Indie-Rock Bakery

Mike Anton takes a ride on the Blue Line.

The Metro Blue Line cuts up the middle of Los Angeles County, from Long Beach to downtown, like a surgical incision, exposing an element of the metropolis many never see.

In a place dominated by freeways and the automobile’s numbing isolation, the 22-mile light-rail line—the oldest in L.A. County, marking 20 years of service this summer—is a rolling improvisational theater where a cast of thousands acts out a daily drama that is by turns poignant, sad, hysterical and inexplicable.

When Jeffrey Deitch takes the helm Tuesday as MOCA’s fourth director in 30 years, he’ll face the problem [of declining attendance]. If I were him, I’d do two things fast: Change the museum’s operating hours and drop the general admission price, from $10 to zero.

Meet Doug Quinn, the man behind the bar at P.J. Clarke’s, in New York.

He remembered what my companion and I were drinking, even though we had ordered just one round so far, and there were at least 35 people clumped around the bar on this early May night, and he was dealing—alone—with all the tickets from all the servers in the adjacent dining rooms, and he wasn’t writing anything down, not that I could see.

He packs a double-wide opener so he can flick the lids off two beer bottles at once. When smoking was allowed, he carried 10 lighters, because some would get wet and some lost, and he didn’t want to lose a second or a step by having to fetch another.

But being armed and agile isn’t the half of it. “A great bartender will get you a date for the evening, get you a job and get you a new apartment,” he said.