Only two more weeks until New Year’s, everyone! Are you excited yet? Do you have plans?

Of course you don’t. No one EVER makes plans for NYE, unless they are buying tickets to one of the ridiculously enormous NYE parties (which is actually in the plural this year) and need the advance planning. The problem with NYE is that it’s a high pressure holiday – clearly, if you are a not at an awesome party, on this night of all nights, you are not socially successful.

On the bright side, if no one you know is throwing a house party you want to go to, there’s often other events in the city. Last year, the future husband and I went to Xian’s Theatre des Wyrm at Nicotine in Hollywood, which was actually pretty fabulous. The tickets were limited, so there was enough space in the tiny club, we liked the DJ’s, and we could hide out in the secret room above the bar, with the hookah smokers, and watch the crush for absinthe at the bar. We were holding out hope that there would be a similar event this year. And there sort of is. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a lot more crowded than last year’s, because this year’s dark-culture New Year’s even is at…Bar Sinister. And, more shocking – it’s a collaboration between the three biggest operations that run Dark Los Angeles: Evil Club Empire, LA Dead and Bar Sinister itself.
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The Getty Center is one of my favorite places in all of Los Angeles. I think it’s perfect. I love the constant changing of exhibits and the richness and depth in which they are presented. I love the grounds and gardens, the way that the focus is on local plants, the way that the surrounding terrain seems part of the landscape design. And I even love the way the museum sits, above the city, a literal ivory complex, those gleaming white buildings that are a world of their own – and yet so much a representation of Los Angeles.

There is a fantastic article in the Times today that talks about the Getty Center, and how our perception of the place changes as Los Angeles changes around it. It is, after all, an architectural icon, but an icon representative of a rapidly changing city. It lends “instant, old-fashioned respectability to an institution that craved it,” to quote the Times article. It is a world-class building and museum, in a city perceived to be so new, and so transitory, that it lacks such things. I highly recommend checking the article out here.

But what does the Getty Center mean to you?
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Thanks to a new state law (SB-250), you, as a California consumer, will no longer be stuck with all those leftover gift cards. Now, if you have a gift card worth less than $10, the store has to give you the balance – in cash. No longer will you be making donations to a retail empire: between 2005 and 2006, some companies cleared more than forty million (nationally) in unused gift cards. This is particularly great news with the holiday season coming up, because now you know your loved ones will be able to get every last penny back out of your gift to them.

This story comes from consumercal by way of consumerist

I’m writing this on my Blackberry, walking south on Beverly Drive, between Wilshire and Olympic. At 9454 Wilshire, on the Beverly Drive side, there are a half-dozen people marching in a circle with signs protesting one Ira Friedman. The signs say things like “Ask Ira how he makes his money”, Hey Ira, is money more important than integrity?” and “If I come up to suite 313, will you cheat me?” Yet when I asked each of them, one by one, who Ira was and what he did, no one answered. They shrugged at explaining, and didn’t seem to know the name of the man they were protesting. One man said only that they were doing it for a friend – but that was all anyone would say.

I wondered if this was a scene of some kind, because there was a cameraman filming the whole thing across the street. But then I googled poor Ira, and there he was: a lawyer. The question is, what did he do to merit a protest outside his offices – especially such an uninformed, unenthusiastic mini-mob?

Here are the awesome things I did yesterday:

1) I went to see the Dali exhibit at LACMA with a friend. I know nothing about art, but I did love seeing how Dali fit into all the American cultural trends of the mid-20th century. I had no idea he had spent so much time in Los Angeles, or that he had collaborated with Disney, or that he was good friends with Jack Warner. Or that he had had so much influence on the film industry. L.A. has a lot more ties to Salvador Dali than I would have ever thought. Also, he had an awesome mustache.

2) I went to Andre’s for the first time. I had no idea there was a decent restaurant tucked away in that 80% ghetto, 20% Whole Foods complex across from the Grove. I attempted to finish a “small” plate of spaghetti with their fabulous meat sauce, and failed. Then we went outside to watch Grove shoppers’ cars being towed out of the lot (I bet the kickbacks from the towing company alone pay for the “security” who call the tow truck company.)

