LA Observed

Political Season Notes

We got a much clearer picture this week of what the election season is going to be like in California. It's going to be long and loud and all over your television...

Whale of a Story

It had the element of crime, that's always important, especially for TV. A Hollywood angle, check, that's good too. Real good. Politics, that'll work, as long as it's not boring or about a difficult issue, like healthcare. Food – there's nothing hotter on the LA cultural scene right now than food...

Thanks a Million

It's been a while since we checked in on the controversy over illegal billboards and giant signs in Los Angeles. It's a fight that has been raging here for more than a hundred years, without much in the way of results. Just look around – LA has more billboards lining its streets than most major cities, seemingly without any aesthetic regulation or principles...

Food Politics

Los Angeles’s reputation as a great food city – or more accurately, region – receives a big boost of validation in the current pages of Saveur magazine ..

LA's Best Soap Opera

This week, Mayor Villaraigosa and the president of the LA City Council, that’s Eric Garcetti, made guest appearances on ABC’s long-running daytime soap All My Children...

Musical Chairs in Local Politics

This must be an especially hard time to be an ambitious politician. City Hall is paralyzed by talk of mass layoffs and the collapse of entire departments. Even municipal bankruptcy has been spoken of – now that would turn a serious mess into a real, perhaps even historic financial catastrophe...

Rainy Day History

After a week of tornado damage, power outages, evacuations, hail and snarled traffic, it's time to pronounce all this rain…a welcome success. Southern California has so far escaped the disastrous mudslides and debris flows that many feared after the big Station Fire. And we've gotten a nice reminder of how much our lives are tied to the Pacific and the jet stream...

Jay, Conan and the Rest

Well here we are at the end of the second week of the great American late night talk show crisis, and I still don't know how I feel about who gets to read jokes off cue cards on NBC at 11:35 p.m...

Saying Goodbye to LA

Here at the start of a new year, when the tone of the city is usually to look ahead, the local news has been full of some notable goodbyes. The first to catch my eye was the rather pointed exit from Los Angeles of the LA Philharmonic Orchestra's principal flutist -- or if you prefer, flautist...

Historic Trees of LA

2009 Standing Ovations

Closure, 2009

Now that 2009 is coming to a close, I suspect we can all agree it's been a pretty rough year. The recession became more harsh and personal for many in Southern California, and the best thing to be said about it is there are the first signs of better days ahead next year...

An LA Style Election

In a corner of the San Fernando Valley section of LA, the voters in one city council district this week put another election to bed. It wasn't exactly an all-consuming event – only about 15 percent of the eligible voters bothered to cast a ballot. Except for a few excited activist bloggers, the media mostly passed on the race, declining to offer much in the way of in-depth reporting...

Spector Shows Up Uninvited

An occupational hazard of following the news obsessively is that you're rarely surprised -– truly surprised -– by anything that happens. It doesn't mean that you know ahead of time what's going to happen. It just means that when news comes across your screen -- like say, the Tiger Woods story, or that couple sidling into the White House dinner uninvited -- you are seldom shocked. More often, there's a part of you that thinks, hmm, should have seen that coming. But I must admit, while scrolling through my Twitter feed the other day, I was completely floored by one news nugget...

Tales of Gavin Newsom

This past week I managed to break free of the Los Angeles gravity for a few days and travel among our fellow Californians who live north of the Tehachapi Mountains. Writers through the years have already described very well how we southern Californians stand out from the northerners. And vice-versa. No need to go there again...