Thirty Day LA

I hoped that by taking on Thirty Day LA, not only would I have some memorable experiences but I would also get some useful ideas for things to do that others might find useful. By request, here are my top ten free summertime activities in LA.

• Getty Museum Off the 405: free music, cash bar, great atmosphere. Get there early to pick out a table in front of the DJ stage
• Griffith Park Night hike: every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday nights starting at 7PM sharp in the upper merry-go-round parking lot. Bring water and hiking shoes.
• Outdoor activities: Shakespeare by the Sea performances, Burbank’s Dancing in the Streets on Thursday nights, Dance Downtown on Friday nights
• Bike to work: Map out your trail with Google Maps or Google Earth, get some buddies to bikepool, and check out the bike-commuting website Roll With It
• Midnight Ridazz: Every second Friday of the month a gang of bikers in the hundreds take over the streets in a safe but thrilling 15 mile ride
• Hammer Museum: Modern art exhibits and music performances in the courtyard at night, free during the summer only
• Nike training runs: starting at 6:30PM every night of the week in different locations throughout LA, these 3 and 5 mile group runs are great for staying in shape, meeting people, and exploring LA by foot
• Karaoke dive bars: if you BYOFlask, you can have fun belting out tunes in your best drunken voice for free all night in any of these places: Backstage, Tattle Tale Room, Gas Lite, Liquid Kitty (Mondays), The Hideout (Tuesdays)
• Music Festivals: Sunset Junction now charges $15 admission, but there are other free music festivals: performances at The Grove, Central Avenue Jazz Festival, Santa Monica Pier Twilight Dance series, Grand Performances, Henry Mancini Institute concerts, Culver City Summer Sunset Music Festival
• Go to the beach: bike to Malibu, surf at Zuma Beach, hike in Santa Monica, get burnt at Paradise Cove, play volleyball/Frisbee/football in Manhattan Beach, run in Hermosa, catch the sunset at El Matador, have a bonfire at Dockweiler, do a midnight swim at Playa Del Rey.

Yes, there is some overlap with my other list Top Ten Things to Do By Yourself in LA, but there they are. I know summer is almost officially over, but the great thing about LA is that it feels like it never ends.

Posted by CaptainMelo at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Saturday night we went to check out NocTOURnals, a tour that includes MOCA Night Vision and a walkthrough of Disney Concert Hall in the gentrified part of downtown LA, on Grand Avenue and Second Street. I had changed my original plans for the tour at the last minute and moved it up a week so that Lefty could go, but he ended up bailing. ShopGirl wanted to go, but she had to go home for the weekend. Save for two people, none of the people that went to Getty bothered to respond. So I headed out with my usual crew, GuitarHero, LazyBoy, WorkoutHound, and then ObligatedGirl decided to join us too.

All in all, it was a very low-key night. At MOCA, we took a tour of the Rauschenberg Combines exhibit. I'm glad we went on the tour because that crazy modern art stuff actually started to make sense after the tour guide explained it. Then we sat through a screening of the best music videos from the LA Film Festival, half of which sucked. There were two people behind us who couldn't stop laughing at everything. They didn't seem high, but if they were I want the crack they were smoking, it would probably make life seem fucking hilarious. I left before it ended and walked around to check out the scene. The DJ was playing his music really loud, and the outdoor lounge buzzed with conversation and drinking. Upstairs, they set up a bunch of tables with some artmaking materials, where grown adults wearing fancy night clothes tore into construction paper and newspapers with blissful abandon.

