Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

Phil Pavel's parents begged him not to go to Northwestern University. They feared that, as the son of a gas-meter reader from Chicago's working-class South Side, he'd be uncomfortable surrounded by rich kids.

The irony is not lost on Pavel. As general manager of the famed Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard, for the last 16 years he's done nothing but cater to the rich and reckless.

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Photo by Lenika Cruz

Arcana Books settling into its new space at Helms Bakery

If you're one of those shoppers who struts into bookstores, clutching a latte in one hand and wrangling a book off the shelf with the other, Lee Kaplan thinks you should be a little ashamed of yourself. Lee and his wife, Whitney, own Arcana Books on the Arts, one of the best bookstores around for new and used books on contemporary visual arts. Not only is that latte a threat to the merchandise in a commercial sense, but it's also a nasty slur against the bound and printed page.

"We're not big fans of liquid in our store," says Lee. Embarrassed, I recall that I walked in for our interview with a big, dumb, styrofoam cup of coffee. "A majority of people would walk in with their bag from Barnes & Noble and their cup of coffee. We'd say" -- his voice becomes light and decorous -- "'Can we please check those at the counter for you?' And they'd assume we were accusing them of stealing, turn on their heels and walk out." Lee swivels his eyes as if to say, I don't get it. "But most people would peek their head in and think we were too weird."

Thanks to a series of fortuitous events, Arcana has happily ditched the Barnes & Noble foot traffic runoff and its longtime home on Third Street Promenade -- where it had been since 1989 -- for newer, much nicer digs at the Helms Bakery building in Culver City. A soft opening is set for Tuesday, and customers will be able to look around and make purchases, but there is still much work left to be done for Lee, Whitney and their seven employees.

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Illustration by PJ McQuade

Why all the hate for the 818?

Midafternoon at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Santa Monica's Main Street, an impromptu conversation sparks between two strangers just feet from me -- he a cheerful, swarthy, well-fed, balding accountant originally from New York City, she a pretty, willowy, 20-something brunette, just arrived from the Boston area and looking for housing.

She mentions parts inland and his face flickers with mild concern. "There are some areas that are OK, I guess," he says. "But I live right around here. And this is par-a-dise."

He savors the word like it's a white truffle.

She assents with a smile, then asks about the area around Sherman Oaks: "What's that like?"

His head tremors from side to side. "Oh my Gaaaawwwdddd. No! I never even go north of Mulholland. Never!"

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Courtesy Francisco Castro/HOY Newspaper

Dr. Hayes-Bautista in the new exhibition for his book on Cinco de Mayo's origins

When Dr. David E. Hayes-Bautista says the phrase "Drinko de Mayo," he is far from bitter. He doesn't rant about how Cinco de Mayo has been subjected to brutal commercialization and stripped of its authenticity. It is, after all, difficult to really critique the Mexican beer companies for divesting the holiday of its "true meaning" when most Chicanos themselves, let alone Californians (or the rest of the U.S.), aren't sure why they celebrate it in the first place.

Before he wrote his new book El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition to, in his words, "straighten out the history," Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine at UCLA and director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture, went most of his life not fully understanding the holiday.

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Photos by Wendy Cheng; Cover design by Nicole Hayward

Let the tour buses take the throngs to visit Marilyn Monroe's handprints at Grauman's Chinese Theater or to press their noses up to the windows on Rodeo Drive and wander Beverly Hills like they're Julia Roberts. Despite what the entertainment industry would have you believe, the city of Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods have a much richer, often conflicted history than just those landmarks -- and A People's Guide to Los Angeles, just released by UC Press, would like to make sure you don't forget it.

Researched for more than 15 years by Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng -- three Southern California natives and academics with backgrounds in ethnic studies or sociology -- and cultivated from published and personal accounts of Los Angeles' long-standing political, social and racial power struggles, the travel guide was released this month and includes 115 sites of interest for the progressive-minded explorer.

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Patrick Connor

Jennifer Moon, Prison Relic #2: Typewriter, 2012.

This week's list includes a show about incarceration, Lena Dunham's dad and art for gamers.

