California – Flung

The Culver Hotel: A Contemporary Time Capsule

Katrina Woznicki — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 20:48:48 +0000

Flatiron buildings aren’t common in Los Angeles, a city more known for horizontal mid-century sprawl than for the 1920’s desert boomtown at its true core. A few weeks after relocating from the New York City area to Culver City, a neighborhood next door to Santa Monica and a brief drive south of Beverly Hills, I was stuck in traffic—in true Southern California fashion—and found myself in the shadow of a very vertical flatiron building that looked like a slice of […]

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Arrive Hotel Palm Springs: New Millennium Addition to the Midcentury Scene

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 22:45:26 +0000

I’m sitting in the leather armchair in the corner of our room at the Arrive Hotel in Palm Springs, clinging to the last hour or so of the three days I will have been here. I’m two days past a major tweak of my back, suffered just after waking on our first morning here. Right now, the back is feeling pretty good, and credit where it’s due—Arrive is a fabulous place to recover from an injury, thanks in large part […]

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LAX –> JFK in JetBlue’s Mint Class

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 17:59:29 +0000

In Flight Reviews, Flung writers provide key information about flights they take in order to leave the flying public better informed in an age of frustration, obfuscation and increasingly unfriendly skies. LAX —> JFK on JetBlue Flight 524 Flight: JetBlue 524 from Los Angeles LAX to New York JFK in Mint class (the airline’s equivalent of business class) Scheduled Date and Time: Tuesday, July 3rd, 2018 at 12:43pm Check In and Security: I checked in online before arriving and was not […]

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The Progress: A Shared-Plates Paradise

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 22:46:56 +0000

If you’re the sort who generally fails to book restaurants ahead of time, like I am, getting a table at the Progress on San Francisco’s Fillmore District can be as impossible as buying an air conditioner in Manhattan during a heatwave. But on a recent trip out West, after being denied a reservation I learned that the bar area is substantial enough, and that it serves diners on a first-come-first-serve basis. This felt more or less what bar dining is […]

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Vesuvio Cafe: Not Missing a Beat

Sarah Stodola — Sat, 07 Jul 2018 20:35:35 +0000

There are very few tourists to San Francisco for whom Vesuvio Cafe does not show up on the radar. Opened in 1948, just in time to host all of the Beat writers that would flock to the City Lights Bookstore when it opened next door in 1953, Vesuvio is now a countercultural landmark. I haven’t looked in the Lonely Planet San Francisco, but I’d bet money it’s listed in there. Yet, when I went in on a recent weekday mid-afternoon, […]

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LA Guide: Flung x Almanac of Style

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 14:33:58 +0000

After years of wrongly dismissing Los Angeles as a temple of narcissism with a tragic lack of public transportation, I’ve recently been romanced by the place in a big way. Newer highlights like the Broad Museum, the Arts District, and even a subway system have given the city some deeper, sharper edges, remaking it as a mecca not only of the entertainment industry, but for the arts, design, fashion, and increasingly, literature. [vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Los Angeles: Readings and Recommendations After years […]

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10 Great Works of Literature About Los Angeles

Sarah Stodola — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 14:52:00 +0000

The city known for churning out fantastical versions of life via film tends toward a darker sensibility in its fiction. Of course, when it’s been in a more sullen mood, the Hollywood machine has adapted a good number of these novels to the silver screen. Here are 10 great novels about Los Angeles… [columns] [column size=”third” last=”no”] [/column] [column size=”third” last=”no”] The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler This atmospheric, high-brow crime novel introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, who conducted […]

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Mornings at Primo Passo Coffee Co.: LA Theater

Sarah Stodola — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 21:15:06 +0000

It was my first morning in Los Angeles and I was sleeping on my college best friend’s pullout sofa in Santa Monica. Or, not sleeping, to take it out of the theoretical. I forget that I get jetlag when I travel from New York City to LA, or vice versa, even though it happens every time, and more intensively the older I get. So I lay there at 5:30am, waiting to see what would happen, back to sleep or not, […]

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The Lowdown on Mama Shelter Los Angeles

Sarah Stodola — Thu, 19 Nov 2015 15:08:56 +0000

Prior to this year, the Mama Shelter brand already had five hugely popular hotels in Europe, all but one in France. They’d proven their model there: The draw of staying in a reasonably priced hotel with a ton of personality in a neighborhood in the early stages of buzzworthiness is strong, it turns out (and, by the way, not just among millennials). The Mama Shelter Los Angeles brings the concept for the first time to the US. Located a block […]

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LA Desaturated: The Black Cat in Silver Lake

Sarah Stodola — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:06:55 +0000

There may be no finer hour in life to sidle up to a long wooden bar than mid-afternoon on a weekday, a time during which we seldom allow ourselves the pleasure, for obvious reasons having to do with slippery slopes. Only when we are traveling does the opportunity present itself unaccompanied by guilt. Entire destinations (Las Vegas, for one) have grown up around this principle. So it was, during a recent visit to Los Angeles, that I turned up to […]

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