Hey!
Okay, Wow! This is letter number Three in Two days. I know what your thinking... Buckie is scrambling to use all of his stamps before the big 2 cent increase this Sunday. No! This is simply not the case, nay I just now got into this groove, and I'm out to prove my love... Or some and such. Really though, I intended to be writing to you much more these past few months but I got really stuck when those bastards in South Dakota returned all my letters. That really chapped my hide. Honestly, like those bastards in SD have
anything better to do then take a couple seconds out of there day, stop hunting for fools gold to sell tourists, and forward my damn letters. This is
really an outrage now that I think of it.
On a related note but down another path... I don't suppose you picked up any fools gold for me when you were passing through South Dakota? I don't know if you had time to make any stops before your run in with those people out there, but maybe you did, I'm sure you needed gas or a slurpy or something. I really Like fools gold, it looks just like gold you know! It's shiny and pretty, but I need not take up a bunch of precious space to tell you that, you
get theses types of things. I bet if you didn't have a chance to stop that they sell that sort of thing in the prison gift shop! That and post cards, "greetings From the Black Hills, We are really much more White than you'd imagine!" I remember when I was just a wee lad growing up in Kansas my cousins who lived just down the road took a family vacation to the Black Hills and they came back with these very cool pieces of fools gold, I was really impressed and green with gold envy (nice play on color huh?). I thought about their cool ass fools gold for almost a year until my family got to go on our very own Black Hills vacation. I remember bouncing up and down in my seat the entire trip, just waiting to see those dark forest fire mountains breaking up my horizon. We drove north from Western Kansas, passing through scenic Nebraska. Nebraska, which for me is normal an enchanted land of modern wonder and excitement was very nearly unbearable. I had just two things on my mind, Fools Gold and The Black Hills. Finally after hours and hours of driving those magnificent hills broke the horizon. The very hills that George Herbert Walker Washington once called "The Very Heart and Soul of Our Great Country". The very hills where the Sioux Indians first invented and practiced Christianity. Where Jesus, Elvis, JFK, RFK and John Lennon all have summer homes. The Black Hills. We drove, all of us mesmerized by the glory of Gods creation. Finally we came to a roadside Stucky's, Dairy Queen, gas station, flee market, truck wash and Indian Artifact Superstore, and we just so happened to need fuel. Father pulled over, we all bailed out of the car, trampling each other and some fat children from Missouri, fighting and pushing to get inside the Indian Artifact Superstore. I was a vile and ruthless young man of 9, and I made the door first. I passed those wonderful plastic tomahawks which on another day would have sent me begging to mother for an advance on next months allowance, past the plastic mining helmets, with one thought in mind, "There's Gold in them there hills!". Finally I found the display, wrapped in a great amount of plastic was a small leather pouch, the packaging exclaiming in gilt letters, "Gold!". I took the plunge, begged my mother to make this one purchase for me, being a kind and understanding human she of course acquiesced, and we strode up to the fabulous faux log cabin counter and made our exchange. I was a boy overjoyed. I ran back to our transport and climbed in, yanking at packaging the whole way. The rest of the family made their way inside and off we went, all the while I still struggled to loose my treasure. Finally I had that little brown leather pouch in the palm of my hand. I pulled at the strings until the whole was large enough to pass the contents, turning the pouch over I dumped it into the palm of my hand. There before me sat my fools gold. Not the pretty gold my cousins had returned with, but ugly little pebbles so obviously spray painted gold. One layer spray painted gold so thin that you could still see the grey of the rock behind. I felt ashamed, how could I have been so stupid? I was after all, the fool at last.
I guess there is really no hiding my desire for Fools gold is there. Wow! What a paragraph. I really thought about starting a new one about half way through but by that time I figured I had gone on so long that it might give un due weight to a particular section if I hit the return key too soon. Enough of that though.
How goes the big house? I'm feeling pretty good today. Last night Amy and I took 25 of our brand speaking new cds to the Virgin Megastore at Crescent Heights and Sunset, and met with the consignment buyer, who was very cool and agreed to carry them in their MEGA-store. It helps that our very good friend Marc happens to work there. The whole Virgin thing is actually going to turn out very cool because Marc does all the placement of cds there, so we will have a listening post and all sorts of other neato things. He and a friend have even talked about sneaking us into the top 30 some weekend. YAY! Sg Guerilla Style!
After that little exchange we walked across the courtyard and had a celebratory meal at CPK. Wait... NEWS FLASH! The Wolfgang Puck that used to occupy the space just across from the Virgin MEGAstore is now a CPK. Sad really as I loved the Wolfgang Puck food, good though because I HATED that cheesy decor and logo. Really, how bad was that? UCK!
Our celebration meal was your standard California Pizza Kitchen Fare.
Interesting note, as we sat looking out the window at the strip mall and WAMU across Crescent Heights, I was reminded of a bit of recent Los Angeles history. Did you know that the very strip mall that now houses the McDonald's, with the strange tunnel drive through, the parking lot and the WAMU all sit upon the sight of forgotten Hollywood history? Yes ma'am, I couldn't make this stuff up. It actually used to be a hotel, restaurant and apartment complex called, The Garden Of Allah, but don't take my word for it, get it from the mouth of Wikipedia:
Garden of Allah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Garden of Allah (cabaret)The Garden of Allah was a famous
apartment complex in
West Hollywood, California, on
Sunset Boulevard between Crescent Heights and Havenhurst, at the east end of the
Sunset Strip.
Although built in a Spanish-Moorish style of architecture, its name did not stem from
Islam but from stage and screen actress
Alla Nazimova, the original owner. She had built her private home there, and at the end of her film career built the complex around it. She went bankrupt, however, and sold the property, but continued to live in one of the villas on the grounds.
The Garden of Allah became home to many celebrities and literary figures.
F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there for several months in 1937-38 at the beginning of his final sojourn in Hollywood. (He wrote himself a postcard while there: "Dear Scott -- How are you? Have been meaning to come in and see you. I have living [sic] at the Garden of Allah. Yours, Scott Fitzgerald.") Humorist/actor
Robert Benchley was a frequent resident.
In spite of the fact that it was among the landmark buildings of the west side of
Los Angeles, it was torn down in the
1960s and replaced by a bank.
and more..
The Vanished Garden of Carnal Abandon
Garden of Allah, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood
I'll make this quick. I know it's frustrating going places with me, because I see what could have been, or what's implied, or what's missing, or what used to be there. This is a 'what used to be there'.
Our story in Hollywood starts with Alla Nazimova, silent movie star, silent movie producer, ultra-dramatic stage actress, cinematic visionary, conspicuously lesbian social magnet, former concert violinist, and accomplished international liar / effective self-publicist. When sound arrived, Nazimova perceived that financial diversification might be good, so she converted her well-situated 1921 mansion estate into a three and a half acre semi-tropical hangout. She retained a private apartment upstairs in her former mansion, with the bottom story converted into a restaurant and bar. The property became a complicated and romantic collection of Spanish-style bungalows and detached apartments, 25 villas were constructed around the pool. Cheap, yes, but designed with drama and scale. And of course Nazimova kept the pool; shaped like the Black Sea. This was January, 1927.
Nazimova's lesbian tatting circle and the financially catastrophic pursuit of her cinematic vision are tempting but off-topic. She'd played opposite Valentino as Camille! Valentino married two of her ex-girlfriends with a brief sloppy overlap for which he was jailed for bigamy! She studied in Moscow with Stanislavsky! No, no, to stay on-topic, the important thing is that her Garden of Allah was bankrupt within a year. It was taken over by an outside operator who raised the rents. Nazimova stayed. As a tenant.
Then a few people came over to stay. Uh, people like Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Clara Bow, Buster Keaton, Ramon Navarro, the Marx Brothers (especially Harpo), Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, Joe E. Lewis, Artie Shaw, Marlene Dietrich, George Kaufman, Laurence Olivier. Those people. And hundreds of other names maybe, who knows. Not everybody who went to the Garden of Allah wanted to be seen there. Orsonfalls in that category. Probably.
Somehow, among the tangle of phony marriages, the fist-fights, the volume of liquor especially all through Prohibition, high-powered and insecure and spoiled celebrities, tons of recreational sex, other tons of drugs, robberies, drunken rages (John O'Hara, to name one; there's a story that afterward, when he tried to apologize, Robert Benchley called him a shit), cross-gender liaisons, the black frustrations of writers (and others) having their souls eaten by the Hollywood system, orgies, more robberies, simmering feuds, money problems and sudden changes of plan, the Garden of Allah acquired a bohemian reputation. A reputation for hedonism. Imagine that.
That reputation grew progressively less glamorous through the property's 30-year decline, and towards the end its arcades and arched alcoves among the thick poolside tangle of orange trees, palms and hibiscus were more likely to be concealing a curled-up junky than a grinning, cursing, naked Carole Lombard. (I'll take door number two.)
Famously, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived here in the beginning of his Hollywood decline. Zelda was installed in an expensive sanitarium somewhere back east, their daughter Scotty in public school, and a recently-recovered trove of studio material indicates that Scott was really working. (Everybody seems surprised that he cranked out more than 2000 hand-written pages in pencil.) Scott lived here in those years just before dating the young pastry named Sheila Graham and trying to finish The Last Tycoon and struggling to make sense of studio employment and fighting an uphill battle to stay sober by drinking a lot of Coca-Cola. In fact, Graham wrote a book-length book about the Garden of Allah, called 'The Garden of Allah."