3) I went to BOOTIE! I went to see Heathervescent perform as part of the hour-long live performance A+D show. Mashups are awesome enough on their own, but as part of a live goth cheerleader performance, or as Mashup Guitar Hero, they are MORE awesome. As a reminder, Bootie is the first Saturday of every month, and while they are still at Safari Sams, they are moving back to the Echo soon. Check website for details.

Can I just say that Saturday was really awesome? Of course, today I am at home, printing and assembling what feels like thousands of wedding invitations (tree-free & post consumer recycled, from InviteSite in Pasadena). Slightly less fun. And with no melty clocks to speak of.

Because I am lazy and forget to go to the farmers market a lot of the time, I signed up in June for Los Angeles Organic Vegetable Delivery – L.O.V.E. for short. These deliveries are customizable boxes of local-area vegetables, delivered to my door each Wednesday. Then I try to come up with creative ways to cook them – usually using the non-local ReBar Cookbook (or, as my fiance calls it, “that cookbook from Jillian’s homeland where every single recipe seems to contain a dozen vegetables”)

Organic vegetable delivery is about the last service I would have thought would exist in L.A. – but the business seems to be doing well enough. Probably from people like me, late twentysomethings and early thirtysomethings who are trying to make better choices in consumption. After all, I’m a big fan of eating local organic where possible. It saves the carbon emissions of transporting the food, and means that you get healthier, more nutritious foods, with fewer preservatives and pesticides and all those sort of P-words. I’m not the other P-word – paranoid – about my groceries, but I do like knowing where my food comes from.

Anyways. Behind the jump is this week’s sample box lineup and what I will use it for:
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I’m writing this from Atlanta, where I’m waiting to hop on a connecting flight to Pittsburgh, for Thanksgiving with the soon-to-be-officially-in-laws. But thankfully, we didn’t fly out of LAX. I’m not sure how much of a gong show it was (feel free to post in the comments if you do know) but Ontario went relatively smoothly. Well, except for a few snags with parking lots & parking shuttles (as in one of the big lots was full & the shuttles in the last lot with space kept passing us by because they were full), but once we got to the airport, we didn’t wait more than a few minutes in any line. Sweet.

Last week, when I posted about Grace Simons Lodge, there were a lot of helpful comments. Including one from 5000! about the L.A. River Center

We LIKED Grace Simons Lodge. We LOVED the River Center. It was like being in a small replica mission, something between the Avila Adobe and San Juan Capistrano. It was full of fountains and water, and, of course, an indoor River Interpretive Center. It had beautiful lawns and Spanish-style tiles and wrought iron candleabras over the doors. It had a beautiful high-ceilinged atrium for a reception, two charming courtyards for ceremonies, and a hidden, high-walled lawn and garden tucked away behind the buildings .But, most importantly, it seemed to me that this was a place close to the heart of the city, a place that celebrated the river that so many people forget is there.

The River Center is where the Arroyo Seco meets the L.A. River, just off the 110, in what I think is now Cypress Park. And I’ve added the photos to my L.A Wedding Venues set on Flickr.

Recently, the fiance and I had a small change in plans for our wedding. Instead of getting married in Victoria, BC, we’re now getting married in L.A. And instead of a July wedding, it’s now March. It may be time to panic.

Fortunately, I remembered something that Mack told me at the last BarCamp before this one, about a little building in Elysian Park that he had been to a wedding at recently. So after some fairly simple Googling (“elysian park” +wedding) we found Grace Simons Lodge, an adorable little building in a quiet corner of Elysian Park, complete with gardens and pavilions and all chairs and tables included. Score. We went down there on a Saturday and took some pictures (link goes to Flickr photoset) and, for the price, it seems eminently serviceable.

So, here’s the question: what is the crime like in Elysian Park? My hopelessly out of date relatives insist it isn’t safe that close to downtown; I say they’re ridiculously outdated. The LAPD Crimemap didn’t have anything deterring in the last few days in or around the park. We could only turn up one shooting in the park-adjacent neighborhood for 2007. Am I right in insisting that my family are being completely ridiculous in insisting that I hold my wedding on the nice, safe (and much more expensive and boring) Westside?

