Ojai: Talk of the Town

If you one of the lucky people, you get a weekly text from Eric Hodge with a list of his freshest sea-to-table catch. Hodge is known by Southern California's finest chefs for his meticulous and precise expertise in the Japanese technique of Ikejime, which quickly and humanely kills the fish, but also enhances its flavor and freshness and shelf life. It took him more than a year to perfect this process.

We talk with Eric about the great abundance of life in and around the Channel Islands, and how fragile and vulnerable that ecosystem is as the planet heats up. Eric talks us through his life path and passions, and how proud he is that his daughters are now crewing on his boat. We talk about the Thursday Farmers Market, where he is one of the mainstays, and where he constantly seeks customer insights and feedback. He is also known for bringing local chefs out on the boat to see firsthand how he catches and processes the fish. Eric's story of growing up locally and being drawn to the ocean through surfing, and how he navigates the fluctuations of currents, fishing seasons and regulations, and how he made a success as a hook-and-line fisherman is fascinating.

We did not talk about the Tasman Sea, making baseball bats from ash or London's theater scene. 

To mark the occasion, I (Bret Bradigan) talk about the podcast, why I started it and why I continue it. At first, the idea back in April 2020 was to create a cultural artifact to mark the moment of Ojai's experience with the podcast during the early days of the pandemic. The first guests - Mayor Johnny Johnston and OUSD Superintendent Dr. Tiffany Morse - gave us key insights into this epochal moment. I urge you to go back and listen to those early episodes and be transported back to that time.

Then I realized it made a great "content funnel" for our Ojai magazines, the Quarterly & Monthly. And also, it's a great excuse to reach out to people to have meaningful conversations. The atmosphere is meant to convey a couple of people getting to know each other, an overheard conversation. With some high-profile guests coming on, it's a testament to our wonderfulness that so many incredibly interesting people call Ojai home. Not all the guests are famous but all the conversations are interesting. Stay tuned, plenty to come.

I did not talk about the designated hitter rule, Beryl Markham or my overuse of the word "amazing." I do not recommend using that as a drinking game. It would lead to death by alcohol poisoning.

J.B. White may best be known to Ojai residents as the leader of the Ojai's house band, The Household Gods, but he's a successful screenwriter with a long list of credits, including the Hallmark Film, "Get Me To The Wedding On Time," which will be released later this summer. As a multi-genre writer, he's also adapted a Peter Benchley book, "The Beast," and written the horror film, "House of Frankenstein."

Among his recent credits for Hallmark Channel are "A Christmas Miracle For Daisy," "The Christmas Ornament," and "The National Tree." He didn't start out to be a screenwriter, dropping out of Stanford (where he was friends with theater major Sigourney Weaver) to pursue a career as a singer/songwriter. We go deep into the sausage-making of the movie business, where J.B. jokes that if you "strip away the tinsel, you'll find more tinsel." He's having a second wind with Hallmark Channel as it moves away from its strict diet of romantic comedies. J.B.'s mother-daughter story, "The Goodbye Quilt," for example, which he first pitched eight years ago, has been purchased by them. "Big Sky River," a modern romance novel set in Montana, which he also wrote eight years and which the channel tossed him off the project, is also now back in development.

After working on the East Coast in the legal trade, he decided to make the leap into screenwriting by writing piles of spec scripts, before a serendipitous turn landed him an agent. He moved to the West Coast in 1993 and soon after moved to Ojai to raise his children with his artist-wife Elizabeth. After writing a script that Andy Griffith liked, he turned that into a flourishing career as a go-to writer with NBC. 

We also talked about the music business, "The Matrix," "The Walking Dead," and Ojai's post-pandemic hangover. We did not talk about Babe Ruth's final game, Stanley Kubrick's innovations in camera lens or birthplace of the Indo-European languages.

Nicholas Weissman, executive producer of "Havana Libre," joins the podcast to talk about this documentary which follows the trials and travails of a dedicated group of Cuban surfers who try to get their sport officially recognized by their government. Surfing in Cuba exists in this liminal space, neither legal nor quite illegal, haunted by the legacy of "balseros," tens of thousands of whom traversed the 90-mile channel between Cuba and Florida on makeshift rafts.

Francisco ("Frank") and Yaya are the two stars of the documentary, and their charisma carries through the film, as they deal with bureaucrats, regulations and risking everything to compete and participate in surfing events in different countries. When surfing was recognized as an Olympic sport for the Tokyo Games, they see their chance to bring their beloved sport into their homeland, but at great risk to themselves and their families.

The project began with an article in the New York Times about an intrepid group of surfboard shapers making do with ingenuity and craft, including tearing open refrigerator doors to get at the buoyant styrofoam. Corey McLean and Seth Brown, two surfers from Maine, recognized kindred spirits and sought to bring their story to the world.

The film has been accepted into the Santa Barbara Film Festival and will be hitting the festival circuit after a two-year pandemic hiatus. Weissman is an Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Ojai. He has worked for the New Yorker magazine, the New York Times, PBS, HBO and National Geographic. He won his Emmy for "A Boy Helps a Town Heal," a film he made for Sports Illustration. His most recent feature, "For Ahkeem," about the juvenile justice system in St. Louis, also won much acclaim. His first independent film, "The Minutemen" about border vigilantes, won the Silver Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival.

