The day started well. As we got out of the car we were greeted by
the song of a mockingbird in the tree overhead. We looked for it but
couldn't find it. No problem. When you find a mockingbird you
haven't found much. It's drab and ordinary. It's the song that is
glorious. You only need to listen for a few minutes to understand
why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. I'm quite familiar with
them—it's the state bird of Texas, where I grew up—but I always
associated them with the South. I didn't know they had them in
Cahleefornia. But I hear one most mornings when I get up, along with
a dove.
The first place of note was
KCET, home to the local public
television station and
Huell Howser, the folksy Tennessean
transplant who has been everywhere in the state and was our first
guide to its odd corners, via videotapes of his series,
California's
Gold.
There's a plaque set into the gate at KCET that identifies the site
as the northwest corner of the original Los Angeles Pueblo. That
puzzled me, as we've been to the pueblo and it's at least five miles
away, on
Olvera Street. But here's the story:
The first white settlement in the area was Mission San Gabriel,
founded by Fathers
Pedro Cambón and
Joseph de la Somera in 1771, under
the direction of
Junipero Serra. Later, in 1781, 44
Hispanic people from the mission moved west and founded El
Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles sobre El Rio
Porciuncula. The Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels on the
Porciuncula River. I'm thinking this must have been the name of the
rancho, like Rancho La Brea even farther west, and that it
encompassed quite a bit of acreage. There's no trace of the place
now, just the KCET building.
Onward to the Vista Theater. If my memory is serving me right, this
was a porn house in the '60s. (By porn, I mean what they called
loops, ten minute films of naked or semi-naked women writhing around
on a bed, no pubic hair, no sex. This was before
Hustler and
Deep Throat.) Now it seems
to be a B-movie version of Graumann's Chinese, with an
Egyptian-style box office and handprints in concrete. And what
handprints!
Ray Harryhausen and my friend
Forry Ackerman!
Elvira, Mistress of the Night!
Ryan and Tatum O'Neal!
Honor Blackman! (Pussy Galore in
Goldfinger, and as far as
I'm concerned still the sexiest of the
Bond girls.) Worth a trip just to
see these.
But whatever you do, try to avoid crossing the street there. It's a
nightmare intersection. If you drive straight on what you think is
Sunset, you end up on Hollywood Boulevard, because Sunset makes a
curve there. It also intersects Hillhurst and Virgil, so it's
complicated. We waited through what must have been three cycles and
STILL didn't get a WALK sign, so I said "The heck with this!" (or
words to that effect), and hobbled across. We had to cross against
the light again, and that's the last time we walk that
intersection. We were walking along the southern edge of the Los
Feliz Village neighborhood, which is fairly ritzy. The literal
translation of Los Feliz is "The Happy!" Nice name for a
neighborhood.
Now we're getting into the medical district., There must be 20
buildings devoted to research, parking, and patient care, and a lot
of construction going on, most of it belonging to
Children's Hospital or
Kaiser-Permanente. Just north of the complex is Barnsdall
Park, which has the Municipal Art Gallery and a
Frank Lloyd
Wright structure,
Hollyhock House. Wright was going
to design an entire arts complex there, but it was interrupted by
one thing or another. It's a good place to go and have a picnic
lunch, which we did a few days ago. Spectacular views of the
Hollywood Hills ... but it's at the top of a hill itself, and not
really on Sunset, so we didn't go that day.
In that complex is Vermont Street, which is the official eastern
boundary of Hollywood, which is a neighborhood of Los Angeles, not a
town in its own right. Hooray! We've made it halfway to Beverly
Hills! The Red Line Vermont/Sunset station is there. All the
stations are different on the surface. This one looks sort of like a
high-tech kerosene lantern. Vermont is also the boundary of our own
micro-neighborhood: Little Armenia.
We stopped for whoppers at a Burger King. Sitting next to us ... or
rather slumping ... at an outside table was a homeless man, fast
asleep. It wasn't until I got up that I noticed he had a dog, a
little Chihuahua, also fast asleep in his lap. If you were homeless
and still wanted a dog, a Chihuahua would be the way to go. You
could carry him in your pocket.
Cahleefornia has long been both a source and a magnet for weird new
religions, and we were about to see two examples of it.
First was the
Self-Realization Fellowship:
subtitled, The Church of All Religions. Founded in the '40s by
Swami Paramahansa Yogananda.
I remember it well from my walks with Chris in the '60s. It is neat,
tidy, and peaceful, only yards away from the clatter and roar of
Sunset. It's walled off, but open to the public. There are lovely
gardens, numerous places to meditate. I have no idea what sort of
snake oil they're selling, but they're sure doing it in attractive
surroundings.
Not so the real weirdo cult, right next door. I speak,
of course, of the
Scientologists. They own large
chunks of Hollywood, all tax-free, thanks to a neat little bit of
blackmail of top IRS officials back in the '80s. They must have 6
buildings on Hollywood Boulevard alone, and there's the monstrous
Celebrity Center just a few blocks
from our apartment.
This place on Sunset looks like the main brainwashing factory,
though. They own a whole city block, they have even somehow
persuaded the Los Angeles government to name the street leading into
it
L. Ron Hubbard Way. (Hint: What is
it every politician likes in his campaign war chest, and what does
Scientology rake in by the trainload?) There are a lot of
business-like buildings and a pavilion and a big flashing sign: COME
IN FOR A FREE STRESS TEST! This is where they hook you up to an
e-meter and tell you you are
crawling with invisible aliens. Then they offer to rid you of these
presences, called
Body Thetans ... for a small fee.
Actually, not so small, around $11,000, and every time you finish an
auditing you find out there's another level on your way to being
"Clear." And then ... you find out there's another level. No mystery
why they can buy all those big buildings around the world. It's the
world's biggest
Ponzi scheme.
I always feel a bit creepy around a Scientology center. (Okay, I
feel creepy in Salt Lake City, too.) It's probably all those
bodiless Thetans raging around, scraped away by relentless auditing,
pining for the bodies they lost 75,000,000 years ago when the
Galactic Emperor Xenu brought billions of people to Earth (then
called Teegeeack) on spaceships that looked exactly like DC-8s with
no engines, stacked them up around volcanoes, and blew them up with
hydrogen bombs, and now all they can remember is previous lives as
clams ... You think I'm making this up?
Check it out.
And remember, Lee and I knew
Theodore Sturgeon, who knew
L. Ron
Hubbard back when he was making all this shit up.
April 30, 2006