Magic Castle

The members-only magic venue has appealed to me for years – and I finally got the chance to go this past Friday. Turns out a friend of mine knows a juggler who was performing there. Said juggler invited my friend and my friend invited me – so I was on the list. It was like getting into the Viper Room, but way better.

After stressing about wardrobe and deciding that it wasn’t the right season for velvet or seersucker and that tweed isn’t appropriate for evening, we dressed in our black-tie vintage finest and drove to the mansion on the hill. I never valet, but I made an exception this time.

Sorry there are no photos – but it’s because they’re not allowed. It was one of the first things the hostess told us. After a short orientation, we entered the club by saying “open sesame” to a plastic owl perched within a bookshelf.

Inside was dimly lit, with vintage geometric print carpets and posters and photos of magicians from various eras on every inch of wall. Drinks in hand, we headed into the first show in the Close-up Gallery. There, a young magician named Kevin Viner popped a balloon to reveal a bottle of wine and remedied an audience member’s Federal offense by mending a torn dollar. He had a busty audience member named Suzette inspect some quarters before he made them magically change places.

Next we were off to the W.C. Fields Bar, which we found with the help of a castle knight named Miss Mindy. She walked with a cane, courtesy of a drunk driver she told us, and its wooden handle had googly, glowing beads for eyes. We took a seat in the back to watch a sardonic witted magician named Erik Tait who had a way with cards and cups. But the woman sitting next to me wasn’t having it. She didn’t believe it was magic, which made me wonder why she’d come to this place at all.

We went to the last main show of the evening at 11. There, Matt Marcy had audience members picking socks out of a bin that miraculously matched the ones on his feet and let us listen in on a call to a magic trick tech support line. Next, Scot Nery cooked a pancake while juggling knives and contorting with a backpack. He also found that woman from the bar, the one who didn’t believe in magic, in the audience and put duct tape over her mouth. Then a French guy named Julien Dauphin turned bubbles to glass baubles and his assistant’s dress from black to white.

Waiting in line for the valet, I felt happy with amazement. I recalled how I’d tried this stuff at home as a kid. I’d covered an unsharpened pencil with black electrical tape and painted the ends with Papermate -- but for some reason, it never quite worked right. However, this place had real magic and I wanted a piece of it. And for $1 at the gift shop, I figured it was worth a try.

Horses

These assholes pictured above met with five other assholes, not pictured, to see KC and the Sunshine Band play at Hollywood Park. KC, having gained wisdom and girth pointed out for those too young to remember having a UHF dial on their TV, that they were the N'SYNC of their time, and you can bet, he added, that one day Justin Timberlake will look like him. Having watched enough VH-1 Behind the Music, I'd say that that's a fair prediction. You'd be safe to throw in a pill addiction too.


KC was the draw, but we were there on official bidness. This is Hollywood Park. We came to make ourselves richer and do it in the company of unsupervised kids running amuck and career horse people for whom dollar beers and hot dogs is as good as any Craft Service in this stink town.







Hollywood Park is the perfect time capsule of an era when littering was cool and smoking counted as pranayama. With only about 25 minutes in between races, time flies and so does the money. Luckily Cash Call proudly sponsors the races. That's what all those flowers are supposed to spell out. Took me 3 hours to figure that one out. According to the billboard (not pictured) I have 5 Grand at my fingertips with just my signature. Yes, my hermanos, sign me up.


I got extremely lucky on the 5th race, both of my horses came in on two different bets. Had I been able to decipher the font as foliage by post time, I could have borrowed 5Gs and parlayed them into a butter-colored Cadillac for each of my friends.


Ethan bet on Mighty Heart because he loved the movie by the same name even though the odds weren't good. Looks like that horse got kidnapped during the race.

It was a rockin time. We each left with our dignity in tact and our pants on.

Photos courtesy Ben.

Shantytown

This week saw the removal of a recently constructed landmark in my neighborhood: a place I’d begun to call the Fountain Street Shantytown.

It sprung up approximately 3 weeks ago, starting out looking like a camp. In a spot behind a mini mall that’s popular with the regular neighborhood homeless folk, there was a mattress, a couple palettes, a stool – just a pile of stuff really.

Within days it evolved into a much more distinct dwelling. That Saturday, I first saw the inhabitant, who had long stringy hair and always dressed in a long skirts and black felt sun hat, walking up and down in front of the camp. Her face was smeared with black-paint-smeared and she held a broom overhead. Although I was in my car, it startled me. She seemed to be marking her territory.

