vol iv MMXVI
“The lines of communication between the conscious and unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have split in two.” Joseph Campbell
Self-Realization Lake Shrine 17190 W Sunset Blvd Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 United States www.lakeshrine.org
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOL IV MMXVI
F e at ur e s
Venice Wraps It’s Arms Around the World
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The Art of Compassion, Venice Causing Artwaves
Ana Arango, Venice Causing Artwaves 7
Cari Lee Sladek, Venice Causing Artwaves 13
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Profile: Te’Devan Kriyavan Kurzweil, Venice Beyond the Boardwalk
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The Sounds of Silence 21 The Quantum Mechanics of the Tarot Card Reader 23 Ancient Laws, Another Viewpoint 27 Art Emily Van Horn 29 Health and Wellness: Magical Botanicals, Lakshmi Lambert 35 The Block House 39 Rear View Mirror: Flipping the Bird 43 Oko Carter, Self Love 45 Cuisine Depressed Cake Shop 49 My Name is Ed 53 Everyday People 57 Last Look... Mother Teresa 65 Back Cover Lion Swirls
COVER Goddess of Compassion © Taylor Barnes, 2016
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Editor and Designer Taylor Barnes Editor Bailey Lewis Associate Editors Rudy Garcia Jennifer Garcia Advisory Board Laura Ragan, Dita Barnes, Tyrus Wilson
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Recently, I spent three weeks at the Aurovalley Ashram, in India. I travelled there with another Venice artist, Cari Lee Sladek. Together, we had been charged with the mission to explore the Ashram as a possible future site for an international symposium of artists and creatives. It was probably more than could be assessed in a single visit but the take-away was, such an event would be life changing for all involved. My self-explorations and subsequent “enlightenment” began with the illustration shown above. I spent three weeks working on this one piece, which was surprising since my expectation was that I would return with sketchbooks of ideas. Instead, I did not return with any art as I left this piece to the ashram as my gift and my thanks. I referred to the painting as my meditation, and through this method, I was able to access all that was being offered on a spiritual level. India held many similarities to Venice in the juxtoposition of extremes – beauty and degradation, dark and light. I thought about the tension that this type of environment produces and how creative people are often drawn to such places because of the stimulation. The brain starts to “play with the pieces.” With the beauty of the beach, the homeless encampments, the million dollar homes, and low income housing Venice has the same dynamic. I felt I was in my element evern though people were speaking Hindi.
Copyright 2016 3.1 Venice is published and designed by L7studio.com. All rights reser ved. Nothing shown may be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. For more information or submission guidelines: E-mail info3.1venice@gmail.com
I left India with a strong desire to embrace our differences, respect our history and keep the creative dynamic strong in Venice.
—Taylor Barnes iv VOL IV MMXVI
Illustration: by Taylor Barnes, © 2106
CONTRIBUTORS
Peter Hamon
Eddie Webb
‘Peter Hamon is an designer/ builder, singer-songwriter and writer. He visited Israel and the occupied West Bank as a delegate of ’The Compassionate Listening Project’, a non-profit organization teaching conflict resolution and peace-building skills. A father of two, he is learning to laugh more, and easily’.
Eddie Webb holds a MFA from Arizona State University, Owns Red Pony Film Productions, and is currently earning his doctoral degree from Northern Arizona University. Eddie is an enrollment member of the Keetoowah Nation in Oklahoma.
Oko Carter
Matias Moreno-Bunge
I’m a Venice resident, I’ve been living in L.A. for the last 6 years. A seeker, an avid reader, art lover, writer (currently writing debut novel) and local dog/pet sitter.
Paula Chorley Before transplanting to Venice, Paula Chorley lived in New York where she was an American correspondent for a major German television network, Pro-Seiben (Channel 7) for program “Taff”. When she is not writing for 3.1 she is either writing screenplays, TV shows, or working on her next art project. paulachorley.com
Matias was born and raised in Santa Monica. He likes to write, breathe, stay curious and eat his beets. MatiasMBunge@gmail.com
Danny Thomas aka Danny Boy Lives in Venice, makes psychedelic mixed-media art. HIs vision is to make the soul and mind bend in inspirational, cosmic, symmetry. “Life is your playground, so be kind to each other, have fun swinging, and don’t get kicked off the monkey bars or you’ll end up in the sandbox.” sunflowerave@yahoo.com
Te’Devan Kriyavan
Special Thanks
I’m a nomad. I was born a nomad and even if i stay in one place forever don’t be fooled because i’m still a nomad. kriyavankurzweil@gmail.com
To our people at Groundwork Coffee of Rose Avenue for keeping us caffeinated.
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enice has always hosted a wide array of philosophies and spiritual practices, some would even say the place is a spiritual vortex. We export our particular brand of creativity and spiritualism to the rest of the world… like dandelion seeds on the wind. Fanning out across the globe, we leave a bit of Venice ever ywhere we go. In an age of ‘technology as god’, we explore beneath the shiny new exterior of Venice to find the purveyors of the old magic. 3.1 Venice Magazine 3POINT1–VENICE.COM
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V E N I C E C A U S I N G A R T W AVE S
THE ART OF COMPASSION
WITH SWAMI BRAHMDEV by Taylor Barnes
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n the rural area of Rishidwar in northern India, at the base of the Himalaya Mountains, on the banks of the Ganga River – a place where wild elephants or the occasional stray leopard will wander – is the Aurovalley Ashram. On any day, if you enter the ashram’s gleaming white marble library after breakfast, you will find Swami Brahmdev seated in a wooden chair at the head of a circle of people, who have come to avail themselves of his wisdom. He is conducting a “Satsang” or a question and answer session. It is a rare moment to ask this man who, has dedicated himself to the spiritual “inner journey”, how to play the game of life better than they have until now.
I travelled to the ashram along with another Venice Beach artist, Cari Lee Sladek, to find out why the Swami believes artists will save the world. “The idea of this place is to come here and discover yourself,” says Swami G (as he is known affectionately by his followers), “art is one of the best ways to discover yourself. Through art, you can discover your self-realization, your highest potential, your true nature, your true self which is the divine. To anyone that wants to come here, this place can help you find yourself in your own way. Through art, you can reach the divine.” It makes sense if you look at the artistic process. Artists are constantly seeking to define our inner journey to the outward world. That inner journey, when defined by Swami G, becomes simpler and easier to understand. Over the span of three weeks, Cari Lee and I painted, meditated, and fell in sync with the peaceful flow of the ashram. I worked on a single painting of two elephants with the tree of life – which I referred to as my daily meditation. I left the piece in India as my gift to the ashram and Swami Brahmdev. In an attempt to define the creative process, I asked Swami Brahmdev about perception and what he thought about the mind’s individual interpretation of ideas, hoping he’d give me a freeway to my spiritual and creative core. Instead, the Swami danced around that question, giving me more of an ambling country road to the concept of thinking versus dreaming.”First, why do you give so much importance to the ideas?” he said, “why not know how to live without the ideas? They are not from a higher or good source, they are just coming from your
Photograph by TAYLOR BARNES
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mind. If your mind is full of ideas it is very full and you cannot create anything with the ideas. If you want to create something, you create with your intuition, you create with your dreams, you create with your imagination, but not with your ideas. Ideas are very small. They all come from the mind and the mind is a little part of our life. I am not a mind. I am much more than that.” “My true potential, my true ability is not because of the mind, it is because of my soul. If I am a soul, then why should I not receive the message from my soul, feel my soul, listen from my soul, and exist according to that, do according to that? Those with dreams… they create… and our dreams become realities, our imagination becomes reality. So you must learn how to dream and what to dream.”
“ Those with dreams,
they create. Our dreams… our imagination becomes reality. So you must learn how to dream and what to dream.” SWAMI BRAHMDEV
“Do not give importance to the ideas. Ideas keep you limited, make you limited, and put you in a black hole where you start feeling, I am poor, I am this, I am that. Nobody is richer than you, because the value of this life is priceless. We all came here on this earth to be a part in this creation, to create more. With all the creations, nature created them to create, so all those creations are busy creating more… how can we be poor?” At the end of my stay there was one more question I wanted the answer to – how to take this feeling back to the city and keep it going in my life in Venice? Swami G said, “Life is not complicated. What makes our life complicated are our own attitudes. Either you live in the jungle, or you live in the city… if your attitude is positive, you are positive always, if your attitude is positive, then you are good everywhere. The problem is not the city, the problem is you. How to live with the best attitude everywhere and anywhere, that is our first responsibility, plus work. So don’t blame life for being complicated, most is complicated. Life is everywhere, we have to live in the world, we are not to renounce the world, we are not to run away from the world, we have to live in all situations, everywhere. That is the art which we have to learn, the art of life.” Since returning from India, I have revisited the feeling of freedom and creativity I had there and have tried to be mindful of applying those spiritual ideas to my daily creative process. Swami Brahmdev saw the information I sought as fully contained in me now and he explained it this way, “We are just like a seed. A seed has the whole blueprint and the whole problem. We are born with very weak capacities that slowly grow and prepare us. Then, that blueprint, which nature has planted in you, when it has prepared you, it slowly, slowly starts unfolding itself and manifesting.” Then, with little fanfare, the Swami ended our conversation with the answer to the question I didn’t ask, but should have, “That is called evolution, through a process of evolution, our life is unfolding and we are here to manifest the plan which nature has planted in the blueprint of our life. In the blueprint of our seed of life, that is the meaning of this life.”
The Auro Valley Ashram
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V E N I C E C A U S I N G A R T W AVE S
THE ART OF DISCOVERY PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANA ARANGO
“One day I woke up and thought, okay I need to change my life, this is not the time for me to go buy a house. There is nothing I’m attached to in Colombia. Life was showing me I needed to go to India. I was getting different messages constantly, so it was time.” Thus began Ana Arango’s journey through India to discover her life’s passion.
