At the top of a tall, round building casting a shadow on the highway — right where Sunset meets the 405 — is a restaurant called West. I ate there Friday night with my girlfriend fiancée and her mom. The view of the city is just incredible and the bone-in New York strip was one of the top ten steaks I’ve ever had.
Friday Five: My Last Five Dinners
One of the all-time best stand-up comedians, Richard Jeni (official page, currently down), apparently committed suicide this weekend. My girlfriend and I read about his death on Perez last night as we were getting ready to watch Rome. Just the night before, while celebrating a friend’s birthday at the Dresden, a few of us were talking about his hysterical HBO special, A Big Steaming Pile Of Me, how difficult stand-up is, and how few real geniuses there are in the field.
I still have that show on the TiVo in the guest room. It will be that much harder to delete it now.
When I ran the LA Marathon last year my goal was to finish in five hours. I had trained for about two months and gotten down to a slender 186 lbs, the least I’ve weighed since my last year of college. Because of a disastrous combination of being mentally unprepared for the event and wearing year-old sneakers, at some point around mile 22 my left knee made a sickening pop. By mile 24 my right knee had joined its brother and I was in excruciating pain. I (literally) limped across the finish line and recorded a disheartening time of 5:46.
This year I decided to run about two weeks ago. I trained my out-of-shape, 200 lb, 33-yr old body for ten days. I figured that I had little chance of doing anything great, but I just wanted to (a) finish the race and (b) beat last year’s time. It was grueling and painful, I got a huge blister on the instep of my left foot, and I thought more than once that I was going to face-plant into the asphalt. But I was much better prepared mentally this time. The miles blazed below me and when I crossed the finish line I was struck dumb by the time: 4 hours, 56 minutes.
For Valentine’s Day this year I enrolled my girlfriend and myself for a class at Los Angeles’ coolest cooking class: hipcooks. Our class was “The Surprise Guest”, the only one available when I registered. We made an endive appetizer, roasted honey pear salad with tarragon dressing, pistachio-crusted swordfish with a light curry sauce, herbed couscous, and for dessert a chocolate bark with poached pear decorated with raspberry coulis. Our instructor, Alison, was wildly perky and made the experience incredibly bouncy. We had a deliciously good time and I would gladly do it again.
After last night’s 6.7 mile run — Death by Doheny, I call it — my girlfriend and I headed to Hollywood to catch The Perfect Victim (previously mentioned here) at The Knitting Factory. These kids put on a damn good show. The lead singer is energetic and bounces around the stage like a young Billie Joe Armstrong. The songs are slick and powerful, with a ton of punk-hard rock guitar riffs. I could have done without the drunk girl sprawled in a pool of her strawberry-daiquiri vomit outside the front door, but that’s just life in Los Angeles. If you get a chance to see them, go.
I added my house to Hotspotr. If you are desperate for free WiFi in Los Angeles, feel free to sit in my driveway and use some of my bandwidth. I have had a Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router with no password for years and I’m also broadcasting with the free FON wireless access point I got a few days ago. I’m glad to see LA ranked #8 on the list at Hotspotr. Wireless internet access should be free.
Seeing celebrities in Los Angeles is still pretty cool, even though I’ve lived here for 6+ years now. It seems like they’ve been coming out of the woodwork lately. Here’s a quick summary of the last week or so:
On Saturday morning I ran a quick 7 miles at 6 am, came home, and told my girlfriend to get ready for an adventure. We packed the truck and headed for wine country (photos). The President’s Day traffic was brutal so it took us almost 3 hours to go what should have only taken an hour and a half. We had a terrific time, though. The Santa Barbara vineyards — of Sideways fame — are just as much fun as going to Napa and they’re only a short drive from Los Angeles. First we hit the Firestone Winery and its sister vineyard, Curtis Winery. Tastings are rough for me because I don’t like any reds, but Firestone had some wonderful whites. I bought a delicious chardonnay and two awesome sauvignon blancs for less than $50 total.
