City Lights

Your choices in San Francisco hotels are overwhelming. The prices can be too. So during our staff visit to the City by the Bay, we looked for reasonably priced hotels that had charm, location or both. We came back with 14 ideas on places to bed down. It's not a complete list, but it is eclectic, like the city itself. Mystic Hotel. This property, which opened in April, stands on a tunnel-adjacent block of Stockton Street that you'll never see on a picture postcard, yet it has style, as do the Burritt Tavern bar and restaurant downstairs.

Springtime may bring thoughts of visiting Paris, but for Southern Californians without the time or means for a transatlantic getaway, there's the City of Lights, City of Angels film festival. Starting Monday, the 17th annual event at the Directors Guild of America will bring 38 French features to L.A., including the North American premiere of Danièle Thompson's new romantic comedy, "It Happened in Saint-Tropez. " Starring Monica Bellucci and Kad Merad in a romp about two cousins who fall in love with the same man, "It Happened in Saint-Tropez" will open in Paris just five days before kicking off the L.A. festival.

The biggest full moon of the year Saturday (tonight) will bring the highest and lowest of tides too. And, according to NASA Science News , dogs may howl and the bright glare of moonbeams may keep you up that night. (If you don't believe me, watch the video above that explains it.) In fact, the "perigree moon," as it's known, occurs at 8:40 p.m. Pacific time when the moon in its orbit comes closest to Earth -- and only super-keen observers will be able to distinguish it from a regular full moon.

The 17th City of Lights, City of Angels French film festival announced its most ambitious slate to date Tuesday with 38 feature films and 19 shorts. Of the 38 features, three are international premieres, 11 are North American or U.S. premieres and 16 are West Coast premieres. The festival runs April 15 to 22 at the Directors Guild Theater. Opening night will see the North American premiere of the romantic comedy "It Happened in Saint-Tropez," from director and co-writer Daniele Thompson (“Avenue Montaigne”)

"I have a message for my dad," Jane Chaplin said in a shaky voice from the podium of UCLA's Royce Hall Sunday night. "I love you very much and I'm thinking of you. And welcome home." The screening of Charlie Chaplin's film classic, "City Lights," with score performed live by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Carl Davis, was an emotional experience. People exited the theater awed by Chaplin, the ultimate hyphenate: star-writer-director-composer.

He came for the free removal of tattoos. He left with hope. Since then, Marco Munguia -- ex-gang member, drug addict, convict -- has become a volunteer counselor at the facility he says saved him from "life imprisonment or death": the Southern California Counseling Center. "When I went to the center to have my tattoos removed, there was so much pain in me, I felt like a throwaway citizen," the 31-year-old said at the center's May 20 awards dinner at the Beverly Hilton hotel.

Virginia Cherrill Martini, a former wife of Cary Grant whose acting debut came as a blind flower girl in Charlie Chaplin's silent classic "City Lights," has died. She was 88. Martini died late Thursday at a hospital in Santa Barbara. She was in few movies after the 1931 classic and stopped acting after marrying Grant in 1933. She met Grant at the premiere of "Blonde Venus," in which he had the lead. Their two-year marriage ended in divorce. Born on a farm in Carthage, Ill.

All this was before--before Adler Alley had been rechristened Kerouac, before the Condor Club tossed its kitschy sign (complete with stripper Carol Doda's flashing red pasties) and long before anyone, anywhere, would have the temerity to open a "Beat Museum."

Had things gone as originally planned, symphony-goers would have encountered a fount of Russian angst and seminal cinema last week in Thousand Oaks. As it turned out, instead of a performance of Shostakovich's score to Eisenstein's silent film classic "Battleship Potemkin," the New West Symphony substituted the lighter fare of Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights." The upshot: pure joy, and a lesson in the beauties of simplicity and virtuosic rhythm.

Enough nesting! Get off the couch! Turn off the TV and the computer. Grab the kids and head for the city lights. Wherever you live, there's nothing like a winter weekend to explore museums, historic sites, zoos, aquariums, shops and theaters. Here's your chance to do something different with the kids and get a new perspective on a city you may already know well. Maybe they can hone their table manners by having tea in a fancy hotel or expand their taste buds at inexpensive ethnic eateries.

