Living in Los Angeles, the media sensory overload of conspicuously consuming celebrities can drive students into added debt for the hottest item on the rack of Fred Segal, or, on the other extreme, force penny-pinching students to become jaded and opt for the California uniform of comfortable denim and flip flops. For fourth-year sociology student […]
Author Archives: Rhea Cortado
Applied math takes on a whole new meaning
Back in the 1990s, members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology blackjack team jetted off to Las Vegas and hustled casinos out of millions of dollars using borderline illegal card-counting techniques. The team’s story is documented in The New York Times Best-Seller “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took […]
Review: “˜Hedwig’ has something others are missing: emotional power
The off-Broadway rock musical-turned-movie “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” gives the drag queen protagonist Hedwig something that is lacking in almost all other drag queen roles: emotional depth. The original stage version of the 2001 cinematic hit (starring author John Cameron Mitchell) about a German immigrant whose body hovers between male and female anatomy because […]
Contest honors creative collecting
The average college student has some sort of inexpensive trinket collection, be it souvenir shot glasses or postcards from friends traveling abroad. Though students swipe their credit cards for hundreds of dollars worth of books every quarter, they rarely (if ever) consider their piles of literature as a precious collection. The Robert B. and Blanche […]
Sexy underpants
If director John Rando does his job, every member of the audience will leave the Geffen Playhouse performance of “The Underpants” feeling a little frisky. The Tony Award-winning director of “Urinetown” and UCLA School of Theater alumnus outlined his goals to the gifted comedic cast of “The Underpants” on day one. “We have to titillate […]
Review: Corporate aspect discredits art work
While traditional museum exhibits display art on white walls in square-shaped rooms, the “Rewarding Lives” installation of Annie Leibovitz’s photographs presents art in spherical spaces to complement the two-dimensional photographs. The free exhibit at the Pacific Design Center, ongoing until July 1, displays a wide range of Leibovitz’s celebrity photography, from a bronzed Arnold Schwarzenegger atop […]
Review: Petronio’s dancers charge Royce program with energy, force
When casting for his company, Stephen Petronio looks for dancers who have a fearless attitude toward dancing awkwardly and probably even looking stupid. Luckily for the eight dancers who performed at Royce Hall last Friday, only the fearless energy shone through. The three-part program exhibited Petronio’s distinct dance vocabulary of aggressive jerking yet clean graceful […]