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LAVA’s Sunday Salon

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On the last Sunday of each month, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather on the third floor of the historic Clifton’s Cafeteria in Downtown Los Angeles (noon-2pm), for a loosely structured conversational Salon featuring short presentations and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. If you’re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community. We also recommend the shortbread.

Special program at the June 27 Salon: LAVA Visionaries will host curated conversations and presentations at tables around the room. To see photos from this past LAVA event, click here.

12:30pm-1pm: A live fashion presentation from Visionary A. Laura Brody. Remake, redo and reuse. While it may sound a little cliché today, it was necessary for survival after the Great Depression and became a catch phrase during the rationing of WWII.  Pushing consumerism during the ’50s made this notion unfashionable, and it has only recently come into fashion again. Unfortunately, it is often just that- fashion and a notion, not actual re-purposing or re-use. Here’s a way to experience actual, non-damaging to the environment re-purposing firsthand- on your body. Visionary A. Laura Brody will demonstrate live draping on a willing volunteer or volunteers, showing methods of creating clothing from existing scraps, fabrics and old clothing. The materials used will be the donated, left over and found remnants from her live draping Hollywood Fringe Festival event, Presque Prêt a Porter. The lucky mannequin/person will get a custom draped piece of clothing created just for him or her draped on him or her. Warning: scissors will be used close to the body. So will duct tape and staples. If this makes you very nervous, you may not be a good candidate. Perhaps 2 people can be draped within the 1/2 hour timeframe. She’ll also show you examples of her own re-purposed art and jewelry. ABOUT OUR FEATURED VISIONARY: A. Laura Brody is a professional costume designer and maker. Working for the entertainment industry exposes her to a disgusting amount of waste. To counter this (and as a matter of personal belief) she regularly re-uses material, notions, scraps and ideas in her designs, jewelry and art.  If you’d like to see more, you can find her jewelry site on Etsy (the handmade lifestyle web site) at https://dreamsbymachine.etsy.com and her art at https://www.dreamsbymachine.com .

1:15-2pm: A table discussion hosted by Visionary Manny Pacheco, the award-winning author of Forgotten Hollywood Forgotten History, which tells America’s story through the eyes of character actors. His paperback was recently added to the prestigious libraries of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, and the Writer’s Guild Foundation. Pacheco is a 30-year Southern California radio and television personality who has appeared on Emmy-winning programs including NBC’s “Santa Barbara” and KCOP’s “In Studio.” At the LAVA Salon, he plans on sharing fascinating stories about Hollywood’s long and sometimes forgotten past during its Golden Age. Talking about character actors such as Lionel Barrymore, Van Heflin, Walter Brennan, Claude Rains, and Basil Rathbone, one can see that America’s story became an essential topic in the movies during the studio era of Cinema. Manny will also share his travels on what it took to get his book self-published. He will motivate you to start writing about your passions (whatever they may be). He will provide a step-by-step outline for bypassing the traditional East Coast elite in the publishing industry to get your inner-author out and into the hands of an eager public looking for new things to read. Whether you are a first-time writer or established scribe, you will want to listen to his motivating approach to the most traditional of businesses. You won’t want to miss a chance to meet the friendly and approachable Manny Pacheco, and check out his new book Forgotten Hollywood Forgotten History!

Clifton’s Cafeteria is at 648 South Broadway, near the corner of 7th Street. There are numerous paid parking lots nearby, and the closest Metro station is Pershing Square. Clifton’s is online at https://www.cliftonscafeteria.com

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LAVA’s Sunday Salon

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On the last Sunday of the month starting in March 2010, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather on the third floor of the historic Clifton’s Cafeteria in Downtown Los Angeles (noon-2pm), for a loosely structured conversational Salon featuring short presentations and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. If you’re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community. We also recommend the shortbread.

Special program at the May 30 Salon: LAVA Visionaries will host curated conversations at tables around the room.

12:30pm: Social historian Joan Renner presents Pandora’s Boxes: According to Greek mythology, when Pandora opened the box that Zeus had warned her never to open, all of the world’s evils escaped and only one thing remained inside – hope. This concept of hope is a fitting metaphor for cosmetics.  Each container of face powder or jar of cold cream represents the dreams and desires of a woman seeking a magic potion that would make her beautiful. The exquisite and fragile packages used to market these dreams became the Pandora’s boxes of the early 20th century. Joan Renner has been collecting vintage cosmetics ephemera for over fifteen years. She has an extensive collection of commercial face powder boxes, rouge tins, advertisements, hair net packages and bobby pin cards. Please join her for a discussion of topics ranging from the design of the packaging to the use of arsenic laden face powder by women in 17th Century Italy to “accidentally” poison their unwanted husbands. Once gracing women’s dressing tables, various unique and beautiful items from Joan’s collection will be also be on display. These include items featured in her blog Vintage Powder Room and some never before exhibited. For a sneak peak at Joan’s collection, click this link.

