More First Person pieces:
*I Was Sick of L.A. Traffic. So I Took a Plane to Work
*I Rode the Entire L.A. Metro in a Single Day
*Why the San Fernando Valley Hate Needs to End Once and For All

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I read a lot of how-to books on making it in this city. Hollywood's multiple versions of How to Win Friends and Influence People could fill the shelves of the Mar Vista Library (which is really small, but still). The books are stuffed with mindless industry platitudes; in my early L.A. days, the one I always tried to follow, often against my better judgment, was "Always say yes."

Which is exactly how I ended up in handcuffs on Hollywood Boulevard. At 11 a.m. On a Tuesday.

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laphil.com/education/yola press photos

Gustavo Dudamel with the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles in October 2012

When her son Jacob was barely a year old, Teresa Esquivel noticed that music powerfully affected his demeanor. Certain tunes would even make him cry. In particular, if Pokémon was on, Jigglypuff's leitmotif would reduce him to wails, even if Jacob hadn't been previously focused on the TV.

Jacob's parents live in South Central L.A. — Teresa works at the DMV, husband Peter at a motorcycle shop. Now that the shop is more established, things are better, but when the family was just starting out, Peter Esquivel says private lessons for his music-obsessed son would have been out of reach.

Until, that is, the family discovered Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles. The organization provides free music instruction to kids in underserved areas of the city, with the motto "Social Change Through Music."

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Illustration by Noah Patrick Pfarr

Parked at the Grove's Farmers Market is a Volkswagen Jetta that costs more than a Lamborghini -- $250,000, to be exact. The Volkswagen is one of only two such cars in Los Angeles at the moment, and one of only 50 in the world. It looks fairly normal except for the pile of high-tech equipment mounted on its roof like a futuristic Eiffel Tower.

Owned by the mapping company Navteq, which is owned by Nokia, the car is called a True Car. Navteq is a pioneer in digital mapping, and its True Car represents the next generation of map building. It drives around the city collecting a terabyte of information every day.

Its driver is Ron Jimenez, Navteq team lead, whose business card describes his work address in latitude and longitude -- 34 degrees 11'9" N, 118 degrees 30'4" W, aka Encino.

On a drizzly weekday, Jimenez and the company's polished director of product development, Sara Rossio, stand in the parking lot with the car, which is on a brief break from cruising every street in town.

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Creative Age Communications/Armando Sanchez

Controversial winner Amy Becker

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week *Top 10 Weirdest Stores in L.A.
*10 Best Vintage and Second-Hand Boutiques in L.A.

At the competition to determine the World's Fastest Set of Acrylic Sculptured Nails, the air is thick with the smell of acetone and ambition. Eight contestants sit at long folding tables, heads bowed as if in prayer. Hosted by the Nailpro Trade Show, the contest is being held at the Pasadena Convention Center on a spring day so lovely and carefree it gives little indication of the tension inside.

Preparation has been intense. Contestant No. 112, Shannon McCown, for instance, sat in front of the TV all night every night for a month doing her 19-year-old daughter's nails, driving her family crazy with nail talk. She now fiddles anxiously with bottles of sanitizing solution and Tammy Taylor conditioning cuticle oil.

Two tables over, as if the pressure weren't bad enough, sits contestant No. 113: Tammy Taylor herself, holder of the unofficial record for fastest set of acrylic nails, author of the beauty school standard The Complete Guide to Manicuring and Advanced Nail Technology, inventor of the flattened brush ferrule and Dazzle Rocks White Twinkling Stars nail powder, and president of Tammy Taylor Nails Inc., "where nails are always fun, and never feel like work." Word is that Taylor has this thing in the bag.

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Joe Stewart

Bats Day: When the goths go Disney

See also: *5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

If you go to Disneyland on Sunday, May 5, and find yourself surrounded by kids of all shades of pale, looking as sinister as the Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, don't be alarmed. It's just Bats Day in the Fun Park, the annual Magic Kingdom gathering of goths and their punk/metal/steampunk brethren, which has been confusing tourists since 1999.

It sounds chuckle-worthy: goths — the mostly black-clad subculture you day-dwellers unfairly characterize as gloomy gusses — at the Happiest Place on Earth. And, OK, watching them spinning in the Tea Cups is a total hoot.

But Bats Day is the one day of the year at the park when combat boots, fishnets and vinyl are as ubiquitous as Mickey Mouse ears, shorts and flip-flops. And goths go to have fun just like everyone else, eagerly taking pictures with Mickey, biting into giant turkey legs and waiting in endless lines for two-minute rides while shielding themselves from the sun. Spooking the "normies" is just an added bonus.

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Gendy Alimurung

The Los Angeles Speed Project runners gather at the Santa Monica pier.

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*A Celebration of Boston, in a Santa Monica Bar

To the young men who bombed the Boston Marathon: You picked the wrong people to fuck with. Or so say the members of the Los Angeles Speed Project runners group.

It's the crack of dawn two days after the April 15 bombing, and they and about a hundred other marathoners are at the Santa Monica Pier stretching and hydrating and jogging in place and otherwise getting ready to do what they do best: run.

