Artisanal L.A.: The Ultimate “Independent L.A.” Post

At the L.A. Mart design center, my sister, J, and I recently went to the Artisanal L.A. Spring Show 2014. We were greeted into the parking lot by the distinctive giant wooden kitchen chair, a gift from a consortium of Italian furniture makers to the company that manages the L.A. Mart. Originally standing tall outside of the Chicago Merchandise Mart, it was shipped to L.A. to take advantage of the nicer weather, just like the rest of us. J and I had been to the L.A. Mart once before, during the Halloween convention Scare L.A. I don’t remember much of that convention, as I spent the entire time clutching my sister, on the lookout for zombies. Because somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that there might be people wandering around in grotesque makeup trying to scare the living daylights out of you. At a Halloween convention.

“I don’t know why you didn’t expect this,” my sister had said, as I shadowed her every move, keeping her in front of me like a shield.

“I don’t know why you think I would have,” I had whispered back, trying to keep from making too much noise lest I attract any predators. “I don’t come to these kinds of things, like, ever. This is your fault.”

To give you a sense of how much I like horror movies, I can’t even watch the trailers that play on TV without covering my eyes. Which meant the fake zombies naturally gravitated toward me, smelling my fear from all the way on the other side of the convention floor, like sharks smelling blood in the water. I told my sister in no uncertain terms that she would have to find someone else to accompany her to future Scare L.A. shows.

Our visit this time, however, was much more my speed. As a show celebrating handmade goods, most of which were food, there was nothing scary lurking around every corner (though J was almost taken out by the dangling legs of a toddler, being airplaned around in the air by the outstretched arms of her oblivious father). We started to make our way around the booths, with J occasionally darting in and out in her patented “business card swipe” move. Her single-minded focus on a vendor’s business card was an efficient tactic, sometimes complicated by my desire to actually speak to the vendor.

One of the booths we stopped by was Laura Ann’s Jams. The strawberry vanilla jam I tried was amazing. “Everyone loves the strawberry vanilla jam,” the lady manning the booth nodded knowingly at me. Laura Ann also makes drinks out of her jams, which I think is brilliant. The lemonade made out of the strawberry vanilla jam was so good that I immediately had to buy a bottle. I played coy about buying the jam—what? There were so many other jams to try before I could make a commitment to just one!—but ended up coming back to buy it later.

I also stopped by the Crème Caramel L.A. booth. Co-owner Kristine de la Cruz was manning the booth herself. She told me they were mainly advertising their catering services, but offered me samples of their vanilla custard ice cream with a hard chocolate shell topping, a brownie, and a chocolate chip cookie concoction that pasted two cookies together with marshmallow fluff. I happily extended my hand out and tried all three while we discussed the new shop she recently opened in Sherman Oaks, right around the corner from my apartment.

J, even though she owns a crafting business of her own, Spookyfinds, isn’t always aware of other artisanal vendors. As we passed the Handsome CoffeeRoasters booth, she laughed out loud at the name and then quickly looked away as the admittedly good-looking gentlemen manning the booth gave her weird looks.

“Are they serious?” she giggled. “Isn’t it kind of weird to call yourself a handsome roaster? Or is that just me?”

Based on the cult hipster status of the Arts District shop, I told her it was just her.

My stomach starting to growl after a couple hours, we hit the food trucks outside the L.A. Mart complex. Tempted by the chipotle burger at the Green Truck, an organic food truck committed to green living, I was super-excited to see that it came on a pretzel bun. Pretzel buns are the best thing ever and it perfectly complimented the lamb patty and mildly spicy chipotle sauce. Very yummy. I briefly thought about taking a picture of it for posterity, but my stomach reminded me that it was hungry and wouldn’t stand for such a silly delay. So I devoured my burger while trying not to swallow any of my own hair being blown about my face by the not-so-gentle spring wind.

With one last look at the giant wooden kitchen chair, my sister and I departed, my strawberry vanilla jam securely tucked into my purse.

Griffith Park, Bigfoot Lodge, and House of Pies, Oh My!

