Another Full Day in LA

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This is the fourth post in a series; fifth if you count the prologue. You really should read them in order, so click on this link for the Prologue or on this link for Part One. And if you want to see all the pictures from this trip, click here. 

Friday in Los Angeles

 Friday began with a hunt for an ATM, which really wasn't all that hard to find, it was just hard to get to, because of all the "no left turns" and "no stopping" and "no parking" in the part of town we're in; although since finding one (right down the street about half a mile away) we've passed maybe twenty branches of my bank, and they all have ATMs. Though I've yet to see a drive-up ATM.

 We were looking for a cafe I'd been to a few years ago for breakfast, but we didn't get that far before we spotted a place called Continental Kitchen that looked as good. It actually turned out to be better, and we sat outside on the patio in the marvelous Southern California weather for probably two hours in full-relax mode.

 We had all kinds of things planned for the day, but we never got to them. Instead, the first thing we did took us all day and we haven't finished with it. Or at least I haven't; I'm not sure if Hank has.

The prop horse head from The Godfather

 That was our visit to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Wilshire. The ground floor is just the gift shop, a bar and two restaurants, which took us not much time at all. (An example of the gift shop: I saw a book I thought about buying for $23, but before I did I looked on Amazon and found I could get it for $9. I didn't buy it.) Above the ground floor are three floors of exhibits. I managed to see one of them in the hours before lunch, which we ate at the bar while discussing what we had seen. While Hank had, apparently, zoomed through the second floor without seeing anything, and had gone through the third and fourth floors at his pace, I had spent that same amount of time just on the second floor, where I saw a fascinating exhibit on the Godfather movies; a film called "Image" that presented short exposés on the work of cinematographers, lighting directors, costumers, model-makers and other professions that are involved in the visual realization of a film-maker's ideas; and a film called "Sound" that showed, using the opening scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, how a soundtrack is created. They were fascinating. I also saw an extensive exhibit on costumes, and a presentation about Oscar winners over the years, which included a number of selected acceptance speeches from history.

 After lunch I went on to the third floor, to see an exhibit called "Hollywoodland" about the Jews who mostly came to Los Angeles to escape Thomas Edison's monopoly claims, and ended up starting most of the major studios between 1905 and 1929. It included a film about their background and their understanding of their roles in the film industry, and while I don't necessarily agree with their view as presented, I think I understand their positions a little better.

 There was also an exhibit about the work of Pedro Almodovár, and behind that, a large room on animation in film; then one about science-fiction film, including special effects and alien make-up. I spent the entire afternoon on that floor and never got to the fourth. Henry, meanwhile, went back to the second floor to see all the exhibits he'd missed after I told him about them; and over dinner I told him about all the exhibits on the third floor that he'd missed. 

 We drove out to Griffith Observatory -- or tried to; there was something going on up there and the police wouldn't let us get to it. So instead we went for dinner to Canter's Deli, which is a place Hank had heard of and wanted to go to. It's on Fairfax, near Television City, and when we got there I realized it was a place I'd eaten last time I was here. Certainly didn't mind eating there again. I had something called The Spicy -- I forget now what that was, but I remember it was good -- and for dessert, Russian coffee cake, a sort of apple cake with vanilla ice cream. Excellent.

 After that, we just cruised through Westwood a little and then went back to the hotel, as we were both barely functional by that point. We had a drink at the bar in the lobby but I couldn't finish mine and just went upstairs. Hank came up soon after.

One Full Day

If you want to be notified of postings on this blog, send me an email at passepartout22@gmail.com and I'll have this platform send you an invitation to subscribe.

This is the third post in a series; fourth if you count the prologue. You really should read them in order, so click on this link for the Prologue or on this link for Part One. And if you want to see all the pictures from this trip, click here. 

Thursday in Los Angeles

 I woke up at about 4AM on Friday morning and realized that I suddenly possessed at complete understanding of the craft of computer coding; that any of the little issues I observed in this, Hank and my first travel experience together, could be solved by simply correcting errors in the coding that created us. We are just characters running in some kind of gigantic complex simulation and yada yada yada

 Then I realized that I could scale up this vast knowledge and expertise I had found within myself, to solve greater problems in the world. I seem to recall it had something to do with the Israel-Hamas war -- this is about where I start forgetting dreams -- and Cheeto Jesus and I was in the middle of composing my Nobel acceptance speech when I drifted back to sleep; and when I woke up again to the cold, grey light of day (because it's dawned cloudy here in Los Angeles) I felt the suspicion that I might not, after all, be awarded a prize for ... well, pretty much anything.

