Birth of Venice:
old-time magazine
artifacts
Actors, Filmmakers and Writers in Venice live or lived
Actors, Filmmakers and Writers in
Venice
hung out
Program of the 1978 Venice Festival at the Fox Venice Theater
Tale of the Fox
(from Free Venice Beachhead)
1981 Resistance Celebration Schedule
1981 Resistance Celebration Articles
To See Venice Is To Live - opening day slogan
Institutions, Organizations, Foundations
Paul Tanck on
Venice-related films
Ceramic artist Patty
RomTom
......his lavishly illustrated book
COMPORTING ROADWISE:
This wonderful memoir of life on the road, Rainbow Gatherings, hippie enclaves, and struggle against conformity was gestated in Venice. RomTom had been writing it for years, but it was only after a series of meetings with publisher Marc Madow, in 1991 and '92, that the project really took off. They parlayed at the old Van Gogh's Ear coffee-house, and much of the book was written there too.
Back when I lived in Venice, the
strange and fascinating vehicles that occupied its streets, parking lots
and alleys were, to many residents, a source of ceaseless irritation.
In fact, vehicle dwellers are still a huge object of contention. The non-traditionally
housed are hated and feared as much as the homeless, and face legal penalties
just for having the nerve to exist. They're called outsiders, "questionable
people," A-holes, "vantasticks," who throw trash around
and live in smelly motor homes creating squalor and urban blight.
Some new parking permit rules were proposed
or passed but were criticized because they just move the undesirables
from one part of Venice to another without ever really getting rid of
them.
"When allowed to congregate, they form the framework for an "encampment""
one outraged householder complained in a letter to the editor. Others
make the accusation that vans have been used for drug sales, prostitution,
and fencing stolen property - the horror! And of course we know that people
living in houses never do those sorts of things. One resident complained
in a local newsletter that one motor home and two cars with people sleeping
in them were 200 feet from her front door! Around the corner, at least
three more vehicles were being lived in. "So far there have been
no reported adverse occurrences, and based on my experience, these sleepers
are harmless," this person admitted. But…….. "What
will be there tomorrow?".
Webslave
In a 2006 interview, artist Emily Winters remembers the truck gypsies of a bygone Venice era, when things were a bit more loose. "The people who lived in their trucks would hook up to our electricity. Nobody had much money. We helped each other." Not much of that spirit remains today.
RUBBER TRAMPS OF VENICE
Familiar faces in remarkable documentary
Rubber Tramps is a unique documentary that explores the lives of people who savor the scenery of the open road, in search of an authentic life. These nomads and gypsies make their homes in converted buses, vans and cars. In his last major media appearance, counterculture icon Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) comments throughout the film, linking today's rubber tramps with the famous bus trips he and the Merry Pranksters made during the bygone hippie era.
Ken Kesey on his farm
Director Max Koetter traveled as a very young man to the U.S. in the late 1990s and fell in love with the open spaces and the road people he met in the course of his own wanderings. First he thought of doing a book, but during a spell back in England, was advised that on return it would be a good idea to take a camera. Someone turned him on to the Canon XL1, which became his camera of choice. His father suggested connecting with Ken Kesey, so that became a goal. Returning stateside, he met Kenny Rosen, who took on the production duties, and they formed Just Passing Through Productions. Sam Taybi ran the video camera, and Brett Beardslee kept track of things in his journal and also translated the magic of wanderlust into the musical medium.
Videographer Sam Taybi
The crew's 2001 odyssey, in a van called Juicy Lucy, began in Venice (where, coincidentally, Kesey once lived) and moved on up the coast to Pleasant Hill, Oregon. All the way, they recorded the lives and words of people whose most important possessions are their wheels, winding up with a movie that is a distilled essence of the Sixties spirit as it has survived into later decades.
Brett Beardslee, Max Koetter in Kesey's barn
In Juicy Lucy, a 1958 VW van, the film crew spent 40 days and 40 nights traveling and filming. Intermittently joined by still photographer Jamie Trueblood, the crew actually lived as rubber tramps themselves while filming their subjects. For the interior scenes, Coleman lanterns were useful to provide illumination brighter than normal, yet still preserving the intimate ambiance of vehicular existence.
