Starting on Monday (April 5) your LA Metblog authors are starting a new series of posts called: LA Plays Itself In The Movies. (Similar to our series last year called Songs About Los Angeles.) We’ll write about favorite movies in which LA is not just a backdrop or a random location or even doubling for somewhere else, but in which the city plays a role. These are movies that could not have been made anywhere else other than our awesome city.

As with last year’s song series, this is not a “Best Of” or “Top 25″ list, it is more fun and personal to each author. The series will last about three weeks and we encourage you to tell us about your favorite movie in which LA is a star!

(The photo is my own.)

Click past the jump to see the full list of posts in this series.

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Apparently,  a lot.  I was making my way through James Ellroy‘s “The Big Nowhere,” and, not too far in, Howard Hughes appears, along with his head of security, a crooked retired cop named Turner “Buzz” Meeks.  Meeks works at Hughes Aircraft, and it takes him an hour to drive to Studio City for some dirty work in pre-405 1950.  Trying to do the math, I recalled the giant Playa Vista residential development just a few miles from my house.

A couple of years ago, I took some dogs walking down the Westchester Bluffs on the South side of the Playa Vista property.  There were a couple of long drab buildings at the base of the bluffs, as well as a narrow service road.  Someone told me the buildings were film studios.  Another person told me they were part of Hughes Aircraft.

So I did some research and found this amazing website.  The gist of it is, this property was not only the headquarters for Hughes Aircraft, it was also Howard Hughes’ private airport. Howard Hughes buys our backyard, after the jump

I think LA would pretty much be a perfect city if it weren’t for the cars and the air quality (I work in Chatsworth–cough, cough). So Matt Logue’s Empty LA (via Urban Daddy) comes across like porn to me–something approaching post-apocalyptic porn, admittedly, but I am pretty sympathetic to the “hell is other people” school of thought so there you go. Logue’s vision of LA’s streets and beaches emptied of people and cars and all signs of life is exhilarating and kind of terrifying. The book comes in cloth and paper, in two format sizes–13 x 11 and 10 x 8. It’s marvelous.

On the other end of the fantasy LA spectrum are the amazing panoramic photos of ca. 1899 downtown LA–Bunker Hill–posted on Shorpy (see Chris Conkle’s comment for specifics about location) It’s an amazing testimony to this city’s ability to shed its skin. LA is a city that razes and rebuilds. While this opens us for the inevitable “why can’t we be more like San Francisco” criticism that we deny our history, at the same time, it’s part of the fantastic optimism (denial of reality even) of a verdant city in the middle of a desert, populated with folks who come here to recreate themselves. LA is where America arrived at the end of the imperative to “go west.” With no more frontier, we level and recreate this city over and over again.

My theory is that, like Halloween, one is either a fan of David Lynch‘s films or not.  I am.  Recently, I watched Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” for the second time, and the first time since moving to the Los Angeles area.  It was quite eye-opening.

As for the film itself, I understood more the second time around.  “Mulholland Drive” simply cannot be viewed only once (unless you are in the category of unfortunate people who don’t like David Lynch films, in which case once is probably too much).  But then I did some research, and found out some really interesting things.  Since I rented and do not own the dvd, I did not know that Lynch inserted ten clues to watching the movie inside the back cover of the dvd box.
  Get a clue, after the jump

Ever since I moved to Los Angeles, and to my dear Fairfax District, I’ve been meaning to eat at the historical Johnie’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire and Fairfax.  Of course, as with most things LA, the shop is a familiar combination of wide repute and complete unreality.  During a week of fiction, simulacrum, and frenzied media creation of a whole lot of expensive something out of almost nothing, it seemed like a fine time for a meal and a photograph: A garish pop star with a history of strange behaviors and legal troubles had died, thereby disrupting all Los Angeles streets, costing the city millions, and turning all national TV news into tawdry melodramatic fiction. Like the city that hosts it, Johnie’s is a movie prop.

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Certainly one of the darkest visions of Los Angeles to ever appear on the big screen, The Informers, adapted from a series of short stories by Bret Easton Ellis first published in 1994, is a brutal look at a group of mostly rich, spoiled twenty-somethings and their families in 1983 as they party, snort a lot of cocaine, have group sex in all variations, contract a mysterious disease and betray their friends, their parents, their friends’ parents and each other.

If you’re the type of person who needs to see fluffy images of sweetness and sensitivity projected in large rooms in 90-minute chunks for entertainment, then this movie of entwined, slimy and squirming characters will probably make your brain swell and explode. Not a single scene relents from the anguish of its characters. It kicks off with a senseless death at a swank party peopled by blonde beauties and descends from there. A pounding ’80s soundtrack, full-frontal nudity and pumping sex scenes make it seem like the new Satyricon, but it isn’t Rome that’s burning– this time, it’s Los Angeles. (R-rated trailer after click.) Read the rest of this entry →

Bumper sticker seen on Crescent Heights, Hollywood.

Sorry for the technical limits.  I was driving, and not able to get an actual picture of the sticker.  I think my reproduction captures the essence of it though.  For what it’s worth, car looked to be about a 1990′s Toyota, not obviously falling apart, but also not so pricey as the German cars that inhabit my neighborhood.

