An experiment I’ve been conducting since moving to Los Angeles: not buying books deliberately. This is not to imply abstinence, merely that I’ve opted to not acquire books based on my desire for them, instead letting fate and chance determine what ends up getting purchased. I can’t swear to total fealty to this approach– there have been a handful of Amazon foulups– but mostly I’ve kept to the technique. LA helps: is this the only major city in the US without a crazy huge warehouse bookstore?

A major component of the strategy has been the cheap acquisition of titles at the Hollywood & Western Out of the Closet, which has the best selection I’ve ever seen in a thrift store. Most books sell for $0.25. My guess is that these shelves are the end destination for the collections of the recent (but not rich) Hollywood dead & volumes given up by failed actors before the move home. Along with countless great deals, I’ve found many oddities — including a book club edition of Bellow’s Herzog that had been a rental at a local Hollywood bookstore in the 1960s. It still has the store’s secondary dustjacket detailing the terms of rentals. $0.05 a day.

Just recently I came across the weirdest book yet– a rebound copy of the 1960s Dover edition of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours. I’ve read both the Dover and the Penguin, and if I’m not mistaken, this is the good translation. It keeps in all the homoerotica and god knows what else. Plus it’s readable. Anyway, considering that Dover’s books are designed to never fall apart, it is very strange to find one rebound– and, as the spine demonstrates, this is a privately rebound copy. It’s not a library book.

Huzzah for Peter Smith!

Other details include a flyleaf inscription by (presumed secondary) owner John G. Cleary, Jr., and another flyleaf inscription from the dealer that sold the volume. $4.50! I paid a quarter! The seller was Charles Sessler Inc., of Philadelphia, which seems to have been a storied establishment. Apparently now gone. Que sera sera.

Big day in Hollywood: Paris Hilton thrown back in jail. Much schadenfreude on all sides.

In celebration, here’s another weird book from the junk shop. A copy of the 14th printing of None Dare Call It Treason by John A. Stormer. Although impossible to read, I’m a big fan of mid-century anti-Commie literature. The books are always fascinating objects– disconnected from the design, printing, and intellectual currents of New York publishing, they’re a sweet fix for the ephemera addict.

This particular title sold something like 7 million copies. While not exactly a rarity, it does have a few interesting highlights, as you’ll see below. I like the HO (for Hollywood) phone number of the original owner.

Yay for the Wayback Machine– it allowed me to find the now dead transcript of Bertolt Brecht’s HUAC testimony during the first wave of Hollywood Blacklist hearings. Unlike the ten who refused to testify, Brecht, rather concerned that he might miss his plane back to Europe, faced the music– and promptly outwitted, mystified and wore down the entire Committee.

A particular highlight:

MR. STRIPLING: Mr. Brecht, since you have been in the United States, have you attended any Communist Party meetings?

MR. BRECHT: No, I don’t think so.

MR. STRIPLING: You don’t think so?

MR. BRECHT: No.

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, aren’t you certain?

MR. BRECHT: No-I am certain, yes.

THE CHAIRMAN: You are certain you have never been to Communist Party meetings?

MR. BRECHT: Yes, I think so. I am here six years-I am here those-I do not think so. I do not think that I attended political meetings.

THE CHAIRMAN: No, never mind the political meetings, but have you attended any Communist meetings in the United States?

MR. BRECHT: I do not think so, no.

THE CHAIRMAN: You are certain?

MR. BRECHT: I think I am certain.

THE CHAIRMAN: You think you are certain?

MR. BRECHT: Yes, I have not attended such meetings, in my opinion.

It’s hardly better than trash-picking but I am an aficionado of taking fliers from light-poles. Today I came across one for a missing dog, lulu– it’s both sad and also (unintentionally) the funniest & weirdest thing I’ve seen in a flier.

FYI: I wouldn’t take a lost dog flier under normal circumstances and had a debate about this one, but there were a lot around.

This was to be first in a comical series of examples about my neighborhood and my inability to discern a quote-ghetto-unquote from anything short of a subdivision where the median income is $200k/yr. I was here for half a year before I realized that I was living in what most people would consider a ghetto– and only because someone said, “Dude, you live in a bad neighborhood.” This is nonsense: there’s no such thing as a bad neighborhood. The entire idea is a subtle form of racism and/or classism. If anything, I live in an up-and-comer waiting to be gentrified by the slow crawl of plasticine actresses and scumbag directors. I’m probably their shock corps.

