Westward Ho!

X (The Band) (The American One, Not the Australian One)

They've been one of my favorites for a long time (probably since seeing the first Decline movie when I was around 11), but their whole squalid-desperation thing just makes so much more sense to me now that i'm living out here. I always figured a lot of the Repo Man/Blade Runner/Appetite For Destruction/Straight Outta Compton /Mike Davis stuff about L.A.-as-burning-apocalyptic-hellhole was sorta half-true, half-myth, but no it's ALL true. This place is no joke. I like it (parts of it), but it tests the fuck out of my patience and goodwill. All that bourgie xenophobia and gated-community living starts sounding less begrudgeable when you've got crackheads on your lawn and your neighbor wakes up with a knife in her face. (And this is supposed to be one of the "better" neighborhoods south of the 10.)

I listened to the Dangerhouse single of "Los Angeles"* three six times tonight. It helped.

Later this morning I'm going to San Marino for a symposium, and as I walk the mile and a half from the nearest bus stop to the Huntington, I'm sure I'll feel like the crackhead on someone else's lawn.

*Oh yeah, if you're squeamish about cultural epithets of any sort, don't download this. It's all just narrative though; the "she" is a character. I relate to the frustration, if not the specific sentiments.

Paragraph of the Week

...from Wikipedia's entry on Harry Nilsson, specifically concerning his Pussy Cats-era "lost weekend" in L.A.:

1974 found Nilsson back in California, and when John Lennon moved there during his separation from Yoko Ono, the two musicians rekindled their earlier friendship. Lennon was intent upon producing Nilsson's next album, much to Nilsson's delight. However, their time together in California became known much more for heavy drinking and drug use than it did for musical collaboration. In a widely publicized incident, they were ejected from the Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood for drunken heckling of the Smothers Brothers. Both also caused property damage during binges, with Lennon trashing a bedroom in Lou Adler's house, and Nilsson throwing a bottle through a thirty-foot hotel window.

From the Obit Pages

R.I.P. Seymour Rosen (pictured left).

Angelique Café

There's a dearth of places in my 'hood where I can get a decent brunch on weekends. The always reliable Denny's is popular among students and local residents, but usually too popular -- you can't get near the place cuz everyone in the West Adams area is trying to greasebomb their hangover away at the same time. I had the same idea this morning, that I still felt a little unsteady from last night's party but would be utterly brilliant with some eggs and coffee in my system. I hopped a bus into downtown (about a mile north), wandered a while, and stumbled upon a little hole-in-the-wall I'd seen before and had made a half-hearted mental note to check out: the Angelique Café, technically on 840 S. Spring but maybe spiritually on Main and 9th (at that triangle where they all intersect).

It's in the heart of the Fashion District, which for you New Yorkers is like Manhattan's Garment District, i.e. longtime home to sweatshops, wholesalers, and no-nonsense supply stores. The Fashion District is where Jack Lemmon worked in 1973's Save the Tiger and doesn't look remarkably different today.

I've only nominally been to France (a layover on my way to Italy), but I associate its urban centers with grime, bird shit, and outdoor seating -- so this downtown L.A. setting would seem to complement a cheap, unfussy, sidewalky Frenchy joint like Angelique. I loved having that soundtrack of faraway car horns, whooshing bus tires, and the occasional scrape of feet against the deserted street. The few other patrons there were a couple of gayish guys raving enthusiastically about the duck paté, as well as a full table of native surrender-monkeys right behind me (tourists? friends of the owners?).

Coffee came seconds after I asked for it, which was seconds after I was asked if I wanted it -- the waiter was polite and attentive, just as much as he needed to be on a low-energy early Sunday afternoon, no more so.

Food came quickly too, and was fabulous: I had the omelette marocaine, a French-Moroccan pancake-style omelette made with merguez sausage and ratatouille (a Provençal stew of zucchini, tomato, peppers, onion, garlic, and herbs -- the North African influence comes from a Maltese sister-dish called kapunata). The whole thing held together surprisingly well considering how liquidy vegetable stews can get, and the eggs were tender and just firm enough. Sausage can be a risky bet, but here the merguez had a perfectly palatable, chorizo-like meat-to-fatty-bits ratio and was a good texture-match for the eggs and ratatouille. Accompanying the omelette were rosemary potatoes (herby, crispy, soft) and field-green salad (nice zingy, lemony dressing). And there was a basket of French bread too, pretty standard stuff but I was starving and was grateful it was there. All of the above came out to $6.95 -- even with the ginormous mug of coffee, the check was still under $10.

