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

Friday, May 27, 2016

THE WALK OF SELF-LOATHING



There’s a story, maybe it’s a fable, maybe it’s even in the Bible (in which case I suppose it’s a parable), about a man who goes around, walking in the usual way, looking at this, looking at that, just generally looking in all directions at whatever grabs his attention.

And one day he happens to look down and he sees money lying on the ground.  It has to be a shiny coin of some value for the story to work, so let’s say it’s a silver dollar.  He picks it up and changes his life.  From then on whenever he walks he only looks at the ground, hoping to find more money.

And he goes around like that for years, always looking at the ground when he walks, but he never finds any more silver dollars.  And then one day he’s walking along and he sees something shining in the gutter and he thinks, “OK, at last, more money!”  But it isn’t a silver coin, it’s a fragment of broken mirror and when he looks down at it he sees a reflection of the sky up above his head, and then he looks up at the sky itself and he sees it looks wonderful, and he realizes what he’s been missing all these years.

 

Well, I certainly look around at thing as I walk.  I like to think I look in all directions (though not all simultaneously, of course), and sometimes I do look notice things on the ground.  I think I have found the odd bit of money here and there, but not much, and I’m sure I must have seen a few mirror fragments.  But it hasn’t changed my life.

And lately, I’ve been noticing things painted on the pavements and sidewalks where I’m walking.  Some of it’s street art, and some of it’s done by guys who work for the utility companies, and the latter is usually much more inscrutable and enigmatic.



Of course on Hollywood Boulevard you have to look down at the ground if you want to see the Walk of Fame and the stars set in the concrete, that celebrate showbiz people.  But a couple of miles east of the Walk of Fame, I found this star that celebrates self-loathing. 


It’s a Hollywood thing, I’m sure, but by no means only a Hollywood thing.

Friday, October 2, 2015

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.


Wednesday, September 16, 2015

STREET POETRY

The rhyming kind.  (Well, almost).






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.