Call Someplace Paradise

By: Pat Hartman

 

Ananda is staying with a friend over on Seville Court while she recovers from yet another abortion and various other health problems. She´s awake and dressed in her customary Gypsy attire and heavy silver jewelry, but looks really dragged out and eventually falls asleep. The owner of this house is not the same friend she was staying with when I first met her, just before Christmas last year. Ananda came into my life as a patient. While I was putting a cast on her arm, she entertained me with her story.
It was such a nice morning, she got slightly ripped on Amaretto, clothed herself in the usual assortment of antique petticoats, and went out for a bicycle ride on Rialto Avenue. When a street sweeping machine took her by surprise, the long skirts got caught in the spokes and down she went, breaking a wrist and a collarbone. She had planned to spend the holidays on a yacht, but of course that was out of the question, since she´d be not only useless but a real liability out there on the water if something went wrong, unable to swim because of those injuries. Nor could she remain with the friend on Rialto, because his main woman was due to come back from college for the vacation.
So I took her home to stay a couple weeks with me and Tony. Her drug of choice was marijuana laced with PCP, and a couple times she tried to remove her cast with a hammer, but otherwise Ananda was a delightful houseguest. During her visit she ran out of pain pills and my boss wouldn´t give her any more, so I drove her to Marina Mercy emergency room and waited while she tried her luck there. I passed on a bit of gossip, that the daughter of a controversial psychologist died at that hospital after a fire in Venice, and her father practiced his primal scream all over the Intensive Care Unit. Ananda confirmed this and added that the daughter was a junkie and a remittance woman, paid off by her dad to stay the hell away from his clinic.
A short time before I first met her, Ananda had been living up in Topanga Canyon with a very dedicated speed freak who spent all his waking hours-about 22 of them per day-making suede jackets that he decorated by sewing on millions of seed beads. One day she found him dead and beat it out of there, taking two of the jackets with her. She gave me one, an astonishing work of art that belongs in a museum. Unfortunately there´s a big nasty grease spot on the fawn-colored leather, because it spent some time stuffed under a car seat.
Ananda gave me the jacket in return for a favor. One day she showed up unexpectedly and in distress. She wore an all-white outfit of leotard, long flowing skirt, and trailing lace shawl. She´d had a fight with Lady Rain, an amphetamine merchant in Marina del Rey. Ananda stole a bunch of the woman´s cash, which she figured was all right because it was dirty money anyhow. She wanted to get out of town, but first had to assume a disguise for safety. She changed into an identical outfit-long skirt, leotard, lace shawl-except all in black this time, and still crowned by her distinctive head of Shirley Temple curls. Secure in the belief that now no one could recognize her, Ananda let me drive her to Union Station.
Back when I still lived over by the freeway, a risky escapade brought me to Venice. I was asked to take care of, confidentially of course, a medical problem, by a man in his early thirties who was a drug counselor. He should have counseled himself: "If you´re gonna hit up, don´t miss the vein." In the crook of his elbow was an ugly abscess, a ping-pong ball sized lump full of pus and smack and who knows what.
After dark, I arrived on Rialto Avenue, where this guy and his wife were kind of camping out in a house he´d inherited but intended to sell "the sooner the better." In the bare living room, a baby cougar growled at me from its cage. When I unpacked the disposable scalpel, alcohol pads, bandages and antiseptic, the wife brought in a speckled blue enamel roasting pan to catch the gunk, but she wouldn´t help any more than that. I was too paranoid to carry around a syringe full of Novocaine so there was no anesthetic. I cleaned off the arm and made a slice and the drug counselor gritted his teeth and squeezed out all the bloody glop into the roasting pan. I bandaged the wound and told him how to take care of it, and "if red streaks show up on that arm, get your ass to the emergency room." I never saw him or his wife again.

 

At the beach: Bessie just returned from a two week trip to find that she´s been evicted from her apartment. While Bessie was away, daughter Sunshine and her friends totally trashed the place. There´s puppy shit all mashed into the carpet, a broken window next to the door because they lost the key, irate neighbors are complaining, etc. Rather than fight the eviction, Bessie figures she´ll live in her van for a while and let Sunshine go stay with friends and trash somebody else´s place for a change.

