Communes

Members of a Costa Mesa religious commune pleaded not guilty at Municipal Court in Newport Beach on Friday to charges that they violated city codes at their crafts store and warehouse. Judge Susanne S. Shaw denied a request from the Piecemakers, who also call themselves the Body of Christ Fellowship, to dismiss the charges. Shaw ordered them to stand trial Feb. 10.

Go take a hike - it's good for your brain. So says a new study that supports something called Attention Restoration Theory , which holds that exposure to nature can replenish our cognitive reserves when they are worn out by overuse. And if you live a modern urban or suburban life, your cognitive reserves are surely depleted: A typical teenager spends more than 7.5 hours per day juggling a computer, cellphone, TV and other media, and the number is surely higher for a typical adult, according to the study: “Our modern society is filled with sudden events (sirens, horns, ringing phones, alarms, televisions, etc.)

It was 1967 when residents of conservative, rural Louisa County learned that some young people were starting a commune on a 400-acre farm outside town. "Most people here didn't even know what a commune was," recalled Hilda Powell, a lifelong resident and editor of the Central Virginian newspaper. Families living on the area's historic farms were as much astonished as alarmed at the prospect of abutting a radical social experiment.

When the L.A. design firm Commune shared photos of its new pop-up in Japan -- a traveling shop and cafe featuring collaborations with Heath Ceramics and"Beginners" director and artist Mike Mills, among others -- what initially caught our eye weren't Mills' limited-edition prints, which are great, but rather a series of fingerprint graphics lining one wall. It turns out the prints in question belong to the thumb of Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer. Commune uses the thumbprint as a maker's mark, its signature "for anything we do that is handcrafted," Roman Alonso, a partner in the firm, said via email in response to our inquiry.

A Watts-based group that set up camp in rural Oregon--ostensibly to help inner-city youths through what it called "toughness training"--became the target of a criminal investigation this weekend when authorities arrested six of its members in the fatal beating of their leader's daughter and took custody of 53 children under the group's care. The children, aged 3 months to 16 years, are all from the Los Angeles area and were found living in a four-bedroom farmhouse in Sandy, Ore.

Two followers of a guru who founded a lavish commune in a remote desert town were convicted Friday of conspiring to murder a federal prosecutor investigating their sect. Sally-Anne Croft and Susan Hagan face a sentence of up to life in prison for plotting to kill Charles Turner when he was Oregon's U.S. attorney. Turner, who was never attacked, was investigating allegations that followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh were conducting sham marriages to circumvent immigration law.

The dusty streets are deserted now. Rajneeshpuram, once the teeming commune of 4,000 red-clad disciples of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, is just a "bad dream" in the minds of many longtime residents nearby. The leader of this ill-starred experimental paradise is long gone, having returned with his religion of personal freedom and sexual liberation to his native India. The 64,000-acre ranch that Rajneesh followers bought for $5.

About 60 sheriff's deputies raided a fundamentalist Christian sect's rural Saugus commune early Thursday morning and arrested four sect members over alleged child abuse. Tony Alamo, the leader of commune, was still being sought late Thursday. Authorities said the raid on the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation commune, scattered along Sierra Highway, was prompted by complaints from a child--removed from the commune last week--that he and other children had been beaten.

Albert BATES grows nostalgic remembering the freewheeling days when hundreds of hippies left Haight-Ashbury in a caravan of psychedelic buses for a celebrated back-to-the-land pilgrimage. Bates was a law student when this electric circus rolled through New York in 1970, and he found it irresistible. Soon he followed, joining a young, affluent exodus to the American countryside that would be one of the most profound social experiments of its time.

The Piecemakers and the city have made peace. Members of the religious commune agreed to a plea-bargain on misdemeanor charges that they hosted special events at their Country Store without city permits and allowed unsafe conditions in a storage warehouse. Terms of the agreement, reached Friday and announced Monday, require three members to serve probation, perform community service and pay a total of $2,000. "They've admitted their guilt for breaking the city's laws," said Steven H.

