The store inside Aroma Cafe in Studio City closes May 17. "In the words of Orson Welles, 'If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.' This is our happy ending," a note says.

Unlike the Pulitzer Prizes, the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes had no reluctance about giving awards to fiction books on Friday night.

I missed this note on Alice Walton's site this morning. The City Hall reporter who launched The City Maven in 2010 as a newly minted master's degree holder will now blog on the KPCC website. Read more

Pedro E Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life" is on exhibition at the Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery through April 25. Guerrero, who is now 94, was a close friend of, and the photographer for, Frank Lloyd Wright.

"Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion."
 
Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012

"He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about...." More inside.

LAPD cancelled the car impound of a city official's husband, Villaraigosa's budget, ex-appraiser admits trying to spur donations to Assessor John Noguez and more.

As usual, writers from LA Observed will be all over the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend at USC. I'll be there both days signing books and schmoozing with anyone who drops by.

Ying Wu and Ming Qu are profiled at USC's Neon Tommy by a Chinese journalism student who was able to gather information in Mandarin from social media. Corrina Shuang Liu writes that the pair came from humble backgrounds, unlike the image some believe that they were spoiled rich kids.

Shooting the Times places "near USC" is actually five miles away in Baldwin Hills. The LA Times building itself is closer to the campus. For whatever reasons, grokking the inner map of Los Angeles is just not an LAT strength.

There is no way, "absolutely no way, that KCET can survive as a television station," says the former head of the California Community Foundation.

The artist and his wife are staying in an Airstream trailer at LACMA during the installation of Levitated Mass. He gave architect Frank Gehry a tour of the site this week.

The New York Times wants your help identifying people in photos by the late Garry Winogrand from the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960.

The Los Angeles Fire Department's news feed this morning noted a car-vs-Metro train collision on South Hoover Street. Unless there's a gypsy train operating out there today, this can only mean one thing. (* OK, it's the third.)

Dennis Romero at the LA Weekly is reporting that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stormed out of an MTA board meeting this morning after county supervisor Mike Antonovich, who is also on the board, characterized the mayor's call for extending the Measure R sales tax by saying something like communities are going to be "gang-raped again."

AEG has posted on Facebook a series of new views of the proposed Farmers Field football stadium and the changes it would bring to the Convention Center and LA Live area. Here are a sample.

More investigation of Assessor John Noguez, Villaraigosa's legacy, police union to sue over impounds, DA's race, Huffington gloats on 'Colbert Report," more Kardashian to Glendale fun and USC remembers the slain Chinese students.

With consumer spending on the rise, especially among affluent shoppers, it's little wonder that merchants are starting to compete for the most desirable locations.

The two disturbing corpse photos from Afghanistan that the Los Angeles Times published today were the least gruesome of the 18 that the paper received from a solider in the 82nd Airborne, reporter David Zucchino said.

Jesse Linares, the city editor of Hoy Los Angeles, died on Saturday after a battle with cancer. From El Salvador, he had previously worked in the newsroom at La Opinión.

Television legend Dick Clark has died. The popularizer of "American Bandstand" in Philadelphia in the 1950s went on to become a true TV programming impresario. "The oldest living teenager" reportedly suffered a heart attack this morning after an outpatient procedure at St. John's hospital in Santa Monica.

The Kings have wrapped up their morning skate in El Segundo and tonight try to upset the NHL's top team and advance to the next round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Local TV will only be on NBC Sports Network on cable, reportedly with a Canadian feed.

At the Times website, editor Davan Maharaj and national editor Roger Smith took part in a live chat with readers this morning. "At the end of the day, our job is to publish information that our readers need to make informed decisions," Maharaj said.

Nicely done. They wanted to be able to show off the mass of great content already on the site, plus new features, and that they have. The relaunch comes with a call for voluntary memberships to help pay for the online review.

USC police shoot a robbery suspect, LAT publishes photos of dead bodies from Afghanistan, advance look at Mayor Villaraigosa's state of the city talk, he's dinged for his support of gay marriage, probation offices ban kids from Homeboy Industries and more.

