sunday times column week nine

Dead Famous

On Sunday we drove half an hour down to the boardwalk at Venice Beach. A cross between the Barras and a low rent seaside circus, it is the scummy tidemark on the bath that was the Sixties.

There is a guy who looks like Osama Bin Laden on roller skates with a little amp and an electric guitar who plays Hendrix songs as he speeds backwards along the beachfront.

You can get a massage, a healing, some sage or have your name carved on a grain of rice. Semi naked jugglers, toothless tarot readers, acid casualties hawking sandals, tie die t-shirts, posters of Al Pacino all vie for your money.

Hare Krishnas, fire eating Latvians, and bored looking Scientologists all compete for the Sunday crowd. There is a sand sculpture of a dragon, a woman shouting about circumcision, and a guy doing a robot dance to fund his planned trip to Mars.

My own personal favourite is the guy who emerges from an actual trash can holding a sign, Spare Some Cash For Poor White Trash, but the cops move him on, as he doesn’t have a licence.

At the end of the Boardwalk is Muscle beach - a former haunt of our Governor, an open air gym where bulked up, steroid stuffed musclemen preen and pose, their oiled up muscles glistening in the late evening sun.

Venice reminds me a bit of the Barras in Glasgow: the guys hawking plates, selling dud batteries, and those same Scarface posters, that weird conjunction of enterprise and desperation.

Though for surreal madness you couldn’t beat Paddy’s market, a street market in the Gallowgate in Glasgow’s East End where you’d see a guy selling a broken shoe lace, a comb with even fewer teeth than he had and a broken light bulb with all the solemnity of an auctioneer at Sotheby’s. Paddy’s Market is most likely all gentrified now and has been turned into a Charles Rennie Mackintosh themed delicatessen.

Los Angeles is a dangerous place. There are mudslides, flashfloods, race riots, earthquakes, drive by shootings, coyotes, rattlesnakes and wild fires.

It was the 4th of July the other week, it is sort of Guy Fawkes’ night meets Ne’erday, lots of parties and people dressed up in clothes made from the Stars and Stripes.

Fireworks are illegal here due to the fire risk, we are in the midst of the longest drought on record. It’s mostly official firework displays but people sneak them in from the neighbouring state of Nevada where seemingly almost nothing is illegal.

One guy made the news after he got into trouble though he’d tried to make sure he wouldn’t be seen by having his private firework display somewhere discreet, in his house.

On July fourth there are always a few injuries caused by ignorance of the basic principles of Newtonian physics. In some of the less affluent parts of town they shoot guns into the air, forgetting that what goes up must come down. So there are always people who land up in the ER because some gangsta shot a bullet that landed on them. They even have ads on the back of buses asking people not to do this.

With all this danger you have to think ahead. There is a huge cemetery here called Hollywood Forever. It was run down and in a mess when two young guys took it over a few years ago and turned it around, making it the in place to be buried.

Its most famous resident is Valentino, who died at 31. It was said that each year on the anniversary of his death a mysterious grief stricken lady in black would turn up at his grave. It turned out when someone did some digging that she was an actress in the pay of the studio. The great director Cecil B De Mille is buried there in a grave facing his beloved Paramount Studios across the road. For the more obscure residents they even have a website, findagrave.com.

Since the new and enterprising owners took over they’ve started showing movies there once a fortnight in the Summer, for ten bucks you can watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest projected onto a white wall in the cemetery. There was even talk of the Zombie movie, “Dawn of the Dead” being in the programme but the graveyard owners stepped in and nixed it.

They do funerals from around eighteen hundred bucks or nine hundred quid, and they’ll even do you a sort of highlight reel of your life. For friends who care but don’t want the hassle of actually having to show up at your funeral they offer a service where mourners can watch your funeral on line, cybergrief.

There is even a guy out here who runs something called Dearly Departed Tours, for the more morbid tourist. Scott Michaels will drive you to the site of The Manson killings, passing the house of the Menendez brothers who murdered their parents. He’ll recount the story of the Welsh actress who met her death by jumping off the Hollywood sign, before they fenced it off. For a bit of light relief en route you can see where Hugh Grant was busted with Divine Brown and take a pee in the public lavatory where George Michael fell foul of an off duty cop. Classy, and the whole thing only takes half a day.