Lifestyle
They turned a junk-filled L.A. yard into a weird and wonderful habitat garden
If a wildlife show wanted to film in the middle of Los Angeles, Casa Apocalyptica — a dizzying jungle of native plants, abundant wildlife, soothing water and salvaged debris — would be a great place to land.
Here, slender salamanders slink through the leaf litter under robust stands of Santa Cruz Island buckwheat and California fuchsia. Dozens of bright red flame skimmer dragonflies chase around a hand-dug pond and rubble-strewn stream.
By day, birdsong is as omnipresent as Muzak at a mall; frogs serenade the night. Near the house, a couple of koi as big as human babies lurch out of their long, raised pool for a head pat and their favorite treat — slices of watermelon.
Except for a few fruit trees, almost every plant in the ground is native to California, including the Roger’s Red grapes that grow in a lush tangle over arbored patios, cooling the temperatures beneath a good 10 degrees — and all thriving without regular irrigation.
And most remarkable: This whole part art, part wilderness adventure is contained in the sloping, 12,000-square-foot yard that surrounds a grand 1910 Craftsman home renovated by Chris Elwell and Kory Odell after the spouses bought the dilapidated property in 2003 in the small Mid-Wilshire neighborhood known as Oxford Square.
Their abundant native landscape growing out of 100 years of detritus-turned-garden treasures has earned them mythic status in the native plant world, and made them a must-see fixture on the Theodore Payne Foundation’s spring Native Plant Garden Tours for more than a decade.
“Casa Apocalyptica imagines our native ecology returning through the rubble after people are gone,’” the couple wrote in this year’s garden tour explainer. But nature got a lot of help from the two men, and if they’d known then how much work it would require, Elwell said, shaking his head, who knows if they would have gone ahead.
Except, listening to them talk, it’s clearly work they relished.
They’d wanted to move into a neighborhood of old homes in 2003, but the massive Craftsman mansion they chose was in terrible shape. Bars covered every window, neither the plumbing nor the electricity worked and all the trademark natural wood had been painted white. The backyard was full of rubble.
“Our friends and family thought we were nuts. They were like, ‘Why are you putting all this time and effort into this old wreck of a house?’” Elwell said.
“But Kory had grown up working on houses, and we wanted a project, and a big yard for a garden,” he added. “The house was more than we’d bargained for, but we were obsessed with building something ourselves and making it authentic to us. And I like the beauty of things that are being overlooked. I felt like there were all these cool neighborhoods right under our noses and everybody’s ignoring them.”
The restoration took most of their free time, but it was also therapeutic, an artistic outlet after a stressful day at work, Elwell said. “But the garden sat for some time because we had so much to do on the house.”
It wasn’t until 2007 that they began on the yard, Elwell said, and both were still working full-time. Odell, now part of the executive team building the Metro Purple Line, was working with a midsize construction firm. And Elwell, now retired, was a television distribution executive with Sony Pictures.
Once again, their free time went to transformation. The front yard was a dense thicket of “freeway ice plant” that required several dumpster loads to haul away, and the bare-dirt sloping backyard was full of interesting trash that people had been dumping for 100 years — “old motorcycle parts, water heaters from the 1920s, horseshoes, lots of whiskey bottles, and lots of old cobblestones and bricks and building materials.”
To their eyes, the “junk” was weirdly wonderful, and it gave them their theme: L.A. after the apocalypse, with native plants growing in and around society’s broken remains.
A rusted metal contraption sits surrounded by plants.
Plummer’s mariposa lily.
The salvaging got to be kind of joke. Odell’s firm was doing earthquake retrofits, and during site demolitions he’d discover some new artifacts, like industrial-sized valves that might have been used in oil fields or a box of long rusty files. “So I’d be at work,” Elwell said, “and get this text with photos of something like an old radiator followed by this question: ‘TREASURE?’”
Neighbors got into the act as well, inviting the couple over to look at things their elders had squirreled away decades earlier. “They’d say, ‘Dad hasn’t opened that door in 20 years; let’s see what’s in there.’”
