You wouldn’t expect a tour guide to...

You wouldn’t expect a tour guide to wear tattered jeans and sport a somber expression framed by long hair and an even longer beard. Except, perhaps, in free-form Venice, where ex-hippie Joe Sigler fits in perfectly.

His business card is a matchbook from the nearby Sidewalk Cafe on Ocean Front Walk. He waits there each day for passers-by to stop at his display--”Joe’s Venice Walking Tours.”

A resident for 33 years, the affable Joe needs no script. He’ll set out in any direction, tailoring his one-hour commentary to the customer. He can lecture on the murals, such as Rip Cronk’s “Venice Reconstituted,” which depicts several characters (including Joe). Or the one-time haunts of the celebrities, like Charlie Chaplin’s penthouse in the Waldorf Hotel. Or Venice’s hideaways, such as the tunnels used by rum runners during Prohibition.

Joe, age 48, doesn’t sugar-coat his lecture. Take the story of why he abandoned his old job as a one-man motorcycle errand service. Someone stole his motorcycle.

Just when it looked as though L.A. was joining the Cultural Big Leagues, with the Getty Museum purchase of Van Gogh’s “Irises,” the town’s other Van Gogh is covered over.

It’s “Starry Night,” as rendered by Scott Dosch on a mural near Joe’s station off Ocean Front Walk. A Bob Dylan mural was recently slapped over it.

Dylan isn’t exactly a sensation these days. Then, again, a whole block of shops in that area seem to have experienced some sort of LSD flashback.

Storefronts bear ‘60s bumper stickers with such utterances as “Goldwater for Halloween,” newspaper clippings of old anti-police demonstrations, and posters of long-dead heroes, like comic Lennie Bruce. There’s even an incense-filled “head” shop.

What’s going on?

It turns out that the Dylan mural and all the rest are props for a coming movie about Jim Morrison.

Once the filming’s done, the temporary unreality will give way to the true unreality.

You mean they didn’t already have a rule?:

The South Coast Air Quality Management District wins our award for most disturbing local press release of the day (week/month/year) with this little bombshell:

“Air quality officials today committed to developing a rule to phase out by 1995 the use of a deadly gas at five major industrial facilities in L.A. County that could engulf thousands of people in a toxic cloud in the event of a major leak.”

Al Hix of Hollywood wonders if L.A. has the only dress code for taxi drivers that found it necessary to state that skirts would be restricted to female cabbies.

MiscelLAny:

Why would anyone call a chili dog stand Pink’s? It’s a question heard more than a few times through the years by the founders of the half-century-old Hollywood eatery, Paul and Betty Pink.