Election day is here, and there are a lot of propositions on the ballot pertaining to LA residents. Still unsure how to vote? Rest easy. We’ve broken down some of the more important propositions for you with this printable voter recommendation checklist.

Proposition 1178: Jayburger Rising
This proposition would redistribute hundreds of thousands of dollars from the teacher’s retirement fund into a slush account for the ruins of the now-defunct Jay’s Jayburger, enabling the once-thriving steaming chiliburger shack to reopen its shackdoor at the historic corner of Virgil and Santa Monica in the shadow of a monstrous development project.
losanjealous recommends you vote: YES

Proposition 655: Thai Town Tail o’ the Pup
This initiative would ensure that in the event the Tail o’ the Pup shack closes, the monstrous hot dog facade will be installed haphazardly on the roof of Oki-Dog a la the acclaimed dog at Thai Town Express. It would also reallocate sixty thousand dollars from the children’s welfare fund into making sure the cubed onions on the dog look properly smog-thrashed, downtrodden and generally filthy.
losanjealous recommends you vote: YES

Proposition 11725: Oki Unity: Force the hand of Oki-2 to comply to Oki-1 standards of grunginess
This propostion would rein in the rogue “Oki’s Dog” on Pico blvd, requiring it to finally conform to the same levels of grunginess and creepiness as the original Oki Dog shack on North Fairfax.
losanjealous recommends you vote: YES

Proposition 786: B is the new A initiative
This proposition would require restaurants with a “B” public health rating or lower to plaster the phrase ‘B is the new A’ on the exterior of the establishment as well as the menu and all marketing and collateral.
losanjealous recommends you vote: FOR CHRISSAKES YES

Whether or not you use our guide, get out the vote!

Visit our concert calendar for a full show list, links to buy tickets and our picks.

***Recommended Show of the Week***
Broken Social Scene, Feist @ Henry Fonda
Do you know why every Canadian indie rock band has at least six members? It’s because they all play each other in an intramural hockey league. BSS, Arcade Fire, New Pornographers, Godspeed–they’re all in it. Broken Social Scene are perennial favorites, due in large part to their deep bench. See them with Feist Monday or Tuesday at the Fonda.

MONDAY
Broken Social Scene, Feist @ Henry Fonda
Wed-Rock (Margaret Cho, Yo La Tengo) @ Avalon
Liz Phair @ House of Blues
I See Hawks in LA, Chapin Sisters @ Echo (free)
Most Serene Republic @ Spaceland

TUESDAY
Broken Social Scene, Feist @ Henry Fonda
Feist @ Amoeba (free)

WEDNESDAY
Aimee Mann @ Largo
Most Serene Republic @ Silverlake Lounge
Jamiroquai @ Wiltern
Front 242 @ Avalon

THURSDAY
My Morning Jacket @ Henry Fonda
Aimee Mann @ Largo
Daniel Lanois @ Spaceland
Give Into the Groove (Chapin Sisters, Jim Bianco, Vagenius) @ El Rey

FRIDAY
Death Cab for Cutie @ Wiltern
Switchfoot, Eisley @ Henry Fonda
Slum Village @ Conga Room
Stars @ Amoeba (free)
Clientele @ Knitting Factory
Corn Mo @ Hotel Cafe
Fenix TX @ Virgin Hollywood (free)
Adult @ Troubadour

SATURDAY
Brendan Benson, Silversun Pickups @ Spaceland
Death Cab for Cutie @ Wiltern
Sounds @ Element
Beat Junkies @ Knitting Factory
I See Hawks in LA @ Hotel Cafe

SUNDAY
Brendan Benson @ Spaceland
Ex-Models @ Smell
Dressy Bessy, Cold War Kids @ Echo

Ticket Alert : Wolf Parade @ El Rey on sale now. Guaranteed sellout.

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Luer “Quality Meat” Rocket Ship, Sunland, 1955

This week’s slide, THE LUER “QUALITY MEAT” ROCKET SHIP, SUNLAND, 1955, is a one of my all time favorite finds.

Yes, I shrieked, then wept when I found it. Btw, you may find it in my latest book SOUTHERN CALIFORNIALAND: MID-CENTURY CULTURE IN KODACHROME, and many of you have seen it in the Retro Southern California Slide Show.

Luer was a meat-packing house that started in downtown Los Angeles in 1885. The 1950s era rocket ship was to them what the weenie mobile is to Oscar Meyer. It made countless appearances in local parades, super market grand openings and other civic events promoting their “quality meat” products. You could actually go inside of it.

