Style in L. A.

   Los Angeles, once a Mecca for kitsch and bad taste still has a few remnants left from the hay days of bad style. One of the most famous, although sadly no more, was the roof of the Brown Derby in the heart of Hollywood.  
Dinning has always remained a large part of the L. A. lifestyle and one can eat from a giant donut for breakfast and a equally huge hot dog for lunch. Also in Hollywood is the Capital Records building, shaped to appear like a stack of L.P.'s with a needle on top. Down the street on Sunset a remnant from the original Jay Ward Studios graces passersby, offering a homage to Saturday morning TV fare. Another older relic is the Coca-cola building towards downtown, a relic of 30's streamline architecture, built like a steamship, ready to set sail down Central Ave.

Also in the neighborhood is the
La Brea Tar Pits, one of the few parks in the world build around the oily graveyard of the unfortunate prehistoric animals that ventured too near its sticky bogs.

    Being Los Angeles, the capital of car culture, there are many shrines to our four wheeled loved ones. Starting in Studio City with the Hand Car Wash sign, one finds a 1963 Corvette perched on a giant hand, a visual oddity that the city leaders have fought unsuccessfully to have removed. Not to be outdone there is always the Northridge Auto Wrecking sign, and the "Garden Car" in West Hollywood.

 
    Even more bizarre than the giant poodle carved from overgrown ivy in the San Fernando Valley, is the wonderful mural on the wall of the Farmer John Building near downtown. Farmer John is the maker of the "Dodger Dog" among other meat products and lurking merely feet behind the bucolic murals of happy hogs playing and frolicking in the fields, is in fact, the killing floor, an apt metaphor for the wonder of L.A. and Hollywood and the reality that lurks beneath.