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In his Westword column in the L.A. Times Book Review, Jonathan Kirsch reviews Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. Playwrights and pop singers...
LA Observed archive
for November 2003
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
Nerve.com's resident guinea pig Grant Stoddard takes on the assignment: get three L.A. women to pose naked for his digital camera. Continuing my assimilation into California culture, I joined a...
Came across articles today from two past editors of the L.A. Times editorial page. Tom Plate, who also held the job at the Herald Examiner, writes on the L.A. Business...
Happy Thanksgiving!...
Confession: I don't always read or look at every section of the paper in the morning. Or in the afternoon. I just now noticed Tim Rutten's column in yesterday's LAT...
Vince Beiser in the LA Weekly pursues the romaine trail from seed to Cheesecake Factory in Calabasas and finds sleek corporate towers, Third World–style shantytowns, toxic chemicals, bioengineering, cutthroat competition......
Richard Horgan considers the "Sexiest Man Alive" phenomenon at FilmStew.com: Two decades later, the annual title of worldwide male hottie, which was awarded last week to a 40-year-old Johnny Depp,...
Tom Mangan is a copy editor at the San Jose Mercury and writes his blog, Prints the Chaff, mainly for other newspaper copy editors. He posts today: My head is...
Following on the reporting staff's globally reported three-part series on Wal-Mart, the L.A. Times editorial page doesn't exactly have a position to argue, but it sure sees Big Questions. What...
Christopher Scheer, the son of regular anti-Bush contributor Robert Scheer, shows up on the L.A. Times op-ed page today arguing that the Administration is "waging the wrong war in the...
More tales of Buzz and of Los Angeles magazine from a few regimes ago, as told by Nancy Rommelmann. Who apparently, and alas, is still leaving L.A....
The Greater L.A. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has announced some awards for journalists of the year: The winners are: Jeff Wald, news director at KTLA-TV; George Nicholaw,...
Four months later, Santa Monica authorities are still trying to decide what -- if anything -- to do with Russell Weller, the elderly driver who killed 10 people and injured...
Verdict: true. Tech companies that do business with L.A. County really have been told to stop referring to "master/slave" computer connections because of the "cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los...
The summer Bar exam given to prospective California lawyers had its lowest pass rate since 1986 -- 49.4%. The 7,788 candidates who took the July exam were the most in...
Freelance writer Rachel Neuwirth has sued rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller of UCLA Hillel, claiming he attacked and injured her as they argued about Middle East politics following a campus appearance by...
In announcing indictments Monday against 14 developers and subcontractors for illegal campaign donations, DA Steve Cooley said that major residential developer Alan Casden is a target of the prosecution. The...
Growing up as young passionate L.A. Dodgers fans, there were two opposing pitchers me and my buddies feared most: Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal. Baseball Musings reminds that the two...
Two takes on Gov. Schwarzenegger's stand on runaway film production, by Alex Ben Block in Television Week and Matt Welch at Reason magazine's blog Hit and Run....
Overseas correspondents are preparing a letter to editor John Carroll complaining about the survivor benefits being offered the widow of Mark Fineman, the veteran L.A. Times reporter who died of...
Los Angeles has quite a few gorgeous old churches, temples and shuls. On Wilshire Boulevard alone are a half-dozen striking landmarks from the 1920s, such as the dark gothic Immanuel...
Eugene Volokh has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of some writerly names, among them Michael Crichton, Elmore Leonard, Scott Turow, Harry Shearer, Ron Shelton and...
They gave a meeting to talk about downtown and, surprise, 1,144 people showed up. That might have been because they held it in the new Disney Hall and Frank Gehry...
Today's second installment (of three) in the L.A. Times front-page series on 'The Wal-Mart Effect" looks at how the world's largest corporation gets suppliers around the globe to cut costs....
The L.A. Times redid its Sunday comics pages this weekend and moved Peanuts and Doonesbury inside, with the revived Opus by Berkeley Breathed new on the front (after a ten-year...
New York Post gossips aren't impressed with Us Weekly's choice of reporter for the Michael Jackson case. Says Page Six: If you're expecting hard-hitting coverage of the child sex-abuse charges...
The Hollywood Reporter and Variety report on how it is that free copies of Sony Pictures Classics' Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran are reaching SAG members as part...
Gov. Schwarzenegger has mentioned a couple of times now -- most recently in his inauguration speech -- the chill of Communism he felt as Soviet tanks occupied his native Austria...
Both the L.A. Business Journal and the Daily News are reporting that the District Attorney is asking questions about the awarding of contracts by the Hahn Administration's Board of Airport...
Disney has been trying to sell the Anaheim Mighty Ducks for four years, and as the L.A. Times reported yesterday, the most interest is coming from the Maloof brothers --...
Telemarketer Nina Smith, who makes calls from a West Virgina boiler room, in the New York Times magazine: "East Coast and Southern people are friendly -- you get profanity from...
L.A. city inspectors insist that the Playboy mansion in Holmby Hills is just a residence -- but Kate Berry in this week's L.A. Business Journal finds that some 80 events...
Longtime USC journalism professor (and former CBS correspondent) Murray Fromson has put up a blog. The Fromson File is doing longer pieces, the current one a remembrance of the night...
Scott Timberg has a pair of Calendar pieces in the Sunday LAT on German art book publisher Benedikt Taschen, who adopted Los Angeles as home and last week opened a...
USC's engineering school is pondering the creation of a minor in video game development. No jokes please -- it's a serious consideration, says the L.A. Business Journal. A committee will...
The L.A. Times is putting off the launch of Image, a new weekly fashion and personal image section, until well into next year, and some travel is being curtailed to...
Roger Simon got his first batches of Academy screeners today, but he didn't have to sign for them and three films from Lions Gate came on DVDs. All of which...
L.A. Times media critic David Shaw was interviewed this week by JournalismJobs.com and had a few things to say about the paper where he has written for more than 30...
"60 Minutes" on Sunday is doing a double-length segment on the $10-billion pornography business, and apparently the Steve Kroft piece will spend a lot of time here in the Valley...
Low Culture finds a certain similarity in the archives of writing about Phil Spector -- who, if you didn't know, was a millionaire before......
Most in the media know the basic Jim Romenesko story -- news guy starts "MediaGossip.com" on his own, moves to Poynter, gets a paycheck, drops gossip from the name, eventually...
Manohla Dargis in the L.A. Times and David Poland at Movie City News both stay in Seussian character to make the point that Cat in the Hat reeks. Dargis, in...
The fight over the Ambassador Hotel just got more complicated, and the momentum may have shifted away from preservation. A community coalition with political connections came out Thursday for razing...
Looks like the Democrats in Sacramento have anointed another L.A. lawmaker to be the next Assembly Speaker. Dan Weintraub says it is Fabian Nunez, the first-term member who used to...
They were all together Thursday at Galpin Ford in the Valley, rallying the troops. The KFI team led the charge, but it was Galpin boss Bert Boeckmann who had to...
In her media column in today's CityBeat, Cathy Seipp gets a free dinner and visits with her friends at the libertarian Reason magazine, where she has written. The piece contains...
Michael Caruso, the editor of Los Angeles while the magazine was owned by Disney, is taking over the top spot at Jann Wenner's Men's Journal, the New York Post says....
Though it's not as surprising as his license to fly helicopters, thanks to the Daily News' Dana Bartholomew we know something else about the personal side of Cardinal Roger Mahony...
The L.A. Times' Matt Lait and Scott Glover report today that investigators have "significant evidence" linking Anthony Pellicano to last year's threat against LAT reporter Anita Busch. She had been...
All three major networks led the evening news last night with the Michael Jackson story, says Variety, which surveys the newsmagazine shows being ripped up to get on the air...
Marc Cooper comes up with the best phonetic rendering I've seen yet for Gov. Schwarzenegger's pronunication, in a piece that says Arnold's push to undo the drivers licenses-for-illegals law might...
The former LA Weekly writer and news editor (1983-93) died this week at home in Huntington Beach. Curran wrote about the Community Redevelopment Agency, the LAPD and the Church of...
The media scene, from AP and Gary Delsohn in the Sacramento Bee. It was L.A. Times staffer Jeff Rabin who Schwarzenegger complimented as "this gentleman with the nice-looking beard and...
Tim Rutten suggests today that the Nation (158,810) overtaking longtime leader the National Review (157,616) in circulation at the top end of the opinion journal rankings could be about growing...
L.A. blogger Arthur Silber, who had to shut down when the MTA strike cost him all his work, was helped out financially by a number of other bloggers and now...
L.A. Times reporter Tim Reiterman, wounded the same day that Jonestown cultists shot and killed congressman Leo Ryan and three journalists -- among them former KNBC anchor Don Harris --...
KPFK (90.7 FM) is devoting all day today to a Pacifica-wide marathon airing of audio tapes from the network's half-century of radio archives. It starts at 4 a.m. with an...
I was wrong back in October about the city's crackdown on lap dancing. Not on the ban itself -- on that I can't get interested either way -- but I...
Slate's Eric Umansky, writing in the New Republic, takes on allegations that the oil wells at Beverly Hills High are causing a high rate of cancers -- a case being...
PreserveLA.com calls itself "a forum and clearinghouse for the latest news, information, and techniques concerning historic preservation and the history of Los Angeles and Southern California." Organizer Christopher Hetzel writes...
Sue Smethurst thought her trip to from Australia to L.A. to interview Olivia Newton-John about breast cancer for New Idea magazine, where she is an editor, would go as smoothly...
Governor Schwarzenegger's inauguration was mighty big, but it wasn't the only news even though he did manage to swell the state budget deficit by $4 billion in his first act....
Tonight at 7 p.m., Leo Braudy will discuss his book, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity, with Los Angeles magazine editor Kit Rachlis. Then on...
That Anthony Pellicano is no dummy. On the eve of going to federal prison for 33 months, he gives an interview to Chuck Philips in the L.A. Times that seems...
Just back from a junket to Israel with assorted city officials, city council president Alex Padilla is scheduled to jet off again -- to Sweden on Dec. 8 to learn...
San Francisco Chronicle book critic David Kipen is a native of Los Angeles and a fan of the Dodgers. He crossed jurisdictions to pen a piece in the LAT Sunday...
Orange County blogger Xrlq is taking the point position in defense of Justene Adamec at CalBlog, who has been threatened with legal action over comments posted on her site. The...
KCRW plans to carry the Schwarzenegger swearing-in ceremony live at 11 o'clock this morning. Meanwhile, historian and state librarian Kevin Starr in the L.A. Times' Sunday Opinion section (and veteran...
MPAA chief Jack Valenti has told the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and critics that there will be no changes in the screener ban this year. The Hollywood Reporter says that...
Good news for all of those Drama Hour fans who keep adding comments to the KNX post from Nov. 3. Don Barrett's LA Radio.com reports that starting tonight, KSUR (AM...
Back a little early from a weekend in San Diego. Just enough time to read a few things: Christopher Hitchens has known David Horowitz since his days on the far...
Next post when the Schwarzenegger clan gathers in Sacramento....
Ben Stein revels in the cushy life where Hollywood meets Fox News Channel. His gig for E! Online website must be the easiest column in town....
Jim Evans blogged from his perch as managing editor of California Journal, but he's taking a job covering the business of government for the Sacramento Bee and sends word that...
At the center of the Bernard Weinraub-Luke Ford episode is a passage about private investigator Anthony Pellicano possibly robbing the grave of Mike Todd, who had been the husband of...
Jack Valenti "most likely will step down" in January as head of the MPAA and probably be replaced by Billy Tauzin, the Republican congressman from Louisiana, Jim Bates reports in...
Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism department chair who writes at Press Think, sounds disappointed and discouraged by L.A. Times managing editor Dean Baquet's remarks this week in New Orleans (see...
Yes, apparently. This twist in the Anthony Pellicano-wiretap story gets an airing by Jack Shafer at Slate, and on the ever-more irrepressible LukeFord.net. More background from Ford pal-confidante-adviser Cathy Seipp....
From the New York Times: Freak Storm Leaves Los Angeles Under a Foot of Hail...
The spoofy LALATimes, slogan "everything absurd under the sun," is looking for "a bone fide publisher and investors to guide and support it through its upcoming expansion," says a press...
L.A. Times managing editor Dean Baquet spoke this week at a gathering in his hometown of New Orleans and began to address the fallout over the paper's groping stories on...
Rip Rense says if he ran a newspaper he'd bring back typewriters and paper just to make the environs seem less bizarro. I had a tour of the San Francisco...
Bill Bradley notes in the LA Weekly that the Schwarzenegger administration "is shaping up so far to be less bipartisan than advertised, even though it will be more liberal than...
Nikki Finke takes the contrarian, ho-hum view of the Pellicano wiretapping stories. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Variety et al. would have us believe in their...
The L.A. Times chose syndicated columnist Robert Scheer to review the Rick Bragg book on PFC Jessica Lynch, and he makes of it about what you'd expect of a guy...
While the MTA shutdown and the supermarket strike-lockout linger on, city attorney Rocky Delgadillo, council president Alex Padilla and councilman Jack Weiss are in Israel on a 10-day junket paid...
Emmis Communications, owner of Los Angeles magazine, is no longer a player in the bidding to buy New York, Keith J. Kelly reports in the NY Post. But Village Voice...
L.A. blogger Arthur Silber is shutting down because the lingering MTA strike here has pummeled his finances, despite his predicament getting some attention in the blogosphere. (Hat tip to Matt...
I'm late tuning in to the Hollywood wiretap story, but it has caught my interest. The federal investigation of prison-bound private investigator Anthony Pellicano and his clandestine work for entertainment...
Burt Pines used to be the elected Los Angeles city attorney and most recently has been the judicial appointments secretary for Gray Davis, helping the governor choose which lawyers to...
Bruce Cook was the books editor of the L.A. Daily News from 1984-90 and had been a senior editor at Newsweek and books editor at USA Today. He died Sunday...
Odd little "Editorial Observer" piece by Brent Staples in yesterday's New York Times, pegged to Los Angeles and California. A correspondent writes that it was almost as if Staples, a...
A listener upset with KNX 1070's cancellation of the nightly Drama Hour has launched KNX Revolt!, hoping to put pressure on advertisers. Comments continue to come in at our original...
The book deals on Publishers Lunch this week include a sale by J. D. Lasica, a senior editor at USC's Online Journalism Review who blogs his musings on New Media....
Kevin Arnovitz, the Fray editor at Slate, writes a confessional piece admitting that he is a Clippers fan and ponied up $1,700 for a pair of upper-deck season tickets at...
Margita Thompson, the press secretary for Dick Riordan's campaign for governor last year, is going to do the same job for the new Guv. She is a producer for CNN's...
Matt Welch clicks on LA.com, the new city guide beta site from Gannett and Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group, and finds it lacking. The team includes Lynda Keeler, a venture capital...
Ron White, a staff writer in the L.A. Times business section, was assigned to take a job as a replacement worker in the produce section at Ralphs. He didn't tell...
Sue Laris, publisher of the Downtown News, writes in today's issue that city officials have been bullying her and other publishers over newsracks and she urges a full-on fight....
L.A. cops will no longer get a membership pitch from the NRA along with their new Berettas. Patt Morrison writes in the L.A. Times that officers objected to the membership...
Professor emeritus Ralph Shaffer has been trying without success to get Times writers to stop referring to Los Angeles as a desert, climate-wise. Simply put, he says it rains too much for the coastal plain to qualify as a desert.
Jon Weisman, who blogs at Dodger Thoughts, points me to a surprising and pleasing L.A. history website: walteromalley.com. Walter O'Malley owned the Brooklyn Dodgers and brought major league baseball to...
The L.A. Central Library's Aloud program for this week: Wednesday, November 12, 7 p.m. NATHANIEL PHILBRICK "Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842." National Book...
The two-month-old blog low culture catches New York Times film reviewer Elvis Mitchell adoring Zooey Deschanel...and again...and again. Now other NYT fanboys -- er, make that male reviewers -- are...
Joseph Mailander at Joyrides Without Maps could do without Virginia Postrel's free market philosophy, but it's her writings on style that really frost him:Ms. Postrel, in short, like most economic...
Ex-mayor Richard Riordan has shelved his Los Angeles Examiner project, semi-officially, while he prepares to assume the advisory post of state education secretary. Riordan himself doesn't comment, nor does Tim...
Journalists Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair and their two young daughters have returned to Los Angeles from Rarotonga in the South Pacific. Mark posts at bOINGbOING, which he co-founded: We'd...
Attention L.A. media party hosts -- in making your invite lists for the holidays, think twice about putting Slate's Mickey Kaus and the New York Times' Bernard Weinraub around the...
National Journal's Wiliam Powers surveys the architectural reviews of Disney Hall and awards Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times the prize for "baroque exuberance verging into meaninglessness." His excerpt...
Brett Pulley in a Forbes magazine cover piece examines the Matrix franchise and says it has so far taken in $1.9 billion in gross revenue -- with the third film...
This week's New Yorker includes fiction from T. Coraghessan Boyle and a piece on the Los Angeles Iranian community by Tara Bahrampour, journalist and author of the memoir To See...
Tim and Nina Zagat respond in the L.A. Times to David Shaw's criticism last month of their restaurant guides. Say the Zagats: Ever since we started asking diners to rate...
The bookstore has sent email to customers saying it will reopen in Santa Monica today at 5 p.m., in the new location at 1450 2nd Street. Earlier post....
Eugene Volokh usually teaches law and posts to his blog at UCLA, but this semester he's in a strange and alien place far, far away. I've noticed that the trees...
At CalPundit, Kevin Drum and many of his commenters are horrified by an L.A. Times story today on the debate over the handling of evolution in Texas biology textbooks. The...
Cathy Seipp's media column in today's CityBeat visits with the L.A. Innuendo team, out with their second issue of what they call L.A.'s scrappiest satirical newsmonthly. "Well, it’s just the...
Reuters' Dan Whitcomb followed up on Tuesday's post about the L.A. Times halting use of the term "resistance fighters" to describe the attackers of U.S. troops in Iraq. LAT assistant...
Joan Kroc, widow of the McDonald's founder, left almost $200 million to National Public Radio. She listened to KPBS in San Diego before she died last month. "No one saw...
Mickey Kaus, self-described "Ward Connerlyite opponent of racial preferences," picks apart L.A. Times coverage of UC admissions practices and connects on some points. I actually don't understand the entire basis...
Cathy Seipp asks on her blog if the online registration at LATimes.com is the worst on the planet. That's a rhetorical question, because the answer, hands-down, is yes, as everyone...
Nikki Finke's LA Weekly column this week is about Rhonda Miller, who says she has yet to get an apology from Arnold Schwarzenegger or his aide, Sean Walsh, for spreading...
Chicago film critics are joining their L.A. counterparts in dropping the handing out of awards unless Jack Valenti allows reviewers to receive screeners, Variety reports. The Los Angeles Film Critics'...
Mark Bowden's October cover story in The Atlantic, "The Dark Art of Interrogation" -- which explored the role of torture and other tactics in interrogation of suspected terrorists -- has...
Nancy Rommelmann discloses how she and Hillary Johnson became acquainted, hooked up with Buzz magazine and rented a Hollywood office together -- nicknamed the Super Vixens’ Dymaxion Lounge....
Robert Tagorda at Priorities and Frivolities recycles this quote from former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan. Did she have certain bloggers in mind? Beware the politically obsessed. They are often...
