Maggie Flynn has lived on L.A.’s east side for 5 years. A Michigan native, Maggie moved to L.A. to obtain her MA from USC, and has published articles on diverse topics such as small business, film and book reviews, and shopping in Los Angeles. Her interests include literature, music, yoga, good restaurants and bars, and watching more Vh1 and E! than is probably healthy.
What would you do if you had the ability to freeze the world and all the people in it? Rifle through friends’ medicine cabinets without fear of being caught, compose witty comebacks to any slight, catch up on sleep and still make it to work on time? The new independent film Suspension — showing Sunday, June 1 at the University of Southern California — asks this question and suggests it’s the sort of power that could absolutely unmoor an individual, especially one a bit off balance to begin with.
In the wake of a car accident that kills Daniel’s (Scott Cordes) wife and son, Daniel rebuilds his son’s camcorder and discovers that pushing the pause button literally stops time. While the rest of the world is on hold, only he stays in motion. Having had a few brief encounters with Sarah (Annie Tedesco), the widow of the other driver involved in the accident, Daniel becomes fixated on using his power to help her.
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Tags: Film · Reviews
Debut novelist Katie Crouch doesn’t speak with a Southern accent, even though she spent her formative years in Charleston, South Carolina. She now lives up the coast in San Francisco, but has taken her wry observations about Southern life with her. Consider this passage from Girls in Trucks, which will be released Monday April 7th:
“She does not insult directly but instead sandwiches her blows between compliments drizzled in honey: ‘Cindy has the nicest disposition. Bottom the size of a lumber barge, but the nicest manners you can find.’”
Crouch has a lot to say on the topic of Southern manners. During our recent conversation, she laughed, “The other thing you hear a lot is ‘Bless her heart.’ Like women will say, ‘Her ass looked so saggy in those jeans! Bless her heart.’ Like it’s fine to insult someone as long as you say ‘Bless her heart.’” Girls in Trucks is filled with such comic remarks, but also explores a deeper emotional terrain.
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Tags: Interviews · Literature
While this Top 5 will be far less L.A.-centric than usual, March is Women’s History Month and high time to celebrate by throwing the following DVDs into your Netflix queue. We’ve come a long way ladies, and if you don’t believe me, check out the crap working woman Rosalind Russell endures from her male colleagues in 1940’s His Girl Friday (pictured). Spanning the days from when a woman in pants could cause a scandal to our own post-feminist age, here are 5 movies that celebrate the power of the female sex.
His Girl Friday (1940):
Rosalind Russell plays Hildy Johnson, a journalist on the verge of doing what’s expected of a woman of her time: giving up her career to marry. The dependable and bland Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) accompanies her to the office to say her goodbyes, but complications ensue when Hildy’s dashing editor and ex-husband Walter Burns (Cary Grant) conspires to keep her around. To a modern viewer, the true tug-of-war is not between Russell’s two loves, but between societal expectations and a woman’s passion and talents for her career. While there’s little doubt that Hildy will ultimately follow her heart in this one, the film makes clear how challenging it was for women of this era to break with conventions.
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Tags: Film · Reviews
The New York Dolls will be playing the Henry Fonda theater tonight, and when discussing the Dolls one must ask: Has any band been besieged by more tragedy than glam-punk pioneers the New York Dolls? Let’s review: Before the band even recorded their 1973 debut, original drummer Billy Murcia died from an overdose. After two classic albums, they were dropped by their label and went separate ways. Guitarist Johnny Thunders died of a heroin overdose in 1991, and drummer Jerry Nolan died the next year of bacterial meningitis.
Despite these losses, the band reformed in 2004 to play the Meltdown Festival in England to rave reviews. Then bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane died of cancer. (The last couple years of his life, in which he lived as a Los Angeles Mormon and dreamed of reconciling with his bandmates, was chronicled in the compelling documentary New York Doll.)
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Tags: Upcoming events · shows
Sure you could stay home and drink a whole bottle of wine for what you’d pay for one glass in any L.A. bar, but what fun would that be? The Los Angeles landscape is dotted with bars ancient and new, classy and dive-y, kitschy and chic. No matter your tastes or purpose – people-watching, hooking up, drunken conversations with strangers, you can find one to suit your needs, often within a mile radius of your front door.
But let’s say that you’re in the mood for a specialty concoction that you can’t get at any other bar. A really good house drink somehow makes that steep tab at the end of the night all the more worth it. So here are the places where you can sample L.A.’s top five drinks. (Note: This list will reflect the fact that I don’t often leave the confines of Los Feliz/Silverlake/Atwater Village. Feel free to weigh in with your own favorites.)
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Tags: Bars · Food and Drink
This first list of many of my favorite things in LA and it is devoted to my picks for the top five songs about L.A. As will be the case with forthcoming “L.A. Top Five” posts, this won’t reflect logical choices based on any methodology, just my own biases. Enjoy.
