Getting Our Knut at the Integratron

For the record, we hate the desert. Fucking hate it. It’s too hot, too sunny, too dry, and the people who live there either tend to be really strange or to suffer from chronic asthma. We’ve never understood why someone would choose to camp in Joshua Tree or spend a weekend in Palm Springs for fun, but whatever; people are weird and as much as we’d like to, we can’t fix them unless they want to be fixed. Even then, we charge an exorbitant fee.

Objectionable as the desert may be, we’d probably visit with greater frequency if there were more people like George Van Tassel living there. Van Tassel is precisely the sort of fellow we’d expect to find living in the desert of Southern California, except that he’s dead. When he was alive, however, he made his home in Landers—just south of the restricted area of the Marine Corps’ Combat Center in the Bullion Mountains of the Mojave—and he put every other desert eccentric to shame.

From the sands of Landers rises Van Tassel’s Integratron: a never-realized electrostatic cellular rejuvenation generator designed to add decades to a human life. The device wasn’t about longevity for longevity’s sake, however, but rather an attempt to minimize the amount of reincarnations needed to reach moral and spiritual maturity by extending each successive lifetime. In other words, longer lifetimes = less reincarnations = shortcut to spiritual perfection. Simple.

In case you’re immediately dismissing Van Tassel as some New Age crackpot, we should probably make note of his impressive resumé: he was the widely-read author of the books I Rode a Flying Saucer (1952), Into This World and Out Again (1956), and the Council of Seven Lights (1958). He also once worked for Lockheed and Howard Hughes, and they certainly wouldn’t have hired anyone weird. He also received the concept, design, and engineering instructions for the Integratron on good authority: Solgonda, the leader of four aliens “with perfect teeth,” traveled to the Morongo Basin all the way from Venus just to give it to him. Soon afterward—enabled with funding from generous donors—Van Tassel contracted a Montebello roofing company to build the Integratron’s shell, which was constructed entirely of wood and without the use of metal nails so as not to interfere with the rejuvenating properties of its electrostatic field. Although the building looked really cool, George never actually hammered out the rejuvenation part. With his structure completed in 1959, Van Tassel continued to tinker with the works until his death nineteen years later, just prior to which he had declared the Integratron “Ninety percent complete.” So many cells to rejuvenate, so little time.

Nonetheless, Van Tassel was a prolific man who enjoyed an exciting life out there in Landers, publishing his own quarterly newsletter, Proceedings, establishing the College of Universal Wisdom, and hosting the Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention. Eager to hear the lectures of famous UFO contactees—and anxious to witness Van Tassel channeling space brothers like Knut—attendees flocked to the annual event by the thousands. After more than twenty years, however, his conventions lost speed—but not before going out in a blaze of glory. Like the storyline of a really excellent drive-in movie, some rowdy bikers crashed the UFO event in 1970 and set a car on fire. Even we’d have trekked out to the desert for that one.

After Van Tassel’s death in 1978, the Integratron’s future looked uncertain. A San Diego developer leased the property with plans for conversion into a disco (another twist on life rejuvenation, certainly), and the dome was rumored to be a meth lab for a time (temporary rejuvenation, to be sure, followed by certain death), but it wasn’t until 1987 that Van Tassel’s inspired erection fell into the hands of a new owner, one who was down with the space brothers. For the first time, the Integratron was open for public tours, albeit infrequently.

In 2000 the landmark was sold once again, itself receiving the very sort of life rejuvenation the Integratron originally promised others. Three groovy sisters from New York found the Integratron’s happy medium, hitting somewhere between trance channeling and pyromaniacal bikers. They’ve equipped the grounds with an outdoor living room, a telescope for nighttime stargazing, a fire pit, and a shaded courtyard. Restrooms marked “Mars” and “Venus” now stand in the shadow of the infamous dome, which has been significantly spiffed up with a fresh coat of paint. A Von Tassel exhibit occupies some of its ground floor, featuring photos, models, news articles and an Integratron timeline. The top floor features a nondenominational altar, and plays host to the best damn time to be had in Landers: weekend “sound baths”—the Integratron’s “sonic healing sessions”—conducted right under the dome itself.

Don’t get excited: in these baths you remain clothed, although you are required to remove your shoes. The Karl sisters bill their scheduled sound baths as “Kindergarten Nap Time of the Third Kind,” wherein bathers grab a blanket or quilted mat, stretch out on the floor at the foot of a set of singing quartz crystal bowls, and immerse themselves in a cascade of soothing sounds as elicited by one of the sisters. Before your bath, you’re given a brief history on the Integratron and the life of Van Tassel, and provided with a dubious explanation of the building site; the Integratron didn’t just land here by chance, certainly. Van Tassel claimed the Integratron’s location is one of exceptional geomagnetic activity, a site he determined by coordinates that have something to do with the great pyramid at Giza and a Landers curiosity called Giant Rock, which is often referred to as “The World’s Largest Single Boulder.” Giant Rock (which sits just up the road) was also a Native American hot spot and the short-lived home of Van Tassel’s eccentric friend Frank Critzer, a prospector and suspected—but unlikely and unsubstantiated—Nazi spy who lived in a hole burrowed beneath the stone. Critzer died in a dynamite explosion after he barricaded himself inside his subterranean hideaway and police attempted to smoke the human gopher out with a tear gas grenade. Unfortunately, the grenade ignited the cache of explosives Critzer kept under his kitchen table. Oops.

Regardless of its inconvenient location and checkered past, one thing is certain: the Integratron’s acoustics are impeccable, and once those bowls start singing—each one tuned to resonate with each of the seven chakras, so we’re told—you may as well be on Solgonda’s spacecraft. Sound waves resonate through you, around you, above you, and beneath you. Tones morph into other tones, traveling through one ear and seemingly passing out the other; their source points shifting with the aid of the Integratron’s amplifying architecture, bouncing, echoing, and reverberating into each other, pulling you into another dimension, massaging the brain, tranquilizing your thoughts, and suspending you in an altered state from which you return only with the greatest reluctance. Maybe it had something to do with finally being able to lie down after the two-and-a-half-hour drive, but we had to scrape ourselves up off that floor when our bath was over.

After staggering down the stairs, we sat for a while on the ground floor, pawing over the Integratron reference library. Some of Van Tassel’s writings and press coverage are archived here, as along with reference books on UFO phenomenon and inventors like Nikola Tesla, by whom Van Tassel was greatly influenced.

Hate the desert as much as we do? The Integratron is worth the trip. Check their Web site for the next sound bath weekend, and make your reservation. You’re unlikely to find many spots more steeped in weirdness, wrought with intrigue, and riddled with lore.

The Integratron
2477 Belfield Boulevard
Landers
760.364.3126
www.integratron.com

Home is where the heart is: Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace

She was as famous for opening supermarkets and splitting her dresses at PR events as she was for her movies—among them the stupendous Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and the trash classics Promises! Promises! and Las Vegas Hillbillies—but her greatest talent was inventing herself, and Jayne Mansfield’s former home was a shining monument to that singular talent.

Reportedly, it was within these walls that Jayne had some nasty acid trips, and developed her habit of polishing off a quart of bourbon a day, often disguised in Coke bottles.  It was also this house that her nine year-old son Miklos tried to burn to the ground, by allegedly dragging a mattress to the basement and setting it ablaze (something about the house being a money pit that kept his mother working and away from home, either doing crappy movies in other countries or touring with a nightclub act). An unabashed publicity whore, Jayne made herself readily available to the paparazzi and her adoring fans by sunbathing in the front yard, or standing out on the front balcony waving to idling tour busses.

Mansfield purchased the three-story, eight-bedroom Spanish-style mansion with her celebrated body-builder husband Mickey Hargitay in 1957.  Remodeling the place with an idiosyncratic sense of personal style and extremely lowbrow taste (you can take the girl out of Dallas…), she splashed the house a shade of Pepto-Bismol pink sprinkled with glitter. Pink marble heart-shaped sinks were installed among the thirteen bathrooms, and a pink marble heart-shaped fireplace graced Jayne former bedroom.  Fuzzy pink high-pile shag lined the floors—and some of the walls—and was permanently stained soon after by a menagerie of Chihuahuas.  The heart-shaped swimming pool flanked with cherubs and bubbling fountains was the property’s most celebrated feature, and details like purple velvet sofas, religious statuary, and walls paneled with gold-vein mirror completely the gloriously garish picture.

