Exhibitionists

Last month, I'd rushed downtown for one of the last days of the Beatles exhibit at the Grammy Museum. I hadn't been to the Grammy Museum before, and it was pleasant, and the Beatles show was small but interesting.

Well, this time, I raced down the first weekend the new exhibit was open, because it was the Ramones show—previously at the Queens Museum, where it had been crowded.

Almost no one was at the Grammy Museum the Sunday afternoon I went, which disappointed me, but this is LA, not New York. I'm reminded of this frequently. Every time I miss home, I'm reminded of this, though I know the NYC that spawned the Ramones has vanished. Hell, the NYC that spat out adult Marie on Avenue B is gone. The original Ramones themselves are even gone. Even the bar Joey Ramone's brother tended bar at is gone, and has been for years.

I don't know how many times I saw the Ramones. I only remember the first time, at Washington DC's Wax Museum with...my sister? The other Marie? Someone in spiked heels stepped on my foot, which is how I learned to avoid mosh pits.

Even then, we were too young, too late. We had only the vaguest sense of what might be going on four hours north of us.

Batman Day

Why? What do YOU wear on Batman Day?

Can You Tell Me How To Get To...

...Jersey City?

I was home for a week in early September, usually the best time of year to be in town, but this year, it was humid, hot, and miserable, with record-breaking temperatures for this time of year.

Still, on the mornings I stayed overnight in the mother-in-law suite of my own house, I'd walk over to Grind, the delicious coffee shop on Communipaw. And pass this row of houses.

As long as I've lived in JC—on and off since February of 1988—I've coveted these beautiful brownstones near Liberty State Park. I might even have been able to afford one if I'd bought back then.

But I'd never have managed the renovations. I can barely handle my current house, half the size of one of these.

Hope

This guy's name is everywhere in this part of the world. My office is near Bob Hope Drive. My house is near Bob Hope Square. His star on Hollywood Boulevard is around the corner from my house. 

It's weird to think how funny the Road to movies were when I was a kid, and they were old news then. Today's kids and so-called Millenials haven't even heard of them. Or him, even, I bet. Heck, they even changed the name of the airport that bore his name. Which is a shame. The last thing Burbank needs is a bit of updating and modernizing.

By Day

By day, she's a mild-mannered comic book editor.

Or not so mild.

The Final Cutting Board Project

Do you remember when I went over to the late, great 3rd Ward to make a cutting board? 

I speculated I'd put off sanding and oiling for a year. Well, it was three years, and in the end, I didn't even do it. BBF carried it downstairs to his basement shop and finished it up there, fixing my inept router work while he sanded.

My cutting board showed up in the mail one day here in Hollywood. The raw wood slurped up the oil quickly, and I had to run off to Home Depot for more food-safe oil. The results are so beautiful I barely want to cut on my cutting board.

"Come home and we'll have a woodshop," BBF taunts me from Jersey City.

Not yet. Still lots of comic book work to be done in Burbank.

Skills for the Coming Apocalypse

I'm not sure what was behind my current zeal to learn new things and get out of the house. It might've been how much BBF and I had seen over the Catalina weekend. It might've been the Groupon I'd bought for the electric bicycles simply reminding me to dig around for options. Or maybe it's just the knowledge that I need to do more than go to work all the time.

I'd signed up through Groupon for a soap-making class at at place called Sankofa Soap Studio, and on a Saturday afternoon, caught the La Brea bus south to a little house, where six of us put on eye protection, masks, gloves, and began mixing things in the instructor's small living room.

Oil, distilled water, scent (I chose something called dragon's blood)...and the reason for the caution, lye. The key to the process was the little digital scale and precision. And not splashing ourselves with lye. Terrifying, but watching components turn into soap was fascinating and fun. We were all pretty thrilled with the results.

We were a little less thrilled when we realized we had to return once the soap had set in the molds. Not only do I have a desire for instant gratification, but I work late every night and getting to mid-LA on a weeknight wasn't going to be easy. Still, on leaving the class, I was pretty jazzed.

Three days later, I left work five minutes early, caught the Burbank Bus to North Hollywood metro, switched to the Red Line to the Purple Line to Wilshire/Western, and caught the Big Blue Bus R7 to Rimpau. I walked four blocks to the Longwood, and picked up my block of soap. The instructor took time out from cooking her fish dinner to help me cut the loaf with a serrated knife. I walked to the La Brea bus to Hollywood, delighted with my new soap I'm allergic to.

That's right. I react to oil-based products. So here I was, carrying 7 bars of soap I couldn't use. But making soap was fun and trying something new is always a great way to spend a day.

