Here's a short, 3 1/2 minute video, showing some of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, by David Hill Photography. This give you a quick, and well shot, look at some of what you can see there. I went there in the spring of 2000, and really loved it.
Back in 2000, I was a taxi driver, and heard on the radio about a book signing happening with Julia Butterfly Hill. She was the activist that lived in a redwood tree for over 2 years, from 1997-99, so they wouldn't cut it that huge tree down. She gained worldwide fame (and ire from many lumber industry people) for her stay in "Luna," as she named the tree. But the act, supported by many other activists, did save the tree from being cut down, and several others nearby. So I decided to go to her book signing in Santa Monica, and buy the book, The Legacy of Luna.*
By some weird quirk of fate, a guy I knew from the BMX industry years before, Frank Scura, was working with Julia and her group at the book signing, and he introduced me to her. I listened to her talk, bought the book, and read it in the next few days. While I had seen some "small" redwood trees in the mountains near Santa Cruz, while living in San Jose in 1985-86, I'd never made it way up to the big groves of redwoods in the northernmost part of Northern California. At the time, in 2000, I was living in my taxi, having become homeless, while learning the ropes of the taxi industry in late 1999. I decided to drop my cab off for a week, take my old Datsun 280ZX, and drive up the coast to the redwoods. There was no more thought into it than that. Taxi driving was a drag, and I needed a break. Back then, you could take time off as a taxi driver at any time. After reading Julia's book, I thought, "I need to see the redwoods sometime in my life, and now's the time." So that's what I did.
My week of wandering alone, in my car, up the long California coast, to the redwoods, and back, became one of the best weeks of my life. I shot video of the trip, and made a 20 minute video for my niece, then less than a year old. I started in Huntington Beach, and spent about 4 hours driving up congested Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), through the O.C. and L.A. traffic, and then picked up speed when I hit Malibu. I had no big plan, no itinerary, and a couple hundred bucks for motel rooms, gas, and food. I wound up seeing juvenile elephant seals near San Simeon, visited Hearst Castle, but the tour was closed for the evening.
I slept on a car turnout somewhere south of Big Sur the first night, waking up to one of the best ocean views of my life, and the smell of the pine forest. That was amazing. That second day, I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which where I had a great time. I wandered slowly through it, shooting video of fish, and other animals, in the various aquariums. I saw a few sea otters, from the deck outside, and one seal, swimming in the ocean, next to the aquarium. I love watching animals, I always have, since I was a kid. I got a lot of cool fish and video footage at the aquarium. I hit the Monterey Skatepark after that, then headed north, up though San Francisco, and over the Golden Gate Bridge.
A year later, I made a BMX video, and used a bunch of my footage from Monterey Bay Aquarium in it. You can check that out here. There's also footage of animals from the San Diego Zoo, the Santa Ana Zoo, and some wild critters, as well. Anyhow, I've never made it back up to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the 20 years since, but I plan to at some point. If you dig animals, it's a great place to spend an afternoon, while in NorCal. Here's their website, where you can find more info, directions, and order merchandise online. Here are several more, much more recent videos, and live feeds, from Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The first music video to show skateboarding on MTV, that made it into heavy rotation, was not some punk band. It was Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, good old American rock n'roll at its finest. I think 7691 Muholland is where the skate shoot took place. There's a house there now, but there's a scenic overlook turnout real close by to get a similar view.
In 1989, I had become the official cameraman for Unreel Productions the video production company owned by Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear clothes. All of our producers and tech guys were actually cameramen, and had more experience than me. But they shot footage only at a couple of large shoots, mostly in the early days of the company. In '89, I was the guy who traveled to all the 2-Hip King of Vert and Meet the Street contests with one of our $50,000, 35 pound, Sony Betacam, cameras. Shooting bike video all day was a workout back then. Someone else, Don Hoffman, I think, traveled to the NSA skate comps that year. Skateboarding was still riding high on the 1980's wave of popularity, and times were good at Vision, going into 1989.
I showed up to work one morning at our office in Costa Mesa, and someone said, "Oh, you're going to Tom Petty today." My reply was, "Huh?" Everyone seemed to know, but I didn't find out until that morning. Some Vision skaters were going to appear in a Tom Petty music video, and my job was to hang out all day, and just shoot behind the scenes footage for the Vision archives. I was given an address on Muholland Drive, way up in the Hollywood Hills (technically Studio City hills). I checked out a betacam to make sure it was in good shape, grabbed a couple of batteries, and took a little S-VHS camera, packed them in Unreel's trusty little Toyota van, and headed up to Hollywood.
By that time, I was one with the Thomas Guide map book, and I found the address easily, mostly because the Vision dually pick-up, and our trailer mounted mini-,were there already. Aptly named for the day, "Hollywood" Mike Miranda, the BMX team manager for Vision, was driving that rig. The address was a driveway right below another driveway, which led to one of those houses on the side of the hills.
For those who don't know, Muholland Drive, mentioned in the song "Freefallin'," it runs near the top of a ridge from the Cahuenga Pass, right above the Hollywood Bowl, to Bel Air, about 14 miles away. It's a long, twisty, mountain-like, two lane road, with lots of multi-million dollar mansions off of it. It's not a place you really want to take a dually pulling a 26 foot long halfpipe trailer. I followed Mike, walking down the driveway, checking it out, to make sure the trailer would make it, and to see if we could turn around at the end. The driveway was literally carved on the side of the hill, steep uphill on one side, huge drop downhill for 100 or more feet on the other. Much to our surprise, the skinny driveway led to a large, flat grassy area, probably half an acre in size. There was plenty of room to turn around. So Mike drove the rig down to the site, as I walked along, making sure the trailer wasn't going off the edge on the tight turns.
The lot was a really cool location, with views of Universal Studios below, and the San Fernando Valley spreading off the the left. Mike centered the trailer in the area, not far from the edge, in what seemed like a really good position. The 6 foot high, wooden, mini-ramp closed up like a clam shell for traveling. Then we started the process of lowering the sides, putting wood under the legs, and leveling the whole thing to make it stable and skateable. The first couple women from the actual video crew, two of the producers, showed up as we were doing that. In typical Hollywood fashion, we got the ramp all set up, and Mike pulled his bike out and rolled around it, to see how stable it felt. Just then the director, Julien Temple, showed up. He looked at the ramp, walked around it for about a minute, and then said, "Can you move the ramp a foot that way?" and pointed to his right. Mike wanted to kill him, and I thought, "This guy's a fuckin' idiot." So Mike Miranda and I spent the next half an hour closing the ramp part way, moving the whole thing a fucking foot, and setting it all back up again. As we were doing that, the grip trucks and other production people showed up, and filled in the lot around us.
This is the area where the skateboard shoot for "Freefallin'" took place, as seen from below, in 2021. I think the house on the left, near the top, is where that lot is. It's right in that area. I believe the address of that lot was 7691 Muholland. I just shot this photo from the Universal City bus/train station a couple of days ago. I remember seeing the house on stilts, here on the top right, across the canyon from where we were shooting, back in 1989. #steveemigphotos
After that sketchy start, things were pretty chill. I parked the Unreel van up on the side of Muholland Drive, where a long line of other worker vehicles were parked. Since I was supposed to be inconspicuous, I used the smaller, prosumer S-VHS camera, to wander around, and shoot behind the scenes footage all day. Mostly I just kept grabbing the free food from the Craft Service table, which is the free snack bar on any major TV or movie set.
The skaters found there way up there, and donned Vision Street Wear clothes. Heather, who designed the Vision women's clothes, played wardrobe woman, and decked out the models in as much "Vision Slut Wear (as us Vision people usually called it) as possible. That was part of the deal. The music video people got to use our ramp and skaters, and we (Vision) got a ton of "product placement," meaning Vision Skateboards and VSW clothes showing up in a major music video that millions of people would see.
At the time, skateboarding hardly every showed up on TV. At all. Unreel tried to sell ESPN on an action sports TV series of six shows, and the suits at ESPN in 1989 replied, "No one wants to watch skateboarding on TV, and what the hell is snowboarding?" Really, that's what they told my boss in. Unreel ended up syndicating the series, and it got really good ratings for an unknown series that year. Things at Vision went downhill fast in late 1989 and 1990, so there was no attempt to syndicate the next year. Obviously ESPN came around, six years later, and started the Extreme Games in 1995, changing the name to the X-Games in 1996.
But on that day in 1989, it was Vision skaters Kele Rosecrans, Joe Johnson, and Eric Nash, doing their thing on the mini ramp. Another thing, mini-ramps were a brand new type of ramp then. It was only a year or two earlier that Paul Schmitt, and some of his skaters, were forced by the city of Costa Mesa to cut down their 9 foot high, vert, backyard halfpipe, to a six foot, undervert ramp, due to city code violations. Known as the Town Street Ramp, and located a couple blocks from Vision HQ, that was the birth of the mini-ramp. They soon found that you could have a lot of fun on a smaller, undervert ramp, and backyard mini-ramps began to pop up nationwide soon after.
The star of the music video, the young blond woman, was named Devin, as I recall. She didn't skate, but was a good surfer. The skaters were more than happy to grab her hips and push her back and forth on the ramp, helping her learn to skate it. Within an hour, she could fakie nearly up to the top in both directions. She picked it up really quick, which surprised us all. She was actually really cool, and the skaters spent most of their day skating, and making friends with the models.
If you watch the video, you'll see a couple of shots, with another woman in a white top, on the deck of the ramp. That's Miki Keller, who was the Sims Snowboard assistant manager at the time. Miki was one of maybe two or three women who could actually skate a mini-ramp then. She did skate during the shoot, but the director left that footage out, which bummed out Miki of course. She went on to work at Morrow Snowboards for years, and later brought women's motocross back to life, starting a whole race series. Miki is an action sports legend in her own right, and Julien Temple missed out by not giving her a little screen time.
A couple hours into our day up on that set, Tom Petty showed up. He's the star, and didn't have to be there until everything was set up and ready to go. Now while TV and movies and music videos sound really cool and glamorous to most people, in reality, shooting film is really boring most of the time. The would set up the cameras at one angle, play the song over and over as Tom lip-synched for the film, and would do several takes of that shot. Then they'd set up the cameras for another shot, and do that several times. So film making is a whole lot of "hurry up and wait." Most of the time, most of the crew is just hanging out, waiting for the next time they're needed.
For me and Mike Miranda, it was a chill as could be. Mike just had to be there to take the ramp down, and I had to shoot some cool footage every 15-20 minutes, and try to not run out of camera batteries. So mostly we hung out, ate free food and soft drinks, and made fun of the director.
At one point, during the down time, Tom Petty was pushing his daughter back and forth on the camera dolly. The grips set down little train tracks, and the dolly is a rolling vehicle that can move the camera up and down, while being pushed back and forth along the tracks. I decided that would be a good time to get a shot of Tom just hanging out. I shot some footage for maybe 30 seconds, as Tom was just being a dad, pushing his daughter, who was 8 or 9, I think, back and forth. He saw me shooting, and looked over. With a smerk he said, "We want royalties on that video." He wasn't being mean, he didn't flip out, he just didn't know who I was, or why I was shooting video. He smiled, and I put the camera down. He nodded. That was about the coolest way to say, "Hey, do you mind not shooting this, I'm hanging out with my kid," as you could get on a film set. He smiled, and I wandered off to get another muffin from the Craft Service table.
In some of the funky hot dog stand shots in the video, you can see Casa de Cadillac in the background. The building looks much the same today. The hot dog stand, across Beverly Glen, is gone now, replaced by a Whole Foods market. #steveemigphotos
It was a beautiful, cloudless, California day, and that's how I spent the day on the skateboard shoot of the "Freefallin'" set. The other locations were the Sherman Oaks Galleria, for the mall shots, and the funky little hot dog stand was at the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Beverly Glen, in Sherman Oaks. The hot dog stand is gone, and there's a Whole Foods supermarket there now. I'm not sure where they shot the backyard scene.
It was early evening, with the sun heading down, as we left that day. I wound up giving Kele and Eric a ride home after the shoot. And while I made a lot of fun of Julien Temple, because he really did come across as an idiot on set, the finished video was cool. AND it put skateboarding all over MTV for a few weeks, at a time when skateboarding rarely got on TV. Julien directed hundreds of music videos, and I haven't, so whatever his method is it worked.
After hanging out that day, and sort of meeting Tom Petty, I started listening to a lot more of his music. Doing that, I realized how much of a genius he was at writing really solid, timeless songs. From "Refugee" in 1980, to "Saving Grace" in 2006, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers put out 40 years of great music, with hit songs spanning 26 years. Their older songs never seem to get dated, he wrote about timeless things, and they just made damn good rock n' roll. My personal favorite Tom Petty songs, besides "Freefallin'," are "Don't come around here no more,""Runnin' down a dream,""Into the great wide open," and "Stop draggin' my heart around" with Stevie Nicks.
