The Egg Press travels continue! Based on typical LA clichés, it's the last place you'd think to find Tom Sprenkle (Egg Press lead printer extraordinaire) who prefers walking to driving, the abstract over the obvious and wears a uniform of black most days. Once we heard how he spent his time, it all made a little more sense….
Portland was starting to feel like a bubble, so it seemed like a good time to go visit my sister Meg in Los Angeles, which is perhaps the Anti-Portland (or as close as one can get without leaving the country). Los Angeles is a huge and crazy sprawl of different and not always intersecting realities, offering a variety of new perspectives.
Each day we set out on a new adventure. For example we started Thursday by winding through the hills on Mullholland Drive and Sunset Boulevard, on to Malibu for fish tacos, a stop off at the pier and beach in Santa Monica and ending up at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a disorienting and labyrinthine collection of seemingly random curiosities (a statue of Napoleon inside the eye of a needle; a map with lights showing the distribution of trailer parks in the world; a room dedicated to early 20th century neuropsychiatrist Geoffrey Sonnabend—who may or may not have existed—and his Theory of Forgetting. The place is hard to describe—you really must experience it yourself).
Other highlights include sneaking around in the partially (barely) renovated Alexandria Hotel and a visit to the Last Bookstore downtown; finding a row of small contemporary art galleries in what seems like a back alley in chinatown (with exhibits such as the Guns + Roses themed show at Coagula); a visit to the Watts Towers; the wonderfully freakish Venice Beach; watching pelicans fishing in the canal at Playa del Rey just after sunset, enjoying the slightly awkward way they would abruptly twist and dive into the water and then bob back up before taking off again, using their feet as paddles to help get going; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Griffith Observatory where after watching the sunset we saw a half dozen coyotes as we exited the park.
