Introduction: The Port of Los Angeles and surrounding San Pedro bay area are subject to extremely high amounts of pollution from the global seaport, though the marine communities of the port complex are extremely abundant and reflect high, healthy levels of productivity. One of the main components of the port…

His family was old and jewish and moved here in the 30s. They lived in Beverlywood and found solace in daily crosswords and wooden ramekins and Chinese food. I graduated with the class of ’74 at 15 years old and subsequently was hired at an auto shop. We worked on…

The tonearm moved across the plinth into the bay of the record player, making a low “clunk” and cradling itself away — the first of a new batch of cheap turntables with automatic tonearms. …

I thought Bonnie was a great secretary. We probably graduated in the same class. She was definitely from Sun Valley, but I grew up on the West Side and so it would’ve been colder at my mother’s house. …

Sometimes I worry that most things will be better in my head. That one day, I will walk down the aisle with a pebble in my shoe or spend an entire winter in Manhattan only to learn that I hate cold weather. I fear that the scenario in my head…

Williams The house really didn’t look that good. For months I’d given the benefit of the doubt, the way that an unfinished structure takes on excuses when the people building it are in love. They built this house too close to Bill Williams mountain. His girl was tall and when…

Kelp, Line, and Sinker A lot of modern literature surrounding climate change focuses on the consumer relationship and small steps that we can take to reduce our impact. These honest attempts to mitigate are often driven by and born out of the same capital and trends of overproduction that are…

The circulation of semiological systems in fictional communities is perhaps the backbone of literary cultural anthropology. Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House provides a boldly elusive ontological framework of relationships that result in the formation of social codes, messaging, and gestures. Using anthropological scaffolding laid out by Clifford Geertz’s semiotic webs…

Her name was Bailey. She was from Venice Beach and in the biology class I would eventually drop. I lived in Westwood which I didn’t know I hated at the time. I would stand beside my bike at the Wilshire-405 intersection and stare up at the V.A. building, next to…