 I've known Hank for more than thirty years now, and we've been good friends for basically all that time. Well, you know, it's easier when you live in separate cities and go for months without exchanging so much as a text greeting, and years without seeing each other. I actually have a lot of acquaintances that I could call friends just on the basis of my relationship with Hank, except that in most of the other cases, I don't have the same good feelings about the other people. I like Hank in a way I don't feel drawn to some of the other relationships that fit the same description. And I think he feels much the same way. Or maybe he's a better actor than I give him credit for. Whatever.

 So this is Hank's first time in L.A., and he's been looking forward to this trip for some time. I have to keep reminding myself how important this long weekend is to him, because his desire to experience the area is a little more spare-no-expense than I can muster; I have, I guess, too many years as a practicing pennypincher to just let go without qualms.

 For example, when we were talking about making this trip, Hank said he wanted to stay in an "iconic" hotel. I pictured in my mind the Beverly Hills Hotel or Chateau Marmont, with their five-hundred-dollars a night rooms, and was so relieved when he said he'd reserved a room in the Beverly Hilton, at less than half that imaginary (though very conservative) rate. In fact, I think I'm using Hank's excited desire to do things like this to conceal my own desires in the same regard: I, too, want to have a spare-no-expense guy's weekend in the Big City, but I don't want to say it out loud. 

downtown LA from our balcony

 So: Thursday. Long day. Fun. But since I've already brought up the hotel, let me start by describing that. It is, as Hank particularly wanted, an iconic hotel. Built in 1955 and often updated, it's had glamourous associations with the film and television industry for its whole existence. It is a nice place, though as often happens with upscale things, there's a certain amount of self-doubting silliness mixed in with its confident display of luxury and comfort. The room isn't large; I have to walk sideways to get into bed. But it is very comfortable and quiet. The best feature is the balcony, where I began writing this. It stretches the full width of the room, with space enough for maybe twenty people to watch a Mardi Gras parade, if one could be induced to pass by. The entire outer wall of the room is double paned glass, in four panels, two of which are huge sliding doors. The double-paned part is important, because another building is going up next door. At the moment, I can see 11 heavy construction machines of the sort my niece gets excited about hard at work destroying whatever was in that space before; but if I go inside, I can barely hear anything.

 The bathroom is relatively large; so large, and so lacking in certain amenities, that when I took a shower I had to lay my towel on the edge of the tub, between the two parts of the shower curtain, because there are not enough hooks and towel bars in the room, and none within reach of the tub, but waaaay over there on the far wall, which let's call Thule. When I pushed the curtain back after my shower, it nearly took the towel with it, into the tub. Not good. There's also a bidet handle attached to the toilet, so this will be my chance to figure out how that works, maybe, though I've never seen one like the one here. Just thinking about it puts me in mind of the Clampett family. And in fact, having looked it over more closely and considered the unlikelihood of my being able to levitate in a seated position over the toilet bowl, along with the effect of gravity on water should I stand to use it, I'm not at all sure that it is meant to be used by normal humans. 

 Now, circling back and progressing in a more orderly chronological style, let me tell you about our first day in LA. 

 I found my cheap Lawndale motel a lot less comfortable in every way than the Beverly Hilton, but wasn't dissatisfied with it. I left there early enough to get breakfast -- oatmeal and fresh fruit at a local chain called the Loaded Cafe -- and get to the airport on a schedule I'd constructed without considering the fickleness of Google Maps. It got me to the vicinity of the airport and then told me "Take the ramp on the right." There were three ramps. I managed to control my anxiety level and selected the second ramp, which I thought looked the likeliest; it turned out to be the wrong one. The Google Maps lady said "Turn left," but there was too much traffic in the intervening two lanes to make a left turn forty feet ahead. Eventually, after she rerouted me five or six times, I pulled up to the cellphone waiting lot. Hank called and said he was at Terminal 7; Google Maps said Terminal 7 was either in Chicago or New York, and after some back and forth during which Hank described the signage around him, I went to the arrivals area and found him. I'll gloss over the trivial intervening anxiety-laden moments in between his call and his collection. Suffice it to say we stayed in phone contact until we actually laid eyes on each other, and described a lot of the physical features of LAX to each other.

 I topped off the gas tank at the first station we came to and we went off to start our Guys' Weekend in the Big City. Don't get any dirty ideas; neither of us is that sort of guy. I might've been so inclined when I was younger (much younger), but if Hank has the slightest inclination in that direction I'd be very surprised. Probably only his priest knows for sure, but I'm betting a second cocktail at the office Christmas party is about as wild as Hank ever gets. We may have different motivations -- I'm old and tired, he's content within his own skin I think -- but it comes to the same thing. 

