Hollywood Decaying

This is the Hollywood (actual geographical Hywd.) we know & are ambivalent about. (Visiting the same likker stores did not make us another Bukowski.)In yet another of those iNternet mystery/daisy chain deals, Biblioklept recently noticed the video, which was uploaded six yrs. (-10 days) ago, & decided to drag it out, then Open Culture embedded it & added two paragraphs (which we reproduce fully as we are too busy to view the video, let alone come up w/ coherent thoughts):

The world tends to think rather loosely about the concepts of Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the motion picture industry, throwing them around, running them together, naming one when they mean another — still, nothing a bracing splash of Charles Bukowski can’t sort out. Above, the famous Los Angeles-resident poet, a figure as shambolically glorious and stealthily inspiring as much of the city itself, gives a brief back-seat tour of Hollywood. No, he doesn’t take us past the movie studios, nor the Walk of Fame, nor the site of Schwab’s Pharmacy. He stays closer to home — his home, the storied bungalow at 5124 De Longpre Avenue. We see his neighborhood, his neck of Hollywood, the northwestern district of vast Los Angeles that contains much less of the capital-I Industry than you’d think, but more of genuine (if often grotesque) interest.

“That’s a lady fortune teller there,” Bukowski says, gesturing toward one of the modest houses around him. “I went in there one time. She read my palm. She said, ‘You’re an alcoholic.’ ‘Really? Do I gamble, too?’ ‘Yes, you gamble. That’ll be five dollars.’” The driver continues down Hollywood’s eponymous boulevard, passing Western Avenue, which gets the poet remembering more: “There used to be cement benches out front, and all the insane people would sit there. The street people. They’d talk to each other all day long.” We pass important landmarks as well: “There’s the old Sex Shop. Keeps changing hands.” He even points out the wheelers and dealers living amid this stretch of bars, brothels, and burger stands: “There’s a woman who’s not a hooker. There’s a dope dealer.” Give me Bukowski’s Hollywood tour over those double-decker buses you see around town, their conductors barking about minor celebrity sightings, any day. “I’ve been to this liquor store many a time,” Bukowski notes. “Many a time.”

At which point laist noticed, then we jumped on the bandwagon & now it belongs to the world.