L.A.'s Eccentrics and their Art Facing Greater Scrutiny

Endangered Off-beat Charm and Colorful Folk Art Defines L.A.

Like a not-ready-for-prime-time-at-Disneyland's Small World attraction attraction, or a rejected eighth-hole miniature golf course design, this blue tree, it's attendant lawn gnomes and a watchful blue owl atop its branches constitute a fixture in someone's idea of Shangri-La. Repulbic Of L.A. spotted this unusual assemblage lovingly appointed to the front yard of a corner-lot home in Los Angeles, near L.A. City College.

Perhaps the coolest aspect of this Dali-esque affair is the fact that it barely stands out amid the delightful (delightful--if you're in a similar mood that this blogger happened to be when charmed by the scene pictured above) hodgepodge of bungalow-style, mid-century, post-modern, contemporary, residential and commercial structures and the equally discordant intentional-aesthetic-meets-obvious-neglect atmosphere that define this and so many Los Angeles neighborhoods.

On the topic of L.A.'s oddest charmers, is the apparently imminent demolition by county bulldozers of Phonehenge West and the jailing last week of its 59-year-old builder, who refused the county's order to tear down the surprisingly "right-looking" buildings.

Kim Fahey, a retired phone-company technician, built an outlandish and playful world for his children and visitors to Lancaster to enjoy. In fact, there's a proper gift shop and regular tours at Phonehenge West. (We're not sure if there's a Phonehenge East.) The County of Los Angeles ordered him to tear down the permit-less buildings, and after years of battles in court, which Mr. Fahey seems to have lost, he's been incarcerated for not following those orders. Because of the inherent property and claimed constitutional rights issues, not to mention the great visuals, plus the David vs. Goliath theme of the story, Phonehenge West has captured national attention. Click here for a link to the Washington Times' reporting of the Fahey and the D.A., and here for an earlier piece by the Huffingtonpost

It's interesting to note that the current edition of the L.A. Weekly has a cover story about L.A. County's "War on Desert Rats" which the paper says is currently underway near Lancaster in the Antelope Valley. Here is a link to that story.

RoLA will keep the exact location of our whimsical creation secret. lest the city attorney tries to pull a (District Attorney) Steve Cooley on it.

HYWD BLVD; Not Times Square, but...

Evening Stroll Reveals Hollywood Renaissance Still Growing

Almost any weeknight on Hollywood Boulevard finds the stretch of road from Gower westward to La Brea pulsing with life. Each week, the sidewalks at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue are pounded by a sea of people the likes of which one would expect at Manhattan's Times Square.

Anyone who remembers the desolation and the nearly defunct nightlife of Hollywood Boulevard circa 1990, which consisted mostly of the homeless, runaways, and prostitutes should be amazed by all of this out-from-behind-the-steering-wheel foot traffic.

For now, the shoulder-to-shoulder quantity of pedestrian activity is concentrated at Hollywood and Highland, but it persists at least for two blocks in either direction of that landmark intersection (on both sides of the street, no less) most Thursday, and just about all Friday and Saturday nights.

Here are some pics RoLA took on a recent Thursday evening walk around Hollywood and Hghland with our trusty iPhone camera in hand:

Photos by Thom Senzee (c) Republic Of L.A.

Famed Surfer, Skateboarder Cahill's Passing Rekindles Memory of Summer of 1980

DYING DAYS in DOGTOWN

Photos by Thom Senzee

It was just a few days ago that I watched the acclaimed indie film "Lords of Dogtown" for the first time. It's a fairly heavy telling of the story of mid-to-late 1970s skateboarding and surf culture in Southern California as told through the eyes of a motley crew of Venice Beach and south Santa Monica-area youth, who turned an industry and a sport on its head.

But it was more than just skating low, fast, and "vert" that made these young lords legends in the long run. It was the fact that they had, as it's been called in other sports, "heart." They needed a certain kind of wherewithal to survive simply because of the circumstances of their time and place. For the most part, they had nothing besides one another, skateboarding and surfing--which the late Chris Cahill, an original member of the group portrayed in Lords of Dogtown (though his character was downplayed in significance) said was always more important to him than skateboarding. To paraphrase, he said: we skated because we surfed; not the other way around.

In any event, skateboarding, surfing and surviving were orders of the day.

As one Cahill's contemporary's put it: "We almost all came from broken homes." Dogtown itself (Venice Beach and south Santa Monica) was a place where you didn't want to take very many steps forward without looking backward over your shoulder. Venice of the 1970s was, in a word, dangerous. It was, in another word, dirty.

The Z Boys (a professional skateboarding team that included one girl skater) got their name from the Zephyr Surf Shop on Main Street in south Santa Monica. Chris Cahill is said to have "talked his way" onto the team. At the 1975 Del Mar National Skateboarding Finals, the Z-Boys won first place with their never-before-seen, aggressive skating style. It's largely agreed that event marked the primordial beginnings of extreme sports. After Del Mar came the magazine interviews, sponsorship offers and endorsement (not to mention money).

From that moment on, Cahill and his fellow Z-Boys set surf and skate fashion, whether they meant to or not. For instance, they helped make Vans tennis shoes famous throughout Southern California. Basic dark-blue Vans were the foundation of their competition uniform. We're talking at least five years before the film "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" made the sneakers famous nationally.

Chris Cahill was found dead at his L.A. home June 24. The cause of death has not been announced. Some who knew him say Cahill was battling cancer.

A personal memory about Chris Cahill:

My dad, little brother and I were homeless, living in a Ford Econoline Van in 1980. I was 12 and 13 during that period. It was the apex of surf-&-skate style in mainstream culture in the southwestern U.S., albeit a couple of years after it had been shaped and influenced by the Z Boys of Dogtown.

Although homeless, not really yet a teenager, and new to Southern California, I struggled to look the part by trying to get my dad to buy whatever O.P. or Qucksilver rags I could find at Goodwill or Salvation Army thrift stores that summer.

So much of our time living in the van was spent at the beach, where it was easier to stay clean (public showers, the ocean). Ironically, one of the dirtiest-looking neighborhoods in the city was where we often drove in order to remain hygenic.

I was familiar with the Z-Boys from skateboarding magazines. I knew what some of them looked like.

I like to believe a guy who stood up for my little brother and me while our drunken father roughly dumped a shampoo bottle and its contents onto our heads, lambasting us for being embarassed and ashamed about our obvious homelessness and use of the public showers as our family bathroom.

It was true; I was ashamed. And, I thought all of those "cool kids" laughing at us probably had really nice houses and moms and dads who doted on them. I only recently learned that guys like Chris Cahill were not the spoiled blond brats who had it made, as I had assumed.

I'll never forget the skinny, yellow-headed skater who kick-flipped his way through the little circle of youths gathered around our outdoor dysfunctional-family affair, during which Daddy downed a can of Bud, used his foot to kick Michael and me in the ass a couple of times each, and told us to soap up and be proud, because we had no right to be embarassed about him or about living in a van.

Then, there was this slight-looking young guy standing bravely between where I and my brother Michael stood and where my much larger and rather intimidating father stood, still ranting away.

The young man said something like this to my father:

"Lay off, man. Who do you think you are? Leave these guys alone, man. They're just kids."

Everyone watching us seemed to know him and acted deferential to the blond skater. They dispersed while muttering phrases toward my dad affirming the admonition of the guy I will always believe was Chris Cahill.

"Let the little dudes rinse off and kick it on the beach, man," were the last words he said before he slapped his board to the concrete and disappeared as quickly as he had arrived. I was sorry he was gone then; I'm sorry for he's gone now.

Postscript: My father got sober in a 12-step program and has remained so for more than 30 years.

