There are few frustrations in modern life that compare to not being able to find a song you want on iTunes. Look, I gave up on illegal downloading in college, after they sent me an email a week about how students caught using Kazaa would be arrested and fined and expelled and THEN the RIAA was going to systematically disembowel you with a blunt shovel. The scare tactics worked. I stick to iTunes these days. But I am a child of the age of instant gratification, and if you want me to continue sticking to iTunes then you had better have what I’m looking for, thankyouverymuch.
The problem, you see, was that I watched Adele perform at the Hollywood Bowl earlier this summer (I can’t believe I never wrote about that. Look for a post later this week.) and she sang this wrenching cover of Many Shades of Black, originally by The Raconteurs. I flipped over it. I came home and tore the internet apart trying to find a copy that I could have to play over and over again. But it’s not on iTunes, it’s not on her CD, it’s not on some shady recording on eBay, it’s not anywhere unless you buy it on vinyl from the UK and pay a million dollars in shipping and I don’t have a record player anyway. I gave up, finally, but not before subjecting quite a few hapless friends to the iTunes rant above.
S0metimes, though, if you bitch loud and long enough, the universe listens. Tonight I was in my room, going about my business and enjoying the sound of the season’s first rain in the back yard, when I heard some familiar chords floating down the hall. My roommates, watching 90210 in the living room, were baffled to hear me shriek “THAT’S THE SONG!!! THAT’S IT!!!!” and shoot to the television as though rocket-propelled. According to the end credits, it was available on the new 90210 soundtrack CD, and when I fired up iTunes, it told me that the album was only just released today. Track 1, Many Shades of Black, by Adele & The Raconteurs: all mine, for $0.99.
Victory!
Hello, October! So far, you are about 30 degrees too hot, but I love you anyway because you have given me an excuse to rip off a page on my desk calendar (I’ll never know why that noise is so satisfying) and to decorate the mantle over my fireplace with Halloween frippery.
Today’s photographic gem is from a storefront in Culver City. Otherwise known as Why I Love West LA:
paris hilton doesn’t shop here, originally uploaded by msgluck.
It seems like half of my recent posts end this way, but I am headed elsewhere for the weekend. (A New Year’s resolution, well-kept!) Speakeasies, Scootcars, deep-dish pizza, football, and old friends await me in San Francisco. I hear Paris doesn’t shop there, either.
Not that you’d know it by the weather. Southern California does this to me, every single year. At the end of April, when I am feeling frolicsome and ready for swimsuits, the whole world looks like it’s been rolled up in grey flannel and the temperature doesn’t rise above 60 for weeks. And then, come September or October, when I am ready to wear a scarf and watch the garden fill up with rain, the sun goes supernova and it’s suddenly hot enough to fry eggs on every sidewalk. The photo above was really taken in January, which sounds about right.
Weather vagaries notwithstanding, we’re perched on the soft coppery edge of my very favorite season. There’s so much to do. I’m cleaning the house one room at a time, sweeping out the leftover sand and taking down the blankets. I’m planning menus: roasted squash, cider, zucchini and pumpkin breads. Last night I moved all the summer fluff to the bottom of my bookshelf, getting ready to tackle some of the heavyweights I’ve been saving. And I’m doing some studying, some planning, thinking about next fall and the fall beyond that. Just today, everything is in balance. I feel like good things are in store.
Happy equinox.
As someone who is still adjusting to the lawlessness of adulthood, travel on a whim – especially to odd, “why the hell would you want to go there?” places – is one of my favorite forms of entertainment. This past weekend, the target oddity was Columbus, OH, originally for a big noisy college reunion at the USC-Ohio State game. None of us had ever been to Columbus before, and all of us will go practically anywhere to watch good football, so why not?
Last-minute crises in everyone’s places of employ (adulthood perhaps not as lawless as I would like to think) reduced the trip to a two-woman expedition. Fortunately, neither I nor friend AT – original mastermind of the venture – were daunted by the prospect. And so I return to the west coast to report that a football weekend in Columbus goes something like this:
- We exit the plane on Thursday night, garbed head-to-toe in USC gear, ready for anything. After being deposited at our hotel, it occurs to us that our $9 LAX sandwiches were a long time ago, and that we have been subsisting for many hours on Southwest’s Nabisco® Selections . We attempt to walk across the (very dark, very sidewalkless, possibly actually a freeway?) street in search of sustenance, and promptly have a near-death experience, as we are almost mown down by a stream of Mack trucks materializing out of the darkness.
- Chastened, we give up and eat at the Waffle House, located in the same parking lot as our hotel. I unwisely order my waffle with strawberries, thinking of the pancakes I had at brunch last Sunday, which were strewn with sweet, whole berries. Instead, the food article in question shows up mottled with a baked-in pink syrup — looking, in fact, rather as though it has the measles. The waitress refers to me as “hon” but could clearly squash me with her pinky finger, so I eat it anyway.
