Los Angeles

Their website is craptacular and looks like it hasn’t been updated since last June, but the Panini Cafe in Marina Del Rey is a damn good place to have lunch. I’ve eaten there probably two dozen times since my company moved into our current building several years ago. I’d go there more often but there just aren’t many places within walking distance of my office and I don’t want to spoil Panini’s by going there every other day.

Except for Uncle Darrow’s (best Cajun food in LA) and Benny’s BBQ (best BBQ in LA) there are only fast food chains near me. We usually rotate between Soup Plantation, Rubio’s, Del Taco (barf!), Quizno’s, and Panda Express. We’ll splurge and go to Chin Chin if it’s someone’s birthday lunch but nobody wants to be spending $15 on lunch on a regular basis.

[click to continue...]

After eighteen months I was forced to consider my foray into the lifestyle of luxury car ownership a failure. Just after Thanksgiving in 2004 I traded my red 1990 Toyota 4×4 for a black 2001 BMW 330 CCi. It was a gorgeous car. I really, really loved it. It was a sport model and a convertible. The car had every option you could get on a BMW at the time: heated leather seats, six-disc CD changer, the works. The engine purred like a kitten. It handled like a dream. It was, in short, the best vehicle I’d ever owned.

The only real problem with it was the tires. The tires and rims were so sensitive — and the I am so accustomed to driving a truck, and the roads between my office and my home are so often blanketed in construction detritus — that they kept getting destroyed. In a year and a half I had to buy eight $250 tires and five $750 rims! There was just no way I could justify spending more on wheels for my wheels than I was spending on the car itself. I loved it, but it had to go. While driving home from a 4th of July weekend in Palm Springs this year I had a blowout on the highway. It was 114° F and I was so upset I decided it was time to end it.

The next day I strolled into the Marina Del Rey Toyota dealership and traded my baby for a black 2006 Toyota Tacoma 4×4. I could only afford the base model, no bells or whistles. I’m really more of a pick-up man, I guess. I do seriously miss having an intermittent setting on my windshield wipers, though. :0(

There is something pathetically ironic about being stuck in twelve lanes of 15 mph traffic in Los Angeles while driving to court to deal with a speeding ticket. Late at night back in May I was doing about 65 mph in the center lane of this same freeway when a maniac came flying down the road behind me. I gunned it to get out of his way and the maniac turned out to be a cop who proceeded to give me a speeding ticket. When I explained that I was only trying to get out of his way he laughed at me.

Traffic on the 405 at 3pm on an average Thursday in Los Angeles.

[click to continue...]

Last night Tricia and I saw Von Cotton perform at Molly Malone’s. They are an awesome new country act playing in Los Angeles. We saw them the first time at some dive honky-tonk just south of Marina Del Rey a year or so ago. Back then they mostly were doing classic country covers. Now they’ve got a slew of original songs and they’re really fantastic. The lead singer has an amazing voice and their stuff is seriously good.

Where do I go to complain about grocery store shenanigans? I’m at the end of my rope with Ralph’s, the local supermarket here in Los Angeles. There are two things they are doing to blatantly defraud customers and it’s driving me crazy.

[click to continue...]

On Sunday my girlfriend and I attended The 2006 Children’s Choice Awards event Bogart Backstage, sponsored by The TJ Martell Foundation. It was held at The Hollywood Palladium and featured a presentation by Bonnie Hunt in addition to appearances by Bowling for Soup, Hilary Duff, and Aly & AJ.

[click to continue...]

On January 18 of this year I got a speeding ticket for doing 53 mph in a 35 mph zone on a barren stretch of Sawtelle Avenue at about 7 a.m.

This morning I drove behind two CHP patrol cars — one was license plate #1204664 — doing between 54 and 57 mph for at least two miles on the exact same stretch of Sawtelle. They obviously weren’t in the act of pursuit or anything. They stopped to get gas.

There really should be a place to report law enforcement personnel who abuse their power like that. Cops in LA are notoriously bad. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat behind an LAPD officer who flipped on lights and sirens just to get through a red light.

