A City Hall Telenovela

Sam Gideon Anson
Mixing personal loyalty and political business is nothing new to Eastside City Councilman Richard Alatorre. That's how he built the city's smoothest-running political machine and how he became the most adept operator in City Hall. But now, by his own account, the mix of personal and political has brought the......

Rent Rage

David Cogan
Santa Monica has long been on the front lines in the civil wars over rent control. That contest was decided last year in Sacramento, but reports from the beach city suggest that landlord-tenant relations have again deteriorated into street fighting. Assault, racism, death threats and larceny are just a sampling......
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Highway 65 Revisited

Chuck Eddy
So I get this 12-inch record in the mail; front cover proclaims "Not if You Were the Last Dandy on Earth!" The vinyl itself has no artist names or song titles or words at all on its white label. The A-side does appear to be an actual song, but the......
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Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
Stereotypes die hard, of course, and if any city understands this, it's Los Angeles. Witness the national fawning over the new Getty Center - as if the superficial daughter of a great, cultured family had finally brought home a boyfriend who could speak the King's English. One of L.A.'s more......
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Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
SUSAN FALUDI exploded into public consciousness in 1991 with the release of Backlash, which reported what she described as an undeclared war on feminism. The book grew out of an article she wrote debunking Newsweek's infamous "man shortage" story of 1986. Born in New York, Faludi calls herself "one of......
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Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
By the time LEWIS MacADAMS discovered the Beats as a Dallas high school freshman, he already knew that "My fate was not connected with the future of the suburbs." After attending Princeton, he spent time in New York, then moved in 1970 to Bolinas in Marin County. From 1974 to......
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Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
JERVEY TERVALON sold his first poem to Scholastic magazine while he was still in junior high school. "'My God,'" the Pasadena resident remembers thinking, "'I can make money at this.' And I've been deluded ever since." Raised in Los Angeles, he attended Dorsey High School and UC Santa Barbara, where......

Le Gros Bob

Paul Malcolm
Robert Aldrich was born into privilege, but he had pulp in his veins. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was his cousin, and it was an uncle at Chase National Bank who landed Aldrich a job as an RKO production clerk in 1941. When he began directing his own films just over......

One World

Ernest Hardy
Gender and sexual politics, the lingering power of the color-caste system, critiques of the production and exploitation of the world's black cultures, and the search for a meaningful black "self" beneath it all - these are the issues, themes and marketing hooks that populate this year's Pan African Film Festival......

London Kills Him

Ella Taylor
No one could accuse Gary Oldman of going with the flow. While British working-class film trades in its hereditary gloom - even Ken Loach is making comedies these days - for perky little numbers custom-built for a swift American pickup (Brassed Off, The Full Monty), Oldman's first directing effort hauls......