If you’ve ever driven South on Riverside after Los Feliz, you’ve probably seen a little gas station that has been abandoned for some time. It’s gotten better and better looking, transforming from a junk shop into what now looks like it could be a pretty cool place to maybe put in a restaurant or store or something since it’s such a curious architectural base.
Well, someone thought that up already: it has been flipped into a multi-purpose event space that hosts movie nights, food truck gatherings, pop-up retail, art events, and more. It’s now being called The Service Station and it’s a pretty sweet little place that you’ll want to be visiting this Summer.
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We rarely get to “break” foodie news but today we get to do that: out in West Covina, there’s a new sushi concept that let’s you get creative with rolls. Applying a bit of a Chipotle logic and allowing you to “make your own” roll, here come’s M.Y.O. Sushi. The concept comes from Chef Michael Rome Noe who sent us a note a few weeks back and then followed up to relay information about the concept. They’ve just opened their doors today for their soft opening and we have word from Rome on where the concept came from and what you can expect.
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Like so many good things in Southern California, the California Scenario is next door to a TGIFridays. I recently made the pilgrimage to Orange County to spend the weekend with extended family, and having already visited the OCMA’s Richard Jackson exhibition and spent several misty mornings at Rudolf Schindler’s Lovell Beach House, I was looking for a new escape. That could very well have meant a trip to South Coast Plaza Mall but, thanks to a photographer friend’s recommendation, it led me instead to a hidden sculpture garden in Costa Mesa, designed by Isamu Noguchi in 1980.
Across from the aforementioned mall, the California Scenario is nested between several tall, mirrored office buildings of the postmodern variety, accessible by a pathway between the parking lot of a steakhouse and that place where you can go enjoy a Tropicalada© after you take in the art. Like so many special art experiences, this one takes some finding.
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We occasionally get notes in our inbox about curious occurrences in and around Los Angeles. A lot are fairly random or pretty bite-sized in the scale of what could be interesting to share. Other times, something is so curious that you have to dig a little deeper to get the story, to find out what exactly is going on. This is what happened with a little series of rock formations that have showed up in Joshua Tree very randomly. They aren’t Runyon Canyon rock stackings or a large scale art installation but instead are a curious combination of the two: they’re strange arrangements of fake rocks in the middle of Joshua Tree’s Keys View. What exactly does it all mean? We spoke with reader Noel Samson about the strange happening.
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Most Angelenos have some sort of vague idea of what Catalina Island is. “That’s where Natalie Wood died, right?” some may ask, attempting to locate the place in relationship to Los Angeles history. Others have spread rumors that it’s cheesy or full of older people or even simply just an island lost somewhere near Los Angeles’ Pacific Ocean: most Angelenos feeling toward Catalina is nothing more than meh at best. The vacation destination loses out to cooler locations like Joshua Tree and Palm Springs.
But who has actually been to Catalina? Have you? Ask someone near you: have they? Of the many friends and acquaintances that I have polled in the past month, only two people noted visiting the island, both of who had visited the place one time and couldn’t really weigh in on what the place was like. When we were invited to visit the island for a wildflower tour by the Catalina Conservancy, we were certainly intrigued. The island has been on our list of places to go in Southern California for years and is one of those places that needed to be explored: the oceanic veil has to be lifted so that we can all gaze upon Catalina’s face.
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