You begin noticing them before you reach the beach: The opalescent baby blue cruiser with pink rims and white walls in front of the yoga studio on Main Street, its flip-flop-wearing owner removing her mat from its wicker basket. The matte black and solid chrome cruisers, draped with young men in mesh-back caps clustered outside the local dive on Washington Boulevard. At Windward Avenue an art grrl...

When I work with clients I do emotional archaeology with them. I want to discover what feeds their souls. I'll use any tool that deepens our dialogue or informs the design — feng shui, astrology, bioenergetics, reiki. My goal is to create spaces that transcend material properties and fulfill complex human needs, spaces that support people......

Who doesn’t find the idea of an event named Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships intoxicating? The moment I heard it, I was sold. I wouldn’t have cared if the next thing I heard was that it was held on a barren wasteland in the middle of nowhere. Which is a good thing because that’s the next thing I heard… ...

You’re a writer. You’ve spent months, even years, slaving away in solitude to transform a great idea into a Great American Novel. And you’ve succeeded. Critics love it. Readers love it. Hollywood luuuvs it and proves just how much by forking over megabucks for the screen rights. ...

Alison and Trevor were living together and considering marriage when Trevor’s sister Yvette — a single mom — was killed. Though he and Alison had been together eight months, they took in Yvette’s 4-year-old son, Donovan. But with Trevor nearly incapacitated by grief, the two were soon overwhelmed by their new responsibilities and conflicting parenting styles. ...

Nature abhors a vacuum, which is why nature is so into tribute bands. Say a classic band dies in a mysterious plane crash. Kablam!!! Fifteen tribute bands spring up before the NTSB has a clue of what went down. Artists don’t even have to be the victims of gnarly circumstances anymore to spawn tribute bands. They can be pouting in Malibu…while a red-hot tribute band named for their last hit is ...

The famously fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous came to mind while viewing Judith Barry’s recent exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica. The show features a pair of substantially reworked multimedia installations from the ’90s, including Barry’s signature Imagine, Dead Imagine....

Note: I had the pleasure of interviewing and writing up profiles on several influential interior designers for a special “sources” issue of now defunct design magazine Elements of Living. For brevity’s sake, I cobbled together only the profiles that I wrote. ...

Half pickup truck, half pig, the glowing blue roadhog turns left onto the bustling esplanade, its bemused expression as hard to decipher as its owner’s intentions. Kandy-kolored glowstick bicycles veer to avoid it, as do a half-dozen pedal-powered muffins and cupcakes. A convertible Cadillac spacecraft idles at the side of the bustling ring road, its passengers haranguing passersby from atop its...

Note: I ran the POZ Planet column’s EARTHWATCH map for nearly a year. I also researched and wrote copy blocks for other POZ Planet content....

One of the early DIY clips I made for UNDERGROUND before videographer/producer Didrik Johnck joined me. It was just me, a cheap video cam and all the filkers, faeries and freaks of LA World Con 2006. This clip was my summation of the event. The “actual rocket scientist” in the clip is Bridget Landry, famed Mars Rover mission leader whom I was just meeting randomly at the World Con. We did a cl...

When, at the end of David Rabe’s powerful new drama, A Question of Mercy, Dr. Robert Chapman admits to wishing he’d never answered his telephone, it’s hard to blame him. The call, an entreaty to assist in the suicide of a young man suffering the agony and desperation of a protracted AIDS death, has plunged the doctor into a quagmire of soul-searching, recrimination and human tragedy any sane...

My political satire clip originally aired on Dogtown Ink, but Huffington Post picked it up, emailing me shortly thereafter to say it was getting a lot of traffic, tell my friends. I penned, performed and produced the song, creating and editing the video to accompany it. (SEE VIDEO)...

It’s hard to have a conversation about video artists who have lent theif voices, visions and passions to the struggle with AIDS without Gregg Bordowitz’s name coming up. Repeatedly. In the first sentence. This young, HIV-positive video activist is mentioned right off the bat by everyone from… (Read More)...

I guess you could say I was gay rodeo curious. So I went to the LA Gay Rodeo. And What I saw there was real McCoys and chatroom cowboys, ropin’ and ridin’ all day, bulls so mean, here and there a drag queen, beefcake every which way…...

I wasn’t always Octavio. My first 20 years — spent in a sleepy provincial city — I was Javier, the nombre everyone called me, my middle name. For 10 more years — as a doctor, then an epidemiologist, living in Mexico City, succumbing to the widespread homophobia of my culture — I remained Javier. (Read More)...

You’d think after spending the holidays together 65 years in a row, the Radio City Rockettes could all use some personal time. On the contrary, the Rockettes positively thrive on togetherness. It’s at their very core. After all, not until this tap-dancing juggernaut breaks into absolute lockstep does it come into its own as the world’s preeminent precision-dance team. That famous togethernes...

Teri coped with job stress and marital frustration by smoking lot of pot — and picking fights. Sean hated her drug use and criticism but rarelyl said so. When Teri suddenly had to have brain surgery, it was a wake-up call for them both. ...

Numbers have always haunted the AIDS community: skyrocketing numbers of people with HIV/AIDS, free-falling numbers of T-cells, inexorably rising viral load counts. Protease inhibitors have brought a measure of relief, and more numbers: thousands of experimental drug and dosage combinations being taken by hundreds of thousands of patients....

Note: Editors at POZ asked me and legendary AIDS activist Rodger McFarlane to collaborate on creating this infographic, which we did: Rodger fed me facts and I came up with the copy. (See Image)...

Summer’s here — time for kids to get to work. Yep, you read that correctly. “Play is the work of children,” says Dr. Dave Walsh, a psychologist and founder of the National Institute for Media and the Family. “What looks to us like play can be very serious business for kids.” In fact, it instills skills. “Younger kids who crawl into the kitchen cabinet, pull out the pots and pands to ...

He’s positive, she’s not. The sex? Amazing… Shawn Decker: I like to say Ryan White hooked us up. We met at a talk his mother gave. Gwenn Barringer: We’re speakers who do HIV education with college students. We’ve been together five years. I’m negative, so we’re doing something right! ...

Episodes of UNDERGROUND typically included two or three feature articles as well as two or three video clips. Though many clips relied on narration provided by the original songs, some clips were more punk news features, like this clip of legendary art car maker, Tom Kennedy, alongside Ben & Jerry’s Ben Cohen, who was underwriting Tom’s art bus. (Watch Video)...

Though pregnancy didn’t have a major impact on my work, motherhood did. After Sarah’s birth, I began working part-time — three days per week — a practice I continue to this day. ...

I was tall and qawky in high school, not one of the popular kids. So I buried myself in books. I'd always had a passion for learning. I thought, I'll show them, I'll be one of the really smart kids....