Trutanich mailer

Gov. Jerry Brown has weighed in on the race for L.A. city attorney, recording a robocall attacking incumbent Carmen Trutanich for "misleading voters" on the issue of prison realignment.

Trutanich supported Brown's realignment plan when he ran for district attorney last year. But now that he's running for re-election as city attorney, Trutanich has turned against realignment and is attacking opponent Mike Feuer for supporting it.

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David Blumenkrantz

Clayton Kershaw is as close to deity as anyone in baseball, and he's getting closer with each passing five-day period. He's a god, let's face it. The man walks on dirt.

And I am his groupie. In fact, I've worked it out with The Main Squeeze and it's decided. We're naming our first-born male child Clayton. Actually, we're naming our first born child Clayton, male or female.

Kershaw spun a game for the regular-season ages Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium (which, if played in October we'd be talking about for generations), pitching 8 2/3 innings of shutout ball, scattering five singles, allowing but one free pass while striking out 11. Kenley Jansen came on to blow away Tyler Moore for the save, the Dodgers had their 2-0 victory, and Kershaw will get an extra day of rest after making 132 pitches to get to within one out of a complete game.

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A / LA Weekly Flickr pool

No big surprise here.

As we bid adieu to our May heat wave, new research has "discovered" that minorities tend to live in hotter communities throughout the nation. Why is this no big surprise to us?

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Ruthanne Reid / Flickr

In the annals of bizarre and desperate attempts to videotape women in the most private of moments, this one is a winner.

A man dressed as a woman went into a Macy's restroom with a camera concealed in a paper bag and got to taping, L.A. County Sheriff's Department officials said last night:

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You wish: A Neutra house in Silver Lake via Neil Fitzpatrick / LA Weekly Flickr pool.

Competition for apartments and rental homes in this town is fierce. At least according to the online rental marketplace Lovely, which crunched the numbers for L.A. recently.

It found that a mix of upscale and hipster neighborhoods made up Los Angeles' most-competitive areas for people seeking to rent. The site used the metric of number of days on the market to come up with the five hottest rental communities in L.A:

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drdre.com

See also: Dr. Dre speaks to LA Weekly about the contribution.

Must be nice to have so much cash that you can pair up with a buddy and donate $70 million to a private, rich kids' school like USC.

Of course, the headphone-endorsement business has been good to Dr. Dre, a.k.a. Andre Young. The same endeavor has been good to Jimmy Iovine, not to mention American Idol and Interscope Records. And the cash the two are ponying up is for a good cause:

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PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALEZ

By Nanette Gonzalez and Sarah Fenske

In just two short months, Charles and David Koch's dreams of purchasing the L.A. Times have gone from a well-sourced rumor, first reported on this blog, to the catalyst for outraged essays in newspapers across the country to a protest song by none less than Ry Cooder. Even in this warp-speed age, that's an impressively speedy arc.

Yesterday a labor-organized rally drew a large group of protestors, including Cooder, to the downtown L.A. offices of Oaktree Capital Management. That investment firm owns the largest share of the Tribune Co., which includes the Times and is now for sale. The protestors hope to pressure Oaktree not to sell the paper to the billionaire Kochs -- part of a multi-prong effort by progressives that also includes petitions and threats from local politicians both in Sacramento and L.A..

See more photos from the protest by Nanette Gonzalez

Protestors wore paper Koch face masks and signs that read, "No Koch Hate In L.A." and "Koch + LA Times = Cancelled Subscription" while music blasted loud enough to be heard blocks away, including such standards of the rally genre as "Respect" by Aretha Franklin and "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

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Scott Ochoa had never met Brian D'Arcy, the head of the powerful electrical workers' union, when D'Arcy called him up in a rage last year. Ochoa, the Glendale city manager, was trying to work out an agreement on behalf of Glendale Water & Power, the city utility. D'Arcy didn't like how the negotiations were going.
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Kevin Scanlon

Omar Gonzalez

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Jan. 7, 2012: Los Angeles Galaxy defender Omar Gonzalez was in an airport bathroom in Belek, Turkey, injecting himself with a blood thinner. He'd arrived in Belek two days before to train with German club FC Nuremberg, which was interested in signing him. But in his first training session, he tore his ACL. Now he was going back to Los Angeles.

"It teaches you a lesson," Gonzalez says of his injury. "Things can change so fast."

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Kevin Scanlon

Eve Irvine

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Police Chief Eve Irvine stops her stroll down Manhattan Beach Boulevard and points to the scene of the notorious crime. "Right there," Irvine says. "That's where I saw her lying in the middle of the street in her own vomit."

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Kevin Scanlon

Simon R. Lewis

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Simon R. Lewis would like to expand your consciousness, which might seem odd coming from the man who co-produced the silly but successful movies You Can't Hurry Love and Look Who's Talking.

But Lewis, 55, barely survived a horrific 1994 car crash that killed his passenger, his wife of five months. Now he's serious about helping others find what he calls "the hidden path."

