Mission Mississippi: From mouth to source on a shoestring

Back in the U.S. of A, this time without a fistful of dollars. After eight months of glorious global travel our coffers are running on empty. With two months of travel ahead of us in one of the most expensive countries on our trip it’s time for a new tack: Mission Mississippi. We are going to travel from the mouth to the source of the Mississippi, with a few detours either side, spending as little money as possible.

Our first visit ten weeks ago showed us how kind and generous people can be in the States. Couch surfing and Craig’s List rideshare are our new best friends. As are all-you-can-eat buffets and thrift stores. Travelling on the cheap will not only help to spread our few remaining dollars, but will also spread the love, taking us to people and places we wouldn’t otherwise experience. We are going to milk this land of bread and honey and seize all the opportunities it affords, cheaply.

Couchsurfing is a global community of travellers and hosts connected by an almighty website and a desire to meet new people. You can search in most towns and cities and find from a handful to an army of people who are offering a couch (or bed if you‘re lucky) for free. That’s right - free accommodation! It’s a reciprocal deal and we will host travellers on our couch when back in Blighty.

Many Couchsurfing hosts are more than just a crash-pad. Like Hollywood resident and comedian Austin Blank (watch this space) who took us to hamburger joints, pizza parlours, sports and titty bars and gave us a real insight into the Los Angeles film and television industry.

Craig’s List is a list of online classified adverts where you can do pretty much anything frompurchasing a parrot to hiring a handyman. They also have a rideshare section. Not knowing what would happen we posted an ad on the Los Angeles Craig’s List asking for a lift to Phoenix. Within hours strangers were replying offering their services. We ended up in a car driven by a mouldy microbiologist (or at least the socks on the dashboard and peanuts on the car floor were moulding) squeezed in with a college student who hadn’t been to sleep that night and a retired chap called Dick.

This merry carload knew how to work the system and do it cheap. We had lunch at Costco, wandering the aisles and filling up on the plentiful tasters. We learnt how that you can just wander in to a Holiday Inn and help yourself to breakfast, whilst making the most of their power sockets and wireless internet. We were also offered a bed by kind Dick. He lived in a retirement neighbourhood surrounded by six golf clubs - a part of America we simply wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Based on these experiences I believe that Mission Mississippi will succeed. We have a few friends to stay with along the way and I look forward to meeting more through Couchsurfing and Craig’s List. Travelling on the kindness of others will be a little more challenging, a bit more Internet dependent and whole lot more fun. USA on a shoestring here we come!

Read more...

A burger of hope

They say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. If this is the case then I truly should have fallen in love with Los Angeles. Or at least one part of it - Big Irv’s.

It’s always been the goal of WISM to try the local and celebrate the differences in whatever forms they take, from food and drink to transport and hatwear.

With this in mind we couldn’t wait for the US, and Hollywood in particular. I anticipated pizza parlours and milkshakes, diners with glistening chrome counters and endless coffee refills.

But I didn’t expect Irv’s.

This may only be a burger stand but it is not any old burger stand.

In a world of the bland and the mediocre, the predictable and the corporate, Big Irv’s stands out like a beacon (or burger?) of hope.

We drove (no-one goes anywhere in LA without driving) over to Irv’s the night we arrived, the name almost shouting out at us from the list of bewildering food options our wonderful host, Austin, reeled off to us.

Austin is real food connoisseur, Hollywood-style. He’s put in many dedicated hours researching the various food emporia LA has to offer but somehow Irv’s sounded different. His eyes lit up when he mentioned the name, his lips started to glisten, and somewhere, deep down inside my belly started to rumble.

Before you could say “double cheeseburger, extra pickle” we were in West Hollywood, ‘Boy Town’ as it’s known locally, on account of the large gay population, parking up at the back in a special parking place (highly prized in LA) Austin seems to have negotiated with the owners.

We entered through the small, battered gate at the back and Austin, on first-name terms with the Korean owners, was welcomed like a member of the family. He set to work immediately, firing off suggestions to us from the board above the stand-up counter, whilst the owners effusively greeted their new English guests, fresh off the boat.

It’s an idiosyncratic place, a small, dilapidated joint crammed in amongst the drive-ins, the monstrous superstores and enormous liquor stores.

Mother, father and grandmother scurry about in a tiny kitchen facing onto the street, peering through small serving counters, surrounded by huge menus and photos of burgers, like an gastronomic art gallery.

A few stools line the counter, a few plastic chairs and tables sit under a low-slung roof. That’s it. No bright lights, no plush comfy chairs and definitely no wifi.

As we waited for our food I took in some of the many articles lining the walls, fading newspaper cuttings outlining Irv’s illustrious history.

