Andy Chase

Our apartment building and its identical twin next door have been getting repainted for the last month and a half. This is mostly a good thing; the color scheme since we moved in has been a lovely battleship grey with dusty blue-grey trim and doors. The new color scheme is white with dark green trim, and it certainly does lighten things up a bit.

Along with the paint, though, have come a couple of less graceful renovations. The first was the installation of some new light fixtures outside everybody's apartment doors. The old ones had become mismatched over the years, but the original fixtures had these great cone-shaped shades and complemented the building's late-40's architecture perfectly. We were lucky enough to have one of these outside our door.

The new light fixtures are these ugly, oval things that more closely resemble drop-lights than residential fixtures. And because they're using those newfangled compact fluorescent bulbs, it's like having a searchlight outside your door.

I don't know what happened to the fixtures they took down; I'm assuming they were thrown away, but I saw no sign of them in the dumpster the night after they made the switch.

The other clumsy renovation was the replacement of our mailboxes. Now, these definitely needed some kind of improvement; they were so small that anything more than a couple of bills and a few circulars would result in half of your mail getting ripped as you yanked it out of the box. But what the contractors did was terrible; they ripped out the old mailboxes, slapped pieces of plywood over the recess in the wall, and mounted these new aluminum boxes on top of the plywood without bothering to refinish the wall at the gaps around the edges of the plywood. So where there were once nicely recessed mailboxes that matched the style of the building, there are now these big, shiny boxes sticking about 12 inches out of the wall, with ugly gaps on either side where the plywood doesn't quite cover the hole where the old mailboxes used to be.

The most ominous change that I noticed happened to the other building, which got repainted first. High up on that building's facade was a sign labeling the building as "Sherman House" - similar to the sign on our own building reading "Sherman Terrace". Both signs were rendered in a classic postwar pseudo-script of the type which graces older signs and buildings all over L.A. About a week after they finished painting the walls and trim of Sherman House I noticed that the sign was gone. I held onto hopes that they would repaint the sign and put it back up, but as the weeks went by it seemed pretty clear that the sign was gone for good.

As they began to paint our building, I kept a close eye on the "Sherman Terrace" sign. One morning last week I noticed the sign laying in an unceremonious pile in front of the building; it had been taken down to facilitate repainting the front wall. It lay there up until yesterday afternoon, when I saw one of the painters pile it into a shopping cart and wheel it back behind the building. I didn't follow him, and thought perhaps they were going to repaint this one, since it was lower on the facade than the "Sherman House" sign and thus easier to put back up.

Nothing doing. I spotted the sign in the dumpster last night. My immediate inclination when I saw the sign sitting on the ground last week was to grab it then and save it from its brother's fate, but I held off lest they really did put it back up. Now that it was in the dumpster it was fair game, and I resolved to save it as soon as it was light out again. It's currently sitting under a tarp in front of our parking space in the car port, awaiting some minor repairs and a couple of coats of Dutch Boy Molokai Blue paint.

Aside from the obvious cool/kitsch factor of having this sign hanging on a wall somewhere in the apartment, the notion of saving the sign from some anonymous landfill took on the importance of a holy mission as soon as I noticed the other sign missing. I am haunted by my experience with the Sundown Drive-In Theatre, and although I could never have saved a part of the Sundown, I could save the sign from our own apartment building.

I discovered the Sundown quite by accident in September of 1998. I had to run an errand in Whittier, A city I had never been to before and wouldn't have much reason to visit again... I drove east around a curve on Washington Boulevard and came face to face with the giant screen of the Sundown. It was a beautiful old place, built in 1954 and closed as a drive-in in 1990. After two years in Los Angeles, I had driven by my fair share of 50's architecture, but the Sundown was the best-preserved example of high-1950's exuberance I had ever seen. By the time I saw it, it wasn't even being used as a swap meet any more, although I didn't know it at the time. I managed to return to the Sundown once more that month to take some photos with my low-quality, blurry Casio QV-100 digital camera.

At some point during the year that followed, those pictures got lost due to a hard drive failure (or possibly sheer file mismanagement.) I'd had my excellent Olympus digicam for about a month when I decided to take a Sunday afternoon and drive down to Whittier to get some proper photos of the old drive-in. Before I left I did a quick internet search on the Sundown to find an address to feed to Mapquest, and that was how I found out the Sundown had been torn down 8 months earlier. I still get crestfallen just thinking about it. So profound was the impression the Sundown made on me that for a while I named my erstwhile freelance pseudo-business and web site after it. I eventually dropped it, because the best domain I could get was sundown-media.com, which was too close to sundownmedia.com (An adult web site company, as it turns out) for comfort. And the domain I really wanted was sundown.com, which somebody in Ohio has been squatting on for years now.

The loss of the Sundown Drive-in is a little easier to bear after salvaging a piece of Sherman Terrace. Like some twisted variant of Gift of the Magi, it was a merry Christmas morning indeed. I saved a bit of classic Los Angeles and picked up a one of a kind wall decoration at the same time.

Christmas snuck up on us this year; just 10 days ago I was commenting that December has felt more like October, and I was just getting around to enjoying a delayed Autumn.

From an economic standpoint, Christmas was by necessity going to be a subdued affair anyway; not that it's all about buying all those presents or anything... but our holiday last year was a good deal jollier what with me having started my new job, the anticipation of it being our last Christmas in Los Angeles, and a friend staying with us from out of town.

This year things just kind of fizzled; I never did get around to putting up the tree, and by the time my long weekend rolled around it didn't seem worth the effort to assemble the tree (yes, we have a fake one despite our proximity to a tree lot) and decorate it only to take it down within the same week.

Fortunately, I had some last-minute shopping to do for Kim, and today I took it upon myself to brave the last-minute crowds.

Actually, it wasn't that bad because I knew exactly what I was looking for - I counted myself lucky not to be one of the hundreds of people I saw with that frantic, "Oh shit, somebody else already gave her Chicken Soup For The Soul!" look on their faces. I made a photo trip out of it, stopping on my way out to Canoga Park (God bless bordersstores.com's store inventory service) to new photos of the Van Nuys Muffler Man, some shots of the Canoga Park Bowl sign, and a couple of other locations along the way. With some choice Christmas music playing on the car stereo, I began to get into a properly festive mood. By the time I got home and began to wrap presents, things felt right again. Like last year, we exchanged gifts tonight as opposed to Christmas morning... not the way we always did it in my family, but given the absence of a tree to put gifts under and the lack of immediate family around, a day early is OK.

Tomorrow we'll be having dinner with our neighbors Jen & Larry, and possibly a game of Simpsons Edition Clue. And to think, I have Boxing Day off too! I haven't taken this many days off since I was unemployed earlier this spring.

I've never been one to let the holidays stress me out or depress me, which was why this year was so upsetting to me... I was stressed out and depressed because of all the changes that have happened since last year. A small part of me still is; you can't turn that stuff off like a light switch. But I'm not going to be crying into my eggnog :)

As for the abject absence of references to the true meaning of Christmas, I got all of that I could stomach from the beloved Rankin/Bass specials they were running on the ABC Family Channel tonight. (Since when does ABC own the Family Channel? Didn't Fox just buy it last year?). And according to Rankin/Bass, the true meaning of Christmas is making sure Santa makes his annual run so that we all get presents. No mentions anywhere about that whole birth of the Savior thing. While that really is the true meaning behind Christmas, the holiday as I've grown up with it has almost been more about a general celebration of good will towards other people, spending time with your family, and having made it through another year.

Wow, that's some pretty syrupy stuff. Good night, Merry Christmas, etc...

How big of an a-hole do you have to be to drive onto a Christmas tree lot with your big SUV and have the attendant tie it to the top when you're ready to go?Ok. When I saw somebody doing this last year I laughed and shrugged it off as a random incident, bound to happen in a place as saturated with SUVs as Los Angeles.

But this year I've seen it happen three more times (most recently this afternoon), and it's not funny any more.

Now, it's a given that about 99% of the people who buy SUVs in Los Angeles aren't going to actually use them for all the stuff they show in the commercials;

"But if I drive on gravel or dirt I might pit the paint!"

"But if I drive through a stream I might get mud un the undercarriage!"

