Lotus

Simplify, then add lightness was the well-worn philosophy that Lotus' founder, the late Colin Chapman, imbued into all of his products. For 2013, it would seem the company is simplifying, then adding an automatic transmission. The company announced that it will be adding an automatic transmission to the options list on the 2013 Evora S, a sublime hunk of metal powered by a 345-horsepower, supercharged Toyota motor. Review: Lotus Evora S Because automatic transmission likely sounds too blase for a sports car company like Lotus, it calls this transmission Intelligent Precision Shift (IPS)

All dressed up with cool places to go, the pretty young things of "Lotus Eaters" are very rich and extravagantly bored. Alexandra McGuinness' first feature isn't quite as aimless as the millennial jet-setters it portrays, but it's at least as good-looking and stylish. And even though the handsome black-and-white lensing is no substitute for a compelling story, it helps, infusing the skin-deep sketches of emotional enervation with aesthetic energy - for a while. The movie's London clique partake of the usual sex, drugs and clubbing, the bathtubs full of bubbly, and, of course, accouter their pet lemurs with jeweled collars.

Christina Aguilera is finally ready to jump back into making music. After months of unconfirmed rumors, the singer announced her comeback record, “Lotus,” will hit stores Nov. 13. Aguilera, who is turning heads (and her chair) on NBC's singing competition “The Voice,” will premiere the album's lead single “Your Body” on Friday. The track, which was written and produced by hit-makers Max Martin and Shellback and co-written by Savan Kotecha, will hit digital retailers Sept.

I'm such a fan of British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop's two earlier cookbooks, " Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking " and " Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province ," that I couldn't wait for her latest to be published in this country. I bought my copy of “ Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking ,”  from Britain. Now it's out in this country and nobody has to wait to start cooking clams in black bean sauce, blanched choy sum with sizzling oil, cold chicken with a spicy Sichuanese sauce or slow-cooked ribs with red fermented tofu.

Los Angeles beat producer Flying Lotus has been building up to the release of his new album, "Until the Quiet Comes," for the last few months. The follow-up to his acclaimed "Cosmogramma" arrives  Oct. 2, and on Thursday morning, he debuted a short film as a teaser, featuring as its soundtrack snippets of three new songs. Directed by Kahlil Joseph, the exquisitely rendered, visually striking -- and at times horrifyingly real -- short takes place in an empty Nickerson Gardens swimming pool during a daytime tragedy, and during another shooting on a red-skied summer night, and features images that stab at the heart of Los Angeles.

The Grande 4-Plex's "Documentary Days," composed of three films each screening one week, begins today with Laurel Chiten's beautiful and moving "The Jew in the Lotus." The film takes its title from a book written by Rodger Kamenetz on the spiritual rebirth he experienced when he accompanied a group of rabbis for a historical meeting with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. When Dr. Marc Lieberman, a Buddhist convert, organized the meeting, he invited Kamenetz to come along.

I'VE been publisher of the Fairfield (Iowa) Daily Ledger for more than 15 years. I've seen dozens of reporters from metro dailies and national television try to tell the story about "small town Iowa meets Maharishi TM." Carina Chocano nailed it ["A Lotus Amid the Iowa Corn," Sept. 10]. Unraveling the Fairfield and Maharishi Vedic City story is hard enough for people who live here, let alone a reporter visiting for a few days. You got it. Congratulations. JEFF WILSON Fairfield, Iowa Send letters to Travel, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., CA 90012; travel@latimes.

Lotus 1-2-3 has been surpassed. A new spreadsheet program, called Surpass, does everything the leading spreadsheet does, plus a lot more. Surpass is one of several programs designed to compete with 1-2-3, which has dominated the spreadsheet market since it was introduced in 1983. A spreadsheet program allows you to enter words, numbers and formulas on a grid of rows and columns. If any number is changed, all formulas that depend on that number are automatically recalculated.

Lotus Development Corp. said its second buyback program would repurchase about 10% of the company's outstanding common stock. Last month Lotus completed a previous share repurchase plan begun in February, in which the company bought 1.65 million shares. The computer software and information services company said it would partly finance the stock repurchase through a $30-million debt offering.

If purchased directly from the manufacturer , the new Moog Sub Phatty will set you back $1,099. But synth nuts curious about the keyboard maker's new model can get a sense of its sound for free, thanks to a composition Moog commissioned from L.A. beat whiz Flying Lotus. Titled "Such a Square," the 90-second track (and an accompanying video by Flying Lotus collaborator Adam Fuchs) was posted Monday on YouTube, and not surprisingly it's a dizzying electro-jazz excursion that shows off the fuzz-toned capabilities of what Moog calls its "grittiest" synth ever.

