Libby Molyneaux's Hoopla has got you covered:

Somebody’s independence is showing — happy birthday, you big ol’ gal we like to call the U.S. of A. Today we grill, we quaff amber-colored fluids of grain, and we (illegally) make loud bangs of explosive color. Just like our forefathers fought for. Of course, we bought our tickets weeks ago (yeah, right) for The Hollywood Bowl’s July 4th Fireworks Spectacular: A Ball at the Bowl With the L.A. Dodgers. Dodgers organist Nancy Bea Hefley kicks things off with “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” followed by classic baseball songs by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Like what? “It’s a Beautiful Day for a Ballgame,” “D-O-D-G-E-R-S (Oh, Really? No, O’Malley)” and “Casey at the Bat.” Tommy Lasorda leads the seventh-inning stretch, and Randy Newman pitches in with “I Love L.A.” and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hlywd.; Wed.-Fri., July 2-4, 7:30 p.m.; $10-$114. (213) 480-3232.

Could anything be more patriotic than the annual pageantry of pecs known as the Mr. & Mrs. Muscle Beach contest? Guys and gals (sorta) in itty-bitty bikinis barely big enough to cover the lower states flex their right to flex their glutes. A parade precedes the finals. Venice Beach Recreation Center, 1800 Ocean Front Walk, Venice; Fri., July 4, 1 p.m. (registration 7:30 a.m.); free for spectators ($75 entry fee). (310) 399-2775.

Last year, Discover Boating — “a national boating public-awareness program” — named Marina del Rey one of the top cities in which to watch fireworks on the water. (Note to self: Get job with Discover Boating.) Good viewing at Burton Chace Park, 4701 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey; Fri., July 4, 9 p.m. (310) 305-9545.

Kids and their parents are expected to come gussied up in their stars-and-stripes finest for Great American 4th of July Kids Bike Parade. Prizes for the most patriotic! Belmont Shore, corner of Granada and Ocean avenues, Long Beach; Fri., July 4, 10 a.m.; free. (310) 396-1585.

Americafest 2008 has delivered a stirring musical tribute to our country’s independence with patriotic, Broadway and popular music for the whole family since 1926. This year features Drum Corps International Marching Music’s Major Leagues, with the country’s top drum and bugle corps. The evening culminates in a 30-minute pyro show not to be missed. Rose Bowl, 1001 Rose Bowl Dr., Pasadena; Fri., July 4, noon-9 p.m.; $13, children 7 and under free. (626) 577-3101.

Your loudest Independence Day offering is the freestyle Motocross show of flying daredevils flipping 20 feet in the air, the roar of monster trucks known simply as KABOOM! Plus, the mother of all fireworks displays, choreographed by Pyro Spectaculars and set to music, whose credits include the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Fairplex, 1101 W. McKinley Ave., Pomona; Fri., July 4, 8 p.m.; $14-$19.50, children 2 and under free. (909) 623-3111.

The sixth annual Vision Outside 4th of July Jazz and Blues Festival is a free event with nonstop music, plus crafts and such for kids. Vision Theatre back lot, 3341 W. 43rd Pl., Leimert Park; Fri., July 4, 1-7 p.m. (213) 202-5500 or www.culturela.org.

This year, the Studio City Chamber of Commerce couldn’t come up with a theme, so they decided to go for Journey Through Time. That means ’40s tunes by the Chantilly Sisters, Journey tribute band Escape, country music by Cody Sumpter, and family-friendly tunes by Pirate Charles, plus magic provided by magicians from the Magic Castle. CBS Studio Center, 4024 Radford Ave., Studio City; Fri., July 4, 5-9:30 p.m.; $15 adult, $8 children in advance; $20 adult, $10 child at the door. (818) 655-5916.

For such an upscale neighborhood, Pacific Palisades puts on a pretty homey Fourth of July Parade and Celebration. Sunset Boulevard is shut down for a rousing parade led by this year’s grand marshal, 90-year-old English teacher Rose Gilbert. Later, a big fireworks show lights up Palisades High School. Sunset Blvd., between Temescal and Chautauqua, Pacific Palisades; Fri., July 4; skydiver 1:50 p.m.; parade 2 p.m.; fireworks 7 p.m. ­www.palisadesparade.org.

And don't let the fact there are 1,000 fires burning in California stop you from enjoying explosive rockets. More city fireworks after the jump...

Read on...

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To illustrate how the mighty greenback has fallen, one need only try exchange $300 cash for Russian rubles on the streets of Moscow. I tried this yesterday. They're currently buying U.S. dollars for 23.63 rubles and selling them for 23. 51 – representing a drop of about 12 per cent in 18 months.

