Los Angeles Trip

Jessica had the day free, so we made an impromptu trip to Los Angeles. First stop, IKEA, to buy a mattress for the new Lillehammer bed we got a few weeks ago. The bed replaced this fall-apart-voodoo-kenny futon bed we’ve been sleeping on for ages, the joints of which had fallen out. Sleeping on this old bed sounded like the creaky deck of the Flying Dutchman. So first I bought the frame, and for a stopgap measure, we had been using the old futon mattress until we came across top mattresses online. Now that at last is gone and our bed is dead comfortable. Like the Poang chair, just lying on it for a few seconds sucks the energy out of you.
Next stop: the Chinese mall off of Del Mar down in San Gabriel. Here we saw many ladies wearing these ridiculous sun-visors, called the Sunee, or something like that. Imagine a plastic sun visor, six inches long, and with the ability to tilt downward and cover the face. Hey, ladies, excuse me. This doesn’t look cool, it looks like you are wearing a welder’s mask. I tried to get a photo while we were there, but no luck. It seems like when it comes to rich Chinese women, irony and taste are X, the unknown value.
We didn’t come to see masks, we came to eat Dim Sum, which we did, at Sam Woo’s Seafood, a regular hangout of ours when we’re in the area.
Then a trip to Pasadena and the Norton Simon Museum. The latest exhibit was Rajput Paintings from the Ramesh and Urmil Kapoor Collection, amazing Indian paintings of scenes from epic poems like the Bhagavatapurana. All the paintings were watercolors and about the size of a 8×10 piece of paper. But what detail! You really needed a magnifying glass to appreciate it all. Neither the exhibition walls, nor the accompanying book (from what I could see) explained how these were created. The brushes must have been like those modelers use, two hairs thick. We were disappointed to see that, though the museum store sold to-scale digital prints of some of these, the quality was dreadful.
Also on display was some prints by Ynez Johnston, which the curator wanted to juxtapose with the Rajput paintings nextdoor. Listen to this malarkey: “Johnston’s unique style is characterized by recurring figures and shapes derived from both Eastern and Western cultures and ancient and modern times. As with miniature Rajput paintings, illuminated manuscripts and Chinese scrolls, Johnston’s art is intended for intimate viewing and affords an endless voyage of discovery.”
Load of old blunt pencil scrawls to me. Talk about suffering by comparison.
Back in Santa Barbara, we went into Montecito and ate at the Italian restaurant VaiVai. Good pizza. In a rare celebrity sighting for me, Michael Richards (“Seinfeld”‘s Kramer) sat at the table next to us along with who I took to be his daughter.