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Showing posts with the label The Long Goodbye

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

From Dawn to Sunset on the Beach - Pelicans, Whales and Memories of my Father

A squadron of pelicans in a feeding frenzy. All p hotographs Copyright  ©  2013 A lexander Chow-Stuart. Living and writing by the ocean - in a spot we like to call Aldabra (which in reality is a remote and very beautiful atoll in the Indian Ocean) - the beach figures large in my thoughts and daily routine. Usually I wake early, and on occasion I walk at dawn through the waves, past the occasional fisherperson, enjoying the darkness slowly transforming into light, the spray of the breakers, the pull of the tide around my feet, the constant barking of the sea lions, the damp of the ocean mist - and the sight of the sun breaking over the horizon to the east. Dawn panorama on the beach. P hotograph Copyright  ©  2013 A lexander Chow-Stuart. Running from the waves. P hotograph Copyright  ©  2013 A lexander Chow-Stuart. Recently, a few days before what would have been his birthday, I thought of my father as I trod the beach at dawn. He came from a tiny Scottish fishin