019 State St. 963-8060.
* Revelers will be beating in the new year at the Green Dragon Art Studio and Espresso Bar with Full Moon Drumming.
Bring your own drum, then dance and sing at 22 West Mission St. No admission charge, no age restrictions. 687-1902.
* A black-tie affair is planned for the Four Seasons Biltmore Hotel, 1260 Channel Drive, in Montecito.
Admission of $110 per person buys a buffet dinner, party favors and the sounds of a jazz trio plus the Bob Ledner Orchestra. 8 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. 969-2261 Ext. 1420. Average age is expected to be about 35.
* A few folks in Montecito’s Music Academy of the West are celebrating extra hard this year.
An anonymous Santa Barbara family recently donated $2 million to the institution to go toward construction of a state-of-the-art music studio building on campus. The money will also be used to renovate and expand the library, and for endowments and annual funds.
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0500aede60bf12618398d598b332484b
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vl-9925-story.html
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BOOK BEAT RED HEN PRESS : A Lesson Learned : Joanne O’Roarke and Hope Bryant became publishers when big companies seemed disinterested in their works for children.
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BOOK BEAT RED HEN PRESS : A Lesson Learned : Joanne O’Roarke and Hope Bryant became publishers when big companies seemed disinterested in their works for children.
Everyone remembers the English folk tale about the little red hen: As she went through her day’s work in the farmyard she asked each of the animals to help her do the chores. No one would help. “ ‘Then I’ll do it myself,’ said the Little Red Hen. And she did.”
Launched only six years ago, the Red Hen Press has become a successful children’s book publishing company and it is no coincidence that co-publishers Joanne O’Roarke and Hope Slaughter Bryant chose the name they did. Both had been unsuccessful in trying to interest big publishers in their work.
“I decided, why should giant conglomerates like Doubleday and Random House make all the decisions about what children are going to read in the future?” said O’Roarke.
“Hope had written a delightful children’s book, ‘Plato’s Fine Feathers’; my nephew David Shearer wanted to illustrate children’s literature, so I decided I would become a publisher myself.”
“Plato’s Fine Feathers” a four-color picture book, bore the logo of the smugly smiling little red hen. It was an enormous success.
“When I held it in my hands,” Bryant said, “I cherished the feel of it, the smell of it. I turned it over and over, and I said, “This is what I want to do.’ My husband and his friends would say ‘Books will become obsolete. Everything will be on microfilm.’ Well, a child can’t curl up with a piece of microfilm!”
In January the company will bring out “A Cozy Place,” written by Bryant and illustrated by Susan Torrance; and “A Feather for Emily,” written and illustrated by Barbara Sawyer.
Although these two new works represent only the 11th and 12th Red Hen books, the company has an impressive number of successes.
The picture book “Extraordinary Chester” will go into its second printing in the spring. Last year it was the finalist for the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Award, given annually by the Publishers Marketing Assn.
Another book, “A Sky for Henry,” has been chosen by the Braille Institute for national distribution.
But Red Hen’s greatest success so far has been in launching author Lee Wardlow.
“We published her first book, ‘Me Plus Math Equals Headache,’ in 1986 and her sequel ‘The Eye and I’ in 1988. National Scholastic Books has just brought out ‘The Eye and I’ as a weekly reader and with a run of 80,000 copies,” O’Roarke said.
Wardlow, a former elementary school teacher, has since acquired an agent and published books with Avon and Silhouette Books.
Now a full-time writer, she has three books coming out in the next year. One of them, “My Mother’s on the Roof,” will be published next fall by Red Hen.
To what do Bryant and O’Roarke attribute the success of Red Hen Press?
“We like to think of ourselves as a launching path,” Bryant said.
“We look at an author’s and an illustrator’s work for itself, rather than at the person’s credits. We don’t depend on the press for our income so we can afford, unlike the big companies, to approach the work as an art.”
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12b53891021847b2001b692ab702a896
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-10031-story.html
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Song of a Savant : Gloria Lenhoff’s Musical Talents Overshadow Her Other Limitations
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Song of a Savant : Gloria Lenhoff’s Musical Talents Overshadow Her Other Limitations
Gloria Lenhoff sings opera in a beautiful soprano voice. She plays the accordion as if it were an extension of herself, effortlessly absorbing new pieces into her repertoire of more than 1,000 songs.
She can converse in a half-dozen languages, including Spanish, Hebrew, French, Japanese and sign.
There is an aura of genius about this woman. And because she excels in extraordinary areas, you forget her limitations in the ordinary ones.
“Gloria, if something costs a dime and you pay for it with a quarter, how much change will you get back?” her father asks.
She stares at him blankly. Math, even simple math, is not a language she speaks. “Can you help me with the answer?” she reponds.
Lenhoff has Williams syndrome, a rare form of mental retardation that didn’t even have a name when she was born 35 years ago. Although she is quite adept at small talk, her conversation becomes halting and foggy when steered off the beaten path.
Gloria is a savant, someone who is mentally deficient but who possesses an extraordinary talent, much like the hero of the 1988 movie “Rain Man.” Unlike Dustin Hoffman’s character, who was autistic and had superior mathematical skills, Lenhoff’s gift lies in music.
While her parents learned of her mental disability when she was an infant, they didn’t recognize her interest in music until she was 11. She enjoyed singing and putting on make-believe shows for them, so they gave her lessons in voice and accordion--with no great expectations.
It was at his daughter’s bat mitzvah that Howard Lenhoff realized how far her musical skills had grown. The 13-year-old girl sang Hebrew hymns with a voice that moved the congregation to tears.
“My wife thinks I place too much emphasis on the bat mitzvah as the turning point,” says Howard Lenhoff, a UC Irvine biology professor. “But that was the first time I saw the effect Gloria has on an audience. Before then, she just sang around the house for her own amusement.”
Ever since, his daughter has been taking her act on the road. She gives performances at synagogues, convalescent homes and Leisure World. A couple of times a year, she steals her father’s thunder at his biology class.
The students had waited months for this night--the grand finale of their undergraduate course, “Conception to Birth.” Lenhoff presents his last lecture of the quarter, ending with a brief discussion of birth defects.
By the law of averages, about a dozen of the people in the room someday would have a handicapped child, the instructor says. What would they do? Would they treat the experience as a tragedy, or as a challenge?
Then, Gloria steps onstage, smiling brightly. She is dressed in casual slacks, as though she were performing for a few friends rather than a few hundred strangers.
Calm and self-assured, she introduces herself.
Then she begins to sing Gluck’s aria, “O Del Mio Dolci Ardor,” her voice strong and lovely. The audience thanks her with a roar of applause as her father stands in the background, beaming.
There is still more for Lenhoff to show off. He suggests the students greet Gloria in foreign languages. “Comment allez vous? " someone asks. “Je vais tres bien, merci,” Gloria responds.
One by one, members of the audience engage Gloria in chitchat in whatever language they throw her way. Finally, a man yells out something she cannot discern. “I didn’t understand,” she apologizes. Is she finally stumped? He repeats himself. Oh! And she rattles on awhile in Japanese.
Next, Gloria sits down on a stool with her accordion and plays a couple of lively waltzes. Two students leap to their feet and dance.
After awarding Gloria a standing ovation, her newest fans line up to hug her and give her written notes of praise.
A few days after the performance, Gloria sits in the living room of the Costa Mesa home she shares with her parents. She is sifting through the students’ notes.
“Listen to this,” she says. She slowly reads one of the letters aloud, occasionally soliciting her mother’s help.
“I first heard you sing at Temple Bat-Yahm in 1977,” it begins. “My sister is handicapped too. . . . When I was pregnant, I was never afraid of having a handicapped child because of (the achievements of) you and my sister. . . .”
How does it make her feel to know that she affects people so positively?
“I really feel a great deal of love,” Gloria says.
The conversation turns to a more trying time, her early life.
“You don’t mind if we talk about this, do you?” her father asks. “You don’t mind because you know how good you are--better than most of us.”
Sylvia Lenhoff, a UC Irvine administrator, lets her husband tell the story.
Shortly after Gloria was born, the Lenhoffs were told she had a mental handicap.
“It was more shattering to me than it was to my wife,” says Lenhoff, who was doing his postdoctoral apprenticeship in Connecticut at the time. “I was the sort of person--and I still am--who makes everything in life go right. When I was a kid going through college, I was always at the top in everything. For the first time in my life, I had no control. You feel like, ‘Why me?’ ”
But the couple adjusted. Three years later they had a second child, Bernie, who now is an actor and musician living in Los Angeles.
Gloria, who has an IQ of 50, went through public school sharing special education classes with Down’s syndrome children, although she was more verbal than most of her peers. No one seemed to know how to classify her own type of mental disability.
In fact, the Lenhoffs didn’t learn the name of Gloria’s condition until 33 years after her birth. In 1988, Gloria starred in a PBS television program that focused on her unusual talents. After it aired, the Lenhoffs received letters from parents who told them that their daughter had Williams syndrome.
“My first reaction was, so what? What good will a label do us at this point?” Sylvia Lenhoff recalls.
However, as she and her husband learned more about the syndrome, it became the missing piece in the puzzle of Gloria. Right down the line, the list of indicators fit: heart murmur, odd gait, superior hearing, crossed eyes, a charming demeanor known as “a cocktail personality” in Williams syndrome circles, and elfin features that--through her father’s eyes--give Gloria her “adorable face.”
Last year, the Lenhoffs attended a convention in Boston for Williams syndrome families. Says Sylvia Lenhoff: “For Gloria, it was like finding her soul mates.”
Gloria can’t read music, much less analyze it. She knows an F sharp when she hears one, but not when she sees one written down. And she can show you a B flat on a keyboard, but she can’t tell you where it is.
“Gloria, how many buttons down from a C is an A?” asks her accordion instructor, Roek Willemze.
“Can you help me with the answer?” asks Gloria, loath to disappoint.
“It’s not important, honey,” he assures her. “You don’t need to know.”
In his 20 years of teaching the accordion, Willemze has “never seen anyone like Gloria.”
“No one comes close, to be honest,” he says. “You play something once for her, and she can play it back for you the next week. She picks up every note in a composition, just the way she hears it. Then she never lets go of it. She’s unbelievable--I myself can’t remember all this stuff.”
The day has been long and tiring for Gloria. She spent all morning at the preschool where she volunteers as an aide, then rushed home for her music lesson. Her spunky “cocktail personality” waned.
But when she sits down with her accordion, she gets an energy burst. She laughs and smiles and taps her feet as she gracefully segued from Beethoven sonatas to polkas.
Howard Lenhoff dreams that someday Gloria’s talents will help her to earn some money for herself.
“Professionally, I see a lot of potential in her and I want to guide her all I can,” he says. “The greatest concern of any parent who has a handicapped child is what happens when you die.”
Gloria’s parents look after her as if she were a 12-year-old. “It’s like having a child who never really grows up,” Howard Lenhoff says. “But she’s a lot of fun to have around.
“Our next great move is for her to live independently of us. There’s a home for mentally handicapped people right around the corner from our house, and we’re hoping that within two or three years she’ll try it. She ought to get used to living away from us before she loses us, although we like having her here.”
“She does not expect marriage and children at all,” her father says. “She just enjoys her life as it is.”
So far, Gloria mostly has garnered only tokens of appreciation for her performances. “You know what? Leisure World paid me $30,” she reveals. “I bought a television with it. My mom and dad helped me pay for it.”
Normally, Gloria catches public buses to and from her volunteer job at an Orange preschool. “I take the 53 bus, and I stay on the 53, then I transfer to the 54 and then I get off at Yorba. . . ,” she proudly explains.
As fathers will do, Howard embarrasses her with a bit of family folklore. “She’s gotten on the wrong bus a couple of times and scared us to death,” he says.
“That’s in the past,” she interrupts.
One recent afternoon, she catches a ride home with a visitor, who spent the morning with her at the Orange Unified Child Development Center.
Gloria helped the children tie their shoes, wash their hands and put out their mats at naptime. She gave them pushes on the swing, hugs and songs. That day, they had gathered around her and--with attentiveness unusual for 4-year-olds--listened to her sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
On the way home, she is full of girl talk. “Do you have a boyfriend? I do. And you know what? One day he was in my swimming pool and he splashed water on me.
“Did you like the lipstick I had on yesterday? Did you think it was pretty? I like to buy Avon makeup. I like to put on makeup.”
She is asked a question almost anyone would find too complex for a simple yes or no: Are you happy with your life, Gloria?
“Sometimes I’m not happy,” she replies. “Sometimes people tease me on the bus. Sometimes I want to do things other people can do that I can’t do. But when I’m performing, I try not to let those things get to me too much, because then I won’t be able to think of all the good things coming up.”
What song does she most enjoy singing?
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Lenhoff says, decisively. “It makes me not feel lonely. The verse I love is. . . . “
And then she sings:
‘Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops, that’s where you’ll find me.”
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cbee05c8eb65743309f2f887f4ea5105
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-10254-story.html
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CLIPBOARD : HOW TO REPORT A MALFUNCTIONING TRAFFIC SIGNAL
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CLIPBOARD : HOW TO REPORT A MALFUNCTIONING TRAFFIC SIGNAL
It is frustrating. There you are sitting at a traffic signal, waiting for it to change. You watch what seems to be a thousand cars whiz by, and still no change. You go into reverse and run over the electronic loop, hoping to activate the signal in your favor, but still no change. You get so irritated you get out of the car and go press the crosswalk button.
And still no change.
You finally give up and whip through a nearby gas station in disgust.
Don’t let it end there, because you just might find yourself sitting at that particular signal again.
In every city of the county, motorists can report malfunctioning and mistimed traffic signals. The county has a traffic engineering division to do the same for signals in the unincorporated areas.
Caltrans will respond to complaints about signals on state-maintained roads such as Pacific Coast Highway, Coast Highway, Imperial Highway, Laguna Canyon Road and most of Beach Boulevard.
The number of complaint calls about traffic signals varies considerably from city to city, from 50 a week in Newport Beach to one or two a month in the smaller cities, traffic officials say.
Complaints range from seemingly mistimed signals to non-working left-turn arrows; from an out-of-whack rotationto a light that has gone out altogether (this last is the most dangerous situation of all, traffic officials say.)
The fault does not always lie in the machinery, however. In some cases, the motorist failed to prompt the light by not running over the electronic loop in the road.
Buena Park traffic engineer Herb Vargas said that there was one case in which the city resorted to painting the electronic loop so that motorists could see where to run over it.
Then there are the complaints from drivers who think they were kept waiting far too long at a particular signal only to have a field check show that the signal is functioning normally.
“Let’s just say we get a number of calls that don’t check out to be what was reported,” said Ron Garrett, traffic engineering technician in Newport Beach.
Although many cities have central computer systems to monitor signals, through the electronic loop system, traffic officials must still rely on the public to report many problems.
Here is a list of phone numbers to call to report mistimed and malfunctioning signals. You must be able to provide the place, the approximate length of time you waited there and the direction you were driving.
Number has a 714 area code unless otherwise noted.
Anaheim
Traffic engineering division, 999-5183.
Brea
Traffic engineering division, 990-7742.
Buena Park
Traffic engineer Herb Vargas, 521-9900.
Costa Mesa
Traffic engineering department, 754-5185.
Cypress
Traffic engineer, 229-6750.
Dana Point
Public Works Department, 248-3560.
Fountain Valley
Traffic engineering, 965-4400.
Fullerton
Engineering Department, 738-6845.
Garden Grove
Traffic engineer, 741-5190.
Huntington Beach
Traffic engineering division, 536-5431.
Irvine
Traffic engineer Rob Hughes, 724-7648.
La Habra
Engineering Department,
(213) 905-9720.
La Palma
Public Works Department, 523-1140.
Laguna Beach
Municipal services, 497-0706.
Laguna Niguel
Call 643-7000 and give the information to the receptionist.
Los Alamitos
Call City Hall at 827-8670 and ask for the city engineer. If unavailable, a receptionist can take down the information and give it to the appropriate department.
Mission Viejo
Secretary of the maintenance division, Julie Snell, 582-2489,
Ext. 2713.
Newport Beach
Traffic division, 644-3344.
Orange
Traffic engineering signal lab, 532-6426.
Placentia
Public Works Department, 993-8131.
San Clemente
Traffic engineer, 498-2533,
Ext. 3405.
San Juan Capistrano
City Hall, 493-1171, and ask for the engineering department.
Santa Ana
Public Works Agency, traffic division, 647-5606.
Seal Beach
City Hall, (213) 431-2527, and ask for the public works yard at Ext. 232.
Stanton
Engineering Department, 220-2220, Ext. 220.
Tustin:
Traffic engineering, 544-8890,
Ext. 289.
Villa Park
Call 998-1500 and ask for the city engineer. If unavailable, a receptionist can take down the information and relay it to the appropriate department.
Westminster
Call 898-3311 and dial in or ask for traffic engineering at Ext. 220.
Yorba Linda
Engineering Department, 961-7170.
State-maintained streets: Call Caltrans traffic operations, 724-2350.
Streets in unincorporated areas of the county: County traffic engineering division, 834-3483.
Source: Individual traffic agencies
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dd04eb1356f52394dac871ff30e6a459
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-10255-story.html
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Mondavi Sets Up Center, Complete With New Vineyard, to Enhance Wine’s Image
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Mondavi Sets Up Center, Complete With New Vineyard, to Enhance Wine’s Image
Michael Mondavi thinks wine is getting a bad rap.
Mondavi, president of a multimillion-dollar Napa Valley wine company that carries the family name, is convinced that it all began in the health-conscious ‘80s, when wine and many other alcoholic beverages were sidelined by the “me” generation in favor of Spandex workout suits and oat-bran protein drinks. He is on an all-out campaign to bring back the days when a glass of wine with a meal was socially acceptable.
“Everything in life has to be done in moderation and that includes drinking wine,” said Mondavi from his Napa Valley office. “If you overindulge with anything--such as food or what have you--you’re going to have a problem, but if you drink wine with sensibility, it’s not going to be a hazard to your health or your lifestyle.”
To spread that message around, the Mondavi family opened a 10,000-square-foot wine and food center last year in the heart of an increasingly booming industrial area in Costa Mesa. The center--the family’s first venture outside of Northern California--is aimed at educating retailers and the public about wine appreciation.
Nicholas Furlotte, publisher of the Wine and Beverage guide in New York, said: “Mondavi has certainly been in the forefront of fostering a better understanding of the role that wine has played in civilization through the years and in educating people about the positive aspects of wine.
“While there may be other wineries attempting to do something similar, Mondavi is certainly on the cutting edge of educating consumers and continues to be the voice of reason in an environment in near hysterics whenever the term ‘alcohol’ comes up.”
This is not your average tasting room, where the wine curious walk in and are served a dribble of the vintner’s offerings. You’ll need reservations to attend one of the events here.
Among the dozens of seminars offered by the winery’s education department are tastings to introduce wines and discuss food pairings, and the more technical seminars that identify the major components in wine. There are blind tastings to compare Mondavi quality with wines from the world’s top growing regions, monthly cooking classes and a large kitchen that showcases the work of visiting chefs invited to the center to prepare meals for guests attending private receptions, luncheons and meetings.
And there is a newly planted vineyard.
Eric Hansen, Mondavi’s director of corporate accounts, said the vines planted on an acre of land next to the center’s complex are part of the company’s educational interest. “We planted the initial root-stock vines in September and with them we are hoping to show the complete process of winemaking, with such beginning procedures as the cultivation of the roots.”
It will take about three years before any wine can be produced from the vines. But, Hansen added, “even at that point the wine will be used for purely experimental and educational purposes. We are not turning this operation into an actual winery.
“This is the first time in a very long while that vineyards have been planted in Orange County, so we are very anxious to see what happens,” Hansen explained.
A wine colony was started in Anaheim by German immigrants in the mid-1850s. Ideal weather made grapes one of the leading crops in the county, and wine was bottled under the Mother Colony label, according to county historian and author Jim Sleeper. But in 1888, phylloxera, a plant louse that destroys vines, caused the fruit and vines to shrivel all over the county. Called the “Anaheim disease,” it caused the local industry to fade into oblivion.
Almost 100 years later, a wine bearing the San Juan Creek label appeared. Released in 1985, the wine was made from Johannisberg Riesling grapes planted a dozen years before in the 71-acre Gobernadora Canyon vineyard a few miles from the San Juan Capistrano Mission. It was bottled at a winery near Temecula. Owner Richard J. O’Neill and his vice president for agriculture for Rancho Mission Viejo cited high daytime temperatures and increasing humidity in the afternoon as assets for growing grapes.
Weather had nothing to do with the Mondavi family decision to build here.
“We moved an operation to the Orange County area because that area is central to everything,” Mondavi said. “People in San Diego as well as folks in Los Angeles who want to come and get some information on wine can now do so without going to Napa Valley.”
The Mondavi name has been a mainstay in the wine industry ever since Michael’s father, Robert, left his family’s Charles Krug Winery in 1966 to build the first new winery in California since Prohibition. Robert Mondavi, 77, who recently retired from daily management operations, is credited with changing the sleepy California wine industry of the early 1960s into an arena of world-class winemaking. There were only about two dozen wineries in Napa County then, compared to more than 200 now, with more on the way.
Company President Michael Mondavi, who is an equal managing partner of the company along with his brother, Timothy, says the company’s major objective continues to be educating the American public about wine and its proper role as a mealtime beverage.
“I believe making good wine is a skill,” Michael said. “Wine is art--and as art, wine is at its best when enjoyed with fine food, while surrounded by art and music.”
The center’s Art Deco-styled building, which is surrounded by a rose garden and sculptures, has marble floors, a grand piano, classic furnishings and artwork on loan from some of the finest collections in the country.
While company officials won’t disclose what it costs to run the elaborate education center, Hansen said the company is pleased with the success enjoyed by the complex.
Mondavi and other premium vintners in the state have good reason be grateful: About 85% of the wine made in the United States comes from California. Last year, home-grown wines rang up $6 billion in retail sales in this state alone. And while wine sales are flat nationwide, sales of California’s premium wines have increased an average of 19.6% a year over the past five years, according to a survey by Habrecht & Quist, a San Francisco investment firm.
“Because of health worries and the increased emphasis people have been putting on the negatives of drinking in recent years, people are not as likely to consume alcohol, particularly hard liquor,” said Furlotte of the Wine and Beverage guide. “The wine industry has suffered to some extinct because of that, but higher-priced, better-quality premium wines have enjoyed quite an increase in sales, much to the benefit of companies like Mondavi.”
In 1989, the last time that sales figures for Mondavi were available, the winery grossed $2.6 million with its premium wine sales, compared to $2.4 million in 1988.
Furlotte added that the country’s new attitude toward wine is: drink less but drink better. “There is, of course, a big image thing in America where people want the best of everything out of life. That means cars, homes, clothes, and right down to the foods and wines they eat and drink. It’s total mind set that focuses on the finer things in life, no matter the cost.
“Mondavi is certainly reaping the benefits of the current trend,” Furlotte said. “Most wineries that have concentrated on the finer wines are all enjoying a bit more success than the rest of the industry.”
Vintners also have some facts to regret: Starting Jan. 1, a federal excise tax on table wine will add about 50 cents to the retail price of a standard bottle of wine. Some industry experts predict that the increase might reduce wine consumption by 12%.
Though Mondavi is positioned well in terms of sales, the company faces a potential danger that industry watchers say could hurt Northern California wineries for the next 10 years: phylloxera has affected about 250 acres, primarily in Napa and Sonoma counties. Replanting with new phylloxera-resistant vines may cost $250 million in Napa County alone.
“Fortunately, we’d decided to used another type of root stock, one that is resistant to the disease, prior to it reoccuring,” Mondavi’s Hansen said. “Up until about three years ago, most wineries had root-resistant stock planted, but now that doesn’t seem to be working, which means a total change in the roots being planted.”
Hansen said the Mondavi operation will gradually uproot and replant its Napa Valley vineyard over the next seven years.
“Years ago, the vines had enough space between them so that a horse could get through to plow, and later on tractors, but we’ve found that the more we do with our hands, the better quality fruit we produce,” Hansen explained. “So now we are replanting the vines closer together, which will give us more vines per acre and less grapes on each vine, which will also enhance the grapes’ flavor.”
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84ca0be5e87dc3e281ef1e055b76619f
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-10256-story.html
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High Life / A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Chia Pets Get No Respect as a Yule Gift
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High Life / A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Chia Pets Get No Respect as a Yule Gift
Not everybody takes Chia Pets seriously, as evidenced by responses of about 160 students and teachers at Corona del Mar High School to a random survey by Ashley Johnson, a 14-year-old freshman at the school.
Though 65% said they would give the red-clay, green-sprouting sheep, dogs, cats, bears and trees as gifts rather than give nothing at all, 52% said they would consider it a joke if a good friend bestowed one upon them as a present.
Just over 46% of those surveyed said they would not want a Chia Pet as a gift, while 38% said they would. And if they did receive such a present, 63% said they would actually grow it, while 17% said they would give it back the following year.
And how would parents react to such a gift from their teen-age sons or daughters? Respondents said 29% of them would take the Chia Pet as a serious gift, 15% would ask for a real present, and 57% would just laugh really hard.