As of 2001, the house remained nearly exactly as it did when Jayne lived there, thanks to it’s last resident, Engelburt Humperdinck, who painted it back to its original pink in homage to Jayne (and much to the dismay of his neighbors) with whom he was once tied.  For over twenty years the Pink Palace stood as a veritable shrine for Mansfield enthusiasts, who relished the opportunity to genuflect at the elaborate front gates, festooned with an ornate “JM” in wrought iron.

Until the house, the pool, and nearly all of the established landscaping was leveled to make way for a real estate development in 2002, we could cruise Sunset and pretend that her nasty car accident was all a bad dream.  And on a hot day, if the convective waves were just right, we could almost see her, out on the front balcony, sheathed in a leopard print nightie, Coke bottle in hand, pupils dilated, blowing kisses, and waving adoringly at passers by.

Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace
Formerly at 11210 Carolwood Drive
Los Angeles

Testing Our Color Blindness at Sambo’s

Anyone who remembers Andy Kaufmann’s brilliant exercise in video verité, My Breakfast with Blassie, will recall Sambo’s Restaurant on Vermont Avenue as the setting of the titular meeting between the soon-to-be-dead comedian and the aging wrestler. By the time that video was released in 1983, all but one of the chain’s 1200 coffee shops had shut their doors forever. The popular franchise that began in Santa Barbara in 1957 had spread across the country by the 1960s, but as the civil rights movement gathered steam, Sambo’s became more known for its racially-charged name than its ten-cent coffee and dollar pancakes. By the late seventies, the chain was under attack: some communities passed resolutions forbidding the use of the name, while others simply refused to grant or renew the chain’s permits to operate.

As kids, we had a feeling that something was not quite kosher about Sambo’s, but we loved it anyway. As adults, we were well aware that it had become a cultural anachronism and its days were numbered. That’s why we ate the Vermont Sambo’s as often as possible.

There was nothing particularly special about Sambo’s, other than the fact that the chain’s mascot and decor was based on a popular children’s book, Little Black Sambo. Ironically, the name wasn’t chosen due to any great love for the turn-of-the-century tale, but rather because its founders, Sam Battistone and Newell Bonette, were commonly referred to as Sam and Bo. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make the leap to Sambo’s, but then again, if two partners named Bob Jigg and Abu Mohammed opened a diner, one would hope they’d have the common sense not to combine their names to create an ugly racial epithet. Still, one can only assume that calling a restaurant “Sambo’s” in the 1950s was as acceptable as calling a tobacco product “Nigger Hair” in the 1920s.

Though the restaurant’s original mascot appeared to be a young boy of African descent, the owners displayed enough common sense to soon change his racial heritage to one that was clearly East Indian (in line with Helen Banneman’s original 1899 story), and that’s the character most remembered by Sambo’s patrons. On the menu and in panels on the restaurant’s walls, the main character was depicted with light-brown to pale skin, wearing a turban and pointy shoes, and carrying a sun umbrella—all of which he gave away to outwit a hungry tiger. For the record, there are no tigers in Africa nor the American South. Even so, explaining to a predisposed lefty that this particular Sambo was Indian and not African was about as easy as explaining the difference between a Nazi swastika and the Buddhist symbol for good fortune to Irv Rubin. Rotsa ruck.

As America juggernauted into the heady, hypersensitive era of political correctness, Sambo’s became increasingly construed by far-left nitwits as little more than Denny’s in Uncle Tom’s clothing. Despite the clearly Indian protagonist on its walls, the name alone carried enough pejorative baggage to raise eyebrows as well as temperatures among those engaged in an already heated national debate. Though some Sambo’s franchises tried to forestall the inevitable by taking new names like “The Jolly Tiger” or “No Place Like Sam’s,” the damage was already done. By 1982, the Sambo’s saga had come full circle; the first shop in Santa Barbara was also the last. It’s still open to this day, and even sells a T-shirt with the original “black” Sambo on it, though he still looks Indian to us.

Vermont Avenue doesn’t seem the same to us without Sambo’s, but if don’t mind the drive, get your ass up to Santa Barbara to experience it for yourself. If you’re like us, you’ll probably wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place.

Sambo’s Coffee Shop (defunct)
Formerly at Vermont Avenue & Sixth Street
Los Angeles

The Last Sambo’s on Earth (still going strong)
216 West Cabrillo Boulevard
Santa Barbara
805.965.3269

There’s No Business but Show Business
at The Crystal Cathedral

We don’t know much about Jesus but we know what we like, and the folks at the Crystal Cathedral sure put on one hell of a show. One might not think laser beams, disco fog, and pyrotechnic displays more befitting the glory days of Siegfried and Roy have their place in church, but here, Christian worship means one thing: special effects! The days of sitting on painfully hard wood pews listening to your priest drone on in Latin—or worse, English—are over. Slide your heathen ass into one of the Crystal Cathedral’s cushy seats worthy of an AMC movie theater and hold on tight.

In addition to the glass and steel architectural oddity that is the Crystal Cathedral, the church is infamous for their splashy Christian spectaculars staged here twice yearly, each one worthy of a Las Vegas showroom. The Glory of Easter is their fast-paced passion play with a cast of hundreds piling onto the cathedral stage, dragging with them oxen, tigers, peacocks, and enough barnyard animals to fill a dozen petting zoos. Even Jesus milks his entrance vamping down a long catwalk through the center of the theater . . . er, church . . . on a real burro.

Rubbernecking chicken hawks take delight in the Roman soldiers, traditionally played by the St. Paul High School football team, charging down the carpeted aisles on horseback baring their muscled, barely-legal thighs in short skirts and strappy sandals. Showstopping ensues with the heavenly angels, strung up by fine wire to an intricate block-and-tackle apparatus, flying hundreds of feet from the far corners of the balconies and swooshing down just inches above your scalp, straining operatically and circling above the expensive seats down front. If you happen to be positioned in just the right spot, you can look straight up into their filmy gowns and cop a peek of some real heaven—which, perhaps, is why those tickets cost a little more.

The magic makers of the Crystal Cathedral are far too savvy to blow their wad all at once; special effects and exotic animals are carefully paced throughout the productions to prevent any downtime, and the finales never fail to thrill. During the crucifixion scene, all three crosses rise from the floor through clouds of dry ice as an enormous section of the cathedral’s glass wall opens like an electric garage door, bringing a gust of the cold night wind into your face while green laser beams shoot from behind the Star of the show and out into the evening sky. For anyone who ever saw KISS in concert the first time around, the resurrection sequence will take you right back an Ace Frehley guitar solo of 1979.

While hardly shy of special effects, “The Glory of Christmas” may lack the fireworks of the Easter extravaganza, but it does boast a camel and special guest stars. We got to see a solo dance performance by Heather Whitestone, the deaf Miss America. Jealous?

Even if it’s not Easter or Christmas, there’s still plenty to see and spend your money on at the Crystal Cathedral. In fact, free tour guides are available to show you around. Don’t miss the parking lot featuring a “drive-in worship” section, in which followers may sit in the comfort of their own SUVs while listening to the Sunday service on giant loudspeakers positioned throughout the lot. One can only fantasize about carhops on roller skates gliding from one driver’s side window to the next carrying giant collection plates. What else might you expect from a congregation that held its first service at the Orange Drive-In Movie Theater in 1955? True, all true.

Want to know what the landfills of tomorrow will look like? Take a peek inside the gift shop. Crystal Cathedral postcards, key chains, pins, poster books, DVDs , thimbles, bells, mugs, even Crystal Cathedral cocktail napkins—it’s all here, and yours with the simple exchange of U.S. currency. And if you haven’t the time to attend Dr. Schuller’s Sunday services or read the books he’s penned, the gift shop radically simplifies the path to enlightenment: you can purchase a glittery halo here and bypass the mumbo jumbo. Also featured among the wares in the gift shop is Schuller’s telling Possibility Thinker’s Creed:

“When faced with a mountain I WILL NOT QUIT! I will keep on striving until I climb over, find a pass through, tunnel underneath—or simply stay and turn the mountain into a gold mine, with God’s help!”

—Robert Schuller

And with the help of Chinese tchotchke manufacturers; etched onto a glass paperweight the creed sells for twenty dollars, plus tax.

Say what you want about Robert Schuller, but the man knows of what he speaks. A gold mine, indeed.

