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This weekend I took Nathaniel and Dillon to Hollywood and LA. We went to a photo store in Hollywood called Freestyle. I mainly wanted to see what kind of Polaroid film they had and how much it was. But I picked up a bunch of cool attachments, including a fisheye, for my Holga camera. Happy birthday to me!

Then the boys went off to browse Amoeba Records, while I took Flat Liberace to dance on his sidewalk star. Yes I got a picture, in spite of the many people all over the sidewalks on a Saturday afternoon in late May. Look for it to appear on the Flat Liberace blog soon.

Here are some other pictures I took in Hollywood. This is a vintage clothing store on Hollywood Blvd:

A mural on a building, forget exactly where (Hollywood’s not full of itself, or anything):

I met the boys back up at Amoeba and Dillon had found a Converge vinyl record, used, on colored vinyl. Great find. I picked up a David Sylvian double album really cheaply, myself. He’s the singer from Japan. The band, Japan, not the country.

Dillon and Nathaniel with their vinyl, outside Amoeba, and through the fisheye attachment on my Holga:

Then we swung by the Hollywood Forever cemetery. I figured we’d just drive through really quick and the boys could see Johnny Ramone’s grave. Of course I couldn’t resist getting a picture of Flat Liberace with Johnny Ramone. I’ve posted about this cemetery before—it’s got some really rich people buried there. The boys were as blown away as I was at some of the graves.

Then on the way home we decided to pull off near downtown where we always see these cool old bridges. We ended up parking at one end of the 4th Street bridge, where there was a bunch of graffiti on some buildings. The boys took off on their own, back over the bridge to get pictures of the largest graffiti tag in Los Angeles, which you can see from the bridge. It’s down in the river bed and it’s like, a half-mile long. It took something like 400 gallons of paint to do. The city says it will cost almost $4 million to remove it (because the toxic runoff has to be caught and removed from the riverbed), so it’s not going anywhere soon. Here’s a quick video view of it (we didn’t take this):

I wandered around on my own. Near where we parked:

A garage sale I stumbled upon (through the fisheye):

That was kind of surreal. The area I was in was deserted, by LA standards. Very industrial. I stumbled on this garage sale in the middle of nothing with all these people there. One drunk guy on a Harley wanted me to take a picture of his bike but I had just snapped my last frame.

They had a few boxes of vinyl, but the only record I was considering getting was a Stray Cats album—until I turned it over and saw there was dried blood smeared all over the back.

It was just weird.

A building right next to where the garage sale was:

I figured if I went up on the bridge I’d see the boys heading back from whatever direction they’d gone. I tried out some split-lens filters I got for the Holga while up there. This is looking straight down the road on the bridge:

The bridge has these benches built into each side, and this one a homeless person had taken up residence in. Their belongings were all piled on it:

I won’t mention the stairwell I came across that someone had used as a toilet. OK, so I did mention it. It was incredibly stinky, and that’s putting it mildly. More gross than I can say.

Found out after we got home that we were basically on the edge of Skid Row.

I loved it though and now want to go exploring all over downtown LA.