This Sunday, October 22, LACMA opens its doors to its ”mid-century indoor-outdoor and lifestyle room with patio overhang.“ No, the museum hasn‘t ventured into real estate. The ’50s display is one of three ”period rooms“ filled with era-specific furniture and decorative arts, and is just the tip of the largest......
I met him only once -- that is, I accosted him as he passed by the Sidewalk Cafe in the East Village and told him how much I loved his music -- but the death of Don Cherry touched me as deeply as if he were . . . I......
There is perhaps no better place to study the effects of the globalization of the world economy than the Tijuana--San Diego border region. There, migrant labor camps abut the bountiful malls of Anglo suburbs, just miles from streets where barefoot Indian children uprooted from southern Mexico beg well-fed tourists for......
Photo by Virginia Lee Hunter As a janitor and union member, Dolores Martinez marched her way to a pay raise. Along with thousands of members of L.A.’s cleaning crews, she helped earn a historic triumph for organized labor in April. During a three-week strike, janitors like Martinez forced 18 contract......
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov Evans Community Adult School has been called Los Angeles’ Ellis Island, where immigrants from all over the world learn English and become part of mainstream California. During the bus strike, the school saw its attendance drop nearly one third; this semester, 15,000 students are enrolled. Now......
It is hard to imagine any realm of American culture more riddled with hypocrisy than our collective attitude toward drug use. Pushing Ritalin on children already enslaved by Pokemon addictions is standard middle-class practice, but a teen on acid would be better locked away. Daily infusions of Prozac keep the......
I used to call it the Idiot Minute. Maybe I did. Maybe I called it the Idiot Beat. Don’t remember. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that it happened enough that I had a name for it at all. It was the moment just after walking through the door for a......
Photo by Gordon Parks/Corbis It is hard to imagine some of the most revered members of the Harlem Renaissance — that famed black artistic and cultural rebirth of the 1930s — working as hired hands in Hollywood. And yet, legendary essayists, playwrights, poets and novelists such as Wallace Thurman, Langston......
Gordon Parks is a photojournalist, art photographer, author, composer and director best known for his groundbreaking films The Learning Tree and the original Shaft. A 30-year retrospective of his photography, “Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks,” is currently showing at the California African-American Museum through December 30. On......
Illustration by Bill Smith Diversity is more than a by-the-numbers proposition, but when it comes to black employment in the motion-picture industry, here are the latest statistics: After enjoying a 77 percent increase between 1991 and 1997, minority writers in the Writers Guild of America still account for just under......