College tuition continues to increase faster than inflation--as it did throughout the ‘80s--according to an annual College Board survey of 2,822 colleges and reported in the December issue of NEA Today, the newspaper of the National Education Assn.
From June, 1989, to June, 1990, the overall inflation rate was just under 5%, while average bills for tuition and mandatory fees increased 8% at private four-year colleges and 7% at public four-year colleges.
The upside: In both kinds of institutions, tuition increases were 1 percentage point less than the 1988-89 increases--the first such drop since 1984.
Musician Frank Zappa doesn’t view the possibility of having a new high school named after him as a compliment. Zappa’s name is among 132 under consideration by the Antelope Valley Union High School District board for its new school, set to open in 1995.
“Considering the sorry state of education in California, it would be more appropriate to name a high school after Ronald Reagan than to name it after me,” said Zappa, a 1958 graduate of Antelope Valley High School.
“The future isn’t what it used to be.”
--Variously ascribed
“The future is much like the present, only longer.”
--Dan Quisenberry, former
major league baseball pitcher
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d89155cf9816f4c3887fada06c01645a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-10258-story.html
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A Japan Story: 100 Years of Love : Literature: Lafcadio Hearn, a 19th-Century American newspaperman who fell in love with Japan, is both praised and vilified by readers in his adopted country.
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A Japan Story: 100 Years of Love : Literature: Lafcadio Hearn, a 19th-Century American newspaperman who fell in love with Japan, is both praised and vilified by readers in his adopted country.
Lafcadio Hearn gazed out his cedar-framed window, contemplated a lotus pond surrounded by irises and moss-covered rocks and listened to the cicadas buzzing on a plum branch.
He turned to his waist-high desk, put pen to paper and wrote a melancholy prophecy that is still valid 100 years after he arrived in this small lakeside city in Izumo, the mythical Province of the Gods.
“Already a multitude of gardens, more spacious and more beautiful than mine, have been converted into rice fields or bamboo groves,” Hearn wrote. “And the quaint Izumo city, touched at last by some long-projected railway line . . . will swell, and change, and grow commonplace, and demand these grounds for the building of factories and mills.
“Not from here alone, but from all the land the ancient peace and the ancient charm seem doomed to pass away. For impermanency is the nature of all things, more particularly in Japan.”
The Greek-Irish journalist from the United States had fallen in love with Japan, although he became increasingly ambivalent as it modernized. And while Hearn has largely slipped into obscurity in the West, the Japanese have never forgotten him, particularly in this centennial year.
Admirers say he was one of the few Westerners who truly understood Japanese culture, possibly because he considered it superior in many ways to the industrialized West.
“He loved the ordinary life, the daily life of the Japanese people,” says Kenji Zenimoto, professor of intercultural studies at Shimane University in Matsue and president of the national Lafcadio Hearn Society.
Elementary school pupils around the country still read Hearn’s Japanese ghost stories, and high-school students practice English with his evocative travel writings. University students study his philosophical essays, and scholars argue passionately over his 12 major books and hundreds of articles and letters.
The largest celebration of his centennial began in Matsue last Aug. 30, exactly 100 years after Hearn arrived, at age 40, to teach English in the city’s middle school.
Hearn wrote about the town in “The Chief City of the Province of the Gods,” part of “Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan,” published in 1894.
Here, between a lake and lagoon near the Japan Sea about 390 miles west of Tokyo, one can see that much about Japan has changed and much remains eternal.
Part of Hearn’s garden remains, including the pond and ancient pines. But other houses now encroach upon the northern portion, where wild flowers and grasses once extended to the wooded hills far beyond.
The Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum displays Hearn’s desk, the shell he blew when he wanted his pipe lit, his glasses and socks and even a lock of his hair preserved in a stone monument.
There are displays that tell of Hearn’s Japanese wife, their four children, and his teaching posts elsewhere in Japan, including Imperial University in Tokyo.
Next door is the lotus-pond garden and the house where Hearn lived after his romance with Japan turned into marriage. Although he left Matsue in November, 1891, he was to stay in Japan until he died in 1904.
He wed Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of an impoverished samurai family, became a Japanese citizen and a Buddhist and adopted the name by which he is known to most Japanese today: Yakumo Koizumi. Yakumo, which means “eight clouds,” is a poetic version of Izumo.
As a child, Hearn had been virtually abandoned by his Irish father and Greek mother. After working as a reporter in Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York and the West Indies, he thought he had finally found a peaceful home in Old Japan.
But Japan was in the throes of modernization begun in the 1868 Meiji revolution. And just as marriages occasionally succumb to disenchantment, Hearn increasingly found fault with Japan.
Historian Kaoru Sekita, a Hearn scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo, says Hearn predicted that Japan could never successfully adopt some Western ideas, particularly democratic political processes. Hearn thought “the modes of Japanese human relations had not fundamentally changed since mythological times,” Sekita says.
Hearn’s collection of essays, written shortly before he died, also discusses the problems that arise from Japan’s emphasis on group loyalty over individual enterprise. Hearn warned of a “rise of new power” in Japan--an “oligarchy of wealth” that would enslave the people.
Hearn is not universally admired in Japan. Some critics say his romantic portrayal of Old Japan perpetuates the myth that Japan is unique, a misconception they say still keeps Japan from participating fully in the international community. Others condemn his work as a defense of ultra-conservatism.
“Lots of people who love Hearn today are nostalgic about the Old Japan,” says Yuzo Ota, associate professor of history at McGill University in Montreal. “They are modernized intellectuals who like his romanticized picture of Japan. They feel threatened by their own mixed identity.”
Hearn didn’t have a simple love affair with Japan but a complicated love-hate relationship, Ota says.
The accepted view that Hearn loved Japan “is based on suppression of evidence” in Hearn’s letters to friends and other scholars, he says.
Zenimoto says some of Hearn’s letters were cut for publication to remove passages critical of Japan, including some that castigated its rigid bureaucratic, military and educational systems. Also cut were some of Hearn’s wry observations about sex in Japan, which was more open in the late 1800s than it is now, he says.
Zenimoto has written to about 10 U.S. libraries with extensive holdings of Hearn letters in an attempt to compile a definitive collection. He and his assistant, Yuko Kawauchi, also are working on a Hearn catalogue that will list everything written by and about him. So far they have listed 1,900 items and have an estimated 7,000 to go.
Hearn’s 28-year-old great-grandson, Bon Koizumi, curator of the Hearn Memorial Museum, prepared a special collection for the festival. It includes manuscripts, classroom notes of Hearn’s students and English-language textbooks he prepared for his wife and children.
Zenimoto, Ota and Koizumi were among a dozen scholars participating in the five-day festival, which included presentations on Hearn’s newspaper stories on macabre events in Cincinnati, the effect of Hearn’s Irish roots on his work, Hearn’s and other Westerners’ interpretations of Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion, and Hearn’s ghost stories.
“Lafcadio Hearn was an ideal foreigner to understand Japan, but he also understood cultural shock and the culture gap,” Zenimoto says. “We must understand more minutely his life, but we must not idolize him.”
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1f741384f6165bf1002137d93f0883c4
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-10259-story.html
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High Life / A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Working in the Lingerie Dept.? Well, It Can Be Very Revealing
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High Life / A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Working in the Lingerie Dept.? Well, It Can Be Very Revealing
When asked where I work, I usually try to avoid the subject. I mean, how does one tactfully say that she spends 15 hours a week buried under a heaping pile of underwear?
No, it’s no fetish. I work in the lingerie department of a major department store in the Brea Mall.
I usually feel fortunate that I have such a well-paying job, a wonderful boss and nice co-workers. I even enjoy taking the trash down to receiving to check out the dockworkers, but there is one disadvantage to my job: Many teen-age males, including my friends, are too embarrassed to come into the department.
One male teen-ager who ventured into the lingerie department was with his father, and the two were planning to buy the boy’s mother a birthday present.
I suppose this poor 14-year-old was close in size to his mother, because his father kept holding up lacy pink negligees and see-through sequined robes in front of his son, trying to visualize what they would look like on his wife. His imagination must have been working overtime because the boy had absolutely no figure.
Anyway, each time the father held up a piece of lingerie, the son would jump back and say, “Daaaaaad! Cut it out!”
Humiliated, the boy finally got fed up with standing in for his mother (not to mention that every woman in the department, including myself, was laughing hysterically) and half-stomped, half-raced over to the sportswear department to watch the football game on TV and reclaim part of his masculinity.
I really couldn’t blame him for being embarrassed; the only male teen-ager to linger in the lingerie department for any prolonged period of time is our stock person, Jason.
Jason is a pretty neat guy and a good conversationalist. Also, because he is over 6 feet tall, no employee needs to use a step ladder to retrieve merchandise.
Still, nothing could change the fact that Jason spends 70% of his working day with a beet-red face.
We girls always do our best to make him blush, and sometimes we don’t have to try very hard.
Jason once found himself trapped in the stockroom with me and another female co-worker. He sat down apprehensively and inquired, “Well, what would you like me to do now?”
He knew we would need his help unpacking and putting prices on merchandise, so we just let his question go unanswered.
After a few minutes, which must have seemed more like hours to Jason, my co-worker and I started opening boxes and checking out the new merchandise. We held the less-attractive items of lingerie up and with each piece would ask Jason: “Hey, how do you like this one?”
From the first time we saw the effect such teasing had on Jason--sweaty palms, blushing, etc.--we knew that each day we would have to bring forth a new and unique method of torture. To keep him from a complete breakdown, I occasionally discussed sports with him, but overall, Jason was exposed to just about everything.
The one thing he never saw, however, was the dressing area.
Although the entrance to one of our stockrooms was through the dressing rooms, that proved no problem for Jason as he could always send someone else to get things for him. No problem, that is, until one of the customers got stuck in a dressing room stall and we needed somebody strong to pull her out.
Jason, as luck would have it, was nowhere to be found in our time of need, so we turned to one of the store’s security men, who rescued the panic-stricken woman by removing the dressing room door.
The only other man I remember setting foot in one of the lingerie dressing rooms happened to be dressed up as a female. He was carrying an armful of designer fashions from one of the store’s posh and extremely expensive departments.
He emerged from the dressing rooms looking like a stylish version of Attila the Hun, wearing four fur coats and three hats over an abundance of dresses.
Well, it didn’t take long for security personnel to spot Attila, who, once he found himself surrounded by official-looking people who weren’t going to offer their shopping assistance, took off running for the exit. He was apprehended (well, tackled, really) once he got outside, and feather hats and furs went flying.
During the holidays, the lingerie department had its annual influx of males in a frantic search for the ultimate in underwear.
Each guy either snatched the first item that caught his eye to escape as soon as possible, or dispatched the entire department to find something his wife would like. Something that is undoubtedly purchased too small out of ignorance . . . or to spare feelings.
Something that will probably be returned the next day.
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901544f4f742c69131d22ed689fe130f
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-9792-story.html
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Deja View : An Updated Look at Some of the Stories Featured Here During the Year : Brewery Shutdown: : Laid-off Workers Take Chance on New Careers
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Deja View : An Updated Look at Some of the Stories Featured Here During the Year : Brewery Shutdown: : Laid-off Workers Take Chance on New Careers
After the Stroh Brewery Co. plant in Van Nuys closed in February, Ray Seufferlein headed straight into unemployment. At 43, he hadn’t expected to start his life all over again.
Four months later, as the financial burden increased, Seufferlein spotted an advertisement for the sale of a pool service in the San Fernando Valley. He bought it for $30,000. The new life began.
“I miss the camaraderie,” the Saugus man said. “But it’s paying the bills. And I’m working outside.”
Seufferlein, a machinist at Stroh’s, was one of the laid-off workers profiled in an article in February. That’s when the plant on Woodman Avenue, several blocks north of Sherman Way, laid off about 390 hourly and salaried workers. The company blamed the closing on its declining market share.
Seufferlein cleans and repairs pools in Northridge, Sepulveda and Granada Hills. It’s a 24-hour-a-day job.
“When I used to leave Stroh’s, I never took my work home,” he said. “But now I have to think about it all the time.”
Not so for Don Daniels, who also lost his job when Stroh’s closed.
Daniels, 55, immediately switched over to Miller Brewery Co. in Irwindale. He’s doing the same job--bottling.
“It pays a little more,” said Daniels of Castaic Lake. “But I have to drive 115 miles every day, and I work from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.”
And Daniels is often laid off for a week or two. “That’s the beer business,” he said. “I can’t make any plans ‘cause I never know when I’m going to be working or not.”
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3d1425e007499d081d0bbb2a6f4ecb48
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-9793-story.html
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Deja View : An Updated Look at Some of the Stories Featured Here During the Year : Leukemia Patient : As Disease Advances, Boy Seeks Marrow Donor
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Deja View : An Updated Look at Some of the Stories Featured Here During the Year : Leukemia Patient : As Disease Advances, Boy Seeks Marrow Donor
In March, readers learned about attempts to help 10-year-old Adam Brock, a child suffering from leukemia and in need of a bone marrow donor.
Now, after several donor drives, increased doses of chemotherapy and a surgical procedure that sometimes rids the body’s marrow of cancerous cells, Adam is still in need of a donor whose marrow matches his.
During the summer, Adam was hospitalized so doctors could perform an autologous procedure. This meant that all of Adam’s own bone marrow was taken from his body, treated for the cancerous cells, then returned to his body. The procedure did not work.
“This year has been grueling for all of us,” said Laurie Brock, Adam’s mother. “We need a donor desperately.”
Adam’s leukemia is now advancing, and time is running out.
Doctors say Adam’s only chance for survival is a bone marrow transplant. Because none of Adam’s immediate family matches his marrow type, Adam must find a donor from a non-related person. The odds of finding such a donor are 20,000 to 1.
“Somebody out there has the same type of bone marrow as Adam,” Laurie Brock said. “If we can find that person, our little boy will be able to beat this thing. It’s our only hope.”
For information about being tested as a possible bone marrow donor for Adam Brock, call the American Red Cross National Marrow Donor program at (213) 739-4594.
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175754509535d9f3671c543fac9eeb3a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-9794-story.html
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Deja View : An Updated Look at Some of the Stories Featured Here During the Year : Gang Shooting: : Volunteers Try to Talk Youths Out of Gang Life
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Deja View : An Updated Look at Some of the Stories Featured Here During the Year : Gang Shooting: : Volunteers Try to Talk Youths Out of Gang Life
Blinky Rodriguez is back at work, at least part time, managing a Van Nuys gym and promoting sports events. His voice sounds stronger; there are glimmers of the unfailing optimism that once pervaded his daily life.
Ten months ago, Rodriguez’s 16-year-old son was killed in what police say was a gang shooting. The elder Rodriguez--a kick-boxing champion-turned-businessman--was plunged into the dark side of life.
He turned to his religion. And he turned to the Pacoima streets where Sonny was shot. Rodriguez launched the crusade of an anguished father, talking to as many kids as he could, trying to talk them out of gang life.
In the months since, Rodriguez has formed a team of volunteers who call themselves the Gang Intervention Special Tactics Force. Many of his workers are members of the Victory Outreach Church in Sepulveda, which prides itself on converting addicts and gang members.
The volunteers, who have been on the streets and in jail themselves, say they know how to talk to young people who are headed in the same direction.
The group now holds its weekly meetings--which have outgrown Rodriguez’s home--at the United Methodist Church of Sepulveda. Members speak at local high schools and junior high schools. They visit juvenile hall.
And they continue to walk the streets.
“We’re out there competing with drug dealers and with the friends of these kids who want to pull them in another direction,” Rodriguez said.
Last weekend, Rodriguez took a group of 21 youths on a camping trip to Big Bear. A bus company donated transportation and local businessmen paid some of the expenses, though Rodriguez was hoping for more donations.
He recently addressed the Kiwanis Club in hopes of attracting more sponsors.
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142198a68a44120e3548a1a1ddf8ceb9
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-9795-story.html
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Deja View : An Updated Look at Some of the Stories Featured Here During the Year : Cat Classes: : Tabby’s Education Leads to First TV Acting Role
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Deja View : An Updated Look at Some of the Stories Featured Here During the Year : Cat Classes: : Tabby’s Education Leads to First TV Acting Role
Ryatt Redford is not related to that other Redford, Robert--movie star, social activist, sex object.
But Ryatt has his own ambitious streak. Not even 2 years old, the red-and-white tabby landed a bit role in a television comedy special, starring Paula Poundstone, which may be on cable TV next year.
Ryatt is a graduate of College for Cats, a weekly acting class in Van Nuys for felines, which was the subject of an article in May.
Owners seek a little socialization for their finicky friends and perhaps a little fortune. Sandi Wirth, animal behaviorist and instructor, started the class last year, teaching cats how to respond to verbal and hand cues, hiss on cue and stay at ease. The 10-week course costs $75.
“Ryatt was very, very shy,” said Jackie Lugo of Culver City, proud owner of the aspiring actor. “I thought the class might be a way to get him out of his shell. At first, I hadn’t really thought of the acting, but it’s wonderful.”
For his debut, Ryatt, along with other cats, entered the stage in a graduation cap and sat on a chair in front of the audience as “Pomp and Circumstance” played in the background.
Meanwhile, Poundstone interviewed the owners in a skit about education classes for cats.
Ryatt didn’t get paid for the HBO part, “but, hopefully, he’s got a long career ahead of him,” Lugo said.
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b9b56c56c40dbd194a7dc08295e73cdd
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-9798-story.html
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Northridge Park10058 Reseda Blvd., NorthridgeSize: 24 acres.Facilities:...
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Northridge Park10058 Reseda Blvd., NorthridgeSize: 24 acres.Facilities:...
Northridge Park
10058 Reseda Blvd., Northridge
Size: 24 acres.
Facilities: Indoor basketball gymnasium, three baseball diamonds, outdoor basketball court, football field, children’s play area, picnic area, four lighted tennis courts.
Hours: 9 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Friday; 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday.
Information: (818) 349-7341.
For Javier Soto, the best thing about being director of Northridge Park is watching the number of families who regularly use the facilities.
“In the summer, the parents bring their children and the whole family uses the swimming pool,” Soto said. “And now, they come together for picnics, baseball and youth basketball.”
Because the park is so popular with families in the Northridge area, more than 120 courses are offered in the community building. In addition to traditional arts and crafts and aerobics classes, Northridge Park has instruction in Hawaiian dance, vegetarian cooking, horseback riding and juggling, as well as a variety of music classes. The courses last 10 weeks and sign-ups for the next session take place in early January.
“It isn’t just that there’s so much to do here,” Soto said. “People seem to love Northridge Park because it’s so clean and safe. It really is the perfect family park.”
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8bad3e2e6a1baf0d444e10dee67e0e67
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-9799-story.html
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Volunteer Groups Take Freeways Into Their Care : Caltrans: Concerned citizens clean the roadsides as part of the Department of Transportation’s Adopt-a-Highway program.
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Volunteer Groups Take Freeways Into Their Care : Caltrans: Concerned citizens clean the roadsides as part of the Department of Transportation’s Adopt-a-Highway program.
The people in orange vests and helmets picking up discarded coffee cups, cigarette butts and banana peels by the side of the road might not be Caltrans employees or probationers and inmates. They could be your law-abiding neighbors who have adopted stretches of the state’s freeways and highways and taken responsibility for cleaning up the litter.
These citizens are part of the statewide Adopt-a-Highway program, which began in 1989. Six organizations in the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys--ranging from employees of a fast-food chain to members of a mining association--have been accepted by or are applying to the state Department of Transportation to become involved in the trash pickup.
One of the groups is the leadership class at Desert Christian High School in Lancaster. Principal Will Wilson and 16 students take care of both sides of the Antelope Valley Freeway between avenues J and L.
“You’ve got to give back to the community where you live and work,” Wilson said. “Besides being a great idea, it gives everyone a chance to become involved.”
“We learned a lot,” said Wilson, 35, who, along with a Caltrans representative, chaperones the teen-agers. “It was a lot harder project than I realized. The slopes, the tumbleweeds and the blisters,” he said, adding that his group filled more than 100 bags on a recent outing.
Open to nonpolitical organizations, corporations, groups and individuals, California’s Adopt-a-Highway program is similar to those in more than two dozen other states.
“Everybody from the Boy Scouts to the Civil Air Patrol to college fraternities and church groups is interested,” said James L. Knox, 53, Caltrans program coordinator for Los Angeles and Ventura counties. “It’s great to see the community involved.”
Once Caltrans assigns a section of the road--usually about two miles--to a group, the volunteers agree to work the area at least four times a year for a two-year period.
Volunteers are asked only to collect the litter in trash bags, Knox said; Caltrans employees later throw the bags on trucks. In return, the workers are rewarded with a 4-by-7-foot roadside sign informing motorists that the area is just a little cleaner thanks to their hard work.
While recognition is appreciated, volunteers say it is local pride that made them sign up for the program.
“One of our goals was to find a way to serve the community,” Wilson said of his group. With the motto, “To Learn by Doing, Lead by Serving,” the Adopt-a-Highway program seemed an obvious choice as a project, he said.
Members of the High Desert Contractors Assn. in Lancaster said they joined the program because they didn’t like seeing their area so trashed. The association takes care of two miles of California 138 between 40th Street East and Avenue S.
“It’s important for us to do community service projects,” member Debbie Richard, 27, said.
“We have quite a sense of accomplishment when we’re finished for the day, and I yell at people when I see them toss something out of the car.”
The association picks up about 22 truckloads of trash per outing, she said, adding that members also keep an eye out for motorists who think that the roadside is their garbage can. “I’ll write down their license plate and turn them in,” Richard said.
Sigma Chi fraternity brothers at Cal State Northridge say they like the program because it gives them a chance not only to support the community--they’ve adopted the Simi Valley Freeway from Balboa Boulevard to Tampa Avenue--but to improve the image of fraternities.
“We want to get rid of the ‘Animal House’ image many fraternities have,” said Rick Golden, 19. “For so many of us, it’s far from the truth.”
The Western Mining Council, which represents miners and prospectors, has signed up for a stretch of Topanga Canyon Boulevard from Nordhoff Street to the Simi Valley Freeway.
“If it’s not hot, it’s a very enjoyable experience, and we’re treated to a view of the Santa Susana Mountains,” council member Dan Velcoff said. “But you are drained.”
Volunteering to pick up trash, however, doesn’t mean one can make a beeline to the freeway or highway with a helmet and a trash bag. Caltrans won’t let anyone participate without a complete safety briefing, and some stretches of road are off-limits for safety reasons.
“We’re concerned about their welfare,” said Tom Pellerin, 47, of Caltrans. “And we certainly don’t want anyone hurt, which means the volunteers are instructed not to touch sealed drums of any kind, anything that might smell, syringes, needles or broken glass.”
Still, what’s left for the volunteers to pick up isn’t necessarily boring.
In their first few hours as roadside garbage collectors, the 14- and 15-year-old students from Desert Christian High found golf balls, a hubcap, a Frisbee, a couple of five-gallon water bottles, a gas cap, a poster advertising a topless bar, a license plate, a Dear John letter, a size 10 1/2 left shoe, condoms, a wallet, men’s underwear, a photo of “Ron and Vicki’s wedding reception” dated 1971, and lots of soiled disposable diapers.
“It’ll make me think twice about throwing litter out of the car,” said orange-helmeted sophomore Jennifer Abate, 15, holding up Ron and Vicki’s photo.
“People will throw almost anything out their car window,” Pellerin said.
In his 18 years with Caltrans, Pellerin said he’s also come across camper shells, sleeping bags, lots of single shoes, a kitchen sink and “anything that was ever thrown out of an ashtray.”
“We’ve had good luck with the program,” he said. “The people show a lot of enthusiasm. There’s more and more litter out there, and we don’t have the time or manpower to concentrate on cleaning it up.”
“We made a dent,” Wilson said of the 100 bags of litter he and his students picked up from both sides of their more than two-mile stretch. “A small one perhaps but, nevertheless, a dent. It’ll be interesting to see how many of these same students come out again next time.”
Groups or individuals interested in the Adopt-a-Highway program may contact Caltrans through James L. Knox, the coordinator for Ventura and Los Angeles counties, at (213) 620-4893.
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2a584eaf5ccf9702d4b9e335bb4ecd9a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-9886-story.html
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R S V P / ORANGE COUNTY : Christmas Glitter, Glamour Do Brunch
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R S V P / ORANGE COUNTY : Christmas Glitter, Glamour Do Brunch
“Salmon eggs Benedict or traditional eggs Benedict?”
That was about as tough as the questions got for guests who attended the Red Cross brunch staged at 21 Oceanfront (formerly the Rex) in Newport Beach on Sunday.
Waiters and waitresses hovered near brunch-goers such as Red Cross Board Chairman Donald Karcher and his wife, Dolly, making sure that their eggs were hot, their orange juice chilled and their champagne flutes filled to the brim. Restaurant booths were crammed with folks sporting holiday finery. (No doubt about it, this is society’s favorite spot to unwind before the Big Day.)
Overseeing the seventh annual event--where the food and service are donated--was restaurateur Rex Chandler and his wife, Susan. “We’re ecstatic today,” said Chandler, whose new Rex restaurant in Fashion Island has become the place to dine in Newport Beach. “The weather is beautiful and the reservation list is long.”