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na’s travels led her to the doorstep of Swami Brahmdev and the Auro Valley Ashram. “At the moment, you never realize what you are going through,” says Arango, “but once you get there, you see that life was building you up for something greater. After I arrived in India, I understood I was always preparing to come here, to see different perspectives, but I didn’t know it until I was here.“ Upon graduating with a degree in visual arts from Universidad Haviana, in Bogotá, Colombia, Ana became involved with the indigenous culture of her native countr y. “I wanted to have one year of my life to go into this kind of work, so I’d been exploring.” When a friend told her about ashrams, the concept clicked. “I thought, ‘This is where I want to be.’ I was tired of being in Colombia. I wanted to travel and experience something different. I consider my life an experiment, so I like to tr y different things.”
“trust yourself, follow your intuition, and love the moment of what you are doing.” – Ana Arango 8 VOL IV MMXVI
Once she was in the visually rich environment of India, Ana found her calling as a photographer. Traveling around the cities and rural areas of this complex countr y inspired her to capture the sights, colors, textures, and most of all – the people of India, in her photographs. While studying art in Bogotá, Ana had been taught to always have a concept behind her work but in India, with a camera in her hand, she felt free to experiment. “I loved to paint, but I was doing photography because I was experimenting. It changed how I saw things. I used to think that no matter what I did, I had to have a concept behind it. But that changed, now I don’t like to think about the concept. Instead my work is about the way I’m feeling, the way I see life –keep it simple.” Living and working at the Ashram exposed Arango to the yogi belief system and a new way of looking at her life. “Since coming here, I’ve gone back to the simpleness of art, and the way I portray it,” she says, “trust yourself, follow your intuition, and love the moment of what you are doing. Photography, drawing, illustrating, whatever it is, just be there and follow what you have inside, follow that flame, that light. After that, things will open up.” Ana admits that she learned much about accessing her creative self from Swami Brahmdev, but most of all how to trust her intuition and instinct.
Arango’s photography has a palpable honesty and humanity to it. She explains her approach to her subject matter this way, “I like documentar y photography because you can explore with childlike curiosity with someone, tr ying to talk to them even though you don’t know what they’re saying. That’s what we are doing now, you’re sharing your stor y with me, and I’ll keep it with me, going to my grave knowing something about you. It sheds light, and it keeps building outward. It creates a sensitivity towards each other.” Not long after she began this new, creative journey as a photographer, she was offered a galler y show in France. A rapid rise for a novice photographer, but Arango would be the first to admit that learning to believe in herself would be the greatest reward from her work. “I would say that the best experience about being here has been learning to believe in myself, believe in who I am, believe in the things that I do. Sometimes we look at other people’s lives and want what they have. Sometimes you compare yourself with ever yone else and doubt yourself, and your work, letting ego get in the way. The biggest lesson is trusting yourself. One of my biggest reasons for coming here was to start working on my own project. Once I was here, that stopped and I started learning from what was around me. I didn’t have the creativity I wanted when I came here, but ever ything I’ve gone through has helped me build that.” Ana rejected what her Colombian culture expected of her in favor of exploring her creative passion – wherever that might take her. “Since I was a girl I always wanted to be an artist,” Ana says, “that’s my passion, that’s my life, I knew that from the beginning. People would ask me, ‘are you sure you want to be an artist, aren’t you worried of not making enough money to live?’ I would say, if I were doing what I really love to do, I would find a way. I’m not going to get stuck in an office twenty-four-seven helping others build their dreams when I’m not building my own. I think my parents knew early on that I wasn’t going to be like the rest of my family, that I was going to do something different, so I always had their support – I’m lucky. Many people don’t get the chance to do what they want because
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they are not supported by their family. They have to build their own family, like the ashram for example, then they can build hope in their dreams. It had been a struggle for me because I knew I didn’t need to follow the expectations of my culture or the suggestions of what’s best for my future. Even when I didn’t want to listen, other people’s opinions still fed into my ears. When I came to the ashram, I thought, ‘okay, I’m not wrong after all.’ I came here and released my struggle, I started to build up my belief in myself and who I am.” Ana’s advice to anyone venturing to India to open themselves up as an artist, or simply to expand as a human being is, “If people want to come here, they should bring all of their ideas about work and life, bring the basket full! Once you are here, you will realize that you are more than any of those ideas. Everything you thought before, you will transfer that energy into different things. You will see the many perceptions and judgements about your life, or your art, and once you come here they will vanish or become transformed. Your own conciseness will grow, you can’t help but see everything differently. I would say be open, and receptive to: the force, the universe, and the light. Some people call it god, some people call it the divine, I call it light. Leave your doors open so all that information can come to you and help you transform your thoughts into something more powerful, something wonderful.”
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COMMUNITY
V E N I C E C A U S I N G A R T W AVE S
Cari Lee Sladek
MAKING WAVES Cari Lee Sladek traveled to the Auro Valley to explore the location and the experience of the ashram on behalf of group, Artwaves. She was on a mission to see if a comprehensive art symposium of international creatives, hosted by Swami Brahmdev and Auro Valley Ashram, could be a viable idea. However, what she found was much more than just a location for a retreat – she found true creative inspiration and a set of spiritual tools to carry back to her artistic life in California. After spending three weeks meditating, doing yoga and painting in the middle of rural northern India, Cari Lee observed how she had changed, “I am much more self aware on many different levels, especially internally. If my head is running around and I can’t stop thinking, I’m able to recognize that it’s happening and stop it.” The daily practice of meditation, along with the quiet atmosphere of the ashram, allowed Cari Lee to become more disciplined about her thought practices. Ashram life, with quiet time during meals and Philosophical discussions during post-lunch Saht San sessions in the library, gave her an open forum with Swami Brahmdev and a safe place to explore her deeper spiritual questions. Since returning to California, she has found ways to integrate these teachings and experiences into her daily life. “I make sure to dedicate more time to meditation and quietness in my life. I try to do this daily because it is so important. Just a little bit everyday goes a long way. Every time I do yoga, it takes me back to the ashram, and I notice that I am more clear and mellow after practic-
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COMMUNITY
C AR I L E E A R T / A R T W A V E S
ing. The biggest impact that my experience at the ashram had on me was, not only to develop the ability to recognize my inner self and observe my actions, but also to become aware of the person I want to be.” One of Cari Lee’s main goals of her visit to the ashram was to identify specifically how other artists might be able to benefit from the yogi philosophy and the experience of daily life at Auro Valley. She felt that the environment allowed her to get into a mental state of clarity and calmness, and temporarily let go of the pressures of her life back home. This opened her up to a creative state. She says, “It’s not about the journey of where you are, it’s about taking the journey inside of yourself.” “There is a simplicity to the ashram life that helps put the material world in sharper focus.” Cari Lee felt lucky to have been making art while she was there because that helped her to truly appreciate the happiness that can be derived from doing what gives you joy even when you are not indulging in material things. “It’s about nothingness, it’s about feeling like you don’t need anything or to be anywhere. It’s about creating your happiness within, even if you have nothing.” There was no denying, the setting was perfect for the type of growth and enlightenment you would expect in India. Cari Lee said, “Being in a small village, at the base of the Himalaya Mountains, and with the Ganga River running through, it was
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MURALS PAINTED BY CARI LEE SLADEK ON LOCATION AT THE AURO VALLEY ASHRAM
peaceful and magical. Plus, as crazy as it sounds, we saw spaceships every night. That was the first time for me, and it was insane. When we asked the Swami about them he said, ‘Oh yes, this is their home.’ Spaceships were perfectly normal to him.” Cari Lee was prepared for the chaos of returning to city life, but with the chaos, she realized she needed not to get frustrated, but to move forward in it and to just keep tr ying. “The most important part is persistence,” says Cari Lee, “keep trying and if you fall down, you get back up and keep going. That’s the most important part. Keep working at it and eventually you will train your mind, and yourself, to become the person you want to be. Be calm and don’t react too much to things – try to remember what’s really important in life.” A question that was being posed as a fact by Swami Brahmdev was – whether creative thinkers and artists of all mediums are the salvation of the planet and why. The Swami believes they are and Cari Lee explains the philosophy behind this belief, “I believe creative thinkers and artists have that passion in life which is completely different than say, a politician or a lawyer. The way we analyze and think about things is coming from a much deeper and more loving place. I can only speak for myself, but when I am making a painting, it’s coming from a place I can’t describe. I think that’s where the spirituality comes in, and that’s that same place in which artists have their greatest problem solving abilities. If we could all come together, in a place like the Auro Valley Ashram, it would be a very powerful force.”
Rishikesh, in the Himalaya Mountains above the Auro Valley.
ARTWAVES “Art Is An Act of Healing,” could be the motto of Artwaves, a creative arts coalition, founded by Cari Lee Sladek, a Los Angeles based artist, and Raphael Zaccai, a Creative Director out of Buenos Aries. “We started thinking about the project in 2013,and in 2014,” said Rafa Zaccai, “Cari Lee Sladek came to Buenos Aries to paint murals in low resource schools and help generate funds. Another project involving Cari’s artwork, raised money to open water drilling sites in remote areas of northern Argentina, where the water was polluted (the main cause of mortality in children in this countr y). The idea is simple – ¨Artwavers¨ will donate time and art to Artwave projects and the money will go to low-income areas to support schools, and clean water drilling sources. Artwaves supports working artists around the world – generating funds for communities in need. A win-win for the artists and the children.
