Photo courtesy of dmax3270 via flickr While the features and shorts at Sundance are occasionally hit or miss, the documentaries are always strong across the board. Yesterday, I was able to see two that I have had my eye on since the festival schedule was originally released: Made in America by Stacy Peralta and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden by Morgan Spurlock. Considering all the frantic back-and-forths I've been doing since last......

Monday Tanya Lemani presents Have Belly, Will Travel 7pm @ Book Soup Kim Sunee presents Trail of Crumbs 7pm @ Vroman's Tuesday Marc Porter Zasada presents The Urban Man: Staying Human in LA 7pm @ Book Soup Patrick Conyer presents Pasadena: A Business History 7pm @ Vroman's Elizabeth Pomeroy presents Pasadena: A Natural History 7pm @ Vroman's Muhammad Yunus discusses Creating a World Without Poverty 7pm @ Central Library Lewis Hyde discusses his books......

Johnny Grant was found dead tonight, around 7 p.m., on a bed at the Roosevelt Hotel where he lived on the 14th floor in a suite.Grant, 84, has been one of Hollywood's most enthusiastic supporters for more than 50 years. Grant got his start in entertainment by hosting a daily radio show in New York City for servicemen and women during World War II, and later co-hosted the first national telethon ever produced to help......

The bestests Christmas present ever a vintage Jiffy Kodak Series II camera used in World War II....

Not too long ago, I recall picking up a certain book on a shelf somewhere and reading the back, and then deciding it was going to be mighty depressing and put it back. A couple months later, I went to see Atonement on a friend's request, knowing nothing of the story, and discovered it was the same book. And yes, friends, this story is depressing. Without giving too much away, (and you probably know......

The sun sets on Lincoln Place Looks like the tenants and former tenants of Lincoln Place can, at long last, declare victory. The short-short version of the Lincoln Place ordeal: Over the last few years, Denver-based apartment management megalith AIMCO has succeeded in evicting nearly all the residents of Venice's Lincoln Place, a 700-unit, post-World War II affordable housing complex. They were hoping to bulldoze the place and build condos.......

How do you make world wars funny? During World War II, one of the more somber moments in world history, it took some time to find comedy in what was an absurd era that fomented the rise of Existentialism and made geniuses out of Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre, none of whom made their mark in comedy. In Springtime for Hitler, Mel Brooks showed us that even the most untouchable tyrants can be......

It's Veterans Day, and, to commemorate, let's check in on Iraq and see how some Veterans-to-be are doing. Turns out, things weren't so festive today there. A civil war continues to rage and officials announced that, with the 853rd death this past week, 2007 is now the deadliest year yet for American troops in the ongoing Middle East quagmire, surpassing 2004's total of 850. So far, 3,860 U.S. soldiers and 4,164 coalition troops from......

Tomorrow may be the day we observe today's holiday, yet today our local newspapers honor the men and women of the past and present who have fought for us. Here are their stories: Steve Lopez takes his weekly LA Times Sunday column and dedicates it to telling the story of Sgt. Maj. Jesse Acosta, who lost his sight, taste and smell in Iraq. Lopez follows Acosta as he commutes on the bus in Los Angeles.......

We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on LAist. AMEX Urban Adventures, because big cities are full of little adventures. Interpol, at the Forum on Tuesday. World War Z, perfect as Halloween is coming up. Nip/Tuck, with season 5's premiere on October 30th. Coasting.com by Shimano, where you can wander around aimlessly. Wristcutters, opening next week. Travelzoo, with its Top 20 list on travel deals. Busted Tees, where they're in......

Monday Porochista Khakpour presents Sons and Other Flammable Objects 7pm @ Dutton's Kenneth Turan presents Never Coming to a Theater Near You 7pm @ Studio City Branch Library Tuesday Susan Faludi presents The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America 7pm @ Central Library Max Brooks presents World War Z 7pm @ Book Soup Walter Mosley presents Blonde Faith 7:30pm @ Skirball Cultural Center President Vicente Fox discusses and signs Revolution of Hope......

We know on Sunday that we can watch people bumpin' uglies on HBO as well as the randy exploits of a Hollywood posse on HBO as well as all the other junk on HBO because Sunday is an HBO kind of day. But I think that there's something else worth checking out that starts Sunday. The much anticipated and hugely overhyped new series from Ken Burns, The War, starts on Sunday night at 8:00pm......

Doom hangs over the new Arcade Fire album. A nameless dread, omnipresent and consuming, from the oceans and the skies, by infernal means and by human hands....

Being a spy is a tough job. Not only do you constantly run the risk of being exposed by your enemies or compromised by an error in judgment or other grievous mistake (heck, your identity might even be leaked by your own government), you must also be able to adjust to rapidly changing conditions and always be quick on your feet. This then begs the question: why have you or a colleague do it......

- According to the LA Times, people who live next to trains and subways do not use them. - Eek! "From July 1 of 2006 to June 30 of this year, only 3.21 inches of rain fell in downtown Los Angeles — the lowest precipitation level since records started being kept in the 1880s." - After 80 mph driving and weaving on the Hollywood Freeway in March, actress Vivica A. Fox (Kill Bill, Independence Day)......

