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From The Independent (UK), May 17, 2006, this from Marina Bradbury in Paris -There are no Monet water lilies here, and our default Giverny will have to be Will Rogers Memorial Park on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, at the north end of Rodeo Drive. just across the street from the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Polo Lounge and all that. The visuals are similar, except the water lilies we get floating here are a slightly different subspecies of what Monet was painting, lotus blossoms, and the reflections in the water are, here, of palm trees. It'll do. Air France has two or three flights a day from LAX to Paris, non-stop, but these lotus pools are just a short drive down Sunset Boulevard.Claude Monet's water lilies, among the most celebrated paintings of the Impressionist movement, will be revealed in their original glory when the Orangerie museum in the Paris Tuileries gardens reopens today. Created especially for the museum, the monumental work, entitled Nymphéas, has been hidden from the public eye for six years, during extensive renovations. The giant frieze, made up of eight separate paintings which together stretch almost 600 feet around the gallery, has not been seen in the way the artist intended for more than 40 years.
"One who performs his duty without attachment, surrendering the results unto the Supreme Lord, is unaffected by sinful action, as the lotus leaf is untouched by water." - Bhagavad Gita 5.10Nelumbo nucifera is known by a number of common names, including Sacred Lotus, Red Lotus, Indian Lotus Bean of India and Sacred Water-lily. Botanically, Nelumbo nucifera (Gaertn.) is sometimes known by its former names, Nelumbium speciosum (Willd.), or Nymphaea nelumbo. This plant is an aquatic perennial. In ancient times it was common along the banks of the River Nile in Egypt along with the closely related Sacred Blue Lotus of the Nile (Nymphaea caerulea); and the flowers, fruit and sepals of both were widely depicted as architectural motifs where sacred images were called for. The Pharoic Egyptians venerated the Lotus and used it in worship. From Egypt it was carried to Assyria and became widely planted throughout Persia, India and China. It may also have been locally indigenous throughout Indo-China but there is doubt about this. In 1787 it was first brought into horticulture in Western Europe as a stove-house water-lily under the patronage of Sir Joseph Banks and can be seen in modern botanical garden collections where heating is provided. Today it is rare or extinct in the wild in Africa but widely naturalized in southern Asia and Australia, where it is commonly cultivated in water gardens. It is the National Flower of India.
Further notes on the park here, saying you should not get this park confused with Will Rogers State Historic Park, six miles west and also on Sunset, Will Rodgers' old ranch. This one is five acres, and that one is enormous, with polo fields you might have seen in "Pretty Woman" and other films. The little park with the lotus pools was a five-acre gift from the Beverly Hills Hotel, in 1915, so the land that became the City of Beverly Hills' first park had been part of the hotel's front lawn. Will Rodgers lived a block away and in the mid-twenties, before he moved down the road to his ranch, he was, informally, the honorary mayor of Beverly Hills. Everybody liked him. After he died the city named this small park after him, even though he had moved out in 1927. No hard feelings.
Trivia from the link -
Good Shepherd is six blocks south and the last time it was in the news was the Frank Sinatra funeral there. Whatever. It doesn't matter.Actor Michael Caine tells of seeing John Wayne land in a helicopter in this park, then watching the Duke head across the street to the Beverly Hills Hotel - while wearing his cowboy duds! (Caine was surprised that John Wayne recognized him, but apparently he had just seen Caine's hit movie, "Alfie.")
This is the park where rock singer Rod Stewart proposed to his wife, model Rachel Hunter back in 1990. They were later married at the nearby Good Shepherd Church.
The website "Seeing Stars" has more detail here -
There are no public tours. This is a working studio in an ugly part of town - think Steubenville with palm trees. It's not tourist territory.Other early movies shot here included "Pennies From Heaven" (1936, with Bing Crosby), "The Thief Of Baghdad" (1940), "The Jungle Book" (1942 with Sabu), and "Angel On My Shoulder" (1946, with Paul Muni). Shirley Temple had her film debut at this studio.
In the 1930's, it was known as General Service Studios, and produced countless b-movies and independent films. in the late 40's Cagney Productions (Jimmy, and his brother William), owned a large part of the studio.
In 1951, the studio turned to television. The first two years of "I Love Lucy" shows were shot here on Stage 2 (before Lucy & Desi moved Desilu studios over to RKO and moved the show over to Ren-Mar). In fact, the studio's sandwich shop next door to Stage 2 is called the "Babalu Cafe." The "Burns & Allen" show was also filmed here.
More recently, the studio was the scene of a noble failure, as Francis Ford Coppola (the director of "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now") began his ill fated Zoetrope Studio here. Alas, Zoetrope didn't last long; when Coppola's first new release, "One From the Heart," bombed at the box office in 1982, he lost the studio. (Although Zoetrope still exists as a production and post-production company in San Francisco, and online at http://www.zoetrope.com.)
As a rental studio, numerous classic TV series were shot there, including "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Green Acres," "Petticoat Junction," "Mr. Ed," "The Bob Cummings Show," "Ozzie & Harriet," "Our Miss Brooks," "The Addams Family," "The Lone Ranger," "Baretta," "The Rockford Files"... and more recently, "The Cosby Show," "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," "Everybody Loves Raymond," "Boy Meets World" and "Soul Train." "
"The Burns and Allen Show" was also shot there, and George Burns had an office at the studio which he visited almost every day until he died (at age 100). In fact, the Burns office is still there.
Modern films shot here include: "The Shaggy Dog" (with Tim Allen), "Cursed" (with Christina Ricci), "The X-Men," "Bad Santa," "Zoolander," "Dumb And Dumberer," "What Dreams May Come" (with Robin Williams), "Scream 2," "The Out of Towners" (with Steve Martin), "A Walk in the Clouds" (with Keanu Reeves), "Con Air" (with Nicolas Cage), "When Harry Met Sally" (with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan), "The Running Man" (with Arnold Schwarzenegger), "Frances" (with Jessica Lange), "Shampoo" (with Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn), "Save the Tiger" (with Jack Lemmon), "The Player" (with Tim Robbins), "The Karate Kid" and 1997's "Spawn."
This will easily get you from a dead stop to sixty in under four seconds, if you have at least 178,906 dollars (before taxes, registration and licensing fees, any options you choose and a chat with your insurance company). You're looking at the intake system of a mid-engine Ferrari F430, their hottest production model now that the Enzo is no more (they built only four hundred of those and they go for a million now, so you rarely see one of them, save for when some fool crashes one in Malibu or you catch a glimpse of Nicholas Cage driving his on the Beverly Hills part of Sunset, a few miles west).So where had this F430 been this time to get so beat up? That information would be here - April 30 start in London and get to Belgium, then May 1 to Vienna, then Budapest the next day, and Belgrade the day after, then the cars are all flown of Southeast Asia and on May 5 race from Phuket to Bangkok, ending up at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel there, and then the cars are flown to Utah, to Salt Lake City, where everyone attends "the red carpet Premiere of Mission Impossible III" and the next morning revs up drives like hell to Las Vegas for a private "Snoop Dog" concert, then off to Death Valley and finally, May 7, the dash to the finish line, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. All that was followed by a dinner at the Beverly Hilton and a party at the Playboy Mansion up the hill, where one of the DJ's was the famous porn star Ron Jeremy.In 1933 legendary motorcycle racer Mister Baker, had crossed the United States coast-to-coast in 54 hours, earning him the nickname Cannonball. He had had an annual race ever since 1914 (when he needed 11 days), and bettered his time ever since. In the 1970s motor journalist Brock Yates of Car and Driver magazine had started the "Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash" in honor of Cannonball. The first race was held on April 1, 1971, and first prize was a Gumball dispenser. The first race was won by Yates and Dan Gurney, former race driver for Formula One and Le Mans, who drove a Ferrari. They needed about 35 hours from New York to L.A. These events inspired the 1976 movies "Gumball Rally" and "Cannonball," as well as sequels such as "Cannonball Run," "Cannonball Run 2," etc. The original Gumball race was finally canceled in 1979.
Drawing inspiration from the 1970s race, the movies and "Smokey and the Bandit," Maximillion Cooper started the modern edition of the game in the summer of 1999 as the Gumball 3000 road rally. Gumball 3000 has since gained the reputation as road race for the modern era and has captured attention. With celebrity participation the public have been bought closer to the race by witnessing it on everything from MTV to reading about it in Vanity Fair.
Just flowers here, in front of an apartment building on the southwest corner of Beverly and Sycamore, a few miles west of downtown Los Angeles, Saturday, May 13, 2006, about ten in the morning -In the 1920s Georges Bataille's art magazine Documents embraced all that was "soiled, senile, rank, sordid" in western civilization.
... Bataille thus stayed closer to the surrealists' roots in Dada, that primal howl which rose out of Zurich in the depths of the First World War. The black soil to surrealism's wildly exotic flower, Dada prescribed strange chants and the ancestral throb of drums as remedies for a culture engaged in ritual self-slaughter. Enlightenment and the march of reason having led to a mass grave (both literally and psychologically), Dadaism sought a solution in the healing powers of so-called darkness.
... In many respects, Bataille's Documents magazine ... was a continuation of the Dadaist onslaught against cultural somnambulism. In it, he wrote that "horror alone is brutal enough to break what is stifling," a statement that communicates the essence of his aesthetic. If the European mind had indeed become a "whited sepulchre" (as Marlow describes the unnamed city in Conrad's Heart of Darkness), cracking it open would require formidable tools.