(Waffle House menu. Mysterious white substance pictured next to the eggs finally identified as grits. Don’t laugh; Nobody eats grits where I’m from.)
coffee and menus, originally uploaded by pink_fish13.
- The next morning, we sally forth to see what there is to see. We spend much of the day wandering up and down High Street and through the OSU campus. I am never so happy as when I am on a campus, any campus, so I spend most of this time bouncing around and exclaiming over things like staircases and acorns. (Really, though, their campus is lovely. And huge. Their library, correspondingly huge, nearly reduced me to tears.)
- We are two of what feels like nine people in the whole town who are wearing USC colors. Being a pair of petite and decidedly non-threatening females, we try to make up for this by smiling a lot. It seems to work: Pretty much everyone is nice.
- Herman Melville wrote about the human propensity to gravitate towards the ocean, saying “Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries — stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.” Replace the word “water” with “tequila,” and you have an accurate description of the American twentysomething (or at least, all the twentysomethings I hang around with). Using this unerring instinct, we locate a likely-looking bar on a street full of same, and order a round. We almost fall off our stools when presented with the tab for a margarita and a Newcastle: $4.75. Columbus is our new favorite city in which to drink.
- Some hours later, we are being ushered past an interminable line into a nightclub throbbing with bass, and seated at a table which I am fairly sure was occupied by another party just moments before. Grey Goose is being poured, and I am having a long conversation with a Very Important Businessman about how he met his wife. Between the fog machines, the endless chants of “O-H!” “I-O!”, and the excellent vodka, I am having a difficult time ascertaining what the hell is happening to me.
- Not enough hours later, I am blearily awake, and AT is standing over me in a towel, shouting, “GAMEDAY!”
- We are waiting in the hotel lobby for a cab. Three middle-aged guys bound through the doors, each wearing a Waffle House ball cap adorned with a gold “Waffle House VIP” pin. In speaking with them, it emerges that they have just eaten at that establishment for the first time ever, and their waitress bestowed caps on them as a reward. We are aggrieved. We were first-timers. (Well, one of us.) We were not given ball caps. Resilient creatures that we are, we press on, hatless.
- It is 7 PM Eastern Standard Time. Tailgating is over. Michigan has narrowly beaten Notre Dame. The band has come and gone. (Ohio State’s is impressive, by the way.) It is GAME TIME. AT — who is five foot nothing, blonde, and bubbly — has completed a Hulklike transformation, and is now standing wild-haired on her seat, using an inexplicable lung capacity to bellow at our football team, the opposing football team, the coaches, the stadium, and the universe in general. Several people seated in the row below us turn around, expecting to see a hirsute trucker type with a bandanna and a beer gut, and are instead confronted by the vision of our petite superfan going apoplectic in her “You can’t beat Pete” tee shirt. She is the hit of the section.
(The Horseshoe, by the way, looks like this. It’s awesome, in the older sense of the word, especially when it’s filled with 100,000 people who hate your guts.)
Ohio Stadium: Ohio State – USC., originally uploaded by bronder.
- Fourth quarter. USC is down, and keeps making stupid mistakes. It seems impossible that we will win.
- We win.
- We go out, clearly. We are double-fisting (well, the bar upstairs was crowded, and we didn’t want to have to fight our way back to it a second time, okay?) and basking in victory. We make friends with a large group of Ohio State fans. They teach us how to do the ubiquitous “O-H!” “I-O!” refrain, and we teach them a So-Cal Spellout, and then we spend some time merrily insulting each other’s cheers.
- There is a lot more drinking, a lot of walking, and a lot of hunting for a cab in another dark street having an identity crisis. (Alley? Freeway? Who knows?) Somewhere circa 4 AM, I pass out.
- For the third morning in a row, we are offended by our hotel’s shameless price-gouging: $9 for a continental breakfast. Dismissing as unbearably tacky the idea of sneaking into the nearby Quality Inn and passing ourselves off as their guests (because surely the Quality Inn knows that breakfast should be free), we once again end up at our new culinary haven. This time, we are both smart enough to avoid anything with the word “strawberry” in the title, and I casually request that my hash browns be “well-scattered.” We are the queens of the Waffle House.
- Secure in this title, we fly home.
I am going to do my very best to keep this from turning into a football blog this fall, because that is not really its purpose, but know that I am a little bit unhinged about college ball — and USC football in particular — so I am attempting a great deal of restraint here. Stay tuned.
USC @ 2008 Rose Bowl, originally uploaded by el_molino12.
If you’ll excuse us, we’re all off to Columbus for the weekend. We have some business to take care of there.
Back Sunday!
