My dad first tried to make a living as a photographer when he was a young man in Gainesville Tx., during the late thirties. The war put and end to that, and when he got back and married my mom, he got suckered into a G.I bill financed “Academy of Cinema” in Paris. That turned out to be a hoax, and by the time the (by now) three of us made it back to the sates, he’d had enough of the starving artist routine for a while.

So for the next 30 years, he taught school, and made photographs on the side. When he finally retired in the late seventies, he started exhibiting those photos, and has done pretty well. He’s shown at Ray Hawkins Gallery, been collected by Graham Nash, is listed as a historical photographer on Corbis. At 94, he’ s still selling pictures, although he can’t work in his darkroom any more.

He chronicled the years we spent in Venice with a truly sharp and faithful eye, and I always get swept back into time when I look at his recording of our world and our lives. These images provide a conduit into the past. The eye is not really the surest way back, of course.

Thinking about his work, I was reminded of the romance the darkroom held for me when I was little. The muffled, dark-red light, the sharp and bitter odors of chemicals, the hushed whispered voices, for no obvious reason – pure magic. They say that memories associated with smells are the ones that we can recall with the greatest immediacy and vividness – and I believe it. Thinking back, trying to recapture some of these memories, I’ve had a lot of those flashes – the perfume of turpentine linseed oil in a studio, the breath of the sea, the odors of a hundred foods and smokes and people.  Maybe that’s what they mean when they say “the nose knows”

That said – never throw photographs away,  they are windows and doorways into places you’ll never really be able to get to again. Cherish them.

Through Max and Arlene, I met a couple of other members of their group (they all exhibited at the legendary “CeeJe” gallery). Chas Garabedian lived just up the street – his painting was awesome (and not in the tawdry modern sense of the word) , but I found him intimidating, as I did most of the older writers and artists I had met around Venice. Another guy I met through them was Lance Richbourg (yes, the famous baseball painter), who had a tiny studio at the corner of Brooks and Pacific. He was friendly and patient, and willing to answer a star-struck fifteen year old’s dumb questions. Lance lived in his studio, a was very much the young, bohemian artist. He also had great taste in music – turned me on to Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters. Looking back, I realize now that while these people seemed like gods to me at the time, they were hardly more than kids themselves.

But most of the neighborhood mentoring in the arts I got came from Max and Arlene. They lived close, and always seemed to have time. At one point, Arlene even gave me lessons – and they both taught me a lot about art, the thing itself, and what it’s for.

But more importantly, they lived a life I thought only existed in films. They made art. They worked at it every day, like my dad and mom worked at their jobs, and they got paid and bought groceries and raised their kids. I realized that “artist” was a real job description.

Now, all I had to do was figure out how to be one.

His poetry was uneven. Some of it was spacey, word picture stuff that was like a cross between E.E Cummings and ASCII art. Some of it was sentimental slop in the vein of Rod McKuen. What I liked best (being 15) was his humor – scatological, vile, and unrepentant in its anti authoritarianism. More than that, I liked Claire because he had time. He only worked when he needed money, and he mostly just hung out — and he had time to talk to a kid who wanted to know everything about art and truth and beauty and who asked a whole lot of really stupid questions.

I don’t know what happened to Claire. When I came back to Venice in the early eighties, he was gone. He had always been a private man, not interviewing with the poetry press and not liking to be photographed. I had one of his books somewhere, but it’s gone now. Even if I knew where it was, because of the paper, it would be dust and crumbles now.

But he had time. That was the exception — most of the creative people I knew were busy, and moving forward. I was lucky to meet a few who head time for a kid. They were the people that pretty much determined the direction my life took. Venice was a hotbed then — a throbbing pulse of new culture, and it’s really hard to convey the feeling of excitement that was floating around then. Things were changing, and everybody wanted to see what came next.

NOTE: The large image of Claire Horner at the top of the page comes from filmmaker and photographer Leland Auslender’s short film Venice Beach in the Sixties: A Celebration of Creativity. Look for more on that film and other of Auslender’s work in DI in the future. In the meantime, to learn more about Auslender and his “Celestial images” inspired by the years he spent in Venice (and documented in the film), go to celestialimages.com.

At that time, it was run by John and Anna Haag, who had taken over from Stuart Perkoff who had started it. They, too, struck me as almost impossibly romantic – for one thing, they were stylish and attractive people, and that only served to amplify their general hipness. More importantly, they defied authority, got away with it, and sometimes even won. And to a fifteen year old boy feeling trapped in the web of adult authority (as most do) that right there is the Holy Grail.

So I spent a lot of time there. I heard a lot of good music, heard a lot of good (and execrably bad) poetry, and learned …well, a great deal more about life than I knew I was learning at the time. I got to rub shoulders with people like Taylor Meade, Claire Horner*, and a whole menagerie of creative, edgy people who were pushing toward the next thing – and there was almost a tension in the air, a compelling sense that something exciting and world-changing was about to happen. And I think I was a lot better off there than I would have been in a “youth soccer” program.

Sometimes, I worry that parents overprotect their kids these days. The typically obsessed, terrified, “helicopter” parent of today wouldn’t consider letting their teenager hang out with a bunch of degenerates such as infested the VW. And I fear that a whole lot of kids are going to suffer poorer, shallower lives because of that.

I’m just very, very fortunate that I had the chance to experience the things I did growing up in a community such as Venice was then. I hope those kind of experiences will always be there for kids – there is no substitute to be found in Disneyland.

* To be mentioned later.

I don’t need to give a bio on Hawkins, it’ s on the Net. The main thing I want to do is encourage people to track down some of this guy’s recordings and hear him. You won’t get the full experience — sounds from a speaker can’t replicate what he could produce in person, but it’ll give you a hint.

He was around the boardwalk for several years, and became a fixture on the scene. To me, he always typified the best of Venice art and music. He gave himself freely to the public (though at the end of the day, his guitar case on the ground in front of him was far from empty). He performed for the high and mighty, and the lowly and poor. He broke hearts and illuminated minds. I miss him.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my parents were beatniks. I knew that things were somehow looser in my household – that people were tolerated and welcomed there that weren’t welcome in the homes of most of my schoolmates. We moved to Venice in 1960, when I was 10 years old – I’d spent most of my life in rural East Texas.  Venice in 1960 was a snapshot in L.A. culture. The Marina hadn’t been built yet, and it was still poor, and bohemian. Most of the buildings were still run-down Victorians and Craftsmen. It was softer and funkier than today’s Venice — with more muted colors.

Parents weren’t so restrictive in my day, I guess, and I was out on the street and getting socially and politically involved by the time I was 14 or 15 or so. Young people were starting to be accepted, as the beats started to give way to the hippies. Venice has changed and stayed the same, through all this. I want to tell about some of the things I saw, and some of the people I knew. I guess everyone does, sooner or later.

Sometimes, all it takes is a picture. Seeing this old shot of the Venice Beach Pavilion really takes me back. In my sixteenth summer, they had a series of free concerts there. It was new then, and hadn’t fallen into disrepair, and could seat several hundred people. That summer I got to hear Taj Mahal, Kaleidoscope, Love, Spirit, and a dozen other seminal L.A. bands that are legendary now. They were more like mini-love-ins than concerts — people dancing in their seats and the aisles, beating on tambourines, the whole deal. At the time, I don’t think I realized that I was witnessing a part of the birth of a new consciousness. At the time, it all seemed very natural and self-evident. I was lucky to be in Venice then, and I am lucky to be here now. It’s a very special place – and a lot of magic has happened here.