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CicLAVia Today!

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ciclavia_june_23_2013So I am late in noting that there is another (much sooner) CicLaVia today! And it is the one I always thought should happen, right from the beginning – it runs right through the center of the city, down Wilshire Boulevard. (Well, my hope is that one day it can run all the way to the beach down Wilshire, but maybe that’s in the future). I note that the times have been improved, by the way. It is from 9:00am to 4:00pm, which is great. So it seems that this is one of the major things they did to improve the event. (See my post from April about various issues that came up.) Fantastic! See the website for [..] Click to continue reading this post →

Busy Weekend

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There’s a busy weekend coming up. Somehow, two of the largest events on the LA calendar have been put on the same weekend – rather unfortunately in my opinion. The LA Times Festival of Books (held on the USC campus) is on Saturday and Sunday, and I’m excited about that (as you know I am every year). festival of books giant crossword I recommend exploring the site for the things you might visit (including the book prizes shortlists – awards will be given out tonight, including special ones to Margaret Atwood and to Kevin Starr!), and then go along and have some fun – all in the name of books, reading, and the worlds that are opened up through books and reading. It should be a great day or two out, and the extra great news is that you can take the subway there. The Expo line goes right up to ten feet from the Festival. You step off at the USC/Expo stop, cross from the platform to the sidewalk, and there you are! Books! Food! Music! Etc…

CicLAvia, another event that brings thousands of people together in the city, is on Sunday. It is extra exciting this year since for the first time it has a route that fully fits with where I think the event should be in the life of the city – it runs from […] Click to continue reading this post →

Sidewalk Colours

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You see such lovely things along the side of the street if there’s time to notice. (Click for a larger view.)

This is one of the many reasons I often walk each day to and from the bus stop or subway station. You miss this stuff in a car (or sometimes even when on a bike).

By the way, I’ve updated my earlier post with photos from the LA Times Festival of Books, as promised.

-cvj

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Festive Weekend!

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It has been another rather busy week this week (including a marathon seven-hour video interview!) and so posting was a bit light. I apologize for this, including for not getting to blogging about an event (or cluster of events) that I’ve been gleefully waiting for since the news broke last Fall that (as I’d mentioned back then) the LA Times Festival of Books is now being hosted by USC. This is something I fantasized about many years ago, in fact – I simply think it is a better fit for the city of Los Angeles for many reasons.

Anyway, the first festival of the new era is tomorrow and Sunday, with a wonderful program that can be looked at on the LA Times website. It will continue to be the largest literary festival in the USA (and perhaps beyond?), and it is hoped that it will get even larger… Next year, we’ll have the new branch of the subway system running, giving three stops at the campus (hurrah!), but in the meantime there’s a dedicated shuttle bus connecting USC to Union Station downtown and the Convention Center (not to mention all the many regular public transport links), and so you don’t have to bring your car to the area to deal with parking issues.

As you know from my blogging about all this in previous years (see list of links at the end), in a sense the whole thing kicks off the Friday night before (tonight!) with the […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Dream Come True!

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Wow! There’s a major piece of news that was announced today that basically exactly fits with a dream I have every year. Furthermore, I have been taking part in some meetings with all the University’s Deans, the President, and other key officials, about major aspects of USC’s future endeavours, and when the issue of strengthening the role of USC in the life of Los Angeles came up, I intended to mention my dream, but we ran out of time yesterday so I decided I’d mention it at today’s lunch meeting instead. So today at lunch I was about to be called on to make the point about local roles, and I’d decided to give the specific examples I had in mind. I was going to suggest that we seek for things analogous to UCLA Live, and to the LA Times Festival of Books, as things we can do to open our doors to the city (even more than we do) and become well known to more people near and far as a regular contributor to the intellectual life of the city (I mean beyond the huge number of people who come to us for an education, and the many public events that we already host and/or sponsor). But I was not called on because the President, Max Nikias, looked at his watch and said he had an announcement to make since it was just past the embargo time that was put on the story.

What was his announcement? The LA Times Festival of Books is going to move to USC starting next year! (See also here.) We’ll be enlarging it, and bringing back the awards ceremony to the way it was, etc.

You’ve maybe read my many posts here about the LA Times Festival of Books, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Festivities Begin!

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LA Times Festival of BooksSo this weekend the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books takes place. This is a two day celebration of books that takes place on the UCLA campus that is a joy to attend each year. I’ve blogged about it many times in the past and you can look at previous posts from the list below. The website for the festival is here.

As you may recall, the night before the festival – that would be tonight – there is a ceremony to announce the winners of the LA Times Book Prizes, with a great reception at the end with lots of interesting people and (often) great conversation. The list of nominated books can be found here, and it is interesting again this year. Here, for example is the science and technology list: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Poetry Slam!

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On Sunday evening (perhaps after a lovely day at the Festival of Books), come along to the Mt. Hollywood Underground for a fun evening of poetry, organized by Smart Gals in the Speakeasy series! There’ll be food, fun, and even celebrity (!) poetry judges, (plus me), on the panel. There’ll also be live music form the Red Maids. Here’s some of the description from their website:

L.A.’s intentionally lowbrow, literally underground literary salon returns! Now running as a seasonal series, Smart Gals’ Speakeasy celebrates National Poetry Month with its fourth annual Dead Poets Slam. Year one, the Suicide Poets stood down the Natural Death Poets by but a few points. Year two, the Men took on the Women. Year three pitted East Coast against West Coast. And now, Smart Gals’ Spring Speakeasy presents a fresh challenge, ripe for a country with new leadership: Citizens vs. Expatriates. Many and mythic are the artists, writers, and otherwise sensitive types who have fled these United States to seek creative support and more responsive international audiences. Recall Langston Hughes’ Parisian sojourns, Hemingway’s romance with Spain. Smart Gals will pit die-hard American denizens against those who chose to disembark. Our criteria? The poet in question must live abroad for no less than four years, the length of one presidential term. Can poet-of-the-plains Carl Sandburg defeat Eurocentric Gertrude Stein? When dead poets enter the slam ring, there is no sure victor.

