1081 miles to home

Well that's it. Party's over. Time to go home. Pack up. Say goodbye.

I've had a fun vacation in Lala land. I think that unless you live in a city you never really appreciate it completely (like the subliminal arrow in the FedEx sign).

But it sure is fun to visit.

See you all soon.

Flora

I spent the morning of my last full day in LA walking around the city and getting pretty badly lost.



I haven't had enough time here to shake that feeling of strangeness you get when you're on vacation or you've just moved to a new city.

The air tastes odd. The buildings don't look quite right. The sky's a funny colour.

Oh, and the flowers here are so different.

Exploding fireworks.



Blaring trumpets.



Or buzzing humming birds.



Others just seem totally alien.



Sometimes I almost get the feeling that I'm walking around on another planet. I'm taking a rocket ship home tomorrow.

My close personal friends.

I went to my favourite music store today. Amoeba Music. Iss dope!















Picked up some vinyl. Because I've decided to quit my job and become a Dee-Jay. I'm going to spin the freshest deep HAUS.















Afterwards I went to Beverly Hills to visit some friends. First stop was my close personal friend Aaron Spelling's house. 37 million dollars, 123 rooms, 56,550 square feet with two rooms just for wrapping gifts. It just suits my style.















Aaron wasn't feeling up for hanging out so I went over to my other good friend Heff's.















I actually named his house "The Playboy Mansion" as a joke but the same just stuck. Fun times, fun times.

Hugh was in a bad mood and wouldn't let me in so I decided to take my business elsewhere.

I taste pennies.

Although it doesn't come up in conversation frequently, most guys have one clear defining moment when they knew, KNEW, that they liked the ladies.

My moment was when I saw Princess Leia, in a bronze bikini, held prisoner as Jabba's slave in Return of the Jedi.

Apparently I am not alone in my fixation.

Well...

Today I went to a showing of over 100 Star Wars costumes and saw Princess Leia's Metal Bikini in person with my own two eyes.



It was a highlight in my short and, to date, unproductive life. A high water mark in my experiences, like Noah's ark on Ararat.

I was six inches away from it for several minutes. I actually leaned in so close the silent alarm went off and a security guard come over and asked me to step back. I was so close to it, in fact, that (in my mind) some of the atoms that were evaporating off it at a thermodynamically minuscule rate were being inhaled into my lungs and carried into my blood stream.

I'll probably die of a heart attack as the copper plates out inside one of my arteries. The clot busting drugs and the angioplasty won't help. The doctors will be confused that nothing seems to be working. But I'll know. And it'll have been worth it.

Low hanging objects

So this morning I drove downtown and parked near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It was designed by Frank Gehry in his "deconstructed organic" style.

Then I walked over to the LA Museum of Contemporary Art to see the two shows I'd read about.

The first show was called "Masters of American Comics". It was awesome but probably of limited interest to anyone reading this but me. They had original work by Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and Art Spiegelman. Chris Ware and Jack Kirby were my favorites.

In an adjoining room they also had some of their permanent exhibits. The surreal childhood portraits by Loretta Lux give me the kind of creeps that takes days to wear off.

The second show was entitled "Ecstacy - In and About Altered States" and had a theme of drugs and well, altered states. It was in a gallery ten blocks away in a huge converted warehouse in little Tokyo. So I started walking.

They wouldn't let me take any pictures in the exhibit so I'll explain what I can. (It goes without saying that many of the students touring the gallery had obviously taken drugs to "deepen the experience". Consider the added effect of this when you read on).

In the center of the room was a pile of pills spilled on the floor.

On the left, a large crystal fountain recirculated a liquid that an affidavit stated to be LSD, although this seems totally illegal.

Directly on the right were the detailed diary entries of a Danish artist who had documented the effects of a seven-day drug binge. A new drug each day, taking enough of each drug to maintain an elevate state for 14 hours a day. The entries were short and brutally honest.

The first installation I saw was in a pitch black room. In the center was a low table with an array of tiny coloured spot lights above and about a dozen cushions all around on the floor. As people sat and watched, a fog machine sent dozens of wisps of smoke through tiny holes in the table as the lights changed in time with a classical music piece. It was like time slowed down and your total focus was on the amazing movement of these wisps of smoke.

...

And after about half an hour I moved to the next piece.

The next two rooms were painted black and linked by a black hallway.

The first room flashed thick rings of monochromatic light on one of the black walls. The brief flash took my dilated pupils by surprise and left amazingly coloured echoes on my retina. The pulses were at a high enough frequency that the moving image left in the darkness was recharged. The result was a melting of colours in total darkness. After a few cycles the colour of the flashing light would change and the negative colour left in my eyes would change too. White made blue and green made purple.

The second room had a simple setup. Five white strobes flashed at once on a sheet of water droplets falling from the ceiling. It was like stopping time in a rain storm. I felt like I could almost reach out and grab a single drop.

There were no direction arrows in the gallery and people were moving throughout the exhibits along different paths. I walked by an old couple who are obviously not enjoying the show. I guess they were having a bad trip.

I sat down on a bench in front of a massive five-canvass painting of dozens of vibrantly coloured mushrooms. Any space on that didn't have a mushroom painted on it had been painted silver. It almost hurt my eyes to stare at it...and then without warning the bench started to slowly move to the right. I started laughing from the surprise. It eventually came to rest at the other end of the painting and proceeded back to the start.

