Pasadena

Pasadena
$13.98
This is it. Ozma took a short break, but this music simply has to be heard by everyone. Ozma can't escape comparisons to Weezer, but if they would have come released an album first then everyone would be saying that Weezer sounds a lot like Ozma. Neither is stealing each other's sound, they just both happen to be from soCal and have similar fanbases. It doesn't matter.

If you have been searching for the raw essence that Weezer captured on their first two albums, don't buy the last 3 Weezer albums, buy the last 3 Ozma albums. I always hope that the next Weezer release will be my favorite, and I love them all for the first few listens, but they never stick with me as classic Weezer did. The sometimes stomach-turning glossiness of recent Weezer productions is what Ozma avoids, trading it in for a more live-show feel. The best thing about Ozma's music is that you can never predict what the next chord will be.

Now that my Weezer rant is over, just buy this album and play it loud. The catchiest song is the opener, "No One Needs to Know". Some other personal favorites are "Fight the Darkness", "Incarnation Blues", and "Underneath My Tree". Perfect summer recording. Plus Star Wick is hot.

Downtown Pasadena's Early Architecture (CA) (Images of America)
$19.99
Scheid talks about and shows photos from mostly a century ago. You can see Pasadena as it then looked. When it was geographically separate from Los Angeles. And it already had an upscale air. Nowadays, Pasadena is just another suburb in the heart of LA.

If you have been to modern Pasadena, the photos may be striking for the sheer amount of open space depicted. Some of it is farmland. Others just appear vacant, waiting for the 20th century to claim them. Some buildings in the photos still exist. And Raymond Street is now of course fully built up.

But don't get too enamoured of the architecture. That Pasadena that gave rise to it was also routinely discriminating against Negroes and Latinos. The upscale nature of the Pasadena districts shown in the photos also translated into an informal colour bar.

Hometown Pasadena: The Insider's Guide
$22.95
Hometown Pasadena: The Insider's Guide Writer Colleen Dunn Bates, a friendly Pasadena woman nearing 50, thought she had a good idea: to put together an upscale guidebook about her city -- a kind of travel book for people who live there. And given the intensely local focus of the project, rather than dealing with a big New York publisher, she decided to publish it herself, producing it out of her den and delivering it to stores from the back of her car.

Almost a year later, "Hometown Pasadena" has not only sold 10,000 copies, it has also turned into a small empire: Local bookstores, both chain and independent, Costco and even a hair salon now carry it, and Bates is branching out to other cities.

Bates' formula for the books is simple: "It's about how to really live in a place, and be in a place, and understand a place, even if you've lived there for 20 years," she said recently. "I've never seen anything like it. My model was to not have it look like a Fodor's guide."

Bates' book taps into the growing desire to conduct the business of one's life as locally as possible, in an era of crazy traffic, expensive gas and worries about the effect of a sprawling lifestyle on global warming. As Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, noted, books about local topics and niche themes are thriving nationwide, helped in part by digital technology that makes it easier to self-publish books with a professional look.

"I think people are interested in themselves. As everything gets more global, the local stuff seems quaint and personal," she said.

"Hometown Pasadena" features well-illustrated sections on eating and drinking, cultural offerings, and where to take the kids, as well as less-typical features: several pages on the Metro Gold Line, a chapter on public and private gardens, and page-long interviews with key local players, such as architectural historian Robert Winter and Pasadena Playhouse artistic director Sheldon Epps. Bates and her four co-authors also know enough to treat the city as the bull's-eye of a cluster of communities that includes Sierra Madre, Eagle Rock and most of the San Gabriel Valley.

Bates' decision to publish on her own press comes from her experience with the New York publishing world, beginning in the early '80s when she edited a series of French-originated guidebooks for Simon & Schuster...
By handling "Hometown Pasadena" herself, she was able to use local talent not only in its creation but in its sales and promotion. One of her co-authors, Sandy Gillis, has kept the book supplied at her hairdresser.

Even more surprising, Bates has gotten the book into a Pasadena Barnes and Noble, despite the difficulty of small presses reaching the chains.

Bates also handles her press' non-bookstore distribution, which for months meant hauling boxes of books into her Subaru and driving them around town.

"I did it all," she said, "and have the chiropractic bills to prove it."

Some of the secret lies in Pasadena itself, the author believes.

"It's a very literary community, very educated," Bates said. "We have, outside of Powell's, the healthiest independent bookstore on the West Coast. There's educational institutions and culture and art and architecture. And food, and neighborhood identity. It has everything that makes for a complete community: There's a 'there' here."

Either way, it takes the right balance of size, cultural sophistication and local roots -- and possibly insularity -- for a city to be right for one of her books, Bates said. San Diego, for example, is too large and sprawling.
"Pasadena has a healthy self-image," she conceded. "It's in love with itself, and that helps."

Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times

Home in Pasadena: Very Best of Pasadena Roof Orchestra
$13.49
For over 30 years, this British band, founded by (now-retired) sousaphonist John Arthy, has been beatin' back hot jazz and tin pan alley tunes from the '20s and '30s all over the British Isles and abroad. (They even ventured into swing a bit with some '40s tunes once, but to lesser success.) They use authentic period arrangements and they're TIGHT, I'll tell ya'. As someone once described it when I played some of their material, "It's like listening to old 78s without the surface noise and scratches." That's only part of it. In addition, with the use of modern recording technology, the sound is as I would imagine it might be if I were standing ringside in a dance hall next to my sainted flapper grandma. Just tremendous. This compilation gives a good overview of those 30 years that the ensemble has been serving up this treat, but in fact, ANY of their albums are worth checking out if you like true-to-the recipe hot jazz, or if you just like feel-good music. It's uplifting and you can't help but move with it. I can only imagine what it must have been like to have lived in that period of such rapid acceleration. Listening to these sides certainly will take you at least partway there!