Elaine Katzenberger

A towering pyramid, outlined in neon, opens its doors to allow the entrance of a low-rider car shaped like a red stilletto high heel. Opera singers dressed as Mexican cabaret entertainers hold forth from raised platforms. A film sequence projects on a screen between the pyramid and a wrestling arena. Warriors sport cholo Pendletons and bandannas and race to nowhere on stationary exercise bikes. A dance troupe of blue-skinned Carmen Mirandas is trapped in a bamboo cage.

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."

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."

A towering pyramid, outlined in neon, opens its doors to allow the entrance of a low-rider car shaped like a red stilletto high heel. Opera singers dressed as Mexican cabaret entertainers hold forth from raised platforms. A film sequence projects on a screen between the pyramid and a wrestling arena. Warriors sport cholo Pendletons and bandannas and race to nowhere on stationary exercise bikes. A dance troupe of blue-skinned Carmen Mirandas is trapped in a bamboo cage.

Philip Lamantia, an American Surrealist poet who helped launch poetry's Beat generation in San Francisco, has died. He was 77. Lamantia died March 7 at his home in San Francisco of heart failure, according to Elaine Katzenberger, associate director of City Lights Books, which published several collections of his poetry. When the city emerged as a home to artists and intellectuals in the mid-1940s, Lamantia was a high school student and one of the youngest published poets of his generation.

Fourteen years ago, Long Beach Opera started something with a wild, unpredictable, sassy, shockingly sexual, groundbreakingly postmodern look at Baroque opera. It was Christopher Alden's production of Monteverdi's "Coronation of Poppea," one of the greatest operas ever written, which until then had been presented in its original version in the United States and never anywhere quite like that. Now period-practice "Poppeas" and postmodern Baroque are mainstream.

As the four-day BookExpo America wound down at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Sunday, there was no easy consensus about a "big book" of the event, which alternates each year between New York and a rotating roster of other cities. The mood, many said, was more subdued than usual, given the flat numbers facing the publishing industry. Some said the slumping economy had meant more conservative travel budgets and hence fewer members in each publishing house's delegation. Still, L.A. is always a draw, and the convention's parties were thick with spirited revelers from around the country.

Let's start with the hands, Ry Cooder's hands. They're large, expressive: hands you could see wrapped around a guitar neck, or in the act of making things. They move when he speaks, creating shapes in the air that take form and dissipate, all in the space of a few words. On a Friday afternoon at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Cooder is using those hands to help recount the saga of "El Chavez Ravine," a 1953 Chevy pickup he commissioned to be rebuilt in 2007 in the style of a vintage ice cream truck and covered with an elaborate mural, by the artist Vincent Valdez, depicting the eviction of Mexican American families from the neighborhood that is now home to Dodger Stadium.

Only moments after what looks to be the last of the rain, Kamau Daaood is catching the first bit of sun. It's early yet, so it's pretty much just him and the birds and someone already set to watering their little patch of cement.