Recycled Beauty

I love this bag. I keep it in my purse and use it for all the little odds and ends I need with me throughout the day like lotion, motrin, a nail file, chapstick, and mascara. What I love even more is that it is from one of my favorite stores in Eagle Rock, Regeneration and it is made of recycled bags from a fair trade company.
Viterra pouches & totes:In urban India, the plethora of plastic bags that blow through the streets are gathered by the homeless and traded in for money. The bags are then processed into the raw material used to create these bags. No dyes are used to create this innovative fabric, as the earthy bands of color are actually derived from the bags themselves.

Winning Beats Losing

This week started out so incredibly crappy. The crappiness was encapsulated within the losing of my cell phone out of state at a conf. I attended for work. I thought it was gone and it was a phone I couldn't afford to replace. The place I lost it at told me they didn't have it on Sat. but today left a message that they did have it. I called them and they are going to send it to me.

In less trivial news, we won our appeal against the shitty building in our neighborhood getting the co-location of a cell phone tower on top of the building. Basically three average run of the mill Angelinos (ok I'm the average one in the group but you know what I mean) fought a slumlord, the city, and T-Mobile and WON! No lawyer, just homegrown grassroots community activism. I spoke at the hearing and the commission voted unanimously to uphold our appeal! This is a huge victory for my neighborhood and for the rights of stakeholders in Eagle Rock.

The York On York in Highland Park

The York in Highland Park may be the best bar in all Northeast Los Angeles. No, scratch that, in all of Los Angeles. This is the kind of place you find in that other California city up north. The exposed brick and wood beams create a lofty urban downtown feel and I think its the windows opening to the street that really make it feel like a San Fran neighborhood bar. The u-shaped bar is a beautiful beast and like no other bar in town, you feel like you are meant to stay as long as you like because there is plenty of room for everyone. My dirty martini was perfectly dirty and Big D enjoyed a fat tire followed by a pilsner. They have small plates, large plates, sides, and desserts and the food is really good.

http://www.theyorkonyork.com/

Back In My Salad Days

First, this is simply a post about salads. In the US, salads are a first course or an appetizer, but in many countries . . . those with more refined palates, salads often come after a main course or at the end of a meal. They are a way to cleanse the palate or add a little roughage to a protein. But in the US, a salad is the beginning of things.

In Los Angeles, salads, like sushi, are what french fry deprived women eat to feel full without feeling guilty by eating a real meal or without running to the bathroom at a culinary treasure like say, Luques on Melrose, to you know what before the main course.

When I lived in Santa Monica, my brilliant friend M (pronounced em), came for a visit from NY where she was working as a parallel and making plans to escape to Paris (which she eventually did). While visiting, she mentioned, "I am really into salads these days," and she made us (and by us a mean M and me) a salad with greens and avocado and scallions and tomatoes and a dressing made with nayonaise and sesame and it was delicious. But, at the time I was tiptoeing across my 20's and was a little too thin to appreciate a good salad as anything other than a prelude to a kiss (and by a kiss I mean a large bowl of pasta). For, I had been dieting on vodka and yoga and, let me say, I had found my bliss!

These are some Los Angeles salads that I like:

Briganti South Pasadena
Insalata di Rugoletta e Carciofi--is an arrugola salad with baby artichokes hearts,topped with shaved Parmesan, lemon and olive oil. I love this salad because it is simple and clean. The salad dressing is simply lemon and olive oil and this is perfect because you can actually taste the ingredients of the salad.

Fritto Misto Santa Monica
Greens and Gorgonzola is baby greens, Gorgonzola cheese, Roma tomatoes, and toasted walnuts in a balsamic vinaigrette. This salad is piled high on a plate and is perfect for sharing (actually, Big D and I almost always share the salad/appetizer course because this ensures that we can make it through dessert.

Canele Atwater Village
Shrimp salad with parsley and celery root is one of the freshest palate cleansing salads I have had. I love the use of parsley as an actual salad ingredient rather than a garnish. It makes the salad extremely soothing and yet bold and unexpected at the same time.

Cafe Beaugolais Eagle Rock
Mixed Green Salad has perfectly ripe pieces of tomato, fresh greens, a creamy dressing and pieces of french bread smeared with herbed goat cheese. Come on, that's just damn good.

