The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson

I guess I thought this was going to be more generally about 1970s film-making in Hollywood, but the book is very tightly focused on the production of Chinatown from inkling of a story through the whole process, focusing on writer Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, Polanski ( Read more... )

 More a note to self than anything else.

Bowtie along the LA River

Valhalla in Burbank

Glendale

Zanja

Movie set or ghost town - why not both?

 The Library Book, by Susan Orlean, details two interleaved stories. One, the history of the Los Angeles Public Library, with a focus on the Central Library. Two, the story of the fire that ravaged the Central Library in 1986.

Even though I was living not that far away, I don't have any memory of the event. One possible reason is that the Chernobyl ( Read more... )

Kind of a neat anthology of some of Chandler's original stories from the pulps. These were largely suppressed by Chandler for anthologization, because these were reworked into his novels. So obviously, in some ways these stories are old (well, if you've read the novels), but lots of details are different, and some of them come to different endings ( Read more... )

Picked up at an estate sale for cheap, this book is a history of LA, told primarily in archive photographs from the 19th century up to 1950. Lots of good ones here, most of which I don't recall having seen (and many I'd like to show you all, but can't find online).

This is not the same image as in the book, but gets the point across.

"A favorite but ( Read more... )

Fresh off reading about Tough Guy Writers, it was maybe inevitable that a few titles caught my eye. Death in a Bowl, featuring a murder of the conductor at the Hollywood Bowl during a concert certainly punched the right buttons. Sadly, there's not as much local color as I hoped, and a plot that's hopelessly cockamamie by the end. But a few ( Read more... )

Last Tuesday, Uzbeki pianist Behzod Abduraimov tore the cover off Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl. I can't say that I know the piece that well, but I agree with the LA Times' glowing (and better informed) view. The Times may be a little harsh on the Pictures at an Exhibition.


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 The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler

Chandler doesn't hold anything back here. Half again as convoluted as The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe navigates his way through a Los Angeles where everyone, just everyone, is almost uniformly awful, including himself. Chandler unloads on Los Angeles and anything else he doesn't like, including alcoholic authors ( Read more... )

 Some pics of a morning walk from Echo Park to Vista Hermosa and back again.

We took a hike this morning to climb up and down some of the stairs in and around the original Hollywoodland development. There's a nice guide to the trail here (and a couple other hikes on the site).

All the pictures.

You do get a bit of a work out.


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