As for the skaters, Eric Nash is still killing it on vert. Here he is shredding the Van's park Combi Pool in about 2011. You can see more of Joe Johnson in this 1989 video, at 5:43. He was Tony Hawk's roommate, at the Fallbrook house, at the time. You can see more of Kele Rosecrans skating, also in 1989, in this video, at 14:46. And you can see what happened when I asked Kele about a thorn tree. You can see a bit of Miki Keller in this video, interviews with legends of women's snowboarding.
When I started this blog a few months ago, I started looking around for weird and interesting stuff in California. I quickly found this couple and their Oddity Odysseys YouTube channel. I've shared a couple of their other videos. They check out a lot of the same kinds of places I find interesting, and make well produced videos. Since I'm not wandering around much at the moment checking out weird stuff, here's another one of their videos.
During the 1920's, alcohol was outlawed by the 18th Amendment here in the U.S., and the prohibition of alcohol became a battle between the law, all the people who still wanted to drink, and some mobsters, Like Al Capone. Speakeasies were the name for the underground bars that popped up in obscure places so people could keep partying during Prohibition. While we may think of these as a weird relics of 100 years ago, there are still some "underground" bars in business today in places.
When I was living in North Carolina a few years ago, guys in the hood told me about "Liquor Houses," which are people who have a working, for profit, bar in their house. One guy I knew at a homeless shelter would buy quality women's shoes at Goodwill or other discount stores, and wander around from one liquor house to another, reselling the expensive, but used, women's shoes to women in the local liquor houses during the day. There were a handful of them on the poor side of that city, and reportedly in other cities as well. I even heard stories of a former Liquor House where, like the speakeasies mentioned in the linked video above, local police officers would go after hours, and off duty, to have a few beers or some "corn liquor," the local term for moonshine.
So as crazy as it sounds, there still are speakeasies, or underground bars, of sorts, are still serving drinks today. These modern ones aren't trying to avoid the Prohibition lawmen, they're just avoiding taxes and permit fees, serving drinks as an old school side gig, you might say. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Off the west coast of an island, that most of the 23 million southern Californians don't even know exists, there's a wave, a huge wave, that can be surfed. Thousands of seals and sea lions are usually sitting onshore nearby, a all-you-can-eat buffet for the great white sharks cruising underwater nearby. This is the little known surf break called Shark Park, off the west coast of San Miguel Island, the farthest west of the eight Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California.
Although I lived for about 20 years in Huntington Beach, I never learned to surf. I was a diehard BMX freestyler most of those years, from 1987-2008, and a fat taxi driver for the last few. In the freestyle days, I knew that once I learned to surf, I'd never want to stop, so I never learned, and focused on BMX, with a little skateboarding mixed in. I did go boogie boarding now and then, so I did get out in the water, and caught some small waves that way.
For that big chunk of my life in Huntington Beach, although I didn't surf, I was surrounded by surfers. So I would hear about the surf every day, "It's overhead on the south side (of the pier) today," "Nice shoulder high A-frames at Tower 14," "It's flat, just little ankle slappers." "Fuck... black ball." So I got to know a bit about the waves, and surfing life.
When I lived on 15th Street, three blocks from the beach, in the late 90's, my neighbors and I would all watch Shark Week TV shows in the afternoons, then go surfing and body boarding at dusk, trying not to think about sharks. Over the best part of 20 years, I was hearing about the waves, the surf, and the surfing world, nearly every day. I even managed to get footage of "Boxcars" breaking once, (not my footage), a swell that breaks about 1/4 mile offshore, off the H.B. cliffs, about once every 10-15 years. Unfortunately, I lost that footage, with all my other video footage, in a move in 2008.
When it came to big waves, Hawaii was the place, particularly the North Shore in the 1980's when I first lived among surfers. We all knew about Pipeline and Waimea Bay. In 1988, working for a video company in Costa Mesa, I was sent down to shoot video of The Wedge, in Newport Beach, on a 15-20 foot day. So I learned about that one firsthand, and shot footage of another big day there in about 2006. In the 1990's, I remember everyone suddenly learning about this unknown, gigantic wave in Northern California, called Mavericks. The mega waves, off Half Moon Bay, surfed for 15 years by a few locals, finally became known to the rest of the surfing world.
Tow-in surfing had been happening in Hawaii for a while, and really big waves, like Jaws/ Peahi, in Hawaii, were believed to be about the biggest anywhere, at the time. But after Mavericks became widely known, it seemed surfers worldwide began seeking out new spots with gigantic waves. The annual XXL contest prize, for the biggest waves surfed, sparked a search for even bigger, surfable waves. Teahupoo, in Tahiti, Todos Santos in Baja California, Mexico, and the Cortes Banks, in the middle of the ocean, 80 or so miles off San Diego or Dana Point, became known. Years later, Nazare, in Portugal, rose to prominence with the biggest waves ever surfed. Here are a few more big waves, mostly without surfing in involved to remind you how crazy the ocean can get.
Life banished me to the Eastern Seaboard for a decade, so maybe I missed it. But I never, ever heard of Shark Park when I lived in Huntington Beach. Not until a couple of days ago, when I was looking up some videos about the archeology on the Channel Islands, something else I'm interested in. Arlington Springs Man, found on Santa Rosa island, is the oldest human remains found in North America, over 13,000 years old. The skeleton seems to pre-date the crazy Younger Dryas era, possibly the craziest period humans have lived through. You have to be a serious archeology geek to understand those last few sentences.
But as I was looking for those videos about California's Channel Islands archeology, over on the right I saw thumbnails of huge waves. The Shark Park videos popped up and I watched the one embedded above. But there were others. Like this one. And this one.
So as a friend of many surfers, I'm sharing this video for anyone who hasn't heard about this insane spot. One of the biggest, heaviest, gnarliest, most dangerous surfed waves in the world, is right here in Southern California, Shark Park. And it's not The Wedge. The west end of San Miguel Island, the westernmost of the northern Channel Islands, is about 45 miles southwest of Santa Barbara, and about 80 miles, almost straight west, of Santa Monica.
