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.

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:

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.

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.