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Kirk Douglas, leaning on a cane, spoke the first words to be heard on the stage at the new Kirk Douglas Theatre tonight in Culver City. Douglas told humorous stories...
LA Observed archive
for September 2004
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
Last week it was Stacey Grenrock Woods, Daily Show wractress and Esquire sex columnist. Today the other guilty party behind L.A. Innuendo, Richard Rushfield, quips his way through Gawker's 5x5...
Even bloggers do those annual lists now. Blogging.la's favorites for 2004, posted today, tend to the Silver Lake-Los Feliz-Melrose side of things, but not rigorously. One contributor even endorses the...
That Moorish-themed building on Beverly Drive just off Wilshire that used to house Fiorucci—and most recently bore an Israeli Discount Bank sign—was the first movie house in Beverly Hills. It's...
Today's LA Weekly runs a follow-up story from Doug Ireland to his piece last week alleging that congressman David Dreier is (gasp) gay, conservative and in the closet. The story...
It appears that Shaquille O'Neal had a pretty good reason to curl his lip at Kobe Bryant last season. Thursday's L.A. Times reported that when Bryant spoke to Colorado police...
Janet Maslin gives the thumbs up in Friday's New York Times to Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession, the new book by Variety editors Dade Hayes...
Ana Marie Cox, the Washington, D.C. writer who blogs about politics with a splash of sex as Wonkette, has signed on to be the keynote lunch speaker when the Online...
In this week's New Yorker, Tad Friend's Letter from California gets up close and personal with San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom. The headline reads "Going Places." The story is not...
In a story today on the Los Angeles Community Colleges, the Daily News quotes elected trustee Michael Waxman praising the job done for the colleges by PR firm Fleishman-Hillard. They...
So the Dodgers win another with five in the bottom of the ninth inning (again, amazingly), and should be steeling for the playoffs. Instead, the story line from last night...
Mayoral candidate Bob Hertzberg was first out of the gate with a website, ChangeLA.com, and a blog. The content has not been scintillating, but since the last time I looked...
John Montorio continues to tinker with his chess pieces on the features floor at the L.A. Times. Today's it's Bret Israel, the editor of Sunday Calendar, who gets some new...
A feature in today's Times on Dodgers co-owner Jamie McCourt opens with her astonishment that L.A. fans head out early for the parking lots even with the Dodgers fighting to...
Brooks Boliek covers Washington for The Hollywood Reporter and writes today that he's ashamed (sort of) to admit he is a journalist. One doesn't go into journalism for the bucks,...
One of the story lines about Jim Hahn's mayoralty is how the Valley provided his margin of victory — with most Valley leaders endorsing him — then supposedly developed a...
Somehow I missed this: the L.A. city council wants its attorney to draft an ordinance requiring window flaps on dog houses. The Times's Jessica Garrison, suggesting the council has become...
Not much of a surprise that Phil Spector was indicted today in the shooting death of Lana Clarkson....
PR Week runs a q-and-a today with Richard Kline, the California president of Fleishman-Hillard. They are a mite touchy these days at F-H, so the questions had to be submitted...
At the end of last week, the editors at LAist posted that the site would be migrating to a new server over the weekend. Always frightening words. As of Monday...
Michael Kinsley, The Times' editorial page and opinion über-editor, told Editor and Publisher that if it's up to him, the paper will probably break with its tradition and endorse a...
Architect Thom Mayne had this to say in today's Times Calendar about some of the adverse reaction to his design for the new Caltrans headquarters downtown: "Some people have told...
The Daily News began popping out an eight-day series on gang violence in Sunday's paper, representing four months of work. It's in the other L.A. News Group papers as well,...
Dennis Ross, the Middle East peace negotiator whose new book is The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace guests on the first hour of...
Third time a charm? Tribune's Distinction magazine has brought on its third editor since launching last summer. It's Holly Palance, until recently the editor of Santa Barbara magazine, this week's...
Mack Reed at LAVoice.org breaks the news that LA.com, the city guide and shopping site put together by the parent of the Daily News and others — but best known...
• The good people behind My California: Journeys by Great Writers — Angel City Press and California Authors.com — gave the first $10,000 check from the book's proceeds to the California...
WriterAction.com is where about 400 members of the Writers Guild go for their daily fix of of dish, dirt and grousing, behind a firewall open only to other guild members....
He wasn't, clearly. Miller, the ex-ABC reporter who chief William Bratton found a $157,000-a-year job at the LAPD — as anti-terrorism boss and head of the Critical Incident Management Bureau,...
Manhattan Beach joined the cities making it illegal to smoke on the sand. Along Santa Monica Bay, only Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach and Torrance still allow smoking, the Breeze says....
Nothing good about tonight for the Dodgers. Savior-to-be Brad Penny wasn't to be, throwing half his pitches for balls, walking five and leaving abruptly in the fourth inning with the...
Former channel 4 weathercaster Christopher Nance alleges that the station, which fired him in 2002, discriminated on the basis of race (he's African American) and subjected him to ridicule for...
Times reporter Scott Martelle, currently assigned to the Barbara Boxer-Bill Jones Senate race, will move over to the Style desk after the election to cover the L.A. literary beat. The...
Hollywood A-listers and assorted other liberals turned out at David Geffen's Beverly Hills manse last night to celebrate New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's visit to tout her new book,...
The New America Foundation, based in Washington and headed by Ted Halstead (co-author with Michael Lind of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics), has opened a Sacramento office...
According to the website The RawStory, this week's LA Weekly will out local Republican congressman David Dreier as gay and report that he lived with his "highly paid" chief of...
At 3:30 in West L.A., the bamboo is wilting, the cat is pawing the walls, my wife's sinuses are cooked and the sounds of the city and passing planes are...
The picture with today's Times story about city councilman Greig Smith injuring a skateboarder with his car is not Smith, but one of his campaign contributors. City police commissioner Alan...
Conservative critiques of Robert Scheer are about as newsworthy as a Scheer blast at George Bush or Rush Limbaugh. But Kevin Drum, the SoCal-based house blogger for the Washington Monthly,...
It's not a certainty that the Dodgers will blow their playoff chance, but they've played like a third place team for more than a month — 18-18, five of those...
Elderly and living in a Santa Monica nursing home, the former editor and poet Joyce Fante — mother of writer Dan Fante — wants a strong-voiced actor to read classic...
The Hollywood Reporter is taking over the Hollywood Creative Directory line of guides and Lone Eagle Publishing. "We are thrilled to add such strong brands to our entertainment portfolio," THR's...
Today's Page Six chuckles over the latest issue of Architectural Digest and the editor's note from Paige Rense about her conversation with an upset "Mr. Television Personality." The NY Post...
The Times is out with a 2,800-word Style profile of Doug Dowie, the newsman-turned-PR exec who is the central figure in the ethics questions about Fleishman-Hillard and its deals with...
The city council only meets three times a week, always scheduled to start at 10 a.m. Tuesday's meeting didn't begin until around 11 when a quorum of members finally rolled...
Daniel Petrie Jr. remains president of WGA West in a landslide vote. He got 71.3% of the 2,110 votes cast by guild members, swamping dissident Eric Hughes, who received 25.6%....
Remember Steve Webster, the TV publicity exec who imploded his career by eavesdropping on high-level conference calls at FX long after he was fired? He pleaded no contest yesterday to...
This look at Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003 is by Cathy Seipp in today's Wall Street Journal (online here for subscribers): Kevin Starr's latest California chronicle, covering...
For eight years, James Fuhrman has been a pesty watchdog eyeing West Hollywood 's city hall. His newsletter and half-hour spot on public access cable, "The Complainers Variety Show," shed...
Paramount is home to the Zamboni machine! Sorry, pet peeve. At least some editor or reporter didn't discover...the Tree People! * Pro and con: Deanne Stillman emails: The Zamboni story...
Oddball downtown televangelist Gene Scott — the papers invariably call him flamboyant — had said he wanted to "give God the first shot" at stopping the prostate cancer discovered four...
Local bloggers Roger L. Simon, Patterico, Hugh Hewitt and Little Green Footballs have been all over the CBS debacle and receiving varying levels of credit in the blogosphere. Simon, for...
Tensions are flaring between the owner and residents of new lofts in the Higgins Building, one of downtown's most storied conversions. The Higgins opened at 2nd and Main in 1910...
Seymour Hersh chats about his book Chain of Command with Lawrence O'Donnell on The Politics of Culture Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. on KCRW (89.9 FM or live on the web)....
At noon today, the Spanish-language music station at 93.5 FM flipped over to hip-hop, proclaiming itself the successor to the late KDAY, the first stop for hip-hop on L.A. airwaves....
Times subscribers have been opening their papers to find the glossy premiere issue of bello — small b — a new magazine of "power, culture and success" for upscale Latinos...
Tim Rutten has taken a long (32 years) circuitous route through the L.A. Times editor and writer ranks, beginning under legendary editor Jim Bellows in the old View section. Today,...
• The contents page in Sunday's L.A. Times Magazine had a posed photograph of a faux prisoner in a faux cell, to illustrate a cover story on the Three Strikes law....
What does it take for the mayoral candidates to make nice to each other? Apparently, the chance to fete kingmaker Bill Wardlaw and his wife, federal appeals court Judge Kim...
This ad ran in Sunday's LAT Book Review: Writer to collaborate on sensational, unsolved murder of prominent, wealthy L.A. businessman in early 30s. The first time two people (my grandparents)...
In the October issue of Los Angeles magazine, Steve Oney traces the transformation of Arianna Huffington from first foreign president of the Cambridge Union debating society to lover of Bernard...
For months, mayoral sibling Janice Hahn has been pressuring for a change in top management at the Port of Los Angeles. She even let it slip in June that her...
The lineup for what organizers advertise as "America's first conservative film festival...and there's nothing Michael Moore can do about it" is firming up. From today's press release: HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Sept....
Questioning the facts and reasoning behind the lefty rhetoric of UC Irvine historian Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz and The Ecology of Fear is a recurring Los Angeles...
OK, we recently noted an L.A. hot dog website. Now we've been pointed to Hamburger LA. They evalute by price, meat and patty, buns, fixings, extras and style and service....
Yesterday's Las Vegas Sun said the "rumor of the day" is that the Tribune Co. is talking to the owners of the Las Vegas Review-Journal about acquiring the paper. Today...
Several locals of the Service Employees International Union — representing 350,000 workers — endorsed Jim Hahn's releection yesterday. Last time, all but one local backed Antonio Villaraigosa, who used to...
Los Angeles Times Books apparently had one more in-house compilation in the works. Ninety collected columns by the late editor and writer Frank del Olmo have been pulled into a...
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's staff has not been a model of stability. In August, his office confirmed that Delgadillo's communications director, Eric Moses, was moving into a new role. The...
Adam Moss continues to reinvent New York magazine. His latest addition is Ken Tucker, the ex-Herald Examiner rock critic and longtime critic-at-large for Entertainment Weekly. He becomes the magazine's film...
KCRW music meister Nic Harcourt (left) is profiled Friday on KCET's "Life & Times," which airs at 6:30 p.m. Tonight the show visits with retiring pastor Chip Murray. Also tonight...
The new City Hall blog 4th Floor reprints a terse email from Mayor Jim Hahn reminding staffers who drive city cars to obey parking signs and pay their tickets. It...
Neil Hopper used to stay close to his Hollywood apartment and drive everywhere, but no more. Now he walks all over L.A., not to get somewhere, but just to discover...
The soccer field and subway tunnel mouth at 2nd Street and Glendale Boulevard near downtown received city designation as a historic-cultural monument, clearing the way for a new housing development...
Jay Leno phoned up the LA Weekly's Nikki Finke to talk about media and politics after she wrote about him and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Weekly put the resulting sit-down interview...
Digital media maven Jason Calacanis today pronounces L.A.-based Metro Blogging, founded by Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo of Blogging.la, "the largest local blog network in the world." They added Tokyo,...
In 1984, when Hennessey & Ingalls published a study of architect Myron Hunt's best work edited by the respected critic David Gebhard, the Ambassador Hotel wasn't included. His Huntington Hotel...
Let's see, in recent months the city Department of Water and Power has been in the news for lax management of the $20 million it has paid Fleishman-Hillard for ordinary...
Rick Caruso gets the voters' approval to build "The Grove East" right next to the Galleria. Good luck driving through Glendale....
The Breeze goes behind the scenes of the L.A. County seal controversy with a feature on Loren Clapp, the civil service graphic artist who designed the new version. He's no...
Ruben Keoseyan, the daily's managing editor, today was named Executive Editor. At the same time, Deputy Managing Editor Pedro Rojas is leaving La Opinión to take over El Diario La...
Staffers at the L.A. Times (and presumably KTLA) have watched the Tribune Co. stock price drop 24% since February, knowing that the bosses back in Chicago are very attuned to...
Time for a change of pace. • Kathryn Maese, formerly the news editor of the Downtown News, has joined the Los Angeles Business Journal to write about tech and defense. • On...
Unfortunately, the personnel notices from the Times' second floor are trickling out rather than landing en masse. Latest to hit the transactions wire is the move of Janet Duckworth, a...
I'm about halfway through reading Slick, the funny debut novel by Daniel Price about a deviously creative Los Angeles crisis PR guy — "a shameless man living in shameless times"...
Jonathan Taylor, recently the L.A. Times' TV and radio editor, is leaving daily journalism to become senior vice president of The Lippin Group. Before joining the Times, Taylor was a...
The literary scene knows Tom Curwen as the one-time deputy editor of the L.A. Times Book Review and an erudite writer in his own right. Today, he was named editor...
Talk radio ideologue Hugh Hewitt has a long blog piece seeking to compare the controversy over Dan Rather's probably fake documents about George W. Bush to that anti-Fox speech given...
The L.A. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has figured out a sure way to get their monthly cocktail mixers mentioned here: invite me to come as the special...
4th Floor is named for the level in City Hall where all of the elected city council members have their offices. The floor teems with ambitious aides who know what's...
Phone lines are buzzing about an impending shakeup in the lineup of editors on the L.A. Times features desks, located downstairs from the main newsroom on Spring Street. There's talk...
• Architecture: The owner of Santa Monica Place is in quiet talks with the city to raze the Frank Gehry-designed shopping center and build an open-air adjunct to the Third Street...
Cost-cutting has come to the Sports section at the L.A. Times. In a memo to his staff received by L.A. Observed, sports editor Bill Dwyre doesn't sound pleased at the...
Sunday's Fall Fashion issue of the Times magazine asked stylist Eddie Schachnow to rate the candidates for mayor on their fashion sense. Some excerpts: James Hahn: He could really loosen...
After 18 years as partners, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and the Jewish Federation are parting ways. The weekly's current issue announces — in what seems a carefully...
The new Thom Mayne-designed Caltrans headquarters on Main Street (between First and Second streets) opens this week. The building remains for me an acquired taste. It's too blocky and visually...
Giselle Fernandez left the anchor chair on the KTLA Morning News in August 2003. Her web site Casa Giselle updates her whereabouts, including a name change to Fernandez-Farrand....
Advice columnist Amy Alkon takes note on her blog of the Times' Paris-based travel writer Susan Spano's recent perplexed observation that the prostitutes on Rue Blondel are "all gigantic and...
One of the eight new Los Angeles Unified campuses to open this week is built on the site of the former Van Nuys Drive-In theatre on Roscoe Boulevard. Later this...
The city's law covering political contributions reads that officials should not solicit donations from anyone with official business before them. The Times has a front-page story today reporting that two...
KABC's morning talk show anchor has been doing L.A. radio for 35 years. He announced on the air yesterday that he will leave the station Oct. 15, quipping: "It's been...
Bernard-Henri Levy — so famous in his native France he's known by his initials — was described on the front page of the L.A. Times in July as a "philosopher,...
The overheated race for mayor won't be the only local contest worth following once the national referendum on good vs. evil is over in November. The fight for the right...
Jon Weisman's appreciation of the troubled and now late local phenom Willie Crawford continues to bring in comments at Dodger Thoughts. Some samples of the latest: • I also always liked...
KCAL-9 news photographer Bryan Frank blogs about his work and life (with his wife) at beFrank. He gives an interesting glimpse at the unpredictable day of a TV news shooter....
At FilmStew.com, Richard Horgan's "Hollywood Spin" says today's tabloids would have gone gaga when Greta Garbo walked out of her 1927 wedding to actor John Gilbert, as the guests were...
Publishers Marketplace, the site that issues Publishers Lunch, has added blogs to its menu of services to authors and others in the book world. Mark Sarvas of the local literary...
Mayor Jim Hahn came out swinging yesterday against Bernard Parks, the police chief he essentially fired in 2001 who's now running against him from a safe seat on the city...
LAist excerpts an interview about the beauty and other qualities of Los Angeles with author and New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler, a Valley boy from Van Nuys who spoke with...
The sky is dripping on the West Side. Not quite rain, but close. (Now it's rain...)...
Romenesko links today to a Cathy Seipp "From the Left Coast" column at National Review Online where she repurposes her blog takes on old nemesis Nikki Finke, the LA Weekly...
The proposed new Los Angeles County seal — without the old Kenny Hahn-designed crosses, oil derricks and goddess Pomona — made its first public appearance Wednesday. If approved next week,...
The Rev. Cecil Murray departs his post as pastor at First AME Church on Sept. 18, after 27 years with the most prominent — and politically connected — congregation in...
The blog kottke.org reports a tip it got on the eventual fate of reigning Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings, whose multi-month run resumed on the air this week....
Newsday reports today on the tough spot facing the Tribune Co., which would see its Los Angeles ownership of the Times and KTLA turn more troublesome once channel 5's FCC...
In today's Times, the rivals to Jim Hahn's reelection next year signal their intention to attack his record on making Los Angeles "the safest big city in America," one of...
The Times has a package today on the war deaths and an online database of casualties by name, home state and details. The Daily News also. Larry Mantle plans to...
KCRW is moving Marc Porter Zasada's weekly commentary "The Urban Man" from Sunday (the old Sandra Tsing Loh slot) to Monday at 6:44 p.m., the slot currently filled by Ricky...
Authors Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons have sold Gay L.A., "a history of the gay culture that took root on the Western frontier in the mid-19th century and evolved with...
Bob Sipchen moved from the L.A. Times editorial page staff last year to shepherd the new Outdoors section into existence. Now he's returning to the fold as editor of the...
The New York Times calls last Sunday's profile of Haim Saban the L.A. media mogul's "most extensive interview in years." In the piece, Andrew Ross Sorkin describes Saban as "one...
Ahmad Yaseen Arain, the UCLA honors student who vanished from an MTA bus in the Fairfax area in July, turned up in Tijuana. His relatives say that he drank from...
The anti-Bush sign poster who calls himself the Freeway Blogger plans to put up 100 signs over L.A. freeways today "protesting the war in Iraq and the failure to find...
Easterner-turned-Angeleno Ruth Shalit's wedding blurb in the lead spot in last Sunday's New York Times is attracting some blogospheric notice. Vanity Fair's James Wolcott writes, "the recent nuptials of former...
Updated all weekend, newest at top • In the Hat: The website that tracks Mexican Mafia killings is unhappy with the media, especially the Times. • James O. Page: The former L.A....
Regarding that ad copy showing up as news stories on LATimes.com, Assistant Managing Editor Joseph M. Russin writes: L.A. Observed certainly knows that this advertorial copy was not deliberately inserted...
Weird how these things happen. Couple of weeks ago in New York, me and mine thoroughly enjoyed the Broadway revival of "Wonderful Town," with Donna Murphy rocking the house in...
The Times' sports columnist-provocateur T.J. Simers notes today that Scott Kaplan, who co-hosts the morning sports talk on AM 1090, said of the teenager who accused Kobe Bryant: "This girl...
A pod of six to eight blue whales — the biggest animals on Earth — has been feeding in the Catalina Channel off Point Fermin this week, a story in...
Sure the media (and of course, we bloggers) wrote about them a lot, but Paul Colford writes in the New York Daily News that the anointed convention blogs didn't attract...
In a package tied to the new Heather Locklear-Blair Underwood series "LAX," USA Today's Chris Woodyard writes about the complexities of filming at the airport in these high-security times. L.A....
Syndicated columnist Jill Stewart (Daily News, Register, Pasadena Weekly) has the cover story in the September issue of Wired on her favorite Koll-i-fornia governor. Headline: The New American Idol. Her...
Ad copy is blended with editorial again today at the Times website. Clicking on Print Edition, then California section, leads to this "story" placed between the news briefs from San...
Kim Masters may be losing her Esquire contract to produce Hollywood stories, Defamer hears. If true, she's still got her deal with NPR at least. NPR local is, however, looking...
Joseph Mailander writes that his anti-Bush blog Martini Republic is getting lots of links and traffic today for reporting that Zell Miller's speech at the Republic convention drew heavily on...
Hollywood producer Rob Long is in New York to do up the RNC alongside Warren Olney at KCRW — the station's Republican analogue to Harry Shearer, who went to Boston....
CityBeat columnist Erik Himmelsbach loses his day job and gets in touch with how much he loathes personal blogs. Before I went on forced employment hiatus a few weeks ago,...
A committee on historians has called on the media to stop citing author Michelle Malkin and her conclusions on the Japanese-American relocation in World War II as anything other than...
Prosecutors in Eagle, Colo. drop all charges after Kobe Bryant's accuser gets an apology and decides not to testify. The last straw for her apparently came when her name was...
How difficult is Jann Wenner to work for? His annual inspections of the staff's desks for neatness are apparently legendary at Rolling Stone. Today, Gawker runs the memo that went...
Jake Dobkin, publisher of LAist and Gothamist, blew through Los Angeles last month on the way to his wedding and Hawaii honeymoon. He has posted some nice photos both inside...
Michael Kinsley is still a new enough addition to the L.A. scene that his at-large punditry seems worth chronicling. At least for a little while longer. He's quoted twice in...
On Aug. 19, an Asiana Airlines jumbo jet arriving from Korea came within about 200 feet of an Albuquerque-bound Southwest flight on the same runway, the FAA confirmed Tuesday. How...
Reason's convention blogger Matt Welch catches up with former California AG Dan Lungren and, in a Madison Square Garden stairway, with Pat Buchanan. An excerpt of his encounter with the...
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.
