 Los Angeles Stories | |
| Author | Ry Cooder |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | City Lights |
Publication date | October 2011 |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 978-0-87286-519-8 |
Los Angeles Stories is a short-story collection by Ry Cooder. Cooder's first published story collection, the book was published by City Lights Books in late 2011 [1] as part of its City Lights Noir collection.
Early reports in the Los Angeles media described the book as "an atmospheric look at post-World War II L.A. that unfolds in Chavez Ravine and Venice, Santa Monica and Bunker Hill." [4] and compared the style to "the Beats and Noir", with "musicians, streetwalkers and other hard-nosed denizens cruising through the madness of our city." [5] San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Jonah Raskin said, "Cooder fans will enjoy the upbeat mix of music and murder. Aficionados of noir fiction will love the characters . . . ." [1] Mother Jones critic Tim McDonnell called it "a requiem to a city wherein the world's tides swept together an impossibly diverse culture that was quickly squandered and homogenized by Hollywood and hit-hungry record executives" and "a deeply humane history of the time before instant pop hits and sprawling superhighways." [6]
Ryland Peter Cooder is an American musician, songwriter, film score composer, record producer, and writer. He is a multi-instrumentalist but is best known for his slide guitar work, his interest in traditional music, and his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems. Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach.
Gloria Richetta Jones is an American singer and songwriter who first found success in the United Kingdom, being recognized there as "The Queen of Northern Soul". She recorded the 1965 hit song "Tainted Love" and has worked in multiple genres as a Motown songwriter and recording artist, backing vocalist, and as a performer in musicals such as Hair. In the 1970s, she was a keyboardist and vocalist in Marc Bolan's glam rock band T. Rex. She and Bolan were also in a committed romantic relationship and had a son together.
Buena Vista Social Club was a musical ensemble primarily made up of Cuban musicians, formed in 1996. The project was organized by World Circuit executive Nick Gold, produced by American guitarist Ry Cooder and directed by Juan de Marcos González. They named the group after the members' club of the same name in the Buenavista quarter of Havana, a popular music venue in the 1940s. To showcase the popular styles of the time, such as son, bolero and danzón, they recruited a dozen veteran musicians, some of whom had been retired for many years.
David Perry Lindley was an American musician who founded the rock band El Rayo-X and worked with many other performers including Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, Warren Zevon, Curtis Mayfield and Dolly Parton. He mastered such a wide variety of instruments that Acoustic Guitar magazine referred to him not as a multi-instrumentalist but instead as a "maxi-instrumentalist." On stage, Lindley was known for wearing garishly colored polyester shirts with clashing pants, gaining the nickname the Prince of Polyester.
Rising Sons was an American folk-rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1965. Their initial career was short-lived, but the group found retrospective fame for launching the careers of singer Taj Mahal and guitarist Ry Cooder.
The Six Gallery reading was an important poetry event that took place on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco.
Chávez Ravine: A Record by Ry Cooder is the twelfth studio album by Ry Cooder. It is the first concept album and historical album by Ry Cooder which tells the story of Chávez Ravine, a Mexican-American community demolished in the 1950s in order to build public housing. The housing was never built. Ultimately the Brooklyn Dodgers built a stadium on the site as part of their move to Los Angeles.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Johnny Handsome is a 1989 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Walter Hill and starring Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Forest Whitaker and Morgan Freeman. The film was written by Ken Friedman, and adapted from the novel The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome by John Godey. The music for the film was written, produced and performed by Ry Cooder, with four songs by Jim Keltner.
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
Jonah Raskin is an American writer who left an East Coast university teaching position to participate in the 1970s radical counterculture as a freelance journalist, then returned to the academy in California in the 1980s to write probing studies of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and reviews of northern California writers whom he styled as "natives, newcomers, exiles and fugitives." Beginning as a lecturer in English at Sonoma State University in 1981, he moved to chair of the Communications Studies Department from 1988 to 2007, while serving as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. He retired from his teaching position in 2011.
Rodger Jacobs was an American journalist, writer, author, film producer, columnist, playwright, editor and screenwriter.
Megan Abbott is an American author of crime fiction and of non-fiction analyses of hardboiled crime fiction. Her novels and short stories have drawn from and re-worked classic subgenres of crime writing from a female perspective. She is also an American writer and producer of television.
Election Special is the 15th studio album by American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ry Cooder. It was released on August 16, 2012, by Perro Verde and Nonesuch Records. Cooder recorded and produced the album mostly at Drive-By Studios in North Hollywood, performing all of the instrumentation, including bass, guitar, and mandolin, with the exception of drums, which were played by his son Joachim.
San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide to Its History & Architecture is a book by Philip Choy, first published in 2012.
Meri Nana-Ama Danquah is a Ghanaian-American writer, editor, journalist and public speaker, whose name at birth was Mildred Mary Nana-Ama Boakyewaa Brobby. She is best known for her 1998 memoir Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression. Her short story "When a Man Loves a Woman" was shortlisted for the 2022 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing.
David Michael Barrett is an American screenwriter and film producer in Los Angeles, California.
Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment is a book written by the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and published by City Lights Books. It takes a close and unexpected look at the historical origins of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Despite being no fan of guns, Dunbar approaches the subject from neither the liberal nor the conservative side of the usual debate, instead digging deeply into the subject as a historian to unearth surprising facts.
Gary Phillips is an American writer, editor, and community activist whose 1994 novel Violent Spring is considered a classic work of crime fiction and one of the essential crime novels about Los Angeles. His more than two dozen books range from hard-boiled mysteries such as the acclaimed Ivan Monk series to graphic novels including Angeltown and anthologies like The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir. Phillips has also served as a story editor and writer on the television show Snowfall.
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