Thursday night in Echo Park there were choices: two prominent "L.A." writers (I put L.A. in quotes because one of the writers lives in Mexico City, when he doesn't live here) reading at two different venues, four blocks apart -- Rachel Resnick and Daniel Hernandez. Talk about a cross-section.

Resnick was at Tavin, the chic, tiny boutique on EP Avenue -- it reminds me of a hummingbird -- which has a surprising and delightful reading series the shop's owner named "Little Birds." The clothing in Tavin often are tagged with literary musings written by Erin Tavin -- bits and pieces you can wear inside your head, whether you buy the garment or not. The audiences at Little Birds tend to be groovy and very well-dressed (one not guaranteeing the other), imported from fancier districts. If Anthony Trollope were alive, he'd write about it.

Meanwhile, at the same time as Resnick's reading, the bass was thumping over at the Echo, where the journal Slake threw a party for Daniel Hernandez, journalist, blogger, and now author of Down & Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century. Hernandez's exceptional blog is called Intersections, and I have written about it before. In Intersections he writes about himself as a "native foreigner" in Mexico and as a foreign native in California.