Hark ! Who Goes There ?

I was just thinking that November will be upon us a lot sooner than we think it will be, and that I had better get cracking with planning a proper itineray for y’all when you come visit moi in Caliphornia.

Two days is not a whole lot of time for L.A., but I am determined to jam as much L.A.-ness into those two days as I possibly can so that it will feel like you  actually were able to experience the place, but not so much that you’ll be twitching and feeling as though you’ve been violated in some manner.    

The first day of course, you will be treated to my infamous driving tour!  Hee.  I will try to incorporate all the major stuff in this introductory tour of the City of Angels.  That includes the film studios, landmarks, and various other things worthy of attention.     

The city is quite large and quite spread out.   We’ll be spending a lot of time in a car.   Let’s be phrank:  The traffic BLOWS.  But that’s part of the charm of L.A., I guess!

Because of the nature of traffic and so on, it’s usually best to tackle one part of the city at a time.   So, I’ve put together a pretty random break-down of the neighborhoods and some of the spots worthy of a look in each. 

This will come together piecemeal though, because I’m not the best organizer and I’m fairly certain that I’ll keep adding stuff to this page up until the day you guys arrive.   I’m also pretty sure this page will be re-arranged, spliced etc.  So check bak, hey?

So far, I’ve got this compiled.   Please forgive me if it’s all scatty and shiz.  

 

Neighborhoods:

Hollywood:  The Walk of Fame is actually a tad bit lame.  It’s never bored me, though, because I’m way into Old Hollywood.  Mostly it’s dingy tourist shops (which have their charm, I suppose!) selling Marilyn Monroe memorabilia (a lot of it very stoopid), various celebrity trash (all of it severely stoooooopid) and such novelties as cups with penis handles (gross!).  

Typically, whenever I went to Hollywood I did two things:   1) Poured libations on the spot at Mann’s Chinese Theater where Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell placed their hand and foot prints in the cement and 2) Laughed at the people walking around in Super Hero costumes.   They work for a costume shop, it’s hilarity.

There’s also the plain and simple fact that there’s a certain feeling you get in Hollywood that you can’t get anywhere else on earth.  It’s not aterribly beautiful place, but it’s got a neat, dirty vibe.  Enough about that.

I usually park near the Kodak Theater (where the Oscar’s are held), and spend about an hour and half mucking about the souvenir shops and surveying the hordes of tourists.   There’s a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf here that I usually go to; it’s yummy.    

There are some really sort of adorable houses and apartment buildings around here that we’ll just drive by. 

* There’s also a Hollywood Heritage Museum.   It’s mostly to do with Silent Films.   May be cool, though?  http://hollywoodheritage.org

Hancock Park:  I’m going to live here one day.   Okay, perhaps not!  I enjoy looking at all the gorgeous houses.   There’s also the infamously hideous “David House” where some dude has like hell of statues of Michelangelo’s David lining his driveway behind a massive white-iron byzantine gate.   I love it for reals, and if he ever takes them down or moves and someone else takes them down, I’m going to drown in a pool of my own tears.  But more on that later.

Robertson Avenue/Melrose Avenue:

Robertson is famewhore central.   Therefore, we’ll just whiz by in the automobile…  Melrose Avenue may be fun to amble about on foot for a bit, though.  I honestly never found much to do here besides get irritated by how tacky and cheap and expensive the crap here was.  Still, it has its good points!   There is a beautiful view of the Hollywood Hills and the Hollywood Sign.   We can try to drive up to it (as far as allowed) if it’s not rainy.   The houses are cuuuuute here, by the way.  There are cute boys here too (usually).   Shoe stores galore! 

There’s an Urth Caffe here (I think this is where Whorelando exposed his butt crack once, when he was sipping on a smoothie, but I could be wrong).  Pink’s is here!  It’s the world-famous hot dog place.   It’s also delicious.  

I don’t feel like I’m back in L.A. unless I’ve been to Pink’s.   Be prepared to wait upwards of 45 minutes in line.   Totes worth it, though!

Venice Beach: 

Home sweet home.   I don’t want it to be too touristy for you, so I think it may be sort of fun to go visit my old stomping grounds.   I’ll show you my old apartment and neighborhood very briefly, and then depending on the weather,  we can walk the canals,  and maybe rent bikes and take the bike path at Venice Beach for about an hour.   It’s nice riding bikes at the ocean.  

We’ll drive through (or walk) the Abbott-Kinney shopping district (where WhOrelando bought some stank furniture with the dingo in tow),  and I’ll show you where I came thisclose to marrying John F (haahaa!).  There’s a PinkBerry here too, so we can chomp on some Frozen Yogurt.

Santa Monica

Palisades Park is pretty.   It is sitauted on a precipitous cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway.   Nice for views and so on.  If you’ve ever seen that brazilliant film entitled The Truth About Cats and Dogs, this is the place where Janeane Garafalo and Ben Chaplin had some sweet times.   It’s sort of pleasant to spend the early evening here and watch the sunset. 

The Third Street Promenade (a few streets over)  has shops, bookstores, restaurants and so on.     

Malibu/Pacific Palisades/Brentwood

Glorious beach neighborhoods.  Mostly we’ll just drive through and peek at all the pretty houses.   I still haven’t found the approximate site of Raymond Chandler’s house in Brentwood.   I know the street, but I never had the actual address.  I will find it, though.  Trust that.   Found it!  There’s also Marilyn Monroe’s house in this burb.  I know exactly where it is and we shall go to it.  Just because.  I can also show you the street that the Terminator lives on.  Brentwood is also the site of the O.J. Simpson  Situation – icky all around.

