Amid the fusillade of terrible headlines this year, one pierced my nerdy heart.
“Enjoying this headline? You’re a rarity: Reading for pleasure is declining …” was the topper to a story by my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts in August. Pleasure reading among American adults fell more than 40% in two decades — a continuation of a trend going back to the 1940s.
I get it. We don’t want to read for fun when we’re trying to wade through the sewer of information we find online and make sense of our terrible political times. But as Tyrion Lannister, the wily hero of George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” series, said, “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
So for my annual holiday columna recommending great books about Southern California, I’m sticking to formats that lend themselves to easier reading — bite-size jewels of intellect, if you will. Through essays, short stories, poems and pictures, each of my suggestions will bring solace through the beauty of where we live and offer inspiration about how to double down on resisting the bad guys.
“California Southern: Writing From the Road, 1992-2025” by LAist reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez.
(Gustavo Arellano / Los Angeles Times)
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s warm voice has informed Angelenos about arts, politics and education for 25 years on what was long called KPCC and now goes by LAist 89.3. What most listeners might not know is that the Mexico City native first earned acclaim as a founder of Taco Shop Poets, an influential San Diego collective that highlighted Chicano writers in a city that didn’t seem to care for them.
Guzman-Lopez lets others delve into that history in the intro and forerward to “California Southern: Writings from the Road, 1992-2025.” Reading the short anthology, it quickly becomes clear why his audio dispatches have always had a prose-like quality often lacking among public radio reporters, whose delivery tends to be as dry as Death Valley.
In mostly English but sometimes Spanish and Spanglish, Guzman-Lopez takes readers from the U.S.-Mexico border to L.A., employing the type of lyrical bank shots only a poet can get away with. I especially loved his description of Silver Lake as “two tax brackets away/From Salvatrucha Echo Park.” Another highlight is contained in “Trucks,” where Guzman-Lopez praises the immigrant entrepreneurs from around the world who come to L.A. and name their businesses after their hometowns.
“Say these names to praise the soil,” he writes. “Say these names to document the passage. Say these names to remember the trek.”
Guzman-Lopez has been doing readings recently with Lisa Alvarez, who published her first book, “Some Final Beauty and Other Stories,” after decades of teaching English — including to my wife back in the 1990s! — at Irvine Valley College.
The L.A. native did the impossible for someone who rarely delves into made-up stories because the real world is fantastical enough: She made me not just read fiction but enjoy it.
Alvarez’s debut is a loosely tied collection centered on progressive activists in Southern California, spanning a seismic sendoff for someone who fought during the Spanish Civil War and a resident of O.C.’s canyon country tipping off the FBI about her neighbor’s participation in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.
Author, activist and Irvine Valley College professor Lisa Alvarez holds a copy of her short story collection “Some Final Beauty and Other Stories.”
(Don Leach / Daily Pilot)
Most of the protagonists are women, brought to life through Alvarez’s taut, shining sentences. Memories play a key role — people loved and lost, places missed and reviled. A nephew remembers how his uncle landed in an FBI subversives file after attending a Paul Robeson speech in South L.A. shortly after serving in the Navy in World War II. An L.A. mayor who seems like a stand-in for Antonio Villaraigoisa considers himself “the crafty and cool voice of one who sees his past and future in terms of chapters in a best-selling book” as he tries to convince a faded movie star to come down from a tree during a protest.
To paraphrase William Faulkner about the South, the past is never dead in Southern California — it isn’t even past.
While Alvarez is a first-time author, D.J. Waldie has written many books. The Livy of Lakewood, who has penned important essays about L.A. history and geography for decades, has gathered some of his recent efforts in “Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire.”
A lot of his subjects — L.A.’s mother tree, pioneering preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, the first Hass avocado — are tried-and-true terrain for Southern California writers. But few of us can turn a phrase like Waldie. On legendary Dodger broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaime Jarrín, he writes, “The twin cities of Los Angeles and Los Ángeles, evoked by [their] voices … may seem to be incommensurate places to the unhearing, but the borders of the two cities are porous. Sound travels.”
Man, I wish I would have written that.
“Elements of Los Angeles” is worth the purchase, if only to read “Taken by the Flood,” Waldie’s account of the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster that killed at least 431 people — mostly Latinos — and destroyed the career of L.A.’s water godfather, William Mulholland. The author’s slow burn of the tragic chronology, from Mulholland’s famous “There it is. Take it” quote when he unleashed water from the Owens Valley in 1913 to slake the city’s thirst, to how L.A. quickly forgot the disaster, compounds hubris upon hubris.
But then, Waldie concludes by citing a Spanish-language corrido about the disaster: “Friends, I leave you/with this sad song/and with a plea to heaven/For those taken by the flood.”
The ultimate victims, Waldie argues, are not the dead from the St. Francis Dam but all Angelenos for buying into the fatal folly of Mullholland’s L.A.
“Elements of Los Angeles” was published by Angel City Press, a wing of the Los Angeles Public Library that also released “Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles.”
Cal State Long Beach sociology professor Oliver Wang offers a powerhouse of a coffee table book by taking what could have easily sold as a scrapbook of cool images and grounding it in the history of a community that has seen the promise and pain of Southern California like few others.
We see Japanese Americans posing in front of souped-up imports, reveling in SoCal’s kustom kulture scene of the 1960s, standing in front of a car at a World War II-era incarceration camp and loading up their gardening trucks at a time when they dominated the landscaping industry.
“One can read entire histories of American car culture and find no mention of Japanese or Asian American involvement,” Wang writes — but that’s about as pedantic as “Cruising J-Town” gets.
The rest is a delight that zooms by like the rest of my recs. Drop the doomscrolling for a day, make the time to read them all and become a better Southern Californian in the process. Enjoy!
Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, with an assist from Noah Goldberg, giving you the latest on city and county government.
L.A. City Hall is not known for making things simple for real estate developers — especially those seeking approval of large, complicated projects.
Yet earlier this year, Westwood resident Zach Sokoloff navigated the city’s bureaucratic obstacle course, winning City Council approval of a $1-billion plan to redevelop Television City, the historic studio property on Beverly Boulevard.
Now, Sokoloff is hoping to make what some might view as a baffling career change, jumping from Hackman Capital Partners, where he is senior vice president for asset management, to a job as L.A.’s next elected city controller.
For that to happen, Sokoloff would need to defeat City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who is running for another four-year term in June. That’s a tall order, given Mejia’s social media savvy, his status as an incumbent and his deft use of graphics highlighting the minutiae of city government — sometimes featuring hat-wearing corgis.
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In 2022, Mejia secured more votes than any other candidate in city history, as he and his team like to point out. Former state Sen. Isadore Hall, who is also running against Mejia, has his own track record of winning elections.
Sokoloff, by contrast, has never run for public office. He’s spent the past seven years at Hackman, which proposed the 25-acre Television City project and owns other studio properties.
A onetime grade school algebra teacher, Sokoloff promised to emphasize “leadership through listening” if he is elected, shining a light on areas where the city is struggling and working collaboratively to find solutions.
Sokoloff gave some credit to Mejia for seeking to make city government more transparent and understandable. But he argued that such efforts are only a starting point.
Mejia’s audits, he said, “just aren’t moving the needle.”
“He’s shown a preference for lobbing criticism after the fact, rather than getting involved early on to shape the outcome,” Sokoloff said in an interview.
Mejia spokesperson Jane Nguyen pushed back, saying Mejia has championed an array of policy changes, including the creation of a chief financial officer position and a move to “multi-year budgeting.”
In an email, Nguyen said public officials have been responding to Mejia’s audits by working to improve oversight of rents for affordable housing, purchases of military equipment by the Los Angeles Police Department and housing placements by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
“Despite our small audit staff, this work is ‘moving the needle’ and making a difference in city policies and departments while improving the quality of life of Angelenos,” she said.
Nguyen said her boss has listened to thousands of constituents at community events and at his town hall meetings.
“All politicians ‘listen,’” she said. “The difference between Kenneth Mejia and our opponents is who we listen to. Our Office listens to the people of Los Angeles.”
If Mejia secures a majority of the vote in June, he will avoid a November 2026 runoff. Forcing Mejia into a round two will be a tough task for Hall and Sokoloff, said political science professor Fernando Guerra, who runs the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
Because city controller is a relatively low-profile position and Mejia is an incumbent, voters will likely stick with him unless there’s serious “negative publicity,” Guerra said.
“While he’s quirky, there’s nothing there that’s in any way scandalous,” Guerra added.
Sokoloff is launching his campaign at an opportune time. Television City is the subject of several lawsuits, which have been filed not just by neighborhood groups but also The Grove, the shopping mall developed by businessman and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso. Those plaintiffs have asked a judge to overturn the council’s approval of the project, saying the city failed to comply with CEQA, the state’s environmental law.
Shelley Wagers, who lives nearby and has been fighting the project, said she was surprised by Sokoloff’s decision to run for citywide office. Asked whether he is in fact good at listening, she replied: “Not in my experience, no.”
Sokoloff defended his company’s handling of the TVC project, pointing to the unanimous votes cast by the planning commission and the council.
“We built a broad and diverse coalition of supporters,” he said. “Ultimately, the results of the [city’s] entitlement process speak for themselves.”
Sokoloff has already picked up one key endorsement: Laura Chick, who was perhaps the most confrontational city controller in recent history. Chick, who served in citywide office from 2001 to 2009, took on officials at the city’s harbor, its airport agency, the city attorney’s office and many others.
Chick, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said L.A. needs a controller who will find strategies to make the city more efficient and effective.
“[Sokoloff] understands that L.A. needs an active problem solver as its chief auditor,” she said.
State of play
— CREATING A RECORD: Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and an assortment of elected officials, clergy and community activists went to a four-hour hearing this week that focused on the impact — and alleged abuses — of Trump’s immigration crackdown. “We want to establish a record, because when the political winds change, we want to hold those accountable,” Bass said.
— THANKSGIVING TEXTS: Caruso, the real estate developer now weighing a second run for mayor, offered his own message on the immigration raids this week, sending a text message blast asking for donations to help families whose lives have been upended by crackdown.
“As we get ready to sit down with family tomorrow, I’m thinking about the families across our city whose Thanksgiving will look a little different,” Caruso wrote on Wednesday. “Many are afraid to return to work after the recent workplace raids, leaving families short on food, rent, and basic necessities.”
— CONCEPT OF A PLAN: Mayoral candidate Austin Beutner said he supports “the concept” of hiking L.A.’s sales tax by a half-cent to pay for additional firefighters and fire stations. Beutner offered his take a few days after the firefighters union confirmed it is preparing ballot language for the tax, which would raise $9.8 billion by 2050. The union wants voters to take up the measure in November 2026.
— FIRE FUNDING: Even without the tax, Fire Chief Jaime Moore is asking for more than $1 billion for his department’s next annual budget, a 15% hike over the current year. Moore said the additional funds are needed to ensure the city is prepared for emergencies like the Palisades fire.
— DIALING 9-1-1: Sticking with the firefighting theme, Beutner posted an interactive graphic on his website showing how much paramedic response times have increased in most zip codes in the city. Beutner said firefighters are being asked to respond to too many non-emergency calls.
— DELAYED RESPONSE: Residents in neighborhoods near the Port of Los Angeles were not told to shelter in place until nearly six hours after a massive hazardous materials fire broke out aboard a cargo ship in the harbor. The handling of the alert, which urged residents to go inside immediately and shut their doors and windows, follows deep concerns about the region’s alert system and how it worked during the Eaton fire in January.
— KATZ OUT THE BAG: The five-member board that oversees the Department of Water and Power has lost its third commissioner in as many months. Richard Katz, a former state lawmaker and a Bass appointee, had his final meeting on Nov. 18. In his resignation letter, he said he’s stepping aside to focus on two upcoming surgeries.
— LACKING A QUORUM: Because the DWP board needs three members to hold a meeting, it won’t be able to conduct any business until the council confirms the mayor’s newest appointee: Benny Tran, who is slated to replace Mia Lehrer. Tran is a principal with Baobab Global Consulting, according to his nomination paperwork.
— IN HOT WATER: A high-ranking DWP employee has been accused of making staffers run personal errands for her on city time, including purchasing tickets to a Snoop Dogg concert, according to a filing lodged by the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission’s director of enforcement. The employee’s lawyer said the claims were the product of a disgruntled subordinate.
— MONEY TROUBLES: L.A. County’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing faces a $230-million financial gap in the upcoming budget year, setting the stage for cuts to key services. Officials are looking at scaling back an array of programs, including services to help homeless residents find apartments.
— BOLSTERING THE BUDGET: The council’s new Budget and Finance Advisory Committee, a five-member citizen panel looking at ways to strengthen the city’s finances, held its first meeting this week, selecting former City Controller Ron Galperin as its chairman. The committee plans to look at the city’s investment strategies, real estate portfolio, legal obligations and overall approach to annual budgets.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to combat homelessness did not launch new operations this week.
On the docket next week: The Charter Reform Commission is set to hold an outdoor town hall Saturday at Echo Park Lake. The event, which runs from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., will take place on the northeast lawn at Echo Park and Park avenues.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
The Lakers’ new big man went to the free throw line. The team’s former big man was on the mind of fans.
“I miss you, AD!” a Lakers fan shouted into the silence as Deandre Ayton prepared to shoot a free throw in the first quarter Friday.
Former Lakers star Anthony Davis played his first game in L.A. since being traded to the Mavericks last season, finishing with 12 points, five assists, five rebounds and three blocks in the Lakers’ 129-119 win at Crypto.com Arena.
The Lakers (14-4) won their sixth consecutive game and clinched West Group B in the NBA Cup, securing homecourt advantage for the tournament quarterfinals. The Lakers will host the San Antonio Spurs, who won West Group C, on Dec. 10 at 7 p.m.
Doncic had 35 points and 11 assists for the Lakers. Former Laker guard Max Christie, who was also involved in the trade, had 13 points and has become a regular starter for the Mavericks.
After two emotional matchups against his former team last year, Doncic said some of the feelings have subsided, but games against Dallas will always have special meaning for him.
Friday’s game was a well-timed return for Davis, who played in his first game after missing a month with a calf strain. The injury stretched for weeks as the Mavericks fell into the basement of the Western Conference.
LOS ANGELES, CA – NOVEMBER 28, 2025: Los Angeles Lakers guard Austin Reaves (15) scores two of his 38 points against Dallas Mavericks guard Klay Thompson (31) in the second half at Crypto.con Arena on November 28, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Meanwhile, the Lakers have the second-best record in the West. Doncic leads the league in scoring with 35.1 points per game.