Indian Lee, videographer Sam Taybi
Two well-known Venice locals are featured in Rubber Tramps. Conga drummer Ibrahim Mihammai has been harassed by the police innumerable times for playing music on the west side of the boardwalk. Ceramic artist Patty has run afoul of the rules governing sales on the boardwalk. (Although individually handmade, her creations are said not to be eligible - while mass-produced, imported junk is allowed.) During the filming of Rubber Tramps, Patty's home on wheels was destroyed by fire, and the filmmakers came to her rescue, giving her one of their buses. RomTom, also in Rubber Tramps, has spent plenty of time in Venice during his travels, and wrote a good portion of his book Comporting Roadwise in a local cafe.
Still photographer Jamie Trueblood
A first cut was made and shown to some people to get a rough idea of what they had. The picture ended up being 82 minutes in length. (Later on, another version was edited to fit in the 1-hour confines of a cable TV show.) Topanga Canyon artist Jody Roberts, a vehicle-dweller himself, spent a month and a half painting a 1955 GMC bus named Gypsy Storm. The interior was remodeled into a screening room, and in it the Rubber Tramps crew set out for the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. (This was the same year the Venice-based Dogtown and Z-Boys won top awards there).
Center: Jody Roberts, who decorated the Gypsy Storm bus for the Sundance expedition
The makers of Rubber Tramps had planned to use their bus as a theater, but that was forbidden by a local law. The city fathers restricted free speech in a big way, as the Park City municipal code forbade filmmakers from handing out flyers or even talking to the public about their movies. Max Koetter received a citation for engaging in "a promotional discussion." The crew joined with other frustrated artists to protest.
Juicy Lucy and the film crew on the road
Today, anybody can watch this wonderfully-reviewed movie via DVD. Visit the Rubber Tramps website to see the Film Festival Trailer and the Internet Exclusive Trailer and visit Rubber Tramps on MySpace for extra photos and interesting news.
Producer Kenny Rosen, Sam Taybi, and Further 2
The filmmakers interview Frog
On YouTube, the Rubber Tramps Trailer
Rubber Tramps
at
Movies
Are Only a Life
Observations on Vehicular Residences in Venice from
Call Someplace Paradise and Ghost Town: a Venice California
Life in the years 1980-1984
The Rodriguez family recently got a pickup
truck with a camper top. After about a month the camper shell was taken
off the truck and placed in the yard next to their house. Carla says two
of Dulci's cousins live in it.
Ghost Town - spring 1980
On Vernon Avenue just about at the corner
of Lincoln there's a house entirely surrounded by high impenetrable foliage
and a formidable gate. A couple weeks ago a big funky old bus that says
Whale Museum showed up in front of the place and has been parked there
ever since.
Ghost Town - summer 1980
On the boardwalk a new (to me anyway)
group showed up called Ecolibrium Alliance, whose home ground is Big Sur
or somewhere equally remote. They travel with several animals in a large
bus trimmed with purple and they all wear purple. Their weird medieval-looking
odd-shaped handmade instruments were laid out on a carpet spread on the
pavement. A banner said "Ecolibrium Survival Show." A sixtyish
man played a wind instrument with many stops, and a dark-haired woman
played a keyboard. Their music was eerie and strange.
Call Someplace Paradise - fall 1981
Tara suggested a mechanic named Jack,
so I went over to his place of business on 3rd Avenue between Rose and
Sunset. All along that block a caravan of strange vehicles park, and I
think people live in them. An Anaheim school bus with non-matching curtains
on all the windows. A flatbed truck with a plywood structure mounted on
it. A van where I glimpsed a woman in white thermal longjohns moving something
inside. And so on.