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V E N I C E B E Y O N D T H E B O A R D WA L K
NOMAD FOR HIRE by Paula Chorley
T
e’Devan Kriyavan Kurzweil is a magical mishmash of incongruities. Formerly known as Jeremy Scott, he is a 6’7” Qigong energy worker, intuitive healer, dedicated meditator, Shaman, free-style rapper, drug-free Burner, professional couch surfer, Jewish kid from New York City. Articulate, well-read, and a poet, he has a B.A. in Psychology, and in a moments notice may break into dance. Kriyavan is a true nomad who spends his days wandering the world with his sign, offering healings, and sharing his abilities with whomever might cross his path. Old and new friends willingly contribute extra beds, couches, and transportation. People offer him donations in trade for a healing which can happen any place from a busy street, to a bar or casino. “Sometimes I may lock into something in a person’s energy field or their body and I might be lead to make certain tonal sounds or mantra’s.” Kriyavan continues to describe the work he does, “There is no agenda or plan other than to see what we can let go of and how deeply I can help someone find their own harmony and balance.” His practice is deeply rooted in mediation and chanting mantras. “Healing happens when the mind stops and the stillness arises”, Kriyavan explains. “Then the miraculous can happen. Meditation allows for more space and stillness around me so that people can release whatever they are holding. I am not doing something. I ultimately look at it; not doing something on my part allows things to happen. What I am trying to get good at is to not do something.” He has sought out and surrounded himself with gurus, yogis, and saints such as Master Gabriel Chin, and Sri Amma Karunamayi (not to be confused with Amma, the hugging saint), among others. Amma, a humanitarian who is devoted to showing the world peace and sharing her love, was an influential teacher for Kriyavan. Most spiritual seekers journey through life looking for enlightenment but Amma Sri Karunamayi is considered born enlightened or an Avatar which, in Hinduism means she is a descent of a deity onto Earth, the incarnation and embodiment of the Divine Mother.
photos by PAULA CHORLEY
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“Until people have the experience I’m just some crazy guy walking around, talking about stuff, and why should they listen? I don’t expect them to listen. Sometimes people’s regular strategies aren’t working and they decide to try it out. Most of the time people feel benefited.” The first time he met Amma, Kriyavan experienced what he later found out was a Shaktipat; the consciousness of the guru enters the disciple and establishes an initiation into the spiritual family of the guru. She touched his third eye and as he describes it, “It felt like my was head cracked open and layers had been instantly been peeled off. I just started sobbing.” Kriyavan became interested in energy healing which led him to Qigong Master, Gabriel Chin, and an inexplicable awakening. A ticking started in his right ear, which is audible to him and other people near him. For fifteen years the volume and speed changes when he is giving or receiving a healing. This started his journey as a healer. There are countless stories of cynics shaken by the profound experience of having their belief system challenged by his intuitive healing. Kriyavan recounts a story of a tough East Coast guy who said to him, “I don’t care what you do. I don’t care what exactly you have done to those people, but I want to walk away from you looking like they did.” Kriyavan says, “Until people have the experience I’m just some crazy guy walking around, talking about stuff, and why should they listen? I don’t expect them to listen. Sometimes people’s regular strategies aren’t working and they decide to try it out. Most of the time people feel benefited.” Kriyavan is often drawn to Venice because many of his spiritual experiences happen close to the water. “Venice was a lot quirkier and conducive to nomadic, hobo-style couching surfing people but has been diminishing over the twelve years that I have been coming. Even though it became more ‘bougie’ and there has been a Santa Monica-ization of Venice, I still feel like there are remnants of the old Venice and I keep coming back.” You might bump into Kriyavan walking down Abbott Kinney, meandering around Whole Foods in Venice, or you could run into him half way across the world. You will recognize him by his peacefully hypnotic and commanding presence – and the sign helps too.
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In this photo the rainbow color passing between Kriyavan’s hands, and moving outward, is the visual manifestation of his healing energy caught on film.
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The Sounds of by Te‘Devan Kriyavan Kurzweil
We exist in a world where we are constantly bombarded by sounds. Most of these sounds in our modern culture can be over whelming or incessant. Yet, many people crave these incessant sounds that perpetuate the chaos they come to understand as their life.
There purest sound is silence.
Within the silence are many different sounds that most people are not in tune with because there is too much external sound. In Christian/Judeo religion there is the Amen,
but in Eastern cultures there is
the Aum. This sound helps to deeply center us and bring us back to our set point of calm awareness. We must allow ourselves to lay in the silence and become aware of the healing sounds that many in the new age are constantly referring. At different points of the day, and based on the needs of the individual, different nuanced sounds help to bring balance… harmony… and peace. These sounds innately exist inside of you and therefore we react positively to hearing them projected externally. The sound of a voice alone, without much focus on the words, will tell you a lot about the mental./emotional state of the individual if you just learn to listen. We have gotten so caught on the words that we lose sight of the power of the healing sounds that exist within ourselves
– that exist within the pure silence.
We must deepen our listening ability so that we can distinguish these innate harmonious and healing sounds. Then we can recreate these sounds with our voice as our instruments. Often, the music we listen to in western culture is to provoke certain feelings or mental states. Rarely is the expressed purpose of this music to bring about
a deep… abiding… calm… ceneteredness
that keeps us more aware of our inherent oneness. 20 VOL IV MMXVI
…Silence We struggle to find a break from the constant noise of this modern world and yet many of us have become addicted to what we are tr ying to escape and start to fear the pure silence. It’s the moment leading up to the pure silence that things will become particularly loud because a lot of unresolved issues will be felt. We must push for ward patiently, persistently, and we will be able to delve back into the purest sound of silence. Silence has a sound, and when we develop an ear for it, we can better share the sounds of silence with others. This will enable people to enter into deep meditative states where they feel at union with the entire world and go beyond the mind and emotions. Our natural state is this pure, unadultered silence.Yet, we have become so distant from it, that silence seems scar y, strange or to some people even boring. At any cost they wish to deny this inherent beautiful silence that exists in the making of this universe and our entire being. If we go deep within through a regular practice, and being in nature, we find ourself in the flow with the natural sound and rhythms of life. We must bathe fully in these inner sounds and then we can make them externally with others.
Something as simple and beautiful as the AUM.
By no means are all Aum’s the same – some are far more laden with the deep inner silence than others. This can differ from person to person or from one Aum to the next. The state of mind is key in making sounds that reverberate to the deeper stillness, where afflictions and illness begin to dissolve. We must make the time, and space, in our lives, to hear the truest of all sounds… the sound of silence. Some of us have gone years without noticing it, but it is always there, ever present. Our awareness must be tuned into this powerful sounds that can bring about peace to all whom we interact with. Even when we are not speaking audibly our thoughts are still creating nuanced sounds that cause other people around us to react in certain ways. Being aware of tuning into the primordial sound of creation gives our words a stronger resonance when we speak with others and gives our ever yday speech a music of harmony that removes conflict in the world around us. We have to set time aside and make rediscovering, or more deeply discovering, the pure sounds of silence a priority. 3.1 Venice Magazine 3POINT1–VENICE.COM
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PROFILE
The Quantum Mechanics
of the Tarot Card Reader An Interview with MICHAEL WAMBACK
Call it a whim, an inspiration or a psychic intuition but in 1998, with only six hundred dollars between them, Michael Wamback and his wife Krista, set out in their little car, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, headed for California. “We were sitting in a pub, when out of the blue I said to Krista, ‘Lets go visit your mom in California.’ I had no idea why I suddenly had the desire to travel across country to visit her mom, it was very much an intuition.” “We gave away and sold most of our belongings, packed up our little car, and set off to California.” Michael continues, “We had six hundred dollars to our name. By the time we reached Krista’s mother’s house, we had eight dollars left. We had no idea how much it was going to cost us. We ended up coming to Venice where Krista’s dad lived. Never once were we hungry or homeless. We never did anything dishonorable to make a dollar. We had done (tarot card) readings in Canada, so her dad suggested we do them on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, that’s how we ended up staying here. Krista got a job at the Bodhi Tree bookstore. The owner came to her and asked if we would be interested in setting up a program with readings for them. From there we moved to Mystic Journey Bookstore, on Abbot Kinney Blvd.”
Photo by bailey lewis
During his years in Venice, Wamback has seen everything, including the massive changes happening within the culture of the community. “We’ve seen everything” he says, “the homeless, the rich, the poor, and everything in between.” “We’ve done parties for celebrities and the local people. We’ve really seen it all – the part of Venice you couldn’t possibly imagine, and it has changed. When we first arrived it was a little more egalitarian, there was less hostility as a whole and especially towards the homeless. There was still an undercurrent of it but you could see how they are trying to restrict the activity on the boardwalk and the vendors. I’m a moderate, so I don’t really like a wild jungle either, and I felt some sensible regulation wasn’t a bad idea but it was clear they were trying to suppress things rather than regulate it. That was the beginning of the shift that has been happening in Venice. When Google moved in, that was a big game changer – first the tech jobs and the money that followed that, then all the development. People who have been here as long as we have (twenty years or more) were forced out. They were replaced with AirBnB’s or houses torn down for high-end development. Those people we’ve lost were the life blood of Venice.” Venice has been described as a spiritual vortex and a unique place. It seems natural that the community would attract a large number of spiritual energy workers, healers, and intuitives. Wamback sees a connection between energy, tarot card reading, fate, and something we might call magic, very clearly, “Tarot card reading has been around since the mid-15th century. The cards have been used to get in touch with divinity and predicting the future.” Wamback refers to the famous ‘double-slit experiment’ (which is often cited as proof of quantum mechanics), as real world proof of ‘the future creating the past’. The experiment consisted of a series of single photons (light particles) fired at a metal plate that has two slits. On the other side is a photographic plate, set up to record what passes through the slits. If one neglects to observe which slit a photon passes through, it appears to interfere with itself, suggesting that it behaves as a wave by traveling through both slits at once. However, if one chooses to observe the slits, the interference pattern disappears, and each photon travels through only one of the slits. The experiment demonstrates that a particle can be a wave and a single photon at the same time.
