Archive: Good read

The mega airport is such a vital and vulnerable piece of our infrastructure that it employs two anti-terrorism experts with top-secret clearances.

LA journalist and author Michael Krikorian has posted a nice piece on encountering an interesting fellow in the gas pumps at the 76 station just above the Santa Monica Freeway.

At the VA campus off Wilshire Boulevard, damaged birds and veterans are getting over their PTSD.

"From the moment I got my first pair of hockey skates at five years old, I got the living shit kicked out of me every single day." No one intervened.

To bring in web readers over the holidays, the magazine is re-running eight of editor Mary Melton's favorite stories from the past 14 years. Today: Amy Wallace's new fake breasts.

The bassist for the 1970s girl band had never talked about the long-rumored incident until now. She collected details from witnesses -- not including Joan Jett, who has yet to acknowledge what she saw.

Amber Carvaly and Caitlin Doughty, both 30, have ambitions to disrupt the funeral business.

Raffi Hovannisian grew up in LA, a member of the Armenian diaspora in California. His son, the director of "2015," explains why Hovannisian went back to the homeland.

Martin J. Smith writes about a book tour through the West in twin mini-vans. Plus David Ulin on The Offing, a new literary magazine in Los Angeles.

The story of the LAPL map treasure collected by John Feathers is told in a video for the LA Review of Books.

Becklund's service on Sunday at Hollywood Forever included a recommendation — seconded here — to read her piece about dying on the LA Times op-ed page. Sacks' too, in the NYT.

Los Angeles magazine profiles Kings coach Darryl Sutter, who might be the most entertaining coach of any pro team in Los Angeles now that Phil Jackson is gone.

A former reporter argues that everyone should stop using the phrase and remember the tragedy that spawned it. A congressman and three California journalists were among the 918 dead in Guyana 37 years ago today.

Daum writes that her recovery from a near-death illness has brought a responsibility she didn't expect. Plus: Joe Mathews sees a generation gap in California.

Andrés Martinez writes about the discomfort of being raised in Mexico by an American gringa, and about the last time he spoke with her.

Jocelyn Y. Stewart used to cover hard news for the Los Angeles Times, an assignment that often took her into the South LA neighborhood where she grew up to cover homicides and other crimes. Then one night, late, her phone rang.

Asra Q. Nomani was a close friend and Wall Street Journal colleague of Daniel Pearl. It was from her house in Karachi that the Los Angeles native left on January 23, 2002 for the interview he never returned from.

Producers Remington Chase and Stefan Martirosian have an unusual and unsavory backstory they tried to get the LA Weekly not to publish. It didn't work.

The Tucson native shows off her hometown and takes a New York Times Travel reporter into Mexico to visit the birthplace of her grandfather. The van carries enough bags to mount a rock tour. "Except nobody’s looking to score drugs or get laid,” Ronstadt quips.

Mostly good reads that have been stacking up looking for a home, and less news.

The only thing random about the LAX Terminal 3 shooting is the shooter, says Charles Pierce, the politics blogger who was around the horseshoe in Terminal 7 when Friday's attack occurred.

Forty-five minutes before landing, the pilot asked the cabin to remain seated when they reached Los Angeles so the military escort could deplane first. He also warned passengers not to be alarmed by the fire trucks. The LAFD, he said, greets all fallen soldiers with a water cannon salute.

Jay Roberts describes for the first time his motel room encounter with Randy Kraft, who is now on Death Row. But is is true? Orange Coast Magazine's editor took steps to find out.

"Days when I find lost baseballs never fail to feel mildly enchanted, as if hot dogs and beer are waiting at home," the LA writer and blogger says. "If I could paint, I would paint them just as lovingly as Cézanne painted apples and oranges."

Esquire's Charles Pierce on what George Zimmerman can do now, the LA Times on the Eastside Calderons, SI's Rick Reilly on the LA Clippers, and two former Herald Examiner sports scribes reconnect.

We have a new example of Vin Scully showing why he's a Los Angeles treasure. Plus: LA Observed takes a trip to the ballpark in San Francisco.

The longtime LA scribe writes at the LA Weekly today about his mother's affair with Clifford Clinton, the reform-era City Hall rabble rouser who ran the popular Clifton cafeteria chain. They met when Clinton patronized Mrs. Richmond's shop across Pico Boulevard from the Fox studio where men would show up seeking, and receiving, certain paid services.

