Trying to explain what música ranchera is to non-Mexicans reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to–take your pick–Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, when someone asked what jazz is. Ranchera ...

Go ahead, call us a bunch of culture-less, lily-white suburbanites with a partiality to flip-flops and right-wing politics. Those kind of labels never cease to amuse us. Because one thing that ...

Rodney Alcala is a man stuck in a time warp, his flowing silver hair, granny glasses, beige blazer and jeans reminiscent of a creative-writing professor circa 1980, the year he began life behind bars.

In 1952 or 1954 (depending on who’s telling the tale), Bert Grimm bought a business located at 22 Chestnut Place in Long Beach, on the corner of Chestnut and Ocean Boulevard. The small square space on ...

Just across the street from Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley, in the middle of the city's suburban placidity, exists what's probably the most anomalous collection of street names in Orange County.

The caravan of Klansmen crept to a stop around midnight in front of the home of David and Lizzie Milder on Nov. 17, 1932. Their quaint bungalow in the Carroll Park neighborhood of Long Beach had just ...

One of the best parts about buying a physical album (if you still do that sort of thing) is the album cover art. And if you're a metalhead or crusty punker, the more brutal and bloody it is, the ...

As he walked briskly along a downtown Santa Ana sidewalk for our first meeting on a toasty, cloudless February 2014 afternoon, criminal defense attorney Scott Sanders’ brain generated waves of ...

Little People's Park is a tiny slab of grass near downtown Anaheim, just down the street from police headquarters and two blocks from City Hall. The afternoon of Sunday, July 29 was similar to most ...

The gleaming black Cadillac Escalade trembles at the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Cerritos Avenue in Stanton. Four young Mexican men inside, all buzz cuts and oversized white T-shirts and ...

It’s no secret that heavy metal music can be a bit morbid and macabre. Heavy metal artists have never been afraid to musically confront mortality, pain, suffering and other grim topics by creating ...

As an 11-year-old kid in the summer of 1981, life was, by all discernible metrics, pretty cool. Even in the nascent months of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, very little seemed of consequence—or even ...