"I AM INTERESTED," JAPANESE NEW WAVE DIRECTOR Shohei Imamura once declared, "in the relationship of the lower part of the human body to the lower part of the social structure." Now 72, Imamura has devoted his working life to unbuttoning the politesse of his native country, as mirrored in the......
Photo by Mike TraisterIN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF COUNTRY, THE worm continues to feed. Elsewhere in the diaspora of fin-de-siècle American pop, the survivors of the grunge apocalypse have begun to gather and hunt. Some huddle together in desperately defined niches (drum 'n' bass, alternative, post-rock), True Believers......
ASK ANY ORCHESTRAL MANAGER, ANYWHERE IN THE world, and you'll get the same answer: There is no better way to pave a pathway to financial ruin than by playing new music. The real money flows in to the tunes of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky; substitute the abstruse patterns of Boulez and......
SINCE THE DAWN OF THE VIDEO age, when the forgotten old cans of film rotting in studio vaults began to look like precious corporate assets, the preservation of motion pictures has become a high-profile crusade. Everywhere you look in April, the art and science of preservation and (increasingly) restoration is......
Photo by Craig SchwartzIN IBSEN'S 1890 HEDDA GABLER (IN A CLASSY YET COLLOquial adaptation by Jon Robin Baitz), lethally romantic Hedda (Annette Bening) hands a pistol to her former flame, Lovborg (Patrick O'Connell), and -- for her own peace of mind -- goads him to suicide with the words "But......
Photo by Paula CourtWHEN SPALDING GRAY WAS A KID, HE'D MASTURBATE in the neighbor's yard. "But there were no witnesses," he laughs during a phone conversation. Gray wove that experience into his first performance monologue, Sex and Death to the Age 14. "Ultimately," he concludes, "the audience is the witness."......
Photo by Virginia Lee HunterTHIS IS A STORY ABOUT MYTHOLOGY, OR, more accurately, about the place where mythology and reality coincide. It's a story that begins and ends with an earthquake, a story that has everything to do with the way that, here in California, the ground is less than......
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov The way Corinne Sanchez tells it, two months had passed since she first tried to contact Mayor Richard Riordan. Now, finally, he was on the phone. A candidate for L.A. City Council from the northeast San Fernando Valley, Sanchez already had the endorsement of Richard Alarcon,......
Photo by Robert Yager Two years ago, Richard Riordan evoked puzzlement and punditry when he vowed to become the "education mayor" of L.A. The mayor, after all, has no authority over the city school system. Bemusement only increased thereafter as Riordan, in pursuit of this goal, stumbled through a series......
Art by Calef BrownONCE AGAIN, THE SAN FRANCISCO AND NEW YORK arbiters of Geek Chic have slighted their poorer relations down in Los Angeles. It wasn't an overt snubbing, or even an intentional one. It's just that last month's annual Webby Awards, the event heralded by the press as the......