The Crystal Cathedral
12141 Lewis Street
Garden Grove
714.971.4000
www.crystalcathedral.org

Stocking Up on Kangaroo Meat and Swastikas at Charlie Brown Farms

You know the feeling. It’s happened to all of us––and can strike at any time. You could be sitting at a stoplight, weeping at a funeral, presenting the annual fiscal report, taking holy communion, getting a prostate exam, walking the dog, shooting heroin, giving birth to sextuplets, peering through the your neighbor’s blinds, being sworn in as the President of the United States, or polishing off a bag of Funyuns when you are overcome by an indiscriminate longing that is sudden and utterly irresistible.

We are speaking, of course, about the undeniable urge to purchase a Hong Kong Phooey action figure set.

Or an alligator steak.

Or, perhaps, a life-size caveman and his lovely, hairy girlfriend.

Or a Betty Boop doll in camouflage gear or a deep-fried Snickers bar or a pencil sketch of Tupac drawn by a hillbilly or a bottle of Brain Wash Soda or a framed photo of Pope John Paul II or bust of Queen Nefertiti that looks like Anjelica Huston or a Chick-O-Stick or a real ostrich egg or a cast-iron Aunt Jemima notepad or a corncob pipe or a shirt that says “I’m with Stupid” or a smoking donkey or Stalin-era commie propaganda postcards or an “I Love Lucy” decal or a full-scale fiberglass moose or an 8 x 10 of Eva Longoria or a homosexual garden gnome or an Elvis Presley Viva Las Vegas folding chair or a jar of pickled okra so big you could fit a human baby in it or a porcelain bulldog wearing a star-and-stripes top hat with the slogan “These Colors Don’t Run” embossed on the base.

You know, that feeling.

Located in the northernmost nether region of Los Angeles County, a desert wasteland better known for its concentration of meth labs, tract homes, and white supremacists, Charlie Brown Farms is Southern California’s sprawling retort to the redneck souvenir shacks commonly found littering the tourist routes of the Deep South. While it may look and sound like a happy place, Charlie Brown Farms has, beneath its manic exterior, all the charm of a Third Reich Stuckey’s (Google it if you’ve never driven east of Arizona), perched seductively beside a forlorn stretch of asphalt known as Pearblossom Highway, or, more commonly, the Highway of Death. Every year, scores of motorists are killed and hundreds more are injured along this godforsaken two-lane deathtrap once known as a shortcut to Vegas and now more notorious as a feeder for desperate wannabes driven to move to the far-flung badlands of Palmdale and Lancaster so they can proudly proclaim “I am a homeowner.” Sad crosses adorned with ribbons and faded teddy bears are common roadside spectacles in this desolate wilderness, and one can only wonder how many of these poor souls unwittingly enjoyed what was to be their last meal—most likely a brisket sandwich and a date shake––at Charlie Brown Farms before they earned a starring role in the ultimate reality show, a driver’s ed movie.

There was a time, before eBay made buying junk a point-and-click activity, when Charlie Brown Farms was a veritable godsend. Where else could one find so much cultural detritus under one roof? (Okay, make that about seven roofs, because Charlie Brown Farms goes on and on and on with one addition after another. In fact, there are three rooms devoted to frightening dolls alone.) Now, however, we get a different vibe as we stroll through the place. What was once giddy elation has been transformed into a kind of a depressing creepiness. It’s not the ghosts of everyone who died out on Highway 138, nor the freezer case packed with exotic animal meat, nor the room full of Christmas ornaments and Jesus paraphernalia, nor or the loads of Southwestern crapola like Lone Stars and Kokopellis that lends the place its subtly sinister vibe, but the odd feeling that we may open a door and stumble into a Klan meeting at any moment.

Make no mistake about it, we saw employees of all skin colors manning the aisles of Charlie Brown’s, so it’s not like this is some secret Aryan outpost (though we couldn’t help but notice the preponderance of white nerdy management types scuttling around in embroidered Charlie Brown Farms sport shirts). And maybe we’re just being too sensitive about the shelves of African-American figurines that are seemingly aimed at black customers, yet are stocked cheek-by-jowl with the aforementioned big-lipped mammy notepad, which is decidedly not geared towards the discerning African-American consumer. Is this just Charlie Brown’s well-intentioned but misguided way of saying, “Hey, we’re not really racist out here in the sticks,” which, in turn, leads us to our next question: just how many blacks make it a point to stop at a souvenir stand in the Hate Crime Capital of Southern California? We have no clue, but our guess is they’re not the ones who collect these things. “Honey, you have just got to see these adorable negro figurines” is probably not a common phrase in the African-American parlance.

We imagine that Jews are equally ill at ease at Charlie Brown Farms, and not because of the heavy Christian vibe, either. Despite a rich history of wandering in the desert, the last thing a Jew wants to see when he stops in the middle of nowhere with his family for a nosh on the way to Vegas is a glass case proudly displaying replica lapel pins of every possible variation of swastika dreamt up by the Nazis. Hitler Youth? Check. Storm trooper? Check. SS? Double check. For $30.99 you can own the complete set in a handsome commemorative plastic case, plus a beautifully detailed swastika arm patch. Oy vey, now that’s a bargain!

Again, maybe we’re just being your typical bleeding heart liberals, but there’s something disturbing––and you may have noticed that we’re not easily disturbed––about the insensitivity of these displays. If this were Melrose, and the store were called Schvarzes and Jewboys, and run by some hip-hop Hasidim, then sure, it would be distasteful, but at least we’d get the joke. Here, there is no joke. These hideous trinkets are sincerely presented as curios without even the slightest hint of irony, and that’s what makes them so fucking frightening. It’s like finding out that Lillian Vernon and Harriet Carter are lynch-happy white power freaks with Aryan Brotherhood tramp stamps.

None of this, of course, is to imply that anyone should avoid patronizing Charlie Brown Farms. Good Americans of all colors work here—it was a young black woman who unlocked the display case and showed us the Hitler Youth pin—and the barbecue is pretty damn good, as is their selection of fresh candy and obscure sodas (almost as many as Galco’s). Sure, it’s at least an hour drive from the city, but that’s how long it takes to get from the Hollywood Bowl to Sunset Boulevard on a busy night. Best of all, it will seem like you’re in another world entirely––like the lunar surface! In fact, we encourage everyone, especially African-Americans and Jews, to take the high road and drop in on Charlie Brown Farms, if only to say “Howdy” and get a taste of Americana that is sadly dying off. In fact, what would be the harm in turning your trip into a cultural exchange of sorts, painting on some Jolson-esque blackface or donning a striped Dachau prisoner outfit with a crude Star of David sewn to chest and then energetically questioning the staff about their unique gifts? Proclaiming “Do you have a mammy with nappier hair or even bigger lips?” or “I won’t give you more than a dollar fifty for the Luftwaffe dagger—and that’s my final offer!” at full volume will surely elicit peals of uproarious laughter and make Reginald Denny proud of all of us, in his own special way.

And don’t forget to order a deep-fried Snickers bar before heading out on the Highway of Death. You’ll need it for the long trip into the afterlife.

Charlie Brown Farms
8317 Pearblossom Highway
Littlerock
661.944.2606
www.charliebrownfarms.com

Catching up With the Horoscopes and Horse-Hung Tranny Escorts of the L.A. X . . . Press

As we watch Hollywood become Universal CityWalked with aggressive sanitization and corporate co-opting, we find ourselves pining for our Hollywood of yesteryear. Not the one of Garbo, Gable, or MGM musicals, but the Hollywood of porno theaters, head shops, and dive bars. Where teenaged runaways were chewed up and spit out like sunflower seeds. Where Hollywood Boulevard was a shopper’s paradise—for aspiring hair bands, cross-dressers, and sundry sex workers. Where you were far more likely to find a wig shop or a ladies shoe store specializing in sizes eleven-plus than you were a Victoria’s Secret. It was a Hollywood that didn’t know from Banana Republic jeans, unless they were pushed down around the ankles of a twenty-dollar john who managed to find a private place to park. Sure, there were the eager tourists who came sniffing ’round Grauman’s and dropped a little cash on car-wash-caliber novelties from the adjacent T-shirt stands and souvenir shops, but further beyond the forecourt of Grauman’s, the tourist foot traffic waned. The stars on the Walk of Fame grew dingier and dirtier on the blocks stretching eastward, their pink terrazzo serving as dependable daybeds for the down and out. The only time Hollywood looked worse was at Christmas, when lackluster garlands snaked around streetlights and arched over the boulevard in a futile attempt to kick up residual stardust. Like garish makeup on an old woman, the dressing only served to highlight what it was trying to hide. Settling into Hollywood’s sagging skin and crawling up its lip lines, it sadly punctuated a long and very rough life, subject to the fickle nature of the city over which it once reigned supreme.

