Gone But Not Forgotten
Courtesy the Los Angeles Public Library, a moment of nostalgia for my brother, Kirk and Kassia, and anyone else interested.
For more heartbreak (or possibly heartburn), go here.
One restaurant unmentioned on those pages: Bruno's, on Centinela. Looked like an Italian church (or very small cathedral) inside, with an arched central nave flanked by raised aisles -- lots of marble and sculpture. Apparently closed around 2000 and converted, appropriately enough, into a church.
Unless my Google skills are fading, there's a dearth of pictures of either Bruno's or Kelbo's online. A shame -- I'd really love to see a good photographic record of the lucite kitsch wall in the West L.A. Kelbo's, which was described lovingly (if inadequately) here:
The building looked wild. It was surrounded by tikis and tropical foliage. It had murals that dated back to the late 50s depicting native chiefs and topless maidens. Men were running toward the trees carrying naked women on their shoulders, while creatures seeming to be half ape, half man, chucked coconuts at one another. Could a mere dining experience truly live up to the kind of idyllic primitivism that these murals seemed to promise? We had to see. Inside Kelbo’s was more excessive still. The ceiling was festooned with puffer fish converted into lamps. Each had a different colored light inside, and emitted a soft eerie glow. The place was very dark, and as our eyes adjusted to the darkness it seemed that every square foot of space was filled with some garish trinket or display. On a bamboo platform behind the cashier there laid a mannequin in a diving suit stabbed in the chest with a knife. There was an entire wall made of lucite, and embedded in it where hundreds of doodads from 1963, the year the wall was made. It contained an irrational assortment of items, none of which seemed to bear any relation to the others: Barbie dolls, lipstick, guns, children’s toys, even two fried eggs. How any of this related to the theme of the restaurant I couldn’t figure then and still can’t. But it was stunning, and mind-boggling, and in a lurid pop art sort of way, beautiful.
The best (only, really) picture of the wall I could find online is here. It almost completely fails to capture the magic of it.
Labels: nostalgia
posted by MeanMrMustard @ 4:05 PM
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