Of all the things we expected Los Angeles to be known for...it wasn't "the best city in the country for booklovers." According to a study by Eventful.com, New York is the city for singles, San Diego is the city for pet lovers, and LA is, crazily, the best city for bookish types. We're also the best city for music events...but that's hardly a surprise. While we do love our books, we find it hard to......

Judith Freeman's just-out book, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved is a must-read for any Angeleno worth their salt. Why? Not only does Freeman detail the fascinating life of Chandler, one of L.A.'s most famous writers, but she documents, researches and visits almost every one of the thirty-five homes he lived in during his life in Southern California. Twenty-four of those homes are in Los Angeles. Twenty-four! Chandler and his wife......

Earlier this week I made a right turn out of a parking lot in order to avoid waiting a lifetime to make a near-impossible left turn. I found myself on a quiet side street in lovely Toluca Lake, and eyeballed my trusty GPS navigation screen in order to see if the road I'd taken would connect me through to a street I knew would hook me up with Riverside Drive and send me on my......

What could have been a humdrum Saturday afternoon turned out to be the most memorable I've had this entire year. No Age and a lucky crowd of about 75 broke history. Actually, I'm not even sure if we broke history. However, I am certain that no other band has had the gall to execute a renegade show of this particular nature before. This is what happens when you combine an Arthur Magazine editor-type guy,......

This week, Fodor's online published a little Q & A with editor Jennifer Paull who recently spent a long weekend in our dear city. She wanted to catch up on all that's been recently new to her as a frequent(ish) tourist. Among that was the Griffith Observatory, The Getty Villa, restaurants Osteria Mozza and Röckenwagner Café in Venice and Moss, the high-design housewares store on Melrose. What caught our attention the most, though, was her......

Halloween only comes once a year. We all know what that means for many of the beautiful people in Hollywood. Time to show it off! I was invited to a slamming party this past Saturday night (one of the hosts in the genie you see below). As for the other 200 people? Never seen 'em, save a few, but I'll tell you this, I started off taking pictures of people's faces and then it......

LA Times staffer and Buzz Bands blogger Kevin Bronson's story "Taking the L.A. indie rock scene personally" hit stands last Thursday. By means of an intimate portrayal, Bronson set forth his pick of indie rock up-and-comers for L.A.'s indie rock scene in 2008. While I completely admire that he would put his neck out there for three rather small, entirely worthy bands (The Airborne Toxic Event, Castledoor, and The Deadly Syndrome) at the forefront of......

The most talked about post on Metafilter today was in reference to a blog entry by a fellow who came out to visit our lovely city. Two excerpts from his post: L.A. is the apocalypse: it's you and a bunch of parking lots. No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the explicit premise of living there – that's the deal you......

Dear _____, Cool! I'm totally in and excited to see you this weekend too! Yeah I totally heard all about Art Crawl X and am excited to check it out. Isn't it something crazy like over 25 galleries and stores all around Echo Park, Silverlake, Los Feliz and Atwater Village are participating and holding shows and exhibits and stuff? And like at night some are having bands perform and tattoo stations and I heard......

When Crazy Girls closed down about two years ago, it flooded the market with bikini dancers and ended a great run as one of the older strip clubs in Hollywood. Presumably, that was it for them, leaving Jumbo’s Clown Room and Cheetah’s to pick up the slack. But two weeks ago, the neon signs turned back on, and Crazy Girls opened its doors again. During its hiatus, management changed hands, and as I found......

Look, LA I know I've acted distant lately, so I suppose I might as well be upfront with you. I've decided I'm leaving you for another city. Which one? Doesn't matter. The point is, I'm flying out of here in two days. I don't know why it's so hard for me to admit that it's not working between us, because there's plenty of other people who love you and want to move in with......

I have a list of things I want to do in Los Angeles pages long. It changes by the season, by the year and most certainly by recommendations given to me by friends. One thing remains constant, exploring Los Angeles and all of its nooks and crannies makes me appreciate this town so much more than I ever could have imagined. For all of the hoopla and stigmas attached with being in LA, it's thrilling......

So I'm sort of a musician and a writer, albeit aspiring, who after feeling like a misfit among yuppies that I continually ran into in the South Bay where I grew up, was thrilled to finally make the move into L.A. a couple years ago, specifically Koreatown and then Los Feliz. Finally, I was free to wear whatever the hell I wanted to wear, and not get hostile looks from people (I once wore......

There are a lot of fucked up things going on in Los Angeles at night. Drug deals, murders, gang violence, just to name a few. To me, it was hard to believe that cops would come in quick time to a domestic disturbance complaint, so I never called until tonight. My neighbor’s girlfriend moved into his apartment several months ago. Since her arrival, there’s been nothing but cackling, crying, screaming, and slamming of doors. During......

Every time I meet someone who just moved here, I am able to spew out facts that surprise them. For one, except for this past year, it rains here in the winter. Sometimes weeks at a time. Two, we have a subway and if they happened to find their first apartment near it, well lucky them for avoiding some gridlock. Finally, the 1994 Northridge earthquake was nothing compared to what's coming, so welcome to......

