Street Cred, 90210
Eschewing New York, renegade London street-art dealer Steve Lazarides has opened another of his audacious pop-up galleries in an unexpected derelict space — an 8,000-square-foot former Anthropologie store in the middle of Beverly Hills. Last week, Banksy’s former gallerist …
Torture, Lies and Louis XIII Cognac
The police dispatch said a man named Lamond Dean had been hit in the head with a gun. When the officers arrived about 9:30 p.m. at a shabby bungalow set back from Verdugo Road in Glendale, they knew it would be a long night.
A crowd was milling in the driveway. One man ha…
Raven, Death of a Hollywood Beauty
Raven was one of the youngest and toughest Hollywood street runaways, living in alleys and back lots where beatings, drugs and prostitution are still common. Addicted to meth, the stunningly beautiful 15-year-old foster kid and runaway turned tricks to buy drugs.
Her real…
Guessing Game
Escorts in Los Angeles residents can be forgiven if their heads are spinning. Two months ago the City Council spoke of cutting 4,000 jobs to balance the budget. Today, the mayor says the budget can balance with just 761 job cuts, and that the final figure might be lower.
What happen…
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…