The rambling metropolis of
Los Angeles sprawls across the thousand square miles of a
great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate
network of congested freeways between the ocean and the
snowcapped mountains. Its colorful melange of shopping
malls, palm trees and swimming pools is both mildly
surreal and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid
self-image that it has spread all over the world.
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LA is a young city; in
the mid-19th century, it was a community of white American
immigrants, poor Chinese laborers and wealthy Mexican
ranchers, with a population of less than 50,000. Only on
completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s
did it really begin to grow, as a national mecca for good
health, clean living, plentiful sunshine and endless acres
of citrus crops. The biggest group of transplants were
refugees from the Midwest, who created a new political
ruling class to replace the old Mexican elite. The old
ranchos were soon subdivided, the population grew rapidly,
and the enduring symbol of the city became the
family-sized suburban house (with swimming pool and
two-car garage). The biggest boom came after World War II
with the mushrooming of the aeronautics industry.
The first-time visitor
may well find Los Angeles thrilling and threatening in
equal proportions; it's a place that picks you up and
sweeps you along whether you want it to or not. While it
has its fine-art museums, California cuisine and a few
old-fashioned urban plazas, what people really come here
for is to experience the city that has come to epitomize
the American Dream the fantasy worlds of Disneyland and
Hollywood, as well as the gilded opulence of Beverly Hills
and Malibu.
With
only limited space between the desert, the mountains and
the ocean, LA has long since filled in the gaps between
what were once small and isolated towns. As a result,
it's a massive conglomeration of interconnected,
amorphous districts, often with little in common.
Los Angeles has had numerous Real Estate opportunities
over the years, with a high influx of population driven
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If LA has a heart,
however, it's downtown, in the center of the basin. It
offers a taste of almost everything you'll find
elsewhere around the city, from upscale avant-garde art
along Bunker Hill to the abject dereliction of Skid Row
in the Eastside, compressed into an area of small,
easily walkable blocks. The area around downtown
contains some decaying Victorian suburbs, 1920s Art Deco
buildings and the center of LA's enormous and growing
Hispanic population.
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Heading west from
downtown to the coast, the first major district you come
to, Hollywood, has streets caked with movie legend --
even if the genuine glamor is long gone. Adjoining West
LA is home to the city's newest money, shown off in
Beverly Hills and along the Sunset Strip. Santa Monica
and Venice to the west are the quintessential seafront
LA of palm trees, white sands and laid-back living,
while the coastline itself stretches another 20 miles
northwest to glamorous Malibu, home to the movieland
elite.
Suburban Orange County,
to the southeast, holds little of interest apart from
Disneyland and a handful of laid-back beach towns. On
the far side of the northern hills lie the San Gabriel
and San Fernando valleys, or simply "the Valley."
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Los Angeles News:29 Jul 2010 at 12:00am
Headlines from latimes.com
•
Long cast in the role of teen heartthrob thanks to 'High School Musical,' he tackles his first commercially dramatic role. He hopes it expands his fan base beyond screaming teens.
Long cast in the role of teen heartthrob thanks to 'High School Musical,' he tackles his first commercially dramatic role.
The majority of the lyrics on the album were rewritten to address the death of drummer Jimmy Sullivan. The result is a highly personal work.
Orange County's Avenged Sevenfold has long been known by heavy-metal fans for its riffs and its death-obsessed imagery. "Sometimes I don't know why we'd rather live than die," sang frontman M. Shadows in the band's 2005 hit "Bat Country," which topped the chart on MTV's "Total Request Live" and earned Avenged the best new artist prize at 2006's Video Music Awards.
Lee, who led the turnaround of the ABC Family channel, would replace Steve McPherson, who resigned abruptly this week, just days before he was to hype the struggling network's new fall shows.
Walt Disney Co. is poised to elevate an executive who began his career as a reporter covering the strife in Belfast, Northern Ireland, as the new president of ABC Entertainment.
Their lawsuit, filed in U.S. courts, values the more than 40 artworks at more than $100 million. The lead plaintiff, who lives in Los Angeles, says his family wants 'Hungary to feel some pressure.'
The heirs of the Budapest-based Jewish banker Mor Lipot Herzog have filed a lawsuit in U.S. courts against Hungary and its leading national museums, seeking the return of what they have identified as more than 40 works of art looted from Herzog's collection during the Holocaust. The lawsuit values the artworks, including well-known paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, El Greco, Francisco de Zurbaran and Gustave Courbet, at more than $100 million.
Los Angeles News:26 Mar 2010 at 12:00am
Headlines from calendarlive.com
• Also reviewed: 'The Harimaya Bridge,' 'Harmony and Me,' 'West of Pluto'
Irish playwright Conor McPherson's agreeably melancholy, spooky and romantic "The Eclipse" -- his third film as writer-director -- gets the most out of assorted hauntings. There's the case of widowed woodworker Michael (Ciarán Hinds), a glum sort with two kids who not only mourns for his wife but begins to see terrifying visions of his still-alive (but in failing health) father.
• The writing and directing team behind 'Lilo & Stitch' creates a sweet coming-of-age story set in ancient Viking times.
"How to Train Your Dragon" has taken the age-old story of a teenage boy sorting through his fundamental life issues -- fit in, figure out self, get the girl, don't disappoint Dad -- set it in ancient Viking times and still managed to give it a thoroughly modern spin. A millennium later and this kid would head an Internet start-up or have a reality show on cable. For now, he's just a misfit in Ugg boots. Ingenious.
• Two insiders take a remarkably unblinking look at the tussles and triumphs of Disney's revival of animated film in the 1980s and '90s.
Hard as it is to believe today, it was not so long ago that animation in general and Disney animation in particular were art forms given up for dead. Things got so bad that in 1984 the studio, which had been kick-started into success by "Snow White" almost half a century earlier, ingraciously booted its beleaguered artists off the lot and onto bleak rented premises.
• Marco Bellocchio's film recounts how the dictator locked away a woman who was politically inconvenient.
One of the most surprising things about watching the wrenching "Vincere," the story of Ida Dalser, Mussolini's secret wife and his first-born son, Benito, is that when the relationship went sour and Ida just wouldn't let it rest, that Il Duce just didn't have her killed.
Los Angeles News:29 Jul 2010 at 5:46am
Headlines from latimes.com
•
A small procession from the Capitol begins a day of planned events. Activists say they have to keep up pressure despite a judge's ruling against key portions of the state's law.
Opponents of Arizona's hardline stance on illegal immigration launched a small religious procession from the state Capitol before dawn Thursday, the first of a series of demonstrations for the day the nation's strictest immigration law was due to take effect.
• A second U.S. Navy sailor who went missing in a dangerous part of eastern Afghanistan was found dead and his body recovered, a senior U.S. military official and Afghan officials said Thursday.
• Most vehicles affected are Avalons. Three accidents have been reported.
Toyota is recalling 412,000 passenger cars, mostly the Avalon model, in the U.S. for steering problems in which three accidents have been reported, the automaker said Thursday.
• South Korea's prime minister offered to resign Thursday after parliament shot down his efforts to scrap a plan that would relocate several government ministries outside of the capital.
• The governor agrees with giant agribusinesses and organic-farm owners who contend that an eight-hour workday isn't practical in the agriculture industry.
Saying he didn't want to damage California's agricultural economy, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday vetoed a first-in-the-nation bill that would have given farmworkers the same rights to overtime pay enjoyed by all other hourly workers in California.
