Archive for March, 2010
Adam Carolla’s Pilot Fish
Adam Carolla’s warehouse looks no different from the others that line this industrial block of Glendale. Most of the 5,000-square-foot garage is dedicated to mechanics and woodworking. Its focus is exotic automobiles, each in a different stage of modification.
The hi…
THERE’S A SKIPPER BORN EVERY MINUTE
Unlike New York and other actual cities, L.A. has never been know for its parades — or any other kind of civic-pride gathering. The organizers of the First Annual April Fool’s Sunset Strip Skip Down, intend to change that. The idea behind the event, a three-mile loop beginning and ending a…
MR. SHRED
Who doesn’t love a thrilling, sky-high guitar solo? Guitarist John 5, who’s worked with tons of rock acts, most notably Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson, has won the admiration of shredding greats Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. The Grammy Museum is the site of Fender Presents J…
DID JEW KNOW IT’S A SMALL WORLD, AFTER ALL?
As comedian Gilda Radner would say, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” If you’re not stuffing your face with Rite-Aid Easter eggs, you’re doing battle with rock-hard matzo balls; if you’re not feigning joy over Jesus’ return, you’re putting on the dog…
PASSIONATE BACH
When Johann Sebastian Bach applied for the position of music director at St. Thomas and St. Nicholas churches in Leipzig, he was far from being the front-runner for the position. The deliberating council really wanted Georg Philip Telemann, who turned down the offer, and then went after three more B…
The Runaways: Wild Thing
On a summer day in 1975, a 16-year-old girl carrying a Silvertone guitar took four public buses from Canoga Park to a two-story house in Huntington Beach. At the door, she was greeted by another 16-year-old, a surfing beauty with piercing blue eyes, feathered blond hair and muscl…
The Mad Men of Los Angeles
Supergraphic multimillionaire Barry Rush couldn’t have been pleased to hear a few weeks ago that Escorts in Los Angeles City Attorney Carmen Trutanich had taken the audacious step of jailing a compatriot in arms, a Hollywood landlord who, for an undisclosed sum, cut a deal with a shadowy fi…
Greenberg: Los Angeles Plays Itself
Sad, funny and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine was common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist — I’d be hard-put to name …
Top Pesto Chef!
Like most people who cook pasta a couple of times a week, I have always been slightly too proud of my ability to make pesto, the raw basil slurry that is a specialty of the Italian port city Genoa. And while most of the time I succumb to the convenience of the blender, in which y…
Manny Pacquiao: The Fight of His Life
Everybody wants a piece of boxer Manny Pacquiao. They want tickets to his fights. They want his autograph, his money, his time. They want him to clobber the second best fighter in the world, Floyd Mayweather Jr., whose recent accusation that Pacquiao must be using steroids caused…