No martinis allowed

If anyone was planning to pack a martini shaker in your backpack for your next hike in Topanga State Park, I just want to break the news to you that martinis, like dogs, aren't allowed.

Buying artwork

This is an original acrylic painting. It's small - about 10 inches square. It's by a Filipino painter named Banang - I don't have his full name - and it's titled "Leaves." I bought it in 1990, at a small community art show, for $75.00.

And I didn't really have $75.00 to spare, exactly.

But I had to have it. I bought it, and I was very apologetic when I called [The Man I Love] and told him I'd written a check. We were a little tight for grocery money that week.

Twelve years later, I saw a watercolor that an artist friend had done. Without thinking, I said, "Rick, what would you sell me that for?" He named a price, I gave him a check. It was for a lot more than my "Leaves" painting.

But it was the same thing. I saw the work, my heart leapt, I had to have it. It made perfectly good sense to me.

When I bought my painting, my gut was telling me that owning that little 10" x 10" square of beauty and seeing its colors every day was worth taking peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches to work for lunch for a month.

Our home has other nice pieces of artwork. Some were chosen by me, others were chosen by [The Man I Love]. But it's only certain pieces that made us stretch, yearn, push, and take a risk to have.

And it's funny how those are the ones we treasure the most.

Now, I actually know people today who you would call "Art Collectors" for real, who own valuable pieces by artists whose names everybody recognizes. And when you read interviews with these people, they invariably say "I buy what I love" - not that they buy as an investment.

Do you suppose that even these collectors experience the same thing I did? Did that $3 million dollar Damien Hirst stretch the family budget? Did they have to cut back to accommodate an impulse buy?

Do you buy artwork? How does it feel when you recognize that special piece, the one you simply HAVE to have?

Three Things to check out - September 15 - 21, 2008

1) If you haven't already checked out the L.A. Conservancy Tours, check one out today. Any Saturday, you can go on a tour of Broadway's Historic Theatre District, the Downtown Historic Core. Other tours are on certain Saturdays of each month. So check it out. Our three monkeys photo today? Well, if you take the Historic Theatre District tour, you might just see where this came from.

2) Saturday, September 13 marks the opening Gala of the Los Angeles World Festival of Sacred Music. This festival, which began in 1999 and continues in 2008, runs through September 28 in multiple venues around Los Angeles. It is founded on the belief that sacred music has the ability to bring forth our shared human values of peace, understanding, and respect for all living things. Go the website, check out the many events all over our community, and enjoy then with people you love.

3) In addition to LACMA, the La Brea Tar Pits, the Geroge C. Page Museum and the Peterson Automotive Museum, L.A.'s Museum Row is the home of the Craft and Folk Art Museum. This little museum evolved from a small craft shop, as one woman's celebration of indigenous art, international crafts, and art made by everyday people. An exhibit on printmaking, titled "Identity: Unlimited Editions" opens this weekend - attend the opening reception on Saturday night, or the public opening Sunday.

A hidden L.A. treasure

Today we had to run an errand in Koreatown. It was about 5 pm, and we'd slogged through some horrific traffic, successfully completed our mission, and we were hungry.

Just across the street from the site of the vanished Ambassador Hotel, is a brick apartment house called The Windsor, built in the 1920s and designed to give an impression of dignified distinction - all decorative brickwork, carved pediments, and limestone quoins. There are many such apartment houses in this neighborhood, and they all have dignified names like the Gaylord or Regency - those names often appear on rooftop signs that were once lit up in their heyday.

On the ground floor is a place called The Prince. I'd heard about it from a friend, who said it was a great "dive" bar with food. Why not give it a try?

Once through the door you walk down a few steps into the dining room - which surprises you with its ambiance and decor. The impression is RED, DARK, and veddy, veddy British.

Wow. Half-moon booths are upholstered with red leather. Fancy paintings hang on the wall beneath museum lights. Flocked red velvet wall-paper like a brothel in a movie. Dark wooden wainscoting. And there are these crazy red-shaded lamps that are little statues of British redcoat soldiers!

When we were there, it was pretty empty - who goes to bars at 6:00 anyway? There was a group at a table in the back room and two businessmen at a table off to the side. As our eyes got used to the dimness, we could see it was a little shabby, a little worn, the carpet scuffed. The waitresses chatted in Korean while they set candles on tables and sliced lemon wedges at the bar. A flat-screen TV hung over the large horseshoe-shaped bar showed a baseball game, and '70's rock played on the PA.

