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Rip Rense is feeling so down on L.A. these days that today he ripped off a second Riposte column for the week. He calls it "This Town is Toast." His...
LA Observed archive
for October 2003
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
The second issue of L.A. Innuendo is online and presumably in print, though I haven't yet run into it anywhere....
Cosmo Israel is a start-up where Editor-in-chief Lea Kantor-Matarasso grapples with the big questions. “It's sometimes difficult to write with humor or tell stories about sexual escapades when 15 people...
Today's Christian Science Monitor reports on the "hot, new indie-lit scene" in Los Angeles and says it is especially hot in the neighborhood around Skylight Books on Vermont in Los...
Because Dean Singleton didn't buy the paper. Dave Wielenga in OC Weekly recalls what happened when Singleton's Media News took over the Long Beach Press-Telegram: He showed up at the...
A week ago, three L.A. Times reporters -- Ralph Frammolino, Nicholas Riccardi and Ted Rohrlich -- had a solid front-page investigative story that I missed as I retreated into my...
Sharri Berg, VP-News Operations at Fox News Channel, responds at Romenesko to the criticisms leveled yesterday by former producer Charlie Reina: "Like any former, disgruntled employee, Charlie Reina has an...
The cover story in this week's L.A. Alternative Press by Joseph Mailander follows up on his first night report at Joyrides Without Maps with more refined impressions of Disney Hall...
Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker, the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes and Time magazine’s James Poniewozik all turned down the L.A. Times television critic job that went this week to Carina...
L.A. Observed makes the cut at Relevant or Irrelevant?, where the slogan is "I decide."...
If what former Fox News producer Charlie Reina says is true, Roger Ailes and his pals not only aggressively juice the political slant, they've created a pretty awful place to...
Richard Horgan makes a persuasive case that the London-based World Entertainment News Network is commandeering celebrity news and gossip without crediting the right sources, and he argues in his weekly...
Whatever came of Richard Riordan's plans for a Los Angeles Examiner to avenge his unhappiness at the L.A. Times and promote the virtues of the city he loves? RiShawn Biddle...
Daniel Okrent has a good grasp of what his new position at the New York Times will mean to his cultural legacy: Now my obituary won’t say ‘Okrent died’ and...
One of the new community news websites listed on the right is Canyon Newspaper.com, which says it covers the hills from Malibu to Hollywood. (The mission statement also includes "saving...
The Lakers won their opener tonight, but are in organizational disarray because of the Kobe and Shaq troubles. The Kings may be worse off. Eight games into the hockey season,...
Prompted by the Gregg Easterbrook flap, Mickey Kaus offers a long defense of unedited blogs. In the course of it, he manages to compliment Luke Ford....
Inside sources who seem to know say the L.A. Times had more than 9,000 subscribers cancel over the paper's election coverage, especially the Schwarzenegger groping stories that ran in the...
Elvis Mitchell pulls together a pretty decent panel to talk about the screeners issue on The Treatment this Wednesday, 2:30 p.m. on KCRW (89.9). Says the KCRW release: New York...
The right side column of links has been freshened and cleaned up. The recall cluster is gone, for instance. I think it's a little more logical, but let me know...
Last week's book sales by L.A. writers or of local interest, from Publishers Lunch Weekly email: Journalist Christopher Noxon's Rejuvenile: How a New Species of Reluctant Adults is Redefining Maturity...
TV Barn says that Entertainment Weekly writer Carina Chocano will be named chief TV critic at the L.A. Times, replacing the retired Howard Rosenberg. Supposed to be announced today. Personal...
With brush fires continuing to spread across Southern California, blown by Santa Ana winds, Channels 2, 4 and 9 are staying live with coverage. Channel 7 is airing "The View"...
The Downtown News out today has a feature on Philippe's, which will mark its 95th year next week by selling French dips sandwiches at the original price of a dime...
The publisher of a book that asserts the Pakistan government was behind the murder of reporter Daniel Pearl is upset with the L.A. Times Book Review. Melville House founder Dennis...
On the gala night Disney Hall opened, Mayor Jim Hahn tried to hold a gathering of city and state officials and their aides at Getty House -- that would be...