One of L.A.'s Juiciest (& Most Forgotten) Stories of Mayhem & Malfeasance

This Week Marks the Anniversary of a Bombshell of a Murder Occured in the City of Angels in 1982

Q: What do this classic 1970s blonde beauty, her murdereous gay roommate, the late founder of Bloomingdales, Larry Flynt, Grauman's Chinese Theater, as well as both Nancy and Pres. Ronald Reagan all have in common?

A: The Story of how a set of Videotapes Reportedly Depicting some of these Famous People Allegedly Participating in Depraved-Sex Orgies were 'Stolen' after the Murder of Vicki Morgan, the alleged mistress of the late Alfred Bloomingdale. Click here for the full story, not mention of the most amazing (however plain) website about the 1980s you'll ever encounter.

Radical Fungi in L.A.?

After a little bit of research and cross-referencing of images and articles across a wide spectrum of major news outlets, life science publications, and at the university Web site of the original discoverers of a new branch of fungi, it seemed apparent that in the first three (vertical) photos here, Los Angeles was indeed being overtaken by the just discovered new phylum of fungi, and that the publiher of this blog, Republic Of L.A., had probably made the same discovery around the same time, or even earlier, than the researchers in Britain.

A phylum is the biological classification just below kingdom; kingdom is just two steps below the classification known as "life." (In other words, the discovery of this "new" fungi is momentus. The discovery was made in a pond at the University of Exeter in the U.K. by researchers there. It's called Cryptomycota, or hidden fungi, because the entire phylum has gone undetected for eons.

Had Republic Of L.A. found the Phylum First?

Here's what we almost posted:

It's noteworthy that Republic Of L.A.'s lens encountered the subject in the three small photos shown in this post at least three months before the Exeter scientists announced their discovery in the journal "Nature." We're contacting officials at the university's Biology Department with these images to see if they can give a likelihood of whether or not this specimen (shown from three different camera angles) may be a member of the dodgy fungi phylum. The photo was taken because the growth on this tree in Los Feliz just seemed extraordinary. (I heard about the discovery of a new type of fungus on NPR several weeks after taking these pics, then read about it on Huffingtonpost.com the same day. I had a hunch that maybe that was the explanation for that somewhat ominous looking beach ball-sized parasite I had s shot with my Droid camera a few months earlier. However, I didn't see any photos of Cryptomycota (aka, Rozellida) until today."

Odd though this fungus appeared in the eyes of this observer, there was a nagging feeling that something was not quite right with the image (bottom of post), purportedly a photograpgh of Cryptomycota, that Huffingtonpost and so many others displayed as an image of the hidden fungus when news of its discovery was announced. That image accompanied so much of the coverage of the the new fungi--online and elsewhere--and it so resembled the thing RoLA captured six months ago, that we wanted to believe our fungus and the image of the fungus others published were both the new fungus. But alas, it became too hard to ignore the nagging and a feeling that this thing was just too big to be a "crypto" anything. Who could miss it?

Not Cryptomycota:

The photo above that has been widely and erroneously presented as an image of Cryptomycota. In fact, the only photo Republic of L.A. could find of the new fungi is of its microscopic cells (click the link embedded in "only" above to see it).

As it turns out, the fungus Republic Of L.A. photographed appears only to be of a common variety known as (drum roll) "Orange Fungus." We still think it's special and weird.

Optical Illusion? Or Haunted House?

M Y S T E R Y ?

This humble Spanish Mission cottage in Hancock Park (-adjacent) inexplicably grew a multi-story castle from its single-story roof.

Actually, the mansion is a graceful, early 20th-Century multi-family residential building one block west of this home near Vine St. and Melrose Ave.

The effect is even spookier with the "darken" special effect on my camera enabled.

M Y S T E R Y solved...

But it's no less magical that only in Los Angeles are all the elements for visual novelties with an air of mystery, or at least of mystique, so easy to stumble upon. I see them all the time. Hopefully, you like seeing them as much as I love sharing them on Republic Of L.A.

