Baby Stones

This piece was originally written for “Ask Silver Lake.” “Ask Silver Lake” is dedicated to exploring the history and insights of our community. If you have questions or ideas you’d like us to consider, please drop a comment or send them to [email protected]. The subject of this month’s “Ask Silver Lake” is Silver Lake’s historic gay bars and other third places. Third places, for the…

Making sense of the 2026 World Cup is no easy task. For the first time ever, it’s being hosted in sixteen cities across three countries — Canada, Mexico, and the US. One of those cities is Los Angeles. The “Los Angeles” matches are actually taking place in the city of Inglewood. The stadium in Inglewood at which the eight games are being played, SoFi Stadium, has temporarily been renamed Los…

If tasked with listing Los Angeles’s “Asian neighborhoods,” you’d probably first think of well-known immigrant enclaves like Chinatown, Koreatown, and Little Tokyo – or maybe less well-known ones like Cambodia Town, Little Bangladesh, or Little India. Perhaps you will think of one of the many suburbs of Los Angeles with an Asian American majority – places like Walnut, South San Gabriel, or…

Taix will serve its last meal on 29 March 2026 – the birthday of famed post-Impressionist, Georges Seurat. I have always enjoyed my visits to Taix, whether for food, drinks, friendship, or to see Australian legends, the Cannanes, perform at a banquet room there, as I did back in 2015. It’s a place that I also enjoyed seeing, whether from the window of a bus, the seat of a bicycle, or on…

INTRODUCTION Screenshot of Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography‘s map of Los Angeles County and Southern Califonria Los Angeles was founded on this day, 18 February, in 1850. A majority of insufferable pedants will have just jumped to the comments to let me know how wrong I am and that “Los Angleles” refers not the Los Angeles County but only to the City of Los Angeles. The rest of us, I think, use…

INTRODUCTION Los Angeles Neighborhoods — From Academy Hill to Zamperini Field and All Points Between is a collected series of haiku, sijo, and Twitter-inspired descriptions of 1,036 communities in Los Angeles County. Naturally, it includes all 88 cities – but also the unincorporated communities and census-designated places; the enclaves and exclaves; suburbs, exurbs, boomburbs, and ethnoburbs;…

In the 2000s, Amoeba Music enlisted an army of writers and data entry people to work on an ambitious website that was meant to be a sort of combination of Allmusic, Apple Music, Discogs, Wikipedia, and more. Despite investing a tremendous amount of time, labor and money, the site, as envisioned, never got off the ground. In 2020 — without so much as a head’s up — the plug was pulled. Not only did…

The Fat Man was a popular radio detective drama that debuted on this date (21 January) in 1946. It starred J. Scott Smart as the titular detective who, although best known as “the Fat Man,” was actually named Brad Runyon. His deep, resonant, rich, and slightly theatrical voice was occasionally described as “fruity,” which fit the character of the gourmand Smart was both in and out of…

Dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002. Starring: Muzaffer Özdemir, Emin Toprak. Foreign/Asian Cinema. Everyone’s paying homage to Tarkovsky nowadays, it seems, albeit often losing something in the translation. Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is among the few directors (along with Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, Malian Souleymane Ciss,e and Iranian Abbas Kiarostami) who thankfully picks up not only…

I could really stand to get a hair cut. I went over to Drea‘s to borrow her clippers (and watch a movie), ended up falling asleep in front of the TV screen watching Traffic before excusing myself and driving home having quite forgotten about one of the main reasons for popping in.She has a new cat. His name is Pepe and he looks like he’s part ferret. He kept climbing up my body and sitting on my…

Well, we, the true believers are keeping rock & roll mondays alive. It takes effort and joie de vivre, I know, and that can be in short supply, at times. You need wheels. As I drunkenly and, more importantly, sleepily trudged through the puddles along the drive, I could hear the neighbors laughing and speaking in Tagalog. I could make out a fairly frightening amount of empty bottles on their…

Seth, Drea & I went jogging around the nearby high school track.