Virtual Expeditions
Let your eyeballs do the walking through some of L.A.'s finer weblogs
By Alfred Lee
For the unfamiliar, navigating L.A.'s blogosphere isn't too different from being thrown into the city itself for the first time: so many places to go, so many places not to go, and, for every bright and helpful soul, a jerk around every corner. It's time for a quick tour of the city's online community and its ubiquitous hyperlinked - who needs a keyboard? - connections. Many fine staples have admittedly been left off, but throw the following into the "L.A." folder in your Google Reader, and you've got a reading list that's nothing to sneeze at.
There's no better place to start, ladies and gents, than at An Aquarium Drunkard (Aquariumdrunkard.com). Probably L.A.'s most successful music blog, the Drunkard not only posts daily MP3s and commentary, it also offers concert ticket giveaways and features like "Off the Record," where artists contribute travel writing on the cities they call home - you can read John Vanderslice enthuse about San Francisco's Mount Davidson Park, "where you can hike for 20 minutes before you see a soul." It's looking like music blogs are, for better or worse, the new first line of tastemaking defense; site-runner Justin Gage has spun things off into radio shows with Little Radio and Sirius, concert sponsorships, and a record label. Scrolling down to the section marked "Townies" in the right column reveals links to his music-blog brethren, including Rock Insider (Rockinsider.com; when checking out a blog for the first time, a glance at the blogroll/links section will give you a good idea of its DNA).
Click through to Passion of the Weiss (Passionweiss.com) for local critic Jeff Weiss's hip-hop-leaning and often humorous observations, as he questions whether Positive K is wearing Joseph's actual "Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" in the video for 1993's "I Got a Man" or complaining about overrated albums in haiku. The "Links" button at the top takes us to a wider range of sites, among them the LAist (Laist.com), part of the global Gothamist network of city-centric blogs. Like the similarly arranged Losanjealous (Losanjealous.com), the LAist adopts a comprehensive, everything-L.A. approach, which seems to have hit a nerve, as it's among the city's most popular blogs.
The LAist's own "Links" section is tucked away in a drop-down box at the bottom of the left column; follow the bread crumbs to the long-running Dodger Thoughts (Dodgerthoughts.baseballtoaster.com), only one of the innumerable sports blogs around town. Dodger Thoughts is run by the insightful Jacob Weisman, who's written for Sports Illustrated and Variety, and it doubles as a message board of sorts for Dodger fanatics, with hundreds of user comments per day. Under the "Less Dodgers, More L.A." section on the right side, we can connect to Blogging.la, the first blog in the now 52-city "Metroblogging" network. Blogging.la's own blogroll brings us to the city's definitive property blog, Curbed LA (La.curbed.com), which provides news and photos of everything from new construction to real estate prices. Collectively, its posts are a wonderful measure of the city's daily pulse, and the shifting character of each neighborhood. From Curbed, we can enter its sister site, Eater LA (La.eater.com), and from there it's down the rabbit hole into the wacky world of food blogging.
The best starting point for that is Digesty LA (La.digesty.com, link in the right column of Eater LA, under "Gastro-Communities"), which compiles some of the premier area food blogs into one go-to page. Explore a little, and follow your nose through any of those blogs, making sure to pop out the other end of that rabbit hole at BBQ Junkie (Bbqjunkie.com) - perfect if you ever wanted to know a good recipe for pork butt or beer-can chicken, or the winners of last weekend's Moorpark BBQ Cook-Off. Finally, BBQ Junkie's blogroll on the left transports us to none other than Kevin Roderick's LA Observed (Laobserved.com), which, along with semi-rival FishbowlLA (Mediabistro.com/fishbowlla), churns out must-read coverage of all things L.A. media.
LA Observed has as fat a blogroll as anybody, from which one can jump to all manner of blogging subcommunities, such as the city's fast-paced movie industry pundit sites (Moviecitynews.com, Hollywood-elsewhere.com, Awardsdaily.com), but a whirlwind tour like ours should finish by curling up at The Elegant Variation (Marksarvas. blogs/elegvar.com; it takes its name from a pejorative literary term referring to a practice of which yours truly is frequently guilty), one of many literary blogs around. You'll find yourself grateful for its muted colors, its refusal to blow up pictures into garish sizes, and, most important, Mark Sarvas's thoughtful writings about literature and the lost art of book reviewing. It's everything you want from an L.A. blog: smart, unfussy, and passionate. There are a lot like it.
Published: 09/13/2007
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