She’s cool.
He’s hot.
She’s from the Valley.
He’s not.

Julie (Deborah Foreman) and Randy (a very young Nicolas Cage) are geography-crossed teenagers in love in 1983 Los Angeles. Not long after dumping her popular boyfriend, Tommy, Julie falls for Randy, who is from Hollywood. Her friends do not approve because, like oh my gawd, he’s “different.” He wears red and black instead of pastels, he slums it in a loud, dirty bar, and has friends who look like Sid Vicious. Grody to the max. I’m so sure.

In spite of how much Julie likes Randy, her bitchy “friends” convince her to “do the right thing,” which is break up with Randy and get back together with Tommy. They threaten her with the prospect of losing all of them and her social status. While truly conflicted, the desire to be popular prevails. What a total bummer. Randy is crushed and tries really hard to win Julie back, but she won’t give in.

In one last ditch effort to get the girl, Randy and his best friend crash the Valley High prom and make quite a scene disrupting the coronation of Prom King and Queen, Tommy and Julie. Fists fly and Randy and Julie steal away in the limo that brought her to the dance. Off they go, up the 405, to spend what can only have been an amazing night at the Valley Sheraton.

The premise of this movie, a modern day Romeo and Juliet, depends on Los Angeles playing a strong supporting role. You could even look at the L.A. portrayed in Valley Girl as multiple characters: The Valley, Hollywood, and The Beach. Now that I live in L.A., I definitely suffer from the problem of noticing, and often pointing out, the liberties that are taken in presenting the city. It’s something I didn’t think about before moving here in 1994. I find it fascinating to see how parts of Los Angeles are stitched together to create a version of the city that suits the needs of the storyteller.

L.A. is actually the first character you see and hear about as Valley Girl starts. A radio announcer says, “…they’ll be playing at the Hollywood Bowl…” as we hover above the Lake Hollywood reservoir looking toward Hollywood. We then head over the hills that house the famous sign for a reveal of The Valley. Well, it’s Burbank, but close enough. What I do find amusing is that instead of panning west into The Valley proper, we pan east into Glendale. Anyway, what-EVER! The first place where we encounter the Valley girls is The Mall. Duh. The location used for the opening sequence is the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, not the Sherman Oaks Galleria which is often misstated on various websites. In addition to official location lists, there is a clear shot of a door handle at the mall that says Del Amo on it.

Click through to read more and see the trailer

Picture it, 1988. The Valley. An alien space ship crash lands in a suburban swimming pool and their savior mentor for life on earth is a “val” named appropriately Val.   Its high camp, cult classic life turned into lampooning caricature of LA circa late 1980′s.

From cruising “the boulevard” to other slice of life bits the film pretty well covers the LA Scene of the era, albeit as cartoony as Roger Rabbit.   Even the Griffith Park Observatory plays a cameo as the “Deca Disco”. Best line in the movie: “You’re so lucky you crashed in The Valley, its the baddest place on earth”. Indeed.

All the cast info you could want is over on the IMDB. In the mean time enjoy a clip from the movie. (Including one extra after the jump).

Read the rest of this entry →

When I saw Magnolia the first time, the sum total of what I knew about the movie, going in to the theater, could fit on an index card: This was a movie by the guys who did Boogie Nights but it was about the 90s not the 70s. That’s it; that was what I knew. I rarely go into a film totally blind, but I’d loved Boogie Nights so Paul Thomas Anderson was enough of a recommendation for me.

To be honest, Magnolia emotionally knee-capped me. I cried, and not just in that oops got something in my eye; damn that guy with too much cologne kind of way. We’re talking full blown weeping complete with nose blowing. And so I am loathe to talk too much about the specifics of the movie in case there are some of you who have not seen it.

What I’ll say is this: the “magnolia” in the title is Magnolia Boulevard that runs most of the length of the east valley. The film follows the intersecting stories of a number of different Valley characters, all of whom are damaged and fundamentally isolated.

Twice in the movie, we hear the line, “And the book says, ‘We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.’” And so it seems for our characters who are all, in their way, wounded by their history. Much of the drama in the movie comes from the effort to outrun or deny the past, the personal equivalent of L.A.’s propensity to raze and rebuild, raze and rebuild. After all, California is where people go to reinvent themselves, no? Read the rest of this entry →

The economic crisis has hurt a lot of people, especially children and families. There are social-safety net programs that are helping as best they can, but more than 2.2 million children live below the poverty line in California alone.

And did you know that diapers and wipes are not covered under WIC or food stamp programs? Poor and especially homeless families often have to make tough choices between food and diapers, forcing them to reuse old diapers or to keep their kids in dirty diapers longer than is healthy or sanitary.

