INVADERS FROM HOLLYWOOD

I often say (I mean often enough that it probably irritates people) that you can’t walk in the same street twice.  Then I add that you can’t walk in the same street once.  This is about as Zen as I ever get.  And there’s a street in Hollywood, Franklin Avenue that I walk down all the time, I mean really all the time, and suddenly a couple of days ago saw something, arguably two things, that I’d never seen, or at least noticed, before.  There was a doorway situated between a couple of eateries (Birds and The Bourgeois Pig, with mysterious stairs leading up into darkness and a sign saying Duarte Salon.

I found this intriguing, and so, being a man who expects too much, I imagined the Duarte Salon was some kind of decadent Bohemian hangout where louche types lolled on velvet couches and sipped absinthe.  Well, that’s too much imagination you’ve got the Geoff.  Duarte Salon, I discover online, is a fancy hairdressers offering, in addition to the old cut and blow, trichological services and the revolutionary technique of "X-presion Creativos."

So, not much there for me, but curiously, and maybe you spotted it at once - whereas it’s taken me about 10 years – there’s a bit of street art next to the door, that I assume is the work of Invader.

You may remember Invader, if you remember him at all, from the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop.  He’s a Frenchman who goes around the world making and installing mosaics, some of them very small, some less so.  But in general his work is so discreet and it’s hard to imagine anybody objecting to it, which is no doubt why it tends to remain in place for so long.  Also possibly because many people, myself included in this case, don’t even know it’s there.

In fact his website suggests that I walk past his lots of his work all the time.  He’s got a couple of mosaics stuck on the Hollywood sign for instance, though admittedly not many people get to walk very close to the Hollywood sign.

But there are also these two right on Hollywood Boulevard, never seen by me till now. I guess there’s so much happening at street level there that few people ever look up. 

Anyway, having spotted the Duarte/Invader nexus I continued walking around my ‘hood and spotted another sign I’d never seen before, this one:

To be fair to myself this one actually was brand new, and similar ones had gone up all over the local streets in just the past few days.  Clearly it’s meant to stop people feeding coyotes, which are a bit of a thing in the neighbourhood – you sometimes see them walking down the middle of the street – and obviously a menace if you own a small appetizing pet. 

But it does of course beg the question of how we define “wildlife.”  Is somebody going to be going to jail for feeding squirrels?  Hummingbirds?  I have been known inadvertently to feed raccoons when the little bastards came and ate all the tomato plants.  And deer in my experience will eat pretty much everything that grows in a garden.  The courts would surely cut me some slack.  The people who put up this sign (again one I’d never seen before) seem like they might be less forgiving.

STREET POETRY

The rhyming kind.  (Well, almost).

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.

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.

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.