Don Shirley: Pianists make history
Iris Schneider on Annie Leibovitz
The latest drone video by Mingomatic includes what looks to be a group workout class on the outdoor observation deck at about 70 stories above the street.
Archive: Observing Los Angeles
The latest drone video by Mingomatic includes what looks to be a group workout class on the outdoor observation deck at about 70 stories above the street.
Magdi Hanna never saw a jukebox growing up in Egypt. Now he is one of the last to repair the icons of 20th century America.
"I’m hurting and I’m sad and mad...I’m beginning to feel the city isn’t good for me anymore," Gigi Graciette vents.
There is too much wallowing in LA history by local media and blogs, but the regular maps feature from Los Angeles Magazine doesn't count.
A bike ferry across Marina del Rey? A pedestrian entrance to Dodger Stadium? Might work!
When the first storms thrown our way by El Niño were bearing down last week, the Los Angeles-based staff writer for the New Yorker, Dana Goodyear, went out and gave...
The Chronicle of Higher Education piles on the praise, saying there's now "an LARB style" of reviewing.
Writer Geoff Manaugh has posted at BLDGBLOG his observation that from above, the shapes of blocks, yards and even specific homes reveal the existence of old streets we can't see anymore. And more.
Scientific American takes stock and concludes "there’s simply not enough land for each of the several males left to establish new territory and find mates."
In his terrific new podcast series, Santa Monica author Bill Barol seeks to explain what it meant to call the San Fernando Valley home.
For her NPR piece on the Day of the Dead celebration at Hollywood Forever, Los Angeles correspondent Mandalit del Barco hooked up with El Mariachi Manchester.
Future of Cities: Leading in LA held its first public event Monday night, while Zocalo Public Square has been going deep on its home city.
A month before shooting her famous migrant mother, Lange documented the "Mexican quarter" before it was razed for downtown's Union Station.
Producer Peter Jones wants the show to feel inpired by Ralph Story and Huell Howser, "who taught me the best quality to have as a journalist: listening."
Al Jazeera America goes for an Eastside tour with Sesshu Foster, "the poet laureate of a vanishing neighborhood."
In Topanga Canyon in 1963, even the doctors got stoned and took acid. Plus: Sacks in the most colorful green room in town.
Quad-copter pilot-photographer Ian Wood is back with another breathtaking video of Los Angeles from the air -- including of the Bullock's Wilshire tower.
Lots and lots of anniversary stories looking back at the riots and how Watts is a different place now. Plus: Rediscovered photos and a black cop's story of racism in the LAPD.
At first he mostly saw that it wasn't New York, but the departing West Coast editor of The Architect's Newspaper came to love and respect the LA thing.
In his new memoir about surfing, the New Yorker staff writer remembers the hot and dry, white, inland place that spawned him. We help him a little with the origin story of Tarzana.
"For Chinese food there's no place in the United States like Southern California," New York Times columnist Mark Bittman says in a new video from Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is becoming a metropolis of the developing world, the New York Times columnist argues.
The journalist and author tried to make it work after being laid off by the LA Times. But it's more complicated than that.
Subways. National healthcare. Curbs on surveillance and mass boycotts of standardized testing. Does he mean us?
At Vice Sports, Jonathan Zeller goes deep on the story of Maccabi Los Angeles.
Under pressure from Olympics officials, the U.S. committee may be looking to drop Boston and put up LA for its third summer games.
Fun stock footage posted on the Internet Archive. Clifton's, the Golden Gopher, the Rialto and other theaters make appearances.
Tim Egan, Dana Goodyear, Mark Arax, Grace Peng and others weigh in on the drought and California's future, while the New York Times style editors again give Angelenos something to wag their tongues about.
A Missouri couple received apologies from a climber rescued off a cliff at Point Dume.
Before wild animals had cute Twitter accounts, the sighting of a cougar in the hills of LA caused a much different response.
The color-colded grids are supposed to be simpler and more logical. That doesn't mean that people like them.
Désirée van Hoek says people ask why "a relatively wealthy, white girl from Amsterdam" spends her summers in LA taking photos of the poor and homeless.
Driving in LA is an art that requires intuition, patience and a sense of the topography, Meghan Daum writes.
In "Viva Gentrification!," Hector Tobar says whites are returning to Latino enclaves such as Highland Park.
Cities aren’t gentrifying by master plan, but because young people with money to spend want to live there.
Pico, Fry's Burbank and Cedars-Sinai are among the LA locales name-checked on Sunday's reunion show. Plus: Jane Curtin on Update.
In good weather the region has about 10 reported crashes an hour, peaking in the morning. On rainy days, the rate soars to 15 an hour and is worst in the afternoon. Go figure.
The New Yorker takes a serious look at the future of Los Angeles taxicabs through the eyes of Eric Spiegelman, the president of Mayor Garcetti's taxi commission, and a believer that taxis can move into the app era.
Dodger Stadium is now the second most-Instagrammed location in the world, after Disneyland, but SoCal destinations no longer dominate the Top 10 list.
The New York Times fashion and style section is back with another of those lightly reported Los Angeles cultural pieces.
The British novelist and journalist Will Self dropped in to our fair city this summer and collected a fresh set of outsider observations about LA — and you know how we all love reading those.
Now everyone knows that a generation of Los Angeles officials has fumbled the infrastructure ball and that Garcetti and the City Council don't yet have a workable answer.
Eight years and three children later, Matthew Garrahan is leaving Los Angeles for a new posting as global media editor for the Financial Times. He shares some observations of LA.
Every familiar building, landmark, roofline and mural is photographed by Ian Wood. The challenge has been thrown down for quad-flying urban videographers.
Since a former student at Marlborough wrote two weeks ago about her English teacher falling in love with her — and more — the scandal has roiled the Hancock Park campus and reached to Pasadena's Polytechnic.
In just seven years, some streets in downtown LA have changed quite a bit. Check it out.
True fact: the entire city of Los Angeles is closed on Thursdays so everyone can catch up on "Game of Thrones."
Old LA Observed friend Steve Greenberg contributes cartoons to the Jewish Journal and connected with this Donald Sterling gem. Previously on LA Observed: Steve Greenberg's LA Sketchbook...
I guess nobody at the Daily Mail recognizes Steven Soboroff, the president of the Los Angeles Police Commission — dismissed as a "jolly older gentleman" and a "pensioner" in a Fail story on Rihanna attending a Clippers game while dressed.
The Donald Sterling story was featured on "Face the Nation" and in the opening segment of "Saturday Night Live," plus Barbara Walters interviewed V. Stiviano.
Garcetti has been using his personal account to post pics from inside the rope lines and events such as his walk to work on Wilshire Boulevard a few weeks ago. The NYT takes notice.
Question: Can the New York Times Magazine cover LA Westside politics without saying "Botox Belt" or "Nate 'n Al's"?
Bryant says he's fairly certain he will retire as a player when his contract expires in the summer of 2016.
I cherry pick some of the more interesting rankings from the Los Angeles Business Journal's annual book of lists.
Jocelyn Y. Stewart used to cover hard news for the Los Angeles Times, an assignment that often took her into the South LA neighborhood where she grew up to cover homicides and other crimes. Then one night, late, her phone rang.
Interesting blog post by law professor and city of Los Angeles ethics commissioner Jessica Levinson on an aspect of the public culture here.
