California Summer 11

The excellent Wende Museum in L.A.

Los Angeles to Las Vegas Neon Cruise

The Museum of Neon Art's "Neon Cruise", with stops at the Las Vegas Neon Museum, Frankie's Tiki Room, and the Peppermill.

The Bonaventure

I rode one of the True Lies elevators up and down on a sunny afternoon while drinking a coffee.

Los Angeles Central Public Library

The Los Angeles Central Public Library doesn't open until 10 in the morning. By that time a crowd gathers outside each of the library's three entrances waiting for the doors to open, and when they do, everyone rushes inside. It's the most excitement I've ever seen directed at a library.

Santa Monica: Hennessey + Ingalls Bookstore

Just a few blocks from the beach, and one block from the Third Street Promenade is Hennessey + Ingalls art and architecture bookstore. H+I is not only the best specialty art bookstore I've ever seen (far better than any museum bookstore, and about 50 times better than Blackwells Art Bookshop in Oxford), it is the bookstore that is most fun to browse, without qualification. I would make an effort to come here every time I go to Los Angeles just to flip through their copy of Candida Höfer's Libraries.

As important as the enormous range of art books they have to the pleasant browsing experience is H+I's knowledgeable staff. When I asked if they had a copy of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the guy behind the counter pointed out that not only did they not have it, but that a copy would cost me several thousand dollars. Obviously that wasn't what I was looking for, though he said they used to "always have a copy in stock". I was actually looking for Ruscha's Then and Now, but couldn't remember the title. He quickly identified what I was after and opened up a sealed copy for me to browse.

Zed recently reminded me that in Michael Mann's Heat, Robert DeNiro's character buys a book on metallurgy at H+I.

And you can walk to H+I from Father's Office after having a hamburger.

Related: You can read my assessment of the relative virtues of the best academic bookstores here.

Thomas 2001 Organ

Wyeth pointed out that the Thomas 2001 organ that decorates the lobby of the hotel I stayed at in Los Angeles plays a small role in one of his motion graphics.

Photo by Melody.

Chocolate Mouse, Lamp Shade, and Other Ice Cream Flavors

The suggestion board and plastic ice cream scoop mobile at Scoops.

The Look of Los Angeles

As seen from B. Chan's Honda.

LAX In-N-Out

Just got back from a California trip. We managed two trips to the LAX In-N-Out, one right after we picked up our rental car and one right before we returned it.

Fish & Chips in Santa Monica

Ye Olde King's Head pub and restaurant in Santa Monica. B Chan suggested that we have lunch at this place.

The fish and chips were decent. The chips/fries were crispy and substantial, and I liked the chunky tartar sauce. But the fish suffered from over-battering. And the batter was crunchy, rather than crispy. There was about 1/2 inch of batter you had to crunch through before you got to the cod, which was sweet and nice (and "fresh from Iceland"). Compare the look of the batter on the fish to this, for example. The batter on English fish and chips is almost translucent.

We also tried their mushy peas (too watery, not pulverized enough), and their rhubarb crumble. I asked for the Bird's custard to be placed on the side, because it usually smothers the taste of the crumble under a pale yellow mass of super-sweet pudding-like stuff (that's "pudding" in the American sense). But this rhubarb crumble might have benefitted from the Bird's camoflauge, because it wasn't very impressive looking.

The Look of Southern California

The view from the walk-up window at Randy's Donuts in Inglewood: cars, asphalt, concrete, palm trees, pale blue sky.

Kicking and Screaming

Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming was one of the first movies that my friends and I watched as freshman in college. We liked the way Grover and Max dressed: sportcoats, corduroys, brown shoes. Some of us still dress like that.

The college scenes in the movie are supposed to take place somewhere on the east coast. Grover at one point refers to the town the college is in as "Munton", but I haven't been able to find Munton on the map. But there are any number of reasons to think that it's set on the east coast: In the opening party scene, Max says that his parents have flown out from Chicago "to rent out these swank digs". When Friedrich says that "racism spans the globe", he says that "from Howard Beach to Crown Heights we witness acts of hatred". Howard Beach is in Queens and and Crown Heights is in Brooklyn. It's unlikely that that would be a familiar geographical reference to someone not close to New York. Grover's dad is obsessed with the Knicks and has an apartment in "the village", and his girlfriend works for the New Yorker and has "a lovely place in Oyster Bay" (Long Island, presumably). The high-school girl, Kate, who Grover tutors and who eventually takes Max to prom has a New Jersey-like accent. And the clothes everyone wears (corduroys, sweaters, sportcoats) are not really west coast. But most conclusive is a remark that Otis makes he is leaving to go to grad school in Milwaukee. Grover and Max say that Milwaukee is only an hour's difference, and Otis worries that he'll be hungry for dinner at five and ready for the local news at four. That means he has to be in the Eastern Time Zone.

