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Reconstructing the Ephemeral

The very idea of a large-scale museum exhibition that focuses on a group of artistic movements whose common hallmark was an untranslatable ephemerality is so perverse that only its sheer audacity partially balances out the dubiousness of the endeavor. For many of the artists included in "Out of Actions," MOCA's......

AIDS Panic at the County

By the arcane calculus of county politics, Peter Kerndt's National Institutes of Health grant caused a lot more than $1.5 million-per-annum's worth of trouble. That's why, though it promised to facilitate research to cure the world's most widespread deadly disease, the County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday officially voted the......
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Tofu before noon

Raisin Bran has its place in the world; blueberry pancakes are fine. We have personally fried enough eggs over easy to swamp Dodger Stadium in slightly runny yolk. But on the other side of the world - and in other parts of town - breakfast is more likely to contain......

Bank Shot

The rush - the heart-stopping terror - of robbing a bank was like nothing else on the planet for Keith. Better than a game-winning buzzer-beater, better than the Magic Mountain Viper, better even than a "master-blaster" - a simultaneous mega-hit of base accompanied by the expert ministrations of a cheap......
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Mostly Magical Mozart

Well, that was more like it. After a season pretty far down in the operatic dumps so far, our aspiring if not yet perfect company has rediscovered enchantment at the most likely fountainhead, the music of Mozart. Last week's Magic Flute, even braving the Friday-the-13th curse for its opening night,......

Hole

It's 5 a.m. in Los Angeles and I've decided to go in search of the perfect donut. I'm not sure what the perfect donut will be - I have my ideas - but I don't want to prejudice myself. I want to be open to the possibilities - a tabula......
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The Best Things in Code Are Free

To those of us who never pay for software anyway, Netscape's announcement, on January 21, that it was about to distribute its browser for free meant exactly nothing. Except for a Quicken financial-planning program I bought in the box for a friend one Christmas, I have never been to a......

Survival, Revivalle

ABC's Prey is a "Darwinian" thriller about a recently evolved race of not-quite-humans who, because "two species cannot occupy the same evolutionary space," are constrained by natural law - it's nothing personal - to kill all Homo sapiens in order to survive. (In which business they proceed - classical alien......
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Divided We Stand

Although the American century arrived with the myth of its melting pot, today we live in a culture riven by identity politics and their dissonant vocabulary. It's no riddle why; while certain categories of people may enjoy more civil rights than they did 100 years ago, they also remain fairly......

Zealots Target Sierra Club

"No nation in human history ever undertook to deal with such masses of alien population," declared the Atlantic Monthly, blaming immigration for the debased standard of living of many Americans, and warning that further admittance of the "vast hordes" could destroy the soil, the land, the very air Americans breathe......