L.A.s

Elliot Zwiebach was 62 years old when he sang in front of a live audience for the first time.

The retired reporter had always loved show tunes, but he’d never considered singing in public before.

“I sang for my own amusement, and I wasn’t very amused,” he said recently.

But one night, after attending a few open mic nights at the Gardenia Supper Club in West Hollywood as a spectator, he got up the nerve to step onto the stage and perform a tune backed by a live band.

For his first song, he picked the humorous “Honey Bun” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific.” It was frightening and he didn’t sing well. And yet, the following week he came back and did it again.

Newbie Ian Douglas, left, and longtime singer Elliot Zwiebach look over a sign-up sheet at the Gardenia’s long-running open mic night.

Sixteen years later, Zwiebach, now 78, is a core member of what the event’s longtime host Keri Kelsey calls “the family,” a group of roughly 25 regulars who sing jazz standards, show tunes and other numbers from the Great American Songbook at the longest-running open mic night in L.A.

“It’s very much like a community,” Zwiebach said on a recent evening as he prepared to sing “This Nearly Was Mine,” another song from “South Pacific.” “Everyone knows everyone.”

For 25 years, the small, L-shaped Gardenia room on Santa Monica Boulevard has served as a musical home for a diverse group of would-be jazz and cabaret singers. Each Tuesday night, elementary school teachers, acting coaches, retired psychoanalysts, arts publicists and the occasional celebrity pay an $8 cover to perform in front of an audience that knows firsthand just how terrifying it can be to stand before even a small crowd with nothing more than a microphone in your hand.

“You are so vulnerable up there with everyone staring at you,” said Kelsey, who has hosted the open mic night for 24 years and once watched Molly Ringwald nervously take the stage. “But it’s also the most joyous experience in the world.”

Director and acting coach Kenshaka Ali sings “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” by Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

The singers are backed by a live, three-piece band led by guitarist Dori Amarilio. The rotating group of musicians — a few of them Grammy winners — arrive not knowing what they will be playing that night. Some singers bring sheet music, others chord charts. And there are those who just hum a few bars and allow the musicians to intuit the key and melody enough to follow along. Poet Judy Barrat, a regular attendee, usually hands the evening’s piano player a copy of the poem she’ll be reading and asks him to improv along with her.

“It’s totally freeform,” said Andy Langham, a jazz pianist who toured with Natalie Cole and Christopher Cross and often plays the Gardenia. “I read the stanzas and try to paint pictures with the notes.”

Keri Kelsey, singing “Mack the Knife,” has hosted the Gardenia’s open mic night for 24 years.

The Gardenia, which opened in 1981, is one of the few venues in L.A. specifically designed for the intimacy of cabaret. The small, spare room has table service seating for just over 60 patrons and a stage area beautifully lit by an abundance of canned lights. Doors open at 7 p.m. on Tuesday nights, but those in the know line up outside the building’s nondescript exterior as early as 6 p.m. to ensure a reasonable spot on the night’s roster of singers. (Even though there is a one-song-per-person limit, the night has been known to stretch past 12 a.m.) Nichole Rice, who manages the Gardenia, takes dinner and drink orders until the show starts at 8:30 p.m. Then the room falls into respectful silence.

Pianist Andy Langham and guitarist Dori Amarilio perform live music accompaniment for each open mic participant at the Gardenia.

“This is a listening room,” said singer-songwriter Steve Brock, who has been attending the open mic night for more than a decade. “I’ve been to other rooms where I’m competing with tequila or the Rams. Here, when anyone goes up in front of that microphone, everyone stops.”

On a recent Tuesday night, the show began as it always does with an instrumental song by the band (a piano, guitar and upright bass) before an opening number by Kelsey. Dressed in a black leather dress and knee-high boots, she had this time prepared “Mack the Knife.” “This may be one of the loungiest lounge songs ever,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I really like it.”

People begin to line up outside the Gardenia at 6 p.m. to get a spot for the Tuesday open mic night.

The first singer to take the stage was Trip Kennedy, a bearded masseur who performed “The Rainbow Connection” in a sweet tenor. When he finished, Kelsey shared that she was cast as an extra in “The Muppets Take Manhattan.”

“It was the most ridiculous thing,” she said, filling time as the next singer consulted quietly with the band. “I was a college student who dressed up as a college student for the audition.”

Dolores Scozzesi, who sang at the Hollywood Improv in the ’80s between comedy sets, performed a moody arrangement of “What Now My Love.” “This is a [chord] chart from 2011,” she told the audience before she began. “I want to try it because these guys are the best.”

Monica Doby Davis, an elementary school teacher, sings the jazz standard “You Go to My Head” at the Gardenia.

Zwiebach performed a medley of two Broadway hits, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (which he altered to “his face”) and “This Nearly Was Mine,” easily hitting all the notes. After, his young friend Ian Douglas, a relative newbie who started attending the open mic night in the spring, sang the jazz standard “You Go to My Head.” Zwiebach praised the performance.

“I know that song very well and you did a great job,” he said.

Monica Doby Davis, who once sang with the ’90s R&B girl group Brownstone and now works as an elementary school teacher, also performed “You Go to My Head.” Although she had left the entertainment business decades ago, she said finding the Gardenia open mic night 13 years ago “brought music back to my life.”

Tom Nobles, left, sings alongside bassist Adam Cohen, center, and pianist Andy Langham at the Gardenia.

There were many beautiful, intimate moments that night, but perhaps the best was when Tom Nobles, an actor and retired psychoanalyst in a purple knit cap and thick plastic glasses, forgot the words to “Lost in the Masquerade” by George Benson.

He stumbled for a moment, a bit perplexed, before turning to his friends for help.

“Whoever knows the words, sing it with me,” Nobles said to the crowd.

Quietly at first and then louder and stronger, the whole room broke out into song.

We’re lost in a masquerade. Woohoo, the masquerade.

AI is driving the stock market to record highs, dominating countless debates about the value of human labor, and radically rewiring the way schools approach education. It’s also causing a stir in the art world, with media artist Refik Anadol poised to open Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, inside the Frank Gehry-designed Grand L.A. complex in downtown Los Angeles next spring.

A first-look at the Infinity Room gallery at Dataland.

(Dataland)

The 25,000-square-foot museum was originally scheduled to open this year, but Anadol announced Thursday that the opening has been pushed back to spring 2026. Anadol also unveiled a sneak peak at the Infinity Room, one of the museum’s five discrete galleries. The immersive room features Anadol’s distinct swirling colors and images and will be infused with AI-generated scents, creating a multisensory experience powered by its very own AI model, called the Large Nature Model.

The Infinity Room design dates back to 2014 when Anadol created his first immersive data sculpture at UCLA. He described it as an exploration into the future of the Light and Space movement. It was essentially a 12-by-12-foot cube, with mirrored walls, ceiling and floors. Projectors emitted pulses of black-and-white imagery that used data as a pigment. To date, the Infinity Room has toured 35 cities and been viewed by more than 10 million people.

Another look at the Infinity Room, which has been viewed by 10 million people on tour.

(Dataland)

“The work emerged from my exploration of the idea that information can become a narrative material capable of transforming architectural space into a living canvas. The question driving me was simple but profound: What happens if there is no corner, no floor, no ceiling, no gravity?” Anadol wrote about his concept for the Infinity Room in a blog post on his website. “At DATALAND, Infinity Room enters a new era. This iteration embodies the technical and conceptual leaps our studio has made over the past decade. Where the original used generative algorithms, this new incarnation incorporates our decade-long research into what I call “machine hallucinations” — the dreamlike, surreal realities an AI can generate from vast datasets.”

The Infinity Room is meant to be a multisensory experience.

(Dataland)

In an interview last year, Anadol said “ethical AI” is essential to his practice. Unlike most large AI models, Anadol secured permission to use all of his sourced material, and said all of the studio’s AI research was performed on Google servers in Oregon that use only renewable energy.

At a car lot just off the 405 in the San Fernando Valley, there is more than meets the eye.

Galpin Motors sells new and used Fords — touting itself as one of the largest dealerships in the world. But next door, it also displays exotic rides: Shelby Cobras. A vintage purple Rolls-Royce. Sylvester Stallone’s Harley from “The Expendables.”

And then there’s the on-site diner, the Horseless Carriage, where the vinyl-covered booths have hosted generations of Valley power brokers and men who have shaped the policies of the Los Angeles Police Department for decades.

Bert Boeckmann, owner and president of Galpin Motors, stands with new Fords in his showroom.

( Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Former Galpin boss Herbert “Bert” Boeckmann was an influential figure in local politics and a member of the city’s Board of Police Commissioners, the civilian panel that oversees the LAPD. A longtime lawyer for car dealer, Alan Skobin, also served on the commission.

Now, another member of the Galpin Motors family is poised to carry on the legacy.

The City Council is scheduled to vote Wednesday on whether Jeffrey Skobin, a vice president at Galpin, will follow in his father Alan’s footsteps and join the commission.

Appointed by Mayor Karen Bass, the younger Skobin, 45, already serves on an advisory board that gives the mayor input on issues facing the Valley. He did not respond to an interview request from The Times.

Skobin cleared one hurdle last week, when the council’s public safety committee approved his nomination by a 3-1 vote.

Several committee members professed to knowing Skobin’s family, with one lauding him for the “good stock you come from.”

Skobin said he wouldn’t take the role of commissioner lightly. The five-member panel acts like a corporate board of directors, setting LAPD policies, approving its budget and scrutinizing police shootings.

“I recognize the seriousness of this role and the gravity of this responsibility,” Skobin told the committee. “My story is deeply tied to Los Angeles.”

A mega-dealership with five franchises, Galpin has long wielded influence as a source of jobs and tax revenue for the city. It was Boeckmann who established the business as a powerful player in local politics.

Rare classic Porsche sports cars on display in the Galpin Hall of Customs during the LA Auto Show’s opening day at Los Angeles Convention Center in 2021.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Boeckmann was a self-made millionaire who started out as a car salesman in 1953, seven years after Galpin opened. He eventually bought out the company’s founder, Frank Galpin.

In the decades that followed, he amassed a large corporate empire in the Valley that also included vast land holdings and a film production company.

Boeckmann and his wife, Jane, longtime publisher of the Valley magazine, backed George W. Bush for president, Gray Davis for governor and Antonio Villaraigosa for mayor.

Galpin’s website features a picture of Boeckmann and his wife meeting California Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1974. “When I think about what’s right in America, I will always think of men like Bert Boeckmann,” said the future president, according to the company.

Samantha Stevens, a Los Angeles political consultant and former legislative staffer, said candidates routinely made pilgrimages to the Galpin lot on Roscoe Boulevard to court Boekmann.

“Everybody would go and ask for their support, not just the money. You wanted the name on the endorsement list,” Stevens said.

Although Boeckmann leaned conservative, she said, he was also a force behind the scenes in L.A.’s left-leaning City Hall and seemed to put aside politics when he found causes or candidates that he believed in — including a failed push for the Valley to break away and form its own city.

Ford Explorers on a Galpin storage lot on Woodley Avenue near Van Nuys Airport.

(Los Angeles Times)

“I remember sending my liberal Democrat candidates to meet with them, and they would get donations,” Stevens said.

First appointed to the Police Commission by then-Mayor Tom Bradley in 1983, Boeckmann served two stints under three mayors.

During his 17 combined years on the panel, Boeckmann gained a reputation as its most conservative member — with critics calling him an apologist for former Chief Daryl Gates.

He sat on the commission during two of the darkest chapters in LAPD history: The fallout of the 1991 beating of Black motorist Rodney King and the Rampart corruption scandal, which uncovered cops planting evidence, dealing drugs and committing other crimes.

Boekmann died in 2023 at age 93, but the company still maintains close ties with both the LAPD and City Hall.

Campaign finance records show that Galpin and its employees, including Jeffrey Skobin, have made contributions to numerous local, state and politicians, though not Bass’ mayoral campaign.

