Grub on! Explore USC’s best in chow


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We all love to rant about $8 Caesar salads or the “Italian food” at Everybody’s Kitchen, but between questionable prices and soggy pasta, USC has a few well-kept secrets, both on campus or within walking distance. The wise senior has probably discovered all of these, but has long since forgone a meal plan and might […]

Indie film Paper Man should be recycled


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Paper Man is a movie about emptiness. Though it’s not really a good film, it’s not really a bad one either, and that might be the point. Jeff Daniels plays Richard, the film’s main character who has a few problems. He is trying to write a novel after the complete failure of his last one, […]

Long Beach foursome delivers with impressive debut


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Here’s a band with respect for its musical elders, playing sincere pop rock with a steadfast dedication to freak-folk delivery and a pleasant penchant for irony. Thus far, the band described is of a pretty standard garage band ilk these days. So what sets Avi Buffalo apart? For starters, its song “Summer Cum” is potentially […]

Indie rock survives in oppressive Tehran


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The formation of underground music scenes is hardly a novel concept. In the United States, music countercultures have always flourished when political tensions peak and carbon copies of a particular sonic trend flood the airwaves. The rock subgenre of punk pierced the flower-child movement as early as 1967 with harder-edged groups like the Stooges and […]

Action film blends humor and smarts


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What would you do to get your life back? Would you steal it? The Losers would. For the special operations team codenamed “the Losers,” it was an average mission — survey an arms dealer’s Bolivian compound for an air strike and come back home. When its CIA handler Max (Jason Patric) betrays it, though, the […]

Stranded in Europe at the mercy of ash


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It’s midnight on a Sunday as I write my very last column of the semester from a computer at a hostel in Prague. Only at this time of night can I avoid the dirty looks I’d normally get for commandeering the sole machine with Internet access. On a computer without Microsoft Office, Google Docs has […]

Females stand out in latest Chicago production


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“Hello, suckers!” cries Terra C. MacLeod’s sultry Velma Kelly at the beginning of Chicago’s second act. She’s speaking, of course, to us, the audience, and we chuckle because we know she’s right. Chicago — in ways far slinkier and shadier than we might originally think or expect — makes suckers of us all, and it’s […]