Sunday night I crept down an alleyway, drank a bunch of absinthe and watched a girl get her eyes gouged out with a knitting needle. The gouging wasn’t real, but the absinthe was. Welcome to Los Angeles' theatre du Grand Guignol de Paris. The Grand Guignol was a theater in the Pigalle district, the seamy underbelly of Paris. The theater’s focus varied slightly with shifts in management, but the subject matter of its short......

We came across this interesting and yummy tidbit of information and had to share, it's National Doughtnut Day! What that means is you can through out all of your being good preparing for summer and kick off June right! Think we're kidding? We found an interesting history to this holiday. National Doughnut Day was established in 1938 by the Chicago Salvation Army to raise much-needed funds during the Great Depression, and to honor the......

A New World War: 14 Scenes from a Possible Future is another study in dystopia, with playwright Rita Valencia taking cues from Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury. While we've seen all this doom and gloom before, it's Valencia's take on the futuristic parable that saves us from cliché hell. The play focuses the Antar (Niamh McCormally), a woman who's signed a long, long-term contract with a company that provides cyborg companionship. But......

Bonjour Tristesse As part of its ongoing Saul Bass mini-tribute, the Skirball Center will screen Bonjour Tristesse, a drama directed by Otto Preminger that stars David Niven as a suave playboy-turned-father and Jean Seberg as his pixie-ish daughter. Their dissolute existence of tromping across Europe from nightclub to cocktail party to casino is upended when Niven falls for the hopelessly upright Deborah Kerr. I also highly recommend the mildly smutty book by Françoise Sagan on......

Occasional car nuts that we are, LAist couldn't be more stoked about the big event this weekend. Mid-Wilshire will be crawling with genuine hot rods all this weekend as part of the 75th anniversary of the '32 Ford, affectionately known as The Deuce. The Petersen Automobile Museum will be the focal point for all things Deuce-ish all this weekend, as 750 of the Fords are expected to turn out for what is certainly to......

Horse racing season has just begun at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, and from now until April 22, SoCal hopefuls (with $5 for general admission fee) can step up to tellered windows and pick the ponies to win, place or show. But there’s a lot of history behind them horses: Santa Anita opened on Christmas Day in 1934, and still now traditionally opens on Dec. 26 each year. Seabiscuit brought the park more notoriety,......

Book people are the luckiest people in the world because they get to read what they love while on the job. So we envy Robyn Kamimura, the assistant Promotional Director at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena. She organizes book signings for authors and gets to meet and greet the celebrated and the strange everyday. Robyn contributes to the books column in the Arroyo Monthly magazine. She also writes a kick-ass email newsletter for the store.......

by Kevin McCollister I spent yesterday morning surrounded by people who were dead before I was born. At the corner of Normandie and West Washington is the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery. Founded in 1884, it's a "Who Was Who" of Los Angeles since the beginning and is therefore where many mayors, prizefighters and at least one mass murderer can be found. It also has several rows (above) of young men buried with no families, no wives;......

"The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." - Mel Gibson, who now has something else to add to his list of controversial quotes regarding religion. You'd think that even if you said that drunk, you'd apologize your ass off the next day. Especially if you're in the Popularity Game and you work alongside a fair share of Hebrew ladies and gentlemen. Instead, after Mel Gibson's arrest for DUI, and filmed......

LA Fire Department blog lets us know that "all fireworks, even the so-called "safe and sane" variety are illegal in the City of Los Angeles, and have been outlawed since World War II!" We hope you recognize that exclaimation mark. The problem is, that poster looks so cool we want to re-create it. And then blow it up real good. - LAFD Don't know what to listen to while you're not letting off fireworks?......

The Daily News looks at the legacy of African-Americans in the valley (it's a little grim). Our favorite part is the story of Ida Kinney, now 101 years old; her grandparents were slaves in Arkansas. She was the first African-American woman to get a job at Lockheed's Burbank plant during World War II, and got a white friend to front for her in order to buy her home on an all-white block. Where she......

For years, Filipino veterans and citizens who served under U.S. armed forces during World War II were denied the same benefits afforded to other servicemen and women though their sacrifices were equal. The U.S. government didn’t begin to redress this inequity until recently -- when many of the soldiers and volunteers were long gone. Tomorrow, a portion of the proceeds from special screening of Miramax’s “The Great Raid” will go to the American coalition......

The Los Angeles Conservancy offers guided walking tours of various of parts of LA. The Conservancy has brought back their summer walking tours due to their popularity and today was the first part of 4 week series which repeats again next month and covered the Art Deco period of architecture which took place mostly between the two World Wars. We met at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel at 5:30pm and then walked across the street......

The funny thing about reading The “Grand Avenue Plan,” preliminarily approved last week, is pondering how often in the last century developers have felt the need to shift the functions of various districts, as though downtown LA were one of those party-favor puzzles in which you slide the little tiles around the board until a picture comes into focus. Certainly something needs to be done with the area — what ought to be a......

On August 6, 1945, Allied Forces in World War II dropped the first atomic weapon used in wartime on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The blast instantly destroyed four square miles of the city and at least 80,000 human beings. Tens of thousands more died of wounds, burns, and radiation in the following weeks. How fitting, then, that the Los Angeles stop of the "September 11: Bearing Witness to History" exhibition is located at the......