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 ...

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 ...

The night of the Great Flood of 1938, Joe Aguirre slept well. It had rained for two weeks, and solidly the past seven days—night and day, cascades followed by gentle showers and now, on the night of ...

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 ...

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 ...

No one gave Maxwell Chorak a second thought as he got off at one of the bus stops near UC Irvine and walked across campus on June 10, 2014. He resembled a disheveled grad student checking in for an ...

Gracey Van Der Mark, a woman removed from two school district panels earlier this year after referring to African-Americans as “colored people” in online comments, is now running for a seat on the ...

Dwight Manley: The Brea King? Illustration by Paul Nagel. Photo by Federico Medina. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, once a young apprentice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who later ran “Rainbow ...

Disneyland custodian Al Ramos came back from vacation in September 1984 with no work to return to, save for walking the picket line outside his job. The company wanted a two-year wage freeze, no ...

Last week, NPR inspired a lot of foodie hand-wringing with a post about an interview that superstar chef Rick Bayless did with a public-radio outfit regarding whether it was okay for a gabacho from ...

“You know that Janis Joplin song where she says, 'Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose'?” asks Tombstone. He's the 68-year-old founder and chairman of an organization created to ...