chasing food trucks round LA
Hello from Los Angeles, where this week I’ve got a ton of meetings, a recording session and four days of mixing for my upcoming fans-only EP ‘Amerikana.’
I start tomorrow with a recording session at JJ Abrams’ new production facility in West LA. Reputedly his new digs are fabulous, and built in some sort of old typewriter depository with the original logos still visible, and no sense of what’s hidden behind closed doors. How very typical! I’ll be recording with a gent called Uli from the LA funk/jam band Ozomatli, whom I met when they played a street party during February’s TED Conference. Uli’s a milti-instrumentalist but tomorrow he’ll be playing a kind of Balkan clarinet on my song ‘Simone.’
Then I have half a dozen meetings with potential new business associates. I’m looking for the right person, entity or company to partner with on the release of the new album. To prepare them for this meeting I’ve let them each hear about 9 songs, in various states of completion. So this will amount to the first ‘industry’ feedback I’ll have receieved on my new material. Take a deep breath!
My schedule over the next few days is pretty hectic so I’ll be tearing all over LA in a hire car and won’t have time to stop in restaurants to eat. But as it happens, there’s a new trend in LA that should work to my advantage. Gourmet food trucks are the new rage! Apparently these days you can eat great fresh food made by famous chefs ‘al fresco’ at bargain prices, and all you have to do is track them with your GPS! They’re GPS-enabled so the drivers used to Tweet with their current location. But that’s only as good as the last Tweet they sent, so now (inevitably) there’s an iPhone app that lets you track your gourmet food truck in real time on a map! It’s called RoadStoves and here’s a screen shot:
So I’ve installed this app, and I’ll check out a few of these trucks over the next few days and let you know how they tasted. I’m so fascinated with location-based apps and content!
I’ve heard really good stuff from a friend about the Kogi trucks (which I see in the screen cap of the app without even clicking on it to enlarge the image!)
Enjoy LA! Fingers, toes, and eyes crossed for successful mixing and meetings!
Don’t want to rain on the parade, but you can have Los Angeles. Sorry you have to spend so much time there. And good luck. Between the graffitti that’s everywhere, the weeds growing between the trash on the sidewalks, the traffic signs that are impossible ot read because they’re coated in black grime and the psycho-steroid road system (a straight line does not exist in that place) it’s pretty much the definition of urban rot. And the pretentious ego!! Does anyone in that down *not* have a narcissistic personality disorder? Even the hobos living under the overpasses think they’re God’s gift to creativity. Ugh. There. That felt good.
Oh, come on! LA is fabulous. The spirit of the place is best summed up by William Goldman’s anecdote of two of its denizens at lunch:
Bill: “You’re lying to me, Solly!”
Solly:”I know. But hear me out.”
The whole place is a giant sun-bleached concoction of ego, smog and amoral manipulation – but it’s all consensual. Everyone knows the rules, and with hard graft and fairy dust you can get stuff done. Go up north to San Francisco if you want to sit on your backside in a haze of dope smoke dreaming of what you might do, or get back to NY if the spirit of LA offends your puritanical soul.
Straight lines are for squares, baby.
Funny, I know some other people who feel the same way. But they can’t say much because they’re spending all their time these days answering questions to the Securities Exchange Commission.
Ouch. Sorry. Okay. Not all of L.A. is a landfill, and not all of the people there are weird, self-centered or weird and self-centered. So I’ll ratchet down the hyperbole in all fairness. Actually, there are some nice areas. I like Long Beach and Pasadena. San Dimas is nice. And I always love watching the veins of traffic and headlights moving up and town the 15 through the Cajon Pass.
Will you be there long enough to check out this interpretation of “Airhead”??
http://ericwhitacre.com/blog/save-the-date-hila-sings-in-los-angeles-may-22-23
My dream of getting a pizza delivered at 65 MPH is getting closer and closer. Bon Appetit Sir Tom!
cyberyukon doesn’t know LA as we Angelinos do. Rain is not something that falls on our fair city, at least not often, and the graffiti contains embedded maps to buried treasure if one knows how to read it. I’m in Venice Beach and have been for almost a decade, and recommend you try biking the path that winds along the shore to Manhattan Beach, perhaps when the air is cool and the sun goes into the Pacific, as an alternative to the 405 to the 10 to the 101 at peak driving hours. Or head North from Venice down Lincoln past La Cabaña, past Olympic, past Montana… explore eldritch Brentwood, where roads that are twice as wide as they should be and canopied by thick-branched Ash trees. Head East to the desert and gaze upon the unblemished stars and the meteor showers at midnight. And if you starve for good company, try veggie stands along the Venice Boardwalk, or the innumerable coffee shops, the jazz clubs, hell, the laundromats where regular folks congregate en masse to live and let live. Or set your Twitter beacon to South Central and say Hi to some people and see what they say in return. Get out of that bullet you seem to ride around in, and you’ll probably come here to live.
Thanks for the tip. Chased down the ‘South Philly Experience’ truck today for lunch. They had a guy playing steel drums and an outdoor dining area set up. Nice! Good food. The ‘Baby’s Badass Burgers’ truck was there too.