bi [sic] le

Alternate Title: Just In Time For The Ides Of March 2010, Let’s Flashback To My Finest Moment As An Acting Student With A Monologue From Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

I was a far better acting student than I ever was an actor. In fact, I’m not quite sure what drove me to study acting, other than it sounded like a fun thing to do and a fun way to meet people and it was something to do besides go to a real school and learn a real trade.

There was probably more to the story than that — like my secret desire to be a world-class movie star — but during the course of my days at the mouthful that was The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting – West, I never took acting nor the business of it too seriously.

The school can now be found in the space above the Hollywood Wax Museum, but the conservatory’s original home was further east on Hollywood Boulevard just south of the Walk of Fame on Argyle. Like many of the landmarks of my past it’s gone, bulldozed in the early ’90s for the Hollywood & Vine Red Line subway station.

The year was 1987 and I was 22. My technique teacher was a fellow named Arthur Mendoza, and I don’t think I could’ve asked for a better one. He was flamboyant, outrageous, outspoken and fully centered in his own universe, but he was also quite perceptive, motivating and intuitive, which are things a student wants from his acting teacher.

As to my fellow students, there was a bunch of talent there, but there weren’t too many names to drop from that class in particular — save one you’ll certainly recognize: Benecio Del Toro. Arthur referred to him as “Beno.”

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With a few minutes to kill I logged into my long-dormant account at Zazzle.com and did as I’d said I would a couple days ago: turned the 1932 Los Angeles Summer Olympics badge image captured at a car show by my friend Frazgo into a tee (click it for the bigger picture):

Then I ordered one for me and one for him — no charge Frazmatazz, since I couldn’t have done it without you!

Want one? Didn’t think so, but you can check out its Zazzle page here.

In these years of fading memory I can’t seem to recall the specfix of how I came to have this image below that I rediscovered this weekend whilst stumbling around my archives. My best recollection is that I found it via my fellow LA Metblogger Frazgo, either via a post he made on the find somewhere or from his Flickr photostream.

What is it? Well, I’m a little fuzzy on that as well. Obviously it’s a weathered treasure from the 1932 summer Olympic games here in L.A., but specifically I’m thinking that in the original image the badge was attached as an ornament  that adorned either the grille or the hood of a car from that time, and that the end result you see above is from my efforts in Photoshop to separate it out and stand it alone, maybe to put it on a shirt or a —.

[Sound of tires screeching]

Mystery solved! Instead of sitting here writing about scratching my head about it, I zipped over to Frazgo’s Flickr photostream and found the original image. Yep, it’s just as I’d thought.

Next stop: shirt creation!

Chicken Boy on Broadway 1974

Originally uploaded by mr. rollers

My friend and fellow walking and biking and Los Angeles history enthusiast Walt has posted on his 90042 Blog the picture at right taken by my friend, awesome photographer and urban cyclist extraordinaire Stephen “Mr. Rollers” Roullier.

Beyond being awesome, it reminds me I don’t do enough to chronicle and document my city. My biggest internal struggle as someone who always has some sort of camera with him when he ventures out and about, is one of apathy and procrastination pitted against a latent desire to document street scenes such as this one.

In the immediate they might be dubbed mundane, worth little more than a glance, but in a city as ever-evolving as Los Angeles, they have value as they age, demanding closer examination of what was and what’s changed.

As a teen, when my friends were blowing their allowances or minimum wage money on video games and cigarettes and clothes and drugs and music, I spent a few months saving up the $120 needed to step me away from the Kodak Instamatic of my childhood and up to my first “real” camera, a simple SLR outfit from Sears, back in 1980-81. Little did I realize that the initial cash outlay for the hardware would be the least of one’s expenses. The package deal even came with a couple 12-exposure rolls of film and I burned through those. Then came the need for money for more film and money for developing. And more film, and more developing. Having so little of the former, subsequently I often went long times without being able to acquire the latter.

And as an obvious result I did a lot more not taking pictures than taking them. I was pretty strict in what I snapped — even as I got older and had more disposable income. It was a simple matter of economics. Of making resources count.

Today, powered by a rechargeable battery, my digital camera can take thousands of pix stored on its memory card. As such, you’d think I’d have pixelized my city like mad, but I have not. One might presume that’s because old habits die hard, but I think it’s primarily laziness coupled with an attitude of “Agh, it’ll be there tomorrow.”

But that’s the point. Just like Chickenboy, and that RTD bus (and the RTD!) and that sapling tree, and Cisco’s in Stephen’s photo: it might not be there tomorrow.

