Santee Alley in Los Angeles is a trove of trashy lingerie, tube socks, prom dresses, and skin-tight jeans. May this be on your list of places “to see” when in LA next. It’s also not too far away from here, which is a whole other world entirely.

Since I moved just over a week ago, the forgotten drek has bubbled to the top—and what treasures I’ve been finding! There are countless disks of music and images, of course, not all labeled. So I treated myself to a few hours of leisurely browsing of old data, old files, hard drive backups, long lost albums. The image above was taken from the showroom I worked at in the Cooper Building on Ninth and Los Angeles Streets in downtown Los Angeles. Being in that part of LA for a few years was an education about my hometown. It’s the oldest part of the city and a wacky convergence of all sorts of people and industries and architecture. It’s the closest LA could ever come to New York, because the haves and the have-nots all sort of coexist there.

More often than not, when I’m talking to my mom on the phone, my niece Siena can be heard in the background, whether she’s stomping around in her “high” heels or making her usual brand of ruckus with her pink Little Tykes car. Generally, she’s not much of a phone girl, but I was lucky last night, because she was grabbing for the phone, saying, “I want to talk to Auntie.” Here’s the gist of our conversation:

Siena: Auntie, auntie, I want to ask you something.
Auntie: Okay, what do you want to ask me?
Siena: Um, um, well, what was the question?
Auntie: I don’t know, Siena, you were going to ask me.
Siena: Okay, bye.