Jim Morrison has eaten here, Hendrix chowed down, even Janis Joplin. It’s featured on album covers and hosted West Side Stories warring gangs the Jets and the Sharks (during breaks in filming).

And besides those that made it in Hollywood, it’s hosted thousands that are trying to, many of them finding a special place in their heart for this old place.

In an ocean of full of big sharks in the shape of the big chains, Irv’s is like a brave little penguin clinging tenaciously to a flimsy little iceberg, proud of its history and determined to remain.

Irv's is a real piece of Americana, that celebrated in film and fiction, a culture fast being lost to the monotonising march of modernity and the supremacy of the corporates.

It’s stood since 1946, knocking out tasty burgers and fries at affordable prices, scruffy, loveable and personal, one of the few remaining old stand-alone burger joints that used to serve the hard-pressed locals of LA.

As the times changed most of these have been swept up, bulldozed down to make way for another chain store.

Irv’s didn’t escape the developer’s attention and its owner decided to sell up, the site earmarked for a coffee shop chain.

Regulars and locals were horrified and launched a campaign to save it, sending hundreds of letters of protest to the city authorities, signing a petition in their thousands. A 'burger brigade' was formed and rallies held.

The campaign caught attention across the city and the entire country, the walls bearing testament to this with newspaper cuttings from far and wide. Even the Washington Post.

The campaign paid off and, eventually Irv’s was saved. The owners beam proudly when they told me of this success, of a community rallying together and saving a piece of their history, a continuing part of their culture.

It was time to sample this myself and I I buried my British sensibilities and dived on in: cheeseburger, chilli cheese fries (“you just HAVE to try these, maaaan”), drowned in sauce, seething with grease.

All served up on a paper plate illustrated with Mama Hong’s own personal message: “Just for you. Sugar Mommy’s one and only honey”, with a big pink love heart. Lara got one too: another love heart, a thumbs-up and the message: “Just for Miss England. US and England. Welcome to Hollywood!”

Every customer gets one of these, an enormous smile and maybe even a hug. The burgers aren’t bad, either.

Imagine a world without that.

Today a sign stands outside, put up by the city authorities: “Historic Building, 1946”. A burger joint, officially acknowledged and protected.

Only in America.

Read more...

The Industry

Los Angeles. The centre of the film and television industry, full of wanabees trying to make it big. Our couch surfing host Austin Blank, aspiring comedian (watch this space), picked us up in his car full of clown shoes, wizard hat and Father Christmas beard (fresh from Burning Man) and whisked us off to his Hollywood pad. Austin lives under the Hollywood sign in Elizabeth Taylor’s old house, the very place where Richard Burton popped the question. A most fortuitous couch surf indeed.

The Blank household is abuzz with Hollywood energy. Five guys, all busying around film studios, helping out enigmatic ‘bosses’, watching movies, partying and sharing the latest Hollywood gossip (would you believe, there is a shortage of fresh pinups). All working in menial to medium jobs in “the Industry” to pay their way and make the contacts they need to thrust their scripts/film/music ideas into the hands of the right person when their big moment arises. And it will. I’m sure at least one of these chaps will make it, and see the dreams of his personal project realised.

For us, it was a perfect insight into Los Angeles, for outside the Industry there is little else there. Aside from the famous streets and locations (Beverly Hills cop station, Rodeo Drive, Sunset Boulevard) LA is remarkably unattractive - one massive sprawl of bungalow. But the Industry is here, so people flock. Neither Austin nor his housemates particularly wants to live in LA, but the work is here and so are they, prepared for the eight year (on average) graft before they get their break.

Between the bungalows there are some exciting places: Irv's burger shack with the best chilli fries in town; Village Pizza with its chrome and neon and giant pizzas; Wang’s sports bar where well-endowed women serve pitchers of beer and bbq chicken wings while the clientele jump, whoop and high-five; and Jumbo’s Clown Bar, where it is hard to decide who the clowns are - the women in their underwear spinning around a pole or the punters throwing dollar bills at them.

We had our own taste of stardom and made our break as the studio audience of the Jimmy Kimmel Show. We were on national television on 10th December. When the camera turns from Adele to Jimmy you will see your World In Slow Motion hosts grinning inanely in the front row. The audience was not disappointing. They whooped, clapped and laughed much more enthusiastically than any British mob, so that the sign to prompt applause was rarely needed.

It seems that everyone in LA is involved in the Industry. Chatting to someone in Wang’s I enquired “So, what do you do?”. “I’m a business consultant,” she replied. I drew breathe in surprise. “For actors,” she continued. There is just no escaping it in LA and even during our short visit we got a taste of the pie. But it didn’t taste good enough to stick around.

Read more...