Lifestyle

A Bastion of Los Angeles Hippie Culture Survived the Flames

Published

11 months ago

January 16, 2025

A Bastion of Los Angeles Hippie Culture Survived the Flames

In Topanga Canyon on Saturday morning, suspended midair from an electricity line, hung the smoldering top of a utility pole. The pole itself had burned away. Its remaining crosspieces resembled a crucifix on fire. By the time Bob Melet videotaped this eerie scene, firefighters had managed to halt the advance of flaring patches that elsewhere had been whipped into infernos.

Barely 100 yards from the front door of Mr. Melet’s store, Melet Mercantile — a destination for fashion and interior designers who for decades have tracked Mr. Melet’s idiosyncratic tastes — lay the fire line at Camp Wildwood, a disused summer camp established in the 1920s and later turned into a resort and community center by two locals, Julia and Oka Stewart. To its west and along the Pacific Coast Highway, almost everything was torched.

“The canyon is a funnel that comes right past my doorstep,” Mr. Melet said by phone from a friend’s apartment in Corona del Mar, his evacuation point. “If it had reached me, it would have wiped out the entire town.”

The fact that it had not represented the miraculous survival of an ecosystem as fragile and anomalous as it is naturally untamed. An eccentric holdout of a countercultural ethos that once went a long way toward defining the Southern California lifestyle, Topanga lies at the western limit of an extensive system of canyons resembling a series of Cyclopean knife cuts slashed into the Santa Monica mountains.

Others among the 28 canyons — Laurel, Beachwood, Runyon — may be better known beyond the Los Angeles basin, largely for their place in rock ’n’ roll history and lore. While gradually over the decades those places succumbed to the irresistible forces of gentrification, Topanga Canyon has clung to its wildness, its renegade spirit and the durable aura it retains of a one-time redoubt of bootleggers and drug runners. Bisected by a single winding mountain road, Topanga straddles the mountains and links the sprawling suburbs of the San Fernando Valley with the blue vastness of the ocean.

“One of the things we’re proudest of in Topanga is the strength of the community,” said Stefan Ashkenazy, a long time resident of the canyon. By some standards, Mr. Ashkenazy’s exclusive hotel complex, Elsewhere — built on 39 hilltop acres of what was once a vacation ranch for the Howard Johnson family — could be seen as a harbinger of gentrifying forces. That it is not owes to his efforts to keep the hotel’s vibe communitarian and local (he has offered free lodging to the area’s ad hoc firefighting teams that call themselves Heat Hawks), and its imprint light upon the land.

“Believe me, I know how lucky we are to have this holdout,” said Mr. Ashkenazy, who also owns the four-star Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood.

For Emmeline Summerton, a self-taught social historian whose Instagram account, Lost Canyons LA, has become an addictive source of Los Angeles history and lore, the story of Topanga Canyon is one of improbable survival — a thoroughly wild place less than an hour’s drive from the city’s business center.

“I’m not sure how much people outside Los Angeles know about it,” she said, referring both to the canyon itself — populated by coyotes, rattlesnakes, and mountain lions — as well as a community that has long worn its ornery countercultural reputation as a badge of pride.

“There is the local, small community and a very rural feeling,” Ms. Summerton said, one still largely under the influence of the first wave of New Age pioneers. There were free-love naturist hide-outs like Elysium Fields and Sandstone Retreat, she explained, along with Moonfire Ranch, a 60-acre sanctuary established in the late 1950s by Lewis Beach Marvin III, an animal-rights activist and heir to S & H Green Stamps, a once popular grocery store reward system.

“It was very much about people living off the grid, with solar and rainwater collection,” Ms. Summerton said, and about a tolerance for oddballs and eccentrics that hung on long after a succession of real estate booms permanently altered the character of other, less remote canyons. “A lot has changed and there’s a new breed of hippie-type people out there, influencers and wellness entrepreneurs, so, yes, it’s more exclusive and expensive than in the past,” she added. “But it’s still the one canyon where you get a sense of what it has always been.”

By this she meant a refuge for renegades and outsiders, for artists like Neil Young, who wrote his landmark solo album “After the Gold Rush” at his house there; for storied ’60s groups like Canned Heat, whose members once worked as the house band at the Topanga Corral club (which burned down not once but twice); for Linda Ronstadt in the days after she quit Stone Poneys, the folk rock trio, to go solo and make music with musicians who would later form the Eagles; for the American actor Will Geer to create an open air amphitheater set in a hillside and call it the Theatricum Botanicum, a name derived from a 17th century English botanical text.

