A Beach Head Write About the Beachhead

By Carol Fondiller

Frankly, I feel as if I’m viewing the decades of the Free Venice Beachhead’s existence on old celluloid film. Jumping and bumping with splats, cracks and flashes. Cutting through images that have been spliced together with cellophane tape being fed through the old moviola of my brain.

Who was that guy with the Jesus-length hair who was a master of lay-out? Can’t remember his name. And John Haag – “this paper is a poem” and through the four decades of its publication, there were poems in every issue of the Beachhead.

The remaining Beats watched with tolerant condescension as the collectives struggled to put this together.

The margins were never even, mis-prints, mistakes were always in abundance. Somehow, no matter now hard we tried to eradicate those cussed little errors, they’d pop up to be forever immortalized in print. Some contributors were really deeply hurt by what they considered negligence and disrespect for their articles. My thought was we gave voice to the voiceless. There were and are many voices in Venice who speak and are ignored. The Beachhead enabled those voices to be heard by a larger group than just their allies.

The Beachhead grew from a bothersome little rag to an influential voice in the community. Truly, the Beachhead worked locally and thought globally. The Beachhead was founded by the Peace and Freedom Party, but except for a few years, welcomed even political contributors to its pages. From polemics and theory to explanations of various laws and regulations and , of course, poems and stories to pro-renter and women’s movements, and anti-war activities, if it was happening locally, it was reported in the Beachhead.

The Beachhead ALWAYS had points of view. It reported events from a distinct populist, what is called leftist point of view. The Beachhead tried to be accurate in its reporting of facts. But it has always been pro majority of the people who inhabit this little blue planet, i.e., the low income folks who are struggling to stay housed, the people who are unhoused and the people who’ve lived in the area for years, but are being displaced because they don’t have $$$ to stay in their community because they have been told by landlords, the city, the state, etc., that they don’t count. (There are still renters who believe that they don’t have a right to voice their opinion, if any, about the direction of their community. The Beachhead still has a lot of work to do regarding consciousness raising about this).

Speak of consciousness raising, the Beachhead raised awareness about stalking and the vulnerability of the people to the dangers of this highly romanticized dangerous activity in a series of articles about the terror and disruption inflicted on a respected member of Venice and a collectivite on the Beachhead.

We used to lay out the Beachhead on the floor using glue, scissors, Xacto Blades and press tape. Oh, who could forget presstype – my nightmare. I don’t know who still uses it,  if it exists anymore – it consisted of a sheet of plastic with letters that are pressed down individually onto the paper, rubbed in, and a headline was created. That is, unless  parts of the letter fell off, and then the handy dandy black pen would come into play. My headlines were almost always crooked – sort of like a humpback whale swimming through the print.

When the Beachhead first came into being there were no computers. In the mid 70s the holy grail of print technology was an IBM Selectric Composer. I believe Moe Stravnezer and Linda Lucks were the proud owners. I never advanced to more than pen and pencil, having been intimidated at an early age with the typewriter ribbon and indentation. I am forever grateful to the people who slaved over my chicken tracks and transcribed them into print.

Now it is zipped through the computer straight to the printer, who mates with the disk and births many thousands of Beachheads.

The Beachhead has gone through many collectives and many changes, but the message remains the same: PEACE AND FREEDOM.

4 More Decades!

The New York Times and the L.A. Times try to be objective; however, in the face of injustice and greed there is no room for objectivity, but there is fairness. Thank Goodness the Beachhead hasn’t “balanced” discrimination with points of view from the KKK to balance out the view of racial equality.

There, I hope I’ve been clear.

 

This article is re-printed from the 40th Birthday Anniversary of the Beachhead in the December 2008 issue. 

Carol Fondiller (June 22, 1936 – January 9, 2010), pictured above, was the one and only Queen of Venice. She was one of the founders of the Free Venice Beachhead in 1968 and continued to be one of its wittiest, most prominent writers for the next 41 years.

The More Things Change…Carol Fondiller Strikes Back from the Archives, March 1985 – Wombs: Property of the State?

By Carol Fondiller

I’m holding a picket sign again, my feet hurt again, and people look past the sign that I picked up from a pile of signs, something about abortion being legal and bombings are not. Yep, back in the ol’ fox hole – again.

For the past five years now, abortion clinics have been torched or bombed, doctors have been kidnapped and clients and patients have been harassed and threatened by people who plead, “Oh, don’t kill your baby!”

It’s a marvel to me how people forget current history.

In one of Reagan’s campaign speeches he spoke of how far women had come in his administration – as if he and those of his political ilk had helped them get there. It’s as if there were no history of women’s right to choose over their biology, no history of suffragists chaining themselves to public buildings, marching, being arrested, no history of women acting in an “unladylike” manner in their struggle for enfranchisement. It’s as if someone wiped out all of history.

Before Ronnie was the Void.