Walking home from work around 10 p.m. a couple days later, I saw her again. The night seemed uncharacteristically dark despite the nearly full moon. Dressed in a black lace blouse, she was seated at the stool in front of a table and was moving her arms and hands as if playing the piano. But there was no sound. From my place across the street, I stopped to check if I might be able to take a photo, but it was too dark. She turned her head slowly in my direction and raised her arm before wiggling stiff fingers to wave at me. Needless to say, I was a little creeped out.

The next morning, I was walking to work and saw her arranging the area, moving a palette propped up against the building and adjusting a painting balanced on a pipe.

That night when a sudden rainstorm caused a heavy downpour, I was relieved to see the mattress area covered in plastic as I was coming home after dinner. When I walked by the next morning, she was dancing. Over the next couple days, the area kept expanding, now with more stuff and places to sit – and soon others were there with her during the day.

And then the writing appeared on the sidewalk nearby.

The same afternoon the message showed up, I crossed paths with her on the corner. For the first time I saw her close enough to notice she had an Adam’s apple. The next day I saw her entertaining the others at the camp. She’d removed her hat and was wearing a pair of tiny white-framed sunglasses as she played a small, stringless guitar. A couple days later, she seemed to be painting something on a board. And I saw her with the silent guitar again.

This was becoming an anthropological fascination for me. I tweeted my observations and told stories to my friends. Amid the news of the Sacramento homeless camp and families struggling in the Central Valley, this seemed like my hipster neighborhood’s version of dealing with the ugliness of the economic downturn. But like all of these situations, it needed to be fixed.

On the walk home from a bar last weekend with my roommate, she confessed to having called the Department of Sanitation to report the site as one of illegal dumping. They’d scheduled cleanup for Thursday. While I was surprised at how close to me the camp's demise had originated, I knew this day had to come. But it came early. The Shantytown was gone by Tuesday.

Hang it up!: A public service message from LA BLOGitude

California as well as a few other states, as you can see in the map below, have banned driving while on a cell phone (but, if it's hands-free you can still drive while technically on a cell phone.) They're trying to keep you from driving with one hand and all those 16 year olds and/or novice drivers need to watch out too. So I don’t even know if this law has any effect but, I hope it keeps at least one accident from happening which is enough in my book.



Unfortunately many Californians still drive and talk on their cell phones with one hand. Which isn’t surprising considering that stop signs mean go and the state motto is “Eureka” and translates to: “I was taking a bath and totally figured something out that has nothing to do with cleaning my genitals or maybe it does?” A very fitting motto for most Californians I know, myself included.

So how do people get away with breaking such a clandestine law? The popular thing to do is have your phone on speaker so that you can hold it in one hand close to the steering wheel so if you see a cop you can immediately hide it. The other thing to do is have your hand plastered to the side of your head and elbow propped up on the door so it looks like you’re bored and trying to keep from dozing off like you did in a 10th grade biology class. . .

Everyday on my commute I see drivers on cell phones. Mostly the one handers, failing to singal a turn, rolling a stop sign, and trying to parallel park. It really bums me out. It just shows that even with a law against something that is trying to make the world a tiny bit safer, people would rather do something in their own interest. It might have to do with the penalty for using a cell phone being $25-$50 bucks and NO points on your driving record. That’ll teach them. So the cops aren’t even going to waste their time to pull you over. And the police are a majority of the people I see on their cell phones.

I decided to discuss this today because, sure enough on my way to work while I was riding my bike down a residential back street a driver in a SUV rolled up to a stop sign didn’t stop completely and proceeded to pull in front of me because, I didn’t have a stop sign. He stopped. I rode in front of him very slowly because; I’d already skidded to a stop. Stared at him while he was staring straight ahead avoiding my gaze with a cell phone in hand. I gave him the “hang it up sign” which is making the universal hand signal for phone or surfing and then hanging it up. He wasn’t fazed and continued on his cell phone SUV green house gas emitting way.



So please my good bloggy citizens don’t talk on your cell phones while driving. Just wait until you're in line at Starbucks to yammer away. Don’t even get one of those Bluetooth things that people can’t seem to take off their ears when they’re not driving, you're not on Star Trek and you look like an anti social idiot.



Have a safe and lovely weekend. As usual it’s gonna be gorgeous in Los Angeles. ..

Oh l'amour

While I was parked on the 405 yesterday because a bunch of yahoos piled into each other, my boyfriend interviewed Andy Bell of Erasure.

This is the video.

The only partially interesting thing that happened to me today, was on my my way home from Cedars Sinai, where my doctor practices, also where the stars go to die, I saw that General Lee has taken residence in Beverly Hills.


I saw the tell tale orange paint and 01 in my rear view mirror.