(for blind readers and robots: the image reads “I’d rather be reading Bukowski”)

One of the many horrors of L.A. architecture is certainly its over-presentation in movies and television. It is comically clichéd to see stories set in other cities, whose framing shots are the same Los Angeles “skyline” that even non-Angelenos have come to recognize as framing shots of every non-L.A. city that makes it onto filmic representation.  What makes this SoCal-centrism so much the worse is the underlying vacuity of buildings in Los Angeles.  Fredric Jameson, following Jean-François Lyotard, famously advanced the notion of postmodernism as pastiche, and Angelena intellectuals often paint the unthinking, seedy eclecticism of Los Angeles as advancing such post-modern ideals (or its anti-idealism, perhaps).

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With scores of Angelenos heading to Austin for the annual SXSW music, film, and interactive conference & festival, this is the perfect opportunity to explore the grubby underbelly of Los Angeles.

Tomorrow, Esotouric, the same unconventional tour company responsible for “The Real Black Dahlia Crime Bus” and the “Crawling Down Cahuenga: Tom Waits’ LA” tour, will be leading an excursion through Los Angeles as Bukowski lived it in, “Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles.”

A dirty realist, Bukowski’s writing was heavily influenced by his hometown of Los Angeles and now you too can get a first hand glimpse of the gritty world he inhabited.

It’s not too late to sign up for tomorrow’s Bukowski tour, as they take reservations up to the morning of the tour. So stock up on scotch and cigarettes and Read the rest of this entry →

Listen up all you Chandler aficionados, noir novelists, and dark lyricists, there’s a new literary magazine in town (inasmuch as an online periodical can be “in town”), and they are soliciting material for their next issue on noir LA.

Chaparral, which will focus on work from and/or about Southern California, was just announced last week. This inaugural issue features poetry by Amy Gerstler, Douglas Kearney, Dorothy Barresi, Victoria Chang and more. Chaparral will be collaborating with Street Poets for a benefit reading in late May or early June. (Check the Chaparral website for details.)

Following the break is the announcement I got about the upcoming issue:

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Angelenos, take some pride in knowing that we can survive just about any disaster.

Riots? Earthquakes? Wildfires? Mudslides? Ryan Seacrest?

Pfft. We got it covered.

And not surprisingly, according to a new Google mash-up called Ground Zero, it looks like no matter where you’d drop a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, most of the rest of the County would survive. That’s the nice thing about urban sprawl.

To see for yourself, click here, enter an address, then choose your bomb of choice, from Fatman to Little Boy to a more modern Chinese built warhead, and click “Nuke It!” You’ll see who dies first, and who may get off with just a little necrosis (I don’t know what that means either, but I’m betting it’s nasty).

You can even see the impact of an asteroid collision, which actually might finally do us in. On the bright side, it would take Seacrest with us.

Its a fraud. I know the author.  Its one of those bizarre connections you get in facebook.  I knew Jeff through Ruth666 while we were in college.  I think he actually moved here long before either of us did.  Today’s “what Jeff is doing” bit made me laugh as well:

Jeffrey G is laughing because the made-up letter he sent to Dear Abby is running today: http://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/

I had to laugh.  Checking the link takes you to todays Dear Abby “YOUNG WORKERS MUST LEARN HOW TO ‘DRESS FOR SUCCESS“.  Its pure fiction.  

For the full letter, used with Jeff’s permission, you must make the jump.  Anyone care to count down how long before its yanked from the web after this is read? Read the rest of this entry →

Don Draper and Peter Campbell are flying out from Madison Ave., New York on Sunday, representing the Sterling Cooper advertising agency at an aerospace convention. Ever since President Kennedy made that crazy promise to put a man on the moon before 1970, everyone has wanted a piece of the action.

Between wining and dining congressman on their abilities to help secure contracts, I’m sure those boys will fit in some fun time away from the wives.

Since the pair are sharp enough to have recently taken up Twittering, I don’t think its too presumptuous to think they’ll be looking here for suggestions on watering holes or restaurants they should patronize… of course, these places will need to exist in 1962, and they should probably be serving Canadian Club.

Of course, there’s Musso & Frank’s and the Formosa… any other joints this pair should visit?

Swamped with work today but wanted to share this latest from the folks at Esotouric:

Face it, all this talk of financial panic has harshed your mellow, chafed your hide and other pithy phrases expressing general malaise. Let your pals at Esotouric drop a little spark of hope into the darkness with this, our weekly email, in which we are giving away ten (!!) seats on the RAYMOND CHANDLER’S BAY CITY tour, announcing the launch of a fabulous new blog from our secret weapon JOAN “RED” RENNER and reminding you that tomorrow night our free floating salon THE HIPPODROME rolls around the Downtown LA Art Walk with some incredible performers. So buck up, bucko, and read on for all the
delights of the day.

Read on for the list – including something extra special on MY BIRTHDAY (Oct 25th) —
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Freshly back with his 18-member delegation from a wildly successful taxpayer-supporter tour of Israel, Mayor Antoniobama Hillarygosa defended the trip by saying:

“I’m mayor of the city of Los Angeles, not some small town in the desert somewhere. We are a global city.”

A spokesperson for the mayor vigorously denied rumors that an aide had to remind him what city he presided over and how it’s commonly pronounced and asserted that there was no slight meant to any small desert towns anywhere. But in response to the comment an international coalition of city officials from the small California desert towns of Baker, Trona, Furnace Creek and Needles as well as Douz, Tunisia, have drafted a resolution telling him where he could put the internationally renowned Baker landmark known as the World’s Largest Thermometer.

According to the spokesperson, the mayor will be happy to respond to that protest after he and a 24-member delegation return from a publicly funded 12-day conference on naval and foosball strategies taking place in the resort city of Digya, Bureaucratistan.