No One Cares About Your Chateau Marmont Reference

L.A. myth and the illusion of shared cultural references

Jim Morrison in 1969 in the hallway of the Chateau Marmont

People in L.A.—and maybe I just mean myself—have this delusion that everyone else in the world knows what we’re talking about when we mention the Chateau Marmont, Mulholland Drive or Laurel Canyon.

Like the rest of the world is just casually fluent in Hollywood mythology. As if everyone has seen all the movies, memorized all the scandals, and is quietly nodding along whenever we drop a street name or landmark.

But when I go to Europe, or literally anywhere that is not Los Angeles, I remember: no one gives a fuck about L.A. They have their own celebrities. Their own streets with reputations. Their own dramas.

So I started wondering if my poetry book, Take Fountain—which is basically a long love letter to L.A.—needs a big, friendly disclaimer. A little map at the front that says: Here be slightly unhinged references. Good luck. Because I mention places like The Grove, Figueroa Street, Cahuenga, Glendale, as if they are universally legible emotional shorthand. They are not.

Let’s start with Mulholland Drive.

It is, of course, made famous by David Lynch’s surreal masterpiece of the same name, which means half the world already thinks it’s a dream sequence you can drive through while dissociating.

“Mulholland Drive” scene

Mulholland Drive is one of Los Angeles’ most iconic roads—part scenic overlook, part engineering feat, part identity crisis.

It’s named after William Mulholland, the engineer behind L.A.’s water system. The man who helped turn a desert into a city.

Now it mostly serves a different function: cinematic elevation. On one side, the mess that’s Los Angeles sprawls endlessly—Hollywood, downtown, the ocean and Catalina Island if the air is clear. On the other, delicious darkness and cozy canyon.

View of L.A. coming down Mulholland

Then there’s the Chateau Marmont.

One of those places where history and fiction stop pretending to stay separate. Designed to look like a French castle in the 1920s—it’s based loosely on Château d’Amboise—it sits just off Sunset Boulevard. Originally apartments. Then a hotel. Then a storage unit for American celebrity collapse.

The fabled Chateau

John Belushi died here in 1982. Jim Morrison allegedly fell off a balcony and walked it off like it’s nothing. Whole decades of careers have started, imploded, or been quietly negotiated in its rooms. The unofficial motto is basically: if you’re going to ruin your life, at least do it somewhere that’s glamorous.

Then there’s Laurel Canyon.

Tucked into the Hollywood Hills, it feels like LA forgot to be a city and decided to become a magical myth. Winding roads. Hidden houses. Lots of lush trees. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was an artistic enclave for musicians who would go on to define an entire era of sound; Jim Morrison. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Frank Zappa. Joni Mitchell.

Mama Cass in Laurel Canyon

They lived close enough to walk to each other’s houses, which sounds so romantic until you remember this is also a group of extremely talented, chemically unregulated people with access to recording studios and each other’s worst impulses. It wasn’t just hippies in the woods. It was hippies in the woods with record deals, psychedelic drugs, and expensive acoustics. According to Vanity Fair, “Peter Tork of the Monkees once told Rolling Stone that kilos of weed were often casually dropped off in suitcases.”

Parts of L.A. are so beautiful: Laurel Canyon

And then there’s Glendale. LOL.

It’s where I go to do decidedly unglamorous things like grocery shopping, CVS pharmacy runs, oil changes, and occasionally treating myself to something fancy on sale for “emotional regulation.” I have a love-hate relationship with this place, as you will be able to see in my book once it’s out.

Glendale is vanilla. It’s orderly. It’s also grumpy side eyes by botoxed bottle-blondes with designer purses, perfect manis, and duck lips. It’s speeding teenagers in expensive cars and old men in polyester trousers playing chess in the parks. I oscillate between finding it comforting and mildly insulting. Which is probably more about me than it is about Glendale.

Americana at Brand outdoor shopping center in Glendale

So yeah. That’s a small sampling of Los Angeles. A city where many a street either has a mythology attached to it or is quietly doing the unglamorous work of keeping the mythology from collapsing entirely.

And as for whether Take Fountain needs an intro?

Probably not.

Perhaps the real arrogance isn’t assuming people know these places.

It’s assuming they need to.

Maybe I’ll just let people Google everything and enjoy the fact that no one is fully in on it.

Including me.