Jenna Thornhill and Cali DeWitt: A punk rock, granny-style mash-up
By Eric Ducker
When Jenna Thornhill, co-vocalist of local punk band Mika Miko, and Cali DeWitt decided to live together in spring 2008, they moved into a one-bedroom rental on the bottom floor of an Echo Park house. With this new home came opportunity. “This was my first time being able to decorate my own place. I had all this stuff that was usually in my bedroom or just piled in my car,” Thornhill says. “Now we’re just displaying all our little things.”
DeWitt, a longtime member of the L.A. music community and owner of the indie record/publishing label Teenage Teardrops, says that in the past, “I didn’t like mixing my stuff with my roommates’ stuff. I selfishly wanted to keep it to myself.”
As the first installment in our series on Southern California music-industry personalities, L.A. at Home takes a peek inside the world of DeWitt and Thornhill, whose band is scheduled to play at Sunset Junction this weekend. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
DeWitt calls the commingling of his and Thornhill’s tastes as “seamless,” but neither has a style that could be called typical. When describing the look of their apartment, the couple pulls out some unexpected references. “There’s a grandmother influence. A grandmother that neither of us had,” Thornhill says. “I feel like a lot of it is stuff we would want our older selves to have, but we have it now.”
Other influences: the occult, nautical items and cabins in the woods.
“We want it to look like a secret society hall,” Thornhill says. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
DeWitt runs the Teenage Teardrops label from the dining room table, which has been converted into a desk for him and Thornhill. (All the records are stored in cardboard boxes beneath it.) The two are taking piano lessons, which explains the old Casio keyboard.
“It was the best we could do for a practice space,” Thornhill says.
“It was the best we could do because we didn’t try that hard,” DeWitt replies. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
The dining room mantel was one of the first parts of the apartment that they decorated. It quickly became home to artifacts each had collected over the years, including a menagerie of toy animals headed to a paper model of Noahs Ark that Thornhill constructed. More recent finds came from antique malls in the Pacific Northwest, where DeWitt’s parents live, and Palm Springs, a frequent getaway spot for Thornhill and DeWitt and the place where they got engaged. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
The pair set up a small art studio in the room overlooking their street on the fringe of L.A.’s Angelino Heights neighborhood. They each have an easel set up and sometimes paint together. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
In the living room, Thornhill and DeWitt sit under a portrait painted of them by Thornhill’s mother. The artworks on the apartment’s walls were found at antique malls, made by the couple, made by family members or bought from artists such as Brian Roettinger and Sumi Ink Club. The latter showed at Echo Park’s recently closed Hope Gallery, which DeWitt co-owned. (He says it will reopen soon in West Hollywood.) Thornhill and DeWitt have already run out of wall space big enough to fit a drawing from Mark McCoy. It’s in the dining room, leaned up against an unused fireplace. “That’s a quality problem,” DeWitt says, “having awesome art that you can’t hang anywhere.” (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
The couple recently purged their music collection, getting rid of about 1,500 records, leaving about 1,000. “I think the trimming of the record collection made it really good. There’s no fat in there,” DeWitt says. “Now we’re working on growing our [book] library.” (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
DeWitt, by one of several bookcases loaded with DVDs, novels and art books. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Thornhill and DeWitt have small closets in their bedroom, but their clothes often spill out of -- or on top of -- a shared dresser. The clothing organization situation has been particularly rough this summer for Thornhill, who has been out of town for three separate Mika Miko tours. She has three suitcases of clothes (one for each tour) that haven’t even been unpacked. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Their dog, Caramel Bobby, was a rescue dog found in Bakersfield, fostered in Pasadena and adopted by the couple last year. Bobby has become a cult figure in his own right. He has his own Twitter account, and the couple held a contest on the Teenage Teardrops website: Whoever sent in the best portrait of Caramel Bobby received a limited edition Mika Miko 7-inch record. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Though Thornhill and DeWitt have been living together for barely a year, the house already feels like it’s bursting with objects to look at and hold. When they went to North Carolina for a wedding in April, they found themselves passing on amazing finds in an antique mall, such as a hand-drawn cover of a Kiss album. “It wasn’t a real cover. It was the cover of their dreams,” Thornhill says.
“We didn’t buy it because there’s no place for it in our lives,” DeWitt says.
“Someone else needs it more than we need it,” Thornhill says. “We can’t hog all the nice stuff.”
Back to L.A. at Home blog (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)