Swung around to experience a sighting much better than Sasquatch at the Ivy. Looks like them Duke boys finally made it big.

The End.

Late Night at LACMA

So the party didn’t stop after the daytime Caddyshack Bocce Party in Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills hosted by Panama Yirko. As the sun set behind the sky scrapers in Century City everyone spun off to their respective homes to rest and relax until the after party. Kate never stirred after laying down for a disco nap so I rallied and electrified the Prius and headed out to pick up Yirko and Ethan.

Late Night at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art aka LACMA is an annual party that occurs after the museum has closed and gives you the opportunity to have a few drinks, rub up against some artwork, and then head over to Canters for a late night snack.

We pulled into the garage got a front row spot and made our way to ground level where the party was slowly reaching its climax. Rope stanchions, security guards, techo, German DJ’s, people spasming in the dance area, mood lighting, projected videos, puppet making, random people from the 1980’s who were cryogenetically frozen all greeted us. I flashed my secret service badge and we blew through security and into the hot pants of the event and hot pants we definitely saw.

So we wandered around the party for a while and then went to see some art. As we made our way to the Broad Contemporary Art Museum aka BCAM we saw this huge line in front. It was like the art museum had literally become The Viper Room circa 1989 and all the losers were waiting behind the velvet rope to be screened and admitted by Johnny Depp himself. Of course we thought this was ridiculous so we crashed to the front of the line and asked Johnny what was up. He said if we wanted to use the “stairs” we could just go in. What? All those people were in line for the giant elevator? Los Angelinos are so funny! They love their elevators.

So we made our way to the very serious exhibition Art of Two Germanys and comedy met tragedy as we wandered through the exhibition. We broke off into small talk about the art, Germany, and Nazis and then made our way to the shoes and gloves. This is a rather depressing work that is basically the display of lost and castoff shoes and gloves circa WWII. The shoes and gloves were found in an abandon railway station in the no-man’s land in Berlin after the Wall went up.

The fascinating thing is that this was the most guarded artwork I have ever seen. Since it’s displayed on the ground the chance of drunken yuppies from Brentwood stammering through the galleries and onto the artwork is at 100%. It was a sad sight to see as the security lashed out at the drunken follies of the clueless but, endearing to see them protecting the artwork so stoically. We watched as the security strictly enforced an invisible wall around the shoes and gloves and it was a humbling experience for all of us. At one point we debated leaving our own shoes behind in solidarity.

After Art of Two Germanys we spun through BCAM 3 which houses some of the Broad’s heavy hitters from their collection: Jeff Koon’s very dusty blue dog, Andy Warhol soup cans, and Rauschenberg combines. There is even a work by Barbara Kruger in the elevator that I’m sure nobody noticed called: Shafted. So after the art we gazed upon the magnificence lights of Park La Brea and descended the reverse running escalator back to the dwindling party.

Here are some pictures from the evening that I didn’t take. . .



This isn't us but, good standin's for us.



The party.



The cryogenetically frozen.



The hot pants.



The puppet show.



The line to the Viper Room.



Bored Germanic looking people.



The shoes and gloves.



A random photo I found on the company's website that documented Late Night.

Bocce

Pillow fight in the morning, bocce in the afternoon. A was busy today. This woman is not A, this is Liesel.

In celebration of my birthday, Ethan organized a surprise Bocce Ball picnic at the Roxbury Park Bocce Ball courts. I love me some bocce and from these photos, you’ll instantly conclude that I love the caddy shack version.

Party of neerdowells on the green. Not usually allowed. Notice that balls are ready, but no one quite gives a fuck just yet.

Can dogs bocce? Abosultely. They provide an additional challenge by helping to chase away your opponent’s perfectly thrown ball. The park ranger had zero tolerance for this bit. We were sternly admonished for allowing this act of outright indecency as if we were midget racing on the green.

Kick our dogs out? That's cool, we'll get kids to take over.

Ben and Kate gave me gold and silver balls - the best kind.

Here are some people congratulating themselves on a) lack of form and b) lack of shame.

Ethan’s delicious home made birthday cupcakes. With the cupcakes, this party and his coordination of the beautifully crafted audio card edited by Evan Roberts starring Ethan and 49 of my dearest friends, he is without a doubt BF of the year. Maybe that’s one extra BJ in the morning this week.

The sun went down and we left no trace. Every bit of trash, every cheetoh that we smashed into the pavement, every bit of tom foolery was scrubbed from the place and we returned it to the domain of the somber professionals, a member of whom appeared on the court as we left. He was dressed all in white, his beautiful balls were in a wooden box, had his own piece of turf and the precision of a neurosurgeon. He was unfazed by our team, as we stumbled out with kitchen chairs, doritos, sun hats and left over burritos and hi fives all around.

Later in the evening, Ben came by in the Prius and took us to the LACMA Berlin Party. It was art and sausage. I hope he'll tell you about it.

Polaroids by David Stein.

World Pillow Fight Day

Today LA Blogitude observed World Pillow Fight Day by participating in the Los Angeles event. Armed with a small green decorative pillow from Ikea, I joined an ally and boarded the Metro Red Line to Pershing Square. On the way I encountered a group of fellow fighters who were quite enthusiastic.

Coming out of the rail station, there were people with pillows everywhere. And they were all headed into the square.

There were pillows of all colors, shapes and sizes – even these ones, which leave little to the imagination.

My ally and I weren’t in the square but 3 minutes before the battle horn sounded. All mayhem ensued.

While battling, my line of sight was limited.

After several minutes, I became the single target of multiple individuals wielding fluffy weapons and my ally led us out in retreat. I snapped a few pictures in parting. In a strange twist of events, one of these photos features our friend over at Lascher@Large. In the chaos of the battlefield, his presence just feet away was unbeknownst to me.

Heading back to the train, the extent of the feathering became apparent. Hours and a change of clothes later, I’m still finding the downy stuff all around. I’m sure I will for several days.

Insomnitude

Two nights in a row now I've woken up at 3 a.m. because of ghetto birds -- you know, those urban helicopters with spotlights -- and couldn't get back to sleep. I'm already prone to cutting out the sleep -- and this latest development isn't helping.

The sleep gods rarely visit me for more than 6 hours at a stretch. My friends Poodle and Tbean tell me that this is very bad, that I'm going to starve my brain. And Princesskatebl says I'll get sick. But this is a burden I've brought on myself. There's too many things to do, to keep up on, to think about. Like that nuisance of urban living that is STILL buzzing outside my window, I'm on a mission to cover a lot of ground, search for the elusive, shed light on new corners.

Am I complaining? Maybe. But it's 5 a.m. on a Saturday! Sleeping in is a luxury, one that I apparently can't afford.

No, We're NOT Outta Here

Just a note to all - Blogitude is still going strong. The previous post is in celebration of the Annual American Day of Hoaxes. Please keep checking in with us.

In the meantime, I give you hostess cupcakes, courtesy of my friend Alfredo, in honor of my birthday today.



And this cake made by Brandon. German white chocolate with marzipan, blueberries, white chocolate ganache and sweet furry stuff.



And I give you a stern warning from Sid Davis and the Inglewood Police Department. You need 10 minutes for this one.

We're done and outta here!

So as many of you reading know, a trifecta was formed to create the experience of LA BLOGitude. Each of us brought our own unique views to this blog and created a place to share in our experiences in the swirling toilet waters of the concrete and palm tree lined landscape of Los Angeles. Well the day has come for us to move on and literally move on. This is our last post and we hope to be back on the internet soon sharing accounts of our new adventures. We'll leave you with these parting thoughts and revelations that each of us has made and where we're heading off to.

Yirko:

Well my people I know this must have come to a shock to all of you. Trust me it wasn't easy for us to sit around that table and discuss our impending demise. I know I was a factor in this just like the other two and I knew my days were numbered when I received an email from the New York Times recently. A member of the editorial staff has been following LABLOGitude and noted that my posts gave a certain insight and off the cuffness that they needed for a Los Angeles focused reporter. So I got the fucking job! Enough of doing this shit for free. You got to log on to the www.nytimes.com from now on bitches! I still love you all and don't think it's not me writing: "Four Wheels: One City" I know they're going to edit the fuck out of me. .. I'll leave you with this. . .

Watch more Yahoo! Music videos on AOL Video

A:

I guess everyone has been wondering why I haven't been posting lately. It's because, I'm moving into a running commune. I found that jogging was my life force and recently everything has been taking me away from what it is I live for. The bus, work, my blackberry, and twitter. So I'm giving it all up and heading out to Joshua Tree maybe I'll see you on the trail or at the top of the mountain. Stay on the Bus! Love, A.



Ben:

I'm just sick of LA. That's just about it.. .I'm moving too. Really far. Kate and I have decided that we need to lend our talents to the new administration. We are heading to D.C. and Kate is going to work with the new Guantanamo Detainees Release Network and I'm going to be a 32 year old bike messenger. It's gonna be dope! I hope to blog again someday soon but, I'll have to sell my computer to pay for my plane ticket so who knows when that day will be.

With fondest memories from all of us at LABLOGitude to you. Keep flushing. ..