James Bartlett

Tonga Hut

See also:
*4 a.m. Last Call for Alcohol Proposed For Calif. Clubs by Sen. Mark Leno
*Top 10 Bars With the Hottest Women in L.A.
*10 Bars Most Likely to Get You Laid in L.A.

The rules state you have a calendar year to complete the task. Amos Clarke is nine months in, "but I've only been making serious inroads over the last couple of months," he says. Tonight, he's at the Tonga Hut on Victory Boulevard in North Hollywood — and down to the last five drinks on his "Grog Log." The log, which looks something like a treasure map, features 78 cocktails, and once Clarke crosses the last one off the list, he'll be inducted as a member of the prestigious Loyal Order of the Drooling Bastard.

Clarke, who just turned 50, is a Brit who came to L.A. in 2004 "to follow in the footsteps of Charlie Chaplin, work in the glorious local conditions as a television director of photography, and seek fame, fortune and love." He has worked on a number of reality TV shows (Ice Road Truckers, Wicked Tuna, Storage Wars), but tonight he's with his "beautiful young bride, Julissa." Dressed in a red-flowered Polynesian dress with a flower in her hair, she's his supportive witness — and ride home — after his moment of "infamy."

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Courtesy of Dave Welch

Cicada Club

See also:
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying
*10 Oddball L.A. Museums Worth Seeing
*10 Places in L.A. to Draw Nude Models

Coffee dates are the worn-in blue jeans of the dating world: about as unoriginal as a third date at a sushi bar, but still used as the comfortable, familiar fallback of choice for an outing you've been on more times you care to admit. You (and the person you're meeting) can do better. Los Angeles has other, sometimes just-as-affordable locales to get to know a potential new paramour.

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Jon Haynes Photography

I'm just going to have one more beer and I'll still be good to drive, right?

Car culture was the last element I embraced in my new life as an Angeleno. The first few months I lived here, filling my gas tank made me physically ill. The cost! The fossil fuels! The hours spent in traffic! I may have cried about it once or twice, alone in my sad sublet behind one of Silver Lake's six thousand hair salons.

Three years later, I relish surface-street shortcut strategies just as much as I once relished plotting how best to escape my high school's Bronx campus to sneak down to IHOP during assemblies, and I crave Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne on my morning commute just as much as I once craved a novel or a newspaper.

And yet I still cannot stomach the casual ubiquity of drunk driving in this city. I see it every weekend among friends, acquaintances and strangers. The stammering insistence that you are cogent. The shrug showing you believe there is no alternative. The sloppy slip into the driver's seat.

Over a thousand Angelenos got DUIs the week of July 4th. Seriously, Los Angeles. We need to talk. Why must you weave a dangerous game of Russian roulette along the freeways and boulevards every weekend?

I have a few theories.

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Simone Paz

Diana Lado

As Diana Lado takes a shallow drag from the cigarette she bummed outside Palihouse in West Hollywood, I ask her why Lindsay Lohan doesn't just get her own apartment. Lohan has recently been kicked out of the Chateau Marmont, and when I met Lado at the Chateau a few days prior, she'd called the place a favorite hangout. I figure she might know.

Her bright green eyes flash in my direction. She probably does know. But Lado simply says, through a sultry Castilian accent, "Lindsay is a very, very nice girl."

Lado knows better than to gossip with me. That wouldn't be good for her image, and her image is everything.

Diana Lado is a socialite. At least, that's how her publicist, Laura Gimbert, initially refers to her. But it's not exactly what Lado, who's in her late 20s, calls herself. Like "hipster," "socialite" is not a label anyone uses reflexively.

Instead, Lado's business card from Freixenet sparkling wine identifies her as a "Brand Ambassador and Cool Hunter," terms equally vague but perhaps more professional-sounding.

Essentially she's a spokeswoman for the cava maker, but certainly not the kind who wears a company T-shirt or hands out coupons. It's more that she's the coolest girl in the room, and she drinks Freixenet. And Freixenet hopes that enhances their brand.

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Photo courtesy of Handsome Coffee Roasters

Handsome Coffee's Michael Phillips

In a city known for its casual dress, someone wearing suspenders and a tie can stick out like a sore (but dapper!) thumb. Especially if that person is not, say, a lawyer or an actor on his way to an audition to play Butler #1 but instead the person behind the counter at a coffee shop.

The nicely dressed barista is not a new thing, it's not going anywhere, and it's seen more at smaller independent shops than at their uniformed polo/apron corporate counterparts.

Perhaps the shops most notorious for their sharply dressed workers are Intelligentsia Coffee and Handsome Coffee Roasters, with employees often donning a button-down shirt, tie, vest and maybe even a 1920s flat cap and an elaborate moustache here and there. It's a look inspired by another time. A time when flip-flops were only found on the beach, you dressed up for dinner, and Spandex was years in the future.

