The Eleventh Plague

Marc B. Haefele
A skeptical young Metropolitan Water District chemist explained it to me 10 years ago. Over a dinner of Montana Avenue pasta, she laid it out straight: "In the environment, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs." I noted the remark and filed it away. At that precise time, though,......
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Wise Blood

Kateri Butler
If you were a club hopper back in the ’70s and ’80s, you undoubtedly took a journey through the deliciously demented dreamscape of perform ance artist JOHANNA WENT , who tossed around goop-’n’-gore everywhere: at Club Lingerie, the Starwood, Club 88, the ON Klub, the Music Machine, Theoretical parties. She......
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Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam. . .

Jonathan Gold
There is sushi. And then there is Spam musubi. Spam musubi is a brick of vinegared sushi rice, the size of a chalkboard eraser but with 20 times the heft, burrito-wrapped in a sheet of dark-green nori seaweed and stuffed with a pink, glistening slab of the luncheon meat. It’s......
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Tacos Belles

Jonathan Gold
When the Southwestern thing was hot a few years ago, we tasted foie-gras tacos with honey-lime sauce and radicchio tacos stuffed with crab; blue tacos and red tacos; Jamaican tacos and Pilgrim tacos; tacos filled with parts of the pig we’d rather not talk about right now, thank you. Still,......
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Heavy Duty

Erin J. Aubrey
Having played everyone from Jesus to the devil, 33-year-old actor Spencer Scott is now taking on a new role, one he officially assumed last year, as producing director of the Unity Players Ensemble, a black theater group based in Inglewood. As the only troupe of its kind in the L.A......

Justice Delayed

Sandra Hernandez
It appeared to be a moment of truth: a pair of Riverside Sheriff’s deputies caught on tape by a television news camera as they delivered a violent roadside clubbing to two Mexican nationals. But more than two years after the April 1 beatings of Alicia Sotero Vasquez and Enrique Funes......

Westwood Can’t Dance

Sam Gideon Anson
The ghost of Karen Toshima is still haunting Westwood Village. Some 10 years after the young woman from Long Beach was gunned down in the crossfire of two rival gangs on a crowded Westwood sidewalk, Toshima’s murder remains a powerful touchstone among Village residents and merchants. Today, Toshima’s ghost is......

Death Defying

Sara Catania
With the scheduled execution of convicted murderer Horace Edwards Kelly less than a week away, his attorneys are arguing in a Marin County courtroom that their client is not sane enough to be put to death. In California’s first pre-execution sanity trial in decades, attorneys pleaded for the life of......

Pot War P.O.W.

Michael Simmons
Drug-reform activist, cannabis horticulturist, amateur research scientist, cancer survivor and accused pot farmer Todd McCormick, 27, was jailed on Friday, April 3, for failing a urine test. Federal Magistrate Judge James W. McMahon ruled that McCormick had violated conditions of his bail by testing positive for THC, the most psychoactive......

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Daniel Zoll
The latest crisis in Iraq brought some long-overdue media attention to the U.S. government’s dangerous habit of providing weapons of mass destruction to unstable, undemocratic regimes. For a few minutes. As media outlets rushed off to cover more pressing threats to national security, such as welfare cheats, illegal immigrants and......