Il Buco Beverly Hills
Tricolore Radicchio with Belgium Endive, Arugula, Balsamic Dressing, and Shaved Parmesan Cheese had the quintessential balsamic dressing, the perfect mix of greens and the shaved Parmesan has that perfect sharp bite. It's just perfect.

Pave This

My street needs to be resurfaced. Many streets in my neighborhood have recently been repaved. I've written two e-mail requests asking for a response as to when our street will be repaved. I know, it's Los Angeles---but hey as my friend Bee always says, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. So, I was searching the city's page for a number to contact a human being and stumbled upon this.

Bureau of Street Services
The Resurfacing and Reconstruction Division
Vision Statement
The Resurfacing and Reconstruction Division provides the highest uality of resurfacing by striving for continuous improvement and a search foe excellence.

Now I know I often have typos, even misspellings but hey I never claim that I strive foe excellence.

Saturday on the Eastside

To help out my dear friend Bee, I spent Friday evening watching the Dewster who lives on the Venice Canals. Venice Beach is without a doubt, my favorite place on this here planet. So after a couple of weekends chocked full of noisy gangsta pounding base in which I had to call the police that never arrive to my corner of Eagle Rock, I was more than happy to spend an evening on the quiet quiet quiet canals. But the Dewster (a dog did I mention that) is a mess. He is happy to see you when you arrive, happy to have a walk, happy to have dinner---but then he gets angry. Like Jekyll and Hyde angry. Oh, he has some sort of skin condition and wants to be itched itched itched. So, he starts barking at you, not a friendly bark, mind you. A I want to kill you bark. Then you must ignore him until he falls asleep. Then you try to get out alive in the morning (before stopping in at the French Market Cafe on Abbott Kinney--a little piece of paradise in a very french/ industrial sort of way).

So after the much needed respite from the 'hood, Big D and I spent a relatively quiet ER day out in our new Target gazebo followed by a side trip to Los Feliz to eat some PINKBERRY and walk little M De Cuba around the Silverlake reservoir. It was pretty wonderful despite the argument we had because Big D had me playing chicken to get back to the car rather than walking a few extra steps to the crosswalk to be all proper and stuff.

This was followed by what I really want to post about which is Marty's in Highland Park. Marty's is the new bar/restaurant of Rudy Martinez who I think just may be a genius and made a simple menu with most of my favorite comfort foods on it--mac n cheese and caprese salad, shoestring sweet potato fries and big D's Kobe burger. And washed down with dirty martinis. Rudy Martinez deserves an award for not only thinking outside the box by opening a zen like bar in Highland Park (not to mention a sushi restaurant in Eagle Rock) but also for reminding us all that we are only as ghetto as the ghettos in our own heads.

http://www.mia-sushi.com/

Los Angeles Neighborhood Signs

This was fun. LA City Nerd started this flicker group. I took a few of the places around my neighborhood. You can click on my Eagle Rock sign if you would like to see more.

Lazy Sunday Morning Interrupted...

to bring you this...

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-adayin13apr01,1,731502.story?coll=la-headlines-west&ctrack=2&cset=true

Another article about Eagle Rock...I can barely keep up.

Shopping Tuesday: Colorado Wine Company

I am writing about them...

1. Because they are cool.
2. Because they have a cool new website design: Colorado Wine Company
3. Because I love wine and I love that this store is around the corner from my house.

Props to the Hood (Eagle Rock in the New York Times)

Hey check this out...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/realestate/25nati.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Looks like Big D and I have done it again. I attribute our ability to snuff out up and coming neighborhoods to poverty and a good eye. When we first moved to Los Angeles, we decided on Los Feliz because of it's proximity to our grad schools, because the bungalow was $600 (the cheapest we could find) and because it had a walkability factor that I was craving after living in Vegas suburbia. This was shortly after the LA riots and people liked to mention this fact to us when we moved there, "You are moving to Los Feliz? You know, the riots came up nearly to there." Or westsiders would say, "Oh, that's east of Hollywood, right?" But I didn't care, I could see the potential for the neighborhood and now look at the Los Feliz/Silverlake area. I'd say I was right.

