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Laserian

Sue Spaid
Internationally known among commercial-art enthusiasts for his pop-inspired faunal and floral imagery, Japanese-born and -educated Hiro Yamagata is best known in the U.S. as the poster designer for the 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1996 Olympic Committees. (He's also designed commemorative stuff for the Air and Space Bicentennial, the U.S. Constitution's......
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Tofu before noon

Jonathan Gold
Raisin Bran has its place in the world; blueberry pancakes are fine. We have personally fried enough eggs over easy to swamp Dodger Stadium in slightly runny yolk. But on the other side of the world - and in other parts of town - breakfast is more likely to contain......

Bank Shot

Johnny Angel
The rush - the heart-stopping terror - of robbing a bank was like nothing else on the planet for Keith. Better than a game-winning buzzer-beater, better than the Magic Mountain Viper, better even than a "master-blaster" - a simultaneous mega-hit of base accompanied by the expert ministrations of a cheap......
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Mostly Magical Mozart

Alan Rich
Well, that was more like it. After a season pretty far down in the operatic dumps so far, our aspiring if not yet perfect company has rediscovered enchantment at the most likely fountainhead, the music of Mozart. Last week's Magic Flute, even braving the Friday-the-13th curse for its opening night,......

The Way of the Dinosaurs?

LA Weekly
In the years following its 1988 debut, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City struggled to survive, and its founder, a deceptively straight-faced fellow named David Wilson, was known to occasionally solicit business by serenading passing pedestrians with his accordion. Lately, Wilson's eclectic assemblage of the weird and wonderful......

Hole

Joe Donnelly
It's 5 a.m. in Los Angeles and I've decided to go in search of the perfect donut. I'm not sure what the perfect donut will be - I have my ideas - but I don't want to prejudice myself. I want to be open to the possibilities - a tabula......
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The Best Things in Code Are Free

Judith Lewis
To those of us who never pay for software anyway, Netscape's announcement, on January 21, that it was about to distribute its browser for free meant exactly nothing. Except for a Quicken financial-planning program I bought in the box for a friend one Christmas, I have never been to a......

Survival, Revivalle

Robert Lloyd
ABC's Prey is a "Darwinian" thriller about a recently evolved race of not-quite-humans who, because "two species cannot occupy the same evolutionary space," are constrained by natural law - it's nothing personal - to kill all Homo sapiens in order to survive. (In which business they proceed - classical alien......
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Divided We Stand

Steven Mikulan
Although the American century arrived with the myth of its melting pot, today we live in a culture riven by identity politics and their dissonant vocabulary. It's no riddle why; while certain categories of people may enjoy more civil rights than they did 100 years ago, they also remain fairly......

Zealots Target Sierra Club

Sara Catania
"No nation in human history ever undertook to deal with such masses of alien population," declared the Atlantic Monthly, blaming immigration for the debased standard of living of many Americans, and warning that further admittance of the "vast hordes" could destroy the soil, the land, the very air Americans breathe......