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Hollywood
Blvd., We're Doomed
Mark Vallen 1980 ©
Color pencil on paper 22"x29"
On
view at
Avenue
50 Studio
March 12, - April 2, 2016
Highland Park
Los Angeles CA
I
based my drawing on sights I had lived and witnessed on
a seedy Hollywood Boulevard in the late 1970's; drifters
loitering on a bus bench graffitied with punk band names,
one of the famous Hollywood sidewalk stars defaced with
a nihilistic punk scrawl reading
..."we're doomed."
The
world famous Hollywood Boulevard was originally the nucleus
for the punk rock movement on the West coast of the United
States. In
1977 the first underground punk club in California, The
Masque, opened its doors in a dark, dank, windowless
basement on Cherokee Avenue, a tiny street off the main
blvd.
While
Hollywood Blvd. was internationally renown for its Grauman's
Chinese Theater, the home to hand & footprints of Hollywood
stars, by the late 70's the legendary street had fallen
on hard times.
Many
of the stores on the boulevard had gone out of business,
or turned to selling cheap imported kitsch to the tourists
that never stopped flocking to the Mecca of the Hollywood
dream machine.
Instead of starlets, visitors were more likely to see male
and female prostitutes, homeless indigents, flamboyant transvestites
and drug dealers. In that context, L.A.'s first punks found
a home.
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