There are so many things to feel guilty about liking in the pure and prurient guilty pleasure that is "Wanderlust. " Starring Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston, this is a comedy of no manners about finding your bliss and escaping the modern grind. The laughter is served up naughty and nice, and frequently au naturel, earning it an R rating when perhaps RR (really raunchy) would have been more appropriate. Appropriateness, however, has pretty much been jettisoned by the filmmakers, who have opted instead for the good-fun-found-in-bad-taste tradition of "The Hangover.

? At a recent preview of the Broadway revival of "That Championship Season," actor Jason Patric took a fall so convincingly that the audience gasped. The headlong tumble down the steps was part of his role as Tom Daley, the cynical sports star turned alcoholic failure who joins a 20-year reunion of his former basketball champs at the home of their coach. But the bruises are real enough. "Most of my injuries happened during the first week of rehearsal," recalls the 44-year-old actor.

ESPN brackets, shmackets -- let's see how good the President is against the spread. Here's the scene -- it starts Thursday morning here, a bigger crowd in the Mandalay Bay Sports Book than in some of the arenas hosting first-round NCAA tournament games. Maybe it's time Staples Center considered putting in a few slot machines to encourage better attendance at Clippers games. Every chair is taken by men -- with the exception of the one woman sitting in the back row.

SECRET SPOTS OF THE WEST We asked you to nominate your favorite vacation places in the West -- your travel touchstones, so to speak -- and you came back with a satchel full of suggestions. We sifted and sorted and chose six to explore for ourselves. Marvelous or mundane? You be the judge. -- "It's so peaceful there. It's just such a beautiful place to go," says Michele Johnson of Los Angeles, in nominating the Best Friends Animal Society's sanctuary in Utah. THE SETTING Angel Canyon, a postcard-perfect, rust-colored sandstone canyon outside of Kanab, Utah, is home to the Best Friends animal sanctuary, said to be the country's largest no-kill animal shelter.

There isn't anything remotely fashionable about this stretch of Burbank Boulevard in North Hollywood, where car dealerships, auto body repair shops and fast-food joints sit cheek by jowl, baking in the sun. But duck down the 5600 block of Elmer Avenue, through the rusted metal gate, past the treehouse and broken-down school bus, and you'll find clothes so fresh the paint hasn't even dried yet. Welcome to "the Compound," the ramshackle home of Elmer...

In a peeling house on South 32nd Street, five friends came together to stretch their faith. They left comfortable apartments for a communal home within walking distance of a prison, a pawnshop, a derelict trailer park. Exhaust from a sugar beet factory drifted down the streets. Moving in last January, they pledged to spend one year together, learning to become true followers of Christ. They would give generously, love unconditionally. They would exchange their middle-class ways for humility and simplicity, forgoing Hardee's fries, new CDs, even the basic comfort of privacy.

On first reflection, Colombia doesn't seem the most likely place on Earth to seek utopia. Instead of weather systems, the map in a Bogota newspaper displays current outbreaks of guerrilla activity--19 in all--scattered like storm cells throughout the land. Apparently, only four of them lie in the direction I'm heading: los llanos, the vast plains that begin near Colombia's geographic center and spread nearly 600 miles to the Orinoco River on its eastern border.

Hippies live. So do "Jesus freaks," many of them in a later incarnation: Christian evangelicals. Those memorable symbols of the turbulent 1960s in America are alive and well, two American scholars of religion say.

Rick Caruso's office is palatial--that's the only way to describe it. Walk in and it stretches before you like a stage set: one vast room, subdivided into areas (a bar, a desk, spaces for conversation), with framed family photos on nearly every surface and a conference/dining room off to one side through a set of double doors. Outside Caruso's third-floor windows, the Grove stretches like the boulevard he means for it to be; noise drifts up from the sidewalk, a low-grade conversational buzz.