Los Angeles

"City of Angels" my ass...

Just returned from an incredibly frustrating business trip to the West Coast.  A few days in San Francisco (which I am starting to enjoy - a larger proportion of authentic dive bars than in most cities) and a day and a half in Los Angeles.  

Our host on the West Coast was supposed to travel to LA with us and make some introductions.  Unfortunately, he got sick so we were sent by ourselves.  Suboptimal at best as these were his relationships and so, after our first meeting, we decided to cut our losses, return home early, and spend the rest of the day on an LA bar crawl to drown our sorrows.

Thankfully we have good friends like Alex who, despite being in NYC, quarterbacked us by text message on where to go in LA.  We changed hotels, went to the Beverly Laurel Motor Hotel (as previously posted) and went to Al's neighborhood near Hollywood & Vine, starting at The Bowery for a late lunch.  We then wandered, finding the Starlight Room (quickly left, as we didn't know it was a gay bar), The Frolic Room (which was delightful, and our favorite - very authentic and the poet Bukowski used to drink & write there.)  

Then we had dinner at Velvet Margarita:

Which was fine - well decorated with velvet paintings (including Elvis & Sinatra), a lot of skull imagery, and good music playing.  Food was just okay but the margaritas were great, as was the decor.  Walked across the street, per another Al recommendation, to the Hotel Cafe for live music.  An incredibly nice bouncer let us go in to check it out without paying the $10 cover charge.  Great venue but the chanteuse (resplendent in a Mrs. Roper-inspired muu muu-esque dress) "singing" that night was warbling Apple-ad nerd folk and I simply couldn't take her yodeling her never-to-be-a-hit "In My Garden."  (The internets tell me it was Obi Best singing "Within These Forest Walls.")

(For those of you who know me & my musical tastes well, you can imagine my horror...  Gano actually liked it.)

So we left and wandered to another Al recommendation, The S Bar.  Very slick (upside down lamps as chandeliers) with remarkably happy, attentive, & amusing bartenders making fancy drinks with very fresh ingredients and a very pretty - if stupid - clientele.  ("You've got a whale on your shirt!"  "Yes.  Yes I do.")

Finally we called it a night, feeling we made our best of it and retired rather early for us, after a late night meal at Swingers Diner where we had brunch the next day and then went to the airport and fled Los Angeles, very excited to leave.

Thank you very much Al for steering us to some good places.  However, in very much the same way that New Orleans speaks to me and I feel different, and better, when I am there; Los Angeles is the antithesis.  It is so abundantly not my town that it messes up my mojo when I'm there...