The landscaping was part inspiration and part experiment, guided by fun, Elwell said, and plenty of mistakes.
One of the first was going whole hog into native plants without understanding anything about them. For instance, Odell loved the manzanitas that grow prolifically around his family’s 40-acre ranch in Shasta County.
So they got a tractor and dug one up to replant in L.A. “It looked great for about six weeks, and then it died,” Elwell said. “That’s how naive we were. So it became a research project — how do you get these things to grow?”
Their research led them to the website of Las Pilitas Nursery, a Santa Margarita grower specializing in California native plants. Bert Wilson, its founder, died in 2014, but his extensive descriptions about native plants “are super helpful to beginners,” Elwell said. “He approached it with a level of fun, writing things like, ‘I know this plant is really tough because we’ve run over it with a tractor several times and it always comes back.’”
From there, they began frequenting the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley, one of Southern California’s premier native plant nurseries, “and as a new gardener, I just wanted to buy everything,” Elwell said. “I was treating the plants more like furniture than ecology. I’d say, ‘Oh, that looks cool.’ I was not thinking, ‘Does it really make sense to plant something that normally grows on an alpine slope at sea level in clay soil?’”
As their knowledge grew, their focus shifted to creating habitat for regional pollinators, birds and other animals. And habitats need water, a realization that had unexpected benefits.
When Odell broke his elbow in a mountain biking accident, he quickly mastered the simple rehabilitation exercises his doctor provided. So when Elwell said he wanted a pond in the front yard, Odell was immediately on board.
“He’s just the kind of person where you point out what you want to do, and he says, ‘OK, let’s go,’” Elwell said. “So he just went charging in with a pickaxe to dig out the hole and a 30-pound digging bar to move the boulders” for a roughly 8-by-12-foot pond, complete with a small waterfall fed by recirculating water (flowing through an oversized recycled spigot) and a large boulder that he drilled out in the middle to provide a gentle bathing area for tiny drinkers. Oh, and a now-large toyon and mountain mahogany on either side to provide partial shade.
When Odell returned for a checkup a few weeks later, his doctor was amazed at how well his arm had healed. “He said, ‘How did you do that?’” Odell said, “And I said, ‘By doing everything you told me not to do.’”
They did bring in a contractor to build the spacious patios off the kitchen and living room, a long narrow koi pond with a Medusa head fountain and a wide swimming pool that follows the slope of the hill.
A fountain bearing a relief of Medusa’s head pours into the koi pond in the backyard.
Naked buckwheat.
But that’s where their “modern” landscaping stops. Instead of lawn or little potted palms around the pool, there are oversize stands of desperado sage, a fragrant hybrid between white sage and purple sage, growing so untamed they’re nearly spilling into the pool.
Odell rented an excavator to slice the bottom of the slope into a cliff, shored up by the dirt excavated for the pool, along with recycled broken concrete and other rubble. He used old railroad tracks to create steps down to the bottom of the slope. He carved out a narrow ditch between the cliff and steps, and that became a recirculating stream that flows into a little marsh full of frogs, butterflies and dragonflies.
Like their home, the yard is divided into “rooms,” or separate experiences, so sitting by the pool, you can’t see the koi pond with its restless fish or the little stream burbling just 10 feet away, or the ornate handmade pergola that offers shade at the bottom of the hill.
Walking this yard is an adventure that reveals itself slowly. Years ago a Mama Bear manzanita (Arctostaphylos ‘Mama Bear’) finally took hold in their side yard, almost entirely covering the old driveway; further up, a hedge of citrus trees produce lemons the size of mangoes.
Plastic planters collect cobwebs on a shelf in the yard.
A dragonfly lands on a plant near one of the yard’s water features.