Doncic’s continued ascent to superstardom and Davis’ growing injury list has only made the trade more bitter for Mavericks fans. They got their form of revenge when former general manager Nico Harrison was fired on Nov. 11, but the change only signaled a new low for the franchise that went to the NBA Finals two short seasons ago.
Now the player who was supposed to help fill the void left by Doncic has been included in trade rumors. The Mavericks went 3-11 without Davis.
To ensure Davis stayed in a positive mental state during the time of turmoil for the franchise, Mavericks coach Jason Kidd encouraged him to simply stay focused on getting healthy.
“The train keeps moving,” Kidd said. “No matter of a trade or a dismissal, you got to keep moving. And so for AD, [it] was to focus on his body, come back healthy. … Can’t get everything solved in 24 minutes tonight, but as we go forward, we feel like we have a chance to win when he’s in uniform.”
Davis was on a 24- to 27-minute limit Friday. To adhere to the restriction, he had to leave the game with 6:56 left in the fourth quarter with the Mavericks down by just three points.
Leaving the court hurt, Davis said. He had gotten two blocks, an assist and a basket during the first five minutes of the fourth quarter, then the Lakers went on a 9-1 run after Davis went to the bench.
To Kidd, Davis is still one of the best in the world when he is healthy. The coach pointed to Davis’ impressive play in the Paris Olympics when he averaged 8.3 points, 6.7 rebounds and 1.5 blocks while shooting 62.5% from the field.
The Lakers didn’t need to be reminded of Davis’ talent. Coach JJ Redick said Davis would get the respect that all star players deserve because of his versatile skillset. But more than the shots he blocked or baskets he scored with the Lakers, Redick valued Davis for his support during Redick’s first year as a head coach.
“Very grateful that I had buy-in from him coming in Day 1 never had coached before,” Redick said. “So, it’s one of those things like you’re rooting for certain guys. … There are certain teammates you had, there’s always going to be guys that I coached [who] I either root for them after they are not your teammate and they are not one of your players. Just not when they play against us. Not tonight.”
The Lakers played a tribute video last year when Davis was sidelined with an abdominal injury for his first game back after the trade. Fans were showered him with cheers when he was introduced in the starting lineup Friday. LeBron James playfully bumped Davis at the center of the court before the game then they did the same intricate handshake they performed before games as teammates.
Lakers guard Luka Doncic puts up a jumper between Dallas Mavericks forward P.J. Washington and guard Max Christie on Friday at Crypto.com Arena.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
After the game, Lakers players lined up to hug Davis. Austin Reaves, who dominated with 38 points on 12 for 15 shooting with eight rebounds and three assists, gave him a two-armed bear hug. Davis grabbed the strap of his jersey and pointed toward Reaves.
“I always liked his game, what he was able to do,” Davis said. “Just now he’s doing it on a more consistent basis, putting up elite numbers. … He’s a player who I always knew could play to this level.”
Reaves left the Lakers locker room with Davis’ blue No. 3 jersey signed by his former teammate.
“He’s one of the best players to ever touch a basketball. I don’t know why he wanted my jersey,” Reaves said. “But for me to get his, it’s pretty fun. … From Day 1, he was telling me to be myself, don’t be anybody else. Continue to work and really be myself on the court. So I owe him a lot.”
With Thanksgiving in the rearview mirror we are now hurtling toward Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and the New Year. December can bring stress, but it also brings the feel-good holiday shows, including “Tinselcolor,” which opens Dec. 2 at CineVita, a 15,000-square-foot double-decker Belgian spiegeltent operated by For the Record, which stages live musical revues of well-known film soundtracks.
Joey McIntyre — the youngest member of the ultra ‘90s boy band, New Kids on the Block — signed on as host of the candy-colored world-premiere extravaganza, which features an eight-piece band and 14 singers performing holiday movie music from 25 film scores including “Home Alone,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “White Christmas.”
For the Record has been putting on shows for more than 15 years, starting in a small bar and restaurant in Los Feliz and moving up to bigger venues leading to CineVita. Over the years, the company became known for attracting celebrity clientele. Quentin Tarantino and Rosario Dawson attended a performance based on Tarantino’s film scores, and Demi Moore’s daughter, Rumer Willis, once joined the troupe. Moore is now an investor.
In an email, McIntyre wrote that he saw the Tarantino show years ago and loved it.
“I knew the caliber of talent and production that this company puts up, and then I stepped foot into this unparalleled space and almost verbatim said ‘sign me up,’” he wrote. “I’m a theater kid. The venue was like Jessica Rabbit calling me in.”
The unparalleled space McIntyre is referring to contains 3,000 hand-beveled mirrors, hand-cut stained glass windows and carved wood ornamentation. It will be decorated with outsized holiday flair for “Tinselcolor,” but it will also feel cozy.
“The theater holds about 700, but it is so warm and intimate, like you’re in my living room for the holidays,” McIntyre wrote. “Our guests are going to feel that. Our director, Anderson Davis, and the creative team have been super open to making it feel authentic to me and showcasing what I bring to the table.”
Performers joining McIntyre onstage include Brian Justin Crum, who recently played the role of Annas alongside Cynthia Erivo and Adam Lambert in the Hollywood Bowl’s electrifying “Jesus Christ Superstar”; Vintage Trouble frontman Ty Taylor; Cheyenne Isabel Wells, who starred in “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies” on Paramount+; and Dionne Gipson from “Found” on NBC and “Haus of Vicious” on BET.
McIntyre noted that he gets to sing the Andy Williams classic, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in full holiday regalia. His favorite holiday movie song of all time, however, is not in the show. That would be “A Brand New Christmas,” which he co-wrote for last year’s Roku Original “Jingle Bell Love.”
His favorite Christmas carol of all time? “O Holy Night.”
“It sits right in my wheelhouse vocally, and it checks all the boxes: heartfelt, classic melody with a pop bluesy accessibility. And you get to ‘fall on your knees’ when you’re performing it,” he wrote.
“Tinselcolor” runs through Dec. 30. After that, McIntyre will head back to Las Vegas to continue the New Kids on the Block residency at Dolby Live at Park MGM, which was extended through 2026 due to high demand.
“We just announced 3 more stints for 2026. We are a blessed bunch of guys. We’ve been able to keep it fresh and exciting over all these years, and the fact that we still had Vegas on the table was something we have really taken advantage of,” McIntyre wrote about the residency. “Our diehards are genuinely blown away, and Vegas is yet another hook for folks who haven’t seen us in a while. And those newbies are loving it too. It feels like a slam dunk all around.”
I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt wishing you a very happy holiday season filled with love, kindness, health and hope. Here’s your arts and culture news for the week.
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On our radar
Clockwise from bottom left: Grand Kiev Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Inland Pacific Ballet.
(Los Angeles Times photo collage; illustrations by Katie Smith / For The Times; photographs from Grand Kyiv Ballet, Cheryl Mann and Marsha McNeely Photography)
Nutcracker roundup The season of Sugar Plum Fairies is upon us. In last weekend’s holiday preview, Ashley Lee did the legwork gathering intel on productions of the holiday perennial that will be dancing their way across Southern California stages in the coming weeks. From downtown L.A. to the South Bay, Orange County and the Inland Empire, the variety of imaginative interpretations offer something for almost everybody. This week alone sees the openings of Anaheim Ballet’s “Nutcracker” (Friday and Saturday. City National Grove of Anaheim, 2200 E. Katella Ave. anaheimballet.org); American Contemporary Ballet’s “The Nutcracker Suite” (Saturday through Dec. 24. Bank of America Plaza, 333 S. Hope St., downtown L.A. acbdances.com); “Bob Baker’s Nutcracker,” a marionette version of the show (Saturday through Jan. 4. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org); and Debbie Allen Dance Academy’s “The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker,” which subs Mariah Carey and other contemporary artists for Tchaikovsky (Thursday through Dec. 14. Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, 1935 Manhattan Beach Blvd. debbieallendanceacademy.com).
What the Dickens!
The cast of “A Christmas Carol” at A Noise Within.
(Craig Schwartz)
Like “The Nutcracker,” the holidays are heavy with varied interpretations of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Friday night in Anaheim, Chance Theater opens Leslie Bricusse’s “Scrooge! The Musical” (Through Dec. 21. Bette Aitken Theater Arts Center, 5522 E. La Palma Ave. chancetheater.com). Saturday night, two long-standing productions of “A Christmas Carol” make their traditional returns. In Pasadena, Geoff Elliott (who also adapted and co-directs with Julia Rodriguez-Elliott) once again steps into Ebenezer’s slippers for a night of ghostly visitations (Through Dec. 4. A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd. anoisewithin.org).
Richard Doyle in “A Christmas Carol” at South Coast Repertory.
(Robert Huskey)
Meanwhile, down in Orange County, South Coast Repertory celebrates the 45th anniversary of resident dramaturg Jerry Patch’s adaptation (Through Dec. 28. Emmes/Benson Theatre Center, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. scr.org). And on Dec. 5, Independent Shakespeare Co.‘s David Melville plays not Scrooge, but the author himself in “A Christmas Carol With Charles Dickens,” a solo storytelling tour-de-force (Through Dec. 22. ISC Studio, Atwater Crossing, 3191 Casitas Ave., Suite 130, Atwater Village. iscla.org).
The week ahead: A curated calendar
FRIDAY Heisenberg Paul Eiding and Juls Hoover star in Simon Stephens’ drama about a middle-woman and an older man who meet in a London railway station. Directed by Cameron Watson. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 22. Additional show 8 p.m. Dec. 18. Skylight Theatre, 1816 1/2 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz. skylighttheatre.org
SATURDAY
Artist Drew Struzan signs his Oscar poster in 2008.
(Mark Mainz / Getty Images)
Drew Struzan Tribute The American Cinematheque salutes the artist, illustrator and designer who died in October with a triple-feature of films for which he designed the posters: “Back to the Future,” “The Goonies” and “E.T.” Struzan also designed iconic one-sheets for such films as “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Blade Runner.” 11 a.m. Saturday. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. americancinematheque.com
TUESDAY
Tom Morello at South by Southwest in Austin in 2025.
(Jack Plunkett / Invision / Associated Press)
The REVOLUTION(S) will be Amplified Musician/activist Tom Morello joins curator Douglas Fogle for a discussion about art, activism, creativity and resistance on the occasion of the exhibition “Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images.” 7 p.m. Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Blvd. marcianoartfoundation.org
THURSDAY Children of the Winter Kingdom Orphaned twins escape a circus and encounter a king and his dragon, a wild girl, a crow, a sorceress and an ice spider in a holiday adventure filled with music and puppetry. Written by Adam Dugas & Mary Eileen O’Donnell, directed by Adam Dugas. 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays, through Dec. 20. The Actors’ Gang at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City. theactorsgang.com
‘Die Heart’ Yippee-ki-yay, Heart lovers! Troubadour Theater Co. revives its holiday musical-comedy synergism of the 1988 Bruce Willis action movie “Die Hard” with the songs of the Wilson sisters. Don’t even think about asking if it’s really a Christmas movie. Dec. 4 to 21. Colony Theatre, 555 N. Third St., Burbank. troubie.com
A scene from “Putney Swope,” directed by Robert Downey Sr.
(Cinema 5 / Photofest)
Putney Swope The Academy Museum’s celebration of film preservation kicks off with the world premiere of a new 35mm print of Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 social satire. 7:30 p.m. Thursday Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org
Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake The Pacific Symphony and pianist Alexandra Dariescu, conducted by Tianyi Liu, perform works by Cassandra Miller, Maurice Ravel and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. scfta.org/events
Dispatch: The Butterfly Effect
Liviera Lim as Vivian Fang in “The Butterfly Effect.”
(Charly Charney Cohen)
Young local theater troupe Last Call Theater specializes in interactive, participatory productions, and its latest, “The Butterfly Effect,” is an intimate affair that encourages one-to-one and small group pairings with actors. The show examines past choices and the consequences of changing them. There’s a fantastical bent, as it’s set in a cafe that promises the ability to time travel. The decade-hopping coffee shop backdrop gives the company a chance to play with multiple storylines that touch on L.A. history, from immigrant tales of a family-run business to those often overlooked by our city’s emphasis on celebrity. The production, which opened in mid-November, runs Thursday through Saturday at Stella Coffee and closes Dec 6. ticketleap.events — Todd Martens
Culture news and the SoCal scene
Robert Therrien‘s “No title (red chapel relief),” 1991, enamel on paper and wood.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
A place at the (big) table If you’ve ever visited the Broad, you’re quite familiar with the large table and chairs in its permanent collection that dwarf even the tallest viewer. Times art critic Christopher Knight (who is retiring as of today) calls the Broad’s new exhibition, “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story,” a “smashing retrospective” and one of the year’s best museum solo shows. Therrien, who died at 71 in 2019, was a unique talent who sits comfortably among the most significant L.A. artists since the ‘60s and ‘70s. “Whether he was making a 3D sculpture to stand on the floor, a 2D painting to hang on the wall, or a 3D sculpture attached to a wall like an ancient frieze,” writes Knight, “he managed the same uncanny result — objects where the purely visual and the utterly physical demand equal time.”
Maya Keleher in the national tour of the musical “Suffs.”
(Joan Marcus)
Suffragette City An all-female and nonbinary cast dramatizes the inspiring story of American women fighting for the right to vote in the musical “Suffs,” playing at the Hollywood Pantages through Dec. 7. Shaina Taub won Tony Awards for its book and score, while also starring as suffragette leader Alice Paul in the Broadway run. In L.A., the national tour’s Maya Keleher “lends alluring warmth to the role,” writes Times theater critic Charles McNulty in his review. “The teamwork of the performers honors the messy yet undeniably effective cooperation of Alice and her freedom fighters — women who changed the world by not staying silent in their prescribed place.”
Viola time Times music critic Mark Swed noted a recent “fall-harvesting viola bandwagon,” with multiple ensembles spotlighting the humble middle child of stringed instruments played with a bow. “The L.A. Phil began viola week with a Tuesday evening program, ‘Brahms Strings,’ as part of the orchestra’s chamber music series at Walt Disney Concert Hall that included the blazing early First Sextet and late, luminously serene Second Quintet,” wrote Swed. “As part of its chamber music series across the street in the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall, Saturday, [the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra] coincidentally held ‘A Brahmsian Affair,’ in this case featuring both the sextets.” On Saturday, recent Colburn graduate Lan Cao and current conservatory student Ran Tae performed Korean composer Isang Yun’s 1988 “Contemplation,” for two violas, “played with gripping meditative intensity” during a day-long MOCA seminar on South Korean artist Haegue Yang.
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Ray Ushikubo will play a rare 1741 Guarneri “del Gesù” violin at a free concert at the Colburn School on Dec. 3.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
History in his hands Ray Ushikubo of San Gabriel, a 24-year-old virtuoso musician, has been selected to play the Playfair violin, an ultra-rare model crafted by the famed luthier Guarneri “del Gesù.” “I’m only 24,” Ushikubo told reporter Emma Madden. “This instrument is from 1741. It’s older than the United States. I can barely comprehend that amount of history. But mostly I feel happiness. And honor. It sounds better than any violin that’s ever been made.” The musician will debut the instrument in a free concert at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall on Dec. 3.
East L.A. Youth Orchestra gets a reprieve “After recently announcing major cuts to its youth orchestra, the L.A. Phil has secured additional donor funding to ensure the East L.A. branch of the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) program will continue at full capacity until the end of the school year,” reports The Times’ Cerys Davies. The initial cuts to the programming at the Esteban E. Torres High School site included laying off teaching artists, gutting programs for younger students and reduced practices for older students. The parents of students and members of the local community responded to the cuts by organizing an Instagram campaign and town hall meeting, imploring the L.A. Phil to temporarily preserve the Torres site.
An architectural whodunit In 2013, Robert Mosher, one of San Diego’s most respected architects, called Keith York, founder of Modern San Diego, a digital archive devoted to the region’s mid-century design, asking to meet for lunch. “I have something I need to tell you,” he said. A revelation at that meeting led York and fellow architecture buff Stephen Buck to investigate the provenance of Balboa Park’s Timken Museum of Art, which opened in 1965. Did two of the biggest names in American design have a hand in it? Sam Lubell has the details on the decades-old mystery.
— Kevin Crust
And last but not least
I give you the 2025 Times holiday gift guide. Even if you don’t see anything on these carefully curated lists that you like, it’s a great inspiration starter.
In defeating a measure to rescind the 310 area code overlay, telecommunications companies showed they won’t shrink from battle as the state moves to put tighter controls on area code changes, industry leaders said Friday.
The state Assembly early Friday approved a bill, AB 406, that sets additional hurdles in place before area code splits and overlays can be imposed.
But the bill, which had been approved late Thursday by the Senate, was passed only after a provision rescinding the 310 overlay on the Westside and South Bay was removed.
That change was credited to a fierce lobbying effort by telecom companies, and could serve as a preview of what’s to come as lawmakers and utilities regulators consider ways to slow the proliferation of overlays and splits statewide, including a split proposed for the San Fernando Valley.
“I was unable to get for 310 what I had my heart set on, which was the recision of the 310 overlay and 11-digit dialing,” said Assemblyman Wally Knox (D-Los Angeles), who wrote AB 406 (which became the vehicle for the legislation formerly known as AB 818).
Knox said a sustained lobbying effort by telephone industry representatives resulted in the removal of the 310 overlay and 11-digit dialing portion from the bill.
Representatives from Pacific Bell, GTE, AT&T;, MediaOne Telecommunications of California, the California Cable Television Assn. and the Cellular Carriers Assn. of California were among the 30 lobbyists arguing that the provision would diminish competition among carriers and consumer choice.
“The intensive lobbying effort should have been anticipated by everyone because the stakes were so high for the industry,” said Dennis H. Mangers, senior vice president of the California Cable Television Assn., a group whose members are seeking a foothold in the telephone business.
Even so, the arm-twisting in Sacramento stands in contrast to the role played by phone companies at public forums on the issue.
At a recent Van Nuys town hall meeting on splits and overlays, for example, no phone company representative spoke publicly–although at least one was in attendance, observing the proceedings.
Telephone company officials said Friday that they have sent representatives to numerous public hearings on the matter, but remained silent to give residents the chance to express their concerns.
*
Industry lobbyists said regulatory meetings and legislative sessions are the proper forums for them to state their positions.
In Sacramento, telecom lobbyists argued that rescinding the overlay in West Los Angeles and the South Bay would be unfair because phone companies had already spent millions to compete for local customers in the region, Mangers said. He also said numbers already had been assigned in the new 424 area code overlay.
“We reminded them that it was they who encouraged communications companies to do business in California,” Mangers said. “If they passed the bill containing that provision, they would be cutting off their own policy.”
Cable company MediaOne, for example, spent $600 million to upgrade its facilities to provide digital telephone service, high-speed Internet access and cable television to Los Angeles customers, particularly those in the 310 region, officials said.
“We have definitely been lobbying in Sacramento,” said Theresa L. Cabral, MediaOne’s senior corporate counsel. “Our concern is that we have made that investment and we can’t use it.”
Pac Bell protested the bill because rolling back the 310 area code overlay would hurt customers who need numbers, said Steve Getzug, a spokesman for the company.
Pac Bell and GTE, the two largest phone companies in Los Angeles, are pushing specifically for overlays when area code relief is needed.
With an overlay, new phone lines within a specific area code are given a new area code–even if it is in the same home or building. Additionally, all users in an overlay area must dial the area code–even to a number with the same area code.
*
Phone company officials say the overlay is less disruptive than actually creating a new area code through a geographic split, but critics say such splits and overlays would not be needed if regulators did a better job of allocating and conserving phone numbers.
Knox, who has emerged as the leading consumer advocate on the issue, said Friday that he will now take his fight to the PUC, which is scheduled to take up proposals for a 310 overlay and an 818 split on Wednesday.
“It is important for folks to know that the fight is not over,” he said. “The momentum we have built in the Legislature we will now take to the PUC.”
Gov. Gray Davis has not taken a position on AB 406, aides said. But if he does sign the bill, PUC officials will analyze it to determine its role in implementing new area codes and overlays, said Kyle DeVine, a PUC spokeswoman.
“Until we get direction from the commissioners,” she said, “we can’t say what we are going to do.”
The bill, which passed the Senate on a 35-0 vote, was approved in the Assembly on a vote of 79 to 1, with Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge), dissenting. He could not be reached for comment Friday.
After recently announcing major cuts to its youth orchestra, the L.A. Phil has secured additional donor funding to ensure the East L.A. branch of the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) program will continue at full capacity until the end of the school year.
In an email to the students’ parents last week, the nonprofit organization announced that it would need to “significantly modify” the programming at the Esteban E. Torres High School site “due to unanticipated financial and funding challenges for the organization.” With these proposed changes, the site’s teaching artists were laid off, the younger students’ programming was gutted and practices for the older students were reduced.
The students’ parents and the local community rallied together in response to the cuts, creating a campaign on Instagram and organizing at town hall meetings. After hearing this outcry and receiving additional funds, the L.A. Phil has been able to temporarily preserve the Torres site.
In a statement to The Times on Wednesday, LA Phil President and CEO Kim Noltemy says, “We are thrilled our donors recognized that this funding provides vital access to music education for the East LA community.”
“Joining together, we have and will continue working tirelessly over the coming months to ensure we remain in a position to support this program, because it is more important than ever,” said Noltemy.
Conductor Gustavo Dudamel rehearses with young musicians from around the country participating in the L.A. Phil’s annual YOLA National Program at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2023.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
YOLA has offered a free musical education to students ages 5 through 18 since 2007. Run by the L.A. Phil, the program gives students access to free instruments and the firsthand experience of being in a musical ensemble. YOLA currently operates out of Inglewood, East L.A., Rampart District and Westlake/MacArthur Park. The Torres site, specifically, serves 165 students.
This program has been championed by star conductor Gustavo Dudamel since he first came to L.A. in 2009. Its teaching format is heavily inspired by El Sistema, the publicly funded program where he first learned music in Venezuela. After his 17-year tenure with the L.A. Phil, the conductor will be leaving the orchestra in June to work with the New York Philharmonic.
An L.A. Phil spokesperson told The Times that their ongoing funding challenges come from “fundraising limitations and rising operating costs,” while also maintaining their day-to-day operations, including free/low-cost community programs.
These cuts were originally set to go into effect after Dec. 12, months before Dudamel’s departure. But with these new funds, the instruction and rehearsal time will stay fully operational, and the previously laid-off staff will be reinstated for the remainder of the program.
These tentative revisions were also announced days before the teaching artists voted to unionize, under the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada. There has been some speculation about whether this unionization played a role in these cuts.
In a statement to the Times, the L.A. Phil says it has a long history of “working constructively with unions” and that the cuts were based “solely [on] financial and organizational needs.”
At the end of the 2025-2026 school year, the L.A. Phil Board will evaluate the Torres site to see if it is the “best and most sustainable location for YOLA programming after this school year.” The Philharmonic says in the release that its board “is committed to sustaining a long-term YOLA program in the East LA community.”
In an effort to build a transparent, collaborative community, the Phil has also announced that it will work to create a parent advisory committee where YOLA families will be heard as future decisions are made.
Silver Lake earned the “hipster” handle long before Spaceland opened its doors. But when the club threw its first show in March 1995 at the venue formerly known as Dreams of L.A., it marked a notable energy shift that made everyone take notice, establishing the neighborhood as a trendsetter and hub for creative talent. The live music space was the right idea, in the right place, at the right time.
Atmospheric dive bars, funky/punky mom-and-pop shops and reasonable rents began attracting artists, musicians and bohemian slackers and scenesters as residents in the early ’90s. They joined its vibrant queer community and multigenerational familial (mostly Latino) populace, which combined to make it one of the coolest places to live in L.A. It still is, albeit pricier and more pretentious, if you ask those who grew up there.
But 30 years ago things were different — the area was hip, but it also felt effortlessly eccentric. The annual Sunset Junction Street Fair, which closed off Sunset Boulevard between Fountain and Edgecliffe Drive beginning in the ’80s, started booking more legacy bands and hot new groups, broadening the cultural consciousness of the city and bringing Angelenos from all over town to the area until it ceased in 2010.
Silver Lake’s music mecca status was ultimately cemented when promoter Mitchell Frank decided to turn his weekly live music night at Dreams called Pan into a bona fide rock venue, taking what was bubbling in the streets, at house parties in the hills and at nearby rehearsal spaces and providing a singular home for music makers to nurture and grow their followings.
Opening night marked a benefit for quirky noise rockers Lutefisk, who lived in the area and, like many there, rehearsed at Hully Gully on Fletcher Drive. After their equipment was stolen, they put together a bill of buzzy local artists to raise funds, including headliner Beck, who got his start at the artsy coffeehouse called the Onyx next to the Vista Theatre, and later on Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz Village.
Rob Zabreckyn of Possom Dixon
(Arlen Hem)
Coupled with the darkly melodic alt-rock of Possum Dixon as openers, the show was a hot ticket. As last-minute luck would have it, the night became even more monumental with an early show addition — the debut of Dave Grohl’s new project called the Foo Fighters.
“It was just crazy. That night it was raining and both shows sold out,” recalls Lutefisk drummer Brandon Jay. “It was that lovely moment in time when KBLT started broadcasting and there was a growing scene in Silver Lake when everyone was like, ‘Oh, Silver Lake is the new Seattle’ — only it was more diverse.”
Jay, who went on to play with other bands like the 88 and Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, hopes to remind local music fans about the seminal scene at the Regent this Saturday, where Lutefisk reunites alongside Dixon’s Rob Zabrecky (playing with various luminaries from the club) and Spaceland favorites Touchcandy, the Centimeters, Jon Wahl (Claw Hammer), Sissy Bar, W.A.C.O. and more.
“This show is as close as you’re gonna get to a real ’90s Spaceland night,” assures Frank. “Touchcandy, Lutefisk, Centimeters, Rob from Possum Dixon and Sissy Bar … this is the exact kind of beautiful symphonic chaos that defined that ’90s era. Nights like this are what propelled a fractured Eastside music scene into becoming a full-fledged scene.”
Indeed, gathering disparate genres, styles and niches in one place was what made this scene unique. “There were so many wonderful, eclectic bands,” Jay adds. “A bunch got signed, but you know, fame is a fickle thing, and you never know what might get played on the radio.”
Plenty who played at the club did. In addition to Beck and the Foos, local acts who broke after playing there include Silversun Pickups (named after a nearby liquor store), Rilo Kiley and the Airborne Toxic Event, while touring indie artists also earned their stripes in front of the mylar curtain-backdropped stage, namely the White Stripes, Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Jet, Ween, Cold War Kids, Death Cab for Cutie, Amy Winehouse … and the list goes on and on.
“There was a point in time where bands were coming through town on tour and playing L.A. for the first time and their agents all wanted them to play Spaceland’s Monday residency,” remembers former head booker Jennifer Tefft of the no-cover event, which became legendary by the early 2000s. “They played for free, but it allowed them to be seen. Everyone wanted to play there and not just on a local level, but on an international level. NME in the U.K. were giving the club so much press, so all these bands wanted to come to L.A. for it … Bloc Party, the Killers and My Morning Jacket all made their debuts at the club.”
Tefft went on to book the Bootleg Theater, but later returned to work with the building’s owner, Jeff Wolfram, to breathe new life into the Silver Lake space under the name the Satellite. It closed due to pandemic struggles in March 2020 and remains shuttered. Meanwhile, Frank, along with booker Liz Garo, left the venue — which was technically still called Dreams, to focus on his new space, the Echo and its later addition, the Echoplex.
He sold the Echo Park complex, along with the Regent, to Live Nation in 2019, but still remains involved in booking and other club business dealings. All three figures deserve credit for the cosmic alchemy and community spirit that made Spaceland and the world it created so game-changing. They really cared about the people who played there and would often champion their favorites and help build their followings through promotion and advertising, namely in the free print edition of LA Weekly.
“We all had the same sort of passion and curiosity about music and supporting locals,” shares Garo, who booked at Spaceland when Tefft left, and really made her name at the Echo. “I think that’s why it kept that integrity.”
There is no shortage of fond, slightly fuzzy memories at Spaceland. There were also many games of pool in their infamous upper-level smoking room (which puffed on even after the ’98 bar smoking ban due to a loophole).
Free Monday promotions were nothing new — Club Lingerie in Hollywood had been doing them for years — but Spaceland’s were magical for both the bands and the fans because of the monthlong residency model. Besides being budget-friendly and clearly well-curated, boasting up-and-comers and offering big-name surprises, it was a place to meet like-minded alternative types who fancied the same fashions, art and pop culture references.
Most of the local musicians who played there seemed to know each other simply from hanging out so much and those who proved themselves on stage were rewarded with new followings that got bigger each week.
The Centimeters perform at Spaceland
(Wild Don Lewis)
“Jen had a really good formula — you would do your residency, then you would not do another show for six weeks or so, and then you’d come back and do a ticketed show,” Garo explains. “Ideally that worked and kind of helped establish that bands could sell tickets. You know, when bands start off, they’re playing to their friends in the audience. When they get to that point where they don’t know anybody in the audience, that’s kind of a big deal.”
Beyond exposure and local notoriety, for Zabrecky, Jay and countless musicians who had residencies — many of whom will be seeing each other for the first time in years at the Regent show — Spaceland was formative not only for their music but also for their life trajectories.
“Playing Spaceland with Possum Dixon was always unpredictable,” recalls Zabrecky, who went on to become a revered magician and performer. “We never knew which direction a show might go. Every band was different, yet everyone was accepted and celebrated for what they were. Groups like Glue, Spindle, W.A.C.O. and the Abe Lincoln Story couldn’t have been more different from each other, and that made every lineup exciting. And, of course, we were all just making it up as we went along, buoyed by the support of our peers.”
The transitional period between Spaceland and the Satellite is marked by the band who helped put it on the map and unintentionally kicked off the fervor to begin with. The Foo Fighters chose the locale for their series of surprise pop-up shows debuting new material in 2011, right before the venue was renamed.
The next year, Forbes dubbed Silver Lake “America’s Hippest Hipster Neighborhood,” which meant it was no longer … that. American Apparel stores had infiltrated, corporate coffee was everywhere and artists were getting priced out, heading East into Echo Park, Mt. Washington, Highland Park and downtown too, with many of the bars and clubs in those regions seeking to capture the old Spaceland vibes. They still do.
Brian Wilson onstage with the Wondermints at Spaceland
(Courtesy of Brandon Jay)
In this way, Spaceland’s legacy has lasted beyond Gen X nostalgia for the good old days. Inspired by the fervent framework for music discovery and social connection of the past, new bands now showcase their stuff at the Echo, Regent, Zebulon, Redwood Bar and many more, eschewing Hollywood and the Sunset Strip for more laid-back environments.
Frank continues to lend his expertise to Live Nation; Garo is planning events and working with venues, from acoustic sets at her book shop Stories in Echo Park to her just-announced gig booking for Grand Performances downtown; and Jay, who lost his home in the California wildfires, turned the tragedy into a beautiful music exchange program called Altadena Musicians. He’s also involved in a new all-ages music venue called the Backyard Party in Pasadena, noting that a new generation of art-minded music rebels continues to thrive just like they did at Spaceland three decades ago.
Jay is also helping with the Regent show planning, and put in the call to Touchcandy’s David Willis, who’ll be flying into town from the U.K. just for the show. Word has also been put out to Beck and Grohl (though no commitments have been made), and the pirate radio station KBLT, whose documentary “40 Watts from Nowhere” counts Jay and Jack Black as producers, will offer sets from its deejays in between the live sounds.
The lineup listed on the event flier is meant to evoke the original benefit promo from ’95, and it represents the magnificent music mix all on its own, flashing back to an exciting era that L.A. music lovers who experienced it will never forget, a time when the scene was “young and free,” as Zabrecky remembers, and those lucky enough to be on the marquee played what he dubs “the best club at the best moment on Earth.”
“These bands were messy, loud, indie, real and somehow still innovative,” Frank adds of the 30th anniversary show, which is being touted as a Vol. 1, suggesting more to come. “Shows like this are the reason any of it mattered.”
A high-ranking employee at the Department of Water and Power made staffers run personal errands for her, including purchasing tickets to a Snoop Dogg concert, according to the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission’s director of enforcement.
Renette Anderson, who has worked as an executive assistant to the DWP’s general manager since 2002, asked subordinates to book a plane ticket for her personal travel, make physical therapy appointments for her, purchase party supplies for a non-work party at her home and make a service appointment at a Mercedes Benz dealership for her personal vehicle, wrote the enforcement director, Kenneth Hardy, in an accusation document dated Nov. 4.
Anderson’s requests to two DWP employees, Brian Johnson and Angenee Reygadas, were made during work hours in 2022 and 2023, and the employees used city resources to fulfill the requests, Hardy wrote.
On June 22, 2023, after the Snoop Dogg & Friends concert at the Hollywood Bowl was canceled, Anderson asked Johnson to request a refund, Hardy wrote.
Hardy accused Anderson of seven counts of misusing her city position to create a personal benefit for herself. If the parties do not come to an agreement, the Ethics Commission will hold a hearing and decide what penalties to impose. Each count comes with a potential $5,000 fine.
John Harris, an attorney for Anderson, did not respond to a request for comment.
Paola Adler, a spokesperson for the DWP, said the department cannot comment on personnel matters but that it takes accusations of unethical conduct seriously.
Anderson serves as director of Equal Employment Opportunity Services and reports directly to Chief People Officer Tracey Pierce. Anderson was appointed to her role by a previous general manager, not by Janisse Quiñones, who has been in the role since May 2024, the DWP said.
For the record:
1:51 p.m. Nov. 26, 2025A previous version of this story said that Renette Anderson reports directly to DWP General Manager Janisse Quiñones. Anderson reports directly to Chief People Officer Tracey Pierce.
“She has been the primary voice on all matters related to Equal Employment Opportunity, workforce diversity, and the fair and equitable treatment of over 10,000 employees,” according to Anderson’s bio on the website of the Stovall Foundation, where she is a board member.
At 8 o’clock on a stormy weeknight in the chilly Chinatown offices of L.A. Taco, Memo Torres finally was worn out.
Since President Trump unleashed his deportation deluge on Los Angeles in June, the 45-year-old has chronicled nearly every immigration enforcement action in the region in three-minute “Daily Memo” videos for the online publication. He and his colleagues track down film footage and photos, reach out to officials to verify what they’ve found and hammer out a script for Torres to narrate.
The audio that played from Torres’ double-screen computer and smart phone as he reviewed the evidence on the day I visited contained snippets of the Southland’s sad soundtrack under what he continually calls the “siege” of ICE. Men pleading to la migra to stop hurting them. Activists cursing out agents. Whistles, screams, honks and sirens. Sobbing family members.
“If I wanted to cry, I don’t think that I could,” Torres said when I asked how he coped with seeing such videos ad nauseum.
“It’s not healthy, I know. It’s not mature. But what I go through is nothing like what the people I’m seeing are going through … Today was hard, though,” he continued, pounding his hand with his fist. “They went … extra hard today. They’re starting to get worse. Numbers that used to be a week’s worth of abductions are now a day.”
He sighed. His deep-set eyes were bleary. Reading glasses did nothing to help with 12 hours of staring at screens. Torres wiped his hands over his face as if washing off the horrors of the day and pressed the record button.
“Today, Border Patrol targeted Long Beach, swarming the streets again and taking gardeners, old men and a 12-pack of beer that they had,” he began. He talked over footage of masked men piling on top of a gardener at a Polly’s Pie in Long Beach as a police officer looked on with hands in pockets and a deer-in-headlights look.
In another clip, federal agents detained an elderly man sitting on the sidewalk near a liquor store, “making sure to put a handcuff on his hand as they helped him up.”
“Remember to stay safe and stay vigilant, folks,” Torres concluded.
He turned off the camera, blasted hardcore punk and began to splice his reel together.
“Daily Memo” has become the diary Los Angeles never asked for but which is now indispensable, documenting in real time one of the most terrifying chapters in the region’s history. Filling the camera frame with his broad shoulders, full beard and a baritone that alternates between wry, angry, calm and reassuring, Torres has been described by fans as the Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite of L.A.’s deportation days — legendary broadcasters he acknowledges never having heard of until recently.
L.A. Taco staffer Memo Torres, right, presents Victor Villa as L.A. Taco’s Taco Madness 2024 winner in an impromptu ceremony outside the Highland Park restaurant in 2024.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
“When you’re in the midst of everything, you forget someone has to keep an archive so we can go back to reference, and you think, ‘Damn is someone is doing that?’ Yeah, Memo is doing that,” Sherman Austin said. The Long Beach-based activist runs the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network, which sends out text alerts with the locations of raids to more than half a million people nationwide. “Memo puts a human face to what’s happening, and that resonates with people in a different way.”
“He’s a neighborhood hero,” said Rebecca Brown, supervising attorney for the Immigrants’ Rights Project of Public Counsel. The public interest law firm has filed or joined multiple lawsuits against the federal government this year over its deportation agenda. “A lot of these stories of people who are getting picked up can fall through the cracks. But their voices are getting captured by his recording.”
While “Daily Memo” is chronicling a city under attack, it’s also bringing comfort to an unexpected person: Torres.
The son of a Mexican immigrant from Zacatecas who came to this country without papers, Torres never had a full-time journalism job until this year, living a “Forrest Gump kind of life.” He estimates he has worked in at least 25 different trades, from butcher to taquero to sound engineer, social media manager and nonprofit worker, none really fitting his life’s goal to do something “meaningful.”
Nothing lasted longer than landscaping. A third-generation jardinero — his grandfather also worked in the U.S. — he at one point employed 28 workers and had contracts across the city, with Hollywood studios among his biggest clients.
Torres, who has two college-age children, sold the business in March to focus on journalism for good.
“My life has prepared me for this s—. There’s nothing that scares me anymore,” Torres said as he began to layer video clips over his “Daily Memo” narration. “So I bury my head into work. My escapism is the cruel reality of the city right now.”
Torres grew up in Culver City and Inglewood. At Loyola High he absorbed the Jesuit maxim of being a man for others. But after graduating from UC Berkeley with a sociology degree, Torres found himself back in the family business, unable to find a job that satisfied him.
“Relatives would make fun of me by saying, ‘There he goes with a degree and a lawnmower in the back of a truck,” he said. “I hated it, but I was good at it.”
His landscaping routes across Southern California inadvertently prepared him for journalism. He started an Instagram account, El Tragón de Los Angeles (The Glutton from Los Angeles), to share his eating adventures. That caught the attention of L.A. Taco in 2018, which was revamping at a time when the city’s indie publications were shuttering or faltering.
“Their mission of street-level reporting called to me,” Torres said. He volunteered to connect L.A. Taco to local restaurants so the publication’s members could score free food and discounts. He soon became director of partnerships, then took over L.A. Taco’s social media accounts, then started to write articles and shoot videos — mostly for free.
“I call him the Mexican Swiss Army knife — and not those small ones but the big ones with all the weird things,” L.A. Taco publisher Alex Blazedale said as he and Torres smoked outside during a short break. “Memo could literally do anything we asked him to, and he wanted to do it and followed through.”
L.A. Taco staffer Memo Torres edits video clips from daily ICE raids which he puts together with narration on an Instagram reel inside L.A. Taco’s studio in Chinatown.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Torres’ taco knowledge earned him appearances on the Netflix show “The Taco Chronicles” and a regular slot on KCRW’s “Good Food with Evan Kleiman.” Blazedale suggested this year that he do a daily news recap under the “Daily Memo” banner. But Torres found the title “cheesy and didn’t know what it was for.”
Then came the raids.
“I grew up on the History Channel,” Torres said. “They would always have these documentaries where they said they were finding new footage that had been thought lost. That’s what’s happening right now. So much stuff is being put up that quickly goes down. We need to document it for history.”
L.A. Taco editor Javier Cabral credits “Daily Memo” with bringing in so many new members that the publication is now financially sustainable.
“He’s not your average aspirational journalist who is either a hobbyist who wants to write more or someone who just got out of [journalism] school,” Cabral said. “He’s just a real paisa” — a working-class guy.
While Cabral finds Torres’ lack of reporting experience “refreshing,” he sometimes has to remind Torres not to editorialize too much.
“It’s that ‘Show, don’t tell’ thing in journalism, you know? But then I had to just check in with myself — am I being jealous by power-tripping at him?” Cabral said. “It was a hard conversation to have, but Memo took it [on] the chin and raised it up.”
Blazedale and Cabral believe so much in Torres that they recently hired a part-time assistant for “Daily Memo” and plan to turn an office at their headquarters into a proper studio. They got Torres a video editor, but the person quit after five minutes of viewing deportation footage — so Torres continues to put together the final product.
“We just can’t have Memo burn out,” Cabral said. “He’s too important to have that happen.”
Torres is unfazed, for now.
“It’s just like when I mowed lawns — let’s seize the day and make it your routine,” he said.
Besides, swimming in the chaos of the times is how Torres has dealt with a tough personal year. He sold his landscaping company, not just because of his increased L.A. Taco duties — he’s officially the publication’s director of engagement — but because the Hollywood writer’s strike and Trump’s deportations decimated his business. Two of his former gardeners have since been deported.
Torres started smoking again “to deal with all this.” He recently broke off an engagement after a 10-year-relationship with a woman whose family members were avid Trump supporters. On Election Night, Torres said, one of them told him to go back to Mexico. The couple’s Glendale home recently sold for far less than they paid. Soon, Torres plans to declare bankruptcy.
L.A. Taco’s offices are filled with boxes of his mementos as he settles into a new apartment. One is a laminated La Opinión story about him trying to recruit more Latino students to Berkeley after affirmative action ended.
“I always envisioned I would be useful for something,” he said before mentioning a letter from his mother he unearthed during his move. She died of cancer in 2006.
“She said, ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re trying to fight for what’s right. Don’t forget it.’ She saw it in me way back then.”
Torres uploaded his finished reel to L.A. Taco’s social media accounts. It was 10 p.m. — early for him. Outside the rain was pouring down harder than ever.
“I hope I can go back to writing about tacos,” Torres said with a laugh that betrayed he knew it wouldn’t happen for a while. “Just give me a break from reporting on the trauma and tragedy. But who knows if the future needs me? Maybe I’m just good for this moment, and I’m good with that.”
He stepped into the storm. Eight hours later, he would be back.
Legendary graffiti artist Daniel “Chaka” Ramos once claimed he had tagged more than 40,000 locations around Los Angeles.
He can now add seven more. And unlike decades ago — when Ramos had to sneak around in darkness to spray-paint his nickname in large, block letters all over the city and surrounding areas — this time it was fully permissible.
Ramos, an L.A. native and Dodgers fan, was more than happy to participate, adding his name and slogans crafted by Nike to each piece. He told The Times in an email that it was his “first major project with a corporate giant like Nike.”
A mural of Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto is a temporary addition to the downtown Los Angeles skyline.
(Natasha Campos / Nike)
“They’re one of the most prolific creative forces in the world, and collaborating with them was a milestone for me,” the 53-year-old artist said. “The rush of graffiti can’t really be compared to commissioned or gallery work, but this experience came close.”
The Nike murals, which are scheduled to remain up through Nov. 30, are among the pieces included in a new and quickly expanding online map detailing the locations of Dodgers murals in and around L.A. The map was created by and is curated by Mike Asner, the mastermind behind a similar website that documents the locations of hundreds of Kobe and Gianna Bryant murals around the world.
Asner already has a full-time job as a marketing director in sports and entertainment, as well as maintaining the Bryant mural site. Still, the morning after the Dodgers clinched their second straight championship, Asner knew it was time to get to start tracking more murals.
“I think the reception from the fans and the artists I got to know from the Kobe mural project was very positive,” Asner, who also has an Instagram page highlighting Dodgers murals, said. “And the main thing I realized was it was helping people and providing a service to them and making things easier. … After the Dodgers won back-to-back championships, we started to see murals going up immediately, so I felt it would be the right thing to do again.”
A sprawling mural by Royyal Dog in South Los Angeles features images of Dodgers greats past and present, including Yoshinobu Yamamoto (second from right) and Freddie Freeman (far right).
The Nike-Chaka collaborations represent some of the newer artwork documented on Asner’s map. A Nike spokesperson said the idea was to give Ramos approved spaces in local neighborhoods to express the pride that Dodgers fans are feeling after back-to-back championships.
Two of the murals were painted directly on the walls by L.A.-based artists, with Ramos adding the slogans and his tag afterward. Artist Swank One painted the one at 2844 1st St. in Boyle Heights. It features relief pitcher Roki Sasaki and Smith embracing after the Dodgers clinched the National League pennant, with the slogan “On the Double.”
Graffiti artist Daniel ‘Chaka’ Ramos was commissioned by Nike to apply his tag to several temporary murals around Los Angeles celebrating the Dodgers’ back-to-back World Series championships.
(Natasha Campos / Nike)
Artists Enkone and Keorock painted at 4560 Whittier Blvd. in East L.A. The mural features pitcher Blake Snell, whose postseason included a one-hit, eighth-inning gem in Game 1 of the NLCS, with the slogan “Twice as Nice.” That mural has since been removed.
For four of the others, Nike licensed game photos from Getty Images, overlaid tag designs from Ramos and then had the images blown up and printed as murals.
Those include “Twice in a Blue Moon” in Silverlake (at Hollywood Boulevard and Hillhurst Avenue), featuring Max Muncy and Hyesong Kim; “Repeat Heroes” in Echo Park (at West Temple Street and North Boylston Street), featuring Smith and Sasaki; “Turn Two, Earn Two” in Echo Park (atSunset Boulevard and Marion Avenue), featuring Muncy; and “Dodgers Rule” — a play on Ramos’ longtime slogan “Chaka Rules” — in Westlake/Echo Park (at Beverly Boulevard and Commonwealth Avenue), featuring Sasaki.
The last mural features a photo of Yamamoto letting out a roar. The photo was blown up several stories high and installed several stories higher in downtown L.A. at 213 S. Broadway. Ramos then boarded a suspended scaffold and was lifted high above his hometown, where he spent four to five hours adding his tag and the slogan “Back 2 Back.”
It may not have been as daring as some of the stunts he pulled in the past, but Ramos definitely felt the rush.
“I’ve done graffiti at daredevil heights without a harness before, but nothing at this scale. This time I actually had to gear up with a harness — haha,” he wrote. “It was intense, but a lot of fun.”
The Nike-Chaka murals will be coming down soon, but Asner says he’s excited to see what other new creations might fill out the map in the aftermath of the latest championship run.
“We’re gonna see really amazing artwork going up, and we’re gonna see artwork of Dodgers that haven’t necessarily been on murals. like Will Smith and Yoshinobu Yamamoto,” Asner said. “There’s a lot of really big stars from this series that deserve to get credit for their amazing job. …
“You know, Ohtani was incredible, obviously, Friedman was incredible. But there were a lot of big players that stepped up — Miggy Rojas, right? Huge, huge reason they won. So it’s gonna be great to see what these artists do, and I’m looking forward to seeing it myself.”
Before I moved to L.A., I’d spent pretty much my entire professional life working for New York-based publications. One of the primary reasons I decided to take this job and transfer my life to the West Coast was because it seemed to me that California was at both the spear point of climate risk and the cutting edge of climate adaptation.
I didn’t expect the peril of climate change to rear its heads as quickly, and as close to my new home, as it did when the January fires became one of the biggest stories in the nation just a month after I started at The Times. I was less surprised to see how widespread a sophisticated understanding of climate issues was at the publication — an expertise borne out by the exemplary coverage of the fires and their aftermath.
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The same, I think, can be said for most of the people I know or have recently met who live in L.A.: There is very little sanguinity about what’s happening here, climate-wise, among Angelenos, regardless of where they work or come from.
So maybe I should have expected that an exhibit of recent work by L.A. artists would be similarly, logically, oriented toward these same (largely home-grown) anxieties around our place in a world increasingly shaped by the developing climate crisis.
Nevertheless, it struck me how many of the artists centered the interface between the built and “natural” environments at the Hammer Museum’s biennial “Made in L.A.” exhibition when I visited last weekend.
Many of the artists seemed to be grappling with how we situate ourselves in a climate-changed world.
From Alake Shilling’s uncanny cartoon bears driving buggies and mowing down weeping, humanoid sunflowers to Kelly Wall’s installation of glass swatches painted the color of toxic L.A. sunsets displayed, for tourist consumption, on an erstwhile pharmacy rack, the exhibition communicates Los Angeles as a place of largely unresolved conflict between human beings and whatever we define as “nature.”
Part of Kelly Wall’s installation, “Something to Write Home About.”
(Elijah Wolfson / Los Angeles Times)
I thought that as a climate journalist, I might just be primed to see such things, but Essence Harden, who co-curated the biennial, noted that “concerns around the environment are historical, they’re rooted. They’re not ahistorical. They don’t come from nothing or nowhere. I think art produced in Los Angeles has a relationship to the site specificity and the dynamic of architecture and history which grounds it.”
Harden said that she and her co-curator, Paulina Pobocha, didn’t seek out artists grappling with climate specifically for the seventh edition of Made in L.A. But after scouring dozens of local galleries, they found that climate and environmental anxieties permeated the scene.
Much of this Anthropocene-angst is “rooted in a sort of longer history of capital,” Harden said. Indeed, as a relative outsider, I have always sort of felt that L.A. wears its supposed climate excellence a little too loudly on its sleeves — or maybe, on its postcards and souvenir T-shirts. The iconic palm trees, for example, are transplants, forced to live in neighborhoods that don’t want them.
“The idyllic palm trees sight line of Los Angeles comes from these neighborhoods that were historically Black and Japanese and Latinx,” Harden said. “They are rooted in these places that people who are buying the product of Los Angeles don’t want to go.”
There are no palm trees in the Hammer biennial. At least, none that I remember. What there are instead are painted cinder blocks and hunks of glass, graffiti and rutted acrylic paint, twisted tubes of neon and roughly formed clay.
Anthropocene Landscape 3 by Carl Cheng
(Hammer Museum)
It was refreshing to see a show that grappled with the environment but was not didactic. Describing her curatorial process, Harden said she is mostly attracted to “people who are more ethereal and capture dreams and sensation.” If they also happen to be engaging with climate change, all the better.
More recent news and ideas on climate and culture
Writing for The Guardian, Beth Mead — a star forward on England‘s national soccer team for nearly a decade, with the all-time most assists in the history of the Women’s Super League — shared how climate change has changed the game she loves over the last decade. For professionals on her level, yes, but more importantly, for the many kids around the world who are now less likely to be able to regularly play what she calls “the world’s most accessible sport” thanks to extreme heat, droughts and flooding.
A “milk apocalypse” is coming for your burrata, reports Motoko Rich for the New York Times. Cheesemakers and dairy farmers in Italy, which produces and exports some of the most popular cheeses in the world, report a declining supply of milk, thanks to rising temperatures.
And if you wanted to pair your favorite Oregon pinot with that cheese … well, better do it now. The Willamette Valley has long had a nearly perfect climate for growing pinot noir — to the point where “Oregon wine” is often shorthand for the varietal. But as Branden Andersen reports for the local outlet Newsberg, thanks to changes in temperature and humidity, the region may need to rethink what’s been practically a vineyard monoculture.
In Belém, Brazil, COP30 is coming to a close. I’ve always been drawn to the art and performance at past COPs, and was glad to see some examples from this year’s climate conference. But what was even more interesting to me was Spanish artist Josep Piñol’s performance piece, in which he was commissioned to produce a large-scale sculpture in Belém and then canceled, saving what he said would have been the emissions equivalent of 57,765 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
The past week in broader climate news
Melody Gutierrez has been in Belém reporting on COP30 for The Times, and this week, she wrote about an image that has come to represent the socio-economics of this year’s events: two gigantic diesel-powered cruise ships, used as temporary housing for the global elite that comprise much of the COP delegations, docked at the mouth of the Amazon River, whose rainforests and people have felt much of the brunt of fossil fuel-driven climate change.
Meanwhile, the California Air Resources Board is expected to vote today on new measures to address methane leaks and underground fires at landfills which — unsurprisingly — are more likely to impact poorer Californians. As my colleague Tony Briscoe reports, landfills are a climate change and environmental health menace, and updates to the rules governing California’s are long overdue.
Earlier this week, a U.S. appeals court put a hold on a California law set to go into effect in January that would require any company that makes more than $500 million annually and does business in the state to report, every two years, the financial impact of climate change.
Finally, there was a lot of talk this week about how the build-out of data centers is driving up energy costs across the U.S. I found this Pew Research article to be a useful one-sheet to get a feel for what we know to be real when it comes to AI’s impact on the energy sector, what is hyperbole and what we still don’t fully understand.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
The Huntington has acquired a rare Civil War-era painting by American master Winslow Homer. “The Sutler’s Tent” was made in 1863 when Homer was traveling with the Union Army as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly. The title refers to a type of transitory store that sold goods to soldiers when they were out in the field, and the canvas shows a soldier eating bread and cheese while another soldier rests beside him.
The acquisition is the Huntington’s first oil painting by Homer. The museum’s other holdings include his watercolor, “Indians Making Canoes (Montagnais Indians)” (1895), and several prints, including “The Life Line” (1887). The pieces show the artist’s journey from commercial illustrator to celebrated painter.
“The Sutler’s Tent” will be unveiled to the public on Dec. 7 in the Huntington’s Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. It was acquired through a partnership with the Ahmanson Foundation — which seeks to help boost the notable holdings of the museum — and marks the fifth major acquisition made through the program.
The gift is intended to honor the country’s upcoming semiquincentennial, and will anchor an ongoing reinstallation of the galleries as the Huntington seeks to expand the multicultural narrative of American art. It will also be integral to the Huntington’s “This Land Is …” initiative, which works to examine the country’s history through its metaphorical and literal landscapes as it approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding.
“The Sutler’s Tent” will be placed in conversation with works about the Civil War and Reconstruction, including Eastman Johnson’s “Sugaring Off” (1865), Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s “Why Born Enslaved? “(1868, cast 1872), and a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation.
“The Ahmanson Foundation’s partnership with The Huntington has allowed us to bring works of profound artistic and historical resonance into our collections and into public view,” said Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence, in a statement. “Winslow Homer’s ‘The Sutler’s Tent’ — a meditation on the experience of war — embodies our mission to connect art, history, and literature in ways that deepen understanding of the American story.”
The Huntington Library is known for its vast scholarly trove of Civil War ephemera. Its United States Military Telegraph archive includes ciphered communications between Abraham Lincoln and the Army command, and soldiers’ letters and diaries. It also holds the James E. Taylor Collection of scrapbooks documenting the war through photographs and newspaper clippings, and two of the most significant known Lincoln archives.
The art museum’s director, Christina Nielsen, said in a statement that the acquisition of “The Sutler’s Tent,” “deepens our representation of the Civil War era and expands the dialogue between our art and library collections. As we look toward the 250th anniversary of the United States, the painting invites reflection on a pivotal chapter in our nation’s history — one that continues to shape the American experience.”
I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, looking forward to taking a deep dive into all that can be learned about our present from our past. Here’s your arts and culture news for the week.
Dispatch: Pulitzer Prize-winning Times art critic Christopher Knight to retire
Times art critic Christopher Knight.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
After 45 years, 36 of them at The Times, art critic Christopher Knight is retiring from daily journalism. His final day at The Times is Nov. 28. In 2020, Knight won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and was also honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Art Journalism from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.
It’s impossible to overstate the loss Knight’s departure represents for the paper and Los Angeles, or what a tireless, generous, inspiring colleague he is. He possesses a quiet, encyclopedic knowledge of art, and in column after column he connected the dots of culture, history, folklore, civics and psychology in razor-sharp assessments of what a piece of art really means, or how a particular exhibition is poised to change the narrative around a longstanding or misguided idea. In short, he is everything a truly excellent critic should be.
He is also endlessly supportive of arts writers like me who look up to him — will always look up to him.
Thank you, Christopher, for all your words.
On our radar
Janai Brugger as Mimi and Oreste Cosimo as Rodolfo in L.A. Opera’s 2025 production of “La Bohème.”
