Photo by Jonathan Alcorn (aka Sundogg) via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr An update on last night's Midnight Movie (you really need to watch this): Curbed has the rendering of the proposed development and for five-stories, it looks a bit... out of proportion. Authorities are on the hunt for the killer of a 25-year-old homeless man whose body was found Sunday night in Venice. The victim was apparently beaten to death. Another......

Don't try this at home -- or at the Civic Center Metro Station. / Photo by puck90 via LAist's flickr pool. TRANSIT TALK Metro is studying alternatives for connecting the Gold, Blue and Expo lines through downtown Los Angeles. This study will examine linking the future Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension (near the Little Tokyo/Arts District Station) and the 7th Street/Metro Center Station. Tonight Metro will update the public on the project and allow......

Photo by karynsig via Flickr This month at LAist, we've been covering breakfast in our Wake Up LA series helping you explore new morning nosh options. On Saturday, there's a one-time breakfast event that we highly encourage you to attend -- one that continues the spirit of giving that exemplifies a man who gave his life for the people of this city. In honor of fallen LAPD SWAT member Randall Simmons, from 7:00 to......

Photo of Jeff Koons' 'Tulips' at BCAM by pink_fish13 via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr As reported this morning, the body of a dead woman was left in a van with the windows down in a spot reserved for police in Pomona. The police told the owners of the car to pick it up or it would be towed. Oops. Now, SFist is reporting a similar case where police impounded a van......

Last year's revelers packed the house for Carnaval in Long Beach | Photo courtesy Aries Productions FESTIVAL Okay, so Long Beach doesn't pack the same exotic pull as, oh, say, Rio, but they're going to put on a Carnaval and pull out all the stops. Get out your Carnaval costumes and get ready to samba the night away! This year’s theme is “Preservation of the Planet” featuring green and recycled decorations. At the heart......

WINE TASTING Rock 'n Roll Wine brings exactly those two things at the Santa Monica Bar & Grille tonight. Vegas-based The Bends play live music while guests taste more than a dozen wines throughout the evening. No one will judge if you swallow it all and don’t spit – between wines. 7 pm // Santa Monica Bar and Grille // 3321 Pico Blvd., Los Angeles // $40 at the door. OPERA USC’s Thornton Opera......

TALK Michael Alexander, author of Jazz Age and the Jews, will discuss Jewish life in the roaring 20s, including performer Al Jolson, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and mobster Arnold Rothstein in the lecture “‘Mammy, Don’t You Know Me?’: Al Jolson and the Jews.” He’ll discuss the 1920s as a heyday of Jewish culture, but why many identified with groups that remained marginalized. Book signing and dessert reception will follow. 7 pm // Davidson Conference......

LAPD concluded that no crime was committed in the possible rape being investigated early this morning on USC's University Park Campus. We have no crime," said Los Angeles Police Department Officer April Harding of the Media Relations office. "The woman was interviewed and she admitted she was drinking and passed out. She was not raped." -- Fox The woman, a USC undergrad, was reported as passed out in a basement classroom around 3:30 a.m. by......

At 4:20 a.m. this morning, another student found a young 18 to 20-year-old woman lying unconscious on the ground. While officers were not able to speak to her because she did not regain consciousness until later during transport, they are considering all options of investigation, including rape. Authorities are unsure whether she was indeed physically attacked or if she could have become intoxicated and passed out, but police are "treating it as a crime scene,"......

Los Angeles police arrested a 21-year-old Loyola Marymount student last night, 11 hours after an anonymous post threatening to kill "many people" appeared on a college gossip blog. "I am going to shoot and kill as many people as I can until which time I am incapacitated or killed by the police," read an entry posted Saturday morning on the user-generated gossip site JuicyCampus.com, according to the Loyolan. LAPD investigators and university officials traced the......

The past year has given us two searing portraits of the human crisis in Darfur: Darfur Now and The Devil Came on Horseback. Tonight on HBO, a worthy third film joins them. In Sand and Sorrow, director Paul Freedman and narrator George Clooney follow John Prendergast, Samantha Power and Nicholas Kristof as they explore the tragedy of the genocide in Sudan. They journey through refugee camps on the Chad-Sudan border, visit mass graves inside......

The WGA and the producers are back at the negotiating table, hopefully they will catch the breaks that they need so that the collapse of Western civilization is averted. In a desperate attempt to avoid family time over the holiday, I managed to watch season one of Showtime's Dexter and my optimism for the future of mankind was restored. I missed Dexter when it premiered last year but was happy to cover the zany stunts......

Monday Edmund White presents Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel 7pm @ Central Library Patricia Hampl presents The Florist's Daughter 7pm @ Dutton's Red Hen Press poets read their work 8pm @ Boston Court Main Stage, Pasadena Tuesday Oliver Sacks presents Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain 7pm @ Central Library Roger Director presents I Dream in Blue 7:30pm @ Barnes & Noble, The Grove Francisco Goldman presents The Art of Politcal......

"Revelation satisfies all doubts, explains all mysteries except her own, and so illuminates the path of life, that fools discover it and stray no more." - William Cowper Sometimes I wonder how it happened. I try to think about how I used to be on the other side, a Cult of Mac hater...a Steve Jobs-despising PC fanboy. But now every time I boot up my Macbook Pro I think about how stupid I am......

A Word or 146: It was fun to watch Molly Shannon on SNL. In general it was a great broadcast and she was just as funny now as she was then but who could really care about Linkin Park? Less fun is reading about the continuing poor decision-making by the networks in their upcoming program development. NBC is trying to cover all it's bases milking Heroes, their only good horse in the running, by creating......

