View this slideshow for photographs of the installation and opening reception of "Robbie Conal: No Spitting No Kidding." Walking into Robbie Conal’s Westside studio on a recent Thursday afternoon, I found the guerrilla poster artist and political hell-raiser wearing green surgical gloves and standing before a brightly lit......
Last month, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and watched myself outlive John Lennon. I’d been bracing for the moment ever since I was 17, six years after Lennon was murdered and right around the time I was headed off to college, seriously pissed off that my generation......
“This is going to make me a nervous wreck,” said an old woman seated on a gaudy chair just outside the padded gray doors that led into the performance space of the Hayworth Theater. “Why?” asked her friend, sitting on an adjacent chair while tightening the Velcro on her sneaker......
Billy Collins, two-time U.S. poet laureate, walked out onto the stage at the Skirball Cultural Center, his bald head resting like an egg inside a wiry nest of gray hair, his face that of a mischievous 7-year-old boy who knows everything and is barely able to contain his glee, and......
There we were, members of the press on preview night at the Skirball Cultural Center, poised at the top of a ramp like pinballs at the mouth of a chute leading into a flashing machine. The exhibit was called Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966, and curator Jasen Emmons, with the......
Hobbling on a cane with the flamboyant teeter of a man whose legs have been loosened at the hips to near separation from his body, Paul Krassner explained, swinging perilously this way and that, how the term "green room" originally referred to the chamber at San Quentin where prisoners awaited......
By now it's impossible to know for sure if David Sedaris is the most deeply gifted American humorist since Mark Twain due to his talent as a writer or as a reader. Maybe it's not a case of being one or the other, but both. Have Joan Baez pick up......
On a recent Saturday morning, I found myself inside the Los Angeles Sports Arena in Exposition Park, sitting 13 feet away from a girl wearing ice skates and a mermaid tail. I was choking back the tears and biting my lower lip to keep it from quivering, the same way......
“I can only guarantee you five minutes.”
In the middle of a park in Sierra Madre, on an absolutely perfect fall Sunday morning, Sharon Jimenez, senior adviser ...
“Who are you again?” Martin Alcala, vice chair of California’s Tongva tribe, wanted to know. According to the literal meaning of their tribal name, the Tongva are “people of the earth.” Having survived for 100 centuries in Southern California, they are original Angelenos. So when I learned that the United......
