[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.16″ background_color=”#d9ae52″ use_background_color_gradient=”on” background_color_gradient_stops=”rgba(224,153,0,0.73) 0%|rgba(224,153,0,0.91) 100%” background_color_gradient_overlays_image=”on” background_color_gradient_start=”rgba(224,153,0,0.73)” background_color_gradient_end=”rgba(224,153,0,0.91)” background_image=”https:\/\/altadenaheritage.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/altatena-woods-bgrnd.jpg” background_position=”top_center” custom_padding=”39px||41px|||” transparent_background=”off” make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”on” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.16″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”on” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.16″ custom_padding=”|||” global_colors_info=”{}” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text admin_label=”Title Header” _builder_version=”4.27.0″ text_font=”Crimson Text||||” text_text_color=”#ffffff” text_font_size=”30″ header_font_size=”63px” background_layout=”dark” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid” global_colors_info=”{}”]The Legend of Jirayr Zorthian[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.18.0″ background_color=”rgba(255,255,255,0)” transparent_background=”on” make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”on” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_row column_structure=”3_4,1_4″ use_custom_gutter=”on” gutter_width=”2″ _builder_version=”4.16″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat” width=”91%” make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”on” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”3_4″ _builder_version=”4.16″ custom_padding=”|||” global_colors_info=”{}” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/altadenaheritage.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Zorthian.jpg” title_text=”Zorthian” show_in_lightbox=”on” show_bottom_space=”off” align=”center” _builder_version=”4.27.0″ _module_preset=”default” width=”100%” module_alignment=”center” custom_padding=”||11px||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n
Jirayr and wife Dabney displayed on the mantle in the Zor-house.<\/i><\/p>\n
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By Hans Allhoff<\/p>\n
We could all travel less and burrow into our own backyards more. Stay home, go deep, practice monogamy of place. Don\u2019t be that person who\u2019s just heard of the Zorthian Ranch. Be someone who\u2019s been.<\/p>\n
You can look down on the Ranch from high on Chaney Trail or Mount Lowe Road, and glimpse why a Star News writer called it a \u201ctrash-strewn hilltop.\u201d Not entirely unfair: Jirayr Zorthian could be accused of razing healthy orchards and amassing non-op cars, industrial waste, and construction debris\u2013in service to his art, of course.<\/p>\n
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But should that matter, if it didn\u2019t matter to the marvelous cast of characters the Ranch drew? L.A. bohemians, Andy Warhol, JPL intellectuals, art luminaries, Bob Dylan, John Lautner, the jazzman Charlie Parker, and most legendary, the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman.<\/p>\n
Zorthian was an Armenian who fled the genocide as a boy, and landed on some Altadena acreage in 1946 by way of Yale School of Art, Europe, FDR\u2019s WPA, and the United States Army. As a GI he worked in intelligence and painted his mural masterpiece The Phantasmagoria of Military Intelligence Training. The whereabouts of the 4 x 157 foot mural are unknown, but a since-covered wall at the Pentagon isn\u2019t out of the question. A digitized version spans the wall of an AirBnB on the Ranch.<\/p>\n
Today, the Ranch comprises 40 acres that\u2019s home to Jirayr\u2019s son Alan (a long-time AH board member), a number of docents, and experiments in the following: permaculture and agriculture, all kinds of art, animal husbandry, assemblage architecture, and living resourcefully. A modern economy and permit-policing state aren\u2019t kind to places like the Ranch. But admirably, if imperfectly, it endures \u2014 and the next generation, including Alan\u2019s daughters Caroline and Julia, are making their own wonderful imprints.<\/p>\n
Alan worked for years after his father\u2019s death in 2004, and still works, to clear away the accumulated detritus that has irked County health and other officials. That is its own artistic practice and challenge. Why scrap the old handpainted Zor Bus, or a classic car, if there\u2019s a chance it can be made to run?<\/p>\n
