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Aztlan Underground is a band from Los Angeles, California that combines Hip-Hop, Punk Rock, Jazz, and electronic music with Chicano and Native American themes, and indigenous instrumentation. They are often cited as progenitors of Chicano rap.
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Wyatt Emory Cooper was an American author, screenwriter, and actor. He was the fourth husband of Vanderbilt family heiress and socialite Gloria Vanderbilt and the father of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.
The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur-industrialist Armand Hammer to house his personal art collection, the museum has since expanded its scope to become "the hippest and most culturally relevant institution in town." Particularly important among the museum's critically acclaimed exhibitions are presentations of both historically overlooked and emerging contemporary artists. The Hammer Museum also hosts over 300 programs throughout the year, from lectures, symposia, and readings to concerts and film screenings. As of February 2014, the museum's collections, exhibitions, and programs are completely free to all visitors.
John Francisco Rechy is a Mexican-American novelist and essayist. His novels are written extensively about gay culture in Los Angeles and wider America, among other subject matter. City of Night, his debut novel published in 1963, was a best seller. Drawing on his own background, he has contributed to Mexican-American literature, notably with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which has been taught in several Chicano studies courses throughout the United States. But, even after the success of his first novel, he still worked as a prostitute, teaching during the day, and hustling at night. He worked as a prostitute into his forties while also teaching at UCLA. Through the 1970's and 1980's he dealt with personal drug use, as well as the AIDS crisis, which killed many of his friends.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón was a Spanish novelist known for his 2001 novel La sombra del viento. The novel sold 15 million copies and was winner of numerous awards; it was included in the list of the one hundred best books in Spanish in the last twenty-five years, made in 2007 by eighty-one Latin American and Spanish writers and critics.
Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock and Zeroville, he is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.
Musso & Frank Grill is a restaurant located at 6667-9 Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The restaurant opened in 1919 and is named for original owners Joseph Musso and Frank Toulet. It is the oldest restaurant in Hollywood and has been called "the genesis of Hollywood."
Charles Davenport Champlin was an American film critic and writer.
Emanuel Levy is an American film critic and emeritus professor of sociology and film of Arizona State University. For the past 50 years, he has taught a wide variety of courses in sociology film, and popular culture at Columbia University, New School for Social Research, Wellesley College, UCLA, and Arizona State University.
Suzanne Lummis is a poet, influential teacher, arts organizer and impresario in Los Angeles. She is associated with the poem noir, as well as the sensibility for which she is a major exponent–a literary incarnation of performance poetry–the Stand-up Poetry of the 80s and 90s. She is also grouped with “The Fresno Poets.”
An auteur is an artist with a distinctive approach, usually a film director whose filmmaking control is so unbounded and personal that the director is likened to the "author" of the film, thus manifesting the director's unique style or thematic focus. As an unnamed value, auteurism originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s, and derives from the critical approach of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, whereas American critic Andrew Sarris in 1962 called it auteur theory. Yet the concept first appeared in French in 1955 when director François Truffaut termed it policy of the authors, and interpreted the films of some directors, like Alfred Hitchcock, as a body revealing recurring themes and preoccupations.
Inherent Vice is a novel by American author Thomas Pynchon, originally published in August 2009. A darkly comic detective novel set in 1970s California, the plot follows sleuth Larry "Doc" Sportello whose ex-girlfriend asks him to investigate a scheme involving a prominent land developer. Themes of drug culture and counterculture are prominently featured. It is considered a postmodern novel that warps the stylistic conventions of detective fiction. Critical reception was largely positive, with reviewers describing Inherent Vice as one of Pynchon's more accessible works. The novel was adapted into a 2014 film of the same name.
L.A. Theatre Works (LATW) is a not-for-profit American media arts organization based in Los Angeles founded in 1984. The intent of the organization is to produce, preserve, and distribute classic and contemporary plays of significance. Along with its "live-in-performance" series, some productions are taken on national and international tours. Recordings of productions are posted on its website and available via broadcast syndication as a weekly series on radio stations.
The Schreiber theory is a writer-centered approach to film criticism and film theory which holds that the principal author of a film is generally the screenwriter rather than the director. The term was coined by David Morris Kipen, Director of Literature at the US National Endowment for the Arts.
Vinay Lal is an Indian historian. He is a professor of history and Asian American studies at UCLA. He writes widely on the history and culture of colonial and modern India, popular and public culture in India, cinema, historiography, the politics of world history, the Indian diaspora, global politics, contemporary American politics, the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi, Hinduism, and the politics of knowledge systems.
Howard A. Rodman is a screenwriter, author and professor. He is the former President of the Writers Guild of America, West, professor and former chair of the writing division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, alumnus of Telluride Association Summer Program and an artistic director of the Sundance Institute Screenwriting Labs.
Libros Schmibros is a lending library located in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, a predominantly Latinx neighborhood. The diversity among the residents means there is great "language diversity within Boyle Heights" as there are many bilingual individuals. Local libraries in the Boyle Heights area started closing on Mondays, and not one of the public libraries offered "bilingual story hours for children". The literary desert forming in Boyle Heights and the lack of access to bilingual media were the founders' of Libros Schmibros, David Kipen and Colleen Jaurretche, primary motivations in creating the lending library.
Glen Creason was the map librarian in the History & Genealogy department at the Los Angeles Central Library, a post he held from 1979 to 2021. He is also the author of Los Angeles in Maps and is a guest writer for many publications such as Los Angeles Magazine, additionally serving as a public speaker on the topics of maps, local history, and music. Creason is featured in Susan Orlean's chronicle of the Central Library, The Library Book. Since 2014, Creason has been the star of a Los Angeles Public Library series called Stories from the Map Cave. He retired in October of 2021.
Stefano Bloch is an American author and professor of cultural geography and critical criminology at the University of Arizona who focuses on graffiti, prisons, the policing of public space, and gang activity.