Miller Time

UNITED STATES—Simpler is better. I felt this strongly while watching “The Human Experiment,” an expose of the silent army of chemicals that pervades our clothing, cosmetics and even our houses. The motivation for this movie was a startling journalistic discovery that will pretty much blow your mind. Get this: the chemicals used in the manufacture products sold in the...

UNITED STATES—When I was in Mexico, a place where time-capsules have a better life expectancy than in California, I would come across these drug stores, the would be faded and filled with all kinds of merchandise, and I would close my eyes and there was that smell. Of buffered aspirin and Maja face powder and hot –rod magazines. And...

UNITED STATES—Nine minutes of video brought many White people a sudden awareness that different treatment for people of brown and browner skinbn was a real thing. Say the name, George Floyd. I was not a newcomer to that unequal treatment. When a friend of mine, a widely traveled Rhode Islander, came to Los Angeles for the first time five years...

UNITED STATES—Even with the rain, the streets are seething, something is on edge in people and a little precipitation isn't making a dent. On a recent rainy night, I took my dog, DeVille, who is kind of an insurance policy against madness and outbreaks of insanity commonplace in Hollywood out, but tonight his magic powers were a little off. I...

UNITED STATES—In the jungle pervaded a smell of coconut oil. There were plenty of morenos, many black as starless night. The train, followed by a plume of black smoke. Sometimes there’d be like raindrops from the sky or a hot cinder thrown off from the train’s forward advance. Antonio had seen a man blinded that way. He still had...

UNITED STATES—The Wylie Empire included a hotel in a prime location on Skid Row—the elegantly named Palmer House on Wall St. (conveniently around the corner from the police station). A lot of work was going on in spring of 1991. It was being painted and refurbished after one manager had been replaced. His replacement, a sweet fellow who favored...

UNITED STATES—A good pandemic is not being wasted: it is sending science racing for answers and fresh ideas are not only being heard, but being implemented. For instance, on busy thoroughfares like Sunset with heavy foot traffic, pedestrian crosswalk buttons were suddenly phased out. Something I'd been dreaming about, especially as in recent times, as you'd have groups of...

UNITED STATES—They had it all wrong. They had it backwards. Suicide is considered a weakness, and even a cowardly act. Balderdash, if I may step in. The fact is: a healthy person may entertain the idea of self-slaughter: a world without me at least once a day. It is humble preparation us for what things may be. Sooner or...

UNITED STATES—She was a good-natured house, robin’s egg blue hidden in a drab, soot-muted gray, where I’d have my free room on the corner of Estrella Avenue and 22nd Street. Brad, my mentor and savior, gave me a brand-new receipt book where I’d be recording all the names of those USC students clambering to live here. A telephone was...

UNITED STATES—“As I said before, the killer saw something so traumatic that it triggered cognitive dissonance. He blotted it out of his mind or thought he was dreaming. What they saw before fleeing the crime was that the victim of the hammer-blow was someone identical to himself. Identical to the twin brother given up for adoption that the killer...