Yes, yes, sideways...

This is the Hitching Post. No, I didn't go in.

Brewer-Clifton

How lucky am I? After my early antics this morning, I went to Melville to taste, bright and early, practically pounding on the glass at 11 am. Greg, the really nice guy behind the tasting bar, tells me after a little wine talk between us, that Parker is in town and Greg Brewer and Steve Clifton have opened up all of their wines for him to taste. He says he's going to head over on his lunch break and do a tasting when Parker's done. I get some contact info from Greg, call up the winery and try to see if I can't swing through. Steve says sure, so I get to go and taste, not just some of the lower allocation wines, or even a full flight of one line, but an ENTIRE PORTFOLIO TASTING of Brewer-Clifton, Melville, Palmina and Diatom! Just absolutely show-stopping wines. I've been a fan of their stuff since Christopher first showed me their Palmina Tocai Fruilano, and Jeanne and Marcos would pop their Brewer-Clifton and Melville Pinots. So amazingly delicious, and I got to meet Greg and Steve. Best part, I had the tasting almost to myself with two of Steve's assistants so I got the inside track on lots of the wines. It just couldn't have worked out better.... So many amazing Pinots and the Chablis-like Chard Inox was just unforgettable.

Also did a great tasting at Fiddlehead, through Kathy's great Sauvignon Blanc and Pinots, another longtime favorite Jeanne introduced me to...

Just outside Sequoia Nat'l Forest

Just got up to Neal Fishback's place at the foot of the Sequoia Nat'l Forest. It's really beautiful up here, I can't wait to check out the park tomorrow.
Neal is Eric's dad, AND had been studying under Maezumi Roshi for years, even living in Residence at ZCLA for three years.

New T-Shirt

One of my friends suggested, I quit all this blogging and just have a t-shirt made that says: "I'm having more fun than you."

Santa Barbara

So, got into Santa Barbara, wandered around, took my cousin to dinner, and then we checked out some bar where her friend was spinning. (Apparently, and this is all news to me, but the kids today don't actually play records, what a waste of tech 12's you say, instead they have these "scratch" records spinning, so they can "scratch" while the music comes out of their iTunes) Anyhow, the important part of this story is that I got my cousin her first legal beer in a bar, and it was a 24 oz of PBR!
Oh yeah, she also finished hers like five minutes before me and just stood there shaking her head at my poor performance.

Hiking in the hills

A long hike up in the hills of Griffith Park by the Hollywood sign.

Hysterically funny message from my mom

While I was up at ZMC in the Mountains up above Palm Springs, I collected some Ponderosa Pine Cones and mailed them to my mom. They're really huge pine cones, maybe like a foot tall and weigh about 5 pounds. Anyhow, I knew my mom would love them (she uses them for centerpiece arrangements and things like that) Anyhow, she left a really funny message on my cell so I thought I'd post it here...

The End of Route 66

The traditional Route 66 ends at the Santa Monica pier. Well, that's debatable, some say two blocks up, some say at the park where there's a plaque to Will Rogers. For what it's worth, I like to say it's the pier. It's sort of a nice marker of the end of my Journey West. I'll head up to the Bay Area and Napa, but haven't yet figured out if I'll get up to the Pacific Northwest. I'd like to, but sort of feel unsure about it. I guess I'll just wait and see.
Down at the Santa Monica pier, they had a big Earth Day Festival there with live music from Juliette Lewis, Ziggy Marley and Taj Mahal. Also a bunch of little rockers from School of Rock. The big acts didn't come on until much later so I wandered around for a little while.

Yvette, will you marry me?

I guess I'm a bit jaded, usually I hate these public proposals, like at foot ball games and everything, but this one was kind of sweet. The guy had gotten a bunch of his friends to help decorate the words in the sand. She said yes, by the way.

Taj Mahal Beat Boxing

Now this was something special. I'm a big Taj Mahal fan, but I've never heard him beat box before...