There are a few other fruit trees on the property, but mostly it’s a riot of native plants with enough variety that even in the summer, when many California native plants go dormant, the garden is full of fragrance and color — bright purple wands of woolly blue curls that smell as sweet as bubble gum; sticky yellow and red monkeyflowers, tall mallows with large flowers in orange and lavender, pinkish white bouquets on the narrow milkweed and sunflowers and fuchsias nearly ready to bloom.
Needless to say, friends and family don’t question their decision now. They deliberately designed the outdoors for entertaining, with a huge welcoming table off the kitchen and bobbing solar lanterns in the clear inviting pool. And over the years they bought the houses on either side of them, and now rent them out to a nephew and friends.
The gates between the properties are always open, and when it’s time for loved ones to gather, Elwell said, it’s only a matter of when — the “where” is never a question.
Lifestyle
'Hacks' peeks behind the curtain of a changing comedy world
What does it mean to be a comedy hack, and is it possible for a comic to age without becoming one? That’s one of the central questions that Paul W. Downs and co-creators Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky explore in the HBO Max comedy series Hacks.
The Emmy Award-winning series, which recently finished its third season, was conceived during a 2015 roadtrip. Downs and his co-creators were headed to Portland, Maine, when they started talking about the idea of contemporary, “cool comedy” — versus humor that young comedians might consider “hacky.”
“We just started talking about this phenomenon and thought, ‘Oh, you know what would be a cool show is a show about an icon of comedy who is misunderstood by someone of a younger generation,’” Downs says. “And so we just emailed each other the idea for the show and kept talking about it for four or five years before we pitched it.”
The series centers on Deborah Vance (played by Jean Smart), a veteran comedian whose career is waning. In response, Deborah’s manager (played by Downs) brings in a Gen-Z comic named Ava (Hannah Einbinder) to help freshen up her act. Along the way, Hacks explores themes of sexism in comedy and the nuances of “cancel culture” — as when some of Deborah’s old offensive jokes resurface.
“It’s a comedy, but we also want to make a show that makes people think,” Downs says. “Because if we have … this platform, it’s like, why not make something that makes you … think about something and reframe something you’ve thought about in the past?”
For Downs, Hacks is a family business; he’s married to his co-creator Aniello, who went into labor with their first child while he was acting in and she was directing the final episode of season 2.
“In this particular scene I had to be nervous. And so guess what? I had a lot to draw on,” he says. “We always say that, right now, Hacks is our first born, and our son is our second.”
Interview highlights
On what Deborah and Ava have in common
I think both of them turn to comedy for the same reason that a lot of comedians do — because there was something in their life that was either painful and they needed to laugh through it, or, for some people, they feel isolated or different or “othered,” and it’s a means of connecting with people or it’s a means of, sometimes, self-protection, to make other people laugh. So I think there’s a lot of reasons people come to comedy. But certainly for both of them, they have a similar use of comedy, which is, it’s a defense for them. It’s armor for them. …
For someone like Ava, who grew up lonely, it was a means of feeling connected to other people and making sense of the world and the things that she was observing. So it is certainly the tie that binds. It’s the thing that makes them very much kindred spirits. I think there are some people who are just giddy and funny. Some people are just naturally liquid funny. But I do think that there is certainly truth to the richness of material that comes from a place of pain and hardship.
On whether or not there are lines that should not be crossed in comedy
In the pilot episode, [Deborah] does say, “There is no line. You can make a joke about anything if it’s funny.” … And I think the finer point, though, on that is you can make a joke about anything if it’s funny and if it doesn’t cause harm. … I think the thing is, when you are punching down, it’s lazy. It’s not as funny.
On meeting his collaborators Lucia Aniello (who later became his wife) and Jen Statsky at Upright Citizens Brigade
We made each other laugh. I think that was the thing. We just shared a sense of humor. There’s two things. One, I found both Jen and Lucia so funny, and two, I found myself being funnier because I wanted to make them laugh. I think when you respect someone’s brain and their sense of humor, getting a laugh out of them is sort of like the ultimate. It feels so good. … I think we just gravitated toward each other because we shared a sense of humor, which often is related to a sense of how you see the world and a sense of values, too.
