The Brown Air Prequel for our Climate Change World

Why the Sky Disappeared, and Why L.A.'s Smog-Choked Atmosphere Can Be Our Lodestar Today.


0 Comments1 Minutes

Chip’s Year in Writing & Creating

For me, creativity isn't just what I do. It's who I am, and my most reliable bulwark against glum emotions polluting my otherwise optimistic view of things.


0 Comments5 Minutes

At Christmas, “It’s A Wonderful Life.” In 2022, hopefully it’ll be a series about a life as Impossible as it is Strange!

Mercury Media has optioned its inaugural title, the underdog story of a teenage daredevil who rose from his deathbed to reinvent himself into a mini-Hollywood kingpin and…


0 Comments3 Minutes

My Fantastic Place – An Essay

Squeeze was the sound I’d been waiting for from the black hole left by John Lennon’s murder and the shallow onslaught of hair-metal. When “In Quintessence” hit that record needle,…


0 Comments20 Minutes

My Fantastic Place

Squeeze was the sound I’d been waiting for from the black hole left by John Lennon’s murder and the shallow onslaught of hair-metal...Speedy guitar paired with mordant lyrics ...…


0 Comments20 Minutes

The Boom that Blew the Petals off the Rose City

South Pasadena Review Square-jawed and persuasive, developer E.C. Webster, it was said, could’ve sold plots on Mars for a profit. Luckily there was Pasadena of the late-1880s


0 Comments7 Minutes

1979 L.A. True-Crime In Song

Medium It was the faces that slayed you that year, when the only reason for a belly-laugh was a Robin Williams standup act. The expressions remain amber in memory ...


0 Comments10 Minutes

The Accidental True Crime Writer

The Los Angeles Review of Books WHEN MY CITY EDITOR yelled out that she needed someone to help cover a shooting at the County General Hospital in East Los Angeles, I sunk low…


0 Comments11 Minutes

Killing Machines: How Car Culture in 1970s Los Angeles Fueled a Terrifying String of Murders

CrimeReads During the late-1960s, with Los Angeles’ skies still blotted by poisonous smog, an angry mother fastened a sign in her station wagon ... “This GM" ... “is a killing…


0 Comments8 Minutes

“The Accidental True Crime Writer” – my Los Angeles Review of Books essay

It wasn’t until one day in 1998, strolling along Hollywood Boulevard, that I got stopped on the sidewalk by a guy named Jerry Schneiderman who had been both a source for stories…


0 Comments11 Minutes