Wild Side Walk: Pt 9.

(Unexpurgated) 1982: Report from the astronaut

extract from Stuart Page's 1982 diary
©1982 www.stuartpage.com

All around the perimeter I see posters proclaiming that Split Enz, the “Great Rock Band from Australia”, will be playing LA in the near future. For some reason it makes me feel sick. I've had enough of the TRAVEL LODGE STARDUST HOTEL ROMAN'S LIQUOR MUGSY MALONEY ICE CREAM BURLESQUE SCANDAL FLUORESCENT 50FT WIDE CARLTON CIGARETTES BILLBOARD KRLA SUNSET CITY for a day.

I don't feel hungry anymore after I walk past the Steak Bonanza, a huge car park where you clip on a table to your car door, and sit there eating steak or burger while your car stereo competes with all the others, and the smell of burning corpses flows through your nostrils. I wonder whether there's still any kangaroo steaks and horsemeat floating around LA?

A bunch of pretty stoned out black kids skate through the fast cars on La Brea, and I hear the Disco funk from the sidewalk blaring from their Walkman headphones. I get the feeling that they symbolise life around here for the underprivileged, always travelling second-class, but making the first class look such a boring bunch of museum exhibits, sterile and unhappy. They end up coming and buying pleasure in the form of prepaid sex and drugs from the hustlers, pimps, hookers and dealers, and are subject to the pickpockets, gamblers, muggers and no-gooders who scrape a living around the Hollywood sideshow.

The Roosevelt parking building on Hollywood Blvd. is also a monument to Hollywood. Inside the locked and barbed wire fenced entrance can be seen ten year old Plymouths, Fords, Chryslers, an E type Jaguar, all with flat tyres and covered in dust. They've been left behind when the Hollywood emphasis moved out to Bel Air and Beverly Hills. They've never been collected since then, and have probably been forgotten, except by the street people who walk past them, never able to afford a cab ride let alone a car.

Passing underfoot as you walk up Hollywood Blvd. are slabs of Black granite inlaid with pink stars 1 metre across and labelled in brass letters are the likes of Hugh Hefner, Boris Karloff, Marilyn Monroe and today Diana Ross paid $1500 to have her name placed in a star along with hundreds of others. There are plenty of spare stars too waiting for Brooke Shields and other new Stars who play the Hollywood game, for a mere 1500.

Lying around Los Angeles and in all kinds of shops are some free newspapers: LA Weekly, LA Reader and Stuff magazine, which give reviews of films, shows, records, books and lots of other ads and info about what's happening in LA. I scanned the pages of all these papers as soon as I discovered them, and stuck anything of great interest in my diary. Pilot Theatre doing Jarry's UBU, Vinyl Fetish best - record shop for imports /new music, Color Xerox address, Laurie Anderson at UCLA, Isolation Tank experience, and Buckminster Fuller at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore, signing his book "Critical Path". I walked over to the Bodhi Tree, down Melrose Av. just past La Cienega, and sure enough, there was Bucky shaded from the glaring sunlight by a bleached canvas tent construction, and signing his books for a patiently waiting queue of people.

While I was waiting in line, I talked to a guy from south of LA, who eventually told me he was a freemason, and this intrigued me, having recently seen a TV programme which credited the original Jack the Ripper murders to a group of three Freemasons. I said I'd like to talk again later and we arranged to meet for coffee. I said hello to Bucky, who said he was coming to New Zealand early 1983 to talk at a MENSA conference, and wished me well on my travels.

(To be continued).

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