The sun sets over Sunset Boulevard; the palm trees silhouette. In the front garden of a big house off the main drag, the puppet show begins.
The sun sets over Sunset Boulevard; the palm trees silhouette. In the front garden of a big house off the main drag, the puppet show begins.
••
This independent podcast is made with listener support. If you like to become a patron, head to patreon.com/thewind and set up a monthly donation.
A huge thank you to all of the residents of Ag Lago for speaking with me and for hosting me over the years. Reve, Jeremy, Vita, Josh, Donnie, Storai, Theo, Arden, Sarah and Eleanor. Also a big thanks to Emily, Spoorthi, Greyson, and all the folks that were part of the puppet show and the countless folks that were part of the Ag Lago community.
Music in this episode was Timex by pas Doo, thanks to Pat Mesiti-Miller for letting me use it, Deville by friend of the show Yclept Insan and 2 songs from the public domain, Auld Lang Syne performed by the Princes Band and this song Marionette by Felix Arndt.
The chapter markers were read by the great Cal Bannerman of the podcast Stories from The Hearth. Highly recommended.
Photos, links and more at www.thewind.org/episodes/aglago
The Eviction Puppet Show of Silver Lake, Los Angeles Transcript
—
This is The Wind, a podcast from a handmade desk in the mountains. Before we get started, some disclaimers on this episode. This story takes place at a house where I spent a lot of time the last handful of years. All of the voices you'll hear are friends of mine and people that I've collaborated with on projects, including my partner who plays a role in this piece.
These interviews were recorded at home among friends in their bedrooms and favorite chairs. So I believe the edges to be flush, but some screws may be looser than others.
This is the story as I saw it and as the roommates told it to me. And with that, this episode is called
The Eviction Puppet Show of Silver Lake, Los Angeles.
The Wind with Fil Corbitt.
Act 1: Ag Lago
The sun sets on Sunset Boulevard; the palm trees silhouette. It's a summer evening in Los Angeles and there's a big house just off the main drag that would be in silhouette too. Instead its face is lit by string lights and by the wrapped attention of about 20 people gathered around the front window.
It's a bay window, no screens, and the panes are open. Chunks of its wooden frame or rotted out hanging against the stucco, which was painted a sort of reddish vermilion brown at some point in the last 120 years. Then offset in the haphazard front cactus garden, a violin and accordion kickoff the show
they play as the 20 or so artists and weirdos and bicyclists nod along, waiting for the puppets to appear. The narrator steps forward to set the scene.
[Look, our housemates are just waking up.]
This puppet show takes place at a community house in the neighborhood of Silver Lake, about 15 miles inland from the coast, where the 10 puppet roommates appear in the bay window as socks. Some of their human counterparts stand in the garden and laugh as their floppy-mouthed roommates dispense inside jokes, songs, and the kind of soft ribbing that is best told by puppets of your roommates instead of your roommates themselves.
At the end of the first musical number, the puppets have demonstrated their wacky way of life in their lovely group home when suddenly, their sock mouths open wide in panic.
(!!!)
On the stucco wall behind the accordion the crowd’s attention is directed to a piece of paper taped to the house. It says…
"YOU ARE BEING EVICTED!!!
Move out immediately so we can demolish your puny home to make way for our mighty real estate empire…OR ELSE!!”
But the thing about this puppet show eviction notice is that it’s a cartoonish embellishment of the real life notice that was posted by the front gate of this very same community house just months prior. This big, 10 bedroom home with 10 non-puppet tenants, is facing a very real non-puppet eviction.
[COLLAGE]
Okay, here we go. What is the name of this house?
The name of the house is Ag lago
Ag lago
Ag lago.
And it's in Silver Lake on Sunset Ju nction.
Sometimes I call it a punk house. Sometimes I just, I call it a collective house. Um, but. It's, it's my home.
Ag lago is a house full of people.
I would say it's a community house.
We live together sort of cooperatively.
It used to be a boarding house, that housed traveling salesman as far as I know
like an artists space where a lot of people live.
I feel like I need to tell you that we don't share our income or anything like that because of our legal stuff.
I think there's the number of reasons why it works and I have lived in a lot of collective living situations and um, many that didn't work at all.
