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Showing posts with the label Robert Altman

California Dreaming - South and North

One of a series of photographs by our friend Dwayne Moser from behind the Hollywood Sign.  Photograph copyright ©  Dwayne Moser. I've lived in many cities in my life, and visited many more. I love the memory of Marrakech, Havana, Hanoi, London, Brighton, Rome, Sydney, Miami Beach (as it was in the 1990s) and, above all, the city that has occupied my imagination , sleeping and waking dreams and heart for most of my life, and my actuality for about 15 years of it, Los Angeles.   I love living in Santa Cruz  now, because it feels like how I imagined Malibu might have been in the 1960s, when it was loose and groovy and surf-crazy and just easy going.  My daughter and me boogieboarding on the beach in Santa Cruz. Photograph  copyright © 2016 Alexander Chow-Stuart. Now I find myself facing the possibility of San Francisco , and with all apologies and respect to those of our friends who live there, I just don't get it as a city.  A couple of days back,

The High Tower Apartments and The Long Goodbye (revisited)

I'm in a reposting mood today, so here is the most popular post of all time from this blog (followed in rank by a personal favorite, Hudson and the W Hotel Hollywood: A Love Story:) , featuring our friend Dwayne Moser's photograph of the High Tower Apartments, one of the key locations in one of my all-time favorite movies, Robert Altman's incomparable  The Long Goodbye  (available to download from iTunes or Amazon ). This post first appeared on March 9 2012. Photograph by Dwayne Moser. This beautiful apartment complex in Los Angeles is called the Hightower or High Tower Complex (the High Tower name refers to the central elevator, I believe), and was designed in 1935-1936 by architect  Carl Kay - and made famous in 1973 by my favorite film, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (see Why I Love Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye ). Although Altman used the building as Philip Marlowe's apartment in his somewhat post-modern Long Goodbye (the film pla