Ghost Town - winter 1981
At the Safeway there has been a camper
truck in the parking lot for a couple of weeks. It has a platform on the
back. A refrigerator and a bag of golf clubs are on the platform with
For Sale signs on them. A middle-aged woman came out, did something up
front of the truck, then went back in. Apparently this is her home. Also
in the lot there was another camper, the type with a sleeper over the
cab, and lights were on inside it.
Call Someplace Paradise - fall 1982
On the way home I saw a school bus in
the parking lot of one of the local light industries. The body was still
yellow, with "Heavy Metal" painted on the side in silver, and
flowered curtains in all the windows.
Call Someplace Paradise - fall 1982
There's an article in the Herald Examiner
about all the people who live in cars, especially in Venice, where they
estimate 100. They interviewed a couple named Jim and Lisa who live in
the Rose Avenue parking lot. They take cold water showers and someone
stole their car radio. Every morning when I go by the Safeway back parking
lot there are half a dozen people waiting by the dumpster for the spoiled
food to come out.
Call Someplace Paradise - spring 1983
At the Rose Avenue parking lot there
are twenty vans, buses, trucks and campers which are residences. One of
them has a wheelchair parked outside it. About the same number of cars
probably have people living in them, or else what are they doing here
at 6:30 a.m.? The decorative pilings are very tall now, since the sand
has shifted drastically on that part of the beach. Ten or so sleeping
bags full of people are clustered around them, and another group of at
least that many sleep farther along by one of the concrete ramps.
Call Someplace Paradise - spring 1983
At the beach this morning, the Whale
Museum bus was just pulling into the Rose Avenue parking lot, which looks
more than ever like a village. Reaganville-by-the-Sea.
Call Someplace Paradise - summer 1983
This morning there were almost no vehicles
in the Rose Avenue parking lot. Seasonal departure, or LAPD cataclysm?
What kind of people end up living in a parking lot on the Pacific? I once
put a cast on the arm of a heavyset, red-haired woman who came here from
Brooklyn with her husband and two kids. Everything they owned was in their
car. They spent their last $400 on an apartment. Both the adults had jobs
lined up, and a babysitter, then the real tenants of the apartment showed
up. The real tenants had sublet to someone else, and the subtenants had
scammed the woman's family. They spent one night sleeping out on the beach
and another in the car. On the way to an interview for an apartment manager
job, the brakes failed and they hit another car that belonged to "a
working guy who saved so long for that car," the red-haired woman
said. On top of all their other problems and her brand-new broken arm,
they felt obligated to pay for the damage to the other man's car. Of course
their own car couldn't be driven, and they got a ticket for leaving the
disabled vehicle on the street where the accident happened.
Call Someplace Paradise - fall 1983
In a vacant lot on the next block there's
a pickup truck, pretty well wrecked and undriveable-looking, with a wooden
shelter built on top. A dog sits next to its open door.
Ghost Town - fall 1983
I asked Dimitrios about the people with
the Whale Museum bus we've seen parked there. They're originally from
Amsterdam and are going back to Europe soon.
Ghost Town - fall 1983
On the other side of Electric Avenue,
on a weedy patch of vacant land, a truck was parked with a big home-made
structure built into it. On the back door someone had painted ART ROD
ARK and FLY-IN SEED. I pondered those inscriptions for a moment, then
noticed in the back window ledge of a nearby parked car a book whose title
was eerily appropriate: Another Roadside Attraction.
Call Someplace Paradise - fall 1983
On Rose Avenue a green bus was parked
- the Green Tortoise Line, which is the outfit our neighbor the videographer
made a documentary about. A man in a mechanic's jumpsuit had the back
end open and all his wrenches spread out. The destination on the side
of the bus said Shreveport and the one on the top front said Paris. A
motto painted in flowing script: "The only trip of its kind."
The wall in back of the grocery has a new slogan in bold white paint:
THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES TO WAR.
Call Someplace Paradise - summer 1984
The back part of a house burned like
crazy, along with a truck/camper that's been parked next to it in the
vacant lot for a couple years. Fire trucks were there and an astonishingly
huge crowd, with more people arriving from all directions every minute.
Ghost Town - summer 1984
