Day 25: Chinatown and The Villa
We visited Chinatown, just us and the kids. What a wonderful hubbub. Real people doing real things. Fresh fish market. We like the Old Town best, but it’s sad these days. I always like little backway streets and narrow walkways. It would still be great at night, what with the lanterns twinkling overhead, but there are too many vacancies, even as C-town booms and grows. Get there for an evening while you can. We had dim-sum at the Golden Dragon while a wedding went on in the back with drums and snaking dragon dances. Henry was amazed. Lucy napped.
(Chinatown fish market.)
We also stopped by Phillipe’s on Alameda in downtown LA. Now there’s a sandwich shop! They invented the French Dip. Great counter ladies and sawdust on the floor. Just a fine old place.
Then we checked out Watts Towers in the ghetto. It’s amazing what that old Italian did so long ago, making that huge work of art, one of the biggest in our nation, I suppose, with zero help from anyone influential, in fact with powerbrokers trying to destroy his work many times. Isn’t that how art is in America so often? He didn’t use hardly any tools or bolts to make it, bending rebar against the rail-tracks next door and wire-wrapping each hoop into place then mortaring by hand and planting colorful scrap glass and ceramics that his neighbors brought to him. Martha was inspired by the 100-foot towers, but also disheartened to learn that the project broke up the artist’s family.
Later on we visit old friends at their old movie producer villa in Santa Monica. They are influential leftist lawyers and their sprawling outdoor courtyard had several big areas with tables and wrought iron lawn furniture. A great place to plan and direct social action indeed.
Later that night I coast my bike down to the Boulevard and check out the old newsstand. Back in the day I would coast down here every night and read magazines. It was the biggest stand I’d ever seen, with magazines from around the world. Bike racing ones in particular. Le Miroir. I learned some French just to read it. This was way before the Internet. It held an international vibe for me, hanging out browsing with all kinds of characters on those hot nights. I went down again and it was still nice, full of magsthat you can find in any B&N today. But the street was still hotter than most, with hidden night clubs in half the alleys. I checked out Micelli’s, an old Italian restaurant that had a piano bar and balcony, murals, wonderful music. Young people sat at the bar talking movie work. Older people, too. Waiters and waitresses came by the piano and took the mic and sang standards and arias. Later on, I asked a beautiful blond opera-singing waitress if I could hang out in the best seat, as it was set for dinner and she said I could sit anywhere, with anyone, if I was friendly enoughshe sure was. A city that parties togetherain’t half bad. At one point she started singing an aria from across the restaurant out of sight of the side barroom the piano-player was in—he followed perfectly anyway. Her singing filled the place and stopped everyone’s heart.
This whole trip we’ve been stopping by places that were run and operated by adults who were there as their livelihoods, because they cared and wanted to be there. Such a heartbreaking contrast to the new American Lifestyle of minimallism that has destroyed Michigan, and most everywhere else, replacing it with pushbutton franchises run by teenagers turning over, by design, every couple months.
On my ride down up the hill I went past a hot new glam nightclub, The White Lotus, or some such; it has a wild white floral shape to the roof. There are limos out front, velvet ropes, lines of wannabe’s, guys in suits with radios. Some people waltz in, others don’t. I cruised past it all slowly. On my way back up the hill there’s action going down. Cop cars pull into the lot in front of me. I roll up and stop at the side to check things out. A guy is face down at the side of the entrance area, two guys with radios standing over him, they aren’t the usual doormen or bouncers. The cops come up and haul the guy away. One of the radio guys is thin and black and has on a long dark leather coat. The other guy is white, unshaven, looks like David Duchovny and has on fatigue pants and wrinkled old blue tshirt, lanky medium build. He’s relaxed and emiting none of the usual club vibes and looks out of place but he clearly doesn’t have to follow the rules for the public. I suppose they’re simply the security and he was just an out of work actor, but it was kinda cool, kinda Mi-Vi.
We went to Venice beach one day for an hour. Henry loved watching the “macho men” surf. The surfers let me in to do my body-surfing action. I saw a big fish of some kind (hammerhead?) in the shallow zone, once. When we were showering off by the beach two actual actors were chatting next to us. Martha was appalled. They were short, tan, buff dudesand dumb as bricks. We gathered that they’d just been filming in Vegas ascops. They were back in town comparing notes on where to go that night to pick up chicks at hotel pools in Hollywood.
When I first came to LA, there were hundreds of exotic hookers of all kinds in the Sunset area. Maybe thousands. It gave the place an electric air. A free for all of extreme fashion. When I visited again when I was more ‘of age’ they’d been mostly swept out, still it was a bit wild. On this visit I said I wanted to see some wild folks like we don’t see in the Midwest. I didn’t get a chance to except that night I biked around a bit. I couldn’t figure anyone out. Basically, most of the girls going to clubs were dressed like what I would call hookers. I thought I was seeing wildlife at first but oh well.