Ziggy Marley

The Music of Chance

Sorry for the cheesy post name, but I just really couldn't help it, sometimes I'm struck by a mood (or 6 or 7 beers) and things are going to play out the way they're going to play out. As the great poet, Nicholas Naddeo, once said, "it is what it is."
Since most of the early music (Obviously before Ziggy and Taj Mahal) was boring as hell, (with the exception of Juliette Lewis, who was surprisingly interesting) I went for a walk and stopped off at the kinda Gymnastic park they have South of the pier. Ended up trying out tightrope walking because, well hey, why the hell not? Ran into these fun young ladies who were kind enough to hang with me for the better part of the day thereafter. Shit, if all it took were tightrope walking, I woulda picked this up much earlier.
By the way, that rope is actually 2 or three feet off the ground, I know it looks like they're walking on the sand, but it's actually kinda tough.

How much fun are these two?

For real, these girls are the kind that make dumb boys reconsider their ways, and begin to understand the opposite sex. If these girls had the proper platform we could really narrow the gap between the sexes. These are the girls for the job, they can save America's youth. They are so funny and so much fun to be around, they'd get 'er done in days, I just know it.
Brandy's a Montesorri teacher too! Is it weird that I think that makes her really extra hot? Did I mention she was wearing 'Roos? (You know, those 80's sneakers with the zipper pocket on the side where you can fold up a dollar bill a million times and cram it in there) I mean, is this like some spy novel where she's some secret agent who's been debriefed on how to win my heart and crush my soul for mother Russia, or what?
You know that scene in Weird Science where they create the perfect woman with the playboy mags and everything? Well these are the girls that would've been created if the guys in charge weren't Anthony Michael Hall and his loser friend wearing bras on their heads.
By the way, this last shot is them taking over some coffee shop. No joke, we owned that place, little green designer dogs too!

Gotta love a girl who takes matters into her own hands

So here we have Page. She'll take issue with this, but them's the breaks. I just knew, KNEW in my heart of hearts, that when we were going to order some coffee, she was going to be one of those orderers that's got some kind of crazy special request. I couldn't even begin to repeat her order, because it's way beyond my conception of what coffee is. I am from Brooklyn, I go to delis, "light and sweet" is about as much coffee talk as I speak. But not our dear protagonist Page. So after placing her order, our "help", if you could call it that, (BTW, side note here, Service SUCKS in LA. I've been in the service industry, I know what it means to do it, and for an economy that practically lives on service jobs, these "actors" really oughta get their shit together and learn how to "act" like they're doing their fucking job) couldn't even begin to make what she asked for. So Page, go-getter that she is, jumped behind the bar and did it herself. I'm not even kidding, she frothed her own milk. But wait, it gets better. The "help" decided to comment how her company employed professional Barristas to teach them. To wit, our hero Page responded, "Well clearly, they don't know shit." Could this girl be any hotter? If I wasn't paralyzed with feelings of awkwardness at the situation, I might have proposed on the spot.
But here she is, Die Hard, pushing suckers out of the way.

Addendum: Not one to casually brush away imprecision, Page has made her corrections in the attached comment.

Fish fucking, or celebrities? A quandary if I've ever seen one.

So, after a nice dinner with Page and Brandy (that's Patty and Brittany to you, suckas) it was time to turn my attentions to other activities. Being the unrepentant nerd I am, I just happened to have overheard on NPR that the Grunion are running. To the uninitiated, like myself, these are the times when the Grunion, an interesting fish with most peculiar mating habits, tends to do it's thing on the shores. Apparently, these guys and gals actually get out of the water, come up on shore, do the humpty-hump, and then go back into the water. Seeing as I'm here to experience the out of the ordinary, I figured, hey, why not go down to the ocean and watch fish copulate? "Perfectly understandable sentiment", I hear you say. Unfortunately for both of my Blog readers, (that's you and me, mom) there was no fish fornication to be seen down by the Santa Monica Pier. I tried to get my lovely new friends to accompany me, but apparently the offer to watch fish fuck just doesn't quite do it for our action packed young ladies of today.
So, instead, I spent some time stalking the hot new resto in town where one of the Papparazzi, after quite a bit of Q+A finally revealed, was the spot that was rented out for Victoria Beckham's B-Day bash, and Tom and Kate and all the other "A-Lister's" (Ooh, I feel so LA lingo'd now) were partying. By "some time stalking", I really mean about 30 seconds to take pictures of the papparazzi, which was kind of gratifying in a ha-ha sort of way, 'cause even though I'm not famous, I hate them anyway. I apologize to those photographers out there who are good people, but by and large, I consider Papparzzi to be relegated to that special circle of hell Dante reserved for Lawyers and Auto Mechanics. Anyhoo, these are the guys waiting for the famous people. Me, I fucked off and found the nearest interesting place that had Guiness on tap.
But here's a link to the glam shots if you're interested...
http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/celebrity/redcarpet/6123/1/0/victoria-beckham-34th-birthday-party.html

