HOLLYWOOD

HOLLYWOOD

Nobody conceived it. Nobody intended it. It emerged.
Somehow.
Like a third breast on a clandestine woman.
Somewhere.
In a barren, sun baked Southern California sandbox. Spawned by notions, dreams and lust. They called it:

HOLLYWOOD
Imagine...
The world's greatest Marionette Theater. Where heaven and hell overlap. Where devils dance with saints.
Where Beauty and the Beast trade underwear.
The strangest ghetto on earth. In which its spellbound captives pray not for escape but for entrance.
Where everybody fits, for everyone's a misfit.
Where there is but one Commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Get Caught".
Where passion mutates into addiction.
Where friendship is disposable.
Where principles are mutable.
Where love is negotiable.
Where promises are tactical.
Where honesty is a poker game.
Where nature's clock doesn't tick but sighs - hexing time into a stretching, pulling rubber band that fools us.
Where there is no future, for nothing ever lasts long enough to become one. Only past and present; an endless cycle of beginnings and middles; dreams from which we awaken before we find out what happens in the end.

HOLLYWOOD.
The mild tempered boiling pot.
Which forever simmers but never boils.
Over a furnace to which eagerly rallies, compelled to worship at the shrine of wishful thinking, mesmerized by blind faith vision, dying to be consumed for an elusive moment, that wondrous congregation called:

ARTISTS
That peculiar creed of obsessive narcissistic masochists, who obsessively feed their bulimic self-esteem with creations and illusions; cursed to embrace perpetual rejection as a way of life; driven to take their pains to market.

HOLLYWOOD
Where heroes and villains of legends past resurrect and gather at the perennial festival of Deja Vu to once again challenge their futile quests...Sisyphus rocking 'n' rolling, Icarus soaring too close to the sun, Don Quixote battling the infernal windmills...
That's Hollywood.
Bewitching the world as the purveyor of happy endings, yet eternally in search of its own.

(c) mw

(From "Cooking For Cannibals" - The Book)

http://www.markwirtz.com