Psychic Consultants and Spiritual Healers – LA Mysticism

WHENEVER I STROLL along the sidewalk to make a beer run to Bristol Farms, I often pass by a strange little store conspicuously wedged between the oil smeared lot of an automotive shop and an upscale crepe and coffee shop. The neon sign posted on the side mirrors of the store advertises its prophetic claim of what its services can achieve – an insight into your future. When I pass by this shop I’m reminded of David Fine’s comments of the psychics and radical spiritualists that have come to form LA’s unique, if not strange, spiritual landscape and its part in constructing LA’s identity:

“One would be hard pressed to find a Los Angeles novel written between the 1920s and the 1960s without the inclusion of a bizarre cult, spiritualist, prophet, or medical quack. While it is tempting to exaggerate their significance in the city’s history . . . their centrality to the city’s fiction cannot be denied. Spiritualists and ‘psychic consultants’ (Raymond Chandler’s term) have been permanent and conspicuous residents in the fiction about Los Angeles…In the literary construction of the city, the charlatans and cults signal the fusion, or confusion, of reality and illusion, fact and fantasy, that has been one of the recurring themes of Los Angeles fiction.”

This elicits several philosophical questions to debate and consider. Is LA a city that is starved and deprived of traditional forms of spirituality that it indulges itself in the world of mystics? same mystics and spiritualists gave rise to so many different religious cults that prospered in the LA area such as Theosophy movement and the Four Square Gospel? Or is it a city that likes its spirituality peddled to them like everything else is on large billboards and page long ads in the paper? After all Miss Cleo was not the first or the last psychic that offered services to those desperate to seek out an answer, an epiphany, a secure knowledge of their future. This shop is but one among many that are no doubt strewn across the city of Los Angeles as sites that often blur the lines between illusion and reality.

If I was a psychic consultant, I wonder what would my sales pitch be?

“Are you uncertain about life’s big decisions? My crystal ball has all the answers.”

“A doctor can heal your body but I can heal your soul…for a small fee.”

“You want to find the love of your life? No pain. No hassles. No time wasted. I can help you find the one.”

“I can guide you to your utopia.”

--Thomas Kim

Waiting for the Rainbow Sign: L.A. April 29, 1992

TIME PLAYS tricks.

It's impossible to believe that almost 20 years has passed since the L.A. Riots of 1992. This week we will look at a set of essays that look at what was brewing under the surface of airbrushed, nip-and- tucked L.A. for decades.

I found a bit of my piece I wrote for L.A. Weekly online over the weekend and it brought it all back in a rush...


from: "Waiting for the Rainbow Sign"

By midnight, no one phoning long-distance bothers with hello. Instead, they just ask, ‘Is it as crazy as it looks?’ I want to say, ‘It started long before all this . . .’ Long before this afternoon’s bewildering decision left me less astonished than strangely numb. Long before George Holliday ran tape capturing Rodney G. King’s struggle and submission. Long before Latasha Harlins, Eulia Love and Marquette Frye became cautionary symbols. Long before Watts shouted its existence into the sky in ’65, sending up searchlights in the form of flames...

Everything felt different for a long time after that: The way people interacted with one another -- or didn't. The texture of the city changed for some time after -- much like the way it feels after you've been in an argument with someone whom you love dearly yet are not what sure the first sentence out of your mouth might or should be.

Years later, essayist Richard Rodgriguez wrote of those three days in April 1992:

"It was the worst moment for Los Angeles. It was also the first moment, I think, when most people in L.A. realized they were part of the whole. The city that the world mocked for not being a city, for lacking a center, having only separate suburbs, separate freeway exits -- L.A. realized that it was interconnected. In fear, people realized that what was happening on the other side of town implicated them.”

A Letter from the Future -- Fifty Years After the L.A. Riots (Jinn Magazine 4/28/97)
-- by Richard Rodriguez

Rodriguez was right, though only partially. Three days after, the first day of "clean-up" community volunteers crossed the region attempting to pick up the mess as if one would be cleaning a negligent child's messy room. But it was a powerful symbol watching people working together. Eerily, however, there were little pods of town that seemed to be operating as if nothing happened: people near the water meeting for their lattes and such talking about work, childcare, and maybe, the "bad air" that the smoke, curling into the sky, was creating -- while others, not so far away, were digging through ash, rubble and worry.

But I guess that's L.A. -- a swirl of stories, a cacophony.

-- L.G.

photo caption: watching l.a. burn on t.v.
photo credit: dan graves, flickr creative commons

Read L.A: Ruben Martinez's Territories

LAST CLASS, Professor Ruben Martinez, who is the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing here at Loyola Marymount University (and my longtime colleague), spoke passionately about his time served here in Los Angeles as journalist, poet, performance artist and pundit -- and how at one point all of that seemed to have merged. He also spoke eloquently about race and class; about communities and causes that had been marginalized by the media; about how a writer finds his/her voice while attempting to describe life from the inside out, make the invisible visible.

Post session, I asked him to share a few of his favorite/resonant texts that deal with Los Angeles. Pulling from various sources and disciplines, he didn't stick to the page as you'll see.

Top-of-the-head response from a quick email:

ask the dust , john fante
white album, joan didion
chavez ravine (the album, the play, the book of photographs)
& of course city of quartz, mike davis

- L.G.

