fwd: A visit to the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition
Tilman Hausherr
========
A visit to the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition
A visit to the Life Exhibition had long been on the "to do" list for one
lurker, an SP, and one curious querulous fellow. Three of us finally made our
pilgrimage last week, on the day that both the Reed Slakin story and the Tom
Cruise porno lawsuit broke, though there was no enturbulation inside the
building. The single male and one of us lovely ladies ("Clay" and "Rose;")
posed as out-of-towners who wanted to see all the sites on H'wd Blvd from the
Museum of Death (right across the street from LRH LE) to Ripley's Believe It
Or Not. The third visitor was poised as our friend in LA "Heather" who was
driving us around. Along with the fake names we'd devised full-scale bios,
and even dressed like tourists, but never really had to use our clever
covers, which was really sort of disappointing. One of the three is a known
SP. Guess OSA needs to post up photos of PTS and SPs in order to prevent such
infiltration. Do we smell an RPF coming on?
Blithely we walked into the Hollywood Guaranty Building and asked for a tour.
The building is a 1920s masterpiece of architecture and has been beautifully
restored. Seriously. Surprisingly and pleasantly, there was no fee involved
for the escorted tour through LRH's life and works, but there was a wait for
the tour to start and the ominous question "How long do you have?" (A billion
years?) The tour takes an hour and a half, so we guessed they ask you to
make sure you are committed to viewing the whole range of Ron's life and
accomplishments. Heather asked go the bathroom and was escorted to the second
floor by our tour guide, an attractive, slender blonde wearing a black
sweater, beige pants and very high heels. She asked Heather what she knew of
Scientology.
Heather relates: "I restrained myself from mentioning the obvious and mumbled
something about reading Dianetics years ago. The bathroom was anticlimactic.
I was hoping for hidden cameras but it was all very mundane." Note: Instead
of cameras, there may very well have OTs exteriorizing to observe if you
graffitied things like www.xenu.net on the walls or doodled little pictures
of clams and squirrels. Bouwhahahahaha!
Shortly after Heather's return the tour began. A Japanese woman who spoke no
English, most likely a very confused tourist, was also with our group. The
tour began with Ron's early life, including his adventures in mineralogy and
flight. We saw a case of Blackfoot Indian stuff that looked really fake and
Ron's Boy Scout badges and Eagle Scout proclamation. There was a photo of
"Old Tom" who was LRH's Blackfoot blood brother. The word "old" used as a
prefix for Ron's teachers would also appear later…
Then there was an exhibit of pulp magazines, which was actually pretty cool
because of the artwork on the covers. We would have liked to have lingered
there, taking in the fine pulp drawings, but alas such was not to be. The
tour would have been faster if it really horrible films had not interrupted
us at every turn. The first cinematic masterpiece (snort) was a black and
white version of how Ron worked on Hollywood serials in the late 1930s. We
checked LRH out on imdb.com when we got home and discovered his association
was tertiary, which nowadays would have at least gotten him in the Writers
Guild. What had us silently snickering and flaring our nostrils in glee was
the film's narrator remarking that Ron didn't feel fulfilled by Hollywood,
and so he left to further explore life's meaning. FLUNK!
Then we saw a dramatic reenactment of a scene from one of Ron's Mission Earth
novels. There were lots of flashing lights and colors and video imagery. We
couldn't help but notice that one of the wax figures bore an uncanny
resemblance to Ron. And again we politely suppressed giggles when the Ronbot
wax figure flapped its lips and the recorded voice blared, "We'll enslave
them with Turkish morphine and methadrine!" Mind bogglingly bad!
Then we passed through a gallery of oil paintings about Ron's early life.
These paintings were better than the ones in the 1978 edition of "What is
Scientology" (a gag Xmas gift to Heather from a friend). An Australian woman
painted these; frankly paint-by- numbers are better than this stuff. They
were pretty garish and amateurish, but as Heather says still better than the
ones in WiS. There was a direly bad portrait of Ron and Old Mayo, the Chinese
mentor of young Ron who taught him magic. Once again the word "old" came up,
and dare say it's a mite patronizing. And is Mayo even a Chinese name? We
think of it as a sandwich spread. Heather almost made a crack about David
Mayo - but restraint was the order of the day. Other works including
paintings of Ran hanging out with Tibetan monks and Mongolian bandits. There
was also a touching portrait of wounded Ron in the military hospital and
another of him in front of a military review board. "Ron had healed himself
from his war wounds, and the brass was so amazed that they took his finger
prints to make sure he was not an imposter, but really the same L. Ron
Hubbard." Wow.
