(08.11.09) Recommends:

Scenes from a Recession, c. 2009.


lot, gower & melrose.

Impatient for Spring

March 2, 2009 - Impatient for spring and inspired by Mother Earth News, I planted three kinds of lettuce (obtained at Seedy Saturday). Green oak, red deer tongue, and mystery lettuce (from the seed exchange).

March 21, 2009 - Off to a respectable start:


The first to germinate was the mystery lettuce, followed by the oak leaf. Red deer tongue still hasn't germinated. Bad seeds? Wrong germination temperature? Once the first round germinated, I sprinkled more seeds randomly.

Today:


They are such beautiful babies!


p.s. Can you imagine only having spring once every 30 years?

(01.19.09) Recommends:

Ericailcane.

We learned about Ericailcane this weekend while we were walking down LaBrea. If you've been around LaBrea and Melrose lately perhaps you've seen this giant [some type of animal(1)] eating a car:

Further research revealed that this mural went up as part of Ericailcane's new show Man Is The Bastard at the nearby Carmichael Gallery. The gallery has a nice, er, gallery of photos from the show up on the website, if you can't see it in person.

But lovers of whimsical ink on paper work should give Ericailane a try.




(1) We use the term 'animal' with some trepidation since it appears to be wearing a very civilized pair of shoes.

(12.23.08) Recommends:

Scenes From Little Armenia.

So the other day we were out walking around, exploring Little Armenia, which is a little neighborhood nestled roughly between Hollywood and Thai Town and which, incidentally (and somewhat inexplicably), has a pretty decent $20 all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant which has all of these elaborate restrictions on the all-you-can-eat meal, including an ominous, though we're guessing never enforced, threat written on the menu that you are being timed, and if you eat for too long you will be asked to leave. The place specializes in spicy sushi rolls, complete with a "if you can eat a certain amount of such and such spicy roll, we'll put your picture up on a wall." Again, all somewhat inexplicable.

Anyway. As we were saying. We were exploring the neighborhood and came across the following sign:




And the sign seemed pretty perfect. Here we were, in this pretty hard to explain neighborhood, during a time when the country and, in fact, literally the entire world, has been gripped by an almost palatable sense of weariness and nervousness and relentless bad news. And then we saw this sign and realized that though the people walking along the street might have differet lots in life, might be at different points in life, might be aiming for different goals in life, there are certain things that are common to us all. It's a useful thing to keep in the back of our minds, as we go about our day to day lives.

(12.03.08) Recommends:

Scenes from Crazy Hook.

Anybody who's been following our Twitter feed knows that we've been pretty obsessed with all these Pirate stories from the last few months. So, in the spirit of staying abreast of current events, we recently hit up our favorite neighborhood in Los Angeles, for a night out at Crazy Hook, Koreatown's very own dot, dot, dot pirate bar/restaurant.




One of the things we love about Koreatown is that its bar owners and restuaranteurs are not shy at taking on novelty themes (pirate bars, robot bars, etc) and not being too cool to actually really run with the themes. For intstance, take the Redwood Bar and Grill, which is located downtown and which we mentioned yesterday. It is billed as a pirate bar, but other than maybe a pirate flag and the bar having lots of dark wood and thus giving off a vaguely nautical feel, it's a "pirate bar" mostly because "hipsters" say it is.

Yeah, Crazyhook has pirate flags:




And, yeah, the interior is dark, wooden, and generally feels like you're on a boat.

And it has a pirate greeter who bares a striking resemblance to Grateful Dead guiatarist Bob Weir (in the foreground, and skeptical friends in the background):




It also has, of course, the obligatory one armed/one hooked pirate who would like to take his picture with you:




But lest you get too complacant around the pirates, know that they usually kidnap and string up at least one female patron nightly:




(note: this fact is more or less made up) There are pretty much dangerous pirates lurking in every dark corner of the place:




Of course, in addition to really taking the themes seriously, the other thing that Korean establishments use that, for reasons unbeknownst to us, their US counterparts have not gotten smart to, is the Booze Botton:




The genuis of the Booze Button is that the servers leave patrons alone to enjoy the company of their companions until the moment the group hits the button, then, seemingly out of nowhere, a server arrives leaving your group with exactly what you want when you want it (namely, centimeters and centimeters of yummy beer)




After a few centimeters of beer and the Crazy Hook sign starts showing up in all sorts of funky colors:

(12.02.08) Recommends:

Signs You'd Probably Rather Not See.