My friend tried to order a martini, but they didn't seem to understand what he wanted. So we ordered a big bottle of Korean beer to share and tried to decide what to eat. The menu had two pages of exotic offerings listed first in Korean and then in wildly, comically misspelled English. I mean - "ping intestine?" Really?

The beer came, along with a bowl of tortilla chips and salsa - Yes, chips and salsa. And really good fresh-tasting salsa.

We ordered some fried dumplings, and a dish of kim chee with spicy pork and tofu. The kim chee was spicy but the wedges of tofu were a perfect foil against the heat. The waitress also brought a complimentary plate with a kind of fried pancake with bits of green scallion - it was delicious!

On the left is the pork and kim chee, surrounded with wedges of tofu. Above are the dumplings, and to the right the pancake. It was abundant and delicious! We had so much food we brought it home.

When I came home, I checked out The Prince online and learned that it had started as the Windsor Inn, the restaurant for the original apartment hotel. In the '40s it became the Windsor House restaurant, one of the finest restaurants in Los Angeles. It served dishes like Chicken Kiev and Steak Diane. Its waiters dressed in tuxedos, and President Nixon had dined there. The mid-Wilshire neighborhood was considered quite elegant in those days, with the famous Brown Derby restaurant nearby and the Coconut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel.

The interior was even used as a location for films, including "Chinatown" and "Thank You for Smoking."

After the Windsor House was sold in 1991, the new owners changed the menu to feature Korean food, but left the decor unchanged. Its quirky juxtaposition of Korean food, music, and culture on a 1940's American version of a British pub attracts a diverse crowd, including neighborhood regulars, Korean businessmen, and trendy hipsters. I can certainly imagine the scene here around midnight! The bar is known for its popular soju drinks, and a generous pour with the whiskey and tequila bottles, while the kitchen is known for its spicy fried chicken and exotic menu offerings like silkworms and bugs.

People often say that L.A. doesn't preserve its history. And while the empty site of the Ambassador Hotel testifies to that, L.A. is full of secret treasures where history survives - in some very peculiar fashions. The Prince once provided a British club atmosphere where middle class apartment dwellers could feel like gentry. Now it hosts Asian college kids drinking soju martinis and eating kim chee, and trendy hipsters soaking up the noir coolness. This is what I love about L.A. - the distinctive layers each generation and community leaves on the city.

If you're looking for a touch of wacky elegance, L.A. noir, and great Korean food, check out The Prince. It's at the corner of 7th and Catalina, in Koreatown.

And dig those crazy redcoat lamps!!

Fish Tale

I had very high hopes for the new goldfish in our pond, but one morning last week, I went out and discovered two dead fish floating on top of the water. And I couldn't see any trace of the remaining members of the dozen we bought last weekend. Oh, no!

Apparently, topping up the water level and replacing the fountain pump weren't enough. So I researched and read what I could. I learned that over time, a poorly maintained pond, can have nitrites build up in the water, and the PH factor of the water changes, and it becomes a toxic environment for fish. Experts advise testing the water, using an oxygen pump to keep the water aerated, and periodically draining the pond by at least 2/3rds, cleaning out the muck and refilling it.

Now you'd think I would have known this. It only makes sense. Create a closed environment like an artificial pond, and you have to perform preventive maintenance. But I'm lazy and optimistic - and in denial - so I managed to create my own version of the Dead Zone. Victimizing my poor defenseless goldfish. I am a horrible person.

Today I decided to drain the pond and clean out all the muck. Then we'd refill it, let the water sit for a couple of days, and test it with a kit. Then we would replace the fish.

So I found a piece of short garden hose and used it and the fountain pump to drain the pond.

I reached in and started hauling out trailing roots of water plants that had outgrown their original pots and rooted in the mucky bottom.

As the water level went down, it revealed all the old plant pots - I hauled them out and let them drain. Oh, rotten dead iris rhizomes! Gah! Horror show!

Did you know that water-plant potting soil is composed mostly of clay, to keep it from drifting out of the pot? Did you know how heavy that clay can get, soaked with water?

I cleared out the horrible rotting corpses of old irises, and trimmed the rhizome of a iris survivor, replanting it in the pot. I carefully replaced the pot in the pond.

The water level went down and down and down. Soon I was able to reach the bottom, and haul out slimy, stinking mats of decomposed plant material. Some of it had quite alarmingly vigorous white roots growing into it.

It was not fun, reaching into murky water with your bare hands, pulling up slimy stuff. Did you know that a dead fish is exactly the shape and size of a rotted water-lily bud? Now I do!

I also managed to abruptly sit down right in a blob of nasty clay mud, while trying to pull up some tenaciously rooted thing.

