festival of books

Yesterday my uncle and I headed up to UCLA for the LA Times Festival of Books. It was my first time going. My uncle raves about it every year he goes, so I finally had to go check it out. Picture a county fair but instead of deep-fried food unfit for farm hogs and lame fair games, the music, entertainment, booths, and activities are all concerned with arts and literature.

There are several panels throughout the day featuring authors, poets, journalists and filmmakers. We really wanted to see Gore Vidal at Royce Hall (pictured below) but being he was the most popular attraction of the day, it was sold out.



We attended a panel called "The Future of News" featuring Jim O'Shea, the new editor of the LA Times; Mark Halperin, ABC News political director and James Taranto of the Wall St. Journal editorial page. What could have been a decent conversation about the challenges facing the news media became a PR session for these old media folks to defend their craft and demean new media (a.k.a. blogs). O'Shea, a former Chicago Tribune editor brought in to run the LA Times last November received boos and hisses from the audience. Angelinos aren't too happy about Chicago billionaire Sam Zell taking over their paper and installing his own crew of bureaucrats.

The second panel was great. Titled "Scripted Spaces: What is the West?", panelists Marc Cooper, Norman Klein and Craig Childs discussed illusions, postmodernity and the artificiality of 21st century life.

Oh, and there was capoeira, the Brazilian dance/martial art.



We then meandered around the hundreds of booths. Practically everyone had a spot - Scientologists, the Ayn Rand institute, Muslims giving out free Korans. The ImpeachBush and 9-11Truth folks were out in full force, so were the Jews for Jesus. I caught this pic below of some Christian dude trying to give out free bibles to some hijab-clad women. They seemed a bit reluctant to give in...



On the way back from UCLA we stopped at the Veteran's cemetary on Western Ave. where my grandparents are buried. My grandfather was a WWII vet. His ashes were placed in the cemetary in 1990. It's been almost five years since my grandmother's ashes were added to the plot but I hadn't yet visited. It was nice to see them together again.



Oh, and LA traffic sucks ass.