5. Behind bars
Artist Jennifer Moon was incarcerated for nine months, though nothing in her current exhibition at Commonwealth and Council tells us why -- except to say she was "a common criminal," not a "political" one. The show does tell us that Moon obsessively picked loose hairs out of her cell bedsheets each morning, dabbled in tobacco smuggling and had a prison romance. Spare photographs of objects she possessed or acquired behind bars hang above little cardboard shelves. There's a book called Where I Learned of Love resting on each, and if you read the bookmarked paragraphs -- which doesn't take long at all -- you'll piece together how Moon learned to assert herself, let herself go and love what she had all at once. 3006 W. Seventh St.; through May 5. (213) 703-9077; commonwealthandcouncil.com.

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Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume 5

The Southern California vocabulary, as endearing or maddening as it can be, doesn't exactly have a reputation for erudition. And we're totally chill about that.

The Dictionary of American Regional English, which you may have heard of recently, is an ambitious lexicographical project that recently reached the end of the alphabet and released its fifth and final volume: a diligently researched, 1,200-page compendium of American words -- from slab to zydeco -- traced through history and from region to region.

As I navigated the book's heft, I noticed that most of the words with California origins referred to either flora (like "tule," or a kind of cattail plant) or fauna (like "splatter-ass," a kind of duck). After much thumbing I managed to find six (legit) phrases that Californians can call their own.

Who knows? Maybe we can get them circulating again.

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Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

Elad Lassry, Man (Ice), 2012

Future and past feel like they're on a collision course this week -- especially in William Leavitt's deceptively mundane drawings of suburbia gone awry and Dennis Hoekstra's and Noah Olmsted's ghostly, garish re-envisioning of the Pacific Design Center.

5. Modern-day mythmaker
Charles Garabedian didn't get the memo, or maybe he just tossed it out. While his peers veered further toward pared-down abstractions (Robert Irwin started making white acrylic discs) and hard-to-grasp conceptualism (Doug Huebler exhibited typewritten "explanations" of black-and-white snapshots), Garabedian dug deeper into mythic narrative: He painted biblical characters topless on TV screens or floodwaters sweeping through Culver City. Work from 1966-76, the first decade of the 89-year-old artist's still-going L.A. career, currently hangs at L.A. Louver, on the second floor. 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice; through May 12. (310) 822-4955, lalouver.com.

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The Box L.A.

Leigh Ledare's Double Bind (2010)

Pacific Standard Time, that half-year, regionwide paean to L.A.'s art history, officially ends on March 31. A show of vintage photographs and one last performance event send it off. Everything else on this week's list is forward-looking.

5. Rebel with a camera
When MOCA staged its big Dennis Hopper retrospective in 2010, it showed glossy, blown-up versions of Hopper's The Fort Worth 400. The exhibit included none of the vintage, 6-by-9-inch 1960s prints of hippies, artists, the Kennedys, Warhol and roadways. Small, scuffed, yellowed and animated by time, these prints by the guy who seemed to be everywhere and know everyone are at Craig Krull Gallery as part of Pacific Standard Time. 2525 Michigan Ave., #B-3, Santa Monica; through April 17. (310) 828-6410, craigkrullgallery.com.

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Courtesy Young Art

David Nemeroff and Cara Benedetto's work False Start

This week's list offers artists making rules, breaking rules or trying to figure out what the rules even are. It also includes a walking tour.

5. War against the photograph
Around 2004, painter David Hockney, famous for slick, smart renderings of SoCal swimming pools and uncomfortably posed socialites, regressed. He began taking easel and paints out into the Yorkshire woods, marrying impressionism with plein air. He did this because he'd become convinced painters as far back as the Renaissance had used mirrors and lenses to aid their work. Since the 1400s, he figured, no one has just looked without the help of equipment. Bruno Wollheim's film David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, which screens at LACMA this week, follows Hockney as he tries to escape the influence of the camera. 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; Mon., March 19, 7 p.m.; $10, $7 for museum members. (323) 857-6010, lacma.org.

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