At one point I looked down a dark hallway at a large black woman who I thought was an attendant. As I walked up to her to ask if there was a piece down this hallway, she started saying something. It wasn't so much saying something as making the strangest noise. The sound was like a cat coughing up a furball. Before I was able to ask if this section was open she said:

"Be careful" and started barking again (I started to think it might be turret's).
"Be careful of what?"
"Low hanging objects"

The barking continued as though I was the only one that could here it and I decided that I was just going to see what was so dangerous that they needed to employed a barking lady to protect the public.

The corridor walls, floor and ceiling were all painted white. At the end there was a hairpin left then another long stretch another hairpin right and so on for five or six times. I was almost ready to turn around when the hallway opened up into a large low ceiling room. The only lighting in the room came from floor panels and there were about half a dozen giant red and white mushrooms hanging from the ceiling and slowly spinning. It was surprising and dizzying.

In another white room there was just a large photo portrait of a man on the wall. It seemed oddly normal in this strange exhibit. As I got closer to the picture I thought that it had a slight warp, like it was taken with a fish-eye lens but then I noticed that the middle on the picture seemed slightly closer than the top and the bottom. It wasn't a camera effect, the image itself was bowed out. I looked at the side of the frame expecting to see it be wider in the middle and narrower at the top and bottom. It wasn't, the frame was the same thickness the whole way down . That's when I realized that it wasn't that the picture that was warped, it was the wall. The whole God-damn wall that this picture was on was bowed out a good six inches, matching the picture's bow, and gave a depth of field confusion that felt like a hallucination.

There were many other installations. These are just the few I can explain. Some of the best ones I can't even begin to describe. I don't really have the words to convey the sensations. Excitement, disgust, paranoia, confusion, synesthesia and finally exhaustion and that vague feeling that it was fun but it'll be a while before you want go back in there.

I think it was the best nine bucks I've ever spent in an art gallery.

Today...

I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be.

It's not just a T.V. show.

Yesterday was all about Melrose Avenue. This famous street is loaded with designers boutiques, vintage clothing stores and the purely bizarre.

This is the Ed Hardy store. They use classic tattoo designs in their clothing. They have red carpet around the store and two-hundred dollar baseball caps inside the store.



Fairfax high is right across the street and was just getting out as I walked by.



It's where Anthony Kiedis and Flea formed the red hot chilli peppers. Apparently you can see their grad pictures on the wall.

Half the stores on Melrose are used clothing stores, vintage clothing stores, stores that sell new clothing that looks vintage and stores that sell vintage clothing that's been made to look new.



By far the strangest of all the stores has to be Necromance. I don't really know how to describe it...other than everything they sell used to be alive.



So if you're looking for human teeth, a rhino beetle or an accurate reproduction of a two-headed fetal skeleton...Umm..then...I guess this is the shop for you?

While I was walking back I saw this lamp post ad for a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and thought "Well there's my next adventure".




















When I got home I checked the gallery's website only to be doubly rewarded.

PS - Later I had dinner with two of my cousins who go to Santa Monica High. I asked them what was new and exciting and they both said "Not much". Then the one of them said "Kanye West played a concert at our school just for the students last night". I found it pretty hard to believe but it was actually true. I think one sign of getting older is being envious of the experiences of younger people instead of older people. Great.

I'm a 6.7 on the Richter Scale.

I spent the morning at a pedestrian area called the 3rd St. Promenade.

The high population density here allows for a ridiculous level of specialization in the shops. Such as a shop called Kid Robot that sells nothing but PVC "urban toys" that are not for playing, just for looking. It's really stupid...















And I had a really hard time leaving without getting something.

From the promenade I walked down to Santa Monica Beach. This is where they filmed Baywatch. There are pale blue lifeguard towers every few hundred feet.















The weather today was sunny and 21.1 C but the beaches were empty. People rode by on bicycles with gloves and hats and scarves.

I don't understand how anyone could find this weather cold. I sometimes think Angelinos would set the air temperature to match their body temperature if they could.

Venice beach is just south of Santa Monica beach. It has an outdoor gym called muscle beach where the current governor used to work out at daily.















It also has crazy white-toga-guy who for years has been roller-blading around playing his guitar...an electric guitar...he carries his own batteries and a transformer.

You'd think for a guy to go to that much trouble he must be an amazing guitar player. You'd be wrong.

I don't know what's going on here but I think I should talk to the person in charge of container stacking...















Well at least they never have any earth quakes here so I guess it's safe.

What are you eating under there?

Today I did something I've wanted to do for a long time.

I had a French Dip (Au Jus) Sandwich from Phillipe's, the place where it was invented.

"...One day in 1918, while making a sandwich for a police officer, French immigrant Phillipe Mathieu inadvertently dropped a sliced roll into a roasting pan filled with hot juice. The police officer said he'd have the sandwich anyway and returned with friends the next day for more. Thus was born the French Dip..."

Sawdust on the floor. Bench seating. $0.60 lemonade.
Oh, and the Best Beef Dip Ever.
I wish you guys were there, I think you would have liked it.

Star Sighting - Kate Beckinsale at the LA Comic and SciFi Convention promoting her new Underworld movie. Surprisingly, they don't actually wear any Underwear in the Underworld.

Have you guys heard about Blogs?

So while on my vacation in LA, I've decided rather than writing letters, postcards or emails to my friends (who don't really care that much what I'm doing, they're just glad to have the break), I'll write in this blog, my friends won't read it and it'll save a step.

Star Sighting - Kelsey Grammer was on my plane from the VanCity. TV's Dr. Fraiser Krane. Um...dude, you're rich...shouldn't you have people to keep people like me away from you? Apparently they're not good enough at their job 'cause I got a whole clump of your hair! Who's the loser now?

Benji - The shoes you bought and I'm bringing back for you are pretty cool. I'm going to wear them while I'm here. To fit in. With the cool people.