Yet when Bass announced the possibility of laying off city workers earlier this year, she chose Galpin as the backdrop of her news conference to rally support.

Last November, less than a week after taking over as LAPD chief, Jim McDonnell held a meet- and-greet at the company’s gleaming showroom of exotic cars across the street.

Galpin twice supported McDonnell’s campaigns for Los Angeles County sheriff, with records showing tens of thousands of dollars in donations during his successful run in 2014 and his failed re-election bid four years later.

In years’ past, the company came under scrutiny after it was revealed that Boeckmann leased city land and sold cars to the city. A controversy arose when the City Council spent $2.4 million to help buy a 239-acre parcel from Boeckmann in Mandeville Canyon. For a time, the LAPD stored some undercover vehicles on Galpin properties.

Those deep ties have led to questions about whether Skobin can be an effective police watchdog. The mayor’s office scrutinized Skobin’s business for any conflicts of interest before putting forward his nomination, city officials said.

LAPD Capt. Johnny Smith said Galpin has given to countless charitable causes and regularly provides meeting space for community groups.

“Their support has always come from a place of partnership, grounded in the belief that together, we can do better for this city we all love,” said Smith, who said he has known the Skobin family for years.

Alan Skobin, 74, told The Times his work on the police commission, on which he served from 2003 to 2012, gave his son a unique window into how the department functions — and what it takes to provide police oversight.

An auto enthusiast views the Batmobile, which was formerly a Ford Futura, on display at Galpin Hall of Customs.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“Number one, don’t take things that are brought to you at face value. Look beyond the surface,” he said. “Always remember you are a representative of the public, and keep that perspective. Continue to be a good listener of various views.”

The elder Skobin recalled how his teenage son once came home upset over a traffic stop that occurred while he was driving to school with a friend, who was Black. The teens felt they were pulled over for no reason — and the incident left a lasting impression about discrimination by law enforcement, Skobin said.

“One thing I know about LAPD is things slip,” he said. “And Jeff is the kind of person that will look into those things.”

The only vote against the younger Skobin when he appeared before the council’s public safety committee last week came from Hugo Soto-Martinez, who peppered him with questions about his reaction to the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration raids.

“Heartbreaking,” Skobin said, noting that roughly half of Galpin’s employees are of Mexican descent. He is also married to a Mexican American woman.

Soto-Martinez also pressed him on how he would respond if he discovered that local law enforcement shares license plate reader data with federal authorities.

The license plate data allows law enforcement to track the movements of Angelenos in their vehicles without court orders, and some worry that they could potentially be used to track people for deportation.

“I think I would take a position to seek to understand the legality of that, what options there are,” Skobin said.

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) visited three Black churches in Los Angeles on Sunday morning to campaign for California’s redistricting effort, which could add five or six Democratic representatives to his ranks.

Amid a congressional deadlock over healthcare subsidies that has left the government shut down for more than two weeks, the minority leader returned to the Golden State to campaign for Proposition 50. The ballot measure would give his party more power against Republicans, who Jeffries said have refused to negotiate in the shutdown and otherwise.

“This is trouble all around us,” Jeffries told the congregation at First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles in West Adams — after poking fun at President Trump’s 2016 gaffe misspronouncing a book of the Bible. “Folks in the government who would rather shut the government down than give healthcare to everyday Americans. Wickedness in high places. And now they want to gerrymander the congressional maps all across the country to try to rig the midterm elections.”

The packed congregation — most wearing pink to support Breast Cancer Awareness Month — were receptive to his message.

“This is a way of trying to keep things equal,” said Kim Balogun, who was in Sunday’s crowd. “A level playing field.”

For many of its members, First AME is more than just a church. As the city’s oldest African American congregation, it has been at the forefront of the fight for civil rights since its founding in 1872.

“This is family,” said Toni Scott, a retired special-education teacher who has been with First AME for 52 years. “As one of the church’s previous ministers used to say, ‘This is a hospital. People are sick; we come to be healed,’” she said.

When news reached L.A. that Nelson Mandela would be released from prison, South African immigrants and anti-apartheid activists flocked to the church, anxiously awaiting the first sights of Mandela walking free. During the 1992 riots, First AME was a bastion of hope amid a sea of chaos.

“We thank you, God, for bringing us through dark times and chaotic times,” the Rev. Charolyn Jones said to the congregation on Sunday, “knowing that our church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was born out of protest.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, left, greets parishioners at First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles. “It’s an honor and a privilege to spend time worshiping at Black churches here with Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove to reinforce the message of the importance of voting yes on Proposition 50,” Jeffries said.

(Ethan Swope / For The Times)

For Jeffries, the first Black person to lead a major political party in Congress, the West Coast trip amid a congressional impasse was important.

“The African American churchgoing community has always been the foundation of the Black experience in the United States of America,” Jeffries said, who also visited the congregations of Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in South L.A. and Resurrection Church of Los Angeles in Carson. “It’s an honor and a privilege to spend time worshiping at Black churches here with Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove to reinforce the message of the importance of voting yes on Proposition 50.”

The state’s redistricting effort, Proposition 50, is part of a national fight over control of the U.S. House of Representatives, instigated by President Trump. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, but in June, Trump began pushing Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional maps to yield five more likely GOP seats.

In response, Newsom proposed California temporarily depose of its independent redistricting commission, led by 14 citizens, to redraw the state’s maps and add five Democratic seats, effectively canceling out Texas’s move.

The Democratic-controlled state Legislature quickly produced redrawn maps and scheduled a Nov. 4 special election to put them up for a vote. Mail-in ballots are already in the hands of voters.

California Republicans, including former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, have slammed the initiative as a “big scam.” Schwarzenegger called Democrats hypocritical, arguing that while they call Trump a “threat to democracy,” they want to “tear up the Constitution of California” and “take the power away from the people and give it back to the politicians.”

Jeffries noted that California was letting its citizens ultimately decide — unlike some Republican-led states.

“We said from the very beginning that we want to find bipartisan common ground whenever possible, but unfortunately, Republicans, from the beginning of this presidency, have adopted a take-it-or-leave-it, go-at-it-alone strategy,” he said, which is part of why, he added, Proposition 50 is so important.

In the current shutdown, Democrats said they will not vote for a funding bill unless it extends tax credits in the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire for many Americans at the end of the year and reverses cuts to Medicaid that Republicans passed in July’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

If the ACA credits expire, premiums would on average more than double for Americans on the enhanced tax credit, one health policy research firm found. But Republicans point out they come with a price: The Congressional Budget Office estimates they would cost the government $350 billion over the next decade.

The bill, which is now law, will cut Medicaid spending by $793 billion, the CBO estimated, and lead to 7.8 million Americans losing their insurance.

On the government shutdown, Richard Balogun, a member of Sunday’s First AME congregation, thinks fighting for healthcare is a worthwhile cause.

“Isn’t it amazing that in England, Australia … you can have national healthcare? Maybe you don’t get treated within the first hour, but you get treated,” he said. In America, “you have to ask yourself sometimes, if I’m going to the emergency room, can I afford that thousands of dollars I’m going to have to pay? That should not be the case in this country.”

A government shutdown has consequences: 2.3 million civilian federal employees are going without pay — roughly 750,000 of whom are furloughed. When the employees are back-paid after the government reopens, that’ll correspond to roughly $400 million of taxpayer money spent every day of the shutdown to pay employees who were not working, the CBO estimates.

Beyond National Park closures and air travel delays, food programs for low-income families could run dry without a funding bill. The Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC) can see effects as soon as one week after a shutdown, the CEO of the National WIC Assn. said. Meanwhile, SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) could also run out of funding further down the line.

Republicans blame Democrats for shutting down the government over their healthcare concerns, but Jeffries pinned it on Republicans, who’ve refused to negotiate.

To Scott, the pink her congregation was wearing to support breast cancer survivors only emphasized the importance of access to healthcare. (Jeffries sported a pink tie.)

“More people need to know what’s going on, so just having him go from church to church, mostly in the Black neighborhoods — that’s where we have the most people: in our churches,” Scott said. “Some may hear the word, see something on fake news, but we know in the church you’re going to hear truth.”

A proposal to explore removing Los Angeles police officers from traffic enforcement is stuck in gridlock. Again.

The initiative to take the job of pulling over bad drivers away from cops is months behind schedule, frustrating reform advocates and some city leaders who argue that Los Angeles is missing an on-ramp toward the future of road safety.

Local officials first raised the prospect during the national reckoning on racial injustice that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, but the plan has progressed in sluggish fits and starts since then. Backers thought that they had scored an important victory with the release in May 2023 of a long-promised study mapping out how most enforcement could be done by unarmed civilian workers.

Last summer, the City Council requested follow-up reports from various city departments to figure out how to do that and gave a three-month deadline. But more than year later, most of the promised feasibility studies have yet to materialize.

“I’m very upset about the delay,” said Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, one of the proposal’s early champions. “Generally speaking, when you try to do a big reform like this, at least some portion of the people who want to do the work are very motivated to change the status quo — and I don’t think we have that here.”

He said there was blame to go around for the continued delays, but that he’s encouraged by his conversations with officials from the involved departments that studies will be completed — a precursor to legislation that would allow for re-imagining traffic safety.

At the same time, he said that he still saw a role for armed police in certain traffic situations.

“I don’t even think we need to be pulling people over at all for vehicle violations, especially for those that don’t pose any public safety risks,” he said, before adding: “If somebody’s going 90 miles an hour down Crenshaw Boulevard, that person does need to be stopped immediately and they do need to be stopped by somebody with a gun.”

In a unanimous vote in June 2024, the council directed city transportation staff and other departments to come back within 90 days with feasibility reports about the cost and logistics of numerous proposals, including creating unarmed civilian teams to respond to certain traffic issues and investigate accidents. Also under exploration were ideas to limit fines in poorer communities and end stops for minor infractions, such as expired tags or air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror.

Of the dozen or so requests made by the council, only two reports by the city’s transportation department have been completed so far, officials said.

Both of the studies — one assessing parking and traffic fines, and the other looking at how so-called “self-enforcing infrastructure” such as adding more speed bumps, roundabouts and other street modifications could help reduce speeding and unsafe driving — are “pending” before an ad hoc council committee focused on unarmed alternatives to police, according to an LADOT spokesman. The committee will need to approve the reports before they can be acted on by the full council, he said in a brief statement.

Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon Tso, the council’s top policy advisor, said she understands frustration over the delays. She said the protracted timeline was also at least partly caused by difficulties in obtaining reliable data from some of the participating departments, but declined to point any fingers. Two additional reports are in the final stages of being finalized and should be released by the end of the year, she said.

Although top LAPD officials have in the past signaled a willingness to relinquish certain traffic duties, others inside the department have dismissed similar proposals as fanciful and argued the city needs to crack down harder on reckless driving at a time when traffic fatalities have outpaced homicides citywide.

Privately, some police supervisors and officers complain about what they see as left-leaning politicians and activists taking away an effective tool for helping to get guns and drugs off the streets. They argue that traffic stops — if conducted properly and constitutionally — are also a deterrent for erratic driving.

A recently passed state law allowed the use of use of automated speeding cameras on a pilot basis in L.A. and a handful of other California cities.

Some advocates, however, are leery of relying on technology and punitive fines that can continue historical harms, particularly for communities of color.

“It’s been just a big bureaucratic slog,” said Chauncee Smith, of Catalyst California, which is part of a broader coalition of reform advocacy groups pushing for an end to all equipment and moving violation stops.

While L.A. has spent more than a year finishing a “study of a study,” he said, places such as Virginia, Connecticut and Philadelphia have taken meaningful action to transform traffic enforcement by passing bans on certain types of low-level police stops.

He cited mounting research in other cities that showed road improvements along high-injury street corridors were more effective at changing driver behaviors, ultimately reducing the number of traffic-related deaths and serious injuries more than the threat of being ticketed. But he also acknowledged the difficulty of making such changes in L.A.’s notoriously fragmented approach to planning and delivering infrastructure projects.