 

The Fox Venice is a wonderful old funky revival house that is one of the best things about this neighborhood. The first time I ever went there was last year to see a Brazilian import called Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, and Hardware Wars, a satire of guess which immensely popular space opera. The graffiti in the Fox Venice restroom is usually of a pretty high quality, but sometimes you see cryptic statements like I HATE SPECS and NIGERS RULE.
Rob is the proprietor of another Venice institution, Beyond Illusions New Age Book and Comic Shop. The front of it is lavishly painted. On a mural to the right of the door, there´s a scroll with a lotus growing out of it, on a background of blue sky with fluffy white clouds. The scroll says in fancy calligraphy, "The Journey Not the Arrival Matters." Above the show window there´s a round painting of holy man in India. There´s another mural on the north side of the building. On the south side is the Flea Market, then the intersection of Windward and Pacific. This is probably the most happening locale in all Venice, and definitely one of the most photographed, since some of the original masonry is still standing: the picturesque arcades or covered sidewalks flanked by columns topped with faces-angels or gargoyles?
Beyond Illusions (listed in the phone book as Venice Bookstore and Culture Palace) is a one-man operation whose stock is determined by the sole criterion of what Rob likes: such books as How to Get the Dragons Out of Your Temple; Frazetta posters; collectible comics; hand painted lapel buttons; underground newspapers and propaganda handouts of all kinds. It was there I bought my copy of Venice of America and picked up an order form for the People´s Yellow Pages and a free poem by Kerry Thornley called "The Jail Bait Blues Boogie." When I wanted to get rid of my AvantGarde magazines I took them to Rob and he swapped me for a selection of postcards, reduced copies of psychedelic Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom posters that were made for mail announcements of the shows. They sell for up to $4 apiece, according to rarity.
One day I was in there and a guy lurched up and vomited in the doorway, not realizing or probably caring, either, that people watched from the other side of the glass a couple of feet away. It was like some kind of bizarre exhibit at Sea World.
One evening last year I was at the store when a friend of Rob´s came in all hyped up because Elvis Costello was at Hollywood High. We knew there wasn´t a prayer of getting in, but the kid was so crazed that we all jumped in my car and took off. We had to stop by his place for a minute. In a building at the corner of Rose and the boardwalk, he had a $125 per month "single" about the size of a closet, with a mattress on the floor and lots of roaches for company. Once at the school, the closest we got was hearing a wisp of "Alison" through the back door before the security guards chased us away. Just so the trip wouldn´t be wasted we went to the Whiskey to see Joan Jett and the Runaways.
The last time I went to Beyond Illusions I gave Rob a stellar dodecahedron I made from construction paper, after seeing the one on the cover of the book of Escher drawings he has in the store. He lives in the back room of the shop and has two guests staying there: a woman who is a refugee from the Krishnas, and her little boy.
Rob is an est graduate, which got me interested in it. One of the nurses I work with wants to take the training too, but both her husband and their marriage counselor are against it. She decided the next best thing was to loan me the $300 so I could go and tell her about it, so I signed up.

 

Another of my co-workers is a guy named Robert who lives in Venice on San Juan Court. He is a musician and does an act with a woman named Anja. I took Carla to hear them at a place called Jett´s Art House (no relation to Joan, as far as I know) all the way over on Manchester.
On another recent excursion, I took Carla and my roommate´s daughter Jill to I.D.E.A., a dance studio in Santa Monica. Two or three nights a week an event called Get High on Dance takes place there. They provide all different types of music, and people just freak around dancing alone or in pairs or groups, whatever seems right at the time. The night we went, the disc jockey turned out to be a man I´d met when researching sex surrogates. If you get tired of dancing there are big cushions at one end of the floor to recline on, and if you need refreshment there´s fruit and health food snacks in the other room.
One of the people I saw at I.D.E.A. was Eileen Kaufman. For eight weeks last February and March I used to drive to Venice every Wednesday evening for a screenwriting class at Beyond Baroque. That´s where I met Eileen, who is white and used to be married to Bob Kaufman, the only black beatnik poet with a Jewish name. Their son is an actor. She was working on a script about Bob´s life, with the intention of having their son play the role.