Frankly, other than a giant toy rocket on a flatbed I wouldn’t have known what it was when I first saw it. Thankfully it’s clearly labeled “LUER QUALITY MEATS. So, that would make it the Luer Quality Meat Rocket. Right?

The color scheme is a most inspired use of two shades that always work together – custard yellow and Chinese red. They are especially effective when teamed with the ultimate space age finish – metallic silver. The cab is packed with a chauffeur and four passengers.

Two space age spokesladies and one spokesman are along for the ride. The lovely young lady upfront is sporting cowboy boots with her smart space suit. She is doing the Buck Rogers meets Roy Rogers look.

Surprisingly, fifty years later, this rocket still exists. Last I heard it’s old and weathered and sitting in a yard in Prescott, Arizona. Wouldn’t the world be an even more wonderful place if they’d fix this miracle of modernity up and drive it around once in a while?

Here’s to the Luer Quality meat Rocket and YOU!

Charles Phoenix

Visit Charles’ site, God Bless Americana, or join his Yahoo Group.

Penny Lane Records of Westwood Village, R.I.P. You served the UCLA population admirably and will be missed, but truth be told, you hadn’t resembled your true self in years. Since moving from that traincar space on Gayley to a larger storefront on a less-trafficked east-west street, you hung on to retail life in an undignified coma, reduced to peddling porn rentals in a back room to maintain a pulse at the till. But before dwelling on the sad later years, let me look back to your glory days.

In the early 90′s, there were 3 record stores in Westwood Village for the student shopper: Tower Records, in a 3-story space on Westwood Blvd; The Wherehouse, first housed at the landmark Janss’ dome building (now Eurochow), then over at the space that is now Urban Outfitters; and finally, there you were, Penny Lane, in a plum spot on Gayley alongside Village institiutions Lamonica’s and Mongol’s. Out of this trio of options, it was easy for you to stand out as the student friendly alternative choice. After all, you had the novelty of a vinyl LP section and, more importantly, you bought and sold used CDs.

Your used bin became a favorite recycling depot for the local industry and new releases turned up early, often and discounted. Your used inventory was pared down to the essentials, an assortment not as vast as Aron’s, not as haphazard as Rhino’s–just the right size for a quick regular check in. Lazy Friday afternoons without classes were dawdled away there. We placed our meager offerings upon your alter of used CD buyback for the valued store credit. You usually rejected 90% of anything we brought in and shamefully we took back the rejects of our uncool high school tastes. In consolation, you regularly let us have some free promo posters to take back to the drab dorms.

»continue reading Penny Lane Records, Westwood – A Rememberance

Before you even ask: Yes, it’s Food Friday.

The Review:

Blah blah blah Han Bat sullongtang soup Jonathan Gold recommendation Korean version of Pho simmered with bones served without them and largely fat-free, Kim Deal Soccer Mom Kurt Cobain influence. Scallions. “A” rating!

You have one option when dining at Han Bat, and that option is sullongtang. If you don’t like sullongtang, don’t come here. If you don’t know what sullongtang is, I’ll tell you now and then you can decide whether or not you should come here. Ready?

It’s soup.

Sullongtang is basically a steamy milky-white broth with a few glass noodles and whatever you choose as your main ingredient. In your soup you can have brisket, beef flank, tongue, or an intestine/tripe/spleen combo. Or the final choice: All of the above. Why anyone would order anything but the “all of the above” combo is beyond me, but there are undoubtedly tongue purists out there.

The soup’s unsalted. You salt it and add some chile paste and soon the milky color goes away and then it basically looks like a bowl of ramen.

I love scallions. It’s true. Fortunately, Han Bat delivers them in spades. You get your own bowlful right there on the table, so after you slurp the first round off the top of the broth, you can load up again. And again. They must chop the things for weeks on end. Han Bat may quite literally have more scallions than you can shake a stick at [photo], provided you bring a stick into the establishment.

For what it’s worth, I can’t stop thinking about the taste of the broth. In a good way.

More scallions with your beef spleen?

Han Bat
4163 W. Fifth
213.383.9499

Dessert idea: Run across Western and grab a pancake from Koo’s Grill outside the California Market. Delish.

Shack Time. The Original Marty’s. The three glowing reviewers over at Citysearch are my kind of people:

What users are saying
Romantic: yes

Couldn’t agree more. Hell yes a shack on the side of the street is romantic! If there’s romance in your life, everywhere is romantic. The fucking aluminum siding section of Home Depot is romantic.

Back to my review. I’ve seen people at this shack. It’s got the Vienna Beef signage ubiquitous on taverns in Chicago (usually paired with Old Style Beer signage, but this is after all a sidewalk shack and presumably alcohol-free).