Stevie Wonder never ceases to amaze. He is a true icon, a kind spirit, and funny. The man is really funny and the crowd loves him. I think the concert of the summer has to be Stevie Wonder at the Greek this past Wednesday. I'm not just saying that because I went with a superfan who drove all the way from Colorado to see this show or because everyone seemed to know every word......

There were two excellent photo essays documenting the high spirits of USC Trojan fans as they walked in to the Coliseum ready to crush another unworthy opponent. The first photo essay was posted last night on the LA Times USC blog by our very own Adam Rose (who has seemed to have gotten way better access after making the move), and the other was here on LAist by our very own Rob Takata. Both......

By the time I got to Gorky's Russian Cafe, its communist-leaning founder had sold out to a south bay capitalist named Fred. He hired me as a server, promoted me to cashier, then made me manager -- of the 1am-9am shift. From 2-6, I was the only staffer there at the corner of 8th and San Julian downtown. People would come in after Jac Zinder's dance club, or a show at LACE, arty people......

Last weekend's Sunset Junction Street Fair was so fun that another photo essay was necessary. So join us after the jump for more memories of the Silver Lake fiesta and lots and lots and lots of pictures. But instead of pics of bands like in our other bad ass photo dispatches, this essay is about the people, the food, and the services. If you were there perhaps you will see yourself.........

There is arguably no other neighborhood that encapsulates LA’s history, its tectonic demographic changes, its reinvention, its promise and potential as does Boyle Heights. Juan Devis wants to document its continued change through “Departures,” a Web digital mural that takes advantage of the neighborhood's subtle beauty to take visitors on an online tour of the people and places in this community. With the upcoming Gold Line extension and the changes occurring in many of......

I love Sunset Junction because I love to see the people of LA. I love the kids, the surfers, the young Mexicans, the gays, the hotties, the locals, the tourists, and the punkers. I like seeing them all in one place, smiling, interacting, getting pushed up against each other, drinking beers, eating chicken off a stick, listening to classic punk and soul, checking out the girlies under their parasols. I like that the vibe......

Some around town feel that it’s hip to dislike KCRW, but this LAist is a fan. It was the music programming that got me at first, but nowadays I’m sure that I listen to as much or more of the news and talk programs as I do the music. Plus, what with the internets and podcasting that all the kids are into these days, I can listen to any show any time I want.......

We thought we knew uber-blogger and writer Luke Ford. He's best-known for his probing stories about the porn industry (nsfw), and most recently admired for being the first reporter to state that Mayor Tony's marriage was dunzo. But it wasn't until this week's interview with the Jewish Journal that we learned how real Ford keeps it. From his 300-square-foot Pico-Robertson crib, the fact that he used to live out of his car, or the......

Parking at a valet is something that many Americans will go their whole lives without ever doing. And yet in LA most of us will do it at least once a week. After we downed some Slippery Shrimp this afternoon in Chinatown while looking at their impressive wall of autographed photographs of state and local politicians (although, curiously, no photos of our Senators) we realized that we were about to retrieve our car from......

LA Daily News readers are up-n-arms due to some changes happening at the Valley paper, the most controversial being the removal of ten apparently-popular cartoon strips and the addition of some new ones. The DN went out of their way to allow their readers an avenue to complain if they want, and the people are taking them up on it. Infact the DN opinion blog, Friendly Fire, posted some of the emails, and the......

As most of you know, LAist is all over the Kwik-E-Mart phenomenon happening around Los Angeles. Who would we be not to give you the latest update? Today the two Kwik-E-Marts at Olive and Verdugo in Burbank, and also at Sepulveda and Venice in West LA, are providing squishees F-R-E-E. Yes, it's a shameless marketing move. But do we care? Hell no. This LAister has been twice to go all goo-goo and gaa-gaa over......

The Los Angeles County Assessor announced that the property values in LA County rose above 9% in 2006 and totals a smidge over $1 trillion. Beating the trend is everyone's favorite, Compton, whose value rose 13.6%. However the largest increases were in Lancaster, Paramount and Palmdale . Lancaster surged by 21% due in part to a lot of new home sales, reports the LA Business Journal. Two inner-city communities also saw substantial gains: Paramount......

Last night we headed over to the Getty Center to check out Fridays Off the 405, a monthly offering of evening hours in the museum galleries, with live music and a cash bar to boot. We got a late start, but stuck to our routine of taking Sepulveda, even though a quick glance told us that the 405 was moving free and clear. As the sun began to fade from the sky we pulled......

All fireworks in LA are illegal. Any time you drive over the speed limit, that's illegal too. Any time you drink a few more beers than you should and get behind the wheel, that's illegal. And any time you lie under oath and obstruct justice when a Special Prosecutor is trying to figure out if the Vice President of the United States authorized a leak of classified information so this administration could continue to......

The Los Angeles Times interviewed director Werner Herzog this weekend about his upcoming film, Rescue Dawn, and asked the German-born iconoclast why he has chosen to make Los Angeles his home: "We lived for a while in San Francisco, but it was too chic and leisurely," Herzog explains. "New York is only a place to go if you're into finances. But we wanted a place of cultural substance. And if you look behind the......