This further suggests that we need to take into account the distinction between name and lexical item, or signified and signifier: the name Hollywood travels along with the HOLLYWOOD citations both when they present other place names (e.g. NYA HOVÅS), and when they do not include a place-designating lexeme (e.g. ÄLSKA LIVET; ‘Love Life’). As Munn shows, a person's fame is the ‘product of transactional processes’ ( Reference Munn1986:107) whereby the person's name travels ‘apart from his [sic] physical presence… through the minds and speech of others’ (1986:105). Similar processes are involved in the citation of HOLLYWOOD; the fame at the core of HOLLYWOOD's meaning potential travels through the name Hollywood, but also through the sign's enregistered features. Interestingly, when the materialization of the citation excludes the place-designating lexeme from the bundling, the name Hollywood is still part of the recontextualization process: it often materializes in spatiotemporal proximity to the citation, in co-texts such as metacommentary by the media and viewers of the sign by which the citation is characterized, as in ‘Hollywoodesque’ or (in Swedish) ‘Hollywood-skylten’.

What differentiates HOLLYWOOD from other global emblems is that it is a written word, a language object, and hence can be filled with varied lexical content. Although the prototypical HOLLYWOOD citation involves a place name like the source sign, not all do; other kinds of names and words are seen, such as Finegood's 1976 HOLLYWeeD and Johansson's 2006 JOHANSSON. Yet another dimension opens up when the citation includes a homonym with different meanings in different languages. The word hell is a (defamed) noun in English and a (famous) place name in Norwegian. The animators of the HELL sign near Trondheim in Norway consciously play with the semantic and grammatic ambiguity that is produced when this language object is lifted from the linguistic trapping of its national context and displayed and mediatized to international audiences where English dominates (Christenson Reference Christenson2021). While such atypical citations expand intertextual gaps, the authority of the sign (and its producer) is often preserved through discourses of creativity and/or transgression. Though the authority of Finegood's and Johansson's citations relies heavily on the artists’ own cultural capital (Jaworski Reference Jaworski, Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin2001; cf. Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984), equally important is the HOLLYWOOD sign's symbolic value and the dominant frame of tourism and place branding (cf. Jaffe Reference Jaffe2016, quoted above). I'm not a dictator", he says, "but I've done time in bands and it's not for me. If you believe in what you do, people call you arrogant. But if you don't, then nobody else is going to either. I think the reason bands form is because they have secrets to keep. I've got my secrets but I'd like to share them with lots of other people.You had a striking image at that point. Did you have people come up to you on the street singing the hit? Yes – I’ve got nothing against them but I’m living in 2019. As much as I appreciate my history I’ve always wanted to move forward. I’d rather do something that spans the whole of my career than just performing What’s The Colour Of Money?. What I really like about UMI is the sound library - it means I can have a large selection of sounds available without having to have a huge amount of equipment. I drag things in, I steal their sounds, I put them on disk and that makes life a lot easier from a writing point of view. Different sounds evoke different emotions, so the bigger your library, the greater your choice of emotions."

Especially in this final example, the citation of HOLLYWOOD is sketchy at best; one might instead argue that McDonald's is simply orienting to the myriad electric billboards that crown Hong Kong's nighttime skyline. Even the tenuous invocation of enregistered emplacement, however, is not a coincidence but a form of ongoing entanglement—one in which indexicality breaks down into iconicity, as McDonald's the brand cites not the physical metonym of the American film industry, but rather a global ‘aesthetics of brandedness’ (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2016:81) that is collocated with that very metonym. Such citations, we argue, are diffuse: the citation of the source of emanation is not necessarily conscious nor explicit, yet through the select application of enregistered semiotic features, an interdiscursive relation with the symbolic value of a source event is nonetheless established. To put it otherwise, HOLLYWOOD ‘does not have to exist, to exist’. The sign's indexicalization of physical place lasted until 1949, when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce furnished repairs in exchange for the ‘LAND’ being dropped. Thus decontexualized, the HOLLYWOOD's mediatized appearance in art and cinema in the 1960s and 70s exhibited alteration of the sign's qualia (Gal Reference Gal and Coupland2016:123; cf. Peirce Reference Peirce1955), or its distinctive physical characteristics. In the film Earthquake (1974), it was eponymously destroyed in its hilltop emplacement, and when inducted into pop art with Edward Ruscha's Hollywood (1968), it was emplaced on the crest of the hillside, rather than nestled mid-slope, to stress the horizontality of the name and sign and their likeness to the landscape. With his piece, Ruscha further altered one of the most distinctive enregistered features of the sign, its misalignment. Footnote 4 In 1976 Danny Finegood made the first alteration to the sign itself, when, arguing that the sign was an environmental sculpture, he draped banners to spell ‘HOLLYWeeD’ in celebration of relaxed marijuana possession laws (Nelson Reference Nelson2007). Two years later, the sign was rebuilt following a high-profile fundraiser, with the new letters constructed in the same font and alignment as the original sign and affixed with concrete and steel girders to ensure lasting perpetuity (Braudy Reference Braudy2011:169).I only have three regular people that I've used to date — the rest are a variety of people who were available at the time I needed them. Another thing I don't want is bread-heads. I don't want someone who will come in and do a job but keep looking at his watch. If you look towards creating something, then the money will follow. I never work with anyone unless I love them, and they have to feel the same way about me. I want something a little extra on top of my money's worth." It's actually three people", he reveals, "There's myself, Jamie B Rose and Cliff Whyte. Cliff's an engineer who does our live work, Jamie does a lot of lyric writing with me and also helps visualising things. We're all from Birmingham and we put Hollywood Beyond together as an umbrella under which we can fulfil our ideas." What has the lead singer of Hollywood Beyond been up to these past three decades? Will Simpson finds out… I won't say what it is because I hate it. It's not an SP12, because I've worked with that and I'd like to get one soon, and it's not a TR707 because I like that, too. I'm not very good with drum machines, so the display on the TR707 is great. When I'm writing, I don't pay too much attention to the start and end of the bars - I like to play with the tap facility and try to get into the feel of the rhythm I want. The trouble is that if the pattern doesn't fall into a proper bar in the machine, it can be difficult to isolate the bit I want. With the 707 I can read it from the display and reprogram it. I'm not a drummer and I don't pretend to understand a lot of rhythmic things from a drummer's point of view so, to me, that little screen is one of the most valuable parts of the machine. The ideas tend to come when I go walking or something. I like making rhythms with my feet and things like that.