Mixed messages at Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles. What’ll show up there next? Your guess is as good as ours.

Untitled #1, from the Freeway Series by Catherine Opie

“Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour. Normandie 1/4 Vermont 3/4 Harbor Fwy I. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.”

— Excerpted from Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

Buildable creatures and implements from Assembly Design, available at Otherwild, one of our very favorite shops in LA.

Family friend Eric Grebe used to work the door at Ace Hotel New York until life grabbed him and told him to go West, young man. If you’ve stayed with us, chances are you remember him. He’s the deceptively doe-eyed fellow “who looks exactly like Keanu Reeves (circa Point Break),” says Fast Company. And if you miss him, we know how you feel. But rest assured he’s okay, riding waves and working through his New York jones with collage therapy. Soon enough, we’ll open an outpost in his adopted neighborhood and he can grace us with his hangdog smile any time he’s not staring down a barrel wave till it raises the white flag.