L.A.: The Unfinished Sentence

THE PHOTO at right is not spot news. Neither is it a lost-now-found record of a forgotten L.A. disaster. Rather, it documents the beginning. Long before L.A. became a breathless, run-on sentence, it was an unfinished thought, a smattering of neighborhoods yet to be connected. To see Los Angeles before its super-structure of elevated roads -- its freeways -- creates a different sort of narrative. Richard C. Miller was there to watch L.A. transform. Lucky for us, he brought his camera with him. A new show that opens next Saturday, at the Craig Krull Gallery, features Miller's six decades of work in and around Los Angeles. Many of these pieces are "snapshots" he made with his 35mm or 4-by-5 while tooling around town between his paying gigs. Miller, now 97, arrived in Los Angeles early last century and copiously documented incidental details -- parking lots, street corners, traffic lights, Good Humor Ice Cream trucks and, most dramatically, the construction of the Hollywood Freeway -- the four-level and all. Miller saved everything and we benefit from the gift of it. I'm in the midst of finishing up a piece for the Times about the show. A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to be able to spend a good portion of the day in Calabassas with Miller and his daughter and some close artist/photographer friends. They were packing him up and moving him to New York's Hudson River Valley.
I saw stacks of prints, pillars of boxed negatives and transparencies packed into closets and beneath beds. Everything was being cleared and sent to a air-controlled vault -- blessedly. Also, since then Miller has had some work hang at the Getty and is flying back here for the gallery opening. Imagine, coming of age when L.A. came of age. Imagine, riding back-and-forth on the freeway just for the thrill of connecting the dots faster. Miller's work allows us to visualize those transitions, L.A.'s own there to here story. Arguably, connecting the dots of the city put fine punctuation on another era, a pastoral quality that so many older Angelenos recall. His work speaks to that, diagrams that complex sentence.

Show information:

Richard Miller: Over the Long Run
Vintage Carbro Prints, The Hollywood Freeway and L.A. in B/W

February 27 - April 3, 2010
Reception: February 27, 2010 4-6 PM
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B-3
Santa Monica, California 90404
Tel: (310) 828-6410
info@craigkrullgallery.com

-- L.G.


top photo caption: "#37"
middle: The Four-Level
bottom: The Cahuenga Pass
Photo Credit: Richard C. Miller

L.A. Neighborhoods in Cyberspace

THE TREND is catching on. A new Facebook page, "Who Remembers East L.A." is really a lovely valentine to the streets that stretch out "over the bridge." If you have a Facebook account check it out. I'll be checking in to see when they actually launch a webpage. But here's a sample of photos from back in the day:


The Lorena Bridge

Atlantic and Telegraph

Around Blanchard and McBride

Atlantic and the 5 Fwy


The Canter Brothers (Boyle Heights)


The Floral Drive-In, East L.A.

All photos from "Who Remembers East L.A.?"

Poor Man's Shangri-La

THIS IS the project that provided the working framework for artist Vincent Valdez's mural; the saga of Chavez Ravine unfolding, panel by panel along the body of a lowrider (yes, it was a lowrider) ice cream truck. Completed in 2007, the truck, El Chavez Ravine, was commissioned by musician, Ry Cooder. We'll discuss the neighborhood, Chavez Ravine, and the project a little bit more down the line but here are some song samples, drawn from the album, that tell the story of an old Los Angeles neighborhood, now vanished.
The song, "Poor Man's Shangri-la" is an aural establishing shot, if you will, of a time and place in Los Angeles more than fifty years ago and a dramatic story of eminent domain.
The lyrics unscroll below. Pay close attention to Cooder's storytelling devices, how he places you in a time, place, era, moment with specific details --

"Tell you 'bout this friend of mine that you don't know
He lives way up a road that's lost in time.
Don't know his name, or where he's coming from,
Only thing you know, he's a real gone cat,
This friend of mine.

He don't have no uptown friends, or drive a Cadillac,
But he's got cool threads and a beat up car.
All his downtown friends like me ride around in the back
'Cause he's a real cool cat, yeah he's a real cool cat,
This friend of mine.

La Loma boys will run with you,
Do anything that you want them to,
If you need a friend 'cause you're feeling blue
Palo Verde girls never let you down.

Na na na na na, living in a poor man's Shangri-La.

Firme guys in their firme cars,
Underneath the moon and stars.
The city lights way down below.
What's that sound? What's that light
Streaking down through the night?
What's it mean? It's a red cloud over
Chavez Ravine.

Orale, UFO, come gliding low.
Se cayo up Chavez Road.
Space Vato, square cat.
Say, "Caramba, partners, where's the party at?"

I heard about the cool jerk, and the alligator,
Tokay wine, Mary Jane, and Lil' Julian Herrera.
I want to learn to dance, make romance.
These La Bishop girls might take a chance.

My friend says, "No, be cool, bro.
If you want to dance slow,
Learn to ask a mi hermana con respeto."

UFO got a radio.
Lil' Julian singing soft and low.
Los Angeles down below.
DJ says, we got to go.
To El Monte, El Monte, pa El Monte.

Na na na na na, living in a poor man's Shangri-La"

Here's an evocative PBS slideshow showcasing a collection of photographs made by Don Normark in 1949.
Where does the music take you? In a nutshell, what other L.A. songs transport you to a time or place?
-- L.G.

(Music Credit: Lyrics by Ry Cooder/William Garcia/Gene Aguilera Hi-Lo Shag Music [BMI]/Wagamita Music [BMI] Carmelita Music)