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PROFILE Applying quantum mechanics to Tarot card reading, Wamback explains it this way, “When you take a deck of Tarot cards, you put them faced down, you select a card, and until you turn it over, it’s just any one of the seventy eight other cards. Is it something that is random or in some way are we creating this moment? Are we making that card what we need it to be as you reveal it? Are we manipulating time and space a little bit with our brains to create the outcome that we need? In some way is the mind is manipulating the particles? “A lot of the experiments that are running in quantum physics right now are starting to suggest that the mind is capable of altering reality. So… when using a Tarot deck, you are creating the moment with your mind. The closest I’ve come to proving this theory was when I used to deal Blackjack, at charity events, for a guy back in Halifax. As I was dealing, I would have the feeling that I could manipulate the game and deal everybody a sixteen, and me a seventeen, or everybody a seventeen and me an eighteen. I experimented with how quickly I could take all their money from them – it was play money, so I had no moral problem with it. I was beating everybody. One night, this guy came up to me and sat down to play. I could not beat him and he couldn’t beat me. He was completely different from the other players. I noticed that as I dealt the cards, everybody, when they got the first card would look at it – once you have looked at the card, you establish what the card is, therefore, after you looked at it, you wouldn’t be able to change it, and I would be in control. This guy wouldn’t do that, he would always wait until I revealed the second card and then he would look at the first card. He was offsetting my advantage, he understood the rule of the game, and that is that you can create that card to what you need it to be. With him, it was a completely different game. In all the time I was a blackjack dealer, he was the only person that did that one thing differently than anybody else. He was the only one who would wait for the second card before he looked at the first one. I would always win with the other people, but with him, I couldn’t win.” Despite all of Michael Wamback’s scientific explanation for the power of the mind to influence a card, reading through quantum mechanics many would still call it ‘magic’ or a trick. “To me,” Michael says, “I would define it as something that just is, but I don’t know why it is. I can’t explain it, yet there it is. In all the old religions, they have the same beliefs. For example in Christianity they speak of ‘as above, so below.’ The idea of choosing a tarot spread is you’re choosing a pattern or creating a pattern. The belief is at every given point in life there is a greater pattern of energy affecting your life. So, in one week you’ve got a good pattern for communicating and everybody that you call answers right away, and the next week the energy for communicating is stuck and you’re playing phone tag all week long. When you create a pattern with anything, whether it’s tossing coins, spreading tarot cards, or tossing bones in a cave in Africa, whatever you do, you’re creating a tiny little sliver of that greater pattern of energy. We can analyze this and if you can understand something about that, you can understand the bigger pattern going on in your life. That’s what they mean about as above, so below – it’s all connected. Every pattern you create connects to that bigger pattern of energy in your life at that moment. Michael continues to explain how he sees predicting the future in card reading, “Prediction is not a psychic thing, and most psychics I know are lousy at predicting things. It is an analytical thing. The intuitive, or psychic, part of you is gathering information. Certainly, you could say that throwing tarot cards to gather information about your life seems bizarre, but that’s how we do it, that’s the magical thing about it. Then the rational mind has to extrapolate, start to reason with that, and say okay if this is true, and if this is true and this is true… then logically the next thing that is going to happen and will probably be this. That’s when you move into prediction,
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PROFILE and it’s a very analytical thing. Many readers don’t develop their analytical abilities as much as they develop the rest of it. That’s what makes them lousy predictors.” Michael says that over the many years that he has been reading Tarot cards for people, everybody’s questions are all based around the same idea. “If you take away all of the material things in life, and ask yourself, what do you really want? At the end of the day, we all want the same thing… something that makes us feels good, happy, that feeling that we call love. We are all searching for a happier state in some way, something fulfilling. Every choice we make in life is somehow always leading us to something that makes us feel good in the end. If we do something that doesn’t make us feel good, we counteract that action by trying to make it good.” “I think regardless of race or economic means, everybody wants the same thing. We are all the same at the end of the day. We want our life to be meaningful. Whether it’s art or something else you do, there’s something, which defines who you are, what you do, and gives you a life purpose. People want their lives to have meaning and a grand purpose. There is no point to having a meaningful life if there is no one to share the experience with, so people also want good relationships. That sense of community or a partnership in their life. You can define it in so many ways, but it’s still always the core of what everybody wants. Whether you’re a movie star or a homeless person, it’s still the desire of, “I want my life to have meaning and I want to share the experience with someone.” We will always be the same – it’s about the pursuit of happiness.”
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A N O T H E R VIE W P OI N T
ANCIENT LAWS I S IT TI M E TO R EVI S IT T H E M ?
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T H E F O L L O W I N G E S S AY I S T H E THOUGHTFUL MUSING OF EDDIE WEBB, FILMMAKER, AUTHOR AND member of the K eetoowah N ation in O klahoma … A Sunday Morning Rant: I read an article published last year proving that if one receives their information from large media powers like CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and various church channels, then one is in fact more ignorant of the world they live in, than if they had never turned the channel on. My dear brother Russell Means used to call the TV the “idiot box.” So, I called up my local cable company and said, “Turn it off.” If you want to get all kinds of low rate deals, given them a call. I held my ground, protected my mind, and canceled the line. I don’t need TV and I don’t miss it (confession: I bought an antenna and watched the Super Bowl). I follow the news from time to time on the Internet. I enjoy listening to play-by-play basketball games on the radio. Yes, NPR too. I am currently earning a doctoral degree, so I am reading endlessly as well. I also enjoy reading political views on FB. Here is mine: Donald Trump does not cause other people to be bigots they already are bigots. Hillary Clinton does not inspire other women to feel empowered they already are in power. Bernie does not cause the masses to think our politicians are bought and paid for, we know they are on the dime. The rest of the dumb and dumber field is clearly unqualified.
PHOTO COURTESY OF EDDIE WEBB
What we Americans need to do is get back to zero. We need to grow healthy food. We need to invest in small communities, invest in meaningful public education and teachers. We need healthy soil, water, and air. We need robust and fair markets (less government regulation for small businesses). We need to rebuild healthy religious institutions that teach our children tolerance and moral values. We the people do not need politicians to rebuild this great country of ours – they need us. Maybe we should cancel all elections until WE the people get our shit together, before we elect someone to represent us. Here is a fact you will not see on TV: Much of the U.S. Constitution is modeled after the Mohawk Wampum Government of the Six Nation Iroquoian Confederacy. More specially, the women of the LONG HOUSES chose their male leaders. Women had no need for feminism back then. Women, were not equal, women are blessed directly from the Great Mystery, the Creator God. It is important to note, being a female was not good enough. A female needed to practice the great law of peace as well (so I was told directly by Chief Jake Swamp). The point I want to make here is we need to take the constitution seriously. We need to take the responsibility of freedom seriously. One last point: Three strikes and you’re out. If a leader of the Six Nations government acted in a selfish way, one that only benefited him, or if he acted against the will of the people more than three times, he was banished from leadership and possibly from the community for up to one year. Maybe it’s time we enforced ancient law. Maybe this why people like Dick Cheney always refer to tribal law as being beneath him. Maybe it is time to shut it down. We need to stop elections until the community can re-define what the people want from this great country of ours? Maybe it is time to stop funding corrupt politicians who over spend, borrow, and waste our tax dollars on imperialistic greed and false arguments of security. I don’t know. Maybe it’s time not just time for revolution, but revelation. 3.1 Venice Magazine 3point1–venice.com
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COMMUNITY
“If you had told me fifteen years ago, I was going to be a working artist, I would’ve laughed. That wasn’t even on my r a d a r – I t h o u g h t i t w a s a n i m p o s s i b i l i t y. I never imagined I could make art that people would want to own.”
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ART
Emily Van Horn by Taylor Barnes
t is impossible to discuss Emily Van Horn’s artwork without juxtaposing it with her commitment as a healer through yoga and TRE (Traumatic Release Exercise). Van Horn accesses her artwork through her intuitive self, and because of this, many people have claimed to feel a healing while viewing her paintings. Van Horn claims to be a late bloomer because she didn’t start painting until her mid 30s. She grew up in Long Beach, California and later studied psychology at San Diego State College. After college, she traveled for a couple of years around Europe: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Portugal, lived in Paris for six months. She also traveled to Israel, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, as well as Brazil and Argentina. “I’d been around the world and I asked myself, ‘what’s next?’ In 1991, I was looking at a copy of the LA Weekly, and there was an advertisement for a restaurant… the Queen of Cups owned by Victoria Branoff (in Venice Beach). I thought I’m going to go work there. I’d only been to Venice once in my life before, but I drove there, walked in the restaurant and they said, “Can you start tomorrow?” This was my initiation into Venice, working in this psychic tea room.” Describing how she came to be on the path of a visual artist, Emily said, “I had just gone through a breakup, and I decided to take a collage class at Santa Monica College – more as a way to get out of my head. I started taking Susanne Temp’s collage class, and then her color theor y class. I just kept taking these night classes when I realized I was incorporating more paint into the collages. I wanted to paint more, so I went to Esalen, in Big Sur, for a month. There I did vision painting. It had nothing to do with technique; it was purely spontaneous and instinctual. I was using kids tempera paint on cheap poster board. I was painting ever yday for a month and I was hooked. In Esalen, I stayed in a yurt, looking out a window onto the ocean ever yday. I was in paradise. When I returned to Venice I knew I needed to find a class and I found the most awesome painting teacher, Alanna Block. She taught a private group which, at first, I was very intimidated by because I couldn’t imagine going to class with real painters. I showed her the work I had done in Big Sur and she said I could join her class. I owe a lot to her, she taught me to paint like myself, not like her. She helped pushed me to the next level. I think I would’ve been crushed in art school because I don’t have a thick enough skin. If you had told me fifteen years ago, I was going to be a working artist, I would’ve laughed. That wasn’t even on my radar – I thought it was impossibility. I never imagined I could make art that people would want to own.” Simultaneous to her emergence as a visual artist, Van Horn began to train as a somatic trauma release (STR) therapist. She has been called a very gifted healer and to quote one former patient, “As a highly skilled STR therapist, she knows how to gently guide you through those truly dark, gut-wrenching events and take the charge out of them, rendering them much less painful and debili
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ART
Emily Van Horn
tating.” The ability to tap into the deepest, darkest places of human emotion, bringing them to the light– combined with her skill as a painter– caused a powerful metamorphosis in her work. Emily describes her evolution as a healer/artist, “Once a channeler told me that each work is already painted for the person who is meant to have it. I have to connect with their higher self and call them in so they can receive their painting. The channeler added that the message in the painting was the equivalent of having twenty sessions with me as a therapist. Later, at one of the ArtBlock Open Studio events, there was a man at Full Circle (on Rose Avenue) viewing one of my canvases. He was actually receiving a healing and I stood there watching as he told me what was going on with him physically, emotionally, and energetically, based upon looking at my painting. He was having a somatic experience from the painting, which is what I do with my private therapy clients. He didn’t know I was a healer. It was then that I realized what the channeler had said was exactly what this man had experienced. This is something you just can’t make up. It’s about raising the vibration on the planet.
