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I'm sitting in cafes and restaurants and public libraries alternating between two books: The X President, by Philip Baruth, and A. M. Homes's Los Angeles. A little too on the nose, as they say.

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I ate lunch, before my visit to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, at a strip mall restaurant named Vegan Tokyo Teriyaki. This is the kind of vegetarian restaurant I love, and rarely find. It doesn't go out of its way to tell you about the spiritual and nutritional benefits, if there are any, of a meat-free diet--there are a couple of pamphlets promising Immediate Enlightenment and a bumper sticker that urges "LOVE ANIMALS DON'T EAT THEM," but it's hard to think that they might be part of the restaurant's mission.

Instead, it's just a run-of-the-mill teriyaki shop, except that all the chicken and beef and shrimp happen to be pretend. Or as an orphaned footnote on the wall-size plastic menu says: "All of our food made from vegetable." And it's cheap, and it's just fine. Although I can't recommend the sushi.


What I can recommend is the museum's current exhibit, L.A.: light/motion/dreams, a much more poetic thing than I'd ever expect to find in a natural history museum.