A++++, would buy from this seller again.

Discovering L.A.

There's so much I'm still discovering in this town. Tonight I finally get to check out one of the hipster "urban pioneer" outposts of the still-sketchy New Downtown, a bar called the Golden Gopher (which I've seen a few times from the 37 bus as it goes east on 8th). I don't go out much at night (the plight of the carless in L.A.), so I'm always really grateful when I can coordinate an evening get-together with someone who does have access to a car.

In this case the coordination at the top level was done by the Associated Students of Planning and Development, the student-run organization that puts together extracurricular social, professional, and academic events. I've been attending some of their meetings and am starting to get involved with their "scholarship committee" -- as far as ideas, I've been thinking about how to use the (physical) city to help make first-year planning students more passionate about and invested in what they're going to be spending (at least!) the next few years doing.

I love the enthusiasm and commitment my professors (and their favorite theorists/leaders/crackpots) have, and how there's a spark there that transcends the drudgery of academia. My fellow students are quite intelligent, but it seems like a lot of them have just come out of undergrad and still have this sort of "college" context for what they're doing -- looking at all this as a bunch of cumbersome homework and Supreme Court opinions to be memorized and grades to be gotten, and you can tell who the older students are, the ones who've been out in the field or on the battleground, by the glint in their eyes and the shake in their fists when they talk about bureaucracies, interest groups, personal heroes, sworn enemies, bungled decisions, and brilliant ideas.

The madness of The City (TM) is thrilling, even on those days when I feel like strangling it with its own red tape. I get this feeling from the Ph.D.s and second-years in one of my upper-level classes, but it would be so terrific to see more of this from the younger kids, as well as more desire to just get cocky and try to conquer the sheer volume of history and information and photographic/filmic evidence and tactile, sensory stuff out there. Learn with our eyes. Learn with our feet. Our tastebuds too, maybe (when I first got here I figured out my way around town with printouts of Jonathan Gold's restaurant reviews in one hand and an MTA route map in the other).

My idea is to have groups of students and faculty do self-guided walking tours of Southern California communities by their particular planning history -- not just focusing on one pivotal event (like slum clearance or freeway construction), but a long and winding narrative that accounts for trivial changes as well as major ones, visual totems of consensus, dissent, compromise, what is versus what would have been if one small variable were different. And things that haven't changed at all, that have remained extant against all odds (not so much stuff that's been preserved by law, but places that have just... survived). It would be fun to focus on the Valley, which is just rife with secret history and the ghosts of Charles Phoenix housewives and roads to hell paved by kooky cigar-chomping land speculators. And I'm kinda thinking about touring some of the sleepier, less-trod parts of unincorporated/general-law northeast L.A. County -- like Montrose and Sierra Madre.

I hope we can pull this off (just once or twice, even). I've been a total hermit since school started and I'm dying to go exploring again.

Pershing Square (Flickr set)

A classmate and I are working on a project about Pershing Square, and since I had a free afternoon today, I went and snapped some photos, and uploaded them into a Flickr set. I'm not a good enough photographer to make the ugly parts look sufficiently ugly (and not merely drab), but I can't let my ego go for long enough to play a straight-up documentarian. I like finding the beauty in mundanity, and I think I made Pershing Square seem a lot more attractive than it actually is -- on the other hand, maybe the square is less of a design failure than I initially thought.

My contribution to the 9/11 literature

I wrote the following on September 12, 2002.

I might as well share some thoughts on 9/11.

Yesterday I watched a few TV things here and there, but I wasn't that interested in hearing the same "national tragedy" spiel ad nauseam. It numbs the mind after a while. And to be honest, I remember 9/11/01 well enough a year later -- I haven't lost any of the bitterness or confusion or sadness.

The morning of 9/11, I was awakened by the clock radio, and the DJ was introducing a new Bob Dylan song called "Summer Days." I thought "What a cool thing to wake up to. What a wonderful song" -- and I hoped it would set the tone for the rest of the day. Next thing I knew, the DJ was saying "Turn on the news when you get the chance; apparently a plane has hit one of the Twin Towers."

