Some of you may still have enough short term memory to recall the
little video I did a few years back with Anthony Miller to promote my novel The City Under the Skin, done under the
auspices of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Los Angeles magazine. The director was Jerry Gorin. It looked like this, and still does:
Basically I walk around bits of LA, point at things and say something
about them in a rather self-conscious way, not least about this onramp to the
Hollywood freeway which I think is a wonderful zesty piece of engineering if
not strictly speaking architecture.
I seem to think that in the video Mr. Miller and I agree that it looks
Ballardian. The shot in the video looks like
this:
And now, blow me down, I discover this album Do Hollywood by a band named
Lemon Twigs, and they’re doing pretty much the same shot. The NME website says of the Lemon Twigs, “Their
greatest talent is their ability to pick the pockets of rock’s dinosaurs
without making it seem passé or pastiche.”
Hollywood – so many options, so few genuinely original ideas – although of course that applies to the whole world, not just to Hollywood.
