From our 2023 update, explained below. Caroline and I dipped into Guelaguetza Oaxacan restaurant for brunch today which included a michelada.

Famous for their moles (pronounced Mo-lay), I was able to snag a sampler even though Guelaguetza was still serving breakfast.

Before we headed back to Phoenix, we had to get in one more walk at the beach. How we ended up at Leo Cabrillo State Beach, which is near Thousand Oaks and decidedly not on our way home, I can’t say. Sadly, no other photos exist of this day, and so what else we did today will remain a mystery.

Update: the above is false, though the name of the beach is likely correct. Here, on 25 December 2023, when I’m updating this, due to some circumstances surrounding Facebook reminding us of things, we discovered details of this trip we thought were lost. The photos above this one of the Pacific were taken from Facebook, as the originals are lost.

This is the elixir for the eyes of those who live in arid spaces.

With feet in the sand and head in the clouds, Caroline was about to step forward…

…into the sea so her feet would carry memories of the ocean for the best Xmas ever.

Update: in the original post, I thought that this was the end of the day and that from here we must have gone home, wrong. We had dinner reservations at Tar & Roses in Santa Monica. What follows was found on Facebook.

We are at Zuma Beach.

I don’t normally like sharing food photos, especially ones that are this poor, but considering that we thought we’d lost so many details about this Christmas trip, I’m including my yummy lamb belly in chutney with mint. Don’t forget people; blog while you can, as sooner or later, too much is easily forgotten.

The night ended in Santa Monica with a late-night walk down the pier. And to think that I thought we were on the way home.

I already lamented in the previous post that this trip to L.A. was not written about for nearly a decade after the fact. Here it is, 2023, and for no other reason than having a single location to see the breadth of our travel photos, I’m bringing this out from the dusty hard drive to share with ourselves. Around this time, Caroline and I were seeing many restored buildings in the Downtown Los Angeles core where lofts were going on sale or rent left and right, but not in a million years were we ever going to afford one. Out of curiosity, I glanced at these Sante Fe Lofts and saw that rents for a decent-sized apartment run about $2,000 a month, which, considering how much rents have risen in the rest of the country, means we could now afford one of these while having access to cultural amenities that blow anything in Arizona out of the desert. One other thing: we had breakfast at the Nickel Diner, which explained why we were in the downtown area, except those photos weren’t worth sharing.

Update: Not a great photo, but here at the end of 2023, after I shared the majority of this post, Facebook reminded Caroline of a drink she had on Christmas Day in Koreatown; well, it turned out that other details of our four-day long weekend were shared over there. So, I’m adding a few poor-quality old photos for memory’s sake and filling in some things that had been neglected, like the newly found day four of what we originally thought was a three-day visit to Southern California.

We could linger in the city for a while as our next stop in Santa Ana didn’t open until 10:00 a.m. Caroline learned of the Bowers Museum, and with the Christmas break upon us, it seemed like the perfect time for a cultural getaway weekend. This piece was part of the exhibit Heavenly Horses about equine art from China and Japan. It is titled Horse with Green Saddle and Raised Left Foreleg and was crafted during the Tang Dynasty between 618 and 907 AD.

The next exhibit we ventured into was Sacred Realms: Temple Murals by Shashi Dhoj Tulachan From the Gayle and Edward P. Roski Collection, which featured a number of Buddhist art that was almost psychedelic in its colorful depictions.

This closeup and the one above it are from a piece titled Virupaska (Dharma King of the West Direction) with 16 Attendants by Shashi Dhoj Tulachan from Nepal. It is a modern work from 1994 and was perfect in our eyes.

I can’t be sure which mural this belongs to, so it will have to suffice that it is another closeup of a painting we found especially attractive.

The title of the main exhibition was China’s Lost Civilization: The Mystery Of Sanxingdui, which opened in October and would close in March 2015. We knew that if we didn’t visit it now, we would have never made it otherwise. Regarding these bronze masks, if I had further info, I’d share it, but there’s nothing, so I’ll just take a stab: these are Chinese Lucha Libre masks from about 1250 BCE.