Another room was set up like a bookstore and featured a glass case with an
original first edition of Dianetics and the actual typewriter that Ron used.
We were speechless. Lining the shelves of this "bookstore" were many
replicated copies of the first edition and some actual first editions of the
time period, including some fine lesbian pulp smut, which Rose wanted to add
to her collection of trashy paperbacks. All of these were sealed in shrink
wrap, which is a really bad idea because shrink wrap, living up to its name,
shrinks with age and will distort and destroy those books (and the pulp mags
which were also shrink wrapped). The curators should really have the books
and magazines in drop bags, little acid free plastic baggies with a fold over
top that can be sealed, which real book collectors use.
Upstairs we were shown two more films fraught with overwrought bad acting.
These were shown on multiple screens so that we were bombarded with different
images at all times. One film showed an evil psych yelling at his woman
patient that he's the one who should tell her what to feel, while another
showed a guy failing at his job. Then of course, everyone gets fixed by
Dianetics and other Scientology books and they all live happily ever after.
We also got to try an emeter. Our tour guide said it measured thought but we
already knew otherwise. Each of clutched the cans in turn and our guide
pinched our arms then asked us to recall the pinch. Rose had to really clinch
and think about eating raw snails to get a recall read, and clever Heather
dug her big toe into her shoe ala Zoe Woodcraft to get a nearly perfect
floating needle. Hehehe. We also got to view a collection of emeters
including various Hubbard models and some newer ones.
Then we were told about Hubbard Management Tech. Do you know Cartier,
Christian Dior, Chanel and other major corporations use his tech? Does
Cartier know? Does Dior? Chanel? And if so will Heather and Rose ever shop
there again? Only their gold cards know for sure! Our guide told us that her
sister works for a large cosmetics company in Germany and that when she went
to visit her sister, she was pleased to see that they were using the Hubbard
Management Tech. Tilman, oh Tilman! Time to get busy, you German super sleuth!
Back downstairs we were told about the Purif Rundown. Our girly guide told us
about how her sunburns come back (hello, niacin makes your skin flush) in the
exact shape of a flower shaped cut-out on her bathing suit when she was six;
and how her old red hair dye leached out; and that she felt novocaine from
past dental work. Yeah right. It was really laughable, and sorta sad. Heather
almost asked about the Vistaril in Ron, and Rose had her "tell me about the
space cooties, Ronnie pleeease" look -- but again, it was all about restraint.
The worst film was the one about drugs, totally over the top. We were warned
we might not be able to take the graphic nature of the film, which involved
an actual person shooting up! Our Japanese fellow tour taker left before the
film started, clearly bored out of her skull. This masterpiece was all about
the evils of drugs and how Narconon can solve it all. There was footage of
the very perky Anne Archer and Kirsty Alley, along with shots of TRs and
people using dictionaries and testimonials from clients. The overwhelming
sense we got from the real people talking on-screen about their experiences
at Narconon is that the treatment program leads to mullets -- that really bad
haircut also known as the "ape drape," "Camaro," "hockey head," "Billy Ray
Cyrus," or "Braveheart." You know -- business in the front, party in the
back; the bi-level. The mullet. Truly one of the scariest moments in the
whole exhibition was the filmic parade of the mullet men clams.
For Heather, the biggest irony of all was the section on the study tech. She
had just
recently listened to the story of the Woodcraft sisters at www.lisatrust.net.
It was strange to see our guide touting the benefits of Hubbard's study tech
when we knew that children in the Sea Org were bereft of a proper education.
The tour wound down with a panorama of The Way to Happiness and ended in
front of a curtained wall-yes we all did think Wizard of Oz "the man behind
the curtain." The blue drapes opened to reveal a wall of awards and
proclamations, which opened to reveal yet another and another until finally
we did see the man behind the curtain, a big portrait of Ron. And lest we
forget, throughout the tour except during the filmed portion of our
entertainment experience, there was piped-in music, which no doubt was Ron's.
