HOME: Stories From L.A.

The crowning paradox of the touring comic’s life may be this: You have to leave home to make a name, but without the grounding and security of home you may not have anything to say. This week, three experienced comedians on striking the tricky balance between the road and home.

Music:

Thanks to Cathy Ladman, whose one-woman show, “Does This Show Make Me Look Fat?”, opens soon; Brad Upton, whose upcoming tour schedule is available here; and Jackie Kashian, who can be heard on The Dork Forest and The Jackie and Laurie Show.

How far would you go to rescue the remains of a bygone world you’ve loved since you were a kid? Peter Knego went to Alang, India, and then did it again and again, to save what he could of the great ocean liners being scrapped there. But he didn’t just want to save the ships. He wanted to live in one. And to a remarkable degree he’s succeeded, filling his home in Oceanside, CA with a breathtaking array of maritime memorabilia.

This week: One man’s mission to recreate, in landlocked miniature, the great days of the oceangoing ships.

Thanks to Peter Knego and Mark B. Perry. To learn more about Knego’s memorabilia business, visit midshipcentury.com. 

Music:

Suppose you wanted to design a home away from home. What would you put in? What would you leave out? What kind of seating would you have? (Soft? Hard? Low? High?) What kind of tables — big working slabs or intimate little two-tops?

A good “third place” may seem casually homey, but its design is the end result of a million tiny decisions. This week, it’s a conversation with Kambiz Hemati, who oversaw store design at Starbucks for two years and now owns Love Coffee Bar in Santa Monica, where he gets to think hard — and think small — about what makes a place feel like home.

MUSIC:

Thanks to Kambiz Hemati of Love Observed and Love Coffee Bar.

Up in the manicured hills of Los Feliz, a neighborhood that boasts at least three famous murder houses, the one with the weirdest history may be the Perelson house… where, deep in the night of December 6, 1959, a husband and father of three lost his fragile grip and went terribly, shockingly crazy. But the story only starts there.

Why did Harold Perelson snap? What does it mean when, without warning, the safety of a family home is shattered from within? And how do you explain what’s happened to the house since?

Read blogger Jen Clay’s account of a 2012 trip to the Perelson house here. That’s her photo to the right.

Thanks to Jeff Maysh, whose “The Murder House” is the definitive work of reporting on the Perelson case; Scott Michaels of Dearly Departed Tours; and Yolonda E. Lawrence.

Special thanks again this week to the fantastically talented, prolific and generous Podington Bear, a/k/a Chad Crouch, whose work is an invaluable repository of music that’s free for non-commercial use. 

MUSIC:

When an elderly parent dies after a long life of lovingly acquiring things, she leaves behind more than memories for her kids. She leaves something much more tangible: The things. So many, many things. Is it things that make a home?

This week, to kick off Season 2, it’s a story of life, death, memory, loss, Christmas, trash bags, and what it means to unmake a home.

One housekeeping note: With this episode, HOME joins such excellent shows as You Are Not So Smart, Futility Closet and Gweek on the Boing Boing Podcast Network. I’m delighted to be partnered with one of the smartest, liveliest names in online culture. bb

MUSIC:

Season 2 of HOME comes your way in January. Subscribe today and new episodes will automagically fly through the aether to you more or less the very second they’re released. And if you get a moment between now and the start of the new season to tell your friends about the show, or even better, to rate and/or review it at the iTunes Store, why, there’ll be a fine fat goose under your Christmas tree!*

(Many thanks to the most excellent Podington Bear for much of the music used in Season 1, including “Vox Bubble Rumba,” heard in this audio update.)

*Not a binding promise of an actual goose

The venerable Villa Carlotta — home to show business A-listers in the Golden Age, and later to a generation of young actors, writers and musicians  — sits, a hollowed-out shell, on Hollywood’s Franklin Avenue. It may or may not be about to undergo a transformation into an upscale hotel. What happens to a community when it’s driven from the place where it’s made a home? One resident stubbornly hangs on, battling for the soul of a building that once buzzed with life and energy.

MUSIC:

Photos, top to bottom:

Thanks to Sylvie Shain (above). For more information on the campaign to save the Villa Carlotta, see its Facebook page.

Read Stinson Carter’s excellent piece about The Carlotta in Vanity Fair.

There’s the San Fernando Valley, the one you can find on a map… and then there’s The Valley, the one that exists in the culture, whose notoriety far outstrips its size. How did that happen? How did it come to be that you can mention The Valley to people in Milwaukee or Toronto or Tokyo and they’ll know what you’re talking about? And what does it mean to call The Valley home? This week HOME looks at the tangled legacy of a place that managed to be both the iconic American suburb and an industrial powerhouse that cranked out everything  from beer to cars, and moon rockets to The Brady Bunch.

For more on the history of the San Fernando Valley, visit the Valley Relics Museum.

MUSIC:

Photo: The Valley Relics Museum, 2015.

Thanks to Denny Tedesco, Kevin Roderick, Hal Lifson and Tommy Gelinas.

Andy Puddicombe left college at 22 and spent a decade tramping the world before returning to the UK and landing, eventually, in Los Angeles. He’s lived in so many countries that he has trouble recalling them on demand. How did his travels, and his training in Buddhism, alter the way he thought about home?

Photo courtesy Andy Puddicombe, Headspace.com

This week on HOME: The winding road that led an ex-monk from Bristol to Venice Beach.

Music, once again this week, by the prolific and generous Podington Bear:

Here’s an article I wrote on Headspace, the Web-and-app-based meditation platform founded by Andy and Rich Pierson, for Fast Company. For more information, visit Headspace.com.

This week it’s a story about Amboy, CA, a ghost town 30 miles from anywhere on the old Route 66, and the chicken magnate who’s spent a fortune trying to keep it from collapsing into the desert sand. Can Albert Okura really hold back both history and nature?

Read more about Amboy here and here. You can find a video about Albert, his right-hand man Charlie and the town here.

MUSIC:

Thanks to Albert Okura and Charlie Aceves.

Albert Okura (left) and Charlie Aceves: Amboy, August 2015