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.
