From left: Antonia Hernández, Councilmember Gil Cedillo, Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Attorney Mike Feuer.  (Photo courtesy the Office of the Mayor, Los Angeles) by Abel M. Salas Offering a powerful and pointed response to the anti-immigrant rhetoric espoused by the President-elect as a hallmark of his campaign, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti was joined earlier today by L.A. County Supervisor Hilda L. Solis, City Councilmember Gil Cedillo, City Attorney Mike Feuer, California Community Foundation president and CEO Antonia Hernandez, the Weingart Foundation’s Fred Ali and Robert K. Ross, M.D., president and CEO of The California Endowment. The philanthropic and elected leaders came together at a press conference to announce the creation of a $10 million fund to assist immigrants facing deportation. Amidst the fear and uncertainty that has followed the election, many hard-working, law-abiding immigrants worry that a Trump administration will make good on his threats to crackd

 by Jesse Bliss The twinkle in her eye gives away the possibility she did it. Dramatic entry ways with large, white marble flights of stairs, the smell of incense and statues of Buddha in various iterations jolt one to awakening as the journey begins through His Lai Temple, the largest of its’ kind in the United States, to the four grand hallways of Fo Guang Yuan Gallery that hold the other-worldly work of Emi Motokawa. The Buddha Nature exhibit brings the teachings of the Lotus Sutra, one of the most influential scriptures of Buddhism, to light in the simplest and most accessible of ways through the lens of hip-hop and wide-eyed souls occupying the space of another realm. This in itself is the forefront of artistic innovation: taking potentially abstract ideas and transforming them into concrete, accessible concepts that instantly strike the soul. This is the first time in history that art, Buddhism, and Hip-Hop intersect in such a way. To house this meeting inside the walls of

Gael García Bernal in Pablo Larraín's Neruda . by William Alexander Yankes For those unfamiliar, Chile has fielded two Nobel laureates in literature. Poet Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945. Pablo Neruda, born in 1904, took the Swedish laurel home in 1971. But just who was this Neruda whose body of work has made his name immortal? His birth name was Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basualto. Because he admired the Czech poet Jan Neruda, he adopted his surname, taking it in a break with his father, a railroad worker who thought him less of a man for his pursuit of poetry and literature. He was born and raised in Chile’s south, in the heart of an indigenous region where the invasion of foreign Spanish colonizers had been most fiercely resisted. There, a millennial Mapuche cosmology sought to preserve an equilibrium between man and the natural world with its rivers and forests and rain and sea. This harmony between man and nature inspired Neruda, who took his