LLWorldTour

Mob rules.  Get a group together and get bulk discount rates for cool stuff.  But what if you don’t have your own gang or posse? No worries Groupon takes care of all that for you.

Groupon is a website with daily deals too good not to pounce on.  From teeth whitening to spa days to dinner deals at your favorite restaurant, Groupon offers discounts from about 50-70% off normal prices.

And Groupon is growing – they are now in almost 20 cities across the US and hope to be in 30 by year’s end.

The Chicago-based company has sold nearly 500,000 groupons, saving consumers about $23 million according to Andrew Mason, the company’s founder.

That is beginning to translate into big money for Groupon. It makes money by taking a percentage of each groupon it sells, and Mason says the cut hovers around 50 percent.

“It’s really exploded in a way that, if I stop and think about it, kind of freaks me out a little bit,” Mason says.

Why am I writing about it? Simply because I signed up, thinks it’s a very cool idea, and am easily entertained by neat, new stuff…plus it really works and you can save a wad of cash!

Check them out, if not for their good deals, at least for their sharp and witty prose. Each day’s write up can be pretty entertaining.

Who hasn’t sidled up to a grease truck on a late Saturday night or bought a tasty falafel-filled pita from a New York City food cart?  But there is a new phenomenon under foot.

Taco trucks are actually nothing new to Los Angeles, but lately they seem to be everywhere.  And their customers are no longer just construction workers or other blue collar Joes. Now, thanks to the social media craze, a truck called Kogi BBQ is causing quite a feeding frenzy. Lines of LA hipsters stretch around the block. People show up from all over just to try one of their Korean-slash-Mexican fusion creations. But what caused it to go from a bit of a buzz to an all out taco tizzy? Twitter, of course. Launched in November, Kogi tweets (under @kogibbq) their trucks’ whereabouts throughout the day and their loyal followers come running. If you Tweet it, they will come.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the operation has become a “social networking juggernaut,” drawing between 300 and 800 people at each stop, with waits of up to two hours. Traditional trucks always parked in the same spot. These new trucks give the air of exclusivity because you have to be in the know to find out where to find them any give day.

My friend Mark and I decided to run down the Kogi truck one afternoon. I found their weekly posting of whereabouts on their site. Then I cross-referenced it with updated Tweets they were making every few hours on Twitter.  There was going to be a truck just around the corner at lunch time. Sweet! We were golden.

We walked over and found no less than 5 imitator trucks dishing out slop to the LA citizenry. But where was our Kogi?  Nowhere to be found. And since we are not so connected and didn’t have a Blackberry or iPhone – we were in a social media black-out.  We asked some other Kogi cravers the obvious question and no one knew where the heck it was.  So, we ate some imitation tacos which were good at $2 a pop, but still not the fusion flavor I had heard so much about.

Okay, cut to two days later. This was it. We were going to track down a truck and shove some tacos down our gullets if it was the last thing we did. We drove to a Best Buy parking lot and…there it was. Actually there they were – two gleaming white Kogi trucks churning out the coveted chow and pumping out some reggaeton (kind of a Latino hip-hop/reggae mash-up) to a small lunch mob that had gathered. I asked for the special – the Blackjack Quesadilla. Mmm, crafty Kogi goodness. It was a crunchy well done tortilla filled with some damn yummy caramelized onions, spicy pork, gooey cheese, and topped with a sesame sauce with just enough kick to make my lips tingle.  It was good, but I think it was the whole manufactured ‘coolness’ of the scene that I enjoyed the most.

Or, as my friend Mark put it, “It was good food and everything, but ya know, it was just eatin’ food from a truck.”

So in-between all the fun and L.A.ery, I was also working, writing articles and found a new career: house and pet sitter extraordinaire. I house sat for 2 poodles, Henry and Charlie, ran with a Sheeba named Ralph, dog sat another pup named Bruce (I get all the guys), and then got the plum assignment: a housesit for Boo the black cat in the Hollywood Hills at the home of a cool couple who work in Television.

I stayed up there in an area famous for its famous inhabitants and enjoyed my new neighbors: Jake Gyllenahal, Will Ferrell, Stockard Channing, KD Lang, Moon Unit Zappa, and sadly, the next-door-neighbor was recently deceased Australian actor, Heath Ledger. He had bought his house a few years ago from Ellen DeGeneres.

I spent many afternoons working and relaxing in their lush, peaceful backyard completely surrounded by towering trees, hummingbirds, and other critters while choppers flew overhead getting shots from the only vantage point of these mansions well hidden behind their tall walls and dense shrubbery.

