Ted Soqui

Ashley Ross, left, and Lindsay Klimitz at the Colony Nightclub with their shoe vending machine.

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Salvation has come to the high-heeled hordes of L.A. nightlife, in the form of the city's first flat-shoe vending machine. Squat, unobtrusive, the size of a dresser, the thing is currently located beside the women's restroom at the Colony in Hollywood.

"We did six or seven pairs last week, not a whole lot," says distributor Ashley Ross, glancing brightly at the machine. "But it's still early. We're a little bit new to the L.A. scene. This is the first of many, is the plan."

It's a Thursday night at the club, and Ross and business partner Lindsay Klimitz are restocking shoes. Called Rollasoles, they cost $19.95 (or "an easy $20"). They are basically ballet flats. Soft and squashy, they drop out of the machine rolled up in a plastic can.

"The first time we came to L.A., we had no idea the streets were so bad," Klimitz says, popping cans into the machine.

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Star Foreman

Iki Company's Masa Kanome, left, Sachiko Hayashi and Ryuji Yamakita

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The would-be samurai of Iki Company are waiting for their master, doggedly whacking at each other with wooden sticks at a park in Westwood. It will be months before he arrives.

The company members are mostly young, aspiring actors trying to break into the U.S. market. All but one are Japanese; many are still learning English.

Master choreographer Keiya Tabuchi flies to Los Angeles from Tokyo once a year to teach them the intricacies of tate, or traditional Japanese theatrical combat. He teaches them how to hold a sword, how to sheathe and unsheathe it, how to swing it, how to cut, how to get cut -- even how to act like your guts are spilling out onto the ground. Then he choreographs the play that Iki Company stages each year, a sword-fighting extravaganza.

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Jennie Warren

David Minkin at the Magic Castle

​The Magic Castle, the 100-year-old Victorian mansion that serves as the private clubhouse for the Academy of Magic Arts, caught fire on Halloween last year. The fire began in the attic. It burned a hole in the roof, progressed to the third-floor administrative offices, slipped between the walls, then leaped from helicopter news cameras to TV screens -- straight into the hearts and minds and imaginations of magicians across the Southland.

As word spread, people worried. They worried about the staff. Did everyone get out OK? Then they worried about things. Priceless, irreplaceable things, such as the original trick billiards table from W.C. Fields' stage show in Ziegfeld's Follies. Or items hanging in the Gallerie de Arte, such as the rare program from a Royal Command Performance for Queen Victoria. Printed on silk with a lace border, it was the queen's personal program, handed to her one Monday evening in 1855.

They worried about other things -- mundane but invested with meaning. The brass owl with the glowing, ruby-red eyes, sitting on a bookshelf in the foyer: Whisper "Open sesame," and the bookshelf slides away to reveal the Castle's secret entrance. Or the baby grand Baldwin piano played by invisible Irma, the Castle's "resident ghost," who takes requests. Did Irma, some folks joked, get out safely?

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Nanette Gonzales

Joey, left, and Anthony Hernandez in their downtown factory

​Sift through the sale rack at your local Forever 21 mall store and you may come across a T-shirt with a picture of a girl staring into shards of a mirror. Retailing for $14.90, it is a seemingly edgy but ultimately innocuous shirt. It has no particular brand affiliation, no band or product or company to promote: It's an enigmatic graphic tee in a sea of throwaway, enigmatic graphic tees. It could have bubbled into the world fully formed from the collective teenybopper consciousness.

Instead, the tee came from the Rule Garment Manufacture factory in downtown L.A. It was created -- designed, manufactured and printed -- six months ago by one of the factory's owners, 26-year-old Joey Hernandez. Forever 21 ordered 3,000 pieces, and they have moved briskly. "It's sold 40 percent so far," says Joey, sitting at a computer in his factory's office. "You get no credit as a designer, but you get paid."

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Nanette Gonzales

Don Ferrarone

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In the credits he's usually listed as associate producer. What it really means is that he's the guy who finds stories. Don Ferrarone, ex-Drug Enforcement Administration agent, finds the real-life people -- the bodyguards, serial killers, narcs, dealers, soldiers, assassins, snipers, henchmen, spies and spooks -- on whom movie characters are based.