Anyway, once you’ve tasted the apple… On my own, I wouldn’t have looked for examples but now I do, and I thought some blog hilarity might be had via the circumstances of the human comedy. About two weeks ago I got off the Metro and there was an awful, awful smell in the air. Fire. I couldn’t figure out where from, so I kept walking towards my apartment and there, down a side-street, it was: a burning car. Firefighters were already on the scene.

I didn’t have my camera, which I immediately regretted. But reality’s got my back: the burned out hulk has been sitting in the same spot ever since. So this was going to be my first jokey post– images of the burned out car & a you know you’re living in a bad neighborhood when… they’re torching cars. Totally awesome!

Only problem: the car is parked in front of the neighborhood drug house. I’m 80% certain that the guys who torched the car are the same guys always in front of the house. Then I had a visionary moment: holy, this is like a salt and pepper set. You know you live in a bad neighorhood when they’re torching cars… and the car’s too close to a drug house to take pictures! #1 & #2.

Huzzah.

So there’s this woman in Los Angeles named Prophet Olga Soto, who is infamous for predicting the appearance of Jesus at the lake in Echo Park. If you aren’t from LA, you know Echo Park and its lake from the beginning of Chinatown. If you are from LA, you know Echo Park as the neighborhood loaded down with two-piece bands, guys who continue to dress like Elliot Smith, and a handful unfortunate bars.

The appearances of Jesus (7/7/05 and 7/7/07) were heralded in hastily scrawled fliers that Olga taped all over the city. The general craziness of content, combined with Olga’s poor English (and not so hot Spanish), have been the occassion for hilarity amongst the dissolute class of hipsters and slackers that find amusement in any expression of religious belief.

Being a collector of ephemera (read: trash picker) and always interested in offbeat religious expression, I tend to take Olga a little more serious than, well, anyone else, really. I don’t find her funny– just fascinating. It’s interesting to think about the leveling out effect that easy duplication has had amongst religious dissenters. If this were 17th century England, Olga’d have to find a lunatic to pay for her typesetting and printing, and then convince a bookseller by St. Paul’s to sell her stuff. The wide availability of copy machines allowed Olga to nearly blanket certain neighborhoods (mine included) with her fliers, for months and months and months.

I had meant to go to the appearance of Jesus on Saturday, but in the bad craziness of the preceding week, I forgot entirely that it was happening. But I have hung out with Olga a handful of times over the last few months. She’s quite nice but obviously troubled, and, as always, it’s nearly impossible to hold a conversation with someone that speaks in tongues.

Here’s my collection of her fliers, picked up over the last few months:

A miscellany:

#1. Okay, I give up. I’ve had my conversion. I adore Achewood and I don’t care who knows.

#2. Given the amount of dudes now dressing up like Captain Jack Sparrow outside of the Chinese Theatre, I propose the institution of a new Hollywood game: Pirate or Homeless?

#3. This interview fascinates not because the President is grilled by a journalist outside the clubby atmosphere of the mainstream media/White House press corps, but because of the unbelievable condescension with with Bush responds. Considering his general reputation as something less than a leading intellectual light, I’ve long found it interesting how much of Bush’s articulation involves speaking down to his listener, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen him manifest it like an Andover old boy. At first I thought it might be because the interviewer is a woman, and chicks need to be spoken to like they’re idiots, but then I realized: Oh my god, no, it’s because she’s Irish. Bush is talking down to her because she’s Irish, and when you’re at Andover or Yale in the 60s, who better to take a few lumps than Paddy?

In honor of The Lost Tracks of Danzig being released, I decided I’d go and take pictures of Glenn Danzig’s house. Mostly the only pictures online of the house are not-so-great images of creepy goth kids standing in front. Anyway, I walk over and first off I see that Danzig’s black-as-night Jaguar XK8 is in the driveway, meaning he’s actually living there again, and then I notice that he’s seriously had the hedges trimmed, and worse yet: THE BRICKS ARE GONE.

Those bricks have been on Danzig’s front lawn since the Northridge earthquake! I remember reading about them in Spin in ‘96!

So I ended up not taking any pictures, but I did bang around online and I found a few images of the bricks. They will be missed. It was reassuring thing to know that no matter how crappy your day, you always could head to Los Feliz and see Danzig’s big ol’ stupid pile of bricks. But alack, no more!

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

UPDATE: Attention Danzig fans! Read this!

Catnappers.

