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 […]

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 […]

Letter From LA: August-September

 Belated Happy New Year and Yom Kippur to my Jewish (and gentile) friends: Sounding the horn at the Jewish new year service. Engraving with etching by B. Picart, ca. 1733. It’s been a very mellow summer in Los Angeles. The weather these past few weeks has been delightful — no major heat waves, with temperatures […]

Letter From LA: May-June

Los Angeles (and, for that matter, all of California) opened wide June 15 and it was, in some quarters, as if COVID-19 never existed. Sporting events, concerts and raves are back on schedule; bars and restaurants were turning away customers — not because they were enforcing a “no-mask no entry” rule but because they were […]

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