Local Intelligence: Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles

Jean Therapy: Paige Premium Denim is just
one of the celebrity haunts on Robertson
Boulevard in Los Angeles.

By Nandita Khanna

When I'm traveling it's not the guidebooks that I turn to, or even the area magazines (but I do buy them)-- it's the locals. Who knows where to eat, sleep, and hang out better than those who call the city home? Earlier this spring I headed to Los Angeles on assignment for the magazine's 20th anniversary issue. While I'd like to think I know the city well--I grew up there-- much like New York, things change in the blink of an eye. And while I insist that In and Out Burger is still the best place in town to grab a bite, I invited these three trend-setting women below--all of whom have taken up post on perpetually packed Robertson Boulevard--to share their favorite secrets and tips in the City of Angels.

The Velvet Rope

The day before the Materialist and her family left for Kyoto, there was an article in the Daily Yomirui, one of Japan's English-language dailies, about a battle between two brothers.

Here's what happened: there's a store in Kyoto called Ichizawa Hampu (Higashioji-dori Furumonzen [Chion'in-mae] Agaru, Nishikawa, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto; 03-75-541-0138), which makes sturdy and plainspoken hemp bags in various butch-chic colors: gray, olive, navy, black. After the patriarch died, the company passed to his third son, Shinzaburo. But then Shintaro, his older brother, contested the will. The case went to court, Shintaro won, and Shinzaburo started his own company, Ichizawa Shinzaburo Hampu, earlier this year. It was like Rashomon as chronicled by WWD. The best part? Not only was Shinzaburo making essentially the same product--though his bags reportedly had a more updated silhouette, as well as a broader and peppier palette--but he'd opened his store almost directly across the street from the mothership. According to the article, the battle had sparked something of a frenzy, and every morning, long lines (sometimes up to 100 people) gathered outside both stores, waiting to get in. This was something the Materialist had to see.

Consumed

Over the years, the Materialist's father's enthusiasms have turned to many things, and places, and people. What appears at first to be a harmless affection for a certain diva, say, or city, can deepen into something closer to an obsession, often without his family noticing until the consequences of his adoration begin to affect them. The Materialist's father has, at various points in his life, been besotted with the Germans, Los Angeles, David Hockney, Robert Adams, Maria Callas, Renee Fleming, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and, most recently, the Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki.

Araki is a member of that great generation of Japanese postwar photographers whose pictures capture that period of modern Japan's most profound metamorphosis, those frightening and fragile years in the late forties through the fifties and early sixties, when everything the country was, and had thought of itself, was suddenly made to change. Their collective images chronicle a Japan so different than the one we think of today that they seem to belong to another world altogether: of filthy orphans, their faces already hard and brown as adults', smoking cigarettes by a curb; of a group of defeated middle-aged men and women, their clothes so shapeless it's difficult to tell one gender from the other, lining up for work; of a mangy dog, its fur oily, its eyes gleaming, its fangs bared, caught wandering the streets of Tokyo. Along with Araki, there was Daido Moriyama, Masahisa Fukase, Ihei Kimura, Shomei Tomatsu, Shoji Ueda, and many, many others, some of whom have become internationally renowned, and others of whom have receded from public memory.

Stop and shop

When on family trips, there is always one leader. On this trip, the Materialist was meant to be that one leader. She set the agenda. She read the maps. She dictated when, and where, people could go. (All while trying desperately to ditch them at every step.) But while the Materialist's mother and brother were happy to follow protocol, trailing after the Materialist through subway stations and down twisty streets, as obedient as small white dogs, the Materialist's father instead attached himself to her side, contradicting her every move. The Materialist's father likes to say that surgeons (with whom he has some experience) are "not always right, but always certain"--the same, however, must be said for him. If the Materialist said, "OK, let's catch the Chuo line to Kanda and then pick up the Yamanote," the Materialist's father was right there to say, "But why can't we just take the Chuo to Tokyo station and then walk from there?" If the Materialist said, "Let's stop by the hotel and drop off our stuff, and then we'll go off to Mandarake before it closes," the Materialist's father would say, "What? It won't close now! It'll be open another few hours at least!" If the Materialist said, "You can all go to hell in a handbasket," the Materialist's father would say, "But I think if we went by plane it would be much faster, and a more pleasant ride besides."

Superfreaks

Did you miss the Materialist last week? DID YOU? Don't lie. It's very nice of you to make the effort, but the Materialist is well aware that her readers were too busy stuffing their craws with turkey and stuffing to notice her infrequent posts.

Well, the Materialist has a good explanation for her silence--she was (as promised, and promised, and promised) in Japan on her annual trip to visit her favorite city, Tokyo.

But is your favorite city still your favorite city when seen with your entire family in tow? The Materialist has visited Japan with her mother, and with her father, but never with the two of them at the same time, not to mention her brother as well. In the months before the trip, the Materialist's personal terror alert never fell below orange, especially after her parents informed her that all four of them would be sharing one room, and the Materialist and her brother a double bed, a bit of enforced incestuousness that was making the Materialist, ever slow to the wallet, begin seriously considering checking herself into the Park Hyatt, alone, her bank account be damned.

Nobody's business but the Turks' (Istanbul, Part 3)

"Take a raincoat," said Esin, the day before the Materialist's departure. "October is rainy in Istanbul. And chilly. In fact, it'll probably be pretty bleak." She sounded and looked quite cheerful at the prospect, as if the gloominess the Materialist would inevitably encounter while on vacation would be somehow a fulfillment of all of her hometown's best worst qualities.

The Materialist, who very much likes and respects Esin, nevertheless took this with a grain of salt. Esin is, after all, a photo editor at a travel magazine, and Turkish, and is therefore given to both pessimism (especially about the weather) and hyper-preparedness, though the Materialist will leave her readers to decide which part of her identity is responsible for which attribute.

She decided to leave the raincoat behind.

The Gold Coast (Istanbul, Part 2)

On her flight from London to Istanbul, the Materialist watched with bemusement a certain type of traveler who has always remained something of a puzzle to her-the procrastinator. Travel procrastinators are the sort of people who board the plane with a thick brick of a guidebook in hand and good intentions, only to promptly fall asleep the second they sit down. An hour before touchdown, they wake, frazzle-haired and gummy-eyed, whereupon they start frantically paging through their Lonely Planet or Rough Guide, turning their last minutes into a frenzy of folding down corners and highlighting in a desperate attempt to get some sort of handle on the city in which they're about to find themselves.

The Materialist is not this kind of traveler. Nor, should it be said, are any of her colleagues at CNT, whose months-long planning and scheming before even the most minor of trips is either admirable or irritating, depending on how you see it. So, in true CNT fashion, the Materialist several months ago wandered into her colleague Kevin's office to (as she sometimes does) shoot the breeze, complain, and, most important, ask him if he had any tips about Istanbul, specifically, about the Grand Bazaar.

Kevin, whose feelings for Istanbul mirror the ones the Materialist has for Tokyo-that is, love, admiration, wonder, and not a little possessiveness-frowned. It turns out that he was working on an exhaustive piece in which he would decode the Grand Bazaar, and was worried the Materialist planned on beating him to the punch. After the Materialist assured him she had no such intentions or desires, Kevin's face cleared, and he went on to offer the Materialist all sorts of useful advice about the Bazaar in particular and Istanbul in general.