Christensen gives LA credit as a good enviro partner in an essay in High Country News, and she's not impressed.
Lots of things are popular but not cool - like the Super Bowl, or crystal meth.
BuzzFeed calls its listicle 40 Movies That Define Los Angeles, which is a big overreach. But it's a fun list nonetheless. A couple I would have added, inside.
Photographer Thomas Alleman found that the ubiquitous billboards for American Apparel say something to him about street art and about Los Angeles. His series, “The American Apparel,” takes its name from the 1976 Lee Friedlander photo project, “The American Monument.”
Fascinating Column One in the LA Times this morning about two researchers with time on their hands. They mapped some — but a lot — of the swimming pools in and around Los Angeles.
The Miami Herald came to town to explore the prep-school roots of Jonathan Martin, the Miami Dolphins offensive lineman who recently left the team over intensive haranguing (and worse) by teammate Richie Incognito.
This painting of a freeway made in 1966 by the artist Vija Celmins is "a prime example of a California-based artist making work that engages the state’s famous highway system," writes arts journalist Tyler Green. He shows 25 examples.
UC Berkeley planning Ph.D. student Fletcher Foti animated the data from household travel surveys showing how people move throughout the day, hour by hour. You can view the population by income and mode of travel.
The actual headline at Atlantic Cities is "More Billionaires Live in Beijing Than in Los Angeles." Check out the data.
You might remember a couple of years ago when we posted a video featuring two throwback businesses that have survived in the Westlake neighborhood: McManus and Morgan, purveyor of fine art papers, and its neighbor on 7th Street, Aardvark Letterpress.
Installment number eight gazillion in a series, but not unamusing. From a writer at Gothamist.
The editors of Boom: A Journal of California asked writer Bob Sipchen and his son Rob to defend LA’s right to exist. Which they did.
KCET columnist Elson Trinidad relates to LA's mess of an airport as an Ellis Island of the Pacific where his father first set foot on American soil in 1969, and where he and his friends regularly arrive back home from Asian travels.
The latest fan of books to write glowingly about the 5th Street store is from The Paris Review.
In a piece for the travel section of the Telegraph, actor Hugh Laurie goes against the grain of anti-LA sentiment among his fellow Brits. "I love the hippyness – better still, the collision between hip and yup – all set against the noirish, Philip Marlowe memories of my moviegoing youth."
The documentary photographer Bruce Davidson is known mostly for his images of New York — and not the softer sides of the city. Recently he has been dropping into Los Angeles for weeks at a time to shoot mostly in the hills and canyons. Palm trees, yuccas and the ivy growing on the undersides of freeway bridges factor in his LA pictures.
Boyle Heights, Wilshire Boulevard Temple and Gov. Jerry Brown all come in for some East Coast observation. Brown at 75 "is the oldest governor in the nation and about to become the longest-serving governor in the history of California."
Financial Times calls the Hyperloop "a marvellously bonkers idea that has been embraced by the tech community but politely dismissed by some California politicians."
Katz is vice president of the Brookings Institution and founder and co-director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. He contributes to The Atlantic Cities and has written a book, "The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy."
This photograph of the fledgling town of Los Angeles apparently was taken from a hot-air balloon in 1887, part of a stunt by William Randolph Hearst and his San Francisco Examiner. Nathan Masters explains.
The movie's funny, she's great and she lands some uncomfortable points about the male domination of movie trailer voice work. The ghost of Don LaFontaine looms over everything, even a party in Reseda.
I just glanced at the New York Times home page and there at the top were the faces of Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti, standing awkwardly at some long-forgotten debate in the mayoral race. No, it wasn't my web browser's cache or a mistake by the Times. It's a story by LA bureau chief Adam Nagourney.
Designer Peter Dunn re-envisioned the Los Angeles area freeways and mounted a Kickstarter campaign that raised enough money to print the map on 36-inch by 24-inch heavy stock. He explains inside.
LAPD detective Christopher Barling is the homicide supervisor for the 77th Street station in South Los Angeles — which has 250 open homicide cases. He agreed to "open up about his life and his work" with online readers of the UK newspaper The Guardian.
The Atlantic Cities observed last week that it was remarkable Los Angeles is thinking of narrowing Broadway's busy stretch downtown to three lanes as part of a plan to make the street more pedestrian friendly.
Lloyd Ziff is a former magazine design director who is working on a book of 40 years of his photographs of Los Angeles and New York. "I was a child in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and L.A. was being built right before my dazzled eyes."
Tom Lutz, the founding editor and publisher of the LA Review of Books, and Kurt Olerud of KO Pictures are co-producers on a feature documentary about the literary culture and history of Los Angeles. Or they hope to be anyway. They are looking to raise $23,000 in a month. Video inside.
Photographer Lane Barden has announced that the Getty Research Institute acquired his series of 130 images called the Linear City Porfolio. The three segments consist of low-altitude oblique aerial photographs of three major visual features of the LA landscape: the Los Angeles River, the Alameda Corridor railroad trench and Wilshire Boulevard.
"It is accompanied by a map that is either totally misleading, or astoundingly visionary," writes Eve Bachrach at Curbed LA. LOL — I choose the former. It's pretty hard to mis-locate the San Fernando Valley, 1.7 million people and all, but I especially like "Waterfront" and "Neighboring Communities."
BuzzFeed listicle gets it right about Los Angeles driving and parking. The reality is even more scary.
As Latinos’ numbers and influence continue to rise, they are feeling optimistic. African-Americans see their hard-earned political gains jeopardized by a declining population share. Whites are the most satisfied with how things are going in their neighborhoods.
Hader is the next "Saturday Night Live" cast member to leave. He wants to do movies and TV in Los Angeles. We'll say this — he knows his way around the city (video.)
In this film made for MOCA TV, Chloe Sevigny bitches about everything in LA and pees in front of the camera — it's amusing and moreso when the twists occur at the end.
Harold Meyerson, the former LA Weekly political columnist, argues in a Washington Post column that the choice of the next mayor is only the second-most important local question in Los Angeles these days.
Dan Crane, a freelance writer and musician who wrote “To Air Is Human: One Man’s Quest to Become the World’s Greatest Air Guitarist,” bought a house in Echo Park with his wife. He had to finish the renovation alone — but he gets a piece in Thursday's NYT Home section.
Nicely done time lapse of downtown and other parts of LA, day and night, from Alex Hallajian of Newport Beach.
LA Times architecture Christopher Hawthorne continues his survey of changing Los Angeles area boulevards with Wilshire — a street that he writes "has always stood apart from the city it slices through." Let's see what he says.
The editorial board of the Arizona Republic newspaper didn't care for last week's LA Times op-ed essay in which a New Mexico environmental author argued that Phoenix, already a pretty sucky place, is in the cross-hairs of Southwest climate change. Instead of refuting the guy's case, they go after LA.
Campaign consultants for Greuel, Garcetti and Perry dissect the mayoral primary races that are behind us — turnout is the story — and look cautiously ahead. Meanwhile, the Sacramento Bee's cartoonist lampoons Angelenos for not voting.
The New York Times was right on top of the Los Angeles mayoral election results, but they still have problems with the name of finalist Wendy Greuel. They only left out one letter.
Canadian astronaut on the International Space Station makes his second appearance of the week on LA Observed. Wait until you see his shot of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate inside.
