I have lived in Los Angeles my entire life. I love it here, and could never see myself moving. Where else can you find this combination of fabulous weather, street freaks (harmless and not-so-harmless), celebrities, glamour, filth, culture, and the best Mexican food north of the border? So it is fair to say I love this town – maybe even just a touch obsessed with it.
Hollywood, Beverly Hills & Other Perversities is a book of photos bye George Rose chronicling the pop culture in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. These are not “perversities” in the traditional sense of so-called deviant sexual tastes. And honestly, I don’t see much by way of celebrity “perversities” (such as material excess). Maybe it is because I love this town so much, I don’t see the lifestyle as “perverse” – to me, it is normality
Still damn good photos, regardless of the title.
Rose’s photos are almost exclusively portraits. There are plenty of celebrity shots: Dolly Parton on stage in Universal City; Meryl Streep winning an Oscar; Elizabeth Taylor at a Hollywood gala; Zsa Zsa Gabor with sister Eva, the two women nearly indistinguishable from one another. The tight close-ups of stars like Jon Voight, Nora Ephron, and Dyan Cannon are skilled – somehow both raw and polished in a single frame. Political figures include Henry Kissinger at Cedars-Sinai and Mayor Tom Bradley with the Beverly Hills Police Department looming behind him with unexpected glamour.
But by far, the most wonderful photos are those that aren’t of celebrity; they are the photos that document the punk scene of Hollywood and the gay party scene of WeHo. For example, a 1979 photo features a concert flyer for the Germs, a notorious LA punk band, but that features the sanitary visage of Elvis Presley. In the background, a strip club luridly announces nude girls. Or a photo taken outside the infamous Whiskey A-Go-Go, crowds wrapped around the block, waiting to see the Motels. Even more amusing if you have been to the Whiskey, and know that the miniscule venue could never hold that many people. Or the smattering of photos titled “Punk Rock Fan” in the truest sense of the term – clothing, hair styles, and makeup that could never be duplicated.
I love the juxtaposition between photographs of underground film star Sylvia Miles Van Halen wild man David Lee Roth, shown on opposing pages. Both photos were taken independent of one another – she in Beverly Hills, he in Inglewood – but both with hands on hips and chests puffed out proudly.
Inexplicably, there are a few photos taken in New York slipped into the mix. While they are portraits and one would probably never know where they were taken if not for the captions, I still feel like if this is a book about my beloved Los Angeles, it should be consistent. Along that vein, there is no organization to the photos. They are not chronological, not grouped by type or location or event.. The fires might be consuming the hills of Malibu on one page; and Wendy O. Williams has her tits out in West Hollywood on the next.
I do appreciate that, however, at the back of the book, there is a little bit of information about each photo.
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