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The board of directors met today and decided on a split vote to let me start roasting their turkeys a few milliseconds early, provided I make up the time later. So posting may be more sporadic than usual for a couple of days. As this post gets updated, the fresh stuff will appear as if by magic at the bottom. Happy Thanksgiving!
⇒ Ozomatli, former Rage Against the Machine lead Zach De La Rocha and other performers are headed to 41st St. and Long Beach Avenue this evening for a concert in support of South L.A. residents trying to block development of their community farm. The action cranks up at 8:30 pm.
⇒ Defamer Mark Lisanti has had talks about taking his Hollywood gossip franchise to the L.A. Times website, with some exposure in the Calendar section, according to Steve Oney's piece on gossip in the December issue of Los Angeles magazine.
⇒ The school board gave the go-ahead to plans for a Los Angeles High School for the Visual and Performing Arts downtown to be developed through a partnership with the nonprofit group Discovering the Arts. Andre Pineda blogs it proudly since his wife, Araceli Ruano, is the group's chair. Eli Broad ponied up $5 million.
⇒ A reader emails to observe that something's new about the L.A. Times under Dean Baquet: Patrick Goldstein writes in today's Calendar column that teenagers think Hollywood movies—his word—suck. That usage was severely frowned upon under previous editor John Carroll.
⇒ 4,072 new lawyers passed the latest State Bar exam. Today's Daily Journal has the entire list. As usual, a tad over half of exam takers failed.
⇒ Metro Networks includes the northbound I-5 between Van Nuys and Castaic on its list of the nation's ten worst holiday traffic snarls.
⇒ Martin Schall of You-are-here.com is headed back to Germany and emails that we can expect a new posting of Los Angeles architectural photographs in a few weeks.
⇒ I'll be signing copies of Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 2 to 4 pm on Saturday. Stop by and say hello if you're there for members weekend. On Sunday, I'm supposed to be on NPR's On the Media talking about the L.A. Times situation with Brooke Gladstone. It airs Sunday at 6 pm on KPCC, 4 pm on KVCR in San Bernardino, 6 am on KPBS in San Diego and 2 pm on KQED in San Francisco.
⇒ The Future of Journalism is a brand new blog by Pepperdine professor Ken Waters: "...a place for a rational discussion of how people of good will can save the news business from itself, and return civil discourse and the search for truth into the fabric of the American experience."
⇒ Brothers Tod and Lee Goldberg interview each other about the craft of writing and other stuff at the lit-blog Beatrice.com. Part one, part two.
⇒ Former Jay Leno writer Brad Dickson opines in the Daily News that sudden talk of two NFL teams in Los Angeles "is like having the girl who snubbed you throughout high school suddenly calling and proposing marriage. It's like France canceling Bastille Day in favor of Homage to America Day. It's similar to the Daytime Emmy people awarding every statuette to Susan Lucci."