Interesting follow up to the previous post...

It's not often these days that I can post a link from the Los Angeles Times with pride, but this one made me smile.  This is Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's adventure in Downtown LA's Historic Core:

Downtown, Pamuk took pictures of Disney Hall from every angle. He asked about the history of Bunker Hill. It wasn't the sleek business towers that enchanted him, but the historic core. "All my friends say there is no downtown Los Angeles," Pamuk said, but clearly he was pleased to see that there was. "There is a downtown here," he noted approvingly. "And it looks very old-fashioned."

Pamuk's first stop was Grand Central Market, where he fell in love with the meticulously restored neon. He photographed everything: the gleaming trays of chiles, the abstract patterns of dried beans displayed behind squares of glass, the cathedral-like wall of whiskey bottles rising into the shadows of the shed. He stopped to snap a picture of the sign above Roast to Go, which boasts it has been serving football-sized burritos "since 1952" -- "That was the year I was born!"

Crossing the street, Pamuk entered the hushed lobby of the Bradbury Building. He studied a display recounting the building's role in "Blade Runner." Pamuk has seen the movie twice. "Istanbul seems more and more like the crowds in 'Blade Runner,' but I like it. I like the chemistry of the streets." His favorite L.A. writer, he said, is Raymond Chandler. "Is there a Raymond Chandler museum here?"

Heading south on Broadway, Pamuk drank it all in: the amplified accordion music blaring from a music shop, the soccer games on flat screen TVs, the shop girls in spiked heels and tight pants on the sidewalk tugging at his sleeve. "Pásale, pásale" they implored in gravelly Spanish, trying to lure him into their arcades. Pamuk's eyes fixed on a raccoon-like toy eternally chasing a weighted battery-operated rubber ball. A Korean lady signaled that the price was $10 by holding up 10 fingers. When Pamuk started to walk away, she held up five.

The whole post is worth reading, and a reminder that when friends of A Literary Cocktail visit Los Angeles, there is a standing invitation to take Irene Wilde's Tour of Cool Old LA Buildings, any Saturday beginning at Union Station. If you are lucky, I'll throw in a French Dip sandwich or a bacon donut.

“I was in California. Everything is new, and it’s clean. The people are filled with hope.”

Hello Devoted Three! Something I forgot in the update, or maybe only touched on and really should explain further. A few months ago, the company where Irene Wilde toils for her daily, uprooted from its anonymous, concrete and glass, maximum-security, high rise rectangular cube in the Financial District. This did two things. First, it landed me in a lovely little bit of Deco, and second, placed right outside my office window a sign hanging off of the Los Angeles Central Library advertising its exhibit of the sketches of architect Richard Neutra. A blow-up of Neutra’s 1917 self-portrait, brooding and intense in charcoal pencil, stared out at me as I unpacked boxes. His eyes watched me, challenged me. Soon enough, I had to toddle over across the street up to the second story (with the fabulous rotunda) to see what he was looking so intense about. If you have the opportunity, go see for yourself.

Meanwhile, settling into my little bit of Deco, I felt like I was finally connecting to the Historic Core of Los Angeles. While many people associate LA with Neutra’s glass walls and horizontal lines, with that Mid-Century Modern look of hillside homes overlooking the city, there was a Pre-War Los Angeles as well, lower to the ground, closer to the River, with its own aesthetic. There is so much I would like to be able to say about this part of town, but to date it remains an inarticulate feeling, a “something,” and “je ne sais quoi” that refuses to be put into words. People call it the “noir” part of LA, the Chandler (Raymond, not Otis) part of LA, but those descriptions are incomplete at best, a tiny part of the full mosaic. For decades this LA sat forgotten on the wrong side of Bunker Hill, overshadowed by The New Downtown’s high-rise, high-tech, glass and steel colossi. The years of neglect, however, are over. The city, a few years back, decided to allow reuse of these Pre-War buildings, accepting it would be better to give them new life than languish in the foolish hope that corporate tenants would suddenly lose their taste for conspicuous consumption and one day return to their low-rise roots. Adaptive reuse was born, and in the intervening years, that other side of downtown has begun a transformation that now can no longer be ignored. Just along my short walk from the station to the office each day, I’ve watched three buildings shake off the dust and cobwebs, get stripped of all the Ugly that the Post-War years tacked onto them until their old school facades are again visible, their ornate detailing pressure washed, repaired, and restored, their true colors at last revealed. A fourth building right now is covered in scaffolding and canvas tarps and looking down Fifth Street it appears to be the last in a couple of blocks to be brought back. Sure there is still much that is seedy and the sidewalks are often a hazard in themselves, but changing in unmistakably in the air.