It’s particularly galling to see women under thirty buying the whole repressive package – “Yes, I’m a doctor, lawyer, policeman, truck driver, C.P.A., miner, general, anchorwoman – but I’m not a women’s libber and I got to where I am with no one’s help!” And the ever-popular real women don’t argue, they discuss. These post-Beatles’ era women who can now have “non-traditional” jobs and even THINK of asking for on-site day-care and even think about thinking about comparable pay, think about the same athletic scholarship opportunities offered to women as are offered to men. These women who were born when I was in college are taking for granted attitudes and choices I didn’t even imagine when I was in high school. And that goes from the right of access to accurate, unbiased information about birth control.

Well, Goddess knows, there’s a saying that those who forget or don’t learn about history are condemned to repeat it. And, my dear younger sisters, this is the history Phyllis and Jerry and Ronnie have in store for us. January 22^nd was the 13^th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision of the Supreme Court.

As I remember, that decision reversed a decision of a lower court’s ruling that abortion was murder to the decision that the matter of abortion was a private matter between a woman and her physician. I read Simone De Bouvoir’s “Second Sex,” and Grave’s “White Goddess” in high school, so to me that decision was long overdue. Anyone remember what’s her name and the thalidomide baby, and how she went to one of those cold liberal northern countries for an abortion? You do? Well, your 30-year high school reunion is coming up, also.

I’m one of those women who’s had a taste of the world when abortions were illegal, and a sample of how it is now that women have the right to their own choice – and I am stating here and now that abortion is not my favorite form of birth control. But what happens if you are ill from the pill and the diaphragm slips? In the past, bar maids, receptionists, dancers, students, teachers did not get maternity leave, and if I may remind you, at this time maternity leaves and benefits are being cut from some of the fringe benefits in some jobs, including the local, state, county and federal agencies which in the past have been the main employers of most of the few jobs where women could get seniority.

And heeeeere’s Ronnie co-opting again – this time from Mao, praising the born-again new feudalists as 70,000 of them assembled in Washington, D.C. on the 13^th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade decision – praising them “on their long march for the right to life.” Well, of course Ronnie would praise the new feudalists, Ronnie needs a constant supply of vulnerable expandable welfare wombs to ensure a steady supply of scab and unskilled labor and cannon fodder to protect his “Shining City on the Hill.” That is why there is more concern about the contents of the womb than for the destiny of the fully formed, already existing sentient female-type human being who if she chooses will be living with it for nearly a year, at least.

Because of the pill and legalized abortion, there has been a decline in Anglo-Saxon babies for adoption by the less vulgarly fertile upper classes.

This same administration which is supporting the new feudalists is also re-promulgating the old myths that: 1) women don’t hold “real jobs”; 2) if a woman has a job, she doesn’t need it as much as a man. Now do you see why I call these people new feudalists? They’re gonna take us right back to pre-Magna Carta days.

Several years ago, I took part in an abortion speak-out sponsored by a pro-choice group. I was disappointed that other women and I were preaching to the already converted. No high school girls or college women heard the other women’s or my histories about coat hangers, green soap, knitting needles piercing uterine walls, being raped by failed doctors on the table, of the men in jail, out of town, dead, or married to someone else, of not having the few thousand dollars to have it neatly and cleanly done in a nice little villa on Doheny Drive by an abortionist-to-the-stars.

Because, believe me younger sisters, if anti-abortion legislation is enacted, it will only affect the middle and low income people as have the inroads on federal funding for abortion for the poor. Well, surely you didn’t think that Reagan would force his cronies wives, daughters, mistresses to have unwanted children, would you? That’s different.

It’s too bad that no one has told you, younger sisters, about being driven by a panic-stricken lover to County General where, bleeding and in pain, you were questioned by homicide detectives; of being called stupid by a young intern because you nearly killed yourself.  No doctor, just poor.    Spending three weeks flat on your back talking to other women who were also pariahs. The shady ladies of obstetrics. A 13-year old who didn’t know she was pregnant until she was five months along and couldn’t remember who did it, much less how; a 45-year-old mother of six who winked at the other women as she said, “I just slipped and fell, doctor.” All of the women were suffering from effects of illegal abortion, not the abortions themselves. The doctor or midwife or neighbor who helped the women abort was also guilty of murder.

A film has been showing around the country called “The Silver Scream.” I saw parts of it on television and frankly, it reminded me of those SUNN movie productions, popular in the late 70s. You know, the ones that try to prove there were space ships in King Tut’s time, and Jesus and Buddha were all aliens-abominable snowmen; well, this is an abominable snowjob. An ultrasound picture of a three-month fetus is magnified about 1000 times its real-size size, which is about the size of a little finger. It then shows what is purported to be a suction abortion, which works on the same principle as a vacuum cleaner. You are then told by the doctor who is, he says, an atheist and former abortionist, that what he shows you in this blurry ultrasound-wave blow-up is the mouth of a baby. Note: not fetus, baby. What I saw saw a series of vaguely connected horizontal lines that, when it was pointed out to me, yes, it did look like fetus, pardon – baby. Much like those blobby things in the sky over the Mojave desert looked like flying saucers. Oh yeah, this one’s kind of cigar-shaped, though. Anyway, this doctor tells us that the baby’s mouth is open in a silent scream of pain, and it’s squirming “…in pitiful attempt to get away,” in the words of the doctor. Well, fine, but it’s still the faintest of faint outlines of a human being, not a fully developed baby. It isn’t all filled in with brain cells, nerve endings, etc. It cannot breathe or take nutrition outside of the womb.

And, with our president’s blessing, that same president who wants to keep the government out of fixing children’s teeth or regulating pollution, wants the Government to stick its snotty pointed nose up women’s vaginas.

Maybe that’s why Reagan doesn’t want sex education in public schools.

Oh, but he loves those bombers and torchers of clinics where abortions are performed. They’re from the Army of God, they say. God told them to do it. They say they are protecting the civil rights of the “unborn babies,” in the same way that civil rights activists of 25 years ago broke the laws to protect the civil rights of Black people.

Civil rights activists never bombed churches or killed un-armed people.

The Ku Klux Klan did that.

The Klanners also claimed that they had a direct line from God.

I hope, my younger sisters, that you remember my past, because if you don’t, my past might be your future.

Not Just The Rich Can Live At The Beach

By Carol Fondiller

Years ago, shortly after the earth cooled, I became interested in housing matters.

It was a matter of self-interest.

During the late ‘60s there was a real estate boom, and property owners in Venice, who derived profits from renting below-code substandard units at fairly low rents, saw the opportunity to make a killing.

The only obstacle standing in their way were the low-rent tenants and inhabitants that occupied their apartments and houses. I was one of the low rent parasites.

During the tumultuous Vietnam Watergate years, the owners of large portions of Ocean Front Walk and other members of the Venice Improvement Association began demonizing low-income people.

It didn’t matter if you were paying low rent and working just enough to support your surfing habit, your poetry habit, or you just didn’t have any ambition except to work just enough to pay the rent and get some duds from the used clothing (pre-collectible) stores that used to be in Ocean Park and Venice, and swim, you were the enemy of all things that made America great.

Every long-haired hippie, peacenik, pensioner, and women’s libber who sat on the now extinct benches on the Last Working Class Beach (as titled in the L.A. Times article) was a barrier to the gazillions of bucks that they could make on their “property.”

In collusion with the development happy ecologically ignorant City Council, who at that time met a piece of black top or office building it didn’t like, the various business and developer groups such as the Venice Improvement Association, the Chamber of Commerce, etc., sicced the cops on people who questioned, who fought back when they were told to make way for more “desirable” inhabitants, i.e., more affluent residents.

Meanwhile, the “undesirables” fought the speculators to a standstill, a huge victory considering that the only resource we had against the well-heeled developers, city officials, and elected representatives were numbers, cunning, tenacity, and a sense of desperation.

In the years that followed, many of the homeowners and owners of smaller pieces of property who sided with the owners of mega-properties were also “evicted” from their homes and businesses because of discriminatory code enforcement and taxes.

 

People became more aware of the value of the incomparable California coastline. The preservation of access to the beach for all Californians and the preservation of the delicate environment became even more important than – gasp! – “property” values.

In a great consciousness raising effort, it became a matter of interest to preserve and build low-income housing to ensure that access to the beach wouldn’t only be for the affluent. Thus the Coastal act was passed.

Although Venice was a refuge for artists of various media of various incomes, in the ‘70s Venice was discovered by the Afflu-Hips. These were the people who wanted a roll in the ol’ nostalgie de boue, but also wanted a hot tub and parking for their three cars plus those of their friends.

In other words, they wanted San Marino in Greenwich Village. To paraphrase Tom Wolfe, when the artists start moving in the millionaires follow.

The strategies that the eco-freaks and community activists used to stall stop or alter huge developments with little or no parking zip low-income housing began to be used against them.

Now when one attends a meeting for a proposed low-income housing project, someone is likely to speak out against it because the parking does not confirm to the coastal development requirements. Some of these people live in buildings whose owner/builders have bootlegged units through all the zoning requirements to the detriment of parking. They are P.O.’d because low-income housing projects are not required to have the same amount of parking as market-rate developments.

But some of the protestors simply do not like the thought of low-income residents living next to them. Perhaps they are afraid of catching the poor disease.

It’s too bad they don’t take the advice of Steve Clare, Executive Director of the Venice Community Housing Corporation, and look at complexes that the VCHC has put up.

VCHC doesn’t squander its money. They use most of it for acquiring property and land to build and preserve housing units. Their buildings do not intrude on the neighborhood.

They grace it. The VCHC takes the space and enhances the environment not only physically with murals and tiles, but also with work plans and art groups. They give back to the neighborhood.

Would that some of the for-profit developers take a cue from the relatively impecunious VCHC and instead of wasting their money on public relations, would put their money into developing buildings of unassuming grace and beauty that used technology to implement solar energy, wind power, etc., instead of building those not-for-artist, grey, concrete bunkers on Electric Avenue.

And the newcomers should be reminded that the low-income folks who they want to eliminate were here first.