Smith and other advocates have also argued for an outright ban on so-called pretextual stops, in which police use a minor violation as justification to stop someone in order to investigate whether a more serious crime has occurred.

The LAPD has reined in the practice in recent years under intense public pressure but never abandoned it. Further changes could require legislation and are likely to face stiff opposition from police unions such as the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which has been highly vocal in its criticism of the pretext policy change.

Leslie Johnson, chief culture officer for Community Coalition, a South L.A.-based nonprofit , said that despite the delays the organization plans to press ahead with efforts to reimagine public safety and to keep pressure on public officials to ensure the study results don’t get buried like past efforts. She said that there is renewed urgency to push through the changes after a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that critics says has opened the door to widespread racial profiling.

“Even though we’re a sanctuary city, we’re concerned that these prextexual stops could be leveraged” by federal immigration authorities, she said.

I am standing on what looks like a cramped, dark city street. A tavern is around a corner, a police department in front of me. And I’m lost.

That’s when I hear a whisper. “Psst.” I turn, and see a puppet peeping his head out of a secret opening of a door. Over here,” he says, and I find myself leaning in to listen to this furry, oval-faced creature in the shadows. He’ll help me, he says — that is if I can clear his name. See, another puppet has been murdered, and everyone right now is a suspect.

Campaign posters for puppet candidates for mayor inside Appleseed Avenue. “Election Day” is a tale of political espionage with puppet-on-puppet violence.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

I am playing a gamed called “Election Day” at Appleseed Avenue, a relatively new escape room in a multi-story strip mall in Newhall. The puppet world is in the midst of a crisis, torn over whether humans should be allowed to wander the fictional street of Appleseed Avenue. My role is that of a detective, and throughout this game of fatal political espionage, I encounter multiple puppet characters — electricians, would-be-mayors, gangsters, dead puppets.

Drama ensues, and that’s where we humans come in, helping the puppets crack the case before we’re banned from their world once and for all. One needn’t be up on the state of puppet politics to participate — and don’t worry, the domestic affairs of Appleseed Avenue are relatively divorced from those of our own. Only a penchant for silly absurdity, and a stomach for puppet-on-puppet violence, is required.

While the look of the puppets may be inspired by, say, “Sesame Street,” with characters that are all big mouths and large eyes, the tone of “Election Day” leans a bit more adult. Recommended for ages 13 and older, “Election Day” will feature puppets in perilous conditions. And if you’re playing as a medical examiner, be prepared to get a glimpse at a mini puppet morgue.

Guests will play as detectives or medical examiners in Appleseed Avenue’s “Election Day.”

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

“Sometimes people do think, ‘Oh, this is for little kids.’ Not quite,” says Patrick Fye, who created the experience with Matt Tye. “We call it PG-13.”

“We wanted that dichotomy,” says Tye. “Really silly puppet-y characters in a gritty world.”

Fye and Tye are veterans of the local escape room scene — Fye the creator of Evil Genius Escape Rooms and Tye the developer of Arcane Escape Rooms. “Election Day,” however, while a timed experience, isn’t a pure escape room. Think of it more as a story that unfolds and needs solving. We’re not trapped. In fact, one puzzle actually utilizes the waiting room, as “Election Day” toys with the idea of traversing the human world and a puppet universe.

Patrick Fye and Matthew Tye, founders of Appleseed Avenue, along with their lookalike puppets.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Puppets weren’t necessarily the driving idea behind their joint venture in Appleseed Avenue. Creating a so-called escape room that was more narrative based was the objective. They wanted a room, for instance, where puzzles felt natural rather than forced. “Election Day” isn’t a space, say, with complex cipher codes to untangle. I was reminded of old-fashioned adventure video games, where one is prompted to look at objects, combine them or go on scavenger hunts, like the one prompted by the puppet I met in an alley.

Puppets were simply a means to an end.

“How can we make something that feels like you’re actually in the story and has more video game-y elements, as opposed to, ‘I’m in an Egyptian tomb. Here’s a padlock,’ ” says Fye. “We were trying to figure out how to mix the diegetics with the overall design. We stumbled on crimes and puppets because we thought it was fun and funny.”

One problem: Neither had created puppets or puppeteered before. Enter online classes, where Tye learned how to craft arm-rod puppets.

“We thought it was the coolest idea we had,” Tye says. When we both look at something and go, ‘We don’t know how to do all of this yet,’ we don’t let that stop us.”

Appleseed Avenue is home to an escape room featuring puppets. It doubles as the street name in which the game, “Election Day,” takes place.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

“Election Day” does unfold like a live-in video game. At times, we’re interacting with a screen, as puppets will relay us messages and quests. Often, we’ll explore the space, as the two have created an elaborate set. Teams are split. Half work as detectives, and half as medical examiners. We can communicate via an inter-room conference system, or simply run back and forth.

But listening to everything the puppets say is paramount, as clues are often hidden in dialogue. Both say they have done too many escape rooms where the story felt too divorced from the actions they were being asked to complete.

“We even say at the beginning of the game, ‘The story really matters.’ You have to pay attention to it,” Fye says. “There’s a moment I’ll never forget. We were doing a Titanic room, and we were in the engine room shoveling coal. But isn’t the ship sinking? What is happening? A lot of times a story is just set dressing.”

The initial response to “Election Day” has been positive, so much so that the two are set to debut a second game in 2026, a sci-fi room titled “Shadow Puppet.” The latter will utilize the same Appleseed Avenue set, although additional spaces will be built out. They’re also looking at some more kid-friendly options. Planned for 2027 is a game titled “Puppet Town Day,” in which little ones will receive passports that prompt them to interact with the puppet characters.

Wanted posters for puppets. Many are a suspect in Appleseed Avenue’s “Election Day.”

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

For now, however, think of Appleseed Avenue as part of greater Los Angeles escape room trend. Whether it’s Hatch Escapes with its corporate time-jumping game “The Ladder” or Ministry of Peculiarities with its spooky haunted house, creators here are emphasizing story. Appleseed Avenue is no different, introducing us to a wacky cast of puppet characters.

It also achieves a rare feat: It makes murder feel ridiculous.

Says Tye: “When there’s a guy named Alby Dunfer who’s getting it from a blowdart from a hitman, it’s like, ‘OK, this is fun.’ ”

Diane Keaton, the actress who starred in some of the biggest movies of the last half-century, including the “Godfather” and “Annie Hall,” while serving as a style trend-setter and a champion of Los Angeles’ past, has died. She was 79.

Her death was first reported by People and confirmed by The New York Times.

In an extraordinary run during the 1970s when she was dominant, her career spanned the high points of American cinema: Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia saga and several of Woody Allen’s urbane comedies, climaxing in an Oscar win for her culture-changing turn as the title character in 1977’s “Annie Hall.” Keaton’s catchphrase, “Well, la-di-dah,” became iconic.

Over her career, she received four Oscar nominations for lead actress, winning for “Annie Hall.”

Born in Southern California, Keaton achieved fame in the 1970s through her frequent collaborations with Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. She appeared in three “Godfather” movies as well as eight Allen films. Her star turn as Annie Hall earned her critical raves and made her a fashion icon of the era with Annie’s fedora hats, vests, ties and baggy pants. The Times once called her look “fluttery, vulnerable, almost unbearably adorable.”

“Annie’s style was Diane’s style — very eclectic,” designer Ralph Lauren said in a 1978 story in Vogue, soon after the movie came out. “She had a style that was all her own. Annie Hall was pure Diane Keaton.”

She was often asked if she got tired of the notoriety “Annie Hall” brought her, including the magazine covers, think pieces and fashion homages.

“No, I’m not. Everything is because of ‘Annie Hall’ with Woody. He has a great ear for women’s voices. I’m so grateful to him; he really gave me an opportunity that changed my life,” she told The Times in 2012. “I’m never disappointed about people talking to me about ‘Annie Hall.’ But I will say, a lot of people don’t know ‘Annie Hall’ exists, and that’s just the way it goes — goodbye! It’s bittersweet.”

She managed to capture the cultural zeitgeist in later films. In 1987, she played a successful businesswoman who upends her life to care for a relative’s baby in “Baby Boom.” In 2003, she won acclaim in “Something’s Gotta Give” for playing a successful writer navigating with romance in her 50s.

Keaton also got Oscar nominations for “Reds” (1982), “Marvin’s Room” (1996) and “Something’s Gotta Give.”

Keaton was a patron of the L.A. arts scene and also gained note as a champion of architecture preservation, remaking grand homes across the region. In collaboration with the Los Angeles Public Library, she edited a book of tabloid photos called “Local News” that ran in the Los Angeles Herald-Express.

In a 2018 interview with The Times, she said she felt privileged to still be working.

“I know what I am by now,” she said. “I know how old I am. I know what my limitations are and what I can and can’t do. So if something appeals to me, I’m definitely going to go for it.”

Later in life, Keaton became a major voice in architecture preservation.

She grew up Santa Ana during the post World War II housing boom in the 1950s and told The Times in an interviews she loved going to open houses with her father

“My father took me to see model homes, which I thought were palaces,” Keaton said.

She began buying and fixing up landmark homes around L.A., especially those of the Spanish colonial style.

“You have to get to know a house and try to keep its integrity. I try to honor the architect,” she said. “I love to go into an empty house. You look at the house and start to feel what it might need.”

“There are so many house treasures, unsung gems, all over Los Angeles,” she said.

Explaining how she came to edit the book of L.A. tabloid photos, Keaton told The Times the L.A. city library came up to her at a swap meet.

The librarian said, ‘There’s these files in the basement of the Central Library’ — the most beautiful building. I took a look. There are books and books to be made out of those images. This is a brilliant archive.”

In recent years, Keaton had become a hit on Instagram, posting photos of architecture, fashion and more. In an interview in 2019, she said she was still very active, eager to work and try new things but was also thinking more about her mortality.

“Of course, you think about it. How can you not?” she said. “I mean, I’m 73. How long do you live? It’s really important what those years are like.”

Keaton death brought tribute across Hollywood and beyond.

“She was a very special person and an incredibly gifted actor, who made each of her roles unforgettable. Her light will continue to shine through the art she leaves behind. Godspeed,” said Nancy Sinatra.

More than a thousand chanting healthcare workers, activists and local officials filled the Los Angeles Convention Center on Thursday afternoon to protest pending trillion-dollar healthcare cuts contained in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

“Healthcare right now in America is bad,” said Romond Phillips, a mobile clinic driver, who attended the rally. “I’m out on the front lines, so I see the need for it.”

David Rolas, a community advocate from South L.A., came out to the rally to show his support. He says, growing up, he remembers how hard it was to get access to healthcare and how many people died because of it. He was diagnosed with diabetes over 20 years ago, and today, he gets healthcare through Covered California.

“It’s helped me get the medicine I need, like my insulin,” said Rolas. “As I get older, I want to make sure I’m around for my kids. But my insulin isn’t cheap, so thankfully, I have affordable healthcare right now, but I will be affected by these changes.”

Earlier this week, Democrats in the Senate refused to vote for a Republican short-term funding bill, which excluded an extension of enhanced premium tax credits. These credits, enacted in 2021, helped healthcare plans offered through the Affordable Health Care Act (known as Obamacare) to remain affordable. Without an extension, the credits will expire.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was passed earlier this year, proposes nearly a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. With these changes, millions of Americans will face higher insurance premiums and possibly lose coverage. Democrats are fighting to get the subsidies extended and are demanding that Republicans reverse the Medicaid cuts.

The dispute over healthcare cuts led to the government shutdown this week.

At the rally, Holly Mitchell, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors who represents the city’s 2nd District, says she’s fearful of going back to the days before Obamacare. Her district is made up of 2 million Angelenos, with 850,000 enrolled in MediCal.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m not going back there,” Mitchell said. “Those are horrible, inhumane, dangerous times. Black, brown and poor people die at a higher rate than they should have because they didn’t have access to healthcare.”

