My girlfriend and I went to the Day of the Dead celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Saturday. It's the coolest cultural event in Los Angeles, if you ask me. I love the clouds of copal incense drifting through the darkness, the tall skinny palm trees leaning in rows below the half-moon, the festive live music, the tacos and margaritas, the hipsters and kids and regular folks in amazing costumes, and most of all the phenomenal altars. People invest so much effort and creativity in these memorials with their sugar skulls, loaves of bread, marigolds, flickering candles, photos and personal effects. They're beautiful, fantastical, sobering. What's not to love about grinning skeletons dressed as brides and grooms, friendly skeleton dogs, cats and even fish? Everyone's having a gay old time, treating death with humor as well as reverence. Yet there were angry political monuments too, shrines to the dead in Iraq, the murdered, and Mexico's desaparecidos – the disappeared. Who knew an appreciation of death could be so life-affirming? And who knew making out in a crypt could be so hot? I finally did it: I got up the gumption to bang the door-knocker on the giant tomb in the middle of the lake. Then hightailed it across the bridge to safety. Better safe than clutched by ghostly, skeletal hands.
