Los Angeles Culture

The Playboy Mansion party hounds are hopping with anticipation. An ex-prostitute turned onetime Libertarian Party hopeful is urging call girls to "minimize their risks" when scoping out the action around Staples Center because "an election year is a very hot year." The L.A.-based Advocate, the nation's oldest gay- and lesbian-oriented newsmagazine, is busily interviewing out-and-proud convention delegates.

Two years ago this month, Melody Kulp plucked a million-dollar idea from the garden and put it in the tresses of two young girls. Kulp was playfully putting flowers in the hair of her boyfriend's 7- and 9-year-old cousins. They, in turn, tried wearing Kulp's decorated barrettes. Like a revised Goldilocks tale, the thin-haired girl called the barrettes too heavy; the thick-haired one said it was too flimsy. Kulp went to the craft store to make a hair decoration that was just right.

Many years ago, when I was 12, my grandmother let me drive her 1970 Buick Le Sabre. The way Nana figured it, somebody had to chauffeur her the seven miles between home and the Shirley Ann School of Beauty in Lebanon, Tenn., for her weekly wash-'n'-set. Might as well be me; I could touch the pedals and see over the wheel. Thanks to this early and illegal driver's education course, I've always felt comfortable driving.

Katherine Betts came to town this week to celebrate not just her first year at the helm of the country's oldest fashion magazine, Harper's Bazaar, but also the very thing that used to get L.A. dissed by anyone east of Doheny: its style. Bazaar came to celebrate what Betts sees as the essence of L.A.--sizzling fashion, Hollywood power brokers, glorious homes and the hot young stars that seem to pop up in every convertible cruising Pacific Coast Highway.

LAST YEAR, I FACED A CRISIS IN NATIONAL identity. My one-bedroom apartment was just not getting cleaned often or thoroughly enough by its sole resident and was becoming an embarrassment. Meanwhile, an enterprising Guatemalan woman recommended by a friend was willing to take on the task (plus my usual basket of laundry) once every two weeks for $45.

Saturday nights were party nights at Maverick's Flat, and when the Ike and Tina Turner Revue got in the groove and Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen kicked back in the shadows, there was no other place to be on a hot Los Angeles night. It was the late 1960s, and the Crenshaw-area club epitomized the hip, sophisticated camaraderie that blossomed during the civil rights era.

This Catholic church in the middle of Watts has stood strong through times of civil revolt and decades of demographic tumult. It survived unscathed when most everything around it burned during the riots of 1965 and then 1992. It has undergone profound demographic shifts: nearly all white through the 1920s, nearly all black in 1950s and '60s. Mostly Latino in 2000. The people of St. Lawrence of Brindisi have long represented the faces, struggles and celebrations of the people of Los Angeles.

The highly regarded Southern California Institute of Architecture will move its campus to downtown Los Angeles in a major boost for civic efforts to revive the central city with new cultural and educational institutions. SCI-Arc, as the school is known, will bring its more than 500 students and staff to a $60-million commercial and residential development planned for the artists' loft district.

You might call it a monument to California's spirit of reinvention--a building with nearly as many lives as a cat and more connections to Los Angeles' civic culture than most politicians. In its 75-year history, downtown's Subway Terminal Building has housed the city's first underground transit terminal, doubled as a World War II bomb shelter, provided hospital care to veterans, and acted as the local office of the Department of Social Security.