3 posts from December 2006

Congrats - TIME Magazine voted you "Person of the Year"!  What's your acceptance speech?

I'm afraid there's been some kind of mistake. I didn't win it, you did.

(boo)

I'm not sure why our downtown-dwelling friend KC chose to have her birthday party 20 miles away in Westwood. There's no good way to get there from Los Feliz on a Friday night, so we met up with the party at the end of a Persian dinner, in time for the present derobing (she and her coworkers are the wardrobe crew for a well-known television show, so my poetic license when I say "derobing" instead of "unwrapping" is allowed, if only I hadn't had to explain it here.) We had brought a great gift, an amazing wine carafe my girlfriend found at the MOMA store. It came wrapped in orange and silver, and the hot pink envelope from the birthday card I picked out at Uncle Jer's really fit KC's aesthetic.

MOMA Vin Eau Carafe

Meanwhile, there were a lot of candles and picture frames among the offerings, so we were pleased with our contribution. We were also pleased at the sight of Doughboy's red velvet cakes as the waitstaff brought them to the table. Unfortunately, the party had decided to move on to the W hotel, and so we were recruited to cart the red velvet cakes there. (A dangerous thing, to be sure — we envisioned a scenario where we showed up with only two of the four small cakes left and cream cheese all over our faces.)

We drove to the W hotel, dropped the car at the valet ($20 + tip), and got interrogated by the doorman. We weren't on a list, and everything on Friday and Saturday night is by reservation or invitation only. We managed to talk our way in, but the guy said we weren't allowed to bring the red velvet cakes into the bar. So we had to leave them at the concierge, whose podium bore in brushed steel lettering the single word: "WHATEVER". How corporately rebellious.

We went into the bar area, where a waitress actually asked people to leave a little sofa lounge area that our party had reserved. I wondered momentarily what it must have taken to reserve a spot in this over-the-top bar. I soon found out that the party was required to purchase two bottles of liquor for at least $600.

I know. "What?!?!"

I quickly did the math, and even if we had full representation from the dinner party, each share was going to come out to $50, which meant a $100 bar tab for me and my girlfriend. To give you an idea of the pricing structure, a bottle of Stolichnaya (for which my dog is named), which normally retails in the $25-30 range, cost $300. If you wanted to get really crazy with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label, which normally can go for $160-175, you'll shell out a cool $750 at the W (clearly heavily discounted compared to the Stoli markup).

Our friend explained that there was another friend who was also celebrating her birthday and staying at the W, and that likely she and her friends would cover that tab. If we didn't want in, we could go and order drinks at the bar. We were happy to take that option. We asked if she would like a drink, and she ordered champagne. That, a glass of truly awful Cabernet for me, and my girlfriend's "Blueberry Breeze" martini, cost $42, or roughly the price of our dinner and two glasses of wine before the festivities. And I think the bartendress was stoned.

In the plus column for the evening, I got to meet KC's boyfriend for the first time, and we had a conversation about his experiences in the ER at USC County hospital. It was somewhat unnerving to listen to listen to him casually talk about intubating a man with severe AIDS-complicated pneumonia and thinking, "Bye, do you know you've got a 5% chance of having this tube taken out of you while you're alive?" Eesh. He also talked about his 2 years in the Peace Corps in Honduras. I told him the closest experience I'd had to Honduras was a bad neighborhood in Alhambra.

Years ago, I managed to score tickets to a surprise Beck show at The Knitting Factory in Hollywood. It was a great show (Elliott Smith walked right past my girlfriend — that's how long ago it was). We figured that was the last time we would see Beck at such a small venue. This was confirmed a year or two later when we saw him at the Universal Amphitheatre from the nosebleed section.

Well, let it never be said that Beck has forgotten his 'hood. He played a show last night to a couple hundred people at The Echo in Echo Park (3 blocks from my old apartment). My girlfriend managed to get two tickets via our friend the browser Reload button at the Ticketweb site (even better: no money to Ticketmaster). We got there early enough that we were able to walk right up to the stage. How close were we? This was taken from my cameraphone:

Bottles and cans, clap your hands