07/03/2005       [ Listen to the whole show]

Vaginal Davis
Los Angeles' most famous drag queen takes Ben on a walking-tour of what is arguably LA's most famous street: Hollywood Blvd.

Music Bridge - Lou Reed, "Dirty Blvd"

Erika Rothenberg - The Road to Hollywood
The road to Hollywood is not paved with good intentions, not a single one. But a public art installation that goes by that name is paved with a black-and-white mosaic that tells stories about how people got their first "big break." Creator and artist Erika Rothenberg explores just how "talent" and "chance" intersect.

Paul Chihara
Composer Paul Chihara was surprised to find out that the story of his "big break" was on the Road to Hollywood. Paul tells us the story of how he landed the composer's spot on Roger Corman's Death Race 2000.

Lennie Bluett
Lennie Bluett, a self-described "black, bald-headed, 86-year-old," tells Ben about how he got Clark Gable to integrate the set of Gone With the Wind.

Slab City
About an hour south-east of Palm Springs is Slab City, what some call the last free-place in America. It's sort of a drifter's camp that, due to a bureaucratic technicality, is under nobody's jurisdiction. Pulitzer-Prize winner Charlie LeDuff finds out that the inhabitants are searching for something more than freedom.

Salvation Mountain
Next to Slab City is Salvation Mountain a man-made hill constructed out of adobe and slathered with at least a 100,000 gallons of paint. Its creator Leonard Knight tells Ben why he's constructing this offering to God.

Music Bridge - Elloitt Smith, "Memory Lane"

Joshua Tree Shacks
There's a strange preservation battle going on out near Joshua Tree that involves thousands of shacks (or is it cabins?) that were put up by homesteaders in the 1950s. Queena talks to an artist who wants to preserve these structures and a long-time resident who's working on tearing them down. The shacks are all along Twenty Nine Palms Highway (see map).

Urban Explorers
Urban Explorers George Russell and Adam Byram break into abandoned buildings and take pictures of these decaying structures. Ayala Ben-Yehuda risks carbon monoxide poisoning to figure just what the thrill is all about.

The Bus
Writer and native-Angeleno Steve Abee reads an excerpt from "The Bus: Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily Mind in Transit" Steve explores the collision of family, history and place.