Hmm, did the ancient Chinese visit the Mayan people at some point in the distant past?

From the Bowers website about the exhibition:

“During the summer of 1986, construction workers accidentally uncovered an astounding cache of more than 200 ancient jades, weapons, burned animal bones, over 60 elephant tusks, monumental bronzes, and a life-sized statue of a nobleman at Sanxingdui, about 24 miles outside of the Sichuan Province capital of Chengdu…The objects date to about 1200 BC, a time when it was thought that the cradle of Chinese civilization existed 745 miles to the northeast on the Yellow River in China’s Central Plain region.”

Papua New Guinea also figured in the collection held here at the Bowers Museum. These images are from the ongoing (as of 2023) exhibit Spirit and Headhunters – Art of the Pacific Islands.

Those are human finger bones you are looking at with the pendant at the center still having the nail and skin attached; yeah, I’d wear one of those.

I can tell you that this photograph was taken for Caroline since it is a textile, and I also know that it is of Chinese origin, but that’s about it.

Possibly the most ornate chess set I’ve seen in person. And with this, we left the museum.

One of those old Facebook images that was salvaged well after the original blog post was shared.

Dinner was at a hip Downtown L.A. eatery called Bäco Mercat.

Originally, the photo of Caroline with a drink was attributed to the confusion of where we ate when and was thought to be a Kimchi mixed drink from Pot, which was actually had the night before. This photo of the restaurant’s interior is horrid, but for some reason, I thought it was good enough for Facebook, which is where I downloaded it from, as some of the photos from that weekend no longer exist in our archive.

In the march forward through the long-neglected blog landscape, alas, yet another few days discovered gathering digital dust on the hard drive of a forgotten time. Here I am now in the future, the year 2023, when, with forensic tools, I uncover these images with great clarity, but the exact details of what we are doing these days, aside from the obvious, will remain buried in brains, not prone to giving up secrets. To state the easily apparent, we stayed at the good ole Wilshire Motel which was often our go-to place for a weekend in L.A.

Taking ourselves to the Grand Central Market in Downtown L.A. was out of the ordinary but made sense, considering we are right next door to a meeting point that has everything to do with the primary reason for this visit to Southern California.

There’s something in common with more than a few of these old posts; it typically takes me some time to remember that I might have the itinerary and that it could have details that would help add to the story. Sure enough, I discovered something we’ll do here at the end of the day that I had no photos for and would have consequently missed; I’ll share it after the last photo.

This is the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway, where we are meeting our tour guide from the L.A. Conservancy for the Broadway Historic Theatre and Commercial District Walking Tour. After learning about some of the history of Sid Grauman’s Million Dollar Theater and the current state of the theater that we couldn’t visit, we moved on to the next location.

The famous Bradbury Building that I’ve likely written about on more than one occasion.

Does Blade Runner come to mind?

Hello Caroline…

As I considered what to write here and started using image search to identify a few facades I couldn’t figure out, I thought about going into some history, but this might not be the best use of my time. Though I’d learn a lot, and Caroline too would capture some history we didn’t retain from our original tour, this post will likely remain unseen by anyone as it’s inserted into its holding place carrying a date nearly a dozen years old. Who, after all, looks at such dated posts?

What I can offer is that we’ve enjoyed the various tours we’ve taken from the L.A. Conservancy and can only hope they remain well-funded and able to continue offering their events and tours for years to come.

Permanence is not part of the American vocabulary if financial utility can move to a newer, shinier location. Once the exodus begins to cheaper digs, decay sets in, and the value of what was once grand is allowed to fall into nothing.

Lucky us, the current tenant of the space formerly known as Roxie Theater allowed us inside to see for ourselves that it now serves as a warehouse but still has the décor and movie screen present.