The rally was organized by St. John’s Community Health, a nonprofit aimed at providing healthcare to underserved communities.

Jim Mangia, president of the organization, announced that St. John’s plans to build a coalition of community-based organizations, labor unions, clinics and hospitals that would get an affordable healthcare measure on next year’s county voting ballot.

“It would go directly to voters and raise hundreds of millions of dollars to save healthcare for our most vulnerable neighbors,” said Mangia. “It would build a national example that can be replicated across the country, to undermine Trump’s billionaire tax cuts, and restore the programs and healthcare our communities need so desperately.”

The working title for the initiative is the Los Angeles County Emergency and Essential Healthcare Restoration Measure. It’s still in its early stages, with ballot language being drafted. Mangia expects that the county would need to gather around $500 million to fill the new gaps Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will leave in residents’ healthcare plans.

Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove, who represents California’s 37th District, said cuts will hit her constituents hard, noting that there are 400,000 people who rely on Medicaid. About 3.5 million people in the state could lose their health insurance, she said.

“It’s about kicking people off of their healthcare benefits,” said Kamlager-Dove.

She blames the Republican party for the government shutdown, saying, “If they want to keep the government open, they would have, they would have negotiated with Democrats, but they chose not to.”

Republicans have, in turn, blamed Democrats for the closure and have said they are open to making changes to healthcare policy later.

Maybe this was a pressure-creating-diamonds situation.

Somehow in the 1930s, amid the immense stresses of economic collapse, natural disaster, Olympic anxiety and the looming shadow of World War II, Los Angeles built some of its best-loved architectural gems. The jaw-dropping lobby of the Pantages Theatre (1930), the hilltop domes of Griffith Observatory (1935), the grand halls of Union Station (1939) — all were produced in that harrowing decade.

How rough were the ’30s in L.A.? The Depression, beginning with the stock market crash in October 1929, put the brakes on new construction and farm production, pushing California unemployment to an estimated 28% in 1932. The City Council, meanwhile, was led by one of the most corrupt politicians in L.A. history, Mayor Frank Shaw.

The city did pull off the 1932 Summer Olympics, drawing a record 101,000 people to the Memorial Coliseum opening ceremony. But those Games drew only 1,332 athletes from 37 countries — half as many athletes as gathered for the 1928 Games in Amsterdam.

In 1933, the Long Beach quake killed more than 100 people and destroyed at least 70 schools. The 19-story Los Angeles General Medical Center was completed (and after decades mostly idle, is now being repurposed).

In 1934 and 1938, major floods along the Los Angeles, Santa Ana and San Gabriel rivers took scores of lives and prompted the Army Corps of Engineers to build Hansen Dam in the San Fernando Valley and encase 51 miles of the L.A. River in a concrete channel.

Begun in 1936 and completed in 1959, that channel might be among the city’s largest and least attractive man-made landmarks — in the words of historian Kevin Starr, “A tombstone of concrete.” But it does its job.

As the city weathered these changes, its signature industry shrunk, then bloomed, as movies (priced at about 25 cents) distracted the masses. The arrival of color deepened the spell, as did blockbusters like 1939’s “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz.”

The landmarks that went up during those years aren’t all great architectural innovations; many flow directly from the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne trends of the 1920s. But all carry hints about how Angelenos changed with the times.

As critic and author David Kipen has written: “If you don’t like the weather in San Francisco, they say, just wait five minutes. If you don’t like the architecture in Los Angeles, maybe give it ten.”

Here we take a year-by-year architectural stroll through the 1930s. You can enter most of these buildings, in some cases for free, in some cases by booking a tour, buying beer or seeing a show.

Veteran L.A. anchor Leslie Sykes signed off from behind KABC-TV Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” desk for the last time Tuesday. She is retiring after more than 30 years at the station.

“It is so hard to believe that this is my last day on this set,” the longtime co-anchor of the morning news show said while flanked by her colleagues. “It’s been the privilege of my life to wake up with you and to share your stories and to be welcomed into your homes every morning. I carry with me so many memories, so much laughter, endless gratitude for the trust you’ve placed in me.”

“I may be signing off but I will always be cheering for this city and this station, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you for letting me be part of your lives,” she concluded, before the St. Joseph High School marching band filed onto the set to salute their alum.

Sykes, who was born in San Diego, grew up in Compton. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta before eventually heading to Hattiesburg, Miss., for her first on-air post. She returned to her hometown to join KABC in 1994 as an on-air reporter before moving behind the anchor desk for the weekend, daytime and, eventually, the morning news show. Sykes announced her plans to retire last month.

ABC7’s tribute package to Sykes included a sendoff from David Muir as well as a sit-down interview with fellow anchor and friend Jovana Lara.

“[Sykes will] admit to some jitters in the beginning, but she was mostly fearless even when some of those stories proved bigger and more impactful,” Lara said in a voice-over on the reel that included clips highlighting Sykes’ life and career. “She’s been among the best covering local news and reporting from abroad.”

When asked about what it feels like to know that she is cherished by the local community, Sykes said she couldn’t believe it.

“I feel the love,” she said. “I feel the connection. And I just feel like this is my hometown, these are my people, and I’m just very grateful.”

A grainy circle flashes on the top-right corner of the screen at the Eagle Theater. The single-screen repertory cinema, run by the nonprofit organization Vidiots, was showing a 35-millimeter print of Paul Thomas Anderson’s psychological drama “The Master.”

The faint warning is easily missed by most viewers, but it appears every 10 minutes, alerting the projectionist to change the reel.

The auditorium was sold out. Audience members clapped as the film title appeared onscreen. There was a buzz in the air even before the lights faded to black with the standby line filled with hopefuls trying to grab a last-minute ticket. The stakes were high for the person manning the reel exchange.

Guests wait to enter the Vidiots movie theater for a movie night in Los Angeles.

Michael Rousselet, a projectionist at the Eagle Rock theater, often drinks a lot of coffee to stay alert during late-night screenings.

“If we do a good job, no one knows we exist,” Rousselet quipped as he showed off the projection booth. “If we mess up, everyone knows we exist.”

The carefully curated communal experience offered by repertory theaters is enduring the hardships of the box office, even after the pandemic, which led to the demise of some well-known cinemas. The famed Cinerama Dome and adjoining former Arclight theater on Sunset Boulevard have still not reopened, despite popular demand.

A Monday screening of a 35-millimeter copy of the 2007 film “Michael Clayton” by American Cinematheque sold out. Independent cinema has captured a niche population that has helped it prevail in a time when box office revenue is tumbling down.

Guests enter the movie theater at Vidiots in Los Angeles.

The summer box office season, which stretches from early May through Labor Day, grossed $3.67 billion in the U.S. and Canada, down slightly from last year and significantly less than the pre-pandemic norm of $4 billion. Some new films with major stars struggle to get anyone to show up. “Americana,” starring Sydney Sweeney, one of Hollywood’s top young stars, earned $500,000 during its opening weekend last month.

The unique cinematic experiences crafted by the different repertory theaters play a pivotal role in revitalizing the film industry in Los Angeles, according to Maggie Mackay, executive director of Vidiots.

“I don’t think you can [raise the next generation of film lovers] through one platform,” Mackay said, sitting down in her auditorium. “I don’t think you can fall in love with an art form by clicking a few times and observing it by yourself.”

Patrons at the bar of the Vidiots’ cinema in Los Angeles.

A 2024 study by Art House Convergence showed that between 2019 and 2024, audiences became younger and more diverse. The number of wide releases have also made the independent industry healthier, according to Rich Daughtridge, president of Independent Cinema Alliance.

Independent theaters “are still down compared to 2019, but the momentum attraction is going up,” he said.

Netflix bought the Egyptian Theatre from American Cinematheque for an undisclosed amount in 2020. The influx of money helped the organization grow the brand and host more screenings — the total jump from 500 screenings to 1,600 with 350,000 patrons visiting their theaters, according to Grant Moninger, artistic director at American Cinematheque.

Part of the reason audiences are choosing smaller theaters over multiplexes is the care and attention staff members put into each showing. The viewing experience at these revival theaters always starts with a crew member reminding the audience to stay away from their phones — they want everyone to enjoy the tiny scratches, dust specks and vibrant colors of the print they are showing.

Patrons watch a movie at Vidiots movie theater in Los Angeles.

“I think people are desperately in search of community right now and of feeling closer to other people and sharing things and not feeling disconnected by technology,” Sean Fennessey, the host of the podcast “The Big Picture,” said after the “Michael Clayton” screening.

“We’re very lucky in Los Angeles that we have so many great spaces … that are encouraging people to come together and hang out and laugh and cry and feel chills,” he added.

Each location offers Hollywood cinephiles and casual viewers alike options to catch a variety of movies based on their niche. Independent cinema has had the least trouble recruiting an audience post-pandemic, according to Art House Convergence.

The Vista Theater and the New Beverly show personal copies from the private collection of Quentin Tarantino, who saved the theaters from extinction. Its recent run of “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” sold out and warranted the Vista announcing a new run of it.

American Cinematheque hosted a festival of films handpicked by different podcasters, which sold out screenings in the middle of the week.

Guests wait to enter the Vidiots movie theater in Los Angeles.

Vidiots hosted a discussion with American Cinema Editors member Leslie Jones after a screening of 2012’s “The Master,” a filmed she worked on. The showing sold out and most of its audience stayed late for a Q&A discussion with her.

Regardless of the inspiration these repertory theaters provide with, say, retrospectives of Akira Kurosawa, the model is not bulletproof to the punches theaters have taken. Organizations like Vidiots and American Cinematheque still rely on their nonprofit status.

These organizations count on donations and memberships. Access to directors, actors, prints and people in the industry also plays an important role in keeping afloat, according to Moninger.

“Our job is to get everybody in [the theater]. You can’t just say, ‘Hey, we’re a nonprofit,’” he said.

The uncertainty of the model does leave room for growth, according to Roger Durling, the executive director of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Vidiots technical director Boris Ibanez sets up a section of the film in a projector in the projection booth of Vidiots movie theater.

The nonprofit organization recently purchased the Film Center, a five-screen multiplex, in the downtown Santa Barbara area. It is the second five-screen theater they have purchased, and it will also screen films during the festival every winter.

Throughout the year, when the theaters aren’t showing movies for the festival, the organization will maintain its existence through a repertory model.

“The nonprofit aspect allows you to concentrate more on the artistic side as opposed to thinking, ‘I just need to make money,’” Durling said.

But the thought is still on his mind.

“The more you concentrate on the artistic side of it, the money will take care of itself.”

I am sitting in a tent placed inside the parlor of a Victorian-era house. Before me lies a spirit board, a lone tarot card and a black scrying mirror. I am here to commune with the dead.

There is no medium. It is only myself and eight other attendees— our guide has left the tent. Though earlier we could hear tension-rattling music setting a cryptic mood, now there is nothing. Lights? Off. The tent has gone pitch black. At this particular moment, there’s only the sound of our breaths, our thoughts and perhaps some new guests.

Welcome to “Phasmagorica,” what composer-turned-magician-turned-spiritual explorer BC Smith describes as “a séance reimagined as art.” It’s running this month at the Heritage Square Museum, itself a location imbued with history and mystery, the site of the homes of Los Angeles as they existed a century ago.

I’ll get right to the point: I did not have an encounter with the dead. And yet I left “Phasmagorica” deeply curious. That’s because Smith sets up the evening as an exploration of the modern Western history of communing with the deceased, attempting to conjure the feeling of a séance as it occurred in late 1880s America, albeit with a better sound system and all the Death in the Afternoon cocktails you can consume (note: you should not consume very many).

The “experiment” — Smith shirks at the word performance — is designed, he says, for believers and nonbelievers. He himself falls somewhere in the middle.

