Archive by Month
October 31, 2004
Bill Plaschke in today's Times reconstructs how the Standells, an L.A. garage band from the 1960s, showed up at Fenway Park before the second game...
Developer Mark Abrams helped channel $300,000 to the mayor's campaign accounts, got a seat on Hahn's political executive committee and successfully urged him to appoint...
October 29, 2004
From Garrison Frost in his online "journal of arts and ideas," The Aesthetic: American Martyrs Church: You can't understand the South Bay until you understand...
Los Angeles schools chief Roy Romer and the school district have sued that disgruntled ex-student who posted gay pornography on a website and claimed it...
Will Swaim, the editor of OC Weekly, explains in an open letter the outpouring of love he got when he was misquoted recently in the...
After a City Hall panel voted Thursday to take over Hollywood's Florentine Gardens and build a new fire station, fans of the club began shouting...
The city's Chief Legislative Analyst, Ron Deaton, could be voted on by the Department of Water and Power board on Tuesday, and swiftly get city...
It turns out that, despite his group photo with the rest of the gang, Byron York is not the new conservative on Left, Right and...
In the new Classic Hollywood issue of Los Angeles magazine (not yet online), Steve Erickson nominates ten classic films that don't belong in the pantheon,...
October 28, 2004
The late Richard Avedon's portraits of the election season run for 32 pages in this week's New Yorker. They are great. A slide show can...
The Dodgers owner has decided to remove players' names from the back of uniform jerseys. Frank McCourt cites "tradition" as the rationale; I guess something...
Mayor Hahn today announced that David Wiggs, on medical leave as general manager of the DWP, has resigned. In his place Hahn has asked his...
LA.com is making the rounds of Fashion Week shows and parties, and has a blog item up about a clueless designer trying to stop the...
To be precise, the drop in Sunday circulation compared to last September is 6.3%, for the daily paper 5.6%. The daily circulation, once well over...
Five residents of Antonio Villaraigosa's 14th district say they will try to recall the councilman for jumping into the mayor's race after pledging he would...
Howard Blume at the LA Weekly asked Kerry voter Michael Kinsley why his L.A. Times editorial page didn't take a stand on the presidential race....
October 27, 2004
On Radford just north of Ventura in Studio City, the offices near CBS where John Wayne hung out when the studio was Republic Pictures, where...
After the markets closed, Tribune Co. announced that Jack Fuller will retire as head of the publishing group at the end of the year. He...
It's been awhile since I checked in on Variety's experiment with free weblogs outside the trade's online subscriber wall. The newest, called Stylephile (spotted at...
The Washington Post has a piece today on a problem with the long-awaited Gourmet cookbook produced by Ruth Reichl, who was the L.A. Times food...
Philip Roth will promote The Plot Against America on "The Today Show" Thursday morning. Liz Smith says the taped interview with Katie Couric will be...
It's going to be on the op-ed page or in whatever the reinvented Sunday Opinion section is to be called, written by Time (and ex-Entertaiment...
October 26, 2004
A post-election newsroom ritual at the L.A. Times is figuring out what the editors and reporters who staffed the campaign coverage will do next. Some...
Darcy Cosper writes that if you were planning to attend the LA Lit party tomorrow night, don't. "Circumstances have arisen...," she says. Cynthia Ozick's appearance...
The time it takes for the LAPD to respond to emergency calls has dropped by several minutes since this year's policy change directing more use...
DA Steve Cooley's Public Integrity Division is interested in the harbor commission's controversial awarding of a lucrative contract to the former executive director of the...
October 25, 2004
The Mann Plaza on Glendon Avenue, once a Laemmle house known for its art films and midnight shows, has closed, says the website Cinema Treasures....
Back in May we passed along a report that the publisher was out at Burbank-based Entertainment Today. Now comes word that the editorial team's last...
Metrofeed LA is a new website that does nothing but use RSS to pull together postings from various Los Angeles-centric blogs that actually "create content,"...
After saying she would sit out next year's campaign, former Rep. Bobbi Fielder announced last week that she is backing Jim Hahn again, Rick Orlov...
Today's Times has the paper's first staff story on the death here of sportswriter Sam Kellerman and the charging of a professional boxer known as...
October 24, 2004
• The website of the city-landmark El Rey Theatre on Wilshire's Miracle Mile has a page of photos out of the past, showing both the interior...
The Los Angeles Business Journal continues to give bigger play than other media to the various official investigations keeping the denizens of L.A. City Hall...
