mary goes to hollywood..and the desert.
i friggin love my new t-shirt.
Click to viewhere's a clip of me talking to you outside this hideous little house in west hollywood where bowie shacked up , during and around' the man who fell to earth'
amazing to think elton john was up the road in his secure fru fru villa in the chateau marmont, while bowie was unprotected down in lower depths of hollywood...
that's the difference in vibe between those two men, i guess....
i have to tell you.. i'm on a huge comedown at the moment
i'm beginning to think that going on holiday is like moving house in the way that it disorientates you.
it would be very easy for me to live completely in my own head and never leave the house...really....i don't need travel.
and it's not that the weather was great.. it was freezing out in the desert half the time, and it rained in hollywood too.
there was chunks of sunshine,but really ,no matter where you go... it's the people that lift you up..... or bring you down.
for me there is only two choices... people who can talk.. and i mean TALK... or no one at all...
i love going to the gritty bars in silverlake ...
there was one bloke there smoking the most exquisite cigars...
our eyes and ears made contact and the evening suddenly made clear sense.
the company of interesting strangers is a wonderful thing.
i hung out with him all evening and returned to the mondrian hotel in hollywood at four in the morning stinking of cohiba cigars...
and here i am gently easing the hangover
i feel for the musicians i know in hollywood...my friend jef is really strong...he sails close to the edge in that town,but its hard...
he played bass on tori amos 'little earthquakes'... and loads of other things...
but there are other souls, and i can really see the pressure getting to them... these are hard times for professional musicians...
thank heavens i was never a professional...a terrible terrible trap!
melrose avenue in hollywood is a great street to hang out on in the afternoon... tis a very funky place...
thomas bought a fantastic art deco drinks tray for his bedroom down there in one of the stores that sells old furniture from old style hollywood homes.
we do no art galleries..or touristy things..thomas likes to relax and read...he likes to get to bed early for many of the nights...and i'm an insomniac...so when he snoozes...i cruizes...over to friends or out to the bars ..where i'd just sit there waiting..for the man...
and he always appears..... you just have to be patient and be open to things .
there was one man in the desert in this bar called 'the toolshed'....a real dive of a place... old hairy bikers and pensioners.....
lonely men looking for someone to share the twilight years with... hope in their eyes, if you're at all friendly.... wild really...
one man came in and started hitting on me...i wasn't really interested in that,but then he opened up and talked....
he's been hiv positive for nearly thirty years and you'd never have known......a fit man...
he got infected before they had a permanent name for it.. he tells me it was temporarily called 'the grids'
his lover came home one day crying and worried that he'd given him this new disease... he was only twenty at the time...
a student at berklee in san francisco.. this older lover eventually topped himself with heroin and this poor boy found him...
he fell apart himself and ended up living on the streets...
and the thing that motivated him to get off drugs and the streets was not being able to have a bath in the morning...
it's funny , the simple things that turn a soul around...
but then his father in his eighties decided to shoot himself a couple of years ago and he found him too!
i wanted and didn't want the details.. if you understand... because my own father left this world in the same manner,i wanted,but didn't want the details...
in truth,i cleverly pressed him for details.... he could tell i wasn't being a mere voyeur and so he imparted them to me..
he told me the smell was very overpowering.. metallic .. because of the iron in the blood ...
that one detail located me completely.
this man now makes violins...i love that....i think making hand made musical instruments is a beautiful way to live...
so then we talked about the different woods used in stringed instruments....rosewood...sitka..and cocobollo ... rare exotic woods from brazil.
do you know that when tori amos became successful,and was able to afford her first really good grand piano,
the piano maker took her out into the forest so she could pick her own tree?.. they then 'knock' on the tree to see if it's ready...
don't you love that?!..
they can tell by knocking on the tree if the density and everything is right.
then there was the vet doctor... . a real animal lover...and this was in the afternoon in the sunshine over coffee and hangovers....
he too had been living in san francisco but he was a scuba diver in his spare time and made his extra money from cleaning the hulls of boats... a fit fit man..
but they had a disaster in the frisco bay recently...an oil slick,which would ruin his diving gear ...
so he left for the desert
and to top that he was the vet who cleaned the teeth of that poor tiger that got shot up in frisco recently...
did you hear about that tiger?
these horrid little scumbags doing crystal meth were dangling there legs over the edge and teasing the animal...
really winding it up..
they were high on grade a drugs,really teasing the beast....
so the tiger pulls one of em down and kills him.....
the tiger,being a bright thing hid around the place,stalking the other trouble makers and then went for them... and them only...
and wouldn't you know it,instead of shooting the poor animal with just a sedative,the authorities put a big old bullet through it... such injustice.....
so this vet was heart broken...he'd been that tigers dental hygienist ..
and of course the money grubbing parents of the dead kids who were high on crystal meth want to sue the zoo..... money money money........
here's a picture of me in the hotel room looking out over sunset strip...
the hotel behind me is the hyatt ,otherwise known as the riot house...
it's famous for hosting english groups in the seventies like led zeppelin ... televisions out of windows ect...
and the roof top swimming pool scene in the spinal tap movie was shot there..
and i can see the room where i lived in for six months... room 706..
i've a shockingly pristine memory.
i remember the night arriving and walking out on to the balcony and going wild in the knowledge that it was my home for six months...
but by the end of that visit i was DYING to get back to ireland ...
i'd had enough...
every single day you'd hear a car being pranged.. the constant purring of harley davidson motor bikes... overload!!!
and the black building in the left hand corner is the comedy store where all the big comedians like bill hicks performed..
and down on the street to the right, just out of view ,behind me, is the' house of blues' where phil spector picked up that poor girl and shot her teeth across his marble floor with his dreary miserable gun...
oh the joy???!!!!
you can really see my old age coming through in this photo...it's not the wrinkles...its the crevases............it's not the sex...it's the stairs.
here's a clip of me talking to you from frank sinatras grave in the desert....
thank you for sharing my desert/hollywood moment ... i hope it was fun for you.
by now,youre thinking...'what a fucking camera whore?!"
how fucking great do i look in this one though..imean...really?!
and finally me and thomas reporting for margerita and martini training.
