ANGELENOS don’t need to be told that they live in one of the nation’s best cities for classical music, but it may still be news to much of the rest of the world. On that count, I wrote a piece for the fall issue of Listen, the classical music magazine, that looks at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hollywood Bowl, local chamber music series, and oddball programs like Classical Underground.The whole … [Read more...]
Jonathan Lethem Comes to California
JONATHAN Lethem is well known to readers of The Misread City one of the most consistently fascinating American novelists. Nearly all the writers we celebrate here are West Coast figures – Dick, Le Guin, Chabon, Chandler, Ross MacDonald – and Lethem has stood out as a kind of token Brooklyner. But Lethem, whose most recent novel was the Upper East Side-set Chronic City, has finally seen the light. … [Read more...]
John Lautner House Imperiled
AN EARLY and long overlooked Beverly Hills house by architect John Lautner -- celebrated by fans as an "organic modernist" -- may soon be history. That's the situation a new story of mine, which runs in Saturday's LA Times, describes. The house, which has fallen into serious disrepair, has been owned for 23 years by a couple, originally from Chile, who have lost patience with the place. … [Read more...]
Ray Bradbury, Still Going at 90
THIS Sunday marks the 90th birthday of the first Los Angeles writer I ever read. I can still remember some of the images and moods in his story collection The October Country. And the yearning lyricism and use of The Red Planet as a metaphor for the American West makes The Martian Chronicles, some days, one of my 10 favorite works of fiction.Critic Ted Gioia has a wide-ranging tribute to Bradbury … [Read more...]
Going Medieval With the SCA
As a retro kinda guy who often thinks music and clothes have not improved since 1965, I've always been interested in people who work hard to live in the past. So I was intrigued to come across a book of photography by Venice, CA., based E.F. Kitchen, which captures chain mail-clad members of the Society for Creative Anachronism.HERE is my brief piece in Sunday's LATimes on this photographer who … [Read more...]
California Vs. The Great Plains
The writer and urbanist Joel Kotkin has a fascinating piece in a recent Newsweek called "The Great Great Plains," which looks at the way cities like Fargo and Bismarck -- as well as most of Texas -- are booming while much of the rest of the country languishes in a dead economy.It got us here at the Misread City wondering: What are Omaha and Dallas doing right that Los Angeles and other West Coast … [Read more...]
Slake Tells LA’s Stories
PORN, celebrity, poetry and sharp graphic design: It’s got a little of everything, just like the city it chronicles. I’D heard enough good things about the new LA-centric quarterly, Slake, to have high hopes for it. But so far, to my initial assessment, Slake – a publication of fiction, art, photography and journalism -- has exceeded he high expectations I had for it.Part of the reason for my high … [Read more...]
The Germans are Coming
IN the years just before, during and after WWII, the flow of exiles and emigres from fascist Germany to Los Angeles became so strong that an injection of wit and decadence transformed parts of the city. I wrote about this period -- and a present where German culture exists mostly in dispersed form -- in Sunday's LA Times. Here is my piece, which looks at both the era where Marlene Dietrich, Thomas … [Read more...]
The Eternal Return of Bret Easton Ellis
THESE days I am digging into Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel of sorts to Less Than Zero, one of the most famous and at least initially controversial novels ever written about Los Angeles.It makes me think back to the stories I've written on Ellis over the years and our conversations about literature, fame, the heartlessness of Hollywood and the records of Elvis Costello. Here is the most extensive … [Read more...]
The Twisted Mind of Geoff Nicholson
THE Los Angeles-based novelist and recovering Englishman Geoff Nicholson had a smart, counter-intuitive and oddly funny essay in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review about his passion for old Guinness Books of Records and "the joys of outdated information."Geoff, whose book The Lost Art of Walking I like very much, was part of a small posse I ran with at Guadalajara’s International Festival of … [Read more...]