Thursday, February 16, 2006

Pasta Place

I haven't set foot in the place for, I'm guessing, twenty years...but I still feel a sense of loss at this news: The Old Spaghetti Factory in Hollywood is closing down this summer. It's located across the street from the KTLA TV studio where I worked a lot in the late seventies. The Old Spaghetti Factory, which was then relatively new, was a good place for lunch — decent spaghetti for a decent price in fun surroundings.

The cartoonist group I co-founded, C.A.P.S., had a banquet there once and we actually had some members complaining the food was too cheap. Our first banquet was at the Sportsmen's Lodge out in Valley and some groused that the meal was poor and that it cost too much. On both counts, they were right but there was a reason. If you go into almost any hotel and book a banquet, what your group will be served will be of lower quality than a comparable meal in the hotel coffee shop, and will cost more. So after the grousing over that event, I suggested we hold a dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory. It was five bucks a head, I think, for a plate of spaghetti with meatballs, a salad and all the bread one could stuff — this was late seventies, remember — and everyone loved the food. I was just congratulating myself on my choice of venue when a group of members approached me and said, "You know, Mark — we're trying to elevate the image and stature of cartoonists, and it's kind of embarrassing for us to have our banquet in a place where the dinner is five dollars a plate." I shoved their faces in the lasagna and walked out.

The building up on Sunset Boulevard has a colorful history. It was originally the Los Angeles home of the Columbia Broadcasting System, back when it was just radio, back before they'd built a larger building a few blocks west on Sunset. (That building is also supposed to be demolished soon, I hear.) In 1935, CBS moved out and left behind all their equipment, which was then used by the new inhabitant — The Max Reinhardt Workshop of Stage, Screen and Radio. By the early fifties, it was a Studebaker dealership and then Gene Autry bought it and opened his TV-radio company there. When Autry moved across the street, it had a few short-term tenants before the Old Spaghetti Factory moved in with its unique style of interior decoration, complete with indoor train cars in which you can sit and swirl pasta.

Word is they'll be tearing the place down later this year to begin building condos, probably with retail stores on the ground floor. I don't understand this new trend in Los Angeles of erecting condominium complexes in commercial areas but I guess some people like living over a Walgreen's in a heavy traffic area.

Yes, I know other Old Spaghetti Factories dot the landscape...although the only other one I ever went to more than once, the one right across from the convention center in San Diego, closed a year ago. But the one in Hollywood was just kind of "our place," once upon a time, and I guess I'm sorry I've neglected it all these years. Maybe I can get back there for a lunch before it all comes crashing down.

(My thanks to Jim Nestler, who's a Professor of Biology at Walla Walla College in Washington, for letting me swipe the above photo from his website. When I go up to Sunset for that lunch, I'll try and take a few of my own.)

• Posted at 9:37 AM · LINK

Coming to Your TiVo

First, the good news: I am told by one of my spies that the next service release of the TiVo software will add an undelete feature. You'll get a new folder on your screen that will say "Recently Deleted" or something of the sort, and when you delete a recording, it will go there and be recoverable until its space is needed for something else. This is a very good idea. The next service release is also supposed to incorporate some Internet-type features for those of us who have our TiVos hooked up to a high-speed Internet connection. These will include getting your local weather forecast and the ability to purchase movie tickets through your TiVo.

Bad news? There's no release date yet for the Series 3 TiVos, which will work with High-Def TV. And when they do debut, they may be without the Tivo to Go and multi-room capabilities. That might make me hold off on getting one...that is, assuming they ever come out and there isn't something better out on the market by then. So far, no one's done a personal video recorder as well as TiVo but let's not forget. There was a time not so long ago when no one had come up with a better piece of word processing software than Wordstar 4.0. Then someone did.

• Posted at 3:01 AM · LINK

Greased Lightnin' Afloat

As we all know, some casinos have been established on ships in order to avoid anti-gambling laws. They take people out beyond the three-mile limit where the nearby authorities have no jurisdiction. Okay. Now, the question is can you trespass on copyright laws if you're out at sea and therefore not in some country that is bound by them? That's what a new lawsuit is going to try and find out.

• Posted at 1:01 AM · LINK