Further ruminations from the City of Angels.

Thursday 19 January, wandered into The Library Bar around 6:00 or so and found only one seat at the bar. Figured we’d, AofSD and I, manage by trading off on sitting. Shortly, young man, about 30, sitting next to us starts to chat. Nice enough guy, insurance underwriter with frighteningly large international conglomerate. We end up chatting with him for hours, downing martinis (moi) and margaritas (A). After 3 rounds, time for Pawn to drift back to relative safety of hotel.

AofSD stays on with young turk, who by this time has revealed himself to be on the cusp of his 32^nd B-day, and to share A’s interest in working out and gourmet cuisine. They muster the where-with-all to stumble over to Ilan‘s where three courses ensue, and further libations, and then to a tequilla bar for even more. AofSD stumbles in to room at 11:15 cursing the hangover he is sure will come.

The morning finds us both working, briefly, before checking out and heading off to BLD for brunch. Traditional eggs Benedict for A and a steak and burgandy Benedict for me. Good, but not as exciting as last night’s turk would have had us believe.

I had planned to try to take in Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2012, at the Barker Hanger in Santa Monica. Turns out tickets were $18 each, plus $13 for parking, and we only had a couple of hours. Hardly seemed worth it, so we headed to the Getty instead. More of Pacific Standard Time, the Southern California joint effort wherein some 60+ galleries and museums reflect on the regional art scene from the mid 70s to the late 80s. While not impressed by the showing at Geffen Collection @ MoCA yesterday, we give it another shot.

The Getty is a spectacular institution, and worth a visit if only for the breath taking architecture and setting. The collection itself is large and comprehensive. We only had time for a few galleries, and largely enjoyed what we saw. The room reconstructions from 17^th and 18^th century France, etc., were fabulous.  Particularly enjoyed the Narrative Inventions In Photography exhibit

Finally, A needed to return to SD, and so dropped Pawn at the LAX Hilton for the Scale 10x conference. After checking in, wandered down to the exhibit hall to find my firm’s booth. Yikes! I’m very unhappy with the booth design — the banners and such. It’s an embarrassment, like a Monty Hall fever dream or something. The only way I can think of to salvage it is to just explain to people that while we have good tech, our marketing guy has never recovered from a bad acid trip in 1978.

Colleagues want to take an excursion to Venice Beach, so off we go. It was like walking through the Internet; everyone yelling for you to watch them fly their freak flag and applaud their appalling lack of talent, vision, style, ideas… as if blogs could speak.

The other day, Pawn’s friend AofSD asked, reflectively, what comes after jaded. I told him I didn’t know, but I figure that an entire generation of hipsters has ruined their lives by rushing to embrace jaded indifference a good twenty years before they were really due it. Now they don’t even have that to look forward to.