Weekly archive
January 14 - January 20, 2007
Saturday, Jan. 20
No sonorous hard sell by Ruth Seymour or endless loops of Roy Orbison at the Cocoanut Grove. Just a simple pitch. We all love putting LA Observed on the web,...
Friday, Jan. 19
The current New Yorker takes its turn with the tale of Adam Gadahn, the Southern California kid from a hippie family who converted to Islam and who now is thought...
Doherty (next to Mama Cass at this 1966 performance in L.A.) was one quarter of the 1960s hitmakers the Mamas and Papas. His death today of kidney disease near Toronto...
Hey, please don't forget to take a couple of minutes and give me your opinions on LA Observed. Along with some basic survey questions, you can let me have it...
What's in Los Angeles: Helen Mirren grabs the cover of the annual Oscars-targeted Movie Issue. There are pieces on the making of Blade Runner and on how David Poland and...
Correction to yesterday's item: it was a homeless woman who jumped to her death from the L.A. Times parking garage yesterday while staffers were arriving at work. Brief memo today...
Sordid stuff out of the Santa Barbara News-Mess never stops. Now owner Wendy McCaw has hit her former editor Jerry Roberts with a claim for $25 million. Let's see, he...
Govindi Murty, co-founder of the Liberty Film Festival, sits in the guest chair this weekend on "Ebert and Roeper." She joins a lineup that has included Jay Leno, director Kevin...
Last chance to take the reader survey and let me know what you think of the site and want more of — or less of. More than 600 of your...
Thursday, Jan. 18
Borat has been out since November and has grossed more than $100 million. The DVD release must be in sight. So some attendees at Wednesday night's members-only screening for the...
Martin had been chief of staff to Mayor Richard Riordan back in the day. A fellow Riordan Administration alum, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, today named her general counsel for Los...
Forget the condo towers. A 120-room Waldorf-Astoria hotel now is planned for the high-profile crossing of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards in Beverly Hills. In the project, the adjacent Beverly...
Free today at WSJ.com, economists Peter Gordon of USC and Matthew Kahn of UCLA discuss the costs of traffic congestion: "the problem it poses -- or doesn't pose -- for...
Authorities now are actively looking for the man shown in surveillance video pouring or spilling liquid mercury onto the platform of the Pershing Square Metro station the night of Dec....
Eric at Blogdowntown has posted a heat map showing where the homeless population is concentrated, based on LAPD counts. You can see distinct nodes of where people are sleeping on...
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...
Time magazine is shuttering its Los Angeles bureau (and those in Chicago and Atlanta) as part of today's layoffs, Ad Age says. People magazine will close its Washington, Miami, Chicago...
Mark Lacter applies his veteran business editor acumen to figuring out what the heck is going on at Times-Tribune. He was also on KPCC this morning as an analyst. LA...
Syndicated columnist Art Buchwald, who died last night, taped his own "obituary video" for the New York Times. It's up on the front page of their site and includes the...
Back in the middle of last week I received a prophetic email from Beverly Hills lawyer Eric Spiegelman. From: Eric Spiegelman Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2007 4:49 PM To: 'Kevin...
Finally, Jonathan Gold weighs in on the great Du-Par's debate. Plus Villaraigosa, Zahniser, Boyarsky and even Lindsay Lohan — click past the jump for your daily dose of Morning Buzz....
In a revision to her first story for today's paper, Sarah Ellison of the Wall Street Journal says that three proposals were submitted to Tribune by yesterday's deadline: one of...
Wednesday, Jan. 17
Twice Updated: Eli Broad and Ron Burkle and the Chandlers are readying competing bids for all or part of the Tribune, Jim Rainey reports in the LAT He essentially confirms...
Not just a little bit either. There was a snow plow working on Kanan-Dume Road this afternoon, and lots of school kids at play beside the road. Also, Channel 4's...
Eli Broad has opened up a bigger lead on David Geffen as LA Observed readers' most likely (or preferred?) buyer of the L.A. Times. Ron Burkle runs a distant third;...
Blogger Andrew Hurvitz at Here in Van Nuys sounds exasperated, or worse, at the way the onetime downtown of the Valley has gone. He writes in a post called Columbus...
While L.A. Times publisher David Hiller struggles to make the paper more local, his business side has decided to out-source the in-house computer help desk — to India. This function...
Curbed LA turns up a real estate listing for a remodeled postwar home in the Valley flats that has an aquarium embedded in the floor. And a big one. The...
HuffIt is a new beta-test section of The Huffington Post where readers can indicate (Digg-style) which news stories of the moment interest them. Those stories will then get priority play...
There's been some in the Santa Clarita area, apparently. (SCVTalk says it's hail.) The National Weather Service at 9:30 issued a winter weather advisory for the local mountains and the...
Will the sad bookstore news never stop? Dutton's Brentwood Books on San Vicente "may soon succumb to its landlord's plans to redevelop the site," the Times' Scott Timberg and Martha...
L.A.'s Latino vs. black gang violence lands on the front page of the NYT, with a web slide show of photos. The county's choice for CAO bolts, Steve Lopez embraces...
Tuesday, Jan. 16
If you enjoy remembering old local restaurants and already exhausted Jonathon Foerstel's Los Angeles Time Machines, writer Mark Evanier's POVOnline is an entertaining place to spend some time. His pages...
In a recent interview with FilmStew, Aaron Sorkin complained about the less-than-cheerleading coverage of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" by writers at the Times' Calendar section. He named Maria...
What do you get when you put together art and radio? Not much, frankly. But what if you add visuals? ArtScene magazine is doing just that with the newly launched...
Less than twelve hours into Pledge Week and the number of replies to the LA Observed Visitor Survey is fast approaching 200. Thank you for helping. I'd like to crack...
The Washington Post's Frank Ahrens looks into a Southern California tale of a disgruntled newspaper family selling to private equity buyers and the cutbacks that followed — but his subject...
You might remember that after losing Tim Brown to Yahoo last November, LAT sports editor Randy Harvey put out the call (second item) for a Spanish-speaking writer to work general...
PI Anthony Pellicano's client isn't as much a fool as he seemed. A week after receiving court permission to represent himself against charges of racketeering and wiretapping, the Daily Journal...
The re-incarnation of Du-Par's at Farmers Market hasn't been panned by everybody, but enough to get your attention. Now comes the flackage for the Jan. 22 "official" reopening, with a...
This is the day to sit down with the Column One story in the Times. Surprise and touching L.A. slice of life that begins with reporter Hector Becerra grappling with...
Hi all. My traditional State of the Blog message was delayed a bit while I got my head around what has to happen in 2007. If you've been here much,...
Monday, Jan. 15
Full list of winners and nominees at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association website....
Some lovely holiday finds around the LA Observed blogs: On old Mulholland: Veronique de Turenne ventured into the hills above Malibu in search of The Old Place, a mythical spot...
California Connected, produced at KCET, received the Alfred I. duPont award from Columbia University for "War Stories from Ward 7-D," called a "sobering report on the range of brain injuries...
You don't have to shiver at the top of Maui's Haleakela volcano to spot Comet McNaught. Clifford V. Johnson has detailed local tips and links at his Asymptotia blog. Not...
Government, schools, most banks and the U.S. Postal Service are closed for the Martin Luther King holiday. News, of course, continues. A scaled back but still pretty rich Morning Buzz...
Sunday, Jan. 14
Rick Orlov gives a sneak peek at tomorrow's Tipoff column in the Daily News to LA Observed video blogger Jacob Soboroff — psst, there's a good item about City Attorney...