Found at 2pm on July 18th:

“wussup cerote
Hopefully you had a good
time at Rito cus I
do when I go. Damen(?)
Hopefully you won the
championship by the time
you get this. Aight then
foo latez”

As reported earlier, Prophet Olga’s second due-date for the appearance of Jesus Christ in Echo Park came and went. I had wondered if this would be the end of Olga’s street ministry & publicly posted Xeroxed broadsides– but huzzah! Olga’s returned, and while she’s not nearly as prolific in the run-up to July 7, 2007, a handful of fliers have begun once more to appear on lampposts and building-sides.

This flyer contains many interesting aspects: visually it’s a fantastic piece of street art, kind of a palimpsest, and in terms of content, it provides us with a new host of predictions. The new due-date for Jesus Christ is November 30, 2008, but Christ will be appear in the homes of all angels (Olga’s term for those who believe), rather than simply in Echo Park.

Also Olga predicts a nuclear bomb attack on New York in 2009.

I’ve never understood the dense calendric symbolism of Olga’s broadsides. My Spanish is not nearly good enough to know if this flier makes much sense in the sister language, but given the inexplicability of previous English fliers that functioned as prophetic meditations on the calendar, I suspect not.

One of the things that Olga demonstrates– both with the failed appearance of Christ in ‘05 and now, ‘07– is the adaptability of religious apocalypticals in the face of unfulfilled prophecy. The most likely explanation for the failure of a predicted event is that certain preconditions of that event– established by a God, UFO, Entity, or Whatever– were not met by the devoted and/or the world at large. The apocalyptic group or individual then enters a period of recovery; in the end, a new prophecy and date emerges. There’s often a hope amongst those Enlightened Folks who could never believe Nonsense that the failure of prophecy will open the eyes of adherents to the basic Unreality of their beliefs; perhaps this occurs with some but, as Prophet Olga demonstrates, hardly with all.

There’s something sad about having been to Twin Towers & Central Arraignment enough to know the way without having to consult Google Maps– but LA always sucks one into its weird world of law enforcement. Way back in ‘05, on the second day of my first visit after a long dry spell, I ended up doing a frantic rush to the Hollywood jail, trying to bail out someone who’d been sent elsewhere & who the cops couldn’t find in the computers, no matter the name given. Stupid times!

Equally dumb: For well over a month, I’ve been frantically sending people this video for the song “Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne. Several friends have mentioned receiving it more than once and have asked that I stop. OK, fine, you win, but can’t we admit that this video– the action of which takes place in a HIGH SCHOOL setting–is a great and terrible abomination before The Lord? There’s something unspeakably twisted & profoundly perverse about a 24 year old woman pretending to be a sixteen year old girl– is there any circumstance outside of pop music where a 24 year old would trade places with a 16 year old and willingly go back to high school?

This could easily be used as the premise for the world’s shortest switched identity film: 24 year old wakes up in the body of a 16 year old.

Kills self.

The famous home of the late Samson DeBrier– 6026 Barton Ave, between Vine & El Centro– is for sale. This is the perfect investment for anyone who wants to own a massively historic piece of 1950s pre-hippie LA freak history. Or anyone willing to drop $1.2M for a beautiful home on a really crappy street.

From this location, DeBrier ran the Hollywood equivalent of a Parisian salon, with pretty much everybody who was anybody paying a visit. One often finds the house mentioned in biographies of ’50s and early ’60s actors like James Dean, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, etc., etc. Film fans may know the house as the location where the good doctor Kenneth Anger shot his well loved Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome; DeBrier himself plays several roles in the film. It should be noted that the property contains three units– the giant on Barton and two cottages. DeBrier rented the main house for income & lived in middle unit.

I wanted to take a picture of the property, but a combination of trees and bushes prevents the house from being photographed from any angle but one. Rather than take a duplicate, I’ve grabbed the realtor’s photo and cleaned up its colors as best I could. See below.

The roof of my garage is one my neighborhood’s major wildlife conduits– I’ve seen feral cats, astonishingly large raccoons and other things unknown.

Finally an opossum:

Ah Cali, Cali, what joys you bring:

Spending halfway of your life halfway insane isn’t a bad way to live– reality has a way of knowing who can handle the weirder stuff and you end up with a greater amount of bizarre experiences than most. The downside is that, very occasionally, you’ll do something that really does qualify as nuts.

Letters can be read symbolically or as words– i.e., one can see words and recognize them from their shape as an identifiable symbol, or read them and gleam their meaning from context; I confess that I often slip into the former, especially when looking at a glance, so when I saw the words “Jane Austen” on the marquee of my local crap movie theatre, I was fairly interested– I’d heard good things about this movie, a biopic starring Anne Hathaway as the famed author. So I go and buy a ticket for the “Jane Austen movie.” I sit myself down and suddenly I’m getting this weird vibe off the rest of the audience– I’m the only male and everyone’s over 50. But that’s fine, I think, who else is going to go see a movie about Jane Austen?

