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What did you have for breakfast on 3 October 1942? somebody yelled. . . . Whats on page 122 of DianeticsT . . . someone else asked. Miss Bianca opened her mouth but no words came out. . . . As people began getting up and walking out of the auditorium, one man noticed that Hubbard had momentarily turned his back on the girl and shouted, OK, what colour necktie is Mr Hubbard wearing? The worlds first clear screwed up her face in a frantic effort to remember, stared into the hostile blackness of the auditorium, then hung her head in misery. It was an awful moment.109

Despite this temporary setback, Hubbard went on to become filthy rich (and increasingly paranoid) from peddling his amalgam of black magic, psychotherapy and science fiction to gullible hippies in the 1960s. Five years after his death was announced to two thousand of his followers gathered in the Hollywood Palladium, Hubbards original Dianetics was enjoying a resurrection on bestseller lists - a discouraging reminder of sciences fate in local culture.

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L.A. needs the cleansing of a great disaster or founding of a barricaded commune . . . Peter Plagens, 1972 Los Angeles has almost no cultural tradition - particularly no modernist tradition - to overthrow. Peter Plagens, 1974n0

Living in Skid Row hotels, jamming in friends garages, and studying music theory between floors during his stint as a elevator operator at Bullocks Wilshire, Ornette Coleman was a cultural guerrilla in the Los Angeles of the 1950s. Apotheosized a generation later as the most influential single figure to emerge in African-American music since Charlie Parker, he spent the Eisenhower years as a lonely, messianic rebel: bearded, dressed in eccentric clothes, the complete antithesis of the clean-cut, Hollywood High School undershirt and tidy crew-cut image of the cool jazz musician.1 1 1 The revolution that Coleman, a Texan, and a small circle of Los Angeles-bred musicians (Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Red Mitchell, Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden) were trying to foment was free jazz112 - an almost cataclysmic

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