“I’m a hopeful skeptic,” Smith says. “If I were a 100% believer, ‘Phasmagorica’ would be a church. I just wanted to create a space that started a conversation for people.”

It is relevant to point out that Smith is also a magician, a member of the Magic Castle, home itself to a popular séance. While Smith has not conducted a Magic Castle séance, he has — and will — orchestrate what he refers to as a “theatrical séance,” for which he is present as a storyteller. “Phasmagorica” is different, Smith says, and was born out of those more dramatic performances, in part because he kept encountering the unaccountable.

“It’s highly curated,” Smith says of a core difference between a theatrical séance and “Phasmagorica,” as the former will be tailored specifically to guest needs and requests. “But people were experiencing a lot in those séances that I could not explain,” Smith says. He recites a story that opens “Phasmagorica” of a shadow reaching out and touching someone on a shoulder. Smith says he witnessed this phenomena, and at that point decided to create an event that focused on realism and dispensed with the notion that there could be any illusions or magic.

BC Smith’s “Phasmagorica” is not a theatrical or magic performance. The event aims to recreate the feel of a vintage séance.

(Roger Kisby / For The Times)

I was surprised, for instance, when Smith left the room. At that point, we were with only a television, which narrates a short history of séances in America before instructing us to hold a pendulum over a spirit board. Knowing Smith’s past, I went in expecting more of a show. Instead, we are prodded to examine a tarot card, peer into the scrying mirror and ask questions to our spirit board.

“It becomes more personal,” Smith says. “Even in my theatrical séances, I’ve had people want to cut me off mid-sentence and say, ‘This just happened to me.’ And they want to spend the next five minutes talking about it. At the end of the day, I think what people like is that this is all about them.”

And still, Smith says, audiences are looking for wizardry. But there’s no tricks of the light, no hidden fans. He stresses multiple times in this interview and at the start of “Phasmagorica” that this is “not theater, not a performance, not a show.”

“I’ve had people walk out of the room and swear there was a magnet in the pendulum board,” he says. “Or swear there was some effect that made them see a person standing. People still have an explanation that I had something to do with it. Whatever helps you sleep with the light off.”

While numerous cultures and spiritual movements have throughout history long attempted to commune with the dead, a séance, says Lisa Morton, author of “Calling the Spirits: A History of Séances,” is a relatively recent occurrence. She and Smith trace their popularity to the Fox sisters, Kate and Maggie, who performed to packed crowds in the late 1880s in New York, attempting to demonstrate that spirits could speak via a series of raps on the walls.

BC Smith calls “Phasmagorica” an “experiment,” shirking at the word performance. (Roger Kisby / For The Times)

Prior to the Fox sisters, Morton says, attempts to commune with the beyond, broadly speaking, were a more personal and ritualistic affair. “The Greeks believed that sleeping on a grave might give you dreams in which you communed with a spirit,” she says. Popular myths, too, would portray the practice as borderline arcane. In Homer’s “The Odyssey,” for instance, a bridge to the spirit world is reached only after a complex series of sacrifices and offerings — a potent mix of sweet wine and the blood of a lamb.

“The séance comes along, and not only is it a group activity, but it suggests that anyone can communicate with the spirits of the dead,” Morton says. “You just need a medium — someone who can enter a trance state and open themselves to receiving spirit communications. It was done with a group, and in the comfort of someone’s home. Those were startlingly new ideas.”

Morton has taken part in Smith’s “Phasmagorica.” She, too, appreciated the historical emphasis, specifically the way a musician performs after the séance as guests mingle with one another and share their experience. Music was a big part of early séances, Morton says.

“People would sit around a table and the lights would be lowered and they would sing,” Morton says “Now, singing did have a scammy double purpose, as they allowed the medium to start doing things in the dark unheard. But these evenings were wondrous for people, and I thought that was what BC Smith captured really well.”

“Phasmagorica” has been running on select weekends at Heritage Square since the late summer. Smith intends to continue adding events throughout the fall as his schedule allows, announcing them on Instagram. Though intimate, they do typically sell out. It’s traveling via word of mouth, theorizes Smith, because people today are increasingly searching for “connection and meaning.”

Heritage Square Museum is itself a location imbued with history and mystery, the site of the homes of Los Angeles as they existed a century ago.

(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)

“The experience is really up to you,” he says. “I think we’re all searching for something. This is a safe space to explore.”

Late in life, Maggie Fox denounced the spiritualism movement that she and her sister Kate had helped start, demonstrating the ways in which they had fooled their audiences. Smith again stresses that he himself is a “hopeful skeptic,” and purposefully stays out of the experience so that guests aren’t trying to figure out if he’s holding onto any secrets.

And yet he says, “Phasmagorica” has permanently changed him. He notes that his wife is a commercial airline pilot and must travel often.

“When she’s away, I sleep with a night-light,” he says. “Maybe that’s the answer to the question whether I believe or not.”

There are certain first names that are also businesses that tap into the Angeleno collective unconsciousness and bring a smile of familiarity even to those who’ve never patronized the place.

Tommy’s Burgers, especially. Frederick’s of Hollywood. Phillippe the Original. Nate’n Al’s. Lupe’s and Lucy’s.

And, of course, Leonardo’s.

The nightclub chain with five spots across Southern California has entertained patrons since 1972. Its cumbia nights, Mexican regional music performances and a general air of puro pinche parri bridged the gap in the cultural life of Latino L.A. between the days of the Million Dollar Theater and today’s corrido tumbado stars.

Its namesake, Leonardo Lopez, came to Santa Monica from Mexico in the late 1960s, at age 17, to work as a dishwasher and proceeded to create a cultural empire.

On Friday, the Los Angeles City Council honored him in a celebration that reflected the joy and diversity — but especially the resilience — of Latino LA.

His family members count at least 40 businesses among them, including restaurants, banquet halls, concert venues, equestrian sports teams, political firms that work Southern California’s corridors of power, and the Pico Rivera Sports Arena, Southern California’s cathedral of Mexican horse culture. They were one of the main forces in the 2023 fight that carved out exemptions for traditional Mexican horse competitions such as charrería and escaramuza when the L.A. City Council banned rodeos.

“Our family is like a pyramid, with every person supporting each other at every level,” said Leonardo’s son, Fernando. “And my dad is at the very top.”

A resplendent celebration

He and about 40 other relatives went to Friday’s City Council meeting to see their patriarch recognized. They strode through City Hall’s august corridors in charro outfits and Stetsons, berets and hipster glasses, leopard-print blouses and sharp ties — the diversity of the Mexican American experience in an era where too many people want to demonize them.

Leonardo was the most resplendent of them all, sporting an outfit with his initials embroidered on his sleeves and his back. A silver cross on his billowing red necktie gleamed as much as his smile.

“You work and work and work to hope you do something good, and it’s a blessing when others recognize you for it,” Lopez told me in Spanish as we waited in a packed conference room for the council meeting to start. He gestured to everyone. “But this is the true blessing in my life.”

Sitting at the head of a long table, Lopez doted on his grandson but also greeted well-wishers like Esbardo Carreño. He’s a historian who works for the government of Durango, the state where Lopez was born in 1950.

“Don Leonardo came with a bigger vision than others,” Carreño said in Spanish. “But he never left his people back home,” noting how Lopez has funded restoration projects in Durango’s eponymous capital, a welcome arch at the entrance to the entrepreneur’s hometown of La Noria and more.

“My tío and dad and my other tíos made it in L.A. because there was no Plan B,” said Lopez’s nephew, Lalo Lopez. He was shepherding guests toward his uncle while also talking up a fundraiser later that evening at the Sports Arena for L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath. “That’s a lesson all us kids learned fast.”

Spanish-language reporters pulled Don Leonardo into the City Hall press room for an impromptu conference, where he talked about his career and offered child-rearing advice.

“Get them busy early,” he joked, “so they don’t have that free time to do bad things.”

Lopez motioned to Fernando and his son Fernando Jr. — both wearing charro suits — to join him at the podium.

“I got them to follow me” to be proud of their Mexican heritage. “Today, it’s the reverse — now I follow them!”

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez then grabbed Lopez. The meeting was about to start.

Always the sharpest-dressed member of the council, Rodriguez didn’t disappoint with a taupe-toned tejana that perfectly complemented her gray-streaked hair, black-framed glasses and white outfit.

Her introduction of Lopez was even better.

“His spaces have created a place where we [Latinos] can be authentically who we are,” said Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley. She praised Lopez’s life’s work as an important balm and corrective “at a time especially when our community is under attack.”

“I want to thank you, Don Leonardo, for being that example of how we can really be the force of resilience and strength in the wake of adversity,” the council member concluded. “It’s a reminder to everyone who’s feeling down that we will persevere.”

Lopez offered a few words of thanks in English, tipping his sombrero to council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who had previously honored him in 2017 when each council member recognized an immigrant entrepreneur in their district.

Harris-Dawson returned the respect.

“You are such angels in this city — L.A. is not L.A. without the Lopez family,” he said, noting how two Leonardo’s stood in his South L.A. district and “y’all never left” even as other live music venues did. Harris-Dawson told attendees how the Lopez family had long catered jazz festivals and youth sports leagues without ever asking for anything in return.

“The only time I’ve seen you closed was that weekend of the terrible ICE raids,” Harris-Dawson said. “And you all were back the next week ready to go and you had security out. … Thank you all for treating us like family.”

The Lopez clan gathered around their jefe at the podium for one final photo op. Doctors and contractors, retirees and high schoolers: an all-American family and as Angeleno as they come. See ustedes soon at — where else? — Leonardo’s.

Today’s top stories

Colorado River water flows in the Central Arizona Project aqueduct beside a neighborhood in Phoenix.

(Kelvin Kuo / Los Angeles Times)

The dwindling Colorado River

• A group of experts say Western states urgently need to cut water use to avert a deepening crisis on the Colorado River.
• The river’s major reservoirs are less than one-third full, and another dry winter would push reservoirs toward critically low levels.
• They say the Trump administration should act to ensure reductions in water use.

Trump’s $1.2-billion call to remake UCLA

• A Times review of the Trump administration’s settlement proposal to UCLA lays out sweeping demands on numerous aspects of campus life.
• The government has fined UCLA nearly $1.2 billion to settle allegations of civil rights violations.
• Hiring, admissions and the definitions of gender are among the areas the Department of Justice seeks to change.

A looming fight over vaccines

• After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ousted vaccine experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, California is now making its own vaccine guidance.
• The CDC is no longer a trusted source for vaccine guidance, some experts now say.
• California and medical groups are urging more people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 compared with the Trump administration.

Your utility bills

The Emmys were last night

What else is going on

Commentary and opinions

• There will be cooling in all L.A. rentals by 2032. Here’s how contributors Sophia M. Charan and Hye Min Park suggest you survive the heat until then.
• Wait, what happened to saving the children? California columnist Anita Chabria points out that California congressmen dodge the issue.

This morning’s must-read

Other must-reads

For your downtime

(Amir Mrzae / For The Times)

Going out

Staying in

And finally … your photo of the day

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Today’s great photo is from Times photographer Allen J. Schaben of ctor Kathy Bates on the red carpet at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. See Allen’s photos from the awards show here.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team

Jim Rainey, staff writer
Diamy Wang, homepage intern
Izzy Nunes, audience intern
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
Andrew Campa, Sunday writer
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to [email protected]. Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

The crew had just poured a concrete foundation on a vacant lot in Altadena when I pulled up the other day. Two workers were loading equipment onto trucks and a third was hosing the fresh cement that will sit under a new house.

I asked how things were going, and if there were any problems finding enough workers because of ongoing immigration raids.

“Oh, yeah,” said one worker, shaking his head. “Everybody’s worried.”

The other said that when fresh concrete is poured on a job this big, you need a crew of 10 or more, but that’s been hard to come by.

“We’re still working,” he said. “But as you can see, it’s just going very slowly.”

Eight months after thousands of homes were destroyed by wildfires, Altadena is still a ways off from any major rebuilding, and so is Pacific Palisades. But immigration raids have hammered the California economy, including the construction industry. And the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this week that green-lights racial profiling has raised new fears that “deportations will deplete the construction workforce,” as the UCLA Anderson Forecast warned us in March.

There was already a labor shortage in the construction industry, in which 25% to 40% of workers are immigrants, by various estimates. As deportations slow construction, and tariffs and trade wars make supplies scarcer and more expensive, the housing shortage becomes an even deeper crisis.

And it’s not just deportations that matter, but the threat of them, says Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist at the Anderson Forecast. If undocumented people are afraid to show up to install drywall, Nickelsburg told me, it “means you finish homes much more slowly, and that means fewer people are employed.”

Now look, I’m no economist, but it seems to me that after President Trump promised the entire country we were headed for a “golden age” of American prosperity, it might not have been in his best interest to stifle the state with the largest economy in the nation.

Especially when many national economic indicators aren’t exactly rosy, when we have not seen the promised decrease in the price of groceries and consumer goods, and when the labor statistics were so embarrassing he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with another one, only to see more grim jobs numbers a month later.

I had just one economics class in college, but I don’t recall a section on the value of deporting construction workers, car washers, elder-care workers, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners and other people whose only crime — unlike the violent offenders we were allegedly going to round up — is a desire to show up for work.

Now here, let me give you my email address. It’s [email protected].

And why am I telling you that?

Because I know from experience that some of you are frothing, foaming and itching to reach out and tell me that illegal means illegal.

So go ahead and email me if you must, but here’s my response:

We’ve been living a lie for decades.

People come across the border because we want them to. We all but beg them to. And by we, I mean any number of industries — many of them led by conservatives and by Trump supporters — including agribusiness, and hospitality, and construction, and healthcare.

Why do you think so many employers avoid using the federal E-Verify system to weed out undocumented workers? Because they don’t want to admit that many of their employees are undocumented.

In Texas, Republican lawmakers can’t stop demonizing immigrants, and they can’t stop introducing bills by the dozens to mandate wider use of E-Verify. But the most recent one, like all the ones before it, just died.

Why?

Because the tough talk is a lie and there’s no longer any shame in hypocrisy. It’s a climate of corruption in which no one has the integrity to admit what’s clear — that the Texas economy is propped up in part by an undocumented workforce.

At least in California, six Republican lawmakers all but begged Trump in June to ease up on the raids, which were affecting business on farms and construction sites and in restaurants and hotels. Please do some honest work on immigration reform instead, they pleaded, so we can fill our labor needs in a more practical and humane way.

Makes sense, but politically, it doesn’t play as well as TV ads recruiting ICE commandos to storm the streets and arrest tamale vendors, even as the barbarians who ransacked the Capitol and beat up cops enjoy their time as presidentially pardoned patriots.

Small businesses, restaurants and mom and pops are being particularly hard hit, says Maria Salinas, chief executive of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Those who survived the pandemic were then kneecapped again by the raids.

With the Supreme Court ruling, Salinas told me, “I think there’s a lot of fear that this is going to come back harder than before.”

From a broader economic perspective, the mass deportations make no sense, especially when it’s clear that the vast majority of people targeted are not the violent criminals Trump keeps talking about.

Giovanni Peri, director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, noted that we’re in the midst of a demographic transformation, much like that of Japan, which is dealing with the challenges of an aging population and restrictive immigration policies.

“We’ll lose almost a million working-age Americans every year in the next decade just because of aging,” Peri told me. “We will have a very large elderly population and that will demand a lot of services in … home healthcare [and other industries], but there will be fewer and fewer workers to do these types of jobs.”

Dowell Myers, a USC demographer, has been studying these trends for years.

“The numbers are simple and easy to read,” Myers said. Each year, the worker-to-retiree ratio decreases, and it will continue to do so. This means we’re headed for a critical shortage of working people who pay into Social Security and Medicare even as the number of retirees balloons.

If we truly wanted to stop immigration, Myers said, we should “send all ICE workers to the border. But if you take people who have been here 10 and 20 years and uproot them, there’s an extreme social cost and also an economic cost.”

At the Pasadena Home Depot, where day laborers still gather despite the risk of raids, three men held out hope for work. Two of them told me they have legal status. “But there’s very little work,” said Gavino Dominguez.

The third one, who said he’s undocumented, left to circle the parking lot and offer his services to contractors.

Umberto Andrade, a general contractor, was loading concrete and other supplies into his truck. He told me he lost one fearful employee for a week, and another for two weeks. They came back because they’re desperate and need to pay their bills.

“The housing shortage in California was already terrible before the fires, and now it’s 10 times worse,” said real estate agent Brock Harris, who represents a developer whose Altadena rebuilding project was temporarily slowed after a visit from ICE agents in June.

With building permits beginning to flow, Harris said, “for these guys to slow down or shut down job sites is more than infuriating. You’re going to see fewer people willing to start a project.”

Most people on a job site have legal status, Harris said, “but if shovels never hit the ground, the costs are being borne by everybody, and it’s slowing the rebuilding of L.A.”

Lots of bumps on the road to the golden age of prosperity.

[email protected]

Tell someone about “The Cortège,” and it may inspire as much apprehension as it does curiosity.

A theatrical procession running this month at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, “The Cortège” promises to explore grief, loss, mourning and our collective disconnection from one another. It’s a dramatic interpretation of a funeral, albeit one with jubilant street-inspired dance and a Sasquatch-like creature. And robots and drones.

I arrived at “The Cortège” just weeks removed from attending a very real, deeply personal funeral for my mother. Did I want to revisit that space as part of my weekend’s entertainment, and would the show inspire a new round of tears? The answer to both turned out to be yes.

“The Cortège” is alternately playful and serious as it explores the cycle of life.

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

For “The Cortège” approaches a difficult subject matter with an imaginative question: What if we explore grief not with isolation or solemness, but with wonder? It’s a prompt that’s ripe for an era of divisive politics, financial stress and often isolating technology.

Beginning at twilight and extending into the evening, “The Cortège” starts with an overture, a six-piece band performing in the center of the field. We’re seated either on the grass on portable pads with backs or in folding chairs on an elevated platform.

Soon, a mist erupts on a far end of the field; a lone figure emerges who crawls and then walks to the center. He’ll move in place for much of the show, remaining silent as a fantastical life transpires around him — dancers, ornately costumed characters and larger-than-life puppets will surreally reflect the journey of life.

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Inspired as much by Walt Disney’s approach to fairy tales as, say, Carl Jung’s theories of collective consciousness, “The Cortège” is a revival of an ancient art — the procession — that aims to be a modern rite of passage. A ritual, “The Cortège” is a communal experience, one that seeks to erase borders between audience and performer while imagining a more optimistic world.

Think of it as theater as a healing exercise, or simply an abstracted evening with elaborate, vibrant costumes and choreographed drones creating new constellations in the sky. It’s also a bit of a dance party, with original music composed by Tokimonsta, El Búho and Boreta.

““The Cortège” builds to a final that invites audience participation — and maybe a little dancing.

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

“The Cortège” comes from Jeff Hull, a Bay Area artist best known for devising participatory and mysterious experiences that have used real-world settings as a game board — some may recall the beloved underground experiment “The Jejune Institute.” This, however, is a more personal show. It’s informed as much by the struggles and challenges of adulthood as it is the awe and playfulness that Hull experienced when he was younger, specifically his time working as a teen at Oakland’s Children’s Fairyland, a theme park-like playground for young kids.

“Every day I would follow the yellow brick road and have a magic key and slide down a rabbit hole, and I would wonder why the rest of the world wasn’t like that,” Hull says. “I’ve been trying to make it like that ever since. Why can’t we play? Why does it all have to be barriers? That’s the motivation from a childlike place, but now I also have motivation from a wise elder space.”

In turn, “The Cortège” is part festive renewal and part philosophical recollection. At the start, music is mournful but not quite sorrowful, a lightly contemplative jazz-inspired feel anchored by a steel hang drum. The music shifts through reggae stylings and Eastern rhythms. Performers are robed and instruments are carried on ramshackle wheelbarrows, setting up the transitory mood of the night.

What follows will touch on religious and mystical iconography — we’ll meet three lantern-carrying masked figures, for instance, with exaggerated, regal adornments as they herald a birth. Expect a mixture of old and new technologies. Drones will form to mark a passage of eras, a marching band will conjure New Orleans revelry, and towering, furry creatures may invite youthful spiritedness while militant, robotic canines will represent clashing images of human ingenuity and violence.

Think of “The Cortège” as a ceremonial rite of passage — a show that wants audiences to find healing via community.

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

For much of the show, we are asked to wear glowing headphones. Their luminescence highlights the crowd while also creating a more intimate, reflective atmosphere. It’s not quite a sound bath and it’s not quite a play, but as more figures enter the field — some haunting and dreamlike with their bodies shaped like arrowheads, and others sillier bursts of feathered color — “The Cortège” takes on a ceremonial, meditative feel.

While some may indeed come for the outsized costumes and extended dance sequences, Hull says the show is the entertainment equivalent of “shadow work,” that is the therapeutic uncovering of suppressed, forgotten or hidden memories.

“Shadow work is something we need to do as individuals, but it’s also something we need to do as a culture,” Hull says. “Let’s look at ourselves. Let’s look at what we don’t want to admit about ourselves. How can we bring that to life? When you do it as an individual, we’re actually partly doing something for the collective. That’s a big aspect of ‘The Cortège.’ Let’s do shadow work as a cultural moment. It’s not all just meant to be entertainment.”

Audiences are asked to wear headphones during “The Cortège,” creating an intimate relationship with the music.

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

Ultimately, however, “The Cortège” is an invitation, a hand extended to the audience asking us to consider and reimagine our own journey through life. Emerging from both the traumatic end of a relationship and the death of my mother, I appreciated the way in which “The Cortège” sought to put our existence in perspective, to reinterpret, essentially, the individual as the communal for a celebratory reminder that we’ve all struggled as much as we’ve dreamed.

Hull says “The Cortège” was born from a time of strife.

“What you mentioned, losing a loved one and going through a separation, my version of that is I had Guillain-Barre Syndrome and was walking with a cane. My wife was diagnosed with cancer and then she lost her father. And this was all during a time when the sun didn’t come out. It was dark out, all day, because of the California wildfires. It was a shift between taking everything personally and realizing that all the things I mentioned were things we all have to go through.”

The show is purposefully abstracted, says Hull, to allow audience members to attach their own narratives. It’s a work of pageantry, inspired in part by Hull’s fascination with medieval morality plays, specifically the story of “Everyman,” an examination of self and of our relationship to a higher power.

“The tale of ‘Everyman’ was one in which a universal protagonist met with all of the challenges of life and a reckoning with himself and with God,” Hull says. “That’s literally what we’re doing here. It is a revival of ancient European pageantry.”

Drones will form constellations in the sky during “The Cortège.”

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

Hull’s name is well-known among those who follow what is the still-emerging niche of so-called immersive entertainment, media that, broadly speaking, asks participants to take on an interactive role. Those who went deep into “The Jejune Institute,” which ran in the late 2000s in San Francisco and inspired a documentary as well as the AMC series “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” could discover a narrative that examined the fragility — or the allure — of human belief systems. It was often, for instance, compared to a cult.

“The Cortège” is clearly a departure. And Hull today is skeptical of the word “immersive.” Though “The Cortege” invites audiences onto the field in its final act and then asks participants to join in a reception (the afterlife), Hull finds much of what is classified today as immersive to be lacking, emphasizing spectacle and imagery over human emotion.

“The Cortège,” says Hull, is “not a metafiction.” Or don’t think of it as a show about a rite of passage. It’s intended to be a rite of passage itself. “That’s kind of the thesis of this piece,” Hull, 56, says, before expanding on his evolved take on the immersive field.