Trailers and advertisements roll. The film begins.

“How odd to use a sans-serif typeface for the credits,” thinks I. “But perhaps this is the way of things.”

The first shot rolls and it is clear, very very clear, that the narrative is not in the Romantic Era; good lord, it’s not even Edwardian. It’s 21st Century Southern California. What the hell has happened?

I’ve bought a ticket for The Jane Austen Book Club thinking it was Becoming Jane.

Like I said. Crazy.

A great song from a panned album. Yeah, it’s old ground and pastiche and yeah , the band did it 12 years prior, but so what? Is there anyone left who expects transcendence from crap rock n’ roll? Swagger and Saxondale’s straight fours on the skins. Some forms have their limits– better to embrace than disdain. This is the way of all things.

Of the video’s content, special correspondent Harvey Etter says: “That’s JERSEY. In a Southern outfit. You hear me? I see that nightly in JERSEY.”

(Harvey’s from North Jersey.)

Me? I just think it’d be nice if addiction were actually fun. In my experience, it’s mostly about getting disastrous 3am phone calls and hunting for crying women who’ve been abandoned in Little Armenia and are lost beneath the 101 overpass while in semi-psychotic states brought on by nine drinks in two hours. C’est la guerre.

LA is remarkable– I’m more than tired of it, but coming back feels like the warm hug of home. Before today, it’d been so long since I’d been down in Hollywood that I couldn’t even remember the last time– maybe early December with the Etters.

There is nothing more pleasurable and disgusting than the bombast of Hollywood & Highland. The first time that I felt like a citizen of the Freak Kingdom was on that very block, watching the dude who dresses like Spongebob Squarepants hit on high school girls. In character. Instinctively, I knew that any place capable of such a disturbing misuse of media properties must be where I belonged.

Today’s tally: (1) premiere of a Hannah Montana movie at the El Capitan, replete with crowd of several hundred screaming kids, (1) giant fiberglass promotional half destroyed Statue of Liberty for Cloverfield and (1) overheard instance of Danny Bonaduce giving people directions to the best tattoo parlor.

Prior to yesterday, the last time that I heard anything off the bloated & overproduced Guns N’ Roses album Use Your Illusion II must have been back in Boston, reclining on the filthy bed of Mr. Arafat Kazi, scourge of the Dhaka theatre community.

Those were high times, with the lumbering giant cycling through the entire history of 1980s and 90s metal, trying to convince me of the magic inherent in Powerslave and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. I have long attributed Arafat’s fondness for metal as a product of some bizarre cultural translation whereby his Bangla brain hears music in a way fully different from my own. (This theory is scalable to Europeans– how else do you explain Robbie Williams and All Saints?)

But last night the random brought up a few old favorites from the semi-original G’n'f’n'R lineup– specifically “Civil War,” “Shotgun Blues,” “Pretty Tied Up,” and “You Could Be Mine.” I’ve never had any patience for the ballads on the Use Your Illusion albums– unlike Mr. Kazi who, to this day, adheres to the beauty and power of “November Rain”– but I admit a weakness for the sound of the rock numbers that, had they been on an earlier album, would stand with the band’s earlier efforts. And let us make no mistake: Appetite for Destruction is the defining album of scum rock, one of the great works, and a thing so fully digested individually and culturally that there’s no reason to listen ever again.

This got me thinking along a line of weird truth: there is a very basic argument to be made that the reason I live in Los Angeles is because of the awful impact of Guns N’ Roses on my childhood brain. I have very specific memories of being a wee lad of 10 or 11 and seeing the videos for “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Patience” and thinking to myself that I should ever so much like to go and live in the disgusting hell of Hollywood. An echo of which occurred at 13 when I bought both Appetite and the Illusions.

It certainly wasn’t a conscious decision but I think I may have moved here to follow out that forgotten childhood wish. God knows “My Michelle” and “Pretty Tied Up” are readable as blueprints for my life, circa early-to-midlate 2007.

The point of all of which is: for all the outcries that it’s just art, that it doesn’t really impact the kids, I’m living proof otherwise. Watch what you give your kids. Shit has consequences. And another thing: there are no more old scores. Yesterday was the day that I settled all the family business.

I should’ve known after I saw the young man vomiting in front of the costume store, but too much time on the West Coast has left me soft– I’ve lost my New York paranoia.