After we got some food at a Korean BBQ restaurant down the street in Little Tokyo (yeah I dunno), ObligatedGirl took off to meet her other friends and just us guys went back to check out the famous Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry. I've wanted to check it out ever since it opened in 2003, especially since I used to volunteer in Little Tokyo and I drove by it everyday. Our tour guide gave a nice personal touch to all of her stories about the design of the hall. The outdoor, one-acre sized garden was really nice, but I thought overly excessive in that they had to use massive cranes to lift up for fifty stories the trees gathered from random houses across Southern California. As for the design of the building itself, everything was curves. I’m not an architect, but I could appreciate the ridiculous complexity in designing and constructing the place. Inside the lobby, I made mention about the ugly carpet, and then our tour guide said that Gehry designed the carpet to look like the pattern of a rose garden in tribute to Walt Disney's dead daughter. That was God telling me that I'm an asshole. The concert hall itself was stunningly beautiful. There was an array of giant wood planks jutting out in different directions from where the organ was. The ceiling and the walls had an organic, flowing design made with specific types of wood that Gehry chose himself, which is supposedly why the Concert Hall's acoustics are the best in the world. The ugly rose patterned carpet was on the seats as well, and supposedly having the fabric on the bottom of the seats as well helped simulate a full audience for the philharmonic practices. Then the tour was over, but we were allowed to walk on the aerial pathway that overlooked Grand Avenue. When we were all in college, we would spend many a drunken night climbing onto some rooftop and taking pictures of the street. This night was no exception, except for the drunken part and the fact that the rooftop we were climbing was the $274 million architectural crown jewel of LA.

Then we all went home cuz we’re old and can’t stay out past 12 on Saturday nights anymore.

Posted by CaptainMelo at 12:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Normally, I’m not inclined to do anything spontaneous. I will think the hell out of something before doing it, list all the reasons why I shouldn’t do it, and then end up not doing it because the opportunity has already passed. But this time, I was feeling slightly bored and so I said to myself, stop thinking and just do it.

Just Do It was one of the slogans that dominated television airwaves when I was growing up. Say No To Drugs was another one. I was always confused by the contradictory messages. I blame the advertising industry for my indecisive nature.

Last week, my friend ShopGirl sent out an email to go to the Getty Museum for their Off the 405 Event on Friday, which featured DJ’s spinning outdoors for night of dancing and fun. After much self-debate, I said I would go. My other friend Lefty said he was also going. He happens to work with ShopGirl at a big ad agency (IRONY ALERT). Anyway, with Lefty going, I knew it would be an excellent night filled with alcohol.

I got out of work early that day because my manager unwisely left me in charge, so I just went home. ShopGirl said she was off early too, so we went to our favorite store, Trader Joe’s, and bought food and snacks for everyone and headed off to the Getty to stake out a table. We hung out, snacked, checked out the views, and waited for everyone to show up. I told ShopGirl about my plan to do something new everyday for thirty days. She endorsed the plan. When Lefty got there, we headed straight for the cash bar. I told him about my plan, but he had already begun filling his liver with toxins, so I quickly joined in. I spent the rest of the night mostly hanging out, watching my roommate LazyBoy dance in the crowd and talking to ShopGirl’s and Lefty’s friends.

My plan was in motion. I had told two people about it already, so there was no way I could back out of it. I went home after the Getty and called up my high school buddy’s girlfriend’s best friend, ObligatedGirl, who we had all hung out with in New York. She was back in LA, so along with my roommates LazyBoy and GuitarHero, we decided to check out a karaoke Dive Bar in Culver City called Backstage.

From the outside, Backstage looks like a typical seedy dive bar, except that it’s the only bar in the neighborhood, on the backside of Sony Pictures Studios. We went in, and the place was packed full of screeching, drunken yuppies. It took me about half an hour to get a drink, but at least the drinks were cheap. I sat down at the table with my friends and watched the performances. Two really drunk guys butchered Bohemian Rhapsody, an older black woman belted out At Last, and a tall skinny black guy sang Kiss and Say Goodbye. GuitarHero put in a song for LazyBoy to sing, but we didn’t wait around long enough to hear his name get called. We left when a tall, thick Asian girl threw herself all over the KJ and went up to sing and tried really hard to be alluring.

I might go back to the place another time, as long as I get roaring drunk first so I won't have any qualms humiliating myself in front of a hostile audience. I might have to go by myself though, because my friends didn’t seem to like the place too much. Oh well.

We went back to our apartment, and LazyBoy introduced ObligatedGirl to the video game Guitar Hero, which I am actually better at than my roommate GuitarHero. He is awesome at real guitar, so it’s not much of an accomplishment on my part. While they were playing, I researched more events and almost persuaded ObligatedGirl to do a team triathlon with me and GuitarHero. She said she’d think about it.

The first night of my adventure, and it was a night of music. Many more to come.

Posted by CaptainMelo at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2)