Lewis MacAdams

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Timothy Liar

Lewis MacAdams
Who was Timothy Leary? He’s mostly remembered as the Johnny Appleseed of acid, the man who turned the world on to LSD. When he was dying in 1996, he was mostly famous for being famous, the oldest celebutant, a 76-year-old guy in a wheelchair at the Viper Room. But back......

Arthur, Arthur!

Lewis MacAdams
Jay Babcock, 35, is the Diaghilev of the L.A. underground, an impresario of the avant-garde. A fourth-generation Californian with a B.A. in political science from UCLA, since the fall of 2002 he has managed, alongside his business partner Laris Kreslins, the practically impossible task of keeping Arthur, a free bimonthly......

Urban Agent

Lewis MacAdams
Daylight life in historic downtown L.A. has a surprisingly neighborhood feel. You walk down Spring Street with a smile and a wave for the elderly Latino couple at the newsstand, the Persian guy at the dry cleaner, the semi-homeless guy that’s long lived in the alley, on your way to......

Burial in the Sky

Lewis MacAdams
Illustration by Ralph SteadmanThe doormat at the entrance to Owl Farm, Hunter S. Thompson’s redoubt in Woody Creek, Colorado, reads “Come back with a warrant.” On August 20, six months to the day after Thompson killed himself with a .45-caliber pistol, friends and family came back to a field behind......

11 Cool Views of the L.A. River

Lewis MacAdams
From the roof of the old city jail on the east bank across from Elysian Park From the roof of the parking garage next to the twin-tower jails From the middle of the Sunnynook Footbridge in Atwater when the river is in full flood From the tunnel at the confluence......

Character of the Happy Warrior

Lewis MacAdams
The first time I saw Mark Madsen play basketball was at an invitation-only, pre-season game last August in the men’s gym at UCLA, a cavernous relic superseded by Pauley Pavilion nearly four decades ago. Most big cities have an ultimate outdoor court where the local hoop gods reign, and a......
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Loving William

Lewis MacAdams
Photo by Jenafer GillinghamJAMES GRAUERHOLZ, THE ONLY CHILD OF A PROMInent Coffeyville, Kansas, couple, grew up wanting to be a beatnik. A Kansas U. dropout, an acid-head, a rock & roll guitar player, he started writing poetry at 14 "with the idea that it should be good." In the early......

Jeremiah Among the Palms

Lewis MacAdams
Photo by Anne FishbeinBeneath a print of Robert Capa’s famous 1937 Spanish Civil War photo of a grief-stricken International Brigade soldier listening to the communist orator "La Passionaria" on the eve of their retreat from Barcelona, Mike Davis, 52, is perched on a chair in the middle of the living......
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What is a Photograph

Lewis MacAdams
Lewis Baltz's late-1970s and early '80s photo projects, brought to astringent perfection in the pristine, gelatin-silver prints of the black-and-white trilogy The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California (1974), Park City (1981) and San Quentin Point (1986), made him a hero to a generation of landscape photographers searching for a......