L.A. Anatomía

I had the pleasure of accompanying AH on a drive I often make: the 405 straight down from the Valley to Orange County. AH sputtered like she was crossing a time zone. She wondered if anything actually did exist BEYOND Los Angeles. I just couldn’t help laughing because everyone in Orange County is perplexed to learn that there is LIFE beyond the Getty Museum.

Similar dualistic feelings caught both of us earlier that week when we headed off to a networking event at the UnUrban Cafe on Urban Street in Santa Monica. Upon arrival, AH and I were floored to find ourselves in a sea of undergraduates. We clung like barnacles to pylons, wondering if the foam would swallow us whole. AH burrowed into an armchair with an adult person for most of the event, sipping her latte and saying marvelous AH things. I attempted to cross the waters to other islands–there was the just-fresh-out-of-school, maybe-we-are-professionals-and-maybe-we’re-not-professionals-but-we-can’t-decide-yet couple, the too-precocious-and-talented-and-unreservedly-but-sincere-ambitious duo who might have been teenagers. I don’t know, but they looked it. Then the older graduate who was here for reasons I couldn’t fathom. Everyone had business cards. Everyone asked what school I was with. I couldn’t believe anyone was asking me that question again.

And again, I’m sure I have another story about extremes but none come to mind….but I’m sure you won’t have to wait long.

The famous opening lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (in the book by Douglas Adams) informs readers that space is big. Really big. You can’t imagine how mind-boggingly big it is. Now, because so our blog is, apply that idea to Los Angeles.

On Saturday of this lovely Memorial Day weekend, I joined up with a friend who is leaving Los Angeles soon. Having long been a native, she’s now trying to do everything she always planned to get to. I think that’s just the way it is in your native locale. You figure you’ll get to all those famous things eventually.

Our plan? We spent the afternoon wandering around the Griffith Observatory and then we hiked up as close as we could to the Hollywood sign.

The Griffith Observatory was very cool. I’d like to go back in the evening when the telescope is open and available for the public to look through. It’s actually quite a compact museum for such an expansive topic. The upper floor recapped lots of grade school information that I had forgotten: eclipses, tides, sunrise and set. It had a lot of really cool pictures of the sun. I love the idea of the sun as being made up of long tubes with “cool” sunspots. It makes the star seem….pet-able.

In another wing, the Observatory mostly had exhibits on telescopes. There was also a demonstration by a tesla coil, which was no so impressive because it’s only purpose seems to be impressive. In the entrance, there is a Focault’s pendulum, which I did not know was first used to prove the earth rotates. Aside from the big swinging pendulum, the most important part is a row of tubes that the pendulum is supposed to knock down. Depending on your position on earth and nearness to the poles and equator, the pendulum will eventually swing in the direction of the rotation and knock down a tube. In Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory’s pendulum achieves its goal once every 42 hours.

Underneath the Observatory are exhibits on meteors, the planets and the whole “space is big” idea. The information is pretty up to date because Pluto is no longer a planet but a member of the Kuipur (sp?) belt. The only other object identified in the belt was Sedna, which takes about 10,000 years to make it around the sun.

Oh! A cool video was how the sun looks from various planets. From Earth, it looks pretty big. From Mars, pretty much the same too. When you get to Jupiter, I was actually surprised at how small it was. And from Pluto, it just looked like another star in the sky.

At the planet exhibit, you could weight yourself to see how gravity was different for each planet. I think some of them were broken because I weighed the same on Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Pluto.

Another cool interative video was one about other planets in the Milky Way. The computer showed you where the planets were located compared to Earth, how big their orbits were around the sun compared to Earth and how big they were in comparison to Earth. I liked that. I also liked videos they had of space vehicles landing on different planets and moons. I didn’t know we got an unmanned spacecraft to one of Saturn’s moons. (I want to say Triton?) And apparently there’s one on the way to Pluto. It will really suck if it misses the planet all together.

Oh! Because pluto takes awhile to get around the sun, the Observatory had a little video that showed where it was located during certain points in Earth history. In one rotation, Pluto would have witnessed a lot.

And I loved how it turned out all of Neptune’s moons are named after characters in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And it was Neptune or Uranus that has “spring” storms that last for years. Down in the sun exhibit, they had really neat videos that showed different features of the sun because of different instruments, and how sun flares can really disrupt things even from far away.

Afterwards, we hiked up to the Hollywood sign. It was a two and a half mile climb upward. We navigated horses and manure and other hikers. We lost a friend. We were reunited with them. We made it back down before dark. But after seeing the vastness of space and then experiencing the vastness of possibility in the confined Griffith Park, we figured the day had been successful indeed.

On Saturday, I:

• volunteered at a 5k marathon at my local community park.
• drove from one pole of Los Angeles to the other
• ate homegrown blueberries that were a leetle tart
• went to an ensemble recital for children at an Art Center
• worked on my little audio project
• went to an art walk in which snowboarding photography was the main attraction as well as pottery and mixe media white canvasses
• drank hot apple cider and had white wine sangrias with an old friend

On Sunday, I:

• worshipped like a good middle-class American in a house of the Lord
• spontaneously called up an old friend
• attended a backyard barbecue in which enchiladas, cheese burgers, bratwursts, strudel and butterfinger icecream pie was served
• watched quite a few episodes of 30 Rock
• felt an earthquake
• drove back from one pole of Los Angeles to the other

And that’s the pulse of an LA weekend sometimes.

The day started out as one where things go wrong, and yet, it had moments where things go right so much so that the right things negate the bad things, and I just realize how much I love living in Los Angeles.

Early morning was just chores. Go here. Go there. Wait in line. Wait in line some more. Spend money. Spend money some more. Put that back to pretend that I save money.
And then a golden moment: While wandering the shoe racks in a Ross clothing store, I came across a father helping his teenage daughter buy wedges. The man was throwing his heart into the moment. He took an active interest in what she was buying, and his daughter (who probably was just a girl learning that high heel shoes make her “hot”) was adorable in wanting his sincere opinion. You could tell he was a man at the crossroads for fatherhood; his little girl was growing up. She wanted to wear hot-pink wedges because they made her feet look cute. And he, well if she was going to do it, was going to make sure they were the “safest” heels a girl could wear. He stopped a nearby female customer and asked whether his daughter should start with wedges before graduating to stilettos. And then, he got into a very serious conversation about inserts. The daughter, so new to this realm of elevated footwear, nodded her head–she’d heard of this before and oh! Didn’t her feet look cute! And oh! Weren’t they so comfortable.

I had to leave. I was smiling too much. Way too much.

Then came more boring things. Get home late. Be late to meet friends. Have trouble looking up directions to get to Downtown LA. Get on freeway. Stop and go traffic. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. For an hour and a half.  There was a weird limo too, which had a trunk like a truck and three suited men sitting in it with a canvas canopy over there heads. Stop. Go. GET OFF THE FREEWAY AND TEXT MSG FRIENDS TO LET THEM KNOW I’M ALMOST THERE! WHEE! And then a really, really, really long train. 10-minutes long. Followed by a search for parking on itty-bitty downtown streets. Restaurants who refused to give me money for the meter and a kind lady in a market who didn’t speak English as I was in Chinatown.

Whew.

I met the friends at Phillippe’s, as recommended by a friend. They boast the best French dip in Los Angeles. I’ve never had French dip before, and when I got there, my sandwich was cold. I asked the friends what there opinion was, and they said they were so hungry that anything tasted good. They also had to agree with my opinion about the weird day. They had taken the metro (missed it) to the Civic Center station to see a tapestry exhibition (which was already closed) then came here to meet me at 12:30 (but i arrived at 1:30).

Speaking of which, it was scorching hot today.

So why were we here? We had met up in Downtown Los Angeles to go and see the twice-a-year “open house” at the Brewery, which is the largest art community in Los Angeles. All we knew about the Brewery was that it existed in Lincoln Heights, which was in no part of Downtown any of us had visited. Now we know that the Brewery is in an old brewery. All the buildings have been converted into individual lofts in which artists can rent them like regular apartments for a contracted period. We met artists who’d lived in the brewery for 5+ years and others who had just moved in. The spaces are completely empty. Each artist receives a space that is literally an empty room with four white walls. They build from there. For the most part, each loft is divided into two floors. The downstairs seems to be the “workspace” while the upstairs is the “living space.” Any further division seems to depend on the individual artist. One told us that you couldn’t even depend on there being a sink upon moving in. That’s up to you.
The Brewery contains approximately 600 artists in old warehouse and factory buildings. When walking around it, it looks like a shantytown. A real bohemia. Each gallery/residence has an entrance. Some artists decorate their outside with potted plants, picket fences, metal walls, tall wooden gates, climbing ivy, bird baths. Each is marked with a number to delineate addresses. And some have signs outside, identifying specific galleries.

600 galleries is overwhelming, especially on a hot April day. We (I) was done in two hours. But before I was woe-is-me tired, we met some interesting artists and saw some interesting pieces. The ones I recall are:

Andre Miripolsky (?) who’s desiging a really huge, thousand-something feet mural for the LA Convention center in stain glass.

Then there was Sam Kopels who’d just finished a series of Downtown landscapes in industrial paints, the kind you see trucks, buildings and factories painted with. He’d sold two but wasn’t sure if he was done with the series. He is a paint supplier on the side. When he wants to paint, sometimes he just throws his huge wooden canvases on the back of his truck and drives them somewhere to sketch.

We next entered the realm of Victoria J. Sebanz, whose business card reads poet, photographer, dance/art educator. She also has a separate card if you’re interested in her travel adventures. (It’s interesting how the artists were moonlighting as other professionals or were clark-kenting their way through the world.) Generally, I’m skeptical of artists who claim to be poets, but Sebanz had beautiful poetry mixed in with her very feminist photos and mixed-media pieces. I always like to talk to artists/actors/creative types and tell them if I like their work. They appreciate it, and Sebanz was no different.
It wasn’t just artist artists in the Brewery. We saw jewelers, tailors, sculptors, refurbishers and all kinds of craftsmen. The art just went on and on. And I will definitely need to return to the Brewery for it’s next open house because we barely tapped the surface of it.

Golden moment: While sitting in patio chairs in front of the kid’s galleries at the Brewery, another father chased after his two golden-haired children. As they settled in chairs, we noticed a guy stop to take a picture of my two friends, me, the kids, the father and his wife. He said he just wanted a picture of people sitting at the Brewery to make into a Youtube video. I asked him if he was an artist here. He said no and anxiously showed us the nonthreatening picture so we didn’t think he was creepy. I said, we didn’t mind. We just wanted to know if he knew any ice cream places nearby. He didn’t. Neither did the family. We didn’t have ice cream.
Before leaving Downtown, I dropped the friends off at Union Station, then I drove to get back on the 5 Freeway. The thing about Downtown is that freeway entrances and exits aren’t uniform, so before I found my entrance, I drove through Lincoln Heights and into the more notorious Boyle Heights and passed several car junkyards. When I got on the freeway, it was more traffic, and that’s when I decided I wasn’t going to deal with. I was somehow going to bypass it and use my LA-traffic sense and travel skills to avoid it all. I got on the 110 North, which is unknown territory for me and just decided to drive until I hit Pasadena. Then I would go from there.
I drove past really beautiful-looking houses in disreputable parts of LA. When I got closer to the more reputable Pasadena, the houses looked smaller and more dilapidated. But then I remembered not to judge anything by its cover because Los Angeles has a habit of surprising you.

When I hit Pasadena, the freeway announced it would end. I had no idea where I was.

Remembering that I had passed a sign for the Norton Simon (a famous art museum in Los Angeles), I decided I’d find my way through surface streets to the museum. Someone had to know how to direct me from there. But before I could even enact that plan, I got distracted by the appearance of Wild Thyme the restaurant. Wild Thyme only means anything to me because I once had an amazing piece of carrot cake from it before it closed in my part of Los Angeles. Being the foodie I am, I couldn’t go back without stopping in. I parked, wandered in, got the staff to draw me a map and then sat down to order. While waiting for my food, I looked out the window and what should I espy? A kumquat tree! Which is when I knew I had to write about this day to all of you!

I totally forgot it was Palm Sunday today, but fortunately, AH and I celebrated in style. On this beautiful beach-kind-of-day in Socal, we headed for the hills, specifically a leafy suburb of Pasadena for an outdoor Last Supper with Jesus. The specifics of the luncheon were this: A friend of AH’s dressed up as the Jesus. He set up a kind of daVinci-like spread in his backyard (rugs on the grass, pillows to lean on, low tables, pita bread, veggies, wine and other libations) and invited a lot of friends over. Some came as AH and I did, somewhat unsure what the deal was and stylishly dressed. While others came dressed in bedsheets, togas, and other “period” specific things. It was a very mellow affair. We sat on the ground and just chatted with a bunch of people. Some played backgammon, others tapped on drums, there was a crossword going around as well as a Vogue (Beyonce on the cover!). There were a lot of good-natured jokes about how this was  probably a lot more pleasant then the original Last Supper. No one had to worry about traitors or death, and the host of our supper eventually was too busy making sure everyone was fed. Oh yeah! The food was “fool”–a fava bean stew to which you could add any or all of the following: salt, pepper, chili, tomatoes, garlic, onions or parsley. There was a moment when everyone tried to remember the 10 commandments, but we forgot one and had to look it up on an iPhone. Figures that everyone forgot that you couldn’t commit adultery. Afterwards, AH and I got ice cream. 

AH and I love food. There are great food places in Los Angeles. Ergo, a lot of entries touch on food, and this entry is no exception.

Unlike lots of Americans, AH and I lurve the spicy food good. Over a meal with other friends, I lamented my general plight to another spice lover. We moaned over how we ask for SPICY dishes, but usually, we are only served dishes that taste at least like something. Said other friends wondered how we could subject ourselves to blazing infernos in our mouths. I think our answer was quite succinct: “Loving spicy food is a slippery slope. Once you start, it’s all downhill from there.”

Now if there’s any kind of food I like, it’s Thai food, especially the hot hot kind. This search has led me to many places in which I have found goodness and great disappointment. This week, it led me into a local Thai shop that I’ve passed often but never entered till now. Smiling brightly at the cashier, who was a native Thai, I asked her to give me the real, naked truth: Was the food any good and would they make it hot?

I think food in America is often very safe. In order to cater to the tastes of a larger clientele, restaurants make their food quite bland. This is especially true for “staple” dishes: pasta, pizza, sandwiches….ok maybe lots of dishes. But it’s interesting when you come in with a challenge. When I questioned the veracity of the cashier’s statement that yes-they-serve-spicy-food was legit, her eyes gleamed. Her face brightened. She assured me that the red curry was the hottest around, that native Thai customers raved the food reminded them of their mother’s and that customers came from miles away from their food.

We laughed over Thai tourism (I’ve been). We marveled over how much good Thai cooking gets overlooked. Then, I decided to issue another challenge. In addition to my red curry, I ordered a side of pad thai. Like many people, I love pad thai, especially good pad thai. But as it is a “staple” dish, I think that a lot of restaurants make it rather mediocre. I explained to the cashier my theory that you knew you found a good place if they handled something as simple as pad thai with love.

Oh her eyes sparked! But let me say, in the end, her boasts were completely on point. The curry sizzled in my mouth and I’ve thought about the pad thai for days.  I want more.

The sugar part of this entry is in reference to a “Hawaiian” restaurant I wandered into. While studying the menu with that restaurant’s cashier, I was told that the only really, truly Hawaiian thing on the menu was the BBQ pork sandwich and sweet potato fries. The sandwich came with a faux spicy sauce, which actually wasn’t as disappointing as I would have assumed. And the sweet potato fries were sprinkled with sugar.

Yes, I make friends easily.

And oh! They stopped making the amazing chai and passion fruit cupcakes at my favorite bakery! Damn you suburbia! Get out and try something other than boring red velvet! It doesn’t even taste like anything! 

I took AH for her very first visit into Topanga Canyon today. 

 Topanga is like the lost world of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles is pretty much a city city, but Topanga is its heart of darkness. There is nothing but twisty canyon roads, hidden homes and survivalist colonies. It’s off the very beaten track. 

We were in Topanga, eating lunch at Cafe Mimosa off the main road. (Very fine fair; AH and I had a portobello and brie panini and chicken curry wrap with raisins and coffee and vanilla chai). Because it was off the main road, we had to make several dangerous u-turns to park—first we passed the restaurant, then we turned around and turned into the wrong road, then turned around, then turned into the right parking spot, all while carefully checking blindspots. 

On the way, we passed some very typical and atypical Topanga sites. 

Typical: The Theatricum Botanicum 

Atypical: A sign advertising a credit check company on a perilous mountain turn. It was a lonely, 81/2 by 11 in sign with the backdrop of the San Fernando Valley right behind it. 

Typical: Hidden driveways and roads. 

Atypical: a patch of snow. Typical: Artistic graffiti and the sense of bohemia everywhere 

Atypical:  a strawberry and cherry stand cause is it strawberry season already? 

Typical: The restaurant closing at 2 just cause, I bet 

Atypical: A hold-up bottleneck

Typical: bicyclists, pedestrians and people randomly walking up the steep roads

And so forth. 

Lovely Saturday afternoon for us here in la-la land! 

Perhaps I write this blog using too many television analogies, but if the literary world is loosing its hold on recognized allusions, then who am I to be a Sisyphus?

 The LOST premiere was last week, and in the opening episodes, the audience was told by one Daniel Faraday that the LOST island was lost in time. It was skipping like a record, pulling the castaways all through the years but getting them nowhere. Even though they’d been stuck on that small, measurable landscape for four seasons, they continued to find themselves in unknown territory without ever leaving. 

And that’s how I felt–acutely–this weekend as an Angeleno. I was turned and twisted around in a way that shouldn’t be normal for someone that’s lived in Los Angeles and its greater areas for a really long time. 

Here’s what happened: It started with an opera. The Magic Flute was playing at the LA Music Center in Downtown, and I really really wanted to go. A few years back, I’d seen the Ingmar Bergman version on DVD. And last year, longtime readers will recall that I re-fell in love with the whole art form when Tosca decided to take that plunge off the fort walls. The show was a Sunday matinee. I left in good time. I drove down the 5 freeway like I always do, planning to merge onto the 170, to get Downtown. But the 170 never came. 

I found myself in unfamiliar but familiar territory. I knew that I’d driven this stretch of the 5 Freeway before, but not in a way that I was crystal clear on where I was. I’d pass my junction and now I had to figure out how to get Downtown via this new route.

It’s a LA sixth sense–navigating the freeways. You need to have an intuitive grasp on how the entirety of the city is connected through these concrete arteries. This way if traffic is congested on the 10 E, you can still take the 110 N to the 101 junction that goes through Downtown to get into Hollywood. Or you could drive up the 405, merge onto the 10E, then exit off on La Brea, drive the side streets until you hit your Hollywood destination. 

I once had a foreign friend wow over the fact that she never had to plan her life and schedule around roads or freeways. Well, this is Los Angeles. 

Fortunately, I have an acquaintance who works Downtown and can read the even-more-than-usual-confusing roads like a fortuneteller over a palm. If I skipped the 170, then I had to take the 110 S, merge onto the 101 S/10W onramp and take the Grand or Temple exit. When I passed Filipino Town, I knew I’d gone to far despite directions. So I got off the freeway, merged back on and then made it to the Music Center with time to spare. 

The opera was great. It was fantastic! It was Mozart. 

But then, I was lost again after the performance. My companions and I wanted to go somewhere to eat, but Downtown on a Sunday with its crazier-than-the-rest-of-LA streets?  And stores are not in walking distance, especially in the shoes I was wearing. This meant that it wasn’t a good idea to eat there. Then where? 

My  companions and I have all lived in or around Los Angeles for years. But here was the bottom line: None of us had ever lived in or near Downtown. We had no idea where to even start looking for restaurant areas. And, because none of us had never had to get to other desirable locations from Downtown, we had no idea how to get to our suggestions from where we currently were. Just like how my world was turned into unknown territory just by skipping my regular junction, we stood dumbly in the emptying opera house wondering how to feed ourselves. 

