Los Angeles

We had brunch at the 17th Street Cafe on Montana in Santa Monica on Sunday. It’s a great little place to have breakfast. The service was excellent and the food was delicious. It was a smidge expensive, but that might have just been because of the mimosas.

It feels like I live in Alaska or something — it’s only quarter-past five and already full-on dark night outside. What’s up with that? It’s been pretty damn chilly lately. Well. Chilly for Los Angeles, at least. It’s mildly annoying because if I turn on the heater in my apartment I have to take my diploma off the wall in my bedroom and stick it behind one of my night tables. I have it hanging directly above the in-floor oil furnace that passes for a heating unit. The heater actually works amazingly well, and quickly. My apartment can go from freezing (okay, mid-40s) to broiling in about ten minutes from that thing. But I worry that I’m going to warp, spindle, or mutilate my diploma, so …

Anyway. I saw Prime last week. Forgot to mention that. It was pretty good. I’d give it four stars just on acting and direction, but the writing fell flat in places, and it didn’t really have a decent ending, so it’s just a three-star film in my book. Of course, I have no book. I also have no standard star-based ranking of anything, so take that with a grain of salt.

Last night I used LimeWire — wonderful tool — and Google to finally get around to finding the version of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” that plays at the end of Die Hard. It’s by Vaughn Monroe, by the way.

So I had a bit of a bug on Saturday and spent most of the day in a deep Alka Seltzer Plus-induced sleep. At one point I awoke to find a curious message on my answering machine. A little kid somewhere in the San Bernardino area code called with a get-well message for Eric Gagne, the Dodgers pitcher. “I’m your biggest fan,” he said, “and I hope your leg gets better really soon.”

I considered calling him and pretending to be the dominant closer, but (a) I have no idea what Eric Gagne sounds like, how he talks, or what in the world you’d say to a kid that thinks you’re a hero and (b) I feared that since he’s sort of close to LA, he might have a classmate or something that does know Eric, and then I’d get the kid or the pitcher in hot water with a lie …

It would be tragic if I was to pretend to be someone I’m not and then have him brag to all his friends and get busted for it. So I just hoped that someday the kid gets to catch a pop fly at a game, that Eric’s leg is on the mend, and then hit delete.

There was massive construction along most of the mathematically-convenient 100 miles between Daytona Beach, FL and Gainesville, FL for the entire 4.75 years I was in college. The State repaved almost all of SR40 and made major improvements to I-75 in that time. Work was mostly done between 10pm and 4am so it was not tragically intrusive to the commute I made dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

Compare that to the laughably inefficient way that Los Angeles is handling the Santa Monica Boulevard Transit Parkway Project. I daily have to deal with roads ripped into pieces comparable to the Big Dig in Boston. The main difference is that the work in LA is only over about a 3 mile stretch. Oh, and they only work between the absolutely most-inconvenient hours of 7am and 4pm. And I don’t believe they have a snowball’s chance of hell in being done in the projected 3+ years. What a joke.

I had a great Easter weekend.

• Dinner at La Loggia’s Friday night. (Inexplicably sans web site for linking. A great restaurant in Studio City. Don’t sit in the patio area if you can help it.)
• A fairly uneventful but relaxing Saturday topped off by The Upside of Anger. (A wonderful flick, I loved it.)
• Fell asleep watching Pierce Brosnan’s stint on Inside the Actors Studio.
• Up at 6 for a long-overdue 3.2 mi run on Sunday.
• Mass at Church and then dinner with the gf’s ‘rents followed by The Incredibles. (What a terrific movie! I can’t believe I waited so long to see it!)
• I also started reading The Promise of a Lie by Howard Roughan. (Only about 150 pages so far, but it has me hooked enough to continue.)
• Using the magic that is TiVo, a co-worker of mine recorded Green Day’s performance on Last Call with Carson Daly and we managed to rip it to DVD and then mp3, so for the hell of it, I uploaded for you an awesome live version of Jesus of Suburbia from American Idiot.
• For the grand finale I organized the rest of my ‘04 receipts and bank statements while listening to classic late 80s hair bands.

Another Thursday night, another becky show at the Roxy. This was — if I remember correctly — the tenth Thursday in a row (excluding St. Patrick’s) that I’ve been there. This time I experienced Los Angeles parking nirvana when I got there. Not only did I get a meter right across the street, but it was broken. (I’ve since been told that parking at a broken meter is against the law, but I didn’t know that last night and I didn’t get a ticket, so the parking gods were smiling on me.) Another dinner at Rainbow Room and then just a terrific performance next door; becky’s been really going over the top lately. They threw in a few brand new songs, including a cover of the Beatles‘ Rain. After the show it was back to the Rainbow Room for a few hours of pizza and Grolsch with the band.

