When I'm not on a stand-up tour of the country, thrilling people in the Bible Belt with my razor sharp wit and polysyllabic dissections of pop culture and socio-political shenanigans, I live in Los Angeles. I have loved here, I have lost here... I shot Dude, Where's My Car?, Spider-man 2 and VH1's “I Love the 80s!" here. In short, Los Angeles and I have bonded.

I was having an argument with a friend the other day about what part of L.A. is the best and as I was just about to chuck a porcelain vase lamp with a stain glass shade at his head for suggesting “Culver City back in the day,” I realized something: there is no best place to live in L.A. Each neighborhood has pluses and minuses that are effectively moot points for anyone who doesn’t live there. That’s what’s so great about it; no one place has everything. And some places, quite frankly, have nothing! And there are people who love that about Burbank... I kid... sorta.

The Sequence Photo by Ed Krieger

Paul Mullin's The Sequence at Theater @ Boston Court is this week's Pick. Read this and the weekend's other NEW THEATER REVIEWS reviews of Two Trains Running at the new Ebony Repertory Theatre; Clare Boothe Luce's The Women at the Hayworth; Bill Sterrritt's Nihil Obstat at SPQR Stage Company; Suzanne Bressler's political comedy Asses & Elephants at Santa Monica Playhouse and Chazz Palminteri's Faithful presented by Ruskin Group Theatre.

For Comprehensive Theater Listings embedded with New Theater Reviews), press the READ ON tab below.

With a wall of fire hundreds of feet long in places, wind-driven smoke billowing over the Hollywood Hills and blanketing most of the San Fernando Valley, and the busy 210 Freeway closed and snarling traffic for miles, fire officials warned that the city could face a "siege" if winds don't let up.

An unknown number of Sylmar residents, said to be in the thousands, have been evacuated, with forced evacuations beginning in the black of night Monday morning after large hot spots tended by 19 engine companies from Los Angeles County Fire and Los Angeles City Fire departments got whipped into a massive blaze that burned buildings and trucks at the Lopez Canyon landfill and may have destroyed much of a nearby mobile home.

"Even if we'd had an army, it wouldn't have made a difference," said one city fire official, as county and city fire officials called in water drops by Super Scoopers and helicopters to put down fast-moving flames that the ground crews, streaming in from all over Southern California, could not contain.

In the 1970s it took a group of Venice-based visionary artists, surf and skateboard shapers, and passionate rag-tag kids to revolutionize skateboarding and launch the rebel skater lifestyle that we know today. At this point, I'd like to think that anyone who hasn't heard of Dogtown or the legendary Z-Boys must have spent the past 30 years living in some underground bunker, subsiding off canned peas and beef jerky, with nothing but a dusty AM radio to connect them to outside world and the ever-changing city of Los Angeles that pulses above.

It doesn't matter whether or not you lived in 1970s-era Venice or Santa Monica during Dogtown's heyday and witnessed skate and surf history with your own, saltwater-stung eyes. Damn, you didn't even have to be born yet. My point is that even if you have never heard of these guys, your life in L.A. has been changed by the Dogtown Z-Boy legacy of being one of the most important art and sport subculture revolutions to originate on the West Coast... ever.

The show - the result of a two-month investigation - was a recap of the historic 2002 billboard ban, which resulted in lawsuits by Clear Channel, Regency and CBS Outdoor and the subsequent "sweetheart" deal brokered by City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo who allowed the three giants to digitally enhance over 800 billboards in LA. In exchange, the billboard companies had to take down three percent of their signs.

Madison was a victim of child serial murderer Mack Ray Edwards.

The remains probably are buried beneath the 23 Freeway but cannot be recovered, announced the Los Angeles Police Department earlier today. There is speculation that Madison's remains are buried underneath the freeway and not on a dirt and grassy patch next to the freeway where four-cadaver dogs originally alerted to. The search, which started on Monday, had been concentrated along the 23 Freeway at the Tierra Rejada Road offramp, where a 12-foot-deep pit was excavated.

A memorial service was held at the site this morning.

Check back here on Monday for NEW THEATER REVIEWS reviews of Two Trains Running at the new Ebony Repertory Theatre; Clare Boothe Luce's The Women at the Hayworth; Bill Sterrritt's Nihil Obstat at SPQR Stage Company; Paul Mullin's Science Drama, The Sequence at Theatre @ Boston Court, Suzanne Bressler's political comedy Asses and Elephants at Santa Monica Playhouse and Chazz Palminteri's Faithful presented by Ruskin Group Theatre.

More L.A. prods in NYC

Circus Theatricals' acclaimed productions of Shem Bitterman's Man.Gov and Harm's Way open October 17 at the 45th Street Theatre in New York, and perform in repertory through November 9. For more info, visit http://circustheatricals.com

For this week's Theater Feature on UCLA Live's problems with Equity, plus The Civilians' This Beautiful City visit http://www.laweekly.com/2008-10-09/stage/culturally-unique-actors-equity-goes-soviet-on-ucla-live/

For the latest New Reviews, visit http://www.laweekly.com/2008-10-09/stage/hamlet-razorback-the-most-mediocre-story-never-told/

For Complete Theater Listings, press the READ ON tab directly below.

I made a passing reference to this the other day, but now it's really starting to bug me. The McCain-Palin street rallies really are beginning to take on many of the chilling aspects of what I witnessed from the proto-fascist right-wing in El Salvador twenty years ago.

It was always quite a bladder-constricting experience to be a reporter at a public rally of the extremist ARENA (Republican Nationalist Alliance of El Salvador). The cranked-up mobs would aggressively threaten us while the party's security thugs, in dark aviator glasses, would menacingly pat the bulging weapons under their coats. Next would come the party's hymn blaring over the loudspeakers.

"Homeland Yes! Communism No!

...Tremble, Tremble Communists!

... El Salvador Will Be the Tomb of the Reds!"

This wasn't just hot air, my friends. Party founder and leader (and big time coke-head) Major Roberto D'Aubuisson was also a leader of the notorious Salvadoran death squads. His high point was organizing the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero as he offered mass in 1980. Major Bob, as we lovingly called him, would whip the crowd into a mighty fury as he raised a machete up above a fat watermelon sitting on a table and then would split it wide open with one thundering wack. As the crowd would stamp up and down, D'Aubuisson would lift a half of the melon up in the air and would yell that this was a symbol of the rival Christian Democratic Party. "Green on the outside," he would yell. "But Red on the inside."

Which were pretty strong words for a crowd that just promised to make the homeland the graveyard of the Reds.

John McCain runs no death squads and the GOP is not inherently a fascist party. Nor are most Republicans fascists or killers. But... McCain and his gal-pal Veep are pushing the envelope just about as far as you can within the limits of mainstream American electoral politics. They are openly pandering to and even inciting the most extreme elements among their base. It's not only stupid and counter-productive. It's disgusting and dangerous. Below find what will undoubtedly be remembered as one of John McCain's lowest moments. If he had any sense of decency he would have at least politely shut down the lunatic ranter in the audience -- someone who would have fit in perfectly at the side of Major Bob. But no dice.

Major Bob meet Senator John. Birds of a feather. How long until McCain links Obama to a watermelon?

“Then I started thinking about it more and more and it started to sound like maybe it wasn’t so funny,” Dunbier said inside Melrose Avenue comic book outpost Golden Apple as Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA” played in the background.  “Maybe it could be done.  Maybe it would be something that would be interesting and fun and informative.  Something different.”

That “something different” is Presidential Material, a comic book double-header featuring one graphic biography of Barack Obama and a similar 28-page life overview of John McCain (for the totally fair and balanced, the set is also available as a flip book containing both efforts).  Released on October 8th, Obama’s bio was penned by novelist/comic book writer Jeff Mariotte (River Runs Red, Desperadoes) and illustrated by Tom Morgan.  Andrew Helfer, who previously wrote graphic biographies of Malcolm X and Ronald Reagan, worked alongside artist Stephen Thompson for the McCain book. J. Scott Campbell (Spider-Man) provided cover art for both pieces.

Lopez has joined the tide unleashed by the Weekly's Christine Pelisek in her seminal investigative story about the tiny, anti-billboard Davids fighting the incredibly greedy big-advertising Goliaths in her April LA Weekly cover story, "Billboards Gone Wild: 4,000 Illegal Billboards Choke L.A.'s Neighborhoods."

Now, KCET will join the fray on Thursday night, so tune in to get an eyeful of the sea of illegal billboards -- 4,000 of them -- that have turned L.A. into the "illegal billboard capitol of the world."

We hear that KCET, not exactly a hard-hitting outfit, will give free editorial time to a journalist who supports EVEN MORE clutter, Sam Kaplan. Kaplan says Angelenos should accept "obnoxious" bright lights because it makes L.A. more like Manhattan.

From where I was standing up in the nosebleeds, Joe Biden didn't look like much more than a crisp, dark suit with a silver topping. But as he bounded up to the podium, more athletically than he has a right to do, Biden was greeted like a rock star by the mix of students and citizens on hand for his rally the morning after Barack Obama and John McCain had their second debate.