We all know the sport of surfing came from Hawaii, but it was the Southern California surf culture of the 1960's, about 55 years ago, that took the idea of surfing worldwide, through surf music and corny "beach blanket" movies. So it's cool to know that SoCal is now home to one of the biggest, heaviest, gnarliest surf spots anywhere, actually two, if you count Cortes Banks, which is due west of the California/Mexico border. Only a few surfers are experienced and crazy enough to give Shark Park a go, and that's just the way it should be. But for all the groms coming up out there, they'll know, out there, over the horizon from their local wave, there's one of the craziest surf spots on Earth. Maybe someday they'll have what it takes to give it a try.
Visible from the Long Beach and Orange County coast, depending on the weather, Santa Catalina Island is home to one town, Avalon, and a few dozen "buffalo", or American bison. Catalina has been exporting live bison to the Dakotas for 19 years, who knew?
In the 24 years I've lived in Southern California, I've made it out to Catalina Island one time. In 1997, I got hired to work on the stage crew of a John Tesh piano concert. While it was a cool trip, I worked 6 10 hour shifts in 4 days, so I didn't get much of a chance to wander the island. I did make it up to the Wrigley Mansion, now a hotel, on the top of a small mountain. John Tesh begins the PBS special show playing piano on the hotel's balcony. The view from up there is absolutely incredible.
As a SoCal main lander, I'd heard there were buffalo on Catalina for some reason, and that was confirmed by a man we worked with over there at the show. He was a descendant of the native tribe on the island, the Tongva, called Gabrielinos by the Spanish missionaries. He told us a bit about the island on breaks and at lunch. The Tongva go back at least 8,000 or more years, living on Catalina Island.
Until watching the clip above, I didn't realize the bison were brought over way back in 1924, for a movie, and have been living there since. I'd heard the movie they were used in was in the 1940's or 1950's, but that's not the case. So for close to 100 years now, American bison, which most of us call buffalo, have been living wild, but supervised, on Catalina. They are native to much of North America, but not to California, or Catalina or the other Channel Islands. With a trip to Catalina, you can take a buffalo tour to go see them. Safety tip: Don't take selfies with the "fluffy cows," they can really mess you up, they' huge and dangerous, even if they look really mellow.
As Southern Californians, we all know Catalina Island is out there, off shore, we've all seen it at some point, on a clear day. Many people forget, or don't know that there are actually eight islands off of the Southern California coast. At about 22 miles offshore, Santa Catalina is the closest, and can be reached by a couple of ferries from Long Beach, and by small planes or helicopters. It's one of the four southern Channel Islands, the other three are Santa Barbara, San Clemente, and San Nicolas Islands. San Clemente and San Nicolas are used by the military, and are off limits. Santa Barbara is tiny, and part of the national park with the northern islands.
So Santa Catalina, usually just called, Catalina, is the one we can all go visit. The native tribes used to travel to all of these islands in small canoes for thousands of years. A native woman named Juana Maria, was the last of the Nicoleno tribe on San Nicolas, and lived alone out there from 1835, until being removed in 1853.
The four northern Channel Islands are west of Malibu, and south of the city of Santa Barbara. Those four islands are named Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, San Miguel, and tiny Anacapa Island. The four northern islands, and Santa Barbara Island, are part of the Channel Islands National Park. You can learn a lot more about the islands, and take a virtual tour at the website on the link. The Chumash tribe, native to the mainland around the Malibu area, also lived on some of the northern islands. There is evidence of humans living on Santa Rosa Island as far back as 13,000 years ago, and 11,000 years ago on San Miguel. So at the end of the last Ice Age, there were people on at least those two islands.
Catalina is the one island with a small city, Avalon, and as I found out when we worked out there, it's really reasonable to stay there in the off season. You can check out the Catalina/Avalon website for more info. Catalina is also known for diving and fishing, and lots of SoCal boaters head out there for day or weekend trips. Not only is Catalina the only place to see a heard of wild bison in Southern California, there's a lot more to do as well. This post will give you links to get started to learn more about Catalina and the other Channel Islands. You can also learn more at the Channel Islands Wikipedia page.
This is a great video of 120 different Kobe Bryant murals in the Los Angeles area. I ride the bus by the two story mural on the VEM Exotic (car) Rentals building, at 11459 Ventura Blvd, in Studio City, every day. That's my favorite mural in this area. That one is at 1:23 in this video.
I was never a diehard basketball fan growing up. I lived in Ohio as a kid at a time when all of the pro sports teams pretty much sucked. The Cincinnati Reds were really good when I was about 4, and lived in that area. But after that, the Indians and the Browns sucked, the Cavaliers were mediocre, and so were the Reds as I grew up. My favorite basketball team as a kid was the Harlem Globetrotters. I never became a huge mainstream sports fan.
I got into BMX racing in freestyle while living in Boise, Idaho, when I was in high school, and it was BMX that brought me to Southern California, to work at two BMX magazines, in 1986. I was totally into BMX, riding every night and on weekends, and rarely watched football, and never watched baseball in my 20's. But the Lakers were a dynasty, and I'd catch a game on TV now and then.
Then in 1996, they got this 18-year-old kid in a trade from the Charlotte Hornets. Like most people, I thought, "Who does this kid think he is, skipping college and going straight to the pros?" Like all newcomers, he made some mistakes here and there, but it was obvious, this kid, Kobe Bryant, was the real deal. I started catching a lot more Lakers games as the 90's progressed into the Threepeat. Kobe became my favorite basketball player of all time. He was just a freaking amazing player, and legit guy, all around.
So today's location for this post of Crazy California 43 is the huge Kobe and Gigi mural at 11459 Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, my favorite Kobe mural, and the one I see daily. If you're a Kobe fan, the locations of 119 more Kobe murals are in the video above, go check some out in person.
Kobe Bryant, obviously, is known for primarily, basketball, but he's a guy who's also won an Oscar and done many other things. There are a few of my favorite Kobe Bryant videos I found while drawing a tribute picture of him, in my Sharpie Scribble Style. Where is that drawing now? I sold it to the guys as VEM Exotics, where my favorite mural is. I hope it's on one of their walls inside.
George Barris, the legendary car customizer, died in 2015. The Barris Kustoms shop, located at 10811 Riverside drive in North Hollywood, California, has closed down now. Here's a look at George Barris, and some of the crazy cars that came out of this shop.