Horrifyingly bad Karaoke

This is the spot that had Guiness on tap. As a side note, West Coasters don't seem to honor the Buy Back policy known and beloved by East Coasters on your 4th beer. As luck would have it, I chilled with an NJ native Josh, cool guy btw, who backed me on it and knew the staff and ensured I was given proper East Coast treatment.
As for the rest, I can't claim, nor do I really want, to be a connoisseur of karaoke, but if American Idol has taught us nothing, (And it just may have accomplished it's goal to do just that) we're all judges. It is with great regret that I must report, tonight, Total Eclipse of the Heart was massacred. I don't say this lightly, cause I need you now tonight, and I need you more than ever, but dear reader, total eclipse of the heart is my one 80's song that transcends the "It's so bad it's good" into the, yeah, I can openly admit I like that song unless I'm at a football game, and it was so totally wronged tonight that it gives me pause. It was unholy horror... a sad, sad day. OK, OK, vast emptiness, nothing holy, but must you beat the hell out of that song like that? Aren't there charitable organizations to prevent this sort of thing? Fuck PETA and Greenpeace, there oughta be something to prevent this kind of travesty from happening ever, ever, again. Yet it goes on, unnoticed, night after night in our nation's taverns and homes, please help prevent this crime against humanity, only you can help.

Serra at Broad's BCAM

One of my all time favorite artisits, Richard Serra, has top billing at BCAM, the new wing (or really it's own museum) at LACMA. Before I sing the praises of BCAM, I have to admit my unbounded, uneducated, unearned snottyness when it comes to modern museums. In defense of my complaints, so many of these museums are poorly arranged, more closely resembling a look-what-I've-got, crap-ass-china-cabinet-of-porcelain-angels than a cohesive journey and experience. They entirely miss the concept of presentation in their focus on "Showing".

But anyhow, now that my little diatribe is done, onto the BCAM and Serra...

The BCAM itself is perfect, The ground floor is dedicated to Serra, and Kruger gets the shaft. HA! She really does though, and it was my only complaint, she has a great piece lining the entire humongous elevator shaft but the back and sides of the elevator are not the glass they should be to showcase it. Insead, they block out the piece as you ride in the elevator. Oh well.

Onto the Serra- This is the kind of experience that got me into Contemporary Art in the first place. Walking in and around these pieces, and seeing and feeling the bend around them, was altering to say the least. My friend Rachael Smith, the Vanna White of Serra's piece in the photos, was thankfully with me to walk into these silent little rooms, born of the bands, as if side altars of a great cathedral. The leanings of the walls, and the depth, and mass of the steel, is something not only seen, but felt, in a truly visceral sense. It's almost as if the power of the piece were enough to transform the air around the piece, bending space itself...

I'm going to stop now, because this is getting out of hand, and I feel like it's my post about the Tea Ceremony (although, now that I mention it, there are some very real similarities) but anyhow, seeing as I might be getting a little over the top here, I'll just wrap it up by saying it was an extremely memorable and moving experience.

