LA Weekly

It's stone fruit season!

Hollywood's Farmer's Market is huge, delicious, pretty easy to get to from many parts of town, and nicely scheduled for Sunday mornings.

Still plenty of this season's cherries left.

And after you've got your bags of fruit you can check in at Amoeba or join a protest in front of the CNN building.

Mr. Ha's apples. If you ever hear someone in LA really raving about how amazing an apple tastes, it's a good bet that they got it from his farm. Once I watched Mr. Ha hand feeding slices of different apples into Jake Gyllenhaal's mouth. It was, umm, strange.

More deliciousness after the jump.

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I drove by the Ambassador last night inadvertently, trying to find some way to shave a couple of minutes off of my commute. The last bit of the hotel's signage faces south-west and caught the setting sun. On the radio, commentators talked about the historic nature of Barack Obama's win of the Democratic nomination, with no mention of the anniversary that was coming the next day.

This morning, the sun remains well hidden under clouds, and work on the Central Los Angeles Learning Center was going full steam ahead. That concrete pillar marking the old driveway to the Ambassador continues to slowly crumble and lose letters as it has for years now. The news on the radio still plays snippets of Obama's speech from last night, but they're now interspersed with those chilling last lines of Robert Kennedy's victory speech from the hotel on June 4, 1968.

"My thanks to all of you. And now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there."

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The flyer from SMC Students Against Budget Cuts was impressive: A cartoon of the Guv all buffed up, standing behind a podium bearing the California state seal, while brandishing a gun. Out of the weapon's viewfinder poured the words: Hasta la Vista Education!!! Schwarzenegger's new budget will slice out $386 million from the Cal State System and $483 million from California's Community Colleges. Competitive Cal Grants – gone. Classes for 50,000 students applying to community colleges won't get their classes.

Running late last Sunday, I sped out of Hollywood around noon toward Santa Monica. A protest march would be starting to assemble just about now at the corner of Pico and Main. An hour later, they were going to March “up Main Street” to the governor's private office on 3110 Main Street.

(Photo by Andrea Zeppelli)

In Beverly Hills, Santa Monica Boulevard squeezed down to one line due to an art fair and road construction. It was about 95 degrees outside, and traffic was sailing along at about five miles per hour.

This gave me time to re-check the flyer to discover that the march was assembling at 11 a.m., not noon. Okay, I figured. These things never stick to schedule. It took 20 minutes to cross Wilshire Boulevard.

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For years now, I only remember the L.A. River clean-up the day after it happens. Wake up on a Sunday morning, and think, "It was yesterday? I missed it again!" It's not as if I couldn't go down to the river with a couple big trash bags almost any day and just cart away some of it on my own. No, no, I keep waiting for river clean-up day.

This year I was finally successful. Maybe the river has just been on my mind a lot. There was the Arroyo Seco art project that Gloria Molina had blasted away. There's been the problem of Eric Garcetti's office cutting down a lot of plants in the river in a possibly misguided effort to control growth of the bamboo-like arundo donax that Jay Babcock has been following at his Nature Trumps blog. And there was the helpful reminder before Speed Racer at Laemmle Theatres from Friends of LA River that the clean-up was Saturday, May 17.

Temperatures were supposed hit 100, so we showed up before 9 near a natural-bottom stretch of the river near San Fernando Rd. with gloves, hats and lots of water.

The very helpful FOLAR folks equipped us with bags and snacks, and sent us on our way. It turns out there was a whole grove of palm trees in the river bed giving plenty of shade, so it wasn't nearly as unbearable as we thought it might be. The trees are also good at catching a lot of the two billion plastic bags we came across.

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