January 2008
New Year in Los Angeles, California.
Happy New Year! New Year’s Eve in Guadalajara was a bit of a wash out, Dave and I full of cold. Arrived here in LA on 1st January with Danny…a three hour flight. Day one lovely weather…wandered around in t-shirts…two days later grey and raining the temperature dropped and the state of California issued flood warnings. We have remained unscathed in Venice at Danny’s house in our room full of music memorabilia. Not a lot to report as we’ve been dossing around eating home cooked food (the first time Danny’s kitchen has been put to full use)…great to skip the refried beans. Danny’s birthday; he took the day off work we headed to Monterey Park and ate great Vietnamese food with old friends Richard and Barbara. We intend to sort a car out; you can’t get around in Los Angeles without one easily…and we’ll plan some trips around this part of California for the next three weeks. Death Valley, Joshua Tree National Park, Palm Springs, San Diego…let’s see where we actually get to. In the meantime we’re chilling here with Danny and Roscoe; beautiful dog popular with the locals…we get stopped by every third person who thinks 9 year old Roscoe is still a pup; asking what breed he is (a mutt from the dog’s home). Morning walks along Venice Beach under the palm trees take double the time it should…but it’s amusing. He’s a movie star of a dog.
Venice California. We’re a 10 minute walk from Venice Beach at Danny’s house. Beautiful sunshine during the day but cold at night and early morning; still beats a UK winter. I’m being hassled to update the blog, I’ve been lazy recently. We’re meeting great people…having fun, but thinking we’d better start some serious planning for the next leg of our travelling.
Walking Venice Beach towards 3rd Street promenade. Remember the opening credits of the hilariously inappropriate TV show Californication? On Main Street Venice the ‘Ballerina Clown’ or ‘Clownerina’ by sculptor Jonathan Borofsky looms 30 feet tall over the entrance to a CVS pharmacy; a 5 minute walk from Danny’s house. Originally built for a local art museum it was installed here in 1989; the motor making the right leg kick out got turned off in 1990 after neighbour’s complaints of noise. We wander the neighbourhood crossing Lincoln and Rose, over in to Santa Monica along Abbot Kinney crammed with coffee shops, boutiques and real estate agents. Breakfasts at Brick House Kitchen on Hampton Drive and The Rose Cafe on Rose Avenue… burgers from Apple Pan on Pico Boulevard.
Venice Canals. I bet you didn’t know that Venice California is so called because it has canals? A lot of them were filled in years ago but a stretch of them still exist flanked by some of the most expensive real estate in California. You would need a few million to live here. Beautiful and surreal being as it’s only a short walk from the beach.
Malibu Beach…Surf’s Up and Malibu Beach Houses.
Feel sorry for these poor Californians having to hang out in the surf all day long….must have counted about 40 surfers catching the waves. The sun dazzled on breaking surf.
We’ve been driving around in the Dodge Charger rental car; it’s huge by English standards…an eyeball searing white in the Californian sun and looks like a pimp car (promise to load a photo of it this week Jules). We parked up on the roadside in Malibu and walked down to the beach to look up at the expensive real estate standing cheek by jowl on stilts…a delay in us noticing the signs warning us off the beach as it’s private property. Same thing in Mexico, the expensive beach plots hugging the Caribbean coast forbid entry to the beach to local people. I’m not a fan of this sectioning off of wide swathes of coastline to private ownership.
Topanga Canyon close to Malibu where a lot of the stars have swish houses in the hills. We took the old Topanga Canyon road to the turn off; Red Rock. Explored steep rocky scree twisted trees, dusty canyon washes.
Santa Monica Beach Houses. Spent a lot of time walking Venice glad to be out of the car after about three and a half thousand miles across Mexico…checking out the architecture of some of the Venice beach ocean front houses. A plot along here costs millions and with millions to throw around there are some eccentric designs. Jerry Lieber’s house (one half of Lieber and Stoller who wrote Elvis Presley’s songs) looks like a tree house surrounded by towering palms.
Disneyland Anaheim. This photo is a special treat for all those people who know how much Dave HATES having his photo taken. On his birthday; a special treat to Disneyland California. We couldn’t find Mickey Mouse and Minnie’s queue for photos was too long, but Woody and Jesse seemed appropriate for Dave’s relaxed new image…though him posing with Pluto would have been amusing. Finn and Cal what do you think? We rode on Space Mountain…thrown around in the pitch black on a rollercoaster, me screaming and digging my fingernails in to Dave’s arm I hated the ride…then loved it….gutted on returning to ride it again to find it closed due to technical faults. Gulp.
Joshua Tree National Park Palm Springs. We’ve been on a road trip for a couple of days. I got full on proper flu and blacked out bashed my head on the motel bathroom wall; Dave reckoned the entire floor of the flimsy building shook when I took a turn. I fell in to the corner of the shower stall so the bruises match either side…I look like a Rorschach Test. We drove down to Palm Springs, a purpose built community in the desert catering mainly to wealthy retirees who spend their days on one of the 110 manicured golf courses or spend their money in shops selling overpriced glitz and tacky glamour. Or perhaps they check in to the Betty Ford Centre also based here. We didn’t ‘get’ Palm Springs. Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball many other Hollywood stars made this home in the 1950’s to escape the smog and crowds of Los Angeles…but the glamour has gone; loads of attractive homes but no atmosphere. Others have moved on to Palm Desert about 20 miles down the road leaving behind a walk of starry fame and a retail hell of identical Spanish styled adobe. Try as we did…both of us pretty much hated the place; overpriced restaurants charging over $40 for a steak. Maybe we didn’t give it chance, I wasn’t feeling great. The snowcapped mountain range is awe inspiring the motel room was great and we were perfectly placed to visit nearby Joshua Tree National Park and Pioneer Town…and Dave loves driving his Dodge Charger muscle car.
