A few days ago, I made a wiseass comment about tourists taking shots of themselves without any irony on the grassy knoll, yeah, that grassy knoll. The next day I got a wonderful email from a fellow named Brett Sonnenschein, who with a sense of irony — and with his wife—  played the gruesome tourist from that very spot. He even sent a link to the online album they made. It’s great, and you can find it here.
Have you ever played The Gruesome Tourist? If so, send me your shots and I’ll post them.
Meanwhile, here’s another one from my album. On April 4, 1958 police responded to an altercation at the home of Lana Turner. When they got there (I’ve always wondered if the “policemen rang twice”), they found her lover Johnny Stompanato dead from stab wounds. The stabber was Turner’s teenaged daughter who was defending her mother from abuse. Here’s me in front of the house, many brown hairs ago.
Whenever friends come to Los Angeles to visit I can’t help but chime in with a mini version of the Grave Line Tour (here’s the Tate and La Bianca houses, Lana Turner’s place, the hotel where Janis Joplin OD’ed, etc.). At some point we end up at the HMS Bounty (my fave dive bar in LA) on Wilshire Blvd – directly across the street from the Ambassador Hotel site and in the middle of rattling off famous patrons of the place (Jack Webb, Winston Churchill, etc.) I conclude with “by the way, this is where Sirhan Sirhan supposedly ate dinner before walking across the street to pull the trigger on Bobby.”
Have lots of photographs, but the only one that’s scanned is the obligatory Grassy Knoll photograph (this from 1992): http://www.flickr.com/photos/quartzcity/4411415399/
BTW, “Gruesome Tourism” needs to be a Flickr group immediately.