LA Weekly

Weekly.

There was the LA Weekly.

Up here we had Seattle Weekly, we had The Rocket, and eventually The Stranger.

The

Stranger.

We got approached by a writer from LA Weekly who had reached out to me and asked, Hey, I wanna do a feature on your band.

And we're like, yeah, that's great.

And got to get to know the writer.

You know, you're on these panels, UCLA, so you're getting some notoriety.

LA Weekly, give us the progression of that.

So the book, okay, so I guess I want to say that I had been working on this book for five years.

Yeah.

Well, that Paisley Underground scene that is well-known, and justifiably so because it's all great bands, I never heard that term back in the 80s when I was a kid.

I mean, I was reading LA Weekly, and I knew people who knew people and friends of friends and stuff, and I didn't hear that term.

uh, word to describe the scene.

I know it was tossed around a bunch in the press and things like that, but I never saw it.

Um, and then.

Going into 2018, they did this Rogue 99 after Jonathan Gold passed away that they wanted to move the 99 over there because we all hated LA Weekly at the time after the new Trump bro owners took over.

So we did this Rogue 99.

So I did some blurbs for LA Taco during that time.

But that's how it is in the summer of 2015 for Tomorrowland, a sparkling work of speculative fiction and wishful thinking that could not be more Disney in the old-fashioned sense, but is dominated by its philosophical thrust against social pessimism and disenchantment.

Similarly enthusiastic was Amy Nicholson, who in LA Weekly wrote, quote, in a junk food summer, Brad Bird's Tomorrowland is a defiant carrot stick, a blockbuster adventure flick where the message is think smart.

It's a deliberate phooey to the kiddie carnage of movies such as Transformers and The Avengers, which frighten children about the apocalypse before they can even spell the word.

But in the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote a negative review that encapsulates the conclusion of a lot of critics that Tomorrowland is a movie that falls short of its ambitions, but it's very hard to be mad about, writing, quote, perhaps Tomorrowland should not be blamed for succumbing to the poverty of vision it works so hard to attack.

We were just chatting about that and making the move from New York to L.A. and to really have the vision and perseverance.

It's probably, as we go back, probably mostly perseverance to get into the crazy media business of the publishing world And across five decades, he built a magazine that anyone in California knows, which is LA Weekly, which went from a startup phase into really one of the largest weekly newspapers in the country.

And...

I think that when after building that, he was actually then turned to develop how to help teach children about emotional intelligence, about what's missing in schools, what are life skills.

All right.

So now, all right, we get through college.

How do you decide to get to LA, this concept of LA Weekly, of following this passion? Where did that all come from?

Well, it all came out of the idea of we got pregnant young with my girlfriend.

Yeah.

So Coyote is a media collective, a news outlet that is modeled after the old alt weeklies that a lot of us grew up reading, right? I'm thinking about the SF Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, LA Weekly, the Village Voice.

And a lot of those publications either got acquired by bigger companies, hedge funds, private equity, and maybe got shut down or turned into something that is really just a vehicle for ads.

And at the same time, we still remember them fondly as having spirit, as having event listings that gave you a sense of the place you lived in.