LA day #2

Today... Breakfast at the Gordon Ramsay restaurant at The London West Hollywood - a beautiful room with distressed floorboards, eclectic furnishings, delicious food and great service.  I experienced Turkey Bacon for the first time and it deserves the capitalisation accorded it.  Next, Beverly Centre.  An American mall, Beverly Hills - style.  It didn't feel that much different to Chadstone, which is meant neither as a compliment to the Beverly centre or chadstone.  Picked up some pretty good trainers.

Spent the afternoon at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).  Amazing contemporary art collection in the Broad building.  Jeff Koons 'Michael Jackson and Bubbles' and the huge metal egg and balloon dog.  Lots of Jasper Johns, Rauschenbergs.  In the general collection some great Rothkos, many Picasso... an awesome exhibition of contemporary Korean art (irreverent, funny, meaningful and basically really good).  Probably the best stuff were the two massively gigantic rusted steel sculptures / installations by Richard Serra.  One of them, particularly, was an experience not soon forgotten - it was sort of a massive-room-sized rusted-steel maze - but even better.

Then back to the hotel - I'm getting more used to valet parking - then a quick change and off to Burbank for M's cousin's wedding.

The wedding was an experience. 

Met up at M's cousin's house and travelled to the wedding with the family in a stretch Hummer.  The wedding was at a weird and intensely uncool reception venue and restaurant in the Burbank hills called 'Castaway'.  Good views over LA, but otherwise almost unbelievably crap.  M's cousin (his mother is Australian and his dad is English - and he grew up in LA and is all-American complete with his own gun collection and pick-up truck) was marrying an Argentinian girl.  So the wedding comprised English cousins, Australian cousins, an Argentinian delegation and many young Angelenos.  There are few certainties in life, but I can confidently say that the fashion this summer in Burbank is for very very short, tight dresses which show as much cleavage as possible.  One (definitely underage) girl's dress was so short that her ass was on view.  Her parents were also at the wedding.  Her mother was among the many tattooed ladies, and had particularly prominent and ugly tattooes across her left breast and left upper back.  Her dress was just marginally longer than her daughters'.

M's dad was there and was definitely the life of the party.  There was a family get-together on Thursday night which we missed, and apparently he had made many friends there, so that on entry he was roundly high-fived and later in the evening was pulled onto the dancefloor by the bride.  And he was definitely a required participant in the garter-throwing (a bizarre tradition i've never previously experienced involving the groom removing the bride's garter and then throwing it over his head like a bouquet to be caught by one 'lucky' unmarried man).

The wedding ceremony lasted between 4 and 5 minutes, and was conducted by the groom's father (M's cousin's husband).  It was,  I understand, his second wedding as a marriage celebrant.  He is a bit-part actor (apparently his career highlight is a one-line part in Titanic) and struggled to give across the microphone to the bride and groom, but he managed to ensure his jokes were definitely picked up by the mic.
The groom's brother gave probably the worst wedding speech ever (and that includes E's speech at his brother's wedding where he described the bride as a fungus that had grown on the family).  The speech consisted of a long, rambling anecdote about the fact that he met his brother's bride first, as they had worked at Burger King together as teenagers.  There did not appear to be any particular point, although I wondered if he was insinuating that he'd been there first.  It was not clear.  He did, however, swear every few words and - sitting next to the groom's parents (ie. his parents) - it was fairly amusing watching them sink lower into their chairs and bury their heads deeper and deeper into their hands.  He also, for reasons which remained unclear, frequently made a farting noise into the mic.  I think he did this either before or after each time he mentioned the bride's name, but I could be mistaken.  Eventually, someone grabbed the mic off him and started another speech. 

The dancing was also interesting.  AC-DC mixed into 'Baby Got Back' mixed into Argentinian pop.  The tall, blond girl dancing next to me in the second-shortest dress of the evening somehow lost her balance and fell on her ass.  This was not particularly graceful and afforded an interesting to those who cared to look.

Overall, the wedding was an experience not to be missed.  The happy couple looked very happy and (on meeting them for the first time at their wedding) seemed very warm and full of love for each other.