AltWeeklies Wire
With a Probable Run for Governor in Sight, a High-Profile Celebrity Drug Case Couldn't Hurtnew
The Anna Nicole Smith indictments and California Attorney General Jerry Brown's contact high with the political power grid.
L.A. Weekly |
Steven Mikulan |
03-20-2009 |
Politics
Spy vs. Spy: Tony Gilroy’s 'Duplicity'new
Julia Roberts goes mano a mano with Clive Owen.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
03-20-2009 |
Reviews
Why Los Angeles Crime-Fighters Fell Years Behind on Rape Testingnew

Experts have suggested a stunning possibility: that 500,000 rape kits, given low priority by scores of police departments, have been sitting untested for years.
L.A. Weekly |
Christine Pelisek |
03-20-2009 |
Crime & Justice
New Gay-Marriage War Coming to Californianew
Whether or not the California State Supreme Court upholds Proposition 8, one thing is certain: The battle to legalize or ban gay marriage in California will not end with the justices’ ruling due before June 3.
L.A. Weekly |
Patrick Range McDonald |
03-13-2009 |
Civil Liberties
A Tough Churchgoing Mom Is at the Center of the Los Angeles Serial-Killer Mysterynew
L.A.’s elusive Grim Sleeper has murdered with impunity for 23 years. The strange journey of his only surviving victim began with a rape and shooting that at the time seemed tragically commonplace.
L.A. Weekly |
Christine Pelisek |
03-13-2009 |
Crime & Justice
Irving Azoff Reveals Ticketmaster Secret at Senate Judiciary Hearingsnew
One of the lesser-reported revelations of last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the proposed merger of the two corporate behemoths of the concert business, Ticketmaster and LiveNation, came during a conversation with Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff about service fees.
L.A. Weekly |
Randall Roberts |
03-05-2009 |
Music
Framed Like a Rembrandt, 'Everlasting Moments' Looks Great, But Misses the Big Picturenew
Lovely to look at but too slow and deliberate to get lost in, Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments is a tribute to still photography filtered through a portrait of working-class life wracked by war and want in early-20th-century Sweden.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
03-05-2009 |
Reviews
The New Cocktailiansnew
The farmers market–loving, sleeve garter–wearing ladies and gentlemen of the bar are taking over L.A.'s restaurants one glass at a time.
L.A. Weekly |
Jonathan Gold |
03-05-2009 |
Culture
Tags: Los Angeles, bartenders
'Crossing Over': Wayne Kramer's Borderline Offensivenew
Haven't we been here before? The inbred mutant offspring of Crash and Babel, Crossing Over treats the subject of illegal immigrants coming to (and from) Los Angeles with the same vulgarity Kramer brought to his 2006 children-in-peril thriller, Running Scared.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
02-27-2009 |
Reviews
Tags: Wayne Kramer, Crossing Over
Los Angeles on $300,000 a Yearnew

The L.A. City Council salaries are not just overinflated in an era of belt-tightening. They are only a hair below the salaries of Congress, and are higher than those of federal judges. They amount to a staggering 400 percent of Los Angeles' median household income of $46,000.
L.A. Weekly |
Patrick Range McDonald |
02-27-2009 |
Politics
Looking for 'Slow Cinema' at the Berlin International Film Festivalnew
If this year's Berlinale was dominated and ultimately defined by polyglot international coproductions that, as one British colleague joked, might have been rated "G" for globalization, the festival's most memorable offerings came from filmmakers who looked no farther than their own backyards for inspiration.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
02-20-2009 |
Movies
Think Blink: Paris Hilton and Rihanna's Eyelash Master, Ja'Maal Busternew
The eye spy can spot the good fakes from the bad in an instant.
L.A. Weekly |
Gendy Alimurung |
02-20-2009 |
Fashion
Enslaved in Suburbia: Two Women, Two Fractured American Dreamsnew
Inside the world of trafficked indentured servants and the visa violators who care for our old.
L.A. Weekly |
Gendy Alimurung |
02-20-2009 |
Business & Labor
Is the King of Pop's Neverland Booty Our Folly Too?new

Life is hard, and economists searching for a symbol to the End of an Era need look no farther than Neverland Ranch, Michael Jackson's 2,800-acre Valhalla outside Santa Barbara.
L.A. Weekly |
Randall Roberts |
02-20-2009 |
Music
Tap Dancing Around the Antimodernity Movementnew
Why live your life like it’s the past? Because the present kind of sucks. Yes, it might seem odd for this faction of the antimodernity movement to obsess over the 1920s — after all, that era is arguably when modernity was born. It’s an era that seems both more decadent and more innocent than ours.
L.A. Weekly |
Gendy Alimurung |
02-13-2009 |
Performance