Malibu is further north, but not by far.  It’s totes doable.  The Getty Roman Villa is here.  It’s pretty awsome.   They have a bust of Caligula – squee!   We could do the museum in two hours, or we can linger longer.   We don’t have to do it all, if you don’t want to do it, though.

West Hollywood/Fairfax: 

West Hollywood has some of the cutest neighborhoods ever.   There’s also an “Orlando Avenue ” here, and I think it only fitting that the Whorely Trinitas have a picture taken here.  

If we get here in the morning, we may want to have breakfast at a little place called Hugo’s.   There’s also a restaurant called El Coyote you may or may not want to dine at.   The food’s not all that great (or so I’ve heard), but it’s mostly famous because it’s the place the beautiful and unfortunate Sharon Tate had dinner before that really awful thing happened.  It’s also where our Whorelando got scolded by the paps when he tried to leave one of his best friends to marinate in her own blood after he crashed that car in 2007.

The Grove (beautiful view here at night from the parking garage, I kidd you not… the view’s pretty cool during the day too, I guess) is here.   Here is the place the dingo almost threw out her hip at Victoria’s Secret blowing air kisses at a coldly indifferent world.   We’ll have to either re-enact that picture, or toss a cabbage through the front door with a skeletal body stapled to it that will serve as an effigy of her.

The Farmer’s Market is actually sort of connected to the Grove, but it is it’s own thing.  It really is a farmer’s market with stalls of beautiful fruit and veggies, but there are tons of places to eat, and lots of shops.

 The LACMA (my favorite museum) is right around the block from these glorious spots.  It’s a really oustandingly pleasant museum with lovely galleries.   I used to hang out here a lot the first year that I was on my own in L.A., and therefore it will always hold a special place in my heart.  There’s a pavillion for Japanese Art, Antiquities, Modern Art (usually my favorite), and so much much more.   

Admission used to be free after 5pm, and I seriously hope that nothing has freaking changed.

 Next door to the LACMA are the La Brea Tar Pits.   It smells like serious petroleum around here.   But it’s cool!   This is the site where shizloads of prehistoric animals such as mammoth’s and saber-toothed cats were preserved in the tar that is now buried under the pavement.   All of this is on Wilshire Boulevard, by the way.   They call this stretch “Museum Mile”.   They used to call it “Miracle Mile” even though nothing miraculous ever happened here.

 One more thing in this area I want to show you:   Rudolf Schindler’s Buck house!   It used to be my absolute favorite International-Style house.   

Westwood/Bel-Air: 

Home of UCLA.  Go Bruins!  Sorry.  The campus we can walk in about an hour (optional, though).  I also want to show you my very first apartment and some buildings by some architects that I really admire in the neighborhood.

Nearby are Holmby Hills (the home of very rich mother phuckers), Beverly Hills (ditto), and Bel-Air (double-ditto).   We’ll just cruise the neighborhoods via automobile and look at the pretty houses and shiz I think.  

While the Getty Center is technically not in Westwood, it’s very easy to get to it from Westwood which is why I’m including it here.   It’s sort of cute how you have to take a tram up the mountains to get to the museum.   The view is soo cool, too.  All of L.A. is beneath you.   At night, it’s especially fabulous.   

*     Other stuff: 

 

If Daner’s comes, we will totally have to visit some Raymond Chandler spots. There are, of course, places where the lovely man lived that we must see, but also a few places that he just wrote about. This includes Marlowe’s Cahuenga Blvd P.I. office. Hoot! I found a few bona fide addresses for his private addresses, and I am psyched to check them out. Not Chandler related, but did anyone see Sunset Boulevard? If you want, we can take a spin by the apartment Joe Gillis lived in shortly before he moved in with that spooky and delusional vixen, Norma Desmond.

 

Actually, just one. Bruce Lee’s pad. It ain’t posh, neithers. It was a very humble abode that I think he stayed at when he was doing some ho stuff in Culver City. I’m totally kidding about the ‘ho stuff’.

 

I’m sure these are simply sentimental, though. If any of them sound interesting, we’ll do them. If they don’t, we won’t. Y’all are the guests and I want to make sure you see and do the things you would like to see and do. Oh, and just notices that I write and speak in a very redundant manner. So sorries. Uh-huh.

 

It’s just something I chanced upon one night while I was driving. It was my first few months in L.A. as a college student, and one way to alleviate the pressures of both school and a roommate was to take to the automobile quite late in the evening. This was the perfect time for driving in L.A. because the traffic is light. It’s also quite romantic because the streetlight’s were on, and there was nothing else in the world except me, my imagination, and my car radio(it didn’t have NO Cd player! I had the shittiest car ever. But I loved it! It was a Toyota Cressida). It’s also nice because you can peek into peoples’ houses and apartments and see random scenes of life as you drive by. I’m fascinated by people’s lives more than I am about people themselves, if that makes sense.

I’m excellent at veering off-topic. Back to Third Street. In all truthfulness, there’s nothing really happening on this here street. It’s just got a good flow for driving. It passes through a fairly trendy stretch of West Hollywood (and that whore-mecca, Joan’s on Third), but it quickly descends into residential purgatory. This is where I first stumbled across the seductive little monster that I’ve dubbed ‘The David House’. I call it this, because there are like, a whole lot of statues of Michelangelo’s David lining the property. It’s hideous, wonderful, and depraved!

I usually turn off of Third Street at this point, for obvious reasons.

 

 

* I’ll finish the first incarnation of this page hopefully sometime this week.  Gotta go to bed now….

Links I’m too lazy to  insert at this moment in time:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formosa_Cafe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffith_Observatory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westwood,_Los_Angeles,_California

http://www.pinkshollywood.com/pgz/history.htm

http://melrose-avenue.com/index.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood

http://www.hollywoodusa.co.uk/sunset-strip.htm