* Lilly has been to Dubai before; everywhere else is new to both of us.
LA is famously a place where you need a car. We quickly found that to be true three years ago when we stayed out in Venice Beach, but slightly less so this time - we're staying in West Hollywood and there's a fair bit of fun to be had within a reasonable footprint, much of which we have dutifully tramped since arriving on Thursday morning* - notable quirky shops on Melrose and Sunset and the Farmer's Market and brand new Grove Mall on Fairfax, and a bit of culture too.
* Incidentally, for all the bad rep that US Immigration gets, especially in LA and NY, we breezed through it as usual and the staff were much friendlier than their UK counterparts. Lots of extra security when boarding in Lima, though.
On Sunday we hired a car to venture further afield. LA is a very driveable city outside rush hour - the roads are straight and wide, the use of lanes is excellent. The downside is that because everyone drives, there is nothing for the predestrian - you can walk miles without seeing a convenience store. It's eerily low-rise, apart from the small downtown business area - whenever you see a four-storey building it looks huge. But LA has grown on me a bit - I'm enjoying it more than I did last time. Lilly loves it, of course.
"Why didn't we do this last time we were here?" she asked as we set off for Universal Studios. There's a bus ride around a lot of famous TV and movie sets and the occasional set piece thrown in - one poor guy's job is to play Norman Bates from Psycho every time a bus goes past, putting a body in a car and then walking menacingly with a knife. Can't say it did much for me, but it is a bit interesting to see how sets are reused - the same street has been used for The Munsters, Buffy and Desperate Housewives, for example.
Then there's a theme park - the highlight is Waterworld, a terrible film I've never seen condensed into a 15-minute camped-up live-action version where the villain gets all the bad lines and Kevin Costner's character runs around sayung nothing. Genuinely fun, and introduces a theme: pretty much every ride and show wants to get you wet to some degree. A new Simpsons ride has a long wait but is as funny as you could hope for from the current state of the show. And there's an old semi-live-action follow-up to Terminator 2 which tickled me - a big guy who looks nothing like Arnie runs around the stage, lip-syncing to Arnie's dialogue, and in a corner of a screen behind him is a close-up of Arnie so you can tell what he should look like. Not the governor of a bankrupt state, that's for sure. Don't come here expecting great rollercoasters, but there's enough variety in the rides and shows (a new Shrek short, a half-hearted Blues Brothers show, short Mummy and Jurassic Park rides) to be just about worth coming. Of course, the best thing about going on rollercoasters with Lilly is seeing the photo at the end, where she usually has her eyes shut and an expression of terror (and I look bored). Jurassic Park the movie terrified her at a formative age, so the photo of the JP ride is a new high watermark. I really should have bought it...
On the way back we had a quick browse in Amoeba, possibly the biggest record store I've ever seen, and then randomly ended up at a stand-up comedy show in the back room of a comic book store (Meltdown). It was surprisingly very good, with a couple of 'names' (a woman that Lilly recognised from the film Knocked Up, and one of the stars of the TV show Parks And Recreation, which you won't have heard of but is 'from the makers of' The Office - the US version... Anyway, we've seen him on TV. I guess there must be thousands of stand-ups in LA but all the guys we saw were decent to very good.)
LA is also very good for museums, and on Saturday we messed up going to MOCA - we went to a small annex of it and just saw a few photos of Vegas.
Then we took in a couple of exhibitions at the home of the Academy - one on animator Chuck Jones and one on stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, both good little shows. We followed this with LACMA, which was mostly closed last time we were here. Slightly marred be some over-officious staff ("If it is capable of taking photographs, it must not be out.") and one waste-of-a-lot-of-space very large 'sculpture'; but some fun stuff, and it has a Japanese pavilion with a decent display of Hiroshige ukiyo-e that was always going to earn points from me.
Two more good museums: the Huntington Library (Monday), a proper mansion with its late owner's art collection is impressive enough, and the grounds match it (lots of themed gardens - wish we'd made more time here, the roses were good, the Japanese garden was nice, and we only had a glimpse of the fantastic Chinese garden); and the Getty Center, a set of modern buildings perched on a hill (accessed by its own tramway) for great views, beautifully designed to show off a cornucopia of all kinds of art - some of the rooms are designed to be like a lush mansion, others are ultra-modern and let in natural light - plus some making-ofs, the only drawback being that it's a bit of a maze.
We went to the Museum of Tolerance* three times - the first two times they wouldn't tolerate our lack of a booking, so eventually we learned. This has the lushest multimedia displays on the Holocaust you could hope to see, although I thought it was a bit like putting Mickey Mouse in 3D - but then I hate multimedia displays that talk at you, I like to be able to skip through the boring bits. Great gas chamber though. Amazingly, Lilly was unable to fault its historical accuracy - I managed to fault its grammar. Lilly thought it was very good so I'll let her say more.
* Well, it's mainly about the treatment of Jews, and a lot is based on the work of "Simon Wiesenthal. Nazi Hunter. Humanitarian." I couldn't quite take that tag line seriously.
Finally, LA wouldn't be LA without entertainment, and we managed a fair range. On Saturday, Lilly's friend Brenton was in town, so we went to Musso & Frank's, the 'oldest restaurant in Hollywood' - dating from 1919. I think most of the waiters could have been there on opening night. Great steak though.
On Sunday we went to the cinema, eschewing Hollywood in favour of a French film, The Father of my Children - a (bad) tip from Lilly's dad!
On Monday, Lilly managed to spot a concert from Russell Brand's fake band in his new film (yes, it made that much sense to me, too). As we approached the venue, a guy in a scary leather jacket came up to us and said "Are you here to see Infant Sorrow?" I had a terrible fear that he was going to pull out a small child and rip its arm off, but fortunately that turned out to be the name of the band. Anyway, Brand irritates me more than almost anyone alive, so I skipped this - Lilly really enjoyed it - and went to most of an evening of free, bad and casually racist* stand-up comedy at a hostel. Eventually a not-terrible act came on and I took that as my cue to leave on as close to a high as I was going to get.
* Sample of interaction with audience: "You're German, yes? No? Austrian? Zat is just ze zame, ja?"
Finally, back in Sydney we saw and enjoyed Amanda Palmer at the Opera House and said we'd see her again if we got the chance. She has a new act, Evelyn Evelyn, in which she and Jason Webley play Siamese twins, one arm each for various instruments. It's as mad as it sounds and great fun.
Right: next up is the Grand Canyon, so off we go to get our kicks...
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