Upgrades on the Gravy Train

Marc B. Haefele
The Daily News had fun lately with the aftermath of the "triumphant" Riordan Far East junket. The News found plenty of witnesses to several cases of upgrading the mayor's party's airline accommodations from business to first class. The upgraded included Mr. and Mrs. Riordan (though the mayor later claimed he'd......

I Am Not From Venus

Judith Lewis
It's midsummer, 1995. I have just turned 35. I am sitting on a barstool at my friend Mark's apartment in Burbank, drinking a martini and confiding the details of my latest romance gone awry, a three-month rebound affair that I know, even as I lament its demise, will leave only......
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Loaves and Fishes

Jonathan Gold
For most of the last decade, Gagnier's of New Orleans was a gleaming white-tablecloth creole restaurant in the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw Plaza shopping center on Crenshaw, casual enough to stop into after a morning of shopping at Macy's, though still one of the nicest places adjacent to the swank black communities......
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Smash the Technorealist State

Judith Lewis
On March 12, a self-organized system of writers and pundits proclaimed themselves "Technorealists" and posted a manifesto on the World Wide Web to explain what that means (https://www. technorealism.org). Among its signatories are writers I respect, thinkers who in various contexts have always sounded right to me: Paulina Borsook, who......

Final Credits

Robert Lloyd
EVIDENCE OF BLOODThe Movie ChannelSaturday, March 28,9 p.m.HOLLYWOODISM:Jews, Movies and the American DreamA&ESunday, March 22, 10 p.m. Here in the killing season between the February sweeps and the summer vacation, they knock 'em down faster than I can write about them. The most spectacular recent axing (indeed, one of the......
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Watch on the Rhone

Steven Mikulan
There's a moment in Gertrude Stein's play about a French town during the German Occupation when one character advises another to "just be natural and do your part." It's a gently ironic suggestion, given how the actors in Interact Theater's production of Yes Is for a Very Young Man neither......

L.A. School Officials Dodge State Auditors

Bryan Steele
Federal funds intended for helping poor children succeed in school were instead spent to pay part of their principals' salaries, according to state officials. The shift of funds occurred at 455 campuses across the L.A. Unified School District this year. State regulators are demanding that the school district either return......

Hollywood Row

Sandy Cohen
Boom times in the film industry are causing headaches for neighbors of one of Hollywood's most venerable studios. Residents of Larchmont Village are rallying to oppose expansion plans by Paramount Studios - specifically, an attempt to build a multilevel parking structure on residential property across the street from the film......

100 Days of Solitude

John Ross
MEXICO CITY - City Hall was literally going to pieces: Carpets were rolled back, floorboards pried up, portraits of Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas pulled down, and the walls stripped back. A nest of wiretap devices and hidden cameras had just been discovered in the offices of Cardenas' second-in-command, and now investigators......

Truth Has Consequences at the MTA

Sam Gideon Anson
A new scandal was erupting at the MTA, and Inspector General Art Sinai, as he has so many times during his four years watch-dogging the perennially troubled agency, was quick to get out in front of it. "MTA Fires Informer," read the banner across the front page of last Thursday's......