I've just learned that the Hotel Del Capri in Westwood, LA, where I wrote the California sections of Hello World during a short Visiting Scholarship at UCLA, closed its doors in November 2003. That really is the end of an era. Opened around 1950, The Del Capri was what they call a Hollywood-style hotel - circled around a central pool with a number of self-contained suites for longer-term rental, and with a movie and theatre-based clientele who found it cosy and convenient. The first time I visited, the greenery in the veranda around the pool was thick with tiny newly-hatched hummingbirds fluttering inches above our heads as they learned how to suckle the flowers. Marion, the somewhat redoubtable hotel manager (well, you had to be when you had whole flocks of wandering orchestras to accommodate for six nights at a time), bid me walk carefuly so I didn't stand on the babies who had fallen to the paving stones. 
Once she came to my room especially to apologise about the cello player who had argued with her outside my window at 4am and nearly fallen into the pool. Did it wake me up? No. I was too busy dozing behind the wooden window slats and dreaming of screens - of computer screens, not the screens they usually dream of at the Del Capri. Although the hotel has probably already been demolished to make way for yet another gigantic luxury apartment block, the Del Capri still lives on in virtuality here on the web, and I have found two images to deposit here for safe-keeping. If you have further pictures and stories of the Del Capri, I'd love to receive them. But for now, see the pool...
