Home: Stories From L.a.

The crowning paradox of the touring comic’s life may be this: You have to leave home to make a name, but without the grounding and security of home you may not have anything to say. This week, three experienced comedians on striking the tricky balance between the road and home. Music: “Sophistication,” from the Complete […]

How far would you go to rescue the remains of a bygone world you’ve loved since you were a kid? Peter Knego went to Alang, India, and then did it again and again, to save what he could of the great ocean liners being scrapped there. But he didn’t just want to save the ships. […]

Suppose you wanted to design a home away from home. What would you put in? What would you leave out? What kind of seating would you have? (Soft? Hard? Low? High?) What kind of tables — big working slabs or intimate little two-tops? A good “third place” may seem casually homey, but its design is […]

Up in the manicured hills of Los Feliz, a neighborhood that boasts at least three famous murder houses, the one with the weirdest history may be the Perelson house… where, deep in the night of December 6, 1959, a husband and father of three lost his fragile grip and went terribly, shockingly crazy. But the story […]

When an elderly parent dies after a long life of lovingly acquiring things, she leaves behind more than memories for her kids. She leaves something much more tangible: The things. So many, many things. Is it things that make a home? This week, to kick off Season 2, it’s a story of life, death, memory, […]

Season 2 of HOME comes your way in January. Subscribe today and new episodes will automagically fly through the aether to you more or less the very second they’re released. And if you get a moment between now and the start of the new season to tell your friends about the show, or even better, to […]

The venerable Villa Carlotta — home to show business A-listers in the Golden Age, and later to a generation of young actors, writers and musicians  — sits, a hollowed-out shell, on Hollywood’s Franklin Avenue. It may or may not be about to undergo a transformation into an upscale hotel. What happens to a community when it’s […]

There’s the San Fernando Valley, the one you can find on a map… and then there’s The Valley, the one that exists in the culture, whose notoriety far outstrips its size. How did that happen? How did it come to be that you can mention The Valley to people in Milwaukee or Toronto or Tokyo […]

Andy Puddicombe left college at 22 and spent a decade tramping the world before returning to the UK and landing, eventually, in Los Angeles. He’s lived in so many countries that he has trouble recalling them on demand. How did his travels, and his training in Buddhism, alter the way he thought about home? This week on […]

This week it’s a story about Amboy, CA, a ghost town 30 miles from anywhere on the old Route 66, and the chicken magnate who’s spent a fortune trying to keep it from collapsing into the desert sand. Can Albert Okura really hold back both history and nature? Read more about Amboy here and here. You can […]

On a warm May day in 2005 a crowd gathered near a freeway embankment in Hawthorne, CA and turned its gaze to a house that wasn’t there. Nobody knows where inspiration comes from — but was the little house that once stood at 3701 West 119th St. the one place above all others that made […]

Herman Stein contributed music to more than 200 films, including some of the 1950s’ best-known monster movies: Creature From The Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, It Came From Outer Space, The Mole People, Tarantula and The Incredible Shrinking Man. He also composed for television, most memorably the Family Theme for “Lost In Space.” He was […]

A story about home, and place, and donuts. Music by: Mongo Santamaria (“Mother Jones”) Wintergatan (“Starmachine2000”) Roger Roger (“Slippery Sid”) Bobbi Humphrey (“Harlem River Drive”) Nick Jaina (“Man Without A Head”) Podington Bear (“Tweedlebugs”) Cosmic Rough Riders (“Morning Sun”)