Labyrinth

Me da pena (y coraje) . It hurts and angers me. In Max Benavidez's "The Labyrinth of the North" (Sept. 15), Mexican artist Roberto Gil de Montes arrogantly and condescendingly proclaims: "I certainly have nothing against Chicanos. After all, we gave birth to them. They come from what we are. . . . When they did try to be like me, it seemed ridiculous. So how could I identify with them? They were trying to become what I already was." But in the next breath, he admits to ripping off Eastside graffiti motifs for his own work.

The staircase is narrow and creaky, with a bookshelf made from a 100-year-old harp case teetering on the precipice of collapse at the top of the landing. Overflowing with open books, pages wildly askew and dangling from uneven shelves, the bookcase looks as if it's escaped from a vintage cartoon. Rolls of yellowed, turn-of-the-century sheet music waft through the air, unfurling from a manual typewriter suspended from the ceiling. A black-clad young woman, with a prominent pierced dimple and a philosophy book under her arm, slips by on her way up. She has found the way into the Labyrinth at the Last Bookstore.

The staircase is narrow and creaky, with a bookshelf made from a 100-year-old harp case teetering on the precipice of collapse at the top of the landing. Overflowing with open books, pages wildly askew and dangling from uneven shelves, the bookcase looks as if it's escaped from a vintage cartoon. Rolls of yellowed, turn-of-the-century sheet music waft through the air, unfurling from a manual typewriter suspended from the ceiling. A black-clad young woman, with a prominent pierced dimple and a philosophy book under her arm, slips by on her way up. She has found the way into the Labyrinth at the Last Bookstore.

I was drinking at King Eddy's, the skid row dive that's being made over into a hipster bar, when I overheard people say that a web of old bootlegger tunnels lay under downtown. A labyrinth, running from the old speakeasy beneath King Eddy's to Pershing Square and points beyond - even San Pedro? They had me at "tunnel. " I had to know more. The Los Angeles Department of Public Works didn't know about the tunnels. Map librarian Glen Creason of the Central Library told me that they were never mapped, for obvious reasons.

'The insurance story was both useful and alarming. As a pocket guide to the labyrinth of corporate healthcare, it is the best of a sad lot. As an indictment of the American way of providing healthcare, it is devastating.' -- David Kase, Palos Verdes Estates, on Sunday's story about getting help for resolving complaints about unpaid health insurance claims and treatment denials

In the latest attempt to give commercial dancers a showcase on local stages, Liz Imperio's Instincts Live Media Dance Company made its debut over the weekend at the L.A. Theatre Center in a program most notable for Imperio's slick stagecraft and the dancers' technical expertise.

Re "Octavio Paz, Mexico's Everyman," editorial, April 21: I first read "The Labyrinth of Solitude" when I was a student at Cal State Fullerton and chairman of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan). This literary masterpiece changed my life forever. I'm very grateful for his love of Aztec civilization and its moral values, which still have meaning to the "Everyman in Mexico" and throughout the Southwest. Octavio Paz and his books of poetry and philosophy greatly influenced the beginning of the Chicano movement in the late '60s and '70s.

Is it just me, or does it seem as if Leonardo DiCaprio's acting career has somehow lost its way in the seventh level of "Inception's" labyrinth? Or worse, is he locked into the nightmare limbo that the Christopher Nolan psychological thriller keeps alluding to? Questions such as these have been running through my mind lately, occasionally even disturbing my dreams, because his "Inception" character, Cobb, is just the latest iteration of what I've come to think of as "the DiCaprio type" — intelligently handsome but intensely tortured, like his possibly insane detective in "Shutter Island.

FRIDAY 1886, a new cocktail den 1250 S. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena 4:30 p.m. to midnight (626) 441-3136 FRIDAY Pretty Lights, Gamatik and Kraddy Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd. 8 p.m.; $28-$35 (213) 388-1400 SATURDAY Cinefamma Pajama Dance Party With DJ Dia and screenings of "Labyrinth" and "Return to Oz" The Cinefamily, 611 N. Fairfax Ave. 8 p.m.; $12 Cinefamily.org SATURDAY OK Go Club Nokia, 1111 S. Figueroa St. 9 p.m.; $22.50 Clubnokia.

