Greetings from Hollywood

You have to be especially careful crossing the street here. In Saigon, the traffic never stops, so you just wade out into the middle of the street and let things flow around you. In Beijing, most drivers would just as soon run you down as look at you, so you need to find an open spot and run like hell. In New York, you wait for the lights. People in each of those cities seem to know the rules, and it's up to you as a visitor to figure them out.

Here, there are no rules. No one seems to have lived here for very long — I've heard accents from everywhere, seen T-shirts claiming allegiance to every team under the sun. When you try to cross Sunset Boulevard, sometimes the cars stop, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes half of them do, and the other half tries to squash you. People seem to sort of make things up as they go along.

"What I like about this place," my cousin Pete said last night, as we drank martinis at a little club around the corner from his apartment with black-and-white headshots circling the walls, "is that it seems as though history just started here. Everything that's happened here happened within the last hundred years or so."

Pete points out the places I should check out while I'm here — the restaurant where Janis Joplin went just before she died, for example, or the best place to catch an afternoon movie. It's a lot to take in: strip clubs and Disney stores, homeless people slumping through Beverly Hills, everyone around me seeming decades younger than I am, something I never seem to notice even while living in a college town. When, for example, did Pearl Jam become a staple of "adult contemporary" radio? And how the hell did Clint Black get a star on the Walk of Fame?

There's a lot more I need to see, and I only have a few hours...and there's a lot of traffic outside.