In the new issue of VQR, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Los Angeles journalist Adam Baer (with photographer Elizabeth Daniels) explores his own and Hollywood's draw to LA architecture, especially the modern works of Lautner.
Temperatures have plunged into the 40s and the local news is freaking out.
Big weekend for Angelenos in the New York Times, including an obituary of Huell Howser. Plus: Kobe and Vanessa back together.
Which all proves that popularity on Instagram does not reflect the actual world, or Internet culture. And that San Francisco baseball fans post more than Los Angeles baseball fans — and more than all the football and soccer fans in the world.
Acosta is a former Los Angeles Times editor who now is the director of strategic initiatives at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center.
Starting this month, museum visitors who take a guided tour on weekends and pay an extra $25 will get to see the special cars kept out view in the garage.
A tongue-in-cheek rip on living in Los Angeles from a transplanted Londoner has some amusing observations. "David Spade is one of the city's most celebrated residents. David. Spade." Plus: Cafe Gratitude.
It's Craig Thornton’s private Wolvesmouth dinners in a loft downtown, says Dana Goodyear in "Toques From Underground" in this week's New Yorker.
Christine Pelisek, the veteran local police reporter who is now a Los Angeles writer for the Daily Beast, writes for the website's broad audience on "the latest use-of-force incident to surface in recent months involving the Los Angeles Police Department, which has been grappling with a series of brutality claims—some of which have been caught on tape."
Reagh took 40,000 photographs of Los Angeles and Southern California from the 1930s until 1991, chronicling a time of huge change in the cityscape and the people of LA. A major new book that showcases a selection of Reagh's work promises to be a must-have for the Angeleno buff you know — even at $225 per copy. Here is a gallery of Reagh's photos through the decades.
Six-minute clip from Harry Pallenberg looks at the rise of Googie coffee shop architecture around Los Angeles. Included are old clips of Astro Burger, the old Carnation building on Wilshire Boulevard, a Van de Kamps drive-in, Ship's, Norm's, Pann's and an interview Googie architect Eldon Davis.
With Campanile winding down to next week's end of its almost-25 year run on La Brea, Emily Green writes at the LA Weekly's food blog that the restaurant launched by Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel "has stood as proof that Los Angeles has a native-born food culture on par with anyone's. It introduced us to the glories of trattoria cooking and reintroduced us to American classics."
Larry Kmetz, who is 70, grew up in downtown Los Angeles toward the end of the streetcar era. He has strong, favorable memories of his travels around the city and has recreated an interpretation of the LA of his youth in his basement in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho. Ed Fuentes chats him up.
Every so often somebody asks about the corroding civil defense sirens up on poles scattered all over Los Angeles. Well, Dennis Hanley knows all about them.
A New York Post real estate editor and travel writer have written a very readable travel piece on the "new" Los Angeles that transcends enthusiasm. It's actually savvy about some of the shifting cultural currents here.
Like with Hawthorne's earlier pieces on Atlantic and Sunset, the theme isn't much deeper than him enthusing that some Angelenos are embracing a shifting style of boulevard and city defined by mass transit, bicycles and walkable neighborhoods. But hey, rail lines are being built and a guy can dream.
This three-minute video from French television "is almost haunting in its poetic but spare portrayal of what was then seen as the city of the future." Via The Atlantic Cities.
Downtown's King Eddy Saloon, a favorite of the new urban enthusiasts for its patina of LA history and image as "Skid Row's last great dive bar," is about to go the full hipster route. A story on the AP wire this weekend talks about the link to John Fante and Charles Bukowski, and the likely arrival of craft beer and cocktails.
Author Michael Connelly is known for his LA mystery novels, but he lives in Florida these days and sat down in Tampa with Warren Olney on KCRW to talk about the sides of town the Republicans may not be seeing.
British readers of The Guardian got a glimpse the other day of a Los Angeles they may not have known about. West Coast correspondent Rory Carroll became the latest journalist to take one of activist George Wolfe's kayak tours on the short stretch of unpaved Los Angeles River in the Sepulveda Dam Basin. Carroll makes some cogent observations, but first he has to find the place.
Artist Colin Rich, who made a pretty stunning timelapse piece on Los Angeles at night last year, returns to the subject of illuminated LA. The music this time is "Echoes of Mine" by M83. Watch inside.
Here's a bit more intelligence on the House of Pies, the Los Feliz survivor that attracted some appreciative attention recently from a blogger at The Paris Review. The LA Weekly got there first.
"Sure, you can get gourmet pie flavors at Pie Hole downtown," writes Aaron Gilbreath at the Paris Review blog. "You can get better coffee most anywhere. You can find more unusual egg breakfasts right across the street. But the burgers here are fat and delicious, the pies are unmatched."
Good Bob Pool story in the Times: the busiest stretch of freeway for signs that, in theory, help drivers find their way to a nearby college is now the 101 in the west Valley. The latest institution to get a sign is Tarzana's Hypnosis Motivation Institute, "which has classrooms on the third floor of a Ventura Boulevard office building."
Freelance travel writer extolls the virtues of the San Fernando Valley for the global audience of the New York Times. Plus more from Sunday's paper.
Social media are lighting up with camera grabs of the sunset, color-enriched by a little unusual July cloud action. This is Gregory Rodriguez's Facebook post from Washington Boulevard and Hill Street south of Downtown.
The LA Times architecture critic's expanded essays based on walking the Los Angeles area's "iconic boulevards" took on Sunset this weekend. He previously visited Atlantic Boulevard.
If you missed your chance to acquire a copy of the Jo Mora map of Los Angeles that we told you about a few weeks ago, I have good news. The curator of the Jo Mora Trust Collection emailed to say that the trust is making an unlimited edition available.
Arnold tells the New York Times' Adam Nagourney that he understands why the bodybuilder community fears being pushed out of Venice by the Google hordes. The company's expansion plans may include the building that houses Gold's Gym. "As soon as I walked in, they said: ‘You heard about Google?'"
The announcement on Wednesday morning of Ray Bradbury's death has been a big story in Los Angeles and beyond. (My updated original post, and Denise Hamilton's personal piece for Native Intelligence from 2006.) Here's a smattering of some of the reflections and tributes since, with more certainly to come.
Joe Donnelly, the co-editor and publisher of Slake: Los Angeles, writes in a Las Vegas magazine about his epiphany with the Beach Boys, many years ago. "I think it was 'Sloop John B' that did it," he writes, "...a miniature pocket symphony, if you will, of ascending and descending harmonies, vocal bass lines, multi-tracking, odd-but-effective instrumentation." Excerpts and a video
Glen Creason, the author of the stupendously grand Los Angeles in Maps, is the map librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library. So when he calls this 1942 carte by Jo Mora "one of THE greatest maps ever" and "one of the true masterpieces of pictorial mapping and my favorite Los Angeles map of all," ordinary schmoes like me have to listen. Well, it turns out that LA Observed has played a small role in making reproductions of the map available for the first time.
The hed and deck to Lee Jenkins's piece called La La Palooza: "For a 78-hour stretch Los Angeles was, finally, the sports capital of the world: 300,000 fans, 10 events, four teams, three playoff series, 110 cyclists. And an eclipse. Results be damned, it was a good four days." Read an excerpt
Diana Chang, who blogs at HRGBRG, posts: "In order from south to north, here's every Venice Boardwalk storefront that faces the Pacific Ocean. Photographs taken on May 17, 2012. With soundtrack."
