Santa Monica Smoke Out - The 2009 LA BBQ Festival

In the morning, I fasted. Well past lunchtime, too. My target was the 2009 Los Angeles Barbecue Festival; my goal a bit of conspicuous consumption. As I drove the 10 westbound to Santa Monica, my morning's sacrifice started taking its vengeance on me; the passing freeway fast food signs never looked so inviting.

And my hunger took a turn for the worse once I took the 4th St. exit. It seemed the city streets had been taken over with rolling barbecue smoke. You could smell it in the parking lots and see it on the faces of the people, as they rotated, one foot swung after the other, back to their cars from a day spent near the pier with old friends: Pulled pork, brisket, ribs, baked beans…

Obviously, I had lost my mind. Once I reached the parking lot below the Santa Monica Pier, I pulled up at the first booth I found, Southside Market and BBQ from Elgin Texas. Their hot sausage was fresh and made with care, but it was a mere appetizer - 10 other barbecue pitmasters encircled the grounds, a great wagon chain making camp for the weekend.

(A brief note - as our annual Best of LA issue is around the corner with the definitive local BBQ pick, I decided to focus my effort and appetite on the out-of-towners.)

After being briefly distracted by Saturday's entertainment, a Beatles cover band called Ticket to Ride (who called a brief intermission to change outfits from the mod 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'-era suits to psych 'Get Back'-era neon marching band uniforms), and a stop at the beer tent to get, what else, a Bud, I decided to ask for some advice. My Granddaddy, a South Carolina native, always used to say that you could pick a good barbecue joint if you spotted some off-duty cop cars in the parking lot. In keeping with this tradition, I asked three of Santa Monica's finest which BBQ was their favorite. They all answered in unison: "L.C.'s."

Boy, were they right. If you have been quietly ambivalent about the recent falling-off-the-bone trend in ribs, take heart - there are still a few places where meaty ribs still exist. Kansas City, to name one. Guided by their namesake figurehead, L.C.'s cooks ribs with such a tough, smoky flavor that I was stuck finishing a half rack outside their tent, blocking traffic. I couldn't be bothered with finding a chair. And the sauce! As I was walking away (my mind made up, the king crowned) one of the younger L.C.'s pitmasters caught up with me to find out where I lived. "West Hollywood," I said. "We aim to have a place near you soon." It sounded too good to be true.

A few quick notes: The best pulled pork I have ever had outside the Mason-Dixon has to be from Butch's Smack Your Lips BBQ. Vegetarians could be told they were eating pillows (or maybe fluffy clouds) and they wouldn't know the difference. Absolutely sublime. But, superlatives aside, the longest line of the day had to be at the Peach Cobbler tent, proving once and for all that there is always room for dessert.

My lone suggestion for improvement: The people who put on the festival, local impresarios drink.eat.play, also run the annual Los Angeles Beer Fest, which took place a couple of months ago. Combo plate next year? We can only hope…

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine

The Man Behind The Voice - David Sedaris at Royce Hall

The most flattering photograph of David Sedaris has him in profile, a cigarette kept in reserve behind his ear. Thick smoke hangs in the air above his lips. He looks, and this is obviously the point, like a writer, fascinated and fascinating.

But Sedaris has given up smoking, so his latest official photograph is the one from his book jacket, a thumbnail headshot in which he looks like a kindly bank manager.

The two young writers who won a contest for the prize of introducing the noted author and humorist at Royce Hall on Wednesday night certainly didn't know what to expect. One refused to speak his name, referring to him instead as 'this individual;' the other introduced him as "See-dar-io-us," which rang out like the name of a Roman conqueror.

But the cheers that reverberated Royce Hall would have come whether Sedaris walked out a smoker or a banker, an American or a Roman conqueror. As is often the case, Sedaris looked like none of these. From the 7th row, he resembled a young Gene Hackman in plainclothes, ready to chase down a perp. In the time it took for the audience to register this, Sedaris walked to the podium and introduced his voice.

Yes, that voice. The voice that has become the signature voice of National Public Radio, standing at odds with every drive-time baritone rumble that has sounded out over AM and FM since the beginning of radio. Sedaris' voice that has come to define This American Life, both literally and in program. It is impossible to divorce Sedaris' voice from his writing, just as it is (almost) impossible that the same voice could be real, or could come from such a regular-looking man.

As Sedaris began to read a new piece about the 2008 election, I witnessed another marriage. To many, listening to Sedaris on public radio is, like reading, a necessarily private affair. Laughter at a well-known piece like 'Nobody Fucks With The Rooster' usually stays within the confines of one's car or cubicle. And if you closed your eyes while Sedaris read, it was just like listening to the radio in your car. That is, of course, if your car was a school bus.

Laughter rolled toward the stage from the upper balcony, along the way gathering row after row of polite chuckling from the more expensive seats. It was like watching a very erudite stand-up comic performing a one-night-run at Club Ivory Tower. Like the unsavory personalities that are Sedaris' radio competition, any time Sedaris pushed one of several keywords ("conservative," "homosexuals," "penis") the crowd, wound-up and ready for the next laugh, exploded.

But unlike the radio shock jocks, Sedaris' most impressive moments were his quiet ones. The end of a new story about an Australian Kookaburra bird turned a raucous audience silent with satisfaction at the clean craft of a well-written, well-spoken story from a now real storyteller. A face finally to accompany the voice.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://www.lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=04/30/2009

Will The Real Gary Baseman Please Stand Up?

His are the quiet drawings of saturated mascots a shade too perverse to be found in a children's book. You've probably seen his wide-eyed faces (bears, bats, and the rare bear-bat) stamped and bound in hardcover in Meltdown Comics in Hollywood or molded into designer toys at the Giant Robot in Silver Lake. You might have seen his signature, sometimes broken up into syllables in the lower-right corner: BASE-MAN.

What you likely haven’t seen is a photo of the artist himself. Like so many other modern day pop artists, he lets his work do most of the work.

That’s why getting to see Baseman at his new gallery showing at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City last Saturday was so exciting. And I wasn't alone. Between the gallery and the Carnival-esque party that filled the cleared out parking lot next door, I must have overheard a dozen guesses: Was he the man in the oversized Dunce hat? Surely nobody else would wear such a thing in public. Was he the colorful man with the scarf? The fashionable man with the upturned collar? The sculptor in the back of the party? He could have been any of them.

But when Baseman was finally introduced in front of the carnival games inspired by his art, near the fire pit burning scraps of paper on which attendees had written their anxieties, and clad in the brown robes of a monk, it was clear and without question that there stood Gary Baseman.

The aforementioned robes bore one of Baseman's sketches like a family crest and he was joined on stage by a live mascot of one of his figures, as if he had kidnapped and corrupted a character from Disneyland. Elsewhere in the party, models with rubber cartoons covering their breasts filtered through the crowd. The Culver City audience stared for a few nervous seconds before taking out their cameras to capture the spectacle, the face behind all those faces.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=05/07/2009