Hail Xenu!

Guess where we went?

So we spent a couple days visiting a friend in Los Angeles. This friend has an actual grown-up job and has a gorgeous apartment in a building that resembles a 4-star hotel (with a doorman and everything) so of course we spent the majority of the weekend demanding guided tours of the city and making him watch movies about sparkly teenage vampires. It was awesome.
We found all this art within 1 square block near his apartment... plus dozens more that I wasn't able to photograph properly out the car window:

From Los Angeles April 2009

Here's an artist starting on a wall:


The same wall the next day:


We spent the first day at the Brewery, an artist's collective of live/work lofts built in and around an old brick factory. The art for the most part was pretty spectacular, and it was really interesting to see the workshops and living spaces of the artists. Kevin Flint was the favorite artist we met who had not only some of the coolest cyberpunk/sci-fi inspired work but had also modded his entire living space to match his theme, including a gun turret on his balcony, a 'bulletproof' refrigerator, and this watercooler:


Walking into his living space was like entering one of the spaceships from Alien or Firefly. It was truly inspirational to meet someone who has essentially created their own reality around a personal aesthetic.
But meh, enough of the beautiful stuff. We came to LA to see trashiness, and we were not disappointed. Behold the leopard limo:


One of the creepiest things about Hollywood Boulevard is the amount of real estate owned by the Church of Scientology. They had no fewer than 4 huge storefronts and a massive church scattered along the street:




And then you walk by the wax museum and Tom Cruise DESCENDS FROM ABOVE. It's terrifying.

Hail Xenu!

I'm not sure what their criteria is for deciding who gets a star on the walk of fame, but based on what I saw it seems to be pretty weak... Liberace, fine ok, he's awful, but famous... The Village People?! Why?! They had one crappy song! Kermit the Frong?! How exactly does one weigh the achievements of a fictional amphibian against, say, Frank Sinatra?


However, Godzilla totally deserves his star. Leveling Tokyo is ARTISTIC, yo!
And then we went to Venice Beach, which was even trashier, although the beach itself was rather beautiful:

Adventures in Narita

From Narita Japan 2008

Our flight home was supposed to go from Bangkok via Tokyo to Seattle. We still had a few days of vacation to go and were relishing the satisfaction of both returning home with time to spare and under budget... until we deplaned in Tokyo and were waiting in line to board the flight home. That's when we turned to each other, grinned, and slipped out of the line for our Seattle flight and headed downstairs to customs.

Then we had the following illuminating cultural exchange with the customs agents:

Earnest, businesslike customs lady: How long do you stay in Japan?
Ben (trying his best not to look like a terrorist): I'm not sure really, maybe only a day.
Customs Lady (raised eyebrow): Where are you staying?
Ben: Well, um, we actually aren't sure yet, I guess we need to find a place (nervous chuckle)
Customs Lady (donning rubber gloves): Follow me please sir

Okay, so I made that last part up, but she did make Ben write my name on a piece of paper so she could confirm with the officer who had stamped my passport, and made it very clear in her professional Japanese way that she strongly disapproved of Ben's facial hair. I should add that this wasn't nearly as bad as our experience during our college years, when we tried to clear customs after a month in Europe of not really showering or changing clothes and having dyed my hair purple the night before in a London hotel room... yeah, that was special.

Anyway, so I spend the majority of my time stateside trying to locate acceptable green-tea flavored softserve, and the first thing I did upon clearing customs was to make a beeline for the airport ice cream vendor (of COURSE NRT has a green tea ice cream vendor!). Ben trailed behind me, helplessly explaining that we needed to find a hotel, and transport, and possibly make arrangements for our flight back home the following day... but I couldn't be bothered until I confirmed the existence of softserve.

Then later in Narita, we discovered a Mr. Donut... selling GREEN TEA DONUTS. Heaven! (Okay, so they were kind of gross and weird, but I have consumed so much green-tea flavored junk food by this point that my brain has been rewired).

Anyway, so we didn't have the money for downtown Tokyo (even just taking the train from the airport to downtown costs upwards of $35 roundtrip per person), so we decided to spend the following 28 hours exploring and sleeping in Narita, the area around Tokyo's biggest airport. Basically, our main impression of Narita is that it is the Japanese version of (for you PacNWesterners) Lynnwood, or perhaps Tukwila. It's ugly, and there are dozens and dozens of car dealerships and drainage ditches landscaped to look like 'rivers' and a shopping mall in need of updating. The mall especially creeped us out; it looked almost exactly like any US mall, and with the exception of some signage you could completely forget you were in another country.

A mall billboard advertising Florida grapefruit. Distance from Miami to Narita: 7,438 miles. But hey, once polar bears are but a dim memory and Tokyo is partially submerged in the Pacific at least we can console ourselves with overpriced citrus! (I type this whilst breakfasting on tangerines from Chile.)

One thing that set Narita apart from Lynnwood is that it has a pretty spectacular temple (Naritasan Shinshoji) but since I've spent this entire post being sarcastic I will have to save that for the next installment.