As guests enjoyed a first course of fresh fruit and croissants “Santa’s little helpers” (little girls smartly dressed for Christmas) sold Red Cross sweat shirts, enabling brunch proceeds to hit the $50,000 mark.
Besides helping the needy, the local chapter of the Red Cross is the primary source for emergency communication between military personnel and their families, said chapter director George Chitty.
Last year, the local chapter provided 28,398 meals for needy families.
Speaking of the Rex: The new Rex at Fashion Island was the site of the recent Christmas luncheon staged by the Sophisticates, a support group of the Assessment and Treatment Services Center (ATSC). What made this get-together super-hot was that it launched lunch at the Rex, giving the in-crowd yet another chic, daytime place to be seen.
Among items on the menu are Thai chicken salad; a lobster sandwich (hint: order this biggie to split with a buddy) and a French dip sandwich (for sandwich-classic lovers, says owner Rex Chandler).
ATSC--whose motto is “arrest the problem, not the child"--provides troubled juveniles with professional counseling. After an initial assessment, a specific treatment is designed to help keep the juvenile out of the criminal justice system. Also on the Rex calendar is a luncheon-auction for ATSC on Jan. 19 marking the opening of the new Lahaina Gallery at Fashion Island. Lahaina artist Gary Swanson plans to attend.
Mark your calendar: The Orange County Juvenile Correction Program will be the beneficiary of a Super Bowl party Jan. 27 at the Santa Ana Heights mansion of Donna and John Crean. Celebrity guests are on the agenda, and hamburgers and hot dogs will be served. Tickets are $150 per person with proceeds expected to reach $50,000. They’re calling the spot where the event will be held (John Crean’s workshop) the “Creandome.” What else?
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e661016b38ae2bf1a65b79253b834bd4
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-vw-9888-story.html
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2-B-2s Have Maternity Clothes With Baby-Size Price Tags
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2-B-2s Have Maternity Clothes With Baby-Size Price Tags
The traditional New Year’s baby wearing a top hat and clad in a 1991 banner will have a special meaning for the many Southland couples who will be welcoming a newborn in 1991.
A maternity wardrobe need not cost you a month’s mortgage payment, and it won’t if you do your shopping at a couple of outlet stores where the quality of the merchandise is high and the prices low. The name of both stores is 2-B-2, but that’s as far as the alliance goes; both operate autonomously.
In Studio City, 2-B-2, open only a few months, is a small, comfortable shop with some of the better-known names in maternity wear. Store owner Marcia Hunter purchases factory overruns from such manufacturers as Ninth Moon, Pink & Blue, Edgar, BB Boomers, Oliver Pease, Janet Baldwin and Japanese Weekend, and sells them at just about wholesale plus 10%.
In the back room, you’ll find a $10 rack and, obviously, that’s where to start. At $10 a garment, it’s mostly last season’s merchandise, but look at it as buying next season.
So much for the generalities. Some specific prices: J. Edgar blouses for $36 that I have seen at a major San Fernando Valley maternity shop for $79 were a good buy. Jumpsuits that generally sell for $65 were $39. A well-styled outfit with the Edgar label was $33 for the top and $30 for the pants, or just about half the retail price. A smart Pink & Blue for dressy occasions had a lace top and velvet pants and was $74 for both instead of $150.
2-B-2, 11824 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, (818) 763-3425. Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays to Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays.
In West Los Angeles is another 2-B-2 in operation for more than a year. Some of the same labels that are in the Valley store are on the racks (Edgar, BB Boomers, Ninth Moon and Pink & Blue) plus others that owner Madelyn Rothschild asked me not to identify. But you should know that they are definitely high-end manufacturers.
One is known for its drop-waist and high-style jumpers that are shown at pricey boutiques for much more than the 50% to 70% discount on the tags here. This same maker creates a good line of career-oriented styles of jacket dresses and tunic tops that start at half off retail.
Cable-stitched Ninth Moon sweaters with tights to match are popular at discounted prices: $25 to $35 for the sweaters and $32 for the tights (retail $70). The day I visited, I spotted a very dressy ensemble tagged at $80 that I had seen in a display window in Santa Monica for $190, a further indication of the kind of bargains you’ll find here.
2-B-2, 2234 Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles, (213) 477-4077. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays and by appointment.
For those gifts that just don’t fit in with your lifestyle and that you can’t return, remember the Gift Exchange.
Here’s how it works. You bring in that pitcher with the mule’s head handle that Aunt Sadie sent and let Gift Exchange owner Lynn Travers set the price.
Let’s pretend Lynn says it’s worth $100. She will give you a $100 credit. If, by chance, you find another item you covet at an equal price, you pay a 20% service charge plus tax and you’ve got it. As you can imagine, the scope of the merchandise here is wide, and Lynn will only take quality goods. If you don’t find an item you want right away, you can use that credit slip for 90 days and you can get credit updates for another 90 days.
The Gift Exchange, 8828 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 276-1016. Hours: 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays. Cash, check only.
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46d9a9a3a765055b2fa511ddd65cde66
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-we-10265-story.html
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McDonald’s Neighbors Are McMad : West Hollywood: Rowdy customers at drive-through are a rude awakening for nearby residents, who take their battle to court.
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McDonald’s Neighbors Are McMad : West Hollywood: Rowdy customers at drive-through are a rude awakening for nearby residents, who take their battle to court.
In its famous jingle, the largest restaurant chain in the world tells its customers: “You deserve a break today, so get up and get away . . . to McDonald’s.”
But what if you live right smack next door to the Golden Arches, and it is precisely that fast-food restaurant and its nearly all-night drive-through window from which you seek respite?
Such is the predicament of Iris Rodney, her husband, Bernard Fishman, and her mother, Hilda Fiddleman--three transplanted Londoners who lived happily in their rent-controlled West Hollywood apartments for the past seven years.
Happily, that is, until the Golden Arches opened for business next door in October, 1988, just across the border in Los Angeles.
Soon afterward, a steady stream of irritable, rude and noisy motorists began arriving under Fishman’s and Rodney’s third-floor apartment windows, revving their engines, beeping their horns and shouting orders for Big Macs and fries at all hours of the night and day, they say.
“It’s destroyed our lives completely,” laments Rodney. “We can’t sleep. Our nerves are shattered. I’ve never been to prison, but I imagine this is worse.”
Fiddleman lives on the first floor, where she says the noise is just as bad. Also, the view from her windows has been obliterated by the wall constructed between the drive-through and the apartment building.
In a lawsuit filed against the McDonald’s franchise at 8152 Sunset Blvd. and its parent company, the three say the restaurant’s drive-through kiosk is too close to their windows. It is so close, they allege, that it violates Los Angeles municipal codes by subjecting them to unbearable noise from motorists and employees who “scream at each other” until the 4 a.m. closing time, noxious and “horrid” car exhaust fumes and unwelcome stares into their windows from impatient patrons waiting for their food.
In addition, trash that has been dumped by employees in back of the restaurant has created “sickening and oppressive” odors and insect infestation that has spread to their apartments, according to the lawsuit.
After two years of fighting McDonald’s--to no avail, they say--the three are ready to take their case to court. A trial date has been set for Jan. 9.
In their lawsuit, filed in Superior Court more than a year ago, the three seek unspecified damages and guarantees that the drive-through be operated only at unspecified reasonable hours, if it is operated at all. Additional safeguards, such as preventing cars from playing loud music, also are being sought.
McDonald’s and the owner/operator of the Sunset Boulevard franchise, Fran Jones, are negotiating with the three plaintiffs in an effort to settle the case, according to their Los Angeles-based attorney, John Ward.
“Basically, McDonald’s doesn’t like to talk about things in litigation,” added Neil Cohen, a local spokesman for the corporation, which has its headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill.
“Obviously, you want to be a good neighbor,” said Cohen. “We don’t want it to go to court. . . . We want to do the best we can to work the situation out.”
Cohen said McDonald’s has invested $100,000 in an effort to reduce the noise level, mostly by replacing a loudspeaker system with face-to-face windows, installing “special acoustical walls” and changing schedules so that delivery trucks don’t unload their wares at all hours of the night.
As the unofficial spokesman for the three plaintiffs, Rodney scoffed at McDonald’s claims that it has done all it can to minimize the impact of the drive-through on the surrounding neighbors. She said Jones and company officials have refused to answer calls and letters and that restaurant employees have been rude and unresponsive when she has complained.
As for the negotiations and settlement offers, Rodney said: “They must be talking to people we don’t know. We’ve heard not a word about settlement.”
Last week, in fact, the three plaintiffs were called into the offices of McDonald’s local lawyer, where they spent the better part of several days giving depositions.
The mitigation measures have done little to help, the three said. Conditions continue to be so bad that they have to sleep with earplugs and with their windows shut at all times.
Rodney and Fishman, both legal aides, said they have been kept up so many nights by the noise that they were forced to leave their jobs at the same law firm.
“We’ve had no sleep. We are going up the wall,” said Fishman, who said he is recovering from lung cancer.
In 15 hours of videotapes, the three plaintiffs and their lawyer, Neville Johnson, have documented screaming matches, fights, drunken people urinating outside the drive-through area, and lines of cars with drivers revving their engines and leaning on their horns at the same time.
“We have horn wars out there,” said Johnson. “I call it the devil’s symphony.”
Johnson said his three clients have spent “a fortune” in pressing the case against McDonald’s, and that they are seeking to recover court and legal costs as well as damages.
Other neighbors are upset, too.
One elderly neighbor, Olga Jager, said the noise and fumes have made it impossible for her to sit outside on her porch and soak in the panoramic view of Sunset Boulevard and the Hollywood Hills behind it--what had been her favorite pastime since moving into the building 14 years ago.
“I simply can’t afford to move,” Jager said. “I love my apartment. Everybody here does.”
Looking out the window of her third-floor apartment last week, Rodney said she too refuses to give up and move, no matter what happens. Even if the drive-through is shut down, she said she will continue to fight until the wall that the restaurant erected comes down.
“They’ve got rid of the Berlin Wall, they can get rid of this,” she said.
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5c50c86a7e3f402fdc17018558fd8e77
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-we-10266-story.html
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The Selling of Malls : Retailing: From specialty stores to unique promotions, shopping centers are luring Westside shoppers with an ever-changing marketplace.
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The Selling of Malls : Retailing: From specialty stores to unique promotions, shopping centers are luring Westside shoppers with an ever-changing marketplace.
Attention, Westside shoppers:
In an effort to improve your shopping experience and give you more reason to open your very deep pockets, your neighborhood mall is offering a variety of new specialty stores and services. Or hadn’t you noticed all those parents being dragged by their moppets to the Disney, Sesame Street and Hanna-Barbera retail stores?
Such is the state of the modern urban shopping mall. No longer just a dizzying collection of trend-setting, fashion-statement retail outlets, malls from Century City to Culver City are forced to constantly adapt to keep up with an ever-fickle buying public.
Museum stores now dot the Westside retail landscape. The kiddie corner is ever-expanding. Politically correct nature stores are sprouting up like mushrooms. Hot restaurants and new theaters are opening their doors.
And promotions. Malls will do almost anything today to attract customers and cash. Santa Monica Place, for example, has a celebrity Christmas tree exhibit in its center hall this year, including one covered with basketballs, courtesy of Magic Johnson.
Retail analysts say a successful mall must be more than just a place to browse and buy. The buzzword among malls today is convenience--it should be easy for shoppers to get from their cars to the counters with their credit cards.
“Everybody is trying to come up with a better mousetrap,” said Robert J. Murray, executive vice president of Westfield Inc., developer of the Westside Pavilion. “Time is precious and most retailers are doing what they can to make things easier for the shopper. Every shopper believes that they have an inalienable right to a parking space 50 feet from the door.”
That’s why the Westside Pavilion, an architectural jewel among malls, is rushing to complete an expansion that will add a bridge for pedestrians and vehicles across Westwood Boulevard and remedy a chronic parking problem. The mall also added valet parking this holiday season to help make shoppers merrier.
The customer service obsession underscores why the Beverly Center and Santa Monica Place direct mall employees to park in remote lots during the holidays to make room for the paying public. And it offers a partial explanation why Fox Hills Mall in Culver City, although much more egalitarian in nature than some of its tonier competitors, continues to thrive: easy access, easy parking, a model of consumer convenience.
“Malls are not now what they were 10 years ago, and they will be much different 10 years hence,” said Thomas Tashjian, senior retail consumer analyst with Seidler Amdec Securities Inc.
Still, store selection remains the key element to any mall’s success. With so much merchandise to choose from, Westside residents can pick and choose among malls to find the best mix of retail outlets and convenience.
Analyst Tashjian says the successful malls--five of the six Westside shopping centers ranked among the top 15 moneymakers in Los Angeles County last year--are providing more and more space to so-called specialty stores because of the higher revenues those outlets provide. Analysts say that while the average mall-based department store does about $175 per square foot in sales per year, and other apparel shops average about $235 per square foot, booming speciality stores like The Limited do even better.
Amid the changes, there is one constant: unflagging interest among developers to the already mall-rich Westside environment. Although there are already six malls slugging it out for a share of the affluent Westside retail market, plans are in the works for two more major shopping centers--Marina Place, near Lincoln and Washington boulevards, and another next to the Farmer’s Market in the Fairfax District.
“The Westside is such an upscale market that I’m sure the developers feel they can come up with such exciting new (retailing) concepts that they will be able to draw enough business away from the existing malls to be successful,” said Thomas M. Murnane, executive vice president of Management Horizons, a division of Price Waterhouse.
Meanwhile, the existing malls are scrambling more than ever to grab onto and hold their piece of the lucrative Westside pie.
The outdoor Century City mall has made a pitch for the Century City lunchtime crowd with a new food center, and for nighttime and weekend customers with a 14-screen movie theater.
Santa Monica Place upgraded its food areas and its dated facade, and has been helped lately by the success of the rejuvenated Third Street Promenade, which offers some of the most popular restaurants and newest theaters along the coast.
The Beverly Center, always considered the trendiest of the Westside malls, continues to draw tourists and residents alike with its hip fashion shops and popular eateries, such as the Hard Rock Cafe and California Pizza Kitchen.
Fox Hills Mall has upgraded its shops and food outlets to maintain its allure to its middle-class customer base in the Westside’s southern and central portions.
Westside Pavilion has tried to outpace the competition on the kiddie front by offering more toy and clothing stores for the Baby Guess set. Yet its real draw remains the first Nordstrom on this side of Mulholland Drive.
In fact, the only mall that has had difficulty adapting to the changing market has been the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, the first mall in the nation to be built in a predominantly black urban community. Officials say a key problem is the developer’s inability to attract many of the top-draw retail stores found in other malls.
A common thread among the Westside’s big malls, and something that sets them apart from nearly all others in Southern California, is that they are urban, not suburban, shopping centers. People come to buy rather than to browse or socialize.
There are fewer teen-agers hanging out at Westside malls than at, say, Sherman Oaks Galleria of “Valley Girl” fame. There are far fewer seniors lounging, chatting or exercise-walking than at Glendale Galleria.
And space is at a premium. There is no place on the Westside to put a super-mall such as Del Amo in Torrance or South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. Fox Hills Mall, the Westside’s largest, is less than one-third the size of Del Amo.
The success of most of the area’s malls is rooted in the vast monetary success of the residents. The average annual income for households within a five-mile radius of Westside Pavilion is $79,000. For Beverly Center and Century City Shopping Center, it is even higher.
“Shopping malls do best where you have an affluent and very dense population, and the Westside has both of those elements,” said retail analyst Tashjian.
In a way, says Jerry Magnin, president of the Magnin Co., which owns the Polo and Ralph Lauren franchise licenses in Los Angeles, the struggle by malls to find the right mix of style, price and service is a never-ending one. But on the Westside, he says, there will aways be a place for “a good mall with an interesting and exciting mix of shops.”
“And for people who are searching for relative exclusivity,” he says, “there’s always Rodeo Drive.”
* OTHER MALL PROFILES: J6
RETAIL SALES
Taxable retail sales reported in 1989 by each of the major shopping centers on the Westside, and how that figure ranked among the county’s 45 largest malls:
Mall Sales Rank* Beverly Center $235,181,000 7 Westside Pavilion $207,582,000 9 Century City Shopping Center $173,275,000 11 Fox Hills Mall $153,538,000 13 Santa Monica Place $129,621,000 15 Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza $ 27,750,000 43
* Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance ranked No. 1 in the county, with taxable retail sales of $444,658,000.
Average sales per square foot for each mall, derived by dividing taxable retail sales by total retail area: Westside Pavilion: $313 Beverly Center: $261 Santa Monica Place: $227 Century City Center: $225 Fox Hills Mall: $169 Baldwin Hills Plaza: $38 Source: State Board of Equalization and individual malls
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302c715a8f71caf73fdc32c4b15a101a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-we-10267-story.html
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‘On Blintzes!’ : Holidays: For Jews wanting a Christmas Day alternative, Canter’s deli has become a tradition of its own.
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‘On Blintzes!’ : Holidays: For Jews wanting a Christmas Day alternative, Canter’s deli has become a tradition of its own.
It was Christmas morning, and like a lot of other Jewish Westsiders, Michael Schwartz and wife Tamara Bergman decided to have themselves a merry little deli.
As Bergman, 33, explained, last year she and her husband had driven all over town, trying to find a restaurant that was open. This year, they headed straight for Canter’s, the venerable restaurant and delicatessen in the heart of the Fairfax District, arguably Los Angeles’ most Jewish neighborhood. As Bergman said, “Fairfax is hopping, just like any other Tuesday.”
On a day when few stores and other public places are open, going to the deli has become a holiday ritual for many Jews. An order of whitefish is as good a way as any to escape the relentless presence of Christmas carols. (As one young man quipped, for Jews, caroling means visiting your Aunt Carol.) But what to do with the rest of the day? A lot of people would rather stand in line at the movies than watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” and other Christmas fare on TV.
Christmas morning, Canter’s and other delis are haimish (that’s Yiddish for homey) havens for all those who decide eating a blintz would be a nice way to pass the time their Christian neighbors devote to tearing open presents.
As a result, Dec. 25 is Canter’s busiest holiday (Mother’s Day is runner-up). On a typical Christmas, manager Gary Canter reported over the mid-morning din, 10,000 people will come to the Fairfax Avenue noshery. They will consume 300 dozen bagels, 700 pounds of corned beef and 500 matzo balls, the latter, of course, floating in bowls of chicken soup.
For Schwartz and Bergman, the trip to Canter’s was part of a conscious effort to give their holidays a Jewish flavor, largely for son Phillip’s benefit.
Phillip is 3, just old enough to begin comparing Santa Claus and the Maccabees, the heroes of Hannukah. Like many Jewish parents before them, Schwartz and Bergman decided that, given Santa’s public-relations machine, the Maccabees could use a little help from their friends.
“This year our house was sort of aggressively Jewish,” said Schwartz, 32. The Hollywood family put a menorah in the window, decorated the house in traditional blue and silver and gave Phillip presents each of the eight nights of the Festival of Lights. Gifts included a train and a video featuring the Berenstain Bears.
Phillip seemed to think Canter’s was an excellent place to spend the morning, but Schwartz wasn’t sure what they would do next. “He’s kind of young for ‘The Godfather Part III,’ ” Phillip’s father noted.
Irene Cammorata was at Canter’s with friend Judith Davidovis. Cammorata’s son, Teddy, who is 9, was spending Christmas morning with her ex-husband. Teddy, who is Jewish, had asked his dad, who is not, to forget the Christmas tree this year--for environmental reasons. “He told his father he didn’t want to have a tree killed just to put some stuff on it,” Cammorata recounted.
Davidovis said she finds some Christians insensitive to the feelings of Jews at this time of year.
“It’s ironic,” Davidovis said. “Jesus was born a Jew. He died as a Jew. He never converted, and he never decorated a tree.”
The Arouestys and the Rosenfeldts had driven to Canter’s from West Hills in the San Fernando Valley. When she was growing up, Jackie Arouesty said, she had been the only Jew in a group of eight girlfriends, and she spent Christmas visiting each and every one of them. Over the years, she and her husband developed a Christmas Day tradition of their own.
“We go to the Jewish bookstores and buy Jewish books and records,” she said. “If we need a tallis (a prayer shawl), we do it Christmas Day.”
The Arouestys now share their holiday ritual with their friends, the Rosenfeldts. “Before she introduced us to Fairfax, we used to go to Frazier Park (near Tejon Pass) for the snow,” Helen Rosenfeldt said. “And on years we don’t go to a deli, we go to a Chinese restaurant,” Sam Arouesty said.
Jeanie Finkelstein, who lives in Encino, was at Canter’s with her family and their friends, the Mincs. She likes the idea of doing something Jewish on Christmas, even if it’s just eating lox. “Especially now, with everything that’s going on in the Middle East, you want to be a little more Jewish,” she said. “You feel the whole world’s against you.”
The Finkelsteins and the Mincs thought they would go see “The Godfather Part III” later in the day.
On Christmas afternoon, George and Eve Suranyi were queued up outside the Mann Criterion in Santa Monica with their son, Ed, who was visiting from Northern California.
The Suranyis, who are Jewish, were waiting to see “The Godfather Part III.” As to how they started the day, George Suranyi explained, “First we went to the deli . . . “
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be8808b75eb7b74977d35d5fb12dc435
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-we-10270-story.html
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The Westside Pavilion Caters to Pure Shopper
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The Westside Pavilion Caters to Pure Shopper
The most architecturally striking of the Westside malls, this John Jerde-designed shopping center scored a major coup when it nabbed Los Angeles’ first Nordstrom, the undisputed king of customer service, as one of its anchor stores.
And while Nordstrom is the big attraction in the eyes of many shoppers, the benefits seem to flow in both directions. The Westside Pavilion store boasts the highest sales per square foot of any store in the Nordstrom chain, according to Iris J. Callie, vice president for leasing for the mall’s owner, Westfield Inc.
Pavilion management officials recently strove to make it the mall of choice among young couples with children by adding numerous toy and children’s clothing stores. For many customers it’s a one-stop shopping center, because it also has a Vons supermarket next to the May Co., its other anchor.
The center also boasts several popular fast-food restaurants and three movie theaters, although mall spokesmen say that the center places less emphasis on entertainment than competitors such as the Beverly Center and Century City Shopping Center.
“Ours is more for the pure shopper,” said Robert J. Murray, executive vice president of Westfield Inc. “We’re not an entertainment center. Our emphasis is on servicing basic needs.”
Although Westside Pavilion wins praise for its bright facade and atrium (Jerde was the design director of the 1984 Summer Olympics), customers bemoan the heavy traffic they must often fight to get there and the poorly designed labyrinthine parking structure that awaits them when they do.
“Parking is a horrible problem,” said Karen Parker, a 32-year-old Nordstrom devotee who lives in Pacific Palisades. “It makes me not come sometimes. In fact, I’ve come here and then left because there’s no place to park.”
The parking dilemma is made worse by the prevalence of parking by permit only in the surrounding neighborhood.
A well-publicized mall expansion plan will add 1,000 new parking spaces and 91,000 square feet of shopping across Westwood Boulevard, connected to the existing complex by a 43-foot-wide, two-tier bridge for cars and pedestrians. This should ease the parking crunch, but the project has also fanned complaints by residents and environmentalists. They contend that the expansion is driven more by marketing than by architecture and that the expansion will only put a Band-Aid on the parking ailment.
This year for the first time, complimentary valet parking was offered during the holiday shopping season.
In 1989, the Westside Pavilion ranked ninth in total sales among Los Angeles County’s 45 largest shopping malls. On a sales-per-square-foot basis, it is one of the region’s top performers.
WESTSIDE PAVILION, WEST LOS ANGELES
Year opened: 1985
Retail square footage: 664,000
Anchor stores: Nordstrom, May Co.
Number of stores: 153
Memorable feature: Central atrium
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f5a39de5b5be1d19ddec242c87ae75cc
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-we-10271-story.html
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A Grand Idea : This ‘Monster’ Story Had a Fairy Tale Ending for Founder of Del Amo Mall
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A Grand Idea : This ‘Monster’ Story Had a Fairy Tale Ending for Founder of Del Amo Mall
When Guilford Glazer set out 21 years ago to build the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, there were those who thought he was creating the shopping-center equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster.
“Some of the very top people in the industry thought it would be too big and wouldn’t work, and we were concerned about it,” Glazer said. “But it was really personal opinion.”
And Glazer ignored it.
“The way a businessman works is that he takes a deep breath and jumps into the river and believes he will swim to the other side because he must,” he said.
Glazer and the firm he owns, the Torrance Co., not only built Del Amo but later expanded it well beyond its original blueprints. Today, the 357-store mall, which sits on 140 acres, can claim title to being one of the largest malls in the world and is by far the biggest in Los Angeles County.
Glazer, recalling the early days of the mall’s development, admits that he himself was surprised that the cities surrounding Del Amo grew as fast as they did, providing the population base needed for the mall’s continued expansion. An amalgam of existing stores and new ones, Del Amo was finally completed in 1980.
“We didn’t know a lot about what we were doing,” Glazer said. “Nobody really guessed the South Bay would grow like it did.”
At 70, Glazer still oversees his Century City-based company, but he rarely sets foot in his office, preferring instead to work from home.
