“Good things come in pink boxes” in Portland maybe, but not in Hollywood. The slogan belongs to Voodoo Doughnut, which opened its fifth location at Universal CityWalk on March 9. The doughnut shop previously sold doughnuts at three restaurants in Oregon and one in Colorado. The pink shop established itself as a doughnut superpower in […]
Category Archives: Arts
Q&A: Alumna explores police brutality, race relations in TV show ‘Shots Fired’
After the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, Fox approached Gina Prince-Bythewood to create a fictional television series about police brutality. Prince-Bythewood felt a responsibility to address the sensitive topic after the black teenager’s death at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The show, “Shots Fired,” is the first television series of […]
Written on the Walls: Los Angeles street art illustrates history of political resistance
Political street art has become an outlet for advocacy among Los Angeles artists after the presidential election. Street art has a long history in the city’s urban culture; several LA streets feature murals with messages. Although street art with politically charged messages is often less visible in relatively affluent Westwood, many of East and South […]
Piercings nose their way into mainstream fashion as a form of self-expression
Valeria Morales entered a shop on the Venice boardwalk to get her septum pierced and thought, “Why not?” The first-year statistics student already had 10 piercings, including two cartilage piercings and a belly button piercing. Two of Morales’ friends had just gotten their septa pierced and she liked how it looked, she said. Worried she […]
Reel Representation: Diversity in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is less radical than Disney claims
Diversity in film and television came into the spotlight in 2016 with #OscarsSoWhite. A USC study in 2016 found only about a quarter of speaking characters belonged to nonwhite racial groups. In “Reel Representation,” columnist Olivia Mazzucato discusses different issues of race and representation in media as they relate to new movies and TV shows. […]
Students to tell stories of incarcerated people via modernized ‘The Wiz’
Hip-hop theater performance “What It Iz!” is like a modern-day version of Shakespeare for Ayanna McKnight. “Spoken word and poetry, in and of itself, go together,” said the third-year theater student. “It’s just a very artistic way to deal with something so serious.” “What It Iz!”, presented by the UCLA department of African-American studies, opens […]
Movie review: ‘Beauty and the Beast’
Remakes can’t win. Either they aren’t faithful enough to their source material or they are redundant rehashes. Disney’s latest live-action remake, “Beauty and the Beast” brings the tale as old as time to life with special effects and more developed character backstories. Despite the difficult task of remaking the classic fairy tale, “Beauty and the […]