I recently had an opportunity to visit Los Angeles for the first time in many years. My son was visiting the city for work, and flying to LA from Sonoma County takes less time (about 58 minutes) than it takes to drive from home to San Francisco (admittedly, an unfair comparison considering the time it takes to get out of the airport on arrival and then into the city from LAX, but it seemed close), so I decided to meet up with him for a couple of days. I’m afraid I dragged him around to a lot of museums, but he didn’t seem to mind and it was good to see him.
On my first day, I was on my own. I took an Uber directly to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from LAX where I had arrived two hours late because our departure had been delayed. LA was shrouded in fog in the morning. Having done some math, I decided it would be cheaper to Uber than to rent a car for three days, so I cancelled my car reservation and hailed a ride. Oil derricks along South La Cienaga Blvd. near Ladera Heights, part of the Inglewood Oil Field, discovered in 1924 and in continuous production since then (thanks Wikipedia), seemed quintessentially LA.
My driver, a Palestinian who told me he splits his time between a home in Egypt and a home in LA, spent the entire trip complaining about Uber and the people in Los Angeles and their driving manners. While driving, he was distracted by trying to find a nearby Islamic center for his daily prayers, and more concerned about finding an accommodating place to kneel than he was in getting me to my destination, but I eventually found the entrance to the park in which LACMA sits after he dropped me and hurried off.
I had seen on the map that the museum complex sits right next to the La Brea Tar Pits, about which I have heard since early childhood (I vaguely remember an illustration of a trapped saber-toothed tiger in one of the dinosaur books I had as a child). After seeing the art museum, I strolled around the pits.
With the exception of one large pit known as Lake Pit (a pond of black water rippled here and there by bubbles of methane gas coming to the surface), the gummy pits are easy to miss as their surfaces are covered with leaves, dirt, twigs, and other debris that has fallen into them and stuck there. It’s not hard to see how an animal could walk into one not realizing the danger. According to informative placards in various places around the pits, most of the fossilized skeletons (apparently thousands have been recovered since excavations began more than 100 years ago) are partial because predators like wolves and saber-toothed tigers would commonly approach trapped animals, rip limbs from them, and take the body parts away to eat (sometimes getting caught themselves). People today are preserved from the danger by fences. The Tar Pit Museum looked interesting, but I will have to save that for another trip. It was the end of the day, I was tired, and the smell of the pits (the smell of asphalt) had given me a headache.
I know the work of artists such as Kirchner, Dix, Heckel, Nolde, and Schmidt-Rotluff through woodcuts, but LACMA has several substantial paintings by some of these that were interesting to see (in addition to a good collection of those woodcuts). The museum has a number of good Picassos and I was surprised to learn that Magritte’s famous 'La Trahison des Images', or, in English, 'The Treachery of Images (This is not a Pipe)'. is here. I was very pleased to see in person Lee Krasner’s 'Desert Moon' (1955), a large painting with strips of painted paper collaged into the surface, as 'Desert Moon' is on the cover of a book about Krasner I recently finished.
After taking in the permanent collection, I looked at a special exhibition called 'Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film', which, among many other things, included small graph paper sketches by Susan Kare for some of her icon designs for the original Macintosh.
As noted above, I was pretty wiped out by the time I finished at the museum and, after my brief stroll around the La Brea Tar Pits, I headed to my hotel in East Hollywood and took a nap ahead of meeting up with my son for a dinner that turned out to be memorable. My hotel room had a view of a billiard parlor, and, through a gap between buildings in the foreground, a distant view of the Hollywood sign in the hills. Turner Classic Movies was showing 'Wuthering Heights' when I dozed off, Olivier's 'Hamlet' when I awoke.
Based on online reviews and instinct, I booked our evening meal at Saffy’s, in LA’s Little Armenia, only about 10 minutes north of the hotel. There was a dense crowd of people outside the place hoping to get tables when we arrived and the restaurant was full inside. I’m glad I had thought the day before to make a reservation. We were seated after only a brief wait.
Cucumber and zucchini with ginger, shallots, mint, chili oil, pine nuts and tzatziki vinaigrette was the opener. Simple but delicious. Next came kabocha and fennel tempura with herb serrano aioli and Kashmiri chili. Again, simple, but perfect – the tempura was as good as any I’ve ever had in Japan or better and the sauces were inspired. A plate of turmeric mussels completed the starters, all of which we shared. The mussels came with carrot, habanero, lime, coconut cream, scallions, and toasted flatbread. We finished things off with the wood-fired schwarma plate, which came with tomato, sumac onions, tahini, red ajika, beet chutney, and laffa. We washed it all down with a solid rosé that I regret I did not record. Both the waiter and the wine server were attentive and friendly. It was a nearly perfect meal. Saffy’s deserves its Michelin Star. The noise was deafening, but the food was worth it – I ripped up a paper napkin from the bar and made earplugs. One of the best meals I’ve had, ever.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment