Venice is a microcosm of everything that is SoCal: burned-out hippies, healers, fortune tellers, bodybuilders, artists, poets, preachers, scam artists, fitness freaks, an animal freak show, a roller skating-rocker skate and wander where 'weed' clinics thrive amid ogling tourists. Along the way scents of incense and grass mingle in the air.

Mere blocks away, some of southern California's most colorful and expensive homes with their well tended gardens reflect on scenic canals in landscapes seemingly from another world. Here every style from Spanish Mission, English Tudor, French Provincial, Italian Venetian, to every stage of modern from mid-century to 2011 Architectural Digest contemporary is crammed side-by-side in that hap-hazard L.A. style. But somehow, here in fantasyland, it all works.

Mild to wild...VENICE is VIVID!

© Bart Aldrich 2011. Images may not be downloaded, copied, altered, linked to or reproduced without written permission.