He devotes most of his energy to various philanthropic causes, including Operation Exodus, the worldwide project to resettle Soviet Jews emigrating to Israel.
But the Tennessee native usually visits Del Amo once a week to make sure his credo that a mall is only as good as its management is being carried out. At Del Amo, he said, the focus has always been on details such as keeping the premises spotlessly clean.
Even restaurant workers’ fingernails don’t go unnoticed by Glazer.
“Guilford has always been a stickler for maintenance and upkeep on his property,” said Torrance Co. President Jim Jones. “He’ll come (to Del Amo) on a Saturday afternoon and spend, gosh, four or five hours.”
Glazer, whose company owns a majority stake in Del Amo, believes malls are popular with shoppers because they provide a controlled environment. For example, parents can go to a mall and not have to worry about their children getting injured by a car.
With their large number of stores, malls also give thrifty shoppers a chance to easily walk from store to store to compare price tags. “Eighty-five percent of your shoppers are ladies,” he said. “They like to compare prices. Therefore it takes a lot of stores.”
And malls may provide people with a sense of community. “It is a revisitation of a small town, but on a small scale,” Glazer said.
Despite the intense competition from other major retailers and discounters outside malls, Glazer said he believes mall stores can prosper. This is especially true at Del Amo because many tenants either own their own stores or leased space many years ago when it was cheaper to make improvements, he said.
"(Stores situated in malls) do have to constantly modernize and change things and avoid a tired look, but their overhead is not as high as current free-standing stores,” Glazer said.
He said he believes more malls will be built, although the number of malls the size of Del Amo will be limited by the availability of land. And malls will continue to evolve to meet merchandising trends, he predicted, but mostly in ways that will go unnoticed except by the most discerning shopper.
“You don’t notice it, but it is changing every month,” he said.
One change that Glazer believes may not work is the building of a giant theme park based on the Snoopy character, inside a mall in Bloomington, Minn. Called the Mall of America, it will have 400 specialty shops when it opens in 1992.
Although Glazer said he has the utmost respect for Mall of America developers Herbert and Melvin Simon, he said combining amusement rides with shopping may fail because parents like to accompany their children on such rides until they reach a certain age.
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fc0eb2ca48e1c7e4dd7de73f8f4b8102
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-27-we-10277-story.html
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Santa Monica’s Kusserow Will Quit Coaching
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Santa Monica’s Kusserow Will Quit Coaching
Tebb Kusserow, who won more games than any other football coach at Santa Monica High, has resigned after 17 seasons with a career record of 122-49-5.
Kusserow, 47, whose teams won eight league championships and a CIF-Southern Section title in 1981, said that there are many reasons for his resignation. One reason, he said, is that his father-in-law, Oreste Cha, has cancer, making it difficult to concentrate on coaching. He said that he also feels it is time for a change.
“Seventeen years is a long time to be in a particular position in one place,” he said. “It’s a good time now for someone to take over the leadership of the Santa Monica High School football program, to take it into the decade of the 1990s. To wait a year would be to put that person at a disadvantage.”
Kusserow, a 1961 graduate of Santa Monica High, said that he would remain at the school as a physical education teacher.
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ecac3c9680839f48f1a62a4d2ee62f57
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-28-vw-7315-story.html
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Colorful Vests, Ties and Cummerbunds Help Make the Man
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Colorful Vests, Ties and Cummerbunds Help Make the Man
This party season, black tie optional has taken on new meaning.
For men who want to stand out in a crowd at formal New Year’s Eve galas, there are splashy bow ties, colorful cummerbunds and rich tapestry vests to liven up the traditional tuxedo.
“Gentlemen are looking for more extremes in furnishings,” says Bjorn Sedleniek, owner of P.O.S.H. in Fashion Island, Newport Beach. “They don’t just want to wear black, white or red bow ties. Those get kind of boring.”
Instead, they’re choosing accessories in dynamic colors and patterns, including florals, paisleys and Art Deco-style prints.
Colorful accessories allow men to get away from the formal tux uniform and show some individuality.
“A lot of our customers are very social. They may go to five events where they’ll be seeing the same people,” Sedleniek says. By adding a fresh furnishing, they can change their look without investing in a new tuxedo.
A slow economy has helped make tuxedo furnishings an attractive option for men, according to Tom Julian, associate fashion director for the Men’s Fashion Assn. in New York City. Even if they can’t afford a new tux, men can update their formal wear with unusual extras.
“We’re doing a nice job with the classic cutaway coat and even the opera capes and top hats,” says Alan Anderson, sales representative for Alfred Dunhill of London Inc. in South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa. “That’s the creme de la creme. Throw that in with a walking stick, and you’re just about making the entry of all entries. It’s shades of FDR.”
One customer ordered an ebony walking stick, white gloves and a black cape to wear with his tuxedo, according to Ray Caruso, manager of Alfred Dunhill.
“He even went so far as to order the cape with a white silk lining” for a more dramatic effect, Caruso says.
More conservative dressers experiment only with the cummerbund set and vests.
“Men are wearing little beauties like these,” says Caruso, unpacking a box of newly arrived vests made in rich woven tapestries. One elegant vest features Art Deco lilies against a pale lavender background, available for $425.
“Vests are a great way to update a tux,” Julian says.
Vests with shawl collars that have geometric and floral prints inspired by the ‘30s and ‘40s have emerged as one of the season’s hottest tux accessories. For a vest to look formal, however, the fabric must be lush.
“The brocades are woven into the fabric instead of printed, so it has a richness that moves,” Caruso says.
Meanwhile, more traditional bow ties and cummerbunds have gone from basic black to loud prints in non-traditional gem colors such as teal and purple.
Sedleniek ordered a gold brocade cummerbund set for New Year’s after the first sets sold out weeks before Christmas.
“It’s a departure from the gray and black,” he says.
If one insists on wearing white, P.O.S.H. has cummerbunds of silk Jacquard with a paisley print woven into the white fabric. Braver souls can choose something more progressive, such as a cummerbund set in pale yellow with large purple medallions or a burgundy-and-gray set with a geometric print.
“A lot of them get gaudy. We try to keep them in good taste,” Sedleniek says.
Braces, once limited to black and white for formal wear, come in all colors and designs. P.O.S.H. carries Art Deco-style suspenders with scenes of party-goers sipping champagne--an appropriate choice for New Year’s. Another set comes with art nouveau scenes of women bathing.
Gary’s & Co. in Fashion Island has special limited edition braces with red-winged cherubs.
“We always do a little novelty at New Year’s, but we’re doing more this year than in the past,” says Rich Myklebust, merchandise manager for Gary’s. “In our part of the country there aren’t as many serious black-tie events as there are fun charity balls, so it’s real appropriate to have fun with things like cummerbunds.”
For New Year’s, Gary’s has a burgundy silk cummerbund set embroidered with gloves, a tall hat and a walking stick for $135.
While black onyx and mother-of-pearl stud sets still carry the day, Gary’s has found antique stud sets are back in vogue. One full dress set, dating from the 1930s, features silver-plated studs with tiny pearls and gray mother-of-pearl. It’s available for $325.
“What’s new is old,” says Myklebust. “Antique cuff links are the tastiest things guys are doing now.”
Most men are still wearing a traditional white tuxedo shirt with straight or wing collars, but some opt for shirts with bib fronts that have a white-on-white Jacquard pattern or fine ticking stripes.
“It’s real subtle,” Myklebust says.
While they may plan their formal wear down to the finest detail, men often overlook their feet.
“So many make the mistake of slipping on a pair of business shoes with their tuxedos,” Julian says. He favors the classic pump in black suede.
Tuxedos mainly serve as the plain black backdrop to all of this flash, but they have loosened up since the ‘80s.
“They’re not as tight or stiff as they used to be,” Julian says. He predicts jackets with shawl collars to be the style for the ‘90s. A few designers are adding velvet collars, quilting and other Edwardian touches.
Holiday parties provide the perfect opportunity to don more festive tuxedo jackets, Julian says. P.O.S.H. carries a black velvet dinner jacket with a shawl collar, or a black-and-gray paisley smoking jacket.
“It’s a great holiday look for men who want a change of pace,” Sedleniek says.
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f448f393af98b9429bda84535bd88012
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5499-story.html
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POP MUSIC REVIEW : Vanilla Ice Fails to Generate Heat at the Celebrity : The best-selling rapper lacks humor and showmanship in his first formal Southern California concert appearance.
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POP MUSIC REVIEW : Vanilla Ice Fails to Generate Heat at the Celebrity : The best-selling rapper lacks humor and showmanship in his first formal Southern California concert appearance.
It doesn’t matter that Vanilla Ice is a white man and not a black man.
The significant news that came out of Ice’s show Saturday night at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim is that he is no showman.
Ice, the first white solo star in rap, may have the nation’s best-selling album at the moment (“To the Extreme”), but he failed to muster the sustained heat needed to make a rap concert burn.
Instead of developing a snowballing torrent of fast-paced action, he inserted long, pointless blackouts between virtually every number. Then, when the lights came on, he would dither some more in stiff attempts at banter with his sidekick, Earthquake.
Quake: “So this is how you gonna do it, huh?”
Ice: “Yeah, that’s how I’m gonna do it.”
Silent voice in critic’s head: “Please, just do it.”
With pacing like that, the 52-minute concert went by like an Ice Age.
Luckily for Vanilla Ice, he has the same sort of very young, very adoring audience as the New Kids on the Block. The fans didn’t mind being kept in the dark for interminable stretches. The kids’ sustained, high-pitched screams filled in the long blanks that their hero left through his own neglect.
Vanilla Ice’s lyrics didn’t say much more than his silences. Basically, the rapper, whose real name is Robert Van Winkle, seems like a nice fellow with an interesting appearance (half James Dean, half Brian Bosworth), but nothing to communicate. The only pointed statement Ice made in his first formal Southern California concert appearance was a self-serving warning to his fans not to pay any attention to his critics--something you’ll also hear from the stage at a New Kids show.
Ice’s wooden rhymes lack the gift of colorful, inventive gab that is rap’s real spark. He has no themes to speak of, resorting instead to the flaccid boasting that has long been tiresome old hat for performers on the form’s creative edge. No stories, and no depictions of his own experience flavor Vanilla’s raps--unless one counts songs in which he narrates sexual encounters in soft-core rhymes that are highly suggestive, but not explicit.
On stage, even the sex fizzled. “Stop That Train” presumably chronicles Ice’s exhausting bout of kinky doings with a domineering woman, but he could have been talking about his toy choo-choos for all the steam he put into it.
Ice does deserve some credit for portraying women as partners in pleasure in his sex raps, rather than treating them, as too many male rappers do, as so much manipulable flesh.
On the down side, the young man has no sense of humor. His appropriation of “Play That Funky Music (White Boy),” by the ‘70s white funk group Wild Cherry, doesn’t have a hint of the original’s self-mockery. The title refrain is just a convenient tag-line for a rapper who wants to capitalize on the only thing that is novel about him--his color.
Ice’s voice wasn’t especially punchy or clear; his foil, the throaty, bellowing Earthquake, was a far more trenchant rapper. But give Vanilla Ice credit for putting on an honest performance. Unlike a lot of rappers who make more creative records, Ice delivered his raps in real time, without the bogus voice-doubling tracks that are frequently used as an onstage safety net.
Vanilla Ice moved well enough through a constant billow of stage fog that often obscured him and his two back-up dancers, but his hip-hop dance steps came only in short, sporadic bursts. String a bunch of those bursts together on video, and you get the illusion of a sustained, kinetic performance. These days, of course, looking good on video is all it takes to prosper. With a concert that gave new meaning to the term “frozen waste,” Vanilla Ice was proof of that.
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5d9c8d9ac05feb4470448426d7f91814
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5500-story.html
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MOVIES
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MOVIES
Looking for Her Fairy Godmother: The singer who provided the voice of Cinderella in the animated film has filed a $20-million lawsuit claiming that Disney violated her contract by producing videocassettes of the classic. Ilene Woods Shaughnessy, who in 1948 was paid $2,500 for “Cinderella,” said in the suit that her contract forbids Disney from making copies of the movie for sale to the public. At 22, Shaughnessy performed such songs as “So This Is Love” and “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” for the movie.
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7ce4b4ee2fdd120a4408f90feb0253a0
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5501-story.html
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NEW YEAR’S NEWS
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NEW YEAR’S NEWS
For Bernstein: Tonight’s New Year’s Eve Concert for Peace in New York City will be a tribute to Leonard Bernstein, who helped found the event at Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Jason Robards, the folk singer Odetta and soprano Kathleen Battle are scheduled to appear. Lukas Foss will conduct a 110-member orchestra of alumni from three youth orchestras created by Bernstein. And Bernstein’s daughter Jaime Bernstein Thomas will perform a song she composed in memory of her parents.
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74487d814b35a203633d1d66d9eabe7e
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5503-story.html
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PEOPLEWATCH
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PEOPLEWATCH
Babystruck: Actor Nicolas Cage stole a baby in the movie “Raising Arizona.” Now he’s raising Weston. Cage is the father of Weston Coppola Cage, born to his girlfriend, actress Christina Fulton, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Cage, whose real name is Nicolas Coppola, starred in “Wild at Heart” and “Moonstruck.” Fulton will appear in Oliver Stone’s movie, “The Doors.”
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ac1f3f09e4998db040789bdd0e1bfc2c
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5505-story.html
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TV & VIDEO
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TV & VIDEO
Zap!: Ted Turner and Roseanne Barr deserve to be zapped, or clicked off with a TV remote control device, according to TV Guide. The magazine has come out with its second annual Zap Awards, which single out bloopers of TV personalities and institutions. This year’s “Phoney Baloney Award” went to the imposter who tricked ABC’s “20/20" producers into believing he was the original Buckwheat from the “Our Gang” comedies, although the true performer died in 1980. Turner won for outlawing the use of the word foreign among his newscasters, who are fined if they don’t use international . Barr was honored for her rendition of the national anthem.
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23bdf70305820b32ae954b749917cfa6
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5506-story.html
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NEW YEAR’S NEWS
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NEW YEAR’S NEWS
Parade Wars: KTTV Channel 11 sent KTLA Channel 5 three blank commercial cartridges, claiming that since it won’t be running commercials during its Rose Parade coverage on New Year’s Day, KTLA perhaps could use them. The stations have been sniping at each other in their on-air parade promos. KTTV says that it will be mentioning sponsors but won’t run spots as such; KTLA cameras won’t leave the parade but will use “see-through” overlay images of sponsors on the screen. The cartridges were sent by Greg Nathanson, president of the Fox Station Group, to Steve Bell, general manager of KTLA. A KTLA spokesman said he was amused by the free cartridges but that Bell was unavailable for comment.
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de9ccf32c207a95471d23baeaefce50f
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5507-story.html
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POP/ROCK
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POP/ROCK
Clash in Chicago: Police and anti-war protesters clashed outside a Public Enemy rap concert in Chicago early Sunday, resulting in 18 arrests. Police reported that people ran across the street once the concert had ended, set up an anti-war banner and began yelling and throwing objects. Police said they asked the group to disperse but that protesters refused. Concertgoers had a different story. Witnesses said that police aggressively pulled down the banner and began arresting the protesters. A formal complaint about police handling of the incident has been filed.
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b903dee2c33ed752f13035d2e6219770
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5508-story.html
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MOVIES
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MOVIES
Seeing Double: Visitors to the corner of Broxton and Weyburn Avenues in Westwood Village will see the unusual sight of two movie theaters with the same film on their marquees: “The Godfather Part III.” Both the Mann Village and Mann Bruin theaters, across the street from each other, are showing the Francis Ford Coppola film at the same time. Mann Theaters director of operations Ben Littlefield said that the success of the film at the 1,500-seat Village Theater since it opened on Christmas Day caused the theater chain to open the movie at the 800-seat Bruin. “It takes a dynamic film with a large demand to warrant that kind of treatment,” Littlefield said.
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0fd5e65aa7b0751a0da185552bef4f1e
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5509-story.html
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MOVIES
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MOVIES
All Thumbs: The reviews are in and movie critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert give each other thumbs down. The syndicated critics sat down for a joint interview for the February issue of Playboy and didn’t bother to hide their jealousies and ill feelings. “A weakness of his,” Siskel says of Ebert, “is that sometimes he goes with the first draft too easily. His thinking is a little glib, a little sloppy.” Ebert countered by saying that he’s simply more prolific that Siskel, who he accused of spending his time “spinning his wheels.” Ebert said that it irked him that people often mistook him for Siskel and he proclaimed himself to be the more intellectual half of the duo. Siskel responded by saying, “Roger, lighten up. You’ve got a great mind--lean back, enjoy it. I’m no threat to you, big guy.”
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337efb234f3f4c644482eaaca93e537c
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5511-story.html
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‘The Long Walk Home'--Four Views : Movie Brings to Life a World of Bigotry in Montgomery Bus Boycott Era
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‘The Long Walk Home'--Four Views : Movie Brings to Life a World of Bigotry in Montgomery Bus Boycott Era
It was extremely disheartening to read the well-written but misguided review by Peter Rainer and commentary by Karl Fleming (Dec. 20) on the excellent new film “The Long Walk Home.”
Both writers objected to what they felt was misguided historical fact. Nowhere does this movie purport to be based on any specific incident or individual. Rather, it opts to fictionalize a story that brings to life the pool of unexhausted bigotry in Montgomery during the 1955 bus boycott.
Fleming actually seems so bitter that the story told in the film is not the one he personally recalls from his old journalism days at Newsweek that he is totally unable to grasp what a compelling drama this is to an audience without his individual experience. If critics wish to judge a movie based entirely on historical accuracy, they should in all fairness stick to reviewing documentary forms of filmmaking.
I did not feel that the whites in “The Long Walk Home” were candy-coated or sympathetic. They were portrayed as scared, narrow-minded and soulless. Even the character of Mrs. Thompson displayed all of these emotions and behaviors at times, and in the best of moments she was behaving as any decent human being should--nothing more. Rising above others’ prejudices does not create a hero, it simply shows an individual with understanding and compassion.
I hope that The Times’ articles do not turn people away from this film. Like most young Americans, I was reminded by “The Long Walk Home” of a time in our country’s history, shortly before I was born, that I am often negligent in thinking about.
It is clear to see that as 1991 begins, our laws have given minorities legal rights, but we as a nation are far from free in enjoying full human rights. This film is not only about 1955--but also about the present. It is a warm, yet strong, reminder about choices and about responsibility. That is something to be commended and rewarded and, hopefully, something we want to encourage others to participate in, not only in the make-believe world of film but in the reality of our daily existence.
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6c797101e69b6e718e043b47c71ce0e7
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5513-story.html
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‘The Long Walk Home'--Four Views : A Reporter Remembers the Whites Who Cared
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‘The Long Walk Home'--Four Views : A Reporter Remembers the Whites Who Cared
I was perplexed at the commentary of Karl Fleming, a comrade-in-arms as a correspondent covering the civil rights wars of the ‘50s and ‘60s, denouncing the film “The Long Walk Home.”
As one who covered the Montgomery bus boycott and lived in that city for 20 years, I cannot name a specific white woman who drove in the black-organized carpools which ferried the maids to and from their work as did the character played by Sissy Spacek in the film based on the boycott. I can, however, point to quite a few individuals who expressed the sentiments implicit in this gesture.
I think, tragically, of Juliette Morgan, the quiet librarian who wrote sensitive letters to the newspaper before she committed suicide. I think of a band of brave white women who met with black women at St. Jude’s Catholic Church, about the only “integrated” place in Montgomery during that period--even though their own husbands in some cases repudiated them publicly. And I think especially of the redoubtable Virginia Foster Durr, who befriended Rosa Parks herself in a manner much as that depicted in the film.
To suggest that such people did not exist, as Fleming does, is the same as to say that there were no Germans who resisted Hitler 50 years ago.
To me, the character played by Spacek represented a composite character in a film which is, after all, a fictional account, and as such she is entirely plausible. It is preposterous to suggest that “The Long Walk Home” is as distorted as the notorious “Mississippi Burning,” which glorified FBI agents when everyone who covered the civil rights movement knew that they were just more red-neck sheriffs in suits and ties.
From a factual standpoint, I found “The Long Walk Home” to be a shade on the sentimental side, to be sure, but generally of the genre of “Driving Miss Daisy” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
It is noteworthy that the indomitable but ever-gentle Rosa Parks herself, in the story that ran beside Fleming’s bitter commentary, seems to share my view.
Incidentally, Parks found it unlikely that a mob might be stopped by someone singing a hymn. Curious as it may seem, I once saw that happen.
It was a bitter cold Sunday, March of 1961, when the tension generated by the bus boycott was at its peak in Montgomery. When a group of about 700 blacks emerged from a meeting in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, they were confronted with a throng of about 5,000 white people who had gathered as a result of irresponsible live broadcasting on one of the town’s radio stations. I had concluded that a physical clash was all but inevitable, with dire consequences.
But at a critical moment, some of the black people on the front line began to sing a familiar church hymn. The whites paused, fell back a bit, and some actually joined in the singing. The tension was broken, which enabled the police to separate the confronting throngs and evacuate the area peacefully.
After witnessing that episode, I never again doubted the power of Southern black Christianity.
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3fbabdb807a52b67fcdddb068e267ce7
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5514-story.html
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‘The Long Walk Home'--Four Views : Karl Fleming Missed the Point
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‘The Long Walk Home'--Four Views : Karl Fleming Missed the Point
How does The Times have the audacity to run an article entitled “Bus Boycott: The Way It Really Was” by reporter Karl Fleming, who never covered Montgomery during the bus boycott? It is clear from Fleming’s writing that he has little knowledge of Montgomery in 1955-56. Mainly, Fleming tries to tell us how “The Long Walk Home” misrepresents life in Montgomery, Ala., during the boycott. But it is Fleming who has to stoop to misrepresentations.
Fleming questions a scene where a white Montgomery housewife, Miriam Thompson, has a white policeman apologize to a black maid, Odessa Cotter. Fleming states, “That a white Southern cop, or any white person, for that matter, would apologize to any black person for anything . . . is extremely unlikely in that era.”
Fleming’s doubts do not change the fact that just such an apology was made in the mid-'50s in Montgomery--for the reason cited in the film. What Fleming does not discuss is Miriam’s rationale (“I will not have my judgment impugned”); Odessa’s husband’s very accurate assessment (“That policeman was apologizing to her (Miriam), not you”), and even the Montgomery police commissioner’s reasons for sending the policeman out to apologize (“the police department has to keep its nose clean”).
Fleming, as an experienced reporter, should be able to accurately report moments from the film. He writes: “At movie’s end we see a threatened Mrs. Thompson and Odessa holding hands and silencing and facing down a raving mob of whites with only the quiet strength of their moral superiority.”
An interesting scene, but not one in the movie. Miriam Thompson never takes Odessa Cotter’s hand. Odessa Cotter makes a choice to confront a potentially violent crowd--and she does so alone. As others understand her action, she is joined by about 20 black women who use nonviolent resistance to face down a mob of whites. Miriam only watches. It becomes apparent that the whites, without the shield of robes or police badges, will not resort to violence--for the moment.
After the immediate danger has passed, another woman--not Odessa--holds out a hand to Miriam. Odessa’s reaction is far more questioning than accepting. Fleming does a grave injustice to the intent of the film to claim that Miriam is “the central heroic figure” in this scene or even the movie. The scene, the courage and the strength belong to Odessa.
Fleming raises the issue of whites supporting the boycott. But what chance would Fleming give a socially prominent white woman from Montgomery sponsoring a noted interracial organization such as the Highlander Folk School?
Not only did Virginia Durr offer sponsorship to the school, she recommended that a black seamstress spend a week at the school. The seamstress, according to Taylor Branch in “Parting the Waters,” returned “to say that her eyes had been opened to new possibilities of harmony between the races.”
The seamstress was Rosa Parks. Virginia Durr and her husband Clifford went to the police station on Dec. 1, 1955, to post bail for Parks when she was arrested in the incident that sparked the boycott. White members of an interracial prayer group wrote signed letters to the paper in support. Many of these women would pick up and drive black women whom they saw walking during the boycott. Three men from Maxwell Air Force Base, along with the Rev. Robert Graetz and his wife, are cited by Martin Luther King Jr. as whites who drove for the black-run car-pool system.
Fleming’s questioning of even meeting with blacks ignores the fact that in 1955, Alabama Gov. Jim Folsom sat in the governor’s mansion in Montgomery and drank bourbon with black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. That the meeting happened shows that the ironies of the times are far more interesting than Fleming may remember.
Yet, Fleming is much more insidious in referring to the black characters as “background players.” I could not disagree more. Maybe through Fleming’s white-man eyes he could only see Miriam Thompson as significant. But that ignores the dramatic weight carried by Odessa Cotter. He takes her silence as a sign that she is “passive,” yet she is the one who tells Miriam that she must have a modicum of respect, or she will “have to quit” her job as maid. She is the one who, by the end of the film, has found the strength to confront a racist mob in an act of courage exemplified by so many during the time.
On the other hand, Miriam Thompson is, as Sissy Spacek put it, “a woman who does all the right things for all the wrong reasons.” However, it is through a slow realization brought on by her confrontations with Odessa that she finds herself politically on the other side of the fence from most of white Montgomery.