Point Vicente lighthouse

 We drove all the way down the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Point Vicente Lighthouse, where we could look out across the channel to the offshore islands. The houses, the landscaping, the roads: it was all beautiful. Neither of us had seen it before. We watched the pounding surf and waited for the cliffs along the shore to crumble into the sea, but nothing happened for a while so we got back in the car and drove around to the harbor, where I got a quick shot of the USS Iowa (and now I've seen all four the the Iowa-class battleships from World War II, so there's that off my bucket list. My bucket list is a dull thing.) before going across two high new Harbor Bridges toward the Queen Mary. (I'll skip over the confusion caused by GMaps' vague instructions.)

 The Queen Mary was our real destination for the day. As boys, both Hank and I were fascinated by ocean liners, the huge ships that even then were all but extinct, the stegosaurs of transatlantic transportation. I had worked out my boyish giddiness at seeing this ship twenty-five years ago, on my first visit; Hank got his out of the way on this occasion. We spent a pretty good stretch of time on board, including a very nice lunch in the Promenade Cafe. Late in our visit my knee suddenly started hurting, something that hasn't happened in quite a while, despite the walking and hiking I've been putting it through the last few weeks. Not the grinding pain of my arthritis (though I haven't felt that either) but the sharp unpredictable pain of having turned it somehow. It came and went for an hour or two and hasn't recurred since, but it was enough to get me to go wait at the car while Hank checked out the engine room at the tail-end of our visit.

 After that, we drove up to Beverly Hills and checked into our hotel.

 Hank insisted on taking an Uber to the restaurant because of the traffic (40 minutes to go six miles) and his concern about being able to park there. I wanted to argue: it was too expensive a ride, I like to drive, we could see more in the Jag than in an Uber. But because my crystal ball has a big crack in it, I didn't try the two arguments that might have won the point: that I knew more about the landmarks along the way than our LA-native Uber driver, and that if we had our own car there, it wouldn't take us more than an hour just to get a ride back to the hotel in the middle of the night. Well, who knew.

 Dinner was at Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, now the oldest restaurant in the city, and one where somewhat-famous people might be spotted in the wild. (They also haven't changed their menu since 1915, so it may now be the only place in town where you can still get calf brains and lamb kidneys.) I'm pretty certain I saw the guy who played Tim Allen's mentor and business partner on Last Man Standing, but I don't remember his name. And the guy across the aisle from us looked more and more familiar as the evening went on, but again, I don't know his name. He just looked like somebody I'd seen on TV.

 (A little later, Nicole Kidman arrived at the Egyptian Theater for a movie premiere, and I got a picture, but I can't see her in it. Still, you know, it was a little exciting. Or it would have been if we'd known she was in the movie, but we didn't know a thing about it. I only took the photo from across the street because people screeched when she got there; I didn't know who they were screeching at; I thought I heard someone call out the name "Kelly.")

 We continued to haemorrhage cash by buying tickets to see a movie in the iconic Grauman's Chinese Theater's main auditorium. It turned out to be a preview of an animated movie that opened the next day, Inside Out 2. Hank and I took turns waking each other up. But it's a beautiful theater, and he gets to cross one more thing off his bucket list. (I also bought a souvenir sweatshirt because, you know, it gets cold in LA when the sun goes down. And I tried to buy tickets to a Fringe Festival stage play on Saturday, but it appears I set up a profile on their web site in 2016, and now I don't know the password.)

 The evening finally came to an end after a shockingly expensive drink at the Library Bar in the Roosevelt Hotel (the iconic Roosevelt Hotel; that's important to my shredded sense of value, which I hope will not be so further strained on this trip). Hank's phone battery had died, and apparently you now have to have the app to get an Uber. The bartender didn't have a charger for his phone, so I said we could just get the hotel to call us a taxi. Turns out not to be that simple anymore, now that everybody's got technology to screw things up.

 Over the course of the last hour and a half of our evening, the valets at the Roosevelt arranged for our transportation, God bless 'em all, with four cab companies. Two never showed up. One showed up, at the other end of the building despite clear instructions, and left because we weren't there. The head valet also had one of his guys go out onto Hollywood Boulevard and flag down a cab in the old fashioned way, but that guy never found his way around the corner to the valet entrance, where we were waiting. Well, eventually one of the cab companies came through and the ride back to the hotel went off without a hitch after that. (And it only cost about half what the Uber ride had cost.)