(Cory Weaver)
La Bohème Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera remains one of the most popular works in the Italian canon. Its doomed romanticism among struggling artists in 1830s Paris has a particular appeal to young people and became the inspiration for Jonathan Larson’s musical “Rent.” Lina González-Granados conducts the L.A. Opera orchestra. Brenna Corner directs this revival of the late Herbert Ross’ enduring production. Saturday through Dec. 14. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laopera.org
Roberto González-Monjas conducts the L.A. Phil this weekend at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
(L.A. Phil)
Elgar’s Enigma Roberto González-Monjas conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program featuring Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Themes and Variations, Op. 42,” Edwin Elgar’s “Enigma Variations, Op. 36,” and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s performance of the world premiere of an Edmund Finnis concerto. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com
Robert Therrien, “No title (plaster snowman),” 1982-98, plaster
(Douglas M. Parker Studio)
Robert Therrien: This Is a Story A quintessential artist’s artist, internationally admired Los Angeles sculptor Robert Therrien (1947-2019) made eccentric objects in two and three dimensions that seem strangely familiar when they are wholly abstract, and strangely abstract when they are instantly recognizable as representations of known things — a tall pillar of giant dinner plates, for example, or a simple little snowman. Often the materials are unusual, like zinc over bronze, buffed plaster or tempera on silver, adding to the sense of mysterious specificity. With more than 120 works spanning five decades, this should be the most compelling museum solo show of the season. — Christopher Knight Saturday through April 5, 2026. The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. thebroad.org
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The week ahead: A curated calendar
FRIDAY Fall of Freedom In a unified act of creative resistance, hundreds of galleries, museums, libraries, comedy clubs, theaters, concert halls and individuals across the nation will host exhibitions, performances and public events, asserting the power of free expression to mount a response to escalating authoritarian threats and censorship in the U.S. Friday and Saturday. There are dozens of local events in Southern California, please check the website for details. falloffreedom.com
¡Cómo el Grinch robó la Navidad! The Old Globe Theatre will present two performances of the world premiere of a new version of the Dr. Seuss classic with your favorite songs in Spanish. And for the 28th year, the Old Globe will also be doing its traditional holiday musical of “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” Nov. 21-28. 7 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m. Saturday. Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, San Diego. theoldglobe.org
From “The Dying World” by Lauren Tsai.
(Josh White)
The Dying World Lauren Tsai’s solo exhibition, an installation utilizing drawing, painting, sculpture, puppets and projected stop motion imagery, explores the liminal space between worlds: subject and object, fiction and maker. Final two nights. 6-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Hollywood Forever, the Cathedral Mausoleum Courtyard, 6000 Santa Monica Blvd. hollywoodforever.com
Amy Engelhardt in “Impact,” a solo one-act at the Fountain.
(Peter Serocki/peterserockivisuals.com)
Impact Composer/lyricist/performer Amy Engelhardt’s one-act solo show (with musical accompaniment) probes the 1988 terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. The Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Los Angeles. fountaintheatre.com
SATURDAY Animal Instinct Chinese American artist Kristen Liu-Wong’s solo exhibition of vibrant paintings with slightly macabre narratives highlights her varied influences from American folk art, the cartoons she watched as a kid, Japanese erotic art and an appreciation for architecture. Opening reception, 7-11 p.m. Saturday; noon-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, through Jan. 3, 2026. Corey Helford Gallery, 571 S. Anderson St., Los Angeles. coreyhelfordgallery.com
A Brahmsian Affair The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra presents a program featuring two sextets by Brahms, plus the world premiere of Julia Moss’ “(Please Don’t) Look Away.” 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Zipper Hall, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.; 4 p.m. Sunday. The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. laco.org
Corita Day Corita Art Center celebrates L.A.’s favorite artist/nun with an afternoon of art activities for all ages, live screen printing by Self Help Graphics, holiday shopping, food, music by KCRW, and a performance by Bob Baker Marionette Theater at 2 p.m. Visitors can also reserve spots from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. to see the exhibitions “Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images” and “Irregularity: Corita and Immaculate Heart College’s Rule Breaking Designs.” 1-4 p.m. Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. marcianoartfoundation.org
Grief Bacon and Other Holiday Treats Melanie Mayron and Sandra Tsing Loh deliver “old and new humor for trying times.” Part of the Odyssey’s “Thresholds of Invention” series. 8 p.m. Saturday. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. odysseytheatre.com
Tom Wesselman, “Bedroom Face,” 1977, color aquatint
(Palm Springs Art Museum)
Mapping the Female Body: Tom Wesselmann and Mickalene Thomas An unexpected juxtaposition of two very different painters from the end of one century and the beginning of the next is set to consider dissimilar representations of the contemporary female nude. In the 1960s, the famous “Great American Nude” series by Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) applied commercial advertising techniques to painterly traditions in Western art familiar since the Renaissance. Fifty years later, Mickalene Thomas applies commercial craft techniques to vibrant paintings of queer Black women — a subject previously absent from Western art history. Questions of gender, sexuality and their depictions are the exhibition’s focus. — Christopher Knight Through April 6, 2026. Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 Museum Drive. psmuseum.org
Venice Winter Fest Chill out SoCal-style with artisan markets, hot cocoa, live music, festive bites and interactive winter-themed activities for all ages. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. 12257 Venice Blvd. thevenicefest.com
SUNDAY Habsburg Harmonies: Haydn, Ligeti, and Brahms Violinist Martin Beaver, flutist Demarre McGill, cellist Clive Greensmith and pianist Fabio Bidini team up for an evening rooted in Austro-Hungarian musical tradition. 4 p.m. Thayer Hall, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. colburnschool.edu
TUESDAY Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern Three adventurers need your help on an epic quest to save the world in this interactive fantasy inspired by the immensely popular role-playing game. Through Jan. 4, 2026. The Montálban, 1615 Vine St., Hollywood. broadwayinhollywood.com
Culture news and the SoCal scene
The Palm Springs Art Museum, founded in 1938, has a small board of 22 trustees.
(Lance Gerber / Palm Springs Art Museum)
Speaking of Christopher Knight’s tremendous skills as a critic, did I mention he’s also a phenomenal reporter? In one of his final columns, Knight chronicles the many financial travails of the Palm Springs Art Museum based on internal documents obtained by The Times. “Recent developments have opened a Pandora’s box,” Knight writes of an accounting firm’s annual audit of the museum’s 2024 books. The audit revealed that there is a “reasonable possibility that [the museum’s] internal financial statements are significantly out of whack,” Knight wrote before detailing the fallout leading to a trustees revolt.
Knight also delighted us with a list of “22 essential works of art at the Huntington and the surprising stories behind them.” No one can highlight what should be considered essential viewing at a museum quite like Knight, who takes readers on a virtual tour of the storied San Marino museum and its exquisite holdings, including Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “Portrait of Samuel Johnson (‘Blinking Sam’),” which Knight writes was not favored by its famous subject.
Cher Alvarez, who reprises her role at the Ahmanson, in “Paranormal Activity” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
(Kyle Flubacker)
Closer to home, McNulty reserved high praise for the spooky “Paranormal Activity,” now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre. “I caught myself wondering during the first act, ‘Is this the best staged production of the year?’,” McNulty writes of the show, which is based on the horror film franchise of the same name and just completed a run at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Director Felix Barrett, playwright Levi Holloway and Tony Award-winning illusion designer Chris Fisher are “masters of misdirection,” McNulty concludes.
I had a great Zoom call with Shaina Taub about the inspiration behind her musical, “Suffs.” Taub is only the second woman, after Micki Grant, to star in a Broadway musical for which she also wrote the book, music and lyrics. The show is about the women’s suffrage movement leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. It opened earlier this week at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre as part of the show’s inaugural national tour.
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(Daniel Tyree Gaitor-Lomack / Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by Tomasa Calvo.)
Interdisciplinary Los Angeles–based artist Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack is staging a solo exhibition, “You Can Hate Me Now,” at Night Gallery. This marks the artist’s second solo show at the space. Much of the new work was informed by Gaitor-Lomack’s life in his MacArthur Park neighborhood. A rep for the gallery wrote in an email that Gaitor-Lomack describes the exhibition “as a kind of ceremony, a gathering of ideas and emotions that have been unfolding across his work over the past three years. Guided by intuition and lived experience, he continues to use found and everyday materials to reflect on the innumerable systems of the world around. The exhibition’s title, long held in his mind, frames the presentation as a meditation on anticipation, transformation, and resilience.” The show will be at Night Gallery through Feb. 14.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has made what it is calling the first-ever restitution of artwork to the descendants of an enslaved artist. The artist, David Drake, was born around 1800 in Edgefield, S.C. He is known for signing his vessels and inscribing them with poetic verses, including one that read, “I wonder where is all my relations.” Fifteen of Drake’s descendants recently traveled to Boston from various states for a ceremony during which MFA returned one of Drake’s stoneware jars to them, and purchased a second back. An L.A.-based attorney named George Fatheree represents Drake’s family and help shepherd the transaction. “This is a day we hoped and prayed for,” said Pauline Baker, the third great-granddaughter of Drake, in a news release. “To see it realized is almost overwhelming. On behalf of our family, we express our deepest gratitude to the Museum of Fine Arts for its courage and integrity. Most importantly, this ceremony restores not just his work, but his humanity.”
A Gustav Klimt painting, “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer,” recently sold for $236.4 million, including fees, making it the most expensive modern work to be sold at auction. The 71-by-51-inch painting, created between 1914 and 1916, portrays the 20-year-old daughter of the Viennese art collectors who commissioned the work. The portrait was sold during a Sotheby’s auction in New York and was part of the private collection of cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder, who died in June. According to the Washington Post, a 19-minute bidding battle catapulted the painting “far beyond its $150 million estimate, with two bidders competing over the phone via their auction representatives.”
Last year, I was fortunate enough to travel to Naples, Italy for the first time.
One of the many reasons to visit this historical and culinary diamond is to experience the famed Margherita pizza, invented there in the late 19th century.
My wife, a group of travelers and I caught a break when a table opened at 50 Kalò, a pizzeria lauded in Italy’s Michelin guide and known for its amazing doughs.
We ordered a variety of Neapolitan pizzas, including a pair of the tomato, mozzarella and basil-based Margheritas. How fortunate we were.
One person at our table, however, refused to try them. Her name is Jan and she’s from New Jersey.
“It’s not better than New York style,” she told a stunned table. “I’m sure it’s fine, but my guy is better.”
We all know a Jan in our lives — or sometimes, it’s us. We all have our favorites, whether it’s pizza, tacos, draft beers or wines. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying something different.
Harris takes readers from Hermosa Beach to Eagle Rock, and from Santa Monica to Los Feliz in search of a lovely pie.
Let’s jump into a few selections from Harris’ list — and remember, don’t be a Jan.
A pepperoni pizza from Sonny’s in Hollywood.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)
Sonny’s (Hollywood)
I have seen all the social media influencers proclaiming Sonny’s to be the best new pizza in Los Angeles. It’s a giant pizza, with a diameter that seems like the size of a semi-truck tire. The crust is so crisp, the crackles are audible in every video of people munching on it.
A layer of bronze oil sits atop the pizza and settles in the many cups of pepperoni. It creates a sheen over the cheese. My fingers were shiny. The oil dripped down my chin. The cheese, sauce and crust coalesce into a slender slice that’s sturdy enough, but flops at the tip.
Some of the crust was cracker-like and golden. Some of it was burnt. It’s not a perfect pizza, but I appreciated the thin crust and the flavor of the grease-streaked mottled cheese. And if someone else is offering to go through the trouble of ordering the pizza, I’ll happily eat it.
The D-Fresh pizza from Redwood Pie in Hermosa Beach. The pizza is topped with pickled serrano chiles and spicy sausage.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)
Redwood Pie (Hermosa Beach)
I first encountered Erik Vose’s pizza when he was operating Vivace Pizzeria, a food truck that housed a 5,500-pound Acunto Mario oven. He made some of the best bubble-flecked Neapolitan pies in the city. Now he’s creating his own category of pizza at Redwood Pie in Hermosa Beach.
He’s making a sourdough crust with a blend of five flours from Central Milling. It’s bready and wonderfully chewy, a sheath of amber orbs and tight, tiny bubbles that create the ideal crunch.
The slice of pepperoni is textbook perfect from Redwood Pie, with a well-balanced sauce, a blanket of cheese and pepperoni cups that transform into blistered meat candy in the oven. For the white pie fans, there’s the “D-Fresh.” A rugged landscape of hot Italian sausage crumbles, frizzled basil and pickled Serrano chiles tops the mozzarella base — and leaves your lips humming with heat.
Pork-and-beef bolognese pizza at Bub and Grandma’s Pizza in Highland Park.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Bub and Grandma’s Pizza (Highland Park)
If you’ve been following Andy Kadin’s career, you know that his breads can be found at restaurants around the city. So it should come as no surprise that his sourdough pizzas possess a wonderful tang and a durable crust that cracks with each fold and bite.
Kadin developed his pizza dough alongside chef Jeff Whittaker, who previously cooked at Hippo and Bar Monette. For the Bolognese pizza at Bub and Grandma’s Pizza, they slather the crust in a robust, meaty pork and beef ragu, with big boulders of meat protruding from the melted mozzarella.
The porchetta pie is painted with a decadent garlic cream and cloaked in ribbons of porchetta, charred broccolini and plenty of pepperoncini. It’s finished with a drizzle of garlic oil and a sprinkle of fennel salt. Imagine all the makings of a stellar porchetta sandwich in pizza form.
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Two out of three think the county is headed in the wrong direction. Four out of five feel its leaders are closely connected to “big money interests, lobbyists, and developers,” and the same fraction felt county supervisors were effective “only some of the time” — or not at all.
How to turn things around? Seven out of ten agreed the county government needed “major reform.”
Those are the top-line findings from a new survey on local governance published this week by the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
The survey, paid for by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, took the pulse of just over 1,000 registered voters and found most were feeling quite glum about the local state of affairs.
“Voters and residents are in a state of distrust and think that the government is not working,” said Fernando Guerra, the center’s director.
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But the survey was meant to show more than just a dejected electorate, Guerra said. He argued it made another point: Now is not the time for opponents to try and undo Measure G, a controversial measure that overhauled the county’s form of government.
“There are some people that are trying to relitigate Measure G, and I’m talking at the level of political elite,” said Guerra, who supported the overhaul. “What these numbers are suggesting, and what I’m suggesting, is if it were to be put up for an election again, it would pass again.”
It’s been almost exactly a year since voters approved Measure G, bringing something akin to a wrecking ball to the county’s governance structure and promising to replace it with something unprecedented in California: namely, nine supervisors instead of five and an elected county executive rather than an appointed one.
The measure was always controversial, with criticism lobbed at the position of chief executive, who opponents said would now hold far too much power over a $45-billion budget and the well-being of the county’s 10 million residents.
The measure barely passed, with a little more than half of voters agreeing to give it a shot. But the ultimate bureaucratic flub is giving some opponents of the overhaul new ammo to bring it back to voters.
Due to an error with how the county handles charter updates, voters inadvertently gave a 2028 expiration date to a different ballot measure that allocates funding for anti-incarceration efforts — known as Measure J — when they approved Measure G. (The head-scratching error is a wonky one — readers curious as to how it came about can find out here.)
Months after the error came to light, the county has still not said how it plans to fix the mistake. There are a few options, including putting either of the measures back on the ballot.
