My heathen daughter munches on a cookie in front of the chapel of the Vedenta Society of Southern California. It’s tucked in a little corner of Hollywood above Franklin near Vine.
The order was founded in 1929 when a couple of Pasadena ladies gave Swami Prabhavanda a little house in Hollywood. In the thirties, his followers constructed the temple and bought the surrounding houses to build the complex. In the forties, guys like Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood hung out here.
Briar met another freakishly-healthy, freakishly-thin man. He turned out to be some sort of holy celebrity. Between fielding photo requests from visitors, he showed us around the place and introduced Briar to a “jolly elf” who turned out to be some sort of administrator.
Another change since the ’30s is the 101 freeway. It’s just over the southern wall. I imagine there is a lot of talk around campus like this, “it’s our ocean” or “the river of life” or “feel the rhythm? just like breathing!”
No disrespect to our practicing brethren, but your shit is pretty obvious sometimes.
looks like Breakfast of Champions here. and I couldn’t giggle more.
The under construction 101 can be seen, briefly, in Richard Fleischer’s Armored Car Robbery, although the location is palmed off in the film as being somewhere off Slauson.