On why they pitch jokes and ideas in email threads
We’ll email [a joke] to the three of us, and then it’s so easily searchable. It’s usually in the moments we’re not working that the muse strikes [and] we have an idea. Something comes to us and we write it down. … We’re on vacation. We’re out to dinner. … So it’s sort of a way to get it filed and then get back to the fun, so you can get the work filed away and you can revisit it when you’re in the writer’s room. But yeah, we do that. We’ve done that for a very long time. We still do it.
On Hacks poking fun at Hollywood only wanting existing intellectual properties, like a Gumby or Operation movie
I do think it’s really hard to sell original ideas. Particularly right now, there’s a real crisis in selling comedy. … I think there’s less appetite to take risks on original voices and original stories. Even when we pitched [Hacks], we thought, ‘Well, a show about two women who do comedy, one of whom is in a waning moment in her career. Will people want to see that?’ And thank God they did. … Unless it’s a sure thing, I do think there’s a lot less risk happening now. … People are afraid to do something that doesn’t work.
On Hacks looking at how late night shows have changed
Exploring the ways in which show business has changed or is changing is really interesting to us because this is obviously a character study about two people. And we always said it was a peek behind the curtain and very much about their lives offstage. But it’s also an examination of entertainment and comedy. It’s really a show about comedy. And so late night, especially for comedians who get their first break on a late night show, whether it’s doing stand-up on a late night show or being interviewed and showing a little bit of their own sense of humor on a late night show, it’s still very much an important marker of your career, I think, especially for comedians. But … it doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning or impact that it did when Carson was on.
Therese Madden and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Clare Lombardo adapted it for the web.
Lifestyle
The antithesis of the Olympics: Using AI to write a fan letter
On Fresh Air in 1986, Maurice Sendak told Terry Gross a story about a little boy who sent him a card and a drawing. Sendak wrote back, including a drawing of his own. Later, the boy’s mother wrote Sendak again, explaining that her son loved the response so much that he ate it. To Sendak, this was the ultimate compliment. “He saw it, he loved it, he ate it,” he chuckled.
Their correspondence stands in contrast to another fan letter many Olympics fans have seen in recent days. During the games, a number of AI ads have been in rotation, but none has raised as many eyebrows as one for Gemini, Google’s AI assistant. In the commercial, a father’s voiceover explains that his daughter, like him, is a runner. And she’s a huge fan of Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. He says he’s “pretty good with words,” but he wants her fan letter to Sydney to be “just right.”
Does he help her? Does he encourage her? Does she enter into the process at all? No. He just asks Gemini to write the letter. The prompt: “Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is. And be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record. She says sorry, not sorry.”
Where to begin. Where! To! Begin!
Let us address quality first
I do not like generative AI, but for the sake of research, I fed this prompt – this very prompt! – into Gemini. I am not going to post the result here in full, but I can assure you that if you ranked all the middle managers of your bank from most to least inspiring, went to the one at the bottom, and asked them to write a draft of this letter for you, this is what you would get. The result is obligatory, desultory, boring and obviously machine-made. It contains sentences like, “You’ve shown the world that with determination, anything is achievable,” a toothless flop of a sentence that is, for the record, false.
The only – the only! – spark of personality comes in the machine’s dutiful inclusion of “sorry not sorry,” which Ad Dad put in the prompt. That is not artificial intelligence, it is a program taking the one piece of yourself that you included and spitting it back out, unchanged.
YouTube
The problem with an AI approach to admiration
Generative AI advocates have sometimes claimed an interest in helping people with disabilities or people with limited English. Their internal business plans may reveal what role those considerations actually play in their planning, and AI could indeed have some of those applications. The bigger issue is that in many cases, including this one, the marketing of generative AI is a broadside against singularity in favor of digestibility, against creativity in favor of drudgery. It’s perfect for anyone who watched the video for Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and rooted for the meat grinder.
