I was at a party a couple of nights back and got talking to guy who’d grown up in Hollywood in the early nineties. He went to Hollywood High, alma mater of Keith Carradine, Linda Evans, Fay Wray and Terry Richardson – to name a broad selection.
And the guy said that any time you walked in Hollywood in the early 90s you were always in danger of turning a corner and realizing you’d set foot in the “wrong” street, and then you’d be confronted by junior gang members who demanded to know what you were doing on “their” street. The answer, “I’m just walking home from school,” wasn’t a good enough answer.
Of course, he said, you learned the rules pretty fast one way or another, learned where you could walk and where you couldn’t, but there was always this lurking anxiety that you might get it wrong.
And some people think that Hollywood has become too safe and gentrified, eh? Yeah, don’t you just hate it when there are no gang members confronting you on the street?
I’m not naïve enough to think that Hollywood is now an entirely safe haven of peace and tranquility, but as you walk around you don’t worry much about straying into enemy territory. And of course it being Christmas and all, Hollywood looks pretty festive right now. Even if the inhabitants behind this particular window haven’t quite got into the Christmas spirit yet:
No comments:
Post a Comment