LA recs??
 

going to be in LA for a tiny bit in a couple of weeks, what's gewd?




also where do I find out about gigs of the 'out' persuasion?

what's good? the global immigrant food

farmer's markets

the getty

beaches (but you have that in aussieland)

for the out persuasion? i'd say get an airb&b in west hollywood and you're set

wait, what do you mean by gigs? british gigs or american gigs?

cuz here a gig is a job

I love airBnB. It's dope.

nah 'out' as in music/concerts/records stores of the 'stylez' on the board....was trying to have a look around but wasn't getting much.....


think I'll have to check out venice beach at least for the smut assault. got a lil airbnb with a friend in echo park.

actually, if anyone has anything worth doing in SF, austin, memphis and new orleans as well lemme know because I'm going in real blind here.

venice is boring. bunch of hobos in the street. the beach is pretty at sunset time but if you live in the pacific you've seen this. wait, you see it from the other side at sunrise. well.

i thought you meant out as in gay of course which is why i recommended west hollywood.

i still would recommend west hollywood. as its own kind of place in the universe.

isn't echo park some kind of cliché at this point? same hipster can be transplanted to any location. no fun. but i guess good place for breakfast.

go see all the immigrant food on fairfax avenue. in spite of what trump would have you believe, the us is still a country of immigrants


in SF, EAT, go see art, etc

i think there i'd be interested in the cultural outcroppings of the tech industry. that's what rules the town. it still has some old timey western roots of course but that's more of a curiosity now. tech is what's going on. like politics with DC.

in memphis, EAT--and listen to good, non-hipster music played by old people

in new orleans drink all day and get yourself a second line and there is more music than you can shake a stick at, but i doubt if many people around here would recognize its quality publicly.

not saying that they can't, it's not like they're deaf, a lot of good ears around here, but just, if people would just drop the posturings for a minute and listened to the notes and felt the sound in their meat packets-- new orleans is the mother lode of american music (so is in another way memphis of course, but eh, even harder to get people to pay attention to it)

in austin i don't know. it's not what it once was. i guess you can visit more echo park style hipster colonies in their respective neighborhoods.

oh hm if you need a hipster endorsement of memphis and new orleans watch jim jarmusch's "mystery train" and "down by law" before you even visit. and then listen to the commentary track where he says what he says about those places.

but those cities don't need jim jarmusch lol. it's more like he needed them. did a good job with them tough.

eta: faifax is mega gentrfied but anyway see this

http://guides.latimes.com/101-best-r...jonathan-gold/

thanks for all o these symbols, much appreciated

obviously not equipped to really contribute much seeing as I haven't been yet but even from looking through stuff from here cali & austin seem like obscenely gentrified, everything seems like a tumblr. "real hipster colonies" indeed.

essentially wanna just go see the "true trashed amerika" which is why I wanna go to venice, and as a self-loathing gay west hollywood sounds like a riot.

is it true what they say about fresh produce not being a thing in massive parts of the states? concept of that's fucking terrifying.

eh, this lack of fresh produce business is a bit of a huge myth. sure, if you go to 7-11 or a corner store you won't find a lot of fresh anything, and yes in some deep lost places you find nothing but processed corn and sugar.

but i live outside a hellhole town in the middle of nowhere and there are a bunch of supermarkets that carry ample produce sections with everything from your usual oranges and apples and iceberg lettuces to 4 types of cabbage and multiple lettuce varieties, three kinds of avocados, armies of chilies, ten kinds of potatoes, all manner of herbs, root vegetables from beets to daikon, weird asian fruits, all kinds of organic stuff, tangerines and tangelos and peaches and nectarines, multiple strains of apples and avocados, imports from around the world, etc.--and im talking about a walmart, not whole foods or any fancy place.

me i buy a lot of frozen veggies, which are more nutritious, cheaper and reliable than their wilting brethren. i really can't afford to have strawberries gathering mold in my produce drawer. so i buy them frozen and they're always ready and unspoiled. why pay more and let things go to waste? aesthetics? eh...

but sure a lot of people think potato chips and ketchup count as vegetables ha ha ha ha. pushing carts full of soda and doritos. i'ts not mandatory. but you see it a lot.

no lack of produce in california though. that place is produce heaven. the best of everything. i remember stumbling onto a farmers market in hollywood one weekend morning and holy shit, it was blocks and blocks of *everything* in the middle of the street--and shoppers galore. you'd love it. never seen one so big.

if you wanna see how those veggies are grown you could drive up the pch to ventura county and see those towns that look right out of the x-files. huge fields covered in plastic (saves water), lots of machinery, and immigrants living in company towns like it's the XIX century. i got lost there once and it was fantastic.

you're gonna need a car for all this (venice included) and traffic is hell in LA. HELL. that's true trashed america alright-- the LA freeways. the horror.

for true trashed america i think mississipi tennessee and louisiana are gonna be where it's at. oh yeah. red states with more obesity and less produce than the rest. if you're in memphis and want true trashed amerika mos def visit graceland! ha ha ha. i've never been, but i want to--so grotesque.

oh, here's a movie you might like as a preview of texas-louisiana: SCHULTZE GETS THE BLUES. it's about a retired german miner who... oh just watch it and have a good laugh. movie has very little dialogue but it's hilarious and great and very much about music.

