LA Weekly

New Fiction: "Sunday"

Laura Branigan, Old Milwaukee and a tough angle on the eight ball: A short story

By JOE DONNELLY

It started up again. … Keep Reading »

A Street Musician's Symphonic Movement

Down and out at Disney Hall and coming soon to a theater near you

By ALAN RICH

Back in September 1964, Jascha Heifetz, the formidable fiddler, was attempting an ill-advised comeback recital at Carnegie Hall. The crowd out front was enormous, and it naturally included many people with long faces hoping for a turned-back ticket to this sold-out event. I was covering it as a music critic for the New York… Keep Reading »

Dan Corson and Catherine Wagner's Illuminating Ideas

Let there be light bulbs

By Peter Frank

“Neon in daylight is a great pleasure,” Frank O’Hara wrote (attributing it to his friend Edwin Denby), “as are light bulbs in daylight.” Still and all, the best time to see Dan Corson’s Empyrean Passage is at dusk, when it turns on, and at dawn, just before it turns off. Twenty-odd metal hoops comprise… Keep Reading »

Sex and the Country: Do Me and Sex for America

Two collections of erotica feel us up

By HILLARY JOHNSON

In a story titled “The Anthropology of Sex,” a 37-year-old woman broods over a long-ago affair with her literature professor — the man’s wife happened to be 37 at the time — and commemorates the guilty event by imagining that her own husband is having an affair. This sounds like a recipe for a… Keep Reading »

LACMA East: "Phantom Sightings" Chronicles the Rise of Post-Chicanoism

By CHRISTOPHER MILES

"Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement” begins with photos chronicling the art collective Asco (Spanish for nausea). Patssi Valdez, Gronk, Willie Herron III and Harry Gamboa Jr., aspiring artists, writers and filmmakers when they formed Asco in the early ’70s, drew from Chicano traditions and contemporary art strategies to address hot-button issues &mdash… Keep Reading »