strange days

I want to talk about two quite unusual places I have been so far in LA,
the first is the Upright Citizen Brigade Theatre in Franklin Avenue, south of Sunset.
http://www.ucbtheatre.com/
It is a kind of improvisation theatre that, I think, started up in New York. It is a word-oriented kind of theatre, many comedian and stand up comedian have started from this sort of experience, one name for all John Belushi. The theatre is very small, about 100 seats, the stage also very small, the audience and the performers are all young with about 80% I would say under the age of 30. The great majority of performers are young male that want to become professional comedian and train in that direction. It is a collective performance. About six actors get to the stage, and ask for a word from the public. Then they start a number of scenes, one of them begins and the other support. They come back to the same scene two or three times and develop the story. The evening I was in there were two groups, one quite bad that seemed like a bunch of guys half drunk and having fun telling made up stories from their past, the second group was quite good, and you could not believe that something so elaborated was , it is really incredible that all you see is not at all prepared but 95% improvised there and then.

The second place, unique to LA is the Museum of Jurassic Technology, on Venice Bld. in Culver city. http://www.mjt.org/
hard to describe, the creation of David Hildebran Wilson, it opened in 1989, and it is a mix of various things, a cabinet of curiosity, a set of different collection, a museum of natural history, and one of popular culture. But it is more and less than all of those things, because in it, you are exiting the realm of positive knowledge to enter in a sort of machine that reflects on knowledge and the museum. As an authoritative voice tells you , over a German original, about a fantastic theory of memory and reality as cones and planes, you start to wonder if what you hear and see is actually true and to what extent. Have these scientists ever existed? And the charts about trailer homes parks around the world are they reliable or they just serves the purpose to convey ethnographical character to the collection? You are exhausted and you end at the Russian themed tea-room serving tea from a samovar. When you exit in the bright California daylight you feel like you understand Alice a little more.

Santa Monica

Sunny saturday, temperature around 23°, more importantly low breeze from the ocean. A good day for a fist LA beach experience. Of course I am not alone in having this thoughts,
Santa Monica downtown is quite crowded with stollers in the pedestrian zone, 3rd street. I have a beach towel,, but I miss few basic items to spend a day in the sun, suncream protection factor 70 (I always buy the highest factor available) flip-flaps, an american institution, and a hat. Thus the first half an hour is dedicated to shopping.
Here I am in the course of my transformation towards a californian look

Second round is the farmers' market, with ridicously overpriced vegetables and fruits, 6 $ for a 2 pounds (900 gr.) of oranges, but they are organic and we are in Santa Monica. Overall not very different than doing your shopping in S Domenico di Fiesole, or at an organic shop inChiantishire, isn't it? I buy plants: Basel, Parseley, Mint and Sage, to make my place feel like home.

The sand portion of the beach is about 50 to 100 m wide,



This place, on the neverending ocean promeaderather is rather basic and unrefined, it played vivaldi music as it served omelettes and burgers.




Here I am as I exit the cold pacific water, pictured by the friend I came with, still a bit overweight. It is mindblowing to be on the beach like it was high summer....

Getty Centre

Yesterday, in the afternoon of a very clear day I went to visit the Getty Centre, In Brentwood, LA, not very distant from Santa Monica. The centre takes its name after J. Paul Getty, the oil industrialist and author of the famous book "How to be rich". Although I had look at it in the internet, I was flabbergasted already at my arrival, 7 floor underground carpark and internal tram system to take you to the centre. What an opportunity for an architect in this case Meier to be playing without hardly constraint of budget....

The dimension of the project and of its realization are beyond scale, more the legacy of an emperor than that of an industrialist in a democratic society, the center stands like the works of those roman emperors that built an aqueduct or a temple, or a Pope, like Pius II and his Pienza.

It is built in white, with a stone quite familiar to Italians, travertine from Rome, but instead of being polished the squared block are left with a rough surface that conferrers more natural grandiosity to the complex. The sections built in white painted steel are instead flat.

It contains a series of terraces, roof gardens, gardens, fountains, statues, few pavilions for the art collections and a research centre where they gave me a two years long reader status with badge for not paying the carpark. In the library all the stacks have an "earthquake bar" to keep the book from falling during an earthquake.

The day was clear thus I visited only one of the exhibitions and spent quite a long time looking at LA from the terraces. I am amazed how green it looks, . with hills and trees everywhere. Travelling on the freeway you often feel you are crossing the countryside. What you see in the photo is freeways 405 that goes south, the Getty is just off the 405, and Century City, the only other area of LA, besides downtown, with skyscrapers.

This is instead a picture of the 405, heading north one can see the traffic of the afternoon. I had to remain in the area until 8 pm before heading back east and home.

griffith park and more, more....