On May 1st Help A Mother Out is hosting a Wine and Cheese Date Night. All you need to do is register here for your free ticket (hurry, the numbers are limited!), buy a package of diapers to bring with you (or 2 or 10!), get dressed up and come on over to the party! Yours truly will be one of the many lovely hostesses. Tillamook Cheese, Barefoot Wine and Fresh & Easy are donating food and drink, so you don’t even have to bring any money. Just bring those diapers!

If you can’t make the party, find other ways to help and lots more info at the HAMO website. They make even make it super simple to donate diapers online.

See you on May 1st!

I think it’s time we started cleaning up the place, don’t you?

I’ve noticed more and more of these billboard trailers popping up all over the Valley recently.  The one picture above is sitting near the corner of Riverside & Whitsett. With City Attorney Carmen Trutanich going after illegal billboards and supergraphics all over L.A., surely these little guys have to be next. Right?

Except that they are legal. Some city council members want to educate us on what to do. Maybe what we should do is elect someone who will get rid of this garbage.

A few weeks ago I posted the first in what may become an occasional series of a large group of snaps of people passed while biking, that one featuring 89 images captured along the strand between Hermosa Beach and the Ballona Creek Bridge.

Today I bring you the second such crop, this one comprised of 103 shots of people encountered on a 16-mile stretch starting at the Chandler Bikeway in Burbank, all the way to the end of the Orange Line Bikeway in Woodland Hills. These were taken two Saturdays ago while biking from Silver Lake all the way up among the rocky tops of Chatsworth and back, so that I might be a part of my grandson’s 1st birthday, and further facilitate acceptance of the actual fact that I am a grandfather.

The Flickr photoset of the above images — once again heavily fauxtoshopped to achieve a stylized semi-illustrative effect — can be viewed here.

I’m a big fan of the Mystery and Imagination Bookstore in Glendale. It’s a great place to get quality used copies of just about every type of genre fiction. It’s where I’ve been getting my original Ballantine copies of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter novels*, and, along with the Brand Bookshop across the street, is one of my favorite places in the city to disappear for several hours.

So you can imagine the degree to which I peed my pants when Mystery and Imagination sent me an email a few minutes ago (I’m on their email list) alerting me that they won’t be open on Sunday because they’ll be selling books at the Black Ace Books 31st Annual Vintage Paperback Collectors’ Show and Sale. The cool part: The event will be chock full of science fiction and fantasy authors, who will be signing their books (at no charge).

I’m excited about Larry Niven, author of the Ringworld series (which, for you video game fans out there, gave some inspiration to Halo). Also present will be alternate-history guru Harry Turtledove, a host of Cthulhu Mythos writers**, and many, many more. Here’s a complete list. (Sadly, Ray Bradbury apparently had to cancel, as did Frederik Pohl, who co-wrote The Space Merchants, one of my favorite SF books of all time.)

Here are the details:

31st Annual Vintage Paperback Collectors’ Show and Sale

Sunday, March 21, 9 AM to 5:30 PM

Guest House Inn Convention Center

10621 Sepulveda Blvd

Mission Hills, CA 91345

Admission $5

* Sadly, Burroughs will not be at this weekend’s event, as he has been dead for six decades. However, Richard Lupoff will be there, and he’s a highly-regarded Burroughs scholar, as well as one of the contributors to Philip Jose Farmer’s Dungeon series, which I’m a huge enough geek to love.

** What’s the collective noun for Cthulhu Mythos writers? I’m thinking “fhtagn.” If you get this joke, you are hereby invited to my birthday party. Or, actually, that might be a terrible idea. Forget I said anything.

OMG I have to run into Rite Aid real quick for my ointment

We like to post pictures here on Metblogs of the automotively challenged. Drivers who cannot park between the lines. We refer to them, affectionately, as Parking Tards.

But, friends, today we have something very special. A tard that overshoots the space completely, landing on the sidewalk.

Sherman Oaks. Riverside & Fulton.

Bravo.

Another angle of awesomeness after the jump.

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This is the scene in front of my apartment building on Woodman Avenue in Sherman Oaks last night around 11:00 pm (with apologies for the grainy cell phone picture). Apparently the woman driving the flipped over SUV was making a left turn into her driveway and someone came around the corner from Moorpark and crashed into her.

Amazingly, everyone was okay and when we arrived on the scene the woman and her son were standing on the curb, chilly but seemingly unharmed. I’m not sure what happened to the driver of the vehicle that crashed into them, but the police said  everyone walked away unharmed. The silver (rental) SUV on the right belongs to my bff, Andrea, who was totally psyched to have found a parking place right across the street from my building. “Guess I should have purchased collision insurance huh?” she said.

fried chicken, greens and mac and cheese.