So we recently visited Santa Monica with a friend. We were on a seafood eating excursion. Our destination was to be Enterprise Fish Co. It should be noted that there was a general reluctance on our part to visit this place because it contains some sketchy info on its website. If you don't click through the link, just know that it advertises a portion of the restaurant that offers "bottle service." Question Mark. Bottle service? At a seafood restaurant? Really? How can that possibly be necessary/justified/non-completely-obnoxious?

We were skeptical.

We were in the mood for oysters.

We gave it a try.


Here's a look at the place from the outside:





Now. We happen to love seafood. But we know a lot of otherwise reasonable people who do not. Some of these people don't like it because they don't like the "fishy smell." We can understand that, we just happen to be fine with the smell. The smell of raw sewage and/or possibly feces, on the otherhand? That's pretty much been universally discredited as an acceptable culinary aroma by now. It's unclear, however, whether Enterpirse Fish Co. ever received the memo, because when we went to open the doors, we saw this:




Yes, shut down because of a "sewage" violation. Yikes. Here's a copy of the code for those interested.

Bottle service was strike one. We're afraid sewage violations are strike two and three. Sigh.

(12.02.08) Recommends:

The Hackensaw Boys.

It's been a rainy/misty/foggy start to the holiday season here in Los Angeles. And, for some reason, rainy/misty/foggy holidays makes us want to listen to bluegrass and drink beer with friends in a setting that features lots of wood, or fake wood paneling if wood is too expensive (and what with the economic crisis we're in, this is probable). We're completely serious about this. We're not sure why we feel this way, but we do. Sort of like how listening to the Strokes' album Room on Fire makes us think of driving around Kansas City with a gentle snow falling.

Well, as an aside, now that we think about it, we actually understand that Strokes connection. We were in the year between graduating college and moving on to our next adventure. We lived in a part of town that was ostensibly hip and as a result our car was broken into three times. The first two times, during the fall, just the windows were smashed but nothing was taken. We actually took this somewhat as an insult because we had hundreds of CDs strewn about the car and not a single one was taken. We figured the thief thought we had bad taste in music and were deeply offended. The third time was during the early winter, and apparently wanting to preserve energy during the cold season, the thief got tricky/steathy. We entered the car. Started it and headed to work. Silence. This seemed weird so we looked down at the car stereo. Only to see that the car stereo had been stolen. Again, all of the CDs we had were entact, but we happened to have the aforementioned Strokes album in the CD player so that one was lost. And in the interim, rather than just going to buy a new car CD player and a new Strokes CD, we would drive around with our laptop open, playing the CD through our laptop speakers (we happened to have, cough cough, downloaded the album prior to purchasing it). Because the part of town we lived in was more ostensibly hip than actually hip (we mean seriously, if this was an actual hip part of town the thief would have left us a goddam thank you note for allowing him/her to behold such an impressive CD collection; at the least s/he would have taken them all to look cool around friends. Not that we haven't gotten over the snub or anything), there were many nights were we'd have nothing interesting to do. So we'd drive a long loop around the city, listening to the Strokes Room on Fire as a light snow fell. The end.

Anyway. Moving on. Here are some pictures of a show that the Hackensaw Boys recently put on at the Redwood Bar & Grill, a random pirate-themed bar downtown. Pirate bar, of course it is. The Hackensaw Boys are a rowdy countrypunkbluegrass band and they put on a very entertaining live act.






















We also recorded some sound. We like this first song because it's about The End Times Coming. And with transformative American authors commiting suicide, and worldwide financial meltdowns, and major/historic elections, and stories of pirates hijacking ships appearing with near daily regularity in the NY Times, and bad-action-movie-plot style attacks in India, all occuring within months of each other, it kinda sorta seems like this song might be on to something.



We like this next song because the band announces they're from Virgina, and if you listen closely, you can hear people in the crowd saying, in a nod to the McCain/Palin campaign and a nod to the memory of George Allen, "Welcome to America" and "the realVirgina?"



Finally, this last clip we like because, well, because the singer insists on making "Pirate noises" as the band looks for its missing fiddle player, and because the banjo player -- we've got a rather large soft spot on the banjo -- seems to get a little bored waiting and breaks into some killer banjo soloing. Yes, we went there: we just said killer banjo soloing.



Now, if you've gotten this far you may be saying to yourself: Man, it's kinda strange that you're into bluegrass music played in a manic style. Or: Man, it's kinda strange that there's a pirate-themed bar so far away from the craggy coastline of Somalia (Note: we think it's some sort of rule of AP Style that the NYTimes cannot draft an article about pirates without mentioning said pirates' proxmity off the "craggy coastline of Somalia," craggy being a word I've seen used in print perhaps never prior to Pirategate '08).

