Dia de Los Muertos, Hollywood Style

The heat wave here is long over and as New England gets colder and darker, and L.A. gets greener and cooler, my grumpiness about living here wanes, at least until it starts to get nice in Maine again next spring (wink, smile). I have been a very busy, antisocial and very productive girl this month as I have continued work on my masters, started a self imposed storyboard course, finished another book illustration, started another icon, built a website, and written a grant to the Maine Arts Commission for Tim and I to finish our book. Whew! The last week I have had some good fun in L.A. though, and I want to share it.

Last weekend on an overcast afternoon Tim and I rode our bikes down the beach to the boardwalk in Venice. The Venice boardwalk is an L.A. must-see in my opinion. If you ever wanted to feel like you are in an '80's high school movie set in California, go down to the boardwalk. Rollerblading in bikinis is still totally hip, and you even still see the old school skates sometimes. I've actually seen people bopping along on bikes or skates with big boom boxes blasting hip hop on their shoulders. On this particular day we saw actor Johnny Holiday, who has been called the French Elvis, cruising along on his bike. We rode a little further with all the speedracers, the vintage cruisers, the be-bopping bladers, past the homeless caravans in the parking lots, the swinging gymnastic rings on the beach, the drum circle down by the waves, and into the skate park between the boardwalk and the beach. As if this scene wasn't fun enough, we happened into a rollerskating and hula hooping dance party! It was almost too much fun. There was a couple doing choreographed dance moves on their skates together. Their skates moved in absolute synchronicity and although she was small and Caucasian and he was very tall and African American, they moved like twins. There was a shirtless guy with corn rows doing splits on his skates. There was a nutty old guy with white hair dancing like crazy in the middle of everything, even though he had no skates on. Perhaps most amazing though, there was another young couple dancing with hula hoops. These were serious hula hoops though, large and made out of metal. The young dancers could put their bodies inside them, like Da Vinci's Vetruvian Man, and spin themselves around and upside down like living gyroscopes. It was beautiful and stunning, and just another Sunday at Venice Beach.

This weekend, since all the kids were with us and not too busy, we went in search of a traditional fall experience, u-pick apples! Believe it or not this is available in the L.A. area, you just have to drive inland and out of palm tree zone, and up into the San Bernardino Mountains. We headed east for about two hours, then wound up from the highway. In the 10 minute drive from the I-10 to the orchard the temperature dropped about 15 degrees and we exited the car into brisk fall weather in a picturesque, hilly orchard under a conifer studded white rocky peak shrouded in misty clouds. This orchard aimed to please, with a general store, BBQ pit and lunch hall serenaded by bluegrass musicians in vaguely colonial costume, (in fact, everyone working there was in vaguely colonial costume, I don't know why, since colonial American culture never actually made it to CA in real time. It would have been more authentic to have Spanish missionaries and Native Americans, since that's who lived in CA during colonial American times. I guess that wouldn't attract homesick New Englanders like us though.) Anyway, they had a press your own cider tent, several pick your own pumpkin patches, and yes, apple trees with low hanging fruit. It cost a lot more than u-pick orchards in Maine, but we had fun eating, picking, and we did press our own cider in one of their pretty hand turned presses. It was really good! It was nice to find something earthy and rural and with a patina of age here in SoCal.

Next event of the weekend is one long awaited and anticipated by me. One of my favorite holidays ever, and very favorite events that L.A. has to offer, Dia de Los at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery! At dusk last night we made our way through the inching traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard and parked on a side street. Then we followed the streams of people in Mexican peasant outfits, clubbing gear and full-on calaca makeup past the street vendors selling hot dogs with roasted jalapenos and on to the gates of the resting place of the moviemaking elite of days gone by. We entered and wove ourselves through the crowded walkways, past illuminated altar after altar. We saw retablos honoring and celebrating lost sons, brothers, fathers, grandmothers, soldiers, Mexican cultural traditions and movie stars. There was an altar celebrating Mayan Gods, with beautiful paper mache figures. There was an altar celebrating the old sitcom The Golden Girls, (las Chicas Doradas), with gold painted skeletons with wigs and dresses sitting on a couch together drinking what looked like pink zinfandel. Some were art, some were statement, some were just people humbly remembering lost family members. It's mostly a family event, and there were lots of couples and kids, but it is Hollywood, so plenty of young hipsters as well, and some abueltitas out late. Chorizo was grilling and beer was pouring, musicians were playing and people were dancing, incense was burning and Mayan dance troupes were performing in full body feather suits with torches in front on Rudolf Valentino's moat surrounded white marble mausoleum as people remembered and celebrated the spirits. This event is wildly artistic and creative, deeply spiritual, and the Hollywood location and makeup and costumes also make it fun and cheesy, all at the same time! It's so awesome. Good times! So sad I have to wait until next year again to celebrate it again.

