Monday, August 9, 2010

Change

The more things change, the French say, the more things stay the same.

I used to live and work in Hollywood (1994-2005); it was a strange area to finish growing up in, so close to the cultural pulse yet removed and buffered by the very fact of locality. A local in Hollywood becomes a part of the scenery, a dash of color, an extension of the wild mélange that typifies the storied Boulevard.

Hollywood Boulevard in the mid-90s was a dirty and faded clapboard and sandstone alley. The façades were worn, shabby; the storefronts sagged -- yes, the boulevard was an aging prostitute, used up and haggard before her time, surviving on the sepia remnants of glamour. The shops lining the mica-flecked black sidewalks were a clash of tourist traps and attractions; cheap eateries; cheaper clothing stories. Fetishwear emporiums and head shops filled the cracks, battling stereos forcing an aural slash featuring Reznor and Marley. The fitful breezes carried leaflets and flyers for Star Maps and escort services.

Venerable structures from the former half of the century reared above the rotting stucco and plywood blocks, pressed into service as musty warehouses, their once grand, marbled entrances marred by plaster and listless, sloppy paint jobs.

You could feel the ghosts in the town; you could taste the tired desperation in the air; it had seeped into the streets and buildings like a febrile sweat; it had been there a long time. Maybe it had always been there.

Only in Hollywood could the homeless themselves become celebrities.

Around the turn of the millennium, a lot of effort, time and money was injected into the old broad; the rehabilitation of Hollywood was undertaken. She got a facelift starting essentially with the reconstruction of the Mann's (now "Graumann's") Chinese Theatre and the addition of a high-end open-air mall adjacent. The bums were liposuctioned away; clubs and class were Botoxed in.

The changes were dramatic, and being as I was in the middle of it, sometimes even participating directly, it was easy to be blinded by the new gloss -- and in those, the sun-blasted days of my youth, optimism came easily.

Had occasion to return, yesterday. It'd been only a couple, three years since I'd last really walked around my old haunt. The improvements are still there, but so too were the same old maladies. The head shops and bondage outfits were still there -- and more besides; the hucksters still hucked and the homeless still jived. You could still get the same five shirts for ten dollars at twenty different "memoribilia" stories.

Sure, some changes -- like the mall, like the posh W Hotel on the east side -- they're too big, too fat and brassy, for a few years in the sinkhole to have any appreciable effect.

But Musso and Frank's lies fallow, the building become a mausoleum housing the shrouded remains of the near-century-gone glory days.

* * *

Change is an odd thing; you can slap on a coat of paint, you can put in a new building -- but unless the change comes from within, where it's least obvious -- you're just masking the symptoms, just smoothing pancake makeup over a black eye.

Change in people is far more subtle. And change in yourself is a constant battle against the expectations of others; the unexamined avatar they hold of you is rarely altered even when you haven't been that person for a long time.

Because of course you are still that person, in a way you always will be, just as I'm still the gangling, spotty teenager who never did wear the right clothes and still loved Nirvana even when everyone else was all about NIN and the Butthole Surfers. (As I wrote this, Pepper came up on my playlist.)

In another way, though, I'm not. I'm much calmer, by far less angsty; I have changed in many ways that it's hard to see from the outside. You can't look at me and know my memory is better, that my perceptions have shifted, that now I know things.

Some of it's because it's hard to change with you watching. It's too easy to let the avatar do the work.

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