However. We submit that the strangest thing to come of all of this is that when we took the subway home -- from Union Station to the Hollywood/Vine station -- we noticed the top of the inside of Union Station is covered with hanging -- strategically or otherwise -- male manequin/blow up dolls -- or, omg, is it possible that they're Real Dolls; oh yikes, please say no. We're not kidding around:

(12.01.08) Recommends:

WSO Update.

Holy moly it's been, like, years since we've updated here. So much has been going on in the world since September that the blog felt a little uncalled for. Plus, we've been cheating on Blogger and spending much of our online time spouting nonsense on Twitter and Tumblr. But now we've gotten over ourselves, and figured we could start sharing here again. It's the holiday seasons. Recommendations are needed. So last time we updated it was about the WSO show at the Hotel Cafe. Below are some of the sites and sounds we captured. (Note: we are on the verge of converting a bunch of .mpg files to .mp3 files, so the days of you having to click on a video that has little or no visible video and only sound are almost over. Recommended: patience.)

Some sites:









Some sounds:
Tilt



Ten Dead Dogs

Visual Hybridity

Apparently not everyone gets or agrees with the social construction of race. There are still people who are shocked when they find out that there's no biological basis for our racial categories whatsoever. These interesting photographs illustrate how we construct the race of people of blended heritage. All via Sociological Images.

First, the image on the right is of little Barack Obama with his grandfather (Stanley Dunham) who looks remarkably like the picture on the left of the adult Obama (although the picture looks slightly stretched to me).

Obama, to my eye, is the spitting image of his grandfather. Yet, we see Obama and Dunham as separate races, members of two categories we see as diametrically opposed, even biologically distinct. <rest>

Then this photo project makes us question how we assign racial or ethnic categories by providing faces that are difficult to categorize.

This project consists of a series of 16 color portraits of people of mixed ethnic origin in front of primary color backgrounds. The images challenge the concept of race by highlighting the disparity between the stark natural boundaries between the primary colors, and the ambiguous and artificial, yet commonly accepted boundaries between the different races. This project asks the viewer to question the existence of race in nature.

The aim of the portraits is to strip our idea of race down to its elements. It is in this nakedness that the viewer watches the races literally dissolve in front of their face like so many moth-eaten clothes. The tone is neither confrontational nor ironic, but rather unassuming in its directness

Finally, this story of fraternal twins - one "white" and one "black". Well, actually both are of mixed race, as are their parents. Over at SI, she uses this example "to illustrate how skin color (which is real) is translated into categorical racial categories (which are not)."

(09.09.08) Recommends:

Man vs. Nature: Before vs. After.

In the red corner we have the Mobil horse, an ExxonMobil brand.





In the blue corner we have a Skullphone mural adorning the Small Bills art space.




"Art is science made clear." Jean Cocteau.

(09.08.08) Recommends:

Signs of the Time.


It was another weekend of beautiful weather, so we woke up early and went for a walk. We noticed that, from certain vantage points, it appears that Hollywood High School is sponsored by TV Guide.






This, we figured, probably helps explains a lot. Such as, why there are very few bookstores in the area. We know of three: Book Soup and Borders, neither of which offers a very reasonable parking situation, and Counterpoint Record and Books which doesn't offer a very reasonable, you know, selection of books. As such, we usually just walk down to our neighborhood newsstand [as can be seen, the newstand is international and, thus, cosmopolitian, and therefore all watchers of television may infer that Rudy Giuliani does not approve.]






High-school-brought-to-you-by-television probably also helps to explain trends such as, people who live in an area known for lots of traffic and not lots of parking buying vehicles such as this:






People who buy Hummers are unquestionably amoung our easiest -- and most deserving -- citizens to mock, but even so, isn't there something terribly sad about that "For Sale" sign in the back of the window?

There are multiple ways out of our Hummer days, and Hollywood is embracing at least two of them. While we firmly adhere to the notion that art made with mission statements is not art, we nonetheless enjoyed coming upon this:






But street messages are a routine part of life here. We were a little bit more taken aback when we saw this:






Maybe as a result of the renewed energy debate that our country seems to be undertaking, we'll no longer have to rely on David Browne Berds to remind us what the real things look like.






A Note For Those Who Yearn To See More Wildlife in the City: for the next two weeks, you have a chance to see the City of Los Angeles put 100 goats to work downtown. We're completely serious about this. Read more here.