The landscape of Joshua Tree is stunning changing constantly with moving clouds influencing the fall of light across barren plains and twisted trees. We meandered a two hour driving route through the park…within seconds the sky turning from brilliant blue to a bruised purple before sliding back in to the blue…the two often overlapping…the play of shadow and light is extraordinary. Joshua Tree National Park is situated where the higher Mojave meets the lower Colorado Desert and covers around 800,000 acres set aside to protect the area and the trees. The Joshua trees are only found in the northwestern area of the park, set against a surreal backdrop of monzogranite boulders; Skull Rock worn by years of wind hollowing it out.
The boulders are giant rock piles pushed up from the earth by the movements of the Pinto Mountain Fault which runs directly below the park. Some are over 100 feet high and all have been weathered and smoothed by thousands of years of wind and flash floods. The Joshua trees aren’t a tree but a Yucca, a type of agave plant and member of the lily family. Some are over 300 years old and named by Mormons traveling through the area in the 1850’s who likened their outstretched branches to the arms of Joshua leading them to the promised land.
Joshua Tree is the name of the 1987 U2 album of the same name and also known by fans of country rock star, Gram Parsons. Tragically in 1973 he overdosed in room 8 of The Joshua Tree Inn aged 27. His body was taken to Los Angeles Airport where it was to be flown on to Louisiana for burial. However, Gram’s road manager Phil Kaufman and a friend got drunk and decided to honour Gram’s wishes to be cremated in the Joshua tree desert which Parsons visited regularly. They borrowed a broken down hearse and drove to LAX airport where they showed false papers, signed for the body and drove it back to The Joshua Tree Desert. Stopping to buy more beer and a container of gasoline, they took Gram’s body into the desert poured the gasoline over it and set it on fire. The two were arrested several days later and fined for stealing and burning the coffin. Gram’s body was only partially burned, his remains recovered and laid to rest in a cemetery near New Orleans. The boulder below marks the scene of the makeshift cremation and is known as Cap Rock. The area has recently been cleaned up and the former shrine to Gram Parsons has mostly been removed. Some graffiti on the rocks remains but a lot of it appears to be new and the small concrete plinth marked with ‘Gram – safe at home’ disappeared in 2003, probably stolen by a fan or ebay bounty hunter or removed by the National Park. The site is not mentioned on any of the park’s maps or brochures. To find it head for the start of Keys View Road to the Cap Rock parking area and the site is just off the side of the road on a well marked trail set back amongst the rocks.
The Joshua Tree Desert like most deserts, is a furnace in summer with temperatures reaching 125 degrees F, but when we visited… bitterly cold with a fierce wind blowing across open landscape…forewarned and prepared we wrapped in several layers.
Pioneer Town close to Joshua Tree National Park is an old wild-west styled town built in the 1940s for filming of movies and TV shows. Expecting it to be Disney-fied we were pleasantly surprised to find it deserted, quite authentic and looking practically untouched since it was created. There’s no official entrance no entrance fee to pay and absolutely no-one around. A bitter wind whipped through as Dave and I wandered the wagons, boxes of fake dynamite and took turns pretending to be in the town jail. Later that night I was out of it…dosed up to get through the day the flu bug took over and flattened me. Wrapped in a blanket, Dave carried me to the car, buckled me in and we drove back to Danny’s in Venice where I spent the next three days in bed sweating it out.
You see some spectacular things driving across these landscapes. This huge group of wind turbines looked futuristic against the backdrop of snowcapped mountains; we learned there are around 30,000 of them in this one area.
Getty Center Brentwood Los Angeles the campus for the Getty Museum high up on a hill we paid to park and a short tram ride ferried us upwards for free entrance. My luck was in….one of my favourite photographers Graciela Iturbide (Mexican) had an exhibition showing…wonderful. Glorious views across to the city of Los Angeles, a maize, restaurant, large grounds, fountains…a billion dollar project designed by architect Richard Meier with elegance and taste.
Petersen Automative Museum Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard, one of the largest museums of its kind. Fabulous fun; walked it for over two hours ogling the old movie star cars, Cadillacs, custom painted lowriders….one a VW Jetta…the same model we just drove over 3,000 miles across Mexico.
Garth, Marie and Tree Man. Hung out again with our old mate Garth (who used to live in Seattle/former guitarist in Jackie on Acid) and his fabulous girlfriend Marie. Lunch then a wander down Venice Beach on to the boardwalk where we met Tree Man…who’s just starred as a robot in the new Will Smith movie. To see Dennis Hopper’s house, a closed steel behemoth juxtaposed with an ironic white picket fence.
Leaving California. We leave California tomorrow and fly to Seattle; expect photos of us bundled up in tons of clothes because it’s freezing cold and snowing. Dave is crying…he was sunbathing today in Danny’s garden. We’re really excited to reunite with our friends in Seattle and Sandra and Tony are coming down from Vancouver Island to meet us at Bruce’s. Fun days ahead.
The Travel Diarist 