The only thing missing from my new ‘live like the rich’ life was a pool. Yep, no pool—instead there was a playground for the kids. There’s something about a pool to make you feel like you actually did something with your day;

“What did you do today?’

‘Oh, I went and laid out at the pool.’

‘Cool.’

Even if you don’t go swimming and just work on your tan for a couple hours, it’s still as if you did something with you day, well, in L.A. at least that’s the case.

I definitely had fun house sitting even if I was kind of living a pretend life in my pretend house, with my pretend cats, dogs, and fish. It was all a bit surreal. My surreal life.

After all this star-gazing I saw some real ‘stars’ at the beautiful art deco, newly renovated Griffith Observatory.

And…finally I even experienced a good, LA-style earthquake. It was CRAZY!!!!!! Okay, not really, a few shelves, lamps shook for 10 seconds we felt the floor move. I ran to a doorway and Mark ran to the bookshelf (something is just wrong with one of our positions!) and then it was all over. The news went crazy with coverage and at the epicenter it was around a 5.4 on the Richter scale, but didn’t feel like much at least where we were—plus he lives on the ground floor. Now I’ve felt one in Tokyo and LA.

My last few days in LA were centered on my birthday where I partied like a rockstar (minus the drugs or suicide-like finale of guests like John Belushi) at Chateau Marmont.

My LA adventure has now come to an end and I guess I’ve experienced almost everything here…except the casting couch. There’s always next time.

Hello friends of LLWorldTour! How are you, by the way? This is not a rhetorical question – feel free to leave a comment on my site with you deepest sentiments.

For those of you that read this site on Internet Explorer there was a problem with the last two posts.

Those who use Firefox (much cooler, faster, better web browser) had no problems of course.

So…I wanted to resend these links to my subscribers who did not get the pleasure of reading them.

Livin’ the LA Life: Part Dos

THE Toaster Smash-Up 2008: A Must Read!

Please enjoy and feel free to make comments, suggestions, rants, raves.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

LL

My friend Mark lives in a great apartment complex in LA called the Palazzo. It has a huge pool ringed with plush cushioned lounge chairs, a clubhouse complete with a buzzy little business office and concierge for all your concierging needs, a bright gym and spa full of the tanned toned celebs of tomorrow, and beautifully landscaped grounds full of constantly pruned shrubs, bougainvillea covered trellises, trickling fountains, and swaying palms. And of course he has a fully appointed apartment…and he pays dearly for it. He personally has everything he needs.

And then there was…the toaster. This metal box lived on his granite countertop mocking us daily with its crappy features, non-dinging toast function, and all around crap-tasticness. It was the most excruciatingly slow toaster I’ve ever encountered in all my travels. You want your bread to turn brown and crunchy with just the right crust on top sealing in a chewy center? Good luck. It was uneven at best and ‘es’, ‘el’, ‘oh’, ‘double-you’ – SLOW. You want a piece of bad toast? Well, pull up a chair and wait about thirty minutes. The thing sucks at toast. And, let’s remember what it’s called. That’s right – a toaster.

SO, I took it upon myself to buy him a brand-spankin’ new twenty-first century toaster with all the bells and whistles and dingers. You want it light? You got it. Dark and slightly burnt – a little more your style? Not a problem. All was good in the breads and whole grains world once again.

But what to do with the old piece of crap toaster? Only one thing of course – smash the hell out of it.

I had the genius idea of taking it out and basically clubbing it to death just for fun. See what happens when neither of us is working and we have too much time on our hands? Don’t tell the toaster-lover protesters. We don’t want them picketing outside or pelting us with bagels, slices of marble rye or, even worse, dense flax seed and multi-grain loaves.

Here’s how it all went down:

Operation: Kill the Toaster

• The Tools: One toaster, one hammer, one golf club, protective eye gear (aka swimming goggles)
• The Location: Ross Back Parking Lot
• The Motive: Years & Years of Shitty Toast

It was a total smash-for-all. I took the hammer and wailed as hard as I could at the top of the toaster. The metal buckled and clanged and plastic bits went flying everywhere. Now it was Mark’s turn. He took the 3-iron and did his best golf swing right into the toaster door. The glass shattered with a crunch and shards of glass went flying all around. Wooo! This was fun. IT was like a reality episode of “when toaster’s suck” or “when bad toasters happen to good people.” We were onto something. I know FOX will call soon.

