Past Stories
Stronger Art, Lower Brows
“Nothing at last is sacred,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once penned, “but the integrity of your own mind.” There was certainly no concrete evidence of anything sacred in the burgeoning downtown LA art scene in ...
Art as Evidence
For thousands of Mexicans, November 25, 2006 will forever be fixed in memory as the day a teacher’s demonstration in Oaxaca’s capital city, held annually for the past 25 years, took a bloody turn when government tro...
Naughty and Nice
The Christmas foundling is a storytelling staple. “Long Lost,” from Richard Lange’s collection of short stories Dead Boys, is one such tale but without the holiday cheer; a found child story inside a found child story. Sp...
The Gooch Watch
Temecula’s own Gabe Gauthier (GO-chay) was called up for the proverbial cup of coffee this past week with the Los Angeles Kings, an 8-2 drubbing of the Buffalo Sabres. This matched the largest margin of victory for the la...
A Christmas Tale For All Seasons
The most famous of all Christmastime tales comes once again to Chino’s Seventh Street Theatre, and for traditionalists, it should be a pleasing sight. Directed by Tom Kirkpatrick, Chino’s Community Theatre manages to put to...
The Art of Surrendering
Art is objective; Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup” may seem like just a can of soup. At first glance, walking into the Antarctica exhibit at Pitzer College, the cans of soup seem like merely cans of soup....
Boy Howdy!
Detroit-based CREEM magazine was truly one of a kind in that its rock & roll critics and chroniclers rocked harder than the bands they helped bash into general consciousness—hence, the quite literal claim of being “Amer...
HINDSIGHT 2020
The road to the Mexican presidency, past and present, is littered with manipulation and corruption. In 1988, “the people’s candidate” was leading until the electoral computer went down. When it came back on line days late...
RADICAL DUDE
Turning radical was easy during the Vietnam War. With the draft ready to interrupt one’s life big time, politics got personal fast. And when politics get personal, people get political. Same holds true today. Lots of us could...
FREAK OF THE WEEK
Bizarre antics and a killer grin—Bat Boy is to the Weekly World News what Tom Cruise is to Us magazine: the perennial coverboy, as enigmatic as he is endlessly compelling.
Like the iconic freak himself (Bat Boy, not Tom), Bat...
GROWING UP BLUE
Your college English prof calls them “coming-of-age” novels. But we like to call tales of teenage angst “thumbsucker lit.” Thumbsuckers include everything from J.D. Salinger’s 1951 classic The Catcher In the Rye (the ...
PRETTY ON THE INSIDE
Victoria Delgadillo is an activist, a Chicana, a member of the Mexican Spitfires art movement, and an Angeleno. While all of these titles inform her artwork, none of them solely define her. At her core, Delgadillo is that mutab...
AIRTOONS
There’s nothing we like more than people who dedicate large chunks of their time to something completely random. Take the creator of Air Toons, for example, who claims he was taking a flight one day in 1999 and noticed th...
THE QUAKER LOBBY
So this doesn’t happen every day: a religiously-based DC lobbying group that we actually want to join? It’s true. Created in 1943, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL—or Quaker public interest ...
CAPALERT!
Since so many Christians get up in arms when we point out the extreme elements of their clan (as opposed actually trying to reign in said elements) we will now refer to these nutjobs specifically as Militant Evangelicals, or ME...
THE CHURCH OF SATAN
Of course you knew this would be our Web of the Week—and yes, it’s just one more sign that we’re all trying to kill Jesus!
But not right now—now it’s lunchtime.
While we’ve never actually s...
BAD MONKEY
There’s a lot to puzzle over in Haruki Murakami’s new short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: a monkey is accused of identity theft; a man sees his own reflection where there is no mirror; another man is so col...
RESIDENCE OF THE SOUL
Iran.
Say this word to most Americans and a flurry of connotations come to mind: Tehran, the 1979 hostage crisis, Islam, America, violence, war. Vague specters of xenophobic dread and geopolitical doom haunt our notions of the ...
DIVORCE AMERICAN STYLE
It’s 2 a.m., and 43-year-old Tom (Kadn Fox) is pissed. He just walked in from a frigid Connecticut snowstorm only to find an even icier reception in his bedroom from his wife of 12 years, Beth (Stephanie Grimley). His marriag...
BLAMM!
Outside New York, The 9/11 Commission Report attracted only passing attention from the general public. Earlier generations poured through The Warren Commission Report on the Kennedy assassination and, later, the Watergate trans...
www.whitehouse.org
Okay, so we like things that are political—and we like things that are funny. (Clever funny, not hardy-har-har, take-my-wife-puleeze funny, which isn’t funny, and that’s why we don’t watch stand-up comed...
STIFFED
Like you, I’m a working stiff. I’ve held any number of jobs, under good management and bad, and I’ve been self-employed. Currently, I have an important day job that pays poorly and is badly managed. To get by, I supplemen...
SISSYFIGHT.COM
I am not a web-game player, or a blogger—two Internet pastimes that just never hooked me (and I know I’ll pay for the blogger thing, but I just get so bored reading everyone else’s opinions—put it in a d...
SEX IN THE COUNTRY
Some things change, but the ticklishness of audiences when it comes to jokes about erections and blow jobs isn’t one of them.
Case in point: In 1675, when William Wycherly’s comedy The Country Wife debuted before the uppe...
SPOOKY SCIENCE
There’s one thing you can say for all the hubbub that’s aired about intelligent design—it’s made Charles Darwin bigger than a dead rock star. The past few months have seen the publication of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, Da...
RUDE BOYS
The alleged plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners discovered recently in the United Kingdom focused negative attention on that country’s young Pakistanis. To believe the corporate media, they’re all frustrated Muslim fun...
THE COMPLETE 9/11 TIMELINE
While the Bush Administration prefers to sloganize the events of 9/11 (“We Will Not Forget!”—as if anyone could), that’s really as far as they’ve gone, offering up only red herrings of Iraq (and no...
Global Hatred in a Nutshell
The Beatles famously sang “All You Need Is Love,” but world history over the last 75 years suggests a very different reality. In addition to World War II where some odd 60 million souls lost their lives, there’s since bee...