Hollywood's Border's Shutters with Hundreds Nationwide

Ending what was a 1990s runaway success, quintessential of that era when big audacious (and unlikely) ventures were homerun hits with investors and consumers alike; Borders, is closing stores and filing Chapter 11.

Not even a high-volume landmark flagship store, such as the Borders at the glamorous, historic and lavishly renewed intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Vine Street in Hollywood is immune in.

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Tax Day? Tea Time!

Anti-Obama, Anti-Medicare, Anti-Tax, Pro-Ryan, Tea Partying Angelenos' Day in the Sun?

What they lacked in numbers during tax season 2011, they made up for in zealousness

By Thom Senzee

WOODLAND HILLS (RoLA)--Patti Hutchens (far left, w/flag) came out in the late afternoon sun Saturday to a park in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of the City of L.A. and did something she's done every April 15 since 2009--wave the red-white-&-blue at passing cars to express her passion for what she believes America needs most: lower taxes.

"I like the Paul Ryan plan," Hutchens, 56 of Canoga Park, said.

Asked whether the part of Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Minn.) plan to end Medicare as we know it today in favor of a system that would give seniors a voucher and marching orders to fend for themselves in the private health-insurance market bothered her or not, the self-proclaimed former liberal aanswered in with a definite "no."

"I don't think [ending Medicare] is a problem," she said. "They can just go to Kaiser."

Hutchens and many of her fellow Tea partiers seem to believe seniors will find few if any barriers to obtaining health care from a largely for-profit private system, despite the fact that politicians and business leaders from both parties have long decried as dysfunctional and inaccessable to at least 40 million people in this country.

But on one defining aspect of the Ryan plan, Hutchens seemed confused. Republic Of L.A. asked her if she really believed an 80- or 90-year-old with pre-existing conditions (is there such a thing as a 90-year-old without pre-existing conditions?) would be able to find coverage with an $8,000 government voucher. That amount that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would be the average value of a voucher for a person aged 65.

"I think it's $12,000," she said. "I think Kaiser would insure someone like that for $12,000."

In fact, according to the non-partisan CBO, the cost for coverage of the kind now enjoyed by all seniors who receive medicare would cost, at minimum, $16,000 on the open market. The Paul Ryan voucher system would allow the average 65-year-old $8,000. The individual would have to come up with the other $8,000 on her own--assuming she could find an company that would accept her (keeping in mind that Republican plans also include repealing Pres. Obama's Affordable Care Act, and returning the nation to a system that allows for denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions).

Yet Tea Party "patriots" such as Hutchens, are confident that not only will insurance companies welcome 65-year-olds with pre-exisint conditions, they'll also roll out the red carpet for 85- and 95-year-olds too.

L.A.'s Overlooked Overlooks

We drive by, walk past and stumble upon some of the most spectacular vistas you could ask for each and every day in this town without ever noticing. Here's one that caught my eye recently. Photo taken from the rooftop parking lot of the Pavilions grocery store in West Hollywood last Saturday afternoon. The challenge for we Angelenos is finding a few minutes to stop and breathe in this storied land. But the payoff is nealy always worth the effort. Slow down once a day and realize how lucky we really are here.

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Green Irony

GOT GREEN?
I was walking back home from the gym on Sunset (Arclight 24-Hour Fitness). Across from Amoeba, there iT was: somebody's dead-tree flier advertising something in an apparently greenwashing manner (greenwashing, of course, means falsley coloring your ad campaign, corporate image, etc...in the colors of an enviornmentally friendly entity).

"OMG, Thom; give these folks a break! It's a friggin' flier...shit happens. The wind probably blew it off of a telephone pole or a bulletin board. Maybe some jerk tore it off and threw it on the ground. This is probably a flier from a cool non-profit, or a small business. Whoever it belongs to is just trying to make a living in the Great Recession!" you say.

Okay, but zoom in a little. See? It's masking-taped to the sidewalk, for crikey's sake."