I arrived promptly at 3pm on a Sunday. My weekend lunch hour. Nobody in sight. No cooks. No clients. No Vienna, No Beef. No Old Style Beer for damn sure. No hours of operation posted. One sole pigeon hanging out underneath a table in the back patio. Pigeons are a sign of a steady food supply. I stared at him. He stared at me. Neither of us were going to get anything to eat. I grabbed the pigeon, got in the car and headed east on Pico towards the boarded-up ruins of the once-majestic Mo’ Better Meatty Meat Burgers at the corner of Pico and Fairfax. I didn’t make it that far. Just past La Cienega something caught my eye, and like a dual Vienna Beef-Old Style sign in Chicago, it demanded immediate attention.

The sun beat down. I turned the car around and eased into the lot.

To Be Continued…

The Original Marty’s Home of the Combo
10558 W Pico Blvd
310.836.6944

Who says the costumed good times end with Halloween? Technically Dia de los Muertos has nothing to do with Halloween, but that didn’t stop people from dragging out their costumes one last time on November 2 to mingle with the bevy of skeletal faces at Self Help’s community Dia De Los Muertos celebration in East LA. Music, skeletons, art, $1 tamales and agua frescas collided in a true community celebration. According to this source:

The Day of the Dead is not a Mexican or indigenous version of Halloween. They have nothing to do with each other. Day of the Dead is about life and about death… about how we honor and how we remember the dead. Day of the Dead ceremonies were once part of a 20-day cycle that also recognized that the earth was about to go into repose.

Not one single dildo or pair of assless chaps in the house. Further, no sign of Abe Lincoln drinking Mai Tais, but that’s not saying he didn’t make an appearance and get his face painted all boney and deadlike for free, just like the girl in this photo. Word has it these two ladies watched an Atlanta Falcons game after the festival while the facepaint was still good to go.

On a personal note, I really enjoyed Wednesday’s festival. It managed to perfectly pair the strength of tradition with the warmth of a community celebration. No bacon-wrapped dogs, but I forgive.

Bonus Photo
A wall artist gets to work outside the stage

Monday. October 31. Halloween. What’s a good Halloween-themed lunch restaurant? Nearly all chain restaurants are scary as fuck. No thank you. Halloween needs gore. I’m headed back to the motherland for Korean Blood Sausage. Losanjealous presents another Jonathan Gold-approved gem in the heart of the city.

Smack in the middle of a ridiculously overwhelming monstrosity of a strip mall at 955 South Vermont, Ham Kyung Do can be initially difficult to find. Your eyeballs are being pulled 1,000 directions and your ears are paying attention to the small Korean woman politely telling you there’s no way you can park here, and to get lost and go park where you’re supposed to. The restaurant’s facade is literally buried behind a locksmith shack and upper-deck staircase, its signage vying for eyeballs amidst a barrage of locksmiths, threatening parking signs and amazing 80′s Nagel hairdos [photo].

Once you find the place and have legally parked, however, you’re in business. There’s no English menu but your choices are limited. This helps. I was able to get what I’d come for by mentioning the words sundae, soup, and making sure she knew we were talking about sausage when she countered with pork. In a few minutes I was all set for an incredible meal.

If you’ve ever had blood sausage or any of the richer cajun sausages, you halfway know what to expect already. If you’ve never tried blood sausages before, I would not hesitate to recommend this place as a primer.

The sausages at Ham Kyung Do are held together by vermicelli noodles [photo] and thrown into a steaming broth with a handful of scallions. Without the noodles, they’d quickly fall apart in the broth. You can salt your broth to suit using a bowl of coarse salt on the table. That’s all fine, but there’s a better method: A very small side dish was placed conspicuously near my bowl. I soon discovered why. What appeared to be teeny-tiny, industrially-salted shellfish hatchlings in kimchi paste lay hiding in the shallow saucer. Used properly, they spiced the sausages perfectly.

Should you make the journey to Ham Kyung Do, I recommend the following regimen: Rub a bit of the coarse table salt into your broth. Scoop a juicy sausage onto your spoon. Add chile paste to suit. Add scallions. Add hatchlings. Eat hella out of.

Repeat.

All this for $7.95. Los Angeles, I love you.

Ham Kyung Do
955 S. Vermont
213.388.2013

Time permitting, why not get yourself a Nagel haircut upstairs for dessert?

Reading Harold Bloom’s new book, “Where Can Wisdom Be Found?”, I decided to take James Gun, the newbie worker from Omnibus, and our twenty-something secretary to The Place for a quick lunch-hour wisdom hunt. My mind was filled with questions. Could wisdom be found in the inanity of struggled actress chatter? Could it be found in booby ogling? What is the direct comparison between Ecclesiastes and skin-tight orange biker shorts? And what can we learn, if anything, from the booby proletariat?

Shakespeare and Plato and Socrates — well, maybe not Plato and Socrates — liked to look at young nymphs in tight frocks for a myriad of reasons. Moreover, a damnable amount of the world’s most capable poetry was created to untangle bodice lacings in an atmosphere of shared passion and excitement. I concur with Bloom that such poetry serves a straight-forward, practical function, and like the Yahwist, the author of Ecclesiastes, and Cervantes, our very own Hooters of Burbank is a form of “poetry”, or “eye poetry”, that scrutinizes our racks in infinitely-recursive, self-referential celebration of the sexual identity.

It is true that Hooters, in stark contrast to Proust or Tolstoy, is a banal fish trap, an idiocy and mind-numbing conversational black-out that can barely be tolerated for one hour. And yet, when one pulls at the bra cups of this eternally unbound and unmasked meat blimp flotilla, delightfully tacky and yet unrefined Orange Pimpernels are these girls! masked by the non-threat of middle class ladder climbing and establishment through marriage to rich computer programmers. And wisdom can be found staring at their tits.

Wisdom also can be found not taking a girl with us when we go. As the Yahwist author of the Septuagint has put forth in omens and portents, girls are jealous creatures by design, and like Ogden Nash has mentioned, we crave the customary feminine attention but our food is late, we seek the close proximity of the D cups but our hostesses remain uninterested in us, we see our kitsch-choked atmosphere no longer mood-changing but imprisoning and unsatisfactory. Hell, indeed, hath no fury like a woman’s scorn.

Wisdom can further be found by not getting a grilled cheese sandwich to go for our prudish human resources officer in a box that says “Hooters” on it.

Now go back and read this article again.

Here we have a hodgepodge assortment of photos taken over the last three days. Seasonal mischief. Graveyards. Costumes. Haunted Houses. Booze. Satanism. Cross-dressers. Jacky’lanterns. Candy. Bacon-wrapped hot dogs. Abraham Lincolns drinking Mai-Tais. KCAL reporters. Everything you’ve come to love about Halloween and much, much less. Let’s begin.

Saturday
Dia De Los Muertos
Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Tinseltown, USA

Two people in a rowboat boat is just fine. Five? Five’s pushing it. Five is a number that sinks the edge of the boat precariously close to the water’s level. Five’s no good for me but five is not a problem for you five lushes.

Additional Saturday Photos
Altar
Johnny Ramone’s Grave (Dee-Dee’s was subtle)
Coffin and Miscellany
Florals
Oaxacan Psilocybin Priestess
Red Altar
I look over and over again, but they are never real nipples
Scare
Skull votives
TV dioramas (flash blessing/curse)
TV dioramas (au natural)
Votives and altar

The weekend continues after the jump.
»continue reading Photo Op: Halloween Hangover

You are Ralph Fiennes, multiple Academy Award-nominated actor and eighth cousin to HRH The Prince of Wales. You find yourself in a movie called The Chumscrubber slated for release on November 11. Rotten Tomatoes has the critics giving The Chumscrubber a 33% approval rating: Nearly completely rotten.

Forget the critics. You are Ralph Fiennes and you know this is a worthy vessel. Time to hit the promoting circuit. What do you do? Do you…

• Downplay involvement and promote your role in Harry Potter?
• Remind people of your work in the English Patient and Schindler’s List?
• Go on Oprah, jump on the couch, pound your fist on the floor, strangle Oprah and declare your love for some 19-year-old starlet?
• Call Matt Lauer ‘glib’ and change the topic?
• (other)

Send your entry to contest@losanjealous.com by November 11. Our three favorite answers win a prize package including a Chumscrubber poster signed by Jamie Bell, Glenn Close and director Arie Posen, along with temporary tattoos, stickers and an assortment of miscellany you will definitely want to keep forever.

The Chumscrubber is being released by Newmarket on November 11th.

Drawing from the overlap in a Venn diagram of my tunes and this week’s show calendar, here’s a pretty haphazard shortish mix I put together on the fly. Be warned–it has barely any Flo, much like the later seasons of Alice. American Analog Set and John Vanderslice have nice tunes in here from what I remember. I cheated a little and pulled some Harold Budd with Eno. I could have thrown on a Grant Lee Phillips song or two, I totally forgot about The Magic Numbers altogether and passed on Jon Brion for now. There’s always next week.

Here it is.

Watch the volume on some of these tracks, especially at the beginning. Some NSFW language in there too.

This mix is dedicated to all the unlicensed hot dog vendors of our city streets. ‘Spect.