I was asked to post this :) ======== 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
tilman@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

Go Back