David Cotner

Best Yo-Ho-Ho’s Fantasy Island, the former Polynesian-themed restaurant Kelbo’s — with its Shipwreck Room, lighthouse décor, Hawaiian spare ribs and regular appearances by ur-organist Korla Pandit — is now a burlesque club cum sports bar. Here, the tattoos soundly outnumber the Tattoos, and the private dancers are pasties-only since alcohol......

Best Giant Doughnuts of Los Angeles When World War IV — or V, or whatever we’re up to now — breaks out and only the pirates are left, how will they guide their ships into the ruined remains of Los Angeles? Giant doughnuts on the rooftops of sunken bakeries. Not......

Best Life-Size Monument to Captain Morgan Driving along Hillhurst in Los Feliz, you may have one day been startled by the appearance of a giant Captain Morgan. But how can this be? Weren’t the Marlboro Man and the Tidy Bowl Man and all their sinfully too-large kin outlawed during the......

In the 1620s, the first literary salons popped up in Paris. They were held in big, lavish hotels by the upper classes. In 1920s New York, we saw the birth of the roundtable gatherings at the Algonquin Hotel, peopled by the cultural elite — Dorothy Parker, Alexander Wollcott, Harpo Marx,......

Rick Rubin must’ve had a crap stereo when he was a kid. Listened a lot in the car, too, the way you do. The difference between him and many other producers is that he never forgot the power of a simple song bashed through cheap speakers. Not a technician, he’s......