29 March 2010

NEWS - DAY EIGHT. THE CONTINENT OF LA, PARKING IN THE CONTINENT OF LA, SANTA MONICA PIER AND 'THERE GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD'

It is hard to believe but, after a week of practice I finally managed to pull out of town at exactly the time I said I was going to. Hoorah! After a yummy breakfast with Derrick at... some place... and a shady, parking lot art deal, I hit the road spot on... whatever time I had decided to. (It's been a few days so details are sketchy) Mind you, the trip was only about an hour to The Continent of Los Angeles, but I was still pretty proud of it.

...sometimes I really do feel blessed by the universe. I couldn't resist pulling a very convoluted U-ey to get this shot. (look carefully)

Why that isn't the title of my blog I just don't know. What was I thinking?

Then it was off to my next victim's house in some pretty swank neighbourhood in Santa Monica (I don't know that there's an un-swank neighbourhood there). Robert Larsen is a gifted photojournalistic-y-type-photographer who I met on JPGmag (man... I should have asked JPGmag to sponsor my trip. This blog is a never ending cavalcade of plugs to them.) some years ago and was also a part of the illustrious if somewhat dysfunctional (and now defunct) 15x100 group.
Robert had some things to do in the afternoon and I wanted to go out and play. So I dropped off my stuff at his place and went to the Santa Monica Pier.
Holy crap batman. Six dollars bought me an hour and twenty minutes of parking. Nine dollars bought me a skinny burger, eleven-and-a-half french fries and a pop. It was all worht it though. I know this stuff is par for the course for some of y'all, but to have a roller coaster on a pier is a pretty impressive thing to me. This place was... well, see for yourself:



surf's up dude! ... dude?



It was a crash course as the time constraints and fear of American parking tickets loomed. The following day's beach outing would prove more fruitful.

On the subject of parking and the means to that end:
I've referred to LA as a 'continent' as it is so ridiculously huge that it should be called one. Day nine would prove to be more of an eye opener for me in that aspect, but holy crap again batman! Just dinking around in the Santa Monica area was a harrowing experience. There should never have to be this amount of driving. Ever. (I will expand on that later as I'm writing this after my fifth day in Southern California and have much more fodder for that rant.)Driving around I got a lot of down-nose looks at The Troutmobile as we puttered along. Especially in the swank neighbourhood. Returning to Robert's place I parked the car and walked around the house as some neighbours were pulling out of their driveway. They very literally drove slowly around the block in the same direction I was walking. I guess this time of day all the 'help' had gone home so they were wondering what someone who dresses like me & drives an old Hyundai was up to in the neighbourhood. I loved every second of it.
Robert's mum then took us out for Sushi. Mums are cool like that. The sushi was a welcome meal as the fast-food-burger-to-sushi-ratio was way off balance by this point in the trip.

Then came Hollywood Boulevard on a Friday Night...

1 comment:

  1. You are a reel man. Was there ever any doubt? Make it part of your bio.

    ReplyDelete