I decided just to let it rip. I went ballistic and start pummeling the damn thing with my hammer shouting with each blow, “YOU STUPID NO GOOD TOASTER. I HATE YOU! SHITTY, STUPID TOASTER!!” Ah, it was cathartic and way cheaper than paying a shrink for the hour.

By now we were making quite a ruckus and I think other ‘would-be’ parking lot loiterers and hoodlums were possibly scared of us. I think I even heard a M63 gang member whisper to his comrade: ‘watch out for those toaster thugs—they’re ruthless.’ Just then a security guard rounded the bend. Were we some thugs wreaking havoc? Were we gangbangers out to get revenge? Were we drug addicts beating up a toaster to score some change to keep our habit going?

No, we were just two white whack-jobs with nothing better to do on a Thursday afternoon. But when the guard saw these two strange casually-dressed Caucasians get out our little dust pan and broom and clean up the mess we just made he turned around and went about his business. I think I heard him mutter, ‘stupid, bored white-folk.’

Just remember friends: Don’t ever take crap from your toaster again. You can have your toast and eat it too.

Go ahead, make my toast. Yippe-ca-yay mother Toaster.

And one more thing…wait for it….that toaster was…toast.

Mission Accomplished.

Yeah Toast!

Okay, so now I have my tan and am a size 0 (plus 6) so time for me to be an actress, right? Well, kind of. I signed up to be an extra. This is the easiest job in the world and yet you have to have ironclad dedication to actually get any work. There’s a hotline you can call everyday to see what gigs are available. Let’s just say it was a tad limiting. Here are some things I actually heard on the line:

“For an episode of According to Jim we need women in Sci-Fi costumes.” Yeah, left mine in storage.

“Hi Ladies. Today I am looking for very upscale women with designer clothes and luxury cars, not black, white, or red.” I left my Bentley in the shop.

“Hello there non-union women. I need a blond, size 4 or less, 5’8” or taller, gorgeous bombshell model types who will be riding bicycles in bikinis…” Oh, too bad I’m just not tall enough.

“Today I need women who can juggle.” Uh, no.

“We are looking for Hispanic looking women who look like they just came from Mexico, in fact you will be swimming in water from the border.” It was for my favorite show Weeds, but no can do.

“Hi Ladies. You must have the ability to de-bone and filet a fish…” Is this what they learn in acting school?

“Hi. We need a woman with lots of tattoos and lots of piercings…” Blast.

After wading through all these odd requests, they finally called me and I was booked for my first call to be background in a scene on the hit TV series “24.” Yep that’s right—just look for me in the November 24 movie: girl in the wool coat (even though it was shot in the 100-degree San Fernando Valley) standing behind the new president of the United States as she is sworn in at the inauguration.

Actually I was in the background with dozens of other extras. Extras are a strange lot. While I was sitting in the ‘extra tent’ awaiting instruction, some old lady with an air of Alzheimer’s about her came up to me insisting she had to do my hair. I think she was just another extra honing her sharp acting skills and she was playing the part of the ‘slightly insane bad hairdresser.’ First she started combing my hair. The she started teasing it. Now, bear in mind, I’d taken special care to straighten my naturally curly/frizzy hair that morning so teasing usually wasn’t a good thing at this point. Then just a minute into her work, without a word, she just up and left. She reappeared a few minutes later with a chair. She used this to place the comb down. Now that we had the important extra chair we needed more space so she asked the guy behind me to move. I said I could move, but she said, “No! You stay!” Wow. She was fierce. Then she proceeded to put my hair up into some kind of bun. I warned her that my hair was layered and that with one bit of breeze, pieces of hair would be flying everywhere making me look like a disheveled mess – not the coiffed politician I was today. Suddenly she just put it in a pony tail with a barrette I’d brought just for this very reason and walked away. I smell an Emmy.

As extras we really spent most of the day sitting around reading and eating (junk food from Craft Service) and making small talk. There was a thin, kind of cute younger guy next to me that I started talking to only to find out very, very soon that he too was insane. It went a little something like this:

“Hi. I’m Lisa. Where are you from?”

“Oh, everywhere. It’s a long story.”

“Oh, were your parents in the military?”

“No, my family was in a cult and we traveled a lot and I hated it and I have put it all behind me now and I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

After he continued to talk for twenty minutes about ‘what he didn’t want to talk about’, I tried to change the subject. “What do you want to do?”

