Weekend shorts

♦ "There is no exact moment when the cultural epicenter of the country shifted from New York to Los Angeles," Manohla Dargis writes in the NYT, "just a series of progressive baby steps to the left." Then she goes on, improbably, to credit the establishment of CalArts.
♦ Howard Blume, let go as the LA Weekly's schools reporter in 2004, is joining the L.A. Times as an education writer, School Me discloses. Blume is currently managing editor at the Jewish Journal and co-host of KPFK's Deadline L.A.
♦ Inland Valley Daily Bulletin blogger Conor Friedersdorf comes down strong on last week's LAT story about the $34-an-hour landscaping jobs Americans supposedly won't do, calling it "dishonest." He uses Google to identify the many activist roles of a key source the story calls "ambivalent on immigration reform." Via Mickey Kaus.
♦ Students in school districts run by mayors do better academically, says a new study at Brown and Harvard via the Daily News. The LAUSD's counterattack on Mayor Villaraigosa, meanwhile, gets some play in the Times.
♦ Six of 818 newly hired LAPD officers used drugs as hard as cocaine when they were teenagers, the Daily News says. Former chief Bernard Parks reacts as if the kind of cops they used to hire were better.
♦ Daily News again, covering the LAPD blog. The blog, meanwhile, announced Friday night's sobriety checkpoint on Santa Monica Boulevard in West L.A.
♦ LAPD beats LAFD on the football field.
♦ EchoPark.net is back as a blog.
♦ A PR guys quits to work with at-risk youth.
♦ Living in Glendale but sending your utility bill to Los Angeles.
♦ Paul Davidson, whose book The Lost Blogs: From Jesus to Jim Morrison is just out, blogs about his story on Pixar in the June issue of Wired.