1pm: Charles Fort, the League of Western Fortean Intermediatists, and a little town called Los Angeles: Phenomenologist Charles Fort (1874-1932) spent 27 years of his life humorously shredding orthodox science by collating thousands of accounts of unexplained phenomena which it couldn’t—and still can’t—explain away. The world has only gotten more phenomenal since Fort’s time, and the League of Western Fortean Intermediatists (L.O.W.F.I.) ensures that his spirit lives on: neither cranks nor skeptics, Forteans are characterized by their objectivity, good humor and lust for supernormal adventure. Based in Los Angeles, L.O.W.F.I.’s focus is on the long, strange life of the American southwest, gathering to discuss its enigmas, peculiarities and unexplainable events. Gonzo journalist and L.O.W.F.I. founder Skylaire Alfvegren has spent a lifetime researching the weird, wacky and unexplainable history of her hometown of Los Angeles. Join her as she explains Fort’s importance and the objectives of L.O.W.F.I., while detailing some of her favorite local cases of unexplainable phenomena. For more information, visit: https://forteanswest.com/wordpress-mu/?p=348


Clifton’s Cafeteria is at 648 South Broadway, near the corner of 7th Street. There are numerous paid parking lots nearby, and the closest Metro station is Pershing Square. Clifton’s is online at https://www.cliftonscafeteria.com

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L.A. Police Historical Society open house

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The Los Angeles Police Historical Society Museum is located in the 1925 Highland Park Police Station, which has been salvaged and restored to its original Renaissance Revival style and, today, is a registered National Historic landmark. Opened in 2001, the museum shares the rich history of the LAPD from its beginnings in 1869 to the 21st century.  

Visitors can tour the station, which showcases private collections and historical memorabilia dating back to the late 1800s, and use their own cameras to create “Booking Photos” of their favorite ‘crook’ in the historic jail. Outdoors, visitors of all ages – from toddlers to senior citizens – can climb into a retired police helicopter…and even try on police gear.  

This year, the museum will also pay tribute to the first policewoman in the United States – Alice Stebbins Wells, who joined the LAPD on September 12, 1910. John Buntin, bestselling author of LA Noir (and LAVA Visionary), will also be on hand to celebrate Museums of the Arroyo Day.

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Scrolls unroll at LAVA’s first Sunday Salon

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On March 28, LAVA put out a call for culturally curious Angelenos to gather in the upstairs dining room of Downtown’s historic Clifton’s Cafeteria for our first monthly Sunday Salon.

We hoped a couple dozen people might take us up on the offer, but the LAVA party filled half the huge room easily, and the volume of enthusiastic conversation and pie fork rattling presented a challenge when Arts District curator and LAVA Visionary Terry Ellsworth got up, without amplification, to bring the afternoon’s proceedings to order.

An impromptu catwalk of dining tables had been constructed in the middle of the room for the auspicious first exhibition anywhere of LAVA Visionary Gene Sculatti’s unfurled cityscape scroll drawings. Following Terry’s short introduction which placed Gene’s work in its context as something done from the heart and for no other audience than himself, Gene stepped forward to unroll an early cityscape, a primitive imaginary California city drawn when he was about 15/16 years old (circa 1962-63). This charming juvenile work impressed the audience, and they enjoyed peering close as Gene pointed out family in-jokes and favorite buildings and human characters (an element which disappeared from later scrolls).

But when he unrolled his current cityscape, three years in the works, the mature Gene Sculatti style blew everyone away–among them several close friends of many years standing who had no idea that he’d been nurturing a secret life as an outsider artist. Folks leaned in close over the dense and cohesive city, exclaiming over the exquisite color sense, compelling rhythms and seemingly endless surprise details running along the length of the table. After about half an hour, as Gene rolled up his scrolls and returned them to his shoulder bag, there were small sounds of disappointment and a strong sense that something truly extraordinary had been shared.

