Author Archives: Alfred Lee

Football, as a lot of people like to point out, is a violent sport. But it doesn’t really stand out from other sports in its level of violence ““ one look at boxing or hockey, for instance, will confirm that. So what is so special about America’s most popular sport? Well, you have to give […]

Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, Michael Graves, … UCLA? In the past, winning Architecture Magazine’s prestigious Progressive Architecture Award has often been associated with outstanding achievement on an individual artistic level. This year, however, the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design has been tapped for the 2005 Progressive Architecture Award for the urban design research […]

There’s a stretch of time near the start of every year, beginning on MLK Day and running through the Black History Month of February, when the country collectively makes an attempt to not only acknowledge the contributions of blacks to society, but also to open some kind of dialogue assessing just how far race relations […]

List-making season is nearing its end, with just about every music publication having weighed in now with its year-end best-of picks. (The major exception being the Pazz & Jop critic’s poll by the Village Voice, which never seems able to tabulate its votes until spring.) But despite this flood of information, it’s difficult to get […]

It’s the holiday season! And that means one thing for students everywhere ““ papers and finals. The point is, it’s the most miserable time of the year for us: As the rest of society savors the magic in the air and spreads cheer to their fellow neighbors, we’re stuck clawing for sleep hours as we […]

It may be hard to remember now, but there was a simpler, purer time not too long ago, when reality television was still all about earning fast cash and 15 minutes of fame. Then “The Apprentice” came along and changed all that. This season’s crop of reality programming features a number of shows following the […]

Sex meets sentiment tonight at Royce Hall, when UCLA Live brings Jane Birkin to perform a tribute to her late ex-husband, the legendary French musician Serge Gainsbourg. Birkin will collaborate with the Algerian group Djam & Fam to reinterpret Gainsbourg’s songs in a North African folk context, a project dubbed “Arabesque,” that Birkin has been […]