In a matter of weeks, Ventura High football coach Tim Garcia will help move his son, quarterback Derek Garcia, into the dorms at Nevada Las Vegas. They’re having one last hurrah, and the memories are going to be priceless.
On Saturday night, Ventura won the Southern Section Division 6 football championship with a 63-28 win over St. Pius X-St. Matthias. It means Ventura’s season keeps going with next week’s state regional playoffs to be announced on Sunday.
Derek passed for 288 yards and one touchdown. Dad was also happy that running back James Watson had 247 yards rushing and four touchdowns.
Earlier this week at the championship luncheon, the Garcias were smiling even though the coach/son role will soon be ending at Ventura. It’s a rite of passage leaving the nest for the son to explore the world.
Derek is thankful he’s had his father at his side for four years of fun and excitement, and what a way to celebrate with a Southern Section championship and maybe even more.
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].
WASHINGTON — Rep. Robert Garcia and his team faced a monumental task on Nov. 5: Sift through more than 20,000 documents obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein in search for something that would shed more light into President Trump’s relationship with the now-deceased convicted sex offender.
After six tedious days combing through the records, Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and four staff members identified three emails that would go on to ignite a political firestorm.
In the emails, Epstein wrote that Trump had “spent hours” at the late financier’s house with one of his victims and that he “knew about the girls,” suggesting the president knew more about Epstein’s abuse than he had previously acknowledged. The estate released the emails to the committee after receiving a subpoena.
“We thought [the emails] really raised questions about the relationship between the president and Jeffrey Epstein,” Garcia said in an interview last week. “We knew we had to get those out as soon as possible.”
Garcia’s plan to release the emails quickly thrust the second-term Democrat into the national spotlight, elevating his profile as a chief antagonist of Trump on a issue that has dogged the president since his first term. It also increased the pressure on the White House to release its investigative Epstein files.
The assertions in Epstein’s emails about Trump’s involvement or awareness of Epstein’s illicit acts have not been corroborated and the White House has denied the veracity of those accounts.
The White House accused Democrats of “selectively” leaking emails to create a “fake narrative to smear President Trump,” adding that Democrats redacted the name of one of the victims, Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April and had previously said she had not witnessed Trump participating in abuse at Epstein’s house.
The email disclosures on Nov. 12 prompted Republicans on the committee to publish the full cache of records just hours later. At the same time, Democrats — joined by a handful of Republicans — were on the verge of forcing a House vote to compel the Justice Department to release its Epstein files. Days later, Trump urged GOP lawmakers to back the bill he had long resisted, and he ultimately signed it into law.
“If we hadn’t released the initial emails, Republicans would likely have released nothing,” Garcia said. “They never release anything until we push them and we bring pressure from the public.”
Garcia said Democrats were prepared to publish the full set themselves — but incrementally over the course of the week, arguing that such a release needed to be done carefully to protect victims’ privacy.
Republicans on the committee have criticized the minority party’s approach, arguing that it focuses on sensationalizing select pieces of information to damage Trump and politicizing the Epstein investigation.
“The most dangerous place in D.C. is between Robert Garcia and a cable news camera,” Republican strategist Matthew Gorman said. “This is simply a ploy for him to draw more attention to himself, and he’s using this issue to do it.”
‘Sometimes you gotta punch back harder’
Garcia’s allies view the 47-year-old’s rise as both foreseeable and reflective of his past.
Born in Peru, Garcia immigrated to the United States as a young child and became a citizen in his early 20s. He later became Long Beach’s first Latino and first openly gay mayor before arriving in Washington — where he is now one of the youngest to ever serve as the ranking member of the main investigative panel in the House.
Five months into the role, Garcia says he remains in disbelief that he is in the position that has been held by people like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), whom he considers one of his “heroes.”
“To be in a place where I’m doing the job that he was in when I got to Congress a couple of years ago is not something that I expected,” Garcia said. “I want to contribute back as best I can, and take on this corruption, take on what is happening with the Jeffrey Epstein case and holding the administration accountable.”
The oversight committee is one of the House’s most high-profile panels and its chair, Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, has broad subpoena power. Comer, a staunch Trump ally, has been leading a review of the government’s investigation into Epstein and his longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Comer has subpoenaed both the Epstein estate and the Justice Department.
Comer declined to be interviewed for this article, as did other House Republicans. But Comer told Politico last week that he was “done with Garcia” and that the Democrat had “burned his bridges with this.”
“He just needs to do TikTok videos or something. … He’s not a serious investigator. He’s like a TikTok video kind of guy,” Comer said.
Garcia responded to Comer’s comments with a reference to the movie “Mean Girls.”
“Why’s he so obsessed with me?” he said Wednesday in an Instagram post — an example of how Garcia often uses pop culture to communicate to a more general audience.
Garcia says his tactics are motivated by an allergy to bullies.
“I grew up as an immigrant kid. … I know what it is like to be on the other side of the bully,” he said. “If the bully is going to punch or cause harm to you or others that you care about, you have to punch back. Sometimes you gotta punch back harder.”
Democrats credit Garcia for pushing Comer to act. In July, a Republican-led subcommittee passed a Democrat-led motion to subpoena the Justice Department’s Epstein documents — a move that ultimately prompted Comer to issue his subpoenas.
Rep. Robert Garcia speaks at a ceremonial swearing-in event in Long Beach in August to commemorate his new role as ranking member of the House oversight committee.
(Jonathan Alcorn / For The Times)
Rep. Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat, said the vote “began knocking over the dominoes” that eventually led to the public seeing a copy of Epstein’s “50th birthday book,” which includes Trump’s name, as well as the three emails linking Trump to Epstein.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), a member of the oversight committee, praised Garcia for securing bipartisan support to secure documents and pushing records out to the public. Khanna, who led the push to force a vote on the House floor to demand the Justice Department release the Epstein files, also co-wrote a letter with Garcia to Epstein’s estate requesting an unredacted copy of the birthday book.
Attorneys for the estate said that they would cooperate, but that they required a subpoena to release materials due to privacy concerns. Khanna said he believes the letter set in motion the push that ultimately led Comer to subpoena the estate.
“I think the way he has worked with Comer to make sure a lot of the investigation has been bipartisan, has been effective,” Khanna said in an interview.
A ‘dynamic’ approach to oversight
Garcia — who is known to use social media and pop culture to amplify his message — has folded those communication tactics into his role on the oversight committee.
The day the emails were released, Garcia promoted them in social media posts and videos and gave multiple interviews. The congressman — a self-described Bravo fan — is scheduled to appear this week on the cable channel’s “What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) told The Times that Garcia’s “dynamic” leadership approach is creating new ways to communicate to a younger generation about the work Congress is doing.
“He seems to thrive on it, and that’s a joy to behold,” the former speaker said. “He is young, but has brought members along and the public along as to what the challenge is.”
Rep. Robert Garcia speaks with Mayor Karen Bass at a congressional field hearing at the Metropolitan Water District on Monday.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Republicans on the committee have accused Garcia and Democrats of intentionally using the Epstein investigation to generate a false narrative against Trump — criticism that Democrats see as Garcia being willing to “fight fire with fire.”
Sen. Adam Schiff, who served on the House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, said Garcia’s push to seek records “outside of traditional channels,” including the Epstein estate, helped drive a “public narrative that broke through.”
“Under such a lawless and corrupt administration, we need talented and creative leaders to do oversight work, expose the malfeasance to the public and break through in a fractured media environment, and Congressman Garcia has proven adept at all three,” Schiff said.
Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee, said Garcia’s strategy could backfire if or when all the information on the Epstein investigation comes out.
“I believe that they’ve sprung Pandora’s box with a whole bunch of conspiracy theories, fake memes and news that the left is fully embracing and that may not actually be real,” he said.
As more records from Epstein’s estate are expected to come to light in the coming weeks, Garcia says he is committed to exposing wrongdoing from anyone, regardless of party. The documents have already shown Epstein’s links to prominent Democrats.
The records have also shown links to major banks, a thread Garcia says he believes could be central in understanding Epstein’s plea deal negotiated by a prosecutor who served in Trump’s Cabinet during his first term.
“I am not interested in protecting anybody,” he said. “I’m interested in justice for the survivors.”
In his riveting book “The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature,” veteran book editor Gerald Howard makes a strong claim for Cowley as a crucial catalyst for the efflorescence of American fiction in the years following World War I. He’s not wrong: Working as a critic, author, essayist and editor, Cowley often provided a lone voice in the wilderness for neglected masters.
As consulting editor for publishing house Viking Press in the ‘40s, Cowley resuscitated William Faulkner’s career at a time when most of his books were out of print. Cowley also ushered in Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel of the Beat Generation, “On the Road,” working for seven years to get it published and finally succeeding in doing so in 1957.
For this week’s newsletter, I spoke with Howard about Faulkner, Kerouac and the death of criticism.
He didn’t have a program or a thesis. He had taste. He was just a pure creature of literature.
— Gerald Howard on Malcolm Cowley, the subject of his new book
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Your book details Cowley’s seven–year odyssey to get Kerouac’s “On the Road” published in 1957 and point out that, contrary to Kerouac’s criticisms regarding the editing, Cowley, in fact, had nothing to do with changes that straightened out his prose.
Cowley took a lot of crap from the Kerouac crowd because Kerouac, in a drunken moment, blamed all his troubles with Viking on Cowley when Cowley was innocent. The Kerouac scholars and biographers don’t quite grasp that a good part of the editing job was assigned to other folks at Viking. They added all those commas in the manuscript that Kerouac was so upset about. Cowley was not an advocate of making big changes to the book; he thought Kerouac’s voice was so vital, so fresh.
Perhaps Cowley’s greatest contribution to 20th century American literature is his rehabilitation of Faulkner’s career at a time when all of his books were out of print. In 1944, he was down and out; six years later, he won the Nobel Prize. Cowley had a lot to do with that.
There was something going on in Europe at the time that was somewhat disconnected from what was going on in the United States. Faulkner’s reputation in France in particular was very high; Andre Gide and Sartre were admirers. But in the United States, Faulkner didn’t sell, he had a very mixed reputation, and he was not well understood. Cowley’s first intention was to write a very long essay about Faulkner’s work, which was serialized in various publications, and then to assemble “The Portable Faulkner” for Viking, which sold well. So the ground was prepared by Cowley.
Critics are “so central to a useful, fruitful culture. I myself don’t particularly care to live in a culture that doesn’t have them,” veteran editor Gerald Howard tells The Times.
(Penguin Random House)
What’s remarkable is the catholicity of Cowley’s taste. He studied Racine at Harvard, but then recognizes the greatness of a disparate group of writers: Faulkner, John Cheever, Kerouac, Ken Kesey, all of whom he shepherds into print.
He didn’t have a program or a thesis. He had taste. He was just a pure creature of literature, immensely versatile and conversant with everything that seemed to matter in the literary universe. Up until the ‘60s, he had his radar up and running. He didn’t believe in a fixed canon.
Cowley was an editor of the New Republic from 1929 to 1944, a small-circulation magazine with outsized influence, featuring critics like Edmund Wilson that generated the cultural conversation. Critics have no such sway anymore. Do you feel there has been something lost from that diminishment of the individual critical voice?
We can let all the online measurements determine the things that people like and allow those things to rise to the surface. But I think the role of the critic is to sort through a vast amount of material to find the things that are really valuable, really interesting. Not just books, of course — also movies, art, music. They’re so central to a useful, fruitful culture. I myself don’t particularly care to live in a culture that doesn’t have them.
Is a maverick editor like Malcolm Cowley possible now?
Probably not. The world that he moved in was a closed world. There wasn’t a lot of room for people who were not white, male and heterosexual. It’s disappointing that he was not more interested in African American literature. He should have been. There are plenty of those people around that he knew. And just appreciating Ralph Ellison was not enough.
(This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
📰 The Week(s) in Books
(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; Cover by Macmillan)
You may have seen the Netflix series about the “OneTaste” sex cult, but that’s not even the half of it, according to Ellen Huet’s book “Empire of Orgasm,” which Julia M. Klein calls a “deeply troubling” narrative of coercion and financial ruin.
Bad Religion guitarist and overall punk legend Brian Baker has a new book of photographs called “The Road,” and Josh Chesler chatted with him about it: “I think I have a knack for being at the right place at the right time.”
Arcana has served the L.A. market for over 40 years, currently occupying space in the Helms Bakery building in Culver City.
(Joshua White)
Given the vicissitudes of the retail book market, it’s a minor miracle that Arcana: Books on the Arts has survived 41 years. Arcana, which since 2012 has occupied space in the Helms Bakery building in Culver City after a long run at the Third Street Promenade, is the best art bookstore in L.A., offering a vast selection spanning photography, painting, fashion, graphic design and much more. I spoke with owner Lee Kaplan about what is hot in his store right now.
Is there any particular kind of book that tends to do well for you?
Perennials tend to be more comprehensive, hardbound volumes of well-known artists such as Edward Ruscha, Andy Warhol, John Baldessari and Jean-Michel Basquiat; photographers Robert Frank, Todd Hido, William Eggleston, Ed Templeton; architects Frank Gehry, Herzog & De Meuron, Johnston Marklee, and Fashion brands like Comme des Garcons, Supreme, Dior, etc. That noted, we sell a lot of inexpensive zines by creators few have heard of, yet.
Arcana has survived a lot of the ups and downs of the retail book business. What do you think is the secret to your longevity?
Moving to a large, beautifully designed space in Culver City’s Helms Bakery in 2012 (after decades on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade) turned out to be a fortunate decision. We have room for scores of thousands of books that we have amassed over the years situated in a lively, artistic and design-conscious neighborhood.
Given the internet, why do people still value looking at art in books?
These are two vastly different experiences, and for me, there is no substitute for holding a book as a tangible, tactile object. Thankfully, there are still many, many visitors daily that seem to feel the same.
On Aug. 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was stabbed 15 times just as he was about to give a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Gravely wounded, Rushdie lost sight in his right eye. The following spring, he published “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” which became a bestseller. His new book, “The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories,” is his first work of fiction since the attack that nearly killed him.
