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The Buchman house from Curbed and the MLS.
Mostly good reads that have been stacking up, and less from the news.
- Must read: Adrian Glick Kudler's value-added write-up at Curbed LA of a simple real estate listing in Elysian Heights.
Maybe you're kicked out of Japan in the 1930s for associating with Langston Hughes and having "dangerous thoughts." Maybe you go to Shanghai where you rig up a little system to take surreptitious photographs of Chinese laborers and help smuggle out accounts of Japanese atrocities. Maybe you go to Mexico in 1939 to guard exiled Russian revolutionary/anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and you spend several months improving his security system and taking hundreds of photos and videos. (Maybe a few months after you leave, Trotsky is killed with a pickaxe to the head.) Maybe you head to Los Angeles...
- On the same(ish) topic, Rip Rense encounters a stalwart of LA's Communist past at lunch in the Byzantine-Latino Quarter. The story is all about gentleness.
Gentle things still happen. She sat at the front table at Papa Cristo’s, the Greek place at Pico and Normandie...across the street from St. Sofia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral and St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, or, more appropriately considering that masses come with mariachis, Iglesia Santo Tomas Apostol.
“This is excellent!” she said, and, really, it was amazing she could say anything at all, let alone in a clear, commanding voice. The withered and dry autumn leaves on the sycamore trees in the neighborhood were stronger. This was, to be indelicate, a corpse that hadn’t gotten around to officially dying. Stick limbs, prune skin, sunken cheeks. Talk about frailty, thy name is woman. . .“Okay, Babe,” said her companion, a young guy with brown curls pulled back in a pony tail. “I’ve got you.” And he steadied her as he removed her walker, and then helped her ease into a wooden chair at one of Papa Cristo’s wobbly tables.
- Dwight Garner in the NYT on Dana Goodyear's new book on food culture, "Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture.” Excerpt:
Ms. Goodyear is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a poet, and the possessor of a gentle, almost demure prose style. Today’s best-known food writers tend to be noisy boys; her soothing sentences are a balm. Like the shy girl in the back of class whose occasional whispered utterances are masterpieces of marinated snark, she gets off a lot of vivid observations...
She hangs out with the scruffy Los Angeles food god Jonathan Gold, the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, a Falstaffian biker type who almost single-handedly upended our notions of what tasty means. “He has a lot to do with people eating at restaurants with a C from the health department,” one avid eater tells her.
- I Was a ‘Vogue’ Intern: Brutal But Worth It, by Elaine Choi at Zocalo Public Square
At peak lunch hour, a delivery from Joan’s on Third can take between 45 minutes and an hour and a half. Our office address didn’t even fall within their local delivery radius. But if you obnoxiously call every three minutes to check whether the delivery guy has left, and if you say that you’re calling from Vogue, you can get those salads in 30 minutes.
I was asked to do anything and everything—from find the name of the male model in Michael Kors Spring 2011 watch campaign (because Rihanna wants it, or rather, him) to convince the post office to stay open for two more hours or track down a UPS driver’s personal cell phone number to prevent him from completing the wrong shipment.
- Opinion editor Nick Goldberg welcomes Kerry Cavanaugh to the editorial writing staff at the Los Angeles Times.
Kerry, who began work this week, was most recently a producer working with Warren Olney at KCRW on “To the Point” and “Which Way, L.A.”
Before that, she spent a decade at the L.A. Daily News, where she was (at different times) a staff writer, an assistant city editor and an editorial writer. In addition to writing editorials on L.A. and California politics, budget and environmental issues, she wrote a twice-a-week front-page column on local government issues. As a metro reporter, she broke news on mass evictions due to condo conversions, on political influence by campaign donors and on failed housing policies.
- Honoring former county supervisor and city councilman Ed Edelman, now 83 and enduring Atypical Parkinson's, by Jonah Lowenfeld at the Jewish Journal.
A staunch liberal, Edelman found himself in the legislative minority for most of his time on the Board of Supervisors, but he still managed to marshal enough support to post an impressive list of accomplishments — including setting up the first County Department of Children and Family Services, establishing a commission to oversee the county Sheriff’s Department, and strengthening government support for some of the region’s most beloved cultural venues, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hollywood Bowl.
Also noted:
The Orange County Register said it will join the media outlets that will no longer refer to the Washington Redskins.
Lionel Rolfe on the role of Bohemian LA in the city's literature. Huffington Post
An etymology for the names of all 88 Los Angeles County cities, by the Militant Angeleno.
The New Yorker likes Jay Roberts' piece from earlier this year in Orange Coast Magazine on meeting and surviving serial killer Randy Kraft. Page-Turner
Michael Schneider's 8th Great Los Angeles Walk will follow a little of Sunset and a little of Wilshire. Info
Pasadena wants more hotels and intends to get them. Pasadena Magazine