Okay, really I actually hate okra, but it’s a sort of acid test for whether a place is a real soul food restaurant, in my book. If there is no fried okra and no cobbler, well…it may be good, but it’s not really soul food. Anyone who knows LA well knows that Soul Food Kitchen is pretty much the sina qua non of soul food, but for those of us in the far reaches of the Valley (Chatsworth to be exact…here be dragons) Inglewood might as well be Savannah.

Oh happy day! Now we have our own soul food place in Northridge. Today I finally checked out Amelia’s on Nordhoff (behind the Guitar Center across from Bev Mo). OMFG. The fried chicken was unbelievably good (see the picture for evidence–can you make out the packets of Tapatio and honey? nice). First of all that was one obese foul, ladies and gentleman. It was not cheap for take out, but it was literally enough food for three meals for me. The entree came with a sizeable wing and a breast the size of my head, thank you very much, as well as two sides. The greens were good. The mac and cheese was slammin’. The fried chicken was pretty damn amazing. I ate until I was stuffed like a tick.

They also have a new weekly meal service delivery option they are offering. In case you know anyone who needs fattening up.

Amelia’s: 19520-4 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91324, Phone:  818-717-8782

We may be in the final rainy throes of winter, but in the rear parking lot of Cinema Secrets in North Hollywood, Spring’s eternal harbinger is peeking out a window, assessing the terrain.

Hi! I’m Little Sister. My mom has had success finding homes for kitties before, via Metblogs. If you’ve been reading for a few years, you’ll know about her cat saga.  Now, she’s trying to find a home for me!

I am gorgeous, if I do say so myself–with long Himalayan-style fur that’s a mix of tabby stripes & calico and marmalade colors. Every time Mom comes home I run to greet her at the gate, and I love being petted. I’m less a fan of being picked up, but can you blame me? I grew up as a feral cat, and being picked up scares me.

Mom says I have to find a new indoor home because coyotes have found our yard where we all live and are killing us one by one. I’m pretty creeped out by that. I hope you can adopt me, because then I’ll be safe! I like being outdoors, but I know my life span will be longer and I’ll be healthier if I become an indoor cat. Mom would let me live in her house but I give her the sneezles.

If you adopt me, I will probably hide under your bed or in your closet for a week before I start to venture out and explore. Pet me and you’ll find I’m a purring machine! I’m mellow and easygoing, and over time as I become used to being an indoor cat I’ll become the perfectest cat in the world! I’ve been spayed and mom says she’ll get me all new shots, which sounds not so fun.

If you’d like me to be YOUR best friend, email mom at lucindamichele (at) metblogs (dawt) com. Meow.

Hello from the beautiful West Valley, where we have everything we need to weather the storm.

Feel free to share links to your rainy-day photos in the comments, below.

Chicken tagine

A couple of weeks ago I needed to organize a last minute dinner party for a dear friend’s birthday. It was Friday. I needed a table for eight for Saturday. I called Pinot Bistro–nothing doing. I called Marche–no dice. I called Simon’s–hurrah! They came through. And that’s the thing about Simon’s: They should be super busy but they’re not. I’ve never had to wait for a table there, and I’ve never been disappointed in a meal. Simon, the owner, chef, waiter, and so on, was born in Morocco and opened the first Moroccan restaurant in Japan. He’s been in Encino for at least as long as I’ve been in LA (8 years) so he must be doing something right.

Dr D with her complimentary cookies

In any case, he was able to make room for our party and, as usual, the service and food were both fantastic. My friends who ordered the brochettes said they were a bit dry, which is unusual, but my chicken tagine was delicious–chicken with currents, apricots, and apples. Simon’s merguez is one of my favorite Valley meals period. I believe he makes the spicy lamb/beef sausages himself and they really are amazing. Also be sure to have falafel to start. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a better falafel. For this trip we had lots of desserts as well and they were all great, but I particularly liked the spiced eggplants and pears I’m sure there’s a fancy French name for these. I just don’t know it. I’m not a foody. I just like food. In the end, the bill was very reasonable and Simon came out and gave the guest of honor a box of cookies for her birthday. Next time you’re at the Arclight Sherman Oaks, do yourself a favor: skip the Cheesecake Factory and walk across the street to Simon’s Cafe. It’s located on Sepulveda just south of the boulevard (across from Whole Foods). There’s parking in the back. You can thank me later.

Someone living on Riverside & Ethel in Sherman Oaks cannot be bothered to recycle. However, this presents you with a rare January opportunity to decorate. Merry Wednesday!

#valleypride