 

 

Billy’s Apartment

Carol Fondiller died last Jan. 9 after working most of 41 years on the Beachhead. Here are her comments from March, 2005:

 

By Carol Fondiller

The voice on the other end of the phone said, “Rumors are whizzing “round, noisy as skeeters on a stagnant pool spreading west Nile disease. Billy’s apartment building is up for sale.”

Fighting through my friend’s hyperbole, I asked ‘say what? Who’s Billy? And what’s love got to do with it?”

“Well,” said my friend, hereinafter known as Gary, “Billy’s apartment building is located on the Ocean Front Walk between Park and Brooks Avenues. About 8 units, 10 people, right next to one of the surviving single family houses on the Front and Billy’s…”

Oh yeah, “Billy’s Apartments.” Well. There’s a strip mall on Park Avenue that sells nothing useful to the surrounding community, the two-story single family house, Billy’s Apartments—which is painted a sort of pinkish brown, has what Easterners call a stoop, and what God-fearing heartlanders would call a small porch, is three stories high. It’s just north of a tattoo parlour and the Café Venezia on Brooks Avenue.

In the late 50s the Ocean Front Walk had a varied streetscape of former hotels turned into permanent apartments, bars, single family houses, a few Mom “n” Pop stores….Excuse me while I brush away a nostalgic those-were-the-days tear.

Well, things do change, sometimes for worse, and sometimes for the better. And sometimes it’s just change. As in decay, rebirth, and all that Karmic stuff.

But to me, the sale of Billy’s Apts. signals a real change.

This is one of the last apartment buildings that have moderately priced units on the Ocean Front Walk, perhaps in Venice. Some of the tenants have lived at Billy’s for twenty years. Years ago, developer wannabes dreamed up a plan for Venice that would, in the words of one developer, “Make Venice a Miami Gold Coast.”

This plan included a freeway that ran west of the beach onto the ocean, the taking of property east of Speedway by eminent domain, in order to facilitate two-way traffic. (It’s estimated that the proposed plan to widen Speedway would have taken about 20 percent of the properties abutting Speedway.) Not just the Hippies and Commies opposed that plan. And, of course, there’s always been controversy in regards to development on the O.F.W.

To put it delicately, Venice is entering another phase.

To my way of thinking, there is a plan to eliminate all dwellings on the Ocean Front Walk. Billy’s Apts. and the single family house next to it can be consolidated. And with claims of hardship exemptions, easements, setbacks and other development goodies, to combine with the property that includes the tattoo parlour, Mom “n” Pop shop and the Café Venezia into one helluva package for plasticized quaint B”n”Bs or Hotel California for discreet business meetings.

As it is, the Ocean Front Walk and the adjacent walk streets are barely livable now.

The uh, gee…dare I offend the west side artistes? I can find no other description—NOISE from the Ocean Front Walk 8 hours a day or longer, 7 days a week, and the fumes of endangered sage, gasoline emissions from huge buses with faulty engines, and the stench of rancid oils that emit from our many fine restaurants. I understand that much of this will change after the Ocean Front Walk ordinance is in place, but I am skeptical. The charms of Venice were the juxtaposition of seedy apartments next to one family houses next to bars and groceries, fruit stands, synagogues, tabernacles, etc.

There was also the mix of Bohemian outcast, orthodox Jew, fundamentalist, etc., workers, poets…; well you know the drill—diversity.

That’s coming to an end now, and not only because of the developers, real estate and the Artbunkers that are popping up like giant pustules. J”accuse some of the aforesaid Artisty–Poos that have invaded the Ocean Front Walk. They seem to think that just because they are poor like Van Gogh, unrecognized as Van Gogh, they automatically have the genius of Van Gogh.

They seem to think that because they claim to be artists, they have the right to annoy and denigrate all the Philistines and greedy money grubbers who have the nerve to live on the O.F.W.

Well, cheer up. Within a few years, with some exertion, Ocean Front Walk will be lined with charming air conditioned hotels and condos converted to “boutique” hotels. Those units facing the Front will have windows that open, so as to be able to throw money to the buskers, hucksters, etc., that will line the O.F.W. Visitors will enjoy the “ambiance” of the O.F.W., because they will be leaving after a short visit, to go back to their homes that do not have a Loud Noise Free Speech area. They will show videos of the man and his rubber snakes, the people who keep assassinating John Lennon over and over every day for 8 hours a day. Those hotel visitors will be able to open and close their windows at will and still be comfortable in their air-conditioned units, free of the concert stage amps used by the exhibitionists to extort money from them.

Debit cards will be issued by the Dept. of Entertainment division of Recreation and Parks. The cards will be issued in varying denominations to be used for entertainment expenses ranging from $1.00 on up—to throw at the hucksters.

But best of all, the residents, or most of them will have fled from the Front inland, east of Lincoln, so that the walk streets can be converted to parking palaces for the hotel patrons. These palaces will be disguised as quaint beach cottages. The end result will be an Ocean Front Walk free of those annoying residents.

The Artisty-Poos will be free to bray bleat whine, sell incense, etc., without any interruption. They will have become part of the establishment that they profess to loathe.

