The other day I went to the RMS Queen Mary for birthday drinks for Lynn Garrett’s birthday. Lynn is the founder and head honcho at Hidden Los Angeles. As the name suggests, Hidden Los Angeles is a highly useful guide to Los Angeles for Angelenos and visitors who presumably have no interest in (or interests beyond) celebrity culture, “The Industry,” or the beaten path in general. It’s also the perfect riposte to Los Angeles’s haters complaints about our fair city. Lynn was staying on board the ship for three a three day non-cruise and the visit to the ship was my first.

The RMS Queen Mary is an ocean liner that sailed the North Atlantic from 1936 (when it was known as the Cunard-White Star) and 1967, when it retired to Long Beach.

She was built in Clydebank, Scotland and held the Blue Riband (an accolade granted to ships with the fast average speed when crossing the Atlantic) from 1936 to 1937 and then from 1938 to 1952.

Members of the press were recently treated to a preview of the historic Rancho Los Alamitos, in Long Beach. The public re-opening will take place on June 10 although special events will afford interested parties an opportunity to enjoy the site before then. 


Rancho Los Alamitos is a deeply significant historic site – home to a 19th century homestead that today offers a 7.5 acre oasis in the middle of a densely-populated urban area -- and the ancestral birthplace of Los Angeles’s Tongva people. For most of its existence it belonged to the prominent Bixby family before it was donated to the City of Long Beach in 1968, when it was apparently converted into a corny tourist trap. In 1986, the Rancho Los Alamitos Foundation took over and this grand re-opening is the culmination of a quarter century’s worth of their restoration efforts.

Under Long Beach’s watch, the barn area buildings on the site were rearranged in a semi-circle, effectively turning the once-proud site into a Harbor Area answer to South Dakota’s 1800 Town. A “Wisteria Walk” was added. Grass was put in and visitors got to make candles. It may’ve all been good fun to the grade-schoolers who visited at the time but it probably wasn’t the ranch’s most dignified era. When the Rancho Los Alamitos Foundation took over and pursued a different approach, there were predictably grumblings. This is SoCal, after all, and Southern Californians are very serious about kitsch.

BROKEN SPOKE, Austin, TX 2010 Color coupler print 20 x 20” © Rhona Bitner

 

Art and rock fans should check out STATIC NOISE: The Photographs of Rhona Bitner showing until April 15, 2012 at University Art Museum Cal State University Long Beach (UAM CSULB) -- concurrently with Lou Reed's Metal Machine Trio: The Creation of the Universe and Split Moment. All are reflections of museum director Christopher Scoates's particular interest the intersection of art and music-related pop culture (as previously evinced by 2009's Brian Eno exhibition, 77 Million Paintings). 

 

New York-based photographer Rhona Bitner previously spent years with a circus and with stage lighting and her earlier photography and surroundings evince a taste for colorful performers and dark, warm shadows. The jump from garish clowns to raffish rock musicians probably wouldn't have been much of a leap but the subjects of Bitner's latest are America's iconic rock music venues and recording spaces themselves, not the musicians and engineers who made and make the music happen.

Amoeba Hollywood recently started carrying Fraulein Lilly Record Bags, cloth LP bags handmade in Long Beach, CA. Each bag holds 25-30 records, and has a pocket for notes, your iPod, or anything else you might need. These handmade bags are $39.98 each.

You can find them on display at Amoeba Hollywood right in the entryway into the Jazz Room.

  

Here are close-ups of some of the bags we are currently carrying:
    

   

First of all: hello! This is my blog. It's called Pacific Standard Time. I'm attempting to cover L.A. bands -- perhaps some you have heard of, some you haven't -- with show previews, record reviews, interviews, and such. It has nothing to do with this, although that's cool too and you should check it out. If you are in a band or promoting one, please email me at billy.gil@gmail.com to pitch me. YES!

Secondly, Sunset Junction will not be happening for the first time in its 31-year existence. While it's true that the festival that started as a way to bring together Silver Lake's Latino and gay communities had strayed pretty far from its roots, we're very sad to see this happen. For me, Sunset Junction was always something to look forward to before I lived in Silver Lake -- a reason to check out the area, a place I saw Sonic Youth play for next to nothing, an alternative gay festival. We're all sad to see it (hopefully temporarily) halted.

But in the absense of that, something pretty cool has happened, something that makes me all the more excited to start this blog and celebrate a music community not known to the outside world for its community-ness: L.A. is picking itself up by its bootstraps and putting on a number of musical events anyway, starting with Amoeba, who will host Long Beach's The Growlers for an in-store performance and signing of their Record Store Day vinyl at 5 p.m. on Saturday, August 25. The Growlers play a brand of dusty lo-fi rock that sounds like it could have been recorded at any given point over the past three decades. They touch upon elements of surf rock, Nuggets garage rock, reverby indie rock, and psych pop in a way that feels seamless and inviting. I've been listening to Hot Tropics (2010, CD) and Are You In Or Out? (2009, LP) on loop in preparation and can't wait to see these guys live again. (See Amoeba's post for more information).