Mas Arai, "a diminutive man in his late 60s with a dwindling number of regular customers whose yards he tends with loving care and a...
The Daily News of Los Angeles backed George W. Bush in 2000 and praises the president for his guidance after 9-11, but says "for all...
October 23, 2004
Dutton's celebrates the opening of its new Beverly Hills store on Sunday. It's at 447 N. Canon Drive, around the corner from Taschen's Beverly Drive...
Ross Porter is out after 28 years, and the radio booth will get an as-yet unhired play-by-play announcer and the team's first baseball analyst....
The Spanish-language papers, caught up in the inflated circulation scandal at Tribune Company, say that "eliminating positions is part of Hoy's effort to ensure long-term...
October 22, 2004
The former Deputy Mayor for communications under Richard Riordan—and then press secretary to First Lady Laura Bush—inked a deal to become Vice President of Corporate...
It appears that KCRW's Left, Right and Center has quietly added Byron York, White House correspondent for the National Review and author of next year's...
William Grimes, the former New York Times restaurant critic, will focus on nonfiction books. He joins Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani as full-time reviewers....
October 21, 2004
Ken Gallacher, a 20-year KFI guy who does the news during the morning show with Bill Handel, is retiring from the station at the end...
The website selling the Schwarzenegger bobblehead doll via the new Blogad over in the right-hand column isn't very informative; here's a Sacramento Bee story from...
KSPN-AM reports that the Dodgers could announce Ross Porter's disinvitation from the broadcast booth as early as Friday, the same day he begins co-hosting a...
The Times found a way to get Pulitzer-winning auto critic Dan Neil's name into the paper more. He's going to pen a column on art...
Both LA.com and LAist have items today announcing that Madame Wu's has closed in the Grove and will be replaced soon with a Cheesecake Factory....
The blog Nick Nolte's Diary isn't by the actor, and he's pissed. E! Online News reports that aspiring screenwriters Christian Newton and Casey McAdams came...
The Long Beach Press-Telegram editorial page today endorses Orange County judge Jim Gray, the Libertarian Party candidate in the U.S. Senate race. The paper cites...
Freelancer Nancy Rommelmann may be living in Portland these days, but she has the cover feature in today's LA Weekly on a hard-working L.A. gardening...
The anonymous City Hall blogger has decided the job risk isn't worth it. After some lengthy discussions, and a few cocktails, it has been decided...
One of the odd things about growing up in the San Fernando Valley (there were many) was hearing the nighttime roar of rocket engines and...
The Greek rights to Steve Hodel's Black Dahlia Avenger were sold to Patakis Publishers. (Via Publishers Lunch)...
The Pasadena NPR station manages to work alot of journalists into the week's news programming. Today at 10:30 a.m., during Larry Mantle's Airtalk, the subject...
The New York Review of Books is co-sponsoring a panel of journalists this Sunday at Occidental College on "The Media and Iraq: What Went Wrong?"...
October 20, 2004
Councilman Bernard Parks let the 4th Floor know by email tonight that he was not pleased with a recent item. After dishing out some (gratuitous...
L.A. freelancing fixture Gary Leonard claims that the title of ex-DA Gil Garcetti's Washington, D.C. photography exhibit on Disney Hall—"Symphony in Steel”—is taken from the...
Mayor Hahn just created a new telecom panel to study the possibility of providing wireless Internet access everywhere in Los Angeles. From the release: Chairing...
Both Steve Lopez and Patt Morrison write columns in today Times playing off the governor's quip about getting no sex from Maria for two weeks...
With the first stage of approval expected today for Mayor Hahn's compromise LAX makeover, airport commissioner Miguel Contreras—whose more relevant day job is head of...
Christopher Knight writes in today's LAT Calendar that the internal rancor at the Getty is a Big Deal and has prompted museum directors around the...
October 19, 2004
The Sacramento newsletter Political Pulse has found a new way to generate income from its election coverage. On Thursday, editor and co-publisher Anthony York will...
Mayoral candidate Bob Hertzberg's campaign has a curious take on those endorsements that Antonio Villaraigosa picked up yesterday from Jewish elected officials on the Westside...
The 26 acres of mostly parking lots north of Staples Center where Phil Anschutz and partners want to build a mega-hotel and entertainment complex is...
Tuesday's L.A. Times story on the abrupt resignation of Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon (reported by L.A. Observed yesterday morning) says she received a standing...
On the Times op-ed page, journalist/First Lady Maria Shriver defends her role in pushing the California State History Museum to become the California Women's History...
