story

From Bill Plaschke: They pull giant boxing gloves over aging, sometimes shaking hands.

They approach a black punching bag on weary, sometimes wobbly feet.

Then they wail.

They hit the bag with a left-handed jab, a right-handed reverse, a hook, another hook, an uppercut, another jab, bam, bam, bam.

They end the flurry with kicks, side kicks, thrust kicks, wild kicks, their legs suddenly strong and purposeful and fueled by a strength that once seemed impossible.

Outside of this small gym in a nondescript office park in Monrovia, they are elderly people dealing with the motion-melting nightmare that is Parkinson’s disease.

But inside the walls of Kaizen Martial Arts & Fitness, in a program known as Kaizen Kinetics, they are heavyweight champs.

Ranging in age from 50 to 90, spanning the spectrum of swift strides to wheelchairs, they are the most courageous athletes I’ve met.

I am in awe of them, perhaps because I am one of them.

I, too, am living with Parkinson’s disease.

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NBA PLAYOFFS RESULTS

All Times Pacific

NBA FINALS

Oklahoma City vs. Indiana

Indiana 111, at Oklahoma City 110 (box score, story)
at Oklahoma City 123, Indiana 107 (box score, story)
Wednesday at Indiana, 5:30 p.m., ABC
Friday at Indiana, 5:30 p.m., ABC
Monday at Oklahoma City, 5:30 p.m., ABC
Thursday, June 19 at Indiana, 5:30 p.m., ABC*
Sunday, June 22 at Oklahoma City, 5 p.m., ABC*

*if necessary

UCLA BASEBALL

From Benjamin Royer: Since coming to Westwood, Roch Cholowsky has had Omaha on his mind.

The Big Ten Player of the Year — a projected No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 MLB draft by some analysts — turned Charles Schwab Field in Omaha into a playground during the Big Ten tournament, winning player of the tournament honors despite UCLA not claiming the championship.

So far, in the NCAA tournament, Cholowsky had been uncharacteristically quiet for his standards. He still made hard plays look easy as a “premium shortstop” — as UCLA coach John Savage glowed about his defensive skills — but his bat wasn’t making its usual noise.

Cholowsky finally had his moment Sunday.

Cholowsky’s RBI single off that strike in the fifth, a part of his two-for-five day, clinched UCLA’s spot in the Men’s College World Series with a 7-0 victory over Texas San Antonio. The two-game sweep of the Roadrunners gave the Bruins their sixth berth to Omaha and first since 2013, when they won it all.

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DODGERS

From Kevin Baxter: The Dodgers have sent Clayton Kershaw to the mound to give a slumping team a lift countless times during his 18-year career. And they’ve rarely been disappointed.

They did it again on a sultry Sunday afternoon in St. Louis and once again Kershaw delivered, earning his first win of the season in a 7-3 victory over the Cardinals that broke a two-game losing streak and ended a slide that had seen the Dodgers lose five of their last seven.

“He’s been a stopper for many years. He’s been a staff ace for many years. He’s going to the Hall of Fame,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said before the game. “So he understands. And he’s going to be prepared.”

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Dodgers box score

MLB scores

MLB standings

ANGELS

George Kirby struck out a career-high 14 during seven innings of two-hit ball, and the Seattle Mariners snapped their five-game losing streak with a 3-2 victory over the Angels on Sunday.

Kirby (1-3) issued no walks while retiring both his first 11 and his final 10 batters. His strikeouts were the most by a Mariners pitcher since James Paxton had 16 in May 2018, and he matched Miami’s Max Meyer for the most strikeouts in a major league game this season.

Taylor Ward hit a two-run homer in the fourth for the Halos, who struck out 18 times overall while losing for only the second time in six games.

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Angels box score

MLB scores

MLB standings

LAFC

Denis Bouanga had a goal and two assists, Eddie Segura scored his first goal since 2020 and LAFC extended its MLS unbeaten streak to nine games with a 3-1 win over Sporting Kansas City on Sunday night at BMO Stadium.

Bouanga converted from the penalty spot in the 59th to give LAFC (7-4-5), which had 56% possession and outshot Kansas City 21-5, a 2-1 lead.

Dejan Joveljic scored a goal for the fourth consecutive game when he ran onto a through ball played ahead by Manu García, and scored from near the penalty spot to make it 1-0 in the 39th minute.

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LAFC summary

MLS standings

FRENCH OPEN

Coco Gauff won the French Open for the first time by defeating top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 6-7 (5), 6-2, 6-4 in Saturday’s final for her second Grand Slam singles title.

The second-ranked Gauff made fewer mistakes in a contest that was full of tension and momentum swings to get the better of Sabalenka for the second time in a Grand Slam final. She also came from a set down to beat the Belarusian in the 2023 U.S. Open final.

Gauff raised the winner’s trophy aloft, then kissed it several times. She held her hand over her heart when the U.S. national anthem played. She is the first American woman to win at Roland-Garros since Serena Williams in 2015.

She then thanked her parents for doing everything “from washing my clothes to keeping me grounded and giving me the belief that I can do it.”

“You guys probably believe in me more than myself,” Gauff said in her on-court speech.

It was the first No. 1 vs. No. 2 final in Paris since 2013, when Williams defeated Maria Sharapova, and just the second in the last 30 years.

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————

Carlos Alcaraz rallied from two sets down and saved three match points to beat Jannik Sinner 4-6, 6-7 (4), 6-4, 7-6 (3), 7-6 (10-2) on Sunday and win the French Open title for a second straight year.

Alcaraz, who won his fifth Grand Slam tournament in as many finals, produced one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the clay-court tournament.

It was even better than his performance here last year, when he came back from 2-1 down in sets in the final against Alexander Zverev. But this time Alcaraz emulated Novak Djokovic’s feat from the 2021 final at Roland-Garros, where he fought back from two sets down to beat Stefanos Tsitsipas.

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Tennis great Stan Smith on life lessons, Arthur Ashe’s legacy and his namesake shoes

NHL PLAYOFFS SCHEDULE, RESULTS

All times Pacific

STANLEY CUP FINAL

Edmonton vs. Florida
at Edmonton 4, Florida 3 (OT) (summary, story)
Florida 5, at Edmonton 4 (2 OT) (summary, story)
Monday at Florida, 5 p.m., TNT
Thursday at Florida, 5 p.m., TNT
Saturday at Edmonton, 5 p.m., TNT
Tuesday, June 17 at Florida, 5 p.m., TNT*
Friday, June 20 at Edmonton, 5 p.m., TNT*

* If necessary

THIS DAY IN SPORTS HISTORY

1888 — James McLaughlin sets the record for wins by a jockey in the Belmont Stakes, six, when he rides Sir Dixon to a 12-length victory. McLaughlin’s record is matched by Eddie Arcaro in 1955.

1899 — Jim Jeffries knocks out Bob Fitzsimmons in the 11th round in New York to win the world heavyweight title.

1930 — Paavo Nurmi runs world record 6 mile (29:36.4).

1934 — Olin Dutra edges Gene Sarazen by one stroke to win the U.S. Open.

1940 — Lawson Little beats Gene Sarazen by three strokes in a playoff to win the U.S. Open golf title.

1945 — Hoop Jr. wins the Kentucky Derby, which is run one month after a national wartime government ban on racing is lifted.

1946 — Joe Louis KOs Billy Conn in 8 for heavyweight boxing title.

1973 — Secretariat, ridden by Ron Turcotte, wins the Belmont Stakes in record time to capture the Triple Crown. Secretariat sets a world record on the 1½-mile course with 2:24, and a record for largest margin of victory in the Belmont, 31 lengths.

1978 — Larry Holmes scores a 15-round split decision over Ken Norton for the WBC heavyweight title in New York.

1979 — Coastal, ridden by Ruben Hernandez, spoils Spectacular Bid’s attempt at the Triple Crown with a 3¼-length victory over Golden Act. Spectacular Bid finishes third.

1984 — Swale, ridden by Laffit Pincay, wins the Belmont Stakes by four lengths over Pine Circle. Swale dies eight days later.

1984 — French Open Women’s Tennis: Martina Navratilova beats Chris Evert 6-3, 6-1; 2nd women in Open Era to hold all 4 Grand Slam titles at once.

1985 — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scores 29 points to lead the Lakers to a 111-100 victory over the Boston Celtics and the NBA title in six games.

1990 — Monica Seles holds off four set points in the first set tiebreaker and goes on to become the youngest winner of the French Open, beating two-time champion Steffi Graf 7-6 (8-6), 6-4. Seles is 16 years, six months.

1991 — In the first all-American men’s final at the French Open since 1954, Jim Courier rallies to beat Andre Agassi 3-6, 6-4, 2-6, 6-1, 6-4 for his first Grand Slam title.

1993 — Patrick Roy makes 18 saves and the Montreal Canadiens capture their 24th Stanley Cup, beating the Kings 4-1 in Game 5.

2001 — Stanley Cup Final, Pepsi Center, Denver, CO: Colorado Avalanche beat defending champion New Jersey Devils, 3-1 for 4-3 series win; Avalanche 2nd title.

2001 — Jennifer Capriati beats Kim Clijsters 1-6, 6-4, 12-10 to win the French Open, her second consecutive Grand Slam title.

2003 — The New Jersey Devils end the Mighty Ducks’ surreal season, winning the Stanley Cup with a 3-0 victory. Mike Rupp, who had never appeared in a playoff until Game 4, scores the first goal and sets up Jeff Friesen for the other two.

2007 — Rags to Riches, a filly ridden by John Velazquez, outduels Curlin in a breathtaking stretch run and won the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first of her sex to take the final leg of the Triple Crown in more than a century.

2010 — Chicago’s Patrick Kane sneaks the puck past Michael Leighton 4:10 into overtime, stunning Philadelphia and lifting the Blackhawks to a 4-3 overtime win in Game 6 for their first Stanley Cup championship since 1961.

2013 — Rafael Nadal becomes the first man to win eight titles at the same Grand Slam tournament after beating fellow Spaniard David Ferrer in the French Open final, 6-3, 6-2, 6-3.

2018 — Justify becomes the 13th Triple Crown winner by winning the Belmont Stakes with Mike Smith aboard.

2019 — French Open Men’s Tennis: Rafael Nadal beats Austrian Dominic Thiem 6-3, 5-7, 6-1, 6-1; 3rd straight French singles title; 12th overall; first to win 12 singles titles at same Grand Slam; 18th major.

2022 — The controversial Saudi-backed LIV Golf Invitational Series gets underway at the Centurion Club, Hertfordshire; PGA suspends 17 participating players.

2024 — French Open Men’s Tennis: Carlos Alcaraz becomes the youngest man to win grand slams on all three surfaces, coming back to beat Alexander Zverev 6-3, 2-6, 5-7, 6-1, 6-2 in a final lasting 4 hours 15 minutes

THIS DAY IN BASEBALL HISTORY

1901 — The New York Giants set a major league record with 31 hits in beating Cincinnati 25-13. Al Selbach of the Giants went 6-for-7 with two doubles and four singles and scored four runs.

1906 — Boston snapped a 19-game losing streak by beating the St. Louis Cardinals 6-3.

1914 — Honus Wagner of the Pittsburgh Pirates got the 3,000th hit of his career off Philadelphia’s Erskine Mayer in a 3-1 loss to the Phillies at the Baker Bowl. Wagner’s hit, a double, came in the ninth. Wagner joined Cap Anson as the only members of the 3,000-hit club.

1935 — The St. Louis Cardinals became the 10th team in major league history to score a run in every inning in a 13-2 win over the Chicago Cubs.

1946 — Commissioner Happy Chandler imposed five-year suspensions on players who jumped to the Mexican League and three-year suspensions for those who broke the reserve clause.

1946 — The New York Giants’ Mel Ott became the first manager to be ejected in both ends of a doubleheader. The Pittsburgh Pirates won both games, 2-1 and 5-1.

1963 — Playing the first Sunday night game in major league history because of excessive heat during the day, the Houston Colt .45s handed the San Francisco Giants their seventh straight loss in Houston, 3-0. Turk Farrell and Skinny Brown pitched the shutout.

1966 — Rich Rollins, Zoilo Versalles, Tony Oliva, Don Mincher and Harmon Killebrew homered in the seventh inning for the Minnesota Twins in a 9-4 victory over the Kansas City Athletics.

1979 — Nolan Ryan struck out 16 batters as the Angels beat the Detroit Tigers 9-1. It was the 21st time in his career he struck out 15 or more batters in one game.

1986 — White Sox pitcher Tom Seaver (306) and Angels hurler Don Sutton (298) had the highest composite win total (604) for opposing pitchers since 1926, when Walter Johnson (406) faced Red Faber (197). Sutton pitched a two-hit shutout to beat the White Sox 3-0.

1990 — Eddie Murray of the Dodgers tied Mickey Mantle’s record by homering from each side of the plate in the same game for the 10th time in his career. The Dodgers beat the Padres 5-4 in 11 innings.

1998 — Cecil Fielder of the Angels and Yamil Benitez of the Diamondbacks each hit grand slams in the same inning in Anaheim’s 10-8 win over Arizona. It was the first time both teams hit grand slams in the same inning since 1992.

2008 — Ken Griffey Jr. became the sixth player in baseball history to reach 600 homers with a drive off Mark Hendrickson in the first inning of the Cincinnati Reds’ 9-4 victory over the Florida Marlins.

2014 — Lonnie Chisenhall had nine RBIs and three home runs in a five-hit game, Michael Brantley scored five times and the Cleveland Indians beat the Texas Rangers 17-7.

2015 — Chris Heston pitched the first no-hitter in his 13th career start, leading the San Francisco Giants over the New York Mets 5-0. The rookie allowed three baserunners — all on hit batters. He also had a two-run single for his first big league RBIs and finished with two more hits than the Mets.

2019 — The Nationals accomplish a very rare feat as four consecutive batters hit solo homers in the 8th inning in Petco Park in San Diego to break a 1-1 tie. Pinch-hitter Howie Kendrick starts things off against Craig Stammen, and is followed by Trea Turner, Adam Eaton and Anthony Rendon, who all go yard. This is only the ninth time in major league history this has happened, and the Nats were the last to do so, on July 27, 2017.

2019 — Former Boston Red Sox star David Ortiz shot in the back while visiting in his native Dominican Republic.

2022 — The Twins open the bottom of the 1st against the Yankees with three consecutive homers off Gerrit Cole at Target Field, by Luis Arraez, Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa. This is the first time in franchise history this has happened.

Compiled by the Associated Press

Until next time…

That concludes today’s newsletter. If you have any feedback, ideas for improvement or things you’d like to see, email me at [email protected]. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.

The Getty announced a $420,000 grant to the L.A. Conservancy for a cultural asset mapping project that will help track, chronicle and maintain Altadena’s cultural, historic and architectural heritage in the wake of January’s devastating Eaton fire.

Community participation will be crucial to the effort as the conservancy works to document buildings and sites, as well as more ephemeral heritage such as local traditions, oral histories and cultural practices. There is also interest in cataloging longtime businesses that contributed to the social fabric of Altadena’s various neighborhoods. The results of this work will be used in collaboration with the L.A. County Department of Regional Planning to ensure that policy discussions and decisions take Altadena heritage into account when it comes to building back what was lost.

Rebuilding efforts in Altadena — an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County — have been complicated by the lack of concrete cultural mapping, including sites of historic interest. By contrast, Pacific Palisades, another area that was brutalized by fire, had already established an official record of its cultural heritage via SurveyLA, a historic resources survey conducted by the city.

“Tackling this incomplete record of Altadena’s cultural resources, both built and intangible, is critical for the community as it contemplates rebuilding,” Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation, said in a news release. “L.A. Conservancy is an excellent partner to lead an alliance of community-based organizations and preservation professionals who are working to ensure that Altadena’s vibrant cultural history is not lost in redevelopment efforts.”

L.A. Conservancy has a special interest in historic preservation and the grant will allow for a complete inventory of Altadena’s heritage sites — to be made available in an online map.

Related to this effort is the news that Artists at Work, which provides artists with employment, benefits and a steady salary for 18 month terms, has released its list of 2025-26 participants. Four Los Angeles artists are among them, including Altadena resident Alma Cielo, who is set to collaborate with L.A. Conservancy during her term. Cielo, a ceramicist, lost her home in the Eaton fire and plans to focus on post-fire recovery.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt marveling at the resilience of Altadena residents in the face of their losses, and firmly invested in supporting them as they rebuild. Here’s this week’s arts and culture news.

Best bets: On our radar this week

“Self-Portrait as a Female Martyr,” about 1613-14, by Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, 1593-1654). Oil on panel. 12 1/2 by 9 3/4 inches. Private collection, United States.

(Bridgeman Images)

Artemisia’s Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece
Five years ago, a massive explosion ripped through the port of Beirut, killing more than 200 people and injuring thousands more. The aftermath of the tragedy revealed a previously unknown painting by the great 17th century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi amid the rubble. “Hercules and Omphale,” an oil-on-canvas work that manifests Gentileschi’s penchant for classical subjects, was severely damaged and sent to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for restoration. That painstaking conservation process is now at the center of an installation featuring four other paintings by the artist, who has become a modern feminist icon. In 2022, when the Getty acquired another painting, “Lucretia,” that is part of the new exhibition, Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote of Gentileschi, “Happily, in the last two decades, the study of her paintings has been widening in productive and exciting ways, giving us a fuller understanding of her challenging involvement with social, political, literary and intellectual currents of her day. There’s a long way to go, and more discoveries are inevitable.”
Through Sept. 14 . J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. getty.edu

Mumford & Sons performing at a Kamala Harris rally in October 2024.

(Morry Gash / Associated Press)

Mumford & Sons
It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly 17 years since Mumford & Sons made their local debut at the Hotel Cafe. Since then, the British folk-rock band — Marcus Mumford, Ted Dwane and Ben Lovett — have toured the world several times over, crafted hit songs such as “Little Lion Man,” “The Cave” and “I Will Wait,” and won a best album Grammy for 2012’s “Babel.” This week, the group is back in L.A. (minus longtime member Winston Marshall, who left in 2021 following controversial social media posts) and playing the Hollywood Bowl in support of their latest album, “RUSHMERE.” The English indie rock duo Good Neighbours — Oli Fox and Scott Verrill — will open the show.
7:30 p.m. Thursdays. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. hollywoodbowl.com

Culture news

“Purpose” actor Glenn Davis, left, who commissioned the play for Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins accept the award for best play during the 78th Tony Awards on Sunday, June 8, 2025, at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

(Charles Sykes / Charles Sykes/invision/ap)

The 2025 Tony Awards honored Broadway’s best and brightest last night at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The surprise hit “Maybe Happy Ending” won best musical and led all productions with six wins, while the musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” inspired by the legendary Cuban ensemble, earned four. Earlier in the week, Times theater critic Charles McNulty made a prescient arument for why Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose” deserved to win the Tony for best play over Cole Escola’s, “Oh, Mary!” The campy melodrama had a wave of giddy popularity at its back, but “Purpose” is the more complex piece of writing and could more readily benefit from the prestige of a Tony win when it comes to rallying support for future productions, wrote McNulty. “There was a time not so long ago when the future of the Broadway play was in serious doubt. The threat hasn’t gone away, and Tony voters shouldn’t pass up an opportunity to honor true playwriting excellence.” Escola did not go home empty-handed, however, winning the Tony for best lead actor in a play and drawing what may have been the largest applause of the night.

The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

The business outlook is not good for the Kennedy Center in the wake of President Trump’s takeover. The Washington Post recently reported that subscriptions were down by about $1.6 million, or 36%, from the previous year — with the hardest hit coming in theater subscriptions, which are down 82%. “At this time in last year’s subscription campaign, the center had generated $1,226,344 in revenue from selling 1,771 subscriptions. This year it has sold 371 subscriptions, totaling $224,059, a difference of more than $1 million,” the Post reported. The numbers were leaked to the paper by former Kennedy Center employees and confirmed by a current staff member, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution.

Journalist Stephanie Elizondo Griest has a new book coming out this month through Beacon Press titled “Art Above Everything,” which chronicles the lives — and countless sacrifices — made by more than 100 female artists around the world in service of their vocations. At the core of Griest’s explorations in Rwanda, Romania, Qatar, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Cuba and the U.S., is the question: What is the pursuit of art worth?

The SoCal scene

Quinn Kelsey as Rigoletto in Los Angeles Opera’s new production of Verdi’s opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

(Corey Weaver / L.A. Opera)

”L.A. Opera unveiled a violent, politically disquieting production in which a tortured jester faces mob rule,” Times classical music critic Mark Swed writes in his review of the company’s season closer, Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” L.A. Opera has tackled the show before, usually to lackluster effect, Swed notes. This show, however, is different. Thanks to outgoing music director James Conlon’s deft approach to Verdi, this production — featuring a truly terrifying clown suit — sizzles with visceral energy. “After 32 years of failed attempts, L.A. Opera has finally moved the ‘Rigoletto’ needle in the right direction,” Swed says.

Cynthia Erivo poses for a portrait October 28, 2024, in New York.

(Victoria Will/For The Times)

Once you’ve read Times music critic Mikael Wood’s recent interview with Cynthia Erivo about her new album “I Will Forgive You” and what she’s doing during her break from “Wicked,” be sure to check out the talented multiplatform artist’s lengthy June 2 profile in Billboard. Erivo discusses the world’s reaction to her being queer. For the most part, she says, she didn’t experience much difficulty in the wake of her decision to come out. But there was a major exception, she told Billboard: a massive conservative backlash earlier this year after the Hollywood Bowl announced that Erivo would play Jesus in its summer production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “You can’t please everyone. It is legitimately a three-day performance at the Hollywood Bowl where I get to sing my face off. So hopefully they will come and realize, ‘Oh, it’s a musical, the gayest place on Earth,’ ” Erivo says in the article.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

There are 600 L.A. landmarks on the National Register of Historic Places, and lifelong Angeleno Etan Rosenbloom is determined to visit them all. Thankfully, for us, Rosenbloom has highlighted his picks for the top 10 in a handy map.

In 2022, Kyra Davis Lurie heard a story on KCRW’s “Curbed Los Angeles” about the residents of South L.A.’s West Adams Heights, nicknamed Sugar Hill after a community of wealthy Black Harlemites. Learning about the sumptuous soirees Academy Award-winning actor Hattie McDaniel hosted in her Sugar Hill mansion, Lurie realized there was a hidden Black history waiting for her to unearth. But how she created the enthralling historical novel “The Great Mann” is a story that owes as much to Lurie’s ability to reinvent herself as it does to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” the iconic 20th century critique of the American dream, which provided a touchstone for the novel.

Lurie, 52, grew up in Santa Cruz, far from the neighborhood where McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Ethel Waters and other striving Black actors and business pioneers depicted in “The Great Mann” lived. While she visited family regularly in L.A., Lurie stayed up north, where she penned the light-hearted 2005 book “Sex, Murder and a Double Latte.” She quickly followed it with two more mysteries. Encouraged by her success, Lurie struck out for L.A. to pursue her dream of getting into a TV writers room. The 2007 writers’ strike deferred that goal, so Lurie pivoted to write three erotic novels which, she reveals, were “critiques of capitalism wrapped in a romance novel.”

By the time she heard about Sugar Hill and its famous inhabitants, Lurie was ready to take on a more nuanced challenge. But many literary agents weren’t receptive to her change of genre. “It was as if Marlon James had gone from writing comic books to ‘A [Brief] History of Seven Killings,’” she says, name-checking the famous Jamaican writer and his Man Booker Prize-winning novel. But as Lurie continued researching the neighborhood and its history, she knew she had to tell its story, even if using “The Great Gatsby” as her North Star proved problematic.

“I’m a huge Fitzgerald fan,” Lurie says, “even though there was a line in that book that always bothered me.” She’s referring to Nick Carraway’s reference to “two bucks and a girl” upon seeing three wealthy Black people passing by in a white-chauffeured limousine. “While it was probably used to get a laugh in 1925, it was demeaning,” Lurie says of the scene. “In the wake of the Red Summer of 1919 [when a record number of race riots and lynchings of Black Americans occurred in the U.S.] and the destruction of Black Wall Street in the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, Fitzgerald’s language says a lot about America’s cultural climate at the time.”

Was it subversive to use Fitzerald’s most famous novel to frame the story of a vibrant Black enclave whose prosperity rivaled that of Jay Gatsby and his ilk? Absolutely, Lurie says, adding, “Through a Black reimagining of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ I tried to marry a family’s story with a little-known part of L.A. history.”

The family story is told through the lens of Charlie Trammell III, a World War II veteran emotionally scarred by the violence he witnessed on the battlefield and at home in Jim Crow Virginia. Charlie arrives in L.A. looking for a fresh start and to reconnect with his cousin Margie, with whom he shares pivotal childhood experiences. But Margie, who now goes by the more exotic Marguerite, has shaken off the past and married Terrance Lewis, a vice president at Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. The Lewises live with their son in Sugar Hill, along with McDaniel, Beavers and Norman O. Houston, the real-life co-founder and president of Golden State Mutual.

Soon Charlie is swept into the world of L.A.’s wealthy Black elite, a mix of real Angelenos like John and Vada Somerville, pioneering Black dentists and founders of Central Avenue’s famed Dunbar Hotel; singers-actors Waters and Lena Horne; and fictional characters including James Mann, the mysterious Black businessman recently arrived in Sugar Hill who hosts lavish parties unlike anything Charlie’s ever seen: “The air is flavored with flowery perfumes and earthy cigars. All around me diamonds glitter from brown earlobes, gold watches flash against brown wrists. The only things white are the walls.”

Mann befriends Charlie, treating the recently discharged veteran to his first hand-tailored suit and fine wine, but soon embroils him in his quest to reunite with Marguerite, the love of his life since the two met some 10 years before when they both lived in the South.

“Through a Black reimagining of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ I tried to marry a family’s story with a little-known part of L.A. history,” Kyra Davis Lurie said.

(Yvette Roman Photography)

Like Fitzgerald’s classic juxtaposition of West Egg and East Egg in “Gatsby,” “The Great Mann” is about new money versus old — interlopers like Mann and the entertainers versus businesspeople like Houston and the Somervilles. But Lurie “tried not to invent flaws” in her historical figures by doing her homework, sourcing accounts in Black newspapers, biographies and even letters between Houston and NAACP leader Walter White to depict these frictions.

“The Great Mann” is also about people reinventing themselves amid the realities and contradictions of the time. Like Black actors who played maids but employed Black “help” in real life. Or the controversy over the stereotypically demeaning roles Black actors depicted. Chief among them was Delilah Johnson, the subservient Black maid portrayed by Beavers in the 1934 film “Imitation of Life.” It’s a debate that’s introduced in “The Great Mann” when Marguerite and Terrance tell Charlie that Beavers’ home, where he will be staying and which is much grander than theirs, is paid for “with Black shame.” Also addressed in the novel are touchier subjects like White’s advocacy for the lighter-skinned Horne to get roles over her darker-skinned colleagues like McDaniel or Beavers.

But the engine that fires up the plot of “The Great Mann,” and which sets it apart from “Gatsby,” is the battle Black creatives and business owners faced to hold onto their properties. A clause placed in thousands of L.A. property deeds in 1902 restricted housing covenants at the time West Adams Heights and many other L.A. County communities were developed, prohibiting homes from being sold to anyone “other than the white or Caucasian race.” But some white sellers sold property to Black buyers anyway, who then had to fight white groups — like the West Adams Heights Improvement Assn. — to prevent eviction from their own homes.

To say how Sugar Hill’s Black residents fared in court would spoil the enjoyment of this suspenseful tale, which has put Lurie on a new path in writing historical fiction. She has another project percolating, but for now, she’s just grateful to have found her niche. “It’s been a journey,” she says of the twists and turns of her writing life, “but writing about historical Black lives feels like home to me, what I was meant to do.”

Lurie will be discussing “The Great Mann” at Vroman’s Bookstore at 7 p.m. June 10; Diesel, a Bookstore at 6:30 p.m. June 11; and Chevalier’s Books at 6:30 p.m. June 19.

Prince, also known by his recording name Dellyswagz, heard about the choir through a friend who was a member when he first moved to Venice in 2017. He was a singer in Nigeria, and his friend told him it was a good community, that they could help him get settled. When he first arrived, they gave him clothes, helped him find work and provided him with legal assistance to begin the process of getting a visa.

He is now 38, soft-spoken, but when he sings, he sways with feeling, and belting the lyrics, his voice strains and nearly breaks. He dresses in blue-tinted sunglasses, a black leather newsboy cap and a full denim outfit. “Like a king,” he says, smiling.

Shortly after he was born, his parents split up, and his primary caregiver was his mother’s father, who he was very close to. When his grandfather died in 2011, Prince no longer had ties to the Lagos suburb where he grew up and in 2015 decided to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean in search of a better life.

“Growing up a boy, your mom have to really pray a lot for you,” he explains. “Either you become a thug or a mafia.”

He lives in a shared apartment in Padua, 40km (25 miles) outside Venice, where he moved after losing his job in a factory and being evicted because he didn’t have his papers yet. His bedroom doubles as his recording studio, where on a cluttered desk with a large monitor, he is recording and producing Afrobeats songs for his first album.

In Nigeria, he was a professional dance teacher, by most accounts successful, yet he felt there was no future there. Friends and family had already left, including his father, who lived in the United Kingdom, yet he didn’t consider leaving until his uncle, who was living in Austria, called and suggested he make the trip with his uncle’s wife and three cousins. Prince gave away his speakers, clothes and sneakers to his students. Along with his family, he saved up thousands of dollars. He brought nothing with him and told his parents he’d already made up his mind.

“The journey was deadly,” he says with a serious expression. “My story comes with a lot of pain and loss.”

The first three weeks were spent on a large open-backed truck packed with dozens of people. They drove across the Sahara and slept on the sand each night. Some had to drink their own urine, he recounts, because they hadn’t brought enough water, and along the way, he saw bodies left in the sand. “I can’t count how many we buried,” he says without emotion, referring to the people who died on the journey. “We used sand to cover them up. There’s no details of a name or family to call.”

From Libya, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean by boat eight times. The entire journey to Italy took him two years. Once, they were kidnapped by pirates when they were on a boat and released two months later after paying a ransom. Another time, he was held in a Libyan prison for four months. At one point, they ran out of money, and he worked as a security guard for seven months in a compound holding refugees and migrants.

Then, in October 2016, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean again. They crowded onto a wooden boat with more than 200 passengers on board. In the middle of the night, water began to enter the boat, and it started to sink. As it capsized, people fell into the water. Prince jumped in to save his cousins. The sea was freezing, and everyone was shouting and screaming around him, and he remembers the dark water lit by stars. By the time he located his 14-year-old cousin Sandra, it was too late. She had drowned because she didn’t know how to swim.

He held her lifeless body floating on his chest with a life vest propped behind his neck for what he estimates was 25 hours before he and other survivors, including the rest of his family, were rescued by fishermen and brought back to Libya.

“I didn’t even know I was rescued because I was so tired,” he says. “My eyes were just seeing white. I wasn’t seeing any more because of the sea, the salt. I was so tired.” Prince and his family were never able to bury Sandra because he says her body was stolen by people smugglers.

In Libya, a fisherman from The Gambia taught him how to use a compass, and on his final voyage, he was the navigator, telling the boat captain in which direction to steer. Their boat was intercepted by a rescue boat off the coast of Lampedusa. “The journey is not something I would wish upon my worst enemy,” he says, shaking his head. The rest of his family, who had gone ahead separately, went to different parts of Italy and Austria.

Prince tried to live with his sister-in-law in Austria, but when the authorities threatened to deport him, he was brought back to Italy, where his asylum case was pending. His flight landed him in Venice. He doesn’t know why.

Life in Italy has been hard, he says. His father had warned him about living as an immigrant, telling him before he left, “It’s better to be a free man in your own country than a slave abroad.” Prince is starting to agree with him. When he was evicted from his apartment, he was homeless for seven months, sleeping on friends’ couches and in a garage.

For him, there’s nothing special to Venice. “All I do is go to work and come home, go to work, come home,” he says. If he could do it all again, he says, he would have stayed in Nigeria.

These days, he has a new job, but it is an exhausting night shift with a long commute that cuts into the time he has to make music. To save money, he has learned to subsist on one meal a day and has stopped painting, another favourite hobby. The choir is the only time he enjoys himself. “When I’m singing with them, I’m always smiling,” he says, “because that’s the only time I can be myself.”

Sean Byrne knows how to show an audience a bad time. Sixteen years ago, the Australian filmmaker launched onto the scene with “The Loved Ones,” his proudly grisly debut about a misfit teenager who gets gruesome revenge on the boy who refused to go to prom with her. Part expert torture porn, part exploration of adolescent romantic anxieties, the film was an instant midnight-madness cult item that took Byrne six years to follow up.

When he did, he went in a different tonal direction with “The Devil’s Candy,” a surprisingly emotional psychological thriller about a heavy-metal-loving painter who moves his family to a beautifully rustic home, only to lose his mind. Working in recognizable horror subgenres, Byrne entices you with a familiar premise and then slowly teases apart the tropes, leaving you unsettled but also invigorated by his inventiveness.

It has now been a decade since that distinctive riff on “The Shining,” and for Byrne’s third feature, he once again pillages from indelible sources. “Dangerous Animals” draws from both the serial-killer thriller and Hollywood’s penchant for survival stories about hungry sharks feasting on human flesh. But unlike in the past, Byrne’s new movie never waylays you with a surprise narrative wrinkle or unexpected thematic depth. He hasn’t lost his knack for generating bad vibes, but this time he hasn’t brought anything else to the party.

The movie stars Hassie Harrison as Zephyr, a solitary surfer who explains in on-the-nose dialogue that she prefers the danger of open water to the unhappiness of life on land. An American in Australia who grew up in foster homes and who lives in a beat-up old van, Zephyr encounters Moses (Josh Heuston), a straitlaced nice guy whom she hooks up with. Not that she wants him developing feelings for her: She takes off in the middle of the night so she can catch some waves. Unfortunately, Zephyr is the one who gets caught — by Tucker (Jai Courtney), a deceptively gregarious boat captain who kidnaps her. Next thing she knows, she’s chained up inside his vessel out at sea, alongside another female victim, Heather (Ella Newton).

Like many a movie serial killer, Tucker isn’t just interested in murdering his prey — he wants to make something artistic out of his butchery. And so he ties Heather to a crane and dangles her in the water like a giant lure, pulling out a camcorder to record her final moments as sharks devour her. Watching his victims struggle to stay alive is cinema to this twisted soul and Zephyr will be his next unwitting protagonist.

Working from a script by visual artist Nick Lepard, Byrne (who wrote his two previous features) digs into the story’s B-movie appeal. Tucker may use old-fashioned technology to record his kills, but “Dangerous Animals” is set in the present, even if its trashy, drive-in essence would have made it better suited to come out 50 years ago as counterprogramming to “Jaws.” With Zephyr’s tough-girl demeanor and Tucker’s creepy vibe, Byrne knowingly plays into genre clichés, setting up the inevitable showdown between the beauty and the beast.

But despite that juicy setup, “Dangerous Animals” is a disappointingly straightforward and ultimately underwhelming horror movie, offering little of the grim poetry of Byrne’s previous work and far too much of the narrative predictability that in the past he astutely sidestepped. There are still subversive ideas — for one thing, this is a shark film with precious few sharks — but Byrne’s sneaky smarts have largely abandoned him. Rather than transcending expectations, “Dangerous Animals” surrenders to them.

One can’t fault Harrison, whose Zephyr spends much of the movie in a battle of wills with her captor. Because “Dangerous Animals” limits the amount of sharks we see, digitally inserting footage of the deadly creatures into scenes, the story’s central tension comes from Zephyr trying to free herself or get help before Tucker prepares his next nautical snuff film. Harrison projects a ferocious determination that’s paired with an intense loathing for this condescending, demented misogynist. It’s bad enough that Tucker wants to murder her — beforehand, he wants to bore her with shark trivia, dully advocating for these misunderstood animals. It’s an underdeveloped joke: “Dangerous Animals” is a nightmare about meeting the mansplainer from hell.

Alas, Courtney’s conception of the film’s true dangerous animal is where the story truly runs aground. The actor’s handsome, vaguely blank countenance is meant to suggest a burly, hunky everyman — the sort of person you’d never suspect or look twice at, which makes Tucker well-positioned to leave a trail of corpses in his path. But neither Byrne nor Courtney entirely gets their arms around this conventionally unhinged horror villain. “Dangerous Animals” overly underlines its point that we shouldn’t be afraid of sharks — it’s the Tuckers who ought to keep us up at night — but Courtney never captures the unfathomable malice beneath the facial scruff. We root for Zephyr to escape Tucker’s clutches not because he’s evil but because he’s a bit of a stiff.

Even with those deficiencies, the film boasts a level of craft that keeps the story fleet, with Byrne relying on the dependable tension of a victim trapped at sea with her pursuer, sharks waiting in the waters surrounding her. Michael Yezerski’s winkingly emphatic score juices every scare as the gore keeps ratcheting up — particularly during a moment when Zephyr finds an unexpected way to break out of handcuffs.

But Byrne can’t redeem the script’s boneheaded plot twists, nor can he elevate the most potentially intriguing idea at its core. As Tucker peers into his viewfinder, getting off on his victims’ screams as sharks sink their jaws into them, “Dangerous Animals” hints at the fixation horror directors such as Byrne have for presenting us with unspeakable terrors, insisting we love the bloodshed as much as they do. Tucker tries to convince Zephyr that they’re not all that different — they’re both sharks, you see — but in truth, Byrne may be suggesting an uncomfortable kinship with his serial killer. But instead of provocatively pursuing that unholy bond, the director only finds chum.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles threw a glitzy bash at the institution’s Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo Saturday, raising $3.1 million and honoring architect Frank Gehry, artist Theaster Gates and philanthropist Wendy Schmidt. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi — a surprise guest — showed up to pay tribute to Gehry, while Ava DuVernay celebrated Gates and Jane Fonda honored Schmidt.

The special program honoring “visionaries” who helped shaped the museum’s trajectory is part of a new gala tradition called MOCA Legends, which will continue with new honorees next year.

The night began with cocktails in the plaza and private access to the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, “OPEN.” The Japanese American drumming group TAIKOPROJECT played while guests found their seats for dinner.

MOCA director Johanna Burton welcomed attendees with a speech about the power of art and its ability to bring communities together.

“As we celebrate our annual gala, we are not just honoring individual achievements, but reaffirming our collective belief in the power of art to connect and challenge; uplift and endure,” Burton said, according to a news release about the event.

After Pelosi’s introduction of Gehry, which included mention of his 1983 renovation of the Geffen Contemporary, the 96-year-old legend noted how much the museum has meant to him over the years.

“Artists brought me into their club — it’s where I wanted to be, and they opened my eyes to another world,” Gehry said.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, and I’m here for all the celebrations of art and artists — the more the better. Here’s your weekend rundown of arts news.

Best bets: On our radar this week

Noah Davis at work in Los Angeles in 2009.

(Patrick O’Brien-Smith)

Noah Davis
A collection of more than 50 figurative paintings made by the late Los Angeles artist, who died at 32 in 2015, just as Davis’ career was beginning to attract wide attention, arrives after stops in Potsdam, Germany, and London. Davis’ paintings, often built around found photographs, regularly balance on a knife-edge between daily life and dream. The exhibition represents the first institutional survey of Davis’ work.
Sunday-Aug. 31. UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. hammer.ucla.edu

Hong Yoo, on the daegeum, performs at the L.A. Phil’s “Seoul Festival” on June 3.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Seoul Festival
The L.A. Phil turns to the South Korean capital this week for a follow-up to its revelatory Reykjavik and Mexico City festivals. Unsuk Chin, today’s best-known Korean composer, is the curator. Despite a seeming wealth of renowned performers, Korea remains a musically mysterious land. The mostly youngish composers and performers in the first festival event, an exceptional concert of new music on Tuesday night, were all discoveries. The festival continues with weekend orchestra concerts featuring different mixes of four more new Korean scores commissioned by the L.A. Phil, Chin’s 2014 Clarinet Concerto and a pair of Brahms concertos. A chamber music concert with works by Schumann and Brahms played by Korean musicians is the closing event Tuesday.
Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com

Emily Yetter and Jack Stehlin in “Lear Redux” at the Odyssey Theatre.

(John Dlugolecki Photography)

‘Lear Redux’
While Center Theatre Group reworks Shakepeare’s “Hamlet” at the Mark Taper Forum (see item below), across town, Odyssey Theatre renews its collaboration with theater artist John Farmanesh-Bocca for a madcap adaptation of the Bard’s “King Lear,” another entry in the director-playwright’s Redux series. Veteran stage actor Jack Stehlin stars as the titular monarch in the production, which Stage Raw’s Deborah Klugman described as “wildly idiosyncratic.” In 2016, Times’ contributor Philip Brandes made Farmanesh-Bocca’s “Tempest Redux” at the Odyssey (also starring Stehlin) a Critic’s Choice, writing that the work “boldly transposes Shakespeare’s play to a darker, more unsettling key, but the inventive staging and solid command of source text make for a memorable re-imagining.”
Wednesday-Sunday, through July 13. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. odysseytheatre.com

Dispatch: ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’

George Clooney in “Good Night and Good Luck” on Broadway.

(Emilio Madrid)

When CNN broadcasts a live performance of “Good Night, and Good Luck” from the Winter Garden in New York City on Saturday (4 p.m. PDT), it’s apparently the first time a Broadway play will be shown live on television, and the timing could not be better.

An adaptation of George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s 2005 film, which chronicled CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s heroic crusade against Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, the broodingly elegant production, sharply directed by David Cromer and starring a quietly committed Clooney in the role of Murrow (played in the film by David Strathairn), was not only one of the most stirring offerings of the Broadway season but also one of the most necessary.

As media companies face a campaign of intimidation from the Trump administration, the figure of Murrow, standing tall in the face of demagogic adversity, is the courageous example we need right now.

I don’t know how different the experience will be watching at home, but “Good Night, and Good Luck” made me reflect on what theatergoing might have been like in ancient Greece. Athenian citizens would gather at an open-air theater as a democratic privilege and responsibility. Playwrights addressed the polis not by dramatizing current events but by recasting tales from the mythological and historic past to sharpen critical thinking on contemporary concerns.

Clooney and Heslov aren’t writing dramatic poetry. Their more straightforward approach is closer to documentary drama, but the effect is not so disparate. We are affirmed in the knowledge that we are the body politic.

— Charles McNulty

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Gina Torres from “Suits” and Patrick Ball from “The Pitt” pose for a portrait as they rehearse for “Hamlet” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Director and playwright Robert O’Hara’s world premiere adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” opened Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum starring Patrick Ball from “The Pitt” and Gina Torres from “Suits.” The Times sat down with the trio of creatives for an interview about how the show came together — as well as the many novel ways it diverges from the traditional script. O’Hara presents a modern-day vision that questions whether Hamlet is a tragic hero or a murderous psychopath. The mystery is solved “CSI“-style and the tone is very L.A. noir. For his part, Ball can’t believe any of this is really happening, having been a relative unknown before “The Pitt” premiered in January.

Domingo Hindoyan was named the new music director of L.A. Opera.

(Chris Christoloudou)

L.A. Opera announced Domingo Hindoyan as its new music director. Hindoyan — chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic — will replace outgoing music director James Conlon when he steps down at the end of the 2026 season. When Hindoyan, a native of Venezuela, made his L.A. Opera debut last November with “Roméo et Juliette,” Times classical music critic Mark Swed speculated he might be in the running for the coveted position. Turns out he was right.

“Los Angeles Before the Freeways: Images of an Era 1850-1950” by Arnold Hylen with Nathan Marsak.

(Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library)

Times contributor Nick Owchar talks with architectural historian Nathan Marsak about the Angel City Press reissue of photographer Arnold Hylen’s book of mid-20th century photos, “Los Angeles Before the Freeways: Images of an Era 1850-1950.” Marsak curated and expanded the new edition, which details a fascinating world of lost streets, civic buildings, shops and restaurants.

Heidi Zuckerman at the construction site of the Orange County Museum of Art in 2021.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Orange County Museum of Art executive director Heidi Zuckerman — who announced she will step down in December — has launched a new online platform called “About Art.” It’s home to her “Why Art Matters” newsletter and “About Art” podcast, as well as a number of lifestyle offerings including an entry on Zuckerman’s love of matcha and how to prepare the perfect cup. In a news release about the venture, Zuckerman notes that her work has gathered a community of 40,000 art enthusiasts.

The summer Hollywood Bowl season is upon us, and with it comes the complimentary Market Tasting Series with wine picks by chef Caroline Styne. The fun begins with the Roots Picnic this Sunday in the Plaza Marketplace near the box office. Tastings start an hour before doors open, and you can meet with vintners and reps from Habit Wines, Skurnik Wines, Grapevine Wine Company, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Elevage Wines and more. The final tasting will take place before the John Legend concert on Sunday, Sept. 28.

Guests enjoy wine and friendship at the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation’s weekly wine tasting.

(Photo by Janna Ireland; courtesy of Barnsdall Art Park Foundation)

Speaking of wine, Barnsdall Art Park Foundation is back — beginning tonight at 5:30 p.m. — with its 16th annual Barnsdall Fridays wine tasting fundraiser (the first two Fridays are already sold out). Proceeds from the events, scheduled to run through Sept. 26, support cultural programming at the park. The popular summer series comes as proposed city budget cuts imperil the park’s finances. Guests are invited to relax on Olive Hill, as well as the west lawn of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House — the only existing UNESCO World Heritage site in the city of Los Angeles. Wines come courtesy of Silverlake Wine, and there are always a variety of local food trucks onsite, as well as a DJ. While there, visitors can check out exhibitions and artist-led presentations at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and Barnsdall Junior Arts Center Gallery.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

I’m happy to report that I’ve been to 14 of the 17 eateries on The Times Food section’s list of L.A.’s oldest restaurants. Some, like Musso & Frank Grill, I’ve ambled into many times (that martini!), and others, like Mijares Mexican Restaurant, I’ve stumbled upon while walking around town. I’ll spend this weekend visiting the remaining three.

As we drove north along Highway 395 — passing the salty remains of Owens Lake, the Museum of Western Film History, the geothermal plant outside Mammoth Lakes that supplies 24/7 clean energy to San Bernardino County — I felt certain we’d found the northernmost reaches of Southern California.

It was Memorial Day weekend, and my wife and I were headed to a U.S. Forest Service campground in the White Mountains, 225 miles as the crow flies from downtown L.A.’s Union Station. If you drew a line on a map due west from our campsite, you’d cut through the Sierra Nevada and eventually hit San José.

But to my mind, we were still in Southern California.

For one thing, Southern California Edison supplied electricity here. For another, Los Angeles had sucked this place dry.

In the early 1900s, agents secretly working for the city posed as farmers and ranchers, buying up land and water rights in the Owens Valley. Then Los Angeles built an aqueduct, diverting water from the Owens River to feed the city’s growth. Owens Lake largely dried up. The city later extended the aqueduct north to Mono Lake.

As a lifelong Angeleno, I felt compelled to see some of the results for myself.

I had spent time in the Owens Valley, but never the Mono Basin. So we took a dirt road branching off the gorgeous June Lake Loop to stand atop an earthen dam built by L.A. in the 1930s. It impounds Rush Creek, the largest tributary bringing Sierra snowmelt to Mono Lake. As I looked out at Grant Lake Reservoir — beautiful in its own way, if totally unnatural — I realized I had been drinking this water my whole life.

Grant Lake Reservoir stores water for the city of Los Angeles. I took this photo standing atop the earthen dam.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

My feelings were similarly muddled when we arrived at Mono Lake.

On the one hand, this was one of the coolest and weirdest places I’d ever seen. As we padded along a boardwalk toward the sandy southern shore, I was blown by the gleaming blue water, the snow-capped Sierra peaks and the tufa — my gosh, the tufa. Bizarre-looking rock towers made of calcium carbonate, like something from a dream.

