Blog | A Lovely Day in Downtown LA

A Lovely Day in Downtown LA

Today Penelope and I walked up the hill a few blocks to check out the Basquiat exhibit at MOCA. The collection is vast and supposedly the largest ever in one place. We very much enjoyed the vivid and tumultuous paintings of the young deceased artist, our favorites of the bunch being Grillo, Now's the Time (a Charlie Parker record) and the various Gray's anatomy inspired paintings, which were obviously inspired by the thick anatomy tome (even though that bit of information was unknown to us).

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One of the paintings at the end of the exhibit was very grafitti-esque and had several small canvases attached to the lower left hand corner that had "tags" that didn't seem to be drawn by Basquiat, if anybody knows who did them I would love to find out. After viewing the works we headed down stairs to check out a 20 minute interview with Basquiat that showed him to be an intelligent and enlightened artist who went from being homeless living in Central Park to a world renowned painter.

After the MOCA tour we headed over to the YMCA to check out their facilities. The Y in Downtown LA is a state of the art gym replete with padded running track, basketball and racquetball courts, 25 meter swimming pool and a wide range of the latest weight and cardio machines. We plan on joining in the next few weeks as their natural light filled facility puts 24 Hour Fitness dungeon to shame. The guy who gave us the tour was really nice and was the furthest thing from a pushy salesmen, unlike the hard selling membership slinger that you find at your everyday corporate gym.

Finally we headed over to Macy's to spend Penelope's birthday gift certificate. We bought some lovely maroon place mats which we desperately needed and a set of nice white plates and serve ware that is much classier than the grey IKEA plates I have had for years. I couldn't resist buying the Henckels Santoku I've been lusting over for several months now and it was on sale. We started walking home, but the bags were heavy so I hailed a cab whose meter I was careful to keep an eye on after reading about the Russian Mob "fixed" meters in the cabs in LA.

When we got home I made a delicious red wine (2 buck chuck) marinade for a couple nice filet mignon steaks we picked up at Gelson's on Saturday, then we headed to Target to spend Penelope's other gift certificate and picked up some nice white hand towels, a meat thermometer and a cheese wire plus some other assorted items. We then headed home to BBQ the steaks and caramelize some onions and mushrooms which we ate along side some organic baby greens we picked up at the Silverlake Farmers Market on Saturday.

All in all it was a lovely weekend and an especially relaxing Sunday. Next weekend I will be very busy with an intermediate Ropes That Rescue course for Search and Rescue, so I'm sadly going to miss the tofu festival. My fiance has promised to go and take pictures for me and bring me some food for dinner.

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Sunday, August 7th, 2005 at 11:26:09 PM

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