L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain, and L.A. Confidential, by James Ellroy, both concern themselves with conspiracies. And both were turned into movies that arguably surpass the books -- no small feat, that. But that's where the similarities end.

In fact, these books could hardly be more different and still both fall under the category of noir.

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The Naked City (1948)

See also:
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament
*More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage

This month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's film series "The Naked City: New York Noir and Neorealism" is highlighting the infusion of street photography and documentary edge into (mostly) crime films and melodramas.

On the one hand, it's a chance to see Hollywood's take on the postwar New York milieu that the young photojournalist Stanley Kubrick (whose exhibit continues at LACMA) documented along with key artists such as Weegee; on the other, it's a chance for Angelenos to revisit outstanding films noir and discover rarely screened masterworks.

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L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading check out:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

Bob Jones, the shipyard worker at the center of Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go, has a mind that runs a million miles a minute. It goes so fast and veers off on so many detours that it takes the first 68 pages of If He Hollers... to get through one day of his life, and you still feel you're barely keeping up.

With Lucia, the tough, strategic gangster's girlfriend who drives Yxta Maya Murray's novel Locas, it's the opposite. She's taught herself to have razor sharp focus and not dwell on what she can't control. You're not sure if it will save or destroy her, but you always know what she's after.

Himes, whose grandfather had been a slave and who moved to L.A. from Cleveland, like his title character, only to find racism in this city stuck to him like a "disease I couldn't shake," published If He Hollers Let Him Go in 1945. Murray published Locas just over fifty years later, in 1997. The two books face off in the Rebels and Outcasts category of our tournament and, given that five-decade gap between them, it's unsettling that they have the similarities they do.

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L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

(Cue Europe's "The Final Countdown".)

Today on Friday Night Lit-Fights we have a hypothetical battle between two titans as their rookie selves. This truly is a battle of the fiercest '80s neo-noir featherweights -- in one corner, weighing in at 215 pages, we have a classically trained neophyte with the pugilistic noir chops of yesteryear -- Devil in a Blue Dress. In the other corner, we have another first-timer, the flamboyant, self-winking, 201-paged The Monkey's Raincoat drawing a different kind of breath from throwback noir.

The competitors are both lean, smooth-moving, and hungry for victory. One will emerge victorious, the other will sleep alone in a pile of vicodin and shame.

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Tanja M. Laden

Fraggle Rock

When she was 12 years old, Beth Barrial had a life-changing experience in a park after dark with some friends.

"A scent passed me by that sparked a strange, unfocused memory from early childhood," she describes. "I had a sudden recollection of one perfect moment of joy and complete freedom, unfettered by worry, responsibility or care, and it was truly a moment of contact with the sublime."

Not unlike in Marcel Proust's famously extended account of eating a madeleine and drinking some tea in his early-20th century work Remembrances of Things Past, Barrial realized that the scent is what triggered her memory, so she immediately became enamored with the sense itself: "I pursued my interests in fragrance the old-fashioned way -- through apprenticeship. I had no intentions of turning my interest in perfumery into a career. It was something I loved, and something I wanted to learn and experience for the sake of that love."

But she has turned it into a career. Together with her brother Brian Constantine, Barrial started Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab in 2000 in the back room of her then-boyfriend Ted's Echo Park apartment. That boyfriend is now her husband, who's since launched Black Phoenix Trading Post, which deals in dry goods, beauty products and other stuff related to the fragrance line. Together, the trio still runs a family-owned business that specializes in making one-of-a-kind products inspired by specific memories, pop-culture icons and a wide variety of other unusual sources.

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Joel Engel reads from his book L.A. '56: A Devil in the City of Angels at Book Soup.

When you investigate the life of a rapist based on a decades-old case file, you don't expect to be confronted by the rapist's family member. Yet that is exactly what happened April 11, when author Joel Engel read from his new book, L.A. '56: A Devil in the City of Angels, at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip.

The book tells the story of Willie Roscoe Fields, a serial rapist who terrorized countless women in the summer of 1956. A middle-aged woman in the third row asks Engel how he came up with the book's subtitle. "Did you really think he was a 'devil'?" she says. The question hangs over the room for a moment.

Engel knows that the woman asking the question is the rapist's daughter. He looks uncomfortable. His editors in New York suggested the subtitle, he says. "The 'devil' refers to the crimes and not the criminal," he adds.

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Courtesy of the artist

Daido Moriyama's photograph Untitled (2011)

This week, artist and sunglasses designer Alex Israel debuts the talk show he shot in the Pacific Design Center, trombonists perform in a downtown art space, and fringe physicists reinvent gravity.

5. They're a collective, not a choir
The trombone is purportedly the brass instrument with a range closest to the human voice -- it's like a Southern preacher, only "with greater amplitude," said poet James Weldon Johnson. It's also one of the oldest instruments. "Trombone choirs" are old things, too, with centuries' worth of arrangements made just for them. But because the Los Angeles Trombone Collective is expressly not a choir, it avoids all of this. Its members favor retooled trombone solos or music not meant for trombone at all. This weekend, at alt-art space the Wulf, the collective will interpret John Cage and debut new live trombone electronica. 1026 S. Sante Fe Ave., #203, dwntwn.; Sat., May 19, 7:30 p.m. (213) 488-1182, thewulf.org.

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Clint Carney stands in front of his latest collection.

Los Angeles artist Clint Carney has spread himself pretty thin over the years but somehow continues to create elaborate and rich final products, securing a place as one of the leading artists in a quickly growing world of dark art. Though painting was his first artistic endeavor he has since picked up many others and continues to tattoo while maintaining the role of singer/songwriter in the bands System Syn and Fake as well as playing keyboards in Imperative Reaction and God Module.

On Saturday the Congregation Gallery hosted an enormous art opening in Hollywood for Clint Carney's "A Warring Tribe." According to Carney, the collection illustrates the many horrors that man inflicts on one and other out of the misguided belief that we are not all "of the same tribe" and the problems in letting dogma decide for us what is right and wrong.

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James Ellroy's LA: City of Demons features the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction staking out L.A. as his own, creating a road map of his own psyche by way of the crimes that have been committed in the city during the second half of the twentieth century -- some well-documented, others not as infamous.

Just out on DVD, the series only lasted six episodes earlier this year on Investigation Discovery. The show's short run is regrettable. Ellroy tells these tales in his own inimitable manner, declaiming each word as if it were a lightning strike. Through his voice, we feel the weight of the crimes themselves and the impact upon those left to grieve.

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