• Will Campbell at blogging.la called out councilman Eric Garcetti in a Monday morning post that complained about getting no answer to his plea for help...
October 18, 2004
This is so lame it hurts to even hear about it. Ron Fineman.com reports that Jackie Johnson, the new weather reader (bio) on KCAL-9, gave...
The City Hall insider blog 4th Floor is on a distinctly unwonkish roll. Yesterday the blog speculated that Mayor Jim Hahn has a new sweetie...
The Editor-in-chief of LA.com is the subject of today's LAist Interview by Jessica Ritz. 9. What's your favorite LA-based movie or TV show? Mildred Pierce....
Neda Shahrokhi sold about 6,000 BMWs in her years at Beverly Hills BMW then jumped to a rival dealership in the Valley, taking her client...
Buried at the end of today's Downtown News story on the Ambassador Hotel controversy, school board member David Tokofsky flings a stinging barb at the...
The New York Post's Page Six got hold of an email from Sharon Waxman, the New York Times' Hollywood reporter, to I ♥ Huckabees director...
The J. Paul Getty Museum just announced that its director, Deborah Gribbon, who is also Vice President of the Getty Trust, will resign from both...
LAPD chief Bill Bratton's anti-terrorism commander, John Miller, has turned in the handguns he was caught with while boarding at LAX a few weeks back....
While everyone else is consumed with the current election, the L.A. political establishment is increasingly caught up in the next election. In today's Times, Patrick...
October 17, 2004
The 1939 train depot is one of the city's signature buildings, and its locale across from the historic Old Plaza could be exploited to add...
Prompted by the gay media speculation about Rep. David Dreier and other recent events, the local chapter of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association...
October 16, 2004
In most news organizations, Tim Rutten writes in his Times media column, the allegations about a network star like Bill O'Reilly—accused of sexually harassing a...
The governor has "left the state," the late Friday email advised Sacramento reporters. Well, where did he go and when might he be back? "It's...
West Nile Virus has caused more serious health problems here and around the nation than the flu-like symptoms experts had expected, "especially among an alarming...
October 15, 2004
If you got caught up in some disruption in Century City and Beverly Hills today, it was just an evacuation drill. Some 6,000 workers in...
This was the longtime channel 5 traffic reporter's last day up in the helicopter. She is leaving the station. Fans of her spots on the...
After last week's tension, Clifford May is not on today's "Left, Right and Center" on KCRW, and no explanation was given on the air. The...
Roger Cohn has quit as editor of the San Francisco-based magazine after five years. Dan Fost reports in the San Francisco Chronicle that Cohn blamed...
That's the title of Court TV's new show based on access to the files of the Los Angeles County Coroner's morgue, located at 1104 N....
An opinion piece in today's Jewish Journal complains that fundamentalist Christians who actively try to convert Jews have been invited to take a prominent role...
Miles Corwin, who accompanied police to Robert Blake's home while researching his book, Homicide Special: A Year With the LAPD's Elite Detective Unit, was ordered...
KPCC is giving Times op-ed columnist (and regular station fill-in) Patt Morrison a two-week run with her own talk show at 7 p.m. "PM with...
Competing views of Anaheim and the Angels, first from Red Sox loyalist Jeffrey Anderson in the LA Weekly: The Angels play before red-clad, suburban boobs...
October 14, 2004
Metropolitan News-Enterprise publisher Roger M. Grace's lawsuit for defamation against eBay is going to the California Supreme Court. Xbiz.com fills in the backstory: The libel...
Cathy Seipp writes in her "From the Left Coast" column at the National Review Online that she misses the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, which the...
Nine members of the city council objected Thursday to the Port of Los Angeles giving a contract to former executive director Larry Keller, whose marketing...
William Bradley, who filed scoop after scoop out of the Schwarzenegger camp during and after the recall campaign, contends in the LA Weekly that the...
October 13, 2004
The Radio and TV News Association and councilman Dennis Zine have negotiated 20 parking spaces for media vehicles around City Hall and Parker Center. RTNA...
He says that journals are for sissies but Hemingway kept a diary, so that's what his website is called. He writes about being at home...
Steve Rosen, writing in The Canyon News, is fed up with discourteous drivers who steal a couple of car lengths in congested traffic by using...
The Writers Guild of America (both coasts) has announced a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract. The official view: "It's been a long five...
The Times' John Montorio has finally named his panel of top editors for the features sections of the paper. As expected, Michalene Busico and Lennie...
Mayor Jim Hahn's reelection campaign still leads in the money race, but the rivals are moving closer. Bob Hertzberg filed reports yesterday showing he had...
