Free Venice Beachhead headlines August 1977-October 1985
25 Years Ago
in the Free Venice Beachhead
Free Venice Beachhead Archives
Lighthearted Beachhead pieces
People of Venice (from Beachhead)
Windward Avenue Articles from Beachhead
Art in the Beachhead
Venice institutions from the Beachhead
Venice in Magazines and other ephemeral sources
Birth of Venice:
old-timey magazines
Destiny's Consent by
Laura Shepard
Townsend
Tales of the Blue Meanie by Allan Cole
New Year's with Santana from Tales of the Blue Meanie by Allan Cole
Quotations About Venice
Alphabetized by author's last name and from many different eras
Venice is like doing acid. If you
can't take it with you after you either come down or move away, you were
never really there in the first place.
Anne Alexander
Santa Monica is what is known as a "Prophet" city. What "Spirit" rules there will create tomorrows reality. It is a major gate way into the entire world!…Venice is known as a "mercy" city. The potential of these two cities and the actors, producers, studios and millionaires that live here, once the Spirit of God is in place, the most "creative" amazing worship that will flood the entire world!
aprophetsreward.com
Venice was a hellhole.
Katie Arnoldi
.....one of the last remaining strongholds
of individualism in Southern California.
John Austin
...this terrible abode of evil....
Will Baron
Venice is a zone, a modern monastic
zone where the artist is secular priest.
Tony Berlant
Ah, Venice, where one crazy
man's canal dream has spawned more California stereotypes, hack artists
and hippie coffee houses than anywhere outside of Santa Cruz.
Stephen Blackmoore
Venice is a seaside archeological
site. Yards littered with paleolithic garbage, sidewalks mined with cenozoic
dog shit....
Irving Blum
Venice was and is full of lost places
where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping
no one will buy.
Ray Bradbury
Here at this far lost end of
the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with
them....
Ray Bradbury
For about 150 days a year in
Venice, the sun doesn't show through the mist until noon.
Ray Bradbury
....decay and disfavor came together
as other parts of the coast were developed, and the canals became weed-clogged
ditches breeding mosquitoes, and the hotels were turned into third-rate
apartments.
Edward Bunker
San Francisco may be slightly
more sophisticated and cultured than Venice, but the only difference is
in the apparal. The tiedye remains eternal...
Vinnie Caggiano
Nowadays it has become chi-chi for
the smart set to roller-skate on the Ocean Front Walk in little satin
shorts and to sit drinking Perrier or white wine at its sidewalk cafes,
while we colorful local inhabitants continue our lives, observed.
Patricia J. Campbell
Welcome to Venice: where dogs vote
and the people shit on the sidewalks.
Bonnie Cheeseman
Venice really is amazing...
it has a lot of my heart when I go around doing research. Such amazing
things happen there.
Brian Chidester
It will always be a good time in Venice. Which is the point of the place.
Allan Cole
I have looked for the center of
the art scene. I went to Paris as a student. I lived in Venice, California.
Eleanor Coppola
Bohemia by the bay, paradise on
the skids.... a burg rife with swamis
Ernest S. Corfine
There were two practical reasons
we moved to Venice. One was that there was an artists movement and a countercultural
movement. Lots of people we might want to hire lived in the area. We also
wanted to buy in a lower rent area that looked like it was going to be
gentrified so that we could eventually sell the studio for more money.
Roger Corman
Venice Beach: proof of the biological
impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking
and poor.
Douglas Coupland
All this cut-price transcendentalism
does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This
becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region
is called Venice.
Quentin Crisp
The gymnasiacs of Venice, in California, are so addicted to these practices that there has arisen a nation of men who can no longer put their arms against their sides
Quentin Crisp
When a guy walks up to me and
starts talking and I turn to look at him, I can't tell if he's a millionaire
or a pauper. You can't tell in Venice.
Rip Cronk
The situation in the film is like
me going out to Venice Beach and talking to a homeless guy on the boardwalk,
and 13 years later he's the president.
John Cusack, about the film Max
...... an outlaw gulch, a haven
for draft resisters, struggling artists, and drug addicts.....a camp for
semi-demented adults.... Venice is like the legendary Phoenix - it always
seems to rise again from the ashes.
Sara Davidson
To me, Venice and Ocean Park
were gaiety. I had not been allowed to go to those things as a youngster.
Marion Davies
Venice Beach is a combination of the tacky, the mindless, the ironic, and the novel.
Freelance Dionysian
People here can go along at
whatever pace makes them comfortable.
Ed Emshwiller
Venice is a sanctuary.
Bob Farrington
[Anais Nin] adores Venice, the refuge
of poor artists, and Venice Beach with its carnival atmosphere, white
sand, and the pull of the sea.
Noel Riley Fitch
You couldn't drive through Oakwood
without feeling the currents of venom, everybody overcharged, wary, and
watching, the asphalt itself vibrating with tension.
Ruth Francisco
Interested scholars and city officials
have travelled across the country to study and attempt to understand the
complex social patterns on the Venice boardwalk.
William Franklin
Venice had changed
in thirty years. The big indoor swimming pool and the amusement pier,
with its Race Through the Clouds, were gone. Most of the canals had been
abandoned or were filled with stagnant water. There were still trams that
ran up and down the deserted beach walk, carrying a few elderly Jewish
passengers, but most shops on Windward Avenue and on the ocean front were
empty. The little grocery store on the corner sold maggot-infested meat.
The whole neighborhood was so creepily shabby, so oddly macabre that Orson
Welles used it as a set for his noir movie, Touch of Evil.
George Garrigues
Love was out of control in Venice.
Everybody was fucking everybody. It was sexual liberation at the high-water
mark: before herpes, before AIDS. The difference in Venice was that nobody
was hiding it.
Alan Gorg
I might love a man, but I love Venice
more.
Anna Haag
Every step in this town is a
damn shame.
John Hamilton
There are too many homeless,
too many crack dealers and too much going on; your senses get numbed there.
Terence Handscomb
Unique among the world's Bohemias
Gordon J. Hazlitt
This is the end. This is as
far as you can go. After this it all starts over again.
Tony Hendra looking out over the Pacific
My experience in Venice tells me
the world is starving for real art.
David Hinnebusch
You can see darn near anything
just by walking along the beachfront from Venice to Malibu.
Del Howison
Venice is as far west as you can
get - in every way.
Keith Kirts
Fear and loathing meet the best
sunsets this side of Hawaii; dog shit meets a sweet ocean breeze; golden
tans meet boozy pallors.....This place is so odd, unique....
Michele Kort
....a cockeyed dump between two
other cockeyed dumps... a rotting slum....the creepiest, most beautiful
ruin you ever did see.
Gavin Lambert
Venice is the only place in
LA where you can breathe.
Lance's friend
America's smorgasbord of the rationally
challenged
Doug Lansky
Yet for all the childish innocence
of its bizarre glamor, Venice developed an atmosphere, or became the outpost
of a sinister deep-rooted power.... It is a place of dreams, not only
the tinseled ones.......
Fritz Leiber
...Venice has been the living future
of contemporary American history since its inception.
Liam
Venice is the only place in LA where
a confused person on drugs might think he's in Greenwich Village, if he
doesn't notice the beach.
Mark Lindquist
Venice West is to Los Angeles
what the Left Bank once was to Paris.
Lawrence Lipton
...streets stained with Beauty/
behind every corner...
Philomene Long
...only
artists and criminals in those days. Venice West was a city of outsiders.
It was (and still is) a last stop-off at the edge of America. ...Ocean
and outlaws. Its setting is a perfect balance for poetry. Beauty and danger.
Agony and rapture.
Philomene Long
The allure of Venice Beach is the
relative freedom which still exists there. It doesn't have the most beautiful
sand or ocean. It doesn't have anything unique except its freedom and
its tradition of this freedom.
Mark Madow
It's America's global village - a place where the
visitor becomes part of the spectrum of what is happening. It's all about
sharing talents, skills, music, food and art. A message in a bottle of
what California is all about.
Marc Madow
Street performers, homemade crafts, keep your wallet in your front pocket and don't buy any crap!
Camryn Manheim
In all our cities...there is always
some sort of casbah, crumbling, decadent in the literal sense...where
the greatest historical distance assures the greatest unreality....
Rich Mann
The old Ocean Park area (near the Santa Monica-Venice border) and the old Venice Canal area were the world's chicest slums....
Roy Marinell
Venice, California, has seldom been
an entirely respectable place
John Arthur Maynard
In its high-floating, quirky
visions and stubborn, off-handed poverty, Venice was a brave and deliberate
affront to an American Dream that worked.
John Arthur Maynard
...the whole town had become
the most ingeniously painted-on surface in Southern California.
John Arthur Maynard
...that embarrassing stepchild of Los Angeles
John Arthur Maynard
.....bizarre, mysterious allure
that so thinly masks brutality and ugliness.
Ann Nietzke
The boardwalk is like the beating
heart of America. You can be normal; you can be strange. It's so rad.
Sean O'Keefe
The throng...is probably a modern-day
equivalent of the Capernaum of Jesus's time.
Richard Omura
"Venice Beach is the last great bastion of free speech in the world…"
Arhata Osho
When you come to Venice, you do
special work.
