Blogs

The Department of Water and Power issues a report on why L.A. saw so many water main breaks in the past few months. It's inconclusive, but a combination of corroded old iron and unusually high reservoir levels and pressure are likely to blame.

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How a small step from one site then crossed over to Facebook and went viral. This is an interview with the creator of the "You're Great" Sticker Laura Shape.

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August Coppola has died. His obituaries began, brutally, by listing his relations: Carmine Coppola (father, composer of The Godfather score), Francis Ford Coppola (director, arts entrepreneur). Talia Shire (sister, actor), Nicholas Cage (son, actor), Christopher Coppola (son, director, producer), Roman Coppola (nephew, director), and Sofia Coppola (nice, director, actor, writer). In his obituaries, August recedes in this crowd of celebrities and the nearly famous. The implication is that he never was as notable as they are,

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This week Huell meets a group of dedicated fountain pen collectors, heads North to see the “Mothball Fleet”, and tries the sweetest, creamiest eggnog this side of the Sierra Mountains. You won't want to miss a minute of it! (For more information on these and other episodes - as well as a chance to purchase them - you can always visit Huell at www.calgold.com).

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Breathing and soft, almost guttural grunts of hard work: these are the sounds that stay with you a few days after viewing Sharon Lockhart's newest film, Double Tide. The immediate experience, though, is sublime visual pleasure. The film follows the work of a woman digging clams at low tide early in the morning and then again at sunset in the same cove on the Maine coast. The morning is foggy, a soft grey landscape; the afternoon features sunset and illuminated clouds. Lockhart's camera remains still throughout the film, framing the woman at a distance and creating an incredibly captivating portrait that unfolds gracefully in real time, a space opening into duration. The LA-based Lockhart has been making these evocative films with specific formal constraints for several years. Pine Flat from 2005 is made up of 12 unmoving 10-minute shots, each of which features the sound and/or images of children from the town of Pine Flat in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Here, too, the effect is dramatic as the details that would normally be lost instead resonate powerfully. More recently, Lockhart has studied workers in Maine, with Lunch Break and Exit, both of which were shot at the Bath Iron Works shipyard earlier this year. Lockhart, who is on the faculty of the Art School at USC, invites us to reconsider cinema with these projects by paring it back to an essential core, leaving room for us to think.

The City Council gets closer to a new medical marijuana ordinance, rejecting key elements of the suggestions from the City Attorney's office. D.A. Cooley says that he doesn't care if the City Council wants to make over the counter sales legal for medical pot dispensaries--he'll ignore them.

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Who knew that Inglewood has a burgeoning arts scene in the northeast corner of the city?

Of course I did, but I have to admit, I didn't give it much thought. Not nearly as much thought as I've given lately to police misconduct, development, homelessness, tagging wars or even the incidence of stray dogs that directly correlate to the rising number of foreclosures and otherwise empty houses popping up in my picturesque neighborhood like dandelions. Nearly every day, I check the curbside lawn outside my local 99-cent Store to see if people will forego throwing trash on it for once; if it's relatively free of plastic bags at the end of the day, I notch a victory. Silly stuff, overly NIMBY stuff, but in my ongoing psychological battle to keep Inglewood normal (for utter lack of a better word), these are the aesthetics I obsess about. My concern with visuals has been limited to clean lawns, paved streets and graffiti-free walls--concern with what isn't there versus what is. I feel I have no choice. Real art is lovely and welcome, but I didn't see it as a solution to anything. It could wait

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SoCal Week in Review gives you the week's best Southern California links, articles, and web-related curiosities.

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I didn’t walk or take a bus to the 18th Street Arts Center on Wednesday evening to participate with other carless Angeleños in presentations connected to Diane Meyer’s photo exhibit: Without a Car in the World: 100 Car-less Angelinos Tell Stories of Living in Los Angeles.

I didn’t have to. Diane Meyer had arranged my ride to Santa Monica. She brought me back to Lakewood.

It would have been possible to walk-bus-train- bus to the art gallery, but the 34-mile trip from my office would have taken me almost two-and-a-half hours. There isn’t any easy way back at the hour the panel discussion ended.

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Day of the Dead's come and gone, one more year on its march toward becoming this country's newest holiday.

That's what Rutgers University professor Regina Marchi argues in her new book. You can find Dia de los Muertos/Day of the Dead celebrations across the U.S. because there are now significant populations of Latin American immigrants in most states. And the celebrations are attracting non-Latinos, who are picking up the tradition as their own.

We need to go back to the Chicano civil rights movement, 40 years ago, to trace the current growth of the observance. Mostly U.S.-born Mexican American artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s started these celebrations in California cultural centers after trips to Mexico, where it was purposefully forgotten in large cities.

In the 1950s and 60s, Marchi said in an interview, Mexico's ruling class saw Dia de los Muertos as a backward tradition that had no place in large cities undergoing post-World War Two modernization. That changed in the 1970s when Day of the Dead was folded into national tourism campaigns, becoming one of many stops on an extensive cultural tourism trail carved out by the Mexican government.

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L.A. police chiefs don't need to win over the public before they get the job, but new LAPD head Charlie Beck is trying to do so in the face of accusations his appointment was too much of a mayoral power play, under departing Chief Bratton's influence.

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I came back to Beijing from Seoul and there was 6 inches of snow on the ground.

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TTLA's blogger boarded an MTA Gold Line train earlier this week, part of a group taking in an advance tour of the six miles of track and eight new stations that make up the long-awaited "Eastside Extension."

TTLA's predictions: The bridge out of Union Station and over the 101 Freeway will be written about on this website; next year's Self-Help Graphics Dia De Los Muertos event at the East L.A. Civic Center will have 50,000 attendees; and the Extension will exceed ridership estimates, barring fare increases and a continuation of nonsensical inter-line ticketing policies.

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This week, Huell's in the City of Orange, mastering the art of drying persimmons, gulping down some Thai food, batting around during badminton, and getting some printing done. He even makes it over to a Pasadena Soap Kitchen to learn about the process. You won't want to miss a minute of it! (For more information on these and other episodes - as well as a chance to purchase them - you can always visit Huell at www.calgold.com).

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