Parks & Recreation - The fallout of not winning Mega Millions

**soundtrack to this post: Tales of Coming News - The Avett Bros  -- right click & open in new tab **

Ever since not winning $319 million in the lottery last Friday despite feeling "really positive" I have been in a slump.  Even my amazing trip to the Getty Villa on Saturday (one of my 11 things to do in 2011!) was overshadowed with thoughts that "if I had won mega millions, I too would buy acres and acres of land in Malibu to build a Roman-style house and fill it with my vast collection of Greek and Roman artifacts."

It didn't help that then on my way back from the Getty I accidentally found myself in a puppy store.  It was like those scenes in movies where the person is all focused on driving home and zones out and when they come to - they're surrounded by puppies! ....exactly like that, actually.  And this wasn't just any  dog store - there were ST.BERNARD puppies in the window.  That's right - two of them.  Absurd.  What is my life turning into? A Beethoven sequel? *REFERENCE!!* - up top!

Note:  I would be remiss if I did not take a moment here to say that my dream dog is a rottweiler named Caleb.  Rottweilers are perfect.  Not to mention that Caleb would be a girl (yes, like me my dog would have a boy's name that started with a C) and her name comes from the Hebrew word Kelev which means dog/loyal.  Not that I've thought about it much.

 Also note: If I didn't get a rottweiler I'd most likely get a teacup pomeranian named Fatty that looked like a little bear.

THIS POST HAS A POINT! 

All this thinking about dogs got me wondering about the park right by my apartment - Plummer Park - so when I got back home I walked over and finally checked it out!  

According to Wikipedia, the east side of West Hollywood (aka the classy place I live...let the stalking begin...) is dominated by Russian immigrants, and the park is a popular gathering place for Russians. In 2005, a controversial monument to Soviet Army dead in World War II was built in the park. While supported by many local residents, it was criticized as being inappropriate given that some might interpret it as honoring the USSR under Joseph Stalin. .....also, there's a farmer's market every Monday.  

Most importantly - there have been rumors of the City of West Hollywood turning Plummer Park into the city's second dog-friendly park!  According to Curbed LA, the long-planned Plummer Park improvements will now include an off-leash dog park.  The Fiesta Hall will be renovated and expanded and a new childcare center will be built. Outside, a pedestrian promenade at Lexington Avenue will stretch across the park, and an interactive water feature, a playground, and gardens will be added. The park will also get a new 179-space underground parking structure to replace one of its existing surface lots. Phase I will include Fiesta Hall, the childcare center, the Great Hall/Long Hall demo, and the parking structure are expected to kick off in June 2011. Those will be open during Phase II, which includes the promenade and outdoor amenities, and which is expected to wrap up in January 2013.

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What're my thoughts?  Well from the Fountain Ave entrance you have to walk through 8 sets of tennis courts to get to any sort of park area.  It's kind of sketch but also...kind of amazing.  All the courts are in use on the weekend!  There are old Russian men playing chess by the basketball court and the Fiesta Hall is HUGE and the smell of something delicious was in the air from some sort of private event being hosted there.  It's definitely in need of a renovation and is a bit run down but what great history - and right by my apartment! Leave it to me to find the prime-est real estate in WeHo after ignoring everyone's warnings that there had been a triple homicide in the area months prior to my moving.  Take THAT everyone!

CTOWN OUT!

"Whatever the Fuck it Takes" - Cinerama Dome

**soundtrack to this post: Fanfarlo - The Walls are Coming Down  -- right click & open in new tab **

This past week my "cultural event" was planned to be the Venice Art Crawl on Thursday night.  Unlike First Fridays, Venice's monthly foodie event, the VAC is an art show event held every third Thursday as a local artist showcase, similar to other art crawl events held around LA in Downtown and Silverlake... to name a few.  The cherry on top of the Sundae which was this past week's event was that the VAC fell on St.Patty's day so it was going to be AMAAAZING!!  But then...see...I arrived at Hotel Erwin Thursday afternoon ready to go and my ID was MIA.  Leave it to me to lose my ID on St.Patrick's Day.  Classy.