I often wistfully imagine what long lost people, places and things and events of my youth and early adulthood might be contained in my archives had digital cameras been born 20 years earlier than they were, and I’d been able to snap away with a greater degree of reckless abandon.  I envy and respect people like Stephen who’ve done what I couldn’t or wouldn’t, as well as those who’ve grown up with the technology. To them I say don’t under-appreciate it. Exploit it for what it can do to capture the past in the present. For the future.

Forty years ago this summer my Aunt Frieda, Uncle Jack and cousins Margaret, Laura and Allan came out to visit my mom and me from Chattanooga, Tennessee. We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in a building on the corner of Hamilton Drive and Gregory Way in Beverly Hills, and being 5 years old I could not tell you how we housed everybody — but that’s not important.

What’s important is that the high point of their visit included my very first trip to Disneyland. Being that there was no internet and my social network was a couple neighborhood kids, plus I couldn’t do that whole reading thing with any consistency yet, I can only guess that I learned of the park’s newest attraction — The Haunted Mansion — via TV commercials, but however it branded itself on my brain it quickly became my entire reason for being on this planet as a human being.

On the big day I could barely contain myself, and we drove down to Anaheim in style with mom renting a 1969 black Impala convertible to tranport all seven of us.

I won’t beat around the bush with all the other rides we went on first and all the wonder and happiness I experienced, because honestly I don’t remember anything accept maybe a bit of Autopia and the submarine ride. Anything else fun that happened got cloaked because when we arrived at the awesome house to finally fulfill my dream of going on the ride I’d been dying to do there was a sign on the entrance: CLOSED. For what? I don’t know. Probably to work some kinks out as it had only been open a short while.

I can’t quantify the devastation I felt there at what’s purported to be the Happiest Place On Earth. I literally thought this had been my One Shot and I was never ever ever going to get another chance to go to Disneyland or ride The Haunted Mansion. Ever again.

When you’re 5 there’s no tomorrow, only Tomorrowland. And  it would be three more years of tomorrows before I returned and finally got a chance to fulfill my long-denied amusement park destiny.

Fast forward to this morning and I’m up at this insane hour because Susan and I are going to do our second-annual Super Bowl-Day Disneyland run. Last year was my first time back in 22 years and I fell in love with the place all over again. The only bummer for me was the Jungle Cruise was closed for long-term refurbishment (It’s A Small World was also shuttered, but that was more Susan’s disappointment than mine). Wondering what might be down for this visit, Susan and I looked online but we couldn’t find any info. Then this morning after I Twittered prior to bedtime about today’s excursion my friend David Markland tweeted back about the status of The Haunted Mansion, and it wasn’t good.

Indeed, I found the right webpage and confirmed that on the 40th anniversary year of its arrival and the 40th anniversary year of me learning about disappointment because of it, The Haunted Mansion won’t be looking for its 1000th resident today. Kinda bummed, but it’s kinda appropriate.

Way back in October 2001, the boss of where I worked at that time implemented a program wherein during the regularly scheduled monthly meetings he wanted his employees to give presentations. The topics could be about pretty much anything, so I was one of the few to actually volunteer for a time slot and then got to work putting my thoughts down in a paper I titled “Bicycling For Fun & Profit,” the first — and incomplete — draft of the narrative which I just accidentally stumbled on whilst diving around the archives on my back-up hardrive..

Some of it seems so quaint now: Gas at $1.50 a gallon. Me resolving to bike 1,001 miles in 2001. Pretty much the total lack of any so-called bike culture (at least in its current and evolving form) worth mentioning.

I remember boiling a lot of the info down into a bulleted, Powerpoint-style presentation and probably have that file somewhere, but anyway… if it’s your bag or interest, a glimpse of me prepping to preach the power of the pedal from the wayback is on the other side of the jump (replete with a photo of my old Raleigh mountain bike — still sporting a number from what looks to be an LA Marathon ride –  at rest on the L.A. River Bikeway around Atwater Village).

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There was a time when you were my one and only. The day I brought you home from the Sherman Oaks bike store on Ventura Boulevard in February of 2002, you forever changed my previous stubborn belief that a mountain bike was all I would ever need to get around. You were lighter, far more agile and maneuverable. And tough? Dang, you were. From that point forward you and I went everywhere.

Then came late 2005 and my venture into the single-speed realm of abandoned bike resurrection, and I hung you and your 24-speeds up in the garage like an old shirt in a closet. Sure, I’ve called on you from time to time, but not out of nostalgia so much as mostly when some sort of malfunction befell, such as the last time I rode you in January in the several days that spanned between the frame of my beloved The Phoenix fatally cracking and the arrival of its replacement, recently dubbed Le Noir.