Today’s lovely weather reminded me of the great weather we enjoyed a few Saturdays ago—not too cold and not too hot. It was perfect for a birthday picnic in Griffith Park. I’d been to Griffith Park to see free ISC Shakespeare in the summer, and had even visited the Observatory way back in high school when I first moved to California, but I’d never really come to enjoy it as just a park—a place for people to gather and enjoy spending time outdoors. Amidst the piles of food were cupcakes from Frosted Cupcakery, and they were absolutely awesome. I had the red velvet one, but there were also chocolate and salted caramel versions. They were minis, so I didn’t feel too badly about eating two of them. Just being outside must surely count as some form of exercise.

After hours of lounging on the picnic tables, we oohed and aahed as the birthday girl opened all her presents. As darkness fell, we packed up and headed to nearby Bigfoot Lodge. When you enter the bar, you have the sense that they used the same decorator that Disney did for Frontierland. But after a while, you start to think that it’s just a bit cooler than the kitschy Old West cartoon village; that the bar is in on the joke, and is, perhaps, even the one making the joke. The result? You feel like you’re in a quirky bar in the quirky/cool neighborhood of Los Feliz. Appropriately then, the drinks all bear themed names. I had the Girl Scout Cookie, a martini based off of the Thin Mint cookie by the eponymous organization. It does, in fact, taste exactly like a Thin Mint, only with the more grown-up bite of alcohol. My sister ordered a Sasquatch, which tasted like it was 200% alcohol. Like if you were actually confronted by the mythical creature, the purpose of that drink is to make you faint. Giving up after a few swallows, my sister ordered a Toasted Marshmallow, which was tasty and accented by a . . . toasted marshmallow (kind of obvious, that).

And because no self-respecting night of drinking ends without a case of the munchies, we headed to House of Pies. The patty melt I ordered was good, not spectacular, but the peanut butter cream pie was fantastic. I don’t really consider myself a pie girl, but you can’t go to the House of Pies and not get a slice of pie. And that peanut butter pie might have just converted me.

After a day and night of gallivanting around Los Feliz, the sight of my bed in the wee hours of the morning was welcome. Dreaming dreams of Sasquatches and pie, I drifted off into oblivion.

Casey’s 40th Annual St. Patrick’s Day Street Festival

Determined to wait out the storm in my apartment on Saturday, my sister whined and cajoled to get me to go Downtown to the annual St. Patrick’s Day street bash hosted by Casey’s Irish Pub.

“But it’s never St. Patrick’s Day on a weekend!” my sister pointed out. “We have to go out!”

She dismissed my objections that we might drown in the rain. Eyeing the overcast sky, gloomy but not actually pouring at that moment, I conceded, curious about a festival that can draw thousands of people to the two-block area surrounding the pub.

On St. Patrick’s Day, I usually wear the obligatory green, while resisting my mother’s attempts to get me to wear socks and dangly earrings with shamrocks and pots of gold on them. It is a holiday to ostensibly celebrate the Irish. And as such, it is naturally also a drinking holiday. I don’t drink very often, so that aspect of the day is usually lost on me. Not so my sister. Drinking for her is more like an endurance sport.

When we arrived at the festival, Hollywood U2, the U2 cover band, was playing under the huge tent erected to protect festival attendees from the impending rain. The first order of business was obvious: get a drink. Among the usual offerings was the kitschy classic, green beer. Never having indulged before, we ordered two straightaway. Clicking cups to toast the day, we parked near the band, enjoying the music and the people watching.

After a few hours of singing along to Hollywood U2’s set list (the lead singer looks and sounds eerily like Bono), we decided to find some food. One look at the really long line to get inside Casey’s and we went a little further afield for some grub. In the mood for fish and chips, I did a Yelp search for nearby restaurants. Originally headed to the gastropub Public School 612, we detoured to the adjacent Daily Grill, which was much less crowded (crowded bars being hazards of St. Patty’s Day). The Baja fish and chips I ordered was yummy. The breading on the fish wasn’t too greasy, and the spiced tartar sauce was pretty amazing. It made a perfect dipping sauce for the shoestring fries in addition to the fish.

Walking back to the festival to the opening strains of the AC/DC tribute band’s set, we decided to head out before the moving storm clouds made it to Downtown. Two minutes after we got on the 101, we passed through the oncoming clouds, which poured buckets of water onto my sister’s car.