Does the fact that a lone sympathetic white character exists in “The Long Walk Home” make the film “about as far from reality as one could get”? No. The film centers around two fictional characters, and two fictional families. But all the background information is correct. Conversations, attitudes and social customs are accurately portrayed. As Rosa Parks herself stated, the film’s “tone is right, the events could have happened.” That is the test of good fiction. And this film should not be judged as a documentary.
The film was shown in Montgomery on Dec. 2--35 years to the day that leaflets were distributed calling for the boycott. A crowd of blacks and whites attended, and the response was very emotional. Many in the theater had been part of the historical fabric that the story relies upon. Some had been (and still are) members of the board of the Montgomery Improvement Assn., the organization created to manage the boycott. The applause meant more to me than anything.
The following night, I attended a meeting celebrating the 35th anniversary of the organization at the Holt Street Baptist Church. I came as an observer but was asked to sit behind the pulpit and even speak to those gathered.
Later, Mrs. Johnnie Carr, the president of the group, and a very active member during the boycott, spoke. She said, “I don’t know if you or John knows how remarkable it is that he is here today. How remarkable it is that he could have written ‘The Long Walk Home.’ ”
In so few words, she managed to bring forth the arc of history for me. The remarkable thing was not that I, a white boy from the other side of town, was in a black church, but that I was exactly where I wanted to be. Exactly where Carr wanted me to be. I had not helped her or any of the others present gain civil rights, respect or a sense of self-worth. The opposite was true. Carr provided me with the illumination. . . just as the fictional black maid, Odessa, did for the fictional white housewife in “The Long Walk Home.”
And that is exactly the point that Fleming missed.
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87532e44cc8ab4480539009d9e14c8cf
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5515-story.html
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Pop Music : Kenny G Gives Long-Winded Performance at Amphitheatre
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Pop Music : Kenny G Gives Long-Winded Performance at Amphitheatre
“The world’s greatest living saxophonist . . . Kenny G!”
Incredibly, that was singer Michael Bolton’s description of his partner during Friday’s opening program of the duo’s eight-night run at Universal Amphitheatre.
But if Bolton’s characterization seemed effusive in the extreme, it was no more overblown than the performance itself, which started late and ran on, interminably, past midnight.
Kenny G--as he bills himself--is clearly not an artist who has yet discovered the mature creative values of economy and conciseness. Every piece featured the same extended saxophone solos, variously on alto, tenor and soprano, all assembled from the same repetitious blues licks.
With rare exception, the numbers all fell into similar patterns--soft ensemble chording on the ballads, funk-driven rhythms on the tempo tunes--and the soloing was interchangeable from one piece to another.
G has discovered a growing fondness for the spotlight, and one that has flourished considerably since his last appearance in the area. Brief features for the members of his back-up ensemble were the only moments when the focus moved away from the saxophonist. And even then he appeared reluctant to leave center stage.
Bassist Vail Johnson and guitarist John Raymond, for example, were obliged to share the opening part of their features via duets with G. Raymond’s skills, modest at most, demanded no more space than they got. But Johnson, an explosively energetic performer, burst out of his exchanges with G into a colorful, stage-stalking, rhythm stomping solo that gave the saxophonist all the competition he could handle. A duet between drummer Bruce Carter and percussionist Ron Powell was too truncated to allow either performer to stretch out, and keyboardist Robert Damper had little opportunity to do anything other than solid support work.
There was plenty of time, however, for G to stretch out. Twice he took long-winded solo excursions through the audience--a pied piper with a portable microphone. Several numbers were dominated by the trickery of circular breathing techniques, which allowed him to hold notes and play patterns for seemingly impossible lengths of time. Others featured rapid-fire fingering that made his line sound as though it was being played by two instruments.
But it was all circus stuff--the kind of technical gimmickry most professional saxophonists learn early and quickly abandon in favor of richer forms of expression. Like the bar-walking saxophonists of the ‘50s and the heavy-metal lead guitarists who are his real models, G appeared more concerned with theater, with impression, with appearance, than with enriching the content of his music.
Most of the program, in fact, had a prepackaged quality. G’s exchanges with the audience--overflowing with determinedly ingenuous nice guy smiles and “Oh wow, this is so fun!” and “I wish I could ask you all a bunch of questions, but I don’t know what to say!” commentary--sounded exactly like his remarks during last year’s performances.
Only Michael Bolton’s opening set was different, enlarged no doubt due to his increased visibility as a solo artist. But his blue-eyed soul style--especially on a classic like Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay"--is an acquired taste, and one which requires almost complete ignorance of the more fruitful sources upon which it is based.
Kenny G and Michael Bolton continue at the Amphitheatre tonight and Wednesday through Saturday. All performances except the final one are sold out.
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8e0eecbc05edb7b5237237643f93f50a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5520-story.html
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Jazz : Jack McDuff Rules From the Organ Bench at Marla’s
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Jazz : Jack McDuff Rules From the Organ Bench at Marla’s
Sitting at the organ in a yachting cap Saturday night at Marla’s Memory Lane in South-Central Los Angeles, Jack McDuff looked a bit like Count Basie. Even the way he ran his septet from the bench recalled the way the Count ruled.
Not content to preside over just another groove session, the organist brought in a quartet of horns--tenor saxophonist Herman Riley, alto saxophonist Edwin Pleasants, trumpeter Steve Huffsteter and trombonist Thurman Green--and had them flipping through charts, working long unison passages and generally adding some intellect to the funky, blues-washed proceedings. Guitarist Earl Alexander supplied harmonic rhythms while drummer Carl Burnett added splash, crash and drive when called for.
McDuff, who started out as a bassist, supplied his own buzzy bottom end, walking the bass pedals with authority during slow blues, or laying down the kind of up-tempo funk patterns that Bootsy Collins might admire. He also showed a pushy way of accompaniment, suggesting dynamic or rhythmic twists to the soloists in none too subtle ways.
But, like Basie, McDuff was stingy with his own playing. He seemed content just supplying support rather than taking the lead himself and there were too-few moments when the organist displayed his tough, no-nonsense keyboard style. He steamed and grooved through “Killer Joe,” but didn’t even solo during “April in Paris,” his shuffling chords barely audible behind the wailing brass. For the most part, soloing chores were left to Riley’s aggressive tenor and Pleasants’ more reserved alto, a contrast that worked to advantage during a couple of up-tempo numbers.
That the evening’s opening group, the Jive Five, still has a long way to go seemed understandable in light of the fact that its members range in age from 14 to 18. Despite a surfeit of dues yet to be paid, the five teen-agers, with their sheet-music books and serious stage demeanors, certainly looked the part of young lions waiting for their day.
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ceea649c3e09c92e5c6193477bc99dcc
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5521-story.html
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German Cinema ‘From Caligari to Hitler’ : The first part of the Art Museum’s survey covers films made before 1933 that were subsequently banned by the Nazis.
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German Cinema ‘From Caligari to Hitler’ : The first part of the Art Museum’s survey covers films made before 1933 that were subsequently banned by the Nazis.
Rare films from Hitler’s Third Reich will be among those shown during “From Caligari to Hitler,” a two-part series surveying German cinema from 1913-1945 that gets under way Friday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater.
The series complements the museum’s upcoming “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” which runs Feb. 17 through May 12.
Part 1 (Friday-Jan. 26) is composed of films made before Hitler came to power in 1933; all were subsequently denounced and banned by the Nazi regime. Part 2 (Feb.1-March 4) covers the key films of the Third Reich, which have not been seen in 45 years.
The series’ title comes from Siegfried Kracauer’s fascinating, hotly debated 1947 history of the German cinema, in which he argues dogmatically--and with varying degrees of persuasiveness--that the coming of Hitler and Nazism was foreshadowed in Germany’s movies.
The series opens with screenings at 1 p.m. and again at 8 p.m. of Walther Ruttman’s abstract 12-minute “Light-Play Opus No. 1" (1921), and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919). The latter, one of the most famous and influential silent films, ushered in the golden age of the German cinema. With its boldly innovative Expressionist style, “Caligari,” which was directed by Robert Wiene, an otherwise obscure experimentalist, projects powerfully--and prophetically--a vision of society as an insane asylum under the rule of a clever and evil madman.
The world of “Caligari” is that of a nightmare in which highly stylized settings, a jumble of bizarre angles and forced perspectives, represents the distorted vision of the film’s narrator, a distraught young man named Francis (Friedrich Feher). He tells a horrifying tale of an evil-looking magician, Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), who arrives in the fictional town of Holstenwall with a carnival.
Caligari’s magic act consists of Cesare the Somnambulist (a cadaverous-looking Conrad Veidt), who upon being wakened in his upright coffin--the “cabinet” of the film’s title--makes predictions based on questions from the audience. Clearly, Cesare is in Caligari’s thrall. Meanwhile, Holstenwall is struck by a series of murders.
Scheduling conflicts prevented Fritz Lang from directing “Caligari,” but he is credited with providing the film’s framing story, which adds a profoundly disturbing dimension to Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz’s script.
Screening at 2:30 p.m. and again at 9:30 p.m. is Ernst Lubitsch’s enchanting 1919 “Madame Du Barry” (released in the United States as “Passion”). It offers a sly, boudoir view of history; a radiant Pola Negri plays Du Barry to Emil Jannings’ petulant, ungainly Louis XV. In the immediate wake of World War I, the French were so taken aback by this sophisticated, though tragic, romp that they banned it for five years. Meanwhile, its stars and director went on to Hollywood and even greater fame and glory.
Saturday brings (at 8 p.m. only) a trio of rarities, starting with the 75-minute first (1913) version of “The Student of Prague,” directed by Stellan Rye and produced by and starring the burly Paul Wegener as “Prague’s finest swordsman and wildest student.”
The title character sells his soul to a satanic magician in this imaginative and poignant variation on “The Picture of Dorian Gray”; in the 1925 remake, Wegener would be more aptly cast as the tempter opposite Conrad Veidt as the student.
It is followed by Richard Oswald’s elegant and sensitive “Different From the Others” (1919), which the late gay activist/film historian Vito Russo declared to be the first film to advocate gay rights. It also is the first to depict a gay bar.
With his usual intensity, Conrad Veidt plays a famed concert violinist who courageously stands up to a blackmailer. This enlightened film stirred up a considerable controversy and was subsequently banned.
Concluding Saturday’s program is a real stunner, the 60-minute “Backstairs” (1921), written by Carl Mayer and directed by Leopold Jessner. Against Paul Leni’s looming, shadowy settings--the print is razor-sharp and mint-fresh--they tell with the utmost economy and psychological impact of the obsessive love of an unprepossessing postman (Fritz Kortner) for a pretty housemaid (Henny Porten) with a tall, handsome lover (Wilhelm Dieterle, later a prominent Hollywood director).
For information, call (213) 857-6010.
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ea1edd9f8c2c67095e8531743dea5a9a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5522-story.html
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ART REVIEW : Survey of Impressionism, California Style : Laguna Art Museum hangs 75 ho-hum paintings. But the exhibit catalogue helps relieve the doldrums.
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ART REVIEW : Survey of Impressionism, California Style : Laguna Art Museum hangs 75 ho-hum paintings. But the exhibit catalogue helps relieve the doldrums.
There have been moments in history when a group of creative visionaries put their hometown on the cultural map. More commonly, provincial art styles beloved by the locals never make the big time, and for good reason. So-called “California Impressionism” is one of those styles, a timidly conservative attempt to capture the look of a coastal Shangri-La using techniques pioneered by artists in France more than a generation earlier.
Granted the continuing public popularity of these paintings, a critic groans at the prospect of yet another show devoted to uninspired images of breezy shores, rugged mountains and dreamily idle women. The “masters” of this genre hardly seem worth differentiating from each other, and they scarcely suffer from underexposure.
So why is the Laguna Art Museum bringing us “California Light: 1900-1930,” an array of 75 works by nine of these artists?
Well, initially it seemed as if the exhibit (on view through Jan. 6) was going to offer a fresh, broadly sociological look at the connection between the art and the sun-dazzled land that was rapidly filling up with newcomers lured by tourist brochures. Even ho-hum art can be wonderfully informative about the habits and beliefs of people living at a particular time.
The catalogue essays by 10 authors with expertise in a variety of fields do cover a good deal of ground, from the phenomenon of migration to Southern California to the way certain artists glorified a vision of passive femininity. Yet guest curator Patricia Trenton seems to be bringing us the same old show, livened up with a few informational tidbits about the unique whiteness of California light.
Strolling through the exhibit, you don’t feel you are in the midst of a revisionist effort, or even a concerted effort to relate art to life. Conventional documentation of the careers of the artists--most of whom also worked abroad and back East--tends to cloud the issue of how the art responded to the social and cultural climate of California. There are no contemporary photographs to give a sense of context, no relevant wall-text discussions of, say, the emphasis on light and color in what passed for critical writing on art in Southern California or the amount of leisure time enjoyed by upper-class women of the period.
The paintings--by Franz Bischoff, Maurice Braun, Alson Clark, Joseph Kleitsch, Edgar Payne, Granville Redmond, Guy Rose, Donna Schuster and William Wendt--are grouped for the most part by artist. A separate gallery is set aside for works painted in Europe by Rose, Clark and Payne, presumably to indicate the different kinds of light they found in Madrid, Paris, Switzerland and Giverny, where aging Impressionist Claude Monet held court.
Although California Impressionism marked the last hurrah of plein-air painting--done out-of-doors to capture instantaneous effects at the source--the Californians went their own independent ways, frequently distorting or modifying the working habits and theories of their French artistic forebears.
Edgar Payne, for example, was really an academic painter in Impressionist’s clothing. He stayed indoors to paint detailed models of fishing boats in Impressionist-style broken brushwork, and carefully recomposed his outdoor sketches of mountains into idealized visions rather than trying to capture the fleeting quality of optical sensations.
Actually, quite a few of the works on view are scenes of light held at bay by parasols and porticoes or filtered into indoor settings. Based on the evidence in these canvases, the only people who took shelter under a roof in California were women. With a few exceptions--such as Kleitsch’s portrait of self-possessed “Miss Ketchum"--these lasses were a droopy lot, given to vague reveries in pretty gowns amid the tasteful furnishings of a prosperous home.
Frequently, as in Clark’s “Reflections"--a semi-nude image of a young thing staring smugly at her manicure--the woman poses near a mirror but doesn’t look into it. The mirror, like the woman, is really there for the spectator’s pleasure in sensual accouterments.
As Bram Dijkstra, professor of American literature and cultural history at UC San Diego, discusses at length in a catalogue essay, in turn-of-the-century painting, a woman was “a clever optical illusion . . . lit only by the reflected light of the masculine sun . . . a mere echo of creativity.”
Such insights and turns of phrase rescue the exhibit from the doldrums; if only the same could be said of the paintings themselves.
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832e8b5927e0f9ed1929d48f70fb2e6c
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5531-story.html
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1990 Highs, Lows for Theater in S.D.
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1990 Highs, Lows for Theater in S.D.
San Diego theatergoers don’t know how lucky they are.
Here is the lineup that was their’s for the price of a ticket during the past year:
“Hamlet,” in a clever rendition; “Burn This,” a searing tale of tortured love; “My Children! My Africa!” the latest indictment of apartheid; “Follies,” a lyrical rendering of passing time; “Teibele and Her Demon,” a magical journey to a shtetl in turn-of-the-century Poland, and “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” a tender tale of love against the odds.
San Diego is one of the best theater scenes in the country but it is also woefully under-funded by federal, state and local government and by individual contributors.
With 1991 upon us, the strain is beginning to show.
Three of San Diego’s most respected professional theaters have announced crises that threatened, and in one case suspended, their 1990 seasons.
The La Jolla Playhouse produced “My Children! My Africa!” as the centerpiece of its season. It outlived its 1990 crisis by raising $700,000 in its $1 million deficit-reducing drive and by producing its most popular season to date.
The San Diego Repertory Theatre, which presented an electric “Burn This” along with a blackly funny “Loot,” a poignant “Cymbeline” and a spiritually satisfying “A Christmas Carol,” has raised nearly $300,000 of the $350,000 it says it needs to assure the completion of its season.
And after six months of suspended activity, the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company is back in business with the recently extended “Frankie and Johnny.”
But finances are still fragile at all three companies. The Gaslamp, for instance, is still staring into the chasm of a deficit that approaches $1 million.
And finances are also fragile at companies were the situation has yet to reach the crisis stage.
The Bowery Theatre, which Actors’ Equity says is the country’s smallest professional house (it has just 78 seats), may postpone or change the next scheduled play in its season, “Stories About the Old Days,” because of a shortage of funds.
“We’ve seen the heights of glory and the depths of despair,” is how Bowery associate director Mickey Mullany describes 1990 for her company.
Because the 8-year-old Bowery has never developed a subscription audience, its fortunes rise and fall with the popularity of individual shows. Last year, it seemed that they could do no wrong as hit followed hit: “Italian-American Reconciliation,” “What the Butler Saw” and “Teibele and Her Demon,” which opened in February of 1990. But “Teibele” was also the last big hit for 1990. Later shows--"Jesse and the Bandit Queen,” “I Am Celso,” “The Glass Menagerie” and “Speed-the-Plow"--attracted their share of praise, but not the hoped-for audience.
The nail-biting result for the company, which runs on an annual budget of $200,000, is that it now lacks the money to stage “Stories About the Old Days,” a play about an elderly black couple, in the way the company would like.
“We have no breathing room at all,” Mullany said. “We are considering the efficacies of mounting the third show now. Is it wise to cross the fingers and hope that people will respond? Or should we do something radical? We can’t do a crisis campaign. For one thing, our entire operation is not in jeopardy. But we cannot afford to get into a big financial bind. Things are nip and tuck and every $25 donation makes a difference.”
Starlight Musical Theatre also ended its season in the red this year, although there is no cause for immediate alarm here. Starlight, which operates on a $3-million budget, can dip into its reserves for the $220,000 shortfall in expected revenues.
What is disturbing is that board members might get an unfortunate message from the drop in revenues.
“Jesus Christ Superstar” broke all records at the Starlight box office, but the least successful show, commercially, was by far the most successful artistically. “Follies,” the company’s first venture into Stephen Sondheim territory, was an important move for Starlight. But is it a move, given the lackluster audience support, that Starlight will make again?
One show that Starlight staff points to with pride in 1991 is the brand-new musical, “For My Country--the USO Musical.”
Starlight is to be commended for devoting time and money during uncertain economic times to developing new material, as it has in its 1990 staged musical series. One wishes the best to this venture, but the choice remains questionable. A preview at a staged reading revealed an unfortunate sentimentality and lack of sophistication about the war scenes it portrays. It will take some work to transform this project into a winner.
Sushi, too, which grabbed headlines this year for having presented all four of the artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants were pulled by NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer, has a $25,000 credit line that it has been struggling to pay off for the last three years.
The avant-garde presenter, which puts on about 35 to 40 different events a year on a $300,000 annual budget, is San Diego’s unique haven for the daring and controversial in theater, performance art, dance and visual art.
“We’re not losing money, but we’re not seeing any growth,” reports Sushi’s executive director, Lynn Schuette. “We know the private sector is not going to increase money and the public sector is going to remain flat.
“We’re constantly concerned about the $25,000 credit line. But unless you launch a campaign . . . .”
Even the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego’s largest, oldest and most secure theater, complains of a lack of growth in these precarious economic times. Although Thomas Hall, Globe managing director, takes a justifiable pride in reporting that the Globe, as usual, ended the year in the black, he complains that finances have been flat for the second year in a row. And when the budget stays the same, it’s hard to grow.
With its $8.4-million budget, the Globe produces a backbreaking 12 shows a year, all of which are necessary to pay for the theater’s substantial overhead. (By comparison, Lincoln Center in New York has a $12-13 million budget and the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco maintains a $10-million budget.)
“One of the things that makes us a little crazy is that people don’t think we have concerns or problems,” Hall said. “It’s a constant battle to stay ahead. The arts in general are woefully undercapitalized. There just is not enough money to have any sense of stability.”
Hall also has dreams of expanding the Globe’s theatrical role. He would like to bring back the Maly Theatre of Leningrad, which presented the powerful “Brothers and Sisters” in 1989, and he’d like to make the Globe “a home for international work on an ongoing basis.”
But that takes money. And while he said he had hoped to bring back the Maly as early as 1991 in collaboration with a group of other theaters, some on the East Coast are dropping out of the shared-cost arrangement because of tighter finances in this recession era.
Given the current economic climate, it is noteworthy that three smaller San Diego theaters flourished during 1990.
The North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach and the Moonlight Amphitheatre in Vista both credit at least part of their growth to a growing, theater-hungry audience in North County.
The North Coast, which operates on a budget of $230,000-$240,000, draws a large crowd from Solana Beach, Del Mar, Encinitas and Carlsbad for its eclectic fare, according to artistic director Olive Blakistone.
Blakistone said she was proudest of the production of Jon Robin Baitz’s “The Film Society,” even though it lost money. But Vaclav Havel’s “The Memorandum,” coincidentally and fortuitously timed to Havel’s ascension to the presidency of Czechoslovakia, and Stephen Metcalfe’s “Emily,” both made money.
Blakistone’s ambition for her 8-year-old company is to increase honorariums for actors to the point where she can prove that her theater can afford a professional Equity contract.
The Moonlight Amphitheatre, with a budget of $170,000, has been increasing attendance by about 10,000 a year in the past three years.
The company mounts its musicals under the moonlight in Brengle Terrace Park, and it made a breakthrough from light fare to challenging programming with a sweet but sophisticated production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” this year. Through that show the company attracted a new audience, and it now has a three-play winter season and is about to begin a $3-million capitalization campaign to build a new theater for its winter season and to improve the existing amphitheater for the summer season.
Meanwhile, in South County, the National City-based Lamb’s Players Theatre, a self-described Christian theater troupe, can credit at least part of its successes this year to the area’s appetite for programming with a religious and Biblical influence.
The company operates on a $1.1-million budget without any government support, and depends on the box office for 80% of its income. Thanks to some hit shows this year, box office income put them in the black.
Already it appears that financial needs will continue to be great for most San Diego theaters in 1991. For some theaters, the need is a question of survival; for others, it’s a matter of growth.
The La Jolla Playhouse, which shares facilities with UC San Diego, must make enough money during its six-month season to pay for year-round overhead, explains Artistic Director Des McAnuff and Alan Levey, business manager. It’s what Levey calls “a very tricky financial model,” which requires significant support even when it has a record season, such as this one, in which the company fills its two theaters to 96% of capacity.
The new 400-seat Mandell Weiss Forum, which will replace the Warren Theatre beginning with the ’91 season, should help because the company will be able to sell more seats. But the company’s goal remains to create a third theater that will allow it to operate year-round.
The San Diego Rep, which has said it needs to increase both ticket sales and contributed income, is pinning its hopes on increased subscription sales in 1991. The Gaslamp, according to managing director Steven Bevans, is counting on “quality” to bring in a new audience.
Officials at the San Diego Rep, the Gaslamp and the Bowery all say they may do some tinkering with their scheduling in 1991, possibly dropping out of the summer theater blitz, during which the Old Globe (which is planning a summer repertory season in 1991), the La Jolla Playhouse and Starlight Musical Theatre reign. Next year the additions from San Diego Playgoers’ of “Les Miserables,” “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “The Grand Hotel,” as well as the San Diego Symphony’s SummerPops, should be quite enough competition for anyone to handle.
Sad endings: the Del Mar Theatre Ensemble, the ambitious new children’s theater that suspended operations after its disappointing production of “Scapan” this summer, is not returning calls. The Progressive Theatre Company closed its doors after its venue at 433 G Street was deemed unsafe by the fire marshal.
On a more hopeful note: The homeless Sledgehammer Theatre, which closed its three-play, $64,000 season with red ink on its hands, is planning to raise funds and return to the Sixth Avenue Playhouse by April, 1991.
The homeless San Diego Actors Theatre ended its two-play, $30,000 season in the black, and artistic director Patricia Elmore plans three shows for next season, beginning with Studs Terkel’s “American Dreams” at The Elizabeth North Theatre in February. And the homeless Ensemble Arts Theatre has reached new audiences through its association with the Gaslamp, with which it co-produced “Dusk to Dawn at the Sunset.”
The Marquis Public Theatre, which, like the Gaslamp, had suspended operations for several months, is now getting new life from its new tenant, Christopher R of the Ruse Performance Gallery.
But the common theme for all is the need for more community support in 1991.
1991 may well be the year when San Diegans show whether they have enough commitment to make their theater scene last and grow.
If 1990 has shown us anything, it is that the span of theaters, like life itself, can be brutally short. The theater you do not support today may not be around tomorrow. Right now, many theaters can go either way. The dramatic tension is high.
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589ab2a00f85cb1f5e30cecbc503e928
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5532-story.html
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Pop Crooner Vinton Gears Up for 2nd Run
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Pop Crooner Vinton Gears Up for 2nd Run
Sooner or later, it happens to every big pop star: The hits stop coming, your record company no longer wants you, and you find yourself tagged as a has-been.
Between 1962 and 1972, Bobby Vinton had 28 Top 40 hits, including “Roses Are Red (My Love),” “Blue on Blue,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Mr. Lonely.” Then, he was unceremoniously dumped by his record company.