But any attentive viewer of the movie will realize that the outdoor shots of the college don't look like anything on the east coast. The buildings have red, Spanish style tile roofs and there are even some palm trees in the background of some shots. It turns out that Baumbach couldn't shoot the movie at Vassar. He shot it at Occidental College, up in the hills above LA. I've known about the location for awhile, but I haven't gotten a chance to go check it out until this last trip to LA. Ben Chan was nice enough to take a break from working on his dissertation and spend an afternoon driving me up there.

Stupidly, I didn't bring shots from the movie with me, so I was working from memory. That meant we spent a lot of time walking around trying to spot locations, with only moderate success. At one point, out of desperation, I approached a bunch of college kids lounging around on the lawn and asked them if they were familiar with the movie. "What movie?" They asked. "Kicking and Screaming", I said. "I haven't seen that", one of them said, and another said, to my surprise, "That's not a very good movie". Somewhat surprised, I asked them if they knew that some scenes from the movie were filmed at their college. None of them knew that, and they seemed nonplussed. I would have thought that watching the movie would have played some role in college orientation the way that The Exorcist or St. Elmo's Fire played at Georgetown.

Later I realized that these college kids thought that I was asking about the 2005 Kicking and Screaming, which clearly was not filmed at their college and isn't a very good movie.

I spotted the location of the scene where Max and Grover talk about improving Grover's resume. Grover has listed on his resume that he "Drove a truck". Max thinks that's not impressive enough and says that Grover should put instead "Responsibilities included: delivering gourmet cheese products throughout the metropolitan area".

From the movie:



From my visit:



Here's what the arbor Max and Grover are walking under looks like from the other direction:



Grover and Max notice that a student is hanging up flyers that read "Cookie Man: Pro Life?" on the pillars of the arbor:



Here's a close-up of one of the pillars:



There are several other locations that I missed:






That means I'll have to go back for another visit.

One thing that came to mind while hiking around the hilly Occidental campus is that the actors must have been unbelievably hot in the jackets and sweaters. It was around 95 degrees when Ben and I were walking around. There is a good reason why people don't dress like that out in Southern California, even in the fall.

Four Degrees Fahrenheit

NPR just said that it's going to be so cold tomorrow that you should just stay indoors. And that after a conversation with Zed last night about how in Los Angeles he sometimes has to put on his adidas jacket.

Looking at this forecast for the coming week, the high of 4 degrees on Monday reminds me of the only time I've experienced weather that cold. We were driving back from a Grotto trip to Wisconsin. It was two in the morning, and the Lincoln Continental needed gas. I got out to fill it up, but I didn't have my gloves on. When I touched the metal handle of the gas pump, I felt like I had been shot in the hand.

The Scorpion

Thanks to Charles P. Everitt, I can post this picture I took through the periscope of the Scorpion submarine that is docked next to the Queen Mary in Long Beach harbor. CPE and I walked around in the sub flipping switches and turning dials while Meredith and Ben sipped on the summer's signature cocktail in the Queen Mary.

The dude in the powerboat doesn't know it yet, but he's about to get hit by a torpedo.

X-Games Rollover

Isaac, Ben and I watched the rally cars at the X-games this afternoon. Rally racer Colin McRae awesomely rolled his Subaru and then went on to finish in 2nd.

Video shot by buddy Ben Chan.

Palm

A palm tree blows in the wind outside O'Malley 304 at Loyola Marymount University.

O'Malley

At Home at LMU.

Sun Screen

From the living room of O'Malley 304.

The Palms

Looking northwest out on LA.

Los Angeles

I can't find my camera. It might have fallen out at The Bridge while watching Miami Vice.

So: links instead of pictures.

Today:

Brunch at Jinky's in Santa Monica.

Browsing books at art & architecture bookstore.

Yesterday:

Tour of the Crystal Cathedral in the OC.

Drinks in the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

Bought all of St. Exupery's flying stories at Acres of Books.

Dinner at Thai Boom.

Cocktails.