Organic firefighters in Santa Monica and the science of "To Kill a Mockingbird"? Check out what our writers heard.
Tucked in among the purple and yellow and white Kings jerseys filling Staples Center tonight, there will also be small cardboard likenesses of a smiling fan. Tannerheads, the fans call them. Here's the backstory, via Toronto. [Update: Kings win]
Vanity Fair and "60 Minutes" conducted a little poll of Americans' answers to an eclectic set of questions you may not have known were pressing. The answers are fun to see.
Flavorpill's Los Angeles bias is showing through again — not that we're complaining. Its Flavorwire site has put Union Station, sometimes called the last great American rail station to be built, in 1939, high on its aggregation of The Most Beautiful Train Stations in the World.
ABC devoted a two-hour "20/20" special edition this past weekend to Sunset Boulevard, "a curving slice of American romance running from the rough edges of East LA through the music of Hollywood, past the riches of Beverly Hills and ending at the Pacific Ocean." Well, not quite East LA, or even the Eastside, but hey it's the promotional side of national news — what do they know.
The New York Times Travel section on Sunday offered a tour, with online slide show, of locations in the Los Angeles area that the late Julius Shulman photographed. "Shulman captured Los Angeles and its surroundings in the middle of the 20th century as the city was shedding its small-town roots and becoming an international capital."
Flavorwire has posted another of its 25 most beautiful lists — and they do aggregate some gorgeous photos and noteworthy locations. This time it's the 25 most beautiful public libraries in the world.
There on top of the red van, in the Mitt Romney family pet carrier: those are a pair of geese.
Suzanne Rico, the former morning co-anchor on Channel 2 who hit the road after losing her job two years ago, is back living in the Los Angeles area and blogging....
A reader emails to point out a few errors in the web slide show that goes with a photo essay by Lise Sarfati on women in Hollywood, in Sunday's New...
Topics included the LA Times, the LA Weekly, Jonathan Gold and more.
The New York Times Travel section does Long Beach.
Curbed LA revisits ten things said about The Grove when it opened ten years ago today. Plus: Seibu department store.
Steve Harvey's column of only in Los Angeles items, formerly a staple of the LA Times Metro section, are now at LA Observed.
Vanessa Whang, the director of programs at the California Council for the Humanities in the Bay Area, contributes a reminiscence of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake on the Zocalo Public Square website.
Los Angeles is likely to be well represented in the commercials that air during Sunday's Super Bowl. Like this one showing a flying saucer crash near Downtown.
The images of 1940 Los Angeles that photographer Ansel Adams shot for Fortune magazine, then put away and forgot for awhile, are getting their first public display other than on websites.
The Natural History Museum, downtown, Santa Monica Pier and Pacific Coast Highway are among the Los Angeles-area scenery in this new video pitch for the 2012 CR-V, featuring Matthew Broderick.
Since taking over as editor of Los Angeles in 2009, Mary Melton has "continued to push the publication beyond its former Westside comfort zone into the far corners of our megalopolis," says The Frying Pan News, the city and politics website from the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.
I kept seeing Twitter and Facebook posts go by marveling at the sunset over Los Angeles on Tuesday. I thought, well OK, sorry I missed it. Luckily, photographer Jonathan...
Heather Havrilesky's immediate point in the NYT Magazine is her disappointment in "Homeland" and "American Horror Story."
The item on the Huffington Post site about New York City doesn't feel right.
With some of his “Rings” earnings, he founded Perceval Press, a small L.A.-based publishing house specializing in art books and poetry.
The director recalled that when he lived in Los Angeles the life and things that happened were so fantastical and divorced from the rest of the world that when he went back to Germany, he couldn't talk about L.A. — because no one would believe him.
A reader of the New York Times contributed an observation to the paper's Metropolitan Diary that included a compliment to Californians.
The big fashion and celebrity fundraiser on Saturday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, co-chaired by Leonardo DiCaprio and Eva Chow, is billed in today's Wall Street Journal as essentially a borrowed idea.
In an online commentary under the New York Times' Opinionator banner, newly New Yorkified journalist Katie J.M. Baker ticks off why she loathed growing up in Encino and the San Fernando Valley.
Filmmaker Gus Van Sant and architect Brad Cloepfil spoke to a Zócalo Public Square crowd at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Auditorium about why they live in Portland (and not Los Angeles), plus what influences their work.
Robert Redford romps on the roof and inside the Village movie theatre in Westwood in a 1965 clip shot by actor Roddy McDowall.
The New York Times finds some skepticism about the arts festival.
Lisa Napoli, the public radio veteran who stepped out of the rat race a few years back to live in Bhutan, recently began hosting All Things Considered every afternoon on KCRW. That made her a cross-town commuter.
Cassie spent her adolescence on the streets of L.A. then got herself together, only to slip back into the rabbit hole of urchins, dealers and characters in...Frogtown.
Bill Bratton to the Financial Times editor taking him to lunch: "So I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I was expecting a much older woman."
Cat shows are far more populist events than dog shows, says The Awl's Natasha Vargas-Cooper.
SI's Lee Jenkins has landed a major piece reconstructing the day when Bryan Stow was attacked at Dodger Stadium, and analyzing how it became such a big story both for Dodger fans and the culture.
Southwestern Law School professor David Fagundes, writing at the legal blog Concurring Opinions, considers the long waits for a hot dog at Pink's and concludes there's a paradox lying therein....
Writing today at The Awl, Eric Spiegelman is amused by the cacophony of Los Angeles place names — some more valid than others.
Lots of stories this weekend about former LAPD chief William Bratton and the political squabbles that have formed around him since the prime minister over there, David Cameron, suggested he would like Bratton to lead the London police.
With so many NPR staffers in town the past week, L.A. stories are getting a good ride on the network.
Photographer Colin Rich worked for months on this time lapse study of Los Angeles at night.
Always fun to see NY media folk with next to zero knowledge of our fair city report out a piece that's dated and distorted.
Faced with stepped-up scrutiny, pilots might want to pull back a touch,
Jacob Lassen works as a commercial actor sometimes, and crawls under houses the rest of the time.
Leo Braudy and Timothy Egan on what to take from last weekend's unexpectedly light traffic.
Carmageddon weekend is taking on the same image of freedom from traffic as the 1984 Olympics has in Los Angeles lore.
"They have to do this every two years to sweep up the shell casings," Jay says in tonight's monologue.
I'm pretty sure I swore off the Hitler spoofs awhile back. but this one is worth it — and just very smart about the city's culture.
"L.A. also smells of fat and sugar—the cheap donuts served at my hotel.”
The Dodgers are in last place on July 4, and the media pile on.
Steve Harvey walks us through the various eras before we end up at Loss AN-ju-less.
Shawn Hubler writes in her Orange Coast magazine column that she senses more openness toward Orange County from her Los Angeles friends.
Here's 54 seconds of video from the Los Angeles entry in World Naked Bike Ride on Saturday. Looks like about 100 riders in different stages of nudity turning off...
7 Days in LA bills itself as a web home for "the city's most interesting guided tours. We're not a tour operator, but a consortium of the region's best independent...
In his quest to read 25 books about Los Angeles this year, LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne is up to David Brodsly's slim 1981 work "L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay."
Times columnist Hector Tobar offers his "guidelines" for qualifying as a real Angeleno.
