Los Angeles

The wifey and I spent last weekend in Los Angeles. Two good friends were getting married, and, besides, we needed an excuse to get on an airplane. The city defied and exceeded my expectations. Upon going to visit a new big city, I often experience some degree of stress over the difficulty of navigating the place. New York is especially prone to this. Its something that I almost welcome: the challenge of deciphering some massive algorithm that is a major metropolitan area.

But LA was different. And maybe this has mostly to do with the general area where we stayed. We spent all our time on the coast, in the Venice Beach / Santa Monica area. Our hotel was there, the Getty museum was there, the wedding was there. Perfect. So we didn't venture into downtown, where we would have been forced to deal with (I'm sure) the worst of the traffic and the possibly-confusing roadways. Instead, it was all driving down curvy, well-reflector'ed coastlines, slight buzz in mind, nice rental car factory system booming in our ears, glad to be somewhere exciting and different.

The Getty is the best museum. The art is good too. I especially enjoyed seeing several prominent Monets. Impressionism has been possibly my favorite style of "historical" art since, in high school, the High Museum here in Atlanta had all the great works on a traveling exhibit, and we took a field trip there, and suddenly I thought to myself, "holy shit, art." But back to the museum part. And by museum, I mean the building, the surroundings, the place. This is a piece of elaborate and perfect modern architecture set atop a mountain with a panoramic view of all of Los Angeles and the lush green mountains that surround it, and filled with thoughtful well-kept walk-through gardens, fountains, and the like. This was a surreal and wonderful place to spend a morning, and then an afternoon.

And then there's Venice Beach. We stayed in a bed and breakfast that I learned about from a Google search. The building is among the first homes built in the borough of Venice, and was the home of one of the guys who started Venice Beach. Turns out the whole area was the brainchild of this mad entrepreneur who wanted to build a Coney Island-like area for travelers and revelers (read: tourists) from 'cross the world. There is the beach-and-boardwalk, with its various amusements, hot dog stands, muscle men, medical marijuana dispensaries, and street performers, and then there is the residential area. The residences (the expensive ones, at least) are built along a series of canals (that's part of the whole "Venice" name). These are exorbitant, architecturally compelling structures filled with wealthy people of all sorts. We wondered whether our favorite movie stars were sitting inside any of them, but realized that, no, probably just doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and that sort of thing.

The wedding was in an area called Topango, a community of California hippies-who-got-wealthy. The whole community sits on top of a mountain that looks over the Santa Monica and Malibu shores, bordering a state park. Apparently (apparently!) you can smoke marijuana there out in public and nobody will bother you, because they probably just smoked some themselves. The wedding was, of course, lovely, the icing on the cake of the whole trip. Dedicating a whole evening to showering your attention on two people who you really like is always a nice thing to do. It was a small, close-friends-and-family type event. Those are the best weddings, in my experience.

I will go back to Los Angeles, and soon, I hope. I hear promise that the weather is almost always perfect there. We picked the one weekend of rain and wind (and, despite that, the weather was really, really nice somehow) and I'll take that as a reason why I just have to go back. Until then.

Jonathan Krohn: Atlanta's biggest disappointment

Some weeks ago, I wrote about a little chap named Tarak McClain, who was featured on NPR's "This I Believe" for a little ditty he wrote regurgitating various liberal cliches that he had heard from his Northern Californian parents. My point was not that young McClain was not quite clever in his own right, but simply that, children will often repeat the political views their parents espouse, in their most basic forms, and those who share those political views will see the whole exercise as some inspirational insight into the truth of these views. If a kid says it, so the logic goes, there must be some very pure truth to it.

Anyway, the political right is equally guilty of this. I present to you this shining example of kids-say-the-darndest thing politics. And, yeah, this one is for more nauseating than the NPR kid. If only because he so well imitates the speak of his talk radio idols. And, of course, everyone cheers at the sound of hearing their views repeated back to them, from the mouth of babes.