Notes from Hollywood and Vine

JuLy 23rd, 2025.

6:30am

Hollywood Blvd & Vine St.

Tom Waits told us in his track Heart Attack & Vine that “…you’d probably see someone you know at Heart Attack and Vine.” I’m not sure how true this would be anymore. This corner, espoused as the heart of Hollywood reads more as a list of strangers waiting for the bus, literally and figuratively.

The buildings that line the corners of this intersection are foundational to the roots of what Hollywood has meant since the first department store went up in the 1930s. The art deco architecture still preserved beautifully, but an almost unrecognizable atmosphere surrounds the brick.

Is this Hollywood?

I see the pink granite stars embedded within the sidewalk. I see the neon sign beckoning bygone eras. Veiled allusions to cinema and culture, the seemingly still heartbeat of times past.

But where’s the glitz? Where’s the glamor?

The Hollywood Beautification team chaperones the Zamboni-style sidewalk cleaner across the traffic light over Vine St., past a woman wrapped in a pink fleece blanket sheltering in the best way she know how from the uncharacteristically cool and dewy July morning.

Many are off to work. Many haven’t worked in ages.

Tourists hold hands wreaking of curiosity and adventure. I can’t imagine they will find what they though they were looking for at Hollywood and Vine. Marilyn Monroe is dead.

What is the bus drivers thought process when arriving at the stop at Hollywood and Vine and the lady in the pink blanket doesn’t rise to join the route eastward?

Do they take it as a slight? Do they become jaded to the next person sitting on the bench in a pink blanket that may actually be waiting to commute to other parts of the city? Does LA Metro have a policy pertaining to stopping for every lady cloaked in pink fleece, sitting on the bus bench?

Perhaps they leave it to the drivers discretion? “Naa, they don’t need the ride, I’ll blow by this one.”

As someone that has been blown by at precarious times of the night, I can acknowledge that on the receiving end it certainly feels like a slight.

“Stay productive!” bellow the man with the face tattoos. His buddy, only with tattoos on his neck, chides my approach of sitting in a folding chair at the corner of the intersection, in proper hipster regalia, typing on a typewriter. He asks, “you writing a movie?”. I tell him that I’m not, I’m doing research for UCLA, which he seems to change his understanding of the situation, softening his stare to match his friends interest.

Does Hollywood and Vine beget such ire towards someone “writing a move” now? Would Andy Kaufman in all his eccentricities, sitting here in the same manner 50 years ago received a similar response?

I actually can’t tell if it would have been better to have been writing a movie in the man-with-the-face-tattoo’s eyes. Did he want a part maybe?

I’d give it to him.

The billboards petition attention for food delivery apps and Jesus Christ, ne’er were the days of 50 foot faces of Humphrey Bogart and Rita Klein, this is no longer the culture of Hollywood, like everything else, this is a mecca for commerce.

Retail consists of dispensaries and vitamin stores called “Body Energy”. Tom Waits wouldn’t write songs about an intersection like this. There is no longer the smokey bar with its heavy pours of whiskey and the choking lay of tobacco smog; although the song Heart Attack & Vine was written about the time Waits’, while drink in the one of the historical establishments , experienced a woman entering the bar with a dead cat, assumingely hit by LA car-culture, asking for help, giving Waits a startle, and the bartender lending the recommendation to “take that shit out to the street”.

I did not see where the lady in the pink fleece blanket went.

Did she get on the bus?

More tourists now. 7:30am seems a befitting time to have eaten their continental breakfasts at the Hampton Inn along the boulevard, and now with maps in hand they must walk into the grit and grime of Hollywood and find passage to smoother landscapes; perhaps CityWalk, or Disneyland. The Zambonis have been, but the street is still dirty. The stars shine less bright and the brass name plates need a polish.

The ominous all-white busses of the Church of Scientology shuttling their cultists to their conscripted locations for the day.

Do crows eat mice? Maybe it’s a raven? It’s one of the smaller sorts, I think thats a crow. I’m nut sure either ravens or crows eat mice, but just to safe I won’t mention to the crow that there is a tiny city mouse sheltered in the lamp post.

———————————————-

July 23rd, 2025

Hollywood Blvd & Vine St.

7:46 am

The jacarandas bloom when their mothers tell them.

The man yells from a silver Ford Fiesta, "show some fucking respect for the law.”

Tourists with bags from Knotts Berry Farm, the birthplace of the boisenberry, now a theme park.

The man with a shaggy beard kicking phantom stones along the sidewalk mutters about not knowing "another federation", and how they had not heard him the previous times he had told them..

Workmen with leather tool belts dismantle chainlink fences around asphalt parking lots. Its almost a certainty it is to be replaced with another form of exclusion -- but who would want to hang out in the parking lot at Hollywood & Vine anyway?

Tourists with rolling bags walk assuredly not to raise suspicion, is it the illuminated "W" that is their north star?