Arf gallery: The title of a recent...

Arf gallery: The title of a recent David Hockney exhibition at Venice’s LA Louver Gallery was “Some Very Large New Paintings With Twenty-Five Dogs Upstairs and Some Drawings of Friends.”

And, yes, there were 25 pooch portraits upstairs, all of dachshunds.

One afternoon, a woman was studying the dog art. Noticing that her male companion also showed some interest, she confided to a nearby spectator: “I’ve never taken him to an art gallery before, but he just had to see this show.”

Her male companion was a dachshund.

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One of the drooling models? Incidentally, the woman with the short-legged hound said her pet had not posed for the exhibition. He was, however, a look-alike for dachshund No. 23.

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Here’s to the Cecil! William Andersen of Woodland Hills writes that the Cecil Hotel on L.A.’s Skid Row can claim another (more positive) distinction--besides being one of the last domiciles of serial killer Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker . . . and the place where police captured a suspected murderer who had escaped from the Peter Pitchess Honor Rancho last week.

Andersen points out that in 1940, the Cecil “hosted the first Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to be held on a regular basis in L.A.” One history of A.A. says that the Cecil congregants “became known as the Los Angeles ‘Mother Group.’ ”

Added Anderson: “I was delighted to discover that the Cecil Hotel is still standing.’

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You can go home again--with certain restrictions: Mention of the Cecil reminds us of a story about a friend of ours who grew up in another Downtown hotel. His family owned it at the time. Thirty years later, he visited the hotel, which by then found itself on Skid Row.

He approached the desk clerk, who was barricaded inside a cage, and said that he hadn’t been back since he was a kid, that he had often thought about the place because it held so many memories for him, and would it be OK if he looked around inside?

“You got a room key?” the clerk asked.

“No,” he said.

“Get the hell out of here,” the clerk said.

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How many calories is it anyway? Ron Baccino of Ventura found a dessert to die for on a Mom’s Day menu.

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More food for thought: An introductory note on Jill Robinson, who wrote “The Ultimate Guide to L.A.” in May’s Travel & Leisure magazine, says she was born “not far from Campanile on La Brea.”

Proximity of one’s birthplace to a fashionable restaurant strikes us as an L.A. type of status symbol.

And we want to register our claim. We were born in Santa Monica not far from fabled Pickle Bill’s. When Bill’s went out of business, the giant pickle on its roof was trucked over to Kelbo’s restaurant, where it was painted and converted into a (dimpled) Tiki war god.

But that’s another story.

MiscelLAny:

In the what’s-in-a-name? category, Tobi Dragert came upon a letter addressed to a company in “Deverly” Hills. The sender was a firm that calls itself the National Intelligence Network.