Melrose Place

CBS (Can't Be Stopped) Crew, 2010

I can honestly say I never saw so much as a minute of the television show called Melrose Place. I don’t know for sure that there’s even an address called Melrose Place. I gathered enough, though, from all the crinkled People magazines I saw in my dentist’s office in the early 1990s that the show was about a bunch of attractive young people searching for their dreams in West Hollywood.

My connection with LA’s Melrose Avenue was less cinematic and carried none of the angst of la vie bohème. When I was out in LA last December I visited a couple of historic homes, one of which is near Melrose Avenue. While trying to find a place to park I drove up and down a few blocks of Melrose. I noticed that Melrose had a mix of funkiness, decay and tragic hipness that would make it a good place to take pictures. I didn’t have time for it that day. But I put it on my list of places to visit later.

This past Friday morning I made it back. I guess the tragically hip don’t get out much in the morning, though, because even by 11:00 a.m. almost all of the shops were still closed. And just to prove to decidedly non-hip people like me that they aren’t interested in us, shops didn’t even have their hours posted. I guess it’s one of those “If you have to ask….” things.

Anyway, I hadn’t planned on shopping. And as it turned out, it wasn’t the eclectic storefronts of Melrose Avenue that caught my eye, but rather the alleys behind the stores on the south side of Melrose.

The alleys are covered with graffiti. It’s on walls, fences and any other fixed surface; all manner of curves, squares, chevrons, arrows, colors, men, women and creatures real and imagined. It’s bright and big, and because it’s in an alley you experience it up close.

Eyes, 2010

It’s probably not fair to call it graffiti. After the initial shock of it all passes, what impresses you is that this looks more commissioned than like vandal art. For one, the business people seem to tolerate it. For another, you don’t see so many of the artist’s tags that you see on more outlaw graffiti. And while walking up and down service alleys isn’t something I usually do, this art was so engaging that I did just that and didn’t feel a bit unsafe doing it.

I’ve since learned that what I saw is the work of the CBS (Can’t Be Stopped) Crew, a group of art school-trained artists with extensive professional experience. They undertook the Melrose alley project, so said one of them, to gain “street cred.”

Getting Aggressive, 2010

They got permission from property owners along the alley and more often than not brought their own Krylon spray paint to work with. The result is an almost continuous stretch of original art on both sides of the alley that runs for twenty city blocks, from Fairfax to La Brea.

I only walked a few blocks of it. To be honest, I’m not usually drawn to this kind of art. But this was fun. The day was sunny and warm. Why not take a walk in an alley?

It turns out there’s a whole gallery of videos about this work on YouTube. Here’s one that will lead you to them.

On Top, 2010

Do They Still Come to Hollywood & Vine?

Hollywood & Vine, 2010

At the end of a week of business travel, I had a few hours to myself in Los Angeles last Friday before my plane left. An unexpected family health emergency back East would end up cutting into that time. But mid-morning I didn’t know that yet, and was more interested in using the time to take some pictures.

LA’s a sprawling place. I didn’t have time to just wander. Besides, LA traffic discourages that. I didn’t have any specific photographic subject in mind, either, though I did want to try to do something distinctly LA-like. So I decided to use the old trick of planting myself in one place and seeing what I could make of that one place.

Actually, I chose two places. The first was Melrose Ave. I’ll write more about that tomorrow.

A good photographic journey can start with just the place. Sometimes that’s enough. After looking at a map and realizing how close I was to it, though, I upped the ante for my little self-assignment and posed the question, “Do they still come to Hollywood and Vine?”

Those of us of a certain age will recall a time—I don’t know if it was real or just something spun by Hollywood PR people—when young beauties in search of motion picture success came to the center of Hollywood, in those days the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, to be “discovered.”

These days I suspect nobody gets discovered that way. They’re probably all up in Burbank doing acrobatics to see if they can get on So You Think You Can Dance or working movie producers’ casting couches the old fashioned way.

Anyway, Hollywood and Vine. It’s pretty disappointing. There’s a bank on one corner, a Borders Book store on another, an old office building-turned-apartment house on the third and a mix of easily forgotten retailers on the fourth. It’s busy, but to be honest I couldn’t find much story to tell there.

Redbury Hotel, 2010

So I moved up Vine to the corner at Sunset Boulevard. If LA has anything akin to New York’s Times Square, the corner of Sunset and Vine would have to be the eastern end of it. It’s ground zero for celebrity-seeking tourists. But rather than running across starlets and leading men, all I saw were tourists of all shapes and sizes from all over the world tripping over each other. Aside from a few landmarks—the Pantages Theater, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, The Kodak Theater, Capitol Records—Sunset Boulevard is one trinket shop and faux trendy boutique after another. The only non-tourists on the street are tour operators hawking tickets, young men with giant foam core signs hawking luxury apartment rentals and Scientologists hawking everlasting life or whatever it is they have to sell. As for opportunity, it’s a street that’s more about what you can’t do than what you can.

