Download or read book Dear Los Angeles written by David Kipen and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich mosaic of diary entries and letters from Marilyn Monroe, Cesar Chavez, Susan Sontag, Albert Einstein, and many more, this is the story of Los Angeles as told by locals, transplants, and some just passing through. “Los Angeles is refracted in all its irreducible, unexplainable glory.”—Los Angeles Times The City of Angels has played a distinct role in the hearts, minds, and imaginations of millions of people, who see it as the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. David Kipen, a cultural historian and avid scholar of Los Angeles, has scoured libraries, archives, and private estates to assemble a kaleidoscopic view of a truly unique city. From the Spanish missionary expeditions in the early 1500s to the Golden Age of Hollywood to the strange new world of social media, this collection is a slice of life in L.A. through the years. The pieces are arranged by date—January 1st to December 31st—featuring selections from different decades and centuries. What emerges is a vivid tapestry of insights, personal discoveries, and wry observations that together distill the essence of the city. As sprawling and magical as the city itself, Dear Los Angeles is a fascinating, must-have collection for everyone in, from, or touched by Southern California. With excerpts from the writing of Ray Bradbury • Edgar Rice Burroughs • Octavia E. Butler • Italo Calvino • Winston Churchill • Noël Coward • Simone De Beauvoir • James Dean • T. S. Eliot • William Faulkner • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • Richard Feynman • F. Scott Fitzgerald • Allen Ginsberg • Dashiell Hammett • Charlton Heston • Zora Neale Hurston • Christopher Isherwood • John Lennon • H. L. Mencken • Anaïs Nin • Sylvia Plath • Ronald Reagan • Joan Rivers • James Thurber • Dalton Trumbo • Evelyn Waugh • Tennessee Williams • P. G. Wodehouse • and many more Advance praise for Dear Los Angeles “This book’s a brilliant constellation, spread out over a few centuries and five thousand square miles. Each tiny entry pins the reality of the great unreal city of Angels to a moment in human time—moments enthralled, appalled, jubilant, suffering, gossiping or bragging—and it turns out, there’s no better way to paint a picture of the place.”—Jonathan Lethem “[A] scintillating collection of letters and diary entries . . . an engrossing trove of colorful, witty insights.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Download or read book Notes from Another Los Angeles written by Anthony Fontenot and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to focus on California architect Gregory Ain’s housing projects, which featured open kitchens, movable walls, and other design innovations. The Southern California architect Gregory Ain (1908–1988) collaborated with some of the most important figures of midcentury design, including Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames, and yet remains relatively unknown. Perhaps one reason for this anonymity is that although he designed private homes for wealthy liberals, Ain was more interested in finding ways to produce high-quality, low-cost houses in well-designed neighborhood settings for working-class families. This is the first book to examine the innovative housing projects that synthesized Ain’s architectural and political ideals. The book is arranged through a quartet of “notes”—both textual and visual—akin to a police or surveillance file (which is no accident, given that among these notes is Ain’s actual FBI file). The first presents a series of striking black-and-white photographs of four of Ain’s built housing projects by celebrated architectural photographer Julius Shulman. These are followed by illustrated essays on Ain by contemporary architectural historians, an archival section of articles, including notes for a lecture on Ain by the distinguished architectural writer and critic Esther McCoy, and lastly project descriptions, drawings, and contemporary color photographs by Kyungsub Shin. Ain’s housing projects represented a new paradigm in neighborhood design that celebrated the everyday life and diversity of ordinary people. Ain’s innovations—including open kitchens and movable partition walls for a “flexible house”—aimed to solve specific problems rather than pursue arbitrary expressions of uniqueness. His high-density developments anticipate contemporary efforts to design building with a minimal footprint. Generously illustrated, this volume reintroduces Ain to a forgetful field. Contributors Gregory Ain, Anthony Denzer, Anthony Fontenot, Anali Gharakhani, Esther McCoy, Nicholas Olsberg, Kyungsub Shin, Julius Shulman

Download or read book Where We are Now written by D. J. Waldie and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles is the second book by D. J. Waldie, one of the most gifted writers on the American scene. As Patt Morrison notes in her foreword, "The suburb is America's lifeline and its punchline, and Waldie is its bard." Few observers can present the facts of everyday life with the texture and emotion of a symphony, the way Waldie does.

Download or read book Notes on a Foreign Country written by Suzy Hansen and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive "A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.

