|
|
|
Topic Archive: Observing Los Angeles
Meridith Baer furnishes and decorates homes specifically to hook potential buyers. A New York Times Magazine writer lusts after the image of a life she created — mountain bike included...
Posted October 26, 2009 12:53 AM
As part of the promotion for his new movie, actor Adam Goldberg drives around Los Angeles pointing out some of the things he dislikes. Among them are the food,...
Posted October 26, 2009 12:25 AM
The lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center downtown stood in for the Rome Hilton, circa early 1960s, on a recent episode of "Mad Men." Spotted by...
Posted October 20, 2009 5:34 PM
Veronique de Turenne was up and outside early this morning and caught this view across the West Valley from the top of the Santa Monica Mountains. She's got another view...
Posted October 15, 2009 4:30 PM
Posted in May, but apt today. What happens in L.A. when it rains, the spoof — with some good lines and extensive UCLA scenery....
Posted October 13, 2009 8:28 PM
The most-viewed article in the UK's Guardian the past 24 hours has been a weekend piece from Los Angeles asking if California will become America's first failed state. For what...
Posted October 7, 2009 12:10 AM
Matthew Fleischer was in the audience last week for Talking Heads founder David Byrne's appearance at Aloud to talk about his new book, "Bicycle Diaries,” and Los Angeles. The event...
Posted October 6, 2009 10:49 PM
An LA Observed reader driving north on the 110, somewhere below the Santa Monica Freeway, emails that the Caltrans info sign that predicts travel times was for once indisputably accurate:...
Posted September 22, 2009 8:33 AM
Times Op-Ed columnist Gregory Rodriguez, who is the man behind Zócalo, ponders today what it means that so many Angelenos were torn between horror and awe by the Station Fire's...
Posted September 7, 2009 6:25 PM
Staff writer Susan Orlean has been in Los Angeles some of the summer and offers a blog entry on The New Yorker website about the week of fires. Excerpt: All...
Posted September 2, 2009 12:03 PM
Most nights, it seems, one window remains brightly lit on the west face of the City Hall tower. Lisa Napoli emails that she and her neighbors on Bunker Hill watch...
Posted July 30, 2009 9:57 PM
The Go-Gos tool around early '80s Los Angeles in a convertible, vamp outside Trashy Lingerie on La Cienega and frolic in the electric fountain at Wilshire & Santa Monica in...
Posted July 30, 2009 3:38 PM
Wired magazine's Mark Horowitz has created a Zee Maps-assisted guide to the Los Angeles locations in Thomas Pynchon's novels and real life, based on the presumption that "Pynchon, the paranoid...
Posted July 27, 2009 4:55 PM
From the Jewish Journal's food blog, posted by editor Rob Eshman: I just got a peek inside David Sax’s new book, “Save the Deli,“ due out Oct. 19, and can...
Posted July 24, 2009 4:47 PM
Los Angeles and New York both make great settings for police dramas on TV. But why, over the last decade or more, are most of the better ones located in...
Posted July 13, 2009 8:27 AM
Sunday's New York Times Style section attended a backyard music festival of L.A. trust fund children and spots a trend. Excerpts: Behind a sprawling home in Encino, a grassy Los...
Posted June 22, 2009 12:37 AM
The French department store Le Bon Marche is featuring items that subtly suggest Los Angeles, but I guess you have to be there. Laurie Pike at The Chic Leak blog...
Posted June 19, 2009 3:26 PM
Dwell magazine's June issue rates San Francisco's new international terminal the best airport in the U.S. Los Angeles International is pegged as the country's absolute worst: Los Angeles is the...
Posted May 15, 2009 5:00 PM
"The Soloist," which I saw Saturday night in Los Feliz, worked well enough for me as entertainment, as a Los Angeles movie and as paean to the best role newspapers...
Posted May 4, 2009 12:14 AM
This morning's post on the Getty's $15 parking fee — I agreed with the NYT's Ed Wyatt that it's essentially an admission charge — elicited a nice flow and range...
Posted April 30, 2009 11:30 PM
In a piece today on the Getty's financial pinch, the New York Times' Ed Wyatt puts the parking fee hike in perspective: For a hilltop museum with no public parking...
Posted April 30, 2009 9:45 AM
KPCC's John Rabe didn't just get to the public observation level high up on Los Angeles. He shot a video from the TOP, where the beacon shines over Los Angeles....