L.A. Times staffers Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, authors of The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, tell in a Calendar piece today...
Good piece by Joel Kotkin in the LAT Sunday Opinion section on downtown revival and how Disney Hall is not it. But there's another reason to be skeptical about the...
The L.A. Times Magazine checks out the surge in migration by Americans (especially from California) to New Zealand. Corie Brown says many of the 200 crew members who went to...
A year after New Times closed with a $9 million, somewhat-illegal nudge from the Village Voice, the LA Weekly has been the biggest benefactor, Darrell Satzman says in a cover...
Venerable Canter's Deli on Fairfax took over an existing deli at Treasure Island in May and is getting set to open a big new showcase in the Strip casino, and...
Author Mark Salzman was invited to visit a writing class at L.A.'s Central Juvenile Hall and was so blown away by the experience that he became a teacher there. His...
Garrison at The Aesthetic writes: Alright, that's it. Now that we're spending more time in the car, we've found ourselves listening to no small amount of AM talk radio, even...
Fashion Week in Los Angeles for the spring lines begins Sunday. Runway shows are held at The Standard downtown and at Smashbox Studios in Culver City. The FashionWeek website is...
Nikki Finke on the LA Weekly website has the news that Sharon Waxman of the Washington Post Los Angeles bureau is taking the long-vacant New York Times Hollywood job. Finke,...
Susannah Breslin, the L.A. writer of the late Reverse Cowgirl blog, is out with You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?, billed as "a short story collection of sordidly sexual tales,"...
Joseph at joyrides without maps is a blogger with cul-chah. He gives a great inside-the-hall report on opening night at Frank Gehry's monument -- and posts it before midnight. He...
"Tony Rafael" at In the Hat, the website where he writes about L.A. gangs and crime, posts a lengthy observation spurred by Jill Leovy's Slate diary on the way bad...
Variety columnist Brian Lowry took Entertainment Weekly to task yesterday for taking this year's "101 Most Power People" so seriously that, with ties, there are 123 names on the list....
The Daily Breeze's Ian Gregor says that Mayor Hahn's vision for L.A. International faces a new hurdle. Mayor James Hahn’s $9 billion LAX modernization plan fails to fulfill its stated...
Katie Roiphe, in a piece for Slate, ponders the evolution of USC law professor and feminist author Susan Estrich, who wrote a column strongly attacking the LAT story on Schwarzenegger's...
Cathy Seipp in CityBeat doesn't quite buy my take on the L.A. Times groping story about Arnold, and doesn't quite dismiss it either. In any case, she writes that when...
Ella Taylor in LA Weekly explains how the Los Angeles Film Critics took up her idea to cancel their awards dinner this year, in protest over the loss of film...
In case anybody forgot, Bill Bradley reminds us in his LA Weekly column out today that he can still get the Governor-elect on the phone. Bradley insists that the bipartisan...
An internal source reports that KPFK's first big fundraising drive since the station made over the program lineup to please the lefties is not going well. The pledges aren't coming...
Jill Leovy, the L.A. Times crime reporter in South L.A., is writing the Slate Diary this week on the crime-ridden 77th Street Division. People typically find out about homicides on...
The Magnificent Montague and L.A. Times writer Bob Baker were on "Day to Day" Monday talking about their book on the early days of black radio in Los Angeles, Burn,...
It may be a come down for Tina Brown to go from editor of The New Yorker and Talk magazine to a column in the Washington Post Style section, but...
L.A. Times publisher John Puerner tells the L.A. Business Journal that subscription cancellations have slowed to a trickle and that some readers who quit over the Schwarzenegger groping stories have...
I've been meaning to mention J. Michael Walker's unique artistic take on Los Angeles for weeks now, just for its scale alone. But it keeps slipping out of mind at...
The coming breakup between partners La Opinion and the Tribune Co. is the subject of a segment tonight on Life and Times (7 p.m., Ch. 28). Philip Bruce asks: Can...
Responding to the continuing and heated criticism of his post about Kill Bill and Jews at the studios, Gregg Easterbrook has put up a long explanation and apology at his...