Just for background, I'd exchanged a $100 note two days earlier with the help of a neighbor named Valentina, a pensioner in her late 70s who insisted on accompanying me, since my Russian-language skills are remedial. The following interactions took place entirely in Russian. Nobody in this district speaks a word of English. Valentina marched me into Russia's federal Sverbank, staight to the currency exchange cashier, who looked at the bill skeptically through a thick wall of glass and remarked that it didn't look crisp enough.

“It's good money!” Valentina snapped. It came straight from America.

Read on...

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The Book Expo America convention has come and gone. Here are 12 things I saw on the last day, in absolutely no order whatsoever.

1. The Independent Publishers Group Alley
Standing strong!

2. Self Help Books on Murder and Drugs
"Buy your kids educational toys. Like a metric scale and tiny baggies."

3. People dragging huge bags of books. Wheeled carts: Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda.

4. The Next Generation of Book Nerd Technology
This gadget is called a Playaway. Its interface is the unsexiest thing you'll ever touch. It costs upwards of $29.99 per title and is perfect for libraries because it's nearly indestructible. It's dorkier than the Kindle, yet somehow still cooler. I'm a Kindle hater. This Goosebumps title is hot off the presses.

5. Winnie Cooper Teaches Math!
Remember Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years? She's got some math books coming out. Talk about sexy nerds.

6. The Olsen Twins...Do Not Teach Math.
Guess who else has/have a book coming out. MK and A.

7. Gigantic Circus Book that Will Crush Your Coffee Table Into Oblivion
From the Taschen booth. Producers of gorgeous books that take coffee table literature to the next level and challenge our preconceptions of what size book shelves should be.

8. Last Gasp Publishing
The awesomest name for a publishing house I've ever encountered. They'd like you to know they are producing Gary Baseman's new book of paintings "Dying of Thirst," as well as some books on Tintin.

9. A Globe Bigger Than Mars
Not really. But it's pretty damn big. It costs $12,000 but was on sale for $8,000. Its applications include sitting in lobbies of big buildings and not fitting through the door to your house. Notice how I cleverly turned it to face North America as an homage to, well, the Book Expo America.

10. New Pink and Green Moleskines!
The only thing wrong with Moleskines was that they didn't come in pink. Problem solved. Do you have a Moleskine addiction, too? The woman who manned their booth had to keep apologizing to people who were asking for free samples. "Sorry, they're just for display." Ah, phooey.

11. Buddhist Monks
My mother (yes, I brought my mother--mothers are ultimately the only ones who will agree to accompany you on a perfectly lovely Sunday afternoon to such events as a convention of BOOKS) said "They're probably promoting some self-help books." Are monks allowed to promote things?

12. Hand Jobs
It's not what you think...unless you were thinking about a book of hand-drawn typefaces from Princeton Architectural Press.

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Book Expo America is supposed to be "for the trade" only. So says the program. That is a move in the wrong direction. Book events, especially the massive spectacle ones, should be inclusionary rather than exclusionary. How else are we going to regain the sense of reading as a fun, sexy thing to do? Why should reading frenzies be limited to worldwide Harry Potter manias that strike but once a year?

The general public is not invited to BEA, but look at some of these great authors you can meet in the Autograph Area on Friday, May 30.

Oscar Hijuelos, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Table 12
Neil Gaiman and Gris Grimly, from 2:00-3:00 p.m. -- Table 17
Sherman Alexie, 2:00-3:00 pm. -- Table 21
Paul Feig, 3:00-4:00 pm -- Table 16
R. L. Stein, 3:00-4:00 pm -- Table 24
Ann Patchett, 3:00-4:00 pm -- Table 29

Then, at 3:00 in Room 403AB, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com will be pimping the Kindle. "This is a conversation any stakeholder in the book industry will not want to miss..." says the program catalog. Putting aside for the moment the horror that is the Kindle and why anyone would want to be known as a "Kindleista," it's a shame these talks aren't open to audiences at large. Aren't readers stakeholders in the book industry, too? Aren't they the most important stakeholders?

Then there's one called "The Future of Reading" (1:00 pm, Room 403AB). They'll be rebutting Apple CEO Steve Jobs's assertion that "The fact is that people don't read anymore," which he said earlier this year in the New York Times. Too bad that discussion's not actually open to a whole lot of, you know, readers.

If anybody manages to crash the Book Expo, let me know. If anybody doesn't manage to crash it, but attempts to, also let me know. I'll mail you my copy of the BEA program Bible as a consolation prize.

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It was so deserted at the Book Expo America at the Convention Center today, I was beginning to despair about the state of the book industry. But it turns out I showed up a day early. I was not the only one. "But the website said it was open today at noon?" another lost soul pleaded with the security guards manning the entrance to the Exhibit Hall, where the various publishing houses were setting up booths.