Below are the remarks of the curator

Band may qualify as Richard Serra's magnum opus, representing the fullest expression of the formal vocabulary proffered by his monumental steel arcs and torqued ellipses of the 1980s and '90s. Band is among the most formally elegant and technically complex works of Serra's oeuvre, a sculpture that took him two-and-a-half years to develop and which he described as "a completely new form for me." Whereas the arcs and ellipses had a stolid austerity and an uncompromising formal logic, Band introduces a new quotient of fluidity and sense of freedom, undulating with the apparent ease of a ribbon, flowing back and forth with almost balletic grace. Yet, it is plainly – obdurately – a manifestation of its own titanic size and weight, indomitable in its mass, volume, and ownership of space.

Serra's art has always forcefully asserted its materiality and evinced the process of its fabrication. Band is no exception. It is a daunting display of its own immensity, evoking the incomprehensible mechanics of handling some two-hundred tons of hot steel and the precision engineering that goes into shaping it, as well as the placing of its component parts, which requires tolerances down to a single millimeter. At twelve feet high and more than seventy feet long, the work is vast even by Serra's monumental standard. Careening aesthetically between bravado and elegance, Band bespeaks the ambitiousness of Serra's artistic vision and his commitment to its physical realization.

Howard Fox, Curator of Contemporary Art, 2008

Damian Hirst and Jeff Koons

Damian Hirst, the artist who did the diamond encrusted skull, up top, did an amazing set of stained glass windows, except they were constructed of butterfly wings. Below that, is another of my favorites, Jeff Koons and one of his giant balloon dogs.

The little short guard, who's dissected by the balloon dog, yelled at me for taking a phone call while I was in the gallery. I was walking out with the phone as I usually do when taking a call in a public space. He was right, but I was upset because I felt like I was being chastised for doing the right thing which I was in the middle of doing anyway. I guess he was right. Beware of truth, it can demand change.

The New LATC

So my friends Trish and Charles invited me out to the re-opening of LATC, an old downtown bank that's been converted to an amazing performance space with a few theaters and a huge main room with a spectacular stained glass ceiling. A few bands played on the main stage as we generally wandered the space...

Virgin Mary out of Japanese Comics

A really great piece I noticed from across the room. It's a Japanimation version of Mary, complete with typical wink, tongue, and not so typical "wardrobe malfunction". It was done as a collage of little pieces of Japanese newspaper and comic books.

Post Script: I stand corrected. After a little bit of footwork, it appears that Mary was often depicted with a breast exposed and it was only after the renaissance that her exposed breast appeared less in public. Janet Jackson shoulda brought this up.

Silver Lake Wine Shop

Started off our adventure with a stop at Silver Lake Wine Shop to do a Cab Franc tasting. Yum. Silver Lake wine shop is a really good shop btw, and the tastings are really cool. Nice selection and good looking store.

Korean BBQ, and Justin Milgrim about to kick some Valet's ass

Here's Justin, all nice and mild mannered, sitting down to some BBQ and soju (A sort of Korean booze that's about 20%)
Roughly five minutes before this shot, he practically bitch slapped a valet with a traffic cone. We got to the parking lot outside the restaurant, and there were traffic cones in front of some of the spots. Some enterprising guy apparently figured he could put on a vest and be a valet in a public lot. Justin wasn't having any of it though. He jumped out of the car, grabbed the cone, and explained rather eloquently that there was abso-fucking-lutely no way we were putting up with this bullshit, we were parking wherever the hell we damn well pleased, and offered some rather anatomically difficult suggestions for placement of said cone if the guy didn't like it.
P.S. Note the picture of the extremely tough looking individual Justin stood up to.

Wine bar hopping

Then met up with Nicco in Culver city to go Wine Bar hopping. We started off at Bottle Rock which was for the most part, really well done. Nice space, good list, informative and friendly staff, our server, Matt, was awesome. The tables and chairs were a bit uncomfortable, but they had a really nice policy of opening any bottle as long as two glasses were ordered. All in all, a good spot. Here's a shot of Nicco looking surprised and a girl at the table behind her who was wearing a red dress unbuttoned at the top with a red brassiere underneath that was a really good look. Ladies, take notice. Then another shot of Nicco at the next place we went which had a vinoteque so we could get ounce pours of any bottle we wanted. Of course, we got a taste of some 02 Shafer Hillside select, which was awesome! (roughly abut $500/ btl if you can find it)

Girls who try to kick me end up with their butts on the pavement...

