Sunday afternoon I headed to the LA Auto Show with some other supposed car fanatics. The show was a bit lackluster this year, attendance was definitely down from four years ago. The GM part of the show floor was almost eerily vacant and quiet, the lights were even dimmed as if to magnify the sense of impending doom. There were few concept cars and the ultra luxury/sports cars on display were mostly roped off. Kind of silly considering I could just drive to Beverly Hills and walk past any of these cars and smear my paws all over them…for free.

The Mercedes booth had some weird concepts like this PT-Cruiser Convertible -ish thing.

The Honda booth had an all-white kinda weird concept car. The car looked like a backwards plastic beer bottle robot.

Various automakers had displays with hosts espousing the values of the car/s. For instance Buick had a guy hawking the merits of their Chinese designed Riviera concept. GM had a Hybrid Silverado on display. This guy was trying the best he could, but nobody was paying attention. And I mean- nobody. (I should have taken a picture of the regular “talkies” which had throngs of people surrounding the car/s for comparison)

Down in the aftermarket section we found this thing. There were brochures with the “Intimate” proclaiming its great design was the result of hiring away a “top” GM designer. The brochure (clearly printed from Microsoft Word on the office B&W inkjet at best) also proclaimed the car was “luxurious.” Take one look at this interior shot and I’m sure you’d agree..

read more about the intimate here

After the show I headed to West Hollywood to meet Cindy to see Azure Ray. Azure Ray went out of business four years ago and decided to reunite at the Troubadour for one show only. I have no idea why, and they didn’t explain it during the show. We had ordered our tickets long ago through the fax method (this negates all the BS ticketmaster fees). When we picked up our tickets we were told “and here are your VIP lounge passes.” We looked at each other – “what? VIP? huh?”

The Troubadour is a very small bar. I would say only 200 people at maximum could fit in the whole club. I know the upstairs balcony had a maximum of 44 souls. We thought the balcony was the VIP section – as the bouncer had said “upstairs.” We went up – found it crowded and went back downstairs. We stood at stage right for a little while during Tim Kasher’s set. Then we saw a window on the second floor. We wondered if this was actually the VIP section. We explored and found a stairway to the left of the stage with an 8.5×11 “VIP Lounge” print out. We showed our passes and hopped up to the lounge. You couldn’t really hear the music from up there – but for the time being this was a good thing as Tim Kasher was quite miserable – a man and his guitar whining about monogamy (“monogameeeeeeeeee!”). The lounge was dark, black and dirty. It was about the size of a large living room with windows looking out at Santa Monica boulevard and a small bar at one end.

in the shot below you can see where the lounge is in relation to the stage:

I added an arrow pointing towards the lounge window.

and below you can see the view of Tim Kasher from the lounge window.

I put an arrow to show where we’d end up watching Azure Ray.

Azure Ray took the stage early around 10:00 (they were listed as 10:15). I was surprised at how young they looked, and also how skinny they were. They looked like the typical waify college (or drop-out) “hipster” girls you see at shows in Silverlake, complete with tight short sleeveless faux-60s dresses with belts. They played a lot of songs off of their debut album. The girls also played one of each other’s solo songs. Although the quiet “dream pop” sound didn’t translate easily on certain songs, the performance was very good. The singing was good and the reproduction of songs they hadn’t played in four years was nearly seamless. During the break of every song someone in the audience would scream “November!” November had always been my favorite song of theirs and apparently I wasn’t alone.

The encore consisted of about four songs – with November capping the night off and satisfying the crowd (who, like me, probably came specifically to hear that song). The “cello” part was created by having a third guitar player use an e-bow. I wonder if this was a stage recreation or if this is how the song was done in the studio.

This shot was taken during the “doo-do doo-do doo-do doo-do doot-do” part of November (this is the only part that Orenda sings in the song).

The show was over by 11. Cindy said “they played a lot of songs, dude.” I measured the performance in minutes, not songs. By the minutes they’d only been on stage maybe 50. By songs I suppose they played many – but each Azure Ray song is between 2 and 4 minutes. It was nice that they played most of the songs off of their debut, which was really the only album I was familiar with. At one point their bassist/rhythm guitarist was allowed to play one of his own songs. Cindy said he sounded like a James Blunt (or was it Jason Mraz?) rip-off. I’m proud to say I haven’t listened to enough James Blunt to notice.

Earlier I had tried to park on the left side of Doheny, when a parking officer (actually helpful instead of writing a ticket) informed me that Doheny was the dividing line between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood (the transition from gay money to REAL money) and everything west of the double yellow line was permit parking. Hollywood parking is usually atrocious, but north of Santa Monica boulevard a permit (on the east side of Doheny) is not required, making parking much easier than I anticipated. I had used up all my cash on the auto show entrance (why did they take credit cards for parking, but not for convention center entrance?) and had been worried about parking later.