Road Trip [revised]

I’d heard that Siouxsie was playing Hollywood soon, but somehow my brain dumped it near the bottom of conscious thought. The week before the show I saw the listing on Ticketmaster and flipped. I didn’t know if we’d be able to make it on such short notice. Good thing the show was on a Wednesday so I didn’t have to worry about calling in sick or just quitting. Siouxsie is worth more than a job. She’s about 46 years old now (not really older than my dad, actually two years younger) and I don’t know how much longer she’ll be touring. She certainly doesn’t scream and yell like she did in 1976. She billed the event “an Evening with Siouxsie”, mixing Banshees and Creatures songs in the setlist. I emailed Dani the show information and mostly gave up hope that I’d be able to make it on such short notice. She’s seen Siouxsie before, but being an Art-School-Girl-of-Doom a pack of wild capibara couldn’t keep her away from such an event. We’d rent a car Wednesday morning, get a hotel, go to the show, go to a club, sleep, and then hit LACMA on Thursday. Sounds simple, no? Well, Dani is always late, my roommate becomes a total ‘tard when facing even simple traffic, and I can’t stand to be in a fucking car. Oh, and we always get lost.

Math problem: “You want to go to a concert. The doors open at 7:30, the show starts at 8:30. You know that it’s a 5-hour drive and you have to get a hotel before the show. What time do you leave?” The answer? “An hour before we did.” Just kidding. We’d agreed I’d be picked up between 11:30 and noon, but she got there at about one. Not critical, but cutting it closer than I’d have preferred. Whatever, I was so tired and delirious that I just wanted to hit the road (and I didn’t want to stress myself out or have a panic attack or anything.) I should have started pounding beers the moment I got up, but I was in such a haze that I didn’t think about it until 12:30 or so. Still, I had time for two or three before the load-out. I put the rest in an ice chest as we started west.

I’m so glad Dani was driving. She’s not the best driver in the world, but still confidant and in control. My roommate’s driving makes me want to kill something then puke. We started on I15, a meandering diagonal that stretches from Sweetgrass, MT on the Canadian boarder down to San Diego, CA. Of course the only part of it I’ve ever seen is from Las Vegas towards the Pacific. After about an hour and a half, we exited the interstate in Baker, CA. The town is so small that I couldn’t fine census data on it. The school district has about 200 children enrolled. I’ve had classes with more people than that. I didn’t understand the need for this rest, but whatever. I was told I’d be able to have a beer or two so what the hell. Along the side of the road, we saw a man in a black suit followed by a woman in a long black dress. Goths, of course. They must have broke down on the way to the show. We made some “beached-up Goth corpse” jokes (just because it would be funny to see Goths wash ashore like whales or sea lions or something) and drove on to the Mad Greek, some insane restaurant in the middle of nothing, a stone’s throw from the world’s tallest (and most useless) thermometer.

The Mad Greek menu is a diptych; Greek food on one side, Mexican on the other. Have a Horchata with your falafel. Of course I had a Mythos with my falafel. My roommate tried a different Greek beer; I think it was called Marathon or something. I didn’t really like it. I keep reaching for my cloves, momentarily forgetting I’m over the state line. Tossing some Kraftwerk in the stereo, we speed off again (most people take this leg of the interstate at 80+.)

I15 meets I10 in San Bernardino, a city that owes its existence to being a crossroads of sorts. The major freight rail lines, two interstates, and several highways all converge on that pile of dirt and desperation. This is the outer ring in what can be considered Los Angeles’ sprawl. Of course that means it gets the table scraps after the dogs have had their share. I’m glad we can’t see much of it. This intersection means two things: first, we only have about sixty miles left and second, the real traffic is about to start. I’m amazed at how it’s changed since I that area for Santa Cruz in 1995. We could always make it to Santa Monica in under an hour. One would be lucky to make this drag in an hour today. Somewhere around West Covina we slowed to a standstill. Dani isn’t used to this kind of driving. There are a few places that gridlock in Vegas, but that’s usually only rush hour. She wouldn’t be driving in those places in Vegas, anyway; they’re all in the suburbs or on the strip. I’m starting to stress the time issue a little, but at least we know we won’t be late for the show.

From I10, we catch US-101 - eyes on the prize. We pass under downtown LA, whizzing past the murals and concert halls. I thought we’d be leaving earlier so we didn’t book a hotel room the night before. That was a mistake. I thought we’d have an hour or so to drive around and find a cool place, but whatever. We found the Day’s Inn that we’d thought about booking the night before and settled in there. Well, by “settled in” I mean frantic dash to get the fuck ready. As I was down at the car, my roommate called from the door of the room, “You have the key, right?” just as the door was closing. I’d set the key on one of the beds. It was almost 8 when we left. I worried slightly, about getting in, about parking, about not missing any of the show, but it turned out okay.

I worried about time for nothing since Siouxsie didn’t go on until rather late. I got to hang out with some cool, chatty people in the smoking section (a.k.a. out back by the dumpster.) I thought I saw Rodney Bingenheimer, but I could be wrong. I stayed inside for the beginning of the set, but a few songs in I went outside to smoke some more. Two attractive women were allured by the rather aromatic odor of my cloves and asked for one. I wound up bumming out several more, but that’s okay. They all offered me a buck each, but I only took one. I pay a bit less than they do for smokes. After the band cranked out some Creatures, I retreated back inside. I don’t listen to the Creatures much (I don’t even have any mp3’s) so I wanted to hear more Banshees songs. I was looking forward to something a little more punk. Somehow, I wound up right behind the two women I was chatting with outside. They must have thought I was stalking them. If I lived near by or was by myself, I would have tried to hang out with them after the show. I didn’t think it a good idea with my small entourage.

After the show ended, we left for a small club called Ghoul School. I didn’t know anything about it. It was in a smallish bar and only had maybe two-dozen people, most of them outside smoking. The music was more low-key than usual, all DR and no EBM. I danced some and played a game of pool (very poorly at that.) Overall it was enjoyable. We passed out quickly when we returned to the hotel.

Of course check out time was 11a.m, about 10 minutes before we woke up. I didn’t get to shower or brush my teeth, but I wasn’t out to get laid so who cares. It would have been nice to scrape a layer of crap off before starting my day, but that’s what I get for not bringing an alarm (or asking one of my companions to set their phone to alarm.) Our load out was quick enough; we headed for LACMA.

I’m amazed that my loose itinerary went so smoothly. When discussing what to do on Thursday, my companions deferred to my experience with this sprawl. We didn’t want to just window shop on Melrose or something like that. We’ve all done that enough, and besides we’d wind up spending the rent on rare records at Vinyl Fetish or Amoeba. I recommended LACMA, MOCA, the Getty, the Huntington, or even the Norton Simon in Pasadena. We agreed on LACMA, mostly due to my raving about Jean-Jacques Feuchère’s Satan and Georges de la Tour’s Magdalen with the Smoking Flame. Plus it’s in West Hollywood. It was good that we had some direction and didn’t just spin our wheels in awful traffic.

I haven’t been to this museum since 1995 or so. I went several times with my girlfriend at the time. We managed to catch a Bill Burroughs and a Pop-Art exhibit. They’ve added a lot since then. I wish I’d brought a notepad; there was so much I wanted to write down. It’s a good thing that their website has so much to look through. We took metered parking over the $5 garage. I think it cost about the same, but we would have to pay twice if we left to get something to eat. I should have stopped to get something to put in my flask, or at least pounded a few beers but I wasn’t really thinking. Plus I was exhausted from the night before, it was better to wait some before getting liquored up.

We started with the Japanese collection. There were two rooms open. We started in one room that had quite a variety of pieces. 5000-year-old pottery doesn’t do much for me I have to say. Seeing a samurai suit of armor was a treat. The woodblock prints were amazing. I don’t know much about the genre, but I can really see how this stuff affected Patrick Nagel’s work, at least the prints involving geisha. There were some other odds and ends- textiles, lacquer boxes, and the like- but not much else that caught my eye. Oh, except this little fox sculpture. He had the wickedest smile and a poofy tail. My companions like this room more than I did, I think. That’s okay since we still had hours to roam around.

We left that room into a smaller gallery filled with netsuke (buttons used to secure a small carry-all box to a kimono.) Some of my favorites: the skeletons, the “no evil” monkey, a stylized bat, the octopus, all the foxes (I didn’t realize the Japanese have such a thing for foxes,) and the caricatures of foreigners. There are hundreds of these little things on display. I can’t wait to see what they put in the other galleries.

The next building was all western art. We started on the second floor so I could see Magdalen and Satan. There are tons of antiquities on this floor. German glasses, Roman statues, Persian stuff, even a mummy! In the same room as Satan, Ian found one piece called la Liberté that Dani recognized from a book she has. Unfortunately that one isn’t on LACMA’s website yet and I can’t find a picture of it. Hidden in an alcove in front of the [by-appointment-only] photography archive, Dani found small Polaroids- Andy Warhol’s snapshots of Halston and Farrah Fawcett.

We grew hungry. We went by the restaurant to look at the menu. Bad idea, it's nothing but overpriced garbage. We’d passed a vegan restaurant at some point, but I couldn’t remember it’s exact location. We drove down Fairfax towards Sunset just looking around. I spotted a place called Eat-A-Pita that looked decent. Every other restaurant in this area is kosher, I think. Or Russian. The pita place has a good-sized patio and a walk up window to order, but no beer. Trees surround the patio, the canopy completely covering it. A water fountain full of fish sits in the center, providing quite an attraction for a group of small birds darting to and fro. We have to swat away the flies every few minutes. A school lets out and we become surrounded by young brown-skinned students. I don’t look closely enough to tell if they are Hispanic or Middle-Eastern or whatever. A few of them order sodas, the rest just make noise and annoy me. Some black girls arrive just after the first group. They’re louder and more bothersome. Fortunately, most of them leave when a bus arrives. I order falafel again. For some reason I never get tired of that stuff. I really hate it when the pita splits open and you have to eat it with a fork.

[more later]