Austin Peralta, the 22-year-old jazz piano prodigy, composer and son of professional skater Stacy Peralta, has died. Flying Lotus, the beat producer and labelhead who released Peralta's music, confirmed the news Thursday morning via Twitter, writing: "it kills me to type that we lost a member of our family, Austin Peralta. I don't really have the right words right now. " Peralta's cause of death has not been announced.  Peralta's recent output has ranged from collaborations on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder Records imprint, including the pianist's 2011 album "Endless Planets," and session work for artists including Erykah Badu and the Cinematic Orchestra.

When Christina Aguilera declares at the top of her new album, "There's a thousand faces of me," she's exaggerating, but not by much. How many Aguileras have we seen since the onetime "Mickey Mouse Club" member rocketed to superstardom in 1999 with "Genie in a Bottle"? She's been the good girl, the bad girl, the Lady Marmalade; she's gone blond and brunet and purple-and-pink; she's worn long pants, hot pants and no pants at all. And her music has metamorphosed with her, from the tinny teen-pop entreaties of her self-titled debut to the lusty thump of 2002's "Stripped" to 2006's "Back to Basics," a lavish double-disc tribute to old-school jazz, soul and funk.

MUSIC As a roiling tide of diverse electronic music sweeps the U.S. - especially the madcap "beat music" that Flying Lotus and the Low End Theory club night in Lincoln Heights helped popularize - Steven Ellison's new album as FlyLo, "Until the Quiet Comes," is an attempt to reclaim his own focus. The album, Ellison's fourth full-length, comes two years after 2010's "Cosmogramma" and a sea change in the American electronica scene. "Cosmogramma" was indebted to the astral free-jazz legacy of his family (his aunt is Alice Coltrane and his cousin is saxophonist Ravi Coltrane)

Simplify, then add lightness was the well-worn philosophy that Lotus' founder, the late Colin Chapman, imbued into all of his products. For 2013, it would seem the company is simplifying, then adding an automatic transmission. The company announced that it will be adding an automatic transmission to the options list on the 2013 Evora S, a sublime hunk of metal powered by a 345-horsepower, supercharged Toyota motor. Review: Lotus Evora S Because automatic transmission likely sounds too blase for a sports car company like Lotus, it calls this transmission Intelligent Precision Shift (IPS)

About an hour before Steven Ellison's debut performance at the Hollywood Bowl as Flying Lotus last month, he got news that made his blood run cold. The elaborate audio-visual rig he'd prepared for his set was screwing up. He'd planned to debut an immersive array of projections on a mesh screen in front of him while he performed his ethereal and beat-chopped electronica. Thousands upon thousands of fans were outside waiting for him. But minutes before his set, they just couldn't make the thing work.

Home A Novel Toni Morrison Alfred A. Knopf: 148 pp., $24 I've long admired Toni Morrison as a moral visionary, but her fiction, not so much. Of her nine novels, three - "Song of Solomon" (1977), "Beloved" (1987) and 2008's "A Mercy" - are masterpieces, yet the others, particularly the post-Nobel books "Paradise" (1997) and "Love" (2003) can be so stylized as to veer dangerously close to self-parody. Anyone who's read her in any depth may understand what I'm referring to: those stentorian rhythms, the biblical cadences, the characters who function more as archetypes than flesh-and-blood.

The gig: Gross, 53, is chief executive of Pasadena's Idealab, a business incubator that has spawned close to 100 companies since Gross founded it in 1996. Idealab companies span a range of industries, including renewable-energy firms like ESolar and Energy Cache, and well-known online services such as photo site Picasa, which was acquired by Google Inc. in 2004, and CitySearch, which merged with TicketMaster Online in 1998. Idealab is now developing nine separate companies at its headquarters on Union Street.

In 2009, Josh Dibb, who performs in the experimental noise-pop band Animal Collective as Deakin, set up a Kickstarter campaign to fund a trip to Mali. He'd been invited to perform at the famous Festival au Désert and wanted to simultaneously work with Malian anti-human-trafficking groups. He promised fans photos, field recordings or a book if they donated, and he raised more than $25,000. If one looks at the top comments on his Kickstarter campaign site today, however, it's full of fans complaining that they have never received anything for their money.

Stormdancer The Lotus War Book One Jay Kristoff St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne: 336 pp., $24.99 With its geisha girls in gas masks and canvas blimps spewing black exhaust as they chug across the sky, "Stormdancer" paints a vivid picture of a decrepit, steampunk Japan. It's startling to witness a country that so reveres nature presented in such an environmentally compromised position, as it is in the kickoff to Jay Kristoff's "The Lotus War" series. But it's this inventive juxtaposition that makes "Stormdancer" such a thrilling addition to the increasingly tired yet continuously expanding dystopian scene.