Almost a prerequisite to living here is having kind of an sort of advanced sense of community, just kind of understanding how it works and what it means to share space like this.
And I think that it's kind of like separate together sort of energy. So like we all come together for things when we. Want to and have to, to solve a problem or share things with each other and when we don't want to, there's like a really clear division of, of personal space
because if you're not used to sharing space like this, it, it could be difficult for you or you might butt heads at certain point when you live with a few people.
It can be really intense to have a conflict when it's like one or two other people, but you know, 10 people and it's kind of really like it diffuses things a little bit and it's like, oh yeah, if there's one person outta 10 that you don’t like you're almost never really just alone with them. There's certain things that actually get easier with a higher number of people.
One of the things that kind of tortures me and I find really funny is the amount of group indecision. If someone like makes a curry and then a couple of people eat it, but then it doesn't get finished, it's kind of a group decision that it doesn't belong to anyone, so it just gets stuck there kind of for a week.
I remember the first time I came into the kitchen when it wasn't a party and I sat down and one of my now roommates was making steak just for people and offered me some steak and I sat down at our kitchen table and enjoyed some food.
I'm just cutting cassava right now and it's like so dense and it's like a root vegetable and it's my first time cutting it. I'm just like, I could be a socially nervous person, especially when there's so many people, but then all of a sudden I was like eating again and there's like so many people around me, which was so good too because I was like alone for a long time too.
When I come home here, I feel a sense of, you know, I'm home. I'm happy to see my friends and my housemates.
I would describe it as, um…textured.
DIY kind of vibes, a little, uh, kind of punk. I don't know.
We have a, a projector frame painted on the wall, murals around us because of the layout of the house it's pretty disorienting if you haven't been in here before.
The house kind of almost feels, somehow it feels non-Euclidean. It feels like larger than, than your mind can wrap around and you're like, did I go up? Why are there two staircases? and you like wrap around trying to look for your friends.
It's just kind of a mishmash of, of different art things.
Things go up on the property, but they don't often come down. So there's like literally decades of stories and projects and abandoned projects and ideas and evolutions that have just kind of built up over the years.
The basement is full of things that, of people who don't live here anymore, who lived here years ago. But besides that, there's a lot of like just things built into the house that were from people past, from cultures past.
I started coming here almost 20 years ago, in the fall of 2004.
Well, I was like a teenager, so I was very just like wide-eyed, bushy tailed about everything, and like, everything was just so cool to me. I was like, wow, what is this place? I think it was the first time like seeing like a punk house for me.
I didn't move in until 2008, so. Uh, by the time I moved in, it had a name, but when I first started coming here it didn't have a name yet, but, but that was pretty, pretty quick. It's pretty soon it got a name.
Ag Lago • Ag Lago • Ag Lago •
[End COLLAGE]
Ag Lago makes their rent checks out to Ju nction Gate way LLC., a subsidiary of Fr ost /chadd ock Developers, whose website says they own and manage over 500 units valued at $150 Million. They did not respond to a request for comment on this story. The company owns a few properties in this neighborhood and they bought this house in 2008.
[COLLAGE]
I mean, it was clearly gentrifying back then.
It's getting very bougie.
The stores are changing constantly over here. Now there's like a Shake Shack and there was a pudding store for a minute, and there are now four ice cream shops. It's kind of oversaturated with tourist shopping experience sort of things.
The landlord just hasn't raised the rent, which is super unusual because our house is renting for well below market rate. Um, in LA and in the neighborhood that we're in.
We had a pretty good landlord in the beginning, um, but he died. We had a property manager, this guy Elmer. He was wonderful. He would show up every month and collect the rent, check and ask if we needed anything. And if we needed anything he would show up and do the repairs himself, then yeah, this new company bought it in, I wanna say like 2009 or so.
They were completely absentee.
Elmer got laid off and they never, you know, they had us deliver the checks to them
basically anytime we contact them for any reason there was the risk that they would remember that we existed and kick us out.
The mainline has always been a problem. We've had, we've had sewage in the basement and in the bathtub and in the, you know, coming out.
Basically, it leaks.
Yeah. The, the plumbing backing up has always been, uh, a big downside to our existence here.