For better or worse, Hollywood Boulevard was our 42^nd Street, and just like New York’s onetime epicenter of sleaze, it’s taking the same path. Its dubious garishness has been replaced with a different sort of dubious garishness, and revamped into a circus of digestible family fun. That’s why we treasure the L.A. X . . . Press. As one of Southern California’s most widely distributed free weekly periodicals, LAXP is quick to remind us of the other Hollywood, the one forced further underground in recent years. Like beacons of sleaze, its iconic red and white distribution boxes stand on virtually every corner, almost as if to say “Hey! Hollywood isn’t that cleaned-up, there are still plenty of ways to see live nude girls, take an erotic enema, or hook up with a he-devil in heels!”

We can hear you now: “My days of tranny hookups and erotic enemas were over in the nineties.” Perhaps. But don’t be too quick to dismiss all of L.A. X . . . Press’s content as pay-for-play personals. Their coverage of world news alone is worth the shame of being seen pulling a copy from a corner box. “COLUMBUS CARRIED SYPHILLIS FROM NEW WORLD, EUROPEAN STUDY SUGGESTS” and “TIGER ESCAPES ZOO, KILLS 1 PERSON” aren’t headlines you’re likely to see garnering much ink in USA Today, but such fodder is business as usual for the XP. Following suit, their local-interest coverage is boiled down to its most salient, going right for the jugular with civic corruption, brutal murders, and natural disaster. People magazine might waste pages with celebrity puff, but the XP is your source for stories like “WILL SMITH ANGRY OVER HITLER COMMENT” or which was the latest A-lister to get thrown into—or released from—jail.

Pet adoptions, horoscopes, and the “Party Joke of the Week” round out the XP content along with the randomly-featured “Hollywood 24 Hours List,” assuring us that there is indeed a community supporting fast food joints, towing services, sex shops, and Laundromats through the wee hours. Wikipedia-sourced celebrity featurettes will catch you up with the likes of Kim Kardashian and Shannen Doherty, while superfluous adult film profiles are padded with superfluous trivia (“. . . After her split from porn director Seymore Butts, she had a tattoo with his name turned into a dolphin.”). “Life in the Fast Lane by Wild-Man Bill” gives the XP a personal voice, and although it’s unclear exactly how fast Bill’s lane actually is, we love how he’ll wax poetic over circus freaks one week, and guide readers with gentle encouragement like the Norman Vincent Peale of sexual liberation the next. Sports, scandal, comics, perfunctory film reviews—and you thought the L.A. X . . . Press was only for the depraved.

Certainly, there’s plenty here for the depraved as well. The XP hasn’t been rolling its presses since 1972 because people love horoscopes. Seems that you can’t throw a stone in any direction without hitting a happy-ending massage therapist in this town, and those in search of a summer job may find an interesting new path in the XP’s “Help Wanted: section. And if you’re looking to fill your dance card, look no further than their Specialties” pages, where a bevy of “fully functional” ladies tease suitors with bikini shots and boast measurements like “36D-26-34, and 9 inches.”

For information junkies who just can’t get enough, the L.A. X . . . Press is a worthwhile ride though a Los Angeles subculture you just don’t find walking the streets anymore. Don’t miss out: visit a distribution box today.

L.A. X . . . Press
Distributed throughout Greater L.A.

Getting the Story Straight at Dead Man’s Curves

Dead man’s curves in Los Angeles are as easy to come by as transsexual prostitutes—and they’re almost as fun, especially if you’ve been drinking. For your driving and dying pleasure, we took two of Sunset Boulevard’s most notorious curves at top speed and lived to tell the tales.

Dead Man’s Curve #1

Few people know that on January 24, 1961, a horrible car wreck almost claimed the lives of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam, and a wealth of other cartoon characters. It was 9:30 in the evening when Mel Blanc, the affable king of cartoon voices, lost control of his sports car on Sunset Boulevard just north of UCLA’s Drake Stadium and collided head-on with another vehicle. With massive head injuries, a broken pelvis, and two broken legs, Blanc spent weeks in a coma, then even longer in a full-body cast.

The near-fatal accident occurred about halfway into production of the first season of The Flintstones, in which Blanc voiced the characters of Barney Rubble and Dino. Rather than replace him, the producers decided to bring the show to Blanc, and recorded him first from his hospital bed, then built a temporary recording studio in his bedroom to finish the season (with Blanc in that body cast the whole time). His fellow Flintstones actors would cram into the tiny room to record each show with him. As for Dead Man’s Curve, within days of Blanc’s accident the city approved changes to reduce the curve’s excessive banking, which had already been blamed for twenty-six accidents and three fatalities. Today that patch of Sunset bears little resemblance to the street where Speedy Gonzales almost bit the dust.

Dead Man’s Curve #2

It was Blanc’s accident that inspired the 1963 hit song “Dead Man’s Curve” by Jan & Dean, which would in turn presage yet another tragedy that would soon befall singer/songwriter Jan Berry. The overplayed oldie was penned by Berry and Roger Christian and went to number eight on the Billboard chart in 1964. The tune tells the story of a race between a Jaguar (Christian’s car) and a Corvette (Berry’s ride) that begins on the Sunset Strip, winds through Beverly Hills, then slams into a wall at . . . you guessed it, Dead Man’s Curve. This one happens to be on Sunset just west of Whittier Drive.

In one of those impossible twists of fate usually reserved for hokier Twilight Zone episodes, the story goes that twenty-five-year-old Jan Berry crashed his Corvette Stingray on April 12, 1966, on the very same dead man’s curve that had made him a rich man. First thought to be dead at the scene, he was rushed to UCLA Medical Center, where, like Blanc, he spent several weeks in a coma. The accident left Berry with severe brain damage, partial paralysis on his right side, and impaired speech. Jan and Dean were through.

If it seems unbelievable that the co-writer of “Dead Man’s Curve” almost died in the very same spot described in his apocryphal song, that’s because it never happened. Jan Berry indeed suffered massive injuries when he smashed up his Corvette in Beverly Hills, but the accident occurred when he slammed into a parked gardener’s truck on a side street south of Sunset Boulevard, near dead man’s curve, but certainly not on it. That doesn’t make the accident any less terrible, but it does make it less interesting, which is perhaps why the myth was consistently perpetuated in print. We understand. It’s certainly more fun to think that God has a sense of humor and was just getting back at Berry—who died of a seizure in 2004—for writing that cloying ditty in the first place, but anyone who has read Nietzsche knows that God is dead.

Dead Man’s Curves
#1 Sunset Boulevard near Bel Air Estates, north of UCLA’s football field
#2 Sunset Boulevard just west of Whittier Drive

Blocking Our Bowels with a Little Bit o’ Brazil at Gauchos Village

Take the romantic ideal of Joao and Astrud and wipe it from your mind. And forget any tropical notions of Brazil-induced aphrodesia, because after you pay your check you’ll probably be too constipated to have intercourse. Gauchos Village is a Brazilian escape of another kind. One of body glitter and thumping disco, of fatty meats and salad bars, of conga lines and plasma screens.

Of all the food trends to sweep the nation, Brazilian churrascaria—the colon-cramming carnivorous gorgefest spreading like shingles throughout the midsection of Greater L.A.—seems tailor-made for American translation. While there are many churrascaria establishments clogging arteries across Los Angeles County, Gauchos Village ups the ante—and although any restaurant that decorates with mannequins gets extra stars in our book, the Brazilian meat orgy is ratcheted up here, in an exhaustive assault on all five senses, as well as some you didn’t know you had.

It was from cosmopolitan Glendale that we departed for our night in Rio, where Carnaval never stops, it seems, at least until your table is needed for the next dinner seating. A long granite bar trims a cavernous Brazilian-themed dining room featuring a decor representing both gaucho life and soccer, accented with department store mannequins in Carnaval finery stationed above diners on high platforms. Sumptuous banquet seating makes use of every square foot, while a curiously small stage occupies a far corner, barely large enough to hold the percussion, much less the mostly naked, marabou feather-headdressed dancers we’d been promised.

