The Writer, The Hotel:
The incomprobable A.M Homes had this great piece in the Financial Times about the incomprobable Chateau Marmont Hotel high above Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles…
Built in 1929 as LA’s first earthquake-proof apartments – modelled after Chateau Amboise in France’s Loire Valley, this “residence” hotel has quite a history – everybody who is anybody has stayed here. Infamous for being the spot where John Belushi died of a drug overdose and where long before that Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures, uttered the infamous and accurate phrase: “If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.” And they did, all of them: Howard Hughes lived in the penthouse, Elizabeth Taylor brought Montgomery Clift here after his car accident, James Dean hopped in through a window to audition for Rebel Without a Cause. More recently, the Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded most of an album while in residence.
The hotel is a well-known hideaway for both those who live here and those who come in from around the world, and with all that comes an oxymoron – privacy and exposure in equal doses. The rooms and public spaces are a safe haven for people who are perpetually over-exposed, the building’s architecture and decor like a heavy drape to cloak oneself. The hotel is a little bit of paradise, a perfect stage set for the fantasy narrative we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are doing in this place.
On the city itself…
Los Angeles is like a mistress who cannot be fully possessed – beautiful, elusive, ever changing; the most thrilling of seductions. Languid, laconic, especially in summer, the humid haze lulls me into a stupor of attraction and desire. It can be experienced in a seemingly inexhaustible number of ways – think of the noirish world of James Ellroy, the decadence of Bret Easton Ellis, the urbane insight of Mike Davis and Joan Didion. It is a city of many cities, vast in its sprawl with great depth of cultures and fast becoming an international destination for art, music, architecture.
(via LA Observed)
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I think that’s a pretty fair explanation of LA’s appeal. It’s hard to appreciate it, though, when you spend two to three hours a day sitting in traffic. I lived there for a year, and that’s what I remember most, before anything atmospheric. Imagine what it could be if it had functioning mass transit.
I think that’s a pretty fair explanation of LA’s appeal. It’s hard to appreciate it, though, when you spend two to three hours a day sitting in traffic. I lived there for a year, and that’s what I remember most, before anything atmospheric. Imagine what it could be if it had functioning mass transit.