But for the love of God, if you drive a Sport UTILITY Vehicle with ALL THAT CARGO ROOM and you buy a Christmas Tree from the corner lot, DON'T TIE IT TO THE TOP OF YOUR FORD GODDAMN EXPEDITION!!!! THAT'S WHAT THAT BIG EMPTY SPACE IN THE BACK OF YOUR GODDAMN 5 MPG "MINIVANS ARE BELOW ME AND I'VE GOT MORE MONEY FALLING OUT OF MY ASS THAN I KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH" STATUS SYMBOL IS FOR!!!!

How big of an a-hole do you have to be to drive onto a Christmas tree lot with your big Jeep/Ford/Chevy/Honda/Toyota* SUV and have the attendant tie it to the top when you're ready to go?

I mean, if you didn't buy the damn thing so you can at least use the cargo space, what did you buy it for? Where do you draw the line for what you'll deign to allow in the back of your SUV? Lumber? Nooooo, you might get a splinter in the upholstery. Potting soil? Nooooo, the bag might burst and get dirt everywhere! A big screen TV? Nooooo, a staple from the carton might snag the carpet!

What the hell is wrong with people? It's shit like this that gives Los Angeles (and California in general) its flaky reputation.

* Lincoln/Cadillac/Lexus/BMW SUV owners are excluded from the list because the act of buying a "Luxury SUV" is in itself an act of supreme assholery, and I'm sure no self-respecting Luxury SUV owner would ever let anything so crude as a Christmas tree see the inside of their vehicle; it might get pitch on the Corinthian Leather!

I don't think I'll start to think about where to put the tree this year until next weekend at the earliest, though.Ok, now that it's actually December I'll entertain thoughts of getting my favorite Christmas album down off the CD shelf. I don't think I'll start to think about where to put the tree this year until next weekend at the earliest, though.

Christmas without snow (or at least the possibility of it) is weird enough for me as it is, but it's especially surreal to walk into a Michael's arts & crafts store a week before Halloween and see that they're already selling Halloween decorations for 50% off so they can fill the seasonal aisles with Christmas crap.

A week before Halloween.

I can remember my father's annoyed comments at how early the Christmas frenzy started every year when I was a kid, but I don't think it was ever quite that early.

This year's advertisements are also unsettling in their unabashed celebration of pure material greed... I mean, even more so than in years past. The one ad that makes me want to kick the TV in every time is for Zales jewelry:

Wife sneaks downstairs (presumably on Christmas morning) while Husband is still asleep and opens a small, jewelry sized present she finds under the tree. Cut away to whichever piece of jewelry it is they're hawking. Cut back to Wife, who runs upstairs and hops into bed beside still sleeping Husband, kissing him on the cheek.

"Well, that's cute and nice and all," you think to yourself as this 30-second drama unfolds before you. But then Wife shows her true colors...

After kissing her still sleeping Husband, Wife leans back on the pillow, pumps her fist and hisses "YES!!!" in a manner that's at once vicious and victorious. As the picture fades to black she shoots a sidelong glace at Husband. From this we can infer that if the gift was anything less than a diamond-encrusted gold necklace, Husband would wake up without his penis.

Christmas spirit, indeed. Aside from being really annoying, these commercials are also really alienating; is this how people who can afford jewelry view Christmas and the concepts of gift giving and marriage in general? The marketing folks at Zales seem to think so. These are the people who think they impress all of us Ford/Chevy/Saturn/Honda/Toyota-driving proles with Luxury Sport Utility Vehicles like the Cadillac Escalade, According to another ad I recently heard, the Escalade is THE MOST POWERFUL SUV IN THE UNIVERSE. That'll show us suckers who get 28 MPG and make car payments less than $300 per month.

I'm reminded of the Irish saying:

"If you want to know what God thinks about money, look at the people he gives it to."

On the bright side, it's been quite chilly here in L.A., and I noted a personal milestone a few days back. I mentioned the cold weather in an e-mail to a friend from the midwest, and for the first time I didn't qualify it with "well, cold for L.A." Part of me is horrified to have adjusted to nights in the 40s and 50s as being cold, but the other part of me is glad to drop the obligatory "cold for L.A." disclaimer. Friends and relatives in cold places are always quick to make the distinction anyway.