This coming Friday, seekingarrangement.com – a website that bills itself as the world’s leading connector of sugar daddies and sugar babies – will be hosting a sold-out party in downtown Los Angeles. With a twist:

The event will feature the “Fifty Shades” Masquerade theme, bringing together beautiful and glamorous women who want to find themselves a real “Christian Grey,” and the highest caliber of wealthy, successful men who are seeking their own “Anastasia Steele.” Masks will be required of all guests before 11 p.m.

Meanwhile, later this fall (November 20), Dallas-based publisher Ben Bella Books will release Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey,  a compilation from its pop culture imprint Smart Pop. Essayists include Marci Hirsch, a production executive at Vivid.

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The biography I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, arriving in stores tomorrow, led music journalist Sylvie Simmons far beyond the clicking of a Google search button. She retraced the various stages of the singer’s life by physically transporting herself to each and every major sign post.

That meant Montreal in the dead of winter, some time spent at New York’s Chelsea Hotel and a visit to a more unusual location outside LA. She tells San Francisco Chronicle music critic Aidin Vaziri that it was the only way to do justice to the life rhythms of her 77-year-old subject:

Simmons nearly reached a breaking point when she checked into a monastery at Mount Baldy, where Cohen spent five years studying Zen Buddhism in the mid ’90s. She barely made it through a week.

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Emmy-award winning journalist, author, and native Angeleno Rubén Martínez has authored a new book, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West, an ” illuminating portrait of the twenty-first-century West.” From the Los Angeles Times review:

“Desert America” is a memoir that also manages to be an excellent work of reportage…

The new old West, Martínez tells us, is where John Wayne filmed many an iconic movie and where immigrants die crossing the desert. It’s home to cookie-cutter subdivisions and water wars. Americans think of its open spaces as a blank page where any loser or dreamer can rewrite his or her life story.

Martinez will be discussing and signing Desert America at Skylight Books on Saturday, September 15 at 5:00 p.m.

The format of Francine Brokaw’s breezy 182-page book Beyond the Red Carpet: The World of Entertainment Journalists, available next Tuesday, is exceedingly straightforward. Under various themed chapter headings, the veteran Family Magazine Group reporter and current member of the TCA asks a group of colleagues to recall Strange Interviews (Chapter 4), Twilight Zone Moments (Chapter 5) and Off the Record (Chapter 10) detours.

Her panel of junket-savvy experts includes everyone from David Sheehan (KCBS) and George Pennacchio (KABC) to Hahn Nguyen (tvguide.com) and Mike Reynolds (various). One journalist who stands out by virtue of being unafraid to name celebrity names is the New York Post’s Sean Daly. Here for example is the beginning of his entry for How Rude! (Chapter 9):

Harrison Ford is the rudest a-hole in show business. Followed possibly by Tommy Lee Jones. I have actually seen Ford call reporters out for asking what he thinks are “stupid questions”…

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The axiom of blogs being able to regenerate as real-world, hardcover books was long ago proven. So in that sense, the September 4 arrival of Suri’s Burn Book: Well-Dressed Commentary from Hollywood’s Little Sweetheart, a compilation of material from Allie Hagan’s hilarious Tinseltown rich kid Tumblr, is ho-hum.

However, when such book news is paired with the September 5 announcement of a joint venture between Hagan and BUZZMEDIA, it qualifies as a legitimate multimedia juggernaut. Can the online TV show spinoff be far behind? From this week’s press release:

Suri’s Burn Book reaches a sophisticated, socially-connected and powerful female audience of more than 620,000 unique visitors monthly, and offers unique contextual ad opportunities for brands that want to reach and engage millennials.

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“Darlene” grew up in an idyllic Pasadena neighborhood. As a young, aspiring actress, she photo doubled for 14-year-old Christian Bale and 12-year-old Corey Feldman. She also co-starred in the very poorly received 1987 revenge flick Monstrosity.

