Royal/T will be presenting the first Japanese Maid Cafe which opens tonight in Culver City. Royal/T is a “playful collision of spaces - cafe/shop/art space - presented in stunning fusion.”

The cafe and it’s servers are dressed for cosplay, so dress up like your favorite Dragon Ball Z character, or maybe Little Bo Peep, and expect to be served your Shrimp & Avocado salad by someone dressed up like an English/French maid. The menu is influenced by the tradition of Tokyo’s Akihabara district. Patrons can expect a menu that is authentic to contemporary Japanese experience. “Presentation and creativity are paramount”

In the shop you will find merchandise that meirros the themes of concurrent exhibitions. The exhibition that is on view until February 25th “Just Love Me”, explores the notion of the overwhelmingly kawaii (cute) and it’s transformation vie excess to the grotesque. Takaya Goto and William Heath examine this dichotomy of the cute and the horrific with carefully selected designer goods and limited artist multiples and prints rarely found in the U.S.

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I dropped by the Firehouse today right after it opened the doors to the current exhibit: LA VS WAR. I wanted to get a good look at the art before there were tons of people standing around in front of it.

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“It” was the Los Angeles City Artwalk at the Brewery downtown. From 11-6 on Saturday and Sunday you had a chance to step into different realms of some of LA’s greatest creative minds. Or something like that. Studio spaces which mostly doubled as living rooms were filled with many ordinary pedestrians like myself and a few others. Having an inkling of an idea I was going to do a short article on this event, I made sure to bring a camera. Batteries not included, so all of the pictures you see in this article has been borrowed off the net. Still, I don’t think it would make much of a difference. The true experience of the artwork, is the living breathing community that resides around it.

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It’s pretty easy to assume that the only horses you’ll see in LA are the ones on Polo shirts and Ferraris, but don’t be so hasty. The horse is alive and kicking right in the heart of Burbank at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. The LAEC is a massive complex situated on Riverside Dr. adjacent to Griffith Park, just east of the Disney studio lot. Rows and rows of barns house all kinds of horses and trainers; multiple outdoor and indoor arenas almost always have someone riding in them. There’s also a place where you can take a guided trail ride through Griffith Park, and although their cash-only, waiver-signing policies are somewhat alarming, it’s totally worth the twenty bucks you’ll spend.

Nearly every weekend there is a horse show or event happening at the LAEC; if I’m in Burbank on Saturday or Sunday, I always stop by to see what’s going on. There’s no admission or gate attendant and there’s tons of free parking. All you have to do is get there, wander around and enjoy the powerful beauty of the horse.

Check out their website for directions and a calendar of events.
Los Angeles Equestrian Center,
480 Riverside Dr. Burbank, CA 91506

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Downtown Art Walk
Second Thursday of Every Month
Thursday, April 10, 12 - 9 pm
(some locations close earlier
see details on Art Walk map)

The Downtown Art Walk is a free, self-guided tour of the many art exhibition venues in Downtown Los Angeles — commercial art galleries, museums, and non-profit arts venues. Public information and a printable map of the Downtown Art Walk are available at http://www.downtownartwalk.com.

Participants in the Downtown Art Walk are The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Gallery at REDCAT, L.A. Artcore Center, de Soto, 2nd Street Cigars and Gallery, Art Slave, Morono Kiang Gallery, Taller 410, Museum of Neon Art, Crewest, Dale Youngman Gallery, LAMP Community Art Project, Pharmaka, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, El Nopal Press, Bert Green Fine Art, Red Dot Gallery, Niche.LA Video Art, The Spring Arts Collective Gallery, M. J. Higgins, Bailey Gallery, Art Murmur Gallery, 626 Gallery, Infusion Gallery, Gallery 727, The Hive Gallery, groundfloor, 01 Gallery, City Center Gallery, Dalessio, Gary Leonard, Grey Goose, and Gallery at 7th & Fig.
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The Ralph’s “Fresh” Fare on 9th and Flower has only-game-in-town-itis. For the most part, the store is satisfactory. Clean … enough … varied … enough. What it’s missing is the attention to detail that competition would bring. Any competition. At all. Anything!

