The rhyming kind. (Well, almost).
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hollywood. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Thursday, December 11, 2014
STROLL ON
We know that walking is often
used as a tactic of political protest. The image above shows a walk in Bangor, designed to preserve a bus service, so there may be one or two unintentional ironies there, but the principle remains.
There was even a walk of protest in Hollywood last week, to protest
police brutality. The walk ended in a “die-in” at the
intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue (above), where the protestors lay
down in the road, which I guess is kind of the opposite of walking, but in any
case it all seems to have been peaceful enough. And of course a few celebs got
in on the act.
Where I grew up, close to the
Peak District in Derbyshire people still talk about the Kinderscout Mass
Trespass of 1932 as though it too happened just last week. It was certainly monumental in establishing the
right of access to land all over the UK, and it shows the power of walking,
especially the power of walking where certain people think you shouldn’t.
And then I saw this oddly moving
piece in the LA Times about how things have been going in Hong Kong - not a walk of protest, but a stroll. (The full
story has now slunk behind the pay wall and I can’t even find who the writer
was, a woman I think and apologies to her for not giving credit, but this
opening gives the flavor.)
“For decades, pro-democracy demonstrators here
have tried marching. And for more than two months now, they have camped outside
government headquarters. In recent days, as they face ouster from their
encampments, they’ve begun a new tactic: strolling for democracy.
After dusk, throngs of demonstrators, self-styled
shoppers all, pace the thoroughfares across several neighborhoods in the city’s
Kowloon district, putting police on edge.
The strolling concept took shape Wednesday in
Mong Kok, the bustling shopping district where authorities had just forcibly
dismantled long-standing protest encampments.
Hours after the clearance was completed, demonstrators returned to
flood major intersections, attempting to build barricades and retake lost
territory. When police interceded too quickly for them to succeed, the
demonstrators, said they were there to shop …”
Well I suppose shopping can often a highly
specialized form of walking. When you
can combine it with trespassing, it may be considerably more.
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.
Labels:
beating the bounds,
Didion,
Fountain Western,
Franklin,
Hollywood,
Joplin,
Melrose,
Ruscha,
secession
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