More explorations of LA, this past weekend, Saturday was hazy and was the day of Griffith Park, the largest Urban Park in the US, it is the one where the observatory that figures in Rebel without a cause and the HOLLYWOOD sign are located. You can walk for many hours in it, going up and down on the hills, it is left un-kept and now that is spring there were a profusions of greens from the emerald to the gray.
The best image that I have, but not a photo yet, is LA as seen from the hills north east of it, as it appeared on sunset at as I was driving on the 210. Flat green grey and brown with two set of skyscrapers. Far on the back closing in with the sky, the ocean. The 210 is really a freeway like the one you see on documentaries on LA life, 6-8 lanes on each direction, it borders the hills north of the city to take people east towards S Bernardino. It is the freeway that runs closer to where I live.
As everywhere else in order to communicate with others about a place you have to learn the various zones, and learn their position and the values attached to them. You start with North and South, rich and poor, and then West and East, a little more complicated, Westend seems to be associated with arty people and the entertainment world, Eastend I still have not grasped it.
And then the many centres, like Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino, the ones closer to where I live, each with their own distinctive identity. Echo park, Angeleno, Venice beach, the ones I've practised the last two weeks. South of Pasadena there is Rosebud, and it is an entire area, that expands toward West populated by Chinese people, 70% of the inhabitants. All the shop signs are both Chinese and English.
I wonder if, because there is no a clear centre-periphery dynamic, there is a greater symbolic autonomy of all these various centres..

.....

"Such a fresh glance into a new land in which we are to abide for a time has still the peculiarity, both pleasant and foreboding, that the whole lies before us like an unwritten tablet. As yet no sorrows and joys which relate to ourselves are recorded upon it; this cheerful, varied, animated plain is still mute for us; the eye is only fixed on the objects so far as they are intrinsically important, and neither affection nor passion has especially to render prominent this or that spot. But a presentiment of the future already disquiet the young heart; and an unsatisfied craving secretly demands that which is to come..."

Goethe, as he, upon his arrival, contemplates Strasbourg from the Cathedral. From his autobiography, english translation, 1882, vol I page 296.

Pasadena Lifestyle

I am in search of "Patio Furniture", yesterday evening at dinner I got the right keyword. The site of the revelation was an Afghani restaurant in central Pasadena, which is a lovely and lively little centre. "you are looking for Patio Furniture...."
One of the problems of everyday life, even if you master the language decently, is how to ask for... So as I want a confortable chair to sit and enjoy the afternoon shadow with a book or write the blog, etc. How do you ask for it? I need soemething to lean in the courtyard, I want a reclining chair, a rocking chair, either too generic or too specific, the attendant looks at you with strained eyes and slowly says, no we do not have those.
They really did not. I went around three Antiques shops, they do not sell old beautiful furniture, but just old, second hand stuff, but they did not have anything for outside. Thus today I will probably go to Home Depot a chain of department stores specializing in everything for the house.

In the meantime I am trying to find my way around the lifestyle in this area of california, of Los Angeles.
Yesterday I went to visit a piece of history of Southern California, the first Trader Joe's store ever opened in 1958. Trader Joe's in a sense stands to Southern California as Dunkin' Donuts stands for New England, a philosophy of eating. But Dunkin' Donuts is a fast food chain providing caffeine saturated fat and sugar, Trader Joe's is a chain of quality and foreign food supermarkets dressed in hawayan shirt. It started in the sixties to market food from abroad with a focus on quality. They have a Hawayan logo and shirts that was introduced to distinguish the company from rival food chains.

http://www.traderjoes.com/index.html

I was not particularly impressed by the store itself, but I suppose that forty years later all chains have learned to have their quality section...

Open food market with fresh product is a political statement. http://www.pasadenafarmersmarket.org/ Every tuesday and saturday there is a farmer's market. I long to go and have a look. They say that tomatoes are tasty, I want to check that out.

In the meantime at the Huntington, this morning upon entering the library there was a basket of free lemons, very tasty and juicy, from the botanic garden.

Orange and olive tree, a golf course

Today I had to move out of sweet Echo Park area to my new place in Altadena, the car was full of stuff, two suitcases and food and my bag, and the two overcoats etc etc. I am staying on one of the last street before the mountains starts, I think one might even walk there right from the house.

There is a golf park right in front, very suburban, area, I can park on the driveway, "stradella" in Italian, an olive tree on the right and an orange tree on the left I think I can recognize this entrance.

My room is a guest room at the back of the house. I can enjoy the courtyard and the wooden patio. Excellent for working and eating up outside, they say they do not have mosquitos here, what else will they have? I will discover it.

Tonight I am going to the cinema, first time in the US, unbelivable, I do not recognize mysef, to see Buster Keaton with live music. At the http://www.silentmovietheatre.com/index.html