“There’s this world of immersive entertainment, but what are we immersing ourselves in?” he says. “Is this just sensory stimulation? Is this gesturing at the numinous? Is this referencing the mystical? There’s no meta-narrative here.”

Hull’s hope is “The Cortège” will erase the line between the performative and the restorative. “We all want to have a pretend metafictional relationship to transformative experiences rather than genuine transformative experiences,” he says.

Not quite a play and not quite a dance show, “The Cortège” incorporates elements of both during its procession.

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

We can get there, Hull believes, by engaging with an art form that has largely been discarded by the Western world.

“We are reconnecting a lost lineage to that which is ancient and to that which is eternal,” Hull says. “A procession is people walking together; that is simply what a procession is. Where are they walking from? They’re walking from their past. Where are they walking to? They’re walking toward the future. That’s what we’re doing.”

I won’t spoil the moment that made me tear up other than to say it was not due to the jolting of any memories. For “The Cortège” is also exultant — a procession, yes, but a walk into an imagined world.

If you consume tea with any sort of interest, maybe you’ve been hearing about the worldwide matcha shortage of 2025?

Matcha, but much much more

In short: Viral posts featuring soothingly smooth, mint green matcha drinks on TikTok and other social media over the last few years have ignited a global craze. Coupled with a pandemic-era focus on matcha as an antioxidant-rich superfood that might help prevent cancer and perhaps even improve memory and reduce anxiety, its demand is booming. Industry analysts predict the market size to almost double to $6.5 billion internationally by 2030.

Supplies from tea farmers, and dwindled inventory from distributors, can’t keep pace — especially given labor shortages and a recent heatwave in Japan that decreased yields of tencha, the traditional variety of shade-grown tea which is powdered into matcha. Many companies, small and large, that sell matcha have attempted to stockpile their reserves. Wholesale prices this year have increased by a staggering 265%, according to the International Tea Co.

Walk with this knowledge into Kettl, a new Japanese tea cafe and shop in Loz Feliz, and the calmness of the two-story space feels all the more remarkable.

Leaves of Koju oolong, grown in Japan, before a tasting at Kettl in Los Feliz.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

No sense of scarcity here. Order a matcha cortado to drink on premises and it arrives in a gorgeously coarse ceramic cup, the tea decorated with the requisite foam art. Choose from three matcha varieties for your latte: nutty and chocolaty, creamy and floral, or umami-intense. Ask for whisked matcha with options in a similar range of flavors. Grab a cooling matcha splashed with sparking water over ice to go.

Or, stick around for a tasting with schooled staffers who can guide you through wider nuances of matcha — and, even better, to a world of Japanese teas far greater than the current object of focus. This is why I’ve become a regular at Kettl.

Zach Mangan was a jazz drummer in his twenties in the 2000s when, on tour in Paris, he happened upon a store selling sincha, the prized tea made from the first spring harvest in Japan.

“The smell of the glossy, needlelike leaves was incredibly nostalgic, though I had never experience it before,” he writes in his 2022 book, “Stories of Japanese Tea.” “It reminded me of the lawn of my childhood home when freshly mowed. I brewed it and was captivated by how much flavor was packed inside my tiny cup of tea.”

Kettl founder Zach Mangan talks tea behind the counter of his new Los Feliz shop.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

The experience led down one path after another: A job at a now-closed tea shop in New York called Ito En. A first monthlong trip to Japan in 2010, where he understood the degrees to which freshness can take green teas from pleasant to electric. A series of return visits in which he developed relationships with tea producers so he could become an importer.

His first client, from a cold call, was renowned chef David Bouley. Other chefs began buying. He and his wife, Minami Mangan, opened the first Kettl shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 2021.

Their Los Angeles location, delayed for several years by a familiar litany of permit and buildout hurdles, steeped their first teas for customers in February.

The state of L.A.’s sit-down tea scene

As a mid-level tea obsessive, I’d say the culture around drinking serious tea in public spaces in Southern California remains niche. No insult intended to matcha and boba shops: I’m talking about places for a face-to-face, sit-down shared experience between the tea brewer and the drinker. I’ve written plenty about Alhambra’s by-appointment-only Tea Habitat, my favorite place in the country for dan cong, the exceptionally fragrant oolongs from the Phoenix Mountain region in China’s Guangdong province.

A tasting at Tea Habitat in Alhambra.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Tomoko Imade Dyen, a Tokyo-born Angeleno who works as a PR consultant and television producer, holds occasional, enlightening Japanese tea tastings with seasonal foods. The Good Liver store in downtown L.A. also holds regular tastings and carries premium matcha that tends to sell fast.

Kettl and its serene, sunny rooms, in this context, feel extravagant. There are ticketed classes, held upstairs, which teach the basics of, say, making iced matcha in summertime, but I’m most drawn to the four-seat tasting bar to the right of the ordering counter. On weekends it’s wise to reserve seats, but I’ve had luck slipping in on weekday afternoons. A staffer will hand you a menu booklet outlining options: bowls of first-rate matcha that begin at $15; pots of other teas, which include multiple steepings, starting at $10; an in-depth tea omakase starting at $70 per person.

I’m happy whisking matcha for myself at home. Drinking in the shop, I’m curious about sencha, the broadest category of green teas produced in Japan. Mangan likens the diversity of styles made under the term to the wild differences between all red wines bottled across France, or whiskies distilled in Scotland.

When he was in town last month, he brewed two for me at the bar. Hachiju Hachiya from Yame — a city on Japan’s Kyushu island so famous for tea that green fields show up at the top of a Google search — was herbaceous but also tasted like popping edamame pods as a snack at a sushi bar.

Hatsutsumi, grown 20 miles away deep in the mountains of the Fukuoka prefecture, smelled like one of those March mornings in Los Angeles after the rain when the city’s terrain rushes into urgent bloom. The texture was almost buttery.

A steeping of gyokuro, a Japanese shade-grown green tea, at Kettl in Los Feliz.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Kettl receives weekly shipments from Japan, so the possibilities are always changing. This past week I drank a rare gyokuro (tea that undergoes a specific, laborious shaded process for three weeks before harvesting; it’s steeped with lots of leaves at unusually cool temperatures) with specific, sweet seashore aromas emblematic of its style.

“The tasting notes were so enthusiastic on this one, I knew Zach wrote them,” joked Ashley Ruiz, who was brewing that day. The taste reminded me, wonderfully, of crabmeat. And I’ve had very few Japanese loose-leaf oolongs; Ruiz suggested one that was light and expressive, with stone fruit flavors knocking about.

There is so much more to return for. It’s promising to witness the shop’s steady foot traffic, and the groups of people lingering in conversation over tea. Maybe it’s matcha mania … and maybe Kettl is nudging L.A.’s tea culture in magnetic new dimensions.

Kettl: 4677 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 407-6155, kettl.co

Early bird tickets

VIP tickets (allowing early entry) to The Times’ Food Bowl Night Market, presented by Square, are already sold out for the Saturday-night session taking place Oct. 11 at City Market Social House in downtown L.A. Friday-night VIP tickets are still available, but going fast. More than 40 restaurants are participating, including Holbox, Baroo, the Brothers Sushi, OyBar, Heritage Barbecue, Crudo e Nudo, Hummingbird Ceviche House, Rossoblu, Perilla LA, Evil Cooks, Villa’s Tacos, Holy Basil and Luv2Eat Thai Bistro. Check lafoodbowl.com for tickets and info.

Also …

The federal public defender’s office in Los Angeles filed a motion Friday to disqualify acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, arguing that President Trump’s pick to serve as the top federal prosecutor in Southern California is unlawfully occupying his post.

Essayli, a former Riverside County assemblyman, was appointed by U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi in April, and his term was set to expire in late July unless he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate or a panel of federal judges. But the White House never moved to nominate him to a permanent role, instead opting to use an unprecedented legal maneuver to shift his title to “acting,” extending his term another nine months without any confirmation process.

The federal public defender’s office filed a motion seeking to dismiss an indictment against their client and to disqualify Essayli and attorneys working under him “from participating in criminal prosecutions in this district,” according to a motion filed Friday morning.

The defendant, Jaime Ramirez, was indicted on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

In a 63-page motion filed in Ramirez’s case, James Anglin Flynn and Aya A. Sarsour , deputy federal public defenders, argued that the Trump administration circumvented limitations that Congress has imposed on temporary service in offices like that of the U.S. attorney.

Essayli’s term was supposed to expire on July 29. At that point the White House had not formally nominated him before the U.S. Senate, and local federal judges had taken no action to confirm Essayli, or anyone else, to the position. At the eleventh hour, the White House named Essayli as “acting” U.S. Attorney, allowing him to hold the post for 210 more days without confirmation hearings.

“Mr. Essayli “was not lawfully acting as the United States Attorney in any capacity” on August 8 when the government obtained the indictment,” against Ramirez the deputy federal public defenders wrote in their motion. “And he has no such lawful authority today.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in L.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In their motions, Flynn and Havens pointed out that the Trump administration has used similar strategies to keep political allies in power in U.S. Attorney’s offices in Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico and the Northern District of New York. But legal challenges are mounting. Last week, a federal judge ruled that Alina Habba has been illegally occupying her seat in New Jersey since early July, although that order was put on hold pending appeal.

Habba was nominated for the post earlier this year but did not receive Senate or judicial confirmation. Instead, local federal judges chose Desiree Leigh Grace, a veteran Republican prosecutor within the office, to replace Habba. Bondi responded by firing Grace and naming Habba acting U.S. Attorney, sparking confusion over who actually held the post and all but paralyzing the federal criminal court system in the Garden State.

On Tuesday, the federal public defender’s office in Nevada filed a motion to do one of two things: dismiss an indictment that acting U.S. Attorney Sigal Chattah brought against one of its clients, or disqualify the U.S. attorney’s office entirely. The 59-page motion specifically challenged Chattah, stating that she is not lawfully serving as acting U.S. attorney.

Echoing Judge Matthew W. Brann’s ruling on Habba, the Nevada public defenders argued that Chattah was not first assistant as federal law required when the U.S. attorney seat became vacant.

The motion also argues that Chattah was illegally kept in office past the 120 day limit and can’t exercise the powers of the office without Senate confirmation.

“The Court should dismiss the indictment; at a minimum, it should disqualify Ms. Chattah from this prosecution, as well as attorneys operating under her direction; and the judges of this district should exercise their authority to appoint a proper interim U.S. Attorney,” the Nevada motion read.

Last month, in the final days before Chattah’s interim appointment ended, more than 100 retired state and federal judges wrote Nevada’s chief federal district judge to urge him not to appoint her once her term expired. The group said Chattah’s history of “racially charged, violence-tinged, and inflammatory public statements” was disqualifying.

The letter called Chattah’s interim appointment “a troubling pattern by the Trump administration of bypassing the Senate’s constitutional role in confirming U.S. Attorneys.”

According to the letter, as of July, Trump had submitted formal nominations for only nine of his administration’s 37 interim appointees.

“If this pattern persists, by late fall, more than one-third of the 93 U.S. Attorneys will have evaded Senate review this year alone,” the letter read. “Yet, the constitutional role of the Senate is vital regarding the appointment of U.S. Attorneys.”

Each of Trump’s controversial picks has demonstrated fealty to the president. Chattah has long upheld Trump’s lie that he actually won the 2020 election. Habba — who once served as Trump’s personal attorney and has no prosecutorial experience — promised to turn New Jersey “red,” breaking with longstanding norms of federal prosecutors eschewing partisan politics. She’s also filed criminal charges against two Democratic lawmakers in the state over scuffles with immigration officers at a Newark detention facility.

Since taking office, Essayli has doggedly pursued Trump’s agenda, championing hard line immigration enforcement in Southern California, often aping the president’s language verbatim at news conferences. His tenure has sparked discord in the office, with dozens of prosecutors quitting in the face of his belligerent, scream-first management style.

A Times investigation last month found that his aggressive pursuit of charges against people protesting immigration enforcement in Southern California has led to weak cases being rejected again and again by grand juries. A number of others have been dismissed.