As I sit writing this the kids of Topanga have finally finished streaming to the door in droves looking for candy while their well-costumed parents stand by, drinks in hand, talking about their latest documentary or photo-journalist assignment. We live in one of the few relatively flat, neighbor-hoody parts of the canyon, so we see a lot of Halloween traffic. Now the Jack-o-lanterns and luminarias are blown out. It's been a fun evening, to cap off a fun weekend. I'm the last one up, on the now dark and quiet street. Just me and the spirits, reminiscing about the fun we've had.

The Absurd, The Ironic, The City of Angels

I so want to complain about L.A. in this post. But I won't. Not much anyway. I've been putting off sitting down to write it because I knew I would feel like this, and I don't even want to sit and listen to it myself, much less make others read it. It's just......it's October! It's colorful foliage and pumpkin season, it's my favorite time of year in New England, when everything smells frosty and smoky and the light is so bittersweet, golden and beautiful. My Dad is harvesting his grapes in VT this week and starting this year's wine. It was 114 degrees downtown last week with air quality warnings. I would just rather be there. Ok I'm done now.

Whenever I have trouble appreciating life in Los Angeles, I look for evidence of the absurd, because I love absurdity, and I find that L.A. rarely disappoints on this subject. I love a flyer that we got in the mail the other day for a local realtor, touting her capability, 20 years of experience and solid knowledge of the market alongside her photo, in which she appeared with windblown hair, sultry half closed eyes and parted lips covered in wet-looking red lipstick. She looks experienced and competent maybe, but real estate is not what she's really bringing to mind. I guess it doesn't matter, she got our attention, and that was the point. Sex sells just about anything, so why not real estate?

Another funny thing about L.A., in not such a good way, has to do with the fact that everyone is so friendly and laid back. Or at least they act like that in person. I'm always like a confused beat behind in delivery of these over enthusiastic greetings that seem to be expected when seeing other parents from Brick's school or friends of friends that I have met just once or twice before. Anyway, there's the facade, or perhaps the reality of extreme friendliness face to face, but it all disappears as soon as people are safely locked away in their automobiles. Then, most interaction turns to greed, incredible impatience and barely controlled rage. No right of way for bikes or pedestrians, honking automatically if the person in front of you is moving one iota more slowly that you would like them to at a stop sign or red light, screaming obscenities at each other in parking lots, and weaving around each other like madmen on the freeways. But then out of the car and those ultra-bleached pearly whites flash again!

Another, more sweetly ironic L.A. thing we noticed just the other night on an evening stroll down the pier in Santa Monica. The pier and the 3rd street promenade shopping area are some of the biggest tourist attractions in L.A. There are tons of nice hotels, restaurants, shopping, the beaches, a bike path, fountains, landscaping, lots of people dressed very stylishly and a real upbeat, modern, consumer vibe. At the very end of the pier though, all through the evening and late into the night, lower income, decidedly un-stylish and un-consumer and un-tourist Latino families hang out together with poles and buckets and fish for their dinners, or for fun, or for some extra cash. Who knows, but there they are just out of view from the fountains and lights, talking and playing with their babies and gossiping in Spanish on folding chairs on the farthest, fish smelling, worn concrete deck leaning over the rhythmic, dark ocean below.

A hundred years ago L.A., as a town, barely existed. Now it is one of the largest cities in the world, with most of this growth happening since the 1930s. Most everything here is fairly new, and most everyone here is from somewhere else. Sense of history in L.A. is very short, evidenced by this example that Tim gave of a situation in which a couple of middle aged dads at one of Nick's baseball games were complaining about the Dodgers and their east coast influenced management and how the team should go back to its roots, to being a real west coast team, like it was 20 years ago in the '80's. Apparently these guys are forgetting that just 20 years before that, in the '60s, the Dodgers were still playing at their actual roots, in Brooklyn!

Perhaps one of the most absurd L.A. events of late happened for us at parent's night at Nick's high school, where we sat in a small classroom in a row of plastic chairs behind comedic genius, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" star and "Seinfeld" creator, Larry David and were introduced to the school's film classes by a couple of stuttering grad students. It's just so weird to see someone you watch on TV suddenly standing with you in a real life, unglamorous place, like a high school. He looked sort of washed out and somewhat confused, like the rest of us, shuffling through the florescent hallways, sitting in rows of narrow plastic desks, listening to the teachers of our kids' classes. The one difference being I guess that he's a genius billionaire, and I'm, well, me.

I may not be a genius billionaire yet, or likely ever, but I am working pretty hard these days. I'm taking some pretty demanding classes again this semester which keep me heading back to the drawing board, literally, much of the time. Also, after a few unsuccessful trips looking for waitressing jobs left me wanting to shoot myself in the head, and that was just at the thought of actually getting a position at one of these places, I've decided to take the next few months and build a website and some more finished work so that I can go looking for some actual illustrating or storyboarding work. Wish me luck!