Bruce Paltrow
men & women of venice, lovers, children, holy citizens
of the heavenly city
all around you there is the sweet air of love......
Stuart Z. Perkoff
venice morning, oceanfront walk
people of venice, smiling, sunned, enchanted
venice magic dazzling eyes with world, with city
with street & ocean.........
Stuart Z. Perkoff
It's a fault line where the
flotsam and energy that washes up from the Pacific collides with all of
urban America crashing in from the other direction.
Antoine Predock
...the frontier of so-called civilization
Arthur Richer, beat artist 1959
...East L. A. with sandflies
Paul Jay Robbins
........a somewhat ruinous precinct
of the dominant society.
Stephen Ronan
Venice is like no place else.
Dylan Rush
Everything was happening all the
time. You never needed television.
Barbet Schroeder
This is the only place that I don't
feel out of place, because everyone here is out of place.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
But it's not about going 'there'.
It could exist anywhere. Places like that, whether they're seen as crass
or not, represent something that people should be thinking about in America
again.
Ned Scott of The Egg
....core of an urban melting pot,
a tough and vital scene where expressions of freedom play and utter outrageousness
can flourish...... a big jolly playpen....a marvelous scene of commerce
and social interaction.
... It is one of the most peaceful, alluring, puzzling,
beautiful, funny and free places I know in the world.
Marcia Seligson
....a kind of stage set where the
dream of high culture could be acted out by residents and visitors on
a Sunday afternoon......aberrant energy..
Reesey Shaw
Nobody's out of place in Venice.
Ronald Shusett
Venice is a place where the past
is still hanging around, waiting for an appointment with the future; but
the future hasn't shown up. In the meantime it is a kind of no man's land,
given up by default and occupied by irregulars and their dogs.
Jack Smith 1976
Time goes by, but the magic
remains.
Jim Smith
Venice, California is known as one
of the most unique, exciting and stubborn communities in the Los Angeles
area.
Professor Arnold Springer
I don't know of any place that loves
so passionately, hates so vehemently, or forgives so easily as Venice.
Moe Stavnezer
...the real front lines, the only
community in Los Angeles where wealthy white people and poor black people
live in the kind of close proximity large eastern cities have been dealing
with for years.
Randall Sullivan
Venice is a transitional point,
a deconditioning chamber, vitally needed for our nation's and the World's
survival.
Sweet William
Since Venice is one of the few places
in America and the World that is a true Melting Pot, people want to see
it function and, if possible, want to live in it.
Sweet William
I've been kind of submerged
in my own little geographic location for a really long time in Venice
Beach.
Amber Tamblyn
The Venice sky is tactile. You can
hold its light in your palms.
Philomene Long Thomas
.... crowded with the detritus of
a continent: the flamboyant and the crazy, the lost and the beautiful.
In bikinis and uniforms and junk-shop costumery they floated by on roller
skates and dope and dreams...
Newton Thornburg
- (in expounding on his theory "anything that’s
fun is going to be ruined sooner or later by people from California"
because they are serious about things that don‘t warrant it, and
tend to become expert in trivial areas.) The example
I use is coming across somebody on Venice Beach who had perfected bubble-
blowing --- knew everything about it, produced these huge bubbles, and
spoke at length at the tiniest opportunity about what went into a bubble.
Calvin Trillin
Venice...playground of the idle
poor...
unknown
..one of the freest places on earth...
Jonathan Wacks
Since the bike path's renovation
and the rebuilding of a few burned-out boardwalk apartment houses …..the
beach had lost some of its funky grandeur.......The bums and winos were
there to keep it real, to deflate the ego and remind that all was vanity.
Bruce Wagner
It is pretty creepy and dirty,
but it was really interesting seeing all the personalities cruising around.
Everyone there wants to talk with you, but I wouldn't call it a friendly
place ever - it's weird !
Alexis Waite (model)
At one time the corner of Hollywood
& Vine was the symbolic heart of Los Angeles, the place one took out-of-town
relatives just so they could say they had been there. Today, that honor
belongs to the Venice Beach Boardwalk...
Westways Magazine, May 1993
Venice is a world view, a condition...
Eva Windmoller
It was like an intellectual
community that moved into Venice. There were bikers and drug dealers too,
but everybody got along.
Emily WInters
No one wants to play at Venice Beach
by themselves because then you really look like a loser.
David Young
In math terms I guess it could
be summarized as: Venice = Noise.
David Yurkovich
Venice is so hip and everyone
seems pretty cool.
Rachel Mae last name unknown, 2004
Bohemian, down-at-heel Venice
Beach, full of beardy, smoking hippy-types flogging funny hats, telling
people's fortunes, playing languid jazz melodies or just chillin'.
Gerry and Denise, last name unknown