A picture from some months ago– even in the worst of times, dear old Los Angeles isn’t normally this smoggy. Taken towards the tale end of the ‘09 Station fire. From up top, it looked as though a grey semi-circle ringed the city, drifting in over the hills through the east, behind downtown, over the south and all the way out to the Pacific Ocean.

They call it the June Gloom.

Hollywood Blvd.

Returned to the Nazi Fortress, saw new things, saw familiar things, took some pictures:

Several days’ worth.

5124 De Longpre Avenue, Los Angeles, California, United States of America, North American Continent, Planet Earth, System Sol: one-time residence of Charles Bukowski. Now an Historic Landmark and now occupied after a long vacancy.

Incidentally, this is located about 5 blocks away from my apartment.

Plus, a repeat visit with the God of Medicine, now tagged:

John Fante is oft considered the real deal, a Los Angeles writer of genuine talent; as far as I can tell, this reputation is based entirely on the word of one man– Chuckie Bukowski– and one novel, Ask the Dust, viewed by Bukowski as a kind of founding document of his own career. I bought Ask the Dust a few months ago– before I knew it was the centennial of Fante’s birth– because of this fabulous post about the apartment in which the book was writ. (Caveat emptor, my sweet darlings, cuz it’s got a few photos of human feces smeared about the floors.)

Having read Ask the Dust, I am now left wondering if anyone other than Bukowski bothered reading past the first twenty pages– yes, it’s nice enough to have an evocation of 1930s Bunker Hill, but that river quickly runs dry, leaving the parched reader with a clunky novel that provides answers to questions everyone has since forgotten. The characterization, such as it is, has one laughing at the author’s seeming ignorance of any human interaction, ever, and the last third of the book contains the worst drug writing that I’ve had the misfortune of reading. We’re talking straight-up, genuine Reefer Madness.

The plot of the book, such as it is, revolves almost entirely around the protagonist’s pursuit of a young Latina woman named Camilla Lopez, a Frankenstein’s Monster of cliches stitched together with misogyny and racism– she’s a Mexican pretending to be white, she’s a hophead lost to the perils of maryjane addiction, she can’t love the author’s stand-in cuz she loves another man who doesn’t love her and she’s an awful whore or some bother like that– that lumbers through the book, ever in danger of being chased by peasants into a burning windmill.

One might forgive the novel its flaws if they read as period anachronisms– after all, ain’t that Heaffy and Caffy jes’ so lifeylike tho’ they speke ne diff’runt from yous and I– but Fante isn’t simply of his period, he’s a victim of it, utterly unable to rise above gutter literature of the late Thirties. It’s a testament to Hank Aqualung’s hold over Los Angeles’s post-Chandler vision of itself– or perhaps the fact that no New Messiah has Arisen amidst chanted Hosannahs and resounding Hallelujahs– that the nodding head of a drink besotted pervert, himself not an especially astute student of human behavior, could elevate a period obscurity into a work deserving 100 year celebrations.

This post is long overdue. I first mentioned my copy of Herzog way back on June 7th, 2007, in this blog’s second week of existence. Less than two years but feels like an eternity. I’m still buying cheap books from Out of the Closet at Hollywood & Western, but these days the deals come in editions of Recent Works. The other week I scored a proof of The Fortress of Solitude and a $0.25 copy of Jesus’ Son; ain’t read either of them yet, as Dorian Gray’s uncle might say, but soon enough they’ll pass before my weary eyes.

But yes, one of the very, very first books I ever bought was a Book Club edition of Saul Bellow’s Herzog. It took me a few months, but once I opened it, I discovered an authentic artifact of old Los Angeles history– for beneath the dustjacket, there was an underjacket identifying the book as property of the Larchmont Bookshop, a long gone establishment that both sold and rented books.

According to the title page, Herzog went for $0.10 a day! The underjacket carries ads for other businesses, presenting a wonderful snapshot of Larchmont Village circa 1965. I’m particular fond of the slogan employed by Bond Cleaners– “Our Work is Our Bond” –and of the ad for Dr. Harry Locks, Chiropractor. Nice to see the phone numbers using the HO exchange.