In a clip taken from the 1968 documentary "Cineaste de notre temps," the actor and filmmaker cruises through the Hollywood Hills in a convertible — with the Beach Boys singing "California Girls" on the radio — and complains there aren't enough people in L.A.
Lewis Brown played high school ball for Verbum Dei and starred for the UNLV team in Las Vegas. The 6-11 former center has been living on the streets of Los Angeles for ten years.
Mickey Kaus compares the trending topics on Twitter in Los Angeles with those in Washington and Islamabad, and says ours are "embarrassing."
he McCourts' involvement in the Dodgers, and Bud Selig's for that matter — as well as Sam Zell and Tribune's role in the Los Angeles Times — are examples of outsiders with no sense of or loyalty to the sounds and rhythms and cultures of L.A.
The first stages of a "narrative experience" about a fictional flood hitting Los Angeles will be unveiled at this weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.
L.A. Day/L.A. Night features 30 aerial images of the city by photographer and pilot Michael Light. The book's introduction by Los Angeles Times critic David L. Ulin observes that "daylight...
Jonathan Alcorn went to Venice Beach for the first warm day of spring in Los Angeles.
Author Anna Stothard, in the center of the photo, writes in the UK Guardian's Observer that "Los Angeles is more spectacular, and more unnerving, than its cliché suggests." She picks...
In the April cover story in Men's Journal, actor Jake Gyllenhaal takes his bike into Griffith Park and is called The Fittest Guy in Hollywood.
Los Angeles Magazine asked the Chicago native to riff a little on life in Manhattan Beach.
As part of the publicity onslaught for "The Lincoln Lawyer," the new movie from Michael Connelly's mystery of the same name, the author and lead actor Matthew McConaughey chat for a Times reporter while parked in an SUV on Connelly's old street above Laurel Canyon.
The state may say L.A. is over four million, but to the U.S. Census Bureau we're at 3,792,621.
Brando Skyhorse and his novel about growing up in Echo Park have won the $8,000 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Los Angeles magazine's Hidden LA cover package this month has some fun stuff. Not amused, though, are fans of the wildly popular Hidden LA website and Facebook page.
And now from a real photographer: Jonathan Alcorn, out early Sunday at Marina del Rey.
Up on the roof on Sunday afternoon, after the storm.
Boyle Heights, established east of the river in 1875, by the 1920s had become "a working-class, multiethnic neighborhood far more diverse than any U.S. city; Mexicans, Japanese, African-Americans, Russian...
Orange County photographer Matthew Givot renders parts of the city beautifully in his time lapse videos.
For 110 years, Children's Hospital has been a Los Angeles institution with a flaw. Its name, in the official papers and everywhere else, was spelled wrong.
Charles Brittin was a beat-era photographer whose best-known work captured Los Angeles and the avant-garde artists of the decades when the Ferus Gallery was big. His photos from the streets...
A preview of the L.A.-centric game from Rockstar, coming later this year.
The L.A. Times architecture critic announced today that he will read and post brief blog essays over the next year on "25 of the most significant books on Southern California...
KTLA's Eric Spillman spotted this Google-mobile at, by the looks of it, Fairfax and Pico.
Not included in the Sofitel Hotel's pool shots: the big ol' shopping center right across the street.
Victoria Delgadillo at the LA Eastside blog explains the December relationship many Angelenos have with their San Marcos blankets — the big thick colorful cobijas that sometimes double as art works.
In one of those promotional interviews that actors do with the smaller magazines when their movie is coming out, Mila Kunis was asked how she broke the diet that let her lose a bunch of weight for "Black Swan."
Is this when we make a joke about pots of special interest gold at the end of the rainbow?
I noticed a lot of yellow and red trees from a Wilshire high-rise this morning, and I read now from Roy Rivenburg at the Times' gardening blog that it's more or less official.
My piece today commented on the observations of L.A. I've mentioned recently by a gifted migrant to the city, Christopher Isherwood, and by 50 native (or close to it) Angelenos in Los Angeles magazine.
Photojournalist Jonathan Alcorn said the sunset was so awesomely red over L.A. on Saturday that he had to pull off the freeway and start shooting.
ESPN's Rick Reilly spent a day tooling around L.A. in Ron Artest's Cadillac Escalade, talking about the Lakers, therapy, and a bunch of other things.
Sounds like some fun stories were swapped about L.A. in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and especially of the gay and artistic underworld of the time, tonight at the Hammer.
I've really been enjoying Los Angeles magazine's feature this month on 50 more-or-less famous Angelenos remembering something about growing up here.
Connie Bruck does the honors in today's issue and introduces Broad as "the Lorenzo de’ Medici of Los Angeles—the city’s singular patron, especially of the arts.”
Councilman Tom LaBonge, with a football in the orange jacket, and organizer Michael Schneider posed for a pic this morning before kicking off the Great Los Angeles Walk on Wilshire Boulevard.
The news site that's merging with Newsweek has rated LAX the fourth-best big U.S. airport, after Phoenix, Seattle and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky. Best, not worst.
Sometimes a picture is worth more than thirty words.
A week in the area Los Angeles, with no car and about $100 a day — staying in a youth hostel. Seth Kugel, the New York Times' Frugal Traveler: Seven...
Martha Stewart has posted on her blog 51 pictures from a recent trip to Los Angeles that saw her appear on "The Tonight Show," "Access Hollywood" and the "KTLA Morning News," eat at Osteria Mozza and unveil an iPad version of her magazine.
An editorial in today's Financial Times urges California voters to pass Proposition 19: "the Golden State should vote to legalise dope."
A Brooklyn blogger says that the cover image on the Best of NYC issue of the Village Voice is of Downtown L.A.
The New York Times Travel section checks in on the Bay City with an update on what's interesting since Santa Monica Place reopened.
The creator of "Law and Order: Los Angeles" regaled the likes of City Council president Eric Garcetti, exiting Bon Appetit editor Barbara Fairchild and NBC correspondent Josh Mankiewicz with behind-the-scenes stories from the show.
Stylish blogger Joe Posnanski came to town and spent a little time with Vin Scully at the stadium, and more time listening on the radio as he rode around Los Angeles, and spins out a a nice piece exploring the origins and meaning of L.A. culture's most enduring relationship.
Eli Broad’s decision to build his art museum on Bunker Hill, and how he arrived at the decision , "illustrates how the billionaire homebuilder does business, and how he has...
Zócalo has launched a series where it invites writers to contribute pieces on going home, "wherever or whatever that may be." First up is Andrés Martinez, who helped spawn Zócalo while he was editor of the editorial pages at the Los Angeles Times, before the dramatic fall.
The Strand, a program on the BBC World Service, features a segment on One-Ten, the opera being composed in serial form along and about the Pasadena and Harbor freeways by Los Angeles Magazine.
Bob Timmermann likes to keep score when he's at a baseball game, but Monday night at Dodger Stadium — horrors — both of his pens ran dry. Twitter to the rescue.
Orange Coast magazine comes up with 52 reasons why life in Orange County is better than life in Los Angeles.
Jay Leno last night asked people on Melrose Avenue some questions about places around the world. First question: In what country are the Hawaiian Islands? Everybody failed, of course.
Here's how Los Angeles doesn't measure up to Santa Monica in the eye of luxury hotel reviewer Melanie Nayer, writing at the Huffington Post.
Channel 2 news photographer and blogger Bryan Frank just completed a marathon picture-taking trek through the area — "my little artisitic endeavor" — that he called 24LA.