Darlene eventually wound up teaching Monday-to-Thursday evening ESL and teenage remedial classes at an LA public school. The real money however, up until 2007, came from her other vocation: dominatrix for-hire by the hour, Fridays through Sundays. It’s all entertainingly laid out in Playing Darlene: The True Double Life of a Public School Teacher and Professional Dominatrix, a 109-page book that will no doubt benefit from the current appetite for all things Fifty Shades of Grey-related. And in this case, all the more intriguing because it is gender-reversed and purportedly all true.

We were not expecting the LA media to have played a key role in Darlene’s whips-and-chain progress. But this was allegedly the case, when she was stationed at a residential-area place of business and the locals started protesting outside:

Mistress Victoria waltzed triumphantly into the lounge and announced to the ladies that the media were on their way. Reporters from the three major networks wanted to interview someone and she needed someone to volunteer to talk on camera…

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Native Angeleno Ben Ehrenreich won the Journalism category for his Harper’s Magazine story “Drip, Jordan: Israel’s water war with Palestine.” We’re awfully proud of him, just as we are fellow FishbowlLA editor Matthew Fleischer, who was a finalist in the Journalism category.

Other Southern Californians to take home PEN awards include Suzanne Jill Levine of Santa Barbara for the Translation category, Hollywood talents Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig for the screenplay Bridesmaids, Alex Ganza, Howard Gordon, & Gideon Raff, who won the Teleplay category for the pilot episode of Homeland.

A full list of winners can be found after the jump.

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In the new book Advertisers At Work, marketing professor Tracy Tuten interviews 20 leading industry execs and entrepreneurs. Leading off this dynamic compilation is Chris Raih, co-founder and managing director of Venice-based creative agency Zambezi.

Raih reveals that from a very young age growing up in Minnesota, he harbored dreams of writing for Sports Illustrated. But things took a turn for the ad world when the print journalism major interned at local agency Fallon. Today, Raih counts the Los Angeles Lakers as a client, has opened a field office in Shanghai and oversees with co-founder Brian Ford some three dozen employees just steps from the beach.

The irony is that Raih gets to work at Zambezi with various sports superstars. In the summer of 2010 for example, the agency put together a vitaminwater campaign with Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Petersen. As he explains in the interview, the icing on the cake was a certain voluble actor:

“The concept was freaking zany – basically that this athlete retained an attack-dog lawyer to try to sue Fantasy Football guys who had Adrian on their team… We cast for the craziest actor we could find and trust me, we found him! We got Gary Busey to play the lawyer…”

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I have a guilt-inducing shelf full of books by friends and colleagues that I’ve every intention of reading, but, because I am lazy, never do. Recently, when a casual acquaintance sent me her new novel, a bit of historical fiction entitled The Black Isle, I cracked the cover out of mere politeness. And was promptly sucked in to a hypnotic tale of romance, intrigue, war, ghosts, colonialism, and a touch of octopus sex.

This book is not for everyone. It’s dark and twisted, and frankly, it gave me nightmares. But if you’ve the stomach for that sort of thing, you should head over to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena on Saturday, where author Sandi Tan will be discussing her new work. I will probably see you there, because after reading her book, I have a mad girl-crush on Ms. Tan and want her to be my new best friend. Also, they sometimes have snacks at these things.

Saturday the 11th, 4 pm, Vroman’s, 695 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, 626-449-5320.

LA Times Beijing bureau chief Barbara Demick (pictured) recently flew back to the west coast to speak to students at Brigham Young University. The author of the award-winning book Nothing to Envy, a look at the accumulated life experiences of six defectors, shared her uniquely informed perspective on the so-called Hermit Kingdom.

Demick’s talk is chronicled in a report today by BYU public relations major Michal Christine Savage. The country’s ban of all things Christian is well known. Perhaps not so celebrated is the underlying motive:

“In North Korea everyone is ranked by their loyalty to the regime,” Demick said. “How high your standard is is whether or not your family believes Kim Il Sung is a God-like figure. As you may know, there is no religion in North Korea, but they’ve plagiarized the Bible. If you read North Korean propaganda, Kim Il Sung is God and the son is Jesus. When he was born, there is a star that heralded his birth and then a rainbow. There is a reason they banded the Bible, its because they’ve plagiarized it.”

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