More Southland

Did Secret Agent Fred and I have a lovely time down in the southland?  Why, yes, yes we did.  Thanks for asking.

In Los Angeles, we repeated our "Fancy Ass Manicure and Mexican Food Tour" plus we added the thrill of making a pass by the Los Angeles County Museum to see the Big Rock.   Friends more in the know than little me had chastised me for going to LACMA last month and skipping said Rock so I was determined to show them up this time.

It's supposed to be called "Levitated Mass,"but even the people that work in the museum refer to it as The Big Rock.  Here's the scoop from the LA Times review of it:

• "Levitated Mass" is a piece of isolated desert mystery cut into a dense urban setting that's home to nearly 10 million people. A water-hungry lawn north of LACMA's Resnick Pavilion was torn up and replaced by a dry, sun-blasted expanse of decomposed granite. A notched gray channel of polished concrete slices 456 feet across the empty field, set at a slight angle between the pavilion and 6th Street. Like a walk-in version of an alien landscape painting by Surrealist Yves Tanguy, quiet dynamism inflects a decidedly sepulchral scene.

Whatever.  It's a big rock sitting on top of depressed (in every sense of the word) sidewalk and you walk under it.  It is just as artistically thrilling as it sounds.  As a big rock, on the other hand, it's great.

We also drove out to Palm Springs where it was HOT, bitches.  I tried to enter into an appreciation of the blasto sun, like a lizard and that sort of worked.  Mostly I avoided it as much as you can in a desert, but I still got the blotchy red skin so very appealing in those of us descended from Vikings and other Northern European cabbage eaters.

Our charming bungalow was in a hotel very successfully decorated by Kelly Wearstler, the mistress of bold graphics and white paint.

I got to go swimming at night, which I love and ate hot fudge sundaes every night.  A perfect desert trip.

I also bought a painting by Chris DiVincente.  I love it, but I don't have any room for it, so I'm negotiating for our friends Jan and Aaron to take a big ass photo off my hands to open up some space.