Tales from The Strip: A Century in the Fast Lane by Van Gordon Sauter, Robert Landau, and Frans Evenhuis
An unruly, two-mile stretch of road is
both mythologized and eulogized in this collaboration among writer Sauter, photographer
Landau, and graphic artist Evenhuis. Starting from its beginning as a cow path
in 1888, through the Hollywood heyday, and now in its “new era” as the site of
mixed-use mega-structures, the Sunset Strip is illustrated in this new book with
lively tales, archival photos and documents, and contemporary night-time
snapshots. Comparing whatisto whatwasis a perennial Los Angeles pastime,
andTalesdoes it through brief
chapters on both people and places, including Hollywood starlets and
fame-seeking gangsters, along with chic hotels and hot restaurants. Glamor and
grime co-exist in these pages, which impart a haze of depravity and doom
familiar in the works of Kenneth Anger (Hollywood
Babylon) and Nathanael West (The Day
of the Locust). The noir elements of the ’40s and ’50s overtake the
rock-and-roll flower-power of the ’60s and ’70s. Today’s “Big buildings. Big
design. Big crowds.” do make Saunter hopeful for a future that doesn’t belie
the past: “All the ‘big’ is riding on a core belief in a sumptuous tomorrow, of
deep pockets and mercantile dreams realized—the same dreams that brought forth
the Strip in the first place.” Indeed.
Angel City Press;
2018; 176 pages; hardcover; $45.
