Somewhere Else

While we were walking along Broadway in Los Angeles yesterday, we saw plenty of interesting places in addition to Angels Flight and the Bradbury Building. Directly across the road from the Bradbury Building, there is an impressively ornate building. This is the Million Dollar Theater which was built in 1918 for LA showman Sid Grauman for the then outrageous price of a million dollars. It was one of America’s first “movie palaces” and still looks fairly palatial today.

In one corner of the building there is a most intriguing pharmacy – Farmacia Million Dollar Botanica – which specialises in worship of Santa Muerte, the Saint of Death. The shop windows have appropriately macabre statues of the Grim Reaper:

A little further along Broadway there is an interesting mural called Calle de la Eternidad (Eternity Street). It shows the Aztec calendar, with hands reaching upwards. As we were walking along, we happened to pick up a copy of the local newspaper, Los Angeles Downtown News – and were surprised when we read it later to find that the current (Aug 30) issue has an article about Broadway between Third and Fourth Streets, exactly where we had been walking. Coincidences do happen!

During this visit to Los Angeles we’ve been reading “Angels Flight”, one of Michael Connolly’s LA crime novels. So today we went along to see Angels Flight, a funicular railway in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. The railway was built in 1901 and is where the murder that sets the scene for the whole plot took place.

The brightly painted railway looks oddly jaunty and funfair-like amid the surrounding glass and concrete tower blocks. We also visited the Bradbury Building, which was built in 1893 and is just a few blocks away on the corner of 3rd and Broadway. This building also features strongly in the novel, since the LAPD Internal Affairs Department is located there and the murder victim had an office in the building as well. If you’re a fan of Blade Runner, you may also recognise the building – some of the movie was shot there.

Walking along Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, California yesterday, we noticed an icon from our childhood. Pasted on the wall beside a bar, there was a stencil poster of the Monopoly Man – playing a piano. And on the base of a nearby lamppost there was another stencil, painted directly onto the surface (below). These appealing images are the work of LA street artist Alec, who leaves his Monopoly stencils all around the city.

The lifeguards’ towers on the sand at Venice Beach in California are another iconic attraction for photographers. But this year they are even more photogenic than usual. Instead of the normal sedate blue colour, they are painted in bright psychedelic colours.

This unusual exhibition of beach art is titled “Summer of Colour” and is the work of thousands of school children across the United States.

We went for a walk along Venice Beach in California yesterday. It’s a lively place – a crazy blend of the ridiculous and sublime, sacred and profane. But somehow it all hangs together to produce aq heady dose of SoCal (Southern California) beach culture.

One thing we always enjoy at Venice Beach is checking out the latest graffiti at the Venice Public Art Walls. These walls have been in operation for over 30 years, giving local graffiti artists permission (with a permit) and an audience for their works of art. They’re very popular with photographers. You can only wonder why this great idea hasn’t been adopted by other beaches all round the world.

Yesterday we mentioned the Wizard of Oz display in the window of the Culver Hotel (above). This distinctively shaped building is a local landmark and was described as a “skyscraper” when it first opened in 1924. An amazing number of movie stars have stayed in the hotel during its 86 year history. And according to local legend, Charlie Chaplin (the first owner) sold the hotel to John Wayne for $1 in a poker game.

Facing the hotel in Culver Town Plaza is the nostalgic, art deco style Pacific Theatres cinema complex:

And next to the cinema there is The Lion’s Fountain, shown below. It is the work of Minneapolis based sculptor Douglas Olmsted Freeman. The sculpture is inspired by a number of different movie lions, including MGM’s trademark Leo the Lion, and the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. However it is not a direct representation of any specific one of them.

It’s time for a major change of scenery. On the weekend we travelled from Cairns to Los Angeles via Sydney. This morning we hopped a green bus to Culver City, “the Heart of Screenland”. Culver City isn’t as well known as Hollywood, but it has its fair share of movie history and there are plenty of little movie reminders scattered around.

The Culver Hotel has a window display commemorating the movie “The Wizard of Oz” which was filmed just one block away in the MGM studios. Members of the cast, including Judy Garland and even the 124 Munchkins, frequented the hotel during the filming. As it turned out, we were in luck – the window display was being tidied up when we were there, so we got to look at the figures close-up without having to peer through the glass window.

We spotted this pub in Ingham, in north Queensland. It’s the pub that ran out of beer and inspired the famous Slim Dusty song “The Pub with no Beer”. (Though to be fair, a pub in New South Wales also claims to be the original.) The event occurred during World War II, when soldiers drank the Day Dawn Hotel dry. Ingham poet Dan Sheahan wrote a poem about the event, and that was turned into the song by Gordon Parsons.

Unfortunately the historic pub was knocked down, rebuilt in a more modern style, and renamed as Lee’s Hotel (above). But don’t despair; there is another pub in Ingham which was built around the same time as the old Day Dawn. It’s the Station Hotel a few blocks away and dating from 1925. It’s a real blast from the past. And in case you’re wondering, both pubs had beer when we were in Ingham last week,

Last week we had a picnic lunch in a park in the Queensland town of Townsville. While we were eating, several butterflies were flitting around us – kindly sitting still for long enough to let us take a few photographs.

According to conventional wisdom, fight or flight is the big decision when faced with danger. But these butterflies showed that there are other options – luckily for them, since butterflies can’t put up much of a fight, and their flight is rather erratic. One was easily visible, with big colourful spots on its wings. Presumably it looked inedible to predators, or maybe the spots looked like big eyes:

Another butterfly chose an entirely different defensive strategy. It looked so much like a leaf that it almost disappeared when it sat on the ground. So we can expand the normal options into: fight or flight … or bright or out of sight.

As well as being the location where the movie “Australia” was filmed, it has pictures of another kind. Many of the walls on buildings in the town have been decorated with huge murals. Many of them display scenes from Bowen’s history.

And of course, some of the murals include those Catalina flying boats that we mentioned yesterday: