NO SAINTS IN L.A.

The Highlands

Saturday alone meant cleaning. Five hours later, I was only a living room and barely a kitchen into cleansing my apartment of hairballs, dust mites, ancient junk mail and scattered clothing I regularly toss on chairs, tables and floors during the week. Then the hubby came home and I stopped, I was done cleaning, tired and hungry. So what’s better than a movie with popcorn? Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was showing Harry Potter, so among the concrete molds and throngs of gawking, cargo-short wearing tourists, we went to the best theatre – right after ArcLight Cinemas – the city has to offer. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, famous for their traffic stopping premieres, nearby Kodak Theatre (home to the Academy Awards) and adjacent (and newly erected) Madame Tussaud’s Wax Musueum, is a spacious and comfortable venue. It’s easy to arrive late and still have a sublime seat of your choosing. The movie was expectedly wonderful in plot, dialogue and cinematography and as is our habit, ColdStone was in order afterward, as well as a visit to the observation deck of the building deemed by Curbed LA as the “Ugliest Building” of 2007. From atop, you can view the costumed characters begging for a dollar (for a picture with them of course), along the most frequented of all Los Angeles attractions, the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The most invested of them being the White Angel (or the Black or Green one, depending on the night) out in flagrant dress.

He’s spotted….from behind…but let’s go for a closer look…

The front….

The Babylonian themed Hollywood & Highland mall.

…and in ironic juxtaposition to the Babylonian theme…Jesus. With Spiderman.

Tags: Angel, Big Bird, Hollywood and Highland, Jesus, Spider Man, Tourist

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Categories Culture, In The City, Neighborhood

No Doubt

28 Jul

First, the Nu Sounds came on. A Swedish band whose female lead, despite her strong voice, echoed along the walls of a mostly empty amphitheater. By the time my Coors Light buzz started to wear off, the only thing I could think was “Please God, get this second rate, wannabe Gwen off the stage,” and that this gyrating blond harpy should stop her Swedish leg kicks and crotch splitting pole grinding – Where’s Gwen? Where’s Paramore, and when do the Nu Sounds stop singing?

Paramore then assumed the stage and took to it in running, jumping, head-bangin’ reverie.

There was a disappointing lack of red lipstick in the audience and not a platinum blond in sight – I was expecting to see a panoply of Gwen-lookalikes and wannabes. The crowd filtered in slowly, the ‘sold out’ show barely packed even after Paramore made their appearance. My need-to-be-early-everywhere punctuality felt more foolish than ever since I had so far watched each opening band in agonizing expectation of the main attraction.

But nothing mattered the moment No Doubt came on. When their shadows graced a backlit white sheet, the crowd erupted and so did I. Thus ensued over an hour of jumping, sweating, singing, shouting, cheerful accolades in response to Gwen’s superlative, ab-bearing performance. Best night ever.

Goodnight.

Tags: CityWalk, Gibson Amphitheatre, Gwen Stefani, No Doubt, Universal City

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Categories In The City, Music, Neighborhood

Sunny Side Up

27 Jul

My hubby and I stopped for Starbucks, then saw this bloke setting up shop. Not five minutes after several attempts to wrangle money out of drivers for his services, a cop pulled up and made him vacate the area.

I see this woman everywhere and always in the sun. She looks burnt and thirsty, but she never begs for money.

…and we’re finally here. Though the idea was to head to Malibu, the North side of the Santa Monica Pier provided several wide open spaces on which to set up camp and lay out. So we stopped here. Unlike the bohemoth parking lot located right next to the Pier and Venice Beach – allowing waves of tourists and large families to set up shop, bouncing past your towels with swaths of kicked up sand and shrieking laughter – smaller lots are available the further you drive towards Malibu, thus restricting the flow of beach-goers. So we choose the quiet.

My size 10 clunkers. Though I annually refuse to wear flip-flops because they always give me blisters, no matter how long or how often I wear them, I have yet to find an accceptable replacement and usually ruin a favored pair of chassures. Pain is beauty, right?

What I look like at the beach. My head covered in towels, hats or a book, I try to avoid burning my face for fear of leathery skin and more freckles than I can count. My pasty skin hardly ever bears a tahitian tan, but I try. My one crowning moment was after I received a spray tan in Miami. An old woman from Chile thought I was Brazilian.

The trouble with L.A., almost always a bad highway accident resulting in miles of irritated drivers.

