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Virtual Virgins

Judith Lewis
Given a moment's thought, any reasonable 12-year-old could have figured it out. The notion that two teens would lose their virginity live on the Internet had to be a hoax. Yet media sources from Channel 11 news to Salon magazine responded to "Our First Time" as if it were either......
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Gruel World

Jonathan Gold
Dim sum can be grand. Northern breakfast breads are delicious. But congee - porridge - may be as close as there is to a universal Chinese breakfast dish, rice boiled with large amounts of broth until it becomes a nutritious, loosely textured gruel, spiked with a handful of boiled peanuts......
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Four Play

Alan Rich
Here's a new name for you: Emil Frantisek Burian, Czech composer (1904-59), imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp but survived, journalist, socialist activist and experimental stage director. A recording on ECM of Burian's Fourth Quartet, composed in 1947, marks his first appearance in the Schwann catalog: a work of exceptional......

Night Lite

Dave Shulman
Some of you might remember: Before the second coming of Reagan (Bush) and His New World Hors d'Oeuvres, people used to come home from work while it was still light out and have something called Their Own Lives, during which it was not uncommon for them to have something called......

School Board Fires Hamid Arabzadeh

Stuart Timmons
Charges of endangered public and student health rang out at last week's hearing that preceded the dismissal of L.A. Unified's safety director, Hamid Arabzadeh. Not present, however, were half a dozen district staff members, some of whom attested in writing to the matter Arabzadeh was officially fired over: his management......

Black Like Who?

Ernest Hardy
The recent 100th anniversary of cinema encompasses a span of time that almost perfectly parallels the stretch of this century. From the beginning, film was yoked to racist imagery. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter, a white former mechanic, directed a 12-minute version of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Tom was played by......

Kiss and Tell

Chuck Wilson
If you had driven past Mann's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard two Mondays ago, you would have been greeted by all the familiar trappings of a movie premiere: red carpet, searchlights crisscrossing the night sky, anxious tourists straining at barricades. "Just another premiere," you might have thought as you peered......

As You List It

Paul Malcolm
List them and they will come. At least that's what the American Film Institute and the home-video departments of the major studios helping to hype its ranking of America's 100 greatest movies are hoping. Behind the AFI's 100 Years . . . 100 Films list is a marketing campaign of......
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The Ballad of Chalino Sanchez

L.A. Weekly
Saturday slides toward Sunday at Rodeo de Medianoche, a cavernous nightclub in Pico Rivera, as the duo Voces del Rancho sing the story of how Lamberto Quintero died. A drug smuggler in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, Quintero was killed in a 1976 shootout, and his ballad - or corrido......
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Sing Now, Die Later

L.A. Weekly
Return to part1 At Cintas Acuario, Pedro Rivera's other son, Juan, devised a series of compilation albums with photographs of staged drug deals and drug robberies: Puros Corridos Perrones (Badass Corridos, more or less). Volume 5, with no promotion whatsoever, sold 60,000 copies in a single week last year. Juan......