CBS COLUMBIA SQUARE /Art Linkletter: Kids Say The Darndest Things

I was attending a film screening at Sunset Gower Studios (formerly Columbia) the other day and I wandered over to the old KNX Columbia Square building. KNX was a beautiful studio in it's day, it's halls were filled with the sounds of broadcasting history from Jack Benny to Edgar Bergen & Charlie Mccarthy, to Red Skelton and Bob Hope. The pilot episode of 'I Love Lucy' was filmed here, right here on the very spot of the first movie studio in Hollywood, Nestor Studios. Across the street is the Gower Gulch, an early hollywood hangout for cowboys where the term 'drugstore cowboy' was coined. Now I stand here on the very spot of the birth place of motion pictures, next to the streamlined neon of the Palladium theater in the now frighteningly dark streets of Sunset Boulevard where I stare up at the dingy, shuttered remains of what was once called the Taj Mahal of Hollywood, CBS Columbia Square. Charlie Chaplin filmed some of his first silent movies on this corner and James Dean was an usher here. And now, in 2009 as i stand here, a homeless man is pushing a shopping cart down the street screaming "VAGINA" in his native vernacular. What the fuck happened to this country?
Art Linklater broadcast his radio and television show 'G.E. House Party' from Columbia Square and had a hilarious segment called 'kids says the darndest things', my grandfather was one of his assistants on the radio program. Here is a brief clip.


Kids Say the Darndest Things - ART LINKLETTER - The funniest videos are a click away

CRAZY TOWN by Benjamin Carrico

Los Angeles and it's surrounding satellites are something to behold.  LA is like it's own little world where nothing quite makes sense until you discover that maybe it is you that LA can't make sense of.  

In week one of this journey I was harassed by the Mexican Demon Twins, a nightmarish security duo that was securing the perimeter of a 'Prison Break' location shoot at Tequila Jacks in Long Beach.  Although I was simply standing on the dock, drinking a Coke while waiting for a interview at 'The Yard House' next door, the chupacabra of the security world decided that I was causing trouble by simply keeping to myself while watching the film crew set up a shot.  These big, punk bastards surrounded me like the gestapo, demanded my identification and then escorted me off the property.  Perhaps these two dumb ass immigrant bikers thought that I was a 'paparazzi' trying to photograph an awful television show being made for a pictorial in "The Worst Show On Television Magazine" or, maybe I just looked like I could be fucked with.

I always seem to look out of place in Los Angeles.  When I am on Melrose, pedestrians shoot glares at me like they somehow know that I haven't been 'trendy' since I wore a pair of pink Converse All-Stars during my senior year of High School and subsequently gained the affection of at least a few closeted freshman.  While Strolling Robertson Boulevard I am treated like one of the Clampetts in the pilot episode of 'The Beverly Hillbilly's' and at Venice Beach I feel like a young Republican at a satanic cult ritual.  Oh, don't get me wrong, I love the cornucopia of crazies at Venice Beach, especially at sunset when everyone acts like the world is going to end. Yet, there is something quite spooky to me when two-hundred drug- addled homeless teenagers are convulsing around  a drum circle at 5 in the afternoon on a Tuesday.

Sure, you can call me lame but I like the history of this City of broken dreams.  I like to the amazing architecture of days gone by, I can often be seen staring up in awe at some abandoned building on skid row because in my mind I can see how this city must have looked during the boom.  There are a million treasures to be found in this town and I plan to find them all.

 

For now, the closest thing that I have found to time travel is sitting in a place like Cole's Electric Pacific Restaurant in downtown LA and striking up a conversation with an old man that rambles about trains for an hour.  Sure the conversation may get redundant but the french dip sandwiches are delicious.

Traveling Life: Hollywood Part 1

Moving to Hollywood, CA has always been a dream of mine since I was a small child.  Of course, the Hollywood of my dreams doesn't really exist, nor has it ever existed according to Locals.  But I moved here anyway to find out for myself weather or not there might be a happy medium tucked between the fantasy tinsel town that lives in black and white studio films and the depressing mess that reality has created in this sprawling cluster fudge.

Once you sit through a few hypnosis sessions with a questionable "professional" to rid yourself of the stress and anxiety that comes with living in a earthquake prone, wild fire free for all, one can really enjoy the sun shine if you can see it through the smog and tear gas.  Of course this is a short list of all the negative aspects of Los Angeles, I wouldn't feel right to leave out the awful Jackson Pollack-ish freeway system, the homeless problem, and zombies.  For the love of God...THE ZOMBIES!

 Then there are the coked out, high-on-there-own-hype celebrities that  grease the gears of this evil machine that destroys everything in it's path.  Hollywood has traded Clark Gable for Paris Hilton and has buried anyone that resembles a role model up to there necks in sand at high tide.  Of course there are still positive influences in Hollywood, one can only feel good about the world when Ed Begley Jr. plows through a crowd of celebrispawn and CW shit heads outside of the Ivy with his electric car.  Ed Begley Jr. has NOT committed electric vehicular homicide but I am sure he dreams about it, well....I dream about it at least.

I am told that Hollywood is going green.  I would love to believe this story, but I happen to use public transportation in Los Angeles and the only actors that slum it on the metro are buskers and heroin addicts.  Riding the rails in LA resembles traveling down a mine shaft on a coal cart with a hundred other people plagued with the same realization that I have come to embrace.  Poor immigrants and down-on-their-luck-ers use mass transit out of necessity not choice while the rich and famous trade out their incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents on their private jets so that they can be photographed with Al Gore for the Earth Day spread in Douche bag magazine.

Of course, I could be wrong.  After all, I have only lived here for a month.