Tuesday, April 8, 2008 – Art Deco Details

A man and woman meet on the fire escape of the local Art Deco landmark, the Sunset Tower Hotel on the Sunset Strip (8358 Sunset Boulevard) – 1929, architect Leland A. Bryant. It's very famous, in a good number of films, and once home to Howard Hughes, John Wayne, Paulette Goddard, Zasu Pitts, and that famous gangster with the great name, Bugsy Siegel. It seems everyone lived there.

You notice the goats?  The goat has long been a visual aid in symbolic and mythological literature.  It has a varied significance, gentleness in one tradition and sensuality in another.  Both sexes of the goat symbolize fertility, vitality and ceaseless energy – the buck represents the epitome of masculine virility and creative energy, while the doe represents the feminine and generative power and abundance.  Of course the goat also symbolizes lewdness. In Christian symbolism the goat often represents the Devil, lust, lubricity and the damned.  The opposite is the lamb, symbolizing the saved.

But this is Hollywood. Note winged figure with horns between the nearly naked man and the woman on the balcony.

Down on Santa Monica Boulevard, the awing at the rock club, Dragonfly, recalls Dante Gabriel Rossetti – more Pre-Raphaelite than Art Deco.

A minor note – along the way Rossetti somehow acquired an obsession for exotic animals, in particular wombats. He would often ask his friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, and would spend hours there himself. In September 1869, he acquired the first of two pet wombats. One wombat – named "Top" – he often brought to the dinner table and he allowed the thing to sleep in the large centerpiece during meals.  Rossetti would fit right in out here in Hollywood – yeah, he would.

Wombats aside, near Dragonfly, there's some pure Art Deco – the old Technicolor headquarters building from the thirties, on the southeast corner of Cole and Santa Monica Boulevard –

Santa Monica Boulevard, the Theater District, inconsequential Art Deco – a green wall with a flower –

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Technical Note:

Photographs after March 3, 2008, were taken with a Nikon D200 – or a Nikon D70 when noted. All previous photographs were taken with the D70. The lenses used are (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300 mm telephoto, or (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. Photography here is modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  The earliest photography in the archives was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik