Destination: Los Angeles
Talking Travel Writing at the L.A. Times Festival of Books
by Jim Benning | 04.19.06 | 12:31 PM ET
For Southern California book lovers, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is, hands down, the must-attend event each spring, mainly because of the terrific panel discussions. This year, the festival takes place at UCLA on April 29 and 30. Two panels are of particular interest to travel-lit fans, and both are conveniently scheduled for Sunday.
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Yahoo! BuzzWhich City Has the Worst Drivers?
by Michael Yessis | 03.31.06 | 1:45 AM ET
Is it Buenos Aires? Mexico City? Kuwait City? Rome? Los Angeles? London Times correspondent Chris Ayres devotes his latest So L.A. blog entry to his opinion on the subject. “[T]his week I returned from Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city whose entire population seems to be trying to break the land speed record in a 1984 Renault 9 GLS,” he writes. “And I concluded that the lapses of concentration demonstrated by motorists in Los Angeles is far preferable to the sociopathic stare of the average Porteno cab driver, who considers it his duty to accelerate towards stationary objects (including human beings) at double the speed limit, before averting multiple homicide by stomping on the brakes or swerving violently.” Sounds horrible, but I’m going the other way on this. I’ve seen some dreadful drivers here in Los Angeles. Just tonight, for instance, I was traveling a busy two-lane street when the guy in front of me swerved into the oncoming lane and stopped cold, just to drop off his passengers. No hazards. No signal. No brain.
J.R. Moehringer: A Day at Sinatra’s House
by Michael Yessis | 03.28.06 | 2:27 PM ET
Los Angeles: Three Great Books
by Jim Benning | 03.11.06 | 5:24 PM ET
L.A.‘s Ambassador Hotel: It’s Gone
by Michael Yessis | 01.18.06 | 1:33 PM ET
The last bits of the famed hotel have been cleared away and The Ambassador is officially no more. The Ambassador’s Last Stand will be hosting a wake next Tuesday at the HMS Bounty, the bar across the street from the hotel’s former location.
Update: Farewell to L.A.‘s Ambassador Hotel
by Michael Yessis | 01.06.06 | 7:24 AM ET
Only a small portion of the famed hotel still remains, and The Ambassador’s Last Stand has the latest photos of the demolition. Readers have also sent in a couple photos of the pantry where Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy in 1968.
2006: The Year of the Long-Haul Airliner
by Michael Yessis | 01.04.06 | 1:36 AM ET
Superjumbo jets like the soon-to-debut Airbus A380 “will fundamentally change the experience of flying around the world,” writes Joe Sharkey in today’s New York Times. Besides making it easier for travelers to get from continent to continent, the planes also promise extra comfort. Airports around the world are beginning to modify their infrastructure to accommodate the 500 to 900 passenger behemoths, but some are lagging, including Los Angeles International Airport.
LAX Through Hotel Room Windows
by Jim Benning | 01.02.06 | 12:58 PM ET
Photographer Zoe Crosher embarked on an unusual and oddly compelling project in 2001: She decided to photograph planes coming in to land at Los Angeles International Airport, shooting them through the windows of 31 motels and hotels around LAX. “Crosher shoots in the morning, and the images (which often feature the plastic linings of cheap curtains) are in a sense second to the narrative thread of the series: transience, anonymity and the fleeting promise of Los Angeles,” writes Steffie Nelson in last Thursday’s L.A. Weekly. A book collection of the photos, “Out the Window (LAX),” is due to be published this spring, with an introduction by Pico Iyer.
Farewell to L.A.‘s Ambassador Hotel
by Michael Yessis | 12.19.05 | 6:02 PM ET
Not too long ago I took a drive east along Wilshire Boulevard from Koreatown to downtown, a part of Los Angeles that many people seem to be avoiding these days. It’s just too painful for a lot of them, Ken Bernstein, director of preservation issues for the Los Angeles Conservancy, recently told the L.A. Downtown News. The reason: That’s where the demolition of the Ambassador Hotel, a Los Angeles landmark since 1921, is currently taking place.
R.I.P. Los Angeles Times Outdoors
by Jim Benning | 12.06.05 | 12:08 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times published its ambitious Outdoors section for the last time today. The paper launched the weekly section in September 2003 as a sort of Outside magazine for Southern California. It was a grand idea, and I was happy to contribute occasionally to its pages. Unfortunately, Tribune Co. has been making lots of cuts lately, and Outdoors was one of them. Editor Thomas Curwen offers a fond fairwell.
Airplane Lands. Nation Rejoices.
by Michael Yessis | 09.22.05 | 4:30 AM ET
Yesterday’s emergency landing of a New York-bound JetBlue airliner in Los Angeles was a post-post-modern experience, passenger and New York Observer editor Alexandra Jacobs told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Translation: Passengers watched the live national television coverage of their crippled jet circling the skies over Southern California on their personal TV screens within the plane. The good news of the landing caused Cooper, who has been covering Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, to smile for possibly the first time in weeks. If you haven’t seen the video of the amazing landing, Crooks and Liars has it.
NYC Gets the Stews. LA and DC Welcome Travel Movies.
by Michael Yessis | 09.22.05 | 4:20 AM ET
Plane Crazy, a play about “stew life” in the ‘60s, is in the middle of a nine show run in the New York Musical Theater Festival. New York Times writer Miriam Horn gave it a mixed review, but the show appears to have sold out every performance. I wonder: Is it a good play that does justice to the life of stewardesses in the early jet age, or do people just like the songs and the outfits?
Santa Cruz vs. Huntington Beach: A Pox on Both of Their ‘Surf City’ Houses
by Jim Benning | 08.19.05 | 4:13 PM ET
Oh, the battles that people and places will wage in the quest for the almighty tourist buck. The California cities of Santa Cruz and Huntington Beach are squabbling once again over the use of the moniker “Surf City USA.” The latest flare-up is the result of a state senator introducing a resolution to make Santa Cruz in his district “Surf City USA.” Not so fast, says Huntington Beach, which has filed trademark applications for “Surf City USA” and uses the name in its logo. A story in today’s Los Angeles Times details the history of the fight, which goes back 13 years. It’s ugly.
“Nothing Makes Me Laugh as Much as the Zagat Dining Guide for Los Angeles”
by Jim Benning | 10.15.03 | 9:09 PM ET
Writer and food lover David Shaw buys three Zagat dining guides for Los Angeles each year—one for his car, one for his home, and one for his office. After all, Zagat guides are enormously influential. But in today’s Los Angeles Times, Shaw unleashes a spirited attack on the guide’s L.A. rankings. Spirited attacks, of course, are always fun to read, so you don’t have to live anywhere near Los Angeles to enjoy this. “I love Woody Allen’s movies, Billy Crystal’s Oscar monologues and Darrell Hammond’s impressions on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Shaw writes. “But nothing makes me laugh as much as the Zagat dining guide for Los Angeles.” And that’s just the first paragraph. (Registration required to access the article.)
The Literature of Los Angeles
by Jim Benning | 07.02.03 | 12:14 AM ET
Writers bring their own psychological baggage to a place—baggage that affects the way they depict that place on the page. Perhaps nowhere is that more true than in Los Angeles. Why is that? Adam Kirsch offers an insightful analysis of L.A. lit on Slate. He takes novelists to task, but what he criticizes is, in my mind, also a form of travel writing. He writes: “Our classic descriptions of Los Angeles were written by visitors who spent only a few weeks or months in the city; or by imported slaves of Hollywood, who act out their rebellion against the city at large; or even by natives writing mainly for an audience somewhere else.”