No sooner than our anemic caipirinha was delivered to our table by a gaily costumed gaucho were we treated to the pounding beat of a contemporary twist on the classic “Brazil,” cueing only three Carnaval dancers—Brazilianly tanned, flesh tight, and breasts of questionable origin—possessing all the qualities that read “sexy” in Brazil but “whorish” in America, to take the stage. With their reproductive crevices concealed by a strategically nestled sequined string, each made the most of an abbreviated performance juncture, like body glitter-smeared angels dancing on the head of a pin. It was a gambol that appeared  more likely fueled by strong Brazilian coffee than formal training, but since we’ve never gyrated in a G-string under a five-foot feathered headdress—at least not in public—who are we to judge? Clearly these were the sort of distinctions that eluded the crowd, reeling as the dancers took the floor and worked the room, a conga line soon trailing behind.

With a flip of our tabletop indicator, it was espeto corrido, the non-stop delivery of meat, meat, meat, sliced right from the skewer and onto your plate. Resilient ribs and a tensile top sirloin were followed by an elastic lamb, but not before a pimply pork sausage was paired with a gummy filet . . . and the meat goes on. While negotiating around the gristle with a steak knife and a set of tongs, a hazy and confusing montage of topless float queens, costumed midgets, synchronized wheelchair brigades, and banana-hammocked man-meat played out in Carnaval coverage from the streets of Brazil, running on no less than five giant plasma screens to the deafening score of the floorshow. Although there really isn’t any opportune moment for a mostly naked feather-and-body-glittered dancer to thrash in the face of a diner wrestling a string of bacon fat from the back of his throat, Gauchos Village never loses sight of the Lent in relentless. With the urgency of Carnaval—standing in the shadow of the impending forty-day period of fasting and abstinence—there just isn’t time to pick and choose those meaty moments as you’d like.

But as promptly as our evening commenced, it seemed, it was over. Our feathered friends dashed to the dark recesses of backstage as quickly as the flan slid past our tongue. The plates were cleared and our check delivered, as the streets of Brazil and the bare-breasted parade honeys vanished from the TV screens, in our case, due to a DVD glitch; THE DISK IS DIRTY – THE DISK IS DIRTY flashed in sync from all five screens, almost mocking our meat-induced reverie. And to add insult to injury, our gauchos—for whom just moments before we were the center of their meat-focused attention—efficiently set to work turning tables for the next seating, reminding us in this microcosm of Roman Catholic tradition, that even the merriment of Carnaval—especially the merriment of Carnaval—must come to an end.

Gauchos Village claims their food is “authentic.” If that is in fact the case, we’re canceling our flight to Rio. The one-sentence review from a fellow diner: “The carrots were good. On par with Brotman Medical Center.”

THE DISK IS DIRTY – THE DISK IS DIRTY – THE DISK IS DIRTY.

Excellent. If all this meat ever passes though our lower intestine, we’ll be back.

Gauchos Village
411 North Brand Boulevard
Glendale
818.550.1430
www.gauchosvillage.com

Getting All Shook Up about Thai Elvis

When we first heard about Palms Thai restaurant, we were enthralled. We imagined an intimate venue embellished with faux palm trees, bathed in blue lighting, its small stage backed with a red velvet curtain and illuminated by a single spot light. As the familiar strains of Die Sprach Zarathustra swell in the background, the lights dim, and the crowd falls silent in reverent anticipation. This, in our mind’s eye, would be the perfect proscenium for the art of Kavee “Kevin” Thongpricha, otherwise known as Thai Elvis.

Yeah, well, dreams die hard.

Palms Thai is a cavernous, cacophonous place with large “family-style” tables butted up against each other in rows that seem to stretch to the horizon. Reservations are accepted before 7:00 p.m.—after that it’s first come, first serve, and you’re on your own. We were prudent enough to make a reservation, and though we arrived early, the place was packed with an eclectic blend of Asians (always a good sign), hipsters (not always a good sign), and a mixed bag of hip-hoppers, average Joes, and yuppies in love (who really cares?). We requested a table close to the stage, where we could get the best view in the house for Thai Elvis. Our wish was granted—we were seated front and center. Hot damn! Bring on the King!

We were so worked up about seeing Elvis that we almost forgot that Palms Thai is also known for its fare, which is impressively vast and varied. Aside from healthy portions of the usual suspects––we started out pedestrian with some chicken and beef satay, then sampled a variety of curries and vegetable dishes, before ordering our some of our favorite exotic delicacies, like wild boar with curry sauce, frog with chili and holy basil, raw Thai sausage, and crispy maw salad (maw is the dried stomach lining of a large fish). With all that unusual food on the table, it was our pad Thai—that perennial favorite––that seemed particularly robust that evening, boasting an aroma not unlike a freshly opened can of Mighty Dog. It was the only clunker in an otherwise flavorful array of dishes.

The stage at Palms Thai is elevated to ensure that all diners, even those a quarter mile away in the back of the room, get a decent view of the entertainment. Behind a hideously gigantic metal sculpture of Elvis Presley that stands in front of stage right, we could glimpse Kevin getting ready for his first show of the evening. A coat draped over his shoulders, scarf around his neck, Kevin was intently focused—one might even say meditating––on the Asian movie playing on the small laptop computer in front of him. As 7:30 drew nigh, Kevin closed the laptop, stripped down to his Elvis regalia, and shook his arms in true Elvis fashion. Showtime, at last.

And yet there was no overture, no change in lighting, not even a cursory intro to announce the arrival of the one, the only, Thai Elvis. Instead, he just strolled onstage, fiddled with a few knobs on the mixer, and without ceremony, launched into “Suspicious Minds.” Or was it “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”? It was hard to tell because of the ceaseless din echoing off the high ceilings. Nary a patron seemed to notice that the show had started. Had we stepped into an alternate universe? How could so many people be so painfully blasé about the fact that the greatest Thai Elvis impersonator in the world was standing right in front of them? Was their pad Thai better than ours? Or were they just typical Angelenos?

Make no mistake about it, Mr. Thongpricha is a consummate performer who delivers an impressive facsimile of Elvis. It’s not just Presley’s vocal stylings that Kevin has captured, but his mannerisms in general, right down to the way the King curved his fingers on his outstretched hand. For Thongpricha, this is obviously a labor of love, one done out of respect for Presley. So how come the guy can’t get a little of the same from the chattering chowhounds packed into Palms Thai?

The first few songs received a polite smattering of applause, as if to say, “Yeah, that’s great, pal, but can you come back later? I’m stuffing my piehole right now.” Even that tepid enthusiasm soon waned as diners became increasingly more engrossed with what was on their plate rather than what was happening onstage. The applause eventually stopped altogether. The room grew even louder. And louder. Looking around, we see that we’re the only ones in the entire restaurant who’ve made even the slightest effort to give Kevin our undivided attention; he seems to appreciate that, throwing a few classic Elvis poses directly our way. If we had been wearing lace panties, they would have been onstage in a heartbeat.

If anything, Thongpricha is a pro. He seemed unfazed by the relentless chatter, the clanging plates, the loud announcement that “TABLE IS READY FOR JOE, PARTY OF FOUR! TABLE IS READY FOR JOE!” Sweet Jesus, if Presley had to deal with that kind of crap, it would have been enough to drive him to drugs.

After a half hour of full-on performances (including a moving rendition of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You”) Thai Elvis was ready to call it quits. Sadly, the act that followed him, an attractive young woman in a silver sequined dress, received even less respect from the audience. The mood had gone from awkward to downright uncomfortable in a matter of minutes. The cackling of the thirtysomething gals at the table next to us, combined with the lingering odor of the pad Thai, didn’t make it any better. We decided the show was over for us as well, which came as a relief to the waitstaff who, although quite friendly, are obviously under orders to turn the tables as quickly as possible. At least Elvis isn’t the only one getting the bum’s rush at this place.

Kevin slipped the coat back over his shoulders, and wrapped the scarf around his neck. With performances every hour, on the half hour, the man has to save his voice. After all, it’s not easy trying to sing over a crowd of loud, hungry philistines, even if you are the ersatz King of Rock ’n’ Roll.

Palm’s Thai Restaurant
5900 Hollywood Boulevard, Unit B
Los Angeles
323.462.5073
www.palmsthai.com

Clowning Around at the California Institute of Abnormalarts

If P.T. Barnum and Pee-wee Herman dropped a lot of acid, built a love shack, and moved in together, their place would look a lot like the California Institute of Abnormalarts, a nightclub in Burbank located, appropriately enough, just down the street from Circus Liquor. Once a strictly hush-hush illicit underground operation, CIA finally went legit, got its liquor and food license, and proudly displays its “A” rating from the health inspector right by the X-ray of the two-headed baby. But more on that in a moment . . . .

