Apologies for the long silence. You know how it is: you take the train down to L.A. for the weekend, and the next thing you know, you’re at this party in West Hollywood at a mansion formerly owned by Slash (formerly of Guns ‘n’ Roses) where your friends in the up-and-coming band Super Duper are playing on the balcony overlooking the massive, terraced, candlelit back yard where hundreds of L.A.’s pretty young things are eating and drinking and soaking in the hot tub and jumping out of the hot tub down the waterfall to the swimming pool below, and you get back to the couch you’re sleeping on in Burbank not too long before 4 in the morning, and then it’s Tuesday and you’re back in Ojai and you haven’t posted anything to the blog for days and days.
Seriously: all that happened. It was monumental.
I’m a terrible party guest, especially if I’m attending a party alone. I have neither the ability nor the desire to mingle well, so I always end up standing by myself with a drink in my hand, watching the drama unfold from a distance. But when it’s something as worth watching as this party was, I don’t mind so much.
All of us involved in the Friday night shenanigans got a slow start on Saturday. My friends Dan and Aaron (vocalist and bassist, respectively, for Super Duper) and I hit up vintage Burbank sandwich shop Giamela’s for afternoon sustenance. The sub I ate wasn’t up to my exceedingly picky sub standards–though it wasn’t a bad sandwich–but the establishment itself didn’t disappoint. Small and dingy, with a bare-bones menu of maybe half a dozen sandwiches, Giamela’s earns a spot on my personal places-worth-knowing-about map of L.A.
We returned then to the scene of the night before to retrieve the band’s gear; from there, we made our way over to Hollywood proper to wander around Amoeba Music until dusk. Restorative coffees were consumed, and some time after that we found ourselves back in Burbank, eating a moderately late supper of what claimed to be Japanese food. The sushi and tempura looked orthodox enough, but the oyakodon I ordered turned out to be something more along the lines of teriyaki chicken atop egg fu yung atop rice: edible, but not oyakodon. I was disappointed and confused until I realized that the proprietors of the restaurant were Korean-American, at which point I was merely disappointed.
On Sunday morning, Aaron–whose couch I was surfing–and I went out for a cripplingly large breakfast and then retreated to his living room to watch football and digest. Dan appeared by and by, and he and I paid a visit to UCLA’s Fowler museum to see the “Art of Tea” exhibit currently showing there. I had the chance to talk at tedious length for awhile about Japanese tea, and I got to see lots of pretty things I didn’t know anything about, mostly Chinese and English pieces.
What we learned after that was that the Burger King in Westwood is perhaps the most soul-crushing of the franchise’s locations worldwide. Not dirty but very, very dark, the restaurant’s decor absorbs both light and enthusiasm. It looks like an airport bar from the early ’80s. It is a bad, bad place. Also the two-Whoppers-for-three-bucks deal running at every other Burger King I’ve passed lately is fifty cents more expensive in Westwood; apparently they’re charging extra for the (literally) crazy blind guy they’ve got yelling in there.
With burgers and more caffeine in us, Dan and I met the rest of Super Duper at a rehearsal space in some undistinguished backwater of the city: a complex that may once, long ago, have been a medical park or some such. Now it’s just a smoky labyrinth of rock ‘n’ roll posters and beat-up sofas and ashtrays and doors through which leaked the muffled din of half a dozen bands without futures. (And Super Duper, the future of which I hope will justify my enthusiasm.) I sat–well, stood–in on the band’s rehearsal and had a fine time of it.
Later, E., one of Aaron’s three housemates, treated me and Aaron and Aaron’s girlfriend to a late supper at Zankou Chicken. And I retired to my last night–of that trip–on the couch in Burbank.
On Monday, I met my old friend J. at crazy popular Porto’s Bakery. We grabbed coffees for the road, and she did me a solid by driving me down to Anaheim. I thanked her with lunch at the La Palma Chicken Pie Shop. (Unchanged; magnificent as ever.)
J. dropped me off at L.’s, and what followed doesn’t bear close recounting. Imagine, if you must, two cranky, poisonously discontent, unemployed men rocketing toward middle age without families or careers; put them together with no money and nothing to do but air their grievances; and you’ve got the idea. I did eventually buy us some beer, and L.’s girlfriend sprang for carne asada fries, and there were several episodes of Huell Howser on the television, so not all was lost–but still, it wasn’t pretty.
We’d wanted to go to Disneyland to take in the seasonal offerings (Space Mountain overlay and Halloween fireworks), but have to postpone the outing until later this month–if it happens at all–when a little more cash might be available to one or all. So I packed up this morning, made my way back to Ojai through a rain that fell all the way from there to here, and spent my afternoon clicking fruitlessly through job listings online.
I love L.A. I never get tired of telling people that. Things just feel right when I’m there, even when things are clearly wrong. I don’t know if that means I’m southward bound or not; a lot now depends on where I can find paying work. It means at least that you probably won’t see me straying too far from the City of Angels. I’ll be back in town at the end of this month for Super Duper’s next big gig: Drac Studios’ Halloween party at Santa Monica’s super-swank Dakota Lounge. I’ll be on roadie/merch table/puppet wrangling detail. Hope I see you there.