On one of those days we were forced to ride home in a gusty deluge that left both of us drenched and dirt-encrusted and some readers questioning my sanity. I didn’t even give you the courtesy of wiping you off when I hung you back up on the garage rack. And there you sat being an anchor for webs of several generations of daddy longlegs, while Le Noir and I rolled out some 3,500 miles.

Well, last night while working on getting her some new handlebars, brake levers and tires I discovered that with the configuration of the new bars, her existing rear brake cable/housing was coming up about a foot short, and there’s simply nothing that can be done about that except to buy some new cable and housing.

So out you came this morning, to my embarrassment and self-disdain still caked with the road junk and long-fossilized grime that I left on you six months ago — and in need of some brake tweaking as I’d borrowed yours for Le Noir and only returned them to you this past weekend.

After apologizing to you profusely while getting you road-ready I outfitted you with Le Noir’s light set and took a cloth and cleanser to you out there on the porch, removing the layers of gunk that stuck to you like barnacles to a ship’s hull:

And you look grand my deserving and trusty friend. Even better: you got me to work safely this morning as if it had been only one day and not 180-plus since our last trek.

You are a remarkable machine my six-year-old entry-level Giant OCR-3. We’ve shared thousands upon thousands of miles on all manner of roads and conditions across town and the state, but other than chains, tires, innertubes, and an occasional worn out seat or spoke you’re still sporting your original drivetrain and components and everything works as well today as it did when I brought you home and you forever changed my perception about what a good road bike is and can do.

You continue to do so.

No doubt about it: with the 100-plus miles I ride every week on my bike across Los Angeles, any given seven-day stretch wherein I don’t get impeded or struck by an inattentive or pre-occupied motorist is a good one. And in fact other than the few idiots encountered the first six/seven months of this year and the spill I took in June that was entirely my fault I’ve strung together a succession of really good weeks  — which is all the more fuel for my disdain that redlines whenever I read of some would-not-be cyclist who trumpets the all-too-commonly held phobia that the streets are just too life-threateningly dangerous to pedal upon, be it around their neighbor or beyond it.

Me and the 3,800 miles I’ve rode around town so far this year are proof otherwise.

My street cred aside, the perceived lack of safety on the streets is an easy argument to make and not without some merit, but too often it comes from people who wouldn’t really know and instead are just subscribing to the easy out. To them I collectively ask “How do you know until you try?” But of course, the risk posing that question is that I’d get retorted upon from someone on the defensive who’d explain that they did “give it a try” and got hit or yelled at or a flat tire or sweaty or all of the above and summarily proved to themselves that biking on the streets is just not worth it.

And to them I’d ask “How do you know until you try again?”

Digress with me by having a seat in my wayback machine and come to my Christmas of 1968, and my first bike (pic, after the jump can be clicked to enlarge it a bit):

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So the great Silver Lake Reservoir draining is finally complete and the big water bowl is empty… until they get around to refilling it. All of its potentially toxic water has been flushed away through a series of subterranean tubes connecting to the Ballona Creek which pours onward into the Santa Monica Bay where the carcinogenic parts per million of all that bromate-tainted water will be diluted into inert nothingness, or an unexpected complex chemical reaction with the saltwater and the bacteria and the styrofoam and the plastic bags and the shopping carts and the gull shit and the hypodermics will ultimately create the monster for the three-quel to the coming sequel of “Cloverfield” who will then go on a rampage across the city. Could happen.

As the reservoir’s level has slowly lowered over the last 60 days, people have been either hopeful or apprehensive as to what might be revealed rusting and rotting away down there on the bottom, but there hasn’t been anything noted as of yet. Personally I know of one 27-year-old relic that’s down there somewheres, if it didn’t get swept down a pipe at some point in such a long interim. It’s a set of keys on a ring, one which I heaved over the fence into its southeastern waters one very early morning back in 1981.

The keys were to the Swensen’s Ice Cream Shoppe that used to be on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, across the street from and in between what used to be Fiorucci’s and RJ’s restaurant. I had worked at Swensen’s for a while during my first and second year at Beverly Hills High School, promoted to night manager before I was fired by the owner’s daughter — Desiree or Dell-something; who badly managed the place for her dad — for not being willing to hold some marijuana for her.

I turned in my keys, cleaned out my locker and collected my final paycheck. I stayed pissed off for awhile not just because I was out of a job, but also because Swensen’s had been the center of my social universe. To have both yanked away so unfairly was a good lesson to learn early but nonetheless a hard one.

