LOS ANGELES

It's not important to me, but think I understand the confusion: the greater Los Angeles area is a series of facades, chaotic and garish, unorganized and unchecked. Anonymous developments inside arbitrary spaces. I find this exciting, as adventure is always behind the facade.


I live in a city that is seven miles square, and in my first 48 hours in LA I drove 200 miles. I see (but did not experience) the potential culture shock. San Francisco is tighter, more careful. The air is replenished by fog. LA can seem like an endless, graying surface. The following isn't a defense, but a description of a journey anyone can take if they look past LA's wilty mask.


We'll start randomly: The picture above is the intro to the meal I ate on my third night in town. In Koreatown, not far from where Biggie Smalls was shot, there's a micro chain of restaurants called "BCD Soft Tofu." BCD has four locations in about ten square blocks. Much of the food above (and the delicious fish below) is brought before you order.


This is my kind of treasure hunting: pulling into indiscernible parking lots and walking into strange lands of food and culture. The bigger the city, the more territory to hunt. For this reason, I feel SF loses points to everywhere south of Santa Barbara.

Culinary treasure isn't only the cement that fastens my love of southern California to the small, heart-shaped lump of bedrock in my chest. It's more of a seasoning, in fact. I'll case study this using Thursday, August 13 as source material.


The day began with astonishing Vietnamese food, the kind with fresh, bright ingredients that burn your dulled-by-the-outside-world-eyeballs. Remembering what was ordered or where I was doesn't seem important, though mint and fresh lemonade were involved. After, we moved to Laguna Beach, population: zero cares in the world. The town is it's own bubble, like a never ending fun-employment blog entry. We found Victoria beach, a "private" beach accessible via "public stairway" (also a good band name/you're welcome). I recommend it, as it's way less crowded than the real thing. Also, there's this mini-lighthouse on the north side (look above). It seems pretty useless, like it should have been built on the twice-as-tall cliff right behind it. But I'm probably misjudging its purpose. It's probably just some primitive symbol of ostentation.


On the south side of the beach we found an apartment complex and this boy's head. Reminds me of that scene in Arrested Development where Gob is looking for his son. Then I went shopping at Fashion Island, which looks funny from space.

Which came first: the chicken or this egg-shaped embryo of capitalism? LA is so enormous that the please-buy-anything-from-us-at-any-price sales haven't stopped, even though it's been more than a year of depressed recession. I bought some Asics Tigers for $35 from Bloomingdales. They were the last pair and didn't come with a box! Sign of the times...


After shopping I ate a vegan dinner on the above blanket. Turns out bananas are a great thickener for brownies. Then shit got interesting.


We parked in the midst of the downtown LA artwalk, a once-a-month clusterfuck of people livening up the high-rise-laden Garment District (or Fashion District?). Oakland has the same thing: a thousand people come to drink, mingle, and get their senses tingled. LA's artwalk is predictably ten times the size of Oakland's. Very exciting.

We start at the "soft-opening" of a bar decorated with hundreds of celebrity mugshots, where I had my second drink in 35 days. I also ate a piece of chocolate. Throughout the night, we would guess who belongs to what mug. This one was controversial:


The controversy was that I knew it was Andy Dick and no one believed me for three hours. (By the way, he was arrested at a Sam's Club in Riverside "on suspicion of sexual battery and marijuana possession after... [he] allegedly grabbed a 17-year-old girl’s tank top and exposed her breasts at a Murrieta bar/restaurant." Now you know!)

Like the artwalk, which brings in thousands of people that can afford to live someplace nicer than downtown, this bar is clearly a seed in an extensive gentrification garden. It lives in the ground floor of the once-glamorous Alexandria Hotel. By once-glamorous I mean that this was the spot in the first part of the 20th century. From Wiki:

In the Alexandria's heyday, movie stars and other celebrities, including Valentino, Mary Miles Minter, Sarah Bernhardt, Enrico Caruso and Jack Dempsey were guests. Charlie Chaplin reportedly kept a suite at the Alexandria and did improvisations in the lobby, and western star Tom Mix reportedly rode his horse through the lobby.^[8][8] It was there that D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks met in 1919 to form United Artists. U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson,^[8] and many foreign dignitaries, also stayed at the hotel while visiting Los Angeles.

Translation: the hotel has a seedy underbelly/dark nether-history. This was actually the subject of our tour-guide's thesis. The grad student leading us around was earning a criminology PHD from Irvine. She is focusing on crime in residential hotels. She is particularly curious about crime myth. She lived in the Alexandria for a spell and knew many generations of residents, from the white-haired schizophrenic 50-something looking lost at the new bar to the goony rich-kid royalty living "high" up in the penthouse. Our guide is, apparently, an excellent lock pick.


That's how we eventually got into this "secret" red room, where Chaplin would hang out. This was attached to the old (now abandoned) lobby space scene two pictures up (above Andy Dick). I'm getting ahead of myself. It's still exciting to remember.

We took a short break from the hotel to enjoy "the last bar on Skid Row" (where Bukowski spent his days; also home to 1/2 beers for a buck). We came back and went straight to the roof of the Alexandria, where there was a two person photo shoot going on. Another thing I like about LA is that once you breech that surface, it is even more itself then you suspected it might be. I think in a lot of cities, you can see what you're getting on the surface, and the further you look the more you feel like there's nothing left to learn.

Anyway, we may all have been living on the edge, but only George was sitting on it, too:


I had to go to the bathroom. So our guide took us to "the abandoned lobby," a massive, empty, corroding second floor. There were huge bay windows, two bars, the original check-in desk, and an elaborate ceiling with fancy moldings and textures.

When I came out, everyone else was gone. I started taking pictures until a security guard appeared and told me to leave. I went downstairs and outside. I called the one sober member of the group asking where everyone went.

"Oh we're in this secret room and they are tearing these pictures off the wall."


By the time I got to the room, our guide had filled an elevator with giant old photos. Some were of old movie stars and many were signed. We took these up to the penthouse, where the rich kids were vaguely enthusiastic to receive us/them. With the photos stashed, we retreated to a few other bars in the area.


Eventually we made it back to our guides new apartment. The buildings were still mostly garment factories, but some had been converted to residential hotels, and some of those were being converted into lofts and condos. She was in at the ground level of this mutation, and for $1600 she had more space than I could imagine, as though the walls of four residential rooms had been knocked down to create a giant live/work space. There was another spectacular view of the greater downtown area. LA is uniquely stunning at night; it seems to never end. Many of the buildings are labeled by the company that owns them, Blade Runner style.


Down her street past the Orpheum was the official after party for the art walk. There was a password needed to get in, and the one we were given ("small balls") didn't work. We waited long enough and were let in, up thirty stairs to a bizarre art space that seemed elaborately decorated and otherwise uninhabitable. The wire art (above) was a real highlight, as was the ATM machine basked in green light. The party seemed to be slowing down when we arrived, but still satisfying to find hiding on a ghostly street with an old theater and homeless men who could harmonize beautifully.

At 3:30 we were in Thai town, sitting down for some electrifying panang curry. At 4 a.m. we were winding our way back to Long Beach, taking the 710 for it's surreal loop through the massive port. Wondering what was arriving in those thousands of shipping containers was a perfect dessert. It was safe to assume they were full of awesome, important, incredible, and utterly twisted items that would outfit the worlds inside the universe that is LA.