california » Jason Cochran

Mystery solved! The grave smiley Samaritan steps forward

Blog

May 062013

I just got this excellent message on my Facebook page.

It seems the mystery of “Who’s leaving smiley faces beside celebrity graves” has been solved, and the answer is rather beautiful in its guilelessness:

Hi Jason. — It’s been brought to my attention that you have been curious to who has been leaving the rock smileys on the celebrity graves… That would be me!

I also leave them on other graves that catch my attention, next to street art, and anything else that catches my attention in the Los Angeles Area. — Also as the commenter on your blog mentioned, Pittsburgh. I just came back from visiting there where I spent a lot of time visiting their cemeteries and leaving my rock smileys.

If you go to my Facebook page, you will see several albums of pictures of where I have left them.

It all started with my friend Tamra finding a little rock with a face on it, and how it made her smile. Then a few of us thought we’d leave some rock smileys around for others to find, sort of like a pay it forward type of thing. — And well, I’ve gone a little crazy with it.

And I am totally flattered that you made a blog entry about my rock smileys…

—Lisa Albanese

Manzanar, where decent Americans were destroyed [WATCH]

Blog, Video

Jan 242013

With everything except the central meeting hall in ruins, this memorial has come to stand for Manzanar. June 2013

The history of the United States could fairly viewed as a succession of excuses for not living up to its contractual obligations.

All men were not created equal, according to the Declaration of Independence: Slaves were allowed. The Supreme Court said the Cherokees were a sovereign nation: The South took their land anyway. Every citizen was entitled to equal protection, according to the Fourteenth Amendment: Women still couldn’t vote for another 60 years, and the Civil Rights Act had to wait another century. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Washington to cash a check, but his people are getting paid on the installment plan.

In our living memories, few stains are more indelible and illustrative than the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War Two. They were American citizens, but that didn’t matter to the government. They were locked away in one of 10 residence camps, and by the time they got out, many people had lost everything — homes, businesses, all gone, wiped out. George Takei and Pat Morita are just two of the well-known people who endured these places and rose above them. Many others were affected for the rest of their lives.

I recently went to the isolated Owens Valley in east central California for a forthcoming feature that will be published by the New York Post. In the spirit of my visit to the little-known concentration/POW camp of Andersonville, Georgia, I shot a video tour of Manzanar, which was made a National Historic Site 40 years after the war ended. By then, most of the barracks had been sold to soldiers for tool sheds and cheap housing. They usually bought them for more money than the typical detainee received from the government upon liberation.

Ironically, this National Park unit is run by the Department of the Interior, which is the very same government body that oversaw the incarceration of legal citizens through the War Relocation Authority. Continue reading »

Who’s leaving smiley faces beside celebrity graves?

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Jul 172012

I swear it’s not me. Someone else is leaving water-smoothed rocks with painted-on smiley faces by the eternal resting spots of the stars of yesteryear. I’m just the first person to notice.

I keep running across them in Los Angeles. These are from Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Forest Lawn Memorial Park Glendale.

They’re not just on classic film stars’ graves. There’s even one on Playmate Dorothy Stratten’s.

Errol Flynn

How James Dean crashed: his death site [WATCH]

Blog, Video

Jun 202012

Looks like it was yesterday. Where he died does, too.

I was obsessed with James Dean in college at Northwestern. I had this Phil Stern photograph of him (left) on my wall. I saw the movie adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for the first time and I was messed up by his intensity. There was something unbridled about his emotion that appealed to a 20-year-old. My acting teacher said to go with it.

A few months later, working for XS Magazine in Fort Lauderdale, I got to interview Julie Harris, who kissed him in that movie. She wasn’t overjoyed that I asked about shooting with James Dean when what she really wanted to talk about was Driving Miss Daisy, which she was doing at the local playhouse. Can’t blame her. The woman is a living legend herself. (Two years ago, I had another East of Eden one-degree: I rode an elevator with Lois Smith at the James Hotel in Chicago. I wisely kept my mouth shut that time even though I also wanted to hug her neck for Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.)

Some people are living lodestones. They get under the skin of other people. You can’t explain why.

Blackwell’s Corner, a half hour east on 46, was where Dean got his last refreshment break. That place was torn down years ago, and the new construction tries to cash in on his gruesome death with a fudge shop and forlorn half-stocked shelves of nuts and ’50s souvenirs. There are signs all but begging people to spend money there. It’s pitiful.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014, it’ll be 60 years since East of Eden came out. When I see clips now, I can recognize that he was totally out of synch with his co-stars. They were more stagey, more calculated. They felt like every other 1950s movie. During his silent scream at being rejected by his father, he was modern, an exposed nerve, and still is, because he was like a beautiful walking wound.

Anyway. I always wanted to see where he died, a place in the forlorn middle of California close to sunset on September 30, 1955. But it was so far away. It’s in the middle of nowhere. I’ve been to San Francisco countless times, and I’ve been to Los Angeles countless times, but at no time have I casually been in the scrubby in-between a half hour east of Paso Robles, California. Continue reading »

Disney Legend Bob Gurr on creating his Disneyland rides

Blog

May 282012

Cheers to Bob Gurr, who both shaped my childhood and drinks my favorite adult beverage. (Photo: MiceChat.com)

My regular readers know that I am passionate about how the past is preserved. We, as a culture, are so obsessed with money that blow our heritage off all the time. That’s one reason I wrote a new article for Travel + Leisure about the original Disney attractions that Walt knew best.

The destruction of Walt Disney World’s Snow White’s Scary Adventures, which happens on Friday, distressed me enough for me to write a slideshow feature about the oldest Disney rides, and for it, I talked to Bob Gurr, an Imagineer who helped build Disneyland in 1955 and went on to be a crucial designer for the park’s most seminal rides.

