“You could always live in Venice,” a friend suggested as I considered both an employment prospect in Santa Monica and my own unwillingness to live someplace so seemingly distant and expensive. Venice, the next beach city south (albeit one incorporated into Los Angeles proper since 1926), has long reveled in the reputation of offering a […]
First came the movies, then came the road-builders, then came the criminals, and now come the hipsters: people tell this same basic story about several Los Angeles neighborhoods, but half the time I hear it, I hear it with Echo Park as the subject. Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Kops anointed the place with the […]
“We’re gonna live in Century City,” sings Tom Petty on his and the Heartbreakers’ 1979 song named after the place. “Go ahead and give in — Century City. Like modern men and modern girls, we’re gonna live in the modern world.” At that time, Century City, 176 acres built up against Westwood and Beverly Hills, […]
“A good urban context and the history it represents teach, with a sense of humor, even kitsch how to live.” So, in “Travels in Hyperreality”, writes Umberto Eco, who, despite not necessarily having Los Angeles in mind, nevertheless sets up a pillar of the mental framework needed to consider this city. Much of what appeared […]
I hear a wide variety of languages spoken in greater Los Angeles, but nowhere have I found a richer Babel than the very same place whose other chief attractions include shoe shopping at Foot Locker, a hamburger at Johnny Rockets, and a 3D Hollywood spectacle at the AMC 7. No matter how hard I concentrated […]
Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s fourth season begins in just over two weeks, on Thursday, August 1st, with a series of in-depth conversations conducted right here with the cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene in LosAngeles. Until then, why not consider tiding yourself over with a few essays from my forthcoming book, A Los Angeles Primer: Mastering the Stateless City? The […]
Heading north on the Red Line one morning, I looked around the crowded car and saw only tourists from abroad. Chinese, many of them huddled together over guidebooks and most wearing bulky, expensively long-lensed cameras around their necks, made for the most visible presence. I also spotted a Francophone family, the father of which flipped […]
Call it cynicism if you must, but if I went to someplace called the “Arts District” in most North American cities, I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find art; in most cases, I’d expect to find nothing at all. The name smacks of official desperation, bringing to mind last-ditch efforts to rebrand blocks you’d never even […]
Just last weekend, I found myself in Silver Lake attending the closing party of Brightwell, my friend (and fellow KCET Departures columnist) Eric’s gentlemen’s shop. He may have opened the first such business in modern Silver Lake, but I guarantee you he won’t have opened the last. The neighborhood has over the past couple of decades […]
“It’s hard to screw up a pupusa,” a friend replied when I suggested he have one for lunch. The thick, cheese-filled Salvadoran tortillas, topped generously with shredded cabbage and hot sauce, available across Los Angeles, do give their preparers little chance for grievous error. But the location of my friend’s office places him especially well […]