 

In a classified ad in a few-months-old copy of Mother Jones magazine, somebody with a box at the Venice post office is selling "clear prints" of the Zapruder JFK assassination film for $10.
An article by William Franklin describes an outfit called Environmental Communications over on Windward Avenue. For ten years they have studied the "complex social patterns" in Los Angeles and particularly in Venice. They are consulted extensively by scholars, designers, architects, artists and urban planners from all over the world. Last year they mounted a major show of visual art at the LA County Art Museum called "Environmental Communications Looks at Los Angeles" and now it´s touring back East. The president of EC is David Greenberg, and he says the Venice boardwalk is a "unique and dynamic socializing environment."
Another magazine quoted several people who said things like, "Venice isn´t the real world," and "Venice is second chance." Others call it "a microcosm of democracy" and say it has been "the living future of contemporary American history since its inception." A writer identified only by the initials J.B.H. says, "It´s like stepping into chaos, hurled and flung by awesome energies and forces-a perilous journey."

 

Filmmakers have it easy: just turn on the camera and let it run. According to notes I made even before moving to the neighborhood, the boardwalk offers sights seldom or never seen elsewhere. Call me sheltered, but I´d never seen crewcut Lesbians strolling along holding hands. There was a man with a braided mustache and one with a long braided beard. A dog on roller skates, and another time, a dog with four broken legs-but come to think of it, maybe it was the same dog. I´ve seen a man wearing a pink bathmat shaped like a human foot on his front and an American flag on his back. A man in a t-shirt that said, "Property of U.S. Paratroopers-Hands Off," and a man in rainbow suspenders. An entire family from India: mother, father, kids, grandmother and grandfather all together. At the foot of Windward Avenue, the sobering vision of an entire black motorcycle gang. A man in a t-shirt decorated with the silhouette of a tennis player and the words, "I play better on grass." An Anglo couple, both wearing jeans, with a whole lot of equipment on their backs, filming an old black man. A bearded white guy standing on a bench with an apparatus to make giant soap bubbles which drift across the boardwalk. An imposing black man, always on skates, with a chartreuse knitted hat over big dreadlocks. Inside the sturdy walls of the public bathroom, I once encountered a biker chick who cried and puked in the washbasin.
The coolest stuff in the world is for sale on the boardwalk. T-shirts and bumper stickers that say I FOUND IT with a picture of a marijuana leaf. Shirts that say "Insanity is hereditary: you get it from your kids" and "I can have my druthers." Helium-filled silver balloons that look like UFOs. Hand-crocheted blouses that look like something in a dream, made by elves from spider webs and strands of moonlight. LAPD pants. Face painting for $1, the proceeds donated to an anti-child abuse project. Gorgeous hand-made applique´ bedspreads, the small size only $12. A booth offers "Free Sample Tan Oil-Tans Quickly", with a black guy minding the store. (Is he the demonstration model?) At the Flea Market, you can get used plaid flannel shirts for a dollar or two, and used leather coats for $8-$35. Frozen treats are peddled from a pushcart named Humphrey Yogart
People who are moving or who simply need some ready cash spread out a blanket on the boardwalk to display their worldly goods. A collector decides to get rid of his underground comix in the same way. One day a young guy named Phil, I know him through my job, is behind a table on the boardwalk helping his sister-in-law sell the jewelry she makes.
I once saw a small plane fly along the shoreline towing a banner promoting a movie: WOW! A DIFFERENT STORY, which perfectly described the scene below. Another time the peace was shattered by the yellow Lifeguard Dive Team van as it raced along the ocean front with siren and lights going. A connoisseur of graffiti can find plenty.
"If you can´t cut it, don´t pick up the knife."
"Send condominiums charity again."