The party broke up around 2pm, with a number of attendees heading west on Seventh Street to take LAVA founder Richard Schave’s “The Flâneur & The City: Historic Core” walking tour. The Sunday Salon was a wonderful first gathering for the larger LAVA community, and we look forward to future Sunday Salons, when we’ll shine the spotlight on more members of the Visionary community and encourage anyone who’d like to be a part of this new cultural consortium to join us for hearty comfort food, good company and unexpected discoveries like Gene Sculatti’s cityscapes.

The Sunday Salon is always held on the last Sunday of the month, from noon to 2pm upstairs in Clifton’s Cafeteria at 7th & Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles. Put it in your calendar, and we hope you’ll join us on April 25, for surprises soon to be announced.

And if you missed this one, here are some photos to whet your whistle.

Civic History as Loop

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To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson, L.A. tends to always “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin.’” Not as in fights & feuds, but as in flashpoints & geneses. Was reminded of this with all the Olympics coverage of snow-boarding, a sport clearly spun from So-Cal skateboarding, itself an adaptation of California-popularized surfing—each one an under-the-radar activity that later wowed the world. This week I also watched the just-out DVD of The T.A.M.I Show, the 1964 Santa Monica Civic concert (Chuck Berry, Rolling Stones, James Brown, Supremes, etc.), whose frontispiece has Jan & Dean skateboarding from Hollywood to the Civic. Stop-frame and squint and you’ve got vanished history at hand. Last night it was The Real Beach Boy, a sad and touching BBC documentary on Dennis Wilson. In Hawthorne, bandmate David Marks walks the camera past a plaque commemorating the group (another auspicious startup), then gestures to the two-story berm and onramp behind it: “This wall of dirt here was where the Wilsons’ house was… and mine was right over there, where that dirt is.” Now I’m wondering if the dozen under-construction, city-block-size apartment complexes changing the face of H’wood and the Wilshire Corridor will turn into the tenements of 2040, warrens for poor, newly arrived Angelenos, thence to be ’dozed and carted off in time for another cycle to start. If you love the town, catch it while you can.

 

Gene Sculatti’s occasional column about Cali-bashing, ‘They Hate L.A.,’ appears at www.sofein.com .

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LAVA’s Sunday Salon

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On the last Sunday of the month starting in March 2010, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather on the third floor of the historic Clifton’s Cafeteria in Downtown Los Angeles (noon-2pm), for a loosely structured conversational Salon featuring short presentations and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. If you’re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community. We also recommend the shortbread.

Special program at the April 25 Salon: starting at 1pm, LAVA Visionaries will host curated conversations at tables around the room.

1-2pm: Journalist and Educator Anthea Raymond hosts a table discussion on the use of Oral History in Media. How can first-person storytelling be used to build historical record?  What is the role of media and journalism in giving voice to those stories?  What is the difference between a journalistic interview and one for documentary purposes?  How reliable is the information that comes from the latter?  What is the importance of accuracy in historical memory? How has the use of first-person narrative changed as the nature of documentary itself has changed in the digital age?  

1-2pm: Social historian and curator Allon Schoener arrived in LA on January 15. Considering himself to be a cosmopolitan, he finds it difficult to get the measure of LA. It is not like other major world cities with which he is familiar. Recognizing that new opportunities will become available to LA as the centers of economic, cultural and political power are shifting to Asia, he is hoping to find an answer to this question with his curated conversation, “What Is LA?”  

1-2pm: Performer Michael “Crimebo the Clown” Perrick will lead a table discussion on the rich subject of Disappearing Los Angeles. Come share memories of vanished favorites, recommend endangered gems, and plumb the depths of your tablemates’ brains for lost locales half-recalled and possibly dreamed.

Following the Salon, you’re invited to join LAVA founder Richard Schave on a free walking tour of the historic Dutch Chocolate Shoppe around the corner. For more info or to reserve, click here.

And in the evening, Visionary David Caldwell opens his Arts District loft for a free presentation of his multi-media War Child Show. For more info, click here.

Clifton’s Cafeteria is at 648 South Broadway, near the corner of 7th Street. There are numerous paid parking lots nearby, and the closest Metro station is Pershing Square. Clifton’s is online at https://www.cliftonscafeteria.com

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LAVA’s Sunday Salon

retro
0 1.2k

On the last Sunday of the month starting in March 2010, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather on the third floor of the historic Clifton’s Cafeteria in Downtown Los Angeles (noon-2pm), for a loosely structured conversational Salon featuring short presentations and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. If you’re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community. We also recommend the shortbread.

Special program at the March 28 Salon: LAVA member Gene Sculatti, outsider artist and pop culture critic (The Catalog of Cool) displays and discusses his fantastic cityscape scroll drawings (see details here, read Gene’s musings here). Since the age of 9, Sculatti, 63, has created imaginary horizontal cities packed with fascinating details that reflect his evolving obsessions: googie signage, soaring bridges, skyscrapers, suburbs, amusement parks and much more. Join us for a rare opportunity to get close to these beautiful and strange artworks, and to hear the artist discuss his inspirations, working methods, and how the scrolls have stayed with him for more than four decades. 

Clifton’s Cafeteria is at 648 South Broadway, near the corner of 7th Street. There are numerous paid parking lots nearby, and the closest Metro station is Pershing Square. Clifton’s is online at https://www.cliftonscafeteria.com

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Raymond Chandler’s Bay City

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Introducing Chandler’s Bay City: Crook town, run down, shabby town, gambling town. Novelist Raymond Chandler gravitated to sin and debauch, so Santa Monica in the 1930s was a frequent stop for Philip Marlowe. From doctors feelgood to second wives with pasts to crooked cops with a loathing for a mouthy PI, this tour has it all. Chandler’s canonization of sin, wealth and sunshine on L.A.’s Westside fed the abiding myths of the American hard-boiled genre and play into the popular conception of the region.

 

Focusing on Chandler’s middle period – “Farewell My Lovely,” “Lady in the Lake” and a few short stories upon which these novels are built, “Bay City Blues” among them– this tour will explore Chandler’s take on the Westside, the real life rackets and murders which gave Bay City its wild reputation, and the elements of the old community that have survived layer upon layer of gentrification.

 

As the bus rolls from point to point, your guides will draw the lines between Chandler’s life and his fiction, offering insight into his nomadic life with wife Cissy, the enigmatic redhead who appears in many forms in his short stories and novels.

 

Locations for the tour include:

 

The ruins of Pickfair (Mary Pickford’s former beach house, and close to the launch for the gambling ships)

 

Site of the former Santa Monica City Hall (4th & Santa Monica) immortalized in “Farewell My Lovely.”

 

Former site of Thelma Todd’s sidewalk cafe (just West of Sunset on the PCH), inspiration for the Lindsay Marriot House in “Farewell My Lovely.”

 

Santa Monica and Brentwood residences for Ray & Cissy.

 

Books & Short Stories covered in the tour: Farewell My Lovely, Bay City Blues, Lady in the Lake, Red Wind, The Little Sister

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Maja’s Mysteries: Rapture & Release

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MAJA’S MYSTERIES is a series of guided excursions to some of the city’s most fascinating spiritual sites hosted by Maja D’Aoust, lecturer and librarian at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz, in association with Kim Cooper and Richard Schave of Esotouric. Come join us on an Esotouric bus adventure into the hidden realms of Los Angeles spirituality, with stops at some of the most unique and compelling worship spaces in the Southland.

TOUR THEME: This tour explores the fundamental contradiction in the two primary paths to salvation: Grace or Karma. The concept of Grace sees salvation and the Messiah (rapture) as imminent and tangible.  Karma is predicated on reincarnation, the cycle of many, many lives lived through selflessness and right action as the soul strives to achieve release.

 

These two notions, while irreconcilable, both inspire real and profound relationships with God in Los Angeles, from the church basements where believers speak in tongues, or in brightly light congregation rooms praying over gigantic crystals.

 

Join Maja as we explore tantric Vedic practices, the Pentecostal rapture, the channeled Venusian stylings of an alien entity and other fascinating paths to salvation.

 

TOUR LOCATIONS

 

The Aetherius Society. A center for cosmic consciousness and healing founded in 1955 by UFO contactee Dr. George King, where we will hear actual recordings of an extraterrestrial voice conveying significant messages.

 

Krotona Apartments. A former Theosophical retreat founded in 1914, where we will have a rare opportunity to visit the central courtyard and view the Rosicrucian window of this now-private residence.

 

Parsonage of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson. On the northern edge of Echo Park lake is the rock upon which Sister Aimee Semple McPherson built her Foursquare Church. One of Los Angeles’ most charismatic characters, Sister Aimee spread her technologically-inspired Pentecostal gospel from the Angelus Temple, while enjoying quiet moments in her adjoining Parsonage home. Recently restored, the Parsonage is now a museum of her life and work, which to this day contains to ring clear to millions of believers worldwide.

 

The Vedanta Society of Southern California. Founded in 1930 to bring sacred Hindu philosophy to the West, where we will be given a presentation on the Society’s history and programming, and browse in its fine gift shop.

 

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