Just Say No, 2010

I hung around for a little while and walked up to Capitol Records to see the famous Richard Wyatt mural, which overlooks a parking lot and has sadly faded to an almost unrecognizable state. I checked out the Hollywood Stars Walk of Fame, something that turned out to be just as unimpressive as I’d imagined and just as contemporary as, say, Jinx Falkenburg.

Just Another Sidewalk, 2010

I finally decided I’d had enough and headed off instead to the quieter precincts of Silverlake to see a couple of Richard and Dion Neutra houses.

Overheard: Blue Ash, Ohio

Parkers Blue Ash Tavern (No Iced Tea Served), 2010

“They have tickets to something every weekend. They act like they’re so rich.”

“I tell you, the world’s going to hell in a hand basket. You just can’t trust anyone any more. Even when you want to believe it, you can’t.”

“Just between you and me, I don’t think Frank knows what the hell he’s talking about.”

“If she didn’t stay with him, he’d have cataracts, too.”

“He’s wearing it all over his face!”

“I’ve done a remarkable job on this assignment, if I do say so myself.”

“Is it SWOT or SWAT? I swear, I think these marketing people are just making words up.”

"Where is Ronald Reagan when we need him?"

“When I got home he didn’t have a stitch of clothing on. I tell you, Miriam, I’m starting to get worried about him.”

“I need a new business partner. The one I have now is holding me back. People in Cincinnati aren’t very receptive to good idea men.”

“I don’t know anyone who clog dances any more. Used to be everyone knew how.”

“There’s been entrenchment on that team. Everybody knows it.”

“She called this morning and told me she has to have all the C42’s today. Today! Can you believe it? ALL the C42’s TODAY!”

“The gays, they’re very reasonable people if you just talk to them. My friend Myra’s son is one of them. He’s so polite. But do you think Harry’ll give him the time of day? Won’t even talk to the boy.”

“I think I’d do a lot better in Alabama.”

“I’m talking about this Martha Lou, not that Martha Lou. That Martha Lou can barely shuffle the cards when we play canasta.”

“I have a lot of great ideas. Maybe I’d do better over in Indiana.”

“If they don’t like coal, maybe they’d like to go without electricity for a while.”

“And then one morning he just didn’t wake up. That was all she wrote.”

“I could be great in Chicago. They’d get me there.”

“I don’t like anything looking scuzzy. I tell my husband, ‘If one of them’s worn looking, replace them all.’”

“I don’t feel it’s my job. But she sure does! So I guess it’s part of my job now.”

“If you ask me, those Tea Partiers ought to be locked in stocks out front of the courthouse where everyone can spit on them for what they’re doing.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll move to Chicago. I could be big in Chicago.”

Askew, and Proud of It

104 North Water Street, 2010

Several years ago my friend Lilly called me “askew.” Lilly’s a nice lady. I didn’t take offense. For a time I actually got a kick out of someone considering my photographic style unpredictably askew.

If anything, many of my photographs have only become more askew, particularly when I’m photographing residences. I’ll still take a very traditional head-on shot sometimes. The residences I showed in Providence, Rhode Island, recently were all pretty much head-on shots.

But the truth is this: these kinds of pictures easily become one-shot wonders. They’re so very symmetrical. You look at them. You have a moment, maybe another. But that’s it. The symmetry might be an accurate depiction of them. But your mind has seen a lot of symmetry and, frankly, it tends to become bored with it pretty quickly.

So whenever I can, I try to supplement the symmetrical pictures with something a little more….yes, askew. I think they’re really much more interesting this way, in the same way I was talking about the Taj Mahal the other day. So much so that during my morning walks through Edgartown the week before last it was almost as if I couldn’t take a symmetrical head-on shot to save my life.

33 Cottage Street, 2010

Fuller Street, 2010

Underground in Plain Sight

Flag at Menemsha, 2010

Okay, someone’s going to have to clue me in.

It’s funny how when you’re in the picture-taking mode you think you’re noticing things when in fact you’re missing all kinds of things.

While looking through all the pictures I took recently at Martha’s Vineyard, I was interested to discover in some of the pictures of what I call “quieter moments”—pictures that are typically close-ups of things—a surprising number of little American flags.

American flags are a proud and common element in American public life. Flags adorn homes, buildings, boats, public spaces and all kinds of other places. I’ve taken lots of pictures of these flags, and Martha’s Vineyard is full of them.

But these were little flags; cheap plastic flags most of them. And most were stick haphazardly in places where you don’t usually see flags, especially little plastic flags that a lot of people wouldn’t even notice at first.

The one shown above was stuck in a picnic table at Menemsha, a place so windy this time of year that I can’t imagine that the flag was left over from, say, July 4th or Labor Day celebrations.

The one shown below was stuck in the frame of a window of a 2^nd floor law office on Main Street in Edgartown.

There were others, all located in unusual places; taped horizontally above a store entrance, glued to a One-Way sign located in front of a restaurant, stuck diagonally in a cedar shake in front of a real estate firm.

Are these flags some kind of Americana mezuzahs? Is there some kind of patriotic illuminati out there, an underground railroad of travelers who know they can find kindred souls under these discreetly placed flags?

Maybe I've just been watching too much Rubicon?