Supt. Roy Romer's plan for razing nearly all of the historic Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard squeaked through the school board on a 4-3 vote....
Gawker Media's troubles staying online Tuesday (affecting the blogs Defamer, Gawker, Wonkette et al at various points in the day) were due to a credit...
Anne Thompson in the New York Times weighs in on the case of ex-magazine writer Jeff Grosso, who sued Miramax for allegedly stealing his screenplay...
October 12, 2004
• John Gabree, the author and former Newsday book reviewer who created Santa Monica's late L.A. (The Bookstore), writes a wide-ranging blog that he calls Impractical...
I guess we can suppose that Michael Ramirez' cartoon in today's L.A. Times didn't intend to suggest that George W. Bush is a crossdresser. But...
Larry Keller's departure as executive director of the Port of Los Angeles last month seemed remarkably clean and free of acrimony. Well, David Zahniser reports...
The Sunset Hill Memorial Park in Apple Valley, where cowboy movie legends Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are buried, is replacing its grass with artificial...
Los Angeles filmmaker, playwright and web presence Brian Flemming, who created the Slumdance film festival in 1997 to promote his Hang Your Dog in the...
It turns out that Phil Jackson told the Lakers in January that he didn't want to coach the team any more if Kobe Bryant was...
October 11, 2004
All four major reelection challengers to Mayor Jim Hahn have come out against his compromise plan for the redesign (call it modernization or expansion, if...
LAist, one of the local New York-owned city blog offshoots, has found a new way to generate buzz about itself. Publisher Jake Dobkin (Gothamist) posted...
• In the Downtown News, Anschutz Entertainment Group president Tim Leiweke suggests that more upheaval is coming in the local sports scene. With the Clippers' lease...
Now that the Dodgers have lost, Mayor Jim Hahn owes a sweet treat to his counterpart in St. Louis. He promised something from "a legendary...
This is the week the school board might decide the fate of the Ambassador Hotel. On Sunday, board member David Tokofsky offered a new plan...
Ross Johnson profiles Scott Greenstein, the ex-Miramax exec and Barry Diller protégé who brokered Howard Stern's lucrative deal to move onto pay radio, in today's...
"Life and Times" has a segment slotted in tonight on Penny Grenoble O’Malley, author of Malibu Diary: Notes from an Urban Refugee. She is the...
LA Weekly columnist Nikki Finke bypassed the paper (which shutters on the weekend) and broke the news of actor Christopher Reeve's death of cardiac arrest...
I only caught the end of their exchange on Friday, but it didn't sound like the new guy on KCRW's "Left, Right and Center" panel...
October 08, 2004
The Times picked liberal columnist Patt Morrison to review Ann Coulter's newest book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). She begins by...
Dodgers outfielder Milton Bradley and Times beat reporter Jason Reid spoke before yesterday's game, and the writer declared the previous day's confrontation over. "He apologized...
Bill Cosby announced Thursday that he's backing ex-LAPD chief and current councilman Bernard Parks for mayor in next year's election. Rick Orlov has a few...
Publishers Lunch brings word that Stacey Grenrock Woods (of Esquire, Oprah, "The Daily Show" and L.A. Innuendo) has signed a book deal. I, California will...
October 07, 2004
Local author and illustrator Mark Frauenfelder is now the editor of Make, an upcoming magazine on applying do-it-yourself skills to technology. It's from O'Reilly Media....
The Times' Calendar section has quietly brought back the feature where readers can ask a question of the paper's critics. On p. 66 of today's...
In September I posted about plans for razing the vaguely Moroccan-themed Beverly Theater and about the Art Deco office building next door, originally California Bank....
The contenders in the Online News Association competition I helped judge over the weekend are now posted. Local finalists include the L.A. Times Outdoors section,...
Xeni Jardin reports at Boing Boing on the return to the web of writer-about-sex Susannah Breslin. Her new website, The Invisible Cowgirl, offers an excerpt...
The Jane Austen Society of North America sweeps into the Biltmore downtown today for a weekend-long conference. Among the day's events are a subway outing...
The lead editorial in today's Times tries to somewhat delicately approach the subject of the president's mental prowess. It admits that even asking the question...
The LA Weekly organizes this year's rendering of the annual "Best of" by the seven deadly sins. It works....
Rip Rense reconnects on his website with Dave Lindorff, his onetime colleague at the Daily News when the paper was still just the Valley News...
Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa was late to get started raising money for his latest bid to become mayor, but he's catching up in a hurry. He...
October 06, 2004
Inner peace still eludes ill-tempered Dodgers outfielder Milton Bradley, who agreed just last week to take anger management classes after going postal on the field....
Nora E. Vargas was named today as the first director of the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, a newly created fiefdom within Mayor Jim Hahn's...
The L.A. Press Club annual meeting that was originally scheduled the night of last week's presidential debate will be held tonight. This is the one...
He's been threatening to move off plain old on-air radio to escape the FCC's crackdown, and today Howard Stern confirmed that he'll take his show...
The last known female lion to roam the Santa Monica Mountains gave birth this summer to a litter of four cubs—which were promptly tagged with...
In local politics, the Valley has a reputation for voting in higher numbers than many other areas of the city. I guess it's true in...
The nasty fight between Hollywood lawyer/celeb wedding presider Barry L. Hirsch and his ex-partners made today's New York Times. The piece by Ross Johnson details...
Hayley Sumner, who has represented the William Morris Agency, screenwriters and actors (among others), has joined the Los Angeles office of Fleishman-Hillard as a senior...
October 05, 2004
Sacramento Bee opinion blogger Dan Weintraub passes along two new polls that pick up a slide in Kerry's lead over Bush among California voters. In...
On his other blog, Mack Reed exorcises the pain that devoured his summer. A sample: The most horrible, vicious, ice-pick pain of my life rips...
A potential supporter of Bob Hertzberg for mayor signed up through his website to receive email updates on the campaign. The first offering to hit...
Caltech's H. David Politzer won the Nobel Prize in Physics for a discovery he shared with two other scientists while a grad student at Harvard—in...
The reporter for the L.A. Times Orange County bureau was found dead today in his home in Cypress. Allison had previously worked as a Times...
Michael Ramirez' "Mount St. Kerry" in today's L.A. Times: Steve Benson's "Mount St. Kerry" in Sunday's Arizona Republic:...
In this latest installment of the ongoing serial The Montorio Files, the Times' Daily Calendar editor Alice Short gets new responsibility for the Thursday Weekend...
The mayor has made his bet on the Dodgers with his counterpart in St. Louis. He defends the honor of his team and offers up—Cobbler...
Analyzed at Cinemocracy: You’ve got a three-act structure (four if you include the vice presidential encounter), recurring characters, and a narrative line driven by the...
Ralphs has begun playing Christmas music in some stores, Franklin Avenue says. That's just wrong in so many ways, but I feel especially bad for...
Mayor Jim Hahn rode out to Victory and Sepulveda yesterday to announce another batch of steps for making traffic flow better on 35 major streets....
October 04, 2004
The writer of The New Yorker's occasional "Letter from California" talks to the San Francisco Chronicle about his recent piece on Gavin Newsom, being the...
A couple of change-of-pace baseball items. Today, the Burbank Central Library opened an exhibition called "The Times They Were A-Changin': Baseball in the Age of...
The Right seat on KCRW's Left, Right and Center is a hard spot to keep filled. Newest to try, starting with this Friday's show, will...
The L.A. Times picked Christopher Hawthorne, currently at Slate magazine, to be the paper's next architecture critic. The frequent New York Times contributor replaces Nicolai...
The Times would love to see its Pulitzer-winning automobile critic, Dan Neil, get more exposure than he receives in the lightly read driving section. The...
The L.A. Business Journal has another story this week on the financial pressures at the Times. The angle to this one is that, with ads...
Rick Orlov writes prominently about the City Hall insider blog in today's Daily News. The 4th Floor has yet to disclose much in the way...
Some guy with a worker's comp claim against the L.A. school district emails me that in a desperate plea to push his case, he has...
Scott at The Juxtaposition reports on his trip up to attend the Liberty Film Festival and gives a few reviews. Being conservative in Hollywood is...
Ex-LA Weekly politics reporter Marc Haefele, writing in his regular spot at the L.A. Alternative Press, is the first to detail in print the labor...
October 02, 2004
I've listened to Vin Scully since I was six years old, and nothing I can remember matches the mastery of his call of the ninth...
I've been busy the last couple of days helping judge entries in the Online News Association awards to be handed out next month. Perusing and...
October 01, 2004
Maxwell Kennedy, a son of slain Senator Robert F. Kennedy, held a news conference in MacArthur Park yesterday to say that his mother, Ethel, and...
Jon Wiener, the UC Irvine historian and KPFK radio host who has been slowly extracting John Lennon's files out of a very reluctant FBI, finally...