I see this guy nearly every time I’m at the Starbucks at Hollywood & Western, churning out screenplays on an old electric typewriter. Normally I wouldn’t photograph him– and never have– but this encounter amazed me. He was hand drawing page after page after page of six panel storyboards. So… I had an ethical lapse.

I didn’t stick around to see if he ever drew anything inside.

From the Los Feliz Ledger, “The ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ started on Kingswell,” by Jean Luc Renault, Community News, February 2008:

LOS FELIZ—When Extra Copy on Kingswell Avenue opened in 1994, the staff knew nothing about the small storefront’s unique history.

About a year later, one visitor changed all that.

“An old woman came into the store and just started crying,” said Extra Copy’s manager Marine Ter-Pogosyan. “She told us she used to work here when it was Disney’s studio.”

Stumbling distance from the Dresden Restaurant’s parking lot, the storefront was the Disney brothers’ first standalone animation studio. But brothers Walt and Roy had been perfecting their animation on Kingswell Avenue for some time before that.

The only photo I could find of the Disneys with the store front fully visible in the background. Apologies for the terrible quality.

Also, a note about Extra Copy: they are a fine place to make duplications! Recommended.

Pictures of what I assume is the US premiere of Watchmen at Grauman’s Chinese.

This is the second time that I’ve been in the presence of the movie’s big stupid prop Owl Ship. My first time was at the San Diego Comic Con. Even there, I don’t think I got any closer. Today I wondered, as I am wont to do in nearly every circumstance, if this made me Special– how many people have ended up near this thing twice and by random?

But my higher brain took over and I decided, no, I’m just a shitbird for living in California.

I will say this– it is incredibly strange to see that thing in person. Not because I am much a fan of the original comic, a brilliantly drawn and constructed but ultimately creaky work of pink boy Cold War Leftism, an anachronism about as appealing and relevant as coercive interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib, but rather because it looks so much like something from the mind of Steve Ditko. The genesis of Watchmen is common lore– the characters are based on 1960s Charlton superheroes, most of which were drawn by Ditko– but it’s rarely remarked how much the comic (and now, the movie) visually resembles Ditko’s Charlton stuff.

Here’s a few panels of the Owl Ship (in the comic, anyway, it’s called the Archimedes, and yes, I’m a sad person for knowing that):

Here’s part of a page with multiple panels of Ditko drawing Blue Beetle’s ship, The Bug, taken from Blue Beetle #3:

I also scanned a page of that issue’s Question back-up:

Seriously. Pure Rorschach.

–

Directly across the street from the Owl Ship, there were two (2) guys dressed up like Spider-Man. It’s Ditko’s world. We’re all tourists.

2/24/09: We still all want our time in Hell.

5260 Harold Way, off Western, between Hollywood & Sunset. Where Bela Lugosi died.

Proof that you see the same places on the way down.

January 10th, 2009. Looking West Hollywood-ishy. From the porch-thing of LACMA Broad Contemporary.

“Rustic Canyon Ruin May Be a Former Nazi Compound,” Los Angeles Times, September 4th, 2005, by Cecilia Rasmussen:

Southern California has been the cradle to many odd cults, credos, utopias and dystopias. Among the most mysterious are the ruins of a Rustic Canyon enclave once known as Murphy Ranch…

…Wrapped in canyon lore, the remnants are believed by one local historian to be those of a small, short-lived colony of Nazis. Although no one can say with certainty who lived there or what they did, Randy Young, a former commercial photographer turned book publisher, said his research indicates that it could have been home to up to 40 local Nazis from about 1933 to 1945…

… According to Los Angeles County records, a Jessie M. Murphy purchased the 50-acre parcel in Rustic Canyon in 1933. That’s how the place came to be known as Murphy Ranch.

Young suspects that Murphy was a front name used by the Nazi group to buy the property. There are no other records of Murphy, nor does the name surface in stories passed along by old-time canyon residents, Young said.

A man known through oral histories only as “Herr Schmidt” supposedly ruled the place and claimed to possess metaphysical powers. He purportedly used the ranch to introduce his Nazi-inspired political philosophy.

Full text.

–

November 30th, 2008.

This is where you enter:

Here are mountains, which make a man feel as though he has entered the Land of the Lost:

One may continue on to the main gate, or descend these stairs:

The first thing you’ll see is a big ol’ stupid gas tank, then there will be more stairs with weird mechanical boxes along the railing:

Five hundred or so more steps down, and a brisk walk along a crappy road, you come to the abandoned power station. It is covered in graffiti and empty. It has a crawl-space for a basement, like every other building in Sunny Southern California.

Travelin’ farther on the path, you come to the devastation of former living quarters. Note that the bathroom tiling has been subject to classy graffito, simulating a glory hole in white and blue. Also DEATH PIRATES graffiti featuring a circle with an A in the middle. Lots of piping and junk.

Assorted debris along the way. Hell Run, a fireplace in a ditch and a crashed-out hippie Van with an UCLA gate pass from 1969:

Further along are the stables. Gated and abandoned.

Walking uphill, one comes to the backside of the front gate. But first there is the water tank:

Goodbye, Goodbye:

Truly questionable eating. An LA tradition decked out Xmas style:

It offers salvation…

….and sin:

Yes. I ate that:

Behind the Ennis-Brown House. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. An Aztec Temple of shoddily mixed concrete rising up over Los Feliz. A new type of nightmare for an old fashioned sort of girl.

Los Angeles voters approved Measure R to increase sales taxes to fund transportation projects, but some projects could take a while to get off the ground. The proposed subway line along Wilshire Boulevard could start by 2013 or 2015 at the earliest, but the mayor of Los Angeles hailed the victory. “The commuters of L.A. were fed up with traffic and gas prices, and they responded by making a historic investment that will change the face of transportation in the region forever,” said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Thursday, 3pm, November 6th, 2008. Santa Monica and Vermont Metro Stop.

(Sorry for the photo quality.)

Hollywood provides endless fodder for one of my worst habits: collecting street ephemera. There is something not present in Los Angeles, a missing piece of the urban environment, that makes it the place par excellence for crazies communicating via light posts. It lacks the self-consciousness of a small town, and it is without the presumed superiority of aesthetic skill of other big cities. It is the epicenter.

I’ve collected a lot of crap off these mean streets, but none of my previous finds had prepared me for my discovery of some weeks past.

Picture this: I’m walking down Sunset near Guitar Center. Possessing a trained eye for such matters, I notice a bundle of papers sitting atop a mailbox. Writing is visible; instantly, I recognize that the letter forms bear the trace of a lunatic. A quick glance around establishes that the author is nowhere present. I grab the packet and go on my merry way.

Later at home, I find this:

Intrigued by the high craziness, I googled on the names of the women to whom the letters were addressed, and discovered that they were individuals who’d written into Vogue on the topic of racism in fashion. Their letters appeared in the July 2008 issue:

Moving along, we come to drawings of a highly sexualized nature, the first of which poses the eternal question: “Paula,… do you masturbate?”

Next, we approach matters automotive:

For the curious, here are pages 7 and the left side of 7 1/2 merged. Together, they form the full Chack-Chack Roadster:

The final two pages are an address on current affairs. Typical of most post-9/11 street writing, these pages include a denunciation of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Most street writing, however, doesn’t suggest that either man associates with crack-cocaine using bordello prostitutes, nor does it typically involve convoluted fantasies of an imaginary bank:

Thus concludes this installment of literature from the streets.

You might be interested in knowing on what sort of paper such a series of thoughts and illustrations would be written. I have helpfully scanned the back of one of the pages. The reader will note that this is a mileage reimbursement form for an employee of the Los Angeles Public Libraries. This is true of all 10 sheets of paper, which in some form or another relate to mileage reimbursement. They date from 2002 through to 2007. Many of them include the name of said employee. (Omitted here, obviously.) The page I’ve scanned appears to be a fax from or to the Goldwyn Hollywood Library; but, again, thanks to Google, I was able to trace the forms to the Will & Ariel Durant Library.

This branch sits a few blocks away from where I found the papers. I imagine the whole thing somehow started there; after all, they probably keep Vogue on the racks. Anyway: