Mosaic

"NOBODY walks on our side of the street anymore," Bobbie Kalendarian says with a shrug and a grin. "I mean, why would you?" Why would you, when in a neighbor's yard a mere 37 feet of asphalt away, an audacious mosaic of plant-filled pottery bursts skyward?

On April 29, 1992, a furious seizure gripped Los Angeles and shook it violently for four terrifying days. John Ridley, then a recent New York transplant, spent much of that time quarantined in his Fairfax district neighborhood, where he huddled on street corners with petrified neighbors and denied rides to white friends looking for his protection. (As a black man he felt no safer from the random brutality and rioting.

Let me describe the #3 plate at every local authentic Mexican restaurant 50 years ago. Imagine an oval, particularly thick ceramic plate being hustled over straight out of an oven, so hot it can only be delivered with a potholder and a warning to never, ever touch--it's a hot, hot plate each recipient, individually, will be told--that is set down a distance from the edge of the table so it won't burn chest hairs or whatever, and the clothes in between.

Honoring the Catholic heritage of Latinos, a shrine to Mary, the mother of Jesus, at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels will be expanded at a cost of $250,000 and with thousands of pieces of broken china donated by Southern Californians. The china will be used to fashion a sweeping mosaic on an existing cathedral courtyard wall that will form the backdrop of the expanded shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Plans for the project were announced Friday by Msgr.

Several months after her identity as a CIA operative was exposed in a newspaper column, Valerie Plame had dinner with five of her classmates from the agency's training academy. Four had left the CIA, and they spent the evening catching up on what they'd done during their clandestine careers, as well as the jobs and moves that followed. But even though Plame's "cover" had been cracked wide open, her dinner companions didn't pry for details.

A well-preserved, nearly 2,000-year-old mosaic depicting five frolicking naked men in a grape harvest scene is Rome's latest stunning find from digs into layers of history under the city's modern-day surface. So far, the only ones to come face-to-face with the underground marvel is a team of cave explorers who lowered themselves into a space under the ancient Baths of Trajan, in the bowels of the Oppian Hill, one of the city's seven ancient hills.

A monolithic public artwork has become a cultural irony in downtown Los Angeles. Despite its size, it is easy to miss by passersby. When it was erected in 1962, the 80-foot by 20-foot mosaic mural in front of the Los Angeles County Hall of Records stood as a glittery testament to the region's booming growth. Today the mural -- a highly stylized topographical map of Los Angeles County fashioned by one of the nation's best-known mosaic artists -- is dingy and decaying.

Until four years ago, car designer Carlos Salaff, 26, of Fullerton had never attended church service and had no interest in associating with Christians. "I just had this idea that church people are real quick to judge you: 'You are a sinner and you will go to hell,' " he said. "I thought Christians were detached, condemning and nerdy." Then Salaff visited Mosaic, a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-location urban church that was meeting in a nightclub in downtown Los Angeles.

When Michael Holroyd, the British biographer of such well-known literary figures as Lytton Strachey and George Bernard Shaw, turned his extensive research abilities and writing skills loose on his own family, a fascinating volume, "Basil Street Blues" (2000), was born. Mixing the rigor of a formal biographer with the intimacy of one telling a family story, Holroyd shaped a hybrid form.