It is no mean feat getting these people's stories, but 28 years with the DEA have served Ferrarone well in Hollywood. He is a man with a certain set of skills.

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Simone Paz

Justin Schenck

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The corpse was a video gamer tasered to death by rogue cops. It lay on the autopsy table, trying very hard not to breathe. "There wasn't much time to rehearse," says Justin Schenck, the actor cast in the role of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation cadaver.

The casting company had sent Schenck to be part of a crowd scene in a recent episode of the enduringly popular TV show, but his enthusiastic cheering caught the production team's eye. They plucked him from the crowd and cast him as a dead body.

It was a dubious honor. Like the many corpses who have come before him -- the show is now in its 12th year -- Schenck wrestled with his dignity, his mortality and his lung capacity.

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Ted Soqui

Injured veterans practice adaptive rowing.

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He was walking through the combat zone when he slipped and fell. Sgt. 1st Class Rorey Nichols landed hard on his lower back. He lay there for a while. He was alone, which was bad. But it was daytime, and he thanked God for that. Slipping sounds stupid. Slipping on your way to the chow hole while carrying 75 to 100 pounds of gear, on a so-called road in Afghanistan that's nothing but rocks and sand, sounds stupid and dangerous. He pulled himself up.

Nichols was no stranger to peril. He'd served in Iraq from 2005 to 2006 and learned that you could be sitting on the toilet when a stray bullet whizzes through the wall and kills you. Or lying in bed -- in which case not even a tattoo of the Archangel Michael can protect you. (Nichols got his on his right forearm when he first enlisted.) A decade and a half in the Army inures you to fear. But when he found out he'd broken his spine, for the first time in his life he was scared. Really scared.

Two years, three ruptured spinal discs and one fractured vertebra later, Nichols is standing barefoot on the dock at Peter Archer Rowing Center in Long Beach. He watches a group of injured soldiers gingerly pick their way onto a long, slim boat. They are learning how to row.

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A scene from Erin Cooney's video project

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A day begins at a research outpost in snowy Alaska. The scientist on duty steps out into the darkness, gazes longingly at her warm cabin, then wonders why her sled dogs aren't barking. Elsewhere in the world, at that precise instant, a child tries to distract her father, a jazz musician, from his practice session. Leaves fall in the Midwest, and a leaf blower rumbles to life and pushes them around like an invisible hand. In a fancy Atlanta condo, a man stands on a balcony and kisses his boyfriend on the cheek. A few states away, girls chop wood in a forest in the Ozarks. A dog named Gracie wags its tail. A pot of water begins to boil. A baby squeals. A cat purrs.

These are the moments 35-year-old Los Angeles-based artist Erin Cooney discovered when she asked people to film themselves for exactly one minute at 8 a.m. PST on Nov. 13, 2010. She asked everyone she knew. She went on the radio and asked people she didn't know. She also begged on message boards frequented by videographers. Ultimately, 300 people submitted videos, resulting in 300 perspectives of a single minute in time.

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Simone Paz

Brett Schlank, left, Natalie Lynch and & Tara Jayn, producers of A Drinking Game

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Never let it be said that the actors in A Drinking Game refused to suffer for their craft. A live reading of classic movies turned interactive drinking game, the monthly production features actors sitting on folding chairs on a minimal, setless stage with their scripts ... and their booze.

They take a swig each time certain words are spoken -- say, "school," "car" or "sick" -- and each time their character's name is called. There's no secretly spitting the beer back into the bottle, or feigning sips or substituting water instead. This is serious, Method acting.

Founder Natalie Lynch's poison of choice is Jack and Coke, while the rest of the cast prefer beer. Drink slowly, she advises. Take small sips. "It's a marathon, not a race."

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Simone Paz

Tony Dominguez, maker of giant Dia de los Muertos puppets

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Tony Dominguez is a 3-D kind of guy. Most people look at a photo and see it only in two dimensions. Dominguez looks at a flat image and sees its geometry in three. He can spin it around in his head. He senses its depth.

As a maker of giant Dia de los Muertos puppets, he is well served by this talent. Lately, though, it seems as if three dimensions aren't nearly enough.

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