"Save Your Home-Vote Yes on 13."
Intriguing notices are posted: "Venice Beach Rec Center Art Show, Monday and Tuesday Class, Venice Adult School." A sign written in purple, blue, green and black felt-tip pen: "LA NUDE BEACH MARCH Sunday June 11, 11am Will Rogers State Park Beach parking lot. We will march to Venice. Join our battle to win a legal nude beach in Los Angeles. We will present a 10,000 name petition to the Board of Supervisors. Signs will be supplied at the beginning of the parade route. Beachfront USA, L.A."
An eavesdropper can pick up some gems, like "Beer gets really flat if you skate around with it." In a circle of people listening to a mixed group of musicians, a guy with a guitar case says to his friend, "I hate niggers but I love this kind of music." In a different conversation, a white guy says, "Bill´s black and wishes he was white. That´s a disgrace. That´s like me wishing I was black."
A man says, "Your fat makes you an ugly looking pig." The woman he addressed says, "Your mind makes you an ugly looking pig." Early one morning I sit on the ground near the eerily empty boardwalk. A man who´s walking by turns to someone behind him and says belligerently, "Go ahead, say it!"-except there´s no one there. A crippled man on crutches confides to me, "I feel sad. I feel like crying. I just want to find a girlfriend to live with." In the shop called Jasmine, one of the clerks says I look just like someone named Wendy who used to write for the Venice Beachhead.
For entertainment, you can sign a petition against the U.S. Government spraying of paraquat and listen to scores of street performers like Hook of the Canaligators, Regina the exotic snake and mask dancer, singing piano mover Ed Brown, and Uncle Bill, king of the Blues. David and Roselyn are a guitar and mandolin duo who bring chairs and a blanket for their baby to crawl around on while they perform. They´re unconventional even for a mixed couple, in that she is black and he is white. He has a great big moustache that hangs over the harmonica supported by a brace around his neck. Their hand-lettered sign reads
If you like the sound
Please stick around.
If you got to split
Please leave a tip.
A small group of musicians will gather in the round splotch of shade cast by a palm tree, gradually shifting to new positions as the shadow moves. Two guys from Holland, a guitar and xylophone duo, come here every summer. On a roof, a rock group plays, complete with amplifiers and groupies. On the ground, a singer has a sign written on cardboard propped inside the open lid of his guitar case:
It´s true that music can cure all ills
But even musicians must pay their bills
So while the music soothes your mind
A small donation would be very kind
A wandering minstrel wishes to say
Have much joy and a very nice day.
So thank you, Lance.
The L.A. Connection improvisation group was a regular Sunday afternoon feature for a while. They would get three kids from the audience up with them and do a quiz show. One of the troupe mimed a writer getting ready to work: smoke a joint, have a drink, shoot up, drop some pills, then sit down and write. They perform at places like the Comedy Store and the Troubadour.
The long broad walkway that leads to the Pavilion is where the hotshot rollerskaters have set up a beer can slalom course and trash cans to jump over. The skateboarders constructed a ramp to jump from. Once I saw a performer jump off the ramp and land in a handstand. The first time I ever became aware of the phenomenon of disco skating was the day a tall blond guy and a short black guy were demonstrating it to a marvelling crowd. The next time, I saw two very foxy girls in orange bikinis, with flowers in their hair, dancing on skates. Theirs was a choreographed and well-rehearsed showpiece.
One thing I hate about the boardwalk scene is the attitude of people who think the beach is their private toilet and garbage can. It makes me want to bring back capital punishment for breaking glass and leaving dog shit. There´s been a costly legal controversy going on for seven years about extending the bike path into Marina del Rey, and as tempting as it is to blame the rich folk for being exclusionary snobs, when you see the crap and filth that public access brings, you can see their point.

