Too much is about right

I went to Mission Street in South Pasadena on Saturday to check out a new Irish Pub near the Gold Line Station.  It's not open yet, so I wandered down to the Fair Oaks Pharmacy and indulged in their Classic Sundae.  Too much ice cream, too much caramel -- which means it was just right.  I'd rather eat ice cream than drink Irish ale any day of the week.  Including the tip it was $9 which is a bit pricey but worth every penny.

There are a couple of other places to get ice cream and frozen yogurt along Mission: Busters and Menchies.  But neither place comes close to the Fair Oaks Pharmacy, which has been in the same location (Mission and Fair Oaks) with its soda fountain since the early 1900s!  

You can have your banana split or cheeseburger at the outside tables and watch the world whiz by, if you wish. Inside, the soda fountain is the star of the show and most of the rest of the floor space is devoted to wacky, whimsical gifts, rather than bottles of aspirin and stacks of cosmetics.  The actual pharmacy is small and tucked into the back.

In the same block are several trendy boutiques filled with clothes by young designers.  Lots of other stores, too, for an afternoon of shopping along Mission in South Pasadena.  And if you'd rather drink your Saturday indulgence instead of eating it with a spoon, stop at the Mission Wine Company for a wine tasting until the new Irish pub is open.

Letraset?! I'd forgotten all about Letraset!

Time for another book review--this one about graphics arts on the screen in front of you and in front of your eyes everywhere else--including the signage for the Metro Gold Line.  The book is entitled Just My Type.  It is an insightful and hilarious overview of type faces, trends in typography and the history of type faces from Gutenberg forward.

Author Simon Garfield writes in brief, snappy chapters about technical aspects of type development and type readability studies. He goes on to explain printing presses, hot type, linotype and monotype as well as phototypesetting.

Then there was that enormous breakthrough, Letraset, which cracked open the door to type decisions made by the masses.  Even a church office secretary could carefully press down the Letraset letters--say in Baskerville Bold--to create a church bulletin that looked sort of nifty.  Now, of course, type faces by a thousands are easily managed, changed, made hideous or improved by millions around the world.

If all this sounds boring, it's not. At times I laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.  Garfield has a British sense of humor and the visual references in the book are contemporary, including, for example, a discussion of what typefaces are being used by various professional football teams.  Not to mention album covers old and new, and ads from the 1890s to the 1960s, and what typefaces subway systems around the world use to tell you where to go.

Garfield also shares words of wisdom from famed type designers, both alive and dead, among them Jim Parkinson (updated Rolling Stone logo), Matthew Carter ( typeface: Georgia), Luc(as) de Groot (typeface: Calibri, currently a Microsoft default) and Eric Gill (typeface: Gill Sans -- and a shocking personal life!) 

If you have ever changed the typeface on your computer to other than the default, you will probably enjoy Just My Type.

Happy Hour and Art Night in Pasadena

The Second Annual Pasadena Happy Hour Week is going to be two weeks long.  You can down your favorites at bargain prices between March 1st and March 15th at 20 restaurants in the Old Town area including:

1810 Argentinean Restaurant

72 North

a/k/a American Bistro

Bar Celona

Café Santorini 

Crème de la Crepe

Dog Haus Biergarten 

Equator Café

Haven Gastropub

Ipic Theaters (formeraly Gold Class Cinema)

Ix Tapa Cantina

Kings Row Gastropub

Pita Jungle

Pop Champagne & Dessert Bar

Redwhite+bluezz

Roxolana Restaurant & Wine Bar

Sushi Roku

Vertical Wine Bistro

Villa SORRISO

Wokcano

Art Night in Pasadena is March 9th.  Free admission to museums and other art venues in Pasadena between 6 and 10 p.m.  Be sure to see the LA Raw exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.  You can read my review of this show below on this blog.

Eat. Cook. Be happy at the South Pas Farmers Market

For years the Thursday night South Pasadena Farmers' Market was sort of a sad little market.  Not many farm booths.  Not many prepared food vendors.

But all that has changed. 

Now you can step off the Metro Gold line at the Mission Station after 4 p.m. and plunge right into an excellent and diverse (if somewhat overpriced)  farmers market.  Of course you will find great heaps of organic veggies and herbs from several farms.  Close by there is a booth with a half a dozen different kinds of  potatos.  In yet another booth are bags of dates, including my favorite, the sweet caramel Bahri dates.  A few steps away is the mushroom lady and in the other direction, a woman selling raw milk and cheese. 

Bill's Bees, the honey guy, is selling his wares as are the folks from Homeboy bakery.  But I cannot pass up the scones and tea at Sugarbird Sweets and Tea.  Their scones are among the best in greater L.A.  Apricot ginger - yum!

If you want to skip the part about cooking your own food, get ready to chow down on the spot.  Robin's BBQ, a carry-over from the previous South Pas market, is still cookin' up barbeque.  For Mexican you have a choice of Euro-Mex gourmet tomales or Homegirl cuisine.  The Happy Inka dishes up Peruvian food and nearby, the Grill Master truck serves delicious garlic potatos and rotisserie chicken. And there are more.  Just bring your wallet and your appetite.

Now about that over-priced comment above.  Most farmers' markets these days are high priced.  I buy my fruits and vegetables at Super King up in Altadena. They have a huge selection and really affordable prices!!  But Super King doesn't have the Sugarbird scones, so I go to South Pasadena every once in a while.  It is so easy to get there on the Metro.