Usually there would only be a plumbing backup. About twice a year, but it was starting to happen about once every two to three months.
Yeah. The mainline has been cracked forever.
They won't address like the root of the issue, but they'll bandaid it. Basically over and over.
We had a plumber come out and look at it and he said, part of your main line is missing. I'm like, what do you mean? He said, it's just gone. That's just a hole into the earth in which there used to be a pipe.
There used to be an El Pollo Loco across the street. People were saying to like, use the bathroom at El Pollo Loco.
Sewage is just slowly seeping out into the soil and also creating a sinkhole in our driveway that's steadily getting bigger.
I remember actually at one point they, they paved over the thing and they filled it in, and then they, and then it got, then it got biggie again.
Um, you kind of have to navigate your vehicle around it to get to the parking behind it.
It's like, you know, small child could lay in there
and we were kind of worried that, you know, it might just open up and the house would fall into a big hole. But luckily that hasn't happened yet.
We were in conversation with the, with the landlord about getting our plumbing fixed. And so the last we had heard somebody was supposed to be out that week to fix our plumbing, and then the next day there was a demolition notice on the house.
[End COLLAGE]
Act 2: I have a plan!
After the puppets see the eviction papers plastered to the outside of the house, they retreat inside. The accordion and violin lead a procession up the porch, through the front door and into the living room. The walls are painted like a psychedelic art-deco movie theater. The audience pulls up chairs, drapes over the big couches and makes room by sitting crosslegged on the red tile floor below a folding table. On top of the table is a partial model of the house.
As the show goes on, the puppets shed their sock forms, and instead become intricate shadow puppets, each roommate identifiable by outline alone.
In the model house, in the little replica of the living room we’re in, the puppet roommates begin to hatch a response to the landlords. They decide they will buy the building, but first they need to raise 15 million dollars.
Each puppet roommate will employ their unique skills to do their part.
The band kicks into a song.
The refrain goes “I have a plan / to save the house / I’ll make it rain / just hear me out.”
Two roommates start a grilled cheese company, who press custom messages into the bread, and deliver them by bicycle. Other roommates attempt to become trampoline tiktok influencers before heading to Eurovision as the first American entrants. Another roommate schemes a puppet bank robbery. And one of the roommates plans to expand their sex-toy company by inventing a self-replicating silicone. With self-replicating silicone, you can make unlimited sex toys with no overhead.
(Music: Timex by pAS dOO)
Many of the puppet schemes correspond to the real life skills of the their human counterparts. One roommate does make sex toys. There’s also a wood worker, a computer programer, a bicycle mechanic, a video editor, a screen printer, a puppeteer, a jeweler, musicians, artists… a bevy of creative occupations that don’t exactly offer LA home-buying type salaries.
But you know, what does?
Friends of the house tell them that they should have been notified of an eviction before a demolition notice was posted. They also say it’s illegal to evict as retaliation for repair requests, which is what they believe spurred it.
And in Los Angeles, under the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, the landlords legally have to pay relocation assistance for a no-fault eviction from certain types of housing. But the stack of documents only offered the payout for 1 tenant, not 10, claiming that the house was not a boarding house, but a single family home.
And to complicate things even more, some of the tenants say they qualify as low-income and one is legally disabled, which means those tenants are owed around double the regular buyout.
So, the roommates figure they might have a case. And they decide to fight the eviction.
[Collage]
We were trying to get legal representation
When we decided we're going to stay and fight this eviction because we believed that we were being wrongfully evicted one of the things that I did was I started the GoFundMe for our legal expenses.
“Save the Food Not Bombs House. Hi. We're the 10 residents of Alago, a community house in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Our home has been providing affordable housing to residents for over 15 years. We host Food not Bombs…:”
Food Not Bombs is a mutual aid group that it's an autonomous group so anyone can start a Food Not Bombs chapter.
We were cooked at a different house and uh, they had to leave and a friend of mine had moved into here and we asked if we could cook here, and they said, sure. So we started cooking and I started hanging out.
It happens every Sunday, so it's kind of like something that. You go to when you're like, oh, I just wanna hang out and like cook something and take it to people who want to eat and is hungry
And we cook a big meal and then just share it in downtown, yeah. At Skid Row.