Proprietors Carl Crew and John Ferguson are former morticians who met couple of decades ago in Marin Country, where they discovered they both had penchant for collecting the morbid, the outré, and the outrageous—especially if it had anything to do with a circus or sideshow. After spending just a few minutes with them, we realized these two give their previous profession a good name, and that made us feel guilty for ever saying that Nixon had the personality of an embalmer. If Nixon had been anything like these guys, he would have made a much more interesting president, delivering State of the Union addresses in demonic clown makeup or using the mummified arm of Claude de Lorraine to shake hands with Mao Tse-Tung. There would have been no need to break into the Watergate; the Democratic National Committee would have gladly shown Nixon all their papers in exchange for just a peek at Señorita Pulpo, the Octopus Girl. Sadly, however, this was not to be.

Crew, an oversized, bespectacled towhead and the showman of the pair, is a natural-born huckster who would have made a great snake oil salesman back in Deadwood. He’s also an actor and writer best known for The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer for which he served as both author and star. And, not coincidentally, an evil side of Crew has been said to come out when dealing with some of the boneheaded bands that play at CIA, and we can’t blame him. In fact, we’re amazed he lets people in there at all, considering the amazing array of oddities he and John have collected over the years (we’d call them priceless, though some would undoubtedly scoff at that estimate). After all, this isn’t some Hollywood dump where it doesn’t matter where you toss your guitar case or what you fall on when you pass out in a drunken stupor. Hollywood dumps don’t have the Alligator Boy or the skull of world’s smallest Freemason in a glass case to worry about. Frankly, other than featuring freak shows and bad B-movies, we don’t think the stage should be used for anything else. CIA is the entertainment, and unless your band has the Incredible Frog Boy for lead singer, you’re probably going to get upstaged by the club itself. Still, CIA manages to book some fairly bizarre musical acts (and a few mediocre ones, too, naturally), so when we showed up to get a private tour of the place, we weren’t surprised to find Carl out front telling some scruffy goth band to get their shit out of the driveway and to be careful where they set up. Then, the perfect gentleman, he beckoned us to follow him through the door with the grinning clown on it.

Inside, it’s a funhouse of blacklights and Day-Glo colors, pirates and clowns, stuffed animals and pickled remains, shrunken heads and human skulls, cases of dark exotic curios that are indescribable until Carl describes them. “That’s a real Fiji mermaid,” he said, pointing to a dried-up thing with a tail. “Those things are really rare.” Uh huh. Then he nodded towards an X-ray of what looks like a two-headed baby. “Believe it or not, I found that in the dumpster of the 7-Eleven just down the street,” he said. There isn’t a hospital or doctor’s office nearby, so how or why an X-ray of an amazing rarity like a two-headed baby would end up in the garbage bin of a convenience store just down the street is anyone’s guess, but it seemed amazingly fortuitous to us. “Yes, it is pretty incredible, isn’t it?” Carl said with a grin.

Outside on the patio, things just got weirder. It was already too dark outside to get a good look at the Dead Fairy of Cornwall, but we’ve seen plenty of dead fairies before. We moved on to the severed arm of French nobleman Claude de Lorraine, which looked like, well, a dried-up, severed arm. Carl told us it was the real deal, so we took his word for it—because what we really wanted to see was the dead clown.

Like many of the other attractions at CIA, Achile Chatouilleu is definitely dead. Unlike most of them, however, he’s real. An American circus performer who was born in 1866 and died of “chronic nephritis” (read: he drank himself to death), the story goes that Chatouilleu asked to be displayed forever in death as he so often appeared in life: in his clown costume and makeup. Whether or not that’s true is up for debate, since Crew says he leased the body from a Gypsy circus family who’ve apparently forgotten about their petrified Pierrot; what was supposed to be a six-month gig for the dead clown has turned into years. Hoping that Chatouilleu’s family has forgotten about him, Crew has built a kind of cage to protect the glass coffin from the elements, and to protect his patrons from the clown. “He’s embalmed with mercury and arsenic,” said Crew, again with the trademark grin. “If that glass cracked, it would take a hazmat team to clean this place up. One good whiff and you’d be dead.” We took a good look through the bars at the moonlit face of the figure in the glass box, and either it really is a dead guy in clown makeup or a really good fake. “Oh, he’s real all right,” said Crew, who says he once put on a gas mask and checked Chatouilleu out for himself. “Just a little skin slippage between the thumb and forefinger, but otherwise he’s in pretty good shape,” chirped Crew, while we made note of the term “skin slippage” for future dinnertime banter. The prison shed setup makes it look like the dead clown isn’t going anywhere, but Crew pointed to another corner of the patio and said he’d be moving Chatouilleu there soon because he had bigger plans for the space the corpse is currently occupying. “We’re going to serve barbecue here,” Crew told us. “And we’re going to call it Long Pig Barbecue.” (Long Pig, for those of you who don’t watch Rachael Ray, is cannibal-speak for “human”). Yummy.

Next to the dead clown, we looked up and noticed a hideously amateurish painting of woman who seemed vaguely familiar. “I don’t even want to talk about that,” Carl said. But of course, he did. “The painting is possessed. People have gone running out of here screaming after looking at. A few Halloweens ago, someone stole it. Two weeks later it was back with a note on it that said “Fuck this.” How interesting. Did its eyes move? Did it talk? Did it suddenly morph into something hideous like Laura Ingraham? We wanted to know. “I can’t tell you,” he said, ominously. When pressed for further info, Crew clammed up completely, so we asked him if we could at least take his picture in front of the painting. He thought about it for a moment and then shook his head. “No. No way,” he said politely, as if he were actually spooked. Then he turned and walked off under an archway that read “Institute of Nude Wrestling” across the top. We got excited for a moment, thinking we had found the sign from the long lost nudie joint on Santa Monica Boulevard. But just as we remembered the place was called “Academy of Nude Wrestling,” Crew snorted and laughed mockingly. “Fuck no, that’s not the real sign. I made that!” (For the real “Academy of Nude Wrestling,” check out p. [xx] in the Lost Strangeles chapter.)

We stuck around for another half-hour of kibitzing with North Hollywood’s preeminent charlatan as he attempted to probe the limits of our gullibility by insisting that the cat staring at us from the rooftop was, in fact, a phantom. “Oh yeah,” he said, “There must have been a vet around here or something because this place is crawling with phantom cats.” When we pointed out that the “phantom” cat on the roof looked very much like a real cat, he laughed once again at our naivete. “You have no idea how real these phantoms can make themselves look.” Okie doke. We made some small talk about Marc Bolan and Bad movies in an attempt to distract him long enough for one of us to steal the haunted painting, but he kept his eye on it the whole time. We’d have to come back for it. On the way out, we noted what appeared to be a dead “merman” (not Ethel, but a man-fish mutant) on the wall, right next to the head of Sasquatch. “Those are probably fakes,” Crew said with unusual candor, then qualified his statement by adding, “Though you can never be sure.”

Right after the Ikea cafeteria, we would have to say that California Institute of Abnormalarts is the second-most romantic place in town. If you really want to make the most of an evening there, check out their schedule and go on a night when they’re having a real live freak show, or even better, a performance by Shaye Saint John, a performance artist who claims to hold the world’s record for having the most problems. “Man, all I can tell you is that she had this horrible disease that destroyed her spine, and then she got hit by a train and lost her limbs and her face got all burned up, but she keeps going, and makes these incredible short films out in her abandoned home in the desert.” Right, Carl, and she probably breeds phantom cats out there, too.  If you’ve never been entertained by what appears to be a coked-up, wheelchair-bound drag queen wearing a hideous mask, wig, and loose-fitting mumu, who flails “her” fake arms and legs (which look surprisingly like those of an old, beat-up mannequin), and babbles incoherently in a voice that sounds like one of the Chipmunks on Adrenachrome, then you must check out this exquisitely “handicapped” fucktard who will amuse you in ways you never imagined possible. We predict she’ll be opening for Bobby Slayton at Hooters Casino in Vegas by the end of the year. She’s that good.

Then again, so is Mr. Crew.

California Institute of Abnormalarts
11334 Burbank Boulevard
North Hollywood
818.506.6353
www.ciabnormalarts.com

Serving Justice at Law Dogs

All rise!

