A Farewell to M Perched like old men on a city stoop 8-31-11 One of my favorite hangouts in Los Angeles - Dinner House M - closed a few months ago. Details here: articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/03/entertainment/la-et-dinnerhousem-20110603 When M closed I felt a bit like the way I felt when Largo closed in 2008 - like a hole had suddenly appeared in my Los Angeles where there used to be solid ground. But M wasn't Largo. You could explain and observe the special qualities of Largo easily enough (and hopefully the film I made with its proprietor Mark Flanagan does that), but M's appeal was harder to explain and less evident. Musicians performed there, yes. Some good ones and probably some great ones. But M was not an artistic salon, not a place where Los Angeles' best convened and collaborated. There were times I went there and could barely tolerate it. I remember one night in particular there was a house DJ named DJ Sleazy or something like that (a fact-checking Google search turns up several variations - Sleazy E, Sleazy D, Sleazy Deazy and Sleaze & Teaze, but no plain old DJ Sleazy). I don't generally like house music and am therefore biased against DJ Sleazy. But apart from the music, his crowd was all meathead. I remember sitting at my usual spot at the bar when a meaty arm draped across my shoulder. I looked up to see a sweaty bro towering above me, my wallet in his hand. He handed it to me and said, "Here's a tip for you: never leave your wallet on the bar, because anyone can snatch it up just like that." Then he smiled and patted me on the back. I said thanks because I'm polite but if I weren't polite I wouldn't have thanked him; I didn't appreciate his tip. For me, M was a place you could leave your wallet on the bar. But not always. And that's as good an example of M's chief virtue as any other I can think of: as scene-y as it could sometimes be, it was not home to any particular, specific scene. There were meatheads, hipsters, hip hop kids, jazz fans, gangster types, tourists staying at the Knights Inn next door, young, old, Asian, Latino, white, black, straight, gay, bi; on certain nights it was a fantastic cross-section of Los Angeles' cultural diversity, lacking only the Beverly Hills and Hollywood types whose presence I didn't miss at all. The last night I was there - June 3 - I told Miki (the proprietress; more on her in a moment) that the crowd was the most diverse I'd seen in all of Los Angeles. She said, "Really?" in a completely indifferent tone, then turned her attention elsewhere, as if she'd never given it any thought and never would. As the LA Times article details, Miki was a jazz singer, and I did see her sing a few times, but mostly I saw her as a fierce businesswoman. She was friendly and social, but there was a hardness to her. Watching her patrol the place with vigilant poise there was never any question that, like any good small business owner, her mind was always on the bottom line. I played piano in a band that performed there twice. The first time we played it was packed and we were a big hit and Miki was happy. The second time, many months later, hardly anyone showed up, and Miki called to berate me about it in the middle of our show - "Andrew, did you promote? You have to promote!" I don't know if Miki shares my distaste for house music (I can't imagine she likes it much considering her jazz background), but the house nights were always packed to the brim, so now, with M closed, Miki is putting on one-off events at different places around downtown, and they're always house music events. I think the two best things any kind of hangout establishment can do are seemingly contradictory: to make you feel at home or to make you feel like a tourist in your own city. I'm not sure how exactly - though undoubtedly it had something to do with the big, soft couches, low light, late hours and the aforementioned diverse crowd - but somehow M managed to accomplish both for me. A few memories: * Perching at the back of the bar with a friend on busy weekend nights watching - and occasionally commenting on - the patrons, like two old men on a city stoop. * Sitting at the bar around 8pm by myself, eating a bowl of noodles in broth, the only person (besides the bartender) in the whole place. * Being there around 3am when Rampart Division cops stormed in, made everyone wait while they searched the place, then kicked everyone out, citing the serving of alcohol past 2 as the reason. Regarding Miki's assertion in the LA Times article that that never happened? Well, let's just say that that's unquestionably true. * Meeting a girl named Jackie, her sister and their friend Ricky - mildly gothy Mexicans all - who, one night around 2ish, invited my friend and I to an after-hours club their friend ran. Up for an adventure, we got in the back seat of their car and rode to South Central, listening to a Bauhaus CD and Ricky, seated next to me, talking about "chunts" - a word he defined as "Mexican shoegazers" - along the way. We parked on a desolate block of nondescript warehouses and waited for their friend - Danny - to come down from one of them and let us in. After a long wait he did and, before letting us in, subjected my friend and I to heavy scrutiny - "Are these guys cool? They better be cool. I just want to make sure they're cool." Jackie vouched for our coolness, so Danny let us in, leading us through a small hallway into the "club" proper: a concrete-walled room with an empty, ramshackle stage and darkwave music videos projected on a wall. An extremely tall girl was dancing by herself in the middle of the room, the sole patron of this club besides us and Danny. We later learned, by talking to her, that she was crazy and/or heavily intoxicated. There was a minibar in the corner of the room so I asked Danny if I could have a drink. He made me a Jack and Coke, then asked me if I would be paying with cash or credit. Paying? Credit? In this place?! Unfortunately I didn't have any cash on me so I went with credit. Danny took out a clipboard and wrote down my card info. A few days later a $40 charge showed up on my card. My friend and I took a taxi home around 4. We stopped at a McDonald's drive-through on the way. Our taxi was a van with a sliding side door. When we pulled up to the food window we threw the door open and I felt like we were commandos leaning out of a helicopter about to machine-gun the McDonald's. Instead we politely took our Happy Meals and ate them the rest of the way home. * Spending a birthday night there with a few friends. At some point a breakdancing competition broke out, probably inspired by the hardcore old-school hip hop sounds of DJ Miyuki (who also worked at M as a bartender). The best of the breakdancers were M regulars I'd seen before - twins who both looked a lot like Slash from Guns N Roses. On this night they were both wearing T-shirts with pictures of Slash on them. I am not making this up. This, maybe more than anything else I've mentioned here, exemplifies why I loved and miss Dinner House M - because I could show up on any given night and it wouldn't be too absurd to expect to see something like Slash lookalike twins wearing Slash T-shirts dominating a breakdancing competition. I don't want to overstate the significance of M in either my life or Los Angeles life in general. Though it had been around for more than two decades I'd only found out about it a couple years ago. Now that it's gone I'll find other places to spend nights with friends, and M is unlikely to be remembered in the city's cultural history. But that's exactly why I wanted to write this: to memorialize, in a personal way, a place that most Angelenos didn't even know existed. There it was, barely discernible on a liminal block near downtown, Westlake and Echo Park, tucked back, out of sight and quietly extraordinary.
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