Sean J. O'Connell

Sometimes it feels as if author Geoff Dyer is trying to break the record for most books about the widest range of subjects. He has tackled jazz (But Beautiful), photography (The Ongoing Moment) and D.H. Lawrence (Out of Sheer Rage). Add to that four novels and dozens of essays and......

For most kids under the age of 65, Gumby was their introduction to stop-motion animation. The high-pitched, oddly shaped hero and his horse companion, Pokey, had their television debut on The Howdy Doody Show in the mid-1950s - and from there the sky was the limit. In 1960, creator Art......

The open road and its seemingly infinite, flat expanses are irresistible to lead-footed dreamers — for about five hours. Nearly 2,500 miles long, Route 66 was the main cross-country route between Chicago and Los Angeles and boasted hundreds of opportunities to answer the neon sirens' call, or maybe just move......

There are more than 75 operational subway stations in the sprawling Los Angeles Metro system. All of them have been touched by the hands of artists whose goal was to make interminable delays and frequent TAP-card checkpoints worthwhile - or at least aesthetically pleasing. Without looking at a station sign,......

Even without having to finesse the varying preferences of friends, significant others and offspring, settling on what movie to watch can be a challenging task. Some people spend more time combing through their queue than actually watching movies, hemming and hawing over thousands of options before settling on something they've......

Author and performance artist Sandra Tsing Loh exudes a homegrown anxiety. The Malibu-raised Caltech graduate has the ability to make any situation sound both overwhelming and hilarious, which comes in handy as she documents her life experiences in The Atlantic. On KPCC, her three-minute serial, "The Loh Life," brazenly captures......

Comic books are the source material for what feels like 99 percent of movies these days. Many a brooding crimefighter first appeared in benday dots before Hollywood figured out how to get people to watch him through 3-D glasses for a surcharge. Thankfully, Free Comic Book Day is a nice......

Everybody's heard of "heavy metal." But is there such a thing as "light metal?" Do the guys in Slipknot ever regret their choice of mask? Who gets blamed for the Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration? Hard-hitting questions like those can be answered when authors Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman discuss their new......