Letter From LA: Winter 2024

This past holiday season was the first time in 15 years that I didn’t send out electronic holiday cards; I’ve been bogged down by so much depressing news about life in Los Angeles as well as the sad state of world affairs that I just lost track of time (here’s a sampling of past holiday […]

Jean-Luc Godard: 1930-2022

Letter From LA – Summer 2022 – The Crime Issue

When I was growing up in Los Angeles, there were certain parts of the city you just didn’t go to — the bad sides of town: Watts, East LA, parts of Venice and Culver City, Pacoima, Gardena. The stigma never really bothered me: I hung out with bikers in Culver City, surf bums in Venice, […]

Letter From LA: Spring 2022

 It’s been more than six months since my last Letter; this winter was a mind-numbing jumble of ill tidings that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, was a winter of (my) discontent, with little to celebrate, to write about. I can’t remember such despair on the U.S. stage since the dark days of the war in Vietnam: Book […]

In Memory of Colin Powell

Poster of the Week from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics   Gulf Wars Episode II Arie Kaplan and Scott Sonneborn Mad Magazine Offset, 2002 New York, NY 20968 “(Colin Powell) . . . made a career out of being a good soldier and supporting U.S. mass murder around the world, but evading […]

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