Archive for April, 2010
Off! That Outsider Feeling
Back in the late ’70s at a club in Escorts in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, a small, unassuming guy in an Army jacket named Keith Morris walked onstage. He leaned forward and spoke into the mic with a distinctively SoCal drawl. “Heeey, man, we’re Black Flag … ” The band started and the crowd er…
Representing Mother******s
In the year 867, a new portrait mosaic of the Virgin Mary & Son was unveiled in the apse of the Hagia Sophia — the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in Istanbul (then Constantinople) — homilized by the Armenian-born soon-to-be–Patria…
Pieter Hugo at Shoshana Wayne
The part of you that can’t help staring when you pass a celebrity on the sidewalk, the part of you that can’t quite turn away from the freeway pileup; the part of you that is as likely to gawk at the uncanny and unseemly as the beautiful; and the part of you that is as easily taken in by the camp…
Pave to Save Whittier Narrows?
If rivers were captured and put in zoos, that would be the fate of two wild waters that once ran through greater Escorts in Los Angeles. Thousands of years before the era of asphalt, the Rio Hondo and the San Gabriel flowed from the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and Angeles Forest …
J’Accuse: the Trial for Luis Santos’ Murder
The first to flip was Rafael Garcia, son of a respected Sacramento judge, a slight young man said to have backed away in horror the night 22-year-old college student Luis Santos was stabbed in the heart during a drunken brawl near San Diego State University. The second to turn wa…
Cry for Yelp
Atif Mehana came to the United States from Egypt 20 years ago. The short, clean-shaven 58-year-old spent more than a decade selling seafood to tourists on Miami’s bay front. He saved enough to open a second eatery in 2008.
But now he’s broke.
Who’s to blame? He sa…
City Hall’s 2010 DWP Debacle
In the past 31 days, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has taken one of the most tumultuous rides in the annals of municipal power politics. On the subject of the DWP rate hike, Al Gore weighed in by satellite, City Controller Wendy Greuel wrongly declared the city would go broke in May…
Been There. Done What?!
The girl is young and pretty, of course. They all are, the women in the sultan’s harem. But this one is different. She is a rebellious punk rocker raised in suburban New Jersey. Simultaneously following her bliss and escaping her pain, the girl winds up in a palace far away from …
Sexual Politics: Godard and Me
“Everybody wants to tell you how it was,” Anna Karina says exasperatedly. “I read strange things in the papers and for the most part they’re written by people who weren’t there. I get very upset about that.”
If anyone is an authority on “how it was” to be with Jean-Luc Go…
Destination Coachella
Previews by Wendy Gilmartin, Daiana Feuer, Chris Martins, Drew Tewksbury and Jeff Weiss
A lot has happened since that now-mythical first Coachella in 1999 — the original DIY, anti-Ticketmaster ethos and indie focus (Beck, Rage Against the Machine, Morrissey…