After getting our MFA's we moved on to the westside. First, to the only dumpy area in Santa Monica, right near the Community College. At the time, this area had been ravaged by the bad rent control policies that ghettoized the apartment complexes. Again, we liked the cheap rent ($800 I think) and there was a little neighborhood yoga studio in walking distance. With changes made to the rental laws and the wild real estate boom in recent years, the area has totally turned around and now it's filled with cute shops and yummy places to eat (like The Counter, which has the best veggie burger ever--and this is a fact that is not open to debate).

Then there was Venice, oh Venice, my favorite place on earth. Our landlords were a married couple that had lived in the area since the beginning of time and had bought their home in the 60's for $6,000, a fact that still beguiles me. They were serious Christians and viewed their work as the lord's work. They would buy bankrupt/foreclosed properties and fix them up, kick out the crack dealers, and then rent them out to upstanding individuals, like myself, thank you very much. I loved that apartment with it's little yard and brand new hardwood floors. They even installed new recessed lighting on dimmer switches for us. I'd buy that place today if it were for sale. Anyway, we all know what happened to Venice. Abbot Kinney is now a second Montana, even, dare I say, 3rd street promenade. And you can't touch a decent house under a mil.

Then it was on to Mar Vista. This was our first foray into real estate. Take yourself back a few years when the market was so hot you could actually see a glow over the West LA sky. Big D just knew we had to get a piece of it. So I somewhat grudgingly went along (I really loved that Venice apartment). We bought a fixer condo in the no man's land area of Mar Vista, the part squished between Venice and Washington blvds. After much blood, sweat, and tears (and I mean this literally) we flipped it two years later for a nice profit. And left behind not only a really cool renovated condo but a funky little neighborhood with stores like, A Mano, Soaptopia, and even a hip coffee house, Venice Grind.

We spent a few months chillin' in Culver City, in a hideout of a cottage I like to refer to as my Innisfree, because it provided the peace I needed to regroup after the condo drama. In the time we moved in and out of Culver City, so much change has happened there that it would take too long to describe. Just check it out next time you are there. Let's just say it's not your parent's dull, dingy, watch the weeds grow boring Culver City of yesteryear, its filled with galleries, boutiques, and bistros--and that wine bar, Bottlerock, which I will try next time I'm in the CC.

So, that takes me to now. Last night, as we sat outside in our very own yard in Eagle Rock, a fire crackling in the fire pit, drinking pinot, and listening to M. Ward, Big D said, "It's been a year since we signed escrow." And it has been quite a year--from the major plumbing work to the birds that prefer to nest in the shingles of our roof than in the multitude of lovely elderly trees. Transitional neighborhoods can have there ups and downs but I love the vitality and the community I have found here and can't wait to see all the changes in the neighborhood come to fruition. This time, I think we'll be here a while.

Post and Ye Shall Receive

A couple days ago I posted the hideous photos of hip high weeds growing in my front yard. Well, like magic, they are gone! I am calling the dirt that remains Desert Landscaping:

So, I am hoping this posting technique will work in reverse and bring good things in as much as it takes bad things out of my life. Internets, please bring me this:

Oh, and did I mention----I AM ON VACATION FOR TWO WHOLE WEEKS, take that SUCKAS!

Bringing Down the Neighborhood (or maybe just fitting in)

FOR THE LOVE OF HUMANITY, PLEASE GET ME A LANDSCAPER!

See, I wasn't kidding about my garden of weeds, what I like to refer to as California Native Landscaping http://girlintheroom.blogspot.com/2007/03/bleach-is-your-friend.html. I'm especially fond of the added touch of garbage, aren't you? Here's another view:

Shopping Tuesday: Regeneration in Eagle Rock

Regeneration: recycle/repurpose/rethink

I love this store. And not just because it is in Eagle Rock. Though, I do love that it is in Eagle Rock. So, I want to keep it here. Therefore, please shop here before she packs up shop (literally) and moves west (like to Venice...beach that is). She has more in the store than online so if you don't find what you are looking for by clicking on the photo above, please stop in next time you are in the Rock.

Afterthought: If you know anything about Eagle Rock, wouldn't you agree that the title of this store kind of describes our community? I love that!