La La Land: The finale
As street artist HUSH hits the loco land of LA for his first solo show Stateside, King Adz joins him to document the ride.
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From Hooters to Beverly Hills... We’ve come a long way since day one...
So my hidden agenda was to have a kinda practise run for my next book — a book about how I (i.e. a regular bloke) climbed the Hollywood ladder to see the madness from up close — and it all turned out good in the hood.
I spent the Friday morning walking down Melrose looking for street shit. As you can't really walk anywhere it makes my usual routine of wandering around a city looking for stuff to write about or shoot really hard. This is the stuff you can’t do from a car. You need to be on the street...
But I had a go anyway and spent the day jumping in and out of my car to shoot Banksys, Nick Walkers, Listers, and other street scenes from the year 2G+9. Friday night we went to a party at a lawyer’s house, where they tried to talk HUSH into some hair-brained scheme: selling street art transfers for the mass market. ‘Buy a HUSH for your living room from Crate & Barrel, and then stick it to your wall!’ Down & Dirty. Then we left and went to what is considered one of the hottest clubs in LA, The Villa, where you have to be a famous fucker or a Hollywood wannabe starlet to get in. We sat with the promoter and I got introduced to several tasty geezers, including the producer of Watchmen..
We spent the next day in Venice Beach, where HUSH was creating an illegal street piece with Retna from Seventh Letter, which was a cool place full of crazy fuckers and tourists looking at the crazy fuckers. One of HUSH’s collectors strolls by — a divorcee from Beverly Hills and soon I chat her into inviting us round to her place that night. She really wants to be down, desperate even. She writes the address down on the back of a chewing gum packet and HUSH finishes the wall and we head back on the absolutely-chokka freeway heading east...
It takes us a while to find the house that night, deep deep deep in Beverly Hills, and when ‘the help’ shows us in, the lady of the house goes wild as she didn't really expect us to actually turn up. We get a tour of the house (mental) and there is even a room full floor-to-ceiling of Star Wars memorabilia, belonging to the ex-husband. The other guests are nice and rich (an understatement) and there is even a very camp guy who's been hired to serve drinks and attend to our every need (the mind boggles). Then a motivational speaker from Oprah rocks up who, it turns out, is from the next town along from where I grew up, a place called Radlett. He is okay though and not as bad as some of the other men, most of whom get drunk and try to be 'cool' or 'down'. One guy (a real director) pulls up his boxers half a foot and thinks he looks 'street', when of course he looks like a right twat. HUSH and I sit under the patio heaters listening to the banter and exchanging looks, not really believing that we've made it this far in just a week.
Crazy days, mental nights, this is King Adz signing out, saying cheers for the ride... up up over and out...
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La La Land: The finale (text) by King Adz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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