And it was really bad!
For Heather, ultimately it was a let down. She felt the exhibit was cheesy,
but not cheesy enough to make it truly enjoyable and that in short, it was
very mediocre. Rose liked it because it was just so darn bad, like
Disneyland's Talking Tiki Hut, and she would go again if only for the
eye-rolling,
whoa-can-you-believe-this-and-to-think-that-people-pay-big-bucks-to-believe-it
factor. Clay, a total guy, was most concerned about what a nice girl like our
guide was doing in a cult like Scientology…
--
Tilman Hausherr [KoX, SP5.55] Entheta * Enturbulation * Entertainment
til...@berlin.snafu.de http://www.xenu.de
Resistance is futile. You will be enturbulated. Xenu always prevails.
Find broken links on your web site: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
The Xenu bookstore: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/bookstore.html
Mark Bunker
I took this tour back in '98 while I was still Dr. Benjamin Wog and the
MintonCam had not yet been patented. It is every bit as breathtakingly
delightful as this report suggests.
I had my own private tour of the Exhibition which happens to be one block
away from the public library. I noticed it after I had just dropped off
"Bare Faced Messiah" at the library and since I had the afternoon off, I
popped inside the museum.
They were very happy to see me and wanted very much to give me the tour. I
was parked in a one hour zone and the tour took and hour and a half so I
told them I was unsure if I would be able to take it. They offered to feed
money into my parking meter for me but I didn't want to point out my car so
I told them I would move the car to "the shade"...which turned out to be
several blocks away so perhaps they wouldn't notice my license.
The tour was supposed to start I think 45 minutes later but they didn't want
me to leave so they brought down a German woman in her 50's and she gave me
my own tour starting immediately. Half way through a young woman joined us
and later two young black girls came along. They ultimately let it be known
that they thought it was all crap and left.
My favorite moments were the life size audio-animatronics figures enacting a
scene from the book "Mission Earth." And the huge exploding volcano
sculpture that erupts before the showing of the Dianetics film. Later I
asked why the volcano, and they told me they just wanted to get my
attention.
After the tour, the woman who joined in late had a soda with me across the
street and I filled her in on the real history of Hubbard. I only wish I
could go back and take the tour again.
"Tilman Hausherr" <til...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote in message
news:jh4dhtcoa0upmp22c...@4ax.com...
> prefix for Ron's teachers would also appear later.
> guide was doing in a cult like Scientology.
Jeffrey L. Bell
Tilman Hausherr <til...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
>...
>. There was a direly bad portrait of Ron and Old Mayo, the Chinese
>mentor of young Ron who taught him magic. Once again the word "old" came up,
Perhaps it was supposed to be David Mayo, the guy who really wrote a
lot of the texts, but I thought he was now an unmentionable.
-Jeff Bell
Chris Leithiser
always one for stereotypical names.
Boudewijn van Ingen
I think some dedicated clam was given the task to word-clear this
presentation. And when it came upon the word "Mao" it was unable to
find that word in Hubbard's dictionary. Near desperate, the clam
turned to policy letters. And so it was that the clueless clam found
the nearest match in a declare of David Mayo...
Of course, the original writer of the text indeed intended to suggest
that Hubbard actually spoke to Mao Zedong. But by then, he had been
moved on to another "hat", to preclude him from finding out or tell
about the abundent lies.
Just speculating... ;-)
Groeten,
Boudewijn.
John
"Chris Leithiser" <clei...@bc.cc.ca.us> wrote in message
news:3B16D765...@bc.cc.ca.us...
Maybe Mr. Hubbard was just eating some old mayonaise? That'd
give me some weird dreams I'm sure.
roger gonnet
Boudewijn van Ingen <bo...@xs4all.nl> a écrit dans le message :
3b190385...@news.xs4all.nl...
Hubbard could not have spoken to Mao, who was then a worker in Renault
industries - Boulogne Billancourt. Then, he became a communist, the sort of
people the Hubbard was denouncing to the "FBI"... in the fifties.
roger