When you emerge, squinting, from the cavelike darkness of the Hollywood/Highland subway stop in Los Angeles, your eyes may need to adjust. Not to the city's surreal sunniness, but to the uncouth collection of Iron Man impersonators, bong shops, tattoo parlors and strip clubs that clog the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an 18-block stretch of sidewalk studded with five-pointed stars honoring the industry's greats.
An estimated 10 million tourists visit the Walk a year; on any given day, it seems 9.9 million show up, shuffling along on a futile pilgrimage to fix the fleeting joys of a film or a song, or their imaginings of fame, to a favorite actor's terrazzo star or concrete handprints. If you can stand the disappointment, the Walk has a rude, shattering honesty about it - the place where Hollywood dreams, or the silicone manufacture of them, collides with the grime, economic inequality and desperation that also underpin this town. If you must experience it firsthand, you can recover with a classier LA tradition: a drought-dry martini at Musso and Frank's Grill, the oldest restaurant in Hollywood.
Location: North Highland Avenue at Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.
For a more contemplative consideration of stardom, head less than two miles southeast to Hollywood Forever, a 62-acre cemetery where many Golden Age greats have found their final resting place. For a cemetery, Hollywood Forever can be buzzingly alive - it hosts sold-out outdoor movie screenings, rock concerts in its Masonic Lodge and the longest-running ritual in Hollywood: an annual memorial service for silent-film star Rudolph Valentino. But the cemetery really reveals its charms in the quiet of mornings or late afternoons, before or after the sun flattens shadows and strollers alike.