 

Ricky Jay the magician lives in Venice with a collection of more than 200 books on magic. Edward Weston, who is regional director of Actors Equity, has a "little retreat at the beach." I read someplace that Charles Eames, who invented the famous Eames chair, lived here in the "postwar period." Other past residents of Venice are said to have included Fatty Arbuckle, Jean Harlow, Clifford Irving, and members of Canned Heat. Also Janis Joplin, Ricki Lee Jones, Ken Kesey, Bob Kaufman, and Kenneth Patchen. Someone told me that Mario Savio of the Berkeley free speech movement used to live at Ocean Front Walk and 25th. I´ve also been told that Rudolph Valentino had a stone house at Speedway and Anchorage, but another source says it was actually Francis X. Bushman´s house and the Sheik was a frequent visitor.

Chapter 1
July-September 1978

Venice is a Los Angeles coastal community like sex is a biological function: an accurate description as far as if goes, and woefully inadequate. Immediately to the south is Marina del Rey, mainly high-rise clone-hives infested by affluent swinging singles. The neighbor to the north is Santa Monica, which isn´t even part of LA. A small yet fiercely chauvinistic area called Ocean Park is sandwiched between Santa Monica and Venice. It´s all continuously populated and the borders are hazy and sometimes arbitrary.
Like its Italian predecessor, with six distinct districts, Venice of America is made up of smaller geographical zones. Sure, I´d rather live in the canal district, or on one of the charming, rustically decadent walk streets perpendicular to Ocean Front. The original developers, ironically, saw the walk streets as a way to economize. To live there now, you need the income of a coke dealer or coke dealers´ lawyer. So I live in Oakwood, which is hazardous but relatively cheap.
I first came to Venice about a year ago, with a friend who took me to the weekly poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque Foundation on West Washington, in a building dressed up by an Aubrey Beardsleyesque mural. The walls of the back room were lined with shelves containing the most complete collection of small press publications in this or probably any hemisphere. Spewing phrases like "semantic substructure," the poets tore each other´s work apart. One indignant critic said, "This is the third time this week I´ve been in the presence of someone who referred to an iceberg as a glacier." Around nine, sounds of live jazz began drifting in from a club down the street. After the poetry, we went to O´Mahoney´s in Santa Monica, where the house band is called Hot Lips and Fingertips. They do a kind of mixture of rock, Irish folk tunes, and progressive country. Their publicity photos, posted near the door, were imprinted with a Venice phone number. The whole thing was just love at first sight, and "Venice or bust" became my guiding principle.

 

Back where I´m originally from, they subscribe to the Continental Tilt Theory: the whole country is on a slant and everything loose rolls to California. It follows that Venice, on the very edge of the edge, is the Last Resort, the place where it all finally comes to rest. It took me a while to roll here. First there were several months in an outlying region 30 miles east of downtown LA, then an interlude in an unremarkable part of the city near the junction of Robertson Blvd. and the Santa Monica Freeway. I lived there with Tony, and part of the reason we´re not together any more is he didn´t want to move to Venice and I did.
There were a hundred reasons: everything I´d seen, heard, and read, and especially the Venice people. Even though I couldn´t move here yet, my job in a medical office introduced me to a lot of them.
They were different, like the boy with a tiny gold ring in his nose, or the law student who broke her wrist rollerskating on the boardwalk just before the bar exams. Or Dick Drake, who looks like a Hell´s Angel and goes around with an unremovable bullet lodged next to his spinal cord. When he found out I played the violin but didn´t have one, he loaned me his.
There was the clinically paranoid musician who´s been in some semi-famous rock groups and does a lot of business writing lead sheets. A professional sex surrogate who lives on Ocean Front Walk said, "I wouldn´t live anywhere else." Only a couple days ago, I met a photographer who wore a Venice t-shirt. When I told him I was in the process of moving here, he said, "Congratulations" and shook my hand.
In the course of packing, I looked through some old letters and realized that one of my oldest friends from back home, who moved away, used to live on Boccacio Place in Venice. I never made the connection before.
The newspaper recently quoted one of the guys who hangs out playing the drums at the beach. He says, "This beach has always been integrated. That never has been a problem here. It´s a problem for the rest of the world, but not here."

 

Right off the boardwalk, on the beach side, there are many large umbrella-like shade structures made of wood and painted dark green, with benches beneath them. The locals call them pagodas, which I suspect is a corruption of pergolas. I´m sitting in one of them, near a wino, a skinny, unkempt white woman who smells pretty stale and has something wrong with her eyes. In the next pagoda, the usual group of men are pounding on congas, bongos, djembes, and doumbeks.
Two young women in rollerskates are here too. One says to the other, "Those drums, it sounds like the natives are restless."
The wino says, "Don´t say that, they´re human beings. Don´t you say that to them." The two young women decide it´s time to move on.
The wino, incoherent with indignation, says, "Don´t tell me a...????"
I reassure her, "You´re right, she shouldn´t have said that."
"You got a quarter?" I give her a quarter.
"Do you wear jewelry?"
"Not very much."
"Here, I want you to have this bracelet." She rolls up her sleeve and slides a bracelet from her upper arm. "This is gold," she says, and picks up my arm and starts putting it on me. "Wear it right next to your heart."
"It won´t go up that far."
"Here, I´ll get it up there." She pushes the bracelet as far as possible up my arm, which isn´t far.
I say thanks and stand up, and tell her I´d better get home and see about my kid.
She peers up at me very solemnly and says, "I´ll remember you for the rest of my life."