View from my room at Hotel Erwin in Venice Beach

Obviously I rallied and went out for my first Japanese barbecue experience in WeHo Thursday but considering Gyu-Kaku is a chain restaurant I wrote of the experience as unbloggable.

This left me with the weekend open for an amazing LA experience so OBVIOUSLY I did what I do most weekends and went out for a double feature at my fave local movie theatre Friday night.  Now I know what you're thinking - movies Carter? seriously? PREDICTABLE! - but wait!!  The arclight Hollywood a little piece of WeHo history!  Well, maybe not the arclight itself but the adjascent Cinerama dome? HELLS YES!

Pacific Theatres' Cinerama Dome is a movie theater in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard designed to present widescreen, 70mm Cinerama films.  It opened November 7th, 1963 after a reported construction time of 16 weeks and Cinerama, Inc had plans to open over 600 theaters of this kind built worldwide within 2 years.  Up until the opening of the dome, Cinerama was known for it's groundbreaking three-projector process but the first premiere hosted at the new Cinerama dome for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World marked the dawn of "single lens" Cinerama. From 1963 until 2002 the Dome never showed movies with the three-projector process.  In 2002, after a 2-year closure, the Cinerama Dome was reopened as part of the 14-screen ArcLight complex (a division of Pacific Theatres) and for the first time ever began showing movies in the three-projector format.  It's one of only three such theaters in the world today! [note: I apologize in advance to anyone who is fascinated by this and goes to Wikipedia to learn more only to discover that I got all my info there.  Sorry I'm not sorry.]

Gotta love my local movie theater!  And while I didn't see anything in the Cinerama dome this week...I pulled a double feature Friday and saw Limitless and Win Win.  Limitless was fun but Win Win is the movie that stayed with me...and not just because Paul Giamatti is on my "list" - *wink wink* - but because this film really hit home long after the credits stopped rolling. At it's surface, Win Win is about a down on his luck lawyer moonlighting as a high school wrestling coach (Giamatti) who stumbles across a star athlete and things start to look up until the boy's mother shows up fresh out of rehab flat broke and threatens to derail everything.  Classic indie plot aside, this movie brought up a lot of memories from my own high school days spending time with my high school trainer O'Neil Medley.  In one particular scene in Win Win, the team is rallying after a match and the coaches ask Kyle, the star athlete, about a move he did while wrestling where he bursted up from a hold with a sudden energy just when we thought he would lose and then won the match while his opponent was off guard.  Kyle resists sharing his technique with the team at first, being standoff-ish and a bit of a loner, but then says simply "I pictured the opponent holding my head under water...and I'm drowning.  My only option is to break free or die.  I tell myself to do whatever the fuck it takes."

The room is quiet for a moment or two with the coaches staring at Kyle in amazement.  They then clap their hands and go "you heard it team - our new strategy is 'whatever the fuck it takes.'"

I couldn't help but crack a bittersweet smile at this.  It was classic O'Neil.  I could almost hear him saying to me "Get your mind right!"  And from that point on...the movie had me.  I appreciated all of the nuance in Giamatti's performance and let Kyle remind me of what it feels like to have someone notice something special in you in that age.  O'Neil had a talent for seeing potential - for singling you out and really seeing you.  During my time at Greenwich Academy I think few people understood our relationship as I wasn't an athlete and never trained with him.  But O'Neil and I - we had our van rides listening to Whitney Houston during volleyball season and Nip/Talk discussions over oatmeal raisin cookies and redbulls.  He always saw me.

When I graduated from Cornell and was moving out West I was so terrified of what the future held and I'll never forget seeing O'Neil on graduation day that year when Steele and I walked to GA to pickup Morgan.  He kept asking me when he could come visit LA and wanting more job details while grinning ear to ear.  I'm so grateful to have had that moment with him - and then to have been with my family months later when we got the news he had passed away in a motorcycle accident - and then to have been in a position to have been able to go home and grieve a loss that so impacted me and my family.