To this day in Topanga Canyon there remains an itinerant community informally known as the “Creekers,” whose members live off the grid in encampments set along creeks in the hills behind the disused Topanga Ranch Motel; residents who ride horses to do their marketing at the Topanga Creek General Store; and naturists hiking canyon roads clad in little besides sun hats and sneakers.

This, of course, was before the wildfires.

Gone on the first day of the Palisades fire was the Reel Inn, a beloved Malibu fish joint opened in 1986 by Teddy and Andy Leonard at the base of Topanga Canyon. Also gone was Cholada, a bustling Thai restaurant whose takeout was both a staple of coastal dining and the source of catered meals for the art world honchos that regularly decamp to Los Angeles for the annual Frieze art fair. Gone, too, were the Topanga Ranch Motel, a bungalow style motel complex built in 1929 by William Randolph Hearst to house railroad workers, and the Malibu Feed Bin, a holdout from an era when this stretch of the California coast was still largely agrarian.

Entire hillsides and washes were reduced to ashes and, later that same afternoon so, too, was an entire stretch of multimillion dollar homes improbably perched oceanside where the canyons meet the water along Pacific Coast Highway.

“If you’re ever going to use the word surreal,” Mr. Melet said of the devastation, “it was surreal.”

What seemed almost miraculous, given the surrounding destruction, was that the fires failed to reach the Theatricum Botanicum, and left unscathed the Inn of the Seventh Ray, whose dining tables are set on stone terraces by a creek side and whose gift shop is filled with crystals and mystical arcana.

“So far Topanga has mainly been spared,” the actress Wendie Malick said by phone from her ranch set on a ridge above Topanga.

“The winds were in our favor,” she added. “Though we’re not out of the woods yet. Things can change on a dime.”

And, indeed, the cyclonic winds — biblical, raging, like nothing in memory — started up again on Monday.

“The fires didn’t get to us last week,” said Nick Fouquet, a French American designer whose Western-style hats are favored by celebrities including Tom Brady, Rihanna, J. Balvin and LeBron James. When the first alert came last week, Mr. Fouquet raced up the coast from his business’s headquarters in Venice to the geodesic dome in Topanga that he calls home and, aided by a band of locals pumped out his swimming pool to soak his house and its surroundings.

It was a scene being repeated throughout the canyon, Mr. Fouquet said, neighbors on a mission of “house triage,’’ putting out small burns before they could grow. Videos Mr. Fouquet sent this reporter from the early days of the fire showed crimson flames crowning a ridge less than a quarter-mile from his property line. “The wind, the firefighters, a myriad of factors have been on our side,” said Mr. Fouquet.

Among those factors were the triage efforts of a tight knit community that stayed put despite evacuation orders and that banded together — as it has consistently across the decades when the canyon was visited by the wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides and rockfalls that are a fact of life in a seismically unstable coastal desert perched at a continent’s edge.

“Topanga always felt like the ugly stepchild no one cares about,” Mr. Fouquet said, while acknowledging the role in his current reprieve of both firefighters and fate. “We’re used to doing things for ourselves.”

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Lifestyle

‘The Mask’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’ actor Peter Greene dies at 60

Published

7 hours ago

December 13, 2025

Press Room

‘The Mask’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’ actor Peter Greene dies at 60

Actor Peter Greene at a press conference in New York City in 2010.

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Actor Peter Greene, known for playing villains in movies including Pulp Fiction and The Mask, has died. Greene was found dead in his apartment in New York City on Friday, his manager and friend, Gregg Edwards, told NPR. The cause of death was not immediately provided. He was 60 years old.

The tall, angular character actor’s most famous bad guy roles were in slapstick and gritty comedies. He brought a hammy quality to his turn as Dorian Tyrell, Jim Carrey’s nemesis in the 1994 superhero movie The Mask, and, that same year, played a ruthless security guard with evil elan in the gangster movie Pulp Fiction.

“Peter was one of the most brilliant character actors on the planet,” Edwards said.

He went on to work steadily, earning dozens of credits in movies and on TV, such as the features Judgment Night, Blue Streak and Training Day, a 2001 episode of Law & Order, and, in 2023, an episode of The Continental, the John Wick prequel series.

