Beat Down

Former LA Times stalwart Don Shirley wrote to tell me that Los Angeles CityBeat, the most recent of several attempts to create a viable alternative to the LA Weekly, is "kaput," in his words. (LA Observed had the scoop, of course, but I missed it there.) The venue provided a post-Times forum not only for Shirley, a veteran of the L.A. theater scene with invaluable, irreplaceable--well, it could be called "institutional memory," except that now he's minus an institution--but also for classical-music titan Alan Rich, whose firsthand memory of the LA Philharmonic stretches back to the Mehta days. That's value you can't put a price on--and, sadly, these days it seems no one wants to.