Steak and boulders

The book club I am in recently read Hollywood by Charles Bukowski, which is the somewhat fictional story of his life being turned into the movie Barfly.  It seems like every few pages Musso & Franks is mentioned. I had never been, and always wanted to try it. So we went to celebrate what we thought was his birthday, but ended up being the anniversary of his death.

Musso & Frank's opened in 1919 and has been a celebrity favorite ever since. Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, the Fitzgeralds, etc. When I was there Friday I saw Debra Jo Rupp, who you may remember as the mom in That 70s Show.

They make a darned good martini and are quite famous for it. (And it is only $9.50, with a pony, which is pretty economical in these parts)  I got a steak, which was good, but it wasn't Taylors.

Los Angeles is filled with wonderful and strange things. The new and newsworthy thing that everyone has been talking about, no, not you Lindsay Lohan, is the LACMA Boulder, which more technically should be called Levitated Mass.

Levitated Mass is a Land Art piece consisting of a concrete hallway with a 340 ton rock monolith hovering above. This rock was cut from a quarry in Riverside California and moved extremely slowly to LACMAs location in Los Angeles. They published the slow moving route and the rock even had a twitter and facebook account, which was an excellent example of brilliant marketing, because if you think about it, who really cares about a rock?  But people totally did, people were following the parade for miles, there was a Block Rock party with bands, there were people who proposed in front of it. It was truly strange.

I had to see what it was all about, and since it was rolling through my neighborhood, it would have been silly not to.  I met a neighbor after that huge meal at Musso's and we walked to Western to watch it come by. I was surprised at how many people had come there to meet it, even more surprised that people had no idea about it.

We met it at Western and 8th and walked with it for a few blocks, as seen in the photos, picked up more and more people, who were waiting to see if it were possible for it to turn onto Wilshire, people were videoing it with their phones and ipads. Some loon ran around it with an American flag and people were holding up signs that said:

"God hates rocks, god loves scissors"


You have to love how creative people are here.


I think that I may have been on the local Korean news channel laughing.