1. “Desperados Under the Eaves” by Warren Zevon
This song from Warren Zevon’s eponymous 1976 album was my top pick because it’s beautiful, funny, and tragically under heard. If just one of you dear readers checks out this song, I’ll feel I’ve done my job here. The late, great Zevon (pictured) lived most of his life in L.A., and the city was his muse for some of his best songs. His biggest hit, 1978’s “Werewolves of London” even made a reference to Trader Vic’s. Yet none of these songs evokes L.A. like “Desperados,”which name checks the long gone Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, Gower Avenue, and all the salty margaritas in Los Angeles. Drink it up.
Sample lyric: “And if California slides into the ocean/ Like the mystics and statistics say it will/I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill”
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Tags: Entertainment · Music
As any younger child can attest, it’s wildly unfair to make assumptions founded on an older sibling’s attributes. Yet in the case of Lipstick Jungle, the new TV series based on the Candace Bushnell novel, it’s hard not to make comparisons to the wildly successful Bushnell-derived series Sex and the City.
So maybe we should start by discussing the differences. SATC was a half-hour HBO comedy, Jungle is an hour-long NBC drama-with-comic-elements. While Carrie Bradshaw and her friends were successful career women, the three main players here hold high ranking titles among the upper echelons of Manhattan’s elite. Jungle makes it clear that the ladies got to where they are through hard work; in the first three episodes, the Jungle crew has logged more time in the office than the City gals did during their entire six seasons.
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Tags: Entertainment · Reviews · TV
In the”Speaking Out” section of legendary Los Angeles writer John Rechy’s website, you’ll find in an article entitled “Lying Writers” the following quote: “…it is naive to think that anything that is set down into writing–print or script–is ever, can ever, be ‘true.’ Memory is entirely unreliable; it alters ‘facts’ daily.”
So it may surprise readers that a writer who takes this view has published a memoir. Yet About My Life and The Kept Woman opens with a declaration showing Rechy’s adherence to his previous statement: “This is not what happened; it is what is remembered. Its sequence is the sequence of recollection.”
What a fascinating recollection it is. Rechy, who will be reading from and signing copies of About My Life at Skylight Books tonight at 7:30, begins the story thus:
“I was twelve, and my sister was about to marry her football-captain sweetheart. She was sixteen, he was seventeen, and the approaching union was fraught with dangers whose effects, many years later, would multiply and spread into the core of San Francisco society and would, more years later, help to define my life.” [Read more →]
Tags: Arts and Lit · Literature
Remember a few years ago when green was simply a color, not a lifestyle? Indeed, had All Shades of Green opened in the days before Hybrid cars and global warming awareness, patrons might have thought that the name of the store referred to the olive green walls that contrast so beautifully with its bamboo flooring.But while most Angelenos will glean the store’s ethos through its name, some false assumptions still exist about stores that adhere to a sustainable philosophy. If I were to tell you that the All Shades of Green stocks products that are organic, fair-trade, and in some cases made with recycled goods, you might picture a store that smells of patchouli and is filled with hemp bags and incense and little that would appeal to your non-hippie friends.
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Tags: Living · Shopping
The notorious case of “thrill” killers Leopold and Loeb has been fodder for books, plays, and movies that have taken creative liberties with the story. But Daniel Henning, the writer and director of Dickie and Babe: The Truth About Leopold and Loeb makes it plain that he considers his production quite unlike the others. The Blank Theater’s press release for the production refers to the piece as a “documentary play” and insists that what happens on stage “all happened” in real life.
What happened in Chicago in 1924 was this: Richard “Dickie” Loeb and Nathan “Babe” Leopold, two privileged and accomplished 18 and 19-year-olds, were charged with the kidnapping and murder of 14-year old Bobby Franks. The subsequent trial was what we today would call a media circus, and the boys were represented by Clarence Darrow, who would become famous with this case and even more famous a year later for his part in the Scopes “Monkey” trial.
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Tags: Arts and Lit · Reviews · Stage
If you need a non-traffic related reminder of just how many of us dwell in this sprawling metropolis called Los Angeles, I suggest posting an ad on Craigslist.
My boyfriend and I recently upgraded our couch and TV, and as often happens as a result of upgrades, we’re now broke. So I thought we could make a little Valentine’s date money and get rid of the old TV and loveseat on Craigslist. In a spare ten minutes I posted two ads, forgoing the trouble of taking digital pictures, figuring I could add those later if I didn’t get any replies.
Posting an ad on Craigslist is free and easy, hence part of its immense popularity. You simply click on the “post an ad in classifieds” link located on the top left corner of the screen, click on the appropriate category, and type up your ad. Then Craigslist will send you a link via email, allowing you to take the ad live.
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Tags: Local LA · News
When an American artist of a certain stature reaches a certain age, he or she is inevitably referred to as a “National Treasure.” Yet if there is one musician worthy of this overused moniker, I’m nominating Willie Nelson, original country music outlaw and patron saint of singer-songwriters and stoners everywhere.
If you’ve never seen this American icon live, I recommend hightailing it over to the Nokia Theater tonight. At the rate Nelson tours, you may have many more chances to see him, but he is 74 years old after all. As a bonus, this show is a reasonably priced one for the state-of-the-art Nokia theater, with tickets starting at $35 and capping at $75.
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Tags: Entertainment · Music