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Kevin Scanlon

John O. Dabiri

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

John O. Dabiri, 32, is the impossibly young chair of faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where he studies jellyfish propulsion and fish schooling behavior — just the thing to spark "some U.S. senator to joke about 'studying how jellyfish move!' " Handsome and quick to laugh, the professor of aeronautics and bioengineering explains, "Look, I do understand the idea of saving taxpayers money" — his research could end up saving piles of it. But his true aim is to address greater challenges like climate change and disease.

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Kevin Scanlon

Janice Min

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

You can divide the timeline of L.A.'s venerable industry rag The Hollywood Reporter into two distinct epochs: pre– and post–Janice Min. The Reporter pre-Min was a dry, highly specialized daily that was being read by fewer and fewer people. In the 2½ post-Min years, it has evolved into a slick, glossy, thoroughly modern magazine-style weekly. "The only thing we kept was the name," Min says.

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Kevin Scanlon

Armando Gonzalez

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

In Latino neighborhoods in the early 1980s, skateboarders were rare. The ones who were around were mocked as whitewashed wannabes.

After all, skateboarding was born when beach kids in postwar Southern California found a way to keep the wave-riding vibe alive by sidewalk-surfing, using roller-skate wheels attached to slabs of wood. But if surfing required access to the Pacific Ocean, tennis was a country club privilege and golf was the sport of kings, skating threw up few socioeconomic barriers. The streets almost begged to be ridden.

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Kevin Scanlon

Ana Martinez

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

In other cities, vice president of the Chamber of Commerce would not be considered a flashy gig. But in Hollywood, it's a dramatically different story and one unique to Los Angeles. Ana Martinez, vice president of media relations for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, produces one of Tinseltown's most enduring traditions: the Walk of Fame ceremony.

A committee selects the honorees, and Martinez decides where each of the iconic black-and-coral, colored terrazzo–and-brass stars will go. In her 25 years with the chamber, she has organized more than 600 sidewalk ceremonies — which now have so many fans they're streamed live.

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Kevin Scanlon

Rob Weiss

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

On a stone patio outside the main house of the world-renowned Promises addiction treatment center in Malibu, therapist Robert Weiss takes a few bites of Mexican food, a slight breeze ruffling the napkin on his lap, and considers the journey that has made him a leading international expert in the field of sex-addiction recovery. A recovering sex addict himself, Weiss, an affable, self-deprecating 52-year-old, has been in a domestic partnership with the same man for more than 12 years.

"I got away from home as soon as I could because my mother was mentally ill," Weiss says. As a teenager in the late 1970s in the New York City suburbs of Westchester County, "I wanted to go to college at Berkeley, but my parents thought it would be too crazy there. But they let me go to Tulane in New Orleans. That shows you something about my parents."

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Kevin Scanlon

Pablo Alvarado

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Pablo Alvarado, 46, normally affable and soft-spoken, bristles when he's called the Cesar Chavez of day laborers. Despite his accomplishments as director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, he doesn't see himself as a hero. "I do this work because I love it," he says. His manner is relaxed but his ebony eyes, deeply set into broad, copper-hued features, reveal fierce determination.

As a child in the farming village of El Níspero in El Salvador, Alvarado witnessed the horror of his country's 12-year civil war, which would leave 75,000 dead. On his daily walk to school, along the roadside, he saw the bodies of those who'd been murdered. Eventually the death squads claimed his teachers; Alvarado witnessed their execution. "Everyone knew someone who was killed," he recalls. Still, amid the brutality and terror, he experienced compassion, and resolved to guide his life by "acts of love."

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Kevin Scanlon

Coley King

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

The first thing you notice about Dr. Coley King is his mustache. It's a handlebar, and he had it before handlebars were cool — three, maybe four years? Not that he'll brag about that. "It just showed up one day," he says laconically. "It may leave one day."

King is pretty chill for a physician: He loves punk rock and used to surf before he became obsessed with mountain biking. He bikes to work every day. "I ride a bike because you can be 7 years old for at least 10 minutes every day," he says. "Until you get to work — then you tear your hair out."

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Kevin Scanlon

Hyongsoon Kim

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

On the 24th floor of Century Plaza Towers, in his office at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, attorney Hyongsoon Kim enjoys expansive views of West L.A. and the Pacific Ocean but revels in what's closer to hand: a mess of legal briefs, boxes and court documents strewn about the room. "This chaos to me invites creativity," says Kim, 34. "You're not going to find a lot of attorneys who will agree with me. ... But litigation is chaos. You can't control every piece of it. It's good for a litigator to thrive in chaos. Because that's what you're in the middle of."

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Kevin Scanlon

Sam Nassrouie

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Sam Nassrouie took a call from a distraught mother. They're always distraught. Her daughter was in love and was planning to get married. But the mother was suspicious. The groom was from Germany, where he claimed he was a big-shot investor developing hotels.

Nassrouie knew the type. He's a Persian private eye. He agreed to take the case. Using a contact in Germany, he tracked down the suitor, whose story unraveled."I found out this guy is married with kids," Nassrouie says. "He's also getting governmental aid — he's on welfare." The girl sobbed when her mother broke the news. "She was very upset, very emotional," Nassrouie says. "But this is the thing — now you know who you're dealing with."

The marriage was off. Case closed.

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