Full disclosure, I'm not a diehard car guy. But I am the son of one. My dad was a draftsman and engineer from a small town in Ohio, who was a serious car guy and street racer in his younger years. He owned three classic Ford T-Birds, a couple of Chevy Corvairs, and about 35 other cars and several motorcycles, before he got married. I remember riding in my dad's last old car, a '55 Ford, when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I also rode in a parade in Wadsworth, Ohio, in a T-bucket roadster with dad and his best friend Wilson, who built the car. So like a lot of kids from the late Baby Boom and Gen X era, I grew up with my dad pointing and going, "Check out that car." That love for buying, selling, modifying, and racing cars came from the early pioneers of American car culture. One of the biggest names in that world is customizer George Barris.
Painting of the original Batmobile, on the window of Barris Kustoms. #steveemigphotos
George Barris was born in 1925, and was the son of Greek immigrants. He and his brother Sam, a year older, loved to build balsa wood models of cars, boats, and airplanes as kids, and entered them in local contests. In high school, George and Sam were given a hand-me-down Buick in rough shape, and they customized it themselves, at a time when nobody really thought of driving cars that weren't stock. The looks and reactions from kids at school, and the fun of creating something new out of an old car, got them believing they were on to something. A few years later, George hopped in his '35 Ford and headed down to Hollywood. George set up shop in the city of Bell, and later moved to Compton boulevard. Brother Sam joined him in 1945, after completing his military service.
The Beverly Hillbillies jalopy, my photo of their photo, on the front of the Barris Kustoms shop.
They customized cars for people in the hot rod and custom car world in the beginning. George also wrote tech articles and shot photos that appeared in many car magazines, particularly Petersen magazines. In 1961, his wife Shirley a new location in North Hollywood, just over the hill from Hollywood itself, but right in the middle of the Burbank, North Hollywood, and Studio City area of The Valley, where most movies and TV shows actually got made. Soon Hollywood actors and personalities, as well as the studios themselves came calling, asking for custom cars to be built.
Barris customized truck, photo on the front of their shop.
Perhaps the most famous car George is known for is the original Batmobile, built for the 1960's Batman TV show- Bam!-Klunk!-Kaplow! George's custom cars became legendary around the world, to thousands of hot rodders and street racers, and millions of kids watching Batman, and other shows like The Munsters. Barris Kustoms built the Munster Koach, and Grandpa's Dragula for The Munsters TV show. The Dragula was a casket turned into a dragster. Barris also designed an built the Beverly Hillbillies overloaded jalopy, James Dean's Porsche Spyder, a car for the Banana Splits kids' show, they modified cars for The Dukes of Hazard, and designed and built KITT from the Knight Rider TV show, along with many, many others.
A crazy six wheeled ATV, again my photo of a photo on the front of the Barris Kustoms shop.
George's wife Shirley passed away in 2001, and George himself got called by a higher power to customize some cars in the afterlife in 2015. The surviving family members kept the business going since then, keeping the huge legacy of George and Barris Kustoms alive through car shows, media, and other events. They haven't customized any more cars since George's death. So now the legendary location of the shop is up for sale. Several of George's cars were donated to the Petersen museum years ago, in Los Angeles, and are on display there. The thousands of photos, posters, die cast cars, and other mementos in the Barris collection will probably wind up on display in a new location at some point. No word on that yet. For the moment, as I write this, (Sept. 4, 2021) the Barris Kustoms shop still has photos of several cars on the front, and a mock-up Batmobile, and James Dean Spyder replica, and the Munster Koach are still visible through the shop windows. So that's today's interesting location here in Crazy California 43 blog, a shop that expanded everyone's ideas of what a car or truck can be, for well over 50 years.
Grandpa's casket turned dragster, the Dragula, from The Munsters TV show. My photo of the photo on the front of their shop.
All good things must come to an end. Around the corner from the Barris Kustoms shop is this mural of the Batmobile, painted on the concrete culvert wall. #steveemigphotos
This is my 1990 self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend. Go to 23:21 in this video for the segment at the Oceanview jump.
In 1990, BMX was in a crazy period. The sport had "died" in 1989, as major corporations pulled out of the 1980's "fad" of BMX racing, and the new trick riding thing called BMX freestyle. The bike industry itself decided in 1989 that BMX was "over" and pulled their support away from all things BMX, and plunged their money into mountain bikes, which are, of course, adult sized BMX bikes. Nearly all freestylers in the 80's raced for a while, before getting into freestyle. But BMX racing was racing, and most racers did some dirt jumping. Freestyle, the trick riding aspect of the sport, had evolved a separate type of bikes, heavier, with framestanders and axle pegs. By late 1990, when this video came out, flatland and quarterpipe contests had existed for six years, halfpipe contests for 3 years, and street contests for only 2 years. Wall rides had only been a thing for 3 1/2 years. Flatland riding evolved into scuffing then into forward rolling tricks, led by Kevin Jones and the Plywood Hoods. It was fading in popularity, but more difficult than ever.
Vert riding was going from quarterpipes to halfpipes. There were no concrete skateparks... ANYWHERE... in California. I think Kona in Florida was the only one left. This video was the first to have mini-ramps in it, they were a brand new thing that skaters had started making. Street riding was the new trend, and most BMX videos by bike companies still had riders wearing leathers. The sport of BMX freestyle had gone underground, the posers were gone, and the progression of the sport was happening at a fast pace. Guys like Mat Hoffman and Dennis McCoy didn't even have factory sponsors at times in 1989. The world had left BMX for dead, the money was gone from the sport. But we kept riding... and progressing.
Jumping had been a part of BMX riding since the very beginning, starting with kids on Schwinn Stingrays in the early 1970's. But by 1990, there were two schools of jumping. Racer/jumpers preferred double jumps,with some distance involved, and their tricks were mostly one handers, and one hand one footers, things like that. Hardly any racers could do 360's. The exception were the crazy young guys on the S&M Bikes team, a garage company at the time, led by Chris Moeller. They were pushing the level of jumping to new highs, and crazier tricks.
The other kind of jumping at the time was freestyler jumping, usually on flyout jumps. Some were ditch jumps where you rolled in one side, and out the other. Some flyout jumps were where you pedaled to a tall jump, 6-7 feet high, and popped straight up. Freestyle jumpers didn't go far, or very high, but these jumps gave you hang time over a flat landing, time to try really weird new tricks. So while the racers were jumping farther and higher, freestylers were jumping smaller, but working more on weird new tricks. In time, the two types of jumping blended, and the trails riders that emerged in the early 1990's took the freestylers' crazy tricks, like 360's, one hander no footers, nothings, and tailwhips, and soon after backflips, and did them bigger, over doubles.