 

There´s something about this zone of sand and cement, greenery, architecture and humanity, that electrifies the imagination. Every stroll along the boardwalk is Peak Experience time. Venice Beach is what results when the very rich and the very poor, who both have a lot of leisure time on their hands, choose to spend that time in much the same way. Venice Beach is a place with more facets than a chandelier. It is a true agora, a place where everyone does their thing in public, which fills a very deeply felt human need. But it´s also a place that can quickly foster agoraphobia.

 

On the boardwalk today (which is not boards at all, but concrete) some Krishna devotees were rounding up people to get on the bus and go to a feast at their Culver City headquarters.
The second time I ever came to Venice was the middle of August last year for the annual Hare Krishna festival, billed as the Love Feast for Thousands. For an imposing spectacle, there´s nothing like the stately procession of the giant chariots as they approach from Santa Monica, pulled all the way along Ocean Front Walk by the devotees. The double-decker chariots, made of painted wood, were covered with flowers and carried dozens of children, dressed in Indian garments, who threw flowers to the huge crowd. The whole lawn around the Pavilion was filled with ornately embroidered tents and awnings, beautifully sewn from bright colored cloth. They had music, exhibits illustrating the Krishna lifestyle, and a large tent where dozens of sari-draped women dispensed the free vegetarian dinners. It pissed me off to see how many people threw their paper plates, styrofoam cups, and even the delicious food, on the ground.

 

On the wall of the Pavilion where a NO PARKING sign is stencilled, somebody came along with pink paint and crossed out a word and added a word, to make the message read NO FUTURE. A notice posted by Rich Mann invites participation in his new project, a mile-long photomural called "I See Designs." Another announcement tacked to a telephone pole is headed, "Artists in Venice-Good Neighbors or Trojan Horse?" (Locals who claim to know say there are about 30 internationally prominent artists here.) The inflammatory issue is the proposed Main & Rose development, and a split has occurred between the poor, minority, working-class residents of Venice and the "artists behind frosted windows."
Half a block from the boardwalk and separated from it by a vacant lot is a building called Fern Violette. I stop there to visit John Wehrle, an artist who is not behind a frosted window, but out there in front of God and everybody, in his usual spot about ten feet up on a scaffold. For some weeks he´s been working on a mural called "The Fall of Icarus." Its desert scenery is reminiscent of San Antonio, where he was born. He used to know Michael Murphey. I talk about a friend back East who is a guerilla muralist, painting under cover of darkness to surprise the populace at dawn. John tells me about a woman who painted a large nude in one night, over a highway somewhere in Malibu. Another visitor stops by, a man who says he´s been wearing spectrographic glasses in order to see the lead that is everywhere. The fall of Rome, he says, was caused by the entire water supply being in lead pipes.

 

With my daughter Carla I visited Santa Monica Pier and the historic and still-functional merry-go-round. Dick Drake told me a while ago about how two friends of his got married there. On a normal business day however, when no wedding ceremony is in progress, you buy a ticket at the booth, then go through the gate toward the merry-go-round. Then the same guy who sold you the ticket pops out and takes it back.
My first time at the pier was back in January with Ananda. First, she talked me into driving her up to Topanga Canyon to check her post office box. She stayed low in the car because the local law enforcement had warned her not to be seen again in those parts. Then we drove as close as people are allowed to Dylan´s Malibu ranch. Ananda is barred from there forever because she got bombed on tequila and rode one of the horses into a lather. On the way back we stopped at the pier and walked out to the end, where a wedding ceremony was in progress-Russian Orthodox would be my guess. The couple went out in a rowboat with the priest and the rest of the crowd held candles. They gave us candles too.
The Fern Violette building belongs to a clothing manufacturer who used to inhabit it until she made enough money to move to Montana and open a truck stop. Filmmaker Carl Borack turned it into offices, editing rooms, etc., and Richard Dreyfuss took one of the offices. Ananda came along with me to drop a fan letter through the mail slot. She was a wonderful guide to Venice, pointing out such landmarks as the white tower formerly inhabited by Isadora Duncan, or so the legend goes. Ananda herself used to live here a couple years back. She made a career of being a boardwalk character and never strolled along Ocean Front without a Gila monster on her shoulder. Since she looks like the incarnation of a Botticelli painting, it must have been a striking sight.
In the sand there are groups of attractively weathered round posts. Ananda told me about a movie Jim Morrison made when he was a UCLA cinema student. According to her, he was tied to the pilings and shot. He lived in the canal district, and also in a building on the boardwalk where the band practiced on the roof. One of his songs, "My Eyes Have Seen You," is about all the TV antennas visible from that roof. He wrote "Hello, I Love You" about a black woman he saw at Venice beach, and a song called "Soul Kitchen" is said to be about Olivia´s, a ribs and cornbread place that used to be somewhere around here.