Of course, without TV sponsoring high school, how many of us would not know about Arby's? That would be an unequivocal disaster, for we all know that Arby's roast beef sandwhiches are, in fact, delicious.

(09.06.08) Recommends:

The Coolest Street Sign in Los Angeles.






So we had a meeting this afternoon in Studio City. We pretty much don't know anything about Studio City, but we do know that from where we live we can get there by taking Laurel Canyon Blvd. And when we were headed South, headed home on that street, we came across the above street sign. It is so awesome, right? We're thinking that has to be a piece of street art. But who knows. Maybe it was a warning from the city: if you insist on taking these curves, while talking on your cell phone, as we know is your wont, eventually you will die.

If anybody has any info on this sign, please leave a comment or send us an email.

(09.02.08) Recommends:

Scenes From a Long Weekend.

With the holiday on Monday, we had a chance to get out and do some exploring.

Traffic. Downtown.





Market. Echo Park.





Utility box. Echo Park.




Paint store. Echo Park.





The following picture nicely captures two truths about Los Angeles. One, LA has a reputation that its citizens are health- and image-obsessed. Whether there is truth in the sterotype, the fact is, there must be more donut stores in LA, by any measure you wish to use, than any place in the US. Probably you can't go more than 100 yards without seeing a donut store. Two, LA does have a staggering amount of diversity; it's really a wonderful thing. Off the top of our heads, we can think of Thai Town, Korea Town, Little Armenia, Historic Philipinotown, Little Tokyo, Chinatown. And those are just the ethnically named neighborhoods. But that doesn't mean the city is always harmonious and coming from Kansas, there's a kind of cognitive disonance when you witness racism here. In LA, which is less than 50% white, discreet ethnic groups throw blame at other discreet ethnic groups. There seems to be tension between Korean people and Black people, for instance. Other groups seem to have a problem with the increased influence of the Hispanic population. Etc, etc. On the other hand, racism in Kansas is more likely to manifest itself in some kind of abstract form: the place is 90% white, so somebody might carry around a notion about "colored people" or "immigrants" in general destroying the country, but in this world view Koreans, Blacks, and Hispanics are all the same and they're all the enemy. I guess it just proves a universal rule: with enough time on their hands, humans have the capacity to complain about anything and lay blame on anybody.





Cafe Was -- still can't figure out if the sign is clever or cheesy. Hollywood.






Qat, it's a Scrabble word you really need to know. Hollywood.






Stormwater ordianance sign. Hollywood.






Of course you would expect palm trees to line the boulavards in a neighborhood that calls itself Country Club Park.






Ice Fade is a pretty awesome name for a barber shop. Slauson Ave.






City bench.






Stencils. Hollywood.





There's something about the way "human" appears on this sign that mezmerizes us. Washington Blvd.





Utility pole art. Hollywood.





The Los Angeles City Council recently enacted a one year moratorium on opening fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles. The story got national coverage, including this NY Times piece in which Jonathan Gold notes that South Los Angeles is the home to the best barbeque in the city and wonders how the ban will effect on that culinary tradition. We thought of the article as we waited nearly 90 minutes for our order from Phillips on Crenshaw Blvd.





Doorway entrance art. Hollywood.





We should just mention now: we ate lots of barbque over the weekend.





You can't make it down Melrose without being inundated by MBW artwork. Some of it we like, some of it we think is overload. We like this one.





Car wash. Inglewood.





MBW stencil. Hollywood.






We love this sign/advertisement/artwork. Not sure if it should be interpreted to mean that the car lot caters to a religious clientelle, or the car lot is suggesting that you'll need to rely on some kind of religious miracle in order to prevent your purchase from being a lemon.





Building. Hollywood.




No, seriously: holidays are made for eating.





Less talk, more rock. LaBrea Ave.





It turns out that it's not just neighborhoods called Country Club Park that are lined with Palm trees. Miraculously, almost every major street has them. Mid City.






The truth about Hollywood (we report, you decide).





Evidence #1:





The original street artist?





Industrial building. Compton Ave.





School days. Slauson Ave.





Motel. LaBrea and Slauson.






Valentine to Los Angeles.





When in Rome.







Old economy.






Fruit cart. Echo Park.






Market. Beverly Blvd.






Political pundits keep saying that Labor Day is when the electorate begins paying attention to the general election season in earnest. If elections were won on window signs, this thing would be a blow out.






Water. Wilton Pl.






Palm trees, blue skies, donuts. We came. We saw. We conquered. Los Feliz.






The clouds rolled in as the hills ate the sun, and as quickly as it came, the long weekend faded away.