Sometimes it’s ultra-cool to live in Los Angeles. My girlfriend’s little sister is in town, so we went to Mr. Chow for dinner tonight. (It’s only the best restaurant in the universe, so if you ever get a chance, I highly recommend it. Sly Stallone and Burt Reynolds were sitting together at the next table, which was pretty nifty.) Then when I got home, suprise, there’s my buddy Rob guest-starring on CSI: Miami. (Yes, believe it or not it’s filmed here in LA.) And — hell — I forgot to mention that just the other weekend right on my street I bumped into and subsequently had Sunday brunch with Bill Caco.
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My girlfriend, Rob, Rebecca and I went to see the Pixies at “the Greek“. It was a great concert; they played a ton of stuff that I love. It was totally cool to see them still rocking after all these years.

I’m also completely hooked on the new Green Day CD, which is a surprise because I really just didn’t like anything they’d done until this. American Idiot, though, is just incredible. I highly suggest you grab it.

From the “I Guess It Depends on Your Point of View Department”:
This morning a dj on KROQ said, “And there’s some good news to report on traffic: The fatal accident that was blocking the 210 has been cleared from lanes.”

I must admit that yes, I did ask him when he was leaving. And yes, I did ask him why he was here. I’m ashamed and downtrodden. He paid for breakfast though, and it was quite good - even if Cantor’s, in general, is a Jerry’s Deli-esque sludgehole that, IMHO, is not even on par with any random House du Waffle in Florida. Where was I? Oh yes. In California. Just incredible. Sometimes, like the man says, I look around and just think, “Wow. I live here.”

For some ridiculous reason I was still at the office at 11:45pm yesterday. When I got on the highway at 11:55pm, I mistakenly assumed that traffic would be minimal and I would zip home.
Ha!
They closed the 405.
They. Closed. The. 405.

Comically they chose not to let you know that it was closed from Getty Ctr. Dr. to (freaking!) Sepulveda until you were about 50 yards from what turned into an hour-and-a-half delaying detour through un-get-off-able mountain passes and backwoods backroads.

What’s amazing to me is that there are the same number of maniacs applying make-up, reading, pitching pilots on their portables, and trying to eat ramen with chopsticks while driving at midnight as there are at 7am. (That number, by the way, is two trillion.)

Every city I’ve ever called home has had something nasty … some ineffable idiosyncrasy … that its dwellers hold high, wave with pride, and flaunt in the face of visitors. In Daytona it was how stupid all the tourists are (were), in Gainesville it was the humidity (and / or stupidity of visiting Seminoles), in Boston it was the months of dark, gray winter. Have you ever had someone from Gainesville visit your home city? “You call this humid? In Gainesville this would be dry!” How about a friend from New England? “You think this is cold and crappy? Hell, in Bahstin we’d be running around in t-shirts if we were lucky enough to have this sawta weathah.”

In LA it’s the traffic. People here brave the traffic and even - though they would never admit it - take pride in battling the world’s worst commute every day.

Eddie waited ’til he finished high school
He went to Hollywood, got a tattoo
He met a girl out there with a tattoo, too
The future
was wide
open …

Well that’s kind of interesting. I have been added to a list of Things To Do In Los Angeles …

The Daily Grill is one of my favorite restaurants in Los Angeles. It’s a bit pricey, but the portions are huge, the service is great, and the food is delicious. The night before I left for Ryan’s wedding, I visited the Studio City Daily Grill with my girlfriend and family.

It was the first night of their new “Summer Menu” and I bravely ordered the Chicken in a Bucket. I had eaten most of my mashed potatoes (a DG favorite), my cornbread, and my salad and was well into my third piece of fried chicken when I noticed something just wasn’t kosher. I was engaged in a fairly animated conversation and hadn’t been paying close attention to my food, but something tasted very strange. I inspected my chicken breast a bit more closely and realized it was raw!

I’m not talkin’ “a little undercooked”. I mean it was bloody! Gah! So of course we called the manager to our table and complained and such. I was quite scared that I would be knocked out with food poisoning the night before I was supposed to get on a plane to be the Best Man! The manager, Charlye Martin, was painfully apologetic and polite. He took my address and was honestly concerned; he made sure that I knew they were sorry and handled the situation very gracefully.

A few days ago I received a tremendously nice, personal letter from Charlye and the Daily Grill expressing their regret. He enclosed $35 worth of gift certificates, took full responsibility for the mistake, and in no way tried to make excuses. It was refreshing to see such a display of good customer service and I just wanted to make a note of it here.