Steve Caplan moved his family to Copenhagen last year to work, explore and blog. Now they are returning. His thoughts.
Since the real estate bubble popped, "ideas have disappeared from the political landscape of Los Angeles," Jerry Sullivan of the Garment & Citizen argues in a piece at New Geography.
Governing magazine's John Buntin surveyed the new architecturally distinct police stations the LAPD has been building this decade — and he found something missing.
Fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars have reacted to talk of their team fleeing west by launching a website called No Way L.A.
Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne considers the record as Eli Broad prepares to cause another museum to be erected in Los Angeles, probably Downtown on Bunker Hill.
New York Times bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer has some fun with L.A.'s propensity for public exercise.
Five years after French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy observed Los Angeles somewhat harshly in the pages of the Atlantic, writer Conor Friedersdorf prosecutes a point-by-point defense of L.A. on the magazine's website.
Lynn Garrett, who started the Hidden Los Angeles website and wildly popular Facebook pages of the same name about a year ago, has quit her job to run the sites and plans to hire an employee.
Kent Mackenzie's 1961 film about Native Americans living in Downtown Los Angeles premiered that year at the Venice Film Festival but was not released commercially. It screens Wednesday at The Hammer.
President Obama's head table at tonight's White House state dinner for Felipe Calderon, the president of Mexico, includes Speaker of the Assembly (and Villaraigosa cousin) John Perez (with Jason Seifer), County Fed chief Maria Elena Durazo, TELACU leader David Lizárraga, farm workers' legend Dolores Huerta and Univision host Maria Elena Salinas.
Gustavo Dudamel, his roots in Venezuela's El Sistema, and the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles were the subject of a segment tonight on "60 Minutes."
The New York Times continues to run Verlyn Klinkenborg's occasional musings about Los Angeles, but they seem to be getting shorter.
David Willis, a BBC News correspondent in Los Angeles, entertained the home folks today with a dispatch on Southern California's recent spate of earthquakes.
If you remember the minor dust-up in March over Saveur's Los Angeles issue — or even if you don't — you might like this. Plus: The Bazaar on "60 Minutes."
We're locked in pre-June gloom on the Westside these days, but Katie Keating had a ray of virtual sunshine find her on the freeway this morning.
I noticed at LAX the other day that the skin is back on the iconic Theme Building, with a fresh coat of white paint. Renovation only took, what, three years? New York Times bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer explained the meaning of it all this weekend for the out-of-towners.
The Wall Street Journal's Hannah Karp informs the global audience that, with the Los Angeles Kings in the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time in eight years, "there's a...
Daniel Hernandez, the former Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly staff writer now working for the LAT bureau in Mexico City, is not a fan of The Entryway.
Over the new few months, the architectural discussion website mammoth will be hosting an online discussion of a forthcoming book, "The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles," as an "experiment in the cooperative reading and discussion of a text."
The finalists reflect a pretty rich selection of points of view about the city. See who the finalists are, and the panel of judges.
Today's observation du jour regarding Angels Flight: the Downtown funicular, in a scene evoking its authentic pre-1969 setting, makes an appearance in a You Tube video for the End Times album by the band EELS.
CNBC's Jane Wells talks to Mayor Villaraigosa and author Joel Kotkin about the city's self-inflicted budget crisis and whether Los Angeles should, perhaps, go bankrupt. Villaraigosa vows there is no...
A: So low that "blood-chasing local television news stations will have to import footage from other cities to uphold their reputation for practicing the nation’s worst and silliest local reporting," writes New York Times online commentator Timothy Egan in a piece that praises L.A.'s turnaround from the depths of 1992.
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times' well-read Op-Ed columnist, starts his latest column on America's need to be more innovative and competitive with a short riff on how bad Los Angeles International Airport looks.
The Society of Professional Journalists of Greater Los Angeles is branching out, subject-wise and geographically, for a free panel discussion tonight.
Deadspin's editor emeritus Will Leitch turns his spring training eye on the Dodgers and, by extension, Los Angeles.
"Much blacker than even the darkest film noir," Scott says, and he means it in the good way.
Photo on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, from a photo feature on actor Jeff Bridges in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
Twitter has erupted with rainbow images from across Los Angeles.
Cintra Wilson's takedown a couple of weeks ago of celebrity dresser Rita Watnick and her Beverly Hills shop Lily et Cie was entertaining on several levels. Alas, Wilson got one thing wrong.
British author Lucy Broadbent writes in the U.K.'s Times on how living in Los Angeles for a dozen years has turned her into a churchgoer.
D.J. Waldie has turned up a planner's sketched-out concept of a reenvisioned Downtown Los Angeles that centered in 1939 or '40 on the newly built Union Station, the recently opened Olvera Street tourist trap and an imaginary cityscape that reminds Waldie of Italy under Mussolini.
No gushing journalism worship for celebrity dresser Rita Watnick and her Beverly Hills store from the New York Times' Cintra Wilson.
Today's New York Travel section recommends 31 places to go in the world this year. Tucked in between Leipzig and Shangai — and after Antarctica and Damascus — is our own little town.
Mathieu Dufour, on leave from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra while playing here with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has decided to return to the Midwest. In the Chicago Sun-Times, he's quoted...
The Los Angeles page is up. Here's a snip from the release out of New York, where the Huffinton Post's paid staff of editors and aggregators is based: The Huffington...
She tells David Letterman she's liking life in Los Angeles....
Noah Sheldon is a New York photographer with a show currently at the Cherry and Martin gallery on south La Cienega. While here this month, he made some nice photographs...
It's about 79 degrees in Los Angeles, a little warmer in spots, with essentially no wind. Up on Mount Wilson, the light is sharp. Thanks for everything. Cam grab at...
Los Angeles native Steve Caplan sold his house in the Valley hills to move to Copenhagen, where his wife is from, to work on the coming United Nations Climate Change...
Good piece coming in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine on the media studio that is the La Habra home of Octomom Nadya Suleman. Seems like there is always a...
Longtime readers know Martin Schall as the German creator of you-are-here.com, the great website of Los Angeles photographs. Although I've been posting since 2004 about the 42-year-old who runs the...
Meridith Baer furnishes and decorates homes specifically to hook potential buyers. A New York Times Magazine writer lusts after the image of a life she created — mountain bike included...
As part of the promotion for his new movie, actor Adam Goldberg drives around Los Angeles pointing out some of the things he dislikes. Among them are the food,...
The lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center downtown stood in for the Rome Hilton, circa early 1960s, on a recent episode of "Mad Men." Spotted by...
Veronique de Turenne was up and outside early this morning and caught this view across the West Valley from the top of the Santa Monica Mountains. She's got another view...
Posted in May, but apt today. What happens in L.A. when it rains, the spoof — with some good lines and extensive UCLA scenery....
The most-viewed article in the UK's Guardian the past 24 hours has been a weekend piece from Los Angeles asking if California will become America's first failed state. For what...
Matthew Fleischer was in the audience last week for Talking Heads founder David Byrne's appearance at Aloud to talk about his new book, "Bicycle Diaries,” and Los Angeles. The event...
An LA Observed reader driving north on the 110, somewhere below the Santa Monica Freeway, emails that the Caltrans info sign that predicts travel times was for once indisputably accurate:...
