Dear Los Angeles

Dear Los Angeles PDF Author: David Kipen
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0812993985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
A rich mosaic of diary entries and letters from Marilyn Monroe, Cesar Chavez, Susan Sontag, Albert Einstein, and many more, this is the story of Los Angeles as told by locals, transplants, and some just passing through. “Los Angeles is refracted in all its irreducible, unexplainable glory.”—Los Angeles Times The City of Angels has played a distinct role in the hearts, minds, and imaginations of millions of people, who see it as the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. David Kipen, a cultural historian and avid scholar of Los Angeles, has scoured libraries, archives, and private estates to assemble a kaleidoscopic view of a truly unique city. From the Spanish missionary expeditions in the early 1500s to the Golden Age of Hollywood to the strange new world of social media, this collection is a slice of life in L.A. through the years. The pieces are arranged by date—January 1st to December 31st—featuring selections from different decades and centuries. What emerges is a vivid tapestry of insights, personal discoveries, and wry observations that together distill the essence of the city. As sprawling and magical as the city itself, Dear Los Angeles is a fascinating, must-have collection for everyone in, from, or touched by Southern California. With excerpts from the writing of Ray Bradbury • Edgar Rice Burroughs • Octavia E. Butler • Italo Calvino • Winston Churchill • Noël Coward • Simone De Beauvoir • James Dean • T. S. Eliot • William Faulkner • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • Richard Feynman • F. Scott Fitzgerald • Allen Ginsberg • Dashiell Hammett • Charlton Heston • Zora Neale Hurston • Christopher Isherwood • John Lennon • H. L. Mencken • Anaïs Nin • Sylvia Plath • Ronald Reagan • Joan Rivers • James Thurber • Dalton Trumbo • Evelyn Waugh • Tennessee Williams • P. G. Wodehouse • and many more Advance praise for Dear Los Angeles “This book’s a brilliant constellation, spread out over a few centuries and five thousand square miles. Each tiny entry pins the reality of the great unreal city of Angels to a moment in human time—moments enthralled, appalled, jubilant, suffering, gossiping or bragging—and it turns out, there’s no better way to paint a picture of the place.”—Jonathan Lethem “[A] scintillating collection of letters and diary entries . . . an engrossing trove of colorful, witty insights.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Dear Los Angeles

Dear Los Angeles PDF Author: David Kipen
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0812993985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Get Book Here

Book Description
A rich mosaic of diary entries and letters from Marilyn Monroe, Cesar Chavez, Susan Sontag, Albert Einstein, and many more, this is the story of Los Angeles as told by locals, transplants, and some just passing through. “Los Angeles is refracted in all its irreducible, unexplainable glory.”—Los Angeles Times The City of Angels has played a distinct role in the hearts, minds, and imaginations of millions of people, who see it as the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. David Kipen, a cultural historian and avid scholar of Los Angeles, has scoured libraries, archives, and private estates to assemble a kaleidoscopic view of a truly unique city. From the Spanish missionary expeditions in the early 1500s to the Golden Age of Hollywood to the strange new world of social media, this collection is a slice of life in L.A. through the years. The pieces are arranged by date—January 1st to December 31st—featuring selections from different decades and centuries. What emerges is a vivid tapestry of insights, personal discoveries, and wry observations that together distill the essence of the city. As sprawling and magical as the city itself, Dear Los Angeles is a fascinating, must-have collection for everyone in, from, or touched by Southern California. With excerpts from the writing of Ray Bradbury • Edgar Rice Burroughs • Octavia E. Butler • Italo Calvino • Winston Churchill • Noël Coward • Simone De Beauvoir • James Dean • T. S. Eliot • William Faulkner • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • Richard Feynman • F. Scott Fitzgerald • Allen Ginsberg • Dashiell Hammett • Charlton Heston • Zora Neale Hurston • Christopher Isherwood • John Lennon • H. L. Mencken • Anaïs Nin • Sylvia Plath • Ronald Reagan • Joan Rivers • James Thurber • Dalton Trumbo • Evelyn Waugh • Tennessee Williams • P. G. Wodehouse • and many more Advance praise for Dear Los Angeles “This book’s a brilliant constellation, spread out over a few centuries and five thousand square miles. Each tiny entry pins the reality of the great unreal city of Angels to a moment in human time—moments enthralled, appalled, jubilant, suffering, gossiping or bragging—and it turns out, there’s no better way to paint a picture of the place.”—Jonathan Lethem “[A] scintillating collection of letters and diary entries . . . an engrossing trove of colorful, witty insights.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Notes from Another Los Angeles

Notes from Another Los Angeles PDF Author: Anthony Fontenot
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262046652
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first book to focus on California architect Gregory Ain’s housing projects, which featured open kitchens, movable walls, and other design innovations. The Southern California architect Gregory Ain (1908–1988) collaborated with some of the most important figures of midcentury design, including Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames, and yet remains relatively unknown. Perhaps one reason for this anonymity is that although he designed private homes for wealthy liberals, Ain was more interested in finding ways to produce high-quality, low-cost houses in well-designed neighborhood settings for working-class families. This is the first book to examine the innovative housing projects that synthesized Ain’s architectural and political ideals. The book is arranged through a quartet of “notes”—both textual and visual—akin to a police or surveillance file (which is no accident, given that among these notes is Ain’s actual FBI file). The first presents a series of striking black-and-white photographs of four of Ain’s built housing projects by celebrated architectural photographer Julius Shulman. These are followed by illustrated essays on Ain by contemporary architectural historians, an archival section of articles, including notes for a lecture on Ain by the distinguished architectural writer and critic Esther McCoy, and lastly project descriptions, drawings, and contemporary color photographs by Kyungsub Shin. Ain’s housing projects represented a new paradigm in neighborhood design that celebrated the everyday life and diversity of ordinary people. Ain’s innovations—including open kitchens and movable partition walls for a “flexible house”—aimed to solve specific problems rather than pursue arbitrary expressions of uniqueness. His high-density developments anticipate contemporary efforts to design building with a minimal footprint. Generously illustrated, this volume reintroduces Ain to a forgetful field. Contributors Gregory Ain, Anthony Denzer, Anthony Fontenot, Anali Gharakhani, Esther McCoy, Nicholas Olsberg, Kyungsub Shin, Julius Shulman

Death Note Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases

Death Note Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases PDF Author: Nisioisin
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC
ISBN: 9781421518831
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Death Comes to Los Angeles There's a serial killer loose in Los Angeles and super-sleuth L is on the case. Along with Naomi Misora, a former FBI agent, he helps the LA police solve the grisly crimes. There's a Serial Killer Loose in Los Angeles and the local authorities need help fast. For some reason the killer has been leaving a string of maddeningly arcane clues at each crime scene. Each of these clues, it seems, is an indecipherable roadmap to the next murder. Onto the scene comes L, the mysterious super-sleuth. Despite his peculiar working habits--he's never shown his face in public, for example--he's the most decorated detective in the world and has never tackled a cased he hasn't been able to crack. But this time he needs help. Enlisting the services of an FBI agent named Naomi Misora, L starts snooping around the City of Angels. It soon becomes apparent that the killing spree is a psychotic riddle designed specifically to engage L in a battle of wits. Stuck in the middle between killer and investigator, it's up to Misora to navigate both the dead bodies and the egos to solve the Los Angeles BB Murder Cases.

Leaving Orbit

Leaving Orbit PDF Author: Margaret Lazarus Dean
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555973418
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a breathtaking elegy to the waning days of human spaceflight as we have known it In the 1960s, humans took their first steps away from Earth, and for a time our possibilities in space seemed endless. But in a time of austerity and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger, that dream has ended. In early 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's last three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the end of an era. With Dean as our guide to Florida's Space Coast and to the history of NASA, Leaving Orbit takes the measure of what American spaceflight has achieved while reckoning with its earlier witnesses, such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Oriana Fallaci. Along the way, Dean meets NASA workers, astronauts, and space fans, gathering possible answers to the question: What does it mean that a spacefaring nation won't be going to space anymore?

Going All City

Going All City PDF Author: Stefano Bloch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649358X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
“We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.” In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them. Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city. Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.

Notes from No Man's Land

Notes from No Man's Land PDF Author: Eula Biss
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970222
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows. These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."

Architecture in Los Angeles

Architecture in Los Angeles PDF Author: David Gebhard
Publisher: Gibbs Smith Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
"The most comprehensive guide over published to the man-made environment of Southern California. Contains hundreds of entries plus notes on city history, freeways, murals, and historic preservation. Also, a comprehensive bibliography, a photographic history of Los Angeles architecture, and an unequalled style glossary. David Gebhard and Robert Winter deftly pilot the enthusiast through one of the richest architectural regions in the world. With perception, understanding, and wit, the authors point out the classical monuments, the tacky copies, the sublime, and the bizarre. They lead us to the famous buildings and through the backstreets and alleys to find the unsung treasures. Loaded with maps and photographs."--Back cover.

Reinventing Los Angeles

Reinventing Los Angeles PDF Author: Robert Gottlieb
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262262975
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Describes how water politics, cars and freeways, and immigration and globalization have shaped Los Angeles, and how innovative social movements are working to make a more livable and sustainable city. Los Angeles—the place without a sense of place, famous for sprawl and overdevelopment and defined by its car-clogged freeways—might seem inhospitable to ideas about connecting with nature and community. But in Reinventing Los Angeles, educator and activist Robert Gottlieb describes how imaginative and innovative social movements have coalesced around the issues of water development, cars and freeways, and land use, to create a more livable and sustainable city. Gottlieb traces the emergence of Los Angeles as a global city in the twentieth century and describes its continuing evolution today. He examines the powerful influences of immigration and economic globalization as they intersect with changes in the politics of water, transportation, and land use, and illustrates each of these core concerns with an account of grass roots and activist responses: efforts to reenvision the concrete-bound, fenced-off Los Angeles River as a natural resource; “Arroyofest,” the closing of the Pasadena Freeway for a Sunday of walking and bike riding; and immigrants' initiatives to create urban gardens and connect with their countries of origin. Reinventing Los Angeles is a unique blend of personal narrative (Gottlieb himself participated in several of the grass roots actions described in the book) and historical and theoretical discussion. It provides a road map for a new environmentalism of everyday life, demonstrating the opportunities for renewal in a global city.

Holy Land

Holy Land PDF Author: D. J. Waldie
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393327280
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Describing childhood in suburban California, a poignant portrait of growing up in the grid of tract houses and carefully measured streets illustrates the good, the bad, and the difficulties found in being ordinary.

Poor's

Poor's PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Public utilities
Languages : en
Pages : 1862

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Book Description