SO CAL PUNKROCK REUNION

Aug 2013

I have learned one thing. As Woody says, “Showing up is 80 percent of life.” Sometimes it’s easier to hide home in bed. I have done both.

– Woody Allen

Shyane at 12…

As the Punk Rock Nostalgia was hitting hard back in 2013

I saw the invites to this event and they stirred me up. I ignored it. Then my brother asked if I was going. It stirred me up again. I love Griffith Park, yet I was in a lazy mood. With conflict and debate the kid and I decided to see what was up. We printed the directions to the event and then we were off. Son is my car-copilot, so he had to tell me where to go…ah how to get there.

I asked,

“You sure we don’t get on the 134 east to get to the 5?”

“No just go straight on the 101 until you get to Los Feliz exit!”

We ended up turning around near the Hollywood Bowl back on to the 101 heading towards the 134.

“Mom, you have gone too far we are already past the Bob Hope Airport.”

I knew what was going on but I wanted him to get an idea and learn ‘the dance of the 134, 5 and 101.’ Once we worked it out, he knew where he goofed up and that we were now heading in the right direction and soon turning off towards Crystal Springs Griffith Park.

We found the place where the event was. I saw Ed Colver, who was the tallest one there. So, we set up our chairs at a distance and enjoyed our subway sandwiches. I was feeling the vibe. Getting an outside view and enjoying the park and my kid.

He was eating and looking at the little pedal chopper bikes that some kids were riding. So, we took a spin on a couple and had a hell of a time for an hour. I had so much fun. Do not think we laughed like that in a long time.

I realized, as I walked closer into the crowd of punkers, what was pulling them together was not the sound of loud music. It was a buzz like bees around honey, friendship.

“Ok, I am ready to move in.”

“You don’t have to Mom.”

What used to draw me to these rebels like a moth to a flame was the sound of loud music. I was not picking up any on my antennas and they were up. We moved on like it was the most natural thing to do. Colored hair, tattoos, and life was there.

A lot of happy faces and talking all-round made it a good place to be. It was darn good to talk with some of my ol’punk friends and say hi to friends. I then got a couple looks from son and we were off.

He keeps me balanced. One foot in the music scene and one in a mama / kid’s world. I like it that way. I am happy we went. It seems like it was an extraordinarily successful event!!

Crystal Springs Griffith Park

I’d have to stay alone, keep out of trouble and make myself very small in the world.

The night, a living presence, was in constant motion, shifting itself, sighing, breathing. She wondered if perhaps it, too, was trying to get warm.

― Laird Koenig, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

A young Martin Sheen as a pervert.

Martin-Sheen-as-Frank-Hallet-the-little-girl-who-lives-down-the-lane-29530808-400-300

I avoided The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane for almost thirty years. Now that we no longer have cable we only view what is available on Netflix. The kid and I are selective to what we can view together, the film having a 13-year-old girl, Jody Foster, as the heroine Rynn Jacobs inspired us to take a chance. Maybe this film might be a scary film as well as a youth film. It came out 1977 and is classified a horror film. It was more than this in a good way and we both enjoyed it.

Marlo tells Frank to leave.

Martin-Sheen-and-Scott-Jacoby-the-little-girl-who-lives-down-the-lane-29530862-500-323

I am pleasantly inspired by the expansive qualities in this film because it has those seventies feelings with a bit of elegance thrown in.

Rynn is 13-years-old and is very mature for her age. Her character has depth, loyalty, and integrity. Her favorite poet is Emily Dickinson, I was instantly impressed. All the characters in the film have depth as well as developed personalities.

There is the town pervert, the nagging and nosey property owner, the boyfriend turned lover and lastly the helpful sheriff.

Oh yes, we also have the father. The whole film pivots around the mysterious father who is a poet. Where can he be? Is he in his study translating Russian poetry?

Rynn: [about her father] Through most all September he looked fine, if the pain was terrible he never said anything. Then one Sunday evening, we were sitting in this room and he whispered to me in a very soft voice that I wasn’t like anybody else in the world; and people wouldn’t understand me, they’d order me around, tell me what to do and try to turn me into the person they wanted me to be. Since I was only a kid, I couldn’t say anything, I’d have to stay alone, keep out of trouble and make myself very small in the world.

Mario: All alone?

Rynn: We worked out every detail, we knew it wouldn’t be easy. Here’s a letter from my father: Don’t give in and play their game, fight them any way you have to, survive. That’s what he said. Then he kissed me and walked off into the trees and down the lane.

The beautiful environment places this film near the ocean. The presence of this film sucks you in with suspenseful moments. It is not an action film. One can sit back breathing and wonder and participate with the film.

