Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

WALKING THE BLACK DOG



The Black Dog has been upon me lately.  Of course there are always reasons to be less than cheerful, but it’s the nature of the Dog that these things get blown up out of all proportion.  Walking has always been a reasonable way for me to keep the Dog at bay and it’s true that recently I haven’t been pounding the pavement as much as I’d like to.  The LA summer has been long and hot, and it’s not over yet – it’s going to be 100 degrees again at the weekend, so I thought I should get some walking done while I can.

Monday being a cooler day, and since I had a dentist’s appointment (no big deal this time, just a check up on last year’s root canal work) and my dentist being within walking distance, I decided to walk there and back, probably an hour in each direction, itself no big deal by serious walking standards.


The route offered the opportunity to walk by the newly-completed Emerson College building, properly referred to as a campus, and just as often referred to as a “futuristic outpost.”  It’s on a slightly bleak stretch of Sunset Boulevard, and it’s designed by local architect (starchitect in some accounts) Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis.  It’s a fine and eye-catching building and if it doesn’t as yet look totally at home in the neighborhood it does at least seem thoroughly, excitingly LA.  And right around the corner from it work was going on to refurbish this rather wonderful building, which in many ways seems even more LA.


On the way to the dentist I happened to notice other dentists’ offices, something I suppose I wouldn't have done in other circumstances – one with this sign:


I personally wouldn’t have spelled esthetic that way, but that’s just me, and then there was this one with it’s own roadside library out front, Richard Ford, the Simpsons, a guide to the best places to kiss, a book on astrology.  Well I guess everything starts to seem very LA after a while.


And of course there are those curious little LA ironies, that you always see when you walk, some of which seem a little too obvious like this Gideon’s bible on top of a trash can:



And these goofy stick on eyes on a fire hydrant:


And finally as I was getting to the end of the return journey, as the temperature was getting above 80 degrees, I saw that classic Batman had returned to the streets in this very fine depiction, front:


And rear:


And was the Black Dog slain?  No, but he was tamed a little, and by the end of the walk he, and I, were a little too hot and sweaty to get into much of a dog fight.  Sometimes I’ll settle for that.



Monday, January 13, 2014

WALKING WITHIN BOUNDS




It being the start of the new year, I decided I would “beat the bounds” of Hollywood.  Beating the bounds is an ancient British tradition, both pagan and Christian, generally conducted by boys who walked around the boundaries of their own parish, fixing various points and landmarks in their memory, a kind of mapping without maps.  Admittedly it was normally done around Easter time rather than the beginning of the year.


As is the way with many traditions, there’s a certain amount of sadism involved.  The website strangebritain.co.uk describes it thus: “Curiously, certain stones, trees or other marker points around the boundary would also be beaten by literally bumping a boy (often a choirboy) against the mark. The boy would be suspended upside down and his head gently tapped against the stone or he would be taken by the feet and hands and swung against a tree … ‘to help them remember’.”


I would do something similar in my own neighborhood, though without the beating, hanging and head banging, but I was aware of difficulties here.  People disagree about where the boundaries of Hollywood actually are.  Hollywood has no absolute administrative or political existence, so its boundaries are at best moot. 



In the early 2000s certain parties wanted Hollywood to secede from LA, to becoming a separate entity like the cities of West Hollywood, Santa Monica or Beverly Hills.  But they conceived a sprawling version of Hollywood with Mulholland Drive as its northern boundary (and trust me, the David Lynch movie aside, you don’t want to go walking on Mulholland Drive), and extending east to include Los Feliz and Silver Lake, areas that saw themselves as geographically and philosophically separate, and very much NOT part of Hollywood.  A referendum was held, and in the end none of the people who would have been affected seemed very interested in seceding.  Google currently draws a map which is a more more limited version of that secessionist scheme.


The fact is that people draw maps in their own image of Hollywood, and I chose to walk the version drawn by the LA Mapping Project, a scheme devised by the LA Times, based on “statistical profiles of communities.”  (These maps will enlarge if you click on them).


Actually this Mapping Project draws a smaller version of Hollywood than I’m accustomed to.  By its reckoning neither the Hollywood Hills nor the Hollywood sign are actually in Hollywood, nor is East Hollywood, which seems to me a part of it.  By their reckoning I don’t live in Hollywood either.  Still, the big appeal of the Mapping Project version was that a walk around this boundary would come in at just under 10 miles.  That seemed like a decent halfday’s walk, rather more with a stop for lunch and the occasional diversion for poking around. 


The route was simple enough – a couple of miles along Franklin Avenue, where Joan Didion lived, where Janis Joplin died, then a left turn south on Fairfax and another onto Fountain.  When Johnny Carson asked Bette Davis the best way an aspiring actress could get into Hollywood, Bette replied, "Take Fountain!" 


Then an odd dogleg via Sycamore to get on to La Brea; the dogleg required because of the very specific, and odd, boundary of the city of West Hollywood, which abuts Hollywood proper. Then Melrose, past Paramount Studios and across Bronson Avenue – from which Charles (nee Buchinsky) took his name.  Finally another left turn and a long schlepp north up Western, past Ed Ruscha’s former digs, up to the Pink Elephant, a liquor store that supplied at least some of Charles Buckowski’s alcohol needs, then back into Franklin, and the circuit would be complete.  These are some snapshots and observations made along the way. 


