Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! more ›

Here are some of my favorite LAist stories from this week: Anti reviews a cd that was sent to him, he gives it a "Good", but someone from the band writes in to complain that it wasn't a good enough Peggy Archer showed us that Malibu is finding that whoring out their best beachfront homes to corporations isn't all they hoped it would be Charles Bukowski is my favorite writer, so I liked this... more ›

Award-winning Canadian blogger Lauren White, aka Raymi, was kind enough to take us up on our request to write a few things about Jack Kerouac on his most famous book's birthday. more ›

Someone very dear to me has recently developed the theory that the music we listened to at 17 is the music that stays with us all our lives, and has the most profound influence on us. When I was 17 I listened to 10,000 Maniacs virtually without pause; this was when their MTV Unplugged album was released, which, as part of the popular televised series, features live acoustic renditions of many of their most popular songs, including "Hey Jack Kerouac" from their 1987 release In My Tribe. As many adolescents are inclined to do, I was eager to latch on to any offered strand of cultural definition in the hopes of locating the essence of identity (read: "find myself") I took Natalie Merchant's eloquent bait and purchased a copy of On the Road. more ›

I know you're up there somewhere at your Big Sur in the Sky (hopefully), probably ignorant of all the buzz about the fiftieth anniversary of the publishing of On the Road, but I wanted you to know this: when I was fifteen years old I taped the following lines to the wall above my desk, and I meditated upon them sometimes when I was alone in my room much like you did, I suppose,... more ›

From time to time, LAist will take a look at the many book-to-film projects underway in Hollywood. We'll explore the books we love and why we're over-the-moon excited or just plain worried about the film projects that bear their name. When it was announced a few weeks ago that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson were teaming up to make a film out of Alice Sebold's outstanding The Lovely Bones, we wondered if they'd make it... more ›

Jack Kerouac gave William Burroughs the pseudonym "Old Bull" in his novel On The Road. Fifty-five years ago yesterday, Old Bull blew his wife Joan's brains out with a pistol during a drinking party. And now we get some information that Old Bull is going to be performing at some carnival/hoedown thing downtown on Saturday. A very dangerous-sounding carnival, featuring "dirty darts, inflatable farm animals, insulting caricatures, drunk duck pond, cactus ring toss, sleazy... more ›

Counting down today's few birthdays: Esteemed playwright Edward Albee ("Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?") is 78; he was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 1996. more ›