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The Spectacle of a Mind

Alan Rich
Here's a letter, one of many. Its writer - whom I'll identify only by noting that we have the same initials - has been rendered morose by my words that suggest a negative reaction to music closer to his heart than to mine. "There is no composition of any era......
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Vietnamese rice in San Gabriel

Jonathan Gold
A French chef is not considered accomplished until he has mastered the classical repertoire from bouillon to ballotines; Italian chefs pride themselves on their ability to prepare 500 pasta sauces on demand. Some Angeleno chefs work from menus that allude to several dozen cuisines. Other chefs, specialists, work their entire......

Mayor Overboard

Marc B. Haefele
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. Where Alph the Sacred River Ran is actually not one of the named destinations of Mayor Richard Riordan's current Asian safari. But there aren't too many other Far Eastern places the city's 80-person official trade task force - enough people......
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Sledgehammers to the Streets

Adam Bregman
Basically, Spin, Rolling Stone, Details and other ridiculously dumb glossy magazines have nothing to offer you but anorexic-model-strewn advertisements and articles where Hootie & the Blowfish get to sound off on world affairs. Instead, why not check out the underground press, which has whole worlds to reveal, scenes that neither......
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Flesh Palaces

Steven Leigh Morris
Yes, it's true that Dan Gerrity and Jeremy Lawrence's Melody Jones (in a return engagement at Theatre/Theater) is set entirely in a Buffalo, New York, strip club, and that the stage is filled with skin and all manner of "exotic" dancing. The club's employees spend much of the play speaking......

Zedillo's Xenophobia

John Ross
SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, CHIAPAS - No one is answering the door these days at Global Exchange's Peace House, situated down a shadowy side street in this old colonial city where so much of the Zapatista drama has been played out. Based in San Francisco, Global Exchange established a......

Sex and the Single Fruit Fly

Peter Garrison
A decade ago, the California Department of Food and Agriculture was dropping malathion on us in order to kill medflies. Now they've changed their approach: They raise medflies and drop them on us. This may seem mad, but there's method in it. The ingenuity of the program is that the......

Oh! My Darling

David Richard Bloom
While record-setting rains beat back the telltale stench, noxious fumes continue to plague the neighborhoods downwind of a meat-rendering plant operated near Vernon by Darling International Inc. Despite abatement orders issued last year by officials at the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), eight complaints were lodged against Darling......
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Nothing's Definite

Glen Hirschberg
BEATSYSTEMBeatsystem (Emit) The name suggests everything tedious about new electronic music: robotic repetition, formulaic compositions, dead ideas stitched together and shocked into spasmodic, zombified life. But this comes from Emit, the curious English label specializing in computer-driven music whose pulses and passions derive from less precise machines, the kind that......
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Demolisten Derby

Mara Schwartz
Record-label A&R execs devote their days to appraising usually excruciating demo tapes and their nights prowling the clubs, searching for that hoped-for Next Big Thing and often spending their careers without once striking platinum. But that future No. 1 hit each so desperately seeks may already be receiving radio play......