This is Nicco under the Salon ME sign which we both thought was funny and had a brief shoving match trying to get the other under the sign so a picture could be taken. I won. Hee-hee. But then Nicco tried to kick me, so I caught her leg, and down she went. She was not happy about that. But I told her, "Sorry sister, girls who try to kick me end up with their butts on the pavement." And then later in the car, when she thought I was taking her picture, I was really taking video and I have some extremely funny video of her calling me all sorts of names. I'm not sure I'm going to upload it though, cause my mom checks this blog from time to time, and I can't handle another one of those, "I don't think it's quite appropriate when you..." phone calls.

De-Daumier-Smith's Blue Period

"As I was returning from wherever I'd spent the evening--and I do remember that it was after dark--I stopped on the sidewalk outside the school and looked into the lighted display window of the orthopedic appliances shop. Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss."

"Something extremely out of the way happened to me some fifteen minutes later. A statement, I'm aware, that has all the unpleasant earmarks of a build-up, but quite the contrary is true. I'm about to touch on an extraordinary experience, one that still strikes me as having been quite transcendent, and I'd like, if possible, to avoid seeming to pass it off as a case, or even a borderline case, of genuine mysticism. (To do otherwise, I feel, would be tantamount to implying or stating that the difference in spiritual sorties between St. Francis and the average, highstrung, Sunday leper-kisser is only a vertical one.)

In the nine o'clock twilight, as I approached the school building from across the street, there was a light on in the orthopedic appliances shop. I was startled to see a live person in the shopcase, a hefty girl of about thirty, in a green, yellow and lavender chiffon dress. She was changing the truss on the wooden dummy. As I came up to the show window, she had evidently just taken off the old truss; it was under her left arm (her right "profile" was toward me), and she was lacing up the new one on the dummy. I stood watching her, fascinated, till suddenly she sensed, then saw, that she was being watched. I quickly smiled--to show her that this was a nonhostile figure in the tuxedo in the twilight on the other side of the glass--but it did no good. The girl's confusion was out of all normal proportion. She blushed, she dropped the removed truss, she stepped back on a stack of irrigation basins--and her feet went out from under her. I reached out to her instantly, hitting the tips of my fingers on the glass. She landed heavily on her bottom, like a skater. She immediately got to her feet without looking at me. Her face still flushed, she pushed her hair back with one hand, and resumed lacing up the truss on the dummy. It was just then that I had my Experience. Suddenly (and I say this, I believe, with all due self-consciousness), the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. Blinded and very frightened--I had to put my hand on the glass to keep my balance. The thing lasted for no more than a few seconds. When I got my sight back, the girl had gone from the window, leaving behind her a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers."

-De-Daumier-Smith's Blue Period- Jerome David Salinger-

I got your axis of evil right here...

Seriously? The Bushes sang Happy Birthday to the Pope? For real? And then W flipped the bird to the Dalai Lama and said, "Get some oil, then we'll talk..."? Wow.

The Minor Cannon at Let's Independent

Radio Free Silverlake puts together a show of local Indie bands once a month.

"It’s more than just another show, it’s a goddamn party that celebrates just how fantastic the LA music scene is... " -somebody said this-

It happens at Boardner's which is a great venue with an outdoor space outback that's just perfect for a warm LA night of Music

Boardner’s is located at 1652 North Cherokee Ave ... a half block south of Hollywood Blvd in Hollywood ... a scenic spot that has been around since the 40s, can be seen such films as Ed Wood, Wag the Dog, LA Confidential, and Leaving Las Vegas, and -- really, I would not kid with you about this -- Guns N Roses trashed the bathroom once. (It’ s like, history, you’re soaking in it or something.)
- Somebody else said this-

Blue

My new charge, Blue, is a pretty good girl. She likes to go on very long walks through LA, and really loves people, especially people that are deathly afraid of dogs...