Cleaning out my sent text messages last night, it occurred to me that if you took a random sampling (excluding all the ones that say things like “Ugh, traffic, be there in 20″), you’d have a tidy and fairly accurate snapshot of my life this summer. It’s what passes for biography in the age of Twitter, I know, but an interesting exercise nonetheless.
- A Tuesday, 8:54 PM: My apartment is being overtaken by ants, and I came home to find my landlord in my kitchen wearing a pith helmet. I’m living in an Indiana Jones movie.
- A Friday, 11:40 PM: Want to come to my place and I’ll drive? Nobody in Watts wants my car and they might want yours.
- A Thursday, 3:32 PM: Dude, my left leg looks like somebody came after me with a hammer. No idea what happened.
- A Wednesday, 10:14 PM: Almonds, a banana and some mango sorbet, all eaten standing in the kitchen at 10 p.m. Think that counts as dinner?
- A Sunday, 1:46 AM: Bouncer won’t let me upstairs come down-!!
- A Monday, 11:22 PM: I just wore toeshoes around the house all night on a whim, then took them off and remembered why you don’t wear toeshoes around the house all night.
- A Friday, 10:52 PM: I am having a conversation about cheese factories. So happy.
P.S. Does it ever occur to you what a terrible time historians are going to have, trying to chronicle the modern age? We don’t write things down anymore; we put all our ephemera in our phones and our computers and then delete it in search of more RAM. Writing that does survive is going to have to be extracted from obsolete machines by a crack team of IT specialists. Computer geeks are the archaeologists of the future, I’m pretty sure.
Mrs. O’Leary herself (to say nothing of the cow) would be staggered by what’s going on here this week.
By day, it basically looks like an a-bomb went off over the city:
(Incidentally, I learned a new word. Pyrocumulus is a cloud formed by a rising thermal from a fire.)
By night, it looks like Mordor:
La Canada Fire, originally uploaded by anosmicovni.
It makes me think of a sentence from Will Durant that I ran across years ago: “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” Southern California is a better-than-usual illustration of his point; I’m sometimes amazed that anybody still lives here at all. Every year the whole place either burns or flash floods, and every ten years an earthquake comes through and knocks down whatever we’ve got left. But we all keep rebuilding and settling in to wait for the next disaster. Maybe the thought of life without In-N-Out is worse than the constant threat of having Mother Nature turn your roof into your floorboards.
In any case, send cold, wet thoughts towards the west coast, would you?
Erica Jong is supposed to have said “Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic church. America gets Hollywood.”
I spend a lot of time arguing that Los Angeles is not really the vapid, plastic city it’s often made out to be. I’m realizing that a big part of the trouble is everyone thinks Los Angeles and Hollywood are synonymous. And they’re not, really. I’ve spent my life in L.A., but Hollywood is still a foreign country to me. Observe:
A few Sundays ago I was on my way to see a play at the Pantages, a beautiful old-Hollywood Art Deco theater that deserves its own post at some point. There is simply no efficient way to get from my part of town to where the Pantages sits on Hollywood Boulevard; I try something different every time, and every time I swear that I will never use that particular *&$#!(% street again. This time, I attempted taking Western north from the 10, a route that’s narrow and full of stoplights but avoids some of the white-knuckle traffic on the main arteries. It does, however, drag you right through all the swelter and grime of Hollywood on a summer afternoon. If you’re not a local, here’s a hideous secret: Hollywood — I mean actual, physical Hollywood, the grid of streets between Melrose and Fairfax and Western and Franklin — is uniformly filthy, neon-washed, and crass. It’s also one of the city’s epicenters for homelessness, particularly homeless kids. It is probably the least-glamorous part of this whole town. I was late, and getting impatient, and everything around me was hot and ugly.
But there’s this one place after Western has turned into Wilton, and it’s all peeling billboards and bare brick walls and grimy curbs. On your left, there’s a huge dusty building that could be on any broken-down corner in any city in America; it probably makes you think idly of recessions and layoffs and other depressing things. But suddenly, you get just far enough north, and the building slides to one side and there it is:
The other week, a friend said to me, “I’ve lived here all my life, and I still feel like a tourist.” I get that feeling every single time I see the Hollywood sign. Those letters are Katharine Hepburn striding into a room, Clark Gable with a julep in his hand, Lucille Ball nose-to-nose with William Holden over the back of a booth in the Brown Derby, all while Columbia lifts her torch and the Metro Goldwin Meyer lion roars in his gilt frame. In 24 years, it’s never ceased to make me catch my breath a little. I’m HERE! I’m where they make the movies! I still think, involuntarily.
