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

Thursday, July 31, 2014

DESERT MONKEYS



Two small observations while walking on Hollywood Boulevard recently.  You might remember that a couple of posts back I was bemoaning the fate of the Blu Monkey Lounge (above).  It had lost its intense blueness, and the word “monkey” had disappeared from its neon sign.  Well the monkey is back!!


Evidently the Blu Monkey management had taken down a part of the old sign prior to replacing it with a new one.  Why do I find this so encouraging?  It makes me want to cheer.

Across the street, not very far from the Blu Monkey, there was this sign that I hadn’t noticed before though it might have been there for a while.  It belongs to something called future memories, a gallery or art space, I think.


The sign doesn’t lie of course, not in the literal sense anyway.  There are various ways of defining what a desert is, mostly based on rainfall, temperature, and evaporation rates, and Los Angeles doesn’t meet any of the criteria.  I would be perfectly happy to live in the desert, but the fact is we Angelenos don’t.

Whether it’s a metaphysical desert, nah that’s a tired old cliché and it doesn’t really work.  You might as well say it’s a jungle: at least that might be a place to find monkeys.




Tuesday, July 15, 2014

L.A. BLEU





I’ve come a little belatedly to a book by Catherine Corman titled “Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City.”  I like it a lot, but then I would.  I’ve never met any writer in Los Angeles who didn’t actively love Raymond Chandler, and not many photographers either.

There’s always a “visual” element in Chandler’s work, by which I mean that you “see” the world through his, or Marlowe’s, eyes.  And there have been various books on Raymond Chandler’s LA, generally well-meaning tomes with some slightly so-so photographs of the city, but Catherine Corman is the real deal.  For one thing, she’s Roger Corman’s daughter, so her LA pedigree is unimpeachable, and she can certainly do the noir look herself when she puts her mind to it.


Daylight Noir consists of 50 or so  moody, arty, square-format, black and white photographs, mostly architectural in some sense, some of them showing very specific LA locations, some of them kind of generic.  And attached to each is a quotation from Chandler.  Again, some of which are very recognizable, some less so.


The book has an introduction by Jonathan Lethem (a seal of approval for sure)  in which he says, “If architecture is fate, then it is Marlowe’s fate to enumerate the pensive dooms of Los Angeles, the fatal, gorgeous pretenses of glamour and ease, the bogus histories reenacted in the dumb, paste-and-spangles cocktail of style.’  Yes, Jonathan, but what if architecture ISN’T fate?


But anyway, it’s surely a good sign that Catherine Corman’s book sent me back to rereading Chandler’s novels, keeping an eye out for architectural detail.  Of course in The Big Sleep we all remember the hall of the Sternwood mansion, the entrance doors big enough to let in a troop of elephants, and the stained glass showing a knight rescuing a damsel in distress (that’s got to be pretty colorful, right?). 



At the back of the house there’s a “wide sweep of emerald grass and a maroon Packard,” and when Marlowe gets into the greenhouse where he meets the General,  “The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tanks.”  I’m seeing a fair amount of color, aren’t you?

         
And when Marlowe gets to Geiger’s house, oh boy, there’s a thick pinkish Chinese rug, a broad low divan of old rose tapestry with some lilac-colored silk underwear strewn across it, a couple of standing lamps with jade-green shades, and a yellow satin cushion.  Carmen Sternwood is there, sitting naked on a fringed orange shawl.  OK, maybe that’s décor rather than architecture, but nevertheless this is some very colorful nor.



         Now obviously I wasn’t around in Chandler’s time, but as I walk around LA these days it looks like the most intensely colored cities I’ve ever been to.  Sure the color may be only skin (or stucco) deep, and sure there may be some dark things happening behind those cheerfully colored walls, but that's the nature of the beast, right?



One of the architectural touchstones from my earliest days of walking around in LA is the Blu Monkey Lounge on Hollywood Boulevard.  When I first saw it, it looked like this:


It seemed intriguing, secretive, vaguely sinister, a dive bar where bad things might happen. A little research suggested it was in fact just a loud bar with DJs and expensive drinks, not exactly a rarity in Hollywood, and not really my kind of place.  A little while late it looked like this:


I guess it was in some transient state as all the buildings around it get gentrified,
demolished or refurbished.  Maybe it was just being repainted.  Anyway, the last time I saw it, it looked it was like this:


You’ll notice that the word “monkey” has disappeared from the name. And I guess that stucco is still a kind blue, but it doesn’t yell “blue” the way it once did.  Isn’t it aquamarine, or maybe turquoise?  The Case of the Absent Monkey?  Well, maybe there is something noir-sounding about that after all.


Catherine Corman's website is right here:
http://www.catherine-corman.com


















Sunday, May 26, 2013

THE HOLLYWOOD WINOGRAND



And speaking of Garry Winogrand, as I often do (that's him above),there’s currently a huge exhibition of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  Winogrand hated the term “street photographer” but most people would think that’s precisely what he was.  The thing about street photographers is that they walk the streets themselves and take lots of pictures of other people who are also walking.  I find this enormously appealing.


Winogrand was a New Yorker, through and through, who grew up in the Bronx, and I think it’s fair to say that the majority of his best pictures were taken in New York, but he worked plenty of other places too.  There was a great early series that became a book, The Great American Rodeo.  He even took some pictures in England. 



Towards the end of his life he moved to Los Angeles and took a lot of pictures there too.  By then however he wasn’t doing much walking.  He got people to drive him around and he took pictures out the windows.  The received wisdom is that this isn’t the very best way to take photographs, certainly not “street photographs,” and that it indicated a great falling off in the quality of his work.  This is an occasion when The recievde wisdom appears to be true.


However,  I just found the wonderful picture above by Ted Pushinsky showing Winogrand on Hollywood Boulevard, at the corner of Whitley Avenue.  Winogrand was, however briefly, a genuine Hollywood Walker. He does look a little overdressed, but then so do the other people in the picture.