Thoroughly glad that my sister convinced me to brave the rain to indulge in some holiday cheer, I left the festival having drunk my first green beer (okay, I poured most of it into my sister’s cup). Next year, St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Sunday. Perhaps I’ll leave it to the professionals (drinkers, that is), and happily make myself some corned beef and cabbage at home.

The Moth

When you hear the words “The Moth,” you don’t automatically think “nonprofit dedicated to the art of storytelling.” Or maybe those of us who still live in the dark don’t. According to the organization’s website, The Moth events are often standing room only. After witnessing how packed Royce Hall was on a Thursday night, and judging by the enthusiastic applause, they’re not joking.

But why would you name your organization after a bug? As I sat in Royce Hall waiting to be entranced by live storytelling, I couldn’t get this question out of my head. What was the significance of The Moth? The enlarged graphic of the creature adorning the T-shirts being sold in the lobby loomed in my brain. Unable to stand the suspense any longer, I whipped out my iPhone and googled the organization. So here it is: George Dawes Green, the founder of The Moth, was a native Georgian, and on humid summer nights, he and his friends would get together on his friend’s porch and share stories. Attracted to the light, moths would get through the holes in the porch screen. Thus, the storytellers started calling themselves The Moths.

I have to be honest: when I read that explanation I was a little let down, as it’s not the most romantic of origin tales. As a former UCLA English Major, I like symbols to have more profound meaning, to be more “symbolic” (if you will) of something larger. But as I started thinking more about the moth as a symbol for the organization, it increasingly seemed apparent to me that the symbol has taken on a larger meaning than its initial adoption suggests. [I feel I must apologize in advance for the following paragraph. My brain started thinking I was in college again and got a little carried away.]

The moth, much like its cousin the butterfly, starts life as a caterpillar, before emerging fully formed from its cocoon. Live storytelling is a lot like that process: the storyteller is transformed by sharing, in real time and without notes, a tale of personal experience. With each word spoken, the raconteur breaks free from the cocoon of isolated experience and turns it into a shared, immediate experience with all of the listeners. What makes the moth an apt metaphor (rather than the butterfly) is that when it emerges from its cocoon, its colors are muted—ordinary. Its transformation is not flashy. So too the storyteller’s; shared human experience is not a tangible product, but it is no less meaningful, and the storyteller is still an ordinary person when he or she walks off the stage.

Oftentimes, though, ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Kodi Azari, a hand surgeon, talked about how he helped pioneer the field of hand transplantation. After having completed the first hand transplantation surgery ever, Dr. Azari explained how he and the rest of his surgical team sobbed in the hospital room of a U.S. soldier, who had lost his hand overseas, as he slowly wiggled the fingers on his new hand.

During Jennie Allen’s story, about how she dealt with the effects of losing her hair from chemotherapy, she recounts how she felt when she lost her eyebrows too. She felt naked, because “my hair was part of my head, but my eyebrows were part of my face.” It’s an immensely enjoyable moment when a storyteller utters a simply worded statement that speaks volumes.

Jerry Stahl’s story was less uplifting than the previous two stories, chronicling his life as a drug addict, but with a dark humor that had the audience laughing out loud. (With the exception of one moment: wanting to avoid his landlady in order to score more drugs, he drove right past her frantic waving. Later, he found out that her husband had had a heart attack and she had been signaling for help. Her husband later died. Apparently, we Californians were too polite to laugh at the situation.)

Rounding out the storytellers were Brian Finkelstein, who chronicled his fateful last night as a volunteer for a suicide hotline, and Annie Duke, who spoke about her emotional journey as a professional poker player.

The Moth’s goal is to put on three live events a year in L.A. Rudy Rush, the host for the evening and entertaining in his own right, also promoted the nonprofit’s poetry slams. After having enjoyed one evening of live storytelling, I’m looking forward to the next live event The Moth puts on.

West Hollywood Book Fair

This past Sunday, I headed into West Hollywood for its annual book fair. This was the first time I’d actually been, even though the fair has been around for ten years. Held on the grounds surrounding the West Hollywood Library, in the shadow of the Blue Whale (aka the Pacific Design Center; see my visit a couple summers ago here), the fair isn’t as big as the vernal L.A. Times Festival of Books, but it still offered plenty to interest the literary Angeleno.

My first stop was the booth of Bill Cunningham, author of I Wonder What Became of Me, right by the entrance to the library. Last fall, as a side project, I edited Bill’s book, a fascinating look at his life and decades-long career building one of the most respected talent agencies in the world. A quick photo with Bill later, I was on my way to the food court, signed book tucked in my bag, with a promise to stop by the booth again on my way out. There was a variety of food trucks at the food court, including the Hungry Nomad and SliceTruck. I decided to grab a cherry slushy lemonade from A ROCKin ICE, which I ordered from a very happy and very friendly blonde guy dressed in a Hawaiian shirt. The slushy was delicious but it made my teeth look like they had escaped from a horror film. One guy made the mistake of asking me where I got my program, and probably did not expect that the short, harmless-looking curly-haired brunette would reveal a set of (what looked like) bleeding teeth.

My icy, teeth-staining slushy in hand, I set out to explore what else was on offer at the fair. I walked up to the Open Booth stage just in time for “Cats Throw Dark Shadows: From Actress to Author.” Julie Newmar, the original Catwoman, was wearing a pair of cat ears, completing her image as an eccentric creative spirit. Next I wandered over to the Comics, Graphic Novels & More stage and caught the “Comics to Screen & Back Again” panel, featuring, among others, Len Wein, co-creator of Swamp Thing and Wolverine. I don’t have a particularly avid interest in comics, but I find that people who do are usually pretty entertaining. My sister works at a collectible figures company, and while the guys she works with behave like total man-children, they are absolutely hilarious.

After wandering around a bit more, I slid by Bill’s booth again and said my goodbyes. Then it was back into the belly of the Blue Whale to find where I parked my car.

Plans for next weekend include scouring L.A.’s vintage furniture stores for a pair of nightstands. Have I mentioned that I’ve spent the last several weeks looking for nightstands? What? I’m picky.

Hello Again

A lot has changed since I last wrote on this blog. In September, I was jobless and hanging out in mid-city L.A., avoiding the heat of the Valley. I had only been back from New York for a few months. Since the fall, temps have cooled (and have now started to heat up again), I moved back to the Valley, and I now have a job (I even had two for a time).

My new job is in a completely different field than any of my previous jobs, which meant that there was a big learning curve when I first started. My brain was so overwhelmed for a while that I didn’t have any extra RAM (as my techie dad would say) to devote to my blog. Moving to the Valley also limited the amount of cultural opportunities/events to explore and chronicle. Lately, though, I find my thoughts straying back to my explorations of the summer and how satisfying it was to write about them. Now, whenever I visit a new place or do something out of the ordinary, I find myself composing blog posts in my head, thinking about how I would describe something and what details I would include.

Having decided to start writing my blog again, I’ve also decided to change the focus slightly. Although New York will still always hold a special place in my heart and I will always miss it, my life is here in L.A. And there are so many great things about living here that I want to focus on celebrating all there is to do in L.A. rather than trying to somehow console myself that I’m not in New York. Thus, while the name of my blog will still be “Falling in Love with L.A.,” it will be more about exploring what it means to love living in the City of Angels. That’s not to say I’ll never mention New York ever again. I don’t think you should ever forget the places you’ve been, especially the places that really get inside of you. But there’s so much to see in the world that you also have to be open to discovering new places. And maybe even rediscovering places, too.

What to Love in L.A. This Weekend

Free Festivities: Officially, Whole Foods doesn’t turn 30 until Monday, September 20th, but this weekend Whole Foods stores all across North America and the UK are celebrating with all sorts of birthday festivities. The Whole Foods nearest me is celebrating with raffles throughout the entire weekend. They’ll be raffling off all sorts of things, from goody bags to gift cards to bicycles (oh my!). Other activities going on include Texas-themed barbecues (in honor of the store’s roots in Austin, where the flagship is located), birthday cake, cupcake decorating, wine tastings, various kids events, and more. Find the Whole Foods nearest you to see what’s happening at your store.