Last weekend, the fiance and I were on our way north to the 2. From home, this requires going up Alvarado until it turns into the Glendale Freeway. And just on the far side of the 101, a panhandler caught my eye. Not because of anything written on a cardboard sign, but because he was being followed by a flock of pigeons. And two of them were actually riding on his arm and shoulder (vaguely visible at right – I took the photo from a moving car)

Pigeons are basically vermin – flying rats – to me. But they’re still technically wild creatures, like anything else living undomesticated in the city. So it amazed me that they were actually perched on this man, like a parrot on a pirate, like pets. It was like seeing a Pied Piper of pigeons. It was just so strange, and I wondered – does he talk to them? Does he have bread crusts in his pockets?

Has anyone else seen the Pigeon Man at any other offramps or stoplights?

Did you know that up to 5% of MTA riders are not paying the proper fare? Seriously. MTA says it may be costing them millions, according to last week’s Times article. If you’re in that 5%, this makes you a bad person. Then again, I wonder if those alleged millions are real, because how much would it cost to put in some sort of automatic ticket validating system on the Green Line, where 6% – 8% of riders do not pay the fare? Maybe MTA considers it a sort of donation to less privileged areas that do not have other adequate transportation?

Regardless of whether or not you are a good person who pays your fares, there’s an opportunity to chime in on the future of Los Angeles transit next week.
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I think a lot of us will agree that yes, people walk in L.A. But the DWP is reinforcing the myth of the car culture by keeping the Festival of Lights focused on cars instead of pedestrians. A wonderfully sarcastic article in the LA Times two days ago describes the DWP’s latest announcements regarding pedestrians and the Festival. The DWP has decided that, despite requests from environmentalists and local residents, it’s just not an option to make the Festival a walking-only event for its entirety. This decision is based on the lack of sufficient parking in the L.A. zoo lot. Since 2500 – 4500 cars visit the event each year, and the zoo only has 1100 spots, that’s a “recipe for a traffic jam”. (Well, except no one really seems to know HOW many spots the zoo has – it could be anywhere as high as 2600 – 3000. Does anyone here know?)

If you are a pedestrian who does not want to share the road with idling cars again this year, there will be a “pilot program” for pedestrian-only access on the lowest-traffic days of the season. That would be November 21st – 25th, the week of Thanksgiving. But for the rest of the year, it’ll be cars as usual. And I’m sorry, Will – there was no update on an extension of the festival of bikes to the pedestrian nights. Maybe we just need to harass LaBonge more on all of this.

Seriously. Why is there a billboard for Black Snake Moan at W 3rd and Laurel, in the Beverly Hills/WeHo border zone? There is one of them fancy schmancy new screen billboards – the ones that change ads – a few blocks west. There are brand new billboards for Vans and for Samantha Who in the immediate vicinity. Thousands of relatively well-to-do people pass this space every day on their way to work – including me. Which is why I have expected, every day since this movie left theaters, to see the billboard taken down. Poor forgotten, faded billboard. Maybe someone will see this and give you a shiny new mainstream movie to advertise.

William Mulholland is Los Angeles’ most Promethean figure: the man who brought it the vital substance of water. He is the hero and the anti-hero of Los Angeles’ history and self-imagined mythology. He created the City of Los Angeles as we know it by “[breaking] the rocks and [bringing] the water to the thirsty land” (from the inscription on his honorary Cal Berkeley PhD: “Percussit saxa et duxit flumina ad terram silentum”) He created one of the greatest engineering marvels of all time, a 233 mile long aqueduct that opened up new areas of Los Angeles to development. Whenever you use a drop of Los Angeles water, there is a good chance that it came to you, if not through the Mulholland aqueduct, then as part of the water system that Mulholland built during his forty years at the top of Los Angeles’ water companies.
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Yesterday, almost everyone in my office was happy. Why? Because it was cloudy! Really. In fact, most people were downright jubilant. I heard at least half of my sixteen-person team comment during the day on how much they loved the weather. Even a couple of the SoCal natives remarked on how much they were enjoying the soft light and cool temperatures outside. More excuses were found to go for walks. More time was spent with coffee outside the local Starbucks. Instead of hiding from the sun, we all went out to experience the clouds.

Fortunately, we have another half-day of glorious clouds in Beverly Hills before it clears up in the afternoon. It’ll stay partly cloudy in the beach cities. But tomorrow, for us inlanders, it’s back to sunshine – perfectly temperate 72F sunshine. Actually, it’s not just cloudy days. I love all fall days in L.A.