There is a point on San Vicente while running West when one rounds a corner and is confronted with — shockingly — what appears to be the entire Pacific Ocean. It is an awe-inspiring sight, even at night. It is at this point, during what is more or less a fifteen mile run, that I usually realize I’ve forgotten to do something to protect my nipples. Aside from the Marathon, this route is the longest I’ve ever run. On little three- and six-mile runs I don’t need to do anything about my chest. On a fifteen mile run, though, thousands of thumping strides will cause a man’s t-shirt to chafe and rub against his nipples until they bleed. The adrenaline and runner’s high will prevent you from realizing how much damage you’ve done to your vestigial mammary glands until you finally arrive home and toss your sweat-drenched clothes into a heap in the bathroom floor. The blisters on your feet, the near-unbearable soreness of your legs and lower back and even arms, the inevitable lingering desire for water … none of these things the next day can compare to the burning pain of having basically rubbed off your nipples. File under: Ouch.
When the LA Marathon first announced its new point-to-point course last summer, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke to the significance of transporting participants for free on the Metro on race day. Yesterday, L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, in her capacity as MTA Chair, said in a committee meeting that marathoners should not be provided with free race day transportation and withdrew the agenda item from next week’s MTA board meeting. Mayor Villaraigosa plans to take this matter directly to the MTA board meeting on February 22, 2007.
Please email Supervisor Molina and ask her to explain herself. Let her know that runners are going to be making traffic hell enough already without taking away this free pass!
Update: I sent an email a few hours ago and recently received a very interesting response. Continue reading for Supervisor Molina’s email reply.
Last week my girlfriend and I had dinner at Cucina Paradiso. It’s a great little Italian restaurant that shares a building with The Palmer Room on Motor Ave. The Palmer Room is a bar / club with a tiny stage for live music; Their website is fairly bland, but the bar itself is quite cozy and a perfect spot to catch a show. We were there to see Landon Band perform. We got to the bar a bit late and only managed to catch the last three or four songs, but I liked what I heard. The lead singer has definitely got some pipes and she put on a helluva good show even though there were only maybe a dozen other people in the audience. It’s tricky because the whole thing is done in Flash, but if you work at it you can download three of the seven songs from their debut album from the official band website.
You have to get out of bed pretty early to pull one over on the local coroner in Los Angeles.
Southern California kicker Mario Danelo was drunk when he plunged over a cliff to his death, but the cause of his death was “undetermined,” according to a coroner’s report released Monday.
He’s a football player in excellent physical health. He got really, really drunk. He climbed a large wall and fell over 100′. I don’t see the mystery here. Tragedy? Yes. Mystery? No.
We found yet another fabulous restaurant last night: Memphis. (map). This “Southern Style Dining” establishment is located in Hollywood in “the last remaining residential house … left on this highly commercialized street.” It’s quirky and fun to eat in a restaurant that used to be a house. The lighting is very romantic and the food was excellent. I had the jambalaya appetizer and the fried chicken and ribs combo and — I have to tell you — it was the best piece of chicken I’ve ever had. Dinner for four, including appetizers, plenty of libations, and a nice gratuity, came to about $300, which is really not that bad for a good place in LA. The service was only so-so, but I think the place was a bit understaffed; it was a slow Wednesday night. If you have a hankering for a taste of N’awlins and you’re stuck in SoCal, I highly recommend it.
Last night was another crazy cool one in Los Angeles. The fun began with dinner on the Sunset strip: Ron Jeremy was at the table on our left and Scott Baio was at the table on our right. The service was uncharacteristically craptacular, but the food was excellent. (You can’t do much better than the steak and lobster at the Rainbow Room.)
After that we went to see Von Cotton play at Molly Malone’s. (Photos at Flckr) They played eight or ten original tracks — all very, very awesome country tunes. I think my two favorites right now are “Shotgun Blast” and “The Tell”. Then Brant closed with a great cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”.
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Hugh Jass! Somebody check the men’s room for a Hugh Jass!
