The photo illustrating my bio was taken on the sidewalk behind the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. I lived in one of the garden cottages up on the hill when I first moved to L. A. for work a few years ago. I still like to drink in the lobby there when it is quiet. The first year I was here I would only drink Manhattans as a recent New Yorker's act of resistance and allegiance.
I noticed last week that they'd hung some new photos of a man costumed as the devil dating from the time of the hotel's construction in the 1920s. They are outside the small kitchen in the lobby, past the front desk. This was right after a friend told me that the basement kitchen, under the lobby kitchen, housed malevolent spirits.
I have never before lived in a city where people told me things like this, but in Los Angeles I hear them regularly, which is something unexpected. It's like we're in old New Orleans or Transylvania. I don't think it's the old Catholic spirits mixed with African animism like New Orleans voodoo, or history like Eastern Europe...
....my theory about the atmosphere around the Marmont is it's affected by the constant stream of failed and frustrated showbiz fanstasies from decades past funneled down Sunset Hollywood and Hollywood Boulevards. Hollywood Boulevard breaks apart and winds up into the hills behind the hotel while Sunset flows on in front of it. The Chateau sits like an island in these two powerful streams. I declare Le Ch. Marmont a Deleuzian island kingdom, the schizo's Mount St. Michel.
The photo below is a British scientist, Rupert Sheldrake, who would categorize the persistence of the past in a physcial environment as a 'morphic field.' It is true that scientists recognize that a particular experiment is more likely to work in an environment if it has already worked once there before. Sheldrake claims reality is a series of mental habits, rather than a universe governed by eternal mathermatical laws.
Sheldrake also tries to account for evolution and other natural pheonmena with this theory. Doesn't seem exactly likely to me, but that's why they call them "theories," which I am always happy to entertain.
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