That same passion for making details about our past available to everyone has inspired me to put Gurr’s full interview on this blog so that anyone can read his words. Magazine and Web articles can only put so many words into stories before people’s click fingers get itchy. But there’s no reason the words of someone as esteemed as Gurr should be left on the cutting room floor. (I also salvaged a choice nugget from an interview with Anthony Bourdain last year.)

Make sure you go to Travel + Leisure and read my whole piece — that will make everyone happy, including me. You can also buy Bob’s book on engineering and Disney History, Design: Just for Fun, at his website. You probably have a long emotional connection with his worth without even knowing it, since he shaped the vehicles of most of Disney’s most iconic ride systems from the Disneyland Monorail (a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark) to the Haunted Mansion‘s distinctive Omnimover (a name he coined).

I asked Bob to discuss a few Disneyland attractions that he had a hand in, and the way Walt Disney figured into their creation. Some of his recollections won’t be new to Mouseheads, but they are full of reverence for the process, and considering the cultural importance of the results of that process to American culture, it’s worth putting on the record anyway. Here’s what Bob said, in his words. Continue reading »

San Francisco’s tourist pitfalls

Blog, Video

Feb 072012

Today, I present a segment (with some really handsome shots by Matt Crum) about all the ways to make San Francisco, which is already a good-value city for vacations, into an even better value.

One of my books is a guide to San Francisco, which is barely still for sale. I don’t think you should necessarily rush to buy it, because it may be the most plainspoken guide to San Francisco ever written. I sort of tell people things are not as exciting as they’re cracked up to be. On The Haight: “You’re more likely to meet slumming rich kids from the suburbs who have discreetly parked their Beemers a few blocks away than you are to meet any actual hippies.” And I proclaim the vagrant-plagued Tenderloin “a national shame.”

Oops.

I do think it’s true. But as it turns out, people don’t always want the unvarnished truth in their guide books. They want a li’l bit of cheerleading. Framed this way, though, in a helpful how-to video, navigating the mistakes of San Francisco becomes much more appealing.

This originally ran (in a much shorter version) for a website that is now in website heaven.

A ride on L.A.’s Angels Flight [WATCH]

Blog, Video

Feb 032012

Just a happy, pleasing video designed to bring you the feeling of being somewhere, without quick cuts or commentary: Like I did for my drive through South Dakota’s Badlands, I shot a ride on the Angels Flight railway in downtown Los Angeles.

Most people don’t know that downtown Los Angeles is steep in places, and this funicular was constructed in 1901 to haul locals up Bunker Hill, which is now the heart of the city but then had some pretty mansions. It’s only 298 feet long (although its historic plaque, installed before the railway was moved slightly south, gives the old length of 315 feet—and adds an apostrophe for “Angel’s”). That it managed to survive at all is a miracle, but the ride has been bumpy. It started as transportation in a residential district, as did Pittsburgh’s Monongahela and Duquesne inclines, which are also still in operation.

It was later engulfed in stone skyscrapers, followed by dismantling, storage, a move slightly south, and a period of benign neglect that climaxed when one of the trolley cars disregarded its brakes, hurtled downhill, and crushed someone. This video was shot 15 days after it re-opened following a nine-year closure and refit. The locals were curious and not a little bit nervous.

Downtown L.A. is actually one of my favorite places. It’s bizarre to me that an entire city, one that is about the size of Chicago’s Loop, would be pretty much abandoned, as L.A. was in the 1940s. The whites went west and left it to the incoming Mexicans. What remains is a fascinating mix of the untouched and the decimated. Part of the city is a stately example of incredible American wealth in the years between the San Francisco Quake and World War II. And part of the city is parking lots. Downtown Los Angeles lost the thread of what its personality was. Angelenos are figuring it out.

Citizens of Beverly Hills, perhaps regretting the white flight that abandoned the Angels Flight, installed this plaque in its old location. They wrongly made its name possessive, too.

How to see Los Angeles without a car: Use the subway

Blog, Video

Aug 182010

This one was fun, and it had me getting paid to eat maple-glazed bacon donuts at the Nickel Diner.

Not recorded: Me getting kicked out of the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre for having a video camera. I felt like a 60 Minutes correspondent, only without the muckraking.

The original post on WalletPop explains everything in more detail, including the cross-L.A. walk I took that gave me the idea to make this to begin with. I cannot overemphasize how much I adore downtown Los Angeles when viewed in the context of its rich and mostly forgotten (by white people) history. Every time I’m there, I see more and learn more.

One of the new travel whippersnappers did a podcast in which he called the idea of discussing Los Angeles without a car “cliché.” To which I might answer: Then why haven’t I ever seen anyone do this video before? (The same writer also admitted to covering the same topic himself. I looked it up. Tellingly, he never researched the possibility of taking the subway, dismissing it with “everyone I spoke to said that the Metro was useless.”)

A few days after this was published on WalletPop.com, my dear friend Brendan Milburn honored his 40th birthday by walking across Los Angeles, too. He went from Pasadena to the ocean and he found is as enriching as I did. Helluva way to turn 40, Brendan! You’re kicking ass even as you walk 20 miles.

The Disneyland Railroad runs on old french fry oil. Want proof?

Blog, Video

Aug 162010

I have a soft spot in my heart for this one, and not because I’ve been eating too many french fries.

I pitched this idea to Disneyland for about a year and a half before they were kind enough to acquiesce to my bringing a camera to the park during operating hours. I think the resulting video is lovely. I have a great job, but I hope CBS News Sunday Morning is paying attention to these.

Major praise to my camera dude Ken, who got those hard-to-get shots from the moving train, including the fleeting view from within Splash Mountain.