I mucked and mucked, and periodically waited for the murky water to subside and clear so I could see what I was doing. And then - guess what?

Look - can you see them? Live fish! There were seven of them! They clustered together, like schoolchildren. They had survived, after all!

OK, now, change of plans. Don't drain the pond completely, just drain 3/4s of the water. Muck it out, and slowly refill it so the fish get clean water. Put the pump back on the fountain, so the water is aerated.

I trimmed and cleaned out the dead bits of the tropical water lily, the papyrus reed, the salvaged iris, and the red-stem thalia, hoping that they will revitalize.

Cross your fingers. Wish my little fishes good luck!

Pink Saturday - Community Garden

Beverly at the blog How Sweet the Sound has a great idea! It's Pink Saturday. Post about something pink, on Saturday. Here are the rules if you want to Get Pink!


If you stroll along Main Street in the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica, you'll come to a large open space - an entire city block - brimming with flowers behind a chain link fence. These pink hollyhocks were blooming here starting in June this summer.

Did you grow hollyhocks as a kid? My mother did. She taught me how to pick the flower and turn it upside down and make a little lady, wearing a long dress!

This is the Santa Monica Community Garden. Thriving in this spot since 1976, it has 65 individual garden plots for residents to use.

What I love about it is the absolute wild riot of plants that thrive. There are vegetable plots among the flowers, but it's the flowers that catch your eye as you walk by. The hollyhocks are the most striking and impressive plants, but there are also lush rose bushes; plots full of cosmos; huge vigorous shrubs of brugmansia, or "Angel's Trumpet", with their large bell-shaped flowers drooping down behind the chain link fence. Oh, and do "Angel's Trumpets" come in pink? Yes, they do indeed!

This garden is truly a beautiful oasis in the heart of the city. It's the perfect place for a stroll on Pink Saturday. C'mon down, and enjoy!

New Look - September

I got so busy I forgot to change the look of the blog this month. Here are some wonderful pictures of vegetables at one of Southern California's Farmers' Markets. Just in time for the fall harvest.

Moomat Ahiko

This is a sign I see every day on my daily commute. Moomat Ahiko. It's just this little access road in Santa Monica that leads from Ocean Avenue to Pacific Coast Highway.

You know how it is. First you learn the route. Then you repeat it. Then you sit in traffic and see the same things, day after day. Every day I sit at a red light, waiting to turn onto Moomat Ahiko Way.

So...you start wondering. What the heck does Moomat Ahiko mean? Where'd it come from?

I first wondered if it was named after someone. So many streets are named after people, or named by real estate developers for people they care about. Was Moomat Ahiko a citizen of Santa Monica who deserved this honor?

If so, who was Moomat Ahiko, anyway? "Ahiko" almost sounds like a Japanese name, but "Moomat" sounds as if it were Persian, maybe, or Middle Eastern. Was Moomat Ahiko a distinguished citizen of Santa Monica who happened to be of Persian-Japanese descent?

The canny commuter carries a pad of Post-It notes in her car. I jotted down my thoughts until the light changed, and then at home I Googled Moomat Ahiko.

Turns out this little access road was named "Moomat Ahiko Way" by vote of the Santa Monica City Council on March 9, 2004, chosen from ninety-seven suggestions submitted by citizens. The phrase means "Breath of the Ocean" in the Tongva language - the language of the native inhabitants of the place that became Santa Monica.

And one certainly does get a breath of the ocean while stopped at the traffic light, just south of the Pier, waiting to turn and merge with the traffic on Pacific Coast Highway. If you roll your windows down, at least.

What new and fascinating facts are there for you to discover, on your daily commute?

Ugly T-shirt

I have a lot of T-shirts. I used to get a lot of freebies in my previous line of work, so the idea of actually paying for a T-shirt is a little weird to me.

A lot of my T-shirts are from concerts, shows, or events I've worked. I had a great collection of '70s and '80s vintage shirts from rock and roll tours like Journey, Earth Wind and Fire, Aerosmith, Springsteen....the list goes on.

I have some that are beautifully designed - almost collectors' items - from arts events, and others from blatantly commercial events.

Because free T-shirts tend to be given out in XL size, they make good nightshirts. Also, some are so offensive that the best use you can make of them is to use them as car wash rags. The one I got for running a spotlight on Spinal Tap's "Smell the Glove" tour is a memorable example. Others are just quirky-ugly, almost like an In-Joke.

What's the ugliest T-shirt you have? Here's mine:

Yep. 1994, and it's still in my wardrobe. This is the shirt they gave out to working staff. I remember we all went "Huh?" when we saw it.

Post a picture of your ugliest T-shirt!