The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty

The heart is the sleeping beauty
and love the only kiss it can't resist.
Even as eyes lay open wide,
there is a heart that sleeps inside,
and it's to there you must be hastening,
for all hearts dream,
they dream only of awakening.

Nicholas Klein

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Wim Wenders

Once upon a time there was an enchanted hotel...

... built many, many years ago,
at the beginning of the last century
on the corner of 5th Street and Main,
in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.
For a while it was the tallest and most splendid building
in the city.
And it carried the euphemistic name
The Rosslyn Million Dollar Hotel.

On the other side of the street
stood its sister building, the Rosslyn.
The two hotels were linked by corridors underground.
Each portal mirrored the other.
Round about, business was brisk.
The Million Dollar Theater and the Million Dollar
Pharmacy
were both just round the corner.
The area was certainly worth a few millions.
This was the headquarters
of the American entertainment industry;
Griffith and Chaplin had their offices here...

That was once upon a time.
When the movie industry moved to
Hollywood and Burbank,
the decline of downtown Los Angeles began.

Today
the two sisters still
stare at each other in silence.

But no more wild, flamboyant parties are celebrated here.
Millionaires no longer cross the doorsteps.
The huge iron scaffolding on the roofs
still carries the same signs,
But the light bulbs in those letters
went out seventy years ago,

The Million Dollar Hotel is now called the Frontier Hotel,
It's a flop-house
where you can get a place to sleep
for eight dollars a night;
that is if you don't have to spend the night on the streets,
like the throngs of homeless people
who stake out their cardboard huts
in the streets round about
night after night,
only to lose their homes the next morning
to the garbage collectors.

By day,
a different kind of popularion hurried past the hotel:
bankers clutching briefcases,
yuppies wielding mobile phones,
tourists carrying digital cameras.
At dusk they all seem to vanish into thin air,
leaving the field once again
to the outcasts.

In this other America,
the Million Dollar Hotel
stands as a fortress,
the last bastion of the hopeless,
but also a stronghold,
of drug-dealing and of prostitution.

This is where our film had its beginning
more than ten years ago,
when Bono, in search of a location for the U2 video
Where the Streets Have no Name,
stumbled upon the hotel.
No song came about from his discovery, for once,

but a story,
from that story came a script,
and from the script a film -
which never wanted to conceal
that it might just as well have become a song:
a song about a different America
beyond that great big Dream,
where truly
everyone
is
equal.




Text and photographs from the book
The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty