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Los Angeles County is moving to add more checks on how federal immigration officials can access data collected by the Sheriff’s Department that can be used to track where people drive on any given day.

County supervisors voted Tuesday to approve a motion, introduced by Supervisor Hilda Solis, to beef up oversight of data gathered by law enforcement devices known as automated license plate readers.

It’s already illegal in California for local law enforcement agencies to share information gleaned from license plate readers with federal agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a warrant.

But after a summer of ramped-up deportations, the county supervisors decided to impose more transparency on who’s requesting license plate data from the Sheriff’s Department — and when the agency provides it.

The change will create a clear policy that the data cannot be “disclosed, transferred, or otherwise made available” to immigration officials except when “expressly required” by law or if they have a warrant.

“In a place like Los Angeles County, where residents depend on cars for nearly every aspect of daily life, people must feel safe traveling from place to place without fear that their movements are being tracked, stored, and shared in ways that violate their privacy,” the motion states.

Supervisor Kathryn Barger cast the sole no vote. Helen Chavez, a spokesperson for Barger, said the supervisor voted against the motion because it calls for the county to support a bill that would limit the amount of time law enforcement can keep most license plate data to 60 days. Law enforcement has opposed that bill, she said.

Across the country, law enforcement agencies use cameras to collect data on millions of vehicles, poring over the records for clues to help find stolen vehicles, crime suspects or missing persons.

A sheriff deputy’s patrol car is equipped with a license plate scanner. The plate numbers are instantaneously processed and if the registered vehicle owners are wanted for felonies or certain types of misdemeanors, if they are registered sex or arson offenders or if an Amber Alert has been issued, an alarm will sound to alert the officer.

(Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement it has roughly 366 fixed licensed plate readers from Motorola Vigilant and 476 from Flock Safety in contract cities and unincorporated areas. An additional 89 mobile systems from Motorola are mounted on vehicles that patrol these areas.

The department said its policy already prohibits it from sharing data from plate readers, known as ALPR, with any entity that “does not have a lawful purpose for receiving it.”

“LASD shares ALPR data with other law enforcement agencies only under an executed inter-agency agreement, which requires all parties to collect, access, use, and disclose the data in compliance with applicable law,” the statement read. “LASD has no current agreements for ALPR data sharing with any federal agency.”

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the agency has multiple resources at its “fingertips to ensure federal law is enforced in Los Angeles, and throughout the entire country.”

“These sanctuary politicians’ efforts to stop the Sheriff’s Department from cooperating with ICE are reckless and will not deter ICE from enforcing the law,” McLaughlin said.

Southern California law enforcement departments — including LAPD and authorities in San Diego, Orange and Riverside counties — have been accused of routinely flouting state law by sharing license plate data with federal agents. A recent report from CalMatters cited records obtained by the anti-surveillance group Oakland Privacy that showed more than 100 instances in a single month when local police queried databases for federal agencies.

“When you collect this data, it’s really hard to control,” said Catherine Crump, director of UC Berkeley’s Technology & Public Policy Clinic. “It’s no different from once you share your data with Meta or Google, they’re going to repackage your data and sell it to advertisers and you don’t have any idea which of the advertising companies have your data.”

Even with the board cracking down on data sharing, advocates say it’s nearly impossible to ensure federal agents are barred from license plate data in L.A. County.

Dave Maass, the director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said private companies that operate in California still collect and sell data that ICE can use.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection also has its own license plate readers around Southern California, he said.

Maass said even if a county bars its local sheriff’s department from sharing data with ICE, it’s difficult to guarantee the rule is followed by the rank-and-file. Immigration officers could informally pass on a plate number to a deputy with access to the system.

An L.A. County Sheriff’s Department patrol car equipped with a license plate reader can scan somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 plates a day.

(Los Angeles Times)

“Maybe they run the plate,” Maass says. “Unless there’s some public records release from the Los Angeles side of things, we just really don’t know who accessed the system.”

Under the motion passed Tuesday, the sheriff department would need to regularly report what agencies asked for license plate data to two county watchdogs groups — the Office of Inspector General and the Civilian Oversight Commission.

“Having somebody who is somewhat independent and whose role is more aggressively overseeing reviewing these searches is actually quite a big deal,” Maass said.

Before the season, Rams coach Sean McVay spoke confidently about his team’s talent and depth.

That depth will get another early test.

Starting cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon was placed on injured reserve Monday after suffering a fractured clavicle during Sunday’s 33-19 victory over the Tennessee Titans.

Witherspoon, 30, will be sidelined “probably 12 weeks,” McVay said during a videoconference with reporters.

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Rams beat reporter Gary Klein breaks down what went right for the Rams in a 33-19 win over the Tennessee Titans as the team shifts its focus toward a big game against the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 3.

Cobie Durant and Emmanuel Forbes Jr. are expected to be the starters, with veteran Darious Williams in a rotational role, on Sunday when the Rams (2-0) play the defending Super Bowl-champion Philadelphia Eagles (2-0) at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.

The Rams also will “bring somebody in,” McVay said.

The Eagles’ offense is built around star running back Saquon Barkley, who rushed for more than 200 yards and two touchdowns in two games against the Rams last season. But the secondary will be tasked with controlling a passing attack that features quarterback Jalen Hurts, receivers A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, Barkley and several tight ends.

The Rams defeated the Titans despite the absence of starting left guard Steve Avila and rotational tight end Colby Parkinson, who suffered ankle and shoulder injuries, respectively, in the season-opening victory over the Houston Texans.

McVay said Avila is “week to week.” Justin Dedich started in place of Avila against the Titans.

Defensive lineman Braden Fiske suffered an oblique strain during pregame warmups against the Titans, McVay said, and he was limited to 13 defensive snaps.

Made of fiberglass and painted by different artists, the exciting large-scale public art project was conceived by the Volunteers of America and the Catholic Big Brothers and made a reality thanks to the L.A. Convention & Visitors Bureau and the mayor’s office.

The project, called “Community of Angels,” riffed on the city’s name by scattering literal angels across the city. It was said to be inspired by Chicago’s 1999 public art display of a similar theme: “Cows on Parade.”

If you lived in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, it was impossible not to see these angels. Unfortunately, the project only took flight for a short time, with the statues eventually being auctioned off to benefit youth programs around the city. A little over $100,000 was raised with the remaining angels sold online.

Twenty-five years later, most are now in the hands of private collectors and businesses who proudly display them in their offices, but there are still a few to be found in public if you know where to look. Santa Monica tends to have a few scattered around, including one in front of the XYZ Media building on Olympic Boulevard. One angel still stands in its original spot at the main entrance to Los Angeles General Medical Center, and the so-called Travel Angel, created by artists Dean and Laura Larson, is tucked away in a corner of the Original Farmers Market. Further out, an angel statue can be found at the 27-acre Century Villages at Cabrillo campus in Long Beach, and there’s one in Claremont’s Mallows Park.

There are more angels out there in the wild, but to date there is no updated database of where they are.

I have a suggestion: Treat yourself to a beautiful meal, right now, at one of the Los Angeles restaurants where the chefs really invest in seasonal produce. There is nothing, anywhere, like the high-ripe flavors and rainbow pigments of California fruits and vegetables at the close of summer. We know this, but the knowing hits different when the produce is freshly considered by our finest culinary minds.

It’s an excellent time for a spontaneous indulgence. Late August and through September is shoulder season for finer-dining in L.A. Vacations are done, kids are back in school, we settle in at work and home before the holiday blur. Reservations are often easier to score. Many of our favorite dining rooms could use our presence. The ingredients are so urgent, I’d nudge you even to show up solo at a restaurant’s bar and savor just a plate or two of summer’s final splendors.

Where to taste the end of summer in L.A.

The cooking at Rustic Canyon, guided by chef de cuisine Elijah DeLeon, is particularly exciting at this annual juncture, when the greatness of the raw product is a given and the deeper pleasure comes from the savvy, daily-changing flavor combinations. His weaving of spells began with a plate of halved greengage plums from Andy’s Orchard — a fruit Lucas Peterson once rightly dubbed the “Holy Grail of stone fruit” — filled with a cherry paste cleverly mimicking the Mexican candy Chamoy.

Charcoal-grilled Jimmy Nardello peppers were paired with hunks of white peach and dusted with fennel pollen, a garnish that can sometimes seem precious and innocuous but here added the right offsetting licorice nip. White cheddar blanketed a spread of earthy-sweet corn kernels and snipped shishito peppers, a feel-good riff that fell somewhere between Midwestern creamed corn and Korean corn cheese. Tiny Sungold tomatoes rolled like marbles around nearly translucent sea bass, crowned for contrast with an oversize round of orange-ish butter flecked with herbs and Calabrian chiles.

Jimmy Nardello peppers and white peaches at an August meal at Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

A meaty pork chop arrived with thin ribbons of zucchini that had been glossed in mustard vinaigrette. The effect was more of a glow than a zap, lifting the pork with gentle acid while allowing the vegetable to also shine. So light-handed, so summery.

DeLeon’s menu moves at warp speed during these heady months; I see figs and purslane currently adorn the pork chop this week, and the variety of snacking plums are speckled Mirabelles.

More summer-themed suggestions

For dining inspiration, here’s a rundown of some other spectacular summertime dishes I’ve had in the last month. They’re going fast, agriculturally speaking. Acorn squash and apples have their own joys, but nothing beats the moment we’re in.

Yess has opened for lunch service, and the menu includes Junya Yamasaki’s famed “monk’s chirashi.” A recent version, splayed over rice, modeled peaches, plums, cucumbers, peas still dangling from their pods and handsomely veiny shiso leaves.

A summertime version of “monk’s chirashi” at Yess in the Arts District.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

I’ve written plenty lately about the glories of the vegetable cooking at RVR in Venice. Go straight for the peaches and purple daikon stung with tosazu (vinegar-based dressing smoky with katsuobushi) and aromatic accents of pickled Fresno chiles, ginger and crushed Marcona almond.

It isn’t summer without at least one cracker-thin bar pie at Quarter Sheets (available Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday, for dine-in only) scattered with Jimmy Nardellos and sausage.

Two perennial favorites for savory-leaning stone fruit salads: The beauty at Kismet fragrant with lemon balm and dressed in turmeric-whey vinaigrette that adds intriguing color and weight, and the tomato and stone fruit salad at Majordomo splashed with a perfectly balanced sherry vinaigrette and flecked with shiso.

Dunsmoor’s summer menu straddles the influence of parallel agrarian regions: California and the American South. A simple platter of sliced duck ham and fleshy Honeyloupe melon from Weiser Farms brought the theme home early in the meal.

Smoked moulard duck ham with Weiser Farms Honeyloupe melon at Dunsmoor

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Camélia in the Arts District is operating at the height of its powers. A late summer dinner: a fluffy salad of greens with slices of yellow peach and hidden walnuts, generously covered in shaved Comté and tensed with calamansi vinaigrette, followed by soft-shell crab tempura over a fresh sauce vierge made with bright, chewy-soft Sungolds. I’m a cheese freak, so a Comté tart with bruléed figs for dessert didn’t feel redundant.

Speaking of stunning salads: They never disappoint at A.O.C. in West Hollywood. Case in point: tender arugula arranged with cherries and nectarines, an ash-ripened goat cheese called Linedeline with the scent of mushrooms and, to drive home the intensity, a garlicky, pesto-like aillade bright green with pistachios.

Birdie G’s, one of the sister Santa Monica restaurants to Rustic Canyon where Jeremy Fox can frequently be seen on the path, has brought back its incredible relish tray featuring five-onion dip. Look for the shimmery sprigs of ice plant among the spectrum of geometric carved vegetables.

Birdie G’s relish plate, pictured in 2019. It’s always changing.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

When do I know summer is over? When Nicole Rucker and her team stop baking pies with stone fruits at Fat & Flour. I just checked with Rucker, and the last of the peaches are touch and go. Fall might be here sooner than I’m willing to admit.

Food Bowl 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 L.A., Evil Cooks, Villa’s Tacos, Holy Basil and Luv2Eat Thai Bistro. Check lafoodbowl.com for tickets and info.

Also …

• This week I review 88 Club, the Beverly Hills fine-dining Chinese restaurant that’s the latest project from star chef Mei Lin and restaurateur Francis Miranda. I love the shrimp toast hands-down, and there’s plenty else to think through.
• Anyone else want to disappear into a big, nap-inducing pile of flapjacks this weekend? Khushbu Shah powered through diners, cafes and brunch stalwarts to name her 11 favorite plates of pancakes in L.A.
• Stephanie Breijo has news of the latest sushi sensation: Kiyoshi Kimura, a prolific sushi restaurateur in Japan known as the “Tuna King,” has debuted his first U.S. restaurant, Sushi Zanmai, in Koreatown.
• Jenn Harris singles out the best sourdough in the known universe. It’s made in Orange County, and it’s purple.
• Some uplifting news from Suhauna Hussain: A new owner aims to reopen the Original Pantry, the iconic eatery in downtown Los Angeles that closed earlier this year, by New Year’s Eve. His goal is also to re-employ the staff of 25 who had been laid off.
• As we head into the best time for oysters, Ari Kolender of Found Oyster and Queen’s Raw Bar & Grill shows us the right way to shuck them.

SANTA YNEZ — Shaun Cassidy steers his Dodge Ram 250 into the parking lot of the Maverick Saloon and throws open the truck’s passenger door, refrigerated air whooshing out of the cab, where he sits behind the wheel wearing sunglasses, black jeans and a black T-shirt.

The onetime teen idol who topped Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1977 with his chirpy cover of the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” — this was seven years after Cassidy’s mother, Shirley Jones, and his half brother, David Cassidy, hit No. 1 as the Partridge Family with “I Think I Love You” — has made a lunch reservation at a vineyard not far from where he lives in Santa Barbara County so the two of us can talk about his upcoming concert tour.

“But the place is as big as Knott’s Berry Farm, and I didn’t want to spend 20 minutes looking for you,” he says, with a laugh. “That’s why I thought better to pick you up here.”

The drive also allows Cassidy, 66, to show off a bit of the picturesque region he’s called home since 2011, when he moved from Hidden Hills with his wife, Tracey, and their four children. (He has three more children from two previous marriages.) “It’s not as remote as it was before the pandemic,” says Cassidy, who’s spent the last few decades working behind the scenes in television. Through the truck’s windows, a panini shop and a microblading clinic roll by. “COVID happened, and suddenly it became part of Los Angeles — a lot of new people,” he says.

“But I grew up in L.A. and New York” — Cassidy’s dad was the actor Jack Cassidy — “and I always envied people that came from somewhere else. My folks told us, ‘Don’t worry, we’re gonna buy a farm in Pennsylvania or move upstate,’ and it never happened.” Here in the Santa Ynez Valley, Cassidy adds, “I’ve managed to manifest the family life that my father always told me was important but somehow couldn’t find for himself.”

Now he’s leaving home for his most extensive run of shows in more than 40 years.

Cassidy’s tour, which kicks off Saturday at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and has dates scheduled through March, will revisit the lightweight pop pleasures of the musical career he maintained alongside his role as Joe Hardy on TV’s “The Hardy Boys Mysteries.” As the younger brother of an established heartthrob, Cassidy came in hot: His self-titled debut for Warner Bros. Records went platinum within months and spun off three Top 10 singles in “That’s Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Hey Deanie”; Cassidy was even nominated for best new artist at the Grammy Awards in 1978, where he turned up onstage in a white pantsuit at age 19 for a bum-waggling rendition of “That’s Rock ’n’ Roll.”

“This young man,” proclaimed the show’s host, John Denver, “is definitely going places.”

Shaun Cassidy at the 20th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in 1978.

(UPI / Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)

Four more LPs came in quick succession, ending with the willfully eccentric “Wasp,” for which Cassidy recruited Todd Rundgren as his producer. Then, following a 1980 gig at Houston’s Astrodome, Cassidy abruptly quit music to focus on writing and acting, which he describes as his real passion.

“I didn’t love being famous,” he says, as we pull onto a dirt road approaching Vega Vineyard & Farm. “But I think I needed to be famous. I came from a family where everyone was well known, and I didn’t want to go through life being someone’s kid or someone’s brother. So I had to sort of step out into the spotlight and announce myself, and once that was done, I could figure out what I want to do.”

Why return to the stage now? For one thing, Cassidy says he’s singing better at the moment than he ever has — a claim supported by his old friend Bernie Taupin.

“Shaun’s voice has matured in the best way possible,” says the lyricist known for his half-century-long collaboration with Elton John. “But the other thing is that he’s a born raconteur.”

Indeed, Cassidy’s road show, which he’s been workshopping sporadically since 2019, is a songs-and-stories affair in which he looks back on an eventful life he has yet to recount in a book. “You have to be fearless and brutally honest when you write a memoir,” he says, pointing to Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” (2010) as one worth aspiring to. “David wrote a s— book, and my mother wrote a s— book, so I feel a bit of responsibility to represent my family accurately and honestly.”

We’re seated now at a picnic table in the shade, where a server has brought over several bottles from Cassidy’s line of wines — the line is called My First Crush, which is perfect — and a couple of Greek salads. “I don’t think there’s anything I’d be scared to write,” Cassidy says. “My bigger fear would be hurting people.”

Who have you used as a comparison point to explain your ’70s stardom to your youngest child?
She has the poster on her wall: Harry Styles. And I didn’t say it to her; her mother did: “You know, your father was that guy.” My daughter’s like, “That old in guy there? Not possible.” But there was a chain you could tie me into. My record had been No. 1 a week or two before Elvis died, so when that happened, lots of reporters called me: “How do you feel about Elvis passing? How do you feel about walking in the King’s shoes?” I was like, “If he’s dead at 42, I don’t want to be in those shoes.”

Did you actually say that to a reporter?
I was too polite. But there’s a lot of truth in it. Ricky Nelson had just been a guest on “The Hardy Boys,” and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be guest starring on a TV show in 20 years. Look, my brother David didn’t handle fame well. I had a model for what not to do, and I had a model for what to do: my mother, who’s 91 and lives five minutes away and is as gracious and lovely and happy a human being as you’ll ever meet.

I like to say I’m in show business, but I’m not of it. I love the work and the creativity — I’m not a red carpet guy. She never was either. She was like, “They tell me where to go, I show up, I do it.” And people love her.

There’s a great photo of you in the L.A. Times in 1978 standing in your backyard next to a swimming pool.
I got “The Hardy Boys” when I was 18 — still living at home with my mom in Beverly Hills. My parents are separated — my father died while I was shooting the pilot, which was pretty traumatic — and I’m like, I gotta get out of here. The family’s business manager calls a bank and says, “He’s top of show on a new series making $2,500 a week.” They got me a loan to buy a house without a down payment. So I went and bought a house on the weekend while my mother was out of town.

Was she pissed?
No, she wasn’t. She was happy for me — sort of. Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.

You went through the whole emotional spectrum in that answer.
It was weird. I only lived there for like a year because now I’m making a lot of money, so the business manager says, “You need to buy real estate and you need to spend more money,” which is dumb, as it turns out. Keep that little house you bought with your first check and put the rest of it in the stock market, and you won’t need to worry about anything forever.

So somebody finds me a place on Mulholland. Warren Beatty is over here, Brando and Nicholson are over here — Valley view, Beverly Hills view, on a promontory with a pool. This is the house in the picture. When I first go up to see it, there’s a recording truck in the driveway and all this recording equipment inside. Fleetwood Mac are there doing something. I’d met Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.

Shirley Jones and Shaun Cassidy at the 73rd Tony Awards in New York in 2019.

(Bruce Glikas / WireImage)

What, as proud Warner Bros. recording artists?
Just at parties in L.A. before they joined Fleetwood Mac. I was out all the time. My parents sent me to boarding school in Pennsylvania in ’73 — I ditched the entire time on a train into New York to go to CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. Danny Fields took me to CBGB’s to see the Ramones when he was managing them. And why did I know Danny Fields when I was 15? Because he was writing for 16 Magazine where [editor in chief] Gloria Stavers was putting pictures of me in there with no record deal: “It’s another Cassidy — isn’t he cute?”

Danny was interesting. He’d managed Iggy Pop, and I knew Iggy — Jim — from hanging out on Sunset because this was the time Jim was living in Hollywood kind of between jobs. Smart guy — big influence on me. Early on, I played Rodney Bingenheimer’s club. I’m there shirtless with a bow tie, screaming, looking kind of like Iggy at 14 or 15.

It’s wild that your most chaotic years happened before you were even 18.
They cleaned me up. I was on “The Hardy Boys” playing a character who really couldn’t look like a punk. My earring had to go.

You ever feel hemmed in by the job?
No, because I was playing a character, and my identity wasn’t tied to the success of the show. Miguel Ferrer was one of my closest friends, and his dad, Joe — José Ferrer, real actor’s actor — I remember he said to me, “So, my boy, you’re thinking of going into the business? Let me give you a piece of advice: I have known success and failure, and they are both impostors.” He took it from Rudyard Kipling, I think. But it stuck with me. Anything I did, even “Wasp” — I don’t view that remotely as a failure. I view it actually as a bold awakening.

One of the great pop-idol freak-outs, 1980’s “Wasp” found Cassidy alternately crooning, yowling and barking his way through new-wave-y covers of tunes by the likes of David Bowie, the Who and Talking Heads while backed by members of Rundgren’s group Utopia.

“All I wanted to do was work with Todd,” says Cassidy, who’d been unhappy making “Room Service” in 1979 “because there was so much pressure from the record company to dive into disco, which I was never a fan of and which felt completely inauthentic for me.” By that time, Rundgren had produced hip records for the New York Dolls and the Patti Smith Group in addition to scoring hits of his own like “I Saw the Light” and “Hello It’s Me.” “He said to me, ‘You’re an actor — let’s do some acting.’ So we created some characters and experimented with different things.”

The album bombed. “My audience wasn’t ready for it, and there was no new audience showing up on FM radio that was gonna embrace me,” says Cassidy. “I think eight people bought it.”

Having been told by a Warner Bros. executive that he should go away — “And he was 100% right” — Cassidy “stayed home for the ’80s,” he says. “My big spending spree would be Friday night. I’d take my rock-star money to Crown Books and bring home $250 worth of books in my Porsche.”

In 1993, he let his brother lure him into co-starring in the musical “Blood Brothers” on Broadway.

“I turned him down three times,” says Cassidy, as we open a second bottle of wine. “I already had a deal at Universal as a writer with an office and an assistant, and I’d sold a couple movies for television. I was on my way, and David’s pitching me: ‘No, no, no — we can be the kings of Broadway!’” He takes a sip. “As it turned out, it was great — really emotionally satisfying. And the show was a big hit.” (David died from liver failure in 2017.)

Yet “Blood Brothers” was enough limelight for Shaun, who quickly turned back to TV. “American Gothic,” the first show he created, premiered in 1995 — an achievement that, he says, “meant a lot more than having ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ as a No. 1 record.” Since then he’s been an executive producer on “Cover Me,” “Cold Case,” “The Agency” and “New Amsterdam,” among other series.

“He reinvented a whole new Shaun Cassidy career,” says Steve Lukather, the Toto guitarist who’s been friends with Cassidy since he appeared in an episode of “The Hardy Boys.” Cassidy’s wife, who’s also worked in TV, didn’t even know he’d been a musician when they met on one of his shows.

“I said, ‘Where you from?’ and Tracey said, ‘Miami,’” the singer recalls. “I said, ‘Oh, I played Miami.’ She goes, ‘What position?’ ”

Still, Lukather reckons that more recently his pal “started missing being onstage a little bit. He knows where it’s at.” Cassidy, who plans to play bass in the show, called Lukather not long ago for some guidance on the instrument. “I told him to play simple — don’t overthink it. It’s not like he’s going out and doing the Mahavishnu set.”

It’s half past 3, and Cassidy has a virtual pitch meeting for a new show at 4 p.m. But first he has to pick up his youngest daughter from school, so we hop back in his truck and head there from the vineyard.

On the ride he says he’s been working on a couple of new songs — the first of his own that he’s recorded since the handful he placed on his albums back in the day alongside stuff by pros like Eric Carmen, Brian Wilson and Carole Bayer Sager. One of them sounds like it could’ve been cut by Mel Tormé, he says. “The other one, it’s very anthemic — I don’t know, maybe like the Killers.”

“It’s been fun to see him to go the piano instead of the computer as an outlet for his passion for storytelling,” Tracey tells me later, though of course Cassidy knows that fans will show up to his gigs wanting to hear the classics.

Who did you long to be at the height of your teen idolhood?
First concert I saw was the Rolling Stones at the Forum in 1972, with Stevie Wonder opening. I took pictures and put those pictures on my wall. Mick and Keith in ’72 — that was a show. I saw David Bowie on “Diamond Dogs” in ’74. And I saw Iggy a lot. Somewhere in between those three is where I wanted to be. Obviously, I was safer than that.

What do you see when you watch the kid singing “That’s Rock ’n’ Roll” at the Grammys?
He’s confident, but he’s not cocky. I remember afterwards Lou Rawls said to me, “Son, never turn your back on the audience.” I said, “They seemed to like it when I shook my ass.”

You lost best new artist that night.
So did Foreigner. Lou Gramm somewhere is still upset.

I wondered if you remembered who else was in the category.
Debby, of course.

Debby Boone, who won — another nepo baby.
Hey, if your dad owns a hardware store and you take over the hardware store, I have no issue with that at all. I don’t know who else. Andy Gibb?

Stephen Bishop and Andy Gibb.
I knew Andy a little bit.

Kind of a similar deal to you, right? Younger brother of a pop sensation.
He had a different challenge, though. This is me being shrink, but I don’t think that anybody got to really know who he was, because Barry [Gibb] was so strong. And I don’t think Andy had a problem with that. I’m sure growing up, he was like, “I want to be a Bee Gee too,” and Barry said, “OK, here’s how we do that.”

David Cassidy, left, with Shaun Cassidy, circa 1975.

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

What was your relationship like with David in terms of the advice you took or rejected?
David never gave me advice. I think it was very difficult for him because he was at a career low point. I would ask him, “What do you think of this?” and I could tell he was conflicted about it. It wasn’t that he didn’t want me to have success. But he was in a place where it was hard for him to enjoy my success, I think. And I knew that, so I didn’t talk to him about it.

What’d you think when he posed nude on the cover of Rolling Stone?
I thought it was dumb. That was his “Wasp” moment — I thought, You’re putting a bullet in something here, whether you know it or not. Now, I’m not so sure. It’s a cool picture. All I know is he complained a lot in the press. He had a chip on his shoulder because he wasn’t Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix or somebody that he revered. It’s like, “OK, play as well as Hendrix and maybe you’ll be Hendrix. But you’re a really charming guy on a big hit television show, and 8 billion people are in love with you. Tell me why this is a bad deal.”

Why did you understand that and he didn’t?
Because I’m Shirley’s son and he’s not. And I got to watch him — I saw how you can handle it differently.

You never burned to be taken seriously?
I took myself seriously. I’m very secure, and that’s rare in show business. I never needed the love of the audience to feel like I was whole.

You got that love elsewhere, and David didn’t.
He would say that.

Was he not right?
Maybe. I mean, to my mother I could do no wrong — to the point that she had no credibility. But if you’re going to err on one side, that’s a better side than, “Where are my parents?” Both of his parents were actors — they were gone a lot. Then his father left his mother to marry a movie star and have me. David would have every reason in the world to hate me as a little boy, but he didn’t.

My brother was a really sweet — I’m gonna get choked up talking about him — he was a really sweet soul who got hurt and couldn’t overcome that. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I spent a lot of time with him. Again, “Blood Brothers” was great because it was an equalizer. I wasn’t the flavor of the moment, and neither was he. That’s one of the things I miss most about him — that he was the only person in the world I could talk to about our experience.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s emergency order over the nation’s capital, which federalized its police force and launched a surge of law enforcement into the city, is set to expire overnight Wednesday after Congress failed to extend it.

But the clash between Republicans and the heavily Democratic district over its autonomy was only set to intensify, with a House committee beginning to debate 13 bills that would wrest away even more of the city’s control if approved.

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office said the order expires at midnight. The National Guard and some other federal agencies will continue their deployment and it’s not clear when that might end.

Trump’s takeover of Washington’s policing and Wednesday’s discussions in the House underscore how interlinked the capital is with the federal government and how much the city’s capacity to govern is beholden to federal decisions.

Trump’s order federalized the local police force

For the last 30 days, the city’s local Metropolitan Police Department has been under the control of the president for use in what he described as a crime-fighting initiative.

Local police joined hundreds of federal law enforcement officers and agents on sweeps and roundups and other police operations. About 2,000 members of the National Guard from D.C. as well as seven states were also part of the surge of law enforcement.

Crime has dropped during the surge, according to figures from the White House and the local police department, but data also showed crime was falling in the lead up to the federal takeover.

Congress, satisfied by steps that Bowser has taken to ensure that the cooperation with the city will continue, decided not to extend the emergency, returning the police to district control.

But Bowser, who has walked a tightrope in collaborating with Trump in an effort to protect the city’s home rule, must now pivot to a Congress that has jurisdiction over the city. The next order of business is a series of proposals that will be debated Wednesday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Some of the House bills focus on law enforcement

Thirteen of the bills call for repealing or changing D.C. laws. Some provisions in play would remove the district’s elected attorney general, who recently asked a judge to intervene in the takeover. Others would allow the president to appoint someone to the position.

There is also a move to lower the age of trying juveniles to 14 from 16 for certain crimes, and one to change the bail system and remove methods the council can use to extend emergency bills.

Even if the bills pass the committee and House, the question is whether they can get through the filibuster-proof Senate. D.C. activists have already begun lobbying Senate Democrats.

Bowser urged the leaders of the House Oversight Committee to reject those proposals.

She argued that a bill sponsored by Rep. Paul Gosar, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, would “make the District less efficient, competitive, and responsive.” She said she looks forward to working with the committee to build a “productive partnership” that “respects the will of D.C. residents and honors the principles of home rule.”

Republican Rep. Ron Estes and several Republican colleagues said they want their constituents to feel safe visiting the capital, and noted the recent murder of an intern who worked in Estes’ office. “We want to make sure that we have a capital that Americans are proud of,” Estes said.

Members of the Republican Study Committee in the House held a news conference Sept. 2 praising Trump’s intervention and supporting codifying his executive order.

“Congress has a clear constitutional authority over D.C., and we will use it without hesitation to continue making D.C. safe and great again,” said Rep. August Pfluger, chairman of that committee.

D.C. mayor says the bills challenge the city’s autonomy

Bowser said the bills are an affront to the city’s autonomy and said “laws affecting the district should be made by the district.”

The district is granted autonomy through a limited home rule agreement passed in 1973 but federal political leaders retain significant control over local affairs, including the approval of the budget and laws passed by the D.C council.

Bowser has said repeatedly that statehood, a nonstarter for Republicans in Congress, is the only solution.

Fields and Askarinam write for the Associated Press. AP reporter Ashraf Khalil contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday temporarily kept in place the Trump administration’s decision to freeze nearly $5 billion in foreign aid.

Roberts acted on the administration’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. President Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.

The high court order is temporary, though it suggests the justices will reverse a lower court ruling that withholding the funding was probably illegal. U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled last week that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.

Trump told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in a letter Aug. 28 that he would not spend $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.

He used what’s known as a pocket rescission. That’s when a president submits a request to Congress toward the end of a current budget year to not spend the approved money. The late notice means Congress cannot act on the request in the required 45-day window and the money goes unspent.

The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and the possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as foreign populations lose access to food supplies and development programs. The administration turned to the high court after a panel of federal appellate judges declined to block Ali’s ruling.

Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge last month that an additional $6.5 billion in aid that had been subject to the freeze would be spent before the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30.

The case has been winding its way through the courts for months, and Ali said he understood that his ruling would not be the last word on the matter.

“This case raises questions of immense legal and practical importance, including whether there is any avenue to test the executive branch’s decision not to spend congressionally appropriated funds,” he wrote.

In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out an earlier injunction Ali had issued to require that the money be spent. But the three-judge panel did not shut down the lawsuit.

After Trump issued his rescission notice, the plaintiffs returned to Ali’s court and the judge issued the order that’s now being challenged.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.

California’s top law enforcement official has weighed in on Monday‘s controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling on immigration enforcement.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta condemned the decision, which clears the way for immigration agents to stop and question people they suspect of being in the U.S. illegally based solely on information such as their perceived race or place of employment.

Speaking at a news conference Monday in downtown L.A., Bonta said he agreed with claims the ACLU made in its lawsuit against the Trump administration. He called indiscriminate tactics used to make immigration arrests a violation of the 4th Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

Bonta said he thinks it is unconstitutional “for ICE agents, federal immigration officers, to use race, the inability to speak English, location or perceived occupation to … stop and detain, search, seize Californians.”

He also decried what he described as the Supreme Court’s increasing reliance on its emergency docket, which he said often obscures the justices’ decision-making.

“It’s disappointing,” he said. “And the emergency docket has been used more and more. You often don’t know who has voted and how. There’s no argument. There’s no written opinion.”

Bonta called Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s opinion “very disturbing.”

The Trump-appointed justice argued that because many people who do day labor in fields such as construction or farming, engagement in such work could be useful in helping immigrant agents determine which people to stop.

Bonta said the practice enables “the use of race to potentially discriminate,” saying “it is disturbing and it is troubling.”

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 …

In Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, travel writer Jan Morris described the city’s many faces and “ambivalence”, maintaining that, unlike most other Italian cities, it has “no unmistakable cuisine”. But I had come to Trieste to experience, if not a cuisine, then a culinary tradition which, to me at least, does seem unmistakable: the osmiza scene of the surrounding countryside.

An osmiza (or osmize in the plural) is a Slovene term for a smallholding that produces wine in the Karst Plateau, a steep rocky ridge scattered with pine and a patchwork of vineyards that overlooks the Adriatic Sea. Visiting osmize is a centuries-old tradition in which these homesteads open their doors to the public for a fleeting period each year. Guests order their food and wine at a till inside – where a simply tiled bar, often set into local stone, might boast family photos, halogen lights and a chalkboard menu – before heading outside to feast at long Oktoberfest-style tables and benches.

“On the Italian side of the border, we just serve cold food,” Jacob Zidarich tells us, as he places down plates of pickled courgette, house-cured salumi, local cow’s milk cheese and a homemade sausage with mustard and grated horseradish. “But in Slovenia, you find cooked food.”

I am sitting with my partner on the hot terrace at Zidarich’s family home, looking out over a glittering Adriatic. To accompany our food, Zidarich pours two glasses of liquid gold vitovska, a white wine indigenous to this corner of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, the north-eastern Italian region that borders Slovenia, and which is home to the port city of Trieste.

To understand the tradition of visiting osmize is to grasp something of Trieste’s complex history and multifaceted cultural identity. The word derives from the Slovenian osem, meaning “eight”, a reference to a decree by 18th-century Holy Roman empress Maria Theresa that farmers in the Karst could sell their wares for eight consecutive days each year.

The result is an enduring tradition in which farmers only open for a short time each season, although almost all of them are now open for more than eight days a year. For this reason, no two osmiza-based itineraries are the same. Turn up at virtually any time of year and there will be osmize open – especially over the warmer months – all offering an affordable flavour of the Friulian countryside.

You’ll pay little more than €2-3 for a quarter-litre carafe of wine and €12-15 for an abundant platter of cold cuts, pickles and pillowy white bread. The tradition is particular to this tiny nook of Friuli, although as Zidarich indicated, it also exists – with differences – over the Slovenian border. Our focus is the Italian side where you can check which osmize are open (on the day of writing, there are 13) and at what time on the website osmize.com.

I base myself at the charming Hotel Albero Nascosto in the centre of Trieste for three nights and, with the intention of visiting as many of the osmize as possible, hire a car. I make it to four osmize, and realise quickly that Zidarich is something of an exception. Although his family had been making simple white and red wines for generations, it was his father, Benjamin, who transformed the farm into one of the most respected wine producers in the region. At other osmize we mostly drink wine from kegs. Some might describe these places as rustic, but even the table wines here have a clear style and moreish complexity to them.

Next up is Verginella Dean, an osmiza bustling with both locals and visitors and known for its peerless view of the Gulf of Trieste. From here the city’s Piazza Unità d’Italia is just visible, as is the brutalist Temple of Monte Grisa (which we visit afterwards). From an outdoor bar with two wine taps, I order a quarter of malvasia for two of us and a mixed platter of pork cuts, triangles of salty cheese and sun-dried tomatoes “for one” (it could feed four).

Osmize aren’t so much a cuisine as a gastronomic tradition, but I might have put to Jan Morris that they are emblematic of a place that, although bureaucratically Italian, has strong Slovenian influences. Zidarich’s vineyards straddle the border with most of the land being in Italy, but Slovenian is the language spoken at home, as with all the farmers I met.

“We don’t feel Italian here, we feel like we’re from Trieste,” says Theresa Sandalj, who owns a green coffee import business based in the city. The daughter of Trieste Slovenians, she tells me she grew up without any Italian traditions – “no lasagne, no ravioli” – and that when she met her Milanese husband she gave him a copy of Morris’s book “to explain what I was”.

Trieste, then, is at a crossroads between three great European cultures: Roman, Slavic and Austrian. But it doesn’t stop there – it’s a multi-faith, “inter-racial jumble”, as Morris had it, home to one of the largest synagogues in Europe alongside Greek and Serbian Orthodox churches. Its significant immigrant communities rub shoulders.

Besides osmize, there are plenty of reasons for hungry travellers to visit Trieste, from its quirky coffee culture complete with its own vocabulary (here an espresso is a nero, which could refer to a glass of red wine elsewhere in the region) to fresh fish and seafood at restaurants such as Trattoria Nerodiseppia and Le Barettine, which are both within spitting distance of the hotel.

We also loved Mimì e Cocotte, a centrally located seasonal restaurant that combines the humility of home-cooked food with a sense of occasion, and specialises in regional natural wines. With these we wash down courgette frittata and two plates of pasta – cacio e pepe, and cavatelli with tomatoes and stracciatella. Just outside Trieste, in the seaside village of Duino, Alla Dama Bianca has the fading charm of a 1970s hotspot. Here we eat razor clams and watch swans glide across the water as the sun sets.

Back in Trieste, on Via Giusto Muratti, we discover Pagna, an artisanal bakery and natural wine bar run by the Serbian pastry chef Pedja Kostic, who was drawn to Trieste from Belgrade via the US, by the wine scene. At Pagna I eat the almond croissant of my life: a perfect crisp pastry with a pillowy interior hugging not-too-much frangipane.

But it was for osmize that I came, where each one reflects the people behind it. At Šuc Erika, an osmiza in the middle of a farmyard, whose walls are adorned with a picture depicting ricotta production and felt-tip drawings by previous child guests, we order from a woman in a Metallica T-shirt. Afterwards, we sit under a pergola of ripening grapes. Rather magically, we are the only ones here, and sip our drinks (which, unusually, include a delicious cloudy beer brewed in-house) to a soundtrack of cattle lowing and stamping their hooves.

Unable to resist just one more before we leave, we head to Osmiza Boris in Medeazza, where Boris’s wife, Patricia, is behind the bar. She tells us about the salumi, wine vinegars, olive oil and honey they make on-site, while two teenage sons pad in and out of a courtyard in flip-flops. Boris was recommended to us by a waiter at La Dama Bianca as one of his favourites to visit before work, which gives you some indication of how widely enjoyed osmize are here – democratic and available to everybody, when they happen to be open.

The trip was provided by Promo Turismo FVG, the tourist board of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia. Doubles at Hotel Albero Nascosto from £120 B&B

Rex Hudler pestered plate umpire Larry Barnett for a game-used baseball, one with the orange laces and number “8” stamp to commemorate Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games record in Camden Yards on Sept. 6, 1995, to no avail.

“He said, ‘No way, you’re gonna have to catch a third out or get a foul ball,’ ” said Hudler, the Kansas City Royals broadcaster who played second base for the Angels the night Ripken broke Gehrig’s record. “ ‘They’re all numbered and counted, and you can’t have one.’ ”

Hudler thought he had one when Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro sent a flare into shallow right-center field with two outs in the bottom of the third inning, but Angels right fielder Tim Salmon called him off and made the catch.

“We’re running into the dugout, and I’m yelling at him, ‘What are you doing? That was my ball!’ ” Hudler said. “And King Fish had this big grin on his face, he kept running and said, ‘Haha Hud, you’ll get one.’ ”

When the game became official after the top of the fifth, and Ripken passed the Iron Man by playing in his 2,131st consecutive game, Hudler took the field and watched as Ripken took an iconic victory lap around the stadium, high-fiving fans, hugging teammates and delaying the game for 22 minutes, 15 seconds.

Ripken shook hands with every player in the Angels dugout — ”And when does that happen?” he said on a Hall-of-Fame podcast — and shared a warm embrace with Angels hitting coach and Hall-of-Famer Rod Carew.

Rex Hudler, above during a game against the Orioles in 1996, played three seasons for the Angels.

(Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)

“I told him, ‘You’ve been great for all these years and very consistent in what you’ve done, and one day I’ll see you in the Hall of Fame,’ ” Carew said. “What a record that was, to be healthy for that long.”

Hudler was standing at his second-base spot when Ripken started his lap, but by the time Ripken returned to his dugout and was greeted by his family, Hudler was standing on the pitcher’s mound.

“I had been in this little dream for however long it took him to go around the stadium, wandering, watching him, following him, just enamored by what he was doing, and the next thing I know, I’m on the mound,” Hudler said. “I quietly turned and walked back to my position.”

When the game finally resumed, the Orioles loaded the bases with two outs, and up stepped Ripken, who hit a two-run homer off Angels pitcher Shawn Boskie in the fourth inning.

“Palmeiro was on second base and he said, ‘Hud, it’s only fitting, look who’s coming up, the baseball gods are here,’ ” Hudler said.

Only this time, the gods smiled on Hudler, who was actually drafted ahead of Ripken in 1978 — Hudler was a first-round pick of the New York Yankees and Ripken a second-round pick of the Orioles — but spent his entire 13-year big-league career as a utility man, while Ripken became a Hall-of-Famer.

“I went back to my position and said, ‘God, have him hit it to me, please,’ and Cal flared the first pitch over my head toward right-center,” Hudler said. “It was kind of a loopy liner, and I remember running, looking up at the ball, and it was in slow motion. I had never fielded a ball in my 21-year career that was in slow motion.

“As I’m running, I’m thinking, ‘That’s a six-carat diamond,’ it looked like a jewel, and I told myself, ‘Hud, you’re gonna break your neck for this. You can’t let this ball drop.’ My adrenaline and speed carried me under it, and when I caught it on the run, I shook my arm three times in disbelief. God answered my prayer on the field! It was unbelievable.”

Hudler sprinted off the field, ignoring teammates wanting to high-five him in the dugout for saving two runs, and into the visiting clubhouse, where he stashed the ball in his locker for safekeeping.

President Bill Clinton is handed an autographed ball by Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr., left, as they meet at the Orioles’ clubhouse at Camden Yards on Sept. 6, 1995, prior to the game with the Angels. Looking on at right are the president’s daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore.

(Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press)

“I secured my precious gem,” Hudler said. “I have never caught a ball more valuable than that.”

Ripken, it turned out, was a gift that kept on giving. After the Angels’ 4-2 loss, Hudler was speaking to writers when an Orioles clubhouse attendant interrupted the scrum to present Hudler a shiny black Ripken bat signed with the message:

“To Hud, we go a long way back, you going ahead of me in the draft and all, but now, I feel like you feel when you strike out with the bases loaded: visibly shaken! All my best, Cal Ripken Jr., Sept. 6, 1995.”

Hudler was floored. He had asked Ripken for an autographed bat that May, when the Orioles were in Anaheim, and he was surprised one didn’t arrive when the Angels were in Baltimore in early June and the Orioles were in Anaheim again in late-August.

“I was speechless, I didn’t know what to say,” the always loquacious Hudler said. “Cal signed a bat for me that night. It was so classy. How could he think of me?”

The bat and the ball he caught to end the fifth inning — Hudler got the ball signed two years later — are featured in a special Cal Ripken shrine in the man-cave of Hudler’s Kansas City home.

And to think, this would not have been possible had a work stoppage not delayed the start of the 1995 season until late April and reduced the season to 144 games, placing the Angels, with no Orioles rainouts, in Baltimore when Ripken tied and broke Gehrig’s record.

Tim Salmon, above batting during the last game of the regular season in 1995, was part of an Angels team that last 29 of its last 43 games and lost a one-game playoff for the AL West to the Seattle Mariners.

(J.D. Cuban / Getty Images)

“I looked at the schedule in April, and a light went off in my brain that these would be historical games of great magnitude,” Hudler said. “I told our old traveling secretary, Frank Sims, that I needed three extra rooms in Baltimore for Sept. 4-6, and he goes, ‘Kid, whattaya mean? That’s so far away.’

“I kind of played it off. I didn’t want to tell him why. Then a week before we went to Baltimore, Frank asked me if I wanted to sell any of those rooms because there were no rooms available. I said, ‘Heck no!’ Three of my best friends who I grew up with in Fresno came out with their wives. Great memories for them, too.”

As cool as it was to be part of Ripken’s historic night, it was bittersweet for the Angels, who were in the middle of an epic collapse in which they lost 29 of their last 43 games and blew an 11-game American League West lead, joining the 1978 Red Sox, 1969 Cubs, 1964 Phillies and 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers in baseball infamy.

Their 5-3 win over the Orioles in the Sept. 4 series opener snapped a nine-game losing streak. The Angels lost nine straight again from Sept. 13-23 to fall two games behind the Seattle Mariners.

They rallied to win their last five regular-season games to force a one-game playoff for the division, but they were crushed by the Mariners and then-ace Randy Johnson 9-1 in that game.

“That was a painful swoon, and it cost us the division, but to be part of that Ripken celebration when your team was struggling so badly took the pain away,” Hudler said. “I was honored to play in those games, because I’m sure one of those lineup cards is in Cooperstown, and that’s the only way I ever got into the Hall of Fame.”

This story originally appeared in “Memories and Dreams,” the official magazine of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. For more stories like this about legendary heroes of the game, subscribe to “Memories and Dreams” by joining the Museum’s membership program at www.baseballhall.org/join.

Michael Zervos embarked on a trip around the world, visiting 195 countries in 499 days and asking hundreds of people exactly the same question – what was the happiest day of your life?

A man who has visited every country in the world found two places in particular to be scary and unwelcoming.

Three years ago Michael Zervos embarked on a trip around the world, visiting 195 countries in 499 days and asking hundreds of people exactly the same question – what was the happiest day of your life?

Earlier this year the Greek-American globetrotter returned to Detroit, his goal of reaching all 195 countries in the shortest time ever completed. He stopped the clock at just under 500 days.

The former movie maker was not just motivated by the glory of becoming the speediest nation-visiting completist but also by a desire to understand what makes people tick in different parts of the world. He recently sat down with the Mirror to share some of his insights into what makes people happy in different places.

Do you have a travel story to share? Email [email protected]

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While Michael stresses that his rapid means of travelling meant he only got a quick glimpse into the cultures of the countries he visited, his insights remain fascinating.

As quick as he is to find positives in the destinations he visited, two places stood out to him as unwelcoming and a little unnerving.

“I had a bad experience in Liberia. I took a picture of a government building. There was no sign to say you couldn’t do it. It turned out to be a money-making scheme. I refused to pay, and they took me to jail,” Michael explained.

It wasn’t just the run-in with the authorities that left a bad taste in the mouth in the West African country. He also endured a more general feeling of unease when exploring.

“Some moments felt surreal. I’d enter a street market, and waves of people would turn to you like, ‘You don’t belong on this street, why are you here?’ Thousands of people would turn to you, and they’d stop what they’re doing. There was a sensation in the back of your neck where something was amiss,” Michael continued.

Another place that left Michael a little shaken was Stabroek Market in Guyana’s capital, Georgetown.

“The locals warned me not to go. It is one of those warehouse-style markets. Drugs are traded openly, and there is sex work as well. As soon as I walked in, it was like a horror movie. There was this guy at the end of the aisle. These deep, dark pockets were obscuring his face. He was staring at me, and he was staring at me. I went down the other aisle, and he followed me. My intuition was to go somewhere else,” Michael recalled.

The UK Foreign Office backs up Michael’s intuition, warning tourists from visiting the market.

“Crime levels are high, and police capacity is low. There are frequent armed robberies, hold-ups, carjackings and other violent crimes, often involving two or more attackers. Passers-by can get caught up in gunfire even if they are not targets because police are armed and shoot back,” the government body warns.

“Muggers can attack in broad daylight, often holding their victims at gunpoint or knifepoint. They may target tourists, particularly if those that show obvious signs of wealth.”

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Tiger Bay and Albouystown in Georgetown; Sophia, south Georgetown; Buxton; Agricola and Stabroek Market area are highlighted as areas “where robberies are a daily occurrence”.

Although the experiences unsettled him, Michael is keen to focus on the many positive aspects of the places he visited. One of his favourite countries to visit, and one of the most surprising, was Madagascar.

“The people, food, arts, and geography, everything was just a little outside what you might expect from mainland southern Africa. You’ve got rich biodiversity from having an isolated island where the flora and fauna are pretty different,” Michael explained.

“The faces of the people are extremely interesting, often very authentic smiles and expressions. They are beautiful to photograph. What you see is what you get. They are straightforward and earnest.”

Michael particularly enjoyed asking people in Madagascar what the happiest day of their life is. He has since turned these answers, and those he collected in other countries, into videos posted on his Instagram page.

“It’s like getting life unfiltered there. Even in the city, which isn’t that common, the language is interesting, and the food is unlike anything you’d find in the area. It’s a mix of Indonesian and Indian food, with high levels of spice, fried food, croquettes, and fritters with interesting green, earthy vegetal flavours.”

When it comes to European countries that particularly stood out, Liechtenstein was a surprise hit.

“People call it really boring, but I found it lovely. It’s a city-state nestled in the Alps. When I arrived, they were celebrating the beginning of Lent, a madigra-type thing. There were bands dressed in blue all over the place, playing music late into the night. People were offering me beers. I went to a local theatre and watched a film festival about extreme sports,” Michael said.

The pretty village is home to a magical tree garden where you can explore 2,500 different types of trees and shrubs from all over the world

Picture an enchanting woodland sanctuary where you can discover and wander amongst 2,500 distinct varieties of trees and shrubs from across the globe, all within Britain’s borders.

Roughly 15,000 trees call this place home, and there’s no finer moment to witness them than during autumn, when their foliage erupts in a spectacular display of colour, from rich crimson to blazing orange and golden yellow.

You can even lose yourself amongst the forest canopy via the Tree Top Walkway. Stretching 300 metres in length, it gently ascends on easy slopes to reach 13 metres high, providing breathtaking vistas across the gorgeous English countryside. The arboretum is hailed as “truly one of the most beautiful tree gardens to be found anywhere in the world.”

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Renowned globally for its magnificent autumn colour spectacle, it provides a memorable day out throughout the year, from glorious blossoming trees in spring, to striking and colourful-stemmed varieties in winter…though autumn truly reveals it at its finest, reports the Express.

One guest remarked: “It is so spectacular, the best place in the world to watch the Autumn leaves change colour.” This breathtaking autumnal haven sits in Westonbirt, location of the National Arboretum, merely a few miles south west of Tetbury in Gloucestershire.

Established by Victorian businessman Robert Holford, its 240 hectares (600 acres) were cultivated during a thrilling era of botanical exploration, when trees and shrubs from around the world were brought to Britain. Westonbirt Arboretum, unlike other arboretums, is laid out for aesthetic appeal rather than botanical order, making it a particularly stunning sight.

The medieval village of Westonbirt was originally situated to the southwest of St Catherine’s Church. In 1840, it comprised ten cottages, a rectory, and a farmhouse, straddling the road to Easton Grey.

However, when Robert Holford inherited the Westonbirt estate in 1839, he found the village’s location obstructed his plans to expand his gardens westward. So, in the early 1850s, he relocated the village half a mile further away. This move allowed him to create an informal garden featuring numerous specimen trees, a lake, and a rockery.

Today, the arboretum is managed by Forestry England and is arguably the most significant and well-known arboretum in the UK. As part of the Westonbirt House estate, the arboretum is listed Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of special historic interest.

It boasts approximately 15,000 trees and shrubs, with 17 miles (27 km) of marked paths providing access to a wide variety of rare plants. The Old Arboretum is a carefully designed landscape dating back to the 1850s, featuring several avenues and a number of rare and exotic trees from around the world.

Silk Wood, on the other hand, is a more traditional working woodland, dating back to the 13th century. Throughout the arboretum, every individual tree bears a label, either attached to its trunk or a low-hanging branch. Blue markers denote Westonbirt’s “champion trees”, the tallest or largest specimens of their species in Britain.

The website advises visitors to “Pop into the Welcome Building at the start of your visit – you’ll find lots of interesting information to help you make the most of your visit as well as stories about Westonbirt’s trees and how they are cared for. There are seasonal trail leaflets, which will guide you around some of the most amazing trees in our tree collection – hand-picked by us!”

Take a walk on the STIHL Treetop Walkway, 300 metres long it gradually rises on gentle inclines to a height of 13 metres offering spectacular views across the arboretum landscape. It is accessible to visitors on foot, using mobility scooters, wheelchairs and pushchairs and to those with dogs on leads.

It leads visitors from near the Welcome Building into the treetops of the beautiful Silk Wood. For families, our play trail is a great way to fire children’s imaginations and, in such stunning surroundings, it’s an enjoyable adventure for the whole family. “.

For more information visit www.forestryengland.uk/westonbirt-the-national-arboretum.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries are alive with sound and activity. Voices echo through the vast, concrete space and a cacophony of drills and electric lifts beep, buzz and blare. A unique colored glaze is being applied to gallery walls, and paintings and photos are being installed throughout.

That gritty whir? It’s the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill. “A very fine product,” says senior art preparator Michael Price with a sly smile. He’s been drilling holes in the concrete walls with the large red contraption, which comes with a small attached vacuum that sucks up concrete dust as it penetrates the wall. The work is simple and done in a matter of seconds.

Senior art preparator Michael Price drills into concrete walls to hang art in LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries. He jokingly calls the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill “a very fine product.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Some of the first holes were drilled a little more than a week ago for the installation of a photo sculpture LACMA commissioned for its entrance by Los Angeles-born artist Todd Gray, titled “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” Last Wednesday, Gray, along with LACMA director and Chief Executive Michael Govan and curator Britt Salvesen, watched the final panel of the 27-foot-long assemblage being hoisted onto the wall and put in place using wooden cleats that fit together much like a jigsaw puzzle.

“This is another thing that concrete makes possible,” says Salvesen, the head of the photography, and prints and drawings, departments, noting with satisfaction how flush the photographs sit against the wall. “The traditional sheetrock drywall used in many museums have been painted and repainted so many times, they’re not exactly pristine when it comes to leveling.”

Gray steps back and looks at the finished product, nodding with quiet pride. The L.A. native attended Hamilton High School and CalArts and felt deeply honored to have been tapped for a permanent commission. He was therefore among the first people to take a hard-hat tour of the building when it was under construction so he could familiarize himself with the space. The new building opens in April 2026.

“I was kind of overwhelmed,” Gray says. “I had never been in an architectural space like this so I was just really curious. But I must admit, I was much more concerned about this wall.”

The wall is big — a blank, concrete slate — and Gray’s piece will be the first work of art guests see when they walk up the broad staircase leading to the new galleries. In Butler’s portrait, which Gray took in the 1990s, the influential writer looks contemplatively off into the distance — whether near or far, one can’t be sure. Her expression is unreadable, at once thoughtful, curious, interested and detached.

A portrait of Octavia Butler, taken by Todd Gray in the 1990s, anchors the 27-foot-long photo sculpture commissioned by LACMA for the entrance of its new David Geffen Galleries.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Her face is in a gold, oval frame and the viewer’s eyes follow hers to other aspects of the piece — an assemblage of large and small photos taken by Gray in places around the world, including Versailles, Norway and Ghana. It includes an image of an idyllic-looking path through bright green foliage that leads to a slave castle in Cape Coast, Ghana. There is also a striking image of stars in the cosmos, a lovely fresco from a church in Rome, a picture of traditional sculpture housed at the AfricaMuseum in Belgium and a series of stoic Greek columns.

“A lot of my work is contesting art history, or talking about art history, or photography’s place in history, my history, various histories culturally,” said Gray, explaining why he likes that LACMA’s collection will not be exhibited chronologically, or by medium or region, but rather in a series of interwoven exhibits that connect vastly different art in dialogue. “So it was really a commission made in heaven.”

The new galleries, explained Govan, will focus on “migration and intersection, rather than American art over on one side of the museum and European art in a different wing.”

Gray’s photo sculpture, for example, will be adjacent to a gallery featuring African art and near another with Latin American art.

It will also be directly across from a floor-to-ceiling window. These giant windows are a key part of Zumthor’s design — and a flash point for controversy, with critics arguing that too much sunlight could harm fragile art.

Translucent curtains are being designed for some of the windows, but won’t be used throughout, and not in the entrance across from “Octavia’s Gaze.” For that reason, Gray said he employed a relatively new technique called UV direct printing that was developed for outdoor signage. The process involves intense ultraviolet lights that cure and harden the ink, ultimately searing it into the printing material. These prints won’t fade, Gray said.

Todd Gray, left, oversees the installation of his photo sculpture “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” The piece used a new UV printing technology to ensure it won’t fade in the sunlight coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows across from it.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Delicate and old art will not be put at risk by light, Govan said. The interior of Zumthor’s building is dotted with boxy, windowless galleries that Govan and Zumthor call “houses.” And like houses, the interior of galleries are being treated to color — not in the form of paint, however.

Zumthor conceived of three colors that he wanted used in the galleries, explained Diana Magaloni, senior deputy director for conservation, curatorial and exhibitions, who has been mixing the glazes and working with a team of four trained artists to apply them. The colors are a reddish black, a Renaissance ultramarine blue and a blackish burgundy that Zumthor hoped would conjure a cave-like dimness. Overall, Magaloni said, Zumthor wanted the color to look as if it were emerging from darkness.

There are 27 galleries and the colors will be divided by section: Nine on the south side are red, nine on the north side are black and the nine in the middle are blue.

The glazing technique was conceived by a friend of Zumthor’s who lives in Switzerland, and LACMA is currently the only organization to employ it, Magaloni said.

Pigments made of minerals including hematite and rocks like lapis lazuli are ground into nanoparticles and suspended in silica, resembling “melted glass,” as Magaloni describes. The glaze is then applied to the walls, a process that must be done at once in order to prevent any impression of brushstrokes, and also because the glaze hardens quickly. Once it’s dry, the team applies a second coat of glaze pigment infused with black carbon nanoparticles. The effect is dark and mottled — it looks as if the concrete has swallowed the color.

“The concrete has all this life in and of itself,” said Magaloni. “You can walk through the building and you can see that those surfaces are not really homogeneous. The material expresses itself with no artifice, and we wanted to preserve that.”

Painting the concrete would erase that life, she added.

A gallery blushing in a deep wine color, with the theme of “Leisure and Labor in the American Metropolis,” is almost ready. Work by George Bellows, James Van Der Zee, Mary Cassatt and Robert Henri adorn the walls, and there is a table ready to receive a Tiffany lamp. Govan points out that such paintings would not have been originally displayed on white walls but rather on walls of richly colored fabric.

“She’s asking you something,” Todd Gray said of his portrait of Octavia Butler.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Gray’s piece will also be in dialogue with this room, calling to it from another time and place — asking viewers to turn their gaze to history, slavery, transcendence, salvation, power and so much more.

At this moment in time, when arts institutions are grappling with the implications of the Trump administration’s claim that the Smithsonian Institution presents “divisive, race-centered ideology” and vow to monitor what other museums around the country are putting on display, Gray’s piece feels like a small bit of resistance.

“She’s asking you something,” Gray says of Butler.

The answer is yours to declare.

The fight to save Dulan’s on Crenshaw … Jenn Harris’ immersion into Nobu Los Angeles vibes … the post-fire rebirth of Altadena’s Bernee as Betsy … plus a new restaurant with no-tip, no-fee, no-surprises menu pricing and more. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Saving L.A. soul food

Greg Dulan inside Dulan’s on Crenshaw.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

On May 26, 1978, at 4:45 a.m., Adolf Dulan took out a black marker and yellow legal pad. The future “king of soul food,” who a few years later would open the Southern food mecca Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch, noted the date and time in the upper right-hand corner and wrote across the top sheet in capital letters: “GREG.”

Then, itemizing each point in Roman numerals and underlining key words twice, the late social worker-turned-entrepreneur, who started out with an Orange Julius franchise and had at that point opened his first independent restaurant, Hamburger City, wrote instructions to his eldest son, Greg Dulan, on running a business.

One of Adolf Dulan’s five guidelines: “Find out [the] cost of each item you sell and how much profit it brings in — determine if you need to drop or add items to be sold.”

At the bottom of the second sheet of paper, taped to the first sheet to form a scroll-like document, Adolf Dulan wrote this directive to his son: “If you are ever going to be a business man, this will be your bible to use … [for] ‘making the nut.’ ”

One piece of advice the elder Dulan didn’t pass on to his son: Don’t let a parking lot deal take you down.

Earlier this week Greg Dulan, who in 1992 opened his own successful soul food restaurant, Dulan’s on Crenshaw — years before his father started Dulan’s Soul Food Kitchen — posted a call on social media for help from the community.

“I bought some adjacent real estate with the goal of building parking for the restaurant and a culinary kitchen for training and workforce development,” he said on a video collaboration with radio station KJLH. “The real estate portion is dragging down the restaurant. The restaurant is doing great but the overall business is in trouble and maybe won’t survive unless I get some kind of support.”

On a fundraising page put up by the nonprofit civic and public arts organization Destination Crenshaw, the situation for the restaurant, which reopened early last year after a two-year renovation, was presented as dire: “With foreclosure looming on September 6,” read the plea, “time is measured in days, not weeks.”

During a phone interview on Friday afternoon, however, Greg Dulan wanted to make one thing clear: “I’m going to be here.” There’s no way, he insisted, that he’s giving up on his restaurant without a fight.

“It’s more of a real estate issue than a restaurant issue,” he said. “The remodel took longer than I expected, and it went over budget. It ate up a lot of my reserve capital.”

Dulan’s on Crenshaw, on a busy section of Los Angeles’ Crenshaw corridor, which has become denser with redevelopment and the building of the Metro K line. After a two-year renovation, the restaurant, which has been a fixture for more than 30 years, reopened early last year.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Redevelopment along the Crenshaw corridor, which prompted Dulan’s renovation, also put pressure on the restaurant. “We lost a lot of parking,” Dulan said. “The density on Crenshaw has been increased.”

He added valet parking to help relieve the pressure but hasn’t had the money to build a proper parking lot for the restaurant. Earlier this year, however, he started using the production kitchen on one of the two lots he bought to prepare heat-and-serve meals for Vallarta supermarket’s Hyde Park location and hopes to expand that operation.

The problem is that he took out a hard-money loan to fund the business and now a big balloon payment is due. “Sept. 6,” he said, “is the deadline for me to satisfy my loan obligation or refinance.” He’s hoping to avoid selling the two parcels he bought or even the land with the restaurant itself, but if he is forced to sell he says he would find a way to keep the restaurant going.

“I can run a successful restaurant,” Dulan said over the phone, “but real estate development is a whole different animal.”

Since the word went out that Dulan’s was in trouble, many people have responded with offers to help the restaurant, a soul food fixture for more than 30 years. “We’re getting calls from a lot of celebrities and people from the community,” he said. “Revenue is up 40% at the restaurant.”

Whether these offers will lead to a solution for Dulan’s money troubles is still uncertain, but for Los Angeles soul food lovers, the remodel has been a success. Dulan’s refurbished patio area has become a popular gathering spot for family parties, political events and even yoga classes. And his fried chicken is still some of the best in the city.

Fried chicken, meat loaf and more soul food favorites at Dulan’s on Crenshaw.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

“I had no idea that that my little soul food restaurant would go viral,” Dulan said of the community response, “but apparently we built up a lot of goodwill that I underestimated.”

Vibes and miso cod at Nobu Los Angeles

A view of the sushi bar and main dining room at Nobu Los Angeles on La Cienega Boulevard.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

Nobu Los Angeles, “which opened in 2008, several years after its more famous Malibu cousin,” writes columnist Jenn Harris, “is somewhat of a hidden gem on a stretch of La Cienega Boulevard, where black cars once swarmed its valet stand and reservations were elusive. Now … weeknight dinner reservations are procured with ease.” Though it “still vibrates with a current of money, celebrity and those who seek it,” Nobu L.A., Harris says, “suffers from the aesthetic malaise of an Asian-themed chain restaurant in the mid-2000s … The menu, for the most part, is … past its prime even if everyone (this writer included) still loves the black cod with miso.”

With a new chef at the helm of Nobu Los Angeles and a Netflix documentary on founder Nobu Matsuhisa released this summer, Harris tries to determine the value of the younger restaurant, up the road from the original Matsuhisa, which after nearly 40 years, she writes, has “exemplary” nigiri. Can Nobu L.A. “continue to thrive on vibes”?

Post-fire rebirth

At the newly reopened and renamed Betsy in Altadena (formerly Bernee), owner Tyler Wells, in a wide-brimmed hat, huddles with his staff at the bar overlooking the hearth.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

I was one of the few who was able to eat at the ambitious Altadena restaurant Bernee in the single month it was open before the Eaton fire destroyed much of the neighborhood around it. The restaurant, which was saved from the flames, was one of the spots that had been attracting diners from all over Los Angeles to the neighborhood. After the fire, chef Tyler Wells — who lost his home and was in the process of separating from his wife and restaurant partner, Ashley — thought he might leave the state and start over. But as Food’s Stephanie Brejo writes, Wells was drawn back to Altadena and is reopening the restaurant this weekend with a new name, Betsy, in honor of his late mother. Breijo’s story has all the details of Wells’ post-fire journey.

Chef-owner Justin Pichetrungsi’s doodles of new dishes for the renovated Anajak Thai Cuisine, left, and dishes served before the restaurant’s extensive remodel.

(Stephanie Breijo and Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times

)

And if you missed it, Breijo also talked with Anajak Thai‘s Justin Pichetrungsi last week about the two-month renovation of his family’s restaurant, which has reopened. “The hardest part of the business is the organization part, not the innovation,” he told Breijo. “Innovation is so fun…. But with all the behind-the-scenes stuff, people never saw how broken [the restaurant] was in order to make the show go on.” I can’t wait to check out the new show.

‘Instant-izing’ food

Customers shop and eat in the dining area at CU Ramyun Library convenience store in Hongdae, Seoul. Ramyun packets are ranked in terms of spiciness levels from “mild” to “very hot & hell.”

(Tina Hsu / For The Times)

Imagine “nearly every conceivable dish” … “turned into a packaged meal,” even “fried rice that you squeeze out of a tube,” writes Times Seoul correspondent Max Kim. “These have turned convenience stores into a $25-billion industry in South Korea and those food products are churned out at a staggering pace: up to 70 new food items hit the shelves each week, effectively offering a live feed of South Korean tastes.”

“In South Korea’s food retail market,” convenience store critic Chae Da-in tells Kim, “you go extinct if you’re not quick to change.”

Cooling down

The refreshing Mexican drink suero with lime and sparkling water.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

For these sweltering days, contributor Carolynn Carreño wrote about the refreshing Mexican water cocktail suero. It’s made with lime, sparkling water and lots of ice, then served in a salt-rimmed glass. She also includes two other cooling drink recipes, including IPA-Lada Michelada from the much-missed Whittier restaurant Colonia Publica and Salty Angeleno Micheladas, developed in our Times Test Kitchen using our own L.A. Times Salty Angeleno blend developed in collaboration with Burlap & Barrel. Salty Angeleno and our other spice blends, California Heat and L.A. Asada, are available online at Burlap & Barrel.

In the kitchen

Martin Draluck prepares sweet potato chili in the Times Test Kitchen.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Black Pot Supper Club chef and founder Martin Draluck, who was featured in the Netflix documentary series “High on the Hog” on Black food traditions, came to the Times Test Kitchen recently for our “Chef That!” video series. Watch him make sweet potato chili with a secret ingredient — a tab of Abuelita chocolate. As deputy food editor Betty Hallock writes, it “gives the chili a mole-reminiscent richness.” The vegetarian chili, she adds, “comes together in under an hour. Find the recipe here.

And if you missed last week’s “Chef That!” episode, you can watch Adrian Forte, the cookbook author of “Yawd” and chef at Sam Jordan’s modern Caribbean restaurant Lucia, make easy fried plantains with Scotch Bonnet aioli. Get the 30-minute recipe here.

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. But Friday-night VIP tickets are still available and for early birds, there is a “date night deal” with two general admission tickets available for $199, a savings of about 20%. 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 …

A recent latte art throwdown at Picaresca Barra de Café in Boyle Heights.