Video: Two-time Olympic champion Kerri Walsh of Manhattan Beach tells NBC 4 that she and beach volleyball partner Misty May-Treanor are going for the gold again in London.

Steve Soboroff, the former city commissioner and candidate for mayor who took a brief spin with Frank McCourt at Dodger Stadium last year, has become pretty well known for his personal typewriter collection. We've written about it a few times, other blogs have. Now it's the LA Times' turn.

KCRW's Saul Gonzalez has aired his report inside the renovation of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple that I gave a little advance look at a couple of weeks ago. "While driving down Wilshire Boulevard early one morning about a month ago, I spotted a beautiful combination of form, function and construction-an exo-skeleton of scaffolding enveloping one of L.A.’s most treasured architectural monuments."

Amanda Hesser, the former New York Times food writer who made a cameo in the movie "Julia and Julia," writes on her current website, Food 52, that she used to always give encouragement to would-be writers who contacted her. Then she felt she had to stop feeding, so to speak, their hopes. It's about the market for writers.

Leonard Cohen delivered a heartfelt statement in Los Angeles Superior Court today at the sentencing of Kelley Lynch, his former business manager. He also thanked the judge for "the elegant manner in which these proceedings have unfolded. It was a privilege and an education to testify in this courtroom."

Mayor Villaraigosa, architect Alex Ward and others consider replacements for the 6th Street Viaduct on "DnA" with Frances Anderton on KCRW. Listen there Previously at LA Observed: 6th Street...

Ken Brusic, editor and senior vice president of The Orange County Register, was named interim publisher Tuesday, succeeding the interim publisher who got the temporary job last year

Flavorwire has posted another of its 25 most beautiful lists — and they do aggregate some gorgeous photos and noteworthy locations. This time it's the 25 most beautiful public libraries in the world.

I love stories about infrastructure: sewers, pipelines, trash and the like. The subject of SoCal investigative author Edward Humes' new book warms my wonkish heart — "Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash" — and has some good LA angles.

Jerry Brown, Darrell Issa, Berman-Sherman, Abdul Arian, Mark Ebner, Vincent Gallo and Melanie Lundquist, plus Richard Riordan on the '92 riots and Jim Romenesko quits cable.

The paper was shut out in the Pulitzers (or beaten by the Huffington Post, if you prefer) but columnist Steve Lopez and photographers Carolyn Cole, Brian van der Brug and Francine Orr were finalists.

The Pulitzer Prizes board could not agree on a single "distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life." "Wow, Pulitzer committee. That's cold," writes Stephen Lee at Entertainment Weekly. Laura Miller at Salon argues that it was "an exceptional year for fiction, American and otherwise."

Speaking of Arianna Huffington's news empire, the AOL Patch site for Echo Park has expanded into adjacent Silver Lake as of today.

Talk about a new era at the Pulitzers. The Huffington Post just won its first Pulitzer Prize, in the national reporting category for David Wood's 10-part series on the lives of severely wounded veterans and their families. "We are delighted and deeply honored by the award, which recognizes both David’s exemplary piece of purposeful journalism and HuffPost's commitment to original reporting that affects both the national conversation and the lives of real people," said Arianna Huffington. Politico's political cartoonist Matt Wuerker, who is from Los Angeles, wins too. Click for list of winners.

Sharon Waxman of The Wrap has now read the script that Joe Eszterhas turned in for the Mel Gibson production of a film about the Jewish hero Judah Maccabee. It's very bloody, but true to the story.

Long Beach editor admits favoring advertisers, Junot Diaz in the New Yorker, Chief Beck under pressure over discipline, how Villaraigosa created some of the city's financial mess and in journalism it's Pulitzer day.

This is the first time we have rebuilt the coding guts of LA Observed from scratch. It has taken many months of work behind the scenes — and isn't finished. But it was time to go public and live with the new look awhile. The biggest change, obviously, is a rethinking of the LA Observed front page — something I've wanted to do for a few years. I'm truly thrilled by the possibilities.

The Los Angeles Kings have been around for 45 years without doing hardly anything to make a lasting impression in the hockey culture. (Except trade for Wayne Gretzky, 24 years ago.) But they're getting noticed now.