The Literate Kitty

You might think you “know” L.A. Kale salads, twenty-dollar smoothies, and sushi.  (Yeah... but it’s also donuts, coffee, and food trucks.) Beautiful people everywhere, dressed like they’re headed for the Oscars. (Most days it’s an endless sea of yoga tights, jeans, sneakers, and flip-flops–on everyone.) The glamor of Hollywood, beachfront mansions, and compounds in the hills. (Except only a small percentage of Angelenos have  that  kind of crazy money... meaning most live in ordinary places, while the unhoused try to survive along Skid Row, under every overpass, or in camps in vacant lots.) It’s a sprawling city of extremes—from unimaginable excess to poverty, peaceful mountains to the unceasing noise of the freeways that intersect everywhere else—and always,  always  a powder keg, about to explode. And in Jordan Harper’s  A Violent Masterpiece , it does.   There’s only so much crime and awfulness even a city of some ten million souls can handle, and L...

Every big city in America has its share of serious crime... but in a sprawling megalopolis like Los Angeles,  there’s your run-of-the-mill crime, and then there’s your okay-that-went-crazy-really-effing-fast crime.   In the latest entry in P. J. Tracy’s Detective Margaret Nolan series,  City of Secrets , Maggie—along with her stalwart partner, Al Crawford—are definitely ankle-boots-and-loafers-deep in the latter.     After arriving on the scene of what—at first glance—almost certainly appears to be  “just” another fatal car-jacking, Maggie and Al soon realize that the dead guy in the fancy car was actually the owner of a premium pet-food company worth millions... which he just so happened to be in the process of selling, for a huge profit. And  that  immediately puts a whole different spin on things.    Sure, in the part of town where things went down—one of those areas someone super-wealthy only goes with the idea of scoring s...

Tonight I had a good, long, ugly cry.   Not over anything sort of ordinary—not the loss of a loved one, some new personal heartache, or painful memories rearing their ugly heads—but over the passing of someone I never got to meet or see… but who nonetheless left indelible prints upon my heart.   [photo credit: Steve Winter, National Geographic] Make that  pawprints … for the dearly-departed in this instance is the L.A. celeb known ‘round the world as P-22. On the off-chance that you’ve somehow never heard of him, dear reader, P-22 was the shockingly long-lived, oft-seen (in public, even!) mountain lion, who called Los Angeles County his home for a decade.    Or, perhaps I should say,  ruled   L.A. County .   P-22 was still a relative youngster when I came onto the scene, some eight-and-a-half years ago, now, … but I was enchanted, immediately ( of course ) by tales— and pictorial evidence of sightings!— of this majestic male cougar. He was living ...

There are certain things an Angeleno just accepts as part of life.  Insane amounts of traffic, clogging freeways and local access roads alike, for two-thirds of every day. Choppers flying overhead fast and low, at all hours.  Perpetual threats of wildfires and earthquakes.  The realization that no matter how much you might want to be one of those people who has “beach days”, the chances of such are slim.  Some new political scandal, somewhere in the county. Rationalizing those late-night In-and-Out burgers by consuming mass quantities of kale and outrageously-priced juices.  Avoiding most of Hollywood like the plague (despite some great theaters and restaurants), due to the overwhelming presence of mentally-unstable transients and gaping tourists (who can never understand why they aren’t running into “stars” at every corner).  And—since the arrival of the coronavirus—a resurgence of the rampant crime (that had actually, finally, been on the downswing). Wh...

Have you ever seen a preview for a show (trailer for a movie, etc.) that really hooked you… but when you tuned in to watch it, found yourself not enjoying it so much as wandering about in the middle of an already long-running series, hopelessly lost?   Yeah, that. That’s what happened to me for much of February [insert the crying-buckets-face emoji here], as I struggled with (then put down, then picked up again, and rinse, repeat… multiple times) David Putnam’s The Ruthless … which I only found out afterward was book number eight ( yep, EIGHT! ) in an ongoing series. Oy. So, I’ll be breaking this experience down for you a bit differently than my norm. _______________ Bruno Johnson is a Sheriff’s Deputy with the Los Angeles Police Department, and has been, for… well, a reasonable amount of time, I’m guessing.  But… some utter shit has (apparently) gone down in Bruno’s life shortly before The Ruthless begins: namely, the abduction (and assumed— by Bruno —murder) of o...

Los Angeles. Whatever you may think about it, it would be hard to name another place that’s home to so very, very many hopes, dreams, and ambitions… or to as much heartache, disappointment, and disillusionment.  Everyone here envisions their fantasies taking flight on a magnificent set of wings… but in The City of Angels, such wings are rarely given freely or won easily… and the scrappy, feathery bits that most of us try our best to cobble together? Never manage to feel like quite enough. And yet, we stay… and more come, from all over, every year: the dreamers and the schemers, the escapees and the seekers, the visionaries and the desperate.  (For a place that sees next-to-no lightning [ I mean, storms? we’d have as much luck wishing for a stampede of unicorns down Wilshire Boulevard, as we would seeing a thunderstorm ], we seem insanely hopeful, as a people, that those electrical bolts are gonna strike, and our dreams all come true.)  You see, we don’t cling to those...

An ancient Indian artifact. A dead archeologist. An attractive art history professor. A dangerous ex. A determined cop. A pair of eager-beaver college students. And secrets, so many secrets.  Sounds like the key elements in a new Indiana Jones tale, doesn’t it? Instead, they’re all part of author Vee Kumari’s first novel, Dharma (A Rekha Rao Mystery) , which I’m joining on a virtual book tour, today!  _______________ When professor Rekha Rao wakes up one Saturday morning, the last thing she expects is a call asking her to assist the police. Actually, make that the next-to-the-last thing; the last thing is what the police want from her, which is to help identify an ancient statue that was used to bludgeon a murder victim, then left atop the body.  The victim? Her mentor and friend, Dr. Joseph Faust, a fellow professor at the same college. Rekha really doesn’t want to get involved, for reasons that go much deeper than the horrifying nature of Fau...

For me, one of the best movie trends from the ‘80s and ‘90s was the rash of “buddy-cop” films. (Think your “Beverly Hills Cops”, “Lethal Weapons”, and“Die Hards”.) What made those movies, in particular, so much fun—and better than others in the same genre—is that they knew what they were about, then executed it. The macho butting-of-heads early on between partners who had somehow gotten stuck working together? Yep. Exciting action (fights and chases) scenes? Check. Interesting stories (that weren’t so complicated you needed to take notes to keep track)? Roger that. Humorous banter aplenty? Absolutely. And finally, a sense that these two characters actually grew to kind of like (or at least, tolerate) each other--became buds--by the time the credits rolled? Definitely. When I sat down to watch “Bright” (a Netflix Original movie) last month, it wasn’t with high hopes. The trailer looked lame, frankly—a muddled mess that didn’t seem to know what it was trying to be. Plus, ...