After five days of testimony in the Scott Peterson prelim, lawyer blogs on the left (Talk Left) and the right (SoCalLawBlog) agree: so far they got nuthin' on him....
Courthouse News, the Pasadena-based legal website, has a blog by journalist Matthew Heller. His latest item is about a lawsuit against L.A. Focus magazine by community activist Najee Ali, who...
The L.A. Times will no longer refer to the attackers in Iraq as "resistance fighters." The word came down last night from assistant managing editor Melissa McCoy, keeper of the...
Catherine Hamm, the L.A. Times deputy travel editor since 1999, ascends to replace Leslie Ward effective immediately. Freelancers and travel industry flacks should revise their contact info. The memo follows....
Don Barrett at LA Radio.com says the response he's hearing to KNX dropping the Drama Hour "has been swift and mostly negative." He calls it "Post-Dramatic Shock Syndrome." Skeptical observers...
Blogger Lonewacko's tour across the country stops in Gallatin, TN, hometown of his idol Huell Howser. Some knew The Enthusiastic One, most didn't. Lonewacko says that the L.A. Cacophony Society...
The Downtown News' Jason Mandell has a feature this week on the designs for Disney Hall that were rejected -- as well as a look at Frank Gehry's original vision....
Nice interview at mediabistro with Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason. The libertarian magazine is nominally based in Los Angeles, but he is near Cincinnati. We're probably far and away the...
I hate to see anyone lose their jobs, but the decision by E! News Live to cut back to half an hour was overdue. Living in a household where the...
Favorite L.A. blurb from this week's Publishers Lunch round-up of fiction sales, but try not to picture it: Lynn Isenberg's MY LIFE UNCOVERED, likened to Mary Tyler Moore meets Boogie...
A couple of liberal politics blogs, Joshua Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Atrios, are publicly pondering the pros, cons and blog ethics of taking candidate ads. Atrios already accepts them,...
Laura Chick -- she's the city controller in Los Angeles -- has hired veteran City Hall hand Miriam Jaffe for the new post of director of government and community affairs....
KNX 1070 has been airing nightly dramas for three decades, but the run ended Friday night with "War of the Worlds," LA Radio.com reports. The "all news" station is going...
Bill Rosendahl, a familiar figure in local politics who has hosted public affairs shows on Adelphia for 16 years, plans to step down this month and announce he is running...
Back in August I observed on journalist (and former LATimesman) Phil Garlington's self-exile to the remote desert. Sunday he made the S.F. Chronicle and today he's the lead item at...
Michael at Franklin Avenue compares and contrasts the fire coverage at KPCC, which has invested in a local news operation, with KCRW, which has gone in other directions. Warren Olney,...
He talks about Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power at LAPL's "Aloud at Central Library" program Tuesday night at 7 p.m. On Wednesday, Simon Winchester comes in to talk...
This is Arnold York's week in the L.A. Business Journal. The owner-publisher of the Malibu Times (with his wife Karen) is in the front page lead of an LABJ story...
Dan Weintraub's California Insider reported Sunday night that Richard Riordan will be appointed Gov. Schwarzenegger's secretary for child development and education, probably today. Given the anonymity of such posts in...
Rochelle Krich slips onto the L.A. Times Book Review bestseller list at #11 with Dream House, her novel of an "Orthodox Jewish true crime reporter [who] investigates vandalism, arson and...
The Seattle-based City Comforts blog -- "cities, architecture, the 'new urbanism,' real estate, historic preservation, urban design, land use law, landscape, transport etc etc from a mildly libertarian stance" --...
David Shaw and Andrew Sullivan both find Shattered Glass close enough to the truth -- uncomfortably so for Sullivan, a former editor of the depicted magazine. The beginnings of the...
The Midnight Special bookstore won't reopen at its new location on 2nd Street in Santa Monica -- off the Promenade, its home until last spring -- before December. City permit...
Tim Rutten interviews disenchanted former Fox News producer Charlie Reina for today's Media Matters column in the L.A. Times. "Roger is such a high-profile and partisan political operative that everyone...
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.
