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 […]

Letter From LA: Super Bowl Issue

In honor of Super Bowl Sunday and the Chinese surveillance balloons that flew across the country for several days two weeks ago, I decided to revisit John Frankenheimer’s 1977 “Black Sunday,” a thriller about terrorists who commandeer the Goodyear blimp with a plan to murder 80,000 spectators at the 1976 Super Bowl in Miami, Florida. […]

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 […]

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