Notes From Half a Film Festival

Ella Taylor
"This is what Sundance is about," an agent who had just snagged a multipicture deal with Miramax for first-time film- maker Chris Cherot (whose prophetically named movie, Hav Plenty, was playing in competition at the festival) told the Los Angeles Times last week. "A guy who made a movie for......
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Music Reviews – Jan 28, 1998

LA Weekly
ATTICA BLUES Attica Blues (Mo Wax) Much like the bizarre R&B/New Jazz album and song "Attica Blues" that brought saxophonist Archie Shepp acclaim in 1972, England’s trio Attica Blues has cultivated a style that’s sure to move you in all-new ways. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s the......
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Old Flames

Greg Burk
THE RIVERSIDE RECORDS STORY The year Charlie Parker died, 1955, Riverside Records founder Orrin Keepnews signed Thelonious Monk, who would stay for six years and record much of his definitive music for the label. It’s a mark of jazz’s post-bop desperation that Keepnews was able to buy out Monk’s contract......
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Marnie Weber at Rosamund Felsen

Brian Baltin
Japanese porn embodies a wild and rigid dichotomy: On one hand, there’s the softcore mainstream, legally prohibited from showing genitalia and, until recently, pubic hair and intended to be consistent with the country’s image of modesty, tact and low crime rate; and on the other, there’s an underground notorious for......
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Rubén Ortiz Torres at Track 16

Terry R. Myers
"They was helicopters," claimed a Midwestern farmer repeatedly on an audiotape I heard back in 1986. Who knows what he thought about being hypnotized to reconstruct his alien abduction, much less what he went through that day in his field — but if we do believe him (not that he......

The Economics Lesson

Evan Wright
"These are people who a few generations ago would have run off to join the circus," noted a participant observing the bare-breasted blonds jiggling down the lanes at Mission Hills Bowl. Their brightly painted nails too long and delicate to fit in the finger holes, they were hurling the balls......
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Up Above the World

Phillip Ramey
This story, originally published in 1997 in L.A. Weekly, was reposted here upon Bowles' death on November 18, 1999. Paul Bowles is the author of novels (The Sheltering Sky) and many short stories, the translator of Sartre's No Exit and several Moroccan works, and a composer of note. Now 87,......
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The Refugee

Brendan Bernhard
This story, originally published in the September 18, 1997, issue of L.A. Weekly, was reposted when R.B. Kitaj passed away October 21, 2007. Photo by Slobodan DimitrovThere are certain phrases that, once you've spent a few afternoons in the company of the painter R.B. Kitaj, rapidly become familiar. "I overstayed......
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Coming to America

Brendan Bernhard
This excerpt was originally published in L.A. Weekly on February 21, 1997, and reposted here on July 3, 2008. Early on the morning of September 30, 1973, in his home in Santa Monica Canyon, the 69-year-old English novelist Christopher Isherwood received a phone call from the Reuters news service informing......
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I Am a Diary

L.A. Weekly
This excerpt was originally published in L.A. Weekly on February 21, 1997, and reposted here on July 3, 2008.    June 1939 House hunting brought us into direct contact with the splendors and miseries of Hollywood architecture . . . Up Laurel Canyon, nearly buried in undergrowth, we found a......