George Kaufmann stuffed himself in the back of a laundry truck to get from the Garden of Allah to the railroad station at the height of the Astor affair, to avoid a subpoena. (That's another story.)
Robert Benchley set up his temporary Hollywood residence in the Garden of Allah, among other east coast writers when they came out west to torture themselves with illusions of quick easy movie cash, their anxieties uncoiling in the permissive climate. Benchley was leery of traffic and called taxis to take him everywhere - for instance, to Schwab's Drugstore, directly across Sunset Boulevard. The site across the street is now a Virgin Megastore. (Hey, pick me up a couple of Mega Virgins if you go. I'm done with these.)
(And looming over the Strip out there across the street is Chateau Marmont which, come to think of it, was built in 1929 and must have always overlooked the Garden of Allah. Hmm.)
Harpo Marx moved into the Garden of Allah some time in the late 20's when he first came to make movies. Harpo had thin walls. (A lot of different people mention the thin walls.) After Harpo set up housekeeping and grew a sense of ownership, he got a new neighbor whose hours didn't coincide with Harpo's hours, and who played the piano, and who wouldn't shut up even after Harpo banged on the wall, etc. So Harpo set the alarm clock early one Saturday, tuned up his harp, and played the first 64 bars of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #1 as loud as he could, over and over and over, until his fingers bled, probably getting it wrong because he was self-taught, over and over and over all morning and into the afternoon, until he heard his new neighbor scream in strangled anguish and bang around like he was packing up, slammed his door, and disappeared, never to be seen again. A lot of effort, Harpo thought, but well worth it to be rid of such a nuisance. Then somebody told Harpo that his new neighbor the piano player was Rachmaninoff.
Where exactly? Southwest corner of Sunset Blvd and Crescent Heights Blvd.
The site is now a Washington Mutual bank and strip mall at 8152 Sunset Boulevard. There's a full-size replica of the Garden of Allah in the Universal Studios theme park in Orlando. The Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi" ("pave paradise, put up a parking lot") is supposed to be about the Garden of Allah, oddly, because Buffalo Springfield's song "For What It's Worth" is partly about the closing of Pandora's Box in 1966 to widen Sunset, right across the street. Close by is also where society & S&M photographer Helmut Newton was killed in a one-car crash, rolling out of the Chateau Marmont in his silver Cadillac SRX.
Really intersting stuff huh?
So after the CPK thing Amy and I tronce on home where we fall asleep watching a DVD of season three of Columbo.
Startling discovery. I was thinking that "tronce" did not look correct, so I checked it on Dictionary.com and I'm having trouble finding the word. Are you familar with this word? I think maybe I mis-spelled it, but a further search of said website does not get me to the word I had intended. The closest I get being "Trounce"
what do you think of this?
trounce
( P )
Pronunciation Key (trouns)v. trounced, trounc·ing, trounc·es v. tr.
To thrash; beat.
To defeat decisively. v. intr.
To censure something or someone forcefully: “I was out to trounce on every digression and indiscretion conducted (or should I say semiconducted) in this performance” (Robert Maxwell Stern).
[Origin unknown.][
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Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth EditionCopyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
trounce
v 1: beat severely with a whip or rod; "The teacher often flogged the students"; "The children were severely trounced" [syn:
flog,
welt,
whip,
lather,
lash,
slash,
strap] 2: come out better in a competition, race, or conflict; "Agassi beat Becker in the tennis championship"; "We beat the competition"; "Harvard defeated Yale in the last football game" [syn:
beat,
beat out,
crush,
shell,
vanquish] 3: censure severely or angrily; "The mother scolded the child for entering a stranger's car"; "The deputy ragged the Prime Minister"; "The customer dressed down the waiter for bringing cold soup" [syn:
call on the carpet,
rebuke,
rag,
reproof,
lecture,
reprimand,
jaw,
dress down,
call down,
scold,
chide,
berate,
bawl out,
remonstrate,
chew out,
chew up,
have words,
lambaste,
lambast]
Hmm...
I woke up around 9:45 with the realization that we had promised we would stop by the Palms and drop off a cd for our good friend and DJ, Myles Mattise. It was difficult to pry ourselves from the womb but after arriving astrangelyrangly crowded palms I was glad we did. Myles was kind enough to play our song "Slut Buffet", the First time for me to have the opportunity to hear it on a large system. Not to go around tooting my own appendage, but it sounded wonderful! We even sold a cd based on it, our first sale of the new album!!
Hooty Hoo!
Okay,
I better wrap it up and stick this in the mail.
Love you Carrie, be good and they might let you out sooner,
Brandon
