Global Vision

David Moberg
When Thailand's baht collapsed last July, it seemed an event of no great significance, a pebble plopped into the sea of global finance. Today, the ripples are beginning to wash up on California shores, and nobody knows if they portend an economic tsunami or just some rough surf. But then,......

Double Fault

David Davis
Peter Fischer, the pediatric endocrinologist who helped coach and mold tennis star Pete Sampras, will be sentenced next week to six years in state prison for molesting children. Under a plea bargain, Fischer has admitted guilt on two counts of unlawful penetration, while 11 other counts against him will be......

A City Hall Telenovela

Sam Gideon Anson
Mixing personal loyalty and political business is nothing new to Eastside City Councilman Richard Alatorre. That's how he built the city's smoothest-running political machine and how he became the most adept operator in City Hall. But now, by his own account, the mix of personal and political has brought the......

Rent Rage

David Cogan
Santa Monica has long been on the front lines in the civil wars over rent control. That contest was decided last year in Sacramento, but reports from the beach city suggest that landlord-tenant relations have again deteriorated into street fighting. Assault, racism, death threats and larceny are just a sampling......
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Highway 65 Revisited

Chuck Eddy
So I get this 12-inch record in the mail; front cover proclaims "Not if You Were the Last Dandy on Earth!" The vinyl itself has no artist names or song titles or words at all on its white label. The A-side does appear to be an actual song, but the......
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Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
Stereotypes die hard, of course, and if any city understands this, it's Los Angeles. Witness the national fawning over the new Getty Center - as if the superficial daughter of a great, cultured family had finally brought home a boyfriend who could speak the King's English. One of L.A.'s more......
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Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
SUSAN FALUDI exploded into public consciousness in 1991 with the release of Backlash, which reported what she described as an undeclared war on feminism. The book grew out of an article she wrote debunking Newsweek's infamous "man shortage" story of 1986. Born in New York, Faludi calls herself "one of......
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Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
By the time LEWIS MacADAMS discovered the Beats as a Dallas high school freshman, he already knew that "My fate was not connected with the future of the suburbs." After attending Princeton, he spent time in New York, then moved in 1970 to Bolinas in Marin County. From 1974 to......

Le Gros Bob

Paul Malcolm
Robert Aldrich was born into privilege, but he had pulp in his veins. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was his cousin, and it was an uncle at Chase National Bank who landed Aldrich a job as an RKO production clerk in 1941. When he began directing his own films just over......

One World

Ernest Hardy
Gender and sexual politics, the lingering power of the color-caste system, critiques of the production and exploitation of the world's black cultures, and the search for a meaningful black "self" beneath it all - these are the issues, themes and marketing hooks that populate this year's Pan African Film Festival......