At the time of his death, the actor was planning to co-narrate the in-progress documentary From the American People: The Withdrawal of USAID, alongside Jason Alexander and Kathleen Turner. “He was passionate about this project,” Edwards said.

Greene was also scheduled to begin shooting Mickey Rourke’s upcoming thriller Mascots next year.

Rourke posted a close-up portrait of Greene on his Instagram account Friday night accompanied by a prayer emoji, but no words. NPR has reached out to the actor’s representatives for further comment.

Peter Greene was born in New Jersey in 1965. He started pursuing acting in his 20s, and landed his first film role in Laws of Gravity alongside Edie Falco in 1992.

The actor battled drug addiction through much of his adult life. But according to Edwards, Greene had been sober for at least a couple of years.

Edwards added that Greene had a tendency to fall for conspiracy theories. “He had interesting opinions and we differed a lot on many things,” said Edwards. “But he was loyal to a fault and was like a brother to me.”

Lifestyle

How maths can help you wrap your presents better

Published

8 hours ago

December 13, 2025

Press Room

How maths can help you wrap your presents better

Acute solution

The method sometimes works for triangular prisms too. Measuring the height of the triangle at the end of the prism packaging, doubling it and adding it to the overall length of the box gives you the perfect length of paper to cut to cover its triangular ends with paper three times for a flawless finish.

To wrap a tube of sweets or another cylindrical gift with very little waste, measure the diameter (width) of the circular end and multiply it by Pi (3.14…) to find the amount of paper needed to encircle your gift with wrap. Then measure the length of the tube and add on the diameter of one circle to calculate the minimum length of paper needed. Doing this should mean the paper meets exactly at the centre of each circular end of the gift requiring one small piece of tape to secure it. But it’s best to allow a little extra paper to ensure the shape is completely covered or risk spoiling the surprise.

Circling back

If you have bought anyone a ball, then woe – spheres are arguably the hardest shape to wrap. It’s impossible to cover a ball smoothly using a piece of paper, not only because the properties of paper stop it from being infinitely bendable, but because of the hairy ball theorem, says Sophie Maclean, a maths communicator and PhD student at King’s College London. The theorem explains it is impossible to comb hair on a ball or sphere flat without creating at least one swirl or cowlick.

“If you think about putting wrapping paper round a ball, you’re not going to be able to get it smooth all the way round,” says Maclean. “There’s going to have to be a bump or gap at some point. Personally, I quite like being creative with wrapping and this is where I would embrace it. Tie a bow around it or twist the paper to get a Christmas cracker or a present that looks like a sweet.”

If paper efficiency is your goal when wrapping a football, you may want to experiment with a triangle of foil. An international team of scientists studied how Mozartkugel confectionery – spheres of delicious marzipan encased in praline and coated in dark chocolate – are wrapped efficiently in a small piece of foil. They observed that minimising the perimeter of the shape reduces waste, making a square superior to a rectangle of foil with the same area.

Lifestyle

It’s Christmastime —– and if you live in the Alps, watch out! Krampus is coming

Published

19 hours ago

December 13, 2025

Press Room

It’s Christmastime —– and if you live in the Alps, watch out! Krampus is coming

Krampuses take part in the annual Krampuslauf or “Krampus Run” on the evening of the Feast of St. Nicholas in the Austrian city of Salzburg. The tradition is centuries-old in the eastern parts of the European Alps.

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SALZBURG, Austria — As you approach Salzburg’s Max Aicher Stadium on the eve of the feast of St. Nicholas, you’d be forgiven if you thought that, from a distance, there appeared to be a Chewbacca convention underway. As you got closer, though, you’d realize the few hundred mostly men dressed in furry brown costumes were not from a galaxy, far, far away, but had instead assembled for a far more traditional, Earth-bound reason: to play, en masse, the alpine character of Krampus, the monstrous horned devilish figure who, according to custom in this part of Europe, accompanies St. Nicholas as he visits children and assesses their behavior from the past year. While St. Nick rewards the good boys and girls, his hairy, demonic sidekick punishes the bad children.

“It’s basically a good cop, bad cop arrangement,” says Alexander Hueter, self-proclaimed Überkrampus of Salzburg’s annual Krampus Run, an event when hundreds of Krampuses are let loose throughout the old town of Salzburg, where they terrorize children, adults, and anyone within the range of a swat from their birch branch switches they carry.

Members of Krampus clubs throughout Austria and the German state of Bavaria gather at a local soccer stadium to change into their Krampus costumes.

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When asked to explain why people in this part of Europe take part in this centuries-old tradition, Hueter skips the centuries of Roman, Pagan and early Christian history that, together, morphed into the legend of the Krampus figure and instead cuts straight to the chase: entertainment.

“If St. Nicholas comes to town on his own, it’s nice,” says Hueter with a polite smile, “but there’s no excitement. No tension. I mean, St. Nick is all well and good, but at the end of the day, people want to see something darker. They want to see Krampus.”

And if it’s Krampus they want, it’s Krampus they’ll get, says Roy Huber, who’s come across the border from the German state of Bavaria to take part in this year’s Krampus Run. “The rest of the year, I feel like a civilian,” Huber says with a serious face, “but when the winter comes, you have the feeling under your skin. You are ready to act like a Krampus.”

Huber stands dressed in a coffee-colored yak and goat hair costume holding his mask which has a scar along the left side of its face, two horns sticking out of the scalp, and a beautifully waxed mustache that makes his monstrous avatar look like a Krampus-like version of the 1970s Major League Baseball closer Rollie Fingers.

Roy Huber, from Bavaria, holds his Krampus mask prior to the Krampus Run. “When the winter comes, you get the feeling to be Krampus,” he says.

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Behind Huber stands a Krampus with a red face and several horns that make up a mohawk. Benny Sieger is the man behind this punk version of a Krampus, and he says children are especially scared of his get-up.

“Very scared,” he says, “but if I act like a sensitive Krampus, it can go well. In fact, our hometown Krampus club hosts an event called ‘Cuddle a Krampus’ to ensure that we are not so scary.”

Sieger, though, says he shows no mercy for young adults, especially young men, who he says “are basically asking to be hit” if they come to a Krampus run. He shows off a long switch made up of birch tree branches that smarts like a bee sting when hit with it.

Normally Nicklaus Bliemslieder would be one of those young adults asking for it at the Krampus run — he’s 19 years old — but his mother boasts of how her son gamed the system by playing a Krampus for 14 years straight since he was 5 years old.

“I was never scared of being a Krampus,” he says, “but I was scared of the Krampus. The first time I put the mask on, I wasn’t scared anymore.”

Blieslieder, Siger, Huber and dozens of other Krampuses pile onto a row of city buses that will take them to Salzburg’s old town, singing soccer songs on the way to rile themselves up. In the town center, they put their masks on, the bus doors swing open, and dozens of Krampuses empty into the streets of downtown Salzburg, lunging at shoppers, swatting them with switches, their cowbells a-clanging. At the front of the procession dressed in a white and gold robe is St. Nicholas, holding a staff, handing out candy with a serene smile, and blissfully oblivious of the cacophony of blood-curdling chaos behind him.

After a city bus drops off more than 200 Krampuses at the entrance to the old town of Salzburg, the Krampuses start to put their masks on and get into character.

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Salzburg resident Rene Watziker watches the Krampuses go by, his 4 1/2 year-old son Valentin perched on his shoulders, his head buried into the back of his father’s neck, and his oversized mittens covering his eyes in terror. As Valentin shakes in fear, his father tries to coax him out of it — unsuccessfully.

“He’s too scared of the Krampuses,” says Watziker, laughing. “This is great, though, because this is my childhood memory, too. I want him to have the same good memories of his childhood. He’s going to look at the video I’m shooting and then he’ll be very proud he came.”

Salzburg resident Rene Watziker watches the Krampuses go by, but his four-and-a-half year-old son Valentin perched is too scared to look at them.

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Further down the pedestrian street, Krampuses hit onlookers with handfuls of branches and smear tar on people’s faces. Onlooker Sabeine Gruber, here with her 13-year-old daughter, manages to crack a smile at the spectacle, but she says the Krampus Run has gotten tamer with time. She points to the stickers on the backs of these Krampuses exhibiting numbers in case you want to complain that a particular Krampus hit you too hard.

“When I was a child,” says Gruber, “this was far worse. You were beaten so hard that you woke up the next day with blue welts on your legs. These days the Krampus run is more like a petting zoo.”

Esme Nicholson contributed reporting.