The year is 1994. Kurt Cobain committed suicide in April. Kristen Pfaff, bassist of the Courtney Love-fronted band Hole, was found dead by heroin overdose in June. Two months later, Hole was on tour for its second album, duly called “Live Through This.”

Suicide is a jarring, tragic event that often cannot be explained. A teacher’s suicide, especially one committed in an elementary school classroom, is even more unthinkable.

The character of the orphaned boy is no stranger to the history of film and literature. But then again, you haven’t met 11-year-old Cyril in “The Kid with a Bike” (“Le gamin au velo”), the French-language winner of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix, written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

In a scene from the 1924 silent film “Kino-Eye,” a slice of beef from the marketplace flies back into the cow. The audience sees the cow’s skin come back on the bone and a knife cut across the cow’s throat in reverse, bringing the cow back to life, back to the stockyard and then finally to the countryside from where it came.

When Judy Chicago came to study at UCLA in the late 1950s, she encountered an L.A. art scene that was largely male-dominated.

There’s a new literary journal in town.
The Rattling Wall may sound like it took its name from a piece of literature, but in fact, its origins are much humbler.

Billy Claven (Tadhg Murphy) is an orphaned, crippled boy who spends most of his time staring at cows and reading books on the island of Inishmaan off the Irish coast, where he lives with his two aunts.

Growing up in New York City, Ellen Levy spent a lot of time in the American Museum of Natural History where she often went sketching, especially on the fifth floor with the dinosaurs.

Most people can tell you Lebanon is situated in the Middle East. Some might even know its political role in the region. But few can probably talk about the Lebanese people and culture as distinct from other cultures of the region.

In Los Angeles, you barely have to make a choice between the wilderness and the city.