“Well, I want to take documentaries and make them into science fiction fantasy kung-fu films.” He said matter-of-factly.

“Are you joking? I mean how do you propose to take a documentary about, oh, say the Holocaust or starving children in some underdeveloped country and make it a science-fiction film?”

“Well, I know that only smart people watch documentaries so this way I can get people who don’t usually watch these kinds of movies to watch and learn something at the same time.”

Of course. I tried to pretend I was reading and slowly get away from this genius so I turned to the guy next to me just as he was spitting his chewing tobacco into a cup. Nice. I guess when you are doing a job that has no requirements whatsoever you are going to encounter some pretty ‘interesting’ people. That was the gist of my short-lived (one day) career as an extra.

One day we decided to join a friend at a place Madonna has made famous worldwide. No, not her crotch – the Kabbalah Center. We thought it would be interesting to see what it was all about. And I’m always open for new experiences even if just to learn a little something more. Well, let’s just say I didn’t learn a thing and the service consisted of an hour of singing really loud in Hebrew (I think), clapping, and well that’s it.

We learned that like in orthodox temples, the men and women are separated so I was left to my own devices on the ladies side. But not for long. Soon the recruiters were on me like flies on a matzoh ball. I met Miriam, a beautiful girl who had been taking classes there for quite some time. She was super friendly, if not maniacal, and answered every question I asked with wide eyes, a huge grin, and an extremely enthusiastic: “That’s a really good question!” She spoke to me in a sincere, albeit brainwashed, sort of way. She tried to explain some things, but I was too distracted by her stepford beauty and culty staring into my soul. At a slight break in the festivities, I approached Mark across the aisle and asked how uncomfortable he was.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say an 11.”

And with that we left. Shalom friends.

Other LA-type activities we did all summer:

• We strolled around the Santa Monica shops on Montana and Third Streets, the bohemian boardwalk of Venice Beach, and the public tide-line sand of carbon Beach in Malibu, aka ‘Billionaires Beach’, walking by the homes of the likes of David Geffen, Courtney Cox, and dozens of other over-paid celebrities.
• We sat in the audience at the hilarious Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Twice. It happens that the CBS Studios are right around the block from Mark’s flat…so why not? Plus I realized I knew the director as I’d interned for him back in my early TV days at my fist gig – “Late Night with David Letterman” in New York City. He gave us a cool tour of all the studios and I even got to ‘touch’ the famous Price is Right wheel. “Come on Down!”
• We saw the an improv/sketch comedy show at the Groundlings and Second City LA.
• We hiked to the Hollywood sign. which I later read is a high security zone complete with cameras and recording devices to watch your every move in case you trespass anywhere near the nine precious, big white metal letters. Want to check out the sign yourself? You can here - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• We went out to various bars and restaurants around town – from the fairly cheap and casual Hollywood staples like Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, the Farmer’s Market, and Astroburger to swanky ‘hotspots like STK, Bar Marmont, and AOC Winebar.
• We watched the Chicago Cubs beat LA and had overpriced dogs and beer at Dodger Stadium.
• I got to cruise Sunset Boulevard in my friend, Neal’s, cute little VW convertible, with the top down and the music up, actually giving me the feeling of being a real ‘Angeleno.’
• We caught a show at the beautiful landmark the Hollywood Bowl.
• I took a couple rock climbing classes at REI Outdoor Store.
• I had a Pastrami Sandwich at one of LA’s oldest delis: Canter’s.
• We ate Sushi on Ventura Blvd where there are no less than 50 sushi joints.
• We strolled through Barney’s New York in Beverly Hills where I tried on one $2000 spiky high-heeled Italian shoe. I sold my car for that same amount. I wonder if they were priced per shoe and the pair was really $4000.
• We made the requisite ‘run for the border’ and took a day trip down to Tijuana.

And of course this is the center of the entertainment industry so I was bound to bump into some celebs, right? Well, sort of. Besides seeing Craig Ferguson and his guests (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and some other actress I long forgot), Cheap Trick doing Sgt Pepper’s at the Hollywood Bowl, and the cast of “24” in person, I also ‘bumped into’ such D-list, third-string, second-tier celebs as Daniel Baldwin, Terrence Howard (literally running on the treadmill in front of me), Tom Arnold (shopping at the Apple store), Bruce Jenner (at a Starbucks), ‘The Office’ big guy, Brian Baumgartner, and the guys of the hit British sketch comedy show “Little Britain” (if you don’t know it yet…you will).