Watch out, Westwood! The color spectrum in Bruinville just got ever so slightly darker. Today's L.A. Times reports that a whopping 203 black students have decided to enroll in next fall's freshman class, out of the nearly 400 that were accepted. This is a 100% increase from last year's debacle, when only about 100 black students enrolled for the fall quarter. Campus officials attribute the rise in minority enrollments to a new "holistic" admissions......

USAC Elections Online USAC elections for UCLA student government are underway. Voting ends tomorrow at midnight so everyone should make sure to cast their e-ballots ASAP. Major issues this year include impeding tuition fee increases, student rights (ie the taser incident), preserving and improving the Undie Run, and advocating campus spirit. On-Campus UCLA Pub Approved The UCLA Board of Directors approved the installment of an on-campus eatery that features alcohol last Friday, appropriating part......

Grindhouse The week begins with a John Hayes double feature. In Grave of the Vampire, legendary vampire Kroft awakens and rapes a woman in a graveyard. The resulting child doesn't need milk. He needs… blood! This is paired with Jailbait Babysitter, which stars Therese Pare as a teenager who's turned out by an older prostitute (Lydia Wagner). Wednesday and Thursday it's a double-bill of Hong Kong action beginning with the Bruce Li (not to be......

Grindhouse Monday and Tuesday it's The Muthers, a combination blaxploitation and women-in-prison flick that stars Janine Bell and Rosanne Katon as a pirate duo who must rescue Bells sister from the private jail of an evil coffee plantation owner, followed by Fight for Your Life, a revenge thriller about a pacifist black minister whose family is taken hostage and tortured by a trio of convicts, until he finally snaps and wreaks his vengeance. Wednesday and......

There have been student reports of gay sexual encounters occuring in the Royce Hall bathroom over the past year. Campus police have confirmed that more than one report has been filed on this matter. One student suggests that gay sex is occuring through holes that exist between the stalls and urinals in the bathroom -- kinky? Some are claiming that gay students (or visitors perhaps) turn to bathroom sex as a way to cope......

Grindhouse The week begins with a pair of 70s actions flicks. The Lady in Red, which has one of my favorite taglines of all time "She's made of bullets, sin & bathtub gin!" is a gangster film starring Robert Conrad as John Dillinger and Pamela Sue Martin as his moll. (Bonus: it was written by John Sayles.) In Bare Knuckles a Los Angeles bounty hunter tracks a psychopath who murders women by using kung-fu. Then......

Say goodbye to Joan Beamin and Barri Martin. After two seasons the genius programming execs at Oxygen have decided to cancel their best show (read: their only watchable show), Campus Ladies. In the latest season the always amusing Campus Ladies had hit its stride with tighter yet more complex narrative arcs, funnier set-ups, a beefed up role for the already strong supporting cast of Amir Talai, Derek Carter and Miranda Kent, and a constant slew......

Grindhouse There probably isn’t a single night I wouldn't enjoy going to the Quentin Tarantino-curated Grindhouse Festival at the New Beverly. On Monday & Tuesday it’s a double bill of Rolling Thunder, a revenge flick about a Vietnam vet who goes on the warpath after his wife and son are killed by thugs, and The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a 1977 film that's set in 1946 about a hooded killer stalking the terrified residents of......

The USC student body is shaken and now it's going to cause a stir. At least 300 protesters plan to descend on Traddies, the on-campus bar, for a rally at 6:00pm on Thursday, March 22. According to Facebook, a popular college networking site, an additional 100 people are listed as "maybe" and over 400 have yet to RSVP for the "Boycott Traddies" event. Confirmations are likely to increase after next weekend as students are on......

In a display of supreme irony, the USC Free Culture group is being fined for every flier posted in the campus' so-called "Free Speech Zone." Campus officials sent an e-mail to the group yesterday, warning: There is a 1$ fine for every flyer posted in violation of policy and at at the moment 14 flyers reading "This is not a free speech zone" have been collected. [...] The fine for chalking is determined by Facilities......

（Or too geeky. Or too broke. Or too old. Or drunk.) As long as you've got access to a computer, you needn't leave the house or spend another dime to get some university enrichment.Your friend the Internet is here to provide the ultimate in affirmative action at the click of a mouse. Here are 5 choice picks to enrich your commute, impress your friends, inspire hallucinations, or maybe even help you get smart: 1) Sci-Fi......

Drawing Restraint Why woo your sweetheart with such tediously traditional notions as flowers, teddy bears and edible panties when you could watch Matthew Barney and his inamorata Bjork going at each other with flensing knives on the deck of a Japanese whaling vessel in Drawing Restraint 9? And if that's not enough Barney for you, there's the making-of documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint. His work has sometimes been described as a "hauntingly dreamlike fantasy......

Predators 4, Kings 1 - After getting roughed up by the Ducks a couple days ago, Nashville headed up the freeway to take out their aggression on the Los Angeles Kings. The Predators scored three power play goals and added one short-handed. They pulled away in a second period marred by five minor penalties on the Kings, two of which were converted. The Kings are just two points out of last place in the......

The best show you've never heard about is returning tonight for its second season. "Campus Ladies" which gets no love, no hype, no nothing because they are cursed with being on the Oxygen (The Oh!) Network is not only the best show no one talks about, but it was one of the best new shows to debut last season. Even the premise is funny: two middle aged women decide to turn their backs on......

Students from North Campus (Arts & Humanities) walked across campus today singing songs of hope for AIDS awareness. They warmly greeted students walking to and from class by handing out t-shirts and asking them to join in and walk. “The ‘Kiss and Tell’ theme is about re-affirming safe sexual practices and is also about everyone knowing how this is affecting others all around the world.” – Dana Helwick, coordinator for Students for International Change.......