A few months later I ended up getting a stockclerk job at the long-gone Hunters Books on Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica (they’re calling it Santa Monica South nowadays), but in that unemployed interim I helped my mom, by then a distributor for the Herald Examiner whose territory included Echo Park, Silver Lake and Los Feliz and Franklin Hills. On weekends I’d get up with her at 2 a.m., and together we’d go pick up all the papers at the Herald Examiner plant downtown, then deliver whatever routes were open or down and we’d get home around sunrise. During the week I’d often have to go across town after school on my little Yamaha Champ scooter and help with collections or customer complaints. Sometimes I’d drive the old 1965 Ford Mustang and cover paper routes solo, especially those in the steeper areas of Silver Lake and Echo Park, where paperboys never lasted.

I don’t remember how long it was after I was fired from Swensen’s that I found the spare “just in case” set of Swensen’s keys I’d had made on my own at some point after I’d been promoted to night manager. Maybe it was a couple days later or a couple weeks. However long it was, when I discovered them I immediately saw dollar signs and started plotting a little payback heist. Ultimately I decided to hit the place in the morning on my way to school. Come up Wilshire to the alley between Beverly and Rodeo at something like 7 a.m., enter through the back — it would be easy pickings. There was no alarm and no surveillance system. And knowing exactly where the money was kept after closing, I could be in and out without turning on a light in a minute, tops, and a couple hundred bucks richer. Maybe a little more if sales had been exceptionally good.

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L.A. Blogfather and L.A. Times Blogmaster Tony Pierce has a picture I presume he took posted to his Busblog of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who in the frame I presume is in the midst of getting an assist with his new L.A. Times blog that Tony helped land — and all of which is awesome.

Tony’s proximity to the NBA’s All Time Leading Scorer and one of my All Time Leading Heroes reminded me of the night back in 1991 that I ended up over at the tennis courts off of Whitsett by the L.A. River playing tennis with Wilt Chamberlain.

The backstory is this. Before it was seen fit to destroy the fabled Racquet Centre that stood at the corner of Ventura and Vineland, I met a fellow by the name of Allan, via the regular men’s doubles drop-in tennis nights hosted there. Basically for $10 or so you got to play 2-3 hours of tennis with a variety of partners and opponents, and on one night I ended up across the net from Allan who was a very capable player. At the end of our set he apparently thought the same of me and asked if I’d like to play singles with him one of these nights. I said sure. We exchanged numbers and soon enough we were getting together once or twice a week either at the Racquet Centre or the courts on Whitsett and playing.

Starting off Allan consistently defeated me. But as we kept on eventually I raised the level of my play and the matches got much closer, with me winning more games and even the occasional set. Now the thing about Allan was that for as good a player as he was he wasn’t as good a sport. I’d bet he went through three maybe four racquets in the course of our matches. And by “went through” I mean destroyed, as in purposefully broken. He’d miss an easy lob and next thing he’d be cursing heartily and flinging his stick either into the ground or against the fence. Repeatedly. Sometimes he’d spare its life and continue. Other times he’d just whack the thing until it cracked. And whenever that happened he’d calmly walk over to his bag, extract the next victim and continue as if nothing had happened.

The behavior was always ridiculous but whereas it would genuinely unnerve me in the beginning, I eventually grew to accept that this was just an inevitable part of a game with him — especially when I started winning. The one thing I could never get around were the bad calls he’d make. If things weren’t going well for him, inevitably he’d call a fair first serve long or a deep volley out that was in. I’d put up with the first couple but eventually I’d call bullshit and he’d tell me to fuck off and we’d argue until he’d show how big he was by allowing us to replay the point. What a guy.

Why he had these flagrant (and expensive!) tantrums was a mystery. But even more of a curiosity was who he was or what he did. Always sporting the best fake-bake tan that money could by coupled to a long, wet-look tightly curled perm that seemed straight outta the ’70s, he finished the fashion statement with a slew of gold chains around his neck perhaps to match the gold-trimmed gold Mercedes convertible coupe he drove. He never talked about what he did, nor did I really ask. The only info I got of him was that he had a kid or kids, knew plenty of rich folk and did a lot of partying with them at a lot of swank westside bars and clubs.

So one night I’d just biked back to Sherman Oaks from the Racquet Centre after the end of drop-in session. Allan hadn’t been there that evening. A few minutes after I got home the phone rings and its him and all he tells me is that their fourth has dropped out at the last minute and would I be interested in joining them for some late-night doubles at the Whitsett courts. I look at the clock and it’s after 9 p.m. but I say what the hell and bike over there.

When I arrive I make my way past empty courts toward the sound of Allan cussing and upon my arrival at the courtside gate, I see him off in the corner beating himself and his racquet up for some botched play. A few feet from him is some guy who later I find out owns a $12-million mansion up on Mulholland. And when I look to the other side of the court I see none other than 400-foot-tall Wilt Fucking Chamberlain standing at the net and smiling at Allan’s antics.

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