So ever since I met chef Eric Greenspan (The Foundry on Melrose, Iron Chef) I’ve known he had a passion for grilled cheese. We met because he wanted to compete in the Grilled Cheese Invitational, and after we got him in touch with the right people he went on to sweep the awards in 2008, and then to act as celeb-chef judge in 2009. And now, the master of the cheesy gooey sammy is planning to launch…yes…a grilled cheese restaurant.

When Merill Schindler announced that restaurant as one of 2010’s most anticipated foodie happenings, I knew I had to ask Eric just what was up. Here’s the info, right from the grilling-master’s mouth. Of course, details of the resto haven’t been finalized yet, but here’s what he was able to report thus far.

LMK: What is this new restaurant going to be?

EG: A quick serve restaurant. Not fast food but a real casual concept: sandwiches, soups, salads, seltser drinks. Real quick, real affordable–out the door for ten to twelve bucks. Something fun and chef driven.

LMK: And where will it be?

EG: We haven’t locked it up but we’re in the process of negotiating next door to The Foundry [on Melrose].

LMK: What made you decide, “Grilled cheese”?

EG: Since [The Foundry] opened, our grilled cheese sandwich has been a real big hit, and when we won the Grilled Cheese Invitational it got even bigger, more talked about. So obviously it made sense ‘cause it’s our most popular item in the restaurant. Also a grilled cheese is comfortable, it’s familiar, it’s quick. It’s typically not…

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It feels like I’m spending my life at the library nowadays. There are surely many far worse fates. The LA Central Library’s ALOUD series of free lectures continues to attract me back, with an ever fascinating array of guests.  Last week, I had seen Walter Kirn speak on his book Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever.  That was an enjoyable program, and Kirn is extremely personable; but for this post, I will comment on last night’s talk with Tamim Ansary, who was presented and interviewed by Amir Hussain (a co-presentation of ALOUD and The Center for Global Understanding).  The title of Ansary’s book matches his talk: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.

Of all the talks I have heard at ALOUD, I found Ansary to be the most engaged and fascinating speaker to date. (more…)

The central library of John Carter's Mars?

Update: It appears that Mrs. Lulu has snuck into the blog again.  The following contains her observations of a delightful lecture at L.A.’s magnificent Central Library.

Last night, Lulu and I attended one of the LA Central Library’s free lectures in their wonderful ALOUD series:  George Lakoff, “The Public Mind:  A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics, In Conversation with Ian Masters”

We were both particularly excited about this talk since we had studied Lakoff in graduate school.  For those of you who don’t know him, he’s a cognitive scientist and linguist  at UC Berkely, whose interdisciplinary work focuses on investigating the ways in which linguistic and cognitive structures (e.g., metaphors, prototypes, frames) shape perception and social life.

A central theme of last night’s discussion was the way in which the framing mechanisms of public discourse have been controlled by the Republicans [...] (more…)

Andrew Walker’s hypnotic time-lapse films of Los Angeles, which I stumbled upon recently on Youtube, provide a conflict of sorts. As the time in the frame zips by, there’s a great stillness that washes over you as you watch them. His films show images such as traffic flowing in a torrential blur like side-by-side raging rivers of white and red light, or gorgeously backlit clouds rapidly mutating behind the silhouetted towers of Downtown. You also notice other lights flickering; office lights blinking on and off, aircraft zipping by, an exterior elevator bouncing up and down like a spastic yo-yo on the side of a distant building. And yet there’s that stillness.

Walker’s company, 599 Productions, makes time-lapse films for a variety of projects– TV and indie film productions and music videos, as well as for corporate clients.

From Placerville, a small town midway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, Walker didn’t go the usual route, through a traditional film school, to get into The Industry. After playing around with a camcorder in high school and editing skate films together for fun, he got a job at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank as a projectionist, which served as his on-the-job training. (Interview with Walker after the click.) (more…)

“In California” (listen to it on last.fm) is a song about searching but not finding; about disillusionment; about being lost.

Photo by flickr user nancy- under a CC license

In California I dream of snow
And all the places we used to go
With the night falling down
With the night falling down
Now I’m living in Korea Town
Waking to the sound of car alarms

Neko Case didn’t write this song, although I first heard this melancholic track off her album Canadian Amp while virtually thumbing through iTunes’ Neko collection. Philistine that I was, for years I believed it to have been penned by the Western-noir fox confessor of Americana herself. Instead, it was actually written by a woman named Lisa Marr, who fronted a band called Cub, and who played off and on with Neko in the 90s.

Was “In California” autobiographical? Or was it, as it is with many songwriters, a case of a musician crafting a narrative around an imaginary life?

So while this post was originally supposed to be about a song and a city, I now find myself drawn into a search for a woman, and her story…

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This came to my inbox.

If anyone knows who took this photo, please let me know in the comments

John Leech, the founder of the Onyx Cafe in Silverlake/Los Feliz/Echo Park and beloved patron of the arts and truth in general has passed away.