And how bizarre, that you’re looking at a prostitute on one corner (even though it’s not yet 6 o’clock) and a wheelchair-bound homeless man in the other, across from a gas station that you’re pretty sure you’ve seen recently on the 11 o’clock news, and there’s this sign rising over the whole mess that somehow overrides your vision, makes you instead see red carpets and designer gowns under the soundtrack of a thousand violins. What an odd juxtaposition. What a circus, indeed.
Later that night, after the play, the traffic was all gone, so I took surface streets home instead of bothering with the freeways. I cruised down Sunset, where all the sidewalks are paved with stars, past Amoeba Records and the Arclight Theater, turning south before I got to Grauman’s Chinese or the Kodak, and then shot west on Santa Monica. At Fairfax I turned south again, and that’s where things start to change.
On Fairfax, the first recognizable landmark is Lola’s, a fantastic lounge where they serve every kind of martini imaginable in glasses the size of your head. Then Canter’s, one of L.A.’s great 24-hour delicatessens — which, as Gridskipper says, “caters to the early bird special crowd as well as their drunk grandchildren.” (Having imbibed many head-sized martinis at Lola’s, and been one of the drunk grandchildren at Canter’s on many occasions, I have warm memories of both.) Then you pass the Farmer’s Market at the Grove, a warren of odd stalls and delicious smells that has been there pretty much unchanged since my dad was tiny, in spite of the giant encroaching Caruso-land right behind it. Then MOCA (austere, trying hard to look serious) and Johnnie’s Coffee Shop (a flashbulb-covered filming location that hasn’t served coffee in decades), and then this little Irish pub called Tom Bergin’s on your left where we all used to go for happy hours when I worked in that part of town. Then the gauntlet of Little Ethiopia, where I have been meaning to eat for years only I was sidetracked last time by an insatiable craving for latkes, and wound up at Canter’s instead. Then you hit Venice Blvd., and if you turn right you’re headed through Culver City, home of The Actors’ Gang, Tender Greens, Sam: Johnson’s Bookshop (colon intentional) and the best little dive in all of Los Angeles, The Backstage Bar & Grill. Culver Blvd. is a few stoplights later, and that will take you southwest towards the wetlands and the beaches and home.
My landmarks are not the Hollywood landmarks. My Los Angeles doesn’t involve handprints in cement or silicone implants or swishing velvet ropes. There is life south of Sunset, everyone, I swear. Stick around and I’ll tell you about it.
I have been neglecting the blog shamefully this month, but I’m alive and I’ll be back soon with some real updates, promise.
In the meantime, I’m curled up in bed alternating between Mastering the Art of French Cooking (because yes, I am one of the lemmings who rushed out and bought it after seeing Julie & Julia) and To Kill a Mockingbird (which I haven’t read in years, but is just as absorbing as I remembered it).
Wisdom from Julia: ”If you can read, you can cook.” I’m really good at reading. I am hoping that sooner or later this will affect my culinary skills, which are so far limited to the production of toast and soft-boiled eggs.
Wisdom from Harper Lee: ”[Jem] went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me – he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn’t see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn’t? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.”
It occurred to me today, while wading through the new LA Times website (still clunky, but an improvement over the previous blue nightmare), that deleting the adjectives is a pretty solid method of improving accuracy for the news in general. Don’t you think?
I have returned. And in doing so I have remembered that it’s really no wonder so many people get such a crap first impression of L.A.
I flew home out of the airport in Springfield, which is clean and spacious and decorated in a pleasant (if weirdly misplaced) ocean theme. I was wearing earrings that were setting off the metal detectors, and had to run them through the X-ray machine in a little plastic dish. The TSA man rescued the dish from the conveyor belt as soon as it popped out and hurried over to me, saying “Careful now! These things tip over easy. Wouldn’t want you to lose your jewelry!” Inside, every gate has big walls of glass that look out over a bucolic Missouri landscape, in my case including the last vestiges of a really splendid sunset.
Three hours later, my fellow travelers and I deplaned down a back staircase and onto the LAX tarmac, a place that strongly resembles my mental image of Dante’s sixth circle of hell. Our motley parade was led by a flight attendant who apparently missed a few days of air hostess training, muttering darkly and continually about “broken jetway” and “frigging morons.” As I scooted through airport (where the design theme is high-security mental institution) and towards the exit, the soundtrack was supplied by one particularly irate gentleman who was busy reaming the TSA staff a new one. “What? What? You want to destroy my bag all over again, now that you’ve BROKEN INTO IT ONCE ALREADY?” To which the TSA woman replied sanctimoniously, “Sir, TSA does not break into bags. We screen them.”
I giggled all the way down the escalator.
Transit does seem to be an issue for me this week, though. There’s an old adage that if it has tires or testicles, you’re going to have problems with it, and my life is running true to form at the moment.
So tomorrow morning I am taking a sweet ride on one of these:
LA Metro Bus, originally uploaded by So Cal Metro.