Throughout 1990, the Oceanview flyout jump in Huntington Beach was one of the places a bunch of the Orange County based riders would show up and push the limits of new tricks. This jump was in the front yard of Oceanview High School in Huntington Beach, at the corner of Warner and Gothard streets. I'm not sure who built it, but it was the perfect place. We had a concrete runway to a 6 1/2 high jump to flat, under the shade of this huge tree. The recent new Jersey immigrant, and hungry and then unknown rider, Keith Treanor, flat out ruled Oceanview at the time. That's why a silhouette of Keith jumping over John's upstretched arm was on the cover of this video.
The riders in this segment are Keith Treanor (23:32), John Povah (23:36), GT vert pro Josh White (23:49), recently retired pro Woody Itson (23: 51), and H.B. local flatlander Andy Mulcahy (24: 03). As small as this jumping seems in today's world, this was cutting edge freestyle jumping for its day. No handers, one hand no footers, and nothings were all pretty new tricks, very few people were trying them. When this footage was shot, decade jumps had not been invented yet, and no one had done a tailwhip on dirt, as far as we knew. The tailwhip attempt that Josh White runs away from in this clip he followed by landing his first tailwhip on dirt ever. My camera battery died, and it shut off, while he was in the air. I missed the shot of Josh White's first tailwhip. Right about the same time, the Spring of 1990, Mike Krnaich landed a tailwhip on a tiny box jump, and that became the first tailwhip jump ever in a video, when the Bully Bikes video came out. Josh wanted to kill me for missing the shot of his first tailwhip, and I never saw him out jumping again, so I never got that shot.
So, as small as this jumping seems in today's world, the sessions that happened almost every night at the Oceanview High flyout jump in 1990, were really pushing the new tricks in jumping at the time. The four or five sessions I shot video of, combined in this clip, recorded those tricks, and motivated riders of the day to push the limits of jumping even farther. In the P.O.W. House and Edison section inthis video, you can see the racer/jumpers like Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer and Mike " Crazy Red" Carlson. Right around that time, jumping contests at some BMX races were starting to happen, which began to turn dirt jumping into its won genre' of BMX.
And just for the record right before this clip, at 23:17, you see a guy doing a double peg grind on a ledge. That's me, and that shot, to the best of my knowledge, it the 2nd double peg street grind ever in a BMX video, and the first on a ledge. In Ride Like a Man, produced by Eddie Roman for 2-Hip, which came out a couple months before my video, Dennis McCoy does a double peg grind on a rail next to a walkway. My grind here is the second double peg grind in a video. And later in this video, Keith Treanor does the first double peg grind down a rail over a small set of stairs, and John Povah does the first ice pick grind on a rail. That's how new street riding was then, fundamental tricks were being invented all over in that era of 1989-1991, and every video had some "first ever" tricks back then.
In the many years since 1990, Oceanview High School became a big skating spot in the 1990's, and "The Ashtray," the first public skatepark in California, was built a couple hundred yards away in Murdy Park. Later on, the high school did a major expansion, and built over the area where the flyout jump used to be. But this spot was one that helped pushed new tricks in BMX in the late 1980's and early 1990's, adding to the evolution of BMX during the "dead" years of the early 1990's.
If you look through this gate, there's a window back there, about five feet off the ground. That's about where the Oceanview flyout jump used to be. This is the 20,000 or so square foot addition to the front of Oceanview High School. #steveemigphotos
This is the front of Oceanview High School now, looking from the corner of Warner and Gothard. The big tree next to the jump was about where the building is now, about the center of this photo. #steveemigphotos.
At 5066 Vineland in North Hollywood, there's a boarded up storefront. For 43 years, that building was home to The Alley rehearsal and recording studios. Bands rented it by the week. Kind of like Fight Club, the first rule was not to tell anyone about it. The next rules were no photos, no film, no videos inside... ever. From 1973 to 2016, bands rehearsed there, and recorded albums there. It was called The Alley, studio and rehearsal hall.
It doesn't look like much from the outside. Musicians entered from the alley in the back, hence the name, The Alley. Michael Jackson recorded four albums here. Prince recorded two. Jackson Browne told owner Shiloh he wrote her favorite song, "For Everyman," in this building. The Alley was there and in operation long before the area became North Hollywood's NoHo Arts District. #steveemigphotos
Don Henley once said that the epic Eagles song, "Hotel California," was about the transition from innocence to experience." The Alley was a place for artists to hide out, and be artists. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, and all that it meant to be a big band in the 1970's, and beyond, happened inside this building. Legend has it that the scene at the Alley was the initial inspiration for the Eagles writing "Hotel California." As best anyone can tell, over 1,800 hits were written or recorded in the non-descript building. The piano that was in the rehearsal studio until 2020 is said to have belonged to Gram Parsons. The Red Hot Chili Peppers auditioned 3,000 guitar players there in the 1990's, before going with Dave Navarro, who they'd pretty much already settled on anyway.
Three Dog Night. Paul McCartney. Bob Marley. Tom Petty, Motorhead, Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Fleetwood Mac. Little Feat. Warren Zevon. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Deep Purple. Jackson Browne. The Eagles. Black Sabbath. Santana. Stevie Wonder. Roy Orbison. K.D. Lang. Bonnie Raitt. Sheryl Crow. Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins. The Interrupters, Lucinda Williams, and on and on. Hundreds, probably thousands, of the greatest musicians of the last 50 years practiced, wrote, hung out, jammed, and recorded music in this building. Even in Hollywood, The Alley studios were legendary, but a secret at the same time. The Alley was a place where musicians could be musicians, close off from the outside world, and let the magic happen.
To top it off, there are even ghost hunters who have put the building on TV. At least one man died there, in a fall down the spiral staircase. Supposedly there are ghost cats roaming the building as well.
The brick walls with the musician and band signatures would probably go for tens of thousands of dollars to rich collectors if pulled out and sold. Sometimes the great places in history are hiding right in plain sight. Like Diagon Alley in Harry Potter, you had to be one of the chosen, the hardcore musicians, to enter this building between 1973 and 2016.
It started in 1965, and a biker named Bill Elkins came there to shoot photos of Three Dog Night in 1972. All of his friends were musicians and Harley type bikers. He just had to own the place, and waited for it to go up for sale. When it finally did, he tore down the For Sale sign so no one else would see it, and called the owner. Bill bought the building, and started using scrap lumber he scrounged to build it into a rehearsal hall and recording studio in 1973. He met Shiloh in the 70's, they married, and lived in the small apartment at the back of the property. He built the business with word of mouth from band to band, musician to musician. That kept the place busy for 43 years, from 1973 to 2016. Bill died in 2015, and Shiloh died in 2017. The Alley closed in 2016. They had no children, so there were no heirs to pass it on to.
