Attempting to successfully perform the plays of Shakespeare at an all-black high school was challenging, to say the least. In the spring of 1985, I starred in Merchant of Venice to a week's worth of empty houses. I"d wanted to do Richard III, because my own real-life form of villainy ...
In September 2004, for the crime of having a massively blocked sewer line under my property, I was condemned to the worst fate a creature of the L.A. Westside could face"I had to move to the Valley. Thank God it was only temporary, while a hundred Mexicans wielding a hundred shovels made my ...
Last week, the 2016 Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival (LAJFF) concluded its weeklong series of screenings here on the L.A. Westside. It's always a special time when the LAJFF comes to town, because when else are you going to see Jews in Beverly Hills? I didn"t attend any movie screenings (I was ...
Emperor of the North, the classic 1973 film directed by Robert Aldrich, details the dysfunctional relationship between train-hopping hobos and the railroad men who kill them. It's the kind of totally unique "70s film that could not get made today, a film in which the male leads are masculine, ...
To put a new spin on the old put-down of vegans, how do you know if you"re a member of the alt-right? Don"t worry"if you"re not, someone will tell you in the comments section. Alt-rightists love being able to cry "he's not one of us!" Milo Yiannopoulos? He thinks he's one of ...
President Obama is spending the waning months of his administration with his grubby hands in an oddly appropriate place: the toilet. Apparently, the prez has an obsession with trans folk and bathrooms. Yes, the "men in the ladies" room" issue, which I tackled last September, has not ...
If you strip away the swastikas and goose-stepping, The Producers is, at heart, a story about wresting success from failure. Max Bialystock is a Broadway producer who has lost the ability to give theatergoers what they want, so he hatches a brilliant plan: If he can"t mount a successful show, ...
By any measure, the Los Angeles Times is a bad newspaper. Sure, it's the fourth-largest paper by circulation in the U.S., but that's akin to calling someone the fourth-least-terminal patient in the inoperable-cancer ward. Simply put, the Times stinks. I mean, this is a paper that once ran a ...
The hubbub surrounding last week's announcement that "Underground Railroad" conductor Harriet Tubman would be movin" on up to the obverse of the twenty-dollar bill led me to flash back to how I first entered the world of professional blogging. In an unlikely turn of events, I became a ...
However the Trump War resolves itself, we"ve already seen at least one casualty"conservative media cohesion. Sides are being drawn, and blood feuds have been declared. As The New York Times recently pointed out, Trump-inspired divisions and conflicts among normally allied conservative media ...