It apparently happened around Monday or Tuesday March 17th or 18th and has been confirmed by the County Coroner. He apparently has no family but he has a trust and its executors have been notified. There is a votive memorial in front of the former location of the Onyx on Vermont Avenue (now Cafe Figaro) in Los Feliz. Initial planning for a fitting memorial to John has begun. More on that soon.

John was one of the rarest things in this world: a genuine philosophical Bohemian in the very best sense of the word who created an austere unpretentious Cafe which was, by his design, a magical safe zone for artists, musicians, poets, scientists, intellectuals and outsiders of all stripes…

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I'll be your author this evening

I moved to Los Angeles in October 2006, for a strange contract, in this strange specular land. Then, as now, I was reminded of our friends at the Bureau of Public Secrets who so presciently remarked of 21st century LA:

As the world of the spectacle extends its reign it approaches the climax of its offensive, provoking new resistances everywhere. These resistances are very little known precisely because the reigning spectacle is designed to present an omnipresent hypnotic image of unanimous submission.

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photo by Thomas Hawk, used under a Creative Commons license

An interview with Leah Peterson, technical consultant for the Steven Spielberg and Diablo Cody produced “United States of Tara.”

Long time Los Angeles blog readers probably know Leah Peterson for her blog leahpeah and as creator and coordinator of the live reading event series LA Angst and LA Bloggers Live!  She’s also contributed to Huffington Post, crocheted hats for Amy Sedaris and sold paintings that hang all over North America. And she’s a mom. Oh, and she also has Dissociative Identity Disorder, commonly referred to as multiple personality disorder. While many people suffering from disorders prefer to keep them secret, Leah wrote a book about it. The book was read by an Oscar winning screenwriter, and now Leah is a consultant for one of cable TV’s hottest shows.

Leah graciously accepted my offer of an e-interview… following are her answers to some of my questions, discussinghow she became involved with “The United States of Tara,” when the show veers from reality, and what Leah is up to next. You reading this, Mr. Spielberg?

How did you become involved with United States of Tara? Is working as a consultant a part of your background?

Leah: The story goes that somehow, my book (Not Otherwise Specified) made it into the hands of Diablo Cody while she was researching DID for the show. She sent me an email and since I’d never heard of her, I forwarded it to my husband, my own personal Snopes, and he looked her up and deemed the name Diablo Cody as a real person. A person really named Brooke Busey. So, fictional, but also real. Crazy? Yes.

I agreed to meet with her and we had lunch. She asked a lot of questions and I gave her a lot of answers. And then a few weeks later I got a call from the studio asking if I wanted to be a consultant for the series. I welcomed the invitation and have loved being involved. (more…)

I might be a bit of a latecomer to the newbie party happening here at L.A. Metblogs, but I’m really excited to join the crew! I’m usually running a little behind anyway, so it’s fitting. My name is Jodi and while not a native, I have called Los Angeles home for the past 14 years, which is longer than anywhere else I’ve lived. I took to L.A. right away and never found that I needed to ‘get used to’ it.

Having resided mostly in small towns and cities on the East Coast and in Texas, the move here was a big change for me. Not only is L.A. the most expansive place I’ve lived, but it is by far the most diverse. The people, geography, lifestyles, and cultures fascinate and energize me. Sometimes I feel like I’ve learned more from my time here than in most of my years of formal education.

A health care professional by day, I pursue crafting, writing, and photography in my spare time. Nature and my pets are often an inspiration for my creativity. I also attempt to take advantage of all that Los Angeles has to offer from music to art to hiking to film to geek-centric gatherings and beyond. There is always something to do, which is one of the reasons why I don’t get enough sleep.

I appreciate the opportunity to write for Metblogs and am looking forward to sharing my love for and my unique perspective of life in L.A. My musings can be found elsewhere online and yes, they often reflect my unhealthy obsessions with tote bags and rodents.

HI.

HI!

HI!!

I’m yet another newbie in this influx of new writers.  You very likely don’t know me from that annoying 2009 Hummer with license plate MRY XMAS hogging the road next to you (or me, this morning, as Yaris and I barely escaped being eaten by that silver monstrosity of a car) but I run a foodie blog over on What You See is What You Eat.  I know, another one of those. Oh well. Other random things: I have a dog that everyone thinks is a fox, but really, is just a shiba inu. I say this at least 5 times a day, so if you’re in Santa Monica and there’s a girl explaining that No I did not steal this “fox” from Runyon Canyon, and, anyway, who would steal a fox and domesticate it? That makes no sense., that is me. My day-and-often-night-time job is to be a lawyer; having to write pleadings that are variations on a you-owe-me-money theme, I am eternally grateful to Lucinda and the rest of the LA Metblogs team for entrusting me with the space to write in English a few times a week.

So, this is my hi post.  The substantive post will be forthcoming.