One time Alley technician, John Strand, tried to get The Alley going again, but had financial and other issues, and had to sell it. Here are a couple of the better videos that do exist from The Alley Studios.
Actors Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart talk about shooting their duet scene at "The Slabs" for the 2007 movie Into the Wild. The movie, based on a John Krakaur book, is about Christopher McCandless, an smart student and athlete, who wandered away from society seeking his own answers, and eventually died in Alaska. This scene was actually shot at Slab City.
I was talking to a friend who's into off road racing trucks, about this blog. I said something like, "You go out to Ocotillo, right? Have you ever been out to the big metal sculptures at Borrego Springs?" He said he had, and I told him I wrote a blog post about those. We got talking about the Southern California desert, and I told him about the legends of the ship in desert. He hadn't heard that legend, but it sounded interesting. Then he said, "and there's that lawless place out there, too, by the Salton Sea." I wasn't sure what he was talking about. Then it clicked, "Slab City?" He said that was the place. That seems to be the way people think of Slab City, those who have heard of it, or maybe visited it, it's "that lawless place."
Slab City got its name because there are a whole bunch of concrete slabs out there, making nive flat places to park a camper, or built your own house of some sort in a place no one really cares about. At least most of the time. The slabs are the remnants of a retired Marine Corps camp's gunnery range.
I first heard about Slab City in the movie Into the Wild. I later read the book, and it stuck in my mind. I was working as a taxi driver in Orange County in 2007, and once or twice a week I'd go see a movie in the early afternoon, as much to escape the heat as to watch any particular movie. Into the Wild was one of the most fascinating movies I saw back then.
I was living in my taxi, working 7 days a week, 16-18 hours most days, just struggling to pay my $550 a week taxi lease. The idea of wandering off into the wild sounded pretty good at the time. The taxi business was going downhill, due to the computer dispatching system, which allowed taxi companies to put far too many cabs on the road for the amount of business that existed.
On Thanksgiving weekend, 2007, I finally hit the point where I wasn't going to make my lease by the next Monday. Totally burnt out, grossly overweight, and not sure what to do with my life, I decided to take a drive that Sunday morning. My goal was to find Slab City, just to check the place out. I didn't work that Saturday night, I felt kind of sick. So I woke up about 4:00 am. I headed south on the 5 freeway, and then east on route 78. Around dawn, I pulled off in a little area in the Anzo Borrego State Park, and took a short hike on a trail there. I got back in my cab, and headed east, until I hit route 86, on the west side of the Salton Sea, California's largest lake, and one of the craziest stories in the state. But that's a tale for another day.
I had a computer in the pawn shop, that I bought just to edit video with, but I never got on the internet then, so I had no idea exactly where Slab City was, I just knew it was somehwere near the Salton Sea, which is like 30 miles long. I drove north, got some breakfast near a casino, and asked a couple people where Slab City was. I went out to the edge of the once popular, now dying Salton Sea, where the bones of millions of dead fish scatter the shore. I headed south, taking tips from a local, but never found Slab City. It was getting hot out, so I headed back up to Orange County.
The next morning I dropped off my taxi at the company, simply dropped the keys at the window, and walked away with my small backpack and about $15. My health was so bad, after three bouts of cellulitis in my legs that year, that I didn't expect to live more than a few weeks on the street. I wound up living on the streets of Orange County for nearly a year.
I've still never been to Slab City. I saw a cool TV show where some skaters went out there and built a mini skatepark, and skated for a few days. There are several videos on YouTube about the place, I'll link some below.
The basic story is that the place was built as Camp Dunlap, a Marine Corps training base in 1942, during World War II. It was functional and used for three years, then dropped down to a skeleton crew. According to Wikipedia, the big area of concrete slabs was part of the artillery range. When it was abandoned, a few drifters set up camp there. A few more came along, and it became a squatters community of people moving in and out, including many snowbirds from northern areas, coming in the winter. The Department of Defense gave the land to the state of California in 1961 officially.
Slab City is pretty close to the middle of fucking nowhere, which is a great place to go if you want to "get away from it all." It's east of the southern end of the Salton Sea, off route 111, near Niland. It's in Imperial county, part of the Sonoran desert, and temperatures can reach a toasty 122 degrees F in the summer.
It's generally seen as a place where the government didn't care about, so people could live cheap with basically no laws. Anarchy in the desert. Since I've found it interesting, but never been there, I'll let the people from Slab City tell their stories, in the links below. I also recommend the movie Into the Wild, and The Salton Sea (which is about meth,so MAJOR trigger alert if you're a recovering tweeker).
The Huntington Beach Pier at dusk. #steveemigphotos
Huntington Beach was an oil well filled, mellow surf town, with the only long stretch of wide open beach in SoCal, when I moved there in 1987. As many cities struggled for a variety or reasons, H.B. kept growing and getting more and more built up and developed. Most of the old oil pumps have been taken down, and the wells capped, and it's a bustling beach town for trendy people now. But it hasn't totally forgotten its action sports roots. Since I live din H.B. for the better part of 20 years, several of the early posts in this blog are locations in Huntington Beach, starting with the iconic pier. Here are links to my posts about H.B., more posts will be added as time goes on.
The first Wahoo's Fish Taco, at 1862 Placentia, in Costa Mesa, California. #steveemigphotos
I first heard of Wahoo's Fish Taco restaurant in 1988, right after this first one opened. I was working at Unreel Productions, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards at the time. Skateboarding was reaching the peak of its third wave of popularity, and Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear clothes were selling like crazy. A lot of really talented young people were working at the various Vision businesses, spread around several buildings, and anchored by the Vision main office at 17th and Whittier in Costa Mesa. This first Wahoo's above was a few blocks from the Vision buildings, and as soon as it opened, Vision workers started hanging out there after work.
Right after it opened, someone came by Unreel from Vision, and told me I should come hang at Wahoo's after work. I've never been a big seafood person, and fish tacos seemed weird to me then. I was totally wrong about that, their fish tacos are great. But it took me a decade to figure that out. I never went to Wahoo's to hang with the Vision crew people. My loss.