And another thing about it that I really liked was, um, I used to sit in Pershing Square a lot which is downtown. And I was unhoused for a long time. And then, the first day I did food not bombs and I cooked here, we went to Pershing Square to sit serve.
but the cooking has been happening for the LA chapter at Ag lago for like 20 years.
I mean, ag lago is part of a larger like kind of network of other houses that all kind of like hang out together
and there's like another house that's like the party and drug house, another house that's like all the set builders live there. And then as like the clown house, though it's not officially the clown house anymore. I think the clowns all moved out.
Ag lago parties are my favorite parties, and part of that's because I live here and I get to party at my house.
I can confidently say if Ag Lago was was having a party…Other places in town, maybe like… shouldn't.
We always have a really weird theme and I feel like over the years the themes have just been getting more and more ridiculous.
It's really fun, like the whole space transforms.
Actually, we had a one party theme that was like Ag lago greatest hits. So like, it just had like a bunch of party themes on the flyer that we've had in the past.
There'll be like a dance floor in the living room and a a fire camp out in the backyard and then like people hanging out in like somebody's room upstairs.
They start late, they go late.
Some early themes, winter formal. Pretty basic theme. You want me to read all of them?
Sure
Future disco, bikini beach party from outer space. Librarians versus barbarians. Anything but clothes Ag lago first Halloween party. Woodland Creatures. Ag lago second Halloween party of 2014. Ag Lago’s Third Halloween party of 2014: Alien Beach Party. The fashion of the christ. God versus science fair. That was one of my favorites. I came as a neuron.
A lot of the parties are actually really blurry for me. Ummm. Let's see…
Viva Log Vegas.
Our Vegas party was a lot of fun. Yeah, maybe I'm just partial to that one because I liked my costume a lot. I was a giant bag of cocaine.
My birthday. It was nobody's birthday, but the theme was my birthday. And so we just had like a classic birthday party.
There was a birthday party here and it was posted on a message board and a lot of people we didn't know came. And at some point the cops showed up for a noise complaint, which they do sometimes, you know? And we just say, okay, thank you. We'll turn it down. And then. Uh, but somebody felt like they needed to spit on a cop that night, and then the cop arrested that person. Then that person's friend got arrested and the cops were called for backup and whole helicopter scenario… helicopter was hovering and there was like cops in riot gears walking down the driveway. But yeah, you know, usually our parties are pretty tamed compared to that.
Our house, it usually is really well known for it's New Year's parties.
There was one year where we had no New Year's Party and a person or two still showed up because they just expected an Ag Lago New Year's Eve to happen.
It's the place to be on New Year's, but during Covid obviously we couldn't do that, but there's 10 of us here. So, we all had our own little party together. So what we did this time, it was just kind of cycle through each different room that was themed differently and we just had a really fun time together.
The fall of the holy ramen empire
Can you explain what the theme, what that one was?
Um, well, I, I, that one was just like Holy Roman Empire, but Ramen. It's in the name. I dunno what else you want me to say.
For a long time the theme of the parties was Ag lago's last party. Um, this kind of how tumultuous things have been for the last 20 years with the landlords who plan on developing the property
[End COLLAGE]
Goal: $10,000. Results, 163 donations amount raised, $10,349.
Fundraiser successful.
Act 3: The gold buried in the basement
Back in puppet show the roommates work on their schemes to raise 15 million dollars to buy the house. One housemate’s plan is to unearth the storied gold that’s buried in the basement underneath a dead former roommate.
The audience follows the puppeteers down into the tight, dark basement. At the bottom of the stairs, everyone stands stooped, between an old home organ and boxes and bags of belongings from roommates past. 20 years of detritus is stacked in front of a 3D printer which prints the molds for sex toys, and occasionally provides heat for a neighborhood possum who has created a home back there.
But when the puppets dig up the long dead mummified roommate, his secret gold is gone.
(LA!!!)
[COLLAGE]
To me, it seems like they knew that this building was an RSO and part of their strategy for dealing with this building and the tenants in it was to never acknowledge the fact that it was under the rent stabilization ordinance. Like that was part of their strategy.