(Julie Wolfson / For The Times)

• Latte art “throwdowns, special menus, omakases, pop-ups, speakeasies and out-of-the-box events are part of L.A.’s growing underground coffee scene,” writes contributor Julie Wolfson in her guide to 9 places to check out IYKYK coffee events. Kumquat, Be Bright, York Manor Market, the Pasadena branch of Woon, Mandarin and Picaresca Barra de Café are some of places that host the events. Of course, if you don’t want to wait for a special event to immerse yourself in coffee geekdom, Jack Benchakul is almost always pouring and, as restaurant critic Bill Addison described a while back, talking water alkalinity at Endorffeine in Chinatown.
• “The American beverage firm Keurig Dr Pepper,” reports the business section’s Caroline Petrow-Cohen, plans to buy JDE Peet’s, the European parent company of California’s gourmet coffee trailblazer, Peet’s Coffee, in an all-cash transaction worth about $18 billion.” Note that JDE Peet’s also owns Stumptown.
• Cracker Barrel is keeping its old-time logo after a new design elicited an uproar, reports Dee-Ann Durbin.
• Durbin also breaks down the rise of Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte business, by the numbers.
• And here’s a restaurant model to watch: San Francisco’s soon-to-open 14-seat counter spot La Cigale from chef-owner Joseph Magidow is instituting all-inclusive pricing with no additional tax, tip or service fees. “When the bill arrives, there will be no surprises,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle’s Elena Kadvany. “The price on the set menu — $140 — is exactly what diners pay.”

Just how unsafe are American streets?

To hear President Trump tell it, killers lurk in every shadow not already filled by rapists and thieves.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom isn’t nearly as dire, pointing out that crime numbers are down.

But “numbers mean little to people,” Newsom lamented during a press gaggle in his office Thursday, where he ruthlessly trolled Trump with a flags-and-all setup that appeared to mock the president’s marathon Cabinet meeting earlier in the week.

Yes, folks, midterm elections are coming and crime is high — in our consciousness if not in reality. Although violent crime and some property crimes have declined in most California cities (and in many major cities across the country), the perils of city living remain stubbornly stuck in our collective psyches.

This angst has augured in another get-tough era of crime suppression, culminating with the fulfillment of Trump’s authoritarian fantasy of National Guard troops patrolling in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and potentially more cities to come.

Newsom is now offering up what many have framed as a counterpunch to Trump’s military intervention: A surge of California Highway Patrol officers in strategic locations across the state, basically Newsom-controlled cop boots on the ground to mirror Trump’s troops.

But looking at Newsom’s deployment of more CHP officers as no more than a reaction to Trump misses a larger debate on what really makes our communities safer. Understanding what makes cops different from soldiers — and Newsom’s move different from Trump’s — is ultimately understanding the difference between repression and public safety, force and finesse.

Newsom has been using the CHP to supplement local police departments for years. In 2023, when the Tenderloin area of San Francisco was plagued by open drug use, making it the favorite right-wing example of a failed Democratic-run city, Newsom sent this state force in to help clean it up (though that work continues). The next year, he sent it into Oakland and Bakersfield, both places where auto theft, retail crime and side shows were rampant.

Now, he’s expanding the CHP’s role in local policing to include Los Angeles, San Diego, the Inland Empire and some Central Valley cities including Fresno and Sacramento.

In each of those places, mobile teams of around a dozen officers, all of whom will volunteer for the job, will target specific crimes, criminals or problem areas. These officers won’t just be patrolling or responding to calls like the local force, but hitting targets identified by data or intelligence, or making their presence known in high-crime neighborhoods.

Here’s where Trump’s military approach has an overlap with Newsom’s — and where the two men might agree: It is true that a visible show of armed authority deters crime. Whether it’s the National Guard or the Highway Patrol, criminals, both petty and violent, tend to avoid them.

“We go in and saturate an area with high visibility and view patrol,” said Sean Duryee, commissioner of the California Highway Patrol, standing at Newsom’s side. “The people that have a problem with that are the criminal community.”

The approach seems to be working. I can throw the numbers at you — 400 firearms seized in San Bernardino, Bakersfield, Oakland; 4,000 stolen vehicles recovered in Oakland; more than 9,000 arrests statewide.

But numbers really don’t matter. It genuinely is how a community feels about its safety. Across California, many if not the majority of small and mid-sized law enforcement departments are understaffed. Even big departments such as Los Angeles struggle to hire and retain officers. There are simply not enough cops — or resources such as helicopters or K9 teams — to do the work in too many places, and citizens feel it.

Using these small strike teams of CHP officers fills the gap of both manpower and expertise. And by aiming that usage precisely at troubled spots, it can make underserved communities feel safer, and crime-ridden communities actually be safer.

Tinisch Hollins is the head of Californians for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group that works to end over-incarceration and promote public safety beyond just making arrests. She is “obviously not a huge proponent of sending law enforcement into communities like that,” she said.

But she lived in San Francisco when homicides topped 100 per year, and now lives in the Bay Area city of Vallejo, where the local police have been so understaffed and plagued by scandal that local leaders declared a state of emergency.

She has seen how the CHP has “made an impact” in the Bay Area.

“There are some very effective things happening,” Hollins said.

That buy-in from community, especially skeptical community, is a massive departure from the militarization of Trump, and also hints at the deeper difference between troops and cops.

California has been on the cutting-edge of law enforcement reform for years, though it is a conversation that has fallen from favor and headlines in the Trump era.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, California outlawed controversial carotid restraints that can cut off breathing. The state put in place a method for decertifying officers found guilty of serious misconduct. It increased age and education standards for becoming a peace officer, increased transparency requirements and put more oversight on the use of military equipment by civilian forces, just to name a few reforms.

Most significantly, Newsom is championing a new vision of incarceration and rehabilitation modeled after successful efforts in Norway and other places that centers on the simple truth that arresting people does not end crime.

Most people who are convicted and incarcerated will return to our streets after a few years at most, and if the state does not change their outlook and opportunities, they will also likely return to crime — making us no safer than the day they were first put into cuffs.

But for a time, it seemed to some as if these reforms with their focus away from enforcement and toward alternatives to incarceration had gone too far. Images of marauding groups of retail thieves invading stores filled the news, and reasonably caused anxiety — leading to Californians passing the still-unfunded, tough-on-crime Proposition 36 that sought to create stiffer penalties for some drug and property crimes, along with mandated treatment for addiction, but which could also take money from rehabilitation programs.

As much as Trump, Newsom’s use of the CHP is the response to that pushback on reform, an acknowledgment that enforcement remains a key piece of the crime-stopping dilemma.

But Hollins points out that the rehabilitation aspect, the most innovative and arguably important aspect of California’s approach to crime, is getting lost in the current political climate.

“It’s not just arresting people that brings crime down,” she said. “The [penal] system isn’t going to deal with the drivers of the crime.”

This is where Newsom needs to do better, both on the ground and in his explanations. It may not be popular to talk about rehabilitation, and certainly Trump will seize on it as weak, but it is what works, and what makes the California method different from the MAGA view of crime.

For Trump, the be-all and end-all is the arrest, and the subsequent cruel glee of punishment. He has called for harsher and longer penalties for even minor crimes, and recently demanded the blanket use of the death penalty in all murder cases charged in Washington, D.C. His is the authoritarian view that fear and repression will make us safer.

“We lost grip with reality, the idea that the military can be out there in every street corner the United States of America,” Newsom said Thursday.

Or should be.

Soldiers on our streets just make even law-abiding citizens less free, and ultimately does little to fix the problems of poverty and opportunity that often start the cycles of crime.

This is the showdown happening right now on American streets, and ultimately the showdown between the Democratic view of crime prevention and Trump’s — soldiers or cops, the easy spectacle of compliance induced by the barrel of a gun or a complicated and imperfect system of community and law enforcement working together.

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that President Trump had no legal right to impose sweeping tariffs but left in place for now his effort to build a protectionist wall around the American economy.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Trump wasn’t legally allowed to declare national emergencies and impose import taxes on almost every country on earth, a ruling that largely upheld a May decision by a specialized federal trade court in New York.

But the 7-4 court did not strike down the tariffs immediately, allowing his administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The president vowed to do just that. “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America,” Trump wrote on his social medial platform.

The ruling complicates Trump’s ambitions to upend decades of American trade policy completely on his own. Trump has alternative laws for imposing import taxes, but they would limit the speed and severity with which he could act. His tariffs — and the erratic way he’s rolled them out — have shaken global markets, alienated U.S. trading partners and allies and raised fears of higher prices and slower economic growth.

But he’s also used the levies to pressure the European Union, Japan and other countries into accepting one-sided trade deals and to bring tens of billions of dollars into the federal Treasury to help pay for the massive tax cuts he signed into law July 4.

“While existing trade deals may not automatically unravel, the administration could lose a pillar of its negotiating strategy, which may embolden foreign governments to resist future demands, delay implementation of prior commitments, or even seek to renegotiate terms,” Ashley Akers, senior counsel at the Holland & Knight law firm and a former Justice Department trial lawyer, said before the appeals court decision.

The government has argued that if the tariffs are struck down, it might have to refund some of the import taxes that it’s collected, delivering a financial blow to the U.S. Treasury.

“It would be 1929 all over again, a GREAT DEPRESSION!” Trump said in a previous post on Truth Social.

Revenue from tariffs totaled $142 billion by July, more than double what it was at the same point the year before. Indeed, the Justice Department warned in a legal filing this month that revoking the tariffs could mean “financial ruin” for the United States.

The ruling involves two sets of import taxes, both of which Trump justified by declaring a national emergency under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA):

— The sweeping tariffs he announced April 2 — “Liberation Day,’’ he called it — when he imposed “reciprocal’’ tariffs of up to 50% on countries with which the United States runs trade deficits and a “baseline’’ 10% tariff on just about everyone else. The national emergency underlying the tariffs, Trump said, was the long-running gap between what the U.S. sells and what it buys from the rest of the world. The president started to levy modified the tariff rates in August, but goods from countries with which the U.S. runs a surplus also face the taxes.

— The “trafficking tariffs’’ he announced Feb. 1 on imports from Canada, China and Mexico. These were designed to get those countries to do more to stop what he declared a national emergency: the illegal flow of drugs and immigrants across their borders into the United States.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose taxes, including tariffs. But over decades, lawmakers have ceded authorities to the president, and Trump has made the most of the power vacuum.

But Trump’s assertion that IEEPA essentially gives him unlimited power to tax imports quickly drew legal challenges — at least seven cases. No president had ever used the law to justify tariffs, though IEEPA had been used frequently to impose export restrictions and other sanctions on U.S. adversaries such as Iran and North Korea.

The plaintiffs argued that the emergency power law does not authorize the use of tariffs.

They also noted that the trade deficit hardly meets the definition of an “unusual and extraordinary’’ threat that would justify declaring an emergency under the law. The United States, after all, has run trade deficits — in which it buys more from foreign countries than it sells them — for 49 straight years and in good times and bad.

The Trump administration argued that courts approved President Richard Nixon’s emergency use of tariffs in a 1971 economic crisis that arose from the chaos that followed his decision to end a policy linking the U.S. dollar to the price of gold. The Nixon administration successfully cited its authority under the 1917 Trading With Enemy Act, which preceded and supplied some of the legal language used in IEEPA.

In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York rejected the argument, ruling that Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs “exceed any authority granted to the President’’ under the emergency powers law. In reaching its decision, the trade court combined two challenges — one by five businesses and one by 12 U.S. states — into a single case.

In the case of the drug trafficking and immigration tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico, the trade court ruled that the levies did not meet IEEPA’s requirement that they “deal with’’ the problem they were supposed to address.

The court challenge does not cover other Trump tariffs, including levies on foreign steel, aluminum and autos that the president imposed after Commerce Department investigations concluded that those imports were threats to U.S. national security.

Nor does it include tariffs that Trump imposed on China in his first term — and President Joe Biden kept — after a government investigation concluded that the Chinese used unfair practices to give their own technology firms an edge over rivals from the United States and other Western countries.

Trump could potentially cite alternative authorities to impose import taxes, though they are more limited. Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, for instance, allows the president to tax imports from countries with which the U.S. runs big trade deficits at 15% for 150 days.

