The House of Pie and other Buildings

I'll admit I underestimated of The House of Pie. I was excited to be going there. I enthusiastically tried to get my house-mates to jump in Gerard's little blue Echo with me and have some pie (they didn't want in). But by the time we got there (10 mins later), the lure of pie-filled plates had left me and I actually wanted a waffle with bacon and eggs. Truly, I gave up the choices of banana cream and chocolate chip cheesecake or a slice of pumpkin pie rather easily, not thinking. Gerard, however, stayed true to the game plan, ordering chocolate cream pie. We were going to share.

The House of Pie is east of me, up Vermont Ave, toward Echo Park and Los Feliz and Silver Lake. It sits on the corner with its proud diner sign and a parking attendant stands in the lot to watch over the cars (part of me thinks this is all very LA). As you enter the '50s style diner with its color palette of browns, the pies are on display in their dingy, rotating glass cylinders, in the glass-protected shelves at the front counter without lighting to illuminate them. If I had looked up, I would have seen the five billboards above the register proudly detailing the extensive pie menu one would expect at an establishment called The House of Pie.

I didn't look up though. I was snobbish in my glances at the rotating pies. The menus were basic. My body really wanted bacon. I ordered a hot chocolate to go with my late-night breakfast. That would be enough.

And it was. In that moment, I really did want a Belgian waffle with one egg dry scrambled and two pieces of bacon with machine hot chocolate. But the pie. The pie was amazing.

Never before had I tasted chocolate cream pie like this. Oh, I have had amazing chocolate pies before--my g'ma makes one special for me every Thanksgiving, for which I am eternally grateful--but this was amazing DINER chocolate cream pie. The kind you can un-guiltily get away with eating, its topping a 2-inch thick layer of whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles, the slice the entire size of your small serving plate. Just the few bites I had made me confident I will definitely be going back.

We chatted over the diner table, perfectly full, for over an hour, then got back in the car to explore the parts of the city I've never known and that Gerard knows so well. Up Vermont, over to Silver Lake Blvd, along Beverly and Sunset, the clock ticking past midnight, strangers coming out of clubs and music venues, all the while watching the buildings, the streets, the architecture, the lights.

Up in that part of the city, up in those small hills, there is something about the houses and the apartments and the buildings that truly is beautiful. I felt a certain comfortable familiarity comparable to the houses and neighborhoods I know in San Francisco and the Bay Area, but there's also a different edge to them that is completely Los Angeles. To try and pinpoint it would be futile, but it makes me believe more and more that LA is a under-praised beauty of a city.

There are archways and balconies and climbing flowers and tile roofs and slanted driveways. In the night, the houses have an off-white cast to them, similar but never the same twice. The streets curve and bend more there than down on Wilshire or Venice and a residential block one minute is a row of small neon restaurant signs the next.

Gerard said he likes to walk around these neighborhoods and look at the houses. That farther up in the hills there are narrow staircases that appear out of nowhere and take you to a somewhere you didn't know existed. It's a surreal city, he said. A city that pretends to be a city in so many ways. A city worth exploration.

Shameless Survival

I have now been here a week, but I started to learn the streets as soon as I got off the freeway. Survival tactics: if I'm gonna get myself into the heart of this city, I better know how in the hell to get out. (I'm suddenly hearing Ani's "Shameless" in my head.)

Mariposa runs perpendicular to Wilshire. Wilshire runs runs parallel to 8th and James M Wood. So does Venice Blvd. Normandie, Vermont and Hoover can get me to Venice. They'll also take me to the 10. Either one can get me closer to Culver City and Danrae's house. I can't remember yet how to get to Kate's or Orange County.

If I turn right on Wilshire from S. Mariposa, there is a Home Depot, a Food4Less, a RiteAid and a Starbucks. There are also the skyscrapers I love to see so much. And in walking distance is the GayLord apartments which has Julia's favorite HMS Bounty at street level.

If I turn left, Emily and I can walk to CVS Pharmacy to drop off recycling at the center in parking lot and hopefully get a few dollars to put in our found blue-bear-with-yellow-tie piggy bank. If I'm driving, I can do the same, past grand churches and temples and the Wiltern before coming to Miracle Mile. And Miracle, as I found out yesterday, has the LACMA and the La Brea tar pits.

I'm thinking I've got a good location here. And maybe one day I'll know the streets of LA like my dad knows the streets of San Francisco. Maybe one day I'll turn on Venice on instinct instead of survival.

In a City that Doesn't Get Dark

I walked out of an event on Friday night at the California Science Center and despite my tiredness I thought it was relatively early--until I got in my car and looked at the clock: 9:45 pm. What?

Driving up Vermont Avenue, I just stared at the skyline. It was dark outside, the sun wasn't still setting, and it wasn't magically the middle of summer instead of the end of February. But the sky did have a gradient appearance to it, from orange light to deeper dark.

And it was then I figured out that it doesn't ever really get dark in LA. The orange streetlights do cut down on the light pollution, I assume, but the city sprawls and is well-lit in its sprawling.

I realized now why the sight of stars was such a big deal, why they meant so much to people, to my friends, from Southern California when they came to Santa Cruz or Siskiyou County. And even though I had spent a few summer months down in Valencia in high school, I guess I still took the sight of stars for granted.

I began to wonder what is like to be in a place that doesn't get dark, that doesn't quiet down, that doesn't go to sleep--all things that do happen here in this city, but how much different is that dark, that quiet, that sleep from what I have known.

And yet, strangely, I somehow felt safe knowing it wasn't going to get dark as I drove the well-lit streets back to Mariposa, found parking two blocks away and walked home.

My Girl 2 -- In L.A.

I think I keep forgetting that I am living in LA. Not in a way where I wake up and I don't know where I am--well, actually, kind of--but, I was thinking more in the sense that my spatial and temporal plane of existence is shifting kind-of-thing and my brain is having trouble keeping up. I mean, I've seen parts of this city hundreds of times in TV and film and now I am actually living where it happens. I'm living where the movies are made...

Trite? Maybe. True? Yes. And funnily enough the one movie I keep coming back to is that 1994 classic My Girl 2, when movies with "2" in the title were popular and I could totally relate to its adorable, feministy, kind of hippied-out 13 year-old protagonist Vada.

I mean, c'mon, her uncle actually says to her in the movie "Don't be a poet, be a TV repairman." And seeing how this constant dilemma between art and money still drives me today, I think at 10 or so I had made a pretty good character match for my life to come.

And now with me now in the very same city, I'm thinking I need to find out what other wisdom or tidbits can be gleaned from that childhood classic. Step 1: Re-watch My Girl 2. Step 2: Re-trace Vada's steps around the city, including taking my girl to the La Brea tar pits. Step 3: buy a mood ring.