Win Win is a story that celebrates those people in the world that see potential and fight for people who sometimes don't know how to fight for themselves.  It reminded me to get my mind right and hopefully this post will inspire you to too!

....for those of you thinking ok Carter...all I read was "double feature" and stopped reading because you were thinking WTF! Big spender $$!  Know that I may or may not have snuck into Win Win.  Also may or may not have bought a senior ticket.  No way I'm doing a double feature at WeHo prices! AND BEFORE YOU JUDGE ME know that in other news - Bill Paxton was shot and killed in the Big Love series finale this evening.  So you know what - a little less judgment and a little more sympathy please.  Thank you.

CTOWN OUT!

GET OUT THE MAP!

Revamping this blog with a more defined purpose -- documenting my new experiences in LA!

If Bear Grills (of man vs wild…get it?) were, you know, a young woman with a back problem – bear with me (OH! PUN!) -and the “wild” for this woman was…say, a city like Los Angeles…

THIS would be said person’s blog!! (hence the amazing logo below and to the left)

Think of this post as your road map of sorts to provide some basic understanding of my future trains of thought and 2011 escapade planning.  The ultimate goal of this mapping initiative (besides totally playing on my blog background/travel theme – AMAZING!) is, of course, to make it easier for me to navigate my documented clever witticisms and sharp insights when I inevitably look back on this site to relive my WeHo shenanigans in my postgrad years.  And if it helps you make some sense of my ramblings as well…you’re welcome.

Starting this month I’m trying a new thing called work/life balance (*testing... testing…. 123…*) and challenging myself to do something cultural that I couldn’t do ANYWHERE else in the world every week.  Shouldn’t be too hard as I’m living in the entertainment capital of the world, right?  With this initiative, expect a new post every Sunday night with the previous week’s event. What with Big Love ending this week, this should help fill the void I’ll feel every Sunday night at 6pm EST (note: expect this Sunday’s post to be a rollercoaster ride of emotions… you’ve been warned).

EXAMPLE A: for the record last week's event would have been the complimentary advanced screening of Jane Eyre I attended with Eric courtesy of Los Angeles magazine.  

Best part of the evening was that we then went to this hole in the wall restaurant which I instantly recognized from my favorite film of 2011 - The Kids are Alright. What are the odds?!? I absolutely DIED!!

Otherwise, there may be the occasional sporadic blog post here and there but I DO have a 24-7 job you know so cut me some slack!  I also have the following “11 Things To-Do in 2011” list to keep me occupied between misadventures:

11 Things To-Do in 2011 (in no particular order)

1. Attend a concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall
2. Visit an amusement park – thinking Six Flags or Disney
3. Sit at Tom’s bench at Angel’s Knoll (from 500 Days of Summer)
4. A Roadtrip (Napa or Vegas?)
5.  Crash a Golden Globes party…again…
6. Read a novel based in Los Angeles
7.  Go to the Getty & Getty Villa
8.  Attend a Griffith Park Observatory Public Star Party
9.  Brisquely walk at Runyon Canyon
10. Something “The Dude” would do
11. Go to the Farmer’s Market at the Grove

(keep track of my progress throughout the year in the "2011 To-Do" Tab)

Anything you think every Los Anglican HAS to do that’s not on that list?  Newsflash: there’s always next year dummy!   

Ha hmm but no seriously let me know and I’ll make it my weekly activity unless your suggestion is lame so think about it.  What would Bear do?  Or better yet…in the spirit of my previous LA-themed random posts that I hate now…”What would Mario Lopez do?”

*** CTOWN OUT! ***

Last Weekend

From left: Beiber, Me, Robert, Jason, Travis at Bar Marmont

Yup...that happened.