Paradise

Hard on the heels of Phillip Noyce's smashing new sea-and-sex chase thriller "Dead Calm" comes a much different movie, one which Noyce shot several years ago: "Echoes of Paradise" (Fine Arts). In "Calm," Noyce shows that he knows how to make a smoking melodrama. In "Echoes of Paradise," he's trying something softer, gentler: a psychological love story about an Australian mother and wife (Wendy Hughes) who leaves her would-be politician husband after discovering his incessant infidelities and takes up with a Balinese dancer (John Lone)

Sam Hall Kaplan was really on target--"L.A.--Whose City Is It Anyway?" (Oct. 23). How can we promote any growth in development or population when our sewers, streets and highways cannot handle the present load, our police department can't handle the wave of drugs and crime, our hospital emergency rooms can't accommodate the patients? Those of us who were raised here have seen this paradise fall into a decay that is devastating! The environment is so polluted one is hard-pressed to remember clean air, clear water (we don't have enough of that either)

We staggered out of bed at 2 a.m., the three teenagers grumbling about whether any experience could be worth this much lost sleep. We were on our way to watch the sunrise from the top of Maui's 10,000-foot dormant volcano, Haleakala, where we would mount roadster bikes and follow a guide more than 33 miles down the mountain through Haleakala National Park (http://www.nps.gov/hale) to the small surfing town of Paia.

The messages of modern life undermine life. The feedback is poisoned. Something has convinced the elephant that it can race like a gazelle; the gazelle that it can destroy leopards with its teeth; the camel that its natural habitat is the icy waters off Maine. Donald Barthelme floats his protagonist along in a stream of reassuring messages, even as his life stands uprooted and perhaps destroyed. "Paradise" is a kind of dream where everything is seen naturally and logically.

Schoolchildren recognize the bird of paradise as our city flower, though most of the adult population of Los Angeles would probably be surprised by this fact. Had I been asked, I might have guessed that our city flower was a native plant, the California poppy perhaps. But our city fathers chose a most exotic plant instead, one likely to maintain our image as a palm-filled paradise.

A Paradise Built in Hell The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Rebecca Solnit Viking: 354 pp., $27.95 The bad news is that more disasters are coming, arising from any number of sources: climate change, widespread infrastructural vulnerabilities, toxic threats brewed at cellular or weapons-grade levels, seismic or oceanic volatility, and so on and so on. Whatever their cause, disasters will be born of some mixture of...

New studies in the jungles of New Guinea have revealed a link between economics and mating behavior that foretells a major change in human parenting. Dr. Bruce M. Beehler, the Smithsonian zoologist who reported his findings in the December issue of Scientific American, doesn't actually say that they will apply to human beings, but male-female relationships in the urban jungle are not much different from what he observed.

On Sunday, in the late afternoon, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony will lead a procession through downtown Los Angeles to a hillside overlooking the Hollywood Freeway. There, he will bless the ground. Ten thousand people are expected to meet him at the end of his pilgrimage from the old cathedral, St. Vibiana's, to the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. In reality, he will start at one parking lot and end up at another. There is no cathedral. The 3.

The next time some knucklehead out-of-towner asks me what it's like to live in La-La Land, I'm going to blurt out just one big, scary compound word that he's not likely to understand: pyrocumulus. That's the term we all learned last week after we gawked at the huge mushroom cloud looming over the San Gabriels, the product of the intense heat and smoke from the Station fire. I know I'm not the only one who took pictures of the awesome cloud formations, and I'd guess I wasn't the only one to feel a pang of guilt when I thought how beautiful they were.

Mirela Kerla, 15 years old and a witness to war, wears a gauze patch over her right eye and three strands of knotted red thread around her left wrist. They are reminders of the place she has come to and the place she has left behind. The makeshift red bracelet was given to Mirela last week--a good luck charm fashioned by a neighbor in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mirela's homeland.