Even if Trump had formally nominated him to serve a full term as U.S. attorney, it is unlikely he would have ever appeared on the Senate floor. California Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff are both opposed to Essayli’s appointment and could have derailed any nomination by withholding what is known as their “blue slip,” or acknowledgment of support for a nominee.

The procedural blockades have drawn Trump’s ire, and the president has challenged Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley to do away with honoring the “blue slip” tradition. Grassley has held firm, but Trump has threatened litigation.

Legal experts called the White House’s move to keep Essayli in office unprecedented last month, and warned it could impact criminal cases.

“These laws have never been used, as far as I can see, to bypass the Senate confirmation process or the judicial one,” Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor in L.A. who now serves as a professor at the Loyola Law School of Los Angeles, told The Times last month. “The most serious consequences are if you’re going to end up with indictments that are not valid because they weren’t signed by a lawful U.S. attorney.”

Architect Simon Ha was trying to squeeze an apartment building onto a 6,400-square foot lot in Hollywood.

The city of Los Angeles requires two stairways for such buildings, which limited the configurations Ha could use. After racking his brain, he finally came up with a solution.

“It was like designing a Swiss watch,” he said of the 2023 project.

Now, the L.A. City Council is on the brink of allowing just one stairway for buildings of up to six stories, making it easier and cheaper to build on smaller lots — but raising concerns about escape routes in a fire or earthquake.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, who introduced the single stairway proposal with Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, said she wants to speed up development to address the city’s housing crisis and to encourage the construction of apartments big enough for families. And she believes safety needn’t be sacrificed.

“We’re trying to say, ‘How can we build more safely — and build more overall?’” Raman said in an interview.

Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Until recently, New York, Seattle and Honolulu were among the few American cities that allowed single stairways in buildings of up to six stories. Since 2022, amid a nationwide affordable housing crunch, at least 16 cities and states have proposed or enacted single stairway regulations, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study released in February.

The double stairway rule, in place in California since 1981, makes it harder to build apartments with more than two bedrooms, urban planners and architects said.

Apartments typically have to be laid out along a long hallway, with windows on only one side of each unit, resulting in less light and ventilation, said Stephen Smith, who is executive director of the Center for Building in North America and one of the single stairway’s biggest advocates.

“For small lots in particular, the second stairway can eat up a huge amount of the building’s footprint,” he said.

A single stair layout without a long hallway could mean more room for larger units

Based on design by Simon Ha

Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee LOS ANGELES TIMES

Under state law, L.A. can reduce the number of stairways it requires, as long as it implements other restrictions, such as high-end sprinkler systems. Raman and Yaroslavsky’s proposal for single stairway buildings would limit the number of units per floor to four.

But proponents of double stairways say they are a key safety measure, giving residents two options for fleeing a fire, along with a separate route for firefighters.

Frank Lima, a Los Angeles firefighter and general secretary-treasurer of the International Assn. of Fire Fighters, or IAFF, said the stairways are a life-and-death issue.

“[A single stairway] forces building occupants to go down a stairwell while firefighters go up a stairwell,” Lima said. “That delays fire attack, delays people getting out of a building — when seconds count.”

“When you try to cut corners to save money or make more units, it shouldn’t be at the price of children that die,” Lima said.

The IAFF, which represents firefighters and emergency medical technicians across the U.S. and Canada, has strongly opposed single stairway proposals — “I’d rather call it ‘only one way out,’” Lima said.

On Aug. 20, the City Council voted 13 to 1 to request that city staffers draft a single stairway ordinance.

In a memo to the council, City Planning Director Vincent Bertoni wrote that the single stairway proposal could make a “substantial contribution” to the city’s housing supply.

“The result is that family-sized units — a much needed segment of Los Angeles’ housing stock — are not being produced at the scale required to meet existing and projected needs,” he wrote of the double stairway requirement.

About 14% of rental units in the city are three or more bedrooms, according to the Planning Department.

Zachary Pitts, the Los Angeles director of YIMBY Action, which advocates for more affordable housing, said he had a hard time finding a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Los Angeles.

There were plenty of studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms, but places big enough for his family of four cost a small fortune.

“We ended up buying a single-family home, since a mortgage was lower than the prices we were being quoted,” Pitts said.

Ha, the architect, said that ditching the double stairway requirement could enable developers to produce “East Coast-style” townhouses like those in New York — a contrast to the “podium-style” buildings now going up in L.A., which generally take up a half or whole block.

Ha has designed buildings from San Francisco to San Diego, though most of his work is in Los Angeles, where he is the architect of many micro-apartment complexes, which contain only studios.

Small parcels of 7,500 square feet or less, where a single stairway would make apartments easier to build, often sit empty for long periods, creating “missing teeth” in the city’s layout, Ha said.

Simon Ha stands inside one of two stairways at the Hollywood Premiere Apartments. Architects such as Ha are in support of single stairway reform that would make it easier and cheaper to develop on small lots.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles Fire Department declined to comment on the single stairway proposal, saying it is under review by the city fire marshal. The councilmembers behind the proposal say the department has been consulted every step of the way.

Raman said she sees “no reduction in fire safety.”

“New fire safety standards in our building code have made it so new buildings are much safer overall,” she said.

Architect Simon Ha shows the two stairways at the Hollywood Premiere Apartments.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

The Pew Charitable Trusts study, co-written and researched by Smith of the Center for Building in North America, found that in New York, the rate of fire deaths in single stairway buildings was the same as in other residential buildings.

“This [double stairway] code originates from when people were cooking with open flames, when there were no sprinklers or fire alarms,” Smith said.

City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian voted yes on the Aug. 20 motion to draft a single stairway ordinance, though he had previously expressed reservations about earthquake safety.

Seattle has single stairways but “less than one-tenth the number of seismic activity we have in our region,” he said during a council meeting.

Councilmember Traci Park was the lone no vote.

“Generally in life, when you have more exits and evacuation routes, things are generally more safe,” she said.

On the corner of East 4th Street and South Evergreen Avenue on a recent Friday night in Boyle Heights, a large crowd gathered in front of Picaresca Barra de Café swaying to the syncopated beats of Los Chicos del Mambo. Near the band, Natalia Lara of Tortas Ahogadas El Águila filled birote salado rolls from Gusto Bread with carnitas. But the main event was underway inside the cafe: a latte art throwdown.

Throwdowns, special menus, omakases, pop-ups, speakeasies and out-of-the-box events are part of L.A.’s growing underground coffee scene. And they might be the best way to tap into what’s happening in the world of coffee. Cuppings, signature drink service and guest barista takeovers add to the diversity and creativity of these coffee experiences, which keep evolving.

“Each one is offering something special and has varying approaches with some very limited coffees or methods,” says Mikey Muench of Senses Café Projects, a pop-up that has made its way around Los Angeles from the Lasita window in Far East Plaza in Chinatown to restaurants, breweries and cafes such as Homage Brewing, Canary Test, Ondo, HIGTE and Woon.

Senses Café Projects allows Meunch to explore the coffees he enjoys drinking and to experiment with new tools and brew methods, he says. He focuses on pour-overs. “It’s my personal favorite way to enjoy coffee,” says Muench. “I am also experimenting with the nostalgic flavors of my childhood. I’m half Thai and half German. The majority of the beverage ideas and components are inspired by my Asian heritage.”

Yasuo Ishii, founder of leading-edge Tokyo roaster Leaves Coffee, was a guest brewer at Kumquat Coffee downtown last March. Other barista guest appearances at Kumquat have included brewers from Fritz Coffee in Seoul and Ditta Arigianale in Florence.

A few hard-to-get reservation-only coffee omakases also have popped up in L.A., such as Nobu Coffee at Courage Piano Lounge in Gardena, serving coffee hand-poured into a fabric Nel filter in a traditional Japanese kissaten style. Tangible Gratitude serves by reservation only a five-course sensory tasting experience in its Hermosa Beach design studio for $125 per person.

Strategic planning unlocks access. Follow coffee experts, specialty roasters and professional baristas from the high-profile competition circuit on social media; they often drop breadcrumbs to the next opportunity.

Keep up with the 2025 U.S. Coffee in Good Spirits Champion Jerry Truong, for example. He recently guest-bartended special shifts at Hollywood cocktail bar Night on Earth and Johnny’s Bar in Highland Park to serve his competition-winning coffee cocktails. Other key players include Frank La of Be Bright; Kay Cheon of Dune Coffee Roasters in Santa Barbara; World Barista Champion Michael Phillips of Blue Bottle; and consultant Jaymie Lao.

In addition to cafes, restaurants and farmers markets, coffee events are spilling into culinary festivals, art galleries and retail stores around the city. Automaker Rivian recently invited Cheon to make coffee with his Slayer espresso machine on the back of an R1T truck in its Venice showroom garden. The cafe kiosk at fashion brand Goodfight’s Historic Filipinotown shop has become a favorite destination for the coffee community.

“Coffee pop-ups are happening all the time in Los Angeles where your favorite baristas can express their ideas, and coffee folks, professionals and enthusiasts can celebrate coffee in ways you just don’t see in cafes every day,” says Lao.

Here are nine places where you can check out previews of yet-to-open cafes, guest baristas serving rare coffees, special pop-up menus or multicourse tastings.

My 8-year-old daughter hates sand in her shoes, but loves to play in the sand. She doesn’t like very loud environments, but enjoys thrill rides at amusement parks. She gets uncomfortable when the playground is too full, but loves to make friends. She wants to explore new places, but often needs to take breaks. And she needs to feel safe expressing and processing her emotions — whether that means crying or crying out — without being stared at or feeling judged.

As you can see, my daughter has particular sensory needs that some may call a “sensory diet.” When she was 3, I realized she is a Highly Sensitive Child. HSC is not a diagnosis or a disorder— rather, it’s a personality trait defined by psychologist Elaine Aron in her 1996 book “The Highly Sensitive Person.” Most people think “sensitive” means emotional, but that’s not the case here. “Sensitive” refers to our senses. In their book “Raising a Sensory Smart Child,” Lindsey Biel and Nancy Peske explain that when it comes to our understanding of sensory experiences, there are seven: the five we’re all familiar with — taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing — along with proprioception (knowing how one’s body moves) and vestibular (how one feels their body in space).

HSCs and neurodivergent kids with autism spectrum disorder, sensory processing disorder, ADHD or other neurodivergent conditions have something in common: differing sensory needs.

An occupational therapist can prescribe a sensory diet as treatment for kids who need help calming down or being alert — in other words, to help them self-regulate. Finding or creating the right atmosphere also takes some trial and error from parents and caregivers.

I, too, am Highly Sensitive and have been mining L.A. County for play environments that are well suited for my daughter and perhaps other kids with similar sensory needs. I’ve learned the hard way that the usual loud, crowded bouncy house birthday party isn’t fun for everyone, and that’s OK. Luckily, Los Angeles has plenty of play spaces that are intentional about being inclusive to all kids.

In my experience, the best play places include a quiet room or an area for kids and their parents to be alone or separate if they need an escape. Some provide sensory bags from KultureCity, a nonprofit focused on sensory inclusion. These bags include noise-cancelling headphones, fidget toys and a nose plug to help the experience. Many places offer a social narrative or story online — with pictures of what happens and where they will be — so kids know what to expect. Some have specific “sensory hours” when the lights are dimmed and the number of guests is limited. All of these inclusive spots invite kids to use their senses — to touch, feel, see, hear, sense, taste, smell or move.

Here are 10 great play places around L.A. for highly sensitive and neurodivergent kids. For each place, I’ve noted whether it’s suited well for neurodivergent kids or highly sensitive kids, or both.

Of course, the best play space isn’t some magical destination, and you don’t need a ticket for it. It’s a space where kids don’t feel judged because of their actions or reactions. It’s a space that gives them the comfort of being accepted, no matter what. You can provide your child with that space wherever you go.