Vernon Loeb, the former investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times, has run marathons (61 of them) and covered the horrors of terrorism. But never on the same day until Monday.

Michael Krikorian freelances now, far as I can tell, but he used to be a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Seventeen rounds from an AK-47 in his trunk got him a 30-day sentence in county jail.

In a piece at the Los Angeles Review of Books getting some nice social media buzz, Laurie Winer considers Wallace and the reality, and literature, of depression and suicide. Plus: a pitch to donate.

Mark Bittman, the New York Times food columnist, asked readers where in the world they wanted him to go to write a solid, serious piece for the NYT Magazine's food issue this Sunday. This challenge led him to California's Central Valley, where so much of the food consumed in America comes from — at least for now. He explains why that had to be the place, and shows his excitement at the scale of it all, but sounds the alarm about the future.

Peter Hong, the former Los Angeles Times reporter who now works as a deputy to county Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, grew up by coincidence on the Barack Obama path. He too was born and raised in Honolulu — has the same style of birth certiifcate — and also went to Occidental College. He observes in a piece for Zocalo that it gives him a certain perspective on the more hysterical claims being fed to conservatives about the president's past.

I have to give it to Steven Mirkin, the Los Angeles music journalist. He makes lemonade of impaling his testicles on an iron fence while house-sitting for a friend — while locked out of the house, with a dog who tried to bite the paramedics.

Internal emails show how bad off Michael Jackson really was, Scientology's auditions for a Tom Cruise wife to succeed Nicole Kidman, Burt Bacharach on Hal David, Michael Woo on the Chinatown Massacre and more.

Julie Cline, the Senior Nonfiction Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, writes at the review today about her father's LA life and travels on the edges of the Hollywood movie machine. Her father lives on a boat in San Pedro, "a retired builder, general contractor, and salesman of everything from used cars to room additions." He's not really an actor, but he showed up in a film shot last year.

A really nice, detailed and clearly told cover story in the LA Weekly by Gene Maddaus reconstructs how corruption and under-the-table payments at the Coliseum offices came to be commonplace under general manager Pat Lynch — while the appointed overseers on the Coliseum Commission failed to oversee. It came to light only due to an accident, Maddaus writes.

Two good stories within a week on the uneasy relationship in Los Angeles with lone wolf car services and drivers — through the decades and now.

Fun story in the LA Times: an analysis of 75,000 computerized traffic citations found the street name "mangled beyond all but the most hopeful inference about 20% of the time....The only thing we can say with 90% certainty about data like this is 'Argh!'"

It's been pretty dang nice along the beaches so far in these final days of official spring. But as anyone with very many summers in Los Angeles knows, a marine layer could blanket us in a deep, gray, soul-sucking June gloom at any moment. A good read on how the marine layer works and why.

Eric Nusbaum, a staffer at The Classical website, tries to explain why he flew down from Seattle for Wednesday's first chance ever for his Los Angeles Kings to skate the Stanley Cup. For survivors of the team's four decades of wandering in the weeds of the hockey world, the "palpability of the wanting" was everywhere inside Staples Center. "The Cup was in the goddamn building and so were we."

Probably not a true story, as the story itself suggests, but it was in the New York Times — in 1922. And the headline is "unsurpassed" in NYT annals, as a Twitter user said

Josh Suchon, the former post-game broadcaster for the Dodgers, is now blogging with a friend in Northern California. He tells a nice story on himself that along the way sheds some light on the relationships between fans, reporters and sports figures.

Fidel Lopez was dragged from his truck, beaten and nearly killed at Florence and Normandie just minutes after the same bad luck fell on Reginald Denny, the afternoon of April 29, 1992. Lopez had gasoline poured over him as he lay on the ground and was saved from death by a pastor who told the attackers they would have to kill him too. Lopez has not been seen in the media much since then, so Times columnist Steve Lopez tracked him down. Wasn't easy.

After Junior Seau died, Deadspin received an email from Albert Flores Jr., a U.S. Marine Corps captain in Sneads Ferry, N.C. He describes a chance encounter in an Oceanside bar last year with Seau, the former USC and NFL linebacker — and Flores' football hero.

A newspaper story about a grown-up Huntington Beach kid who searched for his former teacher so he could apologize for a long-ago act tells us something about forgiveness, and memory, and life. The story unfolds in layers for him, the teacher and the writer of the story. Go read at the Portland Oregonian.