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Dreaming Castaneda

Celeste Fremon
For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, at this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to......

Back In Sight

Paul Malcolm
A few months back, while Steven Soderbergh was in the thick of postproduction on his latest film, Out of Sight, his past caught up with him, again. Sex, lies, & videotape was being remastered for DVD, and Soderbergh, who had to oversee the process, says it was the first time......

Falling Rock

Manohla Dargis
Calibrated for maximum impact, the action movie has become Hollywood's answer to extreme sports. Apparently, it is no longer enough to put the audience on the proverbial roller coaster; extreme movies, such as Michael Bay's The Rock and his latest opus, Armageddon, have to rattle our bones. Now, when we......

The Trip

John Whalen
One morning in April 1962, Cary Grant swallowed four tiny blue pills of lysergic acid diethylamide — LSD. Incredibly, it was the 58-year-old actor’s 72nd acid trip under the supervision of a psychiatrist. Grant relaxed on a plush couch and sipped coffee as the drug began to take effect. During......
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Persian Cats

Jonathan Gold
Canary Canary is an Iranian sandwich shop on Westwood's Iranian strip, a house of kebabs in the most kebab-intensive neighborhood in California. (As W.C. Fields once said of the garlic-packing town of Gilroy, you could marinate a steak just by hanging it on a clothesline here.) Kebab plates come with......
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Nudity, Gunshots, Sex, Feathers

Alan Rich
They've done it again, Michael Milenski and his weird and wonderful Long Beach Opera. What looked on paper like a couple of time-wasting, doom-destined ventures in operatic futility have turned out - in the time-honored Long Beach tradition - fascinating, irritating, provocative and more than somewhat worthwhile. And even though......
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Soft-Shoe Sushi

Jonathan Gold
Sushi on Tap is a stylish sushi bar in a Studio City mini-mall, a tap-dance-themed place with bright posters on the walls, tap documentaries flickering silently on the video screens that dot the room, and saccharine versions of jazz standards floating out of the speakers overhead. The three sushi chefs,......
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Vinny and the Very Bad Day

Judith Lewis
It keeps getting better every time I see it. The 30-second surveillance video, "badday.mpg" (https://www.masspike. com/badday), by now an Internet cult sensation, begins with a fat man with a mustache typing a few words into his computer and peering into his screen for the result. Evidently it's not to his......

Giving him flack

L.A. Weekly
Mark Worth's diatribe against journalists who have gone over to the "dark side" left me wondering if he isn't perhaps the one who is in the wrong profession (Media Culpa, "Hacks Turned Flacks," 7/9; also see Mark Worth's Media Culpa column, this issue). He presented a great deal of innuendo,......

Blockbuster

Sandy Cohen
For the second time in the past six months, a major Hollywood studio is seeking to expand by locating facilities in a residential neighborhood - and the people who live there are saying no. Residents south of Melrose Avenue near Van Ness Avenue filed suit against the city of Los......