Further afield than just the distance between Pershing Square and Bunker Hill, other, even more dramatic re-awakenings have taken place and more are in the offing. The city that, according to rumor, inspired Joni Mitchell to write the immortal words, “pave paradise put up a parking lot” is moving into the future, not by tearing down, but by re-envisioning and restoring what is already here. As former banks and commercial buildings become homes for a new generation of urbanites, the movie palaces of Broadway are being given new hope, and up in the hills those Mid-Century Moderns, which were eventually overtaken by McMansions that make up in square footage what they lack in taste, are also striving to maintain their vision. Down here, in new/old downtown, history is being helped by the move to alternative transportation, by an evolution beyond California’s vaunted car culture. It is not by chance that the restorations I look at every morning are near the subway station, or that Broadway is being looked at for its own streetcar. The visionaries of the Modern movement saw a time when people would live smaller, but wanted to incorporate that need for denser living with a love of nature, taking advantage of our region’s climate to bring the outdoors in and the indoors out.

I’m not naïve and I know there are always going to be people with more money than sense who will build monuments to their own egos and who will cling to their single-passenger SUVs as an inalienable right of anyone who has reached their unassailable level in the consumer culture food chain. For the rest of us though, the idea of moving into the new century with new sensibilities that incorporate our history and preserve our unique heritage, while looking for sustainable and lasting solutions to our problems is exciting. I like to think that the charcoal eyes of Mr. Neutra are looking out at Los Angeles with some sense of hope and satisfaction.

In keeping with our historic bent and downtown focus, today’s recipe is something Mr. Benchley will appreciate because it’s one of those notoriously difficult classic cocktails. In honor of the mixologists at The Varnish, the “secret” bar tucked inside Cole’s on Sixth Street, who will actually make one of these the old-fashioned way for you, bless their devoted hearts:

The Ramos Gin Fizz

(This is the recipe from the Sazerac Bar of The Roosevelt hotel in New Orleans, famous for its version of this beverage)

Ingredients

2 ounces gin

1 ounce heavy cream

1 egg white

juice of 1/2 lemon

juice of 1/2 lime

2 teaspoons bar sugar

2 to 3 drops orange flower water

club soda

Method:

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Add plenty of cracked ice and shake vigorously for a minimum of one minute, preferably two (I have heard rumors that 12 minutes is ideal – good luck with that). Strain into a chilled Rocks glass, and top with just a bit of club soda.

The Neutra VDL Research House is raising funds for some much needed repairs.  The website is: http://www.neutra-vdl.org/site/default.asp?11202009122444

The "Brideshead" Brouhaha* -- I Won't Say More

I don't care about accents, clothes, or class.  I don't care about what Hitch said in whatever interview about actors or scenery.  I don't care that these are "characters" and not people.  I don't care that the damn thing is over 10 hours long and even so they may have missed out a comma from page 142.  I care about this scene, all it says and all it leaves unsaid, and what it means.  If that makes me a sentimentalist, so be it.  If it makes me a complete idiot, so be it.  Sometimes we have to make choices that we know we'll pay for long after they are made, but we make them, we pay for them, and we live with them.  That is "real."  That is "truth."  Hard truth we might choose to ignore or deny or deflect with our arsenal of intellect, psychology, philosophy, or soap bubbles, but at the end of the day, it's still the truth -- whether you've read the book or not, dammit!

And with that, I'm finished on the subject.

*For anyone who really feels compelled, the complete brouhaha is contained here, although I wouldn't recommend it.