Inside the original Wahoo's Fish Taco on Placentia, in Costa Mesa today. #steveemigphotos
So I finally visited this first Wahoo's restaurant last week, intending to meet a friend from Norway, and a few others, in town for the X-Games. From the start, Wahoo's have taken the Baja California fisherman's meal, based on fresh caught fish in tacos and rice, and blended it with a hardcore action sports world vibe. The walls and ceilings of Wahoo's are covered in surfboards, skateboards, BMX bikes, photos, posters, stickers, and artwork form surfing, skateboarding, BMX, and other action sports. They have that "chillin' by the beach when the waves are flat" vibe. Casual, fun, and hanging with friends and good food before or after going riding, skating, surfing, or snowboarding.
Vintage Vision Psycho Stick skateboard on the wall of the Costa Mesa Wahoo's. Few people know (or remember), that Psycho Man, the guy on this skateboard, was a real person who worked in the Vision Skateboards Art department in the late 1980's. He was actually a cool guy, I met him a couple of times. But he had a crazy style, and unique look, so they put him on a skateboard which turned into a hot seller. #steveemigphotos
In more recent times, the last couple of years, I learned that old BMX freestyle friend, Ron Camero, a former Vision freestyler, is the guy who decorates all the Wahoo's restaurants. He contacted me when he saw some of my BMX Sharpie Scribble Style drawings, and wound up buying several to put up at different Wahoo's restaurants. There are none in the original Wahoo's, but my drawings now hang in several other Wahoo's.
Here's one of my Hugo Gonzalez prints, in the Wahoo's in Los Alamitos, I believe.
You can also find my Sharpie art on the walls of Wahoo's in Torrance, the Long Beach Marketplace restaurant, San Clemente, and Las Vegas, I believe. So a huge thanks to Ron Camero to adding my drawings to the walls of the coolest taco place in and around Southern California. The food is good, the beer is cold, and there's a laid back, fun vibe to every Wahoo's. If you are into any of the action sports, or just like tacos (that's pretty much everybody, right?), you need to check out a Wahoo's Fish Taco. Yeah, I'm overselling it, and believe it or not, this is NOT a paid post. I'm just stoked to have some of my art up at Wahoo's around the region.
One of my Krys Dauchy drawings up at a Wahoo's. Photo: Ron Camero
Dave Vanderspek/Curb Dogs drawing up at a Wahoo's. Photo by Ron Camero.
Another Hugo Gonzalez drawing, up at a Wahoo's (top left). Photo by Ron Camero. #sharpiescribblestyle
Disclosure: Yes, I've sold several drawings to be hung in Wahoo's Fish Taco restaurants, several months ago. There was no deal for me to write a blog post in exchange for those sales. When I visited the first Wahoo's last week, I snapped some pics, and decided to do a blog post.
One of the cult classic movies for Generation X people, like myself, the 1983 movie The Outsiders is known for several scenes, but the standout is Ponyboy and Johnny's "Nothing gold can stay" scene, which you can see here. This is a close-up of a mural on the side of Floyd's barbershop, at 13601 Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley. #steveemigphotos
The Outsiders is also remembered for giving most people their first look at several soon-to-be major actors of that generation. C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Patrick Swayze all appear in major roles. Until doing reserach for this post, I didn't realize that Tom Cruise, Diane Lane, Leif Garrett, Tom Waits, and a very young Sophia Coppola (Francis Ford Coppola's daughter and Spike Jonze' ex) are also in the movie. Imagine the budget it would take to get that cast in a movie today. #steveemigphotos
The thing I love about this shot is that shadow line when I took it, sort of visually reinforcing the dark side of the social spectrum, Patrick Swayze leading the Greasers, and the popular kids, in the light, the Soc'es (Soshes?). Here's the classic rumble scene from the movie. #steveemigphotos
Here's the mural from the other angle. #steveemigphotos
I like big books, and I cannot lie... The exterior of Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood. #steveemigphotos
If you are a serious reader, and particularly one interested in movies, TV, film history, acting, photography, or the arts in general, Iliad Bookshop, in North Hollywood, is a place you must get to. I've been a big reader since I learned to read, way back in the dark ages, and loved going with my dad to used book shops to wander among the stacks, and find that one perfect book for that time in my life. Or maybe 10 perfect books.
When I first moved to North Hollywood in 1991, after stumbling into the mainstream TV/video production world, I found Iliad at its former location, right on the X-shaped intersection of Vineland, Lankershim, and Camarillo streets. Odyssey Video rental store was next to it then, a big yellow building. That's where the name came from, a little literary joke, the used bookshop next to Odyssey must be named Iliad, right? The owners thought so.
If you're a book geek like me, you might also believe heaven (if there is one), looks something like this. Until we get there, there's Iliad Bookshop to check out. Floor to ceiling shelves of books. Everything you see in this photo is part of the movie/film section. #steveemigphotos.
Iliad Bookshop has moved from that original location, and is now located at 5400 Cahuenga Blvd., in North Hollywood, the cross street is Chandler. If you're a bike rider, you can actually take the Chandler Bikeway from the Red Line train station in North Hollywood straight to Iliad, and save some gas. I actually walked there from the train station, and I'm fat. It's less than a mile walk.
Iliad is home to two cats, Zeus and Apollo, who have a fan club of their own, people come in just to see the cats. So leave your service rhinoceros or service llama at home, service dogs only, if needed. Iliad is also home to about 150,000 used books. Real, paper books. You can wander the stacks, and find books on almost any subject. Their sections of books on movies, TV, acting, dance, music, art, and photography are ginormous, the biggest selection of these subjects that I've ever seen in any used book store. There's a huge selection of novels, and tons of graphic novels. Most every standard subject is represented, except business oriented books. If you're looking for epic used paperback novels, they have tons. I walked away with Robert Heinlein's Sci-Fi classic, Stranger in a Strange Land, on this trip, which is almost impossible to find in a used bookstore these days.
Iliad Bookshop sits on the corner of Cahuenga and Chandler in NoHo, and the blue background, street facing walls, are covered in murals of dozens of literary legends, and famous scenes from books, plus the huge books in the top photo. #steveemigphotos
If you're a book lover or avid reader anywhere in Southern California, you need to put a trip to Iliad Bookshop on your reader bucket list. In addition to the huge selection inside, there are almost always boxes of donated books, available for free, outside the main door, which is in the parking lot. I found a copy of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons on this trip, in the free boxes. These are the donated books not needed in the store itself. So if you like to read, are looking for that hard to find book, or just want to wander the huge stacks of a real, old fashioned used bookshop of epic proportions, head to Iliad Bookshop. I might see you there.
