Erin J. Aubry

Homeboys From Outer Space and Other Transgressions

Erin J. Aubry
IS ETHNICALLY CORRECT TELEVISION A CIVIL RIGHT? Laugh aloud if you must, but the Los Angeles Times has speculated on that possibility in its fevered reporting of the fact that network television, as it heads into the last fall season of the millennium, doesn't have a single new show featuring......
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Spare Parts

Erin J. Aubry
Photo by Karen RosaNO AGE HAS BEEN SO DIGITALLY SOPHISTICATED as ours, or so restless for new stimuli that the most compelling stories run their courses -- on talk shows or Internet gossip loops -- before they have a chance to engender any kind of sage reflection upon our condition......
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Holiday Bowl

Erin J. Aubry
For slightly longer than I’ve been alive, the coffee shop and bowling alley has stood just south of Exposition Boulevard as a friendly gateway to Crenshaw proper, to its confounding but exhilarating mix of Spanish villas, soul-food haunts, African art shops and furious street vending that on any given day......
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5C’s

Erin J. Aubry
Before I went on my recent 5C’s excursion, I must confess, I hadn’t been to the place for a good 10 years. My absence had nothing to do with the food — it still kicks, big time — and everything to do with graduating from college and moving out of......

Wal-Mart Knocks on Crenshaw’s Door

Erin J. Aubry
Photo by Virginia Lee Hunter Retail behemoth Wal-Mart, which has conquered upwardly mobile suburbia from coast to coast on its way to becoming a multibillion-dollar corporation, has its sights set on a new target — the Crenshaw district, a longtime stronghold of the black middle class that has been historically......

Summer of Spike

Erin J. Aubry
Photo by Kathleen ClarkSPIKE LEE HAS A DREAM. No, it's not to make a biopic about Martin Luther King Jr., though that sounds perfectly logical (no one's done it yet) and pretty Spike-like, a companion piece to his career-defining Malcolm X. People of all colors and ideological persuasions would doubtless......
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In the Key of Dee

Erin J. Aubry
Photo by Brett PanelliONE DOES NOT EXACTLY INTERVIEW RUBY DEE. DIMINUTIVE and warmly intense, the veteran actress does not talk to you so much as let you in on what she's thinking, make you privy to a nonstop ticker tape of notions running through her head once you ask a......

Back to School

Erin J. Aubry
Photo by Jenafer Gillingham Three weeks after being removed from his Hamilton High School classroom following a campus demonstration targeting him as racist, magnet teacher Gregg Beytin was cleared on Monday to return to work. A Hamilton parent group called the African-American Parent Coalition for Educational Equity (AAPCEE) helped orchestrate......

Unsocial Studies

Erin J. Aubry
Photo by Jenafer GillinghamTHE HAMILTON HIGH SCHOOL STORY IS not what you think it is. It is not what I thought it was. It is melodrama that can only be described in epic terms, so here goes: This is a Greek tragedy playing out in the furthest reaches of the......
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Black Magic

Erin J. Aubry
Photo by Robert HaleWHEN THE ORANGE COUNTY BLACK ACTORS THEATER (OCBAT) fizzled some seven years ago, it was not for the usual reasons that plague small-theater efforts in Southern California -- a dearth of capital or commitment. OCBAT founder/director Adleane Hunter had established something behind the Orange Curtain that no......