Here, where I set off from, painted on the side of one of those inscrutable metal boxes that I guess has something to do with telephones, somebody had painted an image of the Brooklyn Bridge.  I wasn’t sure what to make of that.


And there was this very cool, battered Cadillac displaying itself in the Gelson’s parking lot (which I thought was a good harbinger), and the hotdog delivery truck in the background was reassuring that not everybody in this city is a health nut.


Further along Franklin, a Hollywood sign, though not of course THE Hollywood sign. 


The truth is, you can find signs of Hollywood and Hollywood signs all over the place.  That’s one of my favorites above, seen on a different walk, in downtown L.A.


Above is a novel technique to stop people parking in a red zone.  You designate it “douche parking” so that if anybody parks there, they’re by definition a douche.  “Wait,” the would-be parker thinks, “I’m not a douche, this isn’t the place for me.”  I wonder if it works.


Here on Fountain, a dumpster with a quotation from Carlos Castenada on the side.  I was going to write, “surely the only dumpster in town with a quotation from Carlos Castenada,” but this town being as it is, it seems perfectly possible that there’s more than one.  This is the kind of thing that makes Hollywood lovable.


And there’s the kind of thing that makes it less lovable.  Do we, does anyone, really need “a canine social club?”  Well of course the answer is no, but you can be sure this isn’t the only one in this town.


Fortunately on Melrose there was a good old fashioned bookstore, made even more appealing by being illuminated by a sort of magical light, though the guy behind the counter said he thought the store wasn’t likely to be in business in nine months time.


The light was also picking up this beautifully painted pawn shop.  I guess if you have to go to a pawn shop you might as well go to one with an eye-catching paintjob.  The sign saying “collectables” is especially intriguing.


And as is the way with magical light, it soon fades.  Here’s the Pink Elephant by night.  Yes, it is next door to a store that sells used appliances.  And yes, that is the Griffith Park Observatory behind it, illuminated on high.  “While the city was busy we wanted to rest/She decided to drive up to observatory crest,” as the song has it, but I didn’t.


I went to touch base and complete the circuit, take another look at Brooklyn Bridge by night.  It now seemed a lot more appropriate - sort of.

You know each year at about this time I think, this could be the year when I walk systematically along every street in Hollywood.  At this point, I’ve lived here long enough that I believe I probably have walked down every street in Hollywood, though I may have missed the odd one, so doing it systematically, marking it out on the map, filling in the grid, does have it’s appeal, the problem is that in the end I’m not a very systematic walker.   But who knows, maybe this will be the year.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

HOLLYWOOD CHRISTMAS PAST



I suppose there are a lot of people who “go for a walk” at Christmas who’d never dream of doing it the rest of the year.  It’s a thing you do on your holidays, it’s a thing you do with the family, or something you do to get away from certain parts of the family, a way to walk off the turkey, if not the devil’s bath.

Walking around Hollywood at Christmas has its appeal.  It’s sunny and mild of course - good walking weather - though the days are short.  And you might think that in Hollywood you’d see all kinds of excessive Christmas lights and decorations, but with a few exceptions it’s all curiously and surprisingly modest.



Yes the Capitol Records building on Vine Street (above) has a sort of tree made of lights up on its roof, but it’s not exactly Vegas, and it’s had pretty much the same look since it was first designed in 1958. True it uses 4,373 bulbs which is impressive in its way, and I like it a lot, but I like it because it suggests an old fashioned, dignified kind of celebration.  You can see more extravagant and baroque lighting rigs hanging off suburban bungalows all over America.

The fact is I always prefer to see the small-time, domestic, personal decorations, put up by people who’ve made just a little bit of effort but not too much.


I’m particularly fond of this one that’s been placed at the top of a lamppost.  Is it Santa, or is it a Cabbage Patch Doll? Or both?  You decide.


And the thing is, you walk past these decorations in the days before Christmas, and however low key they are, however downright pathetic in some cases, there’s always something optimistic and forward-looking about them, looking forward to a happy Christmas.  But after the day itself you see them with new eyes.  However happy the Christmas was, there’s something forlorn and melancholy about the decorations now.


And that applies especially to abandoned and discarded Christmas trees.  You see some of them dumped by the side of the road, all over Hollywood, sometimes just a couple of days after Christmas.  In certain ways I respect the sentiment - once the party’s over, it’s over – but really guys, there’s no need to be nihilistic about it – at least put the  tree in the recycling.


And so I’m very glad that whoever was walking in Hollywood, up by the corner of Highland and Franklin, and found this discarded tree below (still with some decorations on it for Pete’s sake) decided to plant it in the adjacent pile of rubble, so that it stood upright, so that the season of combined optimism and melancholy lasted just that little bit longer.  


On balance, and I hear your arguments against it, I think that’s probably a good thing.