I love downtown Los Angeles. No two ways about it. It’s rapidly getting better, as you may have heard, and there are so many interesting things to find down there. I hope to do a report sometime on an extended walkabout I did down there last month, but that’s for another time. It is also great to cycle around, as I do quite a lot.
Today, still in the heatwave, I left campus to go and hide downtown, first stopping by the excellent Grand Central Market for a bit of shopping for ingredients for a special dish I am going to prepare for a Salon-style gathering at some friends’ on Saturday. More on that later. Then I went to work in one of my favourite cafes in the city. I shouldn’t give away my hideouts, but there’s only you and me reading, right?
It’s the Lost Souls Cafe, hidden down an alleyway (Harlem Place Alley) off fourth street between Spring and Main. Perfect for the subway at Pershing Square, and one of the few non-bar type places open until 10:00pm downtown. (Wish it would go until 1:00am or so.)
It’s a fantastic place, as you can see from their website, but relatively few people that I’ve met seem to know about it. On the other hand, it has quite a following (so I must be hanging with the wrong crowd), if the web is to be trusted. I recognize regulars there when I return, and they seem to know me enough to wonder and ask if I brought “the bike” this time. The web? Have a look at their Yelp site here for some excellent chatter about it. (Yelp is amazing by the way… I only recently discovered it while Googling for an address… fascinating to read all those opinions about places I may or may not have visited, or ever visit. Put in your favourite place and then get annoyed or delighted by what people say…) I learned about it by accident last year while wandering downtown from some event or other with a refreshingly open-minded companion who indulged and even sometimes matched my propensity to poke about in off-beat corners to see what there is to be seen. I’ve been coming back from time to time ever since.
(Hastily taken stealth shot of interior. There’s a huge amount of floor space – more than can be seen here, and more at the back, and there was a giant fan blowing air from the side. You can just make out my notebooks and the Brompton to the right, in shadow.)
Today, after meetings on a hot campus, Lost Souls Cafe was the perfect place to go and hide from the heat of the day to get some work done. And the best thing was that they supplied something I’ve been wanting for a few days now (recall the opening of this earlier post): Some good old 70s disco/funk music (and slight early 80’s) to somehow fit with the sweltering heat. (I think it is something from my childhood, which has some superhot days lodged in my memory combined with American disco and funk music – I was in the Caribbean at the time, and so even though the setting was very English to some extent, America lurked in very many things, even though I did not fully understand this fact at the time). So it was just great to wander in and hear some of these sounds, and as I worked, more and more great stuff from that era that I remember so well came over the speakers. I’d look up and smile at some of the songs – at once corny and beloved, in several cases, others timeless classics, and all very welcome. Chic, Sister Sledge, (oh yes, the wonderful Nile Rodgers/Bernard Edwards guitar/bass sound) Pointer Sisters, Donna Summer, Earth Wind and Fire, Heatwave (appropriately), and so on, and from a bit later, Chaka Khan, Indeep, and so forth…. total nostalgia trip on the one hand, and on the other hand, with all the heat and being in LA – it all made such sense. I looked around and saw that I was not the only one sitting and rocking or foot-tapping to the music (knowing glances and nods were exchanged from time to time) while we were blasted by a giant fan from the side, locked away from the heat outside. I actually wondered if the whole place was going to erupt into spontaneous dance at one point. (It turned out – I asked – that we were listening to the online radio station “Hot Mix Radio – Disco Funk”, which you can find on iTunes. (It seems to be French – of course…) I will be returning to that channel when I get into that mood again!)
And I got a good chunk of work done, as a bonus!
-cvj
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