Postmodern Bird Watching (Branded)

In my never ending quest to follow the ever blurring line between grafitti and art since I first caught onto Keith Haring back as a kid in NYC, I bring you, "Branded." Seen this dude's stuff up around LA a little bit, and seeing one of his pieces, peeled the reflective sticker off a construction marker he'd rocked in purple ink. Just today I saw one of his 'zines in a local bookshop and found out his tag is "Branded", so I looked him up online and lo and behold he was just featured in an article in Time magazine yesterday.. Got a shot of a throw-up he did inside a mailbox (Yes, that's inside a mailbox, I like this dude's style) and a shot of the reflective strip I grabbed. Maybe this'll have to get framed too... Do check out the links though, they're really fucking cool.

The Link to The Times Article:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1118377,00.html

Branded's site:

http://www.brandedbunny.com/

From the TIMES:

It's 4 p.m. in Los Angeles, and the artist who calls himself Branded is getting ready for a "mission." If he were another kind of artist, he would call it a gallery opening, but today his gallery consists of a few alleys off La Brea Avenue and some threadbare bits of downtown. Once there, he will look for exhibition sites, meaning temporary construction walls, shuttered buildings and utility boxes. One thing to know about street art is that it generally plants its flag in Nowheresville.

In his car Branded has several broad brushes, a bucket of the watery adhesive called wheat paste and a stack of his trademark cartoonish bunny posters. His first target is a utility box on La Brea. With a friend stationed nearby to watch for police, Branded, 30, brushes a layer of paste on the box and slaps up the poster. Then he whips open his cell phone, snaps a picture and e-mails the shot to flickr.com a photo website on which artists post their work.
"The act of doing it is interesting," says Branded. (Street art is almost always illegal--another word for it is vandalism--so pseudonyms are an almost universal part of the culture.) "There's the adrenaline. Once it's up, then it's about getting the reactions." By that night, his images will be flying around the Internet, passed along by some of the hundreds of thousands of people who keep track of this stuff, some because they make it but most because they like to know about it and may spot it in its natural habitat. Think of it as postmodern bird watching...

Apocalyptica

If you've never heard of them, you're missing out. Four cellos doing Metallica. Not exactly what I was expecting, it was a lot harder than I'd hoped for and they really seem to like doing that twirly headbanger thing with their long hair, but still and all, a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, when I got there, the show was sold out. I walked around on Sunset for a bit and texted my friends for rec's, and then went back, figuring I'd see what a little talking could do. As it turned out, after speaking to one of the women who ran the door, there was a radio station promotion going on, and all I had to do was respond, "KROQ is Number One" when asked what my favorite LA radio station was.... et voila! A free ticket to the sold out show. How nice. I love it when a plan comes together.

The Munky King

Found this place on Sunset Boulevard called Munky King. Probably a place that a Munkeybean would like. This is a picture of the Munky King just in case you were wondering, and here's the link to their site...
www.munkyking.com
New news... Sorry for the redundancy, I had to buy one of these limited prints.. They just rocked so hard, so I dropped the dough. I did get 2/40 though...

Morcheeba

Got to see Morcheeba tonight at the Music Box. As expected, they totally rocked! This was their last stop on their North American tour, and their singer, Frenchwoman Manda was so, so, so hot. Unbelieveable presence on stage, and what a singer, it was just awesome.

STARS!

Wow, as I live and breathe, Pat Sajak and Don Cornell. Obviously, you all remember Pat Sajak from Wheel Of Fortune, but you may not remember Don Cornell. As you can tell from the bird's eye view icon below Don's name, he was the guy who was so famous for not being able to properly place his straw in the middle of his drink.

LA Metro Stations

Why is it that NYC Subway, bus, plane and train stations suck so hard? For such a great city, we've got such ugly uninspiring stations. Just look at these LA stations... yeah maybe a bit garish and wacky, but at least they're clean, efficient, and with a sense of style...

Jamie messing around

It was a pretty neat effect he'd accomplished here, by effectively humping the mirror, he made it look like he was floating...
In a side note, Jamie does caricatures professionally, and he's the one that did the drawing Penelope Cruz did of Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky.

The Red Lion

A great Beer Garden. Here Justin is explaining, at great length, why the air is just right for drinking.