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ART
Emily Van Horn Leading a TRE Class.
TRE
TRAUMA & TENSION RELEASE EXERCISES When Emily Van Horn begins one of her TRE courses, she explains the naturalness of these exercises with the following example. “Every animal has a natural response to trauma and stress which is to shake uncontrollably. Adult humans have been conditioned to control that shaking in times of trauma. But if a child or a dog are hurt or scared they will start to shake as a response.” TRE stands for Trauma and Tension Release Exercises. It is a self-help tool for healing anything from stress to Post Traumatic Stress. There are seven exercise developed by Dr. David Bercelli that help the body to produce a therapeutic tremor which then releases stress, muscular tension and emotional trauma. TRE works independently of the emotional content – meaning you don’t need to know the story or experience that started the trauma. You literally just shake it off. After a TRE experience Emily states, “Clients experience a profound sense of relaxation, feel more connected to self and more balanced.” She also says that people can expect to feel lighter, increased energy, release of tension, more grounded, present and focused.
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MAGICAL
Botanicals by Bailey Lewis
Lakshmi Lambert’s hilltop home, is a magical property covered in an abundance of beautifully overgrown plants. The vibe is lush and inviting, a perfect environment for a healing session. Lambert is a deeply respected acupuncturist and herbologist. Her practice, which she runs out of the peaceful environment of her home, uses a complimentary blend of acupuncture, herbology, and her experience with psychotherapy, expressive dance movement, deep tissue bodywork, yoga and mental health. Lakshmi Lambert is as close as you could come to a wise women healer. Even her physical appearance with her long flowing hair, kind eyes, and thoughtful manner when she speaks evoke a healer of another era.
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HEALTH AND WELLNESS
with me once, and I had all these thoughts about things I had to do, he went like this (she makes a loud deep single ahhhh) and my mind cleared like that, instantly. I like the sound of the metal, Tibetan bowls, gongs. I use a rattle, very traditional in ancient healing practice. 3.1 How do you personalize treatment for your clients? Lambert I create the session for what the person needs. If I feel they need bodywork, I may do a whole session with bodywork. I also teach corrective exercise. I have a yoga background, so I’ll teach corrective exercises with people. Unless they start building their core, it’s not going to be helpful, they are going to have problems with their back for the rest of their life, they need to start building their core. I’ll teach them exercises and I’ll do the exercises with them to support them. I spend an hour during the first visit listening to someone’s story and getting a serious history, then I do diagnosis and treatment. I really do my best to listen to what they need. 3.1 Do you have any tools people could use that would help them feel connected spiritually as they move through their daily lives?
3.1 “What brought you into this work?” Lambert I wanted to understand that if someone came to me with Leukemia or another illness, how I could also work with that. That got me into herbal medicine; my first herb teacher was Susan S. Weed who has written many books on western herbalism. I used to meet with her at the Unitarian on Monday nights in about 1980 in Kingston during the Woodstock era in New York. I came to LA in 1984 and in 1995; I started a body and mind institute doing deep tissue bodywork combined with psychotherapeutic processing, so I was working with the feelings stored in the body. 3.1 How do you specifically work with plant energy? Lambert Sometimes I’ll take people on herb walks, listening to the herbs and plants while I’m teaching. Sometimes I’ll teach a class here. I built my front garden so people have a place to come on their way in, where they can sit in the garden and be with the plants. Many of those plants lift the spirits. I do believe in ‘seeing the dandelion in the cracks.’ How much more can a plant (the dandelion) that’s healing the liver be saying? It’s as if it is saying, “This is who I am, I don’t care if you’re putting cement on top of me. I am here, see my yellow face shining out, reminding you that you have a will.” 3.1 Do you use sound in your own healing practice? Lambert Yes, I have somebody who is a brilliant sound healer and he sees clients here. He was working 36 VOL IV MMXVI
Lambert I encourage people to have a daily practice and it doesn’t matter how long it is, five minutes, two minutes, or ten minutes. You could be lying on the floor breathing, meditating, praying, or putting on music and dancing. Your daily practice could be doing yoga or pranayama, but whatever it is, they should do that before they go out and engage with others. I really encourage it. I think it is necessary to know that you have that one commitment to yourself. Our time for feeling the breath going in and out of the body and for caring for oneself. I think so many people are longing for something outside themselves. By starting the day knowing they’re their best lover, they’re their best friend, that they are there for themselves grounds them and gives them a sense of peace and knowing. 3.1 What do you think your contribution is to the people you work with what would that be? Lambert Helping them feel connected to the rest of the world, helping them understand that they have something to contribute to the world, helping them feel grounded, and giving them the skills to feel grounded. I work a lot with people with addiction and I help them achieve the skills to help them feel more centered so that their actions are more sincere and not so reactive... I have found myself saying to people that they are not alone and the fantasy that they are in this world alone is actually not accurate. They wouldn’t be driving their car if they were in this universe alone, there would be no car, there would be no fuel, and there would be no roads. We get food because farmers grow food; we get food because the source of all light and sound created the universe. We are not alone.
HEALTH AND WELLNESS
Above: Photos of Lakshmi Lambert’s entry garden. 3.1 Venice Magazine 3POINT1–VENICE.COM
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by Matias Moreno-Bunge
The Block House. We’ve all seen it. It stands obtrusively—generally speaking—in neglect of its immediate surroundings. It’s yard is nonexistent; it’s porch, absent; it’s symbolism inherently uninviting. “Two worlds exist,” it whispers silently. “The safe one inside my walls and the other one, out there.” In Venice, the Block House often rises in resistance to the land it sits on; an escape from an atmosphere perhaps a bit too unnerving. The tale ahead has been told many, many times; this page is just another onto which its narrative has been written. At times throughout the body of this text, it may feel wholly unrelated to the Box House. In response to that, suffice it to say: If the subject matter stirs your curiosity at all, consider sticking with it; for curiosity is a strangely illuminating phenomenon. All photos by Bailey Lewis
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*** “The human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness,” writes Joseph Campbell, “goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.” With these two sentences Campbell—the great midcentury wizard of mythological metaphor—has painted for us a masterpiece of the human psyche. In less whimsical terms he has made essentially two claims: that there exists an outwardly apparent functional self, and, that behind that visible self, hidden in the recesses of a yet unrevealed unconscious, there exists a trove of wisdom guarded fiercely by the misdirecting demons of our damaged selves. Yes, that is quite a bit to chew on. But please endure, for we have only just peeled the skin off this great mystical potato. Let’s boil the bastard, lest it sit uneaten and spoil. If we envision a thin fabric that separates the conscious self from the unconscious self
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we could say that through the fabric are constantly bled murky images of those demons, begging of the dreamer to fulfill a potent opportunity. “I am here,” hints the arisen image. “Slay me and rediscover my treasure,” it begs. This is no easy task; for to fulfill the destiny of the victor is often to destroy a part of that conscious self we hold so dear. And that, frankly, can be quite frightening. Alas, what occurs on our failure to fulfill that destiny? The sages say we slip into cowardice. The foe is too great, too unnerving, and the reality of its existence is dismissed. Our fear of the arisen darkness grows, and our ability to face it weakens. We collapse. We build a cocoon with comfortable walls that block the entrance of any darkness. Unfortunately, those walls block the entrance of light, as well. The cocoon of falsity engulfs us. A world without reality. *** This ‘world without reality’ is precisely the precipice many are saddened to see Venice teetering towards. With the influx of materialism the vein of life that once pumped heartily in Venice slumps in fatigue. Is the Block House—with its self-evident dismissal of its surroundings—a symbolic cocoon of this recently emerged culture in Venice that
many of us have come to look at with tired eyes? A culture in desperate need of reorienting itself back to the great eternal quest of the living? Is the Block House another of the many symptoms of the collapsed culture which has begun to grip in its sooty claws our beloved beachside city? The sages have written quite a bit of this cocoon. They say that he who dens in the stagnant cocoon will, sooner than later, grow weary and tired of its shadow. And ultimately, a crack will emerge through which light can return. If all this happens to be the case, how will the lightbringing crack manifest here in Venice…
Or will it? 3.1 Venice Magazine 3POINT1–VENICE.COM
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FLIPPING THE BIRD (“You talkin’ to me?”)
by Christine Culler
I
t wasn’t the sort of thing I’d expect to see as I stepped out onto my front stoop, coffee in hand, one morning: A giant bronze statue of a hand, middle finger raised to the sky and seemingly directed at me, plumsituated in our new neighbors’ front yard. I took it personally, defensively, as in, “You talkin’ to me?”