After traveling all over the world and now working my way across America from New York to Chicago to Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Vegas, Palm Springs, and finally hitting the Pacific Ocean, there was just one place left for me to go: Hollywood, baby. Sure, I’d been there at least half a dozen times and never actually loved it, but my good friend, Mark, had moved out there to pen screenplays and his couch was just begging me to come sleep on it.

I learned there are some pros and cons to this odd world of schmoozing, cruising, and boozing:

• Pros: It’s always sunny. It’s always warm.  There’s always a kind of ‘hollywood’ buzz in the air. If you are not from any kind of city there is a lot to do -  museums, beaches, cafes, shopping, and ethnic ‘hoods.

• Cons: It’s always sunny. It’s always warm. In other words, if you like any kind of ‘weather’ it ain’t here. L.A. is not really a city per se in the grander sense of the word. Unlike New York, Chicago, London, Paris or Hong Kong, L.A. has no thriving city center nor does it have great public transportation. Unfortunately, this is a place where a prerequisite is a gas-guzzling, air-polluting motor vehicle. And, as the smog attests to, everyone drives everywhere. L.A.  is not a walkable city. In fact it is more like one big spread out suburb sprawling out across the land with a schlocky amalgamation of shopping plazas and mini malls chock a block with 7-11s, donut shops, nail salons and ubiquitous hamburger joints dotting each corner. I don’t find it a pretty city unless you have a lot of cash to purchase one of the amazing homes here or you catch a glimpse of the snow-capped mountain views the ‘day’ of the year that the smog lifts.

As I mentioned, LA is home to some strikingly beautiful, if not enormous, homes. You can find any architectural style you like: orange-stucco, red-tile roofed, bougainvillea covered Spanish-Mediterranean villas; the clean lines and right-angles of a Mid-Century Modern party pad; the lovely wood-shingled, low roof-lined California bungalow homes of the Craftsman movement with their exposed beams, natural wood and stone materials; or a gaudy, comically-huge gated estate in Beverly Hills complete with gardeners and housekeepers to be your friends (in case you are a wealthy shut-in popping Prozac and other modern meds on a daily basis). Millions of dollars are just spent on landscaping alone. Everyday it seems the population of the wealthy enclaves of Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel Air, and the Hollywood Hills doubles as Hispanic landscapers scurry about trimming, cutting, planting, blowing, and edging the perfectly manicured gardens and lawns complete with trickling fountains, winding stone paths and fragrant gardenias.

Besides the gaggles of gardeners, there is a class of people here loitering about I like to call the Daytimers: moms, nannies, mailmen, joggers, and what appears to be half the population of LA; folks sipping lattes at Starbucks, chatting into the air on their hands free devices, texting incessantly, and click-clacking away at their laptops. What do these people do for a living? Oh, yeah, I’m one of them now.

Los Angeles is definitely a unique place where life revolves around ‘the biz.’ If you don’t work in the entertainment industry, then you are probably a gardener to someone who does. There is no avoiding the in-your-face marketing blitz for movies and TV shows here: a 7-story high movie poster draped over an entire building, ‘smoking’ billboards for the James Franco/Seth Rogen summer release of ‘Pineapple Express‘, buses wrapped in ads for the new ‘90210′ and even planes flying overhead with banners telling us to watch the oh-so-boring reality show, ‘Tori and Dean.’

But since I was spending the summer in Hollywood, I figured I better act like it and live the LA lifestyle.
So besides running and working out nearly everyday to get that size zero body that everyone here covets, I had to immerse myself in all things LA.

This started with working up a sweat poolside with the ‘affected’ crowd. Mark’s apartment complex has a very swanky pool and spa area so might as well take advantage of it while I was here and pretend to live the ‘luxe’ life. Any given day here you can see a microcosm of LA life.

The men are pumped up, bronzed, glistening and mostly gay or…just cocky. The girls are all actress-wannabees: plasticky, stick-thin, big-boobed, tiny-waisted and always texting someone. I guess those are the ones who learned how to do rebus puzzles in 2nd Grade: C U L8R. One day I even saw a beautiful starlet with super long flowing perfectly curled platinum blonde Playboy-bunny locks wearing her kitten-heels while she was lying in the sun as if she was on a photo shoot. Except she…wasn’t. Ah, Hollywood.  It’s hard to not try to get in shape here…either that or constantly compare yourself to these androids and lose all self-confidence, self-esteem, self-respect and bury yourself in your million-dollar-mansion and hope the gardener finds you somewhat attractive.