by Chris Barrus
Midway through the FMDiSC meeting this morning, I got an email message saying that there was going to be a low altitude multi-plane flyby in conjuction with the opening ceremonies for Air Force Week Los Angeles. A U-2 spy plane was scheduled to participate, so I ducked out to Barnsdall Art Park to grab some pictures.
B-1
B-52
And… the U-2. I’ve never seen one of these flying before.
Well here we go. Election plans here at Casa Drone include comfort food and copious amounts of champagne. Regardless of what happens, we’ll be ready. Eater LA has a list of election specials going on around town.
And hey, let’s be careful out there.
After picking fights with irate self-absorbed dog owners, I finally decided to check out the Americana in Glendale. My honorary title of Captain Obvious only permits me to offer up one comment: Yup, it’s a shopping mall. Still, it’s a shopping mall that’s fully 21st century buzzword compliant. Walking around the place you can easily visualize the individual layers in every engineering drawing of the place. Here’s the implicit “public space.” “Luxury condos” up here. A marinade of “new urbanism” over there. A blanket mist of “mixed use” over the whole area. If that doesn’t make the point for you then the ear-splitting background music will certainly enforce it. I’m serious here – the Americana’s background muzak is set to somewhere between “stun” and “kill.”
The Americana is eye pleasing, but not terribly different from the Grove, Santana Row, or any other kind of downtown redevelopment that skips around the “Olde Towne” prefix. The old Glendale Galleria is still there of course – cast aside to the back of the driveway like a hulking old beater car that’s been replaced by spiffy retrofuture-mobile.
The ads and the ambient branding for the Excelsior condos remind me way too much of the Longfellow poem “Excelsior.” In the poem, Longfellow describes a young man passing through a town on his way up into the mountains. His only possession, a banner with the words “Excelsior.” The locals warn him anyway from the dangerous mountain pass, but the young man ignores them and continues his climb until eventually he is found frozen to death in the snow, still grasping “the banner with the strange device, Excelsior!”
The poem describes a young man passing through a town bearing the banner “Excelsior” (translated from Latin as “ever higher”, also loosely but more widely as “onward and upward”), ignoring all warnings, climbing higher until inevitably, “lifeless, but beautiful” he is found by the “faithful hound” half-buried in the snow, “still clasping in his hands of ice that banner with the strange device, Excelsior!”
Irony Department on the phone? Perhaps. I do wonder about the wisdom of opening luxury shopping malls in economic uncertainty. The press release fanfare piles on the Tinker Bell clapping. Still, I keep picturing the Americana – dead empty except for some graffiti on the Excelsior sales office.
There, in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell, like a falling star,
Excelsior!
“I Drink Your Milkshake” scribbled on the sidewalk in Larchmont.
There’s a ton of hysteria about the extra box you have to check if you’re a non-partisian voter in L.A. County who wants to vote on the Demoocratic ballot, and unlike Kos, et. al who are fanning the flames, the directions were pretty explicit from the sample ballot I received in the mail (page two says to check the box!) to the instructions you read on the ballot itself.
Bureaucracy doesn’t have to make sense.
Anyway I suppose I should have joined in with the folks who were taking pictures of their polling place, but everything was running smoothly this morning (I voted at the Oasis Christian Center on Wilshire). Took all of ten minutes.
There was a video crew from Time.com down the street and they ended up interviewing me for the site (note to self: when thinking, make sure your eyes are open). Techincally though, I’m not part of “a group of California Democrats,” – I’m non-partisian and just happened to vote on a Democratic ballot.
Our last day will Sunday, January 13th, 2008.
We’ve been at 1710 Silver Lake Blvd since 2001 [they mean 1991 -CKB]– going on seventeen years! We’ve been in business since 1989 – almost twenty years! Feels like twenty minutes. Whoosh!
I wish I could say we are leaving happily, but the snarky fact is that our landlady, Myrna Marin, owner of Modem Salon, kicked us out with only thirty days notice in December. I guess this was her Christmas present to us and our staff. Well, at least that’s how we’re taking it.
We’ve far outgrown our current space and now we get to do business in a bigger location. As we finalize those arrangements we will post new info. I wish I could say how long that will take, but over the years I have learned that nothing happens as quickly or as slowly as we need it.
What we do know is that our staff will stay with us until this last day and will follow us to our new location and we hope our beloved customers will do the same. We have had a rare privilege in getting to know and serve all of our wonderful neighbors over the years. We hope to be able to do this for another twenty years. At least.
Much love,
Deborah and Reno.P.S. We will happily accept letters from any and all of you who would like wish us well, tell us what we’ve meant to you, or tell our new landlord how happy you’d be to have us in a new location.
OK so upfront, I’m somewhat neutral on rent raise/gentrification issues (yeah, blight is generally bad but be careful what you wish for), but this kicks me in the teeth. Back Door’s coffee, buttermilk scones, and ginger pear muffins have been a fundamental part of my Los Angeles commuting life since 1994. Their baked stuff is consistently outstanding and I’m going to be extra irritated by their absence. I hope they have a new place lined up soon.
It appears some irony lights are burning out there because landlady Marin’s web page has this quote:
A native Angeleno, Myrna earned her license before she even graduated high school. At 25, she opened her own salon on a sleepy stretch of Silver Lake Boulevard. Now the area is ground zero for the progressive Silver Lake scene, something that was established by artists like Myrna who saw the potential of the neighborhood and built it from the ground up.
So apparently it’s now time to purge out those artists. I can’t help but think that this takes a sawed-off shotgun to the entire middle section of Silver Lake Blvd. Back Door caters to a lot of folks: commuters, dog parkers, shambling musicians all of whom wouldn’t have any reason to pay attention to that strip of Silver Lake Blvd. during the day. It’s going to be a ghost town down there.
Meanwhile, the replacement restaurant for the still-missed Netty’s was supposed to open a year ago. It hasn’t yet. If memory serves, this leaves only Leela Thai, Michelangelo and the 7-11 as the only evening eating options. Sigh.
Just stepped out for a coffee and noticed a new column of black smoke a little bit east of where most of the smoke has been coming from. I wonder if this is the Acton fire. The Mt. Wilson Solar Tower webcam has a better image.
HPWREN has webcams distributed throughout San Diego County. The Lyons Peak webcam is pretty close to the action.
I know I’ve been harsh on Twitter before, but the KPBS and LA Times Twitter streams are pretty informative along with this Google Earth/Map page.
Just as FYI to everyone, here are some online police/fire radio scanner streams.
I’ll update this list as I get more information. The SoCalScan group on Yahoo has been a good source of information.
QC was in Irvine this afternoon and in the space of two hours watched as a small column of smoke up the toll road turned into a full-on fire – blacking out the sky.
Ironically, the main emergency management center for Orange County sits on top of the fire area at Loma Ridge. Hope there’s a contingency plan for when/if the emergency center burns down.
There’s a few more pictures on the Flickr stream. Please be careful out there folks.
Â