We did not talk about Duke Kahanamoku, taimen fishing in the headwaters of the Amur River or the Y2K panic.

Tomatomania! is back and Scott Daigre joins us to discuss this fascinating fruit and its many uses and importance in the culinary world. After a pandemic hiatus, Daigre is producing 13 events this year, which are more than just a chance to find rare breeds and learn growing techniques and advice, they take on a festival-like atmosphere.

Daigre's interest in gardening began when he was very little on his grandfather's farm in southern Louisiana, and continued even through his corporate career in marketing, until he followed his passion to a job as a nurseryman, then taking over the helm of Tomatomania! nearly 15 years ago. He is a regular on Evan Kleiman's popular KCRW radio show, "Good Food," and the author of  "Tomatomania!," a lavishly illustrated book full of his insights and advice on this versatile fruit.

We also talk about how he came to find and love Ojai, our climate and its impact on growing tomatoes, as well as the history of tomatoes from the Incans and Aztecs to the present day. He talks about preserving tomatoes, both by canning but also freezing and the uses of tomato water. We did not talk about Baffin Island, the lost wax method of jewelry making or Summit restaurants burgers.

As former chief staff counsel for both the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the First District, just two stops on her distinguished legal career, Judith Hale Norris has gotten know many of the current Supreme Court Justices very well. With Justice Stephen Breyer about to retire, it seemed a great time to reach out to her to get her informed take on this, and many other legal questions confronting our country.

More than that, though both Norris and her husband Bill have woven themselves into the fabric of Ojai life, volunteering and donating to many local causes. Judith is just finishing her term as head of the Ojai Women's Fund, and has held leadership positions with the Ojai Education Foundation, the Ojai Music Festival, as well as co-chair of the Council of Distinguished Advisers, Straus Institute of Resolution and Pepperdine Caruso School of Law.

Judith grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, and those values of civic engagement, service and community have served her, and Ojai, very well. Her husband Bill is a graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, who retired as a Captain and was the fourth branch of service's chief justice. 

We talked about the Robert Bork's confirmation hearing that went awry and how he was unfairly labeled for his role in Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, the loss of civility in our political processes, the wonders of Ojai life and much much more. We did not talk about the Mongol Horde's archery skills, Roman metallurgy or the Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Lanny Kaufer's new book, "Medicinal Herbs of California" was just published by Falcon Guides and he joined the podcast to talk about this thorough look at the 70 plants in this field guide to common plants and their medicinal uses. Kaufer took over the popular Ojai Herb Walks back in 1976 and has been roaming the backcountry, introducing people to the wonders of the botanical world ever since.

This handy field guide includes not just information about the herbs themselves, but where to find them, their medicinal uses, how to harvest them sustainably, and various recipes and potions. Kaufer used five criteria in the book: is the plant common enough to sustain small-scale harvesting; is most of the plant's range within the state; is it already covered in many other books; is there evidence of Native American use; and is there sufficient scientific validation of those uses.

We talked about the how the perverse incentives of pharmaceutical companies because they can't patent an entire plant, the gradual switch from the 1820s to 1910's Flexner Report which systemized medical training and left medicinal herbs to native healers and folklore, and the gradual restoration of their proper place in the treatment of ailments. For example, Covid-19 researchers have discovered that yerba santa, a common California herb, can help block spike proteins from our respiratory systems. Yerba Santa has long been a mainstay of the indigenous medicine chest.

We also talked about Lanny's own introduction to plant medicine through a native American healer in the Jemez Pueblo in the 1960s, and some of his other mentors, including Juanita Centeno, Amanda McQuade Crawford and ethnobotanist Michael Moore. We did not talk about the science fiction novels of Octavia Butler, 1960s muscle cars or the freestylings of Gil Scott Heron.

https://www.amazon.com/Herbs-California-Lanny-Kaufer/dp/1493058029

https://www.herbwalks.com

Kevin Davis, co-author of "Community Powered Journalism," has studied deeply the ways in which newspapers and local media can stay relevant, profitable and enable communities to make informed decisions about their future. He's also studied the ways in which many newspapers have lost their way. He explains how, in a perverse twist, the largest and most profitable companies in the world - Google and Facebook - do no original reporting themselves, and yet are getting richer and richer off the few reliable and trustworthy news sources that remain.

This has resulted in historic low levels of trust and a breakdown in civility and productive dialogue. The solutions are complex but begin with listening.

The process is to drop the pretense of ivory-tower arrogance and actually engage with the public where they are at, determine their needs and provide the information that is meaningful and useful. We talk about the great heroes of journalism's modern era, such as Nobel Prize winners Maria Ressa and Dmitri Muratov, who sounded the clarion call for social media companies to acknowledge the harm they've done to our communities and culture and to hold accountable the demagogues and bad actors who are profiting from that division. We also talked about his project to start the First Amendment Foundation of Ventura County, and how he thinks it can help underserved communities within the county and provide resources for local journalists.

We also talked about John Milton, Oliver Cromwell and Walter Winchell. We did not talk about Catherine the Great, coin-operated newsracks or Ariana Grande.