Ah, Paris. The wine, the food, the fashion, the pigs. You may know the first three, but the last? They're part of the  Salon Internationale de l'Agriculture in Paris, the largest agricultural show in France. The show,  which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, will run Feb. 23-March 3 and will play host to more than  680,000 visitors. It's where town and country meet: cows, pigs, goats, sheep, 200 varieties of chickens, horses, dogs, plus a chance to sample food and wine from all over the country.

Stargazers, get psyched: The Leonid meteor shower is expected to peak late Friday night and continue through the weekend. If you can find a clear, dark spot where the starry night sky is visible, you can expect to see as many as 15 to 20 shooting stars per hour.  The Leonid meteor shower takes place each November as the Earth passes through a ring of rocky debris left by the comet Tempel-Tuttle. The number of shooting stars we get to see down here is determined by what part of the comet's orbit we pass through on any given year.

Construction has kicked off on a $63-million apartment and shopping complex near a light-rail station on the edge of downtown Culver City as developers move to capitalize on the new Expo Line. The six-story project is being built by Santa Monica-based apartment landlord NMS Properties. The development at 9901 Washington Blvd. in Los Angeles, across the street from Culver City, will be known as NMS@Culver City. It will house 131 units over restaurants and shops. The complex is across from the Kirk Douglas Theatre and Sony Pictures Plaza office building.

 This view of Tropical Storm Isaac was taken early Tuesday by NASA's Suomi-NPP satellite. Researchers used the satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses light intensification for the amplification of weak signals. Isaac's clouds were illuminated by reflected moonlight. City lights can be seen through some areas of the storm. LATimesScience@gmail.com Twitter/@LATMaugh

Yohance Salimu, an All-City defensive lineman at Crenshaw High, had run out of options. His family had lost its apartment and was living at a homeless shelter far from school. He was taking trains and buses and staying with friends. There was no place to put his clothes, so they were starting to smell. Crenshaw football Coach Robert Garrett decided it was time to intervene. He offered Salimu six lockers at school. The catch: Salimu had to memorize six locker combinations.

The biggest full moon of the year Saturday (tonight) will bring the highest and lowest of tides too. And, according to NASA Science News , dogs may howl and the bright glare of moonbeams may keep you up that night. (If you don't believe me, watch the video above that explains it.) In fact, the "perigree moon," as it's known, occurs at 8:40 p.m. Pacific time when the moon in its orbit comes closest to Earth -- and only super-keen observers will be able to distinguish it from a regular full moon.

City Lights Bookstore occupies a narrow triangle of space in North Beach, wedged between Broadway and Jack Kerouac Alley, across Columbus Avenue from the original site of A.P. Giannini's Bank of Italy. In a very real sense, it stands at the crossroads of this city--just a few hundred feet east of Chinatown's Grant Avenue and catty-corner to the Condor Club, where in 1969 Carol Doda became the first bottomless dancer in the United States.

Like its rumpled poet-owner, the famed City Lights bookstore has always been a bit of an eccentric. Wedged into a cramped corner of Columbus Avenue, the shop founded by renowned Beat Generation poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti has an oddball pie-slice shape, slanted checkered floors and triangular rooms, not to mention slipshod lighting with wiring running every which way. "This is a wonderful old building," says Ferlinghetti, 81. "I love the place.

On a steep slope, above a retaining wall with scrawled warnings ("Stay off, Stay out, Private Property"), Colin Rich begins to unpack black bags full of cameras and gear. The warnings confirm that this is where he wants to be. The secluded Echo Park hillside offers a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles. Over the next three hours, he will take a sequence of nearly 1,000 images, studying the scene and adjusting his camera as the sun falls and the city lights emerge. PHOTOS: Los Angeles, one frame at a time Rich, a cinematographer and time-lapse filmmaker, has spent many nights in the last year photographing the city from out-of-the-way locations such as this.

Whether you're in love or not, you're sure to cry your heart out at the American Cinematheque's Valentine's Day weekend romantic film bonanza, featuring such classics as "City Lights," "His Girl Friday," "Gone With the Wind" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's. " Egyptian and Aero Theaters, Hollywood and Santa Monica. Fri. to Tue. Schedule varies. $11. http://www.americancinemathequecalendar.com