Whose ‘Face Time’ Was It?
When Eric Tarloff wrote “Face Time,” a tale about a philandering president of the United States and a young female staffer, readers wanted to know if it was an inside look at Bill Clinton.
But the writer insists that any resemblance to actual Washington events is pure serendipity.
“I had no definite idea about what was going on. This was pure coincidence,” Tarloff said at a book party tossed by former CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter and his wife, Kathleen Brown, the former state treasurer who is now a Bank of America executive.
There were plenty of plugged-in politicos in attendance former Clinton Secretary of State Warren Christopher, former Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Meyers, former L.A. County District Attorney Ira Reiner. But none offered any insight about the Clinton affair.
Eventually, Tarloff concluded that sexual gamblers like Clinton and John Kennedy roll the dice because they believe “they are exempt from the ordinary rules of life.”
Don’t Forget Local Stories
Regular readers of the L.A. Times business pages may have been a bit baffled last week when the section’s regular page 2, which for months has focused exclusively on largely Southern California news, was replaced with general business news.
The change was striking, considering the paper’s oft-stated mission of focusing more on local companies and issues.
So what gives?
“The California news will be back on page 2 tomorrow,” Times spokesman Mike Lang said when contacted by the Business Journal last Wednesday.
The regular California news section was temporarily dropped for two days, Lang said, in an effort “to move the news around (and) to group certain subject matter together.”
Will such format shifts start occurring on a regular basis? “We’re trying to put out the best product for our readers,” Lang said. “But we understand that it’s better to keep things in the same place where readers can find it.”
Not a Big Box Kind of Place
West Hollywood may have opted for small shops and restaurants at the city’s less glitzy eastern gateway in lieu of a big-box Costco store. But it may still get a version of a big box at the eight-acre redevelopment site at La Brea Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.
Best Buy has approached J.H. Snyder Co. the lead developer of a planned retail/art-house movie theater project on the site.
“We are talking to a lot of tenants and trying to determine the right tenant mix,” said Cliff Goldstein, who is directing leasing for the project.
Ray Reynolds, West Hollywood’s community development director, said the city hasn’t gotten as far as hammering out an agreement with Snyder, but it certainly wants to have some influence over the selection of tenants.
Goldstein was emphatic that the project will predominantly consist of smaller tenants. “It’s not going to be a big-box center,” he said.