It seemed just about everyone else on our Venice walk street took it personally too, especially some of us “Old Venice” folk who still weren’t used to multi-million dollar architectural modern houses replacing the quaint beach bungalows of our former ‘hood. Back in 1985, my husband and I had scraped together a down payment for what was then our 800 square foot clapboard, and now People With Money were buying, selling, tearing down the old and building the new. As massive modern houses rose up all around us, many of us saw a giant social divide erupting, one as sociologically and economically wide and inevitable as the San Andreas Fault. A divide that said, “Get used to it. This is the future of Venice of America, and there’s no going back.” The rich are different, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, and it wasn’t just that they had more money, per Hemingway’s counter remark, they had attitude too – such as what we perceived as the giant “screw you” Hand Flipping the Bird from our new neighbors’ yard. Talk about attitude! Talk about being in-my-face while I dug and puttered among my succulents and California natives! These people must be from New York! As it turns out, the new neighbors were from New York. They were also the nicest most hardworking people you could imagine. And while yes, they were different from Old Venice, they were eager to belong in their way, genuinely interested in being a part of the community, even if they had seriously miscalculated with their giant offensive artwork. Many neighbors accused them of contributing to the moral delinquency of rug rats (although they themselves had a couple of their own), and Famous Actor two doors down accused them of situating The Hand Flipping the Bird directly - specifically - at his house! (Leave it to an actor to really take it personally.) My husband and I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. They didn’t mean to offend, we said, they simply thought they were being artsy, like Venice itself. They even apologized for The Hand and the fact that others didn’t “get it,” and promised their shrubbery would soon provide camouflage, as if The Hand weren’t in their power to do anything about. To remove, for instance. There was no getting around the fact that Hand Flipping the Bird was expertly done, the folds of skin at the knuckle of the raised middle finger distinctly detailed, suited to a museum. We’d heard that it had been
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created by a well-known artist – certainly it was thought provoking, worthy of conversational interest by some standards, as in what does it mean? Or, as in: Are you flippin’ me off? I mean, who wants to step outside one’s own home and feel immediately affronted? That was supposed to happen in the Whole Foods Parking lot or on the 405, not among trees and birdsong. I didn’t want to think of the deep artistic meaning of The Hand when I planted kale or hung out on my front stoop with the cat, or talked over my walk street fence with passing neighbors. “You should do something, tell them you object,” a friend from the Valley said, raising her voice before their open window. “It’s insulting!” she shouted. I shushed her. She was from the Valley, after all. What did she know about living “cheek-to-jowl” in Venice? We’re Venetians, we live here. Old Venetians, New Venetians, rich Venetians, working class Venetians, this is our turf. We’ll work it out among ourselves. And then I arrived at a solution that at least worked from our side of the fence: I had my pal Miguel plant a row of low pittosporum shrubs along my sightline. This way, while sipping my morning coffee, I wouldn’t have to look at The Hand. Miguel loved this idea, and to this day he joyfully flips me off every time he sees me at the garden center, and I too assume the stance, raising my middle finger, feeling all of twelve years-old while getting more than a few confused stares, as in: Are those two giving each other the finger and laughing? The Hand was eventually removed, replaced by a playhouse for our neighbors’ children. Their kids began coming over to our garden to hunt for “treasure” – little round glass garden baubles I placed among the succulents. Sometimes they find the occasional marble inevitably buried by other children who once played here. The kids planted a cherry tomato plant and their parents even put in a sign - “Rummy’s Tomato” –a more equitable improvement over The Hand Flipping the Bird. And this all got me to thinking. I’m glad I never lost my temper with the new neighbors, never let on about our differences, financial, artistic, or otherwise, because in so many ways, we’re all in this together. The new comes in to replace the old; neighborhoods do get gentrified, modernized, and in some cases paved over. We find the remnants of former generations – the marbles, or that black lily the ninety year-old woman who used to live next door planted back in 1950’s, before she died and her house was supplanted by the modern house with our neighbors of today. I vote democratic and still get miffed when a social media denizen won’t look up from his phone to nod hello. Still, I’m grateful for all of our small efforts to be kind to one another, to accept our differences. In the long run, we all grow older, our children grow older, and even New Yorkers are capable of becoming Californians, maybe even Old Venetians – all in good time!
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ARE YOU READY FOR SELF LOVE? OKO CARTER
talks about…
THE SALT EATERS
A NOVEL by TONI CADE BAMBARA
*Oko Carter uses the literary lens of author, Toni Cade Bambara, to illuminate the prose of her novel, The Salt Eaters. Carter examines the journey into self-love and decodes a selection from this beautiful piece of literature – bringing it into the light, so that we may bask in it’s radiance. (The Characters) Minnie Ransom – is a practitioner, a healer, who is embarking upon the task of healing a woman (Velma Henry) in the throes of darkness, confusion, and suffering from spiritual malnourishment. Velma Henry – the protagonist of this novel: hair matted and dusty, bandages unraveled, broken and desperately in need of someone to pull her through, in need of someone to help her reclaim her wholeness; longing to be well. *** “ Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” asks Minnie Ransom.” This to be beautifully written and incredibly poignant. It’s a question that forces anyone reading these words to stop, think, and take in the simple yet profound question that’s being posed. To be wished well is not the same as deciding to be well.
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“Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter,” says Minnie. Be certain, seems to be hidden within this statement. Could the act of pondering wellness be just as important as choosing wellness? Before you can be whole, you might have to choose to be well. Wholeness is a state of being; completely total. “A lot of weight when you’re well. Now, you just hold that thought,” says Minnie. The moment you choose to be well. You then must walk upright, love your whole self, and accept your whole reality. Wholeness takes one out of subjective victimhood and into wholly completeness. “I can feel, sweetheart, that you’re not quite ready to dump the shit,” Minnie says to Velma. Sometimes what keeps one from wholeness is having to relinquish to the fact that you have to, “dump the shit.” How moral, righteous, and deceptive can pain, anger, and hurt- be. How powerful can it make you feel. How dauntingly hard is it to relinquish, at times. Brokenness can be a weapon used to keep thy perpetrators at bay. A badge to stave off that which you might not want to look at. And a mechanism used to keep that which you might be trying to flee.
“Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to b e healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter,” says Minnie. Letting go of the hurt, the pain, and the anger forces you to remove the barrier that separates you from what you’re trying not to feel. “...got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full,“ says Minnie. It’s the lovely things in life that are always ready to rush in and fill you up. It’s the moment where the mundane becomes holy. It’s realizing that rain can moisten any drought. It’s recognizing that a small crack in
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No chasm too wide, no abyss too steep, no hurt too deep. Nothing can separate you from wholeness. It’s YOURS. Claim it and in the places where you lost it, reclaim it. the concrete can become life for the most courageous wildflower. Accepting the lovely things that life has to offer has the possibility to set the most imprisoned soul free.
THE SALT EATERS by TONI CADE Bambara The novel, The Salt Eaters, is set in the fictional town of C l a y b o u r ne, Georgia. The stor y follows Minnie Ransom, an unmarried, eccentric and fabled healer. Much of the book focuses upon a dialog between Minnie and another character she is trying to heal, Velma Henry, who has attempted suicide. The novel’s action revolves around the healing. Written in 1980, Toni Cade Bambara employed an experimental literary style, weaving a political tone throughout this story that delves into civil rights, feminism, and the antiwar movement of the 60s and 70s.
