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Role reversal: The NYT's Sunday Styles section has three features from Los Angeles today. Amy Wallace, a staff writer at Los Angeles magazine, files a Father's Day Left Coast Journal on the voice behind SpongeBob SquarePants, "A Night Out With" follows Gigi Levangie Grazer, writer and wife of Brian, and Hilary de Vries visits with some Angelenos for dinner on their regular "taco night". Returning the favor, the LAT writes from New York about local hipsters Sean McPherson and Eric Goode giving their style treatment to a Manhattan hotel, the Maritime.
In the LAT: In Sunday Opinion, Jennifer Price uses her encounter with private beach guards in Malibu to mourn L.A.'s relationship with public spaces, and veteran LAPD watcher Joe Domanick examines the sordid past of the department's secret PDID in the context of fighting terrorism...In Book Review, Eugen Weber likes Sugar Skull, the second Eve Diamond mystery from Denise Hamilton. She is a former Times writer and her main character is a reporter at the paper who finds adventures and a little sex in the city...Home of the Week is a $16 million condo on Wilshire Boulevard...The magazine tries to expose aromatherapy, explains how an unknown masterpiece was lost and then discovered inside the Huntington and revisits the Venice Beats.
In other papers: The Beach Reporter reports on what happens to wedding plans when a Manhattan Beach hotel (Barnabey's) abruptly closes down in June...Beverly Hills Weekly looks at Rodeo Drive as a waning tourist attraction...The San Fernando Sun honors the return home of a Marine sergeant from Iraq...The Pasadena Weekly cover is on the exodus of independent theatres: four stages leaving in about a month, mostly due to high rent and weak support.
Selected blogs and columns: Franklin Avenue and Mrs. Avenue eavesdrop on a painful first date...Mark A. R. Kleiman reports on a study that found posting restaurant grades in Los Angeles reduced food-related hospital admissions by 20%...Ben Stein, famously on the right, declares that the most impressive star he has met in Hollywood is---Norman Lear, famously left. It has to do with Lear's World War II record.