Last Thursday’s Democratic debate was the kind of strong, aggressive discussion that was lacking early in the Democratic primaries. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton clearly drew the lines that separate them politically and ideologically. It was real politics on display. But the issue that resounded the strongest was the topic of Israel-Palestine. In what could possibly go down as a...

The critic Walter Benjamin once wrote, “There are perhaps paths that lead us again and again to people who have one and the same function for us.” He included among these functions the roles of pupil and master. For myself, Santa Monica College philosophy professor James Stramel, who passed away from leukemia on Thursday morning, achieved a kind of dual...

I was recently on a 14-hour Greyhound bus trip from the Southwest towards California sitting next to a Donald Trump supporter. The woman was in her late 50s and had been ditched in Texas by her trucker boyfriend. Every imaginable social ill had hit this woman: She was a disabled veteran who had endured the VA’s shoddy management, she’d been...

With sitcoms these days, network TV is stuck on formulas with as little variation as possible. Shows that wildly differ from typical formulas such as "Community" usually don't survive the ratings wars. I hate to show the slightest inkling of my age, but when I was a very young child in the late 1980s, the edgiest show on network TV...

When a biographical movie is done with the consent of the subject's estate, there are bound to be a few unsavory details left out of the film. One such omission from this film being Cesar Chavez's antagonistic view of undocumented immigrants. Though I give this film credit for the slight allusion to it. When farm owners start looking to find...

Santa Monica College's Theater department kicked off its latest season of productions on Friday night with "Yellow." It had both some moments that shined and some imperfections that shown. The story revolves around the Westmorelands, who undergo a crisis when their "perfect" son, football star Dayne, played by Liam Watkins, is stricken by a previously misdiagnosed illness and the family...

As the dust settled from the two week long Coachella festival, Indio, California became home to a different kind of music festival the following weekend. For seven years, Stagecoach Festival has served as a west coast beacon for country music fans of all ages. Bringing together some of the biggest names of the genre such as Luke Bryan and Jason...

Confusion, angst, depression, longing, and systematic oppression; if these don't scream teenage years or puberty to you, you were lucky. Four songs into this musical, the lead character Melchior (Julian Comeau) says to second male lead Moritz (Zach Zagoria), "It's as if the whole world were mesmerized by penis and vagina." To which Moritz replies, "Well I am!" And that...

Addiction: a “chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations." Imagine being a prisoner of your own mind, a slave to your own thoughts and demons; feeling as if no one could possibly understand where you are. So you go find something, something that makes...