 

The LA Times reported on a new eleven-member task force headed by an Oakwood apartment manager in his fifth month of residence. The members were elected at a community meeting organized by councilwoman Pat Russell and attended by a hundred people. In the first quarter of this year, crime rose 20%. The police department assigned thirty extra officers to the area. They say that in the first week, the number of crimes dropped from 257 to 188. Just for comparison purposes, I wonder what the normal week-to-week variations are, and what other factors might influence the numbers. In fact, I wonder about the numbers themselves. The Ocean Front Weekly prints a weekly log of local crime. Assault, burglary, kidnapping, robbery and theft are the categories represented in the list for the first week of May this year, and only nineteen crimes are listed altogether. If the weekly average is, say, 200, what happened to the other 180? Does the OFW only list the most interesting ones? Are the rest of them all traffic stops and open container violations?
In that same week of May, a man was stabbed at Breeze Avenue and Ocean Front for not having any spare change. On Westminster, a block from the beach, a man was abducted, tied up and shoved into the trunk of a car, driven to Hollywood, then brought back to an apartment on Westminster and sodomized. Also, on the same block, two guys in a car asked a man if he wanted to buy some drugs. He got in the car with them and was beaten and robbed of $12. The next day, a man offered to sell some pot to two suspects in a car. He got in the car and was beaten and robbed of $65 worth of personal property. (How much of that consisted of pot is not reported.) There were burglaries on San Juan, Breeze, and Market Street. In a Dudley Avenue break-in, among other loot the burglars got away with a gun.
Anyway, this Times article blathers on about how everything is going to hell because the community is deeply skeptical about the effectiveness of organization. Really? People in Venice adore organizations. They´re forever getting up petitions and holding marches and picketing any business that pisses them off.
One of Russell´s aides says that most of the task force members have been activists in Venice for 10 to 15 years, "and as a result have a limited impact on the community." This makes no sense. It seems to me that seasoned veteran activists must be more effective, not less so. It also doesn´t fit with the reporter´s contention that Venice people are skeptical about organizations. Then the aide says, "We would like more representation from what used to be called the Silent Majority-older people and parents of children..." But hey-if these task force folks have been at the activism game for ten or fifteen years, they must be "older people," wouldn´t you think?
The history of Venice activism goes back to at least 1907. When the Ocean Park government wouldn´t give Abbott Kinney a permit to build a bathhouse or "plunge" because it would compete with a similar establishment owned by a trustee, Kinney went ahead and started building anyway. The authorities ordered that the foundation be destroyed. When the wreckers arrived they found a hundred women and children picnicking on the partially completed walls, who refused to disperse when ordered. The demolition boss got madder and madder and finally went home, and the question of the permit was dropped.

 

The same scenes are going down everywhere. In Venice there´s the $45 half ounce of weed and in Brentwood there´s the lump of cocaine the size of a baby´s head. Still, the availability of drugs in Venice is legendary. In the old days Venice was almost the only part of LA that wasn´t dry, and sailors came here to get drunk. Maybe it was the alcohol that kept the Venetians healthy and virtually unscathed by the vicious flu epidemic of 1918. Then came Prohibition throughout California, which only made the local smugglers and bootleggers richer. Kind of like now, with the drug situation.
Abbott Kinney, the founding father of Venice, made his fortune in Sweet Caporal cigarettes (drugs again). He also bought a large tract of land near Sierra Madre known as Kinneloa and became widely known for his methods of citrus culture. In 1883 he was part of a commission that investigated the condition of the Southern California´s Mission Indians and recommended breaking up the reservations. A fellow commissioner, Helen Hunt Jackson, wrote a book about it called Ramona.

