CityMock: The L.A. Cacophony Society’s merry gang...

CityMock: The L.A. Cacophony Society’s merry gang of pranksters are planning a descent on Universal’s squeaky-clean CityWalk mall while sporting the Ground Zero look. “You know it from cartoons--clothing charred and tattered, face blackened and hair blasted back,” says the group’s leader, who calls himself the Rev. Al.

The members have chosen that fashion style because they see L.A. as “a city teetering on the edge of self-destruction,” while CityWalk offers an idealized version of L.A. sights (no poverty, panhandlers, carjackers, etc.).

The Rev. Al’s troops plan to reconnoiter at noon a week from Saturday at a West Hollywood park, where they will “barbecue some hot dogs and our garments. . . .”

This promises to be one of the most ambitious projects of the La Cienega-area Cacophony Society, which has also held Laundromat poetry readings, picnics on earthquake faults and field trips to companies that practice cryonics.

The society describes itself as a network of “pranksters, poets, artists, undisciplined children, wise fools, and wise asses, the bug under the rug, the termites in society’s crutches, the bad egg at the corporate picnic. . . .”

Its chilling slogan: “You may already be a member.”

That’s OK--we won’t tell.

Ticket to write: The zealousness of parking officers in one beach city has given rise to the bumper sticker: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Park in Hermosa Beach.”

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List of the Day: The L.A. River Artists and Business Assn. was recently formed to upgrade the downtown neighborhood along the fabled concrete waterway. Its newsletter, which is soliciting names for the area, notes that through the years the corridor has been referred to as:

--The Loft District (by area owners of vacant old buildings)

--Downtown Back Lot (by the L.A. Film Commission)

--The Underbelly of L.A. (L.A. Times story)

--L.A. 90012, 90013, 90021 (by the U.S. Postal Service)

--L.A. War Zone (during the riots)

--Page 44, E-1 through E-6 (Thomas Street Guide)

--Yang-Na (by the original Indian inhabitants)

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Retake at the O.K. Corral: Before dying in L.A. in 1929, Wyatt Earp served as a technical adviser on a couple of early Hollywood Westerns. Now, Wyatt Earp, a distant cousin, will make his debut in “Tombstone,” a movie about his ancestor’s famous gunfight. To get a role in the movie, though, young Wyatt had to join up with the bad guys. He’ll portray Billy Claiborne, who breathed his last at the O.K. and, thus, never did get to Hollywood.

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Buddy, can you spare a cauliflower?Willard Norgren and a friend had emerged from a Hollywood eatery with a couple of hamburgers when they came upon a man with a sign that said “Homeless and Hungry.” They offered him a hamburger. “The man said, ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ ” Norgren said. “He acted as though he was kind of insulted.”

miscelLAny:

A section of Southern California was once part of a rancho called Buenos Aires. The name translates, of course, as good air.