The line at Pink’s could vanish, Tail o’ the Pup could tap dance down La Cienega, and Oki Dog could wrap its special in the Shroud of Turin itself––but none of these miracles would match the marvel that was Law Dogs. Forget about Los Angeles; for twenty-five years, on every Wednesday after 7 p.m., Law Dogs cooked up something you couldn’t find at any other hot dog stand in the world: free legal advice.

Law Dogs’ owner and operator, attorney Kim Pearman, knew how to win a court case, but had no idea how to run a hot dog stand, so he did what any intelligent entrepreneur would do: he went through the competition’s trash. Digging through the garbage bin at Cupid’s, Pearman lined up his vendors and perfected the art of putting together a good dog before opening Law Dogs in December 1980 (he was going to call it Stupid’s Hot Dogs, but his wife talked him out of it).

Pearman was as surprised as anyone when his experiment in fast food and free counsel soon blossomed into five more joints, and caught the attention of Hollywood and points beyond. Disney knew there was a story there and optioned the film and TV rights. While the Mouse wrestled with whether to cast Dean Jones or Kurt Russell in the lead, Pearman showed up on every conceivable TV and radio show, and Law Dogs became something of a cult phenomenon.

Sometimes he would get over fifty people in line on Wednesday evenings, with questions ranging from immigration to murder. Pearman never solicited cases for his business and guaranteed each Law Dogger the same confidentiality his paying clients received. This was not a gimmick; Pearman lost sleep worrying about his customers and their problems, and though he wasn’t sure how the state bar might view his generosity, he never had a single malpractice case arise from his Law Dogs’ counseling. As Dickens might have said, “It was the best of times, it was the wurst of times.”

Some of the folks who dropped in for advice were unable to parse the difference between “Free Legal Advice” (as offered on the sign out front) and “Free Legal Representation.” Some expected him to draw up their divorce papers or mount their embezzlement defense gratis. Pearman is generous, but not crazy. What he offered free of charge was his legal expertise to many individuals who could not afford an attorney, or who where baffled by the daunting, often frustrating process of navigating our legal system. This wasn’t about offering someone a helpful hint and telling him to get lost; Pearman guided many folks through entire legal proceedings––like preparing an appeal––which, all told, could easily take months and sometimes more than year. Considering how much lawyerly advice tends to cost by the hour––even over the phone––Pearman’s generosity added up to a pretty penny. A lot of pretty pennies, in fact.

In time, Disney’s interest cooled, and competition from places like 7-Eleven left all but one of the Law Dogs to carry on the good fight; and carry on it did, to the tune of about $2000 of debt every month. Graduates of Wharton Business School will be quick to ask: What kind of businessman keeps his operation going when it loses over $24K a year? Well, how do you spell philanthropist? Pearman wanted to give something back to the community, and his successful law practice allowed him to absorb the loss––for a while. If you didn’t know better, you might think that Pearman was trying to give lawyers a good name.

Undoubtedly, some will argue that Law Dogs couldn’t stand up to Pink’s in the flavor department, but that’s hooey. Law Dogs got its franks from upscale distributor Young’s Market. And if you had to wait in a long line at Law Dogs, you were waiting for free legal advice, and that’s the best condiment of all. Sure, sautéed onions are delicious, but they’re not going to give you pointers on preparing your last will and testament, are they? In a town filled with ambulance-chasers who peddle their services on TV with all the subtle panache of carnival barker, Pearman’s noble venture was truly an oddity, and an exception to the clichéd rule. Unfortunately, even philanthropic lawyers have their limits, and Pearman decided to throw the book at Law Dogs in 2005. Our objections were overruled; now it’s a taco stand.

In closing, let us propose this hypothetical scenario: It’s 1994. You’ve just murdered your ex-wife and her handsome young friend in a fit of rage, and worked up an appetite in the process. Would it make more sense to go straight to Law Dogs–– or to hide in the back of a Bronco and lead police and news crews on a low-speed chase halfway to San Diego? We all know the answer, and though it’s clear that at least one man was not smart enough to take advantage of Pearman’s largesse, plenty of other customers will fondly remember the humble Van Nuys hut where, in addition to Jury Dogs, Plaintiff Dogs, and Super Judge Dogs, justice was also served.

Court is now adjourned.

Law Dogs
Formerly at 14114 Sherman Way
Van Nuys

Indian Squaw-lor at the Wigwam Village Motel

In 1955 the marquee luring visitors to Wigwam Village, one of the more distinctive roadside motels built during the halcyon years of Route 66, read “Sleep in a Wigwam, Get More for Your Wampum.” However, by the close of the twentieth century, Foothill Boulevard was a road far less traveled, and the slightly more desperate “Do It in a Teepee” was the catchphrase used by the Wigwam management to attract potential guests.

It seemed that the clientele to which Wigwam Village originally catered was long gone. There were no apple-cheeked American families on summer vacation frolicking among the rambling lawn hosting Wigwam’s eighteen stucco teepees. The kidney-shaped pool had been drained, and served mostly as a receptacle for dead leaves. The grounds, once grassy green, were an arid wasteland uncannily evocative of the reservations issued to Native Americans by the United States Government (the Wigwam maintenance crew must have been scalped around the same time that the 10 Freeway offered an alternative high-speed route through San Bernardino). As for the teepees themselves, patches of mismatched paint had been slapped over graffiti, iron bars secured the tiny windows, and if there were a star rating system for squalor, this motel would have scored a perfect five.

The future of Wigwam Village however, is looking up. After changing ownership, the place is slowly beginning to look like its former self. The graffiti is gone, as are the bars over the windows, and the pool is now filled with water instead of San Bernardino’s airborne litter. Wigwam Village is beginning to heal.

And for the record, it’s no less fun to do it in a teepee.

Wigwam Village Motel
2728 Foothill Boulevard (Route 66)
San Bernardino
909.875.3005
www.wigwammotel.com

Enjoying the Ultimate Blind Date at Opaque

As America’s answer to a culinary movement that sprouted up across Europe in the past decade, Opaque offers “dining in the dark.” We’re not talking about mood lighting here, people; this is a restaurant that serves its fare in total fucking darkness. The theory behind the experience is deceptively simple: by depriving diners of their sense of sight, other senses—including taste—are heightened. The degree to which that’s true will depend on the individual, but other than supercharged taste buds, one can easily surmise a few other benefits to dining in the dark:

1) ENDURING DULLNESS: Go ahead, close your eyes. You don’t have to look like you care what your dinner partner(s) is saying. A simple “uh-huh” now and then will lead them believe you’re actually listening.

2) AURAL VOYEURISM: We found that dining in pitch blackness lends itself to eavesdropping; so much so that we spent more time listening to the conversations at other tables than bothering to engage in our own.

3) RUDENESS: No one can see your terrible table manners. Eat with your hands, pick your nose, make faces at your date, flip off the other tables—no one will know. Well, almost no one. Be aware that, for security reasons, there may be some degree of night-vision surveillance at the restaurant—we like to picture Ted Levine from Silence of the Lambs roaming among the tables—so while the thought of eating diner with your pants around your ankles in a crowded restaurant is understandably inviting, we would advise against it.

4) AVOID PUBLIC HUMILIATION: This is the perfect place to take someone you’re embarrassed to be seen with in public, like an Ann Coulter or Kevin Federline.

Those not schooled in Braille needn’t worry about reading the menu at Opaque. Diners order their meals in the well-lit lobby area, and can choose from a prix fixe menu of beef, chicken, fish, or vegetarian entrées. Prefer surprises? Choose the “Keep it a secret” option from the menu and live dangerously. Once a selection has been made, you will be introduced to your legally-blind waitperson, who will then ask you to turn off your phones, take off anything that emits light (like a wristwatch or a secret squirrel decoder ring, or a uranium pendant), and put your hand on his/her shoulder before leading your party into the dining area like a slow-mo conga line. From that point on, you’re in the dark, and completely at the mercy of your server. Fortunately, they are a kind-hearted lot.

Opaque’s table d’hôte menu exists for more than just the sake of simplicity. Total darkness makes for some sloppy eating and prohibits the prompt bussing of tables, so the restaurant only allows one seating per table per night. While driving up the price of a meal, this policy ensures diners that they will not be sitting on someone else’s misplaced pat of butter. Or worse. (See VH1’s Rock of Love, season 2, episode 6 for more details.)

