article placeholder

Sticking It Where The Sun Shines

Jonathan Gold
New York has pushcart dogs and the garlic knobelwurst at Katz's deli. Chicago has Vienna franks. Rochester has its white-hots, Cincinnati its chili-sluiced coneys. Sheboygan is famous for grilled brats. Santa Monica . . . Santa Monica is the birthplace of Hot Dog on a Stick. Frankly, as regional hot......
article placeholder

Someone To Watch Over Me

Judith Lewis
At first, I get paranoid: Does the tiny microphone attached to the roof near the rear-view mirror transmit everything I say? Is there a camera, too? Do they always know where I am? The two sales representatives who brought the vehicle to my office, a couple in their 50s who......
article placeholder

Mr. Booth Goes to Washington

Steven Mikulan
It might be said that John Wilkes Booth was America's first political actor: Long before Paul Robeson, Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty - or, for that matter, before R.W. Reagan - Booth had carved his name into the national bark through one ideologically driven deed. True, murder is not considered......
article placeholder

What is a Photograph

Lewis MacAdams
Lewis Baltz's late-1970s and early '80s photo projects, brought to astringent perfection in the pristine, gelatin-silver prints of the black-and-white trilogy The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California (1974), Park City (1981) and San Quentin Point (1986), made him a hero to a generation of landscape photographers searching for a......

Pomp Over Circumstance

Erin J. Aubry
In 1994, architect and developer Michael Anderson felt on the verge of realizing an ambitious project he had been shopping around for months: a five-story office building that would have brought hundreds of government employees to the Crenshaw area and provided its economy with a badly needed shot in the......

Sam Yorty, 1909-1998

Harold Meyerson
In the life of the political leader, there sometimes comes a defining moment, an episode in which he creates himself indelibly and for all time. For Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, that moment came on the morning after the mayoral primary in April, 1969. On primary night, two-term incumbent Yorty......
article placeholder

Hear Him Roar

RJ Smith
Walking proud to the bandstand, grinning like a man going home, Gerald Wilson started a recent set at Moonlight in Sherman Oaks with a little offhand patter. "We got a lot of great guys here tonight," he said, scanning the assembled 17 members of the orchestra. Setting his eyes on......
article placeholder

Power of Flower

Miles Marshall Lewis
'Round midnight on December 20, 1989, at the World in downtown Manhattan's Alphabet City, Terence Trent D'Arby trooped back onstage to perform an obligatory encore for a scant crowd of a couple hundred concertgoers. The black-clad, dreadlocked soul singer was promoting his commercially doomed soph-omore album, Neither Fish nor Flesh,......

Malign Neglect

L.A. Weekly
Thirty years ago, after a summer of riots in the nation's cities, President Lyndon B. Johnson impaneled a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to analyze urban ills and propose solutions. That group, which came to be known as the Kerner Commission, issued a grim report, which concluded that "Our......

What Angie Knows

Chuck Wilson
Angie Dickinson is sitting three rows behind me, and I can't stop whipping my head around to stare at her. Definitely not cool. We are in the Motion Picture Academy theater in Beverly Hills, where staring is a deadly sin. Stare and they know you don't really belong. But it's......