“There’s nothing that stands between you and perfect health, sweetheart,“ says Minnie. No chasm too wide, no abyss too steep, no hurt too deep. Nothing can separate you from wholeness. It’s YOURS. Claim it and in the places where you lost it, reclaim it. “Quit wrasslin, sweetheart, or you might go under. I’m throwing you the life line. Don’t be too proud to live,” declared Minnie. May these words abide with us all. May it help us all. May it comfort us all. May we, in the face of life’s many storms, ask within our own self the question,
Toni Cade Babara
“Are you sure, that you you want to be well?” 3.1 Venice Magazine 3POINT1–VENICE.COM 47 3.1 Venice Magazine 3POINT1–VENICE.COM 47
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t h e depr ess ed cake s hop by Bailey Lewis
3.1 Venice sat down for a chat with Valerie Van Galder, one of the founders of The Depressed Cake Shop. Galder is a passionate advocate for raising awareness around mental illness and specifically depression. She found a unique conduit for getting this information out to the public in a tasty and informative manner via the Depressed Cake Shop. Van Galder is a woman who on the one hand can rhapsodically speak about her bakers, their fantastical creations, and a moment later throw a quote from Mother Teresa into the conversation. The Depressed Cake Shop is a grassroots organization that supports mental health and treatment of depression by creating spaces for people to express their feelings through cake baking. The idea originated in England as the brainchild of Emma Thomas, who calls herself “Ms. Cakehead,” as a way to get people talking about depression and raise funds for local mental health charities. Thomas, a Public Relations executive in the UK, had been doing charity bake events where she asked bakers to create cakes in shapes that reflected the charity she was supporting. She came up with the concept of baking gray cakes to symbolize the feelings caused by depression, while adding a single pop of color to the cake to symbolize hope. This was the beginning of the Depressed Cake Shop hosting their first pop-up event in the UK, in 2012. The idea gained traction on social media and led to a Facebook community who, encourages by their own stories and experiences, have since instigated Depressed Cake Shop pop-ups all over the world. Valerie Van Galder’s father, who had suffered from mental health problems, had a psychotic nervous breakdown after her mother died and she quit her job in Film marketing to care for him. Galder turned to cake decorating as a way to manage her stress and as a result started following various baking bloggers. She discovered “Ms. Cakehead” and The Depressed Cake Shop Facebook group and was inspired to connect with other people and families who were experiencing the same issues that she had. Van Galder believes there is a large intersect between baking, depression, art, and mental health. She believes that organically, people were drawn to the Facebook group organically, which allowed them to form a strong community around The Depressed Cake Shop. The Facebook community Valerie connected with Rebecca Swaner, a baker and a blogger, who had the idea to host a Depressed Cake Shop in Los Angeles. Van Galder said, “I sent her a note, and we met and rented the skateboard gallery the next day and we quickly put this together. She was good at accessing bakers and we worked well together getting publicity. We opened on a Friday night. When we opened the doors, hundreds of people poured in. People that had read about us on the blogs, and in the LA Times. The Los Angeles event was a big success and happy to be able to creatively give back to our community so we decided to keep on going and make the Depressed Cake Shop a succession of baking events. The Facebook group maintained a real community and the shops just started popping up… and I somehow just became the ringleader. I took over the website, the Facebook page, and I took the LA page and converted it into a Depressed Cake Shop main page.” 3.1 “In your opinion and experience, how do the cakes help with depression?” Van Galder “We can’t necessarily cure depression though cake, but what we found through my experience, and through everything we read and studied, is that there’s an audience for our project and it’s people who are interested in baking who might be suffering with mental health issues. What
All photos COURTESY OF THE DEPRESSED CAKE SHOP
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is complicated about mental health issues as opposed to physical issues is that there is a stigma attached to it, so part of it is just talking about it, opening the door to people to be able to dialog, to feel like they’re not so alone. What we found through our Facebook page is that there are a lot of people in our community that just like the idea and they are just looking at pictures of pretty cakes, it make them feel less lonely, we always respond to them, they can email us. Just me saying that looks beautiful give them a lift in their day.... if you could help somebody find a hobby or a community or a way of thinking or something to distract them that occasionally can alleviate the early symptoms of severe depression, it is a very complicated illness. We don’t think we’re curing depression or treating depression, we are shining a light and having compassion for it. We are showing that we understand it, that we are not afraid of it, and that you don’t have to be ashamed talking about it to us and you don’t have to feel like we’re going to judge you. We try to approach everything with a very loving and compassionate voice…. Mother Teresa says something I really like: Not everyone can do great things, but they can do small things with great love.” 3.1 “From your personal experience, how does baking cakes help you? Van Galder “It helps me a lot, I have a lot of anxiety, I think from growing up with a father who had been institutionalized and no one ever told us. He had Electro Shock Therapy. I learned many things after my mom passed away that I didn’t know, so my parents, on the surface, were living a functional life, but there was an undercurrent of something, my dad, and no one ever explained. I’ve always been very crafty and artistic, and now when I look back at it, that’s how I self soothe; that’s how I manage my stress and my anxiety, and it really worked for me. I’ve done a lot of research and read a lot about art therapy. I read last week, that when you’re in a mental hospital, they have occupational therapy, and they have art as part of the treatment program. There are two things that can help solve mental health issues, one is physical activity, get your serotonin going; your endorphins going; take a run; take a walk; get some fresh air. The other one is called projection therapy which is what art therapy is. When people are anxious, that’s when they draw a picture. Try to draw what you’re experiencing; try to paint it; get it out through projection. In a weird way baking is a little bit of projection, and a little bit of physical activity. Kneading bread is soothing, it isn’t just cake, it’s the action of getting all of the ingredients out and measuring them. There was a period of my life when I was really anxious, and I started baking really complicated things, and it never occurred to me until later. I would say to everyone, just leave the kitchen, I have to make this icing, I have to concentrate because if it doesn’t hit the proper temperature it is going to be ruined. Even the specific activity itself can be soothing because it stops your brain from thinking about the things that are bothering you because you have to make sure you measure the flour correctly.” 3.1 “Do you guys hold events where people bake?”
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Van Galder “We haven’t actually held events where people bake so far, but we are actually looking into doing a baking school in August, hosted by The Depressed Cake Shop. You can pay money and come meet these artists and we’ll give some of the money probably to a charity in Venice actually.” 3.1 ”If you could have a very grandiose vision as to where this all is going?” Van Galder ”A brick and mortar shop. It would look like a cottage and there would be a section with big puffy couches where you could just knit and hang out. We’d have community evening and there would be a cake shop and coffee. We’d sell art and stuff.” Valerie and Rebecca have brought their cake magic into collaboration with other organizations across the country, including The Museum of Pittsburgh, and an organization called This Is My Grave, in an effort to support compassionate awareness of mental Illness. Look for a Depressed Cake Shop pop-up event in Venice sometime this summer. For more information visit their website: depressedcakeshop.com
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by Peter Hamon
Author’s note: To give yourself the greatest understanding of this piece, free of preconception, you are urged to read it in its entirety before referencing any of the provided source notes.
t is 2:30am, I wake, and swing my legs out of my bed. Why at this hour? Like every day except Saturday, I must go to work; I have to be there by 8am. Perhaps you’re thinking, hmm…some commute. No, I live less than an hour’s drive from my job, nor am I walking more than part of the way. You see, I’m talking about merely going to work; this is what will consume the next four to five hours of my life. Despite this effort, I am never assured that I will even arrive, nor, incidentally, that I will return to my home. Or if do return, that my home will still be there [1], or that somewhere along the path to my job, my body will not be incarcerated without cause [2], or destroyed without cause
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[3]. For I, along with many, many others live at the pleasure of ‘The Bully’. [4] Whoa…what?! (I know, right?) So perhaps your mind is confused, asking, “Who is this guy?” And…’The Bully’?! Perhaps too you’re thinking, “Where in hell does this guy work?” And if this latter phrase were to cross your mind, then you would have inadvertently yet accurately touched on a metaphysical construct that is all too frustratingly real here, a daily reality whose reach only begins with the terrible and insidious. So, allow me to help you to truly understand in both your head and your heart. For this, you must walk in my shoes. Leaning over the bed, you slip on the worn leather; you do this along with at least 30,000 other men. [5] Not to mention others in your family, one of whom may have gotten up before to brew you some tea (over a flame), and prepare something for you to eat. Some warm food at this hour? Maybe yes, maybe not. [6] You may still smell of the lingering noxious odor from ‘The Skunk’ [7] a few days ago, but another shower is out of the question [8]. (Pause a moment: not only when you rise, but at anytime, without warning: no drinking water in the pipes, no electricity in the house, perhaps both. We won’t speak of the tear gas or bullets; you need to be on your way.) You throw on your jacket and enter into the dark, often a bitterly cold night, and make your way to ’The Door’ [9], which you must pass through on your daily journey. Often a road you took yesterday has become impassable overnight, because of The Bully, so in the darkness, you must seek another way. Or you come across a ‘stop’ that wasn’t there yesterday, and you are delayed as your papers and sometimes person are arbitrarily checked. [10] Eventually, you, and the others arrive at ‘The Door’, a barred entryway comprised of several turnstiles, all presided over and controlled by The Bully. See, no, better to feel the presence of the 15,000 other worried and anxious shadows [11] slowly converging in the dark on this forbidding portal. Each soul is obliged to enter into one of several long iron-barred corridors which funnel the men one by one towards The Door, in the way farm animals are compelled when being transported, or coerced towards the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. I imagine that some of those doomed beasts must surely have died on their feet before making it to their destination, as some of your brothers have died in these constrained and claustrophobic chutes. [12] Now imagine that you have been standing in one of these chutes for several hours, but have not moved forward for some time. The Bully’s job is often tedious and repetitive, so It likes to toy with the already-agitated men, closing a turnstile at will for perhaps the better part of an hour, then another, immobilizing the workers, ramping up the anxiety and worry [13]. Re-opening and 3.1 Venice Magazine 3POINT1–VENICE.COM
