Royal Hawaiian, Laguna Beach, CA (restaurant) - Locating Tiki

B bigbrotiki Tiki Socialite Tiki Island, above the Silverlake Joined: Mar 25, 2002 Posts: 11621	B bigbrotiki Posted posted on Wed, Feb 13, 2008 9:21 AM On 2008-02-13 08:36, Digitiki wrote: I'm so upset to hear about El Chavo. My wife and I crawled over there many times after one too many at the Tiki Ti and we loved its odd/fun vibe. I know. I had to sit outside and swallow my frustration before I could go back to my friends' table and order my customary Chicken Mole. While sitting out on Sunset Boulevard, I philosophized a little about WHY it is always so upsetting to me to loose an authentic vintage place...all the while it seems to be the order of the day that these places disappear. Thinking of my friends, we all had in common our passion for mid-century modernism and the feeling of loss when a place went down, and we all had in common that we were born during that period, and grew up in it. But we also shared a common history of having separated from our parents and family by choice, either by geography (me) or by consciousness (some of my gay friends) to the degree that we really did not have a family in our daily lives. I concluded that these vintage places were a kind of a substitute for our family, a refuge which we wanted to continue to exist as something we could depend on, something with history and memory, our home away from home. Let's not get into the denial of our own mortality, and how each dissappearence of a vintage location is a little death, I don't wanna get too depressing now. :) But there still is the very real sense of the loss of quality, care, style and class that these old places contained, and that is lacking most of the time (with exceptions) in today's new places that replace them. I mean all psychoanalysis aside, that is a fact...isn't it? [ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2008-02-13 09:24 ]

On 2008-02-13 08:36, Digitiki wrote:
I'm so upset to hear about El Chavo. My wife and I crawled over there many times after one too many at the Tiki Ti and we loved its odd/fun vibe.

I know. I had to sit outside and swallow my frustration before I could go back to my friends' table and order my customary Chicken Mole. While sitting out on Sunset Boulevard, I philosophized a little about WHY it is always so upsetting to me to loose an authentic vintage place...all the while it seems to be the order of the day that these places disappear.

Thinking of my friends, we all had in common our passion for mid-century modernism and the feeling of loss when a place went down, and we all had in common that we were born during that period, and grew up in it. But we also shared a common history of having separated from our parents and family by choice, either by geography (me) or by consciousness (some of my gay friends) to the degree that we really did not have a family in our daily lives. I concluded that these vintage places were a kind of a substitute for our family, a refuge which we wanted to continue to exist as something we could depend on, something with history and memory, our home away from home.

Let's not get into the denial of our own mortality, and how each dissappearence of a vintage location is a little death, I don't wanna get too depressing now. :)

But there still is the very real sense of the loss of quality, care, style and class that these old places contained, and that is lacking most of the time (with exceptions) in today's new places that replace them. I mean all psychoanalysis aside, that is a fact...isn't it?

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2008-02-13 09:24 ]

Post #360921 by bigbrotiki on Wed, Feb 13, 2008 9:21 AM