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Fish Out of Water

Jonathan Gold
The San Pedro Fish Market and Restaurant may be the most raucous place in Los Angeles on a Saturday afternoon - a crumbling wharf in the Ports O' Call complex of San Pedro swarming with children, besieged by gulls, vibrating with the sound of mariachis whose trumpets compete with spurts......
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War and Peace:

Alan Rich
It's entirely possible that Gustav Mahler did not compose his Second Symphony with the Hollywood Bowl in mind; yet the two artifacts, the grandiose hullabaloo of a symphony from 1894 and the performance space imposed upon some impressive Cahuenga Pass real estate some 30 years later, strike me as having......

The Marsh

J William Gibson with Aaron Fontana
Add a hunger strike and a developer-sponsored "wetlands observation deck" to the contention surrounding Playa Vista, the enormous coastal development planned for more than 1,000 acres of scrub and marsh on Los Angeles' Westside. The hunger strike came by way of those opposed to the massive project, which would build......
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Taste Globally, Picnic Locally

Linda Burum
Smoke drifts from the mouths of several tandoors set up in Artesia Park for the annual Diwali Mela. This Hindu New Year Fair is one giant schmooze fest for the Indian community. Parents gossip, kids race around, people wander from booth to booth, where cooks turn out fragile dosas and......
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Sheltering Sky

Michelle Huneven
Aristotle said that men are hotter than women. Men are so hot, he said, that sometimes they burn off their hair. Want proof? Just look at the dearth of bald women. (Not surprisingly, in the likenesses of Aristotle I've seen he's bald as an egg.) I prefer to think that......
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Sampling L.A.'s newest restaurants

Linda Burum & Michelle Huneven
BLUEBERRY510 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica(310) 394-7766 If you're not careful, you'll leave this little bakery-cafe with blue lips, a blue tongue and the nagging conviction that you're morphing into a blueberry. The tiny muffins are blueberry, the iced tea is blueberry, the pancake syrup is blueberry, the pie is......
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Anglo Pop

Ella Taylor
Tuesday 3 January 130 lbs. (terrifying slide into obesity - why? why?), alcohol units 6 (excellent), cigarettes 23 (v.g.), calories 2472 . . .-Bridget Jones's Diary In a recent cover story administering hopelessly premature last rites to feminism, Time magazine blasted pop culture for serving up images of '90s women......
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Nick Hornby's Single Man

Judith Lewis
If there were a demographic study tracking the gender balance of Nick Hornby's readers, I'd lay bets it would substantiate this anecdotal observation: Despite Hornby's reputation as a manly writer, a real guy's guy, a GQ type probing the inner workings of the mysterious masculine drive for sex without commitment,......
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Beyond the Reality Asylum

Adam Bregman
While the Sex Pistols encouraged a lot of bored kids to stick safety pins in their noses and be punks for a few years, Crass, who also debuted in 1977, were an articulate band of anarchists who provoked a vital political movement that still exists, espoused revolution, lived communally, covered......