The Brothers Freak

Manohla Dargis
THE BIG LEBOWSKI Directed and written by JOEL COEN Produced and written by ETHAN COEN StarringJEFF BRIDGESJOHN GOODMANJULIANNE MOORESTEVE BUSCEMIDAVID HUDDLESTON and PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN Released by Gramercy Pictures At selected theaters The Big Lebowski is an amiable mess about L.A. and the importance of being nobody - an agreeably......
article placeholder

Mikhail Solo

Sasha Anawalt
When Mikhail Baryshnikov dances alone, light and music consume him in a way they don't when he is with somebody else. Solo, he is the maker of his own tradition. The revelations of his dancing are arguably deeper and greater than when he is in a group, or paired. I......
article placeholder

Portrait of the Critic As a Cool Guy

Robert Lloyd
Pity the critic, if you will, if you can, who must spend his days thinking long and hard on other people's real work. Unlike the artist's celebrated life of garrets and galas, there is nothing glamorous or romantic about his sublunary vocation: Hollywood has yet to produce a film in......

The Importance of Being Iconoclastic

Steven Mikulan
''The further West one comes," Oscar Wilde wrote of his 1882 visit to the United States, "the more there is to like." The city he liked most was San Francisco, which dazzled him with its Chinatown and gave him the warmest reception of his American tour; by contrast, he turned......
article placeholder

The Unrenowned Soldier

Michael Darling
The use of sweeping pronouncements and praiseful superlatives will most often land critics in the dog pound of disdain, for it's axiomatic that a positive review will make one artist happy and fill thousands with scorn. In the case of Tim Hawkinson, however, it is hard to resist the idea......
article placeholder

Big Meat

Jonathan Gold
Al-WatanLike any serious Pakistani restaurant, Al-Watan ostensibly specializes in the complicated offal dishes that make up the heart of Muslim Pakistani soul food: masala, here a ragout of chopped goat's brains cooked in a bright-red spice paste; and paya, a mildly spicy dish of braised beef and tendon. But the......

Checchi on the Cheap

LA Weekly
With all the money megamillionaire Al Checchi is throwing around in his bid to be California's next governor, you'd think the former airline exec could pay for his own rent-a-cops to act in TV campaign ads touting his tough-on-crime stance. But no. Instead, Checchi, the self-proclaimed self-made man, plied his......
article placeholder

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......
article placeholder

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......