Times Op-Ed columnist Gregory Rodriguez, who is the man behind Zócalo, ponders today what it means that so many Angelenos were torn between horror and awe by the Station Fire's...
Staff writer Susan Orlean has been in Los Angeles some of the summer and offers a blog entry on The New Yorker website about the week of fires. Excerpt: All...
Most nights, it seems, one window remains brightly lit on the west face of the City Hall tower. Lisa Napoli emails that she and her neighbors on Bunker Hill watch...
The Go-Gos tool around early '80s Los Angeles in a convertible, vamp outside Trashy Lingerie on La Cienega and frolic in the electric fountain at Wilshire & Santa Monica in...
Wired magazine's Mark Horowitz has created a Zee Maps-assisted guide to the Los Angeles locations in Thomas Pynchon's novels and real life, based on the presumption that "Pynchon, the paranoid...
From the Jewish Journal's food blog, posted by editor Rob Eshman: I just got a peek inside David Sax’s new book, “Save the Deli,“ due out Oct. 19, and can...
Los Angeles and New York both make great settings for police dramas on TV. But why, over the last decade or more, are most of the better ones located in...
Sunday's New York Times Style section attended a backyard music festival of L.A. trust fund children and spots a trend. Excerpts: Behind a sprawling home in Encino, a grassy Los...
The French department store Le Bon Marche is featuring items that subtly suggest Los Angeles, but I guess you have to be there. Laurie Pike at The Chic Leak blog...
Dwell magazine's June issue rates San Francisco's new international terminal the best airport in the U.S. Los Angeles International is pegged as the country's absolute worst: Los Angeles is the...
"The Soloist," which I saw Saturday night in Los Feliz, worked well enough for me as entertainment, as a Los Angeles movie and as paean to the best role newspapers...
This morning's post on the Getty's $15 parking fee — I agreed with the NYT's Ed Wyatt that it's essentially an admission charge — elicited a nice flow and range...
In a piece today on the Getty's financial pinch, the New York Times' Ed Wyatt puts the parking fee hike in perspective: For a hilltop museum with no public parking...
KPCC's John Rabe didn't just get to the public observation level high up on Los Angeles. He shot a video from the TOP, where the beacon shines over Los Angeles....
With the Lakers in the NBA playoffs and expected by many to contend for the championship, the Wall Street Journal looks at why they dominate L.A. sports and concludes "the...
A web-only, video-rich feature at Newsweek's site says the city of Compton "has a new lease on life" after shedding its image as the region's murder capital. Excerpt: The community...
New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff includes Los Angeles in an essay arguing for steps that should taken in four U.S. cities that would begin "making our cities more...
This morning at The Foundry on Melrose, Los Angeles Magazine convened a panel to talk about President Obama. There was plenty of that — some of which inspired my KCRW...
Writing for the front of today's Thursday Styles section in the New York Times, Scott Timberg says that Eagle Rock's much talked-about invasion by young creatives is crashing along with...
While Joel Kotkin sees Los Angeles "fading rapidly toward irrelevancy," this month's Atlantic cover story posits that L.A. is one of the relatively few American places ideally situated to rise...
Urban analyst and critic Joel Kotkin warns at Forbes.com that the upcoming reelection of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor should not be taken as "evidence that all is well in the...
The media scene outside the Suleman home in Whittier — Camp Octuplets, you might say — is described in tomorrow's New York Times by L.A. reporter Randal C. Archibold. Photographers...
Channel 2 (and 9) photographer Bryan Frank had Friday afternoon off and spent it taking pictures on foot in Hollywood and Downtown. Hot dogs at Skooby's and a beer at...
UCLA student Lina Chung isn't just heading off to Rome to study abroad. She's calling a much-needed break from living in Los Angeles. "I have been a faithful girlfriend, devoted...
In the winter of 1949, snow blanketed the floor of the San Fernando Valley and other parts of the basin. But swimming lessons must go on — it was the...
Pat Saperstein at Eating L.A. has some fun digging through the newly released Life magazine photo archive on Google for some prime Los Angeles images. She hit a trove of...
Here's the best thing I read all day. The New York Times has a marvelous Travel section story with Ry Cooder visiting spots in the Mojave Desert, accompanied by an...
A special report on Los Angeles packaged in today's print edition of the U.K.'s Financial Times includes pieces on digital media, art, Antonio Villaraigosa, Hollywood, Downtown, real estate and other...
The New York Times' David Carr jets out to the coast and finds that in Hollywood, it's still morning in America. Hollywood comes by its indifference honestly. Certainly, the stock...
Zina Klapper, a partner in Pop Twist Entertainment and a former editor of Mother Jones, writes at New Geography about some of the issues presented by family life in the...
Los Angeles Times writers and editors chose 25 films from the past 25 years that "communicate some inherent truth about the L.A. experience." The arbitrary time period made "Chinatown" and...
Occasionally someone who gets caught abusing L.A. stereotypes complains that I don't point out the same style violations by writers about New York. Go figure — we call it LA...
Web developer-designer Jonathan Grubb moved here from San Francisco eight months ago to work in Hollywood and has some observations about our relationship with the web. Here's a sample, minus...
By Bay Area tradition, references to freeways don't carry an article. In Los Angeles we "take the 101" (or "the Ventura Freeway") but up north they just "take 101." Times...
Los Angeles-based Washington Post reporter William Booth filed a good piece last week about Moe, the chimpanzee missing near Devore, but I'm guessing he got burned by the copy desk....
Blogger David K. Israel at Mental Floss magazine counted the Pinkberry knockoffs within two miles of his home — 11 places to satisfy his sweet tooth for cold Korean-inspired dessert...
Today's lede about hands-free cellphones and driving, under the byline of Jennifer Steinhauer, the New York Times bureau chief in Los Angeles, who should (and does) know better: LOS ANGELES...
I don't know if National Public Radio's "Bryant Park Project" airs here at all, but if you're interested the show has done a story on the riders who demonstrate by...
David Willis' story was about Los Angeles commuters switching to the tube, if we can call it that, because of the high price of gas. This week I did something...
What says Los Angeles better than a non-native jacaranda in full bloom and non-native water being spilled on the street to flow into the storm drains and out to sea?...
Tribune innovation czar Lee Abrams blogs that before coming to Los Angeles, "For years I have heard the Industry dirt on the Los Angeles Times. Got a lot of 'good...
This week's issue of The New Yorker carries a "Letter from Los Angeles" by Dana Goodyear on the movie being made based on Steve Lopez's L.A. Times columns about street...
The New York Times' Critical Shopper feature visits The Grove and says today that it gets to you, even if you don't want to like it. The first time...
Short piece in the U.K. magazine on L.A.'s move toward more density — and how cities around the West want to avoid becoming the next Los Angeles. Excerpt: The original...
Lisa Napoli did a nice story on today's Marketplace about Ngawang, a 23-year-old DJ in Bhutan who is visiting — and discovering — Los Angeles for the first time. Until...
Writer and blogger Tom Teicholz was on the Santa Monica Promenade this afternoon when he spotted a woman strolling naked and preening for a video camera and still photographer. "This...
In another of those generic magazine roundups claiming to know the best of something, but really an exercise in geographic diversity, Details includes Square One Dining on its top ten...
Much honored Los Angeles sci-fi writer and alternate historian Harry Turtledove writes about time travel in his Crosstime Traffic series. Could he be predicting the future with the sixth book...
