Day: October 5, 2015

Venice – Dogtown Postscript

I’ve been (surprisingly) getting a fair amount of feedback on my old Venice image resurrections.  Some is from old friend and ex-UCLA-colleague, John, who tells me that he was coming of age then in the Dogtown (aka Venice) skateboarding culture era.   Along with many fascinating details of the sport, the music of the time, Venice itself and his own youth as a skateboarder, he reminds me of the 2001 documentary, narrated by Sean Penn, of the skateboarding scene in Venice in the 1970s.  Here’s the trailer (and I will try to see if it can be viewed online in its entirety somewhere — perhaps YouTube):

Venice Beach, Part III

Another random discovery …

And here we meet Victor, from early 1975.  He and his dog lived in an old circa 1952 Pontiac and a decrepit immobile old delivery van on the vacant lot next to the beachfront apartment where I stayed at the time.  Some say that he had a PhD and once had a career as an engineer.  Sometimes Victor was quite lucid, sometimes not at all.  He saw himself as king of the lot and sometimes tried to extract fees from people who parked there. He seemed to survive on that as well as odd jobs (I paid him once to help me out with a fix to something on the Landrover, which is pictured here with Victor and a neighbor.)  We were all quite astonished one day when, according to some neighborhood eyewitnesses, a well-dressed woman appeared in a Mercedes, claiming to be his wife, and took him away with her.   As I recall, he reappeared not long after.