I was hooked on this small hilltop town when I heard about the river jousting. Gazing down from the center of town, I was tracing the curves of a long-demolished Roman amphitheater. Then my digital companion, a CD audio tour guide I had picked up from the local tourist office, informed me that Roman Empire-era residents of the town packed the amphitheater not only for speeches and plays but also to watch floating jousting matches on the Eure River below.

The story of Seattle's ascent out of the tidal flats of Puget Sound is a tad bawdy -- with tales of vice and 2,500 of the city's women whose registered occupation was "seamstress" -- but most of all it's about bad plumbing and engineering ingenuity. "You've just walked through a second-floor window," Tug, our tour guide, tells the group. It's July, and like all good tourists, we're partaking of Bill Speidel's Underground Tour of old Seattle. Tug was obviously delusional -- I know I had stepped through a doorway, from the street.

Second of four parts G abriel Dieblas Roman took orders from cartel bosses in Mexico, hard men who ruled by fear, but he wouldn't approve a shipment without talking to a plucky, middle-aged woman from Compton. Guadalupe "Lupita" Villalobos ran a storefront botanica where Virgin of Guadalupe statuettes sat beside grinning Saint Death skeletons. She would threaten to turn neighbors into toads, and her clients believed she could divine the future by studying snail shells scattered on a tabletop.

Bargain land and wide-open spaces drew Alan Kimble Fahey to Acton. A modest ranch house on a desert lot offered the outpost he sought. But then Fahey wanted to expand. So he began to build. And build. And build. Fahey built a barn and moved in. He traded his motorcycle for a trailer and painted it to look like a rail car. He bartered other possessions for a dump-truck load of rocks and a 60-foot workers' lift. Then he sank 108 utility poles a dozen feet into the hard-packed Antelope Valley ground.

FRIDAY "NeverEnding Story" / "Labyrinth" drink-along Downtown Independent, 251 S. Main St. 7 p.m. $10-$12 (213) 617-1033 SATURDAY Grand Theft Audio Live Meltdown Comics, 7522 Sunset Blvd. 8 p.m. $8. Grandtheftaudioradio.com SATURDAY David Lynch opening William Griffin Gallery, 2902 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica 6-8 p.m. Griffinla.com SATURDAY First L.A. Spaghetti Western Festival El Portal Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd.

I shudder to think how complicated it could get if President Obama's family were to remodel their home in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood, considering the security labyrinth that surrounds what's going on at the house next door. "It's a detailed scheduling exercise," said Robert Berg with considerable understatement. Berg is president of Foster Design Build, the Chicago company that's handling the gut remodeling of 5040 S. Greenwood Ave., next door to the Obama home. A Chicago plastic surgeon and his wife bought the home in April for $1.4 million, according to media reports.

Is it just me, or does it seem as if Leonardo DiCaprio's acting career has somehow lost its way in the seventh level of "Inception's" labyrinth? Or worse, is he locked into the nightmare limbo that the Christopher Nolan psychological thriller keeps alluding to? Questions such as these have been running through my mind lately, occasionally even disturbing my dreams, because his "Inception" character, Cobb, is just the latest iteration of what I've come to think of as "the DiCaprio type" — intelligently handsome but intensely tortured, like his possibly insane detective in "Shutter Island.

Once upon a time on the Island of Crete lived King Minos and a creature known as a Minotaur--half man, half beast and wholly undesirable to the king. Eager to be rid of his company, Minos hired an inventor named Daedalus to build an intricate and presumably inescapable fortress in which to house the creature. The fortress was called the Labyrinth, and every so often, King Minos tossed in 14 young Athenians as snacks for the Minotaur.

With its burned-out lawn and overgrown bushes, the corner lot next to Bethel Tabernacle Church in Venice struck sculptor Robin Murez as ripe for resurrection. So Murez laid plans to turn the church-owned lot into a pocket park with an in-ground labyrinth, where neighbors could gather to chat, and aging churchgoers could park there for suppers and Bible study. "A labyrinth is a very serene place made for spiritual meditation," Murez said. "The neighborhood needs some healing.