Friday 20th April 2007. The City of Angels, California.

Terribly wet weather today which only seems to make the drivers here go faster. Anyway, I had breakfast at a lovely little spot I had passed yesterday, the Café Europe back down on Santa Monica Boulevard. The absolutely delightful Danielle not only makes a mean breakfast, but she even went to all the bother of finding exact and easy routes for me to get both to the Getty Center and to the cathedral…she was one cool Aussie.

LA has a reasonably good public transport system, but it is fair to say that this is a city designed for the car.

So as I head out today along Sunset towards UCLA the area and the homes begin to get very upscale. The Beverley Hills Hotel looked very nice as I passed and you soon realise you are in fantasy land when waiting on the bus you see the students coming from the university campus and leaving in Bentley’s and a stream of vehicles most of us will only ever dream of.

But I am happy on the bus, where I can watch the world go by. I really enjoy traveling as everything is an experience, the people you meet and particularly those you see but never encounter as you move from A to B.

Today I will get my first and only view of the LA beaches and it will be from the balcony of the Getty Center; a truly stunning complex that is a work of art in itself…and the views of LA from this vantage point are unsurpassed.

A memorial to J. Paul Getty (1892-1976), the Getty Center was opened in 1997 and builds upon the already world-renowned reputation of the Getty Villa which opened in 1954 in Malibu.

The Getty Center is a stunning complex and climbing up on the tram is an added bonus with the fantastic views you are afforded of LA and its luxury homes. There is so much going on here that you need to limit yourself if you are to truly appreciate the art. I have chosen to attend the Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden exhibition that presents eighteen works from the two best known Dresden painters: Friedrich, the voice of German romanticism and Richter, the most significant German artist working today.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Friedrich revolutionised European painting. By choosing to work not in the figural mode and by focusing his painting on the German lands he made landscape his primary subject. He moved from the recording and idealised classical vision of the land to a subjective, even romantic response to nature’s glory.

I certainly enjoyed Cross in the Mountains and Evening on the Baltic Shore, but generally his work was too moody for me. That said, he did forge the Romantic Movement with all its nocturnal, moonlit scenes as opposed to the clarity one gets with daylight.

In this exhibition we get two interesting views of landscape: Friedrich holding landscape as the cornerstone of his practice to reflect emotion and spirituality and Richter the contemplative skeptic. Both men commonly exhibit evocative characteristics rather than offering “records” and what they offer the viewer instead is an ambiguous and contemplative experience.

For me coming somewhere like the Getty is a huge challenge. I need to come with a specific plan of what I want to see and even then it takes me the best part of the day just to examine and interpret a limited expose. I have never been able to understand those people who have 'done the Louvre' in an afternoon.

I hadn’t intended on it, but as I passed Fatburger (which claims to be the ‘last great hamburger stand’ and where I saw the saucy burger advertised with A1 steak sauce) I had to try it. This American chain certainly produces fresh and ‘real’ burgers, the type you get from the hamburger stand at a funfair. But this is America after all and along with the 50's feel and the dukebox, there is an ultra-modern touch with a special area for those who have ordered online.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old git, although some of my kids would tell you I have always been so, there is something wrong with a culture where so many youngsters drive ridiculously expensive and powerful cars at equally excessive speeds with no thought of the costs, in all their attendant forms, that are involved.

Oh, and whilst I am on a roll and just having returned to my hotel to use the loo, why is it that hotels insist on so much waste? Take my soap for example. Clean the room, great, but if you know the same person is staying on then why take away the soap? A new bar with its wasteful paper covering every day is excessive.



Well tonight I set off with the manbag, to find the NOHO Arts Center in North Hollywood. I am heading out by public transport and on foot, and as I get lost I ask for directions from what turns out to be a very unhelpful sheriff, but at least the nearby fireman helped me out.

The NOHO arts area calls itself an arts district and there are certainly overtures in that direction, but the sense of community is certainly not aided by the areas soulless buildings.

As for the NOHO Arts Center itself we get off to a bad start. Almost double the price of Celebration and no press pack, lets hope things improve.

Well, at least the toilets were lovely and one thing American theatre is not going to do is rip you off with overpriced programmes, these come as part of the package.

Bush is Bad…It is easy to knock Bush, much harder to defend him and maybe that is why it is like looking for a needle in a haystack to find an American who will admit voting for him. Yet, 59,054,087 of them did.

But when I hear my fellow theatre-goers talking about “I”raq as we wait for the house to open I am reminded of just how ignorant and politically illiterate many Americans are.

We enter the auditorium to strains of patriotic Americana and the first thing of note is how the symbolism of the democratic donkey outweighs the elephant of the G.O.P. in this thetare design. Oh and the audience…

Well many of them flaunt their wealth in both dress and speech and I get to wondering again about the equality of wealth concentration in our world. What frightens me is that such a great concentration of wealth is in the hands of what appear to be such judgmental and narrow people.

The poor start to this play begins with a very late commencement and continues when the first performer appears and the tech guy was so out of it, the lady stood there for sometime before we got going. My sixth form students could have done a better tech job.

For a musical, it would have helped if the performers could have held a note and even better if these actors could act. They were totally unconvincing and that’s why they are still in fringe theatre with careers that are going no where fast.

Now as for the play…

The problem with Bush bashing is that we may yet find that Bush, Blair and Howard are judged very differently by history long-term. After all Winston Churchill, arguably one of the world’s greatest ever leaders, was considered no more than a maverick in his wilderness years when he stood against the tide of contemporary opinion warning against the threat of Nazi Germany and the failings of the policy of appeasement. World history now focuses, not on his isolation, but on his greatness, standing alone in Britain’s darkest hour on his march to victory.

Whilst these three world leaders are lambasted and whilst there is no doubt they have made mistakes, the bigger picture may yet show them to be the great defenders of Western civilization against extremism. Or it may show them to have failed in recognising the closing days of Western culture and as such no more than futile bigots? Time and history will tell, but we must all think rather than just bash, or we are no more than bigots ourselves.

This was anything but a balanced play and as for the acting it killed an already mortally wounded duck!

It would have helped if the writer had gotten his facts correct…all that garbage about the ruling dynasties of Europe and only the Americans truly electing their leaders…

Please, modern America is one of the most undemocratic countries in the world. That said, the writer did recognize that to be in elected office here requires money.

If Bush is Bad, then trust me this piece of musical theatre is 100 times worse.

Well, its now late Friday nite in LA and the brothers are out in force. Lowered suspensions, tinted windows; this is boggin heaven, yet there is no doubt that these boggins have money.

As for me, I met Luke Skywalker on the way home and ended up feeling guilty all my walk back to my neighbourhood. You see, he said hello and I felt guilty as I sharply answered him and walked on without engaging him in conversation…but then I wasn’t sure about talking to strangers at night in LA.

When I get home I enjoy an interesting Napa Valley wine. Interesting, not just because it was local cabernet sauvignon called Screw Kappa Napa, but because it is designed to encourage Californians into a ‘life after cork’ and the joys of the screwcap.