The survey of voters was not an election poll, and respondents were not given opposing arguments. Most voters did not seem to know much about the impending county government overhaul and the survey did not ask about the bureaucratic screw-up, which could be seized upon in a campaign. About half didn’t remember how they voted.
It’s not clear who exactly is pushing so hard for G’s demise currently. While the overhaul had its vocal opponents — including two supervisors — the effort would be extremely expensive and some may not relish the idea of a campaign that may come with an acute sense of déjà vu.
Some on the government reform task force who opposed Measure G said they didn’t think it was in the cards — though those who opposed the measure said they didn’t think it was such a bad idea.
“I have not heard that,” said John Fasana, a task force member who first noticed the error and voted against both Measure G and J. “I think that’s what they should do: if they’re going to do one, I would say it should be G.”
Instead, the county appears to be leaning toward a ballot measure involving Measure J for 2026.
On Nov. 3, Dawyn Harrison, the county’s top lawyer, laid out the possible options for the board to “reverse the error and honor the will of the voters.” That memo included language for various ways to enshrine Measure J through a ballot measure and make sure it doesn’t go poof in a few years.
Brian Kaneda, who is part of the coalition that got Measure J passed, said the group believes the county has multiple options to fix the blunder. But putting Measure J back on the ballot, they warn, should be the last thing the county considers.
“If evidence surfaces that a new ballot measure is legally required, we’re ready,” said Kaneda. “But we believe the county should rectify this internally, honoring the will of 2.1 million voters.”
State of play
— RUFF WEEK: One of the opponents of L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia accused the controller of misusing city resources by using images of his corgis and other graphics for both his office and his campaign. A campaign spokesperson suggested the opponent was “jealous of our cute corgi graphics.”
— BIN BONANZA: Los Angeles has left dozens of green bins on city blocks, so residents can dump their food waste and comply with a state composting law. Some residents say it’s overkill.
— ‘SMEAR’ STANCE: Newly appointed Fire Chief Jaime Moore says the media is trying to “smear” firefighters. The accusations appear to be in reference to a Times report that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to leave the burn area of the Jan. 1 Lachman fire, which would reignite into the deadly Palisades fire.
— FIRE FUND: The city’s firefighter union plans to propose a ballot measure that would increase the sales tax for Angelenos by half a cent in perpetuity, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually for the department to build dozens of new stations, add rigs and increase the size of the department by more than 1,000 by 2050. “This is the most important thing for the LAFD really ever,” said Doug Coates, the acting president of UFLAC.
— FRAUD PROBE: Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said his office will investigate claims that plaintiffs made up stories of sexual abuse in order to sue L.A. County. The announcement follows Times investigations that found nine people who said they were paid by recruiters to join the litigation.
— RESERVOIR QUESTIONS: State officials determined that even if the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been full during the Palisades fire, the water system still would have been overwhelmed and quickly lost pressure. Officials concluded the water supply in Southern California was “robust” at the time of the fire and that the water system isn’t designed to handle such large, intense wildfires.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to Beverly Boulevard and Mountain View Avenue in Historic Filipinotown, an area represented by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez. Outreach teams also returned to previous Inside Safe locations in Echo Park, Van Nuys, Mar Vista, Little Armenia, Sun Valley, Woodland Hills and the Figueroa Corridor, according to Bass’ team.
On the docket next week: The county supes will consider deferring permit fees for some homeowners who are rebuilding single-family homes in areas of Malibu after the Palisades Fire.
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I was a bit skeptical when an emailer suggested touring Torrance as a way to appreciate this South Bay hidden gem. As a San Gabriel Valley product, I’ve enjoyed excursions to the iconic Rose Bowl or the historic San Gabriel Mission.
But Torrance? Really?
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I’m a fan of the divine paradise cakes baked at two King’s Hawaiian locations in Torrance and am aware that Compton-based hip hop group N.W.A recorded “F— tha Police” in a city music studio.
Yes, that’s all fine and notable, but is this city of 140,000 actually tour worthy?
Debbie Hays, a resident and Torrance Historical Society docent, was up to the challenge of proving it certainly was when we met for a tour this week.
History meets Hollywood
We started at the Torrance Historical Society. Inside, visitors receive a quick lesson about the city’s creation, from a Spanish land grant to its founding by financial broker Jared Sidney Torrance in 1912.
A good portion of the talk centers on one of the city’s heroes, Louis Zamperini, known as the “Torrance Tornado.”
The Olympic and USC star, who competed in the famed 1936 Games, was a larger-than-life pillar captured in book and film, the latter the 2014 movie “Unbroken.”
“Louis was a bit of a misfit in his early days and his story is one of redemption and finding his purpose,” Hays said. “It started with track and of course he’s most known about his role in the war.”
“No other place in the world has more information and pieces of history tied to Louis than we do,” Hays says.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Zamperini was a U.S. Army Air Force bombardier in 1943 when his B-24 Liberator went down in the Pacific on May 27 with 10 additional crew members.
Zamperini floated on a life raft for 47 days, battling sharks and hunger before being picked up by a Japanese patrol boat.
He was tortured for two years before he was finally freed.
Hays showed off heirlooms, trophies and files donated by the Zamperini family, including more than 60 pounds of notes and awards, used in production of the movie.
“No other place in the world has more information and pieces of history tied to Louis than we do,” Hays said.
The ‘Ramen Capital of Southern California’
One of the more surprising details about Hays’ tour was the number of excursions the city offers.
You can take one of several self-guided tours of the city’s dozen or so microbreweries and craft beer tasting sites that highlight a burgeoning craft industry.
The most delectable tour, however, may be shown on the city’s Ramen Trail map, which declares Torrance the “Ramen Capital of Southern California.”
As for locales, the film and television map tour denotes more than 200 locations where movies like “Scarface,” “Boogie Nights” and “Horrible Bosses” and television sitcoms like “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Barry” were filmed.
“We aren’t Hollywood, but we have many spots worth visiting,” Hays said. “All they’re all relatively close together.”
The Buffy home
One of her most popular excursions is the Fall Tour of Old Torrance, held annually in October.
Hays offers architectural and historic showings of Tudor, Mission and Spanish Colonial revival homes often butting up against each other. Most homes are over 100 years old.
“It’s a very eclectic tour that you don’t see every day in every town,” Hays said. “We’re not a cookie-cutter neighborhood.”
Yet, it’s the No. 4 spot on that tour, a 1914 Craftsman-style home at 1313 Cota Ave., that draws a pilgrimage year round.
The 2,296-square-foot home is forever known as “the Buffy home,” where the popular television show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was filmed.
The four bedroom, two bathroom home served as the home of main character Buffy Summers, played by actress Sarah Michelle Gellar.
“I’ve led private tours to the home, with sometimes as many as 80 people,” Hays said. “Fans come to the house, they cry, they take pictures, they hug the tree. They love it.”
Paradise cakes, ramen noodles, craft beer and Zamperini memorabilia. You don’t have to love Buffy to appreciate Torrance.
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WASHINGTON — No one seems to know what happened to Vicente Ventura Aguilar.
A witness told his brother and attorneys that the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant, who doesn’t have lawful immigration status, was taken into custody by immigration authorities on Oct. 7 in SouthLos Angeles and suffered a medical emergency.
But it’s been more than six weeks since then, and Ventura Aguilar’s family still hasn’t heard from him.
The Department of Homeland Security said 73 people from Mexico were arrested in the Los Angeles area between Oct. 7 and 8.
“None of them were Ventura Aguilar,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant Homeland Security public affairs secretary.
“For the record, illegal aliens in detention have access to phones to contact family members and attorneys,” she added.
McLaughlin did not answer questions about what the agency did to determine whether Ventura Aguilar had ever been in its custody, such as checking for anyone with the same date of birth, variations of his name, or identifying detainees who received medical attention near the California border around Oct. 8.
Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center who is representing Ventura Aguilar’s family, said DHS never responded to her inquiries about him.
The family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar, 44, says he has been missing since Oct. 7 when a friend saw him arrested by federal immigration agents in Los Angeles. Homeland Security officials say he was never in their custody.
(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)
“There’s only one agency that has answers,” she said. “Their refusal to provide this family with answers, their refusal to provide his attorneys with answers, says something about the lack of care and the cruelty of the moment right now for DHS.”
His family and lawyers checked with local hospitals and the Mexican consulate without success. They enlisted help from the office of Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles), whose staff called the Los Angeles and San Diego county medical examiner’s offices. Neither had someone matching his name or description.
The Los Angeles Police Department also told Kamlager-Dove’s office that he isn’t in their system. His brother, Felipe Aguilar, said the family filed a missing person’s report with LAPD on Nov. 7.
“We’re sad and worried,” Felipe Aguilar said. “He’s my brother and we miss him here at home. He’s a very good person. We only hope to God that he’s alive.”
Felipe Aguilar said his brother, who has lived in the U.S. for around 17 years, left home around 8:15 a.m. on Oct. 7 to catch the bus for an interview for a sanitation job when he ran into friends on the corner near a local liquor store. He had his phone but had left his wallet at home.
One of those friends told Felipe Aguilar and his lawyers that he and Ventura Aguilar were detained by immigration agents and then held at B-18, a temporary holding facility at the federal building in downtown Los Angeles.
The friend was deported the next day to Tijuana. He spoke to the family in a phone call from Mexico.
According to Felipe Aguilar and Toczylowski, the friend said Ventura Aguilar began to shake, went unconscious and fell to the ground while shackled on Oct. 8 at a facility near the border. The impact caused his face to bleed.
The friend said that facility staff called for an ambulance and moved the other detainees to a different room. Toczylowski said that was the last time anyone saw Ventura Aguilar.
She said the rapid timeline between when Ventura Aguilar was arrested to when he disappeared is emblematic of what she views as a broad lack of due process for people in government custody under the Trump administration and shows that “we don’t know who’s being deported from the United States.”
Felipe Aguilar said he called his brother’s cell phone after hearing about the arrests but it went straight to voicemail.
Felipe Aguilar said that while his brother is generally healthy, he saw a cardiologist a couple years ago about chest pain. He was on prescribed medication and his condition had improved.
His family and lawyers said Ventura Aguilar might have given immigration agents a fake name when he was arrested. Some detained people offer up a wrong name or alias, and that would explain why he never showed up in Homeland Security records. Toczylowski said federal agents sometimes misspell the name of the person they are booking into custody.
Vicente Ventura Aguilar, who has been missing since Oct. 7, had lived in the United States for 17 years, his family said.
(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)
But she said the agency should make a significant attempt to search for him, such as by using biometric data or his photo.
“To me, that’s another symptom of the chaos of the immigration enforcement system as it’s happening right now,” she said of the issues with accurately identifying detainees. “And it’s what happens when you are indiscriminately, racially profiling people and picking them up off the street and holding them in conditions that are substandard, and then deporting people without due process. Mistakes get made. Right now, what we want to know is what mistakes were made here, and where is Vicente now?”
Surveillance footage from a nearby business reviewed by MS NOW shows Ventura Aguilar on the sidewalk five minutes before masked agents begin making arrests in South Los Angeles. The footage doesn’t show him being arrested, but two witnesses told the outlet that they saw agents handcuff Ventura Aguilar and place him in a van.
In a letter sent to DHS leaders Friday, Kamlager-Dove asked what steps DHS has taken to determine whether anyone matching Ventura Aguilar’s identifiers was detained last month and whether the agency has documented any medical events or hospital transports involving people taken into custody around Oct. 7-8.
“Given the length of time since Mr. Ventura Aguilar’s disappearance and the credible concern that he may have been misidentified, injured, or otherwise unaccounted for during the enforcement action, I urgently request that DHS and ICE conduct an immediate and comprehensive review” by Nov. 29, Kamlager-Dove wrote in her letter.
Kamlager-Dove said her most common immigration requests from constituents are for help with visas and passports.
“Never in all the years did I expect to get a call about someone who has completely disappeared off the face of the earth, and also never did I think that I would find myself not just calling ICE and Border Patrol but checking hospitals, checking with LAPD and checking morgues to find a constituent,” she said. “It’s horrifying and it’s completely dystopian.”
She said families across Los Angeles deserve answers and need to know whether something similar could happen to them.
Inside a dim New Orleans-style bar in Hollywood, dozens of strangers mingle under the thump of pop music while nursing complimentary cocktails. Each person is sporting a name tag along with a personality sticker, or a few, that best captures their vibe. Neat freak. Plant parent. Night owl. Craft beer aficionado.
The scene reads like a friendly singles mixer, but listen to their conversations and it’s clear the chemistry they are hoping for isn’t romantic. They are here to find the perfect roommate.
Participants mingle around the bar area during SpareRoom’s “speed roommating” event at the Sassafras Saloon in Hollywood.
(Kendra Frankle / For The Times)
Hosted by rental platform SpareRoom, the monthly “speed roommating” event connects people who are renting rooms with those who are looking for one in a low-key, in-person setting — no endless online profiles to fill out, no awkward interviews. Loosely based on speed dating, sans the timed interactions, attendees put on name tags indicating either “I need a room” or “I need a roommate” along with their ideal budget and neighborhoods. Then they wander freely. One woman passed out flyers for a furnished studio in downtown L.A. with air conditioning, a Murphy bed, an in-unit washer and dryer and streaming TV. Another woman showed people her rental on an iPad.
Pris Liora, 40, who was looking for someone to rent the extra room in her Koreatown apartment, didn’t prepare any questions for potential housemates, saying she just wanted to do a vibe check. Her only deal breakers? “No pets, no children, no cigarette smoking and no secret cocaine problem,” she says with a laugh.
With the average rent for a studio starting about $1,688 per month, $2,166 for a one-bedroom apartment and roughly $2,983 for a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, according to Apartments.com, more people are embracing shared living arrangements. Rupert Hunt, founder and CEO of SpareRoom, says they’re doing so not only to cut expenses, but also to foster community. The company’s mixers can help spark those connections, he believes — they’ve been hosting speed roommating events in L.A. since June, following successful events in London, San Francisco and New York.
“There’s something so immediate about the event,” says Rupert Hunt, founder and CEO of SpareRoom.
(Kendra Frankle / For The Times)
“There’s something so immediate about the event,” Hunt says. “You meet 10 people in the time it would take you to meet one the traditional way.”
Hunt has even found a housemate for himself at one of the mixers. “I love sharing,” says Hunt, who notoriously rented out two rooms in his New York City apartment for just $1. “I think I’m a better version of myself. I think I get a bit lazy if I’m living on my own.”