Download or read book Death Note Another Note The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases written by Nisioisin and published by VIZ Media LLC. This book was released on 2008-02-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death Comes to Los Angeles There's a serial killer loose in Los Angeles and super-sleuth L is on the case. Along with Naomi Misora, a former FBI agent, he helps the LA police solve the grisly crimes. There's a Serial Killer Loose in Los Angeles and the local authorities need help fast. For some reason the killer has been leaving a string of maddeningly arcane clues at each crime scene. Each of these clues, it seems, is an indecipherable roadmap to the next murder. Onto the scene comes L, the mysterious super-sleuth. Despite his peculiar working habits--he's never shown his face in public, for example--he's the most decorated detective in the world and has never tackled a cased he hasn't been able to crack. But this time he needs help. Enlisting the services of an FBI agent named Naomi Misora, L starts snooping around the City of Angels. It soon becomes apparent that the killing spree is a psychotic riddle designed specifically to engage L in a battle of wits. Stuck in the middle between killer and investigator, it's up to Misora to navigate both the dead bodies and the egos to solve the Los Angeles BB Murder Cases.

Download or read book Reinventing Los Angeles written by Robert Gottlieb and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-10-12 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes how water politics, cars and freeways, and immigration and globalization have shaped Los Angeles, and how innovative social movements are working to make a more livable and sustainable city. Los Angeles—the place without a sense of place, famous for sprawl and overdevelopment and defined by its car-clogged freeways—might seem inhospitable to ideas about connecting with nature and community. But in Reinventing Los Angeles, educator and activist Robert Gottlieb describes how imaginative and innovative social movements have coalesced around the issues of water development, cars and freeways, and land use, to create a more livable and sustainable city. Gottlieb traces the emergence of Los Angeles as a global city in the twentieth century and describes its continuing evolution today. He examines the powerful influences of immigration and economic globalization as they intersect with changes in the politics of water, transportation, and land use, and illustrates each of these core concerns with an account of grass roots and activist responses: efforts to reenvision the concrete-bound, fenced-off Los Angeles River as a natural resource; “Arroyofest,” the closing of the Pasadena Freeway for a Sunday of walking and bike riding; and immigrants' initiatives to create urban gardens and connect with their countries of origin. Reinventing Los Angeles is a unique blend of personal narrative (Gottlieb himself participated in several of the grass roots actions described in the book) and historical and theoretical discussion. It provides a road map for a new environmentalism of everyday life, demonstrating the opportunities for renewal in a global city.

Download or read book Leaving Orbit written by Margaret Lazarus Dean and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a breathtaking elegy to the waning days of human spaceflight as we have known it In the 1960s, humans took their first steps away from Earth, and for a time our possibilities in space seemed endless. But in a time of austerity and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger, that dream has ended. In early 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's last three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the end of an era. With Dean as our guide to Florida's Space Coast and to the history of NASA, Leaving Orbit takes the measure of what American spaceflight has achieved while reckoning with its earlier witnesses, such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Oriana Fallaci. Along the way, Dean meets NASA workers, astronauts, and space fans, gathering possible answers to the question: What does it mean that a spacefaring nation won't be going to space anymore?

Download or read book Dear Seller written by Teena Apeles and published by . This book was released on 2018-11 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shopping for a home in Los Angeles? It's a sellers' market, where real estate is in high demand and no shortage of money is thrown sellers' way. It's competitive, it's fierce, but it's not always the highest bidder who comes out on top. DEAR SELLER: REAL ESTATE LOVE LETTERS FROM LOS ANGELES features memorable letters by those who attempted to win the hearts of home sellers with their words and stories in order to win the bidding war for the home of their dreams.Each letter paints a portrait of its author -- her or his family, background, and values (economic and personal), as well as future aspirations -- using social capital as well as actual capital in the effort to be selected. Here narrative becomes the currency.DEAR SELLER shares the diverse voices of everyday Angelenos writing from the heart (versus simply their bank accounts), while also offering a colorful look at the interesting architecture of the city -- and a peek at what lies beyond our neighbors' doors.

Download or read book Look Alive Out There written by Sloane Crosley and published by MCD. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sloane Crosley returns to the form that made her a household name in really quite a lot of households: Essays! From the New York Times–bestselling author Sloane Crosley comes Look Alive Out There—a brand-new collection of essays filled with her trademark hilarity, wit, and charm. The characteristic heart and punch-packing observations are back, but with a newfound coat of maturity. A thin coat. More of a blazer, really. Fans of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number know Sloane Crosley’s life as a series of relatable but madcap misadventures. In Look Alive Out There, whether it’s playing herself on Gossip Girl,scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, befriending swingers, or staring down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true. Look Alive Out There arrives on the tenth anniversary of I Was Told There’d be Cake, and Crosley’s essays have managed to grow simultaneously more sophisticated and even funnier. And yet she’s still very much herself, and it’s great to have her back—and not a moment too soon (or late, for that matter).