Our house for years was registered as a boarding house, and so we assumed that we would be protected under the RSO 'cause that protects multi-family residences. And we learned that they pulled a sneaky trick on our last lease and snuck the language single family in there. So it kind of roped us out of a lot of our rights to be evicted individually and receive separate payouts to leave.
Like I kind of became the Charlie Day in that one, you know, episode of Always Sunny, where I just had all this paperwork and I was trying to trace everything.
That's kind of where the first initial investigation was, which is are we protected under the rent stabilization ordinance or not? And if they somehow stripped us of that protection, can we prove that they did that?
There were some heroes at Ag Lago doing like the detective work and the, and the research and finding information.
We dug through pieces of microfiche dating back to 1974. And then we brought 'em all to the enlarger and we were looking at 'em and we, in looking through the microfiche, we found use code designations for the house dating back to 1974 as, uh, the use code was 008. And then in I think it was like 2021 or 2022 I'm forgetting exactly when right now, but then we saw the change from to 0 0 1, and we're like, okay, what is, what is that? And so we looked it up and use code 008 is a boarding house. And so like in the library we got super excited and high fived and you know, we're like, we found the information that we needed, which was exhilarating. We ultimately find that the courts are not that clear cut and that still requires a lot of argumentation.
Well, six people are represented by one lawyer. I'm represented by another lawyer, and three people are self-represented.
The first time we went to court under the advice of the tenants union, we had like a number of our friends join us in red t-shirts to show support.
We asked friends and community to come and so many people showed up that the clerk got really mad and kicked everyone out of the courtroom.
We were all like, kind of hyped up on our friends being there, but like also kind of anxious. But also understanding that this initial court date was kind of, like not much was gonna be decided.
This is my first time seeing housing court play out and like, I guess I didn't have a ton of hope.
We had a settlement negotiation conference, which is common and uh, because the courts are so inundated, it weirdly just like happens informally in the hallway of the courthouse and the lawyers just kind of like walk back and forth to each other negotiating, and it was actually like much more dramatic and heated than we expected it to be.
And the opposing counsel's being absolutely crazy and just being really intense and trying to split us up. They were very surprised by what we proposed as an adequate relocation amount. Their lawyer got really flustered and said a number of things to intimidate us. Like, we're going to depose all 10 of you and we're gonna do, uh, an inspection of the house. And he said. well, how would you feel if we came and cut down all your hedges?
One of the things about being in court is that you see a lot of people going through evictions too. So every time I've been in court, now you're just watching people go through this eviction process and whether they have representation or not, or whether they speak English or not. So you're just literally seeing just a lot of people get evicted every day.
Every time we go to court, the theater and the tragedy and the rigamarole of every day in that court system is so sad and so depressing, and I just kind of try and imagine like how as the species that we are and the rareness of this time that we have, that we've gotten to this place where eviction court is like a, a large part of many people's lives. It's insane. It's so stupid.
[End COLLAGE]
At one point, the fight comes up at a meeting of the Silver Lake neighborhood council, and they write a letter on behalf of Ag Lago. It’s addressed to both the developers and their city councilmember. It says in part:
“It has been brought to our attention that Fr ost /chadd ock Developers, LLC is engaged in a hasty and suspicious eviction process of the property…across from Sunset Ju nction…We are alarmed and concerned by news of this eviction, not only because of the acute and deadly affordable housing shortage in Los Angeles, and Silver Lake specifically, but also because of Fr ost /chadd ock’s history in Los Angeles of leaving properties derelict and empty for decades.”
The letter cites a building just behind Ag Lago that previously housed the pioneering queer bookstore A Different Light, one of a few landmarks in the neighborhood from its history with the gay rights movement. In 2011, according to the letter and to news reports at the time, the building was in the process of gaining historic designation.
“…but the property was demolished before that determination was completed.”
Yeah, they came in early on a Saturday morning and demolished it.
“Twelve years later that lot sits empty collecting trash and graffiti. We don’t want another blight in our community and it’s imperative our neighbors remain housed.”
The neighborhood council ends by asking the developers to halt the demolition, and fix the habitibility issues, and for the Councilmember to thoroughly investigate how the use code changed from a multi-family rooming house to a single family dwelling.
