Halloween 2008

Despite the explosion of sales in sex-styled costumes and leaping liquor sales, Halloween for me this year was a relatively sedentary event. I spent several hours on busses and trains attending errands, a few hours reading and then a bit of time with Brown walking round the various areas of a curiously quiet downtown Los Angeles. But there were a number of remarkable moments throughout the day.

Glenn Danzig's house in Franklin Hills was TP'd sometime Thursday night—or so I imagine, as it were not even 9 a.m. when I strode past Friday morning and saw the bits of paper.

Later that morning, while heading back along Fairfax on the 780, I caught this shot near LaCienega. Granted, the composition of this shot is far from artful. But the elements make for a disturbing mise en scene, I feel ,when pointed out—and pointed out in a particular order. There is the marquee denoting the Adult Day Health Care, the small black lump in the storefront entrance (it is a homeless person, apparently asleep) and then the billboard promoting the movie atop it all.


The nadir of the day came round noon, when I was forced to exit the Red Line at Hollywood/Vine that I could make my way to Amoeba Records. (My mum's birthday is Halloween, and I am always lat in getting her a decent gift—I state "late" as she resides several time zones away and by the time she gets whatever garish gift I send—such as a gift certificate for the chipper/shredder and a re-printed manual stating explicitly to put the husband in feet first!) There, I was again greeted with the expensive idiocy of blowhard Tom LaBonge and idiot child Eric Garcetti:

Questions that neither of these nitwit NIMBY twits would answer include: "How much did this legislation cost the taxpayer?" and "Which of you two morons hired the moron what continues to pioneer—after five years—a litigious gray area with the way "illegal" is printed?"

The afternoon found me reading and drinking. Browne came over round mid-afternoon to drag my cantankerous arse out. We made the rounds, saw the sights and then saw to an evening of indulgence amid a world set to explode in a pagan exhibition of annual debauchery: we went grocery shopping. Upon exiting Ralphs, we came across this licentious six-foot-plus Smurf:

But it all came to a head in a surreal fashion when, crossing the barren wasteland that is Pershing Square, we witnessed a public screening of the outrageous soft-porn S&M cult classic, "Rocky Horror Picture Show." Although it had been a couplea decades since last I took in a performance (and if it were not a performance, there was no reason to attend!), I elected to continue home. Browne suggested I film a few moments, and so I waited to capture one of the two more visually obnoxious segments. (The other is near the end, when Meatloaf defies Dr. Frank N Furter, only to be axed to death in the freezer below, just before the House of Usher . Wonderfully gruesome!) After watching an audience that may as well have been attempting to recreate the lounge scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (released the same year, I might add), I knew I would be better off hanging out at home rather than being arrested attempting to get folk to know that they ain't crazy; it's the bored ones on high who wish to tamp them down and make them merely think they are crazy, that are crazy. [sigh]

But it did not end there—oh, no! Unlike a real city, Los Angeles demands one take a great amount of time to seek out libations—and it were round 3 a.m. or so that I found myself seeking such sustenance only to have to waste a bit of time quarreling with some fool who thought my Borsalino was best complimented by calling it an "indiana jones" hat. Fortunately, the time was not entirely wasted while indulging in the voyeurism of filming some guy in a baseball cap tapping away on his iBook at the odd residential art experiment called "STAY" presently unfolding at the base of the Cecil:

-BusTard