The LA Report

I left New York on Friday afternoon. The Friday before a holiday weekend. Real smart, eh? So I allotted myself two-and-a-half hours to get to the airport.

Traffic leaving the office actually wasn't as bad as I had expected it to be. My cabbie took the Midtown Tunnel and the LIE to Woodhaven Boulevard. It turns out that my cabbie actually lived out by JFK, and this trip was like going home for him.

From Woodhaven Boulevard to the Belt Parkway and then on into JFK. I was there quite early.

The airplane trip itself was pretty uneventful. It went up, it came down, all without incident. The movie was Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, which seemed pretty amusing despite the fact that I was watching it without the sound. The end of the movie seemed eerily familiar though, as if I had seen it before in a dream.

You can learn a lot about a movie by watching it with the sound off.

Once we landed (a very smooth landing, and my compliments to United Airlines), I picked up my luggage, and headed outside and waited for the car rental shuttle. And waited. And waited.

Apparently, LAX is working on consolidating all the car rental facilities into on place, much like how it is at SFO (and Newark, if I remember correctly). This hasn't happened yet.

Until it happens, any weary travelers who have rented a car need to head out to the curb and wait for the shuttle van from their car rental company of choice. For any future travelers to LAX, I'd like to make an observation. Of all the major car rental companies, the one that sends shuttles around the most is Hertz, and the one that sends them the least is Thrifty.

Of course, I was renting from Thrifty.

Once I finally got to the Thrifty office, there was more waiting in line.

I'll skip over the gory details, but I eventually managed  to rent a PT Cruiser for the price of a regular full-sized rental car. Not to shabby. Gotta know how to work the system.

Then I headed off for Bucky & Eldrid's house. It's lots of fun trying to drive through a city that you don't know in a car you've never driven before in the middle of the night.

Eventually, I got up to Topanga… after driving up on the 405, over on I-10, up on the PCH, and up Topanga Canyon Road… which is a dark and windy road at night…

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I'm going to skip over most of the events of the next several days, in large part because I'm lazy and I'm sure that you don't want to read the minutiae of how I kept getting lost in Glendale. Here, however, are some highlights:

  • Big shoutouts to my friends Bucky and Eldrid, who were more than gracious in putting me up for a couple of nights. Also to their son Cieran, who was quite tolerant of this strange, hulking houseguest he'd never seen before (well, actually, he had, but he'd only been two months old at the time, so I don't think he really remembered me).
  • Yes, I went to the Apple Store in the Glendale Galleria. Yes, it's very nice (the mall itself is a fairly standard suburban mall, which was kind of weird -- I guess the last time I'd been inside one of those was back when I was in college, seven years ago. It was really odd seeing all these stores I hadn't seen in literally years, and seeing that, quite frankly, they hadn't changed much at all. But I digress), and it's nice to see Apple push the brand as not just computers, but as a lifestyle. But there was almost no-one in the store. Of course, the fact that it was 4 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon may have had something to do with it.
  • Driving a blue PT Cruiser for four days was really cool.
  • I did go to one day of the Farscape convention. No, I did not go to LA intending to go to that. But, you know, it was there, and I was there, and since the upcoming New York convention was sold out...
  • If you are planning on going to LA (or live in LA and haven't gone yet), get thee to the Getty Center. It is an incredible facility for looking at art (the permanent collection itself is, well, uneven, which is due the fact that it's built on the personal collection of J. Paul Getty, and as he was a collector and not an art historian or critic, he bought things that he liked. Having said that, there are some very nice pieces, and the staff works very very hard to update and make the collection relevant). The Walker Evans exhibit (actually, there are two separate but linked exhibits) is amazing. And the buildings and facilities are astounding. The only other museum in the world I can think of that comes close is the Louisiana in Denmark. To top it off, the cafeteria actually serves pretty good food. Nothing that I think would make Jean-Georges sweat, but it's nice to be able to eat real food at a museum (not the cheapest cafeteria in the world, but what the hey). If I had to make any changes, I wouldn't. I would add things, though. I would add more modern and contemporary art (they aren't always the same thing, depending on how you define the word "modern") and I'd add Asian art. But these really are minor quibbles.
  • The Biltmore (correction: the Millennium Biltmore, and I'm not going to provide a link because their website, well, think of a four-letter word that starts with "s", ends in "cks", and has a "u" in the middle) in downtown LA is an absolute gorgeous old-school hotel. Well, the lobby, the function rooms, et cetera are. The rooms themselves lack that little bit of presence (well, actually, they lack a lot of presence -- they're fairly anonymous rooms), and, since it was Labor Day, the only dining facility open was a sports bar, which was highly unfortunate, since they were having a little trouble with getting a steak sandwich right, but whatever. I suspect the regular cooks had the night off. Of course, downtown LA itself is completely abandoned on the weekend anyway...
  • I don't drive in New York. I think that it'd be bad for my already fragile mental health (there are those who would argue that just living in New York would be bad for anyone's mental health, but we're not going to get into that right now). Having said that, though, I will say that traffic jams in New York are always due to one of three things: construction, accidents, or idiots who block an intersection. This is not the case in LA. I'm driving down the Ventura Freeway to pick up a friend (more on her in a minute) for dinner, and I suddenly see a sea of brakelights in front of me. I obligingly slow down, in order to avoid slamming into the car in front of me. The entire freeway slows down to 30 miles an hour. I'm thinking that there's some sort of minor accident up ahead, maybe on the other side of the road. We continue to cruise along at 30 miles an hour (more or less) for a mile or two. Then it suddenly opens up and we're back up to full freeway speed. No accident (on either side of the road), no construction, no nothing. It was as if there was some kind of mass hypnosis at that point in on the freeway, commanding everyone to slow down to less than half what they had been doing previously. Very strange.
  • Maybe it's just me, but... in New York (Manhattan in particular, but this could be applied to most of the outer boroughs), I don't have any trouble finding things (places, stores, museums, locations in general). This is particularly true even when I don't know where I'm going is ("Yeah, the bar's in SoHo kinda, heading over near Little Italy"; "the Whitney's near Museum Mile somewhere"; et cetera). However, in LA, you can't find anything unless you have exact, precise, down-to-the-millimeter directions ("Take the 134 to the first Burbank exit. Hang a left. Go straight for three blocks. Make a right turn. Go two blocks, past the fire station...").
  • Another note about driving in LA: 99% of the drivers I encountered in my four days there were, for the most part, pretty good drivers. Stop for pedestrians, signal for turns and lane changes, etc. But then there are the guys who careen across three lanes of traffic to get to the freeway exit...
  • Very special thanks to M—, about whom I find it very difficult to write about, because whenever I try to write about her, the higher reasoning parts of my brain get jammed in some kind of mental vapour-lock situation and any pretense of objectivity just flies right out the window. So I'm just going to leave it at that for now.

