The Godfather

Ron Athey
Spending three hours on a Friday morning at the hillside home of cult-film legend Udo Kier, we talked movies, gardening and art. Additionally, I was given a tour of Kier's art and photo collection, which includes work by Jim Dine and Greg Gorman and, to no surprise, a Warhol Indian......

Head Trip

Manohla Dargis
"The hierarchy of hell is tremendously important," a woman remarks casually in the second installment of Lars von Trier's medical burlesque, The Kingdom, "rather like it is here." The character, a dotty spiritualist named Drusse, is talking about the fictitious Copenhagen hospital that gives this bravura, self-consciously recondite epic its......
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The Misery of Il Trovatore

Alan Rich
Everything that's right about romantic Italian opera, and everything that's wrong, comes into focus in Verdi's Il Trovatore. The plotline cries out for parody, and has been handsomely treated in that regard by the Brothers Marx in A Night at the Opera and by Gilbert and Sullivan with their theme......
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Old-School Thais

Jonathan Gold
Vim must have been one of the first dozen Thai restaurants in Los Angeles, a bright, fragrant storefront on a strip of South Vermont that anchored one of the city's original Thai neighborhoods. Composer Carl Stone named one of his earliest MIDI opuses after the restaurant, known for its particularly......
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The Scream of the Hard Drive, the Roar of the Fan

Judith Lewis
Over the course of our species' parallel evolution with the desktop personal computer, we have learned simply to accept certain things. We take for granted, for example, that the machines on our desks are, with rare exception, putty-colored. We assume that the computer's working parts are housed in either a......
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Bet Noir

Steven Mikulan
Gambling, at least as it exists in literature, is not just some juicy existential trope; it's a veritable watermelon of a metaphor. The gambler has long been regarded as a walking system of ethical self-definition, a person living for the moment and only in the present, an homme d'engage who......
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Green Reprieve

Sara Catania
When the leaders of the Sierra Club summoned the media to their San Francisco headquarters last weekend to trumpet the failure of an anti-immigration insurgency, they timed the gathering for maximum effect. A Saturday announcement, they knew, would be splashed across the front pages of the Sunday papers, spreading the......

Dying Declaration

Eric Pape
PHNOM PENH - On April 2, 13 days before he died, Pol Pot, one of the great killers of the 20th century, gave what was likely the last interview of his 73 years. The former Khmer Rouge leader was tracked down to a small hut near Anlong Veng, only a......

Sanity Check

Sara Catania
SAN RAFAEL - Each weekday morning since early April, Horace Edwards Kelly has been roused from his bunk on San Quentin's Death Row to be showered and then shackled for the short drive to the Marin County Courthouse. He takes his seat in courtroom F, quietly smiling or staring off......

L.A. Mob Does Vegas

Matthew Heller
It's a case that began with surveillance of a Las Vegas storefront and ended with the assassination of one of the gambling mecca's most notorious underworld figures. It includes some 1,700 audio- and videotapes, confidential informants, and a former defendant-turned-witness who says he has Tourette's syndrome and attention deficit disorder......