In The Oldest Living Thing in L.A., Larry Levis observes an opossum trying to cross Wilshire and Santa Monica. Sample: A few steps forward, then back away from the breath...
Councilman Ed Reyes stopped in at 7th and Alvarado before noon to dedicate the intersection as Langer's Square. No dummy, he loaded up on the good stuff before making the...
Here's a nice little story from writer Mark Evanier's blog, called modestly News From Me. Seems he began teaching a humor writing class at USC yesterday, but his car broke...
In his Monday afternoon commentaries on KCRW, Marc Porter Zasada takes more creative chances and fashions many more gems than a certain other radio talking head I could name. Today,...
In the eyes of the New York Times, the 96 students in the Colburn School conservatory on Bunker Hill "are among the finest young musicians in the world." The story,...
Over at Native Intelligence, Judy Graeme's third offering on Los Angeles photographers introduces a group of teenagers (and younger) who use borrowed cameras to shoot images of their gritty home...
There are three notable photo exhibitions up at the Getty right now — a survey of nudes and seven decades of Andr Kertsz among them — but the largest and...
Dana Goodyear has been blogging on the fires for The New Yorker and has a Talk of the Town piece in this week. Excerpt: Southern Californians dont like to wake...
From the author's Op-Ed in the New York Times: The fires have come to Los Angeles again and there is only one thing certain, and it is an obscene horror:...
This shot of Angels Flight in its old location beside the 3rd Street tunnel is one of the photographs in the exhibition of "Julius Shulman's Los Angeles" at the Central...
In one of those glib, fast-moving pronouncement pieces that magazines are in love with, Details pronounces the suburbs hip in the November issue. The sidebar anoints Montrose as a worthy...
Richard S. Chang, writing in today's New York Times Wheels section about the pleasures of driving a stick shift: I was living in Los Angeles. Even though stopping and starting...
The latest media to discover the luxury denim industry in downtown L.A. is the New York Times, which focuses Wednesday on Bread Denim and draws the obligatory bigger meaning: Its...
Writer and activist Jasmyne Cannick blogs that her neighborhood of Historic West Adams is more than big houses and the Ray Charles studio: I kid you not, most of the...
Author and Pomona College alumnus Verlyn Klinkenborg has another of his Editorial Observer pieces about California in today's NYT. The subject this time is the forecast that our fair state...
Motivated by yesterday's fun video of Broadway shot in the 1980s, Los Angeles photographer Robert Pacheco sent along his photo essay of Downtown in the 1970s. In his black-and-white...
Bloomberg critic Linda Yablonsky is the latest to fly in, praise Michael Govan and visit some galleries. Excerpt of her piece: You just never know where genius may lurk. Chances...
The radio host and author pens a Times Op-Ed piece about showing his niece around Los Angeles, even though he did get lost for a while. Everybody knows the comedy...
Nice online gallery and slideshow from graduating high school senior Annarose Mittelstaedt. Her website slideshow includes a Google Earth tour of the sights. Photo: Annarose Mittelstaedt...
Matthew Garrahan, the Financial Times' man in Los Angeles, reported Sunday that Apple is in advanced talks with Hollywoods largest movie studios about "launching an online film rental service to...
Lisa Napoli came home from the doctor's office so annoyed she typed up these notes. The Boobs As overheard by Lisa Napoli Scene: The very crowded, very small waiting room...
This afternoon at 2 pm Patt Morrison will have on the German photographer behind You-Are-Here.com, the best website of Los Angeles architectural photos. He blogs about his recent trip to...
Michael Newman, the Times' deputy opinion editor from out of town, thinks so after running yesterday's marathon. He particularly seems to not much like Boyle Heights, Koreatown or the sections...
Today's Wall Street Journal advances tomorrow's Beverly Hills municipal election with a front-page story that focuses on the Iranian face of the city through Jimmy Delshad, a councilman who is...
Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and music critic for Commentary, hits cleanup in the lineup at one of my favorite multi-blog cultural websites, ArtsJournal. Somehow he...
Thomas Mauk, the man who wouldn't be L.A. County CAO, wasn't the first to reject a deal with the Board of Supervisors. Dr. Joshua Perper, the Broward County (Fla.) Medical...
Manhattan's 92nd Street Y is hosting a night this week with three L.A. literary types who happen to be ex-New Yorkers. In advance of Thursday's event, artist/writer/standup Beth Lapides answers...
The New York Sun has turned its critics and reporters loose to ruminate on the Los Angeles they don't know very well. Some of the pieces are interesting, even if...
A study at Central Connecticut State University ranks the most literate cities in the U.S. based on "newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and...
Esquire: In the December "Best and Brightest" issue, Colby Buzzell takes on an unruly quest across Los Angeles "in search of things that make it good to be alive. In...
If I had the power, I would fly Martin Schall to Los Angeles and present him a key to the city. Herr Schall, as LA Observed long-timers know, is the...
Like most everyone else who has toured the newly expanded Griffith Observatory, Orange County Register science editor Gary Robbins was impressed by the aesthetics. "You'll want to hug the army...
Reading between the lines, I'd guess that New York Times bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer's most painful culture shock about moving to Los Angeles this year has been parking tickets. Her...
Weekend clouds obscure the view across Santa Monica Bay, but the cloud pillars orient the geography. Veronique de Turenne has the coordinates at Here in Malibu....
Catherine Elsworth, the Daily Telegraph's woman in L.A., has relocated to New York for a few weeks in part to "remind myself what proper city living is all about." She...
It must be let's talk about L.A. month at the blog of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Last week Sydney Pollack answered questions from Andrew Krucoff, now it's Arianna...
Los Angeles Times metro columnist Steve Lopez just had to pen a column on the latest round of misplaced New York Times journalism on L.A. The recent William Bratton profile...
It's Michael Chow's palace in Holmby Hills, designed by Chow and his wife Eva with a 28-foot-high central atrium and many Chinese touches, but with Mexican arches and carved wooden...
I just received an email from a local editor-in-chief which reads, "David Zahniser's piece in this week's LA Weekly .. is brilliant. I'm jealous." The subject of the rave is...
Is there a lazier media and blog meme going around right now than the anti-Westside digs over the 310/424 area code overlay and resulting addition of four digits to every...
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is swirling through California for a bunch of appearances, including the Rupert Murdoch bash in Pebble Beach. On Monday he will meet the local elite...
It's a lazy Friday in July so why not post a little travel writing, even if it is about home. Notes from the Road calls itself "a project in experimental...
LA Frog refers to herself as "Parisian euro-pudding whose karma ran over her dogma. Met a California surfer dude, traded high heels for flip flops and crossed the world to...
Chris Ayres writes in his L.A. Notebook for the Times of London that going native is one of the worst career moves a foreign correspondent can make. "It is a...
In the Thursday Styles section of the New York Times, Sharon Waxman laments that so many male feet in Los Angeles—by which she means Hollywood—are showing up at work and...
Daily Telegraph correspondent Catherine Elsworth returned to her post in West Hollywood from a trip home to the U.K. with a serious jones for David Beckham and England's World Cup...
Los Angeles now has a media-anointed Yahoo parents group—introduced to the national spotlight in today's Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. Peachhead has 3,000 members, about 500 of...
Janelle Brown talks to occupants about what it's like living in Case Study homes or the classic Victorians on Carroll Avenue, given all the tours and tourists that come by....
New at LA Observed
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.