One more item of note: the South Pas Farmers' Market is very child-friendly.

Art and Internet Game Development

Listen up, all you game developers!

Artist Gwyn Stramler, formerly of Pasadena (her husband taught at Art Center) and now living in Grass Valley has her eyes on creating an internet game based on her most recent Blue Wave Train exhibition-- a show she told me she almost called "The Storyboard".   After seeing all sorts of lovely pictures in galleries during a recent visit to the Nevada City area, Stramler's work was a surprise.  It would stand out --and maybe even sell out--in any gallery here in Los Angeles.

An internet game player herself and a big fan of Farmville, her recent paintings certainly reflect both her abstract expressionist background and familiarity with Japanese anime.  The figures in Blue Wave Train are animals painted on wood and mounted on canvas so there is a sculptural quality to these paintings. 

So keep an eye out for her game, based on this art.

You can see more of her work at www.gwynstramler.com

Death and Sex in Pasadena

After World War II Abstract Expressionism became a dominant force in the art world.  But the L.A.Raw exhibition at PMCA (Pasadena Museum of California Art) shows what non-abstract artists in Southern California were doing at that time.  This show of figurative art is filled with images of death.  And sex.  And all the wrenching human emotions that go with them.

Subtitled Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles: 1945 to 1980, the 50 artists whose works are shown, were, in many cases, young men who were survivors of World War II.  It shows in the anguish and anger expressed in many paintings.  And it shows in the sexual images of voluptuous women.  After all, what do young men want when they come home from war: young women to help them put the violence and death behind them. 

Instead of the war violence left behind, other artists painting in the 1960s and '70s, expressed on canvas the tumult and upheaval that surrounded them in that era.

Among the most notable in this show is Hans Burkhart's "My Lai".  On a monumental canvas he spread the colors of camouflage in thick layers then embedded skulls he had found in ruined Mexican graveyards.  Yes, real skulls.  Seeing it at first from a distance I thought the work would probably be called "The Killing Fields", after the death fields of Cambodia.  But it was Vietnam that gripped him.  Other artists in this show spilled out their emotions about civil rights and sexual freedom--for both men and women.

You will find sculpture and paintings by Edward Keinholz, Betye Saar, Rico LeBrun, and Judy Chicago in this exhibition but also works by artists like John Outterbridge, a self taught sculptor who worked with found materials to create remarkable sculptures from fabric. Three from his series of "Captive Images"  are in this outstanding exhibition.   (See photo to left.)

This is definately a "do not miss" exhibition. (But be aware that there are images which may not be suitable for everyone, especially children.)

LA Raw is part of  Pacific Standard Time, the city-wide survey of art from 1945 - 1980 organized by the Getty.

PMCA is located on Union Street in Pasadena about 3 blocks east of the Memorial Park Gold Line Station.  If you are driving, there is free parking on the ground floor of the museum building.

Roller Derby After-Party

A couple of weeks ago we spent a Sunday afternoon cheering the Derby Dolls at the L.A. Roller Derby on Temple just east of Alvarado.  This amateur sport is not as violent as its previous professional incarnation on TV back in the 1970s--or was it the '80s?   Now the young women skaters, half of them wearing Barbie pink, half wearing Goth black, all with fantasy noms-de-rink, jostle and bump each other in an attempt to block their opponents, but none of them go flying dramatically out of the circular banked track into the spectators. Shoving an opponent with two hands is forbidden these days.  One of the two teams won.  I can't remember which, but it doesn't make much difference.  It was a fun afternoon.  And everyone survived to skate another Sunday.

The official after-party was downtown at Bar 107, but with a teenage girl in our group, we headed east to Wurstkuche, a gourmet sausage hangout in the arts district around Little Tokyo.  This place is incredibly popular with the young crowd living in nearby lofts and condos.  The line in front of us was relatively short--only about 8 people.  (When we left the line stretched out the door and down Third for a block.  I don't think I'd stand in a line that long for a sausage, no matter how good it was.)

After a short wait, we ordered at the front counter and went back to the dining area and bar which has to be among the loudest in L.A.  Then found seats at one of the long family-style tables.  An official from the Derby was seated nearby.

When you order, you get a choice of two from their list of 4 condiments--carmelized onions, saurkraut, sauteed sweet red peppers or spicy peppers--on your sausage in a roll.  Sadly, the carmelized onions are not carmelized; they are just sauteed.  On the tables in the dining area are 5 mustards and ketchup, so you can load up your sausage in a bun with stuff or leave it pristine plain.

I'd been at Wurstkuche previously and had the bratwurst.  This time I ordered the kielbasa.  Others in our group had the hot italian and the vegetarian italian.  All of them were good.  But as far as I am concerned, their Belgian fries with white truffle oil glaze outshine the sausages.  They are great!  And the dipping sauces for the fries are imaginative, ranging from Thai peanut to chipotle aioli to buttermilk ranch.  My fav was the curry ketchup.  I know, it sounds strange but is delish!

The Wurstkuche menu lists 20 sausages including some exotics like alligator and pork andouille sausage and rattlesnake and rabbit with Jalapeno peppers along with bockwurst, chicken/apple and others.  And about 50 Belgian and German beers. 

Wurstkuche is located at the corner of Third and Traction about three blocks from the Little Tokyo Gold Line station.