I’ve been hiding inside all today with the shades drawn. Not interested in the Superbowl or the 2.5 million dollar ads.
Thank goodness a friend of mine surprised me yesterday with a "hey-I’m-bored-let's-go-see-Babel" phone call, or both my days off would have been spent this way. In the twilight zone.
I wish I could write something other than letters, but I can't, so I’m typing away with the rest of the bloggers.
I went to Yuca's yesterday. Little Mexican food stand on Hillhurst, about a block and a half from my apartment. I don't know what their hours are, but they rarely seem to be open when I need them, and believe me, single guy who seldom ever cooks... I need them often.
I have come to learn that they maintain quite reliable hours on Saturday afternoons. Saturdays often find me crawling out of my apartment around 1PM, when I’ve summoned the courage to squint down the afternoon sunlight if it will mean I can score some decent grub to quell the grumbling in my stomach. Like any decent Mexican food stand, prices don't really go over $3-$4, so even if I am short on cash, in an emergency I can dip into my supply of laundry quarters to get together enough for a torta.
Since I’ve been going there regularly on Saturday afternoons for about the past 4 weeks, I’ve learned that Saturdays are the only day you can get tamales there - $1.50 each for a banana-leaf-wrapped, beef-filled bite of steamed masa in a thin, tangy tomato sauce. Two of them for $3 will hold hunger at bay for a few hours and please the palate sufficiently well, even if some critic inside of you wonders why their tamales and burritos are merely checkbook-sized, not the "pregnant" enterprises of Mexican food trucks of fame. As has been amply reported and observed by now, we're conditioned to the super-size, and even the most cynical consumers may be a little pouty about not getting a two-handed portion of anything. One can always assume an explanation for the portion size to be attributable to the regionalization of their cuisine ("yuca" very likely derived from yucatecan..? not the nickname of the grandmotherly proprietress), although being light on the wallet is always the biggest shoutdown of any squeak of discontent over serving size.
There’s always a crowd around Yuca's on Saturdays. Maybe there are more working people in Los Feliz than I am used to acknowledging. Unable to eat their fill of Yuca's during the week, they wait like me to get their fix on Saturday afternoon. Yes, whatever your routine, in LA there are always a few dozen others who will have the same idea and show up before you. Being only a kitchen with a walk-up window to order and a few tables under an awning that will seat the first 6 people who can grab them, patrons tend to stand in clumps around the sidewalk and adjacent parking lot, stomachs grumbling, trying not to grow impatient. There’s not a lot of room in the kitchen either; 3 or 4 people shuffle around a small cube, bumping about while steam rises over simmering meat and beans. No room for storage and no liquor license are probable reasons why very few beverages are offered - OJ, maybe coffee? No sodas. No beer obviously. But people come for food and Yuca’s is not losing any business for not offering drinks. They are next to a liquor store and the enterprising people who have staked their claim to table space have often also procured brown paper bags hiding cans of Modelo Especial. Brown bags also hold orders of warm tacos and burritos when names are finally shouted from the window.
As usual, there were anywhere from 9-15 people standing around, crowded in to hear their name called. Skater kids, men in work clothes, women in yoga pants, artsy guys with Henry Kissinger glasses. Me. I looked in through the window, into the kitchen and caught the eye of one of the cooks, a guy behind two other people, transferring a pot of steaming food from stove to counter, a distance the width of a torso pivot and that was all, a head protruding from shoulders that were not his own. For a second I thought about the heat, the steam, the sweat, the standing, the lifting, the pivoting and no room to stretch, no place to sit; and then about the people eyeing each other outside, counting, estimating how much time they should let pass before they questioned the status of their order. I thought it was great that this was a thriving business, but how horrible must it be to feel tired and look up to see only a mob of hungry faces at the window, staring at you like mute zombies. It made me think about how everything good in LA is ultimately discovered and overrun.
On Friday night, I walked down Glendale Blvd in Silverlake, past the Red Lion Tavern. Outside, there stood a line of at least twenty people, waiting to have their IDs checked so they could get in. I was astonished that a decent, but not extraordinary, neighborhood bar would attract people in those numbers. This is not your designer-label gin and tonic trough for the well heeled. But like I said, whatever your taste, there's another 5 dozen people who are connoisseurs of it. Walking past the Red Lion, Robin and Yolanda remarked on their perceptions of LA's increased population. For the most part these are superficial complaints: the transformation of Latino drag-queen dive bars into trendy, young, sanitized versions of edginess, or the rampant popularity of places which had never before held any special appeal. But inevitably, the discussion of LA's rising population leads to complaints about the corresponding rise in rents and a scarcity of affordable housing. Many people in the city are new enough to not know the "old LA," the affordable LA with its former cultural topography, although certain of us blogging city dwellers become obsessed with trying to find it archeologically in old photos and histories. In this city, you can tell stories of population and neighborhood changes if you've been here more than 10 years. As a newcomer to the neighborhood, I’m not much of an authority on the ill effects of gentrification. The fact that I'm paying $1200/month to live here actually makes me complicit in the problem, helping to drive the rents up by my willingness to pay it. Tom, who has been here at least 10 years, once told me about how the neighborhood was largely Russian/Armenian, a north-easterly extension of Little Armenia, a fact that is only evidenced now by the tuxedoed valets who wait outside the Russian/Armenian parties at the rented Monte Cristo ballroom on Vermont, and the remaining Russian/Armenian tenants who have weathered the rent increases. He said that Vermont had many more businesses that reflected the ethnic make-up of the neighborhood.
Many of my friends have been here for years if not their whole lives, and have complained at some time or other of the passing of old neighborhoods into gentrified versions of themselves. They mourn the passing of old bars, the changing demographics. Alberto once told me his theory that LA was being yuppified by trust-fund NY city kids, scared out of Manhattan by the fall of the World Trade Center. He said it with half a laugh, perhaps thinking it sounded paranoid, but with a genuine irritation. As more of an armchair neighborhood critic/cultural observer, I feel less sense of cultural encroachment I suppose. But population is in flux here, and it is dramatic enough now to capture the attention of the veterans who’ve lived here for ten-plus years. Times writer Lynell George wrote a great article on the transition of South Central from black to predominantly Latino. And there have been other dramatic demographic changes in the city’s history (my favorite, the story of Bronzeville). I read on Wikipedia that Los Feliz was the original home of Hollywood's wealthiest elite, although I think that portion of the neighborhood still exists untouched, north of Los Feliz Blvd. Whether these blocks between Los Feliz and Sunset have changed from Russian or Latino to bobo riche, I have not been present to witness it. Whatever this fashionable neighborhood is, it became that before I arrived. All of the trendy boutiques and hip places to eat and drink existed here before I did, so while I can criticize them, and do, I don’t do it with any kind of nostalgia for what used to be, although I have a more general sense of nostalgia for a California that I grew up in, and now feel unable to afford.
Looking in through the crowded kitchen window of Yuca’s, I wondered if the Saturdays of 30 years ago were this manic, or if they have gradually become more so.
We wait and we eye each other, and we try not to grow impatient as our stomachs gurgle. I grab my paper bag, holding my warm tamales, and head for the constriction-free zone of my $1200/month apartment, to eat without competition, like the Los Feliz wildlife probably do in their dens and nests: rats, skunks, opossum and raccoons whom I have seen on their nocturnal scavenges. On second thought, judging by their hostile machismo, the raccoons probably don't give a fuck about any competition. And hostile machismo is one way to deal with limited resources, I guess.
>>LA Times data on the past 10 years of rent increases in various neighborhoods.
Eventually, I saw the pier. 
