Cool booths

These were some cool booths in a San Diego restaurant. I felt like they were either giant wicker water drops, or birdcages with a cover charge.

Edited to add: Looks like the folks over at Apartment Therapy had their eyes on the same thing.

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Are you feeling gastronomically brave?

Franks Coffee Shop in Burbank is THE most hardcore, decades-old, time-machine, never-changed throwback diner EVER. It's one of the only places to eat within walking distance of my work, so even though you have to be feeling really brave to go in, occasionally we chance it. Even then it's best if you don't look too closely at how clean (or not) the place is kept.

Clearly, the ambiance is a powerful magnet that draws people irresistibly.



The interior. The window shade thingies (visible at top right) are astounding up close--they're plastic and interlocking and indescribable and so 70's Brady Bunch and AMAZING. I dearly wish someone would clean them up to their former orange-and-beige glory, but at the moment they're kind of in grungy tatters. If a decorator could somehow acquire them to put on the huge windows of someone's big modern loft apartment, that someone would have the grooviest pad in history.



Some locals share their views on undoubtedly important stuff.



And finally, the wait staff that makes it all happen. My friends swear they've actually ordered things here and had one of the waitresses tell them no, those things were too inconvenient for her, order something else.

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Look!

There's an "Everything" store in Paris, too!

Internet access--and time to blog--is scarce on my European trip. I'll be back to my picture-a-day schedule as soon as I can.

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Driving and shooting*

The side of the Wiltern Theater in L.A., an Art Deco landmark. This doesn't really show the building, of course, but I think it's interesting how, on the right, vintage neon contrasts with modern (and some might say tacky) neon.

(*Don't try this at home. Or rather...at car.)

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You're so nauti...cal.

I drove past this place yesterday, and though I think I've seen it before, it was obvious that this was my picture for the day.

Methinks somebody read a little too much Mark Twain growing up, and then decided to be an architect. The windows are portholes. WITH bars on them--personally, I think you could ditch that feature. Dude, if anybody could even FIT through that tiny round space to get into your house, they'd deserve whatever they came to steal. God knows the residents must not be getting much light as it is, without adding the extra hardware.

I tried Googling this place before I posted, but amazingly, found nothing. I put in "boat," "house," "weird," "architecture," "los angeles," "silverlake," and the names of the streets on whose corner it is. Nuthin'. Somebody has to have said something about this place previously, and darn it, I want some history.

But for now, I guess we'll just have to settle for looking at it, and pretending we're at Tom Sawyer's island at Disneyland.

All aboard.

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You heard me, everything.

The very existence of The Everything Store fills me with giggly joy.

It's certainly not the best picture ever taken, but I don't think I have another I enjoy more.

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Musso and Frank

Musso and Frank, still surviving even though it's disturbingly marooned in the anarchy of Hollywood Blvd. And though it still has that old dark-and-heavy interior decoration and famous martinis, apparently it doesn't boast old waiters, which really are the best thing to encounter when you go to a Hollywood throwback kind of place.

They used to have those at the old Dupar's in the Farmers Market--waitresses who'd been there practically since the place opened. 70-year-old ladies who either tottered along and called you "dear" or snarked half-kiddingly at you that they didn't "do" glasses of water. People Who Remember The Place When and Still Do Things The Old Way are awesome for the ambiance.

But a friend of mine complained that the last time he got a martini at Musso's, the bar was manned by Latin American immigrants--not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that they didn't know the history of the place or the stories, even if they could have told 'em in English.

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