I'm settling down to my first lonesome night in the Hollywood Hills, right across Barham Boulevard from the ol' Bates Motel in the Universal lot. I'm staying at the Oakwood Toluca Hills, about one hundred feet away from where a couple of kids from Illinois started a fire that nearly burned down Griffith Park earlier this summer. The dead, blackened wood jutting out of sun-baked earth gives the place a rather post-apocalyptic look. It's very homey.