Posted April 29, 2009 2:27 PM
With the Lakers in the NBA playoffs and expected by many to contend for the championship, the Wall Street Journal looks at why they dominate L.A. sports and concludes "the...
Posted April 21, 2009 9:22 AM
A web-only, video-rich feature at Newsweek's site says the city of Compton "has a new lease on life" after shedding its image as the region's murder capital. Excerpt: The community...
Posted April 13, 2009 10:08 AM
New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff includes Los Angeles in an essay arguing for steps that should taken in four U.S. cities that would begin "making our cities more...
Posted March 29, 2009 11:53 PM
This morning at The Foundry on Melrose, Los Angeles Magazine convened a panel to talk about President Obama. There was plenty of that — some of which inspired my KCRW...
Posted March 20, 2009 10:59 PM
Writing for the front of today's Thursday Styles section in the New York Times, Scott Timberg says that Eagle Rock's much talked-about invasion by young creatives is crashing along with...
Posted February 26, 2009 9:21 AM
While Joel Kotkin sees Los Angeles "fading rapidly toward irrelevancy," this month's Atlantic cover story posits that L.A. is one of the relatively few American places ideally situated to rise...
Posted February 25, 2009 9:55 AM
Urban analyst and critic Joel Kotkin warns at Forbes.com that the upcoming reelection of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor should not be taken as "evidence that all is well in the...
Posted February 24, 2009 2:28 PM
The media scene outside the Suleman home in Whittier — Camp Octuplets, you might say — is described in tomorrow's New York Times by L.A. reporter Randal C. Archibold. Photographers...
Posted February 3, 2009 10:48 PM
Channel 2 (and 9) photographer Bryan Frank had Friday afternoon off and spent it taking pictures on foot in Hollywood and Downtown. Hot dogs at Skooby's and a beer at...
Posted January 3, 2009 11:49 AM
UCLA student Lina Chung isn't just heading off to Rome to study abroad. She's calling a much-needed break from living in Los Angeles. "I have been a faithful girlfriend, devoted...
Posted December 11, 2008 5:56 PM
In the winter of 1949, snow blanketed the floor of the San Fernando Valley and other parts of the basin. But swimming lessons must go on — it was the...
Posted November 27, 2008 12:15 PM
Pat Saperstein at Eating L.A. has some fun digging through the newly released Life magazine photo archive on Google for some prime Los Angeles images. She hit a trove of...
Posted November 24, 2008 3:58 PM
Here's the best thing I read all day. The New York Times has a marvelous Travel section story with Ry Cooder visiting spots in the Mojave Desert, accompanied by an...
Posted November 23, 2008 5:15 PM
A special report on Los Angeles packaged in today's print edition of the U.K.'s Financial Times includes pieces on digital media, art, Antonio Villaraigosa, Hollywood, Downtown, real estate and other...
Posted October 28, 2008 1:22 AM
The New York Times' David Carr jets out to the coast and finds that in Hollywood, it's still morning in America. Hollywood comes by its indifference honestly. Certainly, the stock...
Posted October 13, 2008 12:13 AM
Zina Klapper, a partner in Pop Twist Entertainment and a former editor of Mother Jones, writes at New Geography about some of the issues presented by family life in the...
Posted September 8, 2008 9:10 AM
Los Angeles Times writers and editors chose 25 films from the past 25 years that "communicate some inherent truth about the L.A. experience." The arbitrary time period made "Chinatown" and...
Posted August 31, 2008 12:43 PM
Occasionally someone who gets caught abusing L.A. stereotypes complains that I don't point out the same style violations by writers about New York. Go figure — we call it LA...
Posted August 15, 2008 11:21 AM
Web developer-designer Jonathan Grubb moved here from San Francisco eight months ago to work in Hollywood and has some observations about our relationship with the web. Here's a sample, minus...
Posted July 23, 2008 7:54 AM
By Bay Area tradition, references to freeways don't carry an article. In Los Angeles we "take the 101" (or "the Ventura Freeway") but up north they just "take 101." Times...
Posted July 13, 2008 11:55 PM
Los Angeles-based Washington Post reporter William Booth filed a good piece last week about Moe, the chimpanzee missing near Devore, but I'm guessing he got burned by the copy desk....