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Here's a short restaurant review I wrote while I was actually at the restaurant, on my last day in LA.

As I type, I am sitting in the "Encounter" restaurant at LAX. It's in the space where the old observation lounge used to be, under that large, strange white thing that sits in the middle of the airport and is LAX's trademark piece of architecture (something that all three NYC airports utterly lack, the TWA and Delta terminals at JFK notwithstanding).

Have to say that, so far, the "Encounter" experience has been somewhat underwhelming.

When one enters the elevator, music so bad that even Star Trek would have rejected it plays. The decor is dimly lit in blue and purple, with Lava Lamp accents everywhere. Swoopy! and Swervy! (according to Word, neither is a real word) motifs predominate. It's as if they took the worst of Disney's Tomorrowland and pumped it up. The overall effect is like something out of James T. Kirk's worst nightmares. And oh yeah, there's this band, playing Latin-tinged lounge music. The band consists of a bassist, a percussionist (not a drummer), a piano, and a flutist. The music they're playing was popular well before they were born.

Oh yeah, the food.

Honestly, it's not very good. At least the dishes I had. Well, the beef carpaccio was actually rather nice. But the pork chop was a) boneless (what's the point of a chop without a bone in it?) and b) drenched in this strange sweet sauce that completely overpowered the pork. It would have worked really well as an accent, but it completely dominated the dish.

A nice touch was that the chop came with a column of mashed potatoes (with a little limp spinach on top, but we'll ignore that for the time being). I hope that it was intended as a tribute to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, because, if it was, it was pretty clever. If it wasn't, well, I've had better mashed potatoes.

It was also pretty damn expensive.

But the waitress was very nice, and the band, despite the music, was playing with enthusiasm, which is half the battle. And honestly, I don't think that the food is supposed to be the main attraction here (which is something that I have a problem with—it is a restaurant, after all—but maybe it's just me).

If you love kitchy sci-fi, well, you'll love this place.

If you don't, well, there's not much point in dropping by.

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The flight back didn't entirely stink, but here's something weird: the counter agents wouldn't let me check in until four hours before my flight. This was a problem, since I was at the airport at 10:30 a.m., and my flight didn't leave until 10:00 p.m., and I wanted to check in so I could get a good seat and drop my suitcase off and not have to worry about it the rest of the day.

Eventually, the compromise was reached that could check in and get my seat changed, but I still wasn't allowed to check my bag.

The flight back was uneventful (as well it should have been, since I was asleep for most of it), but I kept being accidentally awakened by the flight attendants. Well, once time it wasn't accidental, since they turned on all the light in the plane, which makes no sense to me since it was a red-eye flight.

And of course, the pilot really bounced in the landing, waking everybody up.

And then there was the 55-minute wait for the bags, and then the rush-hour trip into the city... (if we'd gotten the bags 15 minutes after we'd landed, which would have been 6:20, getting into the city would have been a piece of pie, (or easy as cake, depending on how you want to mangle the aphorism); however, since it was basically 7:00 a.m. when we got the bags, plus the wait for the taxis, we got stuck in full-on prime rush hour traffic. I fell asleep on the freeway, near La Guardia, and I woke up to find my cabbie navigating the streets of Long Island City on his way to the Queensborough Bridge).

Then I went back to bed, and then I finally got in to the office.

What a way to travel, eh?