That's the secret, not-to-be-uttered-in-front-of-Him nickname that some on Schwarznegger's staff have for Arnold, says Lloyd Grove, the new gossip at the New York Daily News. Actually it's tame compared to...
Tony Pierce is singled out for writing "L.A.'s most entertaining Web log" in the graphic that runs with James Verini's story on Los Angeles-centric websites in today's LAT Weekend Calendar....
I left Marianne Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen) off yesterday's list of local authors nomnated this week for a National Book Award. Rene Tawa in the L.A. Times has more...
L.A. city councilman Jack Weiss is known around City Hall as a profligate issuer of press releases and, in the great tradition of Westside representatives, for pursuing myriad causes. His...
Just how many drug stores does L.A. need? The creeping urban plague of big superstores opening a few blocks from other big superstores is about to claim the mid-Valley landmark...
The L.A. Times political writer Mark Z. Barabak jumped into the fray over the paper's campaign coverage, apparently telling a class of Berkeley students yesterday that the disputed grope story...
It's not just the Los Angeles TV stations that are planning to cover the Capitol when Arnold gets there. No fewer than eight stations from around California are setting up...
The LA Weekly that comes out today is all Best of L.A. features -- nothing else. There's the usual roundup of best burger, best shopping and best place to pay...
In his food and wine columnist hat, the LAT's David Shaw has had it with the Zagat guide ratings for Los Angeles restaurants. Zagat is enormously successful and enormously influential...
Freedom Communications CEO Alan J. Bell calls the deal to keep the Register mostly in the Hoiles family "nothing less than an armistice" between long-feuding factions. He will stay on...
At the end of a long screed against Quentin Tarantino over Kill Bill, New Republic blogger Gregg Easterbrook suddenly singles out Harvey Weinstein and Michael Eisner because they are Jewish....
Couple of prominent locals are nominees for the National Book Awards: T.C. Boyle in fiction for Drop City and Carol Muske-Dukes in poetry for Sparrow. Tim Rutten also has a...
Poynter has a feature up about Michael Connelly, who went from covering night cops in the Valley for the L.A. Times to writing best-selling mysteries. Clint Eastwood starred in last...
Bob Drogin of the L.A. Times and four other journalists have been ordered by a federal judge to reveal their government sources for stories on Wen Ho Lee. The Times,...
If I'm reading these ratings from RadioandRecords.com correctly, the recall obsession wasn't good for KFI. The talk station's summer ratings were down slightly from the spring book, and down even...
Los Angeles TV news departments, which long ago closed down their Sacramento bureaus, will increase their Capitol coverage when the ratings-booster takes over, says Ron Fineman on his TV site....
John Connolly, the author of the Premiere magazine profile on Schwarzenegger, can't sell his expose book, but humorist Andy Borowitz (or actually his agent Mort Janklow) has sold Governor Arnold:...
Syndicated columnist Jill Stewart responds to L.A. Times editor John Carroll with a long scathing report on her website. Stewart, like most others, assumes she was one of the unnamed...
That didn't last long. Fred Muir, since last year a senior vice president for public affairs in the Los Angeles office of Fleishman-Hillard International Communications, has left and opened his...
Mickey Kaus takes a look back at that L.A. Times Poll midway through the recall campaign that was widely questioned because it's numbers were so far off everyone else's. The...
Freedom Comunications has signed a deal with the two equity firms that represent Hoiles family descendants and other shareholders. The Wall Street Journal says it has already been approved by...
I'm glad someone figured out the spam trick of placing links in old comment threads on Movable Type sites (such as L.A. Observed). But what's with all the women coming...
Matt Labash has a pretty funny Boy on the Bus report from the final days of the Schwarzenegger campaign at the Weekly Standard site. He mingles with the crowds and...
Kim Masters, who seems to be everywhere these days, will host tomorrow's edition of KCRW's The Politics of Culture on the issues raised by the MPAA's ban on free DVDs....
Howard Kurtz writes in the Post that for journalists, "On paper, an effort to recall a California governor who had just been reelected and had committed no low crimes or...
