Dead Idols and the American Quest for Immortality

Took a friend to Hollywood on Friday June 19th. We had intended to visit Grauman’s Chinese Theater however when we got there the place was being mobbed by crazed Michael Jackson fans, and we couldn’t get any where near the theater. So we pasted on to explore the rest of Hollywood. We visited the wax museum, which was delightfully creepy. From there we moved on through the rest of Hollywood, and the press of hot sweaty people which gravitated back along the boulevard toward the sanitized, make believe tragedy represented by a single two foot, pink star sunken in the pavement. On all sides the store fronts took advantage of the public hysteria pushing forward the neglected photos and memorabilia of the long forgotten pop star to the front of the store in a reverence, which can only be excited by such a capitalistic opportunity.

Following the boulevard away from the crowds I discovered the new site of the Betty Page Clothing company, and I pressed my nose to the glass excitedly like a small child at Christmas time. Hollywood boulevard is crowded with all the diversity and perversity of LA. The farther you venture from the carefully sanitized theaters a more interesting picture emerges, one which is far less glamorous. We stopped into a large costume shop, which by it’s very presence there on the boulevard in the middle of June, gave distinct impression that Halloween is an on going holiday in the State of California.

In the back of the store hidden beneath a pile of boxes I unearthed a 1.8 scale die-cast 1967 Chevy Impala. I clutched the model to my breast the entire way home in a displace of unabashed greekdom, which I am only delivered from only on account of it’s general popularity. The miniature muscle car now sits on my bookshelf next to the erotic photos I brought back from the art fair in Austin, the broad brimmed cowboy hat from Athens, the statue of Hermes from the Getty, five kinds of red nail polish, postcards from friends, and collection of books which has put over five hundred dollars on my credit card in just the last four months.

We visited the Hollywood Museum, which is filled with treasures from the Golden Age of the Silver Screen. Scarlett O’Hara’s dress from ‘Gone with the Wind’. Cary Grant’s Rolls Royce. Marilyn Monroe’s million dollar honeymoon dress. Costumes for Charlie Chaplin, May West, and so many more super stars. I am reminded in this place of that lost iconic grandeur as I gravitate toward the idols of the past that I am wholly out of touch with my own generation. This realization having disturbed me from my reverie and I looked about for my friend who looked utterly confused in the midsts such alien idolatry.

There is only a vague notion of the past within the minds of my peers a time before computers, video games, endless shopping malls, cars with automatic transmission, cable television, internet porn, genetically engineered food, and the corporately synthesized idols of today. These artifacts are nothing more then the Neolithic remains of a civilization as remote as Babylon. We -generation Y- are no more aware of our past then we are of our future. We imagine ourselves suspended in time. The first to live, to love, to laugh like this. We believe ourselves to be the vindication of all that came before. As though this frail frame mantled in human tissue where so grand as to justify all the inequalities, and atrocities of the past. We must believe that we are some how remarkable. It is this falsehood which sustains us. This perpetual assertion of our superiority, a like an unspoken prayer, which will protect us from the painful reality of temporal existence.