you gonna be driving or flying?

schultze gets the blues is so beautiful, yeah, made me want to go over there just because it made it seem quite alien I guess? definitely want to see graceland again purely because it seems so inorganic: in a supposed 'heartland' of music it's this grotesque, odd little bit of manufactured america. gross. SAD!

heartening about produce in california, had heard they were okay. just get some horror stories from my friend who lives in daytona beach for a few months in the year, told me that she'd go into a store and 'fresh food' would be served in sealed bags which is a fucking nightmare coming in from here where everything's fresh, no gmo etc. (in the right places that is...)

wasn't planning on getting a car in LA, was just gonna do uber....better off getting a car? as for the rest, driving up to SF over a couple of days via the coast, flying from there to austin and then driving from austin to new orleans over a week and a bit...anywhere interesting to stop overnight between austin and memphis?

Yo. So what'd you do? I'm gonna visit my Sister and I have no idea what I want to do...

okay I'm pretty clueless and a bad traveller in the sense that I don't really do anything, I sort of just turn up there and then walk around. but in terms of neighbourhoods koreatown obviously has great food, downtown is cool just because of how disgustingly it encapsulates this sort of violent gentrification that you see all across america -- an ace hotel and acne literally 200m from skid row bordered on the other side by an 'arts district', cultural commodification of extreme poverty while keeping the whole thing at arm's length -- but the area itself is really beautiful. highland park has really great record stores, especially check out mt analog, really yuppie and the staff are largely hipster douches but they stock some good stuff and it's pretty cheap. echo park is again yeah really gentrified, obscenely hipstery in a sort of antiquated sense but it's cool. hollywood is good on an empty stomach and venice is to be avoided at all costs.



you guys have got an....interesting country...

haaa haaa haaa... i warned you about venice!

and yeah... well, LA is something else altogether. i don't think it reflects the country as a whole. it's more like... an outer planet or something. a strange, strange culture. very alien.

the violent gentrification btw is why i left washington dc. which i used to love when it was a run-down, bombed-out city. but now? just insufferable.

a lot of urban centers are like that of course. but maybe check out some suburbs/exurbs/small towns to see how "the other half" lives. i mean if you like the random anthropology of the unplanned excursion.

requires a car, though...

so you still here or is this a retrospective account?

I wish Suchfriends was still on here. It'd be nice to meet up with him.

he's still on twatter i believe. you can prolly message him there.

when you do, give him the news that trump won!

he might still be in denial :(

ps here you go: https://mobile.twitter.com/Habte_Sabroso

all retrospective. been back a couple of weeks..

yeah a really, really alien city indeed. I sort of saw it as a distillation of everything dumpy I stumbled on across the country, but it's so brazen/shameless that it comes across as endearing rather than bizarro posturing completely lacking in self awareness like it does elsewhere. like austin is a joke (which I gathered before going there), and I'm not sure it has a sense of humour about itself in the way that LA does, as if its merits are attached to how much of a fucking shithole it is. mean this affectionately, I should add - could very easily live there.



it's odd to see, especially as compared with where I'm from -- gentrification is totally insidious as it is everywhere but here I suppose there's some sort of integration, like it's elevating a portion of an area/community to a particular socioeconomic level before they get pushed out too (boomers flocking to the inner cities clasping at their youth), whereas in the states I found it's just people moving outward, transplanting a similar if not identical culture atop a neighbourhood and forcing residents along. it's not 'regenerative' in any sense, it's just a constant thrust. any form of gentrification though I generally find pretty off; in aus as with anywhere it's totally mindless. your big cities just a very extreme instance of it.



and I saw a lot of that "other half" living and frankly that was what disturbed me, like middle class america seems like a totally incomprehensible hell to me in that stereotypical sense, especially across the centre of the country (texas, tennessee, good god fucking arkansas and mississippi) -- have never seen such a nightmarish conception of blind consumerism. seriously have nightmares about driving along those interstates with those enormous maccas signs for 500km ceaselessly.

I was in SF last week, Amoeba Records in SF is the best record shop i have ever been to.
Take plenty of money i burned through $450 in 5 days on just day to day stuff. I used this to find out about live music
http://www.foopee.com/punk/the-list/by-date.5.html

I was recommended to check out these record shops too, but didn't have time or cash:
Stranded
1 2 3 4 Go
Thrillhouse

Make sure you get some good mexican food while yr there.
Berkeley is pretty nice and worth a visit, Telegraph Ave is a fun street to walk down, there's another slightly smaller branch of Amoeba there too

I've never been to LA but if you can check out the documentary City of Gold about the LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold, he's a former punk rocker from LAs punk golden era, and now he hunts down the tasty and amazing looking global immigrant food symbol guy mentioned

I dunno...the only really good food I had here was brunch. I had in n out, I regret that. I had this place called Fat sal's, now I feel super fat. I went to Blue Whale to see Haco perform(totally forgot she was doing US dates). Bought some really good weed and edibles. Went to Amoeba...that place is huge. And in total spent over $200 in music.

As far as the Mexican food goes, my sister says she hasn't really been able to find a place. Was recommended King Taco but it was a bit too late for me.