An LAT source with some likely knowledge of the situation says that subscription cancellations at the L.A. Times over the Schwarzenegger groping stories have cleared 2,000. The circulation department set...
The leading jockey in horse racing history rode 40,000 times, most of them here at Southern California tracks. He was paralyzed in at 59 in a one-car accident after drinking...
A New York Times' Week in Review story today on the ethics of phonecams includes an anecdote and photos from members of the Los Angeles-based photo blog community Buzznet.com, which...
Darrell Satzman in the LA Business Journal looks at the firing last week of the longtime general managers at both local AM radio news stations, KNX and KFWB. George Nicholaw...
Jamesland by Michelle Huneven, dining columnist for LA Weekly, gets a good review in the New York Times. And Malcolm Margolin, publisher of Heyday Books, gives a full thumbs up...
The Times' Jason Reid called it right when he reported a couple of days ago that Frank H. McCourt was the new top bidder for the Dodgers. Now McCourt is...
Following some weeks of high-level negotiation, Robin Wright, the long-time L.A. Times reporter on international terrorism, has jumped to the Washington Post. Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus announced her departure...
Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll responds to the paper's critics in an unusual (and somewhat testy) commentary in Sunday's paper. Titled "The Story Behind the Story," Carroll writes that...
The subject on Deadline L.A. on Sunday (KPFK, 1 p.m.) is the coming grocery wars triggered by Wal-Mart's non-union move into town. The guest is Robert Greene, who wrote about...
John Wayne's 1942 application to be a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA before there was a CIA) is on display at the Central Library. Among the...
Bunch of interesting L.A. presence on Schwarzenegger's transition team, including Richard Riordan and Eli Broad (do they go everywhere together?) and Democrats like mayor Jim Hahn, Bob Hertzberg, the former...
Paul Weeks, retired public info guy for RAND in Santa Monica and ex-LA Mirror reporter, recalls when he was sent to the Valley to do a feature story on a...
David Denby in The New Yorker on Kill Bill--Vol. 1: “Kill Bill” is what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap. It will doubtless cause enormous excitement among...
The Republican talk show host and columnist has been the Times' most vituperative and partisan critic through the campaign (he signed on early with Arnold). He concludes the election cycle...
Cathy Seipp takes a read of Peter Bart's new collection of short stories, Dangerous Company: Dark Tales from Tinseltown, and says the Variety editor "has an ear for dialogue even...
Christine Pelisek reports in the LA Weekly on the deadly gang battle going on over claims to Silver Lake. In the streets abutting Vendome and Marathon, a spate of gang...
Welcome to NBC Universal: LAT, NYT, Hwd Reporter Leno: Nikki Finke in LA Weekly, LAT, Wash Post Shriver: NYT, USA Today, Wash Post...
La Opinion, the largest Spanish language paper in Los Angeles, has been owned 50% by the Lozano family and 50% by the L.A. Times parent company, dating back to the...
LAT editor John Carroll tells the San Francisco Chronicle that subscribers are continuing to cancel, but he added no new numbers. He said the furor has not changed his mind...
A&E is planning to begin production on a TV movie called "See Arnold Run." Says the New York Times: The movie will trace what its creators call the parallels between...
The heat on the MPAA over the loss of free screener DVDs is rising apparently. Richard Horgan, meanwhile, talks to a DVD pirate about the futility of it all, and...
Bill Thomas was the top editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1971 to 1989, most of the time with Otis Chandler as publisher. Today's Times runs a letter to...
There's a new front-runner in the contest to buy the Dodgers from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the L.A. Times' Jason Reid says. It is Frank H. McCourt, a Boston real...
Mickey Kaus's long explanation of why he voted as he did is pretty interesting, dare I say brilliant. Read the whole thing, as they say. Scroll down to "Why I...
Turnout in today's election could hit 65%, the Field Poll says. That would be the most in any California election for governor in 20 years, though less voters than in...
L.A. Times editor John Carroll says in the Wall Street Journal today that he expected a backlash against he paper's Schwarzenegger stories, because they were about the darker side of...
The Hollywood trade paper has started a couple of blogs -- but you have to be a subscriber to Variety.com to read them. This is from the blurb on the...
The L.A. Times had the newsiest of the weekend media stories on itself, reporting that about 1,000 subscribers have cancelled since the paper began publishing reports on Arnold Schwarzenegger's manhandling...
Kim Masters, the Esquire columnist and former Vanity Fair contributing editor, jumps from Marketplace to cover Hollywood in the National Public Radio operation here in Culver City. Says the memo...
Journalist and author Amy Wilentz and Jim Sterngold, the San Francisco Chronicle's man in Los Angeles, talk about the recall with Barbara Osborn. Deadline L.A. is on every Sunday at...
The final Field Poll of the recall race shows the Schwarzenegger lead solidifying -- 36% to 26% for Bustamante. They were even in the previous Field Poll. "No on recall"...
Hollywood writer-producer Roger L. Simon declares on his blog that the backlash against the MPAA's no-DVDs policy begins with him: This Academy voter (and film lover) is not going to...
Former Democratic campaign aide Susan Estrich, now a USC law professor and syndicated columnist, comes down hard on the L.A. Times for publishing the allegations of groping by Arnold Schwarzenegger....
Booked into Wilshire Division for being under the influence, released on bail, picked up again in Beverly Hills, taken to Century City Hospital. Says the L.A. Times: It was not...
In a small group discussion tonight during a USC gathering hosted by the Online News Association and OJR, I praised Kausfiles' handling and prescient call on the LAT groping story....
The volume of stories and Hollywood reactions to the loss of free screener movies has officially surpassed L.A. Observed's ability to keep up. (Kind of like with the recall.) Movie...
Yesterday in New York, the question "Is California Crazy?" was debated at lunch by Ron Reagan, Tom Hayden, Bill Simon, Barry Goldwater Jr. (the long-lost former Valley congressman and son...
Schwarzenegger denies the specifics of the L.A. Times story on his treatment of women, but tells a friendly audience, "I have to say that where there's smoke there's fire." Dan...
He quits as an ESPN football commentator over his remarks about a black quarterback, then the National Enquirer reports (via the NY Daily News) that he recently had a bad...
After looking into the often-heard allegations about Arnold's sexual harassment, an L.A. Times team turns up six women who contend they were groped or otherwise invaded by Schwarzenegger, sometimes while...
Grant Robinson of Los Angeles is the winner of The New Republic's contest to name Gregg Easterbrook's new blog. It's now the Easterblogg. These must be heady days at TNR....
Robert Kardashian, the Simpson friend and lawyer who later questioned the football star's innocence, died last night of cancer. It was at Kardashian's Encino home where Simpson began his notorious...
Dan Weintraub takes a big swig at the Schwarzenegger debut party in Sacramento....
Sam Hall Kaplan's "City Observed" commentaries on local architecture and design are off the weekly schedule at KCRW. In a note emailed to architects and others, Kaplan writes that he...
The LA Weekly's Bill Bradley discloses his role as a back-channel emissary trying to arrange a debate between Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the end, Davis burned Bradley by...
Variety's headline writers have fun with the apoplexy shaking Hollywood (here and here) over the end to free screener DVDs and videos. The L.A. Times also chases with a front...
The next ballot measure that Los Angeles voters may get a chance to decide (after the Davis recall) is whether to cancel the city council's ban on lap dances in...
The new L.A. Times Poll pretty much agrees with all the others (except CNN-USA, which seems to have overstated everything). Barring the unforeseen, the outcome looks certain -- Gov. Arnold....
Life and Times on KCET (Channel 28, 7 p.m. and midnight) will look at the future of the old Raymond Theater in Pasadena on tonight's show. IMAX filmmaker Greg MacGillivray...
Clinton fundraises in LA
Jim Henson Studios on La Brea became a presidential campaign stop on Thursday.
Brown declares disaster area
The natural gas leak above Porter Ranch now qualifies for various government actions. Story
Performing arts with cheer
Donna Perlmutter closes out 2015 with productions downtown and on the Westside.
