Mal and Lauren

September 17, 2021

Today, we visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. LACMA, as it is more commonly known, is the largest art gallery on the West Coast. The museum complex was originally designed by William Pereira in 1965 with six separate pavilions. Recently, four of the original buildings have been, controversially, demolished to make way for a new $750 million structure, designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.

We started our visit, like many do, at the instagram favorite, Urban Light, by Chris Burden. The 2008 installation consists of restored street lamps from the 1920s and 1930s. Most of them once lit the streets of Southern California. Tragically, Burden died of melanoma in 2015 at 69 years old.

The different museum buildings are connected by covered walkways, held up by bright red steel girders.

The museum has an impressive permanent collection, including a whole room of Picassos. One of our favorites was this small Diego Rivera portrait of his lover Frida Kahlo.

There is also a massive gallery containing Richard Serra’s Band. At roughly twelve feet high and more than seventy feet long, the sculpture is vast even by Serra’s monumental standard.

There was also a whole floor devoted to a retrospective of the work of Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. According to the museum’s biographical blurb, he is one of Japan’s most beloved artists. Frankly, we found the repeated paintings of young girls with piercing eyes kind of strange.

There was also an installation by Korean artist Do Ho Suh, who makes full-size fabric reconstructions of places he has lived. This particular installation was of an apartment that he lived in at 348 West 22nd Street in New York.

September 15-16, 2021

We continued to explore West Hollywood and neighboring Fairfax and La Brea on another sparkling day. Here in Southern California, where water is a precious commodity, many of the local residents have transformed their front lawns into desert gardens.

Another reasonably common option is very realistic fake grass, although this perhaps is not the best example.

This tree was spreading its roots far and wide in search of water.

We have come across relatively few deco buildings and houses. This is a rare example.

This guy was doing his best to check out the world outside his yard.

In neighborhoods where every second car appears to be a Tesla, it was surprising to come across this classic gas guzzling muscle car.

Speaking of cars, we have noticed that some residents appear to have chosen their vehicles to match their homes.

Walking along Melrose we passed by the Paul Smith clothing store. Its shocking pink wall has become a favorite instagram selfie spot. So we jumped on the bandwagon.

Los Angeles is indeed a city of colorful walls.

We stopped for lunch at The Original Farmers Market in La Brea. First opened in 1934, it isn’t so much a farmers market as an area of food stalls, sit-down eateries and prepared food manufacturers. It’s also a big tourist attraction.

Near to the market is another iconic LA food establishment. Canters is perhaps LA’s most famous deli. Opened in 1931, it is the perfect place to satisfy your hankering for lox and bagels or matzoh ball soup.

Further up Fairfax Avenue, we passed a number of streetwear retailers. If you ever need evidence of the influence of marketing, go no further than the streetwear world, where two otherwise identical oversize t-shirts can differ in price by a hundred dollars just because of the brand name on them. Case in point, there was a line outside one store. Meanwhile, its neighbors, that as far as we could tell sold pretty much identical clothing, were empty. It struck us that the streetwear industry can only thrive in the modern world, where influencers can spread the name of a favorite brand to millions of followers in real time through instagram, youtube or TikTok. In the past, that kind of reach could only have happened through expensive advertising.

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We liked this quirky store that appeared to be devoted almost entirely to cat lovers.

September 13, 2021

We are currently staying in an Airbnb in West Hollywood, so went out for an explore through the surrounding neighborhoods. In a way it was similar to the neighborhood we stayed at in Long Beach but without the California bungalows. Most of the homes were small Spanish style houses, although there were more than a few modern style homes thrown into the mix.

We walked along Melrose Avenue which is the capital of streetwear in Los Angeles, with numerous shops selling expensive sneakers and oversize t-shirts.

Among the streetwear retailers, we came across this store which sold some very extravagant clothes. If you are thinking of attending the next Burning Man festival and looking for an outfit then Cosmo & Donato is the store for you.

Anglelinos appear particularly fond of giving their cars custom paint jobs, often in bright metallic colors. Here a couple of examples.

September 9, 2021

Sedona is a very pretty town, famous for its red sandstone formations. It is named for Sedona Schnebly, the wife of the city’s first postmaster. It has now become a center for natural healing. The following sign pretty much summed up the general feel of the place.

It’s easy to see how Sedona has become a spiritual and natural mecca. The massive red buttes that tower over the town provide a constant reminder of the grandeur and power of nature. The buttes did not spring out of the ground like mountains. Rather they are the result of millions of years of erosion that ate away at the surrounding land, leaving the buttes as a reminder of how high the land once stood in this area.

We drove out along a dusty bumpy road to the Palatki ruins, outside of town. The site has a set of cliff dwellings that were built somewhere between between 1000 to 600 years ago by the ancestors of the Hopi people. In the Hopi language, Palatki means ’red house’, which seems apt. There are still some finger prints left behind by the original builders in the clay of the surviving walls.

There were also some old wall paintings that were described to us by Jim, a ranger who appeared only slightly less weather beaten than the surrounding rocks.

We could see why the villagers chose the location for their home. It was in a beautiful spot and easy to defend, built into a high cliff.

By this stage, it was hotter than we have ever experienced, with the temperature hovering around 106 degrees farenheit (41 degrees celsius). So we headed to Oak Creek for a swim, the only water source in the whole area.

Also enjoying the cool water on a hot day were a couple of English setters.

September 10, 2021

It’s easy to see why the Grand Canyon has been named one of the seven natural wonders of the world. The name doesn’t do it justice. Something like “Awesomely Majestic Canyon” would be more apt. If it’s not on your bucket list then it should be.