So is this a dress code, or do Intelligentsia and Handsome just hire nostalgic individuals who love a pair of suspenders as much as they love roasting coffee?

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James Flames

Artist James Flames designed Brouwerij West's first label for the Tripel brew.

Beer talk runs the gamut from the frat-boy refrain "Beer is beer" to craft beer enthusiasts sparring in fermentation terminology. If there is any "art" to the drink, it lies within the bottle, and rarely will the conversation veer to what's outside it: the label.

"It's not like you can open up the beer and try it in the store. So what is that other thing that's going to make them buy it? It's the visual aspect," says James Flames, the artist who designed the label above for L.A.-based microbrewery Brouwerij (a Dutch word pronounced like "brewery") West. "I look at rows and rows of labels, and it's a real feast for the eyes. Like being in the world's smallest gallery where all the artwork is squished together."

Flames' design for the Tripel brew -- as with all of Brouwerij West's upcoming labels -- is more artfully conceived than many of the other hops-and-grains, typography-heavy, St. Pauli girl-style or simply bizarre labels that tend to dominate the beer shelves. To avoid this worn-out iconography, Brouwerij owner Brian Mercer has given all the artists on his roster almost total creative freedom.

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James Flames

Artist James Flames designed Brouwerij West's first label for the Tripel brew.

Beer talk runs the gamut from the frat-boy refrain "Beer is beer" to craft beer enthusiasts sparring in fermentation terminology. If there is any "art" to the drink, it lies within the bottle, and rarely will the conversation veer to what's outside it: the label.

"It's not like you can open up the beer and try it in the store. So what is that other thing that's going to make them buy it? It's the visual aspect," says James Flames, the artist who designed the label above for L.A.-based microbrewery Brouwerij (a Dutch word pronounced like "brewery") West. "I look at rows and rows of labels, and it's a real feast for the eyes. Like being in the world's smallest gallery where all the artwork is squished together."

Flames' design for the Tripel brew -- as with all of Brouwerij West's upcoming labels -- is more artfully conceived than many of the other hops-and-grains, typography-heavy, St. Pauli girl-style or simply bizarre labels that tend to dominate the beer shelves. To avoid this worn-out iconography, Brouwerij owner Brian Mercer has given all the artists on his roster almost total creative freedom.

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Photo by Calvin Lee

Main course inspired by Ed Ruscha's painting LACMA on Fire

"You screwed up," chef John Rivera Sedlar told Getty curator Andrew Perchuk in the months before Pacific Standard Time began. The sprawling, Getty-funded celebration of postwar SoCal art should have included food. But Perchuk, already working to facilitate exhibitions at 60-plus institutions and organizing his own show, felt he had plenty to worry about besides appetizers and entrees. Later, though, after the frenzy surrounding PST's launch subsided, he decided Sedlar was right: PST should include food.

After all, didn't gallerist Everrett Ellin open the Chez La Vie café beside his original West Hollywood gallery in 1958, to serve the art-viewing public? Didn't dealer Virginia Dwan install working fountains by sculptor Jean Tinguely in homes of collectors before hosting a progressive dinner, plying guests with Champagne as they bussed from house to house? And hasn't Al's Café, the 4-month-long pop-up restaurant artist Al Ruppersberg staged in 1969, where he sold plates of art rather than food, become almost mythic for the way it made conceptual art a social experience?

The official PST menu, which debuted Saturday at Sedlar's year-old West Hollywood restaurant Playa and will be available to all diners starting Tuesday, Feb. 7, is far sleeker, honed and literal in its approach to food-as-art than anything I imagine Ruppersberg, Ellin or even the posh Dwan served when they dabbled in dining years ago.

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Carol Cheh

Night Gallery in Lincoln Heights, where artists come for their after-hours nightcap.

We all know that a good drink -- or two, or three -- sometimes help to make high-minded cultural events somewhat more, let's say, palatable. Or it's a good way of convincing your friends to come along to the gallery exhibit you've been meaning to see for months. Either way, L.A. is a city where cocktails and culture are ideally matched, and our Best of L.A. issue happens to have a few suggestions as to where to find the best combination of drink and art in town.

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Nanette Gonzales

Breakfast for dinner

Also check out our slideshow by Nanette Gonzales on The Pancakes and Booze Art Show
Some gallery owners organizing a show might draw inspiration from their college degrees in art history. But when Tom Kirlin curated his first art show, he was inspired by college memories of drunken pancake breakfasts.

Three years ago, Kirlin, a 33-year-old Arizona native, was working in Hollywood as a cameraman when he rented a warehouse downtown and threw an art, alcohol and pancake party for an artist friend.

"It was something that I always did in college," Kirlin says. "You'd go out and drink all night long, and then the only place that's open for 24 hours is IHOP."

The Pancakes & Booze art show, billed as the largest underground art show in Los Angeles, takes place locally about once every three months now. The latest installment, a "Best of" show representing over 100 Pancakes & Booze artists, happened this past weekend.

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