I was on my way to a class, but when I left the house I wandered in the opposite direction of the subway, down to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where I could see an unobstructed view of the burning tower across the river. A huge group of people had already assembled down there -- they weren't emotional at that point, they just wanted to see what was going on. I stuck around for a few minutes, and walked to the subway.

I was able to get down to the Court Street N/R platform with no problems, but I knew something was wrong once I'd been waiting for my train for 20 minutes. Soon, all the subways were out of service. No way I was gonna make that class, so I headed back to the Promenade to see what was happening. The smoke was getting thicker, and blowing into the air on an 11 o'clock angle. Went home and turned on the news.

I had left the room for a second, and while I was in the other room I heard a loud, startling thud outside. New York cable news station NY1 had live coverage of the first attack, and as I ran into my bedroom I was able to see the second tower being hit.

Back on the Promenade, people were gathering, taking pictures (which I thought was tasteless), staring in disbelief, screaming "Holy shit!!!" -- but despite the vision of two skyscrapers on fire, things were still considerably under control on our end. Until... the towers began to collapse and the debris started flying.

The smell was AWFUL, like the most grand mal, grotesque barbecue you could imagine -- an inescapable odor of smoke, gas, and burning flesh. People were running for their lives, covering their faces with their hands, trying to keep the smoke and debris out of their eyes. The air was a greyish white. It was impossible to see anything, and my clothes and hair became covered in debris (my guess: reams upon reams of paper, some detritus from the structure of the buildings, some soot, and maybe some fibers of burned clothing). I went home, and I didn't go back out until the afternoon, when the buildings had completely collapsed, and the smoke was contained on Manhattan Island and the skies above it.

The smoke didn't clear until days later -- but on the afternoon of 9/11, it was so thick that it covered the entirety of lower Manhattan and much of midtown. That afternoon, I just sat out on the Promenade, watching the smoke clear in real time, treating the act as a meditative exercise. By the time evening rolled around, I could actually sort of see the negative space that once contained the towers, with the smoke clinging to the buildings' angles like phantoms.

The days following were awful. I was terrified of everything; I didn't wanna take the subway for fear of a suicide bomber; I kept looking out the window of my midtown classroom, wondering when the Empire State Building (two blocks away) would come toppling down on us. Like everyone else, I watched the news constantly, but there was no hard news, only expressions of shock and replays of the two planes crashing into the towers.

It was an emotional time for me, because of the WTC, because of other things I was dealing with (and I still look at 9/11 as kind of an outrageously melodramatic metaphor for the shitty year I was having... when I put it all in context, I was like "well, THAT fuckin' figures"). So it's tough for me to relive all that stuff now, in 2002.

I did go down to Ground Zero yesterday. It was the first time I'd gone to the disaster site; I'd just never felt the need to go, to gawk and rubberneck and congregate with all the picture-snappers and t-shirt buyers. Not my style -- I decided I'd rather mourn with my memory than with my eyes.

Yeah, so I went down there, and it was all blocked off by police barriers (the president was down there, so security was kicked into the highest gear). Crowds were kept at bay and made to stand several blocks from the site.

I didn't stick around; I made it down to the river and walked north along Greenwich St., checking out the historic buildings and warehouses in the area, feeling lucky to be a New Yorker, in such close proximity to some of the world's most beautiful architecture, landmarks protected from ravenous developers and pretty much guaranteed NOT to be a target for terrorists. As I came up behind Borough of Manhattan Community College, I discovered a whole row of perfectly preserved Federal-style houses from the 19th century, tucked away on Harrison St., hiding in a tiny cranny of the more modern, utilitarian surroundings of the college.

It must sound corny to out-of-towners, but these are the things that make New Yorkers passionate about their city. I began the day feeling a little down. I don't usually drink in the morning, but I dreaded the day and figured I'd polish off the wine I'd bought the previous evening (a 2000 Rabbit Ridge Merlot -- very yummy and perfect for a drinking binge). By noon I was feeling okay and I went out for a really satisfying pasta lunch at a local Italian place.

If that's what the pundits mean by "defiance" -- enjoying good food and wine and other aesthetic pleasures on a day associated with terror and victimization -- I'm in. I think I'll make this a tradition.

Apologies

...for not updating over the past week. Schoolwork and pain-in-the-ass real-life stuff have kept me busy. I'll be back soon; don't take my link off your sidebar just yet!