The prices seem high. The organic produce has one foot in the grave. The weekly wine tasting: no offense, wine guy, but it’s well suited for a small town in one of the Dakotas. If a store is going to hold a wine tasting anywhere between Sonoma and Los Angeles, they’d better put a knowledgable sommelier on the job.

My biggest gripe, is their biggest success. The crowds. The store is always packed. I went to shop at 1:30 on a weekday and decided to grab a bite from the salad bar. No place to sit. I ended up on the cement steps outside the door in the hot sun with business people angrily stepping around me. I felt a little like a piece of chewed gum on a doormat.

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In the wake of ABT’s migrating swans last week, a small inner-city dance academy in the heart of Compton won honors and recognition of excellence.

Compton is more known for gangster rap than for ballet.

Carol Bristol-Henry and Compton Dance Theatre received the Addie Patterson Award for Outstanding Service in Community Development from the City of Compton. The U.S. House of Representatives bestowed a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition, and the California legistlature presented a Certificate of Recognition.

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The project to bring up the home of the new W Hotel is a pretty impressive undertaking. I loved the lines that the cranes made against the sky, and I thought I would shoot a few photos. The aerial view from the 9th floor of the Taft Building (where my brilliant and talented chiropracter is located) was complex and detailed, all the workers looked like Doozers from Fraggle Rock.

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Thursday, my husband and I received a call with the most important and life-changing news of our lives. Our contact from the adoption agency called to let us know that the Haitian orphanage from which we are adopting, had a 2.5 month old boy named Luc for us!

Adoption isn’t a spur of the moment decision. Serious discussion began about three years ago. Paperwork started a year and a half ago. Our finalized dossier was submitted in early July.

Well, actually we will have our son after the Haitian government ssslllooowwwlllyyy files all the paperwork. However, it’s time to prepare for sweet Luc.

This gave me a great idea.
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There seems to be a trend for a new breed of womanizer - with fashion sense somewhat reminiscent of the 70’s pimp. The worst thing about this is that these men are paying so-called ‘professionals’, who claim to have found the secret to womanizing.

I’ve met real pimps before in Amsterdam. These men were charming and polite (also well dressed) -me and my friend assured these men that our University degrees were going well at present, and yes, we’d call them if we ever fancied a career change. These men roaming in LA however, aren’t as charming and somewhat badly dressed.

I’d like to say that ‘give me your tongue’, is not a good chat-up line, unless you want your chosen lady to collapse in a fit of laughter. Please, men out there, have self confidence, be yourself and spend the money on a nice tasteful shirt instead.

Illustration by Klara

When the tide is at its lowest, many of the local breaks come to life. Rocks sun themselves. Animate sea life, with nowhere to hide, carries on as if it’s business as usual. If the waves are good, surfers grudgingly cross the difficult divide between smooth sand and peeling rights. The lowest of low tides is a wondrous event.

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Growing up in smaller towns, there’s a natural fascination with the larger cities - it’s where it all “happens,” where all the celebrities gather, where the important people of the world live. Most importantly, movies take place there, and who doesn’t want to be where movies take place? No one I want to be friends with, clearly.

I remember the experience of watching “Spider Man 2″ in New York and in many ways, it was exactly as I imagined. First of all, LA movie audiences are tame. NY audiences are loud, communal, farting, singing opera, anything but quietly watching the movie. For certain movies, that’s obviously terrible, but for other movies - “Spider Man 2,” anything with Will Smith, - it’s fantastic. I’m not sure people oohing and ahing at Will Smith’s gratuitous shower scene (perfect example by the way of unnecessary male nudity for those keeping score) in “iRobot” was what Durkheim had in mind when he imagined collective effervescence, but that’s exactly what watching a movie in NY is like. It’s a community for better or worse. And when, in the case of “Spider Man 2,” the set is the city, it makes it all the more fun. Walking back from Times Square afterwards, I kept expecting Spidey to fly by through one of the neighboring skyscrapers. I had to settle for asking a Kirsten Dunst look-a-like on the street for her number instead, but that’s another story entirely, and one I’d refer to my lawyer.

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