Prior to the move to Hollywood, many of the studios were located right here in the Downtown Los Angeles core. Fading for decades is the old logo of Paramount Pictures on the side of this building.

This terrazzo sidewalk used to be part of the Pantages Theater.

Detail of the Beaux Arts and Spanish Baroque style Broadway-Spring Arcade Building.

The Los Angeles Theater, built in 1931, was considered to be the most lavish of Broadway’s great movie palaces. Reading about all these old theaters, I got curious about the oldest operating theater in the U.S., it turns out to be in Washington, Iowa. The State Theater has been open since 1897 and is still showing movies as of 2023.

Growing up in the Los Angeles area and a frequent visitor of the downtown area, I wasn’t able to really consider the history of what I was seeing as I was simply overwhelmed by the sense of scale and decay of the city I was walking through. Learning that the Palace Theater was originally the Orpheum and was built in 1911 for vaudeville acts, not the movies, comes as a surprise, as is the fact that the building was loosely based upon a Renaissance-age Florentine palazzo. On its stage, the likes of Harry Houdini, Will Rogers, Fred Astaire, and Rita Hayworth have performed.

Pardon the wonky bending in my photo of the State Theater building, but it was created from three different images stacked one upon the other in a panorama, as I couldn’t capture it correctly with the lens I was using.

From a terrific website by Mike Hume / Historic Theatre Photos with the copyright held by him, he wrote of the State Theater:

In 1929, a Bakersfield act called The Gumm Sisters played at the State, featuring a lead singer who earned the nickname “Leather Lungs” for her ability to be heard clearly at the rear of the 125-deep auditorium. As the Great Depression took hold and vaudeville declined (vaudeville ceased at the State in the mid-1930s), the Gumm Sisters moved to Culver City to appear in experimental Technicolor musicals, and “Leather Lungs” changed her name to Judy Garland.

Behind the diamond is an old Warner Bros. logo, and while this was originally a Pantages Theater in 1920, by 1929, it became the home of Warner Bros.

Tower Theater was once one of the narrowest theaters built; today, the ground floor is an Apple Store.

To the casual visitor, I wonder how many of them miss these old marquees?

A bit more background on the Orpheum. These theaters were part of something called the Orpheum Circuit,  a chain of vaudeville and movie theaters. As vaudeville was winding down, Orpheum merged into another company, becoming Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures. RKO gave us such films as King Kong, Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Notorious. Howard Hughes took over operations in 1948 before selling shortly ahead of its collapse.

Prior to this day, Caroline nor I had ever eaten Salvadoran food so the idea of having a lunch of pupusas at a Pupuseria sounded great to us. As of this writing in 2023, Sarita’s here at the Grand Central Market is still open.

Seeing we’re already parked here downtown, why not spend a little more time and visit the Central Library? During the late 1970s, the Los Angeles Central Library was one of my favorite places to hang out and browse its amazing collection of old books. Little did I know back then that the city had ideas of demolishing this building, and it was that idea that gave rise to the L.A. Conservancy in 1978.

This Globe Chandelier featuring the 48 states that existed when it was built in 1926 for the rotunda of the central library survived the fire that devastated the library in 1986 and is just beautiful.

While the high rises of Los Angeles are imposing from below and make for a great skyline from a distance, they are ultimately impersonal and disposable, in my opinion.

While the old architecture is reflected in the new, the new hardly carries much of its own character that would make it interesting to look at.

This 12-story building, built in 1912, is 100 years old here in 2012 and has found new life as luxury lofts for those fortunate enough to be able to live in such splendor in the heart of L.A. This here should have been the end of the post, as I have no more photos of what we were doing on this day, but as I referenced above regarding itineraries, I had a note in that directory.

It turns out that we saw one of the earliest screenings of the documentary film Samsara, not only that, we had the opportunity to meet and talk for a moment with the director Ron Fricke, who made Baraka too, one of our all-time favorites.