Except for a brief comeback in 1974 with “My Melody of Love,” he hasn’t had a hit since. And, like so many has-beens, he’s been relegated to playing Las Vegas and Atlantic City lounges.
But now, the 49-year-old pop crooner, who will appear New Year’s Eve at the Hotel del Coronado’s Grand Ballroom, is gearing up for a second run. He has a new recording contract, with Curb Records, and recently “Blue Velvet” returned to the British pop charts after the song was featured in a television commercial for Nivea cold cream.
Having a hit again, after so many years, was an unexpected surprise that’s done wonders for his self-confidence, Vinton said.
“Any recording artist will tell you, there’s nothing like a hit record,” Vinton said. “You try so hard--everybody lives for it and tries for it, and here I am, I didn’t even know I had it. They called me in Malibu and said, ‘Do you know you have the No. 1 record in England?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure I do, who is this, what is this, some kind of a joke?’ But then I found out it wasn’t a joke, it was true, and I was very excited.”
Shortly before “Blue Velvet” was rereleased in England, Vinton was signed to Curb Records after a chance encounter with label president Mike Curb on a plane. Vinton’s first project for Curb was a greatest-hits package in which he rerecorded many of his old hits, followed by an album of Christmas songs. His next project, and the one he’s the most excited about, is an album of new songs.
“I really want to make a new album and come out with new material, because what happens is you quit believing in yourself,” Vinton said. “You start to wonder, how can the world be wrong; my music must not be what’s happening anymore. But, in light of what happened in England, well, maybe it’s time I got going again.”
Vinton was born in Canonsburg, Pa., also the hometown of Perry Como. He played clarinet and saxophone in his high school band. After a stint in the Army, he moved to Pittsburgh and became a bandleader.
“We backed everybody from Sammy Davis Jr. to Chubby Checker, Fabian, Sam Cooke--you name it,” Vinton said. “I was the conductor, musician and arranger.”
In 1961, Vinton signed with Epic Records and cut two Big Band albums, but neither was a success.
“They thought I was going to be the next teen-age Glenn Miller, but nobody wanted Big Bands; they were dying out, and my record company was dropping me,” Vinton recalled. “But then I looked at my contract and said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, my contract calls for me to cut 14 sides, and we only did 12, so you owe me two more sides.’
“So I had them, and I figured that, since I had made enough records as a bandleader, I should cut something as a singer. While we were in the office, I listened to a few songs on this reject pile, and one of them was “Roses Are Red.” I thought to myself, ‘Gee, that sounds like one of the songs I hear on the radio,’ and I told them, that’s the song I want to do.”
So he did it. But, although “Roses Are Red” ended up spending four weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles charts, it didn’t happen overnight.
“Initially, it was a struggle, trying to get people to play it, and the record company gave up on it,” Vinton recalled. “So I went and bought a thousand records out of a distributor in Pittsburgh, and the next thing I knew, they called me up and said, ‘Hey, we think you’ve got a hit.’
“So now I have a thousand records, and I got in my car and put them in every record store in the Pittsburgh area. But still, nobody would play it. So I came up with this idea of putting the record inside a dozen roses and giving this bouquet to the disc jockeys.
“The first radio station I went to, there was the disc jockey, behind his glass window, and I was smiling at him, and he was smiling at me, and I felt really awkward, handing this guy a dozen roses. Just then this good-looking girl comes walking down the street, and I told her, ‘I can’t help but notice how good you look, and would you do me a favor? I’ve got all my life invested in these records here, and would you walk in with these flowers and hand them to that disc jockey?’
“She said, ‘You’re crazy, but I’ll do it.’ And then she walked in, and I could see the disc jockey behind the glass, smiling and looking at her legs, and then he’s putting on my record. When she came back out, I told her, ‘Look, I’ve got a couple more records and a couple more radio stations,’ and we ended up going to six or seven other stations, and they were all playing my record at once.
“I checked the stores a week later, and my records were all gone.”
“Roses Are Red” first topped the Billboard charts in July of 1962. By the end of the year, two other songs had charted. Vinton’s hit streak would continue for nearly 10 years.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.
“My record company, Epic Records, dropped me,” Vinton recalled. “They said, ‘You’ve had it. You’ve sold 50, 60 million records, how many more can you sell? The times are changing, people don’t want your music anymore, and we’re going to have to let you go.’
“I said, ‘Hey, that’s no trouble, I can get a deal anywhere.’ But I couldn’t. All the other record companies were saying, ‘Hey, if Epic doesn’t want you, why should we want you?”’
Eventually, Vinton did succeed in finding a new record deal, with ABC Records. In 1974, he returned to the pop charts with “My Melody of Love.” Sung partially in Polish, the song was embraced by Polish-Americans and Vinton, of Polish descent, soon became known as the “Polish Prince.”
“It was really more than a record, it was a happening,” Vinton said. “In cities like Chicago and Detroit, where there is a big Polish ethnic group, I didn’t have fans, I had armies. It was like I was going to free Poland with this song.”
Indeed. Shortly after the release of “My Melody of Love,” Vinton hosted a Chicago telethon that raised millions of dollars for Poland’s then-fledgling Solidarity movement. He also traveled to Poland to speak and perform.
In the wake of the hoopla surrounding “My Melody Of Love,” Vinton was given his own syndicated television series, “The Bobby Vinton Show,” which lasted three years. Yet, try as he might, he couldn’t come up with another hit record, and when ABC Records folded in 1977, Vinton said, “I was on the street again.”
For the next 12 years, Vinton didn’t do any recording at all. “I was just playing Vegas and Atlantic City, making millions of dollars a year. I was working about 30 weeks a year, and I was probably in Las Vegas as much as Wayne Newton, just raking it in.’
But money isn’t everything, Vinton said, and he’s grateful that Curb is giving him the chance to record again, and that “Blue Velvet” put him back on the charts.
“Like I said, there’s nothing like a hit record,” he said. “That’s what this business is all about.”
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f710d021bb0a02c8591c8d4053c5779b
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5567-story.html
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Orange County 1990/1991: THE YEAR AHEAD : O.C. ART : A Bright ’91--With Dull Spots--Is Likely
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Orange County 1990/1991: THE YEAR AHEAD : O.C. ART : A Bright ’91--With Dull Spots--Is Likely
Bursting with exhibitions likely to delight, confound and enlighten--amid a few dull spots--the new year has a promising look. Following is a rundown of what’s on tap at the major institutions and a few less heavily trafficked spots.
At Newport Harbor Art Museum:
* “Edward Hopper: Selections From the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art” (Jan. 20 through March 17). The American painter who so memorably captured the loneliness of the human condition is a hardy perennial, appealing to art innocents and art sophisticates alike with his isolated figures who pass empty hours in offices, cafes, porches and hotel rooms. A major traveling exhibit of Hopper’s work--65 paintings, 35 watercolors, 50 prints and drawings--is making its first stop (and only California visit) in Newport Beach, where it’s likely to be the year’s most popular show. Hopper’s art will be exhibited chronologically, beginning with early student works, and including pieces rarely exhibited. The Whitney received Hopper’s estate of 2,500-plus works as a bequest from his widow, Josephine Nivison Hopper, the model for many of the women in his paintings.
“New California Artist XVIII: Robert Millar” (Jan. 20 through March 17). Millar’s photographs, sculptural objects and site-specific works have to do with light, form and space, and his first one-person museum show makes its point by deliberately wandering all over the place. Five of his pieces will be in the museum, a stairlike construction will touch down in the outdoor sculpture garden, and four wooden chess tables and seats designed by Millar will be found in various locations around Newport Beach. The exhibit was organized by Lucinda Barnes, the museum’s former associate curator.
* “Typologies: 9 Contemporary Photographers” (April 9 through June 2). For the contemporary art crowd, this is the big one. It’s the first international survey of work by nine contemporary artists from North America and Germany who photograph suites of visually similar images that examine a particular subject matter--like industrial buildings or people’s faces. The work is closer to traditions of documentary, ethnographic and natural science photography than to traditional art photography. The exhibit, organized by guest curator Marc Freidus, includes work by Lynne Cohen (from Canada), Judy Fiskin, Roger Mertin, Ed Ruscha (United States), Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and the husband-and-wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher (Germany).
“New California Artist XIX: Kim Yasuda” (April 9 through June 2). Yasuda uses such materials as fabric, photographs, wood, sand and living trees to make installations concerned with the passage of time and its cycles of growth and decline.
* “Selections from the Permanent Collection” (June 25 through Sept. 15). “Collection” shows are usually routine things, but Newport’s collection of postwar California art normally remains tucked away, awaiting a building with more gallery space. This show also features recent acquisitions, some on view for the first time.
“Third Newport Biennial” (Oct. 6 through Jan. 5, 1992). In previous years, the biennial surveyed either Northern or Southern California work by up-and-coming artists. This year, the museum has the whole state to play with, and it’s come up with eight artists who are said to have made a significant impact on the scene. The fun of these shows lies partly in the endless quibbles they spark--how could anyone possibly choose artist X and not artist Y?--and partly in the delight of discovering new work and possibly seeing a favorite artist honored with curatorial attention.
At Laguna Art Museum:
* “Edward Corbett: A Retrospective” (Jan. 11 through March 24). Organized by the Richmond (Calif.) Art Center, this is a 30-year survey of work by a leading San Francisco painter of the postwar years and an influential teacher at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). The exhibit emphasizes Corbett’s atmospheric paintings and drawings from the late 1940s.
* “Kim Abeles: The Smog Collector” (Jan. 11 through April 21, at the museum’s South Coast Plaza Satellite). The museum commissioned the well-known Los Angeles artist to do an installation, and she responded with a piece everyone can relate to--about the quality of our air. Images that appear to be etched on pieces of glass and other transparent materials were actually created by placing stencils on the glass and leaving them on Abeles’ studio roof for 30 days.
* “The Expressive Sculpture of Alvin Light” (Jan. 18 through March 24). The drawings and sculptures in this show (organized by the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art) were made over a 25-year period by one of the pioneers of abstract sculpture in the Bay Area who died in 1980. Light found equivalents in wood for the themes of his Abstract Expressionist painter colleagues. Using both milled lumber and tree branches he found on beaches and in parks, he forged a quirky style entirely his own.
* “Morphosis: Buildings and Projects” (March 29 through June 9). A couple of years ago, at the annual American Institute of Architects dinner, Morphosis partner Thom Mayne excoriated Orange County architects for creating bland buildings that baldly refuse to relate to one another. Now Orange County gets to see the kind of unconventional solutions cooked up by Mayne and Michael Rotondi--the driving forces behind Morphosis, a Santa Monica-based architecture firm--for such projects as single-family and multiple-unit housing, medical facilities, restaurants and retail spaces. The exhibit, curated by museum director Charles Desmarais, includes models for buildings and furniture as well as mixed-media prints and other non-traditional architectural documents.
* “Beginning the Next Decade: Recent Acquisitions” (March 29 through June 16). Now that the renovation of their Laguna Beach building is history, the museum has been making a big push to beef up the collection with gifts from friends. One prize for the gift-givers--and, we hope, also for the community at large--is seeing their stuff on display. This show will including paintings by Lorser Feitelson, Roger Kuntz and Dan Lutz, works on paper by Peter Alexander, an assemblage by Bruce Connor, and other California works from the past century.
* “The Cutting Edge: Contemporary American Folk Art from the Rosenak Collection” (June 14 through Aug. 18). Work by unschooled rural and urban artists from a major private collection (organized by the Museum of American Folk Art in New York) sounds likely to lure casual visitors during the season when a museum has to work pretty hard to compete with a beach.
* “Arthur Wesley Dow and His Influence” (June 21 through Sept. 1). Dow, whose style filtered the look of Asian art through a Western sensibility, was an important influence on such American modernist painters and photographers as Georgia O’Keeffe, Max Weber, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Clarence White, Gertrude Kasebier and other members of Alfred Stieglitz’s circle. This exhibit of prints and photographs was organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
* “Dream and Perspective: The American Scene in California, 1930-1945" (Sept. 6 through Nov. 17). And now, a show organized by the Laguna museum that aims to examine the social roles played by artists in California during the isolationist and war years of the 1930s and ‘40s. This sounds like a good opportunity to reveal the sociology behind the art; as for the art itself, we’ll have to wait and see whether work by Millard Sheets, Maynard Dixon and such lesser-known figures as Phil Paradise, Rinaldo Cuneo and Barse Miller still offers food for thought.
* “The Transparent Thread: Asian Philosophy in American Art, 1950-90" (Nov. 22 through Feb. 9, 1992). This ambitious show aims to explore the impact of Asian philosophies on a number of otherwise disparate artists, among them, John Baldessari, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Arneson, Jasper Johns, William Wiley and Larry Rivers. If the works are well chosen and the catalogue essayists can muster persuasive arguments, this may be Laguna’s top show of the year. It was organized by the Hofstra University Museum, Hampstead, N.Y., with the Edith C. Blum Art Institute at Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
At the Fine Arts Gallery, UC Irvine:
* “Ansel Adams: Fiat Lux” (Jan. 8 through Feb. 10). Millions love his pristine images of nature--but it remains to be seen whether local viewers will go gaga over his 100 images of University of California campuses, agricultural fields and research labs. The photos, commissioned by then Chancellor Clark Kerr, were taken in the mid-1960s to commemorate the university system’s centennial but never shown publicly because student protests put the kibosh on the 100th-birthday celebration. Also on view, the (yawn) oh-so-famous images that compose “Ansel Adams: The Museum Set.”
At the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton:
* “System/Situation: The Narrative in Kinetic Sculpture” (Jan. 19 through March 3). Jim Jenkins, associate professor of fine arts at Cal State Fullerton, guest curated this show, which examines some of the ways sculptures with movable parts can tell stories. The artists--Kim Abeles, Lewis Alquist, Dave Quick, George Stone, Catherine MacLean and David Wilson--use dioramas, photographic documentation, light, sound and other means to depict objects, events, historical periods and unusual experiences of various kinds.
At Security Pacific Gallery:
* “Prints from the Security Pacific Collection” (Jan. 31 through March 24). A show without a meaningful theme, alas, but an opportunity to see lithographs, intaglio and silk screen prints by more than 40 well-known artists, including John Baldessari, Jennifer Bartlett, Vija Celmins, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, Susan Rothenberg and Andy Warhol.
* “Chamber Soundings” (April 6 through Dec. 22). The next piece for the gallery’s Project Room will be an interactive sound installation by New York composer Kevin Jones.
At the Orange Coast College Art Gallery:
* “Oracular Orifices” (Jan. 31 through March 6). Winner of the Oddball Award for 1991 art shows in Orange County--this one offers just about everything you ever wanted to know about contemporary “pinhole” photography, including work by 31 artists, and large and small examples of the handmade cameras that produce these soft-focus images. Among the artists are Marcus Kaiser, who used the Berlin Wall as a pinhole camera, and Dominique Stoobant, who makes sun tracings and recordings of solar eclipses. Among the cameras on view will be one built especially for the show by Darryl Curran, photography department chairman at Cal State Fullerton, and “Pinhole Journal” publisher Eric Renner’s version of the pinhole, designed especially for underwater shots. Curated by San Clemente photographer Peggy Ann Jones, who teaches photography at Orange Coast.
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153a76d77ec1274167017157c592da70
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5568-story.html
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O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Vanilla Ice’s Act: New Meaning for Term <i> Frozen Waste</i>
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O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Vanilla Ice’s Act: New Meaning for Term <i> Frozen Waste</i>
It doesn’t matter that Vanilla Ice is a white man and not a black man.
The significant news that came out of the rapper’s show Saturday night at the Celebrity Theatre is that he is no showman.
Ice, currently the hottest commodity in pop music with his No. 1 album, “To the Extreme,” failed to muster the sustained heat needed to make a rap concert burn. Instead of developing a snowballing torrent of fast-paced action, he inserted long, pointless blackouts between virtually every number. Then, when the lights came on, he would dither some more in stiff attempts at banter with his black sidekick, Earthquake.
Quake: “So this is how you gonna do it, huh?”
Ice: “Yeah, that’s how I’m gonna do it.”
Silent voice in critic’s head: “Please, just do it.”
With pacing like that, the quintuple-platinum-selling rapper’s 52 minutes on stage went by like an ice age.
Luckily for Vanilla Ice, he has the same sort of very young, very adoring (and racially mixed) audience as the New Kids on the Block. The fans didn’t mind being kept in the dark for interminable stretches. The kids’ sustained, high-pitched screams filled in the long blanks that their hero left through his own neglect.
Vanilla Ice’s lyrics didn’t say much more than his silences. Basically, the rapper, whose real name is Robert Van Winkle, seems like a nice fellow with an interesting appearance (half James Dean, half Brian Bosworth), but nothing to communicate. The only pointed statement Ice made all night was a self-serving warning to his fans not to pay any attention to his critics--something you’ll also hear from the stage at a New Kids show.
Ice’s wooden rhymes lack the gift of colorful, inventive gab that is rap’s real spark. He has no meaningful themes to speak of, resorting instead to the flaccid boasting that has long been tiresome old hat for performers on the form’s creative edge. No stories, and no depictions of his own experience flavor Vanilla’s raps--unless one counts songs in which he narrates sexual encounters in soft-core rhymes that are highly suggestive, but not explicit.
On stage, even the sex fizzled. “Stop That Train” presumably chronicles Ice’s exhausting bout of kinky doings with a domineering woman, but he could have been talking about his toy choo-choos for all the steam he put into it.
(Ice does deserve some credit for portraying women as partners in pleasure in his sex raps, rather than treating them, as too many male rappers do, as so much mindless, manipulable flesh.)
Worst of all, Vanilla Ice has no sense of humor. His appropriation of “Play That Funky Music (White Boy),” by the ‘70s white funk group Wild Cherry, doesn’t have a hint of the original’s self-mockery. The title refrain is just a convenient tag-line for a rapper who wants to capitalize on the only thing that’s novel about him--his color.
Ice’s voice wasn’t especially punchy or clear; his foil, the throaty, bellowing Earthquake, was a far more trenchant rapper. But give Vanilla Ice credit for putting on an honest performance. Unlike a lot of rappers who make more creative records, Ice delivered his raps in real time, without the bogus voice-doubling tracks that are frequently used as an on-stage safety net.
Vanilla Ice moved well enough through a constant billow of stage fog that often obscured him and his two backup dancers, but his hip-hop dance steps came only in short, sporadic bursts. String a bunch of those bursts together on video, and you get the illusion of a sustained, kinetic performance. These days, of course, looking good on video is all it takes to prosper. With a concert that gave new meaning to the term frozen waste , Vanilla Ice was proof of that.
Opening group C+C Music Factory has a lively debut album that teams a good rapper with a promising R&B; vocal stylist. It would be interesting to hear rapper Freedom Williams and singer Zelma Davis perform with a real band, a la Soul II Soul, instead of with the canned instrumentation and taped vocal doubling that backed their 20-minute set.
Pit stops for two costume changes by Davis placed a drag on the brief proceedings and indicated an unhealthy emphasis on image instead of the solid substance and craft apparent on the group’s album “Gonna Make You Sweat.”
Of course, ambitious young pop performers and their record companies would argue that pitching image is the way to get rich. It seems that financiers were saying the same thing just a few years ago about junk bonds. The performers who have the basics--talent, ideas, and a fire for musical expression--are the ones who’ll survive any shakeout in the market.
As for Vanilla Ice, he’d better milk it while he can.
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feb91f605c233f350c77e61c1e128e36
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5569-story.html
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JAZZ REVIEW : John Pisano Hits Right Chords for Brazilian Tunes
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JAZZ REVIEW : John Pisano Hits Right Chords for Brazilian Tunes
It was one of those cultural juxtapositions, like the kosher burrito, that we in Southern California have come to expect. This time it was Brazilian jazz being played in a Mexican restaurant.
The occasion? New York-born guitarist John Pisano joining bassist Luther Hughes’ trio Friday and Saturday nights for their regular weekend appearance at El Matador restaurant in the Huntington Harbour Mall. Pisano was a member of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass and wrote material for Sergio Mendes and Brazil ’66 some years ago. He also accompanied Peggy Lee for a time and appeared on Joe Pass’ momentous album “For Django.” Pass included Pisano on his most recently recorded album as well.
It was the Pass association that was most prevalent during Pisano’s first set Friday. In a program of mostly familiar Brazilian standards, the guitarist, on both electric and acoustic instruments, played with clean, accurate tones and improvisational savvy of the kind that Pass has built his reputation on. In a world full of guitarists making a living on no more than three chords, Pisano deserves wider exposure.
Opening on electric, Pisano pulled a classic Wes Montgomery-like sound from his instrument during Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Captain Baccardi,” spiking melodic single-note lines with plucky, rhythmic chording. While keyboardist Matt Harris stated the winsome theme of “Cascade of the Seven Waterfalls,” Pisano’s soulful, samba-flavored chording moved along at the speed of a stroll in the sand. The tune ended with some spunky chordal exchange between guitar and keyboard that recalled the melody to Thelonious Monk’s “Bright Moments.”
The guitarist switched to acoustic for his own “Amanhecer"--Portuguese, Pisano explained, for “dawning” or “daybreak"--spinning strings of well-defined notes into a narrative whole above Hughes’ gently swaying bass. The bassist took a spare, considered solo on the tune, reworking the somber theme while backed by Harris’ synthesized string accompaniment.
Everaldo Ferreira held down the percussive chores, working an understated double time on his cymbals during bossa nova-style beats and always keeping some suggestion of dance movement in his timekeeping. Odd man out on this night seemed Harris, whose electric keyboard solos, glistening with pop sensibilities, detracted from the evening’s decidedly Brazilian feel.
The crew found common ground on Jobim’s well-worn “One-Note Samba” and “Summer Nights,” the title cut from Pass’ latest album. Though the rhythm section seemed a bit tentative on the reflective tune, Pisano put this mood to good use, coaxing an intoxicating blend of hope and nostalgia from his strings. The guitarist turned to his electric instrument on Neil Larson’s “Sudden Samba,” a lively romp which featured Ferreira using his snare as a kind of touchstone during his snappy drum solo.
Brazilian burrito, anyone?
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012e18eac2d1414c79b73e90fcced98f
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5615-story.html
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Celebrating New Year in Front of the Tube : Parades, Bowl Games, Movie Marathons, Traditional Programming, Special Features Will Fill the Screen
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Celebrating New Year in Front of the Tube : Parades, Bowl Games, Movie Marathons, Traditional Programming, Special Features Will Fill the Screen
Television viewers will be bombarded today and Tuesday by parades, football, made-for-TV New Year’s Eve celebrations, a movie marathon and talking heads bravely or foolish predicting what will transpire during the coming year.
If everyone loves a parade, then television must love the Rose Parade, with all three major networks and three local stations providing coverage.
New Year’s Day bowl games, which had shrunk to three in the early 1970s, will be represented by a record eight telecasts this year--plus another two today. The bowl glut, along with lackluster matchups, could result in record-setting low ratings.
ABC, CBS, NBC and MTV will continue their tradition of New Year’s Eve special programming, which, outside of the midnight countdowns, figures to be all but ignored as revelers create their own amusement.
Parades
Coverage of the Rose Parade begins at 8 a.m. Tuesday.
The 102nd parade will also serve as a Can-you-top-this? competition between KTLA Channel 5 and KTTV Channel 11. The two independent stations, which have been sniping over the meaning of KTTV’s claim that its coverage will be “commercial-free,” will each open with an hourlong pre-parade show at 7 a.m. KTLA, which made history in 1947 when it became the first television station to carry the parade, has seen its audience continue to grow through the years. KTLA has had the highest-rated parade telecast for 15 consecutive years with last year’s coverage attracting more viewers than KTTV and the three network affiliates combined. KTLA will also air encore parade presentations at 10:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. Bob Eubanks and Stephanie Edwards host.
Sarah Purcell, Mark Summers and Bill Welsh anchor KTTV’s coverage, which will be rerun at 10:30 a.m., 1 p.m., 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Patricia Janiot and Jaime Garcia provide Spanish language coverage on KMEX Channel 34 at 8 a.m. and 11:30 p.m.
On the network level, “Knots Landing” regular Kevin Dobson and Leeza Gibbons from “Entertainment This Week” host on CBS (Channels 2 and 8), “Today” show co-host Joe Garagiola and Marsha Warfield anchor on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39), while sportscaster Jim McKay and “Good Morning America’s” Joan Lunden do the honors for ABC (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).
There are two parades today: the Sunkist Fiesta Bowl Parade at 3 p.m. on Channel 4 and the King Orange Jamboree Parade at 8 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39. CBS carries New Year’s Day’s other parade, the Cotton Bowl Parade, at 2 p.m.
Bowl Games
No Bart Simpson Bowl yet, but there will be 10 college football bowl games over the holiday period, eight with corporate sponsors in their titles and three with a possible bearing on the wire service-selected national championship.
USC fans, who have grown accustomed to seeing the Trojans playing on New Year’s Day, will see their team conclude a disappointing season a day earlier than usual in today’s John Hancock Bowl against Michigan State, 11:30 a.m., Channels 2 and 8. California fans can see their Bears make their first bowl appearance since 1979 in the Domino’s Pizza Copper Bowl, 2 p.m., TBS. Wyoming provides the opposition.
New Year’s Day bowl telecasts begin at 8:30 a.m. on ESPN with the Mazda Gator Bowl between Michigan and Mississippi. Clemson and Illinois kick off the Hall of Fame Bowl at 10 a.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39.
The national championship scramble begins at 10:30 a.m. No. 2 Georgia Tech (10-0-1) faces No. 19 Nebraska (9-2) in the Florida Citrus Bowl on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42. At the same time, No. 4 Miami (9-2) plays No. 3 Texas (10-1) in the Cotton Bowl on Channels 2 and 8.
Next on the menu are two games that have seen their significance diminished.
The Fiesta Bowl, which decided the 1986 and 1988 national championships, has had to settle for a matchup between No. 18 Louisville (9-1-1) and No. 25 Alabama (7-4) after Notre Dame and Virginia opted for other bowls after Arizona voters’ rejection of a paid state holiday honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Coverage begins at 1:30 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39.
The 77th Rose Bowl, pitting No. 8 Washington against No. 17 Iowa, airs at 2 p.m. on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42.
The action picks up a step at 5 p.m. when No. 1 Colorado (10-1-1) meets No. 5 Notre Dame (9-2), in the Federal Express Orange Bowl on NBC.
New Year’s Day’s final game is the USF&G; Sugar Bowl between No. 10 Tennessee (8-2-2) and Virginia (8-3), 5:30 p.m., Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42.
New Year’s Eve Specials
New Year’s Eve celebrations begin at 11:30 p.m. on ABC, CBS, NBC and MTV.
Jane Pauley hosts festivities from Times Square as part of “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” (11:30 p.m., Channels 4, 36 and 39). Jay Leno substitutes for Johnny from Burbank. B.B. King and Dwight Yoakum are the musical guests along with comedian Phil Hartman from “Saturday Night Live.”
ABC counters with “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” with the Beach Boys, Bell Biv DeVoe, the Kentucky Headhunters, Nelson, the O’Jays and Sweet Sensation.
Melissa Manchester is the headliner on “CBS’ Happy New Year America” which also features James Ingram, Eddie Rabbitt, Kid Creole and the Coconuts and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
MTV conducts its “New Year’s Eve World Party” from the Tokyo Dome, the Ritz in New York and Deutschland Halle in Berlin at 11:30 p.m. Bon Jovi, Skid Row, Wilson Phillips, Cinderella, the Black Crowes, Vanilla Ice and Scorpions provide music.
Other Programming
Viewers looking for alternative programming do have choices. KCOP Channel 13 airs a 22-hour commercial-free movie marathon beginning at midnight. Films include “From Here to Eternity,” “The Good Earth” and “Chinatown.”
“Nightline” presents its sixth annual predictions show at 11:30 p.m. New Year’s Day. New York Times Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist William Safire, economist Arthur Laffer and Frank Deford, editor of the National, the ailing all-sports newspaper, give their guesses for 1991 with a look back at their 1990 predictions. Sam Donaldson hosts.
Cable’s TBS begins airing full-length, unedited versions of “The Andy Griffith Show” at 3:35 p.m. Tuesday, restoring scenes that had been cut from the network version to provide for additional commercial time in syndication.
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ac065e3efb33bb40909a8850f455fa29
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5616-story.html
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Vanilla Ice’s Fans Jittery but Stalwart : Rap: A violent incident at an Ice Cube concert 48 hours before doesn’t keep the singer’s admirers from filling the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim.
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Vanilla Ice’s Fans Jittery but Stalwart : Rap: A violent incident at an Ice Cube concert 48 hours before doesn’t keep the singer’s admirers from filling the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim.
Just two nights before, Mark Anthony Nelson had found himself dashing away from Anaheim’s Celebrity Theatre, fleeing the sound of sudden gunfire that marred an evening of rap music.
But Saturday night, the Orange resident, 22, looked relaxed as he stood in the Celebrity lobby, waiting for another rap show to begin.
Nelson, wearing a T-shirt of the rap group Public Enemy and colorful baggy trousers he had custom-decorated with rhinestones, said he had suspected there might be trouble on Thursday night, when Ice Cube, the controversial chronicler of Los Angeles gang violence, was the headliner.
Trouble came: a youth was wounded by a gunshot just outside the entrance, not far from the box office where Nelson had stood before making his dash. And a brief melee inside the theater had forced the show’s cancellation before Ice Cube was able to appear.
“It scared the hell out me,” Nelson said. But now the headliner was Vanilla Ice, and Nelson said he had no fear of anything similar happening (as it turned out, the concert went off without incident).
“Vanilla Ice has a different crowd,” said Kedric Hubbert, 20, who drove from Bakersfield to join the 2,500 other fans at the sold-out show. “He puts out a different message. He’s not negative, he’s real positive. I had no qualms about coming. I’m real excited.”
Hubbert said he hadn’t been surprised to hear about violence at an Ice Cube concert. “That show was sure to draw a rough crowd,” he said. “It’s kind of gang-influenced (music). I don’t listen to that kind of rap--it’s negative. But everyone has the right to do their kind of music. They shouldn’t stop having rap concerts because of one (incident). They should look at (each) group to see the history of the group, and what kind of (audience) they bring.”
Other fans interviewed also pointed to the wide gulf between Ice Cube, whose angry, obscenity-laced raps aim to confront the public with graphic renderings of inner-city social pathology (some critics accuse him of glorifying gang violence), and Vanilla Ice, an innocuous, good-time rapper with no social agenda and an audience that included many pre-teen children accompanied by adults.
Still, some admitted they were a little jittery because of the violence at the previous rap concert.
“I think it’ll be a pretty good concert,” said Heather Cox, 15, of Anaheim. “The crowd doesn’t look scary. My dad didn’t want me to come, but he left it up to me. He said I should be very careful: ‘If you hear any shooting, duck.’ ”
“My parents were very afraid something would happen,” said Andrea Salas, a 14-year-old Anaheim girl. “They just said, ‘Be careful.’ They knew I wanted to come.”
Debbi Morse, 28, of Anaheim, said that she and her 11-year-old daughter, Nicole, “almost didn’t come” because of the trouble two nights before.
“It’s kind of eerie, because you don’t know what kind of crowd these younger rap groups are going to draw. Then we thought, ‘You can’t judge the crowd from one concert to another.’ It’s a totally different audience.” Besides, Morse said, if she had refused to take her daughter to the show, “we would have had more problems at home than at the concert. I was nervous, but now I’m real comfortable, seeing all the security outside.”
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46673daa2b862df7cccef1a4b92d6054
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5617-story.html
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Oakland Ends Its Yearlong Ban on Rap
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Oakland Ends Its Yearlong Ban on Rap
Rap is back.
After a yearlong moratorium, rap music returned to the Oakland stage Saturday night as 3,000 fans packed the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium for a show featuring rappers Too Short and Ice Cube.
The concert--with unusually tight security--was the first since violence at earlier shows prompted the moratorium. Aside from a few shoving matches, the event was peaceful.
Oakland ranks with New York City as the nation’s hotbed of rap, spawning Too Short, superstar MC Hammer and the group Digital Underground.
The city’s last rap concert, on the same stage, ended in violence when fights among several rival gangs broke out during a December, 1989, show by the controversial rappers 2 Live Crew.
It was the last in a series of violence at rap shows, including a wild, chair-throwing fracas at the Oakland Coliseum that left one person with a gunshot wound.
As a result, the auditorium and the Coliseum both imposed a yearlong moratorium on all rap concerts. The Coliseum has yet to book another rap show.
Too Short, whose biting and sometimes raunchy lyrics stirred the audience Saturday, repeatedly reminded his fans to keep it cool.
Concert promoter Bill Graham said he increased his usually tight security by about a third, and the auditorium came up with a security plan designed just for the show.
A police helicopter hovered overhead, lighting the parking lot with a bright beam. Barricades circled the parking lot and fans were ushered through a maze of metal gates leading to the auditorium entrance where they were patted down and scanned with a metal detector.
At the end of the show, the crowd was herded out by a line of police officers and security personnel.
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e280e416d369b6f138f4f5f97fb96ace
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5618-story.html
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The Creator of Milli Vanilli Speaks Out--in His Own Words : Pop music: German producer Frank Farian admits that he should have been more candid about the duo’s lip-syncing, but please don’t compare him to Saddam Hussein.
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The Creator of Milli Vanilli Speaks Out--in His Own Words : Pop music: German producer Frank Farian admits that he should have been more candid about the duo’s lip-syncing, but please don’t compare him to Saddam Hussein.
“And now the Moment of Truth!” says Frank Farian, creator of Milli Vanilli, inventor of Rob and Fab, the pretty faces who--can you believe it!--people actually thought were singing.
Farian, the German producer who blew the whistle last month on his own fraud, swivels around from his 84-track mixing console, the Pontiac-size machine on which Milli Vanilli was really made, and furnishes the promised honest-to-God truth.
It’s a record album.
“That’s the name,” he giggles as he hands over the freshly printed album cover. “The name of the new Milli Vanilli album is ‘The Moment of Truth’! I say it’s always best to make what you can out of a bad situation. So this is ‘The Moment of Truth.’ Good, eh?”
By God, it is. The new single, “Keep on Running,” is out already in Europe, and of course, it’s No. 4 and rising, No. 1 in Austria. Release date in America is Jan. 21, but right now there’s still a problem--what to call the new Milli Vanilli, no, the old Milli Vanilli, well, that’s the problem.
The new band is partly made up of the old band--that is, the same musicians who played and sang, sans credit, on the first Milli Vanilli album.
On the European album, the band is called “The Real Voices of Milli Vanilli,” but in the States, they’re not sure that’s good enough.
Just off the fax machine, a letter from Joel Schoenfeld, senior vice president and general counsel of Bertelsmann Music Group in New York: “ ‘The Real Milli Vanilli’ does not solve our problem.” Maybe “The Original Milli Vanilli” would be better.
And with this, a caveat: “New members who weren’t on the first album should be noted with ‘new members.’ ”
“Yes, yes,” Farian says to himself, wearily. “We did that.” Frank Farian, the man Arista Records called a “creative genius” even after the Milli Vanilli fraud stripped the duo of a Grammy, can’t get over those Americans. “Here in Europe, everything is positive. Stars play a greater role in America. They’re taken so much more seriously. And they love the scandal. This music--it’s just for dancing!”
Out here at the FAR Studios, Farian’s sprawling villa of recording rooms and mixing consoles down a rutted road 40 minutes outside Frankfurt, the walls are chockablock with gold records and charts studded with Farian-produced numbers and--they’re still here--posters of Rob and Fab, the 22-year-old pretty boys who finally gave Farian what he had always dreamed of, mega-success in the U.S.A.
“Robert has lied so much,” Farian says. He sighs and shakes his shoulder-length orange hair. Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, the front men for Milli Vanilli, have said many terrible things about Farian since the lid finally was blown off their scam. They’ve said their producer took most of the money. They’ve said Farian refused to let them sing. They’ve said they agreed to fake being the lead singers only to escape their miserable existence living in the Munich projects and working at McDonald’s.
“Terrible lies,” Farian says. “I know Rob’s father and mother--very honorable people. They adopted him from a children’s home. He wants sympathy. There are no slums in Munich, no projects. He was a clerk in a department store, a normal German teen-ager.
“It’s very bad now, but in five or 10 years, Rob will see it wasn’t so bad. Then he’ll be thankful.
“I made them rich. Rob and Fab got 3 million marks--$2.1 million--from us. The record companies were very satisfied. The real singers also got rich. And Frank Farian got even richer. Only Rob Pilatus wanted much more.”
What Rob and Fab wanted was to sing, just as they saw themselves doing on the videos. Impossible, Farian says.
“I’ve never heard such a bad singer,” he says. “They wanted to sing. They wanted to write songs. It never happened. They went instead to discos till 4 a.m. and slept all day. All they ever really did was party. Someone who lives like that can’t make good music.”
Rob and Fab have said repeatedly that they’re good singers, and at a press conference after the hoax was exposed, they performed a lusty if inelegant rap riff from the song that launched them, “Girl You Know It’s True.” They could not be reached for comment.
Thirteen kittens live in the doorway. Farian’s black Jaguar is parked outside, and inside, in his playroom, the producer tries to put it all in perspective. Why does someone named “Gerade Rifera” want him to appear on his American TV talk show? Why has “Milli Vanilli"--such a cute name, borrowed from a defunct Berlin discotheque--become a synonym for slime?
Farian, who sings in virtually unaccented English but speaks only a few words of the language, is alternately defensive and apologetic.
“This caused me to lose a lot of sleep,” he says. His assistant nods and later adds that Farian even checked into the hospital with chest pains and high blood pressure at the height of the controversy.
Farian is uncomprehending. “What was the betrayal? Did anyone in America believe that the Village People or the Monkees really sang themselves? The Archies? Please. Everyone’s been doing it for 25 years. Madonna, Janet Jackson--these perfect dance shows are expected now. So the best way to go onstage is with tapes.
“But you have to say what you’re doing. I know this.”
Now he knows it.
“The press in America is exactly like the kids,” he says. “Here in Europe everyone is more cool. They write about it, but not like I’m Saddam Hussein. Read the American press and you’d think I’m more important than Saddam.”
He’s 48 and looks like an overgrown Dennis the Menace. With Kennedyesque eyes, a square jaw and a two-day beard, he’s still trying to look like the rocker he always wanted to be.
His father made briefcases, out of real leather. His mother played piano and sang in the church choir. Farian grew up near Saarbruecken on the German-French border, near the U.S. military bases that would change his life.
The Original Frank Farian never bought Beatles records. He was a soul man--give him Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Otis Redding. Farian imitated the sounds of black American music and began singing in the local clubs that targeted the homesick U.S. soldiers.
He got good enough to do decent covers of the latest soul hits. The soldiers liked his singing; the clubs brought him back. But Frankie Farian and the Shadows never made it big.
“No one wanted my music,” he recalls. “It was better from America. A white singer singing black music wouldn’t work. The record companies sent me back to German music.”
Then, as now, German pop was a lilting barrage of bright sounds designed to elicit the rhythmic clapping that brings gleeful smiles to German audiences. It’s oom-pah music gone high tech. Even the love songs sound martial. Farian was miserable.
In the early ‘70s, he shifted from performing into producing and soon pushed his way back into black music, forming Boney M, a disco-cum-Europop group that proved to be massively successful in Europe and a modest dance-club hit in the States. Numbers like “Sunny,” “Gotta Go Home” and “Brown Girl in the Ring” repeated Farian’s formula of pingy synthesizer rhythms, mind-numbing beats and simple, catchy melodies, often adapted from children’s songs.
Boney M record albums pictured five black performers, mostly former U.S. service members who stayed on in Germany to make a living in music. But Boney M was also Frank Farian, finally getting to record the black music that got him into the business. On the albums, he was mentioned only as a back-up singer, and sometimes he wasn’t mentioned as a singer at all. It was like practice for the Vanilli gambit.
“Boney M was the most perfect mix of black and white music, but in America, music still had to be black or white,” Farian says. “The real crossover didn’t come until the late ‘70s, early ‘80s.”
Farian was selling millions of records and became one of the world’s most valued producers, making records for Meat Loaf and Stevie Wonder. But Farian still hungered for his U.S. breakthrough.
He found some new singers, Brad Howell and John Davis, former American soldiers with a good sense of the new thing, rap. He worked up new mixes for some of the numbers he’d written in the Boney M days. But Howell was 45 (by his own account; Farian insists he is 38) and wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of going on tour.
Farian wanted a catchy look to go with the bouncy sounds. With the Milli Vanilli songs already recorded, Rob and Fab walked into the studios one day, seeking work. They looked great. They sang terribly. They were perfect.
“I just said, OK, let’s do it,” Farian remembers. “What’s the difference? It’s some extra money for me. Even here in-house, the musicians didn’t know. I knew it could get them all in trouble.”
Farian set up Rob and Fab with long-braided wigs, costumes, dance bits.
Howell says Farian had him come into the studios after midnight to record, often working until 4 a.m. No one could see him. No one could know.
Another ex-soldier, Charles Shaw, was hired to do the rap on “Girl You Know It’s True.” The song would go platinum seven times in the States.
“It was a crazy idea,” Farian says. “I thought, OK, it’s just for discotheques and clubs. I never thought it would be a great hit, not No. 1, not Top 10 in America. And then it was too late and I was too embarrassed to say anything.”
Now the Grammy is gone and Milli Vanilli’s future is uncertain. “If I had it to do over,” Farian says, “perhaps it would have been smarter to have them all together onstage, have the original people singing and Rob and Fab just dancing.”
But despite all the outrage over Milli Vanilli, no one should expect artificial pop groups to disappear. Farian says it’s American consumers who need to wise up.
“Sure, for young kids, it’s very powerful to hear that the heroes are not on stage but in the studio,” he says. “But the kids have to learn, have to open their eyes. We sell illusions and they are not reality. That’s a good lesson for every kid to learn.”
Others in the music industry admit widespread lip-syncing at concerts, but contend that Milli Vanilli went beyond the pale.
“What Milli Vanilli has done is criminal,” Dieter Bohlen, Germany’s most successful music producer, told Stern magazine. “You can’t play around with teen-agers’ dreams. As a teen, I was a total Beatles fan. If someone had told me that Paul McCartney didn’t sing himself, my world would have collapsed.”
Farian claims to be happy with himself. He has letters from fans who say he was courageous to admit the fraud, which Farian announced only after Rob and Fab forced his hand by demanding a singing role in their next album. “I take the responsibility with pride,” he says.
But he finds himself back on the defensive even now, weeks after the initial storm. There are the former employees who say Farian paid them token fees and kept the riches for himself. Farian says the real Milli Vanilli voices got the same standard percentage that Rob and Fab got.
There are the old Boney M singers who left Farian and are now in a messy legal battle over the name of the band. Three original Boney M members who claim the right to keep performing under the name say that Farian is out to destroy their livelihood. They point to a letter warning club owners, deejays and music publications not to hire the “the band illegally using the name Boney M.”
A member of the non-Farian Boney M produces a pile of threatening lawyer letters the two sides have exchanged. The singer says the producer has threatened his former employees and is “very revengeful.” Farian says only that he owns the rights to the Boney M name and plans to keep a band going under that name.
And there is the Charles Shaw case. Shaw, the rapper on “Girl You Know It’s True,” tried to blow the whistle a year ago, telling reporters that he sang the song then atop the charts. This fall, Shaw refused all interviews but let it be known through friends that Farian had threatened him and banned him forever from FAR Studios.
“I told Charles, ‘You may not tell anyone you rapped,’ ” Farian says. “But threatening calls, that’s something else. That he may not work here anymore, that’s my decision. I told Shaw I wouldn’t work with him if he said he was the voice of Milli Vanilli.”
Farian says he recently settled with Shaw, paying him $155,000. “We shook hands, made a deal, and now he says Frank Farian is a genius again,” Farian says, and he laughs. Shaw did not return numerous phone calls.
“Someday we’ll be able to laugh about all this,” the producer says. “It’s a pity that I became recognized this way. My great dream is still to produce for 10 more years and be like Quincy Jones. People are realizing now that the new artists are producers. That’s the most important role now.”
Farian has to hurry off to finish the remix on “Too Late,” a cut on the new album. “It’s coming out exactly as it was going to,” he says.
But before he goes, he wants to show off the publicity stills for the real Milli Vanilli, three original lead voices and two new singers. One’s a woman, Gina Mohammed, an 18-year-old student at a U.S. military high school, who did back-up vocals on the first album.
Another is Ray Horton, 25. He’s tall and thin, with thick eyebrows, light eyes, a prominent jaw, cleanshaven, braids down to his chest-- wait, wait, Frank, you haven’t. . . .
“It’s a wig, just like Rob and Fab. They all really have Afros.”
But Frank, won’t people think. . . .
“What?” Farian asks. “Why do all you Americans say he looks like Rob? I don’t see it. It’s just accidental. Coincidence.” Frank Farian chuckles as he wanders back into the studio.
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d23acdf0bffde9d9b6203cf59d35198f
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5620-story.html
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Counting Out Most of the Year’s Top Records : Pop music: no more than four of 1990’s No. 1 songs will be considered significant a decade from now. Here are some that might.
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Counting Out Most of the Year’s Top Records : Pop music: no more than four of 1990’s No. 1 songs will be considered significant a decade from now. Here are some that might.
Beware.
If you listen to the radio tonight, the chances are you’ll hear a lot of records by New Kids on the Block, Janet Jackson, Phil Collins, Paula Abdul, Michael Bolton, M.C. Hammer, Aerosmith, Bell Biv Devoe, Taylor Dayne and Wilson Phillips.
They were the 10 most popular recording artists of 1990--according to Billboard magazine--and radio programmers, too, love to reminisce on New Year’s Eve.
Not that they are doing us any favor with a musical count-down based on this year’s pop charts.
It was bad enough being bored by most of those artists during the last 12 months without having to be subjected to them again on a night reserved for celebration.
Each of us probably enjoys the music of two or three of the names, but there is such little genuine creative spark in the over-all list that we are reminded why pop radio continues to be a wasteland.
Instead of seeking records that challenge and inspire, stations specialize in music that comforts by recycling proven formulas or that entertains on a superficial level.
The good news is that time has a way of over-riding the the sales charts and honoring the true achievements of a given year.
Look, for instance, at the charts from 10 years ago. How many of the 16 records that made No. 1 on the Billboard weekly sales list in 1980 tell us about life that year or represent a link to the serious pop currents of the past decade?
The records: K.C. & the Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go,” Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You,” Captain & Tennille’s “Do That to Me One More Time,” Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” Blondie’s “Call Me,” Lipps, Inc.'s “Funkytown,,” Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Coming Up,” Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic,” Christopher Cross’ “Sailing,” Diana Ross’ “Upside Down,” Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” Kenny Rogers’ “Lady” and John Lennon’s “Starting Over.”
Maybe four?
Remember, 1980 was the year that gave us such breakthrough albums as the Clash’s “London Calling,” Bruce Springsteen’s “The River,” Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light,” “Prince’s “Dirty Mind,” the Pretenders’ “The Pretenders” and X’s “Los Angeles.”
And what about this year?
Here are the records that reached No. 1 on the pop charts during 1990: Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise,” Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You,” Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract,” Janet Jackson’s “Escapade” and “Black Cat,” Alannah Myles’ “Black Velvet,” Taylor Dayne’s “Love Will Lead You Back,” Tommy Page’s “I’ll Be Your Everything,” Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Madonna’s “Vogue,” and Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love.”
Plus: New Kids on the Block’s “Step By Step,” Glen Medeiros’ “She Ain’t Worth It,” Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love” and “Love Takes Time,” Sweet Sensation’s “If Wishes Came True,” Jon Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory,” Wilson Phillips’ “Release Me,” Nelson’s “Love and Affection,” Maxi Priest’s “Close to You,” George Michaels’ “Praying for Time,” James Ingram’s “I Don’t Have the Heart,” Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” Whitney Houston’s “I’m Your Baby Tonight” and Stevie B’s “Because I Love You.”
My guess, again, is that no than four will be considered significant a decade from now.
This year-end edition of the Alternative Top 10 offers a New Year’s Eve countdown that is likely to stand the test of time--the singles and album tracks that represented the richest currents of pop music during the year.
But first, some honorable mentions--focusing on artists whose records twisted pop boundaries.
* Was (Not Was)’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” (Chrysalis)--A marvelous update of the old Temptations hit that not only adds an aggressive rap consciousness, but also combats the sentimentality of the original song by confronting “Papa” for having abandoned his family.
Sample rap: I want to forget the little bit I know / And make sure I never sink so low / ‘Cos I want my kids to grow up and know / That I was always there because I loved them so.
* Dwight Yoakam’s “Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Lose” (Reprise)--Los Angeles-based Yoakam isn’t highly regarded in Nashville, but he brings a rock sensibility to country. In this lively, bittersweet bar-room tale, he recalls earlier links between country and rock--both in the Johnny Cash records of the ‘50s and the Buck Owens hits of the ‘60s.
* Tevin Campbell’s “Round and Round " (Paisley Park/Warner Bros.)--When is the last time Prince got upstaged on his own album? You may have to go all the way back to Michael Jackson and Frankie Lymon to find a teen-ager who make a record quite as ear-catching as this.
* Ice Cube’s “Who’s the Mack” (Priority)--M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice may have brought rap to the mainstream during 1990, but the artistic pulse of the music remains in the hard-core artists, including Los Angeles’ Ice Cube. The language is still too blunt for radio, but the theme--about less obvious ways to hustle--is less brutally combative than most of Ice Cube’s recordings.
* Tony! Toni! Tone!'s “The Blues” (Wing)--This Oakland outfit mixes traditional and modern R&B; currents with invention and humor.
* C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” (Columbia)--Splendid dance record with a clever mix of rap and frenzied, gospel-edged vocal outbursts.
* Concrete Blonde’s “Joey” (I.R.S.)--The drama and passion of old Phil Spector hits mixed with contemporary rock anxiety.
Now, the official New Year’s Eve countdown:
10. Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places” (Capitol)-- A rowdy, good-natured underdog tale by the man who is at the forefront of country music’s return to classic blue-collar themes and honky-tonk musical character.