But like “artists” before them, from Michelangelo to Warhol to Kinkaide, they go where the money is.

As I was writing this I heard a noise on the Front, no, not the Lennon-McCartney assassin, but some guy who was lecturing the customers at the café by my apartment building—he was yelling at some of the patrons. A bouncer came out and chased the man down the Front.

The “musician” who was singing applauded. A customer rebuked the exhibitionist for cheering as the man was chased off. The exhibitionist yelled at the customer for ‘trying to dominate my space. This is MY space!” he yelled through his microphone, ‘this is my show! I get to perform here! You don’t like it, leave!”

So much for love, camaraderie and caring by the sensitive (only to their own needs) exhibitionists on the Ocean Front Walk. Did it ever occur to the exhibitionist that if this man’s two-minute tirade so disturbed him, what must it be like to listen to his atonal renderings (and I mean rendering) of the Beatles” songs over and over again five hours a day five days a week?

Someone takes over on the weekends, and after the Beatle Killer and his Arnold Schwarzenegger imitations (another reason to vote out Arnold!) someone who kills off Bob Dylan comes on to commit more auditory rape until it gets dark.

 

Perhaps the proposed Robert Graham statue for the Venice Traffic Circle is a fitting definition of Venice after all—a stainless steel cunt.

 

WHEN VENICE STOPPED A (POLICE) RIOT BY STOPPING A PARADE

By Carol Fondiller

The Establishment Parade vs. the “People’s Parade” but first, background. Background is all. I remember the parade that didn’t happen in Venice.

Those nasty un-patriotic beer swilling pot smoking coffee drinking hippies and Beats and Commies as Werner Scharff and the Venice Civic Union used to call them, and if one indulges in E-mail, that vicious, crude and lying effluvium, the same swill slightly recycled still eminates from some flea ridden hound’s master’s website. “Anti-Progress” they bark un-American they whimper Aging Hippy Commie Dope Smoking Beats they whine, as they cower in their lairs wishing they could afford to live in Malibu but absenting that, these rabid whelps will endeavor to move disagreeable elements out of Venice, i.e., patrons of Los Trocas on Rose Avenue, clients of the Venice Family Health Clinic. (Many of the nouveau hip donate money to St. Joseph’s and the Venice Clinic. They love poor people just not in their backyard, the street they live on, the libraries they patronize, the shopping centers – you get the drift. They love you in Biafra just not on San Juan Avenue.)

In 1968-1969 the threats Venice faced were the same as now. People who had been paying their mortgages and their rents for years were faced with what were called improvements – and to be fair, some of the improvements would have been beneficial – street lights paved sidewalks, etc. But most of the improvements centered on getting rid of small cottages and hotels that were part of Venice since it’s inception. And in the improvements the casualties would be low income people. Folks who bought the little houses to live in, and renters who looked on Venice as their home.

But they were soon told by the powers that be, the City of Los Angeles, the banks who acted in collusion with property owners who owned large plots of land, that the property owner and renter alike, were expendable. they were to be displaced for a better use of the land, Werner Scharff’s vision of Miami Beach West.

The Venice Survival Committee, and the Free Venice Committee, one of the first groups to advocate secession from Los Angeles, fought back. These groups were organized by the Peace and Freedom Party, and despite red baiting, police and F.B.I. harassment, these groups managed to rally people to fight for the right to live where they were. It wasn’t as if these rich people were happily doing whatever rich folks do, and suddenly all these ground apes, knuckles dragging on the dirt, invades their mansions, peed in their fountains and their Perrier, it was the other way around. Low income people living by the ocean! Much too good for them — and money, honey, could be made. As one of the mini speculators, Alan J. Radford, developer of the unsuccessful Washington Square project said, “Water and poor people don’t mix”. The city saw tax dollars and the speculators saw more — the only barrier to wealth were those annoying people who already lived there.

In ‘68-69 this pot had been boiling for years. Confrontations with the, at that time, the lackeys of investors and banks, the LAPD, and the Venice residents were common and sometimes brutal. Protests against the war in Viet Nam were savaged and spied upon, the F.B.I. was trying to infiltrate the Peace and Freedom Party. And as it is today, people question loyalty to cover up their own lack of commitment to the principals of the government’s contract with the people – the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

The Free Venice Survival Committee and the Peace and Freedom Party decided to take back America. It was also discovered that in 1905 Venice was officially opened. What better way to say Happy Birthday America and Happy Birthday Venice than with a parade? — Indeed, it was thanks to the Free Venice Beachhead years later, that Venice’s Birthday was taken note of by the establishment.

So this “unamerican” bunch of hippies of every color and persuasion, radicals aging and otherwise, bikers, librarians, poets, drunks, REALLY SQUARE homeowners, and churches got together a parade committee. We worked on it for months.

Parade permits were applied for and denied. So, we decided to walk our parade route. We hadn’t counted on parade horses or motorcyclists but the motorcyclers, most of whom hung out in the pagoda by Breeze Ave. So, we through we’d just walk, obeying all the traffic signals and allowing traffic and pedestrians to pass without being blocked. We leafleted and planned, and met. The meetings were open, and, for the limited resources of P and F the publicity was pervasive.

The police started warning people to stay away from the parade.

As the 4th of July neared, the police were more present than usual. Police rode motorcycles up and down the Ocean Front Walk. Portable booking stations were installed in the oil holding facilities by Windward and O.F.W. Police cars sirened up up and down the streets.

I was living at Westminster and West Washington Blvd. (Now Abbot Kinney Blvd.) opposite Westminster School. I was awakened several days before the Fourth by something flying overhead. The police were practicing landing and take-off maneuvers with their helicopters on the school playground.

People were told by Councilman Marvin Braude’s office to stay away from Venice. I believe the the newspaper, the Evening Outlook, even printed cautionary tales regarding the forthcoming July 4th radical-led riots in Venice. Did I neglect to tell you that we had children’s groups and the Israel Levine Senior Citizen Center signed up for the parade? We also had a boom box contingent.

As the 4th got closer as in 2 days before, we began to hear rumors of a “Police Action”, that is, being clubbed by a baton wielding L.A.P.D. officer for just being there. The day before the parade, we faced the reality that an un-armed peaceable joyous celebration with flags children dogs and PEOPLE would be clubbed and beaten for just walking celebrating their town’s and their country’s birthday. We sat up all night debating. I remember crying because we really had to call off the parade. We called, explained, re-leafleted walked and got the “walk” cancelled.

Ah, but the cops had their fun anyway. It seems some hippys took responsibility to save lives and stood on entrances to the beach with signs saying, “Stay away from Venice Beach! Police Riot Planned!” “Free Venice!” These people were trying to save lives. They were arrested and roughed up by the police. We were also castigated by a group of self proclaimed radical documentary filmers called NEWSREEL for not going forward with the parade so they could film the confrontation between the cops and the citizens. They missed the drama of people being driven out of their homes and prevented from partaking in a celebration.

Subsequently, the Peace and Freedom Party and the Free Venice Committee and the Free Venice Survival Committee sponsored other parades. They were fun, they were funky and anyone could join. No charge. Eventually the City even signed our permits.

So excuse me if I feel a bit out of sorts when I see “my” parade being co-opted by profit makers. Listen I hope the Venice Centennial Committee has a great time. I’m really happy about my Centennial calendar, and I want a Centennial T shirt (XXXL) but I miss the sight of Happy Jack ex-biker riding a car down the O.F.W. with a beer and a broad YES! a broad on each arm, the low riders, and the fife and drums led by John Haag holding the Don’t Tread on Me flag.

So, it’s interesting to me to see that the same issues are still here in Venice, only bigger and meaner. And one other anecdote from the parade that never was.

July 5th, I was walking down the O.F.W., when I was stopped by a white haired woman. “Thank you”, she said “Thank you for cancelling the parade.” She pressed $5.00 on me for the Beachhead into my hand.

So, I don’t begrudge the City sponsored Venice Centennial, with it’s masks and cars. I just want some of the new arrivistes to realize if it weren’t for us ol’ rads cranks and socialists there wouldn’t be, as Ruth Galanter said, anything left to fight over.

Originally published July 2005.

From the Beachhead Archives Nov. 1977: Remembering Bingo: “Daughter-of-Darkness, Sister of Light”

By Carol Fondiller

People gathered on the rocks at Brooks Avenue Beach to remember a very important person.

The people who are moving in and building Valley-sized houses on Venice lots, whimpering that less than 2,000  square feet for a family is a slum, wouldn’t think  “Bingo” Bingham important at all.  In their eyes she was a failure –  Why?   Because she did not have a Cuisanart?    The city agencies and the Coastal Commission look upon people like Bingo as “unfeasible”.  And certainly low income housing is  “unfeasible”  because the property values have been artificially driven up by paper swapping speculators who drive up the value without one cent of real money changing hands  — “All done with mirrors, folks.”  But you have to be a success and success means money.  Go to jail for a few months for selling out the country, write your memoirs, make a mint — you’re a success.  Turn people onto LSD, snitch on your friends, jump bail, write a book — you’re a success.     You can live in Venice.  No others need apply.

But Venice is still an economically stable community, all economic classes still intermix.  Which means it’s a Home Town — a Home Town by choice.  You watch kids grow up and people grow up.  We see one another getting older.  The people who you left behind when you went on your search for whatever Holy Grail you had in mind will still be there when you come back.  Venice is a home for the rootless.  They’ll find someone they know.

A Home Town is where people come back to partake in ceremonies that mark rites of passages.  Births, christenings, brisses, weddings, all remind us of the fragility of human beings.

A Home Town is where people remember you after you die, even if you didn’t write the Great American Novel, shoot the President or give Johnny Carson the finger.

A Home Town is where you are immortal.  Venice is a Home Town.  The usual pace of change and attrition of people moving out, moving in and dying has been escalated by the City Planning Department and speculators.    But there were rocks at Brooks Beach to say good-bye to Benita “Bingo” Bingham, flower child, doer, dreamer, the bane of bureaucracy, Animal Regulation in particular.  Bingo was thirty years old when she was murdered.

Bingo striding down the front, swathed in scarves, taking a swig from a proffered short day, moving on and traveling light.  Bingo returning from the Valley, the desert Maine, running up to people, her arms outspread, shouting affectionate obscenities to her friends in a husky humorous voice.

Bingo describing another hair-raising close call with authorities or some crazy dude who picked her up hitchhiking, so that while the blood ran cold, the stomach ached from laughing.

Bingo, alley cat thin arms trashing in the garbage cans and wearing discards with the elegance of a queen. Bingo, her soft short hair curling around her small face, her eyes large and dark with fear as she was going to court to testify against the men who raped and beat her, uncomfortable in dealing with the police who had arrested her for vagrancy, now being helped by them to protect other women from similar, violent humiliation.

Bingo. A Person of the streets.

Bingo, whose veins had collapsed long ago from the needles she’d stuck in them.

Bingo was fresh and young when she came to Venice. Her skin was resillent and firm. She was pretty. She got involved with drugs. High on drugs and riding with a drugged up dope, she got into an accident. Her face was scarred, her teeth were knocked out. But heading down the Ocean Front Walk on a bike she’d borrowed from a friend with or without their knowledge, she was beautiful.

Bingo had a Samoan disregard for personal property. If she needed it, she’d take it. She didn’t steal it. Sometimes she’d lose what she’d borrowed, or it would be stolen from her. She’d try and replace it with something of equal value. Sometimes she borrowed that, and things would become quite complicated. It was sort of like the operations of Bert Lance. Bingo was alive,. Intense. Vulnerable. She understood other peoples grief and had a humorous objectivity about herself.  Periodically she would lose her false teeth in the surf, and she’d walk around with her mouth covered until Medi-Cal would come up with another pair.

Bingo would try, off and on, to keep a pad.  But she couldn’t stay in four walls very long.  On cold winter nights with the rain coming down in knife-sharp drops, Bingo would be seen wrapped up in blankets, her dog Beamer in her arms, fording, the ankle-deep debris-filled river that was Speed-way, looking for a warm hallway or alcove.

Bingo traveled light. She didn’t take up much room.

After Bingo was raped and she’d testified in court, she moved to Ocean Park.  She wanted to clean up her act.  She rented an apartment.  She was finally, people said, getting it together.

Bingo told the truth when she talked to people about herself.  But she didn’t tell the whole truth to any one person.  She had different people she told different things to.

She wrote, people said.  She wrote well.  Bingo went to poetry readings, jazz concerts, and art openings.  She knew dealers, procurers, poets, dancers, singers, and combinations of any and all of the above.

Sometimes she was less than kind to her lovers or would be lovers, people said.

People said she was abused and battered from the day she was born.  Wild Thing. Our Lady of the Wild Things. Gypsy.  Urchin, Harridan, Bitch, Crane, Mean, Clown, Sturdy, Human.

She was beaten and stabbed to death in that apartment where she was getting her act together.  People say.  Some people say that they loved each other. He’d come back from a stay in jail.  People say, some people say they were drunk and arguing. People say.  Some people say her husband did it.  People say.  Some people say he is in custody.  People say. Some people say he isn’t.

Willy Loman’s sister cries out at Willy’s funeral in Death of a salesman, “Attention must be paid.”  John Donne wrote  ”No man is an island.  Each man’s death diminishes me.”

Friends and enemies met at the Brooks Beach rocks.  We sat and stood in the warm mid-October sun.  A man was crying.  “I love this family.”  Junkies, Poets, Philosophers, Children, all with their different conceptions of what happens after the heart and brain goes out and the body decays gave testimony for Bingo.

Bob Alexander from the temple of Man read poems by Stuart Perkoff and Marcella.  Frank Rios standing tall in winged sleeves read a poem and burnt it. Flowers were strewn on the waves forming a blanket for half of Bingo’s ashes. The family has the other half.

“Just like Bingo,” someone smiled, k”she was always scattered.” Flowers. Incense. Babies. The Sun. Pelicans flew in strict formation, dipping gently over the flower-covered water.

So Long, Carol –It’s Been A Blast!

Carol Fondiller Berman

June 22, 1936 – Jan. 9, 2010

A Community Celebration
of the life of
Carol Fondiller Berman who
dedicated herself and her writings
to the preservation
and betterment of Venice

Saturday, February 13
at Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Blvd.

1pm – Reception
2-4pm – Program

All Beachhead Readers are invited. For more information: Beachhead@freevenice.org
or 310-306-7372/399-8685

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent  to Carol’s favorite newspaper, the Free Venice Beachhead, Venice 90294

Carol Fondiller

By Pam Emerson

When I met Carol in 1975, she was engaged in a struggle to preserve space for poor people – benches to sit on, apartments to live in, small groceries and small places to eat. She had been doing this for years in several venues, including the Beachhead.

