Letter From LA: Gods and Monsters
Swaying palm trees, cool evening breezes, night-blooming jasmine, ruby red and purple bougainvillea, golden sun at twilight: these are some of the cliches that describe Los Angeles — and they’re true. But here’s another version of LA’s reality, from the famous French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard: “There is nothing to match flying […]
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 […]
Milestone Film & Video: “This April, we say NO to wars past & present”
The online article accompanying Stu Levitan’s 2020 interview with author and filmmaker Gregg Mitchell describes his fascinating book about the making — and unmaking — of a postwar anti-nuclear Hollywood feature film: “The Beginning or the End was a B movie about the A bomb, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in February, 1947. It promised to disclose […]
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