9. Neneh Cherry’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (Chrysalis)--A bold reworking of the Cole Porter standard in which a hip-hop beat heightens the drama and punch of Cherry’s AIDS awareness message.
8. Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” (Elektra)--Irresistible dance-floor spunk from a concept-conscious New York trio.
7--Jane’s Addiction’s “Stop” (Warner Bros.)--More than anything else on record by this hard-rocking Los Angeles band, “Stop” reflects the almost intoxicating energy surge that the group offers in its best moments on stage.
6. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Head On” (Warner Bros.)--Something to play whenever someone says that rock ‘n’ roll has lost its power and heart.
5. Faith No More’s “Epic” (Slash/Reprise)--One of the most radical rock records in ages: a blend of rap, metal and punk that that is a marvelous update of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”
4. Don Henley’s “The Heart of the Matter” (Geffen)-- The former Eagles co-leader’s best songs continue reflect on personal relationships in ways that also seem to define the times. Sample lines: These times are so uncertain / There’s a yearning undefined / . . . people filed with rage . . . / How can love survive in such a graceless age?
3. Madonna’s Vogue (Sire)--No record better defined mass pop culture in 1990, from the dance-based exuberance and fashion consciousness to the continuing video drift toward style over substance. “Vogue” had style and grace and wit: “Strike a pose,” indeed. One of two records on the list that actually made it to No. 1 during the year.
2. Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” (Def Jam/Columbia)--One of the most emotionally charged bursts of artistic fury since Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” days. A five-minute declaration and defense of a rapper’s musical style and artistic impulses.
1. Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” (Chrysalis)--It may be an old Prince song, but the vocal was simply astonishing . . . so passionate, intimate and inspired that that the record could either be taken as an expression of spiritual longing or romantic loss. One reason why O’Connor was the artist of the year in pop.
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5621-story.html
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Japanese TV Views Americans’ Antics : Culture: In Tokyo, ‘Daybreak’ accents the offbeat in presenting the ways we amuse ourselves. The show might be called ‘Stupid American Tricks.’
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Japanese TV Views Americans’ Antics : Culture: In Tokyo, ‘Daybreak’ accents the offbeat in presenting the ways we amuse ourselves. The show might be called ‘Stupid American Tricks.’
It’s breakfast time on a muggy summer morning, and all over Japan people are looking up from their rice and soup to watch a morning news show that might be called “Stupid American Tricks.”
The actual name of the increasingly popular program on the national Asahi TV network is “Daybreak.” But in tone and substance, it frequently resembles David Letterman’s “Stupid Pet Tricks"--with Americans providing the amusement.
The hourlong show features news clips, mainly provided by Cable News Network, about current doings in the United States. Among the stories shown in recent weeks have been these slices of American life: A man in Louisiana who turned a room of his house into a shrine honoring a roll of toilet paper he stole from Graceland, the Elvis Presley museum in Memphis. A contest in Texas where men reach into a basket full of rattlesnakes to see who can pick up the most without being bitten. Women in Florida arguing passionately for their constitutional right to reveal bare buttocks on the beach. A “pierce boom” in California, where some teen-agers have pierced not only ears but also noses, navels, nipples, chins and fingers to wear jewelry.
After each news clip, the show’s two anchors, Katsuya Konishi and Mayumi Kawase, offer explanatory comments. Following a report on U.S. women suffering permanent bone injuries because of overexercise, Kawase told the audience that Americans “have a need to be perfect.”
After a recent story on some people in Oregon who decided to make the world’s largest world map, Konishi raised an eyebrow. “Americans drawing a map,” he said dryly. “I wonder if they know where Japan is.”
The often scathing view of America presented to Japanese viewers on this and many other TV shows both stems from and feeds a sharp change in traditional Japanese attitudes toward the United States.
“There is a very clear sense here,” said political scientist Seizaburo Sato of the University of Tokyo, “that America is a country in trouble. This image is everywhere in our media.”
“There has been an obvious shift between generations,” said Konishi, the 36-year-old kyastah --the Japanese version of “newscaster"--on “Daybreak.”
“Our generation, people who don’t remember the war and the occupation . . . would think there is not much we can learn from America,” Konishi said in an interview. “This is the epicenter of rising Japanese nationalism. I want to present the U.S. as a contemporary of ours, but there is a view of . . . America as a country with less culture, less civilization.”
Modern Japanese life, of course, is suffused with American culture. McDonald’s, Mr. Donut, and 7-Eleven stores are everywhere. American slang pops up in every sentence.
TV and print media are jammed with American pop icons ranging from Pete Rose to Prince to Miss Piggy. Bookstores carry American nonfiction and novels by the hundreds, both in English and in Japanese translation.
But all that has become such a standard part of Japanese life, Konishi noted, that people don’t think of it as American anymore. “They take what happens in New York or Hollywood as part of their own culture,” he said.
Instead, the Japanese draw their current image of the United States largely from television. And the picture of America portrayed on Japanese TV, by and large, is of a country mired in crime, drugs, corruption and greed.
One day last week on “Daybreak,” for example, Konishi asked a TV Asahi New York correspondent, Aiko Yabuki, for the latest news from the Big Apple. Yabuki replied with stories about several recent shootings of toddlers, plus a string of 22 murders of cab drivers.
The mere fact that a major national network would design an hourlong show devoted almost totally to information about the United States and broadcast it during morning prime time evidences Japan’s continuing fascination with America and Americans.
The show is seen in the Tokyo area from 6 to 7 a.m., when people are getting ready for the long commute to work.
Konishi is well-versed in American lore. He spent a year in high school as an exchange student in Chicago, speaks an easy, idiomatic English and wrote a master’s thesis in American studies. Kawase, 27, his female counterpart, speaks almost no English and said she has no firsthand knowledge of America other than a vacation in Hawaii.
The two commentators work from a studio set similar to that on U.S. evening news shows. Like other kyastahs here, they sit up in their chairs and bow deeply to the audience before commercials.
Some of the stories on “Daybreak” are laudatory. The program has reported on clever ideas that came out at an American inventors’ convention. A Japanese sports writer who visited the show after touring America was clearly impressed with the racial harmony he observed in big-league athletics.
Mainly, though, “Daybreak” is about strange American happenings, such as Roseanne Barr croaking the national anthem and a contest where people competed to iron the most clothes.
“America is so interesting,” Konishi said. “I think we have to admit that in our editing process, we might pick stories that are unusual, just because that’s what interests us Japanese.”
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b7f943625c263a7fa27bc03ed19e788a
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-ca-5622-story.html
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It’s Coming Up Roses--and Thorns : Radio: Two stations will offer their own satiric commentary on the Rose Parade. They’ll even broadcast a portion of their shows together.
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It’s Coming Up Roses--and Thorns : Radio: Two stations will offer their own satiric commentary on the Rose Parade. They’ll even broadcast a portion of their shows together.
Everybody makes fun of the Rose Parade.
But two Los Angeles radio stations really make fun of the Rose Parade.
Both KPFK, 90.7 FM, and KSLX, 97.1 FM, will offer their traditional lampoons of the flowery fiesta New Year’s morning. The stations invite listeners to tune their television sets to KTTV Channel 11, which is broadcasting the parade from 8-10:30 a.m. without commercials, but then turn down the sound.
Instead of listening to the happy patter of the television hosts, viewers who want a little cynicism that early in the morning then turn up the sound on KPFK or KSLX, and listen to the commentary provided by station personalities.
After years of separate spoofs, the two stations are actually going to broadcast a portion of their parody patter together, as KPFK’s Baldy and Scout--played by comedian Peter Bergman and his wife, Patricia Stallone--hook up by telephone with KSLX comic deejay Frazer Smith.
“It’s a great way to send up American culture,” said Bergman, who began spoofing the parade as a member of the comedy group Firesign Theatre two decades ago. “American culture basically begins and ends each year in the Rose Parade. America floats by every New Year’s morning, and we take the cream off the float.”
While the two stations will broadcast together for part of the parade, their general approaches to satirizing it are quite different.
Bergman and Stallone create a complete fantasy world around the parade--they make up their own theme and pretend that the floats fit in with it--and their comedy is mostly political.
For example, the two plan to pretend that parade grand marshal Bob Newhart is really Saddam Hussein in disguise, in Pasadena in a last attempt to appease George Bush.
Their program will feature a number of “guests,” mostly in the form of impersonations done by executive producer Bob Young.
“I’ll probably be playing George Bush, and occasionally when my voice feels too deep, I’ll do Henry Kissinger,” Young said, slipping from a creditable imitation of the President to the voice of the Nixon-era diplomat.
KSLX’s Smith plans to be generally irreverent but more based in reality.
“His is not political and not out to be a barb,” said Shaune McNamara, acting program director at KSLX. “He’s just free-spirited. Like if somebody is walking by dressed like a court jester, he may say, ‘Hey Dad!’ or something.”
Spoofing the Rose Parade has been a Los Angeles radio tradition since the late 1960s, when Firesign Theatre broadcast from KPCC, 89.3 FM, at Pasadena City College, then an underground rock station. Over the years, KRLA-AM and KMET-FM also broadcast satirical versions of the event.
“We do it because it’s fun,” McNamara said. “By the time New Year’s comes around everybody’s burnt out. This is a way people can have fun while just sitting at home not doing anything.”
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-fi-5592-story.html
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WEEKLY SCORECARD : MUTUAL FUNDS
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WEEKLY SCORECARD : MUTUAL FUNDS
Average total return, including dividends, in percent for periods ended Thursday, Dec. 27.
Category(No. of funds) Week Year-to-date 12 months Health/biotechnology(9) +0.66% +18.2% +19.6% Small company(85) +0.40 -10.9 -9.9 Science and technology(23) +0.09 -3.7 -2.6 Gold(36) +0.08 -25.2 -24.6 Utilities(15) +0.07 -1.6 -1.0 Natural resources(19) +0.03 -8.8 -8.2 Fixed income(545) -0.13 +3.7 +4.1 Capital appreciation(141) -0.17 -8.8 -8.0 Balanced: stock and bond(65) -0.20 -0.7 -0.3 Equity income(68) -0.21 -6.6 -5.7 Growth and income(207) -0.24 -5.2 -4.6 Growth(267) -0.32 -6.2 -5.5 Global: U.S. and foreign stocks(44) -1.44 -11.3 -11.1 International: foreign stocks only(60) -1.92 -12.9 -12.8 S&P; 500 index, excluding dividends -0.35 -7.1 -6.4 General stock fund average -0.18 -7.0 -6.2
Source: Lipper Analytical Services Inc.
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436983381ab7e71a35eaa4ba1fbdc793
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-fi-5593-story.html
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WEEKLY SCORECARD : STOCK GROUP WINNERS & LOSERS
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WEEKLY SCORECARD : STOCK GROUP WINNERS & LOSERS
Best- and worst-performing industries and companies in each group, with closing stock price, for the week ended Dec. 28. Only stocks trading for $1 or higher are included. BEST PERFORMERS 1) Rare metals: +2.8% CanyRs (1 1/4): +25% 2) Rubber/plastic: +1.5% Furon(10 3/8): +13.7% 3) Oil refining, marketing: +1.4% Quaker State(11): +7.3% 4) Cosmetics: +1.3% Guest Supply(4 5/8): +19.6% 5) Oil, gas services: +1% GEO Intl(2): +33.3% 6) Business services: +0.6% Neogen (2): +33.3% 7) Iron/steel: +0.5% Pettibone(1 3/4): +16.7% 8) Heavy construction: +0.5% Clinical Homecare(3 1/2): +75% 9) Miscellaneous retail: +0.2% Ketchum(1 3/4): +40% 10) Drug manufacturers: Unch Zila (2 1/8): +54.6% WORST PERFORMERS 1) Shoes: -3.3% G-III (3 3/4): -11.8% 2) Discount drugstores: -3.3% Child World(2 3/4): -12% 3) Business equipment: -3.3% VeloBind(7): -23.3% 4) Confections: -2.9% Coca Cola (46 5/8): -3.8% 5) Credit: -2.7% Angeles Mtg (10 5/8): -6.6% 6) Personal services: -2.7% SNL Fncl (1): -33.3% 7) Real estate: -2.4% Congress Street(1 3/4): -26.3% 8) Electronics: -2.3% Siliconix(2 1/8): -43.3% 9) Apparel: -2.3% Andover Togs(1 3/8): -21.4% 10) Banking: -2% Century Bancp(1 1/8): -35.7% Source: Media General Financial Services
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dbc83d0caa82249795cf41942ab6c8ac
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-fi-5671-story.html
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Nestle’s New Accent : Food: The company will consolidate its U.S. operations under a new leader, the former Carnation president. The idea is to compete better with the giants.
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Nestle’s New Accent : Food: The company will consolidate its U.S. operations under a new leader, the former Carnation president. The idea is to compete better with the giants.
Grocery shopping would probably fail to show up on a typical teen-ager’s Top 10 List of Things to Do. But for a young Tim Crull, shopping for food was something to look forward to.
“As a teen-ager, I used to love to go to supermarkets. I’d go shopping for my mother. I still go to the stores . . . looking for what’s new. To me it’s part of the game.”
These days, the 59-year-old president of Carnation Co. is a player in one of the toughest games around: the $475-billion U.S. food industry.
Beginning tomorrow, Crull becomes an even more formidable opponent as he takes charge of the far-flung companies--including Carnation, Stouffer Foods and Hills Bros. Coffee--that make up the U.S. holdings of Swiss foods giant Nestle.
Nestle, by combining its U.S. subsidiaries under one corporate umbrella, hopes to create a company large and diverse enough to survive in the food industry big leagues during the 1990s.
While the consolidation may be a long and complicated process that could result in layoffs, industry analysts say the move will help Nestle regain lost ground in some key businesses and remain competitive in the tougher times that lie ahead.
Despite more than $6 billion in annual sales, Nestle USA is dwarfed by giants such as ConAgra, with 1989 sales of $15.5 billion, and Phillip Morris’ Kraft General Foods subsidiary, the nation’s largest food firm, with more than $22 billion in revenue during 1989.
“Nestle is starting to realize that results have been somewhat sluggish in the U.S.,” said food industry analyst Nomi Ghez at Goldman Sachs & Co. “They have not been taking full advantage of their size.
“Reality is forcing them to look at these opportunities more aggressively. They have very strong brands in the U.S., but in the last two or three years, they have been losing market share in very important categories.”
Some of the lost ground has come in the frozen food area, where Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine has been battling inroads made by ConAgra’s Healthy Choice line. In the coffee business, Nestle’s Hills Bros. division contends with an increasingly aggressive Kraft General Foods.
The Friskies Pet food division has come under severe competitive pressures lately, analysts say. Carnation’s foray into the infant formula business has also fizzled, and the company, over the objections of pediatricians and advocates of breast feeding, will begin advertsing its Good Start formula directly to mothers, beginning in January.
Furthermore, Nestle, like other food companies, must cope with a recession after the boom years of the last decade.
“The ‘80s were a very awesome time for the food industry,” said Ronald B. Morrow, a food and tobacco industry analyst at Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Co. “In the ‘90s, costs are increasing. Some areas (such as cereals) are slowing down. It will not be as robust as the ‘80s.”
Timm F. Crull, an easygoing man who joined Carnation in 1955, knows of the challenges and is preparing Nestle USA and its employees for them. The move toward a more aggressive, fast-lane approach is reflected at Carnation’s new, post-modern headquarters in Glendale, where employees are still trying to figure out the meaning of avant-garde works created by California artists. That’s a big departure from the prints of Carnation ads that decorated the walls of the company’s former Wilshire Boulevard home.
“It’s a statement of what our company is and wants to be,” Crull said of the company’s bold new tower and works of art. “The art here is to give our employees a creative environment to work in.”
As chief executive officer of Nestle USA, Crull will oversee the single largest national market for Nestle, which had worldwide sales of nearly $31 billion in 1989. While Crull minds the food business, Chairman James M. Biggar will tend to the Wine World division and Stouffer Hotels & Resorts.
Nestle’s much-applauded consolidation efforts have already begun. Last June, it consolidated all its food service divisions at the Glendale office. It is now in the process of merging the distribution networks.
“Nestle has many sales forces in the United States,” Crull said. “Do we need seven sales forces or can we do it better with two or three? These will be things we will review.”
So far, no employee has lost a job as a result of the consolidation. But Crull says he cannot guarantee jobs in the long run. “We don’t really know” if people will be laid off, he said.
The advantages of Nestle’s efforts outweigh any short-term difficulties, analysts say. Kraft and General Foods, for example, were able to cut costs by $300 million to $400 million the first year after their merger. A larger, consolidated operation “also gives you more muscle with the (retail) trade and better chance to get shelf space,” said Ghez.
Crull is eager to begin reaping the benefits of consolidation. “By putting them together, we will have a lot of synergies that will make us a lower-cost producer. It will also give us more advertising dollars that will make us more competitive with the Procter & Gambles and the Kraft General Foods companies.”
Besides cutting costs, Crull seeks other advantages. “We can move the strong brands into other areas, which is more difficult to do when you have separate companies. Stouffers is very strong in the frozen food business, but there is no reason why they can’t be in the refrigerated business, which Carnation has done very well with, with their Contadina Fresh.”
In fact, the Contadina line of refrigerated pastas and sauces has been a major success for Carnation, proving highly popular with young consumers who crave fresh, gourmet-type meals but lack the time and skills. Industry sales of refrigerated items total about $400 million and are growing rapidly, Crull says.
“There seems to be a lot of growth in refrigerated,” Morrow said. “So there is a lot of potential right there. That’s kind of the future for Carnation.”
Nestle USA’s research and development operation will become more focused on coming up with such products as Contadina Fresh--originally developed by a company that Carnation acquired--that take advantage of changing demographics and lifestyles.
Despite spending millions on research, food companies can still lag consumer behavior, as Carnation discovered. In developing the Contadina Fresh line, Crull said, researchers first believed that consumers would heat the sauce in a pan. Instead, they popped it into the microwave to cut down on the estimated 12 minutes it takes to prepare a Contadina meal.
As a result, Carnation researchers repackaged a sauce container more suitable for the microwave.
“American lifestyle is like a treadmill--it gets faster and faster and faster,” said Crull. “People want that convenience to the point where they are almost willing to sacrifice taste and quality. It’s our responsibility to develop products that maintain or improve taste and quality while giving them . . . convenience.”
NESTLE FACTS
Nestle S.A. 1989 sales: $30.6 million 1989 profit: $1.5 billion Employees: 196,940 Factories: 421 Nestle USA Annual sales: $6 billion to $7 billion. Major divisions: Carnation Brands: Carnation, Friskies pet food, Contadina, Coffeemate, Buitoni Major divisions: Neslte Foods Brands: Quik, Nestle Crunch, Nescafe, Nestea, Taster’s Choice Major divisions: Stouffer Food Brands: Stouffer’s frozen foods, Lean Cuisine Major divisions: Hills Bros. Brands: Hills Bros., MJB, Chase & Sanborn
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96fba59aef7b49122ab0103678c57bb3
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-fi-5673-story.html
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Manufacturing Growth of .9% Forecast for ’91 : Economy: The industrial sector’s performance will continue to lag that of the service sector, the government predicts. Exports are expected to be strong, however.
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Manufacturing Growth of .9% Forecast for ’91 : Economy: The industrial sector’s performance will continue to lag that of the service sector, the government predicts. Exports are expected to be strong, however.
Industry will continue to grow slowly in 1991 as export activity helps to counteract economic weakness at home, the Commerce Department said Sunday.
Overall, the manufacturing sector will grow 0.9% next year, compared to about 1% this year, the department said in its annual Industrial Outlook, which covers 350 U.S. industries.
The manufacturing sector has been slumping for some time, and Michael Farren, undersecretary for international trade, said service industries will continue to outperform the manufacturing sector next year.
In the latest sign of manufacturing weakness, the Commerce Department said orders for big-ticket durable goods plunged a record-tying 10.5% in November. Such weakness is seen as evidence that the economy has entered a recession that is expected to last at least through the first quarter.
Nevertheless, the Commerce Department survey shows plenty of bright spots in the manufacturing sector.
High-technology industries will continue to do well, particularly computers and semiconductors, the report said.
Among other fast-growing industries, the report listed surgical and medical material, medicines, poultry processing, aircraft, dental equipment and supplies.
Those expected to lose ground include mobile homes, boat building and repair, creamery butter and frozen bakery products, motors and generators, sawmills and electric housewares.
“Exports will provide an important source of vitality for many industries, partially counteracting weaknesses in other elements of the U.S. economy,” Farren said.
Other projected growth areas include aircraft, engines and parts, and machine tools.
Of machine tools, Farren said: “This is an indication that businesses will continue to invest in new equipment needed to raise efficiency and productivity in today’s increasingly competitive environment.”
More than 60% of the industries surveyed should grow, and they represent about 75% of all manufacturers, Farren said.
But, “on the negative side, two major segments of the economy--construction and motor vehicles--are again expected to decline,” he said.
Those weaknesses would affect the economy broadly. They have a slowing influence on steel, building materials, household durables, wood products and other industries.
Farren predicted that the 1990 trade deficit will be $105 billion--and 1991’s shortfall about the same--due to higher oil prices triggered by the Persian Gulf crisis.
The 1989 deficit was $109 billion.
Farren said the department estimated overall 1991 growth at 1% to 3%, with the mostly likely outcome 1.3% to 1.4%.
The Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development recently projected U.S. growth for 1991 at 0.9%.
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62ae709e74b3ae03a41f1f5d8804129c
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-fi-5675-story.html
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Financing Secured for Power Plant: Pacific Gas...
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Financing Secured for Power Plant: Pacific Gas...
Financing Secured for Power Plant: Pacific Gas and Electric and Bechtel Power Corp. of Bethesda, Md., have successfully completed financing arrangements for a $200-million electrical power generating plant proposed for southern Venango County, Pa. AC Power Corp of Emlenton, Pa., said it has been trying for 10 years to find investors to build an 80-megawatt plant in Scrubgrass Township that would produce electricity by burning a mixture of low-grade coal, waste coal and limestone. Construction may start this spring.
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391460a78af8b67e5850f446eb107420
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-fi-5676-story.html
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Many Markets to Close Early: The New...
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Many Markets to Close Early: The New...
Many Markets to Close Early: The New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange and the over-the-counter market will hold regular trading sessions today, but other exchanges will be closed or have shortened sessions ahead of the New Year’s Day holiday. The New York Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange will be closed, as will the New York Cotton Exchange. Exchanges that will close early include the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Commodity Exchange, the New York Futures Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
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c12e407109c821fbab5f89554e234b19
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-fi-5677-story.html
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A summary of Southern California-related business litigation developments during the past week.
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A summary of Southern California-related business litigation developments during the past week.
Dispute Over Coasters Name: A Coasters band member has sued the manager of another Coasters band to prevent him from interfering with a New Year’s Eve performance at the Nugget in Las Vegas. The Coasters, formed in 1954, split in 1957 into two bands. Billy Richards, who joined one band, filed a Los Angeles federal court suit alleging that Walter Kohn, manager of the other band, was threatening to sue the Nugget on grounds that Kohn’s band held an exclusive trademark to the band’s name. A judge issued a temporary restraining order barring Kohn from interfering with the Richards band’s engagement at the Nugget. The suit also seeks a permanent injunction against interference. (Case No. 90-6943. Filed Dec. 27, 1990.)
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4a1bb9f41b4b0f4b375325bf7a01b14a
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-fi-5678-story.html
|
A summary of Southern California-related business litigation developments during the past week.
|
A summary of Southern California-related business litigation developments during the past week.
Profits From Ohrbach Estate: Los Angeles dentist Gary Milan has sued Sotheby’s auction house in New York on grounds that it breached an agreement to share profits with him from items auctioned from the estate of Jerome Ohrbach of Ohrbach’s department stores. The Los Angeles federal court suit said Sotheby’s agreed in October, 1973, to give Milan a 20% commission on sales of property from the estate in return for helping Sotheby’s obtain the account. The suit said Sotheby’s repudiated the agreement in September, 1990. (Case No. 90- 6907. Filed Dec. 26, 1990.)
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360a83aa0f96d7f59f3e2d94b410044b
|
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-31-fi-5679-story.html
|
A summary of Southern California-related business litigation developments during the past week.
|
A summary of Southern California-related business litigation developments during the past week.
‘Noise-Free’ Radio Signal: Korean Community Broadcasting Inc. has sued California Broadcasting Group for more than $5 million, alleging that it breached a contract to provide a 20,000-kilowatt “noise-free” radio signal. The Los Angeles Superior Court suit contends that California Broadcasting Group agreed in August to provide a “clean, static and noise-free radio broadcast signal” over which Korean Community Broadcasting could broadcast at 10,000 kilowatts. The suit said California Broadcasting Group agreed to boost the frequency to 20,000 kilowatts by February. Korean Community Broadcasting paid $310,000 for the contract, hired employees and incurred overhead costs exceeding $50,000 a month, the suit said. It said California Broadcasting Group breached the agreement in November by failing to provide a clean signal and in December by disclosing that it could not buy the equipment needed to boost the signal. (Case No. BC017876. Filed Dec. 26, 1990.)
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