Mandrake’s Rocks

Mandrake’s Rocks

There’s a barely noticeable bar in the middle of a one block stretch of La Cienega between Washington and Venice Boulevards where the two are almost close enough to hold hands.  The block is full of contemporary art galleries – ten of them in all – and not one of them schlocky or touristy.  That’s a lot of serious galleries for one block in any city.  The bar presents itself to the street with one of those seemingly characterless facades behind which anything could be happening.

Proportioned like the end of a shoebox, it’s covered in rough textured white plaster.  To the facade’s right side, there’s a frameless quadrangle of glass block through which nothing of the interior can be discerned.  As far to the left as it can go, a recess about the size of a telephone booth breaks into the otherwise flat plane of the facade to offer access to a sturdy steel door with its own small glass window.  It also reveals nothing of what’s inside.  For outdoor signage, there’s no visible ID anywhere, just the street address near the roof line and, near the door, a small white neon sign that spells out “bar.“

I was confident that I’d found the place I was looking for but it was closed.  All I could do was look at it from the outside, which turned out to be a more interesting experience than I would have thought.  The design of its few elements revealed a subtlety, a minimalist sensibility, that made me wonder whether this was conscious design and not just an accident of a history that was probably fifty or sixty years old.

In large part because I was just standing there on the sidewalk thinking architecturally and designerly, my attention was drawn to a large patch of greenery in front of the bar.  I soon realized that this patch of greenery was just about the only and certainly the biggest and most verdant green patch anywhere on this part of La Cienega, which is otherwise lined by utterly unimaginative ficus trees poking out of the sidewalk at regular intervals with their dense leafy canopies totally obscuring anything and everything behind them.

This green patch consisted of roughly 50% beautifully luxuriant and well fed crab grass and 50% lush tall beach grasses waving and blowing in the early afternoon’s light breezes.  The crab grass could have grown there by accident, but not the lush tall grasses.  The same, too with the third element of this green patch: a group of larger and smaller rocks informally piled together amidst the crab grass at the northern end of this landscape.

Clearly this was a well and thoroughly designed place, though it doesn’t look like it until you look at it.  It made me like the place already, even though I hadn’t been inside because it was closed.

Only later did I learn that the design of the place was intentional in every aspect – except for the rocks.  I learned that the first and largest of the rocks had just shown up one morning shortly after the green patch had been planted with its lush tall grasses; and that all the other rocks had just shown up in the same way thereafter, as if they’d followed the big one – one at a time.

I also learned that the name of the place is Mandrake.  I learned other things, too.  For example, I learned that the story of the rocks that I was first told and that I’ve written about here is incorrect, except for the part about the first and the biggest one.

 

(More about Mandrake and its rocks to come later.)