Chapter - 2
A Night On The Town

Los Angeles-millions of people, millions of desk jobs, people in Hollywood whose jobs are so nebulous even they don't know what they do. But the sun sets, Los Angeles takes a collective shower, the lights go on and its time to go out.

There's an absurd quantity of things to do at night. Every movie palace, dance hall, bar, and night club switches on their signage to draw us inside for the chance of finding love, escape, distraction, and danger. Flashing, blinking, glowing, undulating signage around every corner, from which there is no escape.

New York has times square, that concentration of electricity that glows bright like a collapsing star. Los Angeles is such concentration exploded-like a shattering windshield scattering jeweled fragments across the city.

Fly into LAX at night, and from your window seat you sit gape mouthed at the miles of lights below. Down there, humming away, are more movie marquees and dazzling pleasure domes than you could visit in two lifetimes. The light, the light, the light.

Like the transmogrification of a great electric beast, the world of lights shifts and changes. The great be-neoned nightclubs of the past are no longer with us-Ciro's, the Trocadero, the Mocambo, the Earl Carrol, the Cocoanut Grove, all gone. Even the Hollywood Palladium, legendary venue of Benny and Frankie and the Dorseys, is being razed for a housing development. New venues are formed: bars like the Good Luck construct signage reminiscient of the glory days of LA's past. Klieg lights are still trotted out and hauled around town for the openings of Korean nightclubs and Latin movies.

But remember, it's all Hollywood. The floodlit nightscape promises scintilation, but as the Situationists would say, it's the society of the specticle. Your money runs out, the lights are snapped off, and you're pitched into the Stygian night. Come the morrow the world is ablaze with daylight you hide in your cubicle at work, waiting for the sun to set. And then it's back into the strange, luminescent hologram of the Tinseltown night.

The Frolic Room. This infamous West Coast speakeasy was made part of the Warner theater complex in 1934. Howard Hughes bought , owned and ran the Frolic for the duration of the 1940's and 50's and installed this eye-popping sign. The Hollywood and Vine focal piont of serious drinkers and dealmakers for half a century (and a swell movie location, e.g. Kevin Spacey's exit from the Frolic in L.A. Confidential), the Frolic Room nearly lost its neon when the Disney Corporation rented the Pantages theater next door, and cited that the signage didn't work with the Disney image. This resulted in some strongly worded letters and bad press, which fortunately convinced The Mouse to back off.

Photo by Nigel Cox