My girlfriend and I had dinner last night at The Rainbow Room and then went to see The Perfect Victim play at the Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Blvd. We didn’t know it in advance, but the Whisky was hosting a “launch party” for a new concert review web site, TheConcertGoer.com, so there were several bands playing and they were filming.

[click to continue...]

Last night we went to dinner at Aroma in Silver Lake and then caught a new band — Castaneda (website, myspace) — at El Cid. My girlfriend works for a music management company, so we often find ourselves out seeing new music in LA.

Castaneda is a really polished act, and I was surprised to learn that last night was only their second ever live performance. They’re very, very good for a new band, with a sound sort of like The Killers meets U2. I am a fan of the five-piece band genre — lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar, drums, keyboardist — and these guys were great. You can (and should!) listen to four of their songs on their myspace page. (The songs were recorded in their house!) “The Same” is the track I like best.

Words cannot describe how frustrating is it to drive anywhere in Los Angeles. The part that really slays you is when you realize that the problem is not bad drivers. (Warning: It will take you at least a solid year to come to this realization.) The real problem is the traffic infrastructure: traffic lights, stop signs, road configurations, and construction. I’ve written before about the supreme idiocy of the Santa Monica Boulevard Transit Parkway Project. Today I was quite upset to learn that in 2005 the Federal government — not money from my California tax dollars, but from my Federal taxes — granted $1,611,962,012 to the California Department of Transportation. And yet it still takes 30 minutes to drive 5 miles.

After I shot a (pathetic) 51 at Penmar yesterday, I scooted to Nagao to grab dinner. On the way home, with five steaming cups of miso and several orders of sushi riding shotgun, I popped into the Brentwood Blockbuster because my girlfriend wanted to watch The 40-Year-Old Virgin. My BB account expired sometime around 1998 so I had to buy a copy. The not-very-helpful Blockbusterista said that there were four used copies in the store, but he had no idea where they were, things weren’t alphabetized well, it wasn’t his “usual” store, and he could only sell me a new one for $21.99. Yeah, right.

After spending a good twenty minutes browsing through stacks of dozens of copies of The Adventures of Pluto Nash and the assorted random not-very-good movies that always seem to be all that any BB ever has, I left empty-handed.

[click to continue...]

Tricia and I had dinner at Citizen Smith in Hollywood last night. ‘Twas quite an adventure just getting there. We didn’t have directions or know the address when we left the house. Cingular’s 411 service is frustratingly bad. It’s all computer-aided voice prompts now and they inevitably connect you to the wrong number the first time you try. Once we finally got through to the restaurant, it took three calls to find an employee that apparantly knew exactly where the place is.

So. We were an hour late for our reservations. (This is shockingly not uncommon in Los Angeles.) We were seated right away, though, because it wasn’t very crowded. There was some confusion with the waitstaff and after getting our waters it wasn’t for another fifteen minutes before Gerron, our waiter, realized we were in his section.
He recommended and beautifully described the night’s chef’s special: Linguini with clams. Tricia ordered that and a red wine and I got the pork chop and a pinot grigio.

[click to continue...]

My girlfriend and I had dinner at Mr. Chow last night to celebrate her dad’s 60th. Paris was there with — apparently — her entire family. Bummer for them: They were seated on the much-less-prestigious right-hand side of the dining room. (We, of course, were on the left.) The paparazzi was in full force out on the sidewalk because Jessica and her mondo entourage were sitting at the table next to us. I could have sworn her little sister was there with her, but my girlfriend’s little sister told me it wasn’t her, and it’s a wise man that defers to someone less than half his age when it comes to matters of pop culture.

I‘m moving! My old place was great, though. If anyone is interested in moving to Westwood, I can’t say enough good things about my old apartment. My landlord was super nice.

As a bonus: John Lithgow lives next door!

It’s listed on Westside Rentals; or let me know if you want to see photos.

[click to continue...]