Heading over to Highland Park in order to celebrate the official launch of the 2007 Not For Tourists Guide to Los Angeles, I could not help but feel a more than a little ambivalent. On the one hand, the offer of free Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and a free NFT Guide proved tempting; however, the wording of the invite sounded just a little too-self-congratulatory: "Bloggers, you know L.A. We at N.F.T. know L.A..." As much as I like admire baseless flattery, I have never been a tremendous fan of the the N.F.T. Guides, mainly due to their too-mundane detail(do we really need to know about every laundromat in the Hancock Park area?) and their amazingly-arcane maps which frankly make the study of Egyptian hieroglyphs seem like fifth-grade material by comparison.
Anyhow, by the time I arrived, the party had been going on for two hours already, so I had to forget about the evening's main draw, a free N.F.T. Guide, a fact the doorman attempted to make up for by passing me a ticket for an extra dosage of the P.B.R, actually a good deal since I had planned on the Seinfeldian "regift" job on the N.F.T. Guide anyhow. Footsie's-known as Highland Park's local hipster dive-certainly did not disappoint, with pool matches played by people who clearly knew better than to take the often-sacrosanct rules of pool seriously accompanied by a safe, too-by-the-Hipster-Handbook dosage of seriously-muted indie rock on the jukebox, a condition that nearly-always gives me an inexplicable jones for the completely hipster-suicide, 100% KMART aisle musical equivalent of a bright green polyester Nehru Jacket-the Vengaboys("We Like to Party" anyone? No takers?). Alas tackiness 'tweren't what it used to be...
