Greg Goldin

The Alficionado

Greg Goldin
Photos by Ted Soqui I first saw my dream car in the spring of 1983. It was parked at the Santa Monica repair shop where I used to take my 1965 Volvo 122S, a four-door sedan with white paint oxidized to chalk and a black steering wheel melted to rubbery......
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Empire Strikes Back

Greg Goldin
Illustration by Paul Sahre In Empire: nozone ix, the most recent installment of Nozone, a periodic zine of political cartoons, comics, photomontages, assemblages and brief essays, you will find a definition for the splendid Greek concept hegemony. The dominant culture penetrates every fiber of our consciousness without our being aware......

Bunkum Hill

Greg Goldin
Last Wednesday, April 7, four thick packages arrived at the 34th-floor offices of the Grand Avenue Committee, a quiet public-private partnership charged with remaking the hub of downtown, Bunker Hill, home to the city’s elite cultural and governmental institutions. One of the envelopes contains what will become the blueprint for......

Mr. Phoenix's Wild Ride

Greg Goldin
Charles Phoenix, the raconteur who performs “retro slide-show tours” of the good life in sun-drenched, prosperity-bound Los Angeles of the ’50s and ’60s, has now turned his eye from interpreting a past frozen in photos to the remnants of bustling city life suspended in the bricks and mortar of downtown......

The Untouchables

Greg Goldin
Photo by Ted Soqui The Rampart scandal, which broke in 1999, exposed LAPD corruption at its audacious, seamiest best. Anti-gang cops turned gangsters, and gangsters turned cops. Officers purloined cash and swiped cocaine — sometimes right out of the LAPD’s own evidence lockers. The crooked police shot and tortured the......
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Behind the Scenes

Greg Goldin
Photos by Phil Stern/CPI Phil Stern is a tough old cuss posing as a tough old cuss. The 84-year-old photographer’s best-known images, of James Dean peering over the collar of a black sweater and of Marlon Brando in jeans and leather jacket during filming of The Wild One, are instantly......

Hummer Bummer

Greg Goldin
In the early-morning hours last Friday, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), the loosely knit, anonymous band of eco-saboteurs, torched 20 Hummer H2s and damaged another 20 of the ersatz-military gas-guzzlers at Clippinger Chevrolet in West Covina. Explosions of gas tanks and tires shook the neighborhood of modest tract homes around......

Giving Up the Ranch

Greg Goldin
On May 27, about an hour before the county gave final approval for Newhall Ranch, the largest housing subdivision in Los Angeles history, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, the lone dissenter, had one of those rare, revelatory exchanges with a public servant. Pity Barry Witler, the county’s in-house traffic expert......

Light and Open

Greg Goldin
Photos by Gerald Zugmann The bulldozing and defacing of landmark 20th-century modernist homes in Los Angeles has recently become a sadistic art form. First, a well-heeled buyer puts up hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars to buy a legendary R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra or Gregory Ain. Next, usually with......

Last Stand at San Onofre

Greg Goldin
San Onofre State Park Beach must be one of the most unprepossessing spots along the Southern California coast. Dusky, scrubby, narrow, it is a low-lying wetlands that runs along San Mateo Creek, a mostly hidden, sandy-bottomed stream that spills into a lagoon near the top of a three-mile-long beach beneath......