[Music: Deville by Yclept Insan]
The court battle stretches on for the next six months than a year than more.
The house has a dozen important dates that build up a deep anxiety — that this next hearing, or motion, could be the last one — but each slides by with little material consequence.
It’s a stressful, sometimes Kafkaesque experience that is discussed as a nauseating loop around the kitchen table.
And as that unfolds, the plumbing continues to back up. The landlords send a crew to cut down the hedges, which makes things noticeably louder, and less private. And in the driveway, the sinkhole continues to grow.
Act 4: The Sink Hole
The puppets stand in the basement with the mummified corpse of their past roommate whose buried gold is missing. They are dejected, but since they already have their shovels, they decide to at least fix the sinkhole. They walk outside and begin filling it when suddenly the ground collapses
As the dust settles, the puppet roommates find a bizarro version of the house at the bottom of the sinkhole. The dark-mirror version of their house is occupied by the dark mirror versions of themselves. One of the puppets looks to them and says, “why do you look like us, but bad?”
The puppets then enlist their shadow selves to help with the eviction fight, who agree with enthusiasm. So, the now 20 roommates begin to scheme.
Back in the real world, the landlord follows through on their threat of a full inspection. And It's a tense situation.
[COLLAGE]
So they did this insane inspection of the house where they brought two lawyers, two property managers, an architect, a contractor, and an armed security guard to walk through our house, taking photos and documenting.
And not 10 minutes before they arrived, we noticed the water coming up in the sink and we were like, oh, I better go check the bathroom. And then, you know, the sewage in the bathtub. And, and they were very, uh, skeptical and they had, you know, um. An armed security guard with ‘em, a whole parade of people.
They were trying to take photos of our male and do all these sneaky things, so we just kind of had to like, follow them around for a really long time. The basement is pretty tight, so I didn't physically go down there with them, but as they went down there, we were like, oh, that's very funny. There’s still the set from the puppet show. There might have been a mummy made of clear plastic tape. I think there was a lot of fabric and there were, in the basement and around the property, there were these very satirical eviction notices from the puppet show. So it was just a paper that said like, you are being evicted, I think with a bunch of exclamation points and all caps, and we like taped them on the house as a prop for the puppet show.
And then when later on, the landlords were doing like an inspection of the house. And I guess they took pictures of the fake eviction signs.
I think they said something like, get out next week, or We will turn you into dirt for our real estate empire and make lots of money out of your bodies or something. It was very…. and then, yeah, they deposed all 10 of us
and I would just like to make it clear that specifically in my deposition, they asked me about a fake eviction notice that was part of the puppet show.
When we all got deposed, They asked all of us about that. Yeah. And they were like, what is this?
Do you recognize these eviction notices? And I said, yes. And they said. Yeah, is it true they're part of a puppet show? And I said, yes. And they said, so you don't, you're saying the landlords did not put these here. And I'm like, no, the landlords did not put these here. No.
Do you have any indication that the landlords found out any of the plot of the puppet show or just that it happened?
(laughing) I hope they did, but I didn't give up any of that information in my deposition.
[End COLLAGE]
The depositions take weeks if not a couple months…? The timeline frankly gets blurry, as does the attention and will of the house. At one point, the house may win on a technicality…the landlords made a filing error….but then the judge gives them a break…
The roommates argue over minutia and strategy, the plumbing continues to fail, a pretty serious rat infestation breaks out… parties, daily life, the sound of clawing inside the walls, meals, time passing, and about a year and a half into the fight, it finally looks like then it might actually go to trial.
From what I understand, a win means this case is over. But then the landlords can post a new eviction notice, start the process all over again. To me from the outside, another year of court dates and fundraising and sewage issues sounds pretty rough.
There’s really only one way for this story to end….the landlords own the house, and a bunch of land around it, and eventually, they will win.
Act 5: Here's the deal
In November of 2024, the landlords offer the 10 residents of Ag Lago a settlement. They'll pay the tenants a bit less than what they think they're legally owed as relocation assistance for a no fault eviction, but they will also let them keep back rent since the beginning of the eviction process. And, possibly above all, the roommates got almost 2 extra years in their house.
In that time, the pandemic era eviction moratorium has long been lifted and this neighborhood has been developing at a rapid clip. Chains and high-end vintage stores have sprouted. The landlords could clearly develop this valuable block if they wanted to — a big corner where Sunset and Santa Monica Blvds meet.
The tenants consider their options.
They debate, they waiver, and then, they take the deal.
As autumn sweeps across the dry hills of Los Angeles, Ag Lago’s eviction fight is finally over.
[COLLAGE]
So initially I had a lot of, um, I felt very happy. I was like, cool, there's like an end to this. It's not gonna be this giant stress hanging over me, like do I need to call off work to go to court this day or not? Then the following days it kind of sunk in that we're gonna be losing this space. Yeah, it's been definitely an emotional rollercoaster and processing grief with everyone in the house.
I mean, it was surreal, like we, like there was, there was silence among us, like just sitting around looking at each other just to be like, oh my God like it's finally real. And none of our friends in Los Angeles are gonna believe that.
Yeah, like over the last 120 years, like the concept of living specifically, like American concept of living just makes something like this kind of inconceivable or like a passing thing you do in youth instead of like a general part of the culture. And beneficial.
I don't think the landlords can wrap their head around what this place is actually like.
It's like a very free place.
Here's the thing, I think that like, you know, when you live with a bunch of people who all do things, one, one thing that ends up happening is the space gets used more. So like you end up having people hanging out in the front yard, people hanging out in the backyard, people using the living room, people using the kitchen.
I always say the house’s happiness is in how loud the kitchen is. It has to be moving. Like things has to be used, cleaned, washed, otherwise it's like a dead space. It's like meaningless. I have my challenges too. It's so hard to live with people, especially um, we all got our mental health stuff. We all got our challenges and baggages and even physically when you sit close to someone with all your baggages, that's already inconvenient. You know?
I mean, I take up a lot of space. I do a lot of stuff. I have a shelf of gallons of wine fermenting in the kitchen and I have, you know, a little, uh makeshift incubator for Tempe and Koji in the living room. And you know, I use the shop a lot. Uh, you know, to, to degas silicone and, and poor sex toys. And yeah, sometimes it takes a minute to relax into space, especially when you're thinking about just so many other people, living with so many people and thinking about what you're supposed to be doing. And yeah, relaxing into that space and being like, oh, I can, I can take up space. And also just, you know, feeling supported and having people feel psyched about your projects and, you know, and your presence. That really allows you to relax into a space.
I mean, I think one of the things that's always great about collective living, whether it's functional or not, is that it’s economical to live with a lot of people and it saves you money and therefore you have more time because you're not so stuck working to make money to then pay for your own individual refrigerator and your own individual electricity bill. You know, all those things. So I think one of the ways it's allowed me to live a more creative life is for that reason. And then I. Uh, you've probably noticed interviewing everyone and knowing everyone…I live with a, a bunch of geniuses, like crazy geniuses.
My partner's sister visited once, like a couple years ago for the first time, and she said like, “is this just a house of hot professors?” which I loved. Everyone here is really talented in their own ways. And, and like for me, and I feel like other people can say this too, but Ag Lago has really helped foster and support that because like, it has, it's given me space to be able to excel in different things. I've just kind of like having the space to work. I became a metal worker. I became a better bike mechanic. I learned a lot more carpentry skills than I did before. All sorts of different things.
When you live in a house like this…I went through a lot of self-development. So a lot of my creative process that would go into my art would instead go into myself or how I spend time with people or interacting with community, which I feel like is a overlooked part right now of making art or existing as a creative person because you can make as much art as you want, but I feel like if you're not engaging with other people in some way, that something is missing, developing yourself is equally as important as developing your art. 'cause really your art and yourself shouldn't be separate.
Not only is it one of the rare, affordable housing spaces in this whole neighborhood and city, but it's just this like beautiful textured community of people that will disperse after this separate from each other forever. And I think it also will mark a real end of an era of, you know, the rapid gentrification of cities and the rising rent prices like, and the, aging of houses like this that aren't built anymore. It also feels like the end of an era in a bigger way than just this house. Yeah.
