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 […]
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 […]
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