LJ Digital

LJ Digital Student Jeff Sizemore Story Featured on Zocalo

From his article, “DIY to Stimulate Your Senses: Browsing the Shelves at Downtown L.A.’s The Smell”

by Jeff Sizemore

I define myself as much by my love for music as by my love for books. So my first trip to The Smell, a tiny do-it-yourself music venue in Downtown L.A., was an experience deserving of excessive cliché (eye-opening! life-changing!). The bands I heard altered my perception of how music could be played, distributed, and enjoyed. But as I waited for them to start (with the tardiness characteristic of DIY concerts), I was just as enlightened by the venue’s small but eclectic communal bookshelves.

The entrance to The Smell is dressed up in a collage of graffiti—everything from simple tags to more intricatewheatpaste poster art. As you step inside, the stimuli are overwhelming—not just the glorious cacophony of a band or a DJ set crackling through the ancient PA system, but also the venue’s namesake. As you enter the lobby from an alley, a bouquet of cigarette smoke and bodily humors wafts over you.

Read more at Zocalo.

LJ Digital is on front page of Zocalo today. 

“How We Whippersnappers Read Now — The Next Generation Of Readers Explain Their Approach To Words in the Digital Age.”

(Yes, they called you whippersnappers, lol).

At UC Irvine, students in the class “Narratives in a Digital Age,” taught by journalist and assistant professor in the literary journalism department Erika Hayasaki, are discussing the future of reading. A 2012 report found that “the increased use of mobile devices has provided a boost in readers for long-form journalism.” But is that true? The class discussion led to the below set of essays, called “How I Read.”

Read full article at Zocalo.

UCI Literary Journalism student Lauren Alejo writes about Hill’s Brothers Lock & Safe shop in Garden Grove in Zocalo’s “Where I Go” column this week, a piece that began as an assignment for professor Amy Wilentz and evolved into this published essay.

Lauren writes:

I can pinpoint the source of my fascination with keys to one of my favorite childhood novels,The Secret Garden. There was something so magical and special about the key to the garden, as if it did not just guard the entrance between two physical spaces, the garden and the manor, but rather between what was real and what was imagined. I remember how I wished I could find a beautiful old key to some secret space, just like the one in my novel: a key to lead me though an entryway to a place that was not entirely real, a place only I had access to.

As with most childhood dreams it was forgotten over time. That is, until I was faced with the mundane task of buying a new garage door opener. Some of the most fascinating places we find are the ones we discover by accident.

Inside the locksmith’s shop, rows of locks and keys are layered across the wall like sedimentary rock. The oldest ones cover the top half of the wall, and the most recent additions dangle from their spaces across the bottom half. 

*Zócalo Public Square is an online magazine, that blends on-the-ground events and web journalism, connecting people to ideas and to each other.

Read the full story here.