Dodging a bullet(Click on the pic for a bigger image.) We gasped when we saw this sign yesterday, stuck in the window of a store in Little Tokyo, in downtown LA.
But we forget this is a gun-totin' country.
In the early hours of the morning, there'd been a shoot-out on the 101, the Hollywood Freeway. No-one was killed, thank heavens, but the freeway was closed for about eight hours. It must have re-opened just a couple of hours before we whizzed blissfully along it on another fab day up in the big smoke. Lucky we missed all the drama, let alone the traffic nightmare ...
The Big Smoke was an appropriate term for LA yesterday.
As you can see from this pic I took on the outskirts, it wasn't a good-air day.
But it was still fabulous.
I finally got to see the stunningly beautiful Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall.It's my third Gehry building (I'm collecting them!), after the open-air concert shell in Chicago, and the Experience Music Project building in Seattle.I reckon it's time Perth had one! Imagine how good it'd look by the river ...We took in the big exhibitions of Louise Bourgeois and Martin Kippenberger at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art, then walked a few blocks to the Geffen Center at MOCA, which was a little underwhelming and ever so slightly disappointing.
Then we were off to the Americana centre in Glendale for dinner, and ate at Katsuya by Starck, a sort of Japanese-American restaurant where — we heard in a neighbouring store — Britney Spears had been dining only the night before and told off for smoking.
And we pinched ourselves when we ended up here ... for a preview screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the hot new Cate Blanchett movie. It was okay, but oh! so long — almost three hours. Weird, considering it was an adaptation of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Cate's always a treat to watch in action, and Brad Pitt, her co-star, is always just lovely!