Like all the best people, I associate public intoxication & its dreadful results with the island of Manhattan. Whenever I return to that corner of the world, it’s inevitable that I see someone– and always within a few hours– forcibly expel the contents of his or her stomach. It’s a time-honored thing, an awful way of knowing that I’m home. The city welcomes its wayward son with a reminder of low ways and old days.

But I’ve forgotten my natural defenses. So I carried on. A few blocks later a dude on a skateboard came blasting West, playing chicken. I side-stepped to my right, avoiding him, and took two steps forward. My right boot slipped and I slid down Hollywood Boulevard, almost falling on my face. My balance in these situations is near impeccable– a relic of New England winters and black ice– and I recovered before the crash.

I looked down. An enormous slick of vomit. Then I realize what block I’m on and it makes sense. This post is intentionally cryptic, but I say this: every piece of serious writing eventually comes true.

By now, it’s true, everybody knows: I live in the wilds. I’m not sure how it’s possible, but this apartment attracts a consistent menagerie. The ant problem has died out– praise be to Allah– but I’ve got two or three feral cats living beneath the floorboards. (They are no longer in heat.) And as I write, the main room appears to have developed an association with enormous, black bumblebees. The spider issue, as always, is on going.

Lately there’s been a beautiful blue bird around the fig tree. I’ve tried to get a few pictures, but they’ve been crap. Today I managed nice ones:

I presume that this is an example of the Western Bluebird. I’m never unphased when I see such native creatures (in the Northeast, you’re lucky if you spot a Bluejay once every two years.) I remember when I encountered my first hummingbird –about three years ago– and could not believe that it was real.

These images come from a pre-residency trip to Los Angeles– May and June 2005. Considering the amount of chaos & personal change that’s occurred since, I am unable, literally unable, to comprehend that it’s only been 2 Years and 10 Months. That trip proved to have huge consequences– determining my fate for several years and, very possibly, into the foreseeable future.

On May 31st, 2005, I was on Hollywood Boulevard and espied black smoke coming over the tops of buildings– the fire was on the roof of the Sunset & Vine Tower, which had stood vacant since 2001. I snapped a few images. Until yesterday, I had forgotten that they existed.

The building has since been stripped to its barest and is being retrofitted with ugly glass into a condo tower.

Anyway, here’s the thing burning:

One will note that the last image is of the photographer’s descent into the Hollywood & Vine Red Line Metro station. This picture is a relic of by-gone days; there’s currently a huge Hotel/Apartment/Retail complex being built around the station. This, then, is a lost view. C’est la guerre.

With zero understanding of the Armenian language, and knowing very little about the current state of Armenia, I won’t hazard a guess. This is one of three fliers that started appearing about two weeks ago– the first is nearly identical, with the head at the top of the chain being hornless. The other was a Satanic collage of two heads eating each other. Recent rain destroyed all copies. I should’ve snagged it when I had the chance.

The Fontenoy Apartments. 1811 N. Whitley Ave, Hollywood, California, 90028.

One of the old & long standing residences. Unremarkable except for the mid-to-late 1990s occupant of room #901. Our Patron Saint, Matt Drudge. From this structure, looming down on pre-”Renaissance Hollywood,” the man began his newsletter, which became his website. His rent was $600.

If you read period profiles of Drudge, reporters always play up the crapitude of his neighborhood. In 1998, I spent two weeks in the building that’s kitty-corner to the Fontenoy on Yucca. I confirm: the stories are roughly true.

How deeply appealing to consider Drudge’s presence therein amongst the drug dealers and hookers.

January 28, 1968, “Commerce in Hippieland” by Jane Wilson:

“Trade follows the fad. On the one hand stand the hippies, suppliers of psychedelic art, tribal crafts, drug religions, acid rock, love-ins, be-ins, underground newspapers and flowers. On the other hand stand the voracious teenyboppers, curious college kids, swinging singles, gimmicky housewives, and panicky over-30s, who fear that Life may be passing them by. The hippies are supplying something, the straight world is demanding something, and in the middle–guessing–stand a few fearless entrepreneurs. Some of these are Flower Children, some are businessmen, some are greedy, some are idealistic…”

1-3. Angels Flight. World’s shortest railway. Maybe.

4. Hotel Clark.

5. 5601 Hollywood Blvd. Next door to an empty lot with an invisible palace that can be seen only when the liquor store across the street extinguishes its lights.

6. Freeway. Celebrity Center of Scientology in upper left. Don’t forget the Guy Fawkes mask.

7-8. One of any number of pre-50s phallic buildings. Earthquake regulations. It’s on Hollywood Blvd.