Funny, isn’t it? That I could outlive something like free-form FM radio?

When Ray Bradbury’s wheelchair was pushed into the auditorium of the Los Angeles Public Library and situated next to me, I froze. I’m not fazed by rock stars, but authors are something else.

Hollywood Forever Cemetary reminds me of Los Angeles in the late 1990s, when I met Creepy Hearse Guy in a film studies class and fell in love.

When I moved into my new house, imagine my surprise in finding out that my new neighbor was once a Hollywood agent. Here are a few of the stories he has shared with me so far.

Let us now praise a much-read, much discussed novel by David Foster Wallace, a relatively obscure portrait of a Russian princess, and a weird film by The Monkees.

The grounds of Disney’s Burbank studios is an odd place; it seems to have more in common with a small college than a big Hollywood studio. And the commissary serves one wicked bowl of chili.

You’re talking about water falling from the sky in great cascades; fat raindrops smacking against windshields and rooftops. We rarely get to see anything like that up here in Seattle.

I was a state-champion turkey caller. I organized a neighborhood circus day. But my favorite activity of my formative years was obsessing over a certain 1980s prime-time detective drama.

What was it that made Fairfax a vortex of such characters? Was it the food, the bookstores, the music, or the presence of ghosts?

For about five years during the 1970s, a square mile of earth in Hollywood, CA., centered around North Fairfax Avenue between Beverly and Melrose, saw an amazing confluence of people passing through.