A Short Trip to Pseudo-Denmark

Publishing traditionally has short Fridays in the summer. Of course, we'd lost that at Marvel during the bankruptcies, and my current company isn't strictly a publishing endeavor now that we moved to Burbank, but miraculously, this tradition moved with us.

Unfortunately, working in a deadline industry means you can't really take this benefit, but I did manage to take two short Fridays over the summer of 2016.

One was for the trip down to Catalina when BBF was in town. The other was so I could head up to Solvang and Santa Barbara for a night.

Solvang is a somewhat goofy tourist trap with a Danish theme. I'd heard mixed reviews, but was still curious. At least, it reputedly had a good bookstore, so why not check it out?

I took a Lyft up to the Burbank Amtrak station, which is next to the airport. My phone decided to spazz right when I was ordering the Lyft, and I nearly missed the Amtrak, but fortunately, the train was a few minutes late.

I ordered some Amtrak microwave special for lunch, which discouraged people from sitting next to me as the train sped west to the coast. I watched out the window with curiosity--these towns were all places I could live and commute to work from. Chatsworth...Moorpark...Oxnard. 

Eventually, the train halted in Santa Barbara, where I transferred to an Amtrak-chartered bus for another hour or so up to Solvang. We passed billowing smoke from a huge fire and I thought about one of the women from work taking yesterday off to rescue animals with her truck. A donkey had died. She hadn't taken it well, but who would?

The bus pulled up in Solvang in the town center, and I rushed over to the town mission, which closed in a half-hour. I needn't have worried. One benefit of traveling alone is speed. I was through the mission in 20 minutes.

My concern with Solvang was its early closing time, so I delayed checking into the hotel until I'd walked down every block I found and gone into every open store. I stopped for a coffee at a Danish cafe.

Solvang reminded me of Swakopmund, Namibia, in that way where Swakop is more German than Germany--it's stuck in time a bit, affected by the notion of how things SHOULD look rather than evolving the way a European city would. The kitschy factor was pretty funny, with windmills (um, isn't that more Dutch) and clogs and the little mermaid. The bookstore housed a genuinely interesting Hans Christian Andersen exhibit.

I can't say I was ready to stay a week. In fact, I was pretty well done with Solvang by the time I finally collapsed into my hotel room at twilight.

Which was why Saturday morning was so amusing. I went to catch the local bus to Santa Barbara, along with four others, and it simply never showed up. We called numbers, spoke to people. No one could explain why the bus never materialized, though we did receive quite a few apologies. I had four extra hours to wander the streets of Solvang before the Amtrak bus finally showed--I bought a ticket to one stop past Santa Barbara, since riding the bus without the train transfer is forbidden.

And I wandered State Street in downtown Santa Barbara for around four hours, before collapsing onto the Amtrak in exhaustion.

One bit of good fortune though--the Amtrak was running quite late, which put me back at the Burbank airport exactly when the bus to Hollywood showed up. Otherwise, I'd have had to go to Union Station and backtrack on the Red Line.

I won't be heading back to Solvang, Santa Barbara, or any of the train stops along the way anytime soon, but I'm pretty pleased with amount of touristing I got through this summer.

Excuse to Go Somewhere New

from Google Maps

I'd bought a Groupon for a pattern-making workshop. Or maybe it was a CourseHorse. Or a LivingSocial. Who can keep track?

I left work on time for the bus to the Red Line, took it to Pershing Square, and caught another bus all the way to the eastern edge of DTLA, past the tents of Skid Row. The sewing workshop was on a higher floor of an old factory, all very industrial.

The actual class itself was a bit hopeless--it was the instructor's first time teaching the class, and the structure was to basically write down everything she said to write down as she measured a dummy, then cut out the shape we'd written down. I can't say I took away any info of value.

But I took away this. There are people making things in industrial nooks and crannies on the edge of the Arts District. It's the same part of town I went to in November, when I went to the gallery where Daniel J was performing.

Night had fallen when I left the blocky old building, and I walked with a bit of skittishness to the nearest bus stop that looked useful. A mentally ill woman sat there, then she wasn't sitting, she was kind-of grinding, dancing as if she were performing at a strip club. She stopped to take a drag from a cigarette, or to glare at me occasionally, but other people waited for the bus too, so I didn't feel under pressure to leave.

I didn't learn a damn thing about pattern-making, but I enjoyed doing something completely unlike anything I normally do in Los Angeles County.

WPA Post Office on an August Evening

Late summer, my local post office in early evening.