Once seated, we found the spatial disorientation to be oddly intoxicating, like being naked in public. Groping for the bread basket was a newfound odyssey. The sound of our water being poured proved to be an auditory revelation. The thrill of poking our eyes out while trying to eat our salads had us giddy with excitement. And cutting meat in the dark? Fugeddaboutit! Even if the food had been mediocre, the adrenaline rush alone would have been worth the price of admission.

But the food was great. We’re not sure how much of it had to do our palates being enhanced by the darkness, but who cares? How often do you have the occasion to spend ten minutes speculating as to exactly what that delicious crunchy thing in the salad was? The beef “hangar steak,” despite conjuring the frightful image of Joan Crawford looking over our shoulders, was incredibly tender and tasty. And though one of us is an avowed cheesecake hater, eating it in the dark made it not only tolerable, but downright delicious. Does this mean we’d be raving about a dog turd had it been presented to us on a plate? That all depends on how it’s prepared.

Cheap scat humor aside, eating in the dark succeeded in forcing us to actually pay attention to what was going into our mouths. And once there, the food tended to linger longer than usual. We savored each bite, mulled over the combinations of tastes, and generally carried on like a couple of yahoos who’d never tasted feta cheese before.

We were not only pleasantly surprised by the quality of Opaque’s cuisine, but also by the warmth of the service. Our waiter, Michael, had a soothing demeanor, was always prompt with the chow, and got bonus points for serenading us with “Blue Moon” on the trumpet. Suck on that, singing waiters!

Unless you camp out in the lobby, celebrity spotting is understandably difficult at Opaque. In fact, the restaurant is the only high-profile “can’t-see-and-can’t-be-seen” establishment we can think of. Notable patrons have run the gamut from transitory A-lister Mekhi Phifer to Married with Children gnome David Faustino to demented presidential has-run H. Ross Perot. If there are celebs at your seating, you will have to rely on senses other than sight to pick them out of the gloom. This is harder than it seems: we could have sworn we smelled Larry King, but it turned out to be the pesto-crusted chicken.

Opaque
Somewhere in the dark
310.546.7619
www.darkdining.com

A Reverie in Tomato Sauce at the Original Vince’s House of Spaghetti

We’d guess that the day people got excited about spaghetti passed long ago. Apparently not, Vince’s is quick to demonstrate. There are lots of people who get excited about spaghetti. Real excited. We don’t just mean sploshers either.

If you venture into the saucy world of Vince’s—and you damn well should—don’t waste your time with any location but the original in Ontario. Owned and operated by the same family since 1945, it’s everything you’d want a spaghetti house to be. And on a Friday or Saturday night, it’s at full throttle, pulsating with all that spaghetti is and can ever be.

You can smell the sauce as soon as you step out of your car, and when hit with the anachronistic blur of green vinyl, red gingham, wood paneling, and polished terrazzo immediately upon entering, it will be unequivocally clear that the quarter tank of gas you burned to get here was not in vain. An idiosyncratic lighting scheme which was probably installed sometime before Nixon’s resignation bathes Vince’s expansive series of dining rooms in an abrasive yet strangely calming glow, bringing to mind some of the less-popular New York subway stations. And the claim that Vince’s serves “over 15,000 miles of spaghetti a year” almost makes our nipples hard.

A refreshingly simple menu basically—but not exclusively—offers either spaghetti or mostaccioli served with tomato sauce, tomato sauce with meatballs, or tomato meat sauce. The food itself is pleasingly mundane, completing a delicate but perfect balance between location and ambience; one has to search far and wide to enjoy a meal this dull, and Vince’s House of Spaghetti pays off as one of the few restaurants in Los Angeles county that is 100 percent of exactly what it is. The fact that dinner is wheeled to your table on a cart, that the beverage menu features buttermilk, and that the dessert list includes rainbow sherbet bumps Vince’s precariously close to the top of our list. Plus there’s a parmesan shaker on every table, so there’s none of that “Would you like some fresh grated parmesan?” bullshit. Pour it the fuck on.

It is actually possible to stuff yourself for less than ten dollars. “Vince’s Dinner” includes minestrone soup, salad, and a garlic or cheese roll (their “exclusive taste sensation”), puffy as a brand new bedroom slipper. And one thing Vince’s knows is their spaghetti—a heaping platter full—cooked al dente, and not wanting of sauce. Add extra carbs with draft beer, even champagne, and a remarkably extensive wine list for a place where the most expensive dinner caps out at $11.95.

The Vince’s staff runs like a well-oiled machine (including our secretary-hot waitress, but we digress) and they’ll also serve up a bitchin’ Vince’s Spaghetti T-shirt upon request, a steal at only ten bucks.

And if you do happen to be a splosher you can get an extra dinner order to go, and no one will be the wiser.

Vince’s House of Spaghetti
1206 West Holt Boulevard
Ontario
909.986.7074
www.vincesspaghettirestaurant.com

Coming into Our Own at World Modeling Agency

The San Fernando Valley is famous for many dubious achievements, not the least of which is its rep as the nation’s capitol of porn production. While the Internet has allowed anyone in the world to compete on the global market as long as they can get their hands on a camera, a computer, and some genitals, the Valley is still home to the majority of the players in the X-rated industry, and is a veritable incubator for porn fodder, i.e., fresh meat.

And during the golden years of porn’s heyday, no one fed the industry more new flesh than the Farmer John of porn agents, Mr. Jim South of World Modeling Agency. A pompadoured, mustachioed gentleman with a slick Southern drawl that betrays his Texas roots (his dad was the assistant chief of the Dallas Police Department), South was once the de facto king of the nudie agents before he decided to hang up his spurs back in 2006 after thirty long years of slinging snatch. Competition from the Web and young upstart agents made it harder and harder for South to turn a profit, even though there were more girls entering the business than ever before. Gone were the days of the true porn superstar, when a handful of quality clients kept South solvent: beauties like Christy Canyon and Ginger Lynn, original suicide girls Savannah and Shauna Grant, and most famously, an underage Traci Lords, who duped South, the industry, and even the U.S. government into believing she old enough to be fornicating on film. In those days, a beautiful porn starlet was worth her weight in blow—and the blow got spread around. Now, even an average-looking smut queen––the kind who stars in a twenty-one-guy creampie then disappears––tends to be more attractive than the hottest contestant on America’s Next Top Model. Throw in the fact that looking and behaving like a streetwalker is now standard operating procedure for certain mega-celebs; overt sluttiness will get you your own reality show rather than ostracized; and any girl with a Webcam and a lock on her door can become an international sex superstar while Mom and Dad are watching Dancing with the Stars in the next room; and, well, it’s easy to see how an old-school porn agent might be a bit of an anachronism.

But showbiz is in the blood, as they say, and South couldn’t stay out of the business. When he reopened World Modeling less than a year after shuttering the place, he promised to limit the number of performers he represents—but we’re not sure that’s going to help him. Having seen a steady decline in his clients prior to his early retirement, South lost the rest when he decided to close shop. After being out of the loop so many months, and with his former clients now being repped by newer and shinier agencies like L.A. Direct Models, he has his work cut out for him. In many ways, South is like an X-rated version of Mike Ovitz. Both were once puppet masters who are now striving to make a comeback, and though Ovitz may appear to have the more difficult task ahead of him in a town that is fickle at best when it comes to granting second chances (Paul Reubens, anyone?), just scrolling through the talent on the World Modeling Web site shows just how fucked South might be. Perusing his current stable of, uh, talent, is akin to going through CAA’s client roster and finding out their biggest clients are now Tova Borgnine, Jared from the Subway sandwich commercials, and Baby Shamu. Grim, very grim.

But we’re rooting for South (who has teamed with his son, Jim, Jr.) if only because he’s a good ol’ boy as well as an XXX relic this town can’t afford to lose. His “cattle calls” were the stuff of couch-stained legend, and his office was the nexus of the porn industry. Within the faux wood-paneled walls of World Modeling there’s no telling how many angry fathers, brothers, and boyfriends threatened to kill him; how many nymphets pranced on the balcony to the chagrin of motorists on Van Nuys; how many lines of blow were snorted off freshly-waxed pudenda; how many corny stage names were invented; how many dreams were fulfilled; how many lives ruined; how many boners induced; how many marriages destroyed; how many tears shed; how many loads blown; how many boxes of Kleenex consumed.

The numbers stagger the mind.

World Modeling Agency
4523 Van Nuys Boulevard
Sherman Oaks
818.986.4316
www.worldmodeling.com