Download or read book Notes from No Man s Land written by Eula Biss and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows. These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."

Download or read book Architecture in Los Angeles written by David Gebhard and published by Gibbs Smith Publishers. This book was released on 1985 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most comprehensive guide over published to the man-made environment of Southern California. Contains hundreds of entries plus notes on city history, freeways, murals, and historic preservation. Also, a comprehensive bibliography, a photographic history of Los Angeles architecture, and an unequalled style glossary. David Gebhard and Robert Winter deftly pilot the enthusiast through one of the richest architectural regions in the world. With perception, understanding, and wit, the authors point out the classical monuments, the tacky copies, the sublime, and the bizarre. They lead us to the famous buildings and through the backstreets and alleys to find the unsung treasures. Loaded with maps and photographs."--Back cover.

Download or read book City of Inmates written by Kelly Lytle Hernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

Download or read book Going All City written by Stefano Bloch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.” In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them. Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city. Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.

Download or read book Los Angeles in the Thirties 1931 1941 written by David Gebhard and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Speed, mobility, freedom: these governed the aesthetics of the "city of the future" as it spread its arterials across the Southern California landscape. If ever a city and a decade seemed meant for each other, it was Los Angeles and the streamlined '30s. The gloom of the Depression did little to curb the dynamism of this optimistic, greedy, sprawling metropolis. The Hollywood dream machine mirrored the aspirations of millions of Americans - a single-family home and yard, the independence of a private car on uncluttered streets, and the latest household conveniences. And L.A.'s built environment reflected the dreams, realizing in fact what the film sets offered in fantasy, with imagery ranging from up-to-date recreations of popular period styles to the stripped-classic monumentality of public buildings, and on toward the future in the sleek Moderne of curved corners, fluidly bent neon and metal tubing, and sculpted surfaces of stucco and glass brick ... Attention is focused on the types of architectural imagery used in commercial, public, and residential buildings..."--Page 4 of cover.

Download or read book Notes from the Field written by Anna Deavere Smith and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Smith’s powerful style of living journalism uses the collective, cathartic nature of the theater to move us from despair toward hope.” —The Village Voice Anna Deavere Smith’s extraordinary form of documentary theater shines a light on injustices by portraying the real-life people who have experienced them. "One of her most ambitious and powerful works on how matters of race continue to divide and enslave the nation” (Variety). Smith renders a host of figures who have lived and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith has put it: “Rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated.”) Using people’s own words, culled from interviews and speeches, Smith depicts Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who eulogized Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who confronted a violent police deputy; activist Bree Newsome, who took the Confederate flag down from the South Carolina State House grounds; and many others. Their voices bear powerful witness to a great iniquity of our time—and call us to action with their accounts of resistance and hope.

Download or read book Holy Land written by D. J. Waldie and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-04-17 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describing childhood in suburban California, a poignant portrait of growing up in the grid of tract houses and carefully measured streets illustrates the good, the bad, and the difficulties found in being ordinary.

Download or read book Notes on Decor Etc written by Paul Fortune and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interior design legend Paul Fortune opens his design portfolio and shares his inimitable worldview in this monograph-cum-memoir. Arriving in Los Angeles from London during the 1970s, Paul Fortune gradually made his way as a graphic artist, art director of music videos, and even nightclub owner. But with the renovation of his own now legendary Laurel Canyon house in 1978, Fortune's career as an interior designer was born. Fortune Design Studio, based in Los Angeles, has been operating since 1982, enjoying the patronage of discerning clients worldwide, whose ranks include Marc Jacobs, Sofia Coppola, and David Fincher. Exhibiting a distinct style widely recognized for its integration of refinement with lived-in comfort, Fortune's designs are uniquely geared toward accommodating the history and material integrity of each chosen venture. In Notes on Décor, Etc., Fortune--a natural raconteur--not only documents his favorite of these timelessly elegant projects but also his life and times as a designer, an expatriate, and an Angeleno in a one-of-a-kind chronicle that Architectural Digest, in its 2018 AD 100 list, describes as, "A tell-all monograph-cum-memoir detailing significant projects and stories from Fortune's peregrinations through the beau monde."