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closing The Door, sometimes closing down the whole process itself. Thirsty? Tough. Need to piss, to shit? Forget it. Today you are ‘fortunate’; you are admitted through the turnstile, but you are not yet through The Door. The Bully demands your ID, your permit to even be there seeking entry: you can be stripsearched, or refused passage through The Door, and sent back. Some have not lived to tell the reason why their journey ended here. A bullet from The Bully is not uncommon [14]; a knife placed quickly on the ground beside your body will magically transform murder into self-defense, and a foreordained conclusion. [15] So perhaps you have made it through, though the fear does not entirely dissipate, for you are now standing on the stomping grounds of The Bully itself: a place where you have no rights, not even to your own body. Yet, somehow, perhaps because your cheap labor is a tolerable if desirable commodity to the culture The Bully allows, you manage to arrive safely and perhaps even on time, to your job. Now you can work. You try not to think of the perils of the return trip, or of your stomach, which feels like a hard, shrunken ball, or the endless, and perilous repetitive commutes that you see filling all the days of your life. Still, and yet, you say to yourself, I am alive, I made it here today, and there will be money for the family. I am one of the lucky ones. So now, I release you to the blessed accident of your birth, of your life, your freedom. When you wake up tomorrow morning and your cell phone battery is not dead (because the power was not turned off in the night), or you drive to work by whatever road you wish, fill a glass with water from your tap, or bathe when you like… please remember me, and the one hellish morning that you are unlikely to ever have to experience. Remember, that this is my life. Lastly, please forgive me my one subterfuge: you see, ’Ed’ is but part of my name: my full name is Mohamed’, and I am a Palestinian, living in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. [Author’s note: ‘Ed’, i.e. ‘Mohammed’, is a common Muslim name. While the character cited above is representational, the events and inhumane conditions that an average Palestinian worker generally encounters traveling crossing over and returning from Israel to the occupied West Bank are true and accurate. Please note too that Israeli soldiers, “young men and women, raised in a seemingly-democratic society….are the products of a Zionist education system (which) taught these men and women that Palestinian life is worthless”. -Miko Peled] On the eve of International Population Day, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics published a statistical review that showed that the “total population of Palestine at mid- 2013 was about 4.42 million; 2.24 million males and 2.18 million females.” The estimated population of the West Bank was 2.72 million, while the estimated population of the Gaza Strip totaled 1.7 million, according to the review. 54 VOL IV MMXVI
sources 1. March 23, 2016 International Solidarity Movement ‘Demolitions in Khirbet Jenba, South Hebron Hills’ http://palsolidarity.org/2016/03/ demolitions-in-khirbet-jenba-south-hebron-hills/ 2. September 21, 2014 B’Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories ‘Administrative Detention’ Israel’s use of administrative detention blatantly violates the restrictions of international law. Israel carries it out in a highly classified manner that denies detainees the possibility of mounting a proper defense. Moreover, the detention has no upper time limit. Over the years, Israel has placed thousands of Palestinians in administrative detention for prolonged periods of time, without trying them, without informing them of the charges against them, and without allowing them or their counsel to examine the evidence. In this way, the military judicial system ignores the right to freedom and due process, the right of defendants to state their case, and the presumption of innocence, all of which are protections clearly enshrined in both Israeli and international law. http://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention 3. March 26, 2016 International Solidarity Movement ‘Israeli forces return to dehumanizing number system in wake of Hebron killings’ “Israeli forces completely closed the checkpoint on March 24th, barring any Palestinian from entering, after soldiers gunned down and killed Abed al-Fattah Yusri al-Sharif and Ramzi Aziz al-Qasrawi, both 21 years old, summarily executing al-Sharif with a shot to the head after he was already lying incapacitated.” 4. ‘The Bully’, aka the Israeli Army Oct 1st, 2012 Miko Peled, ‘The General’s Son’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOaxAckFCuQ “The laws that govern Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and this is, really, at the pleasure of the Israeli Army. If they want to destroy, they destroy, if they want to arrest and beat, they arrest and beat, if they want to torture, they torture, if they want to kill, they kill, and Palestinians have no recourse. This is the reality.” 5. According to the Palestinian Census Bureau, around 30,000 Palestinians have received permits to work in Israel and are thus forced to cross the checkpoints on a daily basis. 6. March 19, 2016 LA Times (USA) Maher Abukhater Israel cuts off electricity to thousands of West Bank Palestinians 7. Sept 12, 2015 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34227609 Who, What, Why: What is skunk water? 8. Miko Peled, http://mikopeled.com/2011/12/20/ ethnic-cleansing-of-invented-people-by-miko55 VOL IV MMXVI
peled/“Water, which is the scarcest resource of all, is controlled and distributed by the Israeli water authority, as follows: Per capita, Israelis receive 300 cubic meters of water per year. In comparison, per capita Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza receive 35-85 cubic meters per year, while the World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 100 cubic meter of water per person per year.” 9. this writer’s euphemism for fixed Israeli checkpoints 10. March 12, 2014 11:51AM ET by Mairav Zonszein http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/12/ visual-activism-activestillsphotographsthebarrierwall.html “As of September 2013, there were 99 fixed checkpoints in the West Bank through which Palestinians must pass to move between towns. Most have been privatized and are run by employees of security companies rather than by uniformed Israel Defense Forces soldiers, and are a constant source of disruption and humiliation in Palestinian life.” 11. December 31, 2014 Ma’an News Agency http:// www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=751058 Sources in the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unions said that more than 15,000 Palestinian workers pass through al-Tayba checkpoint every day. According to the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, Israel denies permits to tens of thousands of other Palestinians who apply, and up to 30,000 Palestinians work in Israel without permits. 12. December 31, 2014 Ma’an News Agency “Palestinian Man Crushed to Death Inside Overcrowded Israeli Checkpoint” 13. December 17th, 2015 International Solidarity Movement ‘Palestinian workers forced to cross overcrowded checkpoint everyday’ “Workers also complain that the turnstiles often remain closed for no reason. Between 4:00 and 5:15, each turnstile was open for an average of 21 minutes. At one point, one turnstile was closed for 40 minutes, leaving the Palestinians to choose between climbing over to the next lane, risking to upset other workers, or having to go back to the entrance, and start the process all over again.” 14. September 25, 2015 CNN “Israeli soldiers shot Palestinian teenager Tuesday at a military checkpoint in Hebron” http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/23/middleeast/ palestinian-shot-west-bank/ 15. March 16, 2016 International Solidarity Movement “After many Palestinians were gunned down at checkpoints in recent months, not only in al-Khalil but throughout the West Bank, knives suddenly ‘appeared’ next to them. Many Palestinian women have told me of how they are scared that soldiers would plant a knife in their bag when ‘searching’ it at checkpoints. http://palsolidarity.org/2016/03/ checkpoint-harassment-everyday-normality/“
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EVERYDAY PEOPLE EVERYDAY HEROES
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… O F VE N I C E B E A C H P h o t o s t o ry by B a i l e y L e w i s
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OMAIR QADIR My mornings are hectic, I tr y to get up early, but because of the second job I have, and I kind of scrounge about. I throw on whatever I can, and tr y to look as professional as possible. It takes me about thirty to forty-five minutes to get to work even if it’s only five miles away because of traffic and what not. When I get off that job, I have to hurr y to the next job, so I have my clothes in the trunk to get ready for the second job, and then start it all over again for another eight hours. Ever ything is good and it’s only going to get better. It’s really weird tr ying to find balance between working to live and living to work. I am so used to working all the time, that now I am tr ying to find balance in between all that and go towards things that I love to do and allow myself to do so without being hard on myself and thinking that work in itself has to be a struggle. I think that is the hardest thing for anyone really, tr ying to find what you love to do so it doesn’t really seem like work but still make ends meet and live comfortably. I have three kids, I am recently divorced. My daughter is seven and two boys are five and two, so that pressure on top of tr ying to take care of my parents is a big factor in work. It is cool that you kind of get the opportunity to invent yourself as many times as you want, I kind of feel that in reincarnation, you can kind of do it within whatever life you have now, many times over.
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MARCÉ BUTLER It takes about an hour, so I usually leave at five in the morning, and end up here around six. I am coming from Slauson and Western, close to downtown. It starts really fast and busy and then slows down. I am a struggling artist. `I just take a breather and walk away, but usually the customers in Venice and working in Venice has been really nice, so it’s never really that bad. I like the community here, people here are very laid back. I used to work in West LA, and it’s ver y different. Good energy. It gets, hard but I tr y to keep positive.
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ROGER LEGASSE I have to get up four hours before work because I have three stents in my heart and other conditions, so I have to get up and prepare, drink coffee, toast, power shake, oatmeal and then a breakfast and then I’m ready to come to work. I like to say Louie Armstrong, what a wonderful world it is. I listen to it ever y morning. I work here and then have an extra job that I do one day a week. My evenings are to relax totally because I give one hundred and ten percent at my job, I don’t float it; I love to work hard and sweat.
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DANIELLE PHILLIPS I live in Downtown, LA so it takes me about a good hour and a half to get to work. I am literally catching a bus to another bus. I work two jobs. I am also a freelance barber, so all of my appointments that I do are after work. I am up at four thirty in the morning, work until four in the afternoon, then go home and cut hair until about eleven at night. It is hectic but you have to do what you have to do. As long as I am doing what makes me happy, instead of only doing a job that makes me a ton of money and be miserable because I hate my job. I love to cut hair, I love coffee, and I’m invested in it, which plays a big part in it. If you love what you do, you are supposed to work hard at it, working these tired endless hours to get to where you want to be. Growing up as a kid, you would always come to Venice because it was the cool thing to do. Now it’s more than that, it’s a big community and I love it. I’m all about community. Once you get to know your neighbors, you create that relationship; Venice is a big part of that. There is a lot of culture here; it’s what I really dig.
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Yasamin Satarzadeh If I’m not coming from school, it’s an hour and a half to two hours travel. At nighttime, it’s about three hours coming from Inglewood because I have to take the bus. I read mostly, it allows me to do most of my research and homework. I go full time to a private arts college. I do urban gardening, and I write and perform. I work four to five days a week. I do private jobs sometimes and get commissions for paintings, so those allow me to live. Things don’t really get stressful, you prioritize, and them knock them out. List writing sometimes. When I was a little girl I wanted to move here, but can’t afford it yet, it’s a good community, ver y supportive people. Really supportive community. We are made fun of, and a lot for the people we are, but I don’t care. I like my avocados, my yoga, and the beach.
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EDDIE NAVARO I jump between a couple different types of transport to get to work, depending on how my morning starts. I wake at four in the morning, and make coffee, then put on running shorts and circle around my neighborhood, about twenty minutes. In the past, I rode my bicycle from Downtown to Venice, which I enjoyed ver y much, but made me to tired, in time. As I moved closer to work in Venice, I became more use to driving, which I want to change badly. A friend taught me the word ‘acknowledge,’ which I know as ‘reconocer.’ I work hard to live in each moment, stress happens, life is a challenge, and not meant to be simple. When stress or problems happen, I acknowledge it and move for ward. I think positive for most of the time, I am driven by thought of my daughter, and the life I want for her and that always brings me a smile. I also enjoy soccer ver y much, and play as often possible, thinking of that can change my day too.
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Last Look... “NOT ALL OF US CAN DO GREAT THINGS BUT WE CAN DO SMALL THINGS WITH GREAT LOVE.” QUOTE BY MOTHER TERESA Cake designed by the Depressed Cake Shop and Kara Andretta (Kara’s Courture Cakes.) www.karascouturecakes.com 65 VOL IV MMXVI
Artwork by Danny Boy © 2016
Lion swirls BY DANNY THOMAS © 2015