The Coen brothers' new anthology film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, portrays the frontier as a place of death so sudden and terrible that the word "ironic" is too fancy for it. Here are demises as swift as a dropped anvil in a Road Runner cartoon. As filmmakers, the Coens often create equal and opposite reaction to film classics, spinning off of ideas they're trying to top, honor or besmirch. (This tribute to Westerns starts with a common prestige-movie beginning of the old days: a hand opening a leather bound volume and turning the pages.) But the half-dozen tales found therein are closer to Ambrose Bierce than Louis L'Amour. One of the briefest, "Near Algodones" with James Franco as an unlucky bandit, seems to be a riff on "An » Read More

It's a rough ride to the frontier planet, a wetland of ferns and shining flies and deadly aerial spores. (The Seattle-based filmmakers shot this in the Hoh rainforest on the Olympic peninsula.) Blown off course, the craft is shipwrecked a long foot journey away from the target. They were headed to a hidden motherload of valuable gems, growing in the living membranes of a polyp-like creature called an Aurelac. The stones are tricky to pick out from the meat, since they're protected with an acid strong enough to melt flesh. » Read More

Most would ignore a leaf that's fallen just above the clasp of a car door handle, but not Gabriel Orozco. He finds detritus, things that are overlooked and wasted, and then aims his camera at them. He photographs two dozen glass soda bottles corroded with grime and standing at attention against a gutter wall, or a charred metal oil barrel abandoned on the side of the road with a black rock placed on top, like the sign of a gothic coronation. » Read More

With over 38 published books, Gaiman's writing has spanned genres, mediums and topics. But for many, the greatest work of his career remains one of his first: the 75-issue run of DC's The Sandman. Beginning in 1989, Sandman was notable for its literary tone and profound scope as much as it was for its forward-thinking depiction of women, queer, transgender and gender-fluid characters. Long before either the #MeToo movement or recent conversations around gender-fluidity, Gaiman presented desire as androgynous, treated queer lives as visible and normal, and made one his most heartfelt and complex characters a trans woman. Read today, Sandman still feels ahead of its time, despite being almost 30 years old. » Read More

Last year, in September, MACLA hosted the first staged reading of Ask a Mexican by the Denver-based playwright Anthony J. Garcia. He based it on Gustavo Arellano's trenchant OC Weekly column of the same name. From 2004 until his resignation from the weekly last year as editor-in-chief, Arellano would answer letters from the public about Latinx culture. The cartoon bandido character who appeared at the top of every column set the tone. Arellano was going to confront caricatures and stereotypes by dismantling blatantly racist letters that were ignorant of and/or openly hostile toward immigrants and their experience of America. Arellano replied to them with an unapologetic, cynical glee. » Read More

My entire camp humor identity began on that machine, so its demise calls for a twisted eulogy of sorts. But first, some history. Stevens Music, which existed from 1951 to 1984 at 1202 Lincoln Ave., was an institution in Willow Glen, selling and repairing instruments, plus sheet music and related products for thousands of people throughout the valley. Entire generations got their chops inside that building, operated by Tom Stevens and his son Gordon. After the main retail business closed, Reik's music eventually moved into the ground floor, with the upstairs then converting into more lesson rooms and other independent music businesses, including Stevens Violin Shop. Up until Gordon sold the building in 2013, he claimed the oldest » Read More

Putting it in general collegiate terms, the female mind majors in psychology; the male mind majors in physics. Research by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen finds that women tend to be the "empathizers" of the species, driven from childhood on to identify others' "emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion." Men, on the other hand, tend to be "systematizers," driven to understand the inner workings of the blender. The good news is, there's a secret for comforting an upset woman, even for the most emotionally inarticulate man. You don't have to be Shakespeare; just don't go all shutupspeare. For example, last week, when I was bummed about something to the point of tears, I was on the phone with my boyfriend, and » Read More

Interior designer Dorothy Draper said she wished there were a single word that meant "exciting, frightfully important, irreplaceable, deeply satisfying, basic and thrilling all at once." I wonder if such a word exists in the Chamicuro language spoken by a few Peruvians or the Sarsi tongue spoken by the Tsuu T'ina tribe in Alberta, Canada. In any case, I'm pleased to report that for the next few weeks, many of you Aries people will embody and express that rich blend of qualities. I have coined a new word to capture it: tremblissimo. » Read More

At 11:30am on a Monday, the American Kickboxing Academy is quiet, cool and hidden from the world. Recessed within a suburban block somewhere between strip mall and business park, the 27,000-square-foot gym is almost peaceful, a relief from the unrelenting heat of California's still-cranking Indian summer. Inside, the lights are still off. Gloves and pads lie unused on the edge of a black boxing ring, heavy bags hanging in silence. At the front desk is Joanna Takacs, who, between greeting guests, is preparing the gym's tax filing. It's easy to think that here, in this building between the DMV and the McDonald's, nothing interesting ever happens. » Read More