Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Notes from Los Angeles, part two:

On the Raymond Chandler bus tour, we are taken into the Mayfair Hotel in downtown, where Chandler briefly lived. The proprietor comes out to inform us that the very first Oscars were held there. (This turns out to be a lie.) He also tells us that the hotel is booked up because of a convention for something called Nu Skin. A fellow Chandler fan whispers that Nu Skin is a pyramid selling scheme for cosmetics. Later, I go to In'N'Out Burger in Hollywood, and find myself in the queue behind 30 or 40 Japanese women in Nu Skin T-shirts. The burger is good, but I can't believe it does much for my complexion.

***

On Hollywood Boulevard, I pass a quiet group of demonstrators from The Church of God. They all wear close-fitting white shirts with the top button done up but no tie, which makes them look weirdly Dalston 2009.

***

Also on the Raymond Chandler tour, we stop at the Musso & Frank Grill, where Chandler, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and many other writers once drank. Faulkner used to go behind the bar to mix his own mint juleps. There is a bartender there who still remembers serving Bukowski. Again, we meet the proprietor, who says that he wants to turn it back into a literary destination. When I return later for a beer, I am inititally disappointed to find myself sitting next to two men who talk about nothing but "crazy" ex-girlfriends and bad films. But then it occurs to me that Hemingway and Fitzgerald must have been exactly the same.

***

Katsu-Ya in Studio City, widely regarded as the best sushi in town - and it is indeed very good - is tucked between a Domino's Pizza and Randy's Pet Discount Center in an anonymous strip mall. Apparently that is standard in Los Angeles.

***

I'm surprised the sunsets here don't cause more car accidents.

***

Venice Beach is full of legal cannabis dispensaries. I go there with a girl who used to carry a medical marijuana permit. She had no particular desire to get cannabis on prescription, it was just useful in case she ever got pulled over by the police when she happened to have a joint in her car - literally a get-out-of-jail-free card.

***

At a karaoke bar in Los Feliz, one table along from a nice-looking girl with "EVIL CUNT" tattooed across the backs of her thighs, I find out from a friend that he has now slept with at least two women in LA who have had their pubic hair lasered off. As in, so that it will never grow back. I had never even heard of this procedure. I have no specific objection, but I do think it's a useful signal that it might finally be time to move to rural Nepal.

***

Going to see Abe Vigoda at The Smell in downtown, I discover that the venue doesn't serve alcohol because it's all-ages. Apparently most of the kids who go there get wasted before they arrive. But the bands don't finish until 1:30am, by which time everyone has sobered up. It's like a London gig in reverse.

***

In fact, Californians, for the most part, don't seem to get drunk at all. Which makes you wonder, how does casual sex ever happen here? The answer, I assume, is that sometimes it's just the only way to get a lift home.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Notes from Los Angeles, part one:



It's unnatural for a city to smell so good. The entire place feels like a house for sale in which the estate agent has lit an aromatherapy candle just prior to a viewing. Meanwhile, you stay locked in a staring contest with the daylight, waiting for it to blink, but it never does.

***



There is a white guard dog on the roof of Frank Lloyd Wright's Sturges House in Brentwood. There is also a white guard dog on the balcony of the colonial-style house opposite. They bark at each other hour after hour, staunch canine proxies for the architectural debates of the 20th century.

***

The serious young women at MOCA who discuss minimalism and Robert Frank with visiting groups of Latino grade school kids may be the closest thing I've ever seen to angels.

***

In the middle of the day, three deer saunter through the car park of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. They are friendly but visitors are told not to stroke or feed them. The previous night I saw a coyote crossing the street up on Griffith Park. It was only the size of a medium dog. I had honestly thought that coyotes were as big as werewolves.

***

Later, in the space exploration museum at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we are shown a full-size replica of the Voyager spacecraft that was launched in 1977. It was wrapped in “black thermal blankets” to keep the electronics from freezing. As a result, it looks like something assembled in the back room of a biker bar.

***

Silverlake is now world famous as LA's Williamsburg/Hoxton; when in fact it comprises about five nice cafes, three vintage shops, and a comic shop.

***

My last meal would be albacore rolls from Yoshi's Sushi in West Hollywood followed by strawberry pancakes from Fred 62 in Los Feliz. Or maybe a few pounds of the spicy shrimp and clams from the Boathouse in Alhambra, which are dumped on the table in a big clear plastic sack full of blood-red sauce, like something from an organ transplant facility.

***

As it turns out, house parties in West Hollywood are not really any different from house parties in Camberwell, except that you are apparently allowed to dance to Maroon 5 and Matchbox 20 without irony.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Today I was biked an annotated photocopy of Boxer, Beetle from Sceptre's excellent copy editor, whom I have never met and whose name I don't know but who has made lots of useful suggestions about word usage and commas and so on. I confess the experience of having a novel copy-edited reminds me a bit of the experience of realising that someone has fallen in love with you. In both cases it is alarming, almost sickening, but ultimately exhilarating to have another person pay such close attention to your most insignificant modes of operation. You find yourself not just willing but eager to make little changes, as a way of thanking them for caring so much.

Only little changes, though.

Monday, October 05, 2009

Theory: when Katherine Hepburn pretends to be an eccentric posho in the first of The Philadelphia Story she is actually parodying Irene Dunn's performance in previous Cary Grant screwball comedy The Awful Truth.