If I had been with certain people, if I had been with a smaller group, if and if and if, then maybe I would have tapped deeply into my LA sixth sense and found a place that would have been lovely. Instead, we stuck to the beaten path and ascertained that at 6 PM on a Sunday traffic was great and Santa Monica was only 15 minutes away instead of 2 hours. We ended our evening in a creperia on Third Street, laughing over reheated fries and bready paninis. 

And when I left to go home? I did it again! Almost. I almost took the wrong onramp onto the freeway, thinking that I was heading north instead of south? Or was it south instead of north? Or was it because the northern onramp is usually on the second to farthest right lane except for this one time?I don’t know.

All I know is that it was highly undignified to be so lost. 

For reasons that I shall never divulge to any living person (unless I do and probably shall do without hesitation), I had to come into possession of a book by Sunday, January 18. But here were the problems: 1) I didn’t know I needed the book until January 13. 2) I, for said reasons given above, couldn’t purchase the book online unless pricing and shipping were reasonable. 3) The book plus shipping even at a reasonable price and date were not doable. 4) The book, called The Typographic Workbook, is not easily found unless you look online.5) There’s a new edition of the book coming out at the end of February, which means all current copies are rare.It was a dilemma similar to the one I found myself back in when I was in high school. As a senior, my teacher sent 80 of her students out in the pre-Amazon days to find a copy of Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot. We students searched bookchains, used bookstores and libraries. But, as you can imagine, Waiting for Godot is not so popular a read. So it came down to a battle royale among us classmates–who could find the books first and claim them as their own?I found that I needed to actually do a little searching to find my typographic workbook, which in these post-Amazon days, took a little thinking.First, I tried to see if I could bum it off someone. Nope.Second, I tried to beg for more time. Nope. Third, I called my local Borders and Barnes and Noble. Neither of them had the book in stock, but they would happily order it if I was willing to wait 7 to 9 business days.Not so much.That pretty much ex-ed out all local bookstore options for me.I retreated into solitude to think.Now, I thought, this is Los Angeles. I know their are many chain bookstores and many specialty bookstores. I know there are bookstores for fiction, poetry, comics, mysteries, erotica and comics. I know that I know people who can list five places in which to find books. But I know of only one place that might have the book I’m looking for. However, being that this is the age of technology, why go to the store only to be disappointed?I hopped online and did a search. I found my book. The bookstore in question had it.So on Friday, I bypassed early-weekend traffic and headed down Wilshire to Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I planned to step into Hennessey + Ingalls for the first time ever to get my book. (I had called earlier to put it on hold.) I have good and bad memories of bookstores on Third Street Promenade. It used to be the home of Midnight Special, which had awesome book sections like Arabic literature. The local Barnes and Nobles also used to hold a very hip poetry series. I’d seen great and local LA poets like Marvin Bell, David St. John and Dorothy Barresi there. But like the once great indie bookstore, the poetry series is no more.But Hennessey + Ingalls is there. It’s a design and architecture bookstore, which had my book. I parked. I walked in. I bought my book and I left.I guess all adventures can end very simply–like when I found Godot. I was driving down a street when a used bookstore that I’d never visited caught my eye. Within moments of entering, I found a copy in the shelves. But the simplicity never would have come without the search. Instead of pulling a Vladimir and Estragon, it’s always better to search out some solution. Heck, that’s usually how good and necessary books fall into your seeking hands. 

AH was over last night, and instead of being Angelenos and going out to eat, we stayed in and experimented with the contents of my fridge. Overall, I have to give us a very satisfactory A+. And I felt like I had to work a bit as AH had filled me up with homemade goodness a few days earlier.Here was AH’s menu:

• An avocado salad with homemade dressing, green onions on the side
• wheat pasta with vodka sauce and spicy sausage on the side
• water flavored with lemons and cucumbers

(AH if I totally got this wrong, please fix it. Your menu was a thing of beauty.) The menu at my place:

•  pastrami salad with endives and balsamic honey dressing totally brought into incarnation by AH herself
• spicy cornmeal muffins
• goat cheese and currants
• pomegranate wine totally

It just goes to show that no matter how many “best restaurant in Los Angeles” lists we come up with, sometimes there’s just no place like home. Hmmm, a bit sappy, but food does go right to the gut.