Venice California Book Signed by Author

Call Someplace Paradise

by Pat Hartman

Venice, California gave up its status as a city seventy years ago and still became one of the world's most stubbornly independent communities. Acknowledged as a unique urban environment, Venice is a microcosm of everything that's good and bad about America.

Venice has been called the Center of the Universe, the Last Resort, the living future of contemporary American history, the living national monument to the achievement of the American dream, and the world's largest outdoor outpatient clinic. The Sixties started there sooner than most anywhere else, and then didn't know when to quit. Venice also provides a lot of clues to why the Sixties ended elsewhere.

Millions of people have seen innumerable images of Venice on TV and in movies, and visited the boardwalk, and wondered how it would be to live in such a crazy place. Call Someplace Paradise is a kaleidoscopic collection of observations from the viewpoint of an inhabitant over more than half a decade, 1978-84. Unlike the sociologists and bureaucrats who came from afar to scrutinize Venice, I had the advantage of living there.

Call Someplace Paradise covers Venice shrines, institutions, historical sites and monuments: the Gas House, the pier, the Venice Beachhead, Tony Bill's 73 Market Street studio, the canals, the street where part of A Touch of Evil was filmed, Beyond Illusions bookstore, Jim Morrison sites, the Fox Venice Theatre, the cultural centers Beyond Baroque and SPARC.

Some of the local characters and celebrities in Call Someplace Paradise: Swami X; Susan Moscowitz the Doll Lady of Venice, beatnik painter Robert Farrington, LA Fine Arts Squad muralist John Wehrle, rollerskater/guitarist/Sufi Harry Perry, Alky Bob, Uncle Bill, Jingles, Ananda the drama queen, the guy with a bullet in his spine, Hare Krishnas, landlords who give free enterprise a bad name, Greenie the stalker, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, silent film star Mary Miles Minter, Ernie the poor little rich boy, the grocery cart bounty hunter, sex surrogate Joan Silverthorn, the Circle Man, the ubiquitous religious graffiti nut, and a ton of other weird folk, substance abusers, professional oddballs, buskers, con artists, deadbeats, grifters and street people.

Here are some other things in Call Someplace Paradise: the boardwalk and beach, vendors versus the law, skaters versus the law, the powerful senior citizens' lobby, living at the beach whether in buildings or tents, famous rent strikes, murals, Tuum Est addiction recovery center, stolen art work, cafe life, John Lennon's Birthday, the Hare Krishna Parade, the Kite Festival, the gentrification juggernaut, Survival Sunday, Francisco and His Cosmic Beam, gruesome hot tub deaths, drum circles, Zendiks, improv groups, body decoration, the heritage of the Beats, the archetypically senseless murder of a convenience store clerk, readings by well-known poets and aspiring nobodies.

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