THE HOLLYWOOD WALKER, ACTUALLY WALKING IN HOLLYWOOD

So I was walking on Hollywood Boulevard, and I went to see an exhibition at the LACE gallery, a “storefront installation” of photographs by Ave Pildas, titled Hollywood Boulevard The 70s.  Pildas worked as an art director at Capitol Records just up the street, and he took thousands of pictures on the Walk of Fame, between 1972 and 1975, although just 50 were on display at LACE. 

Pildas says,  "At that time people were saying the country was tilted to the West and all the crazies rolled towards California. They stopped just short of the ocean and landed in Hollywood."

        I can testify to the essential accuracy of that.  This was the time I first set foot on Hollywood Boulevard: in 1974.  I was a fairly young, though not entirely naïve, English hitchhiker, absorbing the very last rays of the hippy sunset, and although there was still a “sex and drugs and rock and roll” vibe to Hollywood, it didn’t feel like any summer of love.  The place was scary.  The people didn’t just look crazy, they looked downright dangerous, and as I remember it, way less benign than the ones who appear in these photographs.  

         I was saying all this to my walking and exhibition-going companion, the photographer Jason Oddy.  Jason has been known to take photographs in the street, though he’s a very long way from being a street photographer. He takes very serious, very beautiful and elegant, and largely depopulated photographs, like this one of Mentouri University, Constantine, Algeria, 2013, from the “Concrete Spring” Series:

We were both struck by this faux Ku Klux Klan photograph in the Pildas exhibition: 

Jason said he didn’t imagine you could get away with that kind of thing on Hollywood Boulevard anymore.  And I said I was kind of surprised you could get away with it even in the early seventies.  These days Hollywood feels like a perfectly safe and civilized place. 

I’m not sure just how much of a walker Jason is, but I dug out an interview with him in which he said that Thomas Bernhard’s novel Correction “is the nearest book I have found to a Bible. This relentless novel addresses every major theme: the trials and torments involved in becoming an authentic, autonomous human being; the problematics of writing; even the meaning and possibilities — as well as impossibilities — of architecture. All of it suffused with the blackest of humour and told in Bernhard’s inimitable, incantatory prose. It’s writing taken to the limit.”

         I’m a fan of Bernhardt too and although I haven’t read Correction I do know that its narrator writes, "A description of the road from Altensam to us in Stocket and a description of the road from Stocket to Altensam, naturally two entirely different descriptions…"  But of course.  Later in the book Bernhard says, “Who had the idea of letting people walk around on the planet, or something called a planet, only to put them in a grave, their grave, afterwards?”  Well, who indeed?

After we’d seen the Pildas exhibition we went for a brief drift, and I was muttering a few platitudes about Hollywood Boulevard being some kind of crucial indicator of the state of Los Angeles, that of course it had once been seedy and dangerous, but it was gentrifying just like everywhere else in LA, and compared with the bad old days it’s positively a haven of calm and safety. 

At which point we were both hit in the face by some kind of liquid, and we looked around and saw a laughing crazy young black man hurrying rapidly away. We could see he had some kind of squirt bottle in his hand, with which he’d no doubt squirted us, but it was all very sudden and we were too slow to think about pursuing him.  And of course we wondered what was in the bottle, and then a guy from a local open-fronted restaurant came up and said, “Did that guy just squirt something at you?” And we said yes, and this guy had been squirted too, and we said to each other, “Do you think it’s water or something worse?” and we more or less agreed that it probably was water, but it took us a while before we were absolutely certain. Obviously we agreed that it could easily have been something much worse.  And maybe back in the 70s it would have been something much worse.  But it did suggest that Hollywood Boulevard hasn’t quite become Disneyland, which on balance is a good thing, I suppose.

Here's a link to the LACE, Pildas Exhibition:

http://www.welcometolace.org/exhibitions/view/hollywood-boulevard-the-70s/

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.

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