Falling James

"You know how it goes," Scott Wannberg once wrote. "They say your name enough times/and even you sooner or later begin to believe it is actually your own." A coterie of the late poet's friends and peers will freely invoke his name and will "all sing Scott's simultaneous languages of......

With its atmospheric look at Los Angeles, blending shots of Tinseltown's vanishing past with stark mid-'80s urban seediness, X: The Unheard Music is a strikingly unusual concert film. Director W.T. Morgan didn't just document the story of the local boho punk icons X, he conjured a haunting, lingering fever dream......

Although she lives now in New York, Joan Didion was for many years the quintessential L.A. woman, depicting the unsettling contradictions of the Left Coast lifestyle in such novels as Play It as It Lays and the landmark essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Whether she was......

In this season of wicked witches and groovy ghouls, it's sometimes easy to forget this is also a serious time of year to remember and commune with dead relatives and friends. For All Souls' Day, community cultural organization the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) hosts a Dia de......

History is written by the victors, which is why, with the veritable flood of books about the late-1970s L.A. punk scene bubbling up over the past decade, most have focused on relatively popular bands like the Germs and X. But the original punks were too irreverent and egalitarian to tolerate......

Tonight's show is a direct blast from the early punk-rock past, led by the soulfully fiery exhortations of Kat Arthur and her hard-rocking Legal Weapon. There was a time when her passionate vocalizing attracted major-label interest, but luckily the band survived such outside attempts to water down their iconic sound......