What Google is selling in this ad is not an assistive device; it is the promised replacement of your flawed humanity with the immaculate verbiage of Google. Immaculate verbiage like, “Watching you compete is like witnessing magic unfold.” So if you like your letters awkwardly structured and with all the emotion of a birthday card from your eye doctor, Gemini can help.
What a fan letter could be
Ad Dad is going about this all wrong. He says Gemini can get the letter “just right.” But there is no need for a fan letter to be “just right.” There is perhaps no truer example on Earth of “it’s the thought that counts” than a letter to someone you admire, telling them how much their work or their example means to you. Ad Dad’s daughter could have done anything from writing a short note in her own words to drawing a picture, and it would have been fine.
If you do want to help your kid write a fan letter as an exercise, don’t give her a tool designed to extrude the average of all the other letters that have come before it. Sit down with her and help her be specific. When did you first see Sydney compete? What does it look like to you when she goes over a hurdle? How do you feel when you see her perform? Do you like her stance? The way she hits a finish line? Her smile when she wins? What do you love about running? And sure, go over spelling with her if you want, too, or help her with her grammar. It’s a perfect opportunity.
A fan letter is not the beginning of a transaction, or even necessarily an exchange (though it can be that). It is an offering, a gift given in appreciation. Its purpose is not to impress, but to express. That it contains your wild and beautiful self – however imperfect, misspelled, and simple as it may be — is what makes it valuable.
A kid doesn’t need a comms strategy or a marketing department. There is all kinds of time for her to learn how to write a proper business letter, or a complaint letter, or a letter to Congress, or a legal brief or business plan. A kid needs to develop confidence that her voice is valuable and should be used. And over time, of course her writing can improve — but only if she’s given a chance to build skills. If you tell her to hit up Gemini when she wants to produce a letter, how will she ever live without it? Choosing a message of “don’t practice, just hit this button” is strange anywhere, but it feels downright perverse during the Olympics.
All an admirer needs to be is her best self. And who knows? If she genuinely makes a gesture on paper from the bottom of her heart, somebody might become overwhelmed and eat it. It’s been known to happen.
Lifestyle
Nicola Peltz Sues Dog Groomer After Death of Chihuahua Nala
Nicola Peltz-Beckham is officially taking legal action against the groomer who treated her beloved dog before she died … and she’s come out swinging in a new lawsuit.
In a new filing obtained by TMZ … Nicola claims HoundSpa caused the untimely death of her chihuahua Nala — specifically pointing the finger at a groomer, named Jony Ceballos.
Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media.
Nicola claims Jony has a history of “intentional and malicious abuse of dogs,” further alleging Nala was left injured and in severe physical distress after being treated for a routine grooming in HoundSpa’s mobile van.
Nicola is also taking to task HoundSpa and its owner, Deborah “Deb” Gittleman, for keeping Jony on the staff — even though she says there were past complaints against JC about his mistreatment toward animals.
Per Nicola, she’s been left emotionally distressed by the whole ordeal, especially since she witnessed Nala die after rushing her to the vet following the grooming — and says she treated the pet “like her own child.” Nicola claims her other dog, Angel, is also suffering in the aftermath of the grooming, noting the dog shakes/screams from terror when left alone now.
Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media.
The actress’ lawsuit isn’t necessarily surprising — as we reported, Brooklyn Beckham‘s wife had lawyered up after the loss of Nala — which she first announced back in June. From the get-go, Nicola pointed the finger at the groomers … with the events of the tragedy never sitting right with her.
She says she originally posted about Nala’s death to raise awareness, but chose to take action when she learned how many other pet owners faced similar experiences at different groomers.
She adds … “I’ve dedicated most of my life to saving dogs and I can’t in good conscience let this horrifying act happen to more families. I will work for changes and laws to help make sure no one else ever has to experience this heartbreak.”
TMZ Studios
Nicola is seeking compensatory damages, as well as punitive damages, over her dog’s death … though she states that she plans to donate all the money she may receive to a dog rescue organization. We’ve reached out to HoundSpa for comment … no word back yet.
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