Snow Tempest

The Festival of Books is a lot of fun and a set of curious paradoxes. The first is that it's an enormous social festival about books, an art form usually enjoyed, unlike, say, theater, film, or music, by oneself in silence. Another is that much of the point of the festival is to see writers in the flesh, even though the point of a writer, really, is that their thoughts and feelings reach their...

As he promised, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa released his proposed budget today. In true blog fashion, we offer you an early but sketchy summary based on a quick scan of what seem to be the highlights of the 399 page budget and its supporting documentation. In many ways, the budget is designed to offer new services that benefit everyone while gleaning revenues from those most able to afford it. The new items in the budget...

Dear Hollywood Actors and Actresses: After we work all day and fend off LA's many arrogant and entitled drivers on our commute home, we sometimes find watching your television performances a pleasant way to unwind -- unless you make our blood boil by revealing in what you seem to think is a "charming" way that in fact you are one of those awful drivers. Last night on The Late Show with David Letterman, Alexis...

Today at 5:30 pm, Mayor Villaraigosa made a "State of the City" address -- sort of like the State of the Union address, but just for LA. In fact, the speech in many ways served as the inverse of this year's State of the Union address. "Angelenos, it's time for all of us to make the tough choices," said Mayor Villaraigosa. According to the Mayor, we're trying to stop violence and inequity, and we're...

There's a literary "voice" and a spoken voice, and if you were listening to the National Public Radio show "Marketplace Money" today around 2:30 on KPCC, you might have recognized both "voices" in one piece as belonging to LAist's own Carolyn Kellogg. She didn't mention it here herself, but Carolyn wrote, produced, and narrated a piece on whether people actually use algebra once they are grown up. If you missed it, or want to...

The Believer's April 2006 issue and web site have several articles about LA and/or by LA writers. As we've mentioned, in Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A." , Jenny Price takes the facetious response she gets when she tells people at cocktail parties that she is a Los Angeles-based nature writer, --"Is there nature in LA?" --as the starting point for her meditation on the natural world in the city, or the city...

June Pointer, youngest of the singing Pointer Sisters, died Tuesday of cancer at UCLA Medical Center. In addition to singing on the group's major albums, including lead vocal on the song "Jump (For my Love)," she co-wrote songs such as "I'm So Excited," which exemplified the group's capacity for joyous naughtiness. The Pointer Sisters' music spanned genres: they could sing rock, R&B, old-fashioned jazz, and country all on the same album and still have a...

My brother was in town today, and since he's been here before, I wanted to think of something to do that was specific to LA, but not the Walk of Fame, the Getty, or the beach. He already appreciates LA: as a helicopter pilot, he takes a certain professional delight/amusement in this city's obsession with that mode of transportation, and having spent time in Naples, also enjoys LA's quasi-Mediterranean landscape. He'd already gone with...

L.A. based writer Caitlin Flanagan gets profiled, and demonstrates some of the more hypocritical aspects of her personality, in this month's Elle. Ms. Flanagan has been criticized before, in places like Beverly-Hills based Ms., but the Elle article is particularly well-written, and Elle is not generally known for having a set political agenda, unless you count the trumpeting of one shoe designer over another. (Thanks to Salon.com's Broadsheet for pointing it out.) Both articles...

Los Angeles's Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony has an Op-Ed in the New York Times (registration required) about his statement that he would tell his priests to defy a proposed law about illegal immigration. He writes, "Providing humanitarian assistance to those in need should not be made a crime, as the House bill decrees. As written, the proposed law is so broad that it would criminalize even minor acts of mercy like offering a meal...