Californians have been breaking or, better yet, ignoring the rules of seemly journalism since the heyday of Carey McWilliams, and before him Mark Twain.

With The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Southern California all but invented The New Journalism. Maybe only while covering this region could Tom Wolfe have found a story so untold, procrastinated so creatively and, in the late great L.A. Jim Bellows, found an editor so inspiringly laissez-faire as to publish Wolfe's 49 pages of notes as written. Since then and even before, a bumptious tradition has grown up, if that's the word, relying on indecorous language, innovative structure, and, as in Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies, the cinematic counterpoint of word to image.

This panel brings together memoirist, poet and publisher Luis Rodriguez, popular historian, novelist and biblioklept Richard Rayner, and painter, writer and visionary historian J. Michael Walker, for a discussion of the city they love and the stories that beggar fiction.