 

Tony and I aren´t officially "together" any more but we still hang out. We took a walk to the beach to see Ben (one of Tony´s music friends) and his girlfriend Lucy, who live in an ugly new building with an ocean view. We found them poking around at a "moving sale" on the boardwalk, sorely tempted to buy some 8-foot Gro-lux lamps. They got a china cabinet instead. I predict trouble ahead for this relationship. We saw the gold bracelet woman, who had one eye swollen up something awful.

 

Boardwalk scene: As a singer-guitarist performs, his listeners include a wino who does a boisterous hula dance. This is particularly effective because of the wino´s manner of dress: no shirt, and pants that ride low on the hips with three or four pieces of clothing tucked into the waistband, hanging down like a skirt. He carries a red sleeping bag bunched up in one hand and a couple of old books in the other. Irritated I suppose by an apparent lack of respect for art, a friend of the musician gets on his bicycle and charges at the hula wino, who suddenly takes off running across the sand. The pursuer jumps off the bike and gives chase on foot. The wino flings away first the sleeping bag, then the books, as he runs along with sand spraying up from beneath his feet. He sheds the shirt and jacket and whatever else had been draped around his waist. The musician´s friend almost catches up, and the wino goes down, losing his pants on the way and giving the boardwalk a view of his scrawny ass.

 

People are very political around here and there are all kinds of activist organizations, like Co-Opportunity in Santa Monica, which has a waiting list in the hundreds. The Venice-Ocean Park Co-op evolved out of a buyers´ club called the Free Venice Food Co-op. It has a $3 membership fee, plus you buy a $10 share and then put in two hours of work and another fee each month. It meets at the Church in Ocean Park, a renegade Methodist outfit with a radical preacher, where a lot of the activism in the neighborhood originates. I first learned about the church from a flyer on green legal-size paper I picked up at the Old Main Street Fair last August. It describes itself as "a gathering of persons of common spirit celebrating life through art, liturgy and laughter, sharing with one another and acting on behalf of life in the political arena." Aside from Sunday morning services and Sunday evening programs of art, music, film and dance, the church sponsors the Public Works Improvisational Theater Company, the Women´s Center, the Community Center, the Centro Legal, the Children´s Place (day care) and is affiliated with the Westside Women´s Clinic where abortions are available from $85 to $150.

 

Another revelation at the Old Main Street Fair last year was the music of Francisco and his Cosmic Beam, which I heard again more recently at the Venice Pavilion. Francisco Lupica has an actual I-beam electrified somehow to make ethereal noises. The Beam is held by two driftwood tree trunks with masses of roots, trimmed off evenly to be support stands. It not only looks great but must be very stable. He also plays acoustic guitar, electric space guitar, drums, chimes, zither, gongs, and some weird homegrown instruments like the one made out of a couple hundred house and car keys hanging in a bunch. He´s performed with such folks as Lee Michaels and Taj Mahal and was even in a hillbilly band in Georgia. At his concerts Francisco sells his independently recorded LPs, cassettes and 45 rpm singles. He says about his music, "One of the first comments people make is, ´Aha! I feel so high and I didn´t even get stoned.´" Dr. John Lilly, of isolation tank and talking-to-dolphins fame, has officially endorsed the Cosmic Beam Experience as "the best prescription I know."
Civilian vehicles aren´t allowed on the ocean front, but cop cars roam the boardwalk like Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Garden of Eden. The bikers pass around bottles clenched in brown paper bags. Francisco introduces a friend-"without him it would be real difficult to put this on." The gold bracelet wino, wearing a bikini and with one eye grotesquely swollen, is over near the Beam. She´s inside the rope, sparring with a man who tries to convince her to get back in the audience. As the roadie tries for the third or fourth time to remove the contentious drunk, Francisco remarks, "Will Venice ever change?"
Another rowdy young chick tries to dance but can barely stand up. A bouncer hands her over to a guy dressed in black who humors and hugs her, tells her he loves her. A little girl with a key around her neck wears a t-shirt that commemorates the Motorcycle Toy Run. Francisco gives us a light-hearted number called "Going Down the River." Over on the pavement, a young man dances while astride a tall unicycle. Francisco announces another piece: "This is a song for people who have a hard time hanging out with themselves." A man says, "You must be thinking about me then, brother." Yet another derelict woman dances with a scruffy looking character who can´t stop holding onto his own ears. She dances with the speakers and tries to crawl up into them. A man calls his daughter-"Ariadne..."-and Arnold Schwarzenegger is in the crowd.