Tuning Out, Naturally

Social Climes ran into ‘60s icon-turned-cosmopolitan-gadfly Timothy Leary at a party celebrating the L.A. Reader’s 15th anniversary at the Mayan.

Trip meister Leary, the evening’s keynote speaker, is never at a loss for a repeatable quote.

We found this one particularly amusing:

“Just a couple of years ago,” he said, “I discovered a great new way to get high and keep me in a fog for hours. It’s called senility .”

Valentine Video

Honest, this is the last Valentine’s Day-themed item: We called a few video stores to see what L.A. romantics are reserving to watch with their love muffins tonight.

Would it be the old standby “Casablanca”? Or would they try something more original, like “The War of the Roses”?

What we found was . . . no one plans ahead. By midweek, none of the places we contacted (Vidiots, Tower Video, Blockbuster, Rocket Video) had gotten requests for Valentine’s Day.

But we did receive this depressing news from one video store clerk: “All I see are people breaking up and asking to take the other person off their account.”

Sound Bites of the Week

We overheard a Beverly Hills woman outlining the finer points of her superior shopping skills. “My biorhythms,” she said, “are attuned to the final markdown.”

And we liked this politically correct phrase an industry type in the audience used to describe John Sayles’ arty film, “Passion Fish”: “It’s commercially challenged.”