
Irwin Held, who owned the controversial beer-and-burger dive Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Boulevard from 1970 to 1999, died Monday from a kidney ailment at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87. The restaurant opened in 1927 and in its early heyday serviced the likes of Lana Turner and Clark Gable and, in later years, Janis Joplin (said to have eaten her last meal there) and Jim Morrison were frequenters. It was also memorialized as a full-scale museum installation by artist Ed Kienholz. When Held took over the ownership, he inherited a sign over the bar that read “Fagots Stay Out,” a warning posted by the Beanery’s previous owner, John “Barney” Anthony, who had put it up after police in the 1940s raided his restrooms for then-illegal homosexual activity. Urged to remove the sign, Held held out, despite prolonged picketing and other protests by the LGBT community and others. ”He was just one of those guys who didn’t like being told what to do with his business,” said the Beanery’s current co-owner, David Houston. “He was very old-school, and this was a freedom issue.” (Held allowed smoking at the Beanery even after smoking was banned in bars.) When West Hollywood incorporated in November, 1984, an anti-discrimination ordinance was passed and, facing a fine of $500 a day, Held reluctantly removed the sign two months later, and stopped handing out matchbooks with the hateful Fagots Stay Out slogan.”For the first time in my life, I know how MacArthur must have felt at Corregidor,” he told the Los Angeles Times, referring to General Douglas MacArthur’s 1942 retreat from Japanese troops in the Philippines. (via latimes)






Ray Harryhausen, the longtime master of stop-motion animation in the movies, died today at London’s Hammersmith Hospital, where he had been receiving treatment for about a week. He was 92. The cause of his death was not immediately known, but his passing was “gentle and quiet,” said his biographer and friend Tony Dalton. Harryhausen, the great-grandson of African explorer David Livingstone, is the wizard behind the amazing and exciting effects in 1955′s It Came from Beneath the Sea, 1963′s Jason and the Argonauts (
