Tag Archives: Los Angeles

1. “While My Guitar Gently Beeps”

“When it was over, McCartney returned to his trailer for a cup of tea with soy milk and sugar. At 67, McCartney, even up close, is still unmistakably the cute one. He smiled, the lines around his eyes crinkling, and unbuttoned his jacket as he sat down. Like Starr, he volunteered that he can’t play his own game, but he suspects that if it had been around when he was a kid, he would have liked it. Would he have liked it too much? I asked. If his drive to play rock ‘n’ roll had been satiated by a 1950s Guitar Hero, would the world have been robbed of the Beatles? ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Knowing me and knowing my ambition.’ He thought for a bit, then added that any kid who is going to become a musician anyway won’t decide to stop with a game. ‘They’ll get the Beatles down, but then if they’re that into music, they’ll just hook up with friends, like they do, and say, let’s try to write one of our own. I think that’ll always happen.'”

2. “I Say Spend. You Say No. We’re in Love.”

“Despite the old saying ‘opposites attract,’ scholars have found that in almost every way imaginable, people tend to choose mates who look, sound and act as they do.But in the area perhaps most fraught with potential conflict — money — somehow, some way, people gravitate toward their polar opposite, a new study says.”

3. “Choosing Summer’s Last Big Read”

“The book I want is a vortex. When I lower my eyes to it, I’m sucked deep into a place more plausible than the one that surrounds me. When I look up, I want the actual life around me to look strange and original, like a brand new page in a pop-up world.”

4. “They Seem to Find the Happiness They Seek”

“Two years after the Gay Divorcee Rogers reached her apogee in Swing Time (1936). By now she has a dancer’s body as beautiful as any the screen has ever seen. The glimpses of her legs in their ‘Pick Yourself Up’ number (her calf-length skirts fly as they tap) are enough to make you gasp. Her spine can now arch and bend in many ways, all apparently full of feeling; the slenderness of her waist is always ravishing.”

5. “Big Enough to Take on the Sports World”

“‘Every male has a little bit of couch potato bravado when they’re watching sports on television,’ Mr. O’Neal said. ‘They see someone make a mistake and think, ‘I could do better than that.’ And me, as a superb athlete, I see Ben Roethlisberger throw a pass in the corner, and I think, if I had the same blocking, I could make that pass. If I’m racing Lance Armstrong 10 miles on a bicycle, and I get a 4-mile head start, I’m going to beat him. That’s what I think,’ He continued. ‘And Jerome said, “You’re out your damn mind.”’”

6. “Pandora’s Boombox”

“If industry leaders had always followed their mistrust of technology, we’d still be listening to music on 78-r.p.m. shellac, or maybe even wax cylinders.”

7. “Fat Tax”

“People’s weight is a reflection of how much they eat and how active they are. The country has grown fat because it’s consuming more calories and burning fewer. Our national weight problem brings huge costs, both medical and economic. Yet our anti-obesity efforts have none of the urgency of our antismoking efforts.”

8. “L.A. Confidential”

“Babitz loves Los Angeles the way a Parisian loves Paris, and she defends it, taking on all comers. Nathanael West, celebrated for his portrayal of the city’s spiritual vacuum, is accused of catering to Ivy League snobbery, telling the East Coast intellectuals what they think they already know. Joan Didion, though never named, is surely implicated as one of L.A.’s most eloquent detractors. And New Yorkers’ favorite put-down — that there’s no there there — grows less and less convincing as Babitz fondly depicts a one-of-a-kind setting and a frame of mind unique to it. Not only is there a there there, it’s completely unlike anywhere else.”