Riding on the Metro-oh-oh

In the several months I've been in Los Angeles, I think today was the first day that the Metro bus service actually made me throw up my hands and silently scream "Gah! It's 2006! Figure your shit out!" I left my just-southwest-of-downtown apartment at 10:45 AM to catch a 1:10 movie (the riotously funny Idiocracy) at the Arclight, and finally got to Sunset and Ivar at about 1:01. I was stressing over it because I'd bought my ticket online and didn't want to have to eat the eleven bucks and catch a later show. Not only did I end up taking multiple buses to get to my destination (I didn't take the Red Line, for reasons too boring to explain), but one bus that seemed fine to me mysteriously went out of service and kicked everyone off, leaving us waiting a half-hour for the next bus. Also, ugh, traffic. And constant red lights. And a guy in a wheelchair (I'm normally very sympathetic to the plight of the other-abled, but not today).

But you know what? It's a holiday weekend. Every single time I've stuck around in NYC over a major holiday weekend, I've had the same thing -- trains and buses going out of service or not showing up at all, me playing tour guide for my out-of-town friends and feeling embarrassed that one of the most complex and consistently reliable public transit systems in the world should malfunction just when I had a great opportunity to show it off to people. There was one July 4th weekend where a group of us had a Warriors-like adventure getting from uptown Manhattan down to Coney Island -- usually this trip doesn't take more than an hour and a half even with the slow slog of rush hour, but thanks to various breakdowns and no-shows and re-routes, it took about three hours. What gives?? If the city wants to up its tourist dollars, shouldn't it, like, not pull the plug on service at a time when there's a strong likelihood of people from other cities coming in for a visit? In order for them to generate all that revenue you hope they'll generate, they need to be able to get to their upmarket urban-retail-and-entertainment-complex and family-friendly greenspace McFunstertown. And it's not like any residents would want to go anyplace within city limits to enjoy their time off, nope nope.

So take heart, Angelenos, it's not just you. Remember that all the good drivers, conductors, and coordinator-types are probably lying naked on a beach in Aruba right now, and that holiday workers are typically the bottom of the employee barrel. Things'll be better on Tuesday... but for now, if you don't have a car, you're screwed. (Eh, it's fine; I have a lot to read this weekend anyway.)

Zeke's Smokehouse

Earlier this afternoon I had lunch at Zeke's Smokehouse (the WeHo location on Santa Monica, on the Formosa side of that big New Urbanist thing with the Target). The usual sources give the 'cue at Zeke's favorable reviews, although the less-easily-impressed among them say that it's good but not award-winning. I'd need to go back and try more of the menu to give the place a fair assessment, but I think what Zeke's does is a very good stab at middlebrow barbecue and soul food. I've been to similar restaurants and had far worse (and I've had better, but I'm not going to be bitchy since I really enjoyed what I ordered today).

My meal was the brisket sandwich with a side of collard greens ($9.95; side included). I actually believe that they're doing a disservice to diners by offering the brisket as a sandwich -- the flavor and tenderness of the meat get buried in all that bleached white flour, and the roll itself isn't memorable. I ate the brisket with a fork (good call) and put the roll aside for the end of the meal, and then broke it up and made an efficient little transportation system for the trio of barbecue sauces on the table. My favorite of the sauces was the Carolina-style Zeke's Back Porch -- I tend to like my 'cue vinegary and mustardy and not overly smoky or sweet, and this was a nice synthesis of spice, savoriness, and acidity. I almost bought a bottle to take home with me, which says something considering I barely have any other food in my apartment right now (would the Back Porch sauce go with my oatmeal raisin Slim-Fast bars?).

The greens were awesome comfort food, although I felt they were the part of the meal that might have suffered too much from their WeHo-ization. The trick with collards, I think, is to get them to a point where the fatback mellows out the bitterness but you're still left with something verdant, earthy, and a little pungent. If you de-harsh it to where it tastes like cooked spinach, why bother serving it at all?

Zeke's greens don't pass the point of no return, and their version is very tasty, but part of the tradeoff of serving this kind of food to moneyed white folks is that you've got to cut back on the grit and the funk of the genuine article. But on the spectrum of affordable places where your retirement-age yankee dad could find something to eat, Zeke's pwns even the best casual-dining chains.

I wanted to take a picture with my snazzy new phone, but one of the waiters was watching me eat (ooh, I hate that) and I felt self-conscious.