Ironically, the only open section today was the Remaindered Books area. There, if you are someone who owns a gift shop or grocery or if you represent a Borders, you can order many, many copies of an $80 book on Solar Eclipses that will sell for $9. "Welcome to the New World," a banner in this area said. As the kind gentleman at one of the remainders booths explained, a "remaindered" book is one left over from the original print batch that the publisher couldn't sell. If they do a print run of 100,000 and only sell 90,000, remainder companies bid on the unsold ten thousand. That's where those severely discounted copies of Chicken Soup for the Soul at your local drug store come from.

Eventually, I wandered into a panel discussion on "The Author-preneur: Balancing Authorship and the New Business of Brand-building." It was the most well-attended panel of the afternoon. (Though maybe this is because it was one of the only panels of the afternoon.) "Writers," said moderator Kevin Smokler, "Yes, you need to do something on your own behalf."

Mark Sarvas, debut novelist and blogger extraordinaire--his Elegant Variation blog is required reading for the literary set these days, declared that he's "not convinced that we should start wearing black armbands yet" to commemorate the death of reading. Though he also said that he'd been called a snob twice already that day.

The panelists included literary agent Betsy Amster, Kim Ricketts, Ron Hogan and Smokler and Sarvas. All were agreed that people in the print industry need to start embracing new business models--new ways of promoting yourself as an author, of marketing your book, of selling books, of approaching the audience. "Tomorrow's readers are on the Internet," Sarvas said, "It's time to stop this snobbery about print." Kim Ricketts, whose company brings authors out on promotional gigs on cruises, and resorts, and conferences in Dubai, predicts that "we will see more bookstores go down." Yet she also predicts the rise of the library, so go figure.

Towards the end of the discussion, someone in the audience remarked that the panelists had put forth two contradictory points of view. Namely: Everybody was agreed that (1) authors should concentrate their energies on writing good books, not on hashing out good marketing plans. But, if that's true, then why are (2) the bestseller lists full of crap books? Is it maybe because the market demands crap?

No one seemed to have a good answer for that one.

Oh! I also wanted to say, about Betsy Amster: she is one of those old school literary agents who is still looking for books she can't put down. Period. When considering works of fiction, she doesn't care about the author's "platform." The work rules the day. This, at least, is a relief.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, when the BEA begins in earnest. It felt weird to be at the Convention Center not wearing a costume with funny ears, as I've been to so many science fiction conventions there in the past. Today was really just the calm before the storm. For those of you who are going to the Expo, when you check in, you'll be getting one of these:

You know you're at a BOOK expo when the program is thicker than the Bible.

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In need of a good weekend read? Check out this excerpt from Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi's new book The Great Derangement, in which he goes undercover at the weekend retreat of Christian Zionist, and McCain pal, John Hagee's Cornerstone Church in Texas Hill Country.

My disguise was modeled on other men I'd seen in church — pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I'd been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! — so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

Taibbi's weekend with Jesus concludes in bizarre fashion when the pastor leading the getaway encourages his parishioners to vomit in paper bags as he casts out the demons of "handwriting analysis" and "anal fissures."

If you need more reading material, also check out the Weekly's interview with Taibbi from last December -- where he compared America to (a then living) Ike Turner.

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Brushing aside allegations that Charles Bukowski was a Nazi sympathizer, the Los Angeles City Council approved the designation of Buk's former bungalow on De Longpre Avenue as a cultural landmark on Tuesday -- sparing it from demolition. Though the effort to save the house was successful, Buk's legacy took its share of hits in the process. In her fight against the cultural landmark designation, the bungalow's current owner, Victoria Gureyeva, called Bukowski "Hitler number two," and threated to "bring the whole Jewish Westside into the debate" against Bukowski. Gureyeva's Nazi charges stemmed from a 2003 article in the Hollywood Investigator by former Bukowski acquaintance Ben Pleasants, which claimed, among other things, that “the idea that [Bukowski] could betray Hitler by being Jewish was too much for him to bear.”

You can read more about the Nazi charges and the effort to save the bungalow in the Weekly's story "Bukowski's Ruin?"

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Between December 2005 and March 2006, Sam Slovick did a stunning series of cover stories for the LA Weekly that took readers deep inside the everyday tragedies and triumphs found on Los Angeles's Skid Row. These articles have played an integral role in the public and private debates over what do about what LAPD Chief Bratton describes as "the worst social disaster in the country."

Now, they are the genesis of a five-part documentary written and directed by Sam, and sponsored by Good Magazine, that debuts today on Myspace. We couldn't be prouder of Sam and the light he's helped shine on this issue.

-Joe Donnelly

Skid Row Part 1 - Introduction

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We'll post links to other sections of the documentary as they go online.

Also check out Sam Slovick's LA Weekly coverage of Skid Row below:

Inside The Box With The Super Dope Cops

Coming of Age in the Mouth of Madness

Dying To Get Off Skid Row

Down On Main Street

Miracle on Skid Row

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