A mile later…

Another mile…

And another…

My hubby and I caught sight of this pimp-mobile just blocks from our house and I had to take a photo. Though the car is obviously a bit rough around the edges, something like this only comes from love, and so seems endearingly named “Fig” for its purple hue.

Tags: California Beaches, Fig, Pimp My Ride, Santa Monica Beach

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Categories Culture, In The City, Neighborhood, Tourist

Dirty Panes, Broken Windows

24 Jul

Tags: California Flowers, Graffiti, Painting

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Categories Art, Neighborhood

Pissed

23 Jul

HAHAHAHA! This coincidence is ironically amusing. As I stated before, I’ve found a saving grace in Jenna Sauers; but I wasn’t finished reading her stuff…so I went home and read some more. Then I found out she took a snapshot of the L.A. showroom I worked for during the first two years I was out here. Hated it. Loathed the people. Like it says in the bible “bad company corrupts good morals.” Something I once repeated to a sixth grade friend, which is laughable maybe, but a philosophy I’ve firmly believed in once I moved to L.A. and experienced it firsthand through big egos and the capricious absence of any discernable morals; because the only value streaming through showrooms is how best to show buyers a goodtime (the more they buy) and if a girl is good-looking, how best to bed her sooner than later (aforementioned ego) – oh, and lots of gossip aka lie, lie, lie – whatever gets you where you want to go and who you want to click with. So here it is, the entrance to my fucking unawesome whore of an employer – Derelicte.

Can you sense my acrimonious sentiment? Yeah, me neither.

Tags: Fashion Showroom

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Categories Culture, Fashion, Quotidian

The Prosaic Quotidian

23 Jul

I have absolutely no steam today. Among other things, I have been asked to take a pound of receipts and tape each one to an 8 1/2 x 11″ piece of paper so they can be scanned, type out the name of tenants on a report because the computer has chopped off syllables, make copies, scan said copies and allocate every line item on a stack of invoices an inch thick. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten enough sleep, but give me hours of endless monotony and you couldn’t bullhorn me into being alert. So, between the “arts and crafts” and an increasing opposition to the trite work I am assigned as the week comes to an end, I’m cooked. Done. Take me out of the oven.

What’s kept my mind from actually being cooked is a girl named Jenna Sauers, whose kiwi roots are close to my heart because of my New Zealand stepmother (you cannot beat that accent). Jenna is a model/writer whose thoughtful and witty prose is fully addictive. Her diverse experience through modeling has taken her from Australia to Los Angeles, and since I’m all about L.A. here, how delighted was I to find this photo of her in full L.A. glory, grabbing a cup o’ Joe at Starbucks at the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.

Jenna was recently outed as the authoress behind Jezebel’s popular writer ‘TatianaTheAnonymousModel’ in the featured article I Am The Anonymous Model. My recent fave feature was her essay on committed model Karen Mulder, a modeling industry victim.

ME. End of Day.

Tags: Jenna Sauers, Office Work, Quotidian, The Anonymous Model

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Categories Cafes & Delis, Fashion, In The City, Literature

A Caveman Could Do It

23 Jul

Parking is hell. For every streetside spot we saw open, a car was already on its way to take it. Then finally, three blocks away from India’s Oven, we found a parking space. Which turned out to be awesome, because I walked right past Banksy.

…the city’s hesitation to clean up Banksy, may have resulted in leniancy for others…

Beverly Boulevard

Tags: Banksy, Banksy Caveman, Banksy Tank, Indias Oven

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Categories Art, Fast Food, In The City, Restaurants

I Spy

22 Jul

La Brea

Tags: Giraffe, Graffiti

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Categories Art, In The City, Neighborhood

Paw Prints

21 Jul

Felines strike me as (on the whole) delicate creatures. They are picky, aloof and sometimes very cuddly; laying across your newspaper, swiping at hanging strings as you prepare for the day – they are a soft ball of not-so-grown kittenhood, the semblance of adolescent behavior always intact. In contrast to their canine counterpart, whom I always imagine sniffing and licking and drooling (I do love dogs, but I can’t seem to remove the imagery) a cat’s paws look soft, more like a quiet invitation to “follow me” than a stomping rollop that says “I WAS HERE.”

Then I realized…holy squishy cat, those tiny paws have claws and are a wee bit mashed into the concrete. No cat would step in wet cement then run around in it, they’re not that oblivious.

Tags: Cat Paws, Cement Writing