2^nd Floor Window, Edgartown, 2010

Chance Glances

The Atlantic View, 2010

When you get in the habit of looking for pictures, I don’t think your eyes ever relax. They’re always on the lookout. Maybe this sounds like a lot of unnecessary mental work to you. But I consider it a gift. And if you’re similarly “gifted,” you know exactly how I feel.

A friend of mine (a poet who always has a pen and index card in his pocket for just such occasions) used to refer to this ability of the brain to keep working on things after you’ve consciously put them aside as the “subconscious hit list.”

I wasn’t thinking about pictures the afternoon my wife and I joined here sister and brother-in-law for lunch at The Atlantic restaurant in Edgartown. I don’t remember what it was we’d been doing before lunchtime. But I do remember that whatever it was we were all in need of a few moments of relaxation and liquid therapy.

Maybe the relaxation’s the key. I don’t know. Once I stepped into the restaurant my eyes started seeing things that had me drawing the camera up to my eyes again and again.

The first thing I saw was the view shown above. The scene is the Edgartown harbor as seen through the plastic screen surrounding the outside deck of the restaurant. The plastic gave the view the kind of impressionistic feel I often like. (Click again on the image above and it will enlarge so that you’ll see what I mean.)

It was still chilly outside, so we asked to move indoors. The first thing I saw inside was this view, a good example of the “portal perspectives” I enjoy so much.

From The Atlantic, 2010

When we were finally seated and began to unwind, I noticed a planter just outside the window. My first shot of it, below, was purely information, not anything I’d want to keep.

From The Atlantic, 2010

The last shot, though, was the one I like most because it has this scene of the two flowers poking their faces up at the window as if to look in and see what we were having for lunch.

Chance Glances, 2010

I Beg to Disagree, Mr. Gladwell

When You Get Stuck on a Long Conference Call And the Camera’s Within Reach,

You Shoot Anything, Even Your Own Foot, 2006

I enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. I don’t always agree with him. But I admire the way he draws seemingly disconnected facts, science and history across time into coherent insights and conclusions.

In the October 4 issue of The New Yorker, Gladwell writes (Annals of Innovation: Small Change) that social media cannot replicate the experience of personal contact when seeking to effect serious social change. He tells the story of how in 1960 four students from North Carolina A&T University held a sit-in at a Woolworth’s Department Store lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, store. If you’re too young to remember this, let me just say that those guys were putting their lives on the line doing this. Within days, though, their action inspired thousands of other people to hold sit-ins in cities throughout the South.

Sure, there are all kinds of flash mob stories. Yes, personalities like Glenn Beck can summon hundreds of thousands of people to rallies. But to do as those four brave young men in Greensboro did, to put their lives on the line, Gladwell states, there had to be close proximity between the four men. Their touch had to be more than virtual. In fact, Gladwell believes you can’t effect serious social change using social media.

I don’t know if I agree with Gladwell, or not, though I can’t think of any time I’ve ever been challenged by anything I saw at Twitter or Facebook to put my life on the line the same way those young men in Greensboro did. But I can tell a true story of when I believe a life was saved by the loose network of connections at Fotolog.

Fotolog is one of the early online photo-sharing communities. Its founders imagined that people would post snapshots of nothing more serious than what they were eating each day. But Fotolog quickly grew into a much larger phenomenon, one so vast that it soon outstripped its founders’ capital, technology and managerial know-how.

Even in those nascent days of social networking, though, like-minded groups of online friends started assembling. One of the people whose photographs some of us followed was a young lady in London who posted photographs of her legs and shoes. Before you jump to conclusions, let me assure you there wasn’t anything tawdry about her photographs. They were artful studies—almost like ads you’d see in Vogue—of lines and colors that just happened to be her legs and footwear.

It was during this time that I learned how when you follow a person’s pictures on a day-to-day basis, you can learn a lot about a person. If the person is up or down, you can tell. If the person suffers from depression, you could tell when the person was cycling down.

That’s just what happened in the winter of 2004. The young woman’s photos started taking on ominous tones. I don’t recall what it was about the photos or their titles that clued us in, but I could tell from the comments people left at her Fotolog site that those of us who followed her work were becoming concerned about her condition.

[I’ve done a lot of marketing research about and among people with mood disorders, so I’m attuned to noticing the symptoms of such conditions.]

Let me add that none of us knew each other by anything more than our screen presences. We didn’t know anything about this woman but her first name. But when things became so dark in her photographs that we suspected she was in some kind of trouble, we came together as a group, this disparate group of friendly strangers, and took action.

Keep in mind this woman was in London. Most of us were in the U.S. Our action took the form of an informal “six degrees of separation” game. Using what information we could derive about this young lady from her pictures and titles, we were able to contact people we knew or knew of in London who lived nearby. It involved a few more than six degrees of separation, but we were eventually able to find someone who knew the woman and send a neighbor who was closer to her to check on her. The neighbor found the young lady seriously considering suicide and was able to convince her to seek help.

Take that, Mr. Gladwell!

The photo above is in honor of Jackie, our English friend. She got help, but never returned to Fotolog.