In America, everything is usually fenced off to prevent the stupid from doing dangerous things and then suing for millions when things go wrong. So it was astonishing to see how possible it was to walk up to the edge of cliffs that dropped vertically for thousands of feet to the canyon floor. Although they don’t do the place justice, here are some photos from a truly spectacular day.

September 6, 2021

Fifty four years ago on this date, Mal was sailing across the Atlantic on board the RMS Queen Mary from New York to Southampton, England. It was the ship’s second to last voyage. A month later, on October 31, 1967, she would depart on her final voyage, arriving in Long Beach on December 9, 1967, where she has remained ever since. She is now a floating hotel.

September 5, 2021

In the morning we visited the Long Beach Museum of Art where we caught an amazing retrospective of the works of Tristan Eaton. Eaton is an LA native who started life doing street art before turning to toy design. Now he is a much sought after designer doing work for Nike and Universal among others. He is also one of the most prominent international moralists working today with murals as far flung as Paris and Shanghai.

The artist himself was at the exhibit so we said hello and told him how much we admired his work. He was very gracious and friendly, definitely not the pretentious artist type.

We then drove north to LA and spent the late afternoon and early evening at Venice Beach. We don’t think that there can be better place in the world to people watch than Venice. There is just so much going on.

We were surprised to see a synagogue right in the center of all the action.

A great place to hang out is the skate park which attracts big crowds to watch the high flying skateboarders.

There were a lot of other sports going on at the beach, including soccer, handball, volleyball, paddle tennis and surfing. But we were there to watch basketball. Our sons’ company, Dompen, sponsors the Green Lights, one of the teams playing in the Venice Basketball League. As the sun was starting to set we watched our team win both its games, propelling it into the league playoffs.

There was a beautiful sunset over the Pacific.

And the crowd started to thin out.

But for some the party was just beginning

September 3, 2021

Today we walked through Naples, an upscale neighborhood built on three islands, separated by canals which open into Alamitos Bay.

September 2, 2021

We are starting our West Coast trip in Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles. It’s not a city that we have spent time in before but we like what we’ve seen so far. We are staying in Belmont Heights, a quiet neighborhood of Californian bungalows and Spanish style houses.

Down the hill from us and near to the beach is Belmont Shore, where the houses are closer together but just as Spanish.

We saw some beautiful doorways.

And some cool classic cars.

We walked along 4th Street, which appeared to be where Long Beach’s hipsters hang out.

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One store had some topical t-shirts

And a vintage portable turntable that we liked.

There were more small apartment buildings in this part of town.

But plenty more bungalows and casas

This guy creeped us out peaking over the fence.

We finished up the walk, by ambling along the bluff that overlooks the beach.

Just offshore are a number of man made islands that look like some sort of giant movie sets for a futuristic movie. In fact, they were constructed in the 1960s to house oil drilling derricks and equipment that were built to tap into the Wilmington Oil Field just offshore. Architects designed the islands to hide the oil drilling apparatus from those onshore by adding trees, fake buildings and even waterfalls. The islands were named after prominent astronauts of the time. The island in the photo below was named Island White after Ed White who became the first American to walk in space on June 3, 1965. Tragically, he died two years later in a fire during pre-launch testing for Apollo 1.

There are a number of apartment buildings and large houses lining Ocean Boulevard that follows the bluff.

We came across a navy memorial that looked familiar. In fact, it is an exact replica of the sculpture called The Lone Sailor, that was created by Stanley Bleifeld for the United States Navy Memorial in Washington DC. Apparently, there are about a dozen such replicas scattered throughout the country.

August 20, 2021

We walked across the border and into Maryland, ending up in Bethesda, the suburb where Mal spent a number of his childhood years. It takes its name from Jerusalem’s Pool of Bethesda where Jesus miraculously healed a paralyzed man, according to the Gospel of John. Lauren remembers its downtown area from her teenage years as consisting mainly of small buildings containing shops, restaurants and dive bars. Things have certainly changed. Although there are still some of the original storefronts.

The area is becoming more and more dominated by modern high rise buildings.

One Bethesda institution that has remained is the Farm Woman’s Market which was established in 1932 and still has a thriving market on weekends.

The market appeared to be closed as we passed by so we headed across the street to the newly opened Tatte for a lemonade, a coffee and some cooling air conditioning.

We then walked up Wisconsin Avenue toward the older part of Bethesda, passing the old post office, which in a sign of the times had become a fitness center at one stage. We don’t know if the center has survived Covid but there didn’t seem to be anything going on inside.

Next to the Post Office building is what appeared to be a random memorial for downtown Bethesda, until we did some post-walk googling. The Memorial to the Pioneer Mothers of the Covered Wagon Days is a recurring piece of public statuary that stands in twelve locations from Maryland to California, tracing a historic travel route from covered wagon days. The statue is of the Madonna of the Trail, clutching a rifle with one hand, and infant with the other, with another child grasping at her skirt. The statues were erected in 1928-29 and are strung along the National Old Trails Road (now mostly US 40). The sites were chosen with the help of the president of the National Old Trails Road Association, a then-little-known Missouri Justice of the Peace named Harry S. Truman. The Bethesda statue is the first in the line with the others strung westward through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

Walking through the older section of Bethesda we noticed a number of restaurants had closed their doors, including one of Lauren’s grandfather’s favorites, Positano. We were sad to see it go, having eaten many enjoyable dinners there with Oscar. Particularly memorable was the time when Ben, who was about four at the time, pulled the fire alarm, much to the dismay of the restaurant’s staff and patrons.

One dining establishment that continues to go strong is the Tastee Diner which has been serving breakfast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, since 1935.

We then walked over to the Bethesda Row development. It is an excellent example of a new development that actually works, creating a a mixed-use walkable district. Even on a hot weekday afternoon, the area was bustling, far different than the virtually empty old part of town where we had just walked.