Posted July 9, 2008 3:28 PM
Blogger David K. Israel at Mental Floss magazine counted the Pinkberry knockoffs within two miles of his home — 11 places to satisfy his sweet tooth for cold Korean-inspired dessert...
Posted July 9, 2008 3:08 PM
Today's lede about hands-free cellphones and driving, under the byline of Jennifer Steinhauer, the New York Times bureau chief in Los Angeles, who should (and does) know better: LOS ANGELES...
Posted July 8, 2008 9:48 PM
I don't know if National Public Radio's "Bryant Park Project" airs here at all, but if you're interested the show has done a story on the riders who demonstrate by...
Posted June 15, 2008 9:30 PM
David Willis' story was about Los Angeles commuters switching to the tube, if we can call it that, because of the high price of gas. This week I did something...
Posted May 23, 2008 9:25 AM
What says Los Angeles better than a non-native jacaranda in full bloom and non-native water being spilled on the street to flow into the storm drains and out to sea?...
Posted May 14, 2008 12:23 PM
Tribune innovation czar Lee Abrams blogs that before coming to Los Angeles, "For years I have heard the Industry dirt on the Los Angeles Times. Got a lot of 'good...
Posted May 5, 2008 4:55 PM
This week's issue of The New Yorker carries a "Letter from Los Angeles" by Dana Goodyear on the movie being made based on Steve Lopez's L.A. Times columns about street...
Posted April 28, 2008 9:23 AM
The New York Times' Critical Shopper feature visits The Grove and says today that it gets to you, even if you don't want to like it. The first time...
Posted April 24, 2008 9:24 AM
Short piece in the U.K. magazine on L.A.'s move toward more density — and how cities around the West want to avoid becoming the next Los Angeles. Excerpt: The original...
Posted March 31, 2008 9:32 AM
Lisa Napoli did a nice story on today's Marketplace about Ngawang, a 23-year-old DJ in Bhutan who is visiting — and discovering — Los Angeles for the first time. Until...
Posted March 24, 2008 5:33 PM
Writer and blogger Tom Teicholz was on the Santa Monica Promenade this afternoon when he spotted a woman strolling naked and preening for a video camera and still photographer. "This...
Posted February 28, 2008 3:20 PM
In another of those generic magazine roundups claiming to know the best of something, but really an exercise in geographic diversity, Details includes Square One Dining on its top ten...
Posted February 25, 2008 8:56 AM
Much honored Los Angeles sci-fi writer and alternate historian Harry Turtledove writes about time travel in his Crosstime Traffic series. Could he be predicting the future with the sixth book...
Posted February 8, 2008 9:23 AM
In The Oldest Living Thing in L.A., Larry Levis observes an opossum trying to cross Wilshire and Santa Monica. Sample: A few steps forward, then back away from the breath...
Posted January 30, 2008 8:21 AM
Councilman Ed Reyes stopped in at 7th and Alvarado before noon to dedicate the intersection as Langer's Square. No dummy, he loaded up on the good stuff before making the...
Posted January 24, 2008 8:31 PM
Here's a nice little story from writer Mark Evanier's blog, called modestly News From Me. Seems he began teaching a humor writing class at USC yesterday, but his car broke...
Posted January 17, 2008 11:12 PM
In his Monday afternoon commentaries on KCRW, Marc Porter Zasada takes more creative chances and fashions many more gems than a certain other radio talking head I could name. Today,...
Posted January 14, 2008 11:48 PM
In the eyes of the New York Times, the 96 students in the Colburn School conservatory on Bunker Hill "are among the finest young musicians in the world." The story,...
Posted January 6, 2008 10:56 PM
Over at Native Intelligence, Judy Graeme's third offering on Los Angeles photographers introduces a group of teenagers (and younger) who use borrowed cameras to shoot images of their gritty home...
Posted January 5, 2008 11:58 PM
There are three notable photo exhibitions up at the Getty right now — a survey of nudes and seven decades of Andr Kertsz among them — but the largest and...
Posted December 31, 2007 11:58 AM
Dana Goodyear has been blogging on the fires for The New Yorker and has a Talk of the Town piece in this week. Excerpt: Southern Californians dont like to wake...
Posted November 1, 2007 11:51 PM
From the author's Op-Ed in the New York Times: The fires have come to Los Angeles again and there is only one thing certain, and it is an obscene horror:...
Posted October 28, 2007 11:28 PM
This shot of Angels Flight in its old location beside the 3rd Street tunnel is one of the photographs in the exhibition of "Julius Shulman's Los Angeles" at the Central...
Posted October 11, 2007 10:59 PM
In one of those glib, fast-moving pronouncement pieces that magazines are in love with, Details pronounces the suburbs hip in the November issue. The sidebar anoints Montrose as a worthy...
Posted October 9, 2007 9:48 PM
Richard S. Chang, writing in today's New York Times Wheels section about the pleasures of driving a stick shift: I was living in Los Angeles. Even though stopping and starting...
Posted October 4, 2007 10:38 PM
The latest media to discover the luxury denim industry in downtown L.A. is the New York Times, which focuses Wednesday on Bread Denim and draws the obligatory bigger meaning: Its...
Posted September 25, 2007 11:39 PM
Writer and activist Jasmyne Cannick blogs that her neighborhood of Historic West Adams is more than big houses and the Ray Charles studio: I kid you not, most of the...
Posted July 21, 2007 2:10 PM
Author and Pomona College alumnus Verlyn Klinkenborg has another of his Editorial Observer pieces about California in today's NYT. The subject this time is the forecast that our fair state...
Posted July 18, 2007 12:38 PM
Motivated by yesterday's fun video of Broadway shot in the 1980s, Los Angeles photographer Robert Pacheco sent along his photo essay of Downtown in the 1970s. In his black-and-white...
Posted July 12, 2007 8:59 AM
Bloomberg critic Linda Yablonsky is the latest to fly in, praise Michael Govan and visit some galleries. Excerpt of her piece: You just never know where genius may lurk. Chances...
Posted June 26, 2007 8:40 AM
The radio host and author pens a Times Op-Ed piece about showing his niece around Los Angeles, even though he did get lost for a while. Everybody knows the comedy...
Posted June 13, 2007 8:27 AM
Nice online gallery and slideshow from graduating high school senior Annarose Mittelstaedt. Her website slideshow includes a Google Earth tour of the sights. Photo: Annarose Mittelstaedt...
Posted June 11, 2007 8:38 AM
Matthew Garrahan, the Financial Times' man in Los Angeles, reported Sunday that Apple is in advanced talks with Hollywoods largest movie studios about "launching an online film rental service to...
Posted June 11, 2007 8:15 AM
Lisa Napoli came home from the doctor's office so annoyed she typed up these notes. The Boobs As overheard by Lisa Napoli Scene: The very crowded, very small waiting room...
Posted May 25, 2007 9:18 AM
This afternoon at 2 pm Patt Morrison will have on the German photographer behind You-Are-Here.com, the best website of Los Angeles architectural photos. He blogs about his recent trip to...
Posted March 26, 2007 8:28 AM
Michael Newman, the Times' deputy opinion editor from out of town, thinks so after running yesterday's marathon. He particularly seems to not much like Boyle Heights, Koreatown or the sections...
Posted March 5, 2007 4:18 PM
Today's Wall Street Journal advances tomorrow's Beverly Hills municipal election with a front-page story that focuses on the Iranian face of the city through Jimmy Delshad, a councilman who is...
Posted March 5, 2007 12:10 PM
Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and music critic for Commentary, hits cleanup in the lineup at one of my favorite multi-blog cultural websites, ArtsJournal. Somehow he...
Posted February 22, 2007 9:29 AM
Thomas Mauk, the man who wouldn't be L.A. County CAO, wasn't the first to reject a deal with the Board of Supervisors. Dr. Joshua Perper, the Broward County (Fla.) Medical...
Posted February 12, 2007 1:25 AM
Manhattan's 92nd Street Y is hosting a night this week with three L.A. literary types who happen to be ex-New Yorkers. In advance of Thursday's event, artist/writer/standup Beth Lapides answers...
Posted January 23, 2007 1:59 PM
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...
Posted January 18, 2007 11:36 AM
A study at Central Connecticut State University ranks the most literate cities in the U.S. based on "newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and...
Posted January 3, 2007 1:12 PM
Esquire: In the December "Best and Brightest" issue, Colby Buzzell takes on an unruly quest across Los Angeles "in search of things that make it good to be alive. In...