"Marathoners are warriors. They don't quit. Their spirits aren't exactly easily broken," Blue Benadum declares. He's team captain of Los Angeles Speed Project, which organized today's impromptu tribute run.

The project comprises six extreme runners — "extreme," of course, being a relative term. To these six athletes, it means both distance and speed. It means running 300 miles through the desert — from Los Angeles to Las Vegas — as fast as you can. It means running and running until every ounce of fat has melted from your body, and then running some more.

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Paul Ulukpo

Customers get into the pile at 2 Dollar Clothing.

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*10 Best Vintage and Second-Hand Boutiques in L.A.
*At This West Hollywood Fashion Library, the Prada Dress You Rent Could Save Your Life

Nothing at the 2 Dollar Clothing store in West Hollywood costs more than $2. Not the new Marc Jacobs or DKNY tops, not the BCBG skirt or the Michael Kors boots, not the Gucci, Miu Miu, Armani or Jimmy Choo — not even the pair of pants a man once found that inexplicably had $800 in the pocket. He tried to return the money, but the owners wouldn't have it. 

"If you buy that for $2, it's yours. Whatever comes in it is yours, too," says Joe, who opened the storefront in October with his siblings Destiny and Alex. He describes himself as the brain behind the store.

Destiny, his younger sister, is the heart, and the one who keeps the store chugging along. "I don't care if you're the homeless guy, you can get the Gucci item," she says.

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Wikimedia Commons

Wanna get rid of that breakup letter? Give it to Colin Dickey -- he'll take it to the Arctic.

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*Five Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
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When writer Colin Dickey goes to the Arctic this summer, he will be bringing two pairs of long underwear, insulated boots and a whole lot of misery. The misery is not his own — he has been dying to go to the Arctic for as long as he can remember — but that of others.

"The idea is if you have things you want to get rid of — break-up letters, crappy news, a terrible health diagnosis — I will take them up to the North Pole and read them out loud to the frozen, terrifying wasteland, banishing them forever," Dickey says.

Dickey, 35, is participating in a residency called the Arctic Circle, which takes 12 scientists and artists up to the Svalbard Peninsula, a small cluster of islands 10 degrees shy of the North Pole. In exchange for help with banishment, people are giving Dickey money to fund his trip.

A week after launching his Kickstarter campaign, he is sitting in a nice, warm café in sunny Los Feliz thinking cold thoughts. Not only will he banish things into the snow, he will preserve them. "It's the opposite," he says, "but practically speaking it's the same thing." He will read a piece of good news, a love letter or anything else you'd like "locked away in a frozen time capsule."

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Nanette Gonzales

Lisa Adams and her eclipse at CB1

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*Is This 500-Year-Old African Sculpture Worth $1 Million?

For three days last summer, as the August heat rose across Los Angeles, Lisa Adams saw nothing in her right eye but black. What she felt was pain: her swollen forehead, pressed down on the edge of the desk in front of her, her bones sore from the weight of her head — her neck and back muscles wrecked from the weird position.

But even as she grew more disoriented from sleep deprivation, she would not forget what her doctor had told her: "Keep your head down," he had said, "parallel to the ground." And so she'd do it, even as she'd trudge to the bathroom, wading through Vicodin.

Eating meant a plate was put on a box below her, at the height of her knees, and she would lower a fork to it, then bring it up, concentrating more on not moving her head than on the taste. The food was tangential — a way of keeping her eye alive.

It was her eyes that had always kept her alive. Lisa Adams is a painter.

The pain was at its worst in her right one. The one that had been cut open for surgery. The one in which a surgeon had reattached her retina. What had happened was this: It had torn in the months after a simple cataract surgery and detached from the base of her eye.

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Warner Bros. Entertainment

William Friedkin directed The Exorcist, pictured, and The French Connection before a staggering fall from grace — detailed in his new memoir.

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*More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

Hollywood heavy hitters normally wait until they're out of the film game to write their memoirs. That way they can settle scores and write the first draft of their cinematic history without severing relationships they still need.

Not William Friedkin. Still going strong at 77, the director is releasing his tell-it-like-it-was memoir, The Friedkin Connection, in the middle of a late-career renaissance. Horror-thriller Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011) garnered some of the best reviews of his 50-year career. Killer Joe, a critical darling slapped with an NC-17 rating, would have done even better at the box office had Friedkin given in to the rating board's demands that he trim some of the Southern-fried depravity surrounding Matthew McConaughey's police detective with a side career as a contract killer.

Friedkin's against-all-odds success story is compelling reading from the start. He was raised in the white slums of Chicago by Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine; his mother was a saint who kept him away from the neighborhood toughs; his father a semi-pro baseball player turned clothing salesman. Inspired by Citizen Kane to become a director but with no money for college, Friedkin started working in the mailroom of TV station WGN. Within a couple of years he was directing live TV, and soon his documentary about a convicted murderer, The People vs. Paul Crump, won several awards and contributed to the commutation of Crump's death sentence.

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