A showcase for his dynamic range, the book careens from social critique to ghost stories and dream-like fables. On a recent Zoom call, the writer discussed the consolations of fiction, Franz Kafka and the moral rot of the gilded class.
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This is the first fiction you’ve written since “Knife.” How did you get that part of your creative brain going again?
I’m so happy to have fiction to talk about again! The attack kind of stopped the fiction juices from flowing. It’s as if my mind wouldn’t look back into the world of the imagination. But the moment I finished “Knife,” even before it came out, I was suddenly thinking about fiction again. It was as if by magic, I had to somehow sweep that subject away — out of the front of my mind, into the back of my mind — in order to let other stuff come in.
So you’re thrilled to be writing fiction again.
Yes. Memoir was never a form that attracted me. I don’t particularly want to write about myself.
Were all the stories in the new book written after the knife attack?
The two stores which bookend the collection were written earlier, although I did revise them. The first story I wrote for the book was “Late,” which is the first ghost story I’ve ever written.
“The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories” by Salman Rushdie.
(Random House)
That is actually astonishing to me. You have had elements of the supernatural and fantasy in your fiction, but not specifically a ghost story?
I’ve had that, but I haven’t had a ghost as a hero. And I must say, it became incredibly enjoyable to write.
I’d always wanted to write something arising out of my time at Cambridge, but I’d never really found a story. Then I had this idea of an encounter between this older academic and this young Indian woman who made friends because of their mutual love of India. When I sat down to write it, I found myself killing him. It took me completely by surprise. And the story became something else entirely.
There is in a few of these stories the character of the old don, the wizened, sage academic. Were these characters based on gray eminences you may have encountered at Cambridge?
I was lucky that my time at King’s College overlapped just a little bit with the great E.M. Forster. He was almost 90 and I was 19, but he was very approachable. He liked students to approach him and have a conversation. He would sometimes come and sit in the student common room with a little glass of beer and a little kind of flat cap. And when he discovered that I had a background in India, he became extra chatty because India had, of course, been unbelievably important to him in his life.
“Oklahoma” is perhaps the most dream-like story in the collection, about a young man searching for an older man, a famous writer, who has disappeared. It’s a dense piece, with a distinct Kafka influence.
There was an extraordinary exhibition at the Morgan Library here in Manhattan, of the manuscripts of Kafka. They had “The Trial,”“The Castle” and “Amerika,” an unfinished novel whose original title was “The Man Who Disappeared.” And that stuck with me. So I found myself writing a story in which Kafka makes a guest appearance, but it’s basically in the end about two men who disappear. “Oklahoma” is taken from “Amerika,” but Kafka never set foot in America, of course. It’s an Oklahoma of the mind and spirit, the place where you find satisfaction and fulfillment.
In “The Musician of Kahani,” about a marriage between a middle-class pianist and wealthy playboy, it feels like you are describing this new class of what you refer to as the “rich-rich,” the new vulgarian wealthy class. In the past, rich people were associated with glamour, but now it feels like a kind of boorish narcissism.
Yes, in the past, there was a kind of Gatsby-level glamour attached to the wealthy. One of the things that used to be the case in India after independence is that Gandhian ideas were very prominent. Indian weddings tended to be quite modest affairs. There was a Gandhian idea that you don’t flaunt your wealth. Well, that’s gone out the window, right? All the Gandhian notions are very much out of favor in India now. This has resulted in fantastically flamboyant weddings. And when you get to this level of the ultra-rich, there is a kind of surrealism on display.
Susan Straight’s new novel “Sacrament,” about a clutch of ICU nurses battling COVID in a San Bernardino hospital, “broadens the reader’s understanding of community beyond flesh-and-blood friends, family and neighbors,” according to Merdith Maran. “The love and care that flow within her community of characters draws the reader into their bright, tight circle, making the characters’ loved ones and troubles feel like the reader’s own.”
Hamilton Cainhas mixed emotions about Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays, “Dead and Alive,” writing that “the book’s finest pieces wrangle, in elegant prose, with humanity’s contradictions,” but “the weaker ones indulge in name-dropping, footnotes and op-ed invective.”
📖 Bookstore Faves
Zibby’s Bookshop is on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.
(Courtesy of Zibby Media)
In the two years since Zibby Owens opened Zibby’s Bookshop, the Santa Monica store has become a vital hub for booklovers on the Westside who are drawn to the quaint, well-curated selection of books and the numerous events that take place throughout the year. I asked Zibby’s store manager Kartina Leno to tell us what book buyers are scooping up.
Our author events are such a place of community and comradeship to our customers. We have anywhere from three to five per week, and they feel like such a safe and welcoming space. We also offer a once-a-month book club that meets in person and also sees a great turnout. We have people who’ve been coming now for almost three years!