I've never lived in a Los Angeles without Ag lago as a home base. And, uh, honestly, like, it, it, that's 17 years. And it changed a very significant course of my life. And the fact that it's ended, it's really sad. A bitter ending to, you know, you losing ag lago. We all lost ag lago. The city itself, like LA community lost Ag lago and we lost our home. It was a very, very important, monumental powerhouse.
I grew up here and feeling like I'm getting priced out of my own city just feels awful, and I grew up poor and I grew up, you know, my dad was poor. He lived in a tin shack when he was a kid, and, you know, I was thinking about it and like. Ag lago is kind of like the closest thing to intergenerational wealth that I'll ever have. The only intergenerational wealth that people like us can cultivate is love, and that is that. That is largely how I think about Ag lago and how I get to kind of inherit that
[END COLLAGE]
Act 6: The new year
December 31st, 2024, Aglago hosts its last party ever.
DJs preside over the fold out table in the living room.The windows rattle, all fogged up. This is the place to be on New Years.
Out back there’s a bar, a friend of the house makes a soup station. And a makeshift stage in the back yard becomes a runway, complete with pageant queens in DIY gowns. The house is shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall, people dance to a booming subwoofer.
Then, the bass fades out…
[countdown - POP]
[Midnight]
The ceiling is marked by stains of champagne from past new years parties. And against the ceiling, where it meets one of the walls in the living room, somebody’s confetti cannon has hit a huge, stringy shelf of cobwebs.
The colorful scraps of paper become captured in the web’s sticky grasp. The confetti hangs there, in mid air, through the night into the next morning then into the following weeks. The moment frozen in time, as the housemates move out beneath it, and they all go their separate ways.
Ag Lago, Los Angeles, California
2005 - 2025
[Music: Auld Lang Syne]
Back in the puppet show, a year and a half before the move, all of the puppets mostly half-baked schemes have officially failed. No tiktok traction, no bank robbery…
The shadow roommates have a different idea… their plan is to fortify the house. They build scarecows, plant wooden spikes, then they baton down the property with heavy chains.
As they wait inside their fortress, however, the puppets and their shadow roommates are not getting along. They are stuck inside, living with the worst versions of themselves.
Tension rises, until an oblivious roommate says the landlord knocked on the front door so they let him in. He’s waiting in the living room.
—
As the housemates panic and process this farcical security breach, they notice a weird slime coming up from the floors…
They have forgotten about the one final scheme that has not yet failed…
the self-replicating silicone, which has been brewing in the basement.
The audience watches as a puppeteer moves a modified box fan covered in green cellophane into the center of the room.
—
A cartoonish two-faced landlord puppet, dollar signs painted over his eyes, lurks through house He’s searching for the tenants, who have comically fled. Then, the puppeteer flips the switch on the box fan.
Green cellophane rises to the ceiling like one of those dancing tube guys in front of car dealerships.
In the puppet show, the self-replicating silicone is not only successful, but it’s gotten out of hand. It self replicates until it erupts and engulfs the entire house. The landlord puppet is still inside, and drowns in an explosion of dildo rubber.
[Music: Auld Lang Syne]
[CREDITS:]
The Wind is produced by me, Fil Corbitt.
This independent podcast is made with listener support. If you like to become a patron, head to patreon.com/thewind and set up a monthly donation. You get access to bonus material, other perks, and become part of the community that makes stories like this possible.
A huge thank you to all of the residents of Ag Lago for speaking with me and for hosting me over the years. Reve, Jeremy, Vita, Josh, Donnie, Storai, Theo, Arden, Sarah and Eleanor. Also a big thanks to Emily, Spoorthi, Greyson, and all the folks that were part of the puppet show and the countless folks that were part of the Ag Lago community.
Music in this episode was Timex by pas Doo, thanks to Pat Mesiti-Miller for letting me use it, Deville by friend of the show Yclept Insan and 2 songs from the public domain, Auld Lang Syne performed by the Princes Band and this song Marionette by Felix Arndt. The chapter markers were read by the great Cal Bannerman of the podcast Stories from The Hearth. Highly recommended.
Links, photos, images of the puppets and sources all available at TheWind.org.
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