Posted November 30, 2006 2:15 AM
If I had the power, I would fly Martin Schall to Los Angeles and present him a key to the city. Herr Schall, as LA Observed long-timers know, is the...
Posted October 27, 2006 2:10 AM
Like most everyone else who has toured the newly expanded Griffith Observatory, Orange County Register science editor Gary Robbins was impressed by the aesthetics. "You'll want to hug the army...
Posted October 27, 2006 2:03 AM
Reading between the lines, I'd guess that New York Times bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer's most painful culture shock about moving to Los Angeles this year has been parking tickets. Her...
Posted October 27, 2006 12:57 AM
Weekend clouds obscure the view across Santa Monica Bay, but the cloud pillars orient the geography. Veronique de Turenne has the coordinates at Here in Malibu....
Posted October 16, 2006 1:06 AM
Catherine Elsworth, the Daily Telegraph's woman in L.A., has relocated to New York for a few weeks in part to "remind myself what proper city living is all about." She...
Posted October 10, 2006 3:05 PM
It must be let's talk about L.A. month at the blog of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Last week Sydney Pollack answered questions from Andrew Krucoff, now it's Arianna...
Posted September 25, 2006 9:11 AM
Los Angeles Times metro columnist Steve Lopez just had to pen a column on the latest round of misplaced New York Times journalism on L.A. The recent William Bratton profile...
Posted September 6, 2006 11:04 AM
It's Michael Chow's palace in Holmby Hills, designed by Chow and his wife Eva with a 28-foot-high central atrium and many Chinese touches, but with Mexican arches and carved wooden...
Posted August 24, 2006 6:35 PM
Is there a lazier media and blog meme going around right now than the anti-Westside digs over the 310/424 area code overlay and resulting addition of four digits to every...
Posted July 28, 2006 1:13 PM
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is swirling through California for a bunch of appearances, including the Rupert Murdoch bash in Pebble Beach. On Monday he will meet the local elite...
Posted July 28, 2006 12:19 PM
It's a lazy Friday in July so why not post a little travel writing, even if it is about home. Notes from the Road calls itself "a project in experimental...
Posted July 14, 2006 12:52 PM
LA Frog refers to herself as "Parisian euro-pudding whose karma ran over her dogma. Met a California surfer dude, traded high heels for flip flops and crossed the world to...
Posted July 14, 2006 2:50 AM
Chris Ayres writes in his L.A. Notebook for the Times of London that going native is one of the worst career moves a foreign correspondent can make. "It is a...
Posted July 12, 2006 9:09 AM
In the Thursday Styles section of the New York Times, Sharon Waxman laments that so many male feet in Los Angeles—by which she means Hollywood—are showing up at work and...
Posted June 29, 2006 10:08 PM
Daily Telegraph correspondent Catherine Elsworth returned to her post in West Hollywood from a trip home to the U.K. with a serious jones for David Beckham and England's World Cup...
Posted June 29, 2006 3:25 PM
Los Angeles now has a media-anointed Yahoo parents group—introduced to the national spotlight in today's Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. Peachhead has 3,000 members, about 500 of...
Posted June 18, 2006 10:33 PM
Janelle Brown talks to occupants about what it's like living in Case Study homes or the classic Victorians on Carroll Avenue, given all the tours and tourists that come by....
Posted June 16, 2006 11:22 AM
© 2003-2009 • About LA Observed • Email the editor
| Bev Hills billionaire Ron Burkle has $56 million in loans against his two houses. The McCourts have borrowed $28 million on their properties.
| Advice for Greenies in a Complicated World
| Steve Jones, the self-proclaimed Sire of Wilshire (a nod to the physical address of his former home at Indie 103.1 FM), is back on the air!
| She gaped at me like I was living history -- Miss Jane Pittman come to put her withered lips to the "Young Only" fountain straw of ageism.
As newspapers and television pull back from investigative reporting, foundations and other organizations are beginning to fill the void. One of the most interesting is Accountable California, a project of Local 721 of the Service Employees International Union.
Sponsors
Blogads
Get RSS Feeds
of LA Observed
of LA Observed
LA Observed publishes several Real Simple Syndication feeds for easy scanning of headlines. If you wish to subscribe to a feed, most popular RSS readers will do it for you. You can also enter the web address from the XML button below or click on a specific feed. For more help with RSS, try here or here.