The 70s motif is placed in this film very carefully as well, for in an impossible situation two youths find love if only for a while and are transformed!!

The-Little-Girl-Who-Lives-Down-the-Lane16

Opossum

Day starts with a baby possum in the door screen,

put it on a tree branch in the backyard,

for mama to find,

get in the car with a run,

soon we are caught in traffic…

but then this song comes on our car radio…

and living is sweet

The Paisley Underground

Punk Rock Colleague & Historian and Professional Consultant

Hudley Flipside.

Posted on 6 Apr 2013

The Three O’ Clock are playing at the Glass House tonight in Pomona CA. which is more than an hour and 7 minutes from where I live, but with traffic much more on the way there. This means if I want to drink some beer that is a hell of a risk that I would be taking on the way back, late in the wee hours of morn.

Ya, when I was a youngster nothing would stop me from seeing my favorite bands. Critical thinking has really ruined my fun life. I feel blessed that I saw this band many times in my youth. They are a unique band who are now associated with the Paisley Underground; but they got their momentum from the early Los Angeles underground punk rock scene. We loved them. Their music dazzled us.

They once called themselves the Salvation Army.

As the story goes, I was very nasty to them when they changed their name. I apologize now with all my heart… also about the religious candle too with Jesus on it. I made fun of it at Mr. Ricky Start aka Michael Quercio parents’ home.

I am sorry. The Bangs (Bangles) and The Salvation Army rained hard on the Los Angeles punk rock scene in the early 80s. It was always changing, a penumbra of style and ideologies. We were all growing up together.

This is when I learned that just because you loved a band, supported a band and offered them free promotion did not mean you had any rights to how they saw life.

I found out the hard way. A band could drop you like a hot potato. Some did…but there were always other bands coming along that needed some help.

Thanks goes to Christina Zamora for the psychedelic pictures taken at the Glass House

I’ve included an interview from Flipside Fanzine with The Three O’ Clock from their earlier years as Salvation Army. What they had to say is remarkably interesting too. Also, I am sharing a little psychedelic weirdness with you the reader. Salvation Army is on the cover of this issue.

The advertisement on the back cover of Flipside 30 is Shattered Faith.

Yes, both bands are playing on the same night which is kind of interestingly out there. Shattered Faith is playing at The Redwood Bar & Grill.

This does sting my heart a bit because you cannot be two places at the same time. The addiction to see bands, support them and know them personally…has somewhat passed. Yet, it is comforting to know both bands are still out there doing their thing and having fun.

(There are many Stories from the BIG PUNK ROCK this in just one of them…~Hudley )

Black Butte Porter

A few Years ago after my mom passed on she left me some money. She was not an independent type of woman but an old-fashioned stay at home mother who took care of my father. So I did what I always wanted to do with her but never did. I took a train, bus, walking trip with my ten-year old. We went to Portland Oregon and Garibaldi Oregon to see some of the city and view and ride some trains.

We even visited Rockaway Beach, but what was really sweet was the little pub in Portland Oregon I forgot the name of. It had a beer; it was the beer I remembered. Today while at a local restaurant I found that beer again. Black Butte Porter. Awesome to the core, rich, smooth with what I think is an underground taste of chocolate.

http://www.deschutesbrewery.com/brew/black-butte-xxi-porter

Below Map of Garibaldi, OR
http://maps.yahoo.com/embed#tt=&q=Garibaldi%2C+OR&conf=1&start=1&lat=45.55925&lon=-123.91552&zoom=14&mvt=m&trf=0

Nose humor and gangsters… a serendipity tale..

ose picking is not a popular topic but we all do it, some more gracefully than others. My music teacher, who was also my voice teacher, did it on stage with a tissue. When she sang opera on stage she could transform from being a 40-year-old woman to a youthful angelic being, and just as lovely while waiting for the class to get ready, with her finger up her nose. I watched her put that tissue with a finger way up there and then she pulled it out and acutely looked at it. She was not embarrassed or self-conscious about it either and I thought to myself,

“How does she do that…to pick ones nose and not care? Doesn’t she think about all of us watching her?”

My dad told me a story once. He was on Hollywood Blvd. and a big limousine pulled up alongside his car. They were both waiting at the stop sign when he saw a woman picking her nose in the back of the limousine. I guess in the 1940s not all big limousines had tinted windows. She looked over at Dad and seemed to blush and then she gave him a big smile. It was a youthful Elisabeth Taylor.

Hollywood and Santa Monica was the “cat’s meow” back then for movie stars, gangsters and the common folk. They mingled nicely back then. Things were spread out and people were intimate. Dad said that at some of the night clubs that he went to there were a number of actors and gangsters present. One night he said hello in passing to Bugsy Siegel while in a Santa Monica restaurant. He said his eyes were piercing blue and as cold as ice. I think this was a few days before he was actually found murdered. Maybe he wasn’t killed by the mob for money laundering or for his wheeling and dealing in Vegas; maybe they caught him picking his nose.