At the event, Aeris DeLeon, who was wearing a sticker with the phrase “foodie,” says her mother was the person who told her about the speed roommating event. The 25-year-old was temporarily living in Bakersfield but recently moved back home to L.A.
“It was just dead over there and I was just home sick, and it wasn’t really working out for me,” she says.
Upon arrival, attendees can pick out personality stickers with phrases like coffee addict, plant lover and early bird.(Kendra Frankle / For The Times)
She decided to attend the event because it’s more “personable than just going on Craigslist or Facebook, and it’s the best [way] to weed out scammers,” she says. Her mission was to find an apartment that cost $1,300 a month max with someone preferably close in age.
James Caton, 68, was just getting started in his search for a room. After learning that his apartment building — where he’s lived for nearly a decade — might be sold, he jumped into action.
“To me, as soon as you find out, it’s better to go ahead and start looking for something,” says Caton, who attended the mixer with his childhood friend who was looking to rent a room.
SpareRoom’s speed roommating events are free with an RSVP, and each person receives two complimentary drinks along with a one month trial of SpareRoom premium.
Speed roommating is free to attend and comes with complimentary drinks.
(Kendra Frankle / For The Times)
Even if attendees didn’t find a roommate at the event, several of them continued their conversations late into the evening. Some even stayed for karaoke at the bar. It seemed that in a world where talking about finances can be seen as taboo, having a space to openly discuss rent prices, how to deal with nightmare landlords and housemates and other grievances was its own win, a moment when they could feel a bit less alone.
There was a time when KevOnStage was a very literal description of comedian Kevin Fredericks as a hungry comedian looking for stage time. These days, he might as well be called KevOnEverything. You can find him cracking jokes on live comedy tours, TV sketch shows, books, podcasts and just about every social media platform you care about. From books like his 2025 New York Times bestseller “Successful Failure” to his latest podcast, “Not My Best Moment,” the idea has always been about forward momentum to breed a funny brand that, just like his name, continues to stick with a sense of humor that ultimately succeeds at being relatable.
Moving from Washington state to L.A. with his wife and kids to fulfill his comedy dreams, he focused his comedy on the Black church and family life in a way that hadn’t been done before. The result was his breakout success with the show “Churchy” that started as a self-funded series that was picked up by BET and recently ran through its second season. It created a lane for him to expand his content universe with sketch shows like “The Hospital” and “Safe Space” on Tubi that allows him to retain creative control and put on more comedians working with veteran stand-ups like Tahir Moore and Tony Baker. The latter is his podcasting partner in crime whom he’s been touring with on the Bald Brothers comedy tour which wraps up in L.A. at the Wiltern on Sunday. Recently we spoke to KevOnStage about the secret to building his comedy brand — by being everywhere.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
I love that this is a year where so much is happening for you from so many angles.
When did you decide to go from being Kevin Fredericks — working a regular job and doing comedy on the side — to becoming “KevOnStage”?
I was working at the Spanaway [Washington] branch of Key Bank and I was on Twitter. This must have been 2009 — very early on Twitter. And people were just making jokes and people were getting fired [from their jobs over their jokes on Twitter]. People would not like a joke you said, search your name, Google you, find out where you worked and email like your boss, and people were getting fired. And I was like, “I can’t afford to lose my job over some ports take.” So I’m gonna take my full actual government name out of my handle, which was just Kevin Fredericks at the time. And I was like, “I’m Kev and I be on stage.” And that was literally as much thought as I put into it. I was just not trying to be easily found and fired. So I switched my handle to KevOnStage because I was doing stand-up all the time at that time and it stuck. Hindsight being 20/20, I would have just kept Kevin Fredericks, which was my Facebook name, but I think KevOnStage is cool as a moniker. I’m trying to be like Beyoncé, Bono, Sting, Oprah, KevOnStage — one name. People think my actual name is Kevon because of that. If they think that, then I know they found me because of the internet. Which is also fine. As long as people know me, it doesn’t bother me.
KevOnStage with Tony Baker on the Bald Brothers comedy tour.
(Joshua Gonzales )
When did you really find your tribe of comedians in Washington state that you still hang out with today?
In Washington state there was only really like Nate Jackson, he was the only working comedian who was working nationally. In Washington it was me, Nate, Big Irish Jay, a comedian named Terrence — those are the only people that were kind of doing comedy consistently. And then we had the Bay Area Black Comedy Competition, I don’t remember what year it was, and I met Lance Woods, who I’m still cool with. But then when I moved [to L.A.], that’s when I met Tony Baker and Tahir Moore through All Def Comedy. Because I didn’t really do stand-up on stage that much when I first moved to L.A. My wife was like, “we’re not gonna move to L.A. and then you’re on stage four or five nights a week.” And it was hard to get on stage … you have to go and hang out, go to Denny’s and like hang out all night. And [my wife] was not going for it and I had small children who had to go to school. So the majority of the people that I know I met through All Def.
You brought up an interesting point about the lifestyle of comics because it is a lifestyle that doesn’t really agree with everything else for most of the 9-to-5 working world — especially being married and having kids. So how did you then decide to focus more on content creation as a means to perform?
Well, interestingly enough, it started before I moved to L.A. There’s hardly any entertainment opportunities in Washington. There’s very rarely a TV show, even shooting there, much less a show you can actually audition and be on. So what happened was we were doing plays. We’re trying to be like Tyler Perry, David E. Talbert or Je’Caryous Johnson. And we were on our way, but there weren’t enough people in Washington to mount a successful black play — or “urban plays” as people called them. So we did our best, but even if we got 3,000 people, that was only for one night. And we weren’t doing that, by the way. We’re getting like 68 people. So I was watching a lot of YouTube at the time and I was realizing these people have fans everywhere. So I was like, we can do internet comedy and make people laugh on the internet and hopefully we get fans all across the United States. And from the first two videos we did, I was like, forget the play thing, I think the internet is the thing. Just like focus on that. I think we do that, we will build our own audience, and everything will be easier for us.
As far as the ability to own your content and guide however you want, how has that been important for your comedy career?
For me it’s been like, “He who pays says.” Like if you pay for it, you get the final say. So for a long time, it was by default because nobody’s getting paid. I’m just making it and posting it. The first big thing we did that was like really expensive was “Churchy” [on BET]. And there was a lot of [money from previous brand deals] that I saved, a lot of [money from doing] Spectrum commercials that I saved. I made eight episodes of “Churchy.” And shout-out to Jamal Henderson, he helped us meet executives at BET and they bought it. And they couldn’t have any creative control because it was already done.
So that’s kind of a process that we’ve repeated with [my sketch shows] “The Hospital” and “Safe Space.” We pay for it and then license it or partner with a company and make it now. And with Tubi, they’re a little bit different. They let you have creative control, even if they pay for it. They’re like “hey, we trust that you built your audience, you know your audience.” They’re the only platform that I’ve worked with that’s completely like, “we don’t have any say-so, no notes, you don’t have to send us a script, you don’t have to send an edit for approval, we trust you.” And that’s fantastic for me because you get to make it as close to [the original vision] without any impurities as possible.
Now I gotta be honest, when I work with BET, we had amazing executives and they’ve given us a lot of great notes, but they also give you some notes that you don’t agree with that you have to take. And that’s also part of just making things. It’s not a full negative. They also made [the show] better in a lot of different ways. And the one thing that I’m very grateful for with our partners at BET is every note they gave was to make the overall project better and for more people to enjoy it. I am a comedian at heart, so sometimes I’m loyal to the joke to a fault. The executive is like, we gotta tell the best story — so it’s not all bad. A lot of times we hear people bemoan partnering with people, and it has its negatives, but also my TV exec was more experienced than I was at making good TV, so some of their notes were really helpful, and I can carry those with me when I’m making other projects.
“The Hospital” and “Safe Space” are both like sketch shows. What was important about the formats for both shows — one at a hospital, the other on a therapist’s couch — that allow you to find the funny?
Richard Washington, who is a creative exec at KevOn Stage Studios, head of T V and film, and I built the systems and then we allow the people to work within the systems to the best of their personality. So I think the great part about “Safe Space” is the talent. Like you give them a premise, you find the right people, and then they take it and make it funny. “Safe Space” was really the same with “The Hospital.” Like, you know, we hired more sketch writers for the hospital, but Safe Space was more improv than even “The Hospital.” We had some fully written sketches for “The Hospital,” but we didn’t stick to everything exactly. Some are almost all improv. Like comedian CP’s episodes, he’s just riffing. So it’s as close to a stand-up version of content as you can get. And what I mean by stand-up is the audience is sitting there not knowing what the person’s gonna say. And that’s why I think it works.
KevOnStage recording a podcast.
(Mike Folabi)
As a creator of these shows, you often hold the door open for new talent to shine. How does that help your own vision of allowing there to be space for new actors and comedians to come up?
I grew up playing sports and then I went into plays. And with both of those elements, it’s it’s a team environment. You need other people to be successful and you gotta rely on other people to do their thing. With plays, you wanna have the best show possible. And then you put it all together and it’s the best product. And I think that’s the same approach that I take to creation. A lot of comedians, I’ve been told, they won’t take the best comedians. They’ll take people who are OK, but nowhere near as good as them.
Considering you post three to five videos a day, how do you find the time to produce as much content as you do?
So the thing is like this is my job. And I work really hard. I think people compare themselves to me, but they also have a job. Like you’re thinking of “how does he do this?” because you’re thinking of your actual day job. For the most part, I get up and think of funny things to say all day. And the other thing is I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m gonna do or editing it at all. If something funny happens right now, if I walk out of here and I trip and fall, I’ll probably make a video immediately and within five minutes that video’s gonna be on seven different platforms. So I’m not really precious about what I make. And I feel like people think it’s hard, but this is not hard for me. It’s something I love to do, I create freely out of joy. The guy who runs my doughnut shop who hasn’t taken a day off in 20 years, literally I was talking to him about this. He never takes a day off. Twenty years he’s at that doughnut shop, every night at 8 p.m., he makes doughnut, preparing for the day. Every day at 4 a.m., he comes and bakes them. That is hard. Not to say what I’m making is not hard. It is, but it’s not hard like that. People have hard jobs. I just be silly for two minutes and post it within five minutes. That’s not really hard for me.
“For the most part, I get up and think of funny things to say all day,” says KevOnStage.
(Joshua Gonzales )
I guess you’re not getting cellphone calluses.
Not at all [laughs] … I kind of designed my content to be able to make it easily because I feel like my approach is just inundating you with Kev. Like I want to be unavoidable. Yeah. I want to make content on so many different topics. It’s not even always comedic. I want people to just share you and or have a thought or make you have a thought. Right now I’ve been doing a lot of podcasts. So if you don’t follow me, but you follow for example “The Pivot,” which I did last week and they collab with me, now you’re seeing me on “The Pivot” or Funny Marco or I interviewed Issa Rae for the first episode of [my new podcast] called “Not My Best Moment.” And Issa Rae doesn’t do a whole whole bunch of interviews if she’s not promoting something. So if you’re interested in what Issa has to say, you got to hear me because I asked the question. So people rip my stuff, I’m like, “this is great!” They rip it and post it on threads. This is like as close to getting bootlegged as possible.
That’s what you want.
Yeah, bootleg me! Obviously I’d love to make the money, but it’s like the exposure will become capital or currency later. I just want to be out here so much that you’re eventually like, “All right, what is he talking about?” Because think about how many videos do you see in a day now. Back in the day, we used to have to be like, OK, I want to watch the videos. I’m gonna go to my computer and go to like, I remember before YouTube, I used to go to Break.com and watch videos. It was a thing I did for some time and then I went on about my day. Think about how many videos you consume on a daily basis. … So you gotta really hit ‘em over and over before they make a decision. So that’s why I just wanna flood you. I want you to be like, “Oh, my God, enough!”
Well, add one more to the pile right here.
Yeah, absolutely. Once I saw cameras here [at the L.A. Times studio], I was like, “Yeah, baby, I thought this was just an interview, we got video content, baby. Let’s go!” So yeah, it’s like that’s my approach. Just keep going — a lot.
LA28, the committee behind the Olympic Games coming to Los Angeles, quietly added to its roster of directors some high-profile Republicans with ties to President Trump.
The 35-member volunteer board of directors now includes notable Republican political figures Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, and Reince Priebus, who was Trump’s chief of staff during his first term. Before his role in the White House, Priebus served as the longtime chair of the Republican National Committee.
Diane Hendricks, a major GOP donor who has given millions to Trump’s campaigns, and Patrick Dumont, who owns the Dallas Mavericks and is the son-in-law of another major Trump donor, were also added to the board. Ken Moelis, an investment banker who worked with Trump in the 1990s and predicted the businessman would win the presidency in 2016, is also listed as a board member.
The Trump-adjacent inflow to the board of directors, first reported by Politico, is the latest sign of the president’s involvement in the major Los Angeles event.
It is not clear why the decision was made to expand the board of directors and how the individuals were selected. A spokesperson for LA28 did not immediately respond to The Times’ questions Thursday about the move.
Kevin McCarthy
(Associated Press)
Los Angeles business consultant Denita Willoughby and philanthropist Maria Hummer-Tuttle are also newly listed as board members.
“We are thrilled to welcome this accomplished group to the LA28 Board who will help create an unforgettable Games for athletes and fans alike,” Casey Wasserman, the chair of the 2028 L.A. Olympics organizing committee, wrote in a statement.
Wasserman could not immediately be reached by The Times for further comment.
Although past presidents have taken a largely ceremonial role in Olympics that have been held on U.S. soil, there are signs that Trump is seeking a more active role in the Games, which will occur in his final year as president.
In August, he signed an executive order naming him chair of a White House task force on the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. The president views the Games as “a premier opportunity to showcase American exceptionalism,” according to a White House statement. Trump, the administration said, “is taking every opportunity to showcase American greatness on the world stage.”
Trump at the time noted that he’d be willing to send the military back to Los Angeles to protect the Games. In June, he sent the National Guard and U.S. Marines to the city amid escalating immigration enforcement actions, prompting pushback from Mayor Karen Bass.
Wasserman attended the signing at the White House in August and thanked Trump for “leaning in” to planning for the Olympics, which he said is akin to hosting seven Super Bowls a day for 30 days.
“You’ve been supportive and helpful every step of the way,” Wasserman told the president at the time. “With the creation of this task force, we’ve unlocked the opportunity to level up our planning and deliver the largest and, yes, greatest Games for our nation, ever.”