Likewise, Section 301 of the same 1974 law allows the president to tax imports from countries found to have engaged in unfair trade practices after an investigation by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Trump used Section 301 authority to launch his first-term trade war with China.

Wiseman and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mark Sherman and Josh Boak contributed to this story.

“The chances are getting better as the years ago on – although not by much,” said Norrie, who is ranked 35th in the world.

“The level he brings and the competitiveness he brings is crazy. Every time I’ve played him he changes tactics and makes it difficult.

“I’m ready for anything – him playing unreal, or him not playing great and stopping the match for something, then playing good.”

Djokovic looked unsteady on his feet in humid conditions during his first-round win over Learner Tien and needed treatment for a blister on his toe.

Seventh seed Djokovic had not played for six weeks before the US Open and showed more signs of rustiness on Wednesday, dropping a set against American qualifier Zachary Svajda.

It is always dangerous to suggest Djokovic looks vulnerable, and Norrie is certainly wary.

But Norrie’s brand of tennis – trying to make things physical and drag Djokovic into an energy-sapping scrap – could be key if the former world number eight is to snap his losing streak against the Serb great.

“”I will have to beat him with physicality,” said Norrie, who showed his own survival instincts in a four-set battle against Argentina’s Francisco Comesana on Wednesday.

“I did see the blister but he’s the king of adversity. He fights and pushes through it.

“I’m not going to be a servebot and serve him off the court.”

The summer rain in Mexico City has been driving Meme del Real crazy. “This season of permanent torrential downpour gets to a point where you’re like, ‘Enough,’ he says with a sigh. “There’s people who really enjoy it, but I’m done. It’s too much introspection to be in here all day, to not be able to go outside. It forces you to try other things, to find a conversation within that rather than a resistance.”

Surrender has been a big theme lately in the life of the longtime vocalist and keyboardist of legendary Mexican alt-rock group Café Tacvba. Del Real — a Swiss Army Knife of a musician who has produced for the likes of Julieta Venegas and Natalia Lafourcade, among others — has been unpacking his life after a recent move back to the Mexican capital, after five years in the idyllic Valle de Bravo. About two hours away from CDMX, the lakeside town became his district of solitude.

It was in this escape from city life that the singer-songwriter was able to be quiet enough to tap into something beyond himself. With his own studio, a broad space overlooking a forest, he had the mental space to look inward. Perhaps more importantly, he gave himself permission to welcome the inspiration that arrived without him seeking it.

“It’s not that I went to this place and said, ‘OK, now I’m going to find inspiration.’ It was more of a tension within myself that naturally unraveled,” says Meme of his “Walden” moment. “From that exercise of exploring old songs and ideas in process, something started to bloom within me in a way that had never happened before. It was a moment that invited me into a solitary process that I hadn’t undertaken with any formality or intention. If these songs have anything to do with where I was physically at the time, I do think that distance I had from everything manifested itself as music.”

The songs on Del Real’s first solo album — the title yet to be revealed — plumb the depths of silence and sonic expansion. He is unpretentious in his experiments and unafraid to get playful. “Tumbos” is a warbling electronic love song intercepted at times by plinking bachata strings. Del Real swelters on futuristic bolero “Incomprensible,” which takes the old-school Cuban torch-song genre and pitches its emblematic guitar to psychedelic new heights. Atmosphere is everything here: Two of the soon-to-be-released tracks border on ambient, zeroing in on the sounds of church bells and chirping birds and the expansive feeling of mushrooms blooming across a forest floor.

These little mountains of fire blaze with a gentle heat emanating from Del Real’s voice. Die-hards and casual fans of Café Tacvba have heard “Eres” at least in passing, a smash from the group’s 2003 album, “Cuatro Caminos,” that features Del Real on lead vocals. He’s still singing about love: Careening norteña-inspired “Embeces” sees Del Real’s voice soar over warbled trumpets, and lead single “Princesa” layers cinematic orchestration with trip-hop beats and sweltering lyrics about failed promises and proclamations of loyalty.

For those who can’t get enough, Del Real is set to preview some of the new music with a special performance on Sept. 2 at the Grammy Museum.

“These songs arrived, and I couldn’t look the other way. It was an instinct that was stronger than me, a now-or-never moment,” says Del Real. “I’ve found that every unknown and every challenge has left me with a lesson. When I’m onstage [with Café Tacvba], I play and sing, but I also love to dance and express myself with my body. Before we can play, when we’re children, we hear a rhythm and dance. It doesn’t matter if you look ridiculous, but you made something. It’s better to make a fool of yourself and experiment rather than not live what you’re feeling.”

De Los spoke with Del Real over Zoom from Mexico City as he’s settling into a number of beginnings: a new home, a new daily rhythm and his first solo project, which is out next month.

There are so many places where artists go to isolate and channel, but you weren’t looking for that at all. Listening to the album, I heard the parallels between the songs and the space that natural environments bring. There are two tracks that border on ambient, focusing on the sounds of a church bell and a small sound that grows into an encompassing roar.
The creative act is intuitive and spontaneous, and I think it makes a symmetry with the cycles and forms of nature. Having such a tangible way to witness creation left a deep impression on me, to be in such an exuberant forest coexisting with so much.

How was making this solo record different from making a Café Tacvba record?
I have a certain experience of creation with the band — of making an album, a project, a video, a tour, a spectacle — but these songs manifested themselves almost like they rose out of the floor to meet me. At my old house, the studio I made was surrounded by a massive forest. I really felt like I was yet another element of nature in that cycle of life that I had to live there. Something bloomed in that moment for me. More than the result, the experience itself for me was its own project, and it’s been so personally valuable to me that anything that comes of that is a consequence, an extra gift. The process was transformative, like nature itself, something that couldn’t be controlled or manipulated.

I love that you describe the songs as arriving; that’s very different than creating with the intention of connecting to a muse. To your point about movement, there’s so much of it here: bachata, cumbia, electronic music … so much to dance to.
Everything you describe came about very organically. My dad was a musician, and he devoted his life to music. At home, my mom and dad and siblings and I all grew up hearing a lot of music across genres. I got very familiar. Watching my dad [on the trumpet] with his orchestra play at parties, specifically all of these formal Latin American genres to dance to …

When I started making the songs, the genres rose out pretty organically. If it came out sounding like Ministry or a norteña or a bolero or disco or punk, then that’s what it was. If creating doesn’t have that playful factor, if it doesn’t translate honesty, then it becomes so intellectualized. I think it’s a balance between spontaneity, a game between the organic, the intellectual, the conceptual. When I listened to all the songs, I really didn’t know if it was an album. I approached Gustavo Santaolalla [Godfather of Latin rock] to get his feedback, and that’s when it became clear to me that something was happening.

The songs were there, as I built them there in this place I described to you, like beyond just composing on guitar, piano and making a demo, it was like, “Well, what if I add something else?” I started experimenting, and before I knew it, there were already quite robust and complex arrangements in most of them. But another thing is that, when I [would] bring a demo to [Café Tacvba], I [would] sing it, and that [was] it. But in this case, the same thing. Gustavo told me, “Hey, one of the things that’s interesting is the way you’re singing … What’s happening on a vocal level, that seems to me to be revealing a very clear picture of you at this moment.” So, nothing, it stayed that way.

When I was trying to find the throughline here, I was thinking about the subject matter: There’s a lot of love and yearning here. Would you consider yourself a romantic?
Based on some interviews I’ve been doing, they haven’t asked me this question, but the term “romantic” has come up. And it’s not that I’ve thought about it or assumed it, but I think that if romantic means, in my case, finding a translation of what I feel and what I reflect on and resonating well with it, then yes.

I’ve also found myself — who hasn’t in these times? — being attentive and reflecting on the issues that are happening around the world, all the horrors of certain situations and in certain regions. But I definitely find that there is beauty in human relationships or in personal relationships, in relationships with your personal, universal, cosmic or internal ecosystem, with paradoxes, with what is opposed. I don’t know if that’s romantic, but that’s it. Even at the end of the world, in the midst of so much horror, love and beauty are the things that give us the desire to want to go on, right?

This album is so sonically forward-thinking, and I’d say it’s aligned to the current zeitgeist of genre mixing. Where do you situate it?
I am also very attracted to the way in which I don’t understand much of what is happening with these new generations and all the music, all the art and creation that is taking place. It seems that, as in other eras, attention was focused on the situations that were happening around them, socially and politically, and there was a lot of talk about it and criticism was made. Today, it seems that this generation is not observing that, but I have discovered in my theory that discourse is more powerful precisely because it is not talked about directly, but rather it is talked about as, “I am going to have a good time and enjoy it because this is coming to an end … I have no choice but to take what I have and what I can do and what I can experience with my gang, with my people, and with this global digital community.”

I find that very powerful and very sad at the same time. I mean, it’s very sad to think that there is a generation that sees the world as ending. That’s my take on it — that there’s little hope, that everything is so complex that it’s better not to look at that. “Just look at what’s in front of me, because I’m young and because if I don’t take advantage of my youth to have a good time right now, I don’t know if I’ll make it to the next stage. Or I don’t see how.”

In our time, at least in my time, I think there was more. The outlook was clearer. You could see further ahead.

This interview was conducted in Spanish, translated, edited and condensed for clarity.

Leila Dean, from Manchester, urged people to visit the small village after saying it was one of the best places she ever visited. The traveller posted her advice in a TikTok video

As temperatures begin to drop, the thought of spending time at a seaside town or beach might seem less appealing, even though the UK boasts several stunning coastal destinations worth discovering and exploring.

For several people, the arrival of September equals the beginning of autumn, meaning sunny ice cream treats could give way to cosy cups of tea beside crackling fires while listening to rainfall pattering against windows. The autumn season also presents an excellent chance to discover various British towns and villages, as shifting weather conditions can make them feel even more enchanting – sometimes in quite literal ways.

Manchester local Leila Dean turned to social media to chronicle her visit to Burley, a charming village nestled in Hampshire’s New Forest. Through her video, she documented highlights from her trip, describing it as the ‘perfect’ English village.

“I ended up in a village called Burley and it has to be one of the best places I’ve ever visited in the UK,” she declared at the beginning of her footage.

“It’s situated in the New Forest, and it’s known to have horses everywhere,” she explained while showing horses roaming freely through the streets.

She continued by revealing glimpses of her selected lodgings, having chosen to reserve a room at a local manor house surrounded by expansive natural grounds for exploration.

“And in the town, it is full of horses, lovely people, and witchcraft,” she revealed.

During the 1950s, a Scottish woman called Sybil Leek made Burley her new home. She quickly earned the title ‘the witch of Burley’ after declaring herself as a white witch. Following the decriminalisation of witchcraft in 1951, she rose to become Britain’s most famous witch.

She established her own mystical shop in the village, named A Coven of Witches, which continues trading today and stocks witchcraft-related merchandise.

Though Sybil eventually relocated to America due to not wanting to be the centre of attention anymore, Burley has preserved its witchcraft connections, with shops and attractions celebrating this eccentric past and attracting visitors fascinated by its supernatural legacy, according to the New Forest’s website. Surely it sounds like the ideal destination for a Halloween getaway?

Leila was subsequently spotted stroking a horse, explaining all the horses were gentle as they simply wandered around the village, searching for the finest grass for their next meal.

She continued by describing the activities she’d enjoyed, which included browsing the local shops, including the renowned fudge shop, before hiring bicycles to discover the surrounding countryside.

“And honestly, it was such a wholesome day,” she remarked.

She added in the video’s caption: “Burley you have my heart. The best place for couples, besties or children! Bike rides, horse rides and so much more.”

Leila then posted a second clip documenting their adventure from day two in the village, which featured a stroll alongside a herd of alpacas, followed by a visit to a farm where visitors can harvest their own flowers and berries.

“I literally cannot recommend this place enough,” she said at the end of the video.