She was also a story teller and a fun lover and an appreciator of cats. When I knew her best we were near neighbors and could visit in the evenings and have endless discussions of fairness and foolishness, selfishness and justice, self-righteousness and pomposity and the deceptions of men – and women.

In the seventies Carol was concerned with preserving the two sided benches on Ocean Front Walk where elderly residents had been accustomed to sit.  Roller skating had become popular.  Roller skaters were moving the wood and concrete benches that had stood on Ocean Front Walk for years to separate themselves from slow-moving pedestrians, creating a need for repairs. The City budget was again limited, and the Bureau of Street Maintenance decreed that it would no longer repair the benches.  Carol was a vocal participant in the ensuing controversy that was resolved only after the construction of the bike path out on the beach.

She was scathing about the lack of consideration of the young for the old, and of the rich for the poor but in discussing other issues; she could turn around and point out the need for room for families, for small merchants, even for vendors.  Carol did not hew an ideological line; she was more interested in fairness.  She would raise an issue so that it could not be ignored, but she was not entranced by ideological purists.

She appreciated people who saw things differently but detested bullies. In fact, Carol could scent a bully a thousand miles away, pluck the stuffing out of his coat and describe each wiggling string for the benefit of her cats.  She was suspicious of abstractions because abstractions describing programs often left out the people they were supposed to benefit.

She criticized community improvement programs that included no housing; loans to enable people to restore housing for low income people that had catches and loopholes such as twenty year limits for the low-income housing, or contracts that allowed the recipient of the loan to refinance and opt out once the market went up.   She would not get into the technicalities; she would just point out that the housing was supposed to be there and somehow it was not; the program had the name, but did not deliver the goods.

People who did not understand her view of public, open space may not have understood the growing conflict she had with vendors along Ocean Front Walk who now did not permit her, grown old and feeble, to sit on the very benches she had fought so long to replace.  Whenever you talked to Carol any opinion you had turned out to be a little bit wrong because she had noticed something and you had not and the conversation was off.  Carol was a moralist and an essayist and a humorist and a generous person.  We will miss her.

When wasn’t there Carol?

By Lance Diskan

The first Venice neighborhood meeting I went to – 1968 – there she was. When I visited Venice to celebrate our Centennial in 2005, there she was. For us, it’s been forty years of shared struggle, joy, language and solidarity. She’s irreplaceable, and a fundamental personality in Venetian history. Abbot would have loved her.

No one has ever written about Venice with more devotion, passion or skill. Her Beachhead articles were always the most worth-reading – with apologies to all the rest of us who added filigree to her essential documentation of not just what goes on, but why we should care. Future historians who want to learn about those times need only read her articles.

She not only had a wonderful way with words, but her prose had deep outrage, humor, insight and a sense of (in)justice that illuminated her expression. Any cause was fortunate to have her as an ally.

But it’s my friend who I’ll miss the most. A familiar face – and unmistakable voice – in the crowd, whether on Ocean Front Walk or along a crumbling walkway at a Canal Festival or at a City Hall public hearing or testifying before the Coastal Commission or lending a sparkle of light to some furiously-heated debate at the Venice Town Council or – you name it.

And Carol was loyal, a value that manifests the notion of community, binding each one of us to one another. Nothing equals the strength and satisfaction of decades of communion with another soul, and every one of us who knew her was a beneficiary of that experience. Lucky us!

I’d like to thank those people who helped Carol get to live at 5 Rose Avenue. No one ever deserved a million-dollar view more than she. It’s, as Abe Lincoln put it, “altogether fitting and proper” that she got to stay in the community she helped protect and define – an uncommon common woman amidst the wealthy. I hope one of the final sights she had was an unobstructed view, over the sand and past the breaking waves to the far horizon.

The Harpy has flown. Happy landings, sweetheart; and thanks for so much everything.

Carol by any other Name

By Lynne Bronstein

She called herself the Harpy, Essie LaYenta, and numerous other soubriquets. She was also known as Carol Berman via a former husband’s surname. When one of her Beachhead articles appeared with the byline Carol Berman, she wrote the paper two letters, one from Carol Berman and one from Carol Fondiller. In the former, she denied having written the article and wanted to make sure she wasn’t confused with her alter ego. “Carol what’s her name is a silly punk rocker with mangled syntax,” she explained.

This was Carol Fondiller (the name I knew her by), a woman who lived by her own rules and didn’t give a good flying you-know-what about what anyone thought of her. If someone insulted her, she could give back with a great retort. She never censored her thoughts.

The paper you are reading is what it is to a great extent because of Carol. She was there at its founding and she was writing for it for most of its 41-year existence. She wrote many of her articles by hand, leaving it up to others to “transcribe” them. But nobody minded that task because it provided an opportunity to read Carol’s words before almost anyone else (except for the other collective members). At editorial meetings, everyone begged to be the one to read Carol’s latest article out loud. Although probably no one could read her work with the elan that she herself provided.

Ancient Athens had Euripides and Aristophanes; Elizabethan England had Shakespeare, and Venice had Carol Fondiller. Venice will be singing her song parodies and quoting her observations for a long long time.