(no subject)

[d_aulnoy]

Frankly, I think Francesca Lia Block has a lot to answer for.*

When I moved out to LA, I had expectations, most of which were engendered by pop culture, and which were influenced most heavily of all by the Weetzie Bat books.  Damnit, when I got to LA, I was expecting jacaranda and bougainvillea, twinkly white fairy lights everywhere,glitter and dried rose petals, punks who were still punk at my age and beyond, and maybe a genie.  Okay, I guess maybe not really the genie, but at least a genie-friendly attitude of possibility.

Then again, I can't say she didn't warn me: 

"What does 'happily ever after' mean anyway, Dirk?"  Weetzie said.  She was thinking about buildings.  The Jetson-style Tiny Naylor's with the roller-skating waitresses had been torn down.  In its place was a record-video store, a pizza place, a cookie place, a Wendy's, and Penguin's Yogurt.  Across the street, the old Poseur, where Weetzie and Dirk had bought kilts, was a beauty salon.  They had written their names on the columns of the porch but all the graffitti had been painted over.  Even Elvis Land was gone.  Elvis Land had been in the front yard of an old house on Melrose.  There had been a beat-up pink Cadillac, a picture of Elvis, and a giant love letter to Elvis on the lawn.

Then there had been the old places.  Like the Tiki restaurant in the Valley, which had gone out of business years ago and had become overgrown with reeds so that the Tiki totems peered out of the watery-sounding darkness.  Now it was gone - turned into one of the restaurants that lined Venture Boulevard with valets in red jackets sitting out in the heat all day waiting for BMW's.  And Kiddie Land, the amusement park where Weetzie's dad, Charlie, had taken her (Weetzie's pony had just dawdled, and sometimes turned around and gone back to the start, because Weetzie wouldn't use the whip, and once Weetzie was traumatized by a plastic cow that swung onto the track); Kiddie Land was now the big, brown Beverly Center that Weetzie would have painted almost any other color - at least, if they had to go ahead and put it up in the place of Kiddie Land.

"What does happily ever after mean, anyway?" Weetzie said.
-Weetzie Bat

The moral of that passage is, "happily ever after" doesn't mean LA, or at least, not the LA the propogates itself via lowest-common-denominator profit, the LA of strip malls and strippers and implants, of suburbia and "good school districts" and an all-pervasive car-culture, of pre-fab construction and endless highways and the color brown.  But the moral of the book as a whole is that in a place as monochrome and homogenous and dispirited as this one, it's important to make your own happily ever after ... may it involve jacaranda and bougainvillea and glitter and rose petals  and staying yourself till the (hopefully not so) bitter end.

So!  Yesterday, we went to Silver Lake.  Silver Lake is the "hip" LA neighborhood, sort of like a 1:12 scale Park Slope.  After the disappointment of other putatively cool LA neightborhoods (sorry, but Venice Beach is trying too damned hard to be Cony Island, and Melrose Place is what happens when you Xerox St. Mark's and lay the results end to end for a couple of miles), I didn't really have high hopes, but Silver Lake (all three blocks of it) is actually pretty cool!  This is due, in large part, I think, to the fact that everybody there has also read the Weetzie Bat books, and is self-consciously dedicated to recreating their aesthetic.

To whit: there's a vintage shop called Ragg Mopp.  It stocks bizarrely wonderful things like Indian headdresses and glittery chiffon party dresses and a blue velvet opera coat with a violet silk lining that may have come home with me.  There was also bougainvillea draped over everything, and twinkly white fairy lights, and a place called the Casbah Cafe that had been painted with a mural a la the Arabian Nights (genie-friendly!  and, that wasn't even a deliberate thought in my head when I started the entry ....) and a general atmosphere of possibility.  Silver Lake, I dub thee Francesca Lia Block Land, and I grant you the dubious honor of being my favorite neighborhood in LA.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this, as I ran into a colleague and her wife on the street (seriously, my first time this has happened in LA!  in NY, it's no big/an opportunity for all involved to say trite things like "Small world!" and "Great minds think alike!" but out here, it feels portentous - it is the only good neighborhood!) and then met up with msmsgirl  and her husband for dinner at a really cool Mexican place that had flocked red velvet wallpaper, gold lanterns, strawberry-infused tequila, and red glass candle-holders on all the tables.  It was bliss!  msmsgirl  was clever enough to bring BPAL for sniffing, gifting me with an imp of Gingerbread Poppet and giving me my second dose of BPAL goodness in the day - I hadn't realized BPAL had actual retailers out here!  Le Pink and Co. had one last lone bottle of Peacocks left - did you think I could resist?  She also brought her ridiculously adorable little dog Darla with her.  So cute!  Methinks I forsee future visits.

But now, for the complete antithesis of FLB-Land, off to the drudgery of grading ... did I mention that this week is our "break" between terms?  I say break-with-scare-quotes because I have till Wednesday to finish grading, and then the next term with its new classes begins next Tuesday ... and somewhere in between, I have to write a book review and a conference paper.  What would FLB do?  Grade in the blue velvet opera coat, and pray for a genie, I think.  It is better than the alternative of grading sans opera coat and sans hope, I guess ....
 

*Goddamnit!  Judging by the link, she was doing a reading not too far away from where we were last night.  Curses, LA!  Once again, you foil me with your tinsly disappointment.