Visually, the Ranch remains funky \u2014 more reclusive Topanga, you might think, than beautiful Altadena. There is a pool with a view, but it won\u2019t make your vision board if you typically source from Dwell and Architecture Digest. The ascent is precarious, if you prefer your roads graded and your bridges sturdy, but you forget all that at the top. Welcome to what Zorthian himself called \u201cThe Center for Research and Development of Industrial Discards with Emphasis on Aesthetics.\u201d Alan jokes his dad always said he needed 40 more years to get the Ranch right. La Sagrada Familia de Altadena.<\/p>\n
The Ranch belongs here all the same, though, because it stands for the same thing Altadena stands for, namely, the primacy of place in our happiness and freedom. Counter-cultural, sure, but not antagonistically so. You can\u2019t just show up at the Ranch, but if something is happening\u2013and something usually is happening\u2013everyone is welcome.<\/p>\n
But back to the man. The wild man.<\/p>\n
\u201cJerry\u201d was Dionysian and unpretentious in his worldview, but a Yale man, millimeters removed from Skull and Bones. Knowing that Jerry and Richard Feynman were dear friends, trading lessons in physics and art for years, I like to imagine how a meeting between the artist and William F. Buckley, his fellow alumnus, would have gone. Would WFB have threatened to \u201csock him in the goddamn face,\u201d as he did Gore Vidal? This would have ended poorly: Jerry was 5\u20193 but a ferocious and decorated wrestler.<\/p>\n
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Zorthian was a witness not only to genocide but to the death of his own 18-month old son, whom he accidentally, tragically, backed over in his van. Yet he came out on the other side with a life oriented to experimentation and play. He often painted nudes and in later years famously hosted a birthday party every spring in which he, calling himself Zor-Bacchus, sat on a throne as nude women danced around him.<\/p>\n
He was a trained artist, but uninterested in the art world or the art business. He studied Michaelangelo and da Vinci while in Europe, and wanted to be broadly talented like them. It was always the Ranch, not any piece or portfolio of art, that was Jerry\u2019s lifeline and justification. <\/p>\n
Zorthian\u2019s art does hang at the Ranch, of course \u2014 a portrait of Miss October 1963 Christine Williams is in the Ranch\u2019s version of a gift shop (and photos of Zorthian painting it in Playboy\u2019s October 1963 issue). Across the room is a massive painting, The Divorcement, depicting the disintegration of his first marriage. That wife, Betty Williams, served him with papers upon his return from Syria attending to the death of his father. As Alan tells it, she\u2019d been in Pasadena, falling in with Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard, and Alistair Crowley. In the divorce, she got the kids and he the land. His second marriage, to his enduring muse Dabney (and Alan\u2019s mother), lasted until his death.<\/p>\n
The Feynman friendship left an artistic footprint, too. There is the Feynman Wall of Passion, a stone and brick wall inlaid with found objects that frames a small sanctuary. Across the way, a metal sculpture approximately the size of an RV represents the collision and harmony of their respective fields.<\/p>\n
But it feels like the art isn\u2019t the main point of the Ranch. It\u2019s the built environment\u2014almost all of it by the hands of Ranch-dwellers themselves. It is habitable, and that\u2019s just fine: it may even be what the Ranch sees as one of its defining virtues. If you\u2019re trying to serve up an alternative vision of how to live, and what to live for, construction details are decidedly not the point. It is telling that Jerry considered the Boy Scouts of his youth as formative to his design philosophy as Yale.<\/p>\n
About the jazzman\u2019s visit: \u201cCharlie Parker at Jirayr Zorthian\u2019s Ranch, July 14, 1952,\u201d is not easy listening. It exists because someone on the property happened to have a reel-to-reel tape recorder: the liner notes say \u201cthe sound quality is inevitably bad.\u201d But that is not an apology, because what you\u2019re listening to is less a concert than a night in time. The story of their meeting and the night is told in comic\u2013book form in Chasin\u2019 the Bird: A Charlie Parker Graphic Novel.<\/p>\n
The Ranch is pure Jerry. But emerging from it, rolling back down to Loma Alta, the poet Gary Snyder comes to mind: \u201cFind your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there.\u201d Alan told me that when his dad came to southern California, he first looked at La Jolla. Let\u2019s celebrate that this beautiful person found Altadena and dug in here instead.<\/p>\n
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