Box Canyon Road the magical place

When times get boring and I have had enough.

I take a ride up Box Canyon Rd.

Image of Yucca Plant in Box Canyon.

Box Canyon Road begins at the corner of Lake Manor Drive and Valley Circle Blvd. It ascends a hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

It leads into the old Santa Susanna Pass Road. It is a wild ride that contains the feelings of how ‘the San Fernando Valley’ once was when I was a kid.

The desert meets the rolling hills of rocks, dirt, wildflowers, and herbs. This is a place of mystery too. It was once the hang-out of the notorious Charles Mansion family who used to creepy-crawl through-out houses in the ‘Valley’.

Yet, this doesn’t spoil it for me. I drive on Box Canyon Road on rainy days. My favorite time is on foggy mornings when the clouds meet the hills.

The earth opens up with fragrant softness. Is there a valley down below or the end of the earth; a drop into vast whiteness because when you look up you see the same view.

Any time you go there the Lady-Face rock will greet you. There is a ranch halfway up Box Canyon Road that I dream of owning.

The view from the house I am familiar with and the barn there is a place for horses.

Stone Face Woman In No Man’s Land Vandalism?

The Yucca Poem

The Treefort apartment.

Living in Van Nuys in the 1990s was difficult because we endured isolation, discrimination, and frustration, but we were a family and had each other and a college community that supported our goals. In those challenging times, the struggles we faced seemed overwhelming; however, it was our unwavering bond that kept us strong.

While navigating the complexities of life in a less-than-welcoming environment, we found solace and hope in the connections we formed with others who understood our plight.

One call from Los Angeles Valley College’s daycare center changed our lives forever, opening doors to new opportunities and pathways to success that we had previously thought were out of reach. The support from the college community became a lifeline, empowering us to dream bigger and work harder toward a brighter future, filled with possibilities we never imagined.

CapeChestnutTreeBlooming at LA Valley College

Los Angeles Valley College

Van Nuys California is the place for mothers and their children. Driving through this city you will see lots of mothers pushing their strollers around. It is a busy city and a dirty city. Restaurants, laundromats, and discount stores line the streets. When I was seventeen, I used to cruise Van Nuys Boulevard with my friends. We listened to music and looked for boys and had lots of fun doing it. It was a teenager ritual that started back in the 1950s.

I never would have believed then that I would end up living in Van Nuys for seven years on the second floor of a tree fort apartment. We lived in a Latino community, and we felt isolated. Yet, when our son JF started to go to school we made friends and soon blended into the community.

I loved going to the Russian produce store near our apartment where we could buy fresh herbs and vegetables. They had giant buckets of fermented coleslaw, tomatoes, and pickles for sale. Each Christmas the owner gave my son a Russian bunt fruit cake covered in dry fruit and as hard as a rock. Next to them was the Italian deli where we purchased feta cheese and olive oil.

We lived off of sixty dollars a week for food which was doable in the mid-1990s. Occasionally when my son and I saved our pennies we would go to Jack in the Box for some hamburgers and French fries. The toy from the kid’s meal brought so much joy to my child that life was extremely sweet.

Our tree fort apartment only faced another apartment on one side, otherwise we had windows all around us. We could look out and over the world below which was mostly asphalt, noisy children and gangsters often rooming around. My son told me that there was a tree he could see from his bedroom window. (We all sleep together in one bedroom)

He enjoyed watching the seasons change while watching the tree over a year’s time. On sweltering summer days, we went on walks through nearby residential neighborhoods. We went looking for sprinklers watering the lawns and ran and danced through them. Magical as it was for my son and I to share, I dreamed of having a home of our own someday. There were many pockets of people with different identities and communities that lived around us that at times seemed foreign and odd to us.

John, my husband, had a dead-end job working for a furniture restoration business down in Los Angeles. We only had a large old green monster van to get around with. Most of the time my son and I took the bus, or I pushed him around in a shopping cart.

Back then in my desperation to find a job or go back to school, I put my son’s name on a long waiting list for daycare at Los Angeles Valley College’s Day care center. It was only a few miles from where we lived. Unexpectedly they called me, and it changed our lives forever. Within a day’s time I had my son sign up for daycare. I also was signed up for twelve units.

I had all the financial aid I needed to attend school. Within a year I talked my husband into going back to school. He majored in science and then earned a degree in Respiratory Therapy It was a dream come true for us, and due to the government financial aid programs offered to us, John went on to find excellent work, and I went on to continue my education at Cal State University Northridge.