Sweet, Sweet Tang

Photo by Chris ZieglerI spend a lot of time in Huntington Beach. I go there when I want police helicopters to follow me as I walk my dog, when I'd like to contract a non-specific skin condition after a few minutes of frolicking in the surf, or even when I'm feeling down about recent geopolitical …

Ambient Sidewinding

Sidecar sound like the Smiths dispatched through an isolation tank, or Julee Cruise trapped in a misty David Lynch dream, or an orchestra of toy instruments searching for a deep bass rhythm. Do you understand now? Or does that sound like an unidentified musical object? Sidecar's Lili De La Mora and Kenny Negrete don't have …

Textbook Heckling

The Distraction The Liquid Den Friday, March 1 Is there life beyond boardshorts and bad blond-tipped dye jobs? Not in Huntington Beach—at least, not till recently. But now strange stirrings on the fringe are starting to make us wonder what else is out there. For starters, some rad drunk dudes. We have a new favorite …

Primary Madness

Photo by Yoshitaka Okada March 5, 2002 3:50 p.m. Christian radio station KBRT of Costa Mesa encourages listeners to vote against the “evil, radical, extremist” Gray Davis. 6:34 Pauline Aguilera, a clerk at the adult-entertainment store Nighty's and Naughty's, says no one has come into the store talking about the election. “Mostly, they just come …

Business as Unusual

Photo by Jack GouldAs long as he can hold a pen, former Huntington Beach City Councilman Dave Garofalo remains a menace to society. Any doubt about that was removed last week when Orange County Register reporter Jim Hinch revealed that Garofalo wrote himself a check for $11,500 out of the city Conference and Visitors Bureau's …

A Bloody, Smashing Success

For those still toiling under the assumptions of Playwrighting 101—that a play isn't a “good” play unless it's plot-heavy and populated by fully “dimensional” characters the audience can truly believe—we submit George Bernard Shaw. Shaw didn't write plays as such; he wrote manifestos promoting his own brand of humanistic socialism. Animated by his eagerness for …

Stopping Time

by Richard RossRichard Ross has snapped several photographs of the J. Paul Getty Museum's reconstruction, one of which features a gaping square hole cut into the floor of a room caked with the dust and debris of violent transformation. Around the hole's edge, steep piles of rubble threaten to collapse into the void. From beneath …

Diary of a Mad County

MONDAY, Jan. 7 Newport-Mesa Unified School District trustee Jim Ferryman pleads guilty to a misdemeanor drunk-driving charge, something he hoped would close the book on the case. It didn't. Fellow trustee Wendy Leece, one of those Christian, conservative, Stepford wives who get this time marker's internal gear mechanisms all moist, uses the next board meeting …

Bad Company

Orange County suits are no doubt tickled pinstriped at how prominently our region figures in “The Ten Worst Corporations of 2001.” In some darkened boardrooms, it's probably a badge of dishonor that more than half of this year's crop boast corporate offices within our borders and all but one have at least a store or …