Hosted by Noël Alumit (Letters to Montgomery Clift, Talking to the Moon), the Dead Poets Slam levels the creative playing field by forcing seasoned performers to throw down anonymously. […]

To find out who’s performing and judging (besides you in the crowd), go to the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Literary Festivities

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ice sculpture with typewritersDon’t forget this weekend’s LA Times Festival of Books! It is always a pleasure to wander the huge festival and see what’s on offer, and simply be part of an enormous gathering of people in LA on the usually lovely weekend days. – Gathering in the name of books! How excellent that is!

Some bad news this year. You’ll recall that I’ve reported (here and here) on the Oscar-like awards ceremony for the book prizes, complete with fancy after-party. (With chocolate fountains, and ice sculptures with embedded typewriters, no less!) Well, they’re not doing it this year. I imagine its the hard financial times. You see… now it’s hitting home to me that there’s a crisis out there – no awards gala, and no chocolate fountains. However will I survive?

Well, the good news is that the awards continue (actually there is a private ceremony at the LA Times building… yes, for all I know if it is the usual affair, and perhaps they just don’t want the riff-raff any more) and the short lists are interesting once again. You can […] Click to continue reading this post →

I See Book People

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The LA Times Festival of Books is coming up this weekend (see my upcoming post). In memory of the fun time I had at the first time I went to the accompanying awards ceremony in 2006, I’m reprinting a post I did over on CV that year, in which I reported on it. (Timestamp: April 30th, 2006 3:45 am.)

book awards LA Times Well, I’m recovering from an excellent hike up Mount Wilson with the USC Neurobiologists earlier today, so while I do that, I’ll tell you about last night. Recall that the LA Times Book Festival is happening this weekend.

I came closer to seeing a realization of one of those topsy-turvy scenarios I often fantasize about, where more “academic” pursuits, or at least those more associated with the life of the mind, are celebrated in full Hollywood fashion. (I envision it in the context of science and scientists….imagine an Oscar-Like awards ceremony for the year’s best science papers, watched by millions on TV in prime time… but this will do for a start.)

Yes, I went to my first LA Awards ceremony, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, and although I joked about Oscar analogies in a previous post, it actually was […] Click to continue reading this post →

Luncheon Reflections

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LIAH_Hawthorne_luncheonYou know, I never got around to mentioning here that I am now Director (co-directing with Louise Steinman who runs the ALOUD series) of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities (LAIH), a wonderful organisation that I have mentioned here before. It is full of really fascinating people from a range of disciplines: writers, artists, historians, architects, musicians, critics, filmmakers, poets, curators, museum directors, journalists, playwrights, scientists, actors, and much more. These LAIH Fellows are drawn from all over the city, and equally from academic and non-academic sources. The thing is, you’ll find us throughout the city involved in all sorts of aspects of its cultural and intellectual life, and LAIH is the one organisation in the city that tries to fully bring together this diverse range of individuals (all high-acheivers in their respective fields) into a coherent force.

One of the main things we do is simply sit together regularly and talk about whatever’s on our minds, stimulating and shaping ideas, getting updates on works in progress, making suggestions, connections, and so forth. Finding time in one’s schedule to just sit together and exchange ideas with no particular agenda is an important thing to do and we take it very seriously. We do this at […] Click to continue reading this post →

Late Night Review

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You know, I’d love to pretend that I’ve just come in from hanging out at the Edison, or the Blue whale, or some other fun place, feeling a bit concerned about my morning class on how to write equations for the shape of the universe (we do some cosmology in the General Relativity class tomorrow)… but instead I’m up at almost 1:00am because of a persistent dry cough, indigestion, and a noisy mockingbird in a tree just outside. Are these connected? I do not know. All I know is I cannot sleep.

So I blog.

It has been, once again, a crazy week. There are times when I wonder if this has become the norm, which usually leads me to valiantly fight a bit to ensure that is not the case, resulting a a withdrawal from a lot of stuff to regroup. I hope to do that soon. Although I’ve said yes to so many things, it is looking like July or August before that can happen. That’s bad.

Right now I can only remember back as far as Wednesday, where the day began with a last check of the midterm I wrote for the GR class (second midterm for them) before setting it at 10:00am. (Perhaps the most interesting thing on it was perhaps the computation of the surface gravity of a static black hole, working in Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates…) At 10:25 I snuck out of the classroom to meet with a screenwriting student who is working on a screenplay featuring a physicist character. She was seeking some advice and wanted to exchange some thoughts about the work she’s doing… I got to gripe a bit about my pet peeves about scientist characters (not just the scarcity of well drawn ones – although things have gotten better in recent years) in TV and film. Somehow the rest of Wednesday (after the seminar ended at 1:40) is a bit of a blur, but I think it did involve me leaving campus to head home to hide and do a bit of finish work on a page I mentioned in the last post. Maybe. (Oh, there was also the official opening party for Umamicatessen (new restaurant downtown) in the evening, that kept me out to almost midnight. I’ve been meaning to blog about the place since the official “soft” opening party about two months ago, but had not got to it yet.)

Thursday saw me start the day way too early (as described in that post), and the [..] Click to continue reading this post →