At the same time, much of the boardwalk ideally would have been underwater.

Under a 1994 ruling by state officials, L.A. is supposed to try to limit its withdrawals from Mono Lake’s tributaries, with a goal of restoring the lake to an elevation of 6,392 feet — healthier for the millions of migratory and nesting birds that depend on it for sustenance, and better for keeping down dust that degrades local air quality.

Three decades later, the lake has never gotten close to its target level. L.A. continues to withdraw too much water, and the Mono Basin continues to suffer. Mayor Karen Bass said last year that the city would take less, but officials ultimately reneged, citing a dry winter.

As we walked past a sign on the way to the southern shore marking 6,392 feet, I felt a little pang of guilt.

Tufa formations line the sandy southern shore of Mono Lake.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

Responsibility is a funny thing. When we got back from our camping trip, I read about a woman suing oil and gas companies over the tragic death of her mom, who died of overheating at age 65 during a historic heat wave that roasted the Pacific Northwest in 2021. The first-of-its-kind lawsuit claims wrongful death, alleging — accurately — that the companies spent years working to hide the climate crisis from the public.

I’m neither a psychic nor a psychologist. But I’m guessing, based on more than a decade reporting on energy and climate change, that executives at the fossil fuel companies in question — including Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Phillips 66 and Shell — aren’t suddenly feeling guilty for their role in boiling the planet.

Same goes for the Trump administration — impossible to guilt. The World Meteorological Organization reported last week that Earth is highly likely to keep shattering temperature records in the next few years, driving deadlier heat waves, more destructive fires and fiercer droughts. That hasn’t stopped President Trump and congressional Republicans from pressing forward with a budget bill that would obliterate support for renewable energy.

So why was I, a climate journalist, feeling guilty over something I really had nothing to do with? Was it silly for me to bother taking responsibility when the people wrecking the planet were never going to do the same?

I think the answers have something to do with the importance of honesty.

Sunset from the White Mountains.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

As we sat at our campsite by a roaring fire — stoked by my wife, who’s way better than me with open flames — I cracked open a book of speeches by President Theodore Roosevelt, delivered in 1903 on his first trip to California. He was on my mind because he’d originally established Inyo National Forest, where our spectacular campground was, to protect the lands and watershed where Los Angeles would build its Owens Valley aqueduct.

“You can pardon most anything in a man who will tell the truth,” Roosevelt said. “If anyone lies, if he has the habit of untruthfulness, you cannot deal with him, because there is nothing to depend on.”

“The businessman or politician who does not tell the truth cheats; and for the cheat we should have no use in any walk of life,” he said.

Naturally, I thought of Trump, whose political success is built on outrageous lies, from climate and election denial to insisting that Haitian immigrants eat their neighbors’ cats. I also recalled a recent order from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum discouraging “negative” depictions of U.S. history on signs at national parks and other public lands — a directive with the Orwellian title, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Did that mean educational materials at Manzanar National Historic Site — which sits just off Highway 395 and is managed by the National Park Service — would soon be revamped, to avoid explaining how the U.S. government cruelly and needlessly imprisoned more than 10,000 Japanese Americans there during World War II?

If a similar order were issued covering the Forest Service, which is overseen by a different federal agency, would the Mono Lake visitor center take down its thoughtful signs explaining the history of the Los Angeles water grab? Would the Forest Service alter a sign at the nearby Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest detailing the possible impacts of global warming, considering that the U.S. is the largest historical emitter of heat-trapping pollution?

Trees at Schulman Grove in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

Only time will tell. But Teddy Roosevelt was right. So long as Trump and his allies keep lying — pretending that oil and gas aren’t cooking the planet, that we don’t need sound science, that Americans have only ever done good — they’ll feel no guilt, no responsibility. Because they’ll have nothing to take responsibility for.

Accepting the facts means owning up to the hard ones.

It’s not just politicians who have trouble. Highway 395’s Museum of Western Film History is mostly hagiography, a collection of props and artifacts that fails to unpack the settler colonialism behind the western films it glorifies.

But I did learn that the original “Star Wars” was one of many films to shoot footage in the Owens Valley. And the “Star Wars” universe, as it happens, is all about fighting an empire that seeks to control people’s homelands and histories — a message central to Season 2 of “Andor,” now streaming on Disney+.

“I believe we are in crisis,” says Galactic Senator Mon Mothma, a leader of the brewing Rebellion. “The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.”

Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) makes a pivotal Imperial Senate speech in “Andor,” Season 2, Episode 9.

(Lucasfilm Ltd.)

Here’s the truth: There’s not enough water in Mono or Owens lake. It’s hotter than it used to be. The sky is dark with wildfire smoke more often. The Sierra Nevada peaks frequently aren’t as snowy.

Again, the senator: “When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”

In America, monsters are screaming. Find harbor in honesty, and perhaps the mountains.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.

For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Hardcover fiction

1. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press: $30) An unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond.

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4. Never Flinch by Stephen King (Scribner: $32) Holly Gibney is back on the case, this time facing both a serial killer and a stalker.

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…

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…

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1. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $19)

2. Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley: $20)

3. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20)

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5. Sandwich by Catherine Newman (Harper Perennial: $19)

6. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18)

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8. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17)

9. One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune (Berkley: $19)

10. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury

…

Paperback nonfiction

1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12)

2. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21)

3. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20)

4. All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley (Simon & Schuster: $19)

5. Cultish by Amanda Montell (Harper Perennial: $20)

6. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (Amber-Allen: $13)

7. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)

8. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18)

9. The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (Penguin: $19)

10. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $36)

Fortune Feimster and her wife of five years, Jacquelyn “Jax” Smith, are divorcing, the former couple posted Monday on social media.

“Together, we have made the difficult decision to end our marriage,” they wrote in a statement posted on their Instagram accounts. “We’ve been separated for a little bit, both of us dealing with tough health situations in our families, so it wasn’t something we were ready to talk about.”

They continued, “While we are sad to see this chapter of our lives come to a close, we wish each other nothing but the best as we move forward. We’ve had 10 years together, and there’s so much to celebrate about that and so much we will look back on fondly.”

“The Mindy Project” actor, a Groundlings veteran, requested privacy in the wake of the news.

Smith was a kindergarten teacher and later joined Feimster’s creative team, executive producing three of her comedy specials, “Sweet & Salty” in 2020, “Good Fortune” in 2022 and “Crushing It” in 2024. The two met at a 2015 Pride event in Chicago, dated long distance for a few years, got engaged in 2018 and married in a small ceremony during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The women’s families attended the wedding via Zoom.

“I want people to know me and Jax are like everybody else,” the 44-year-old comedian told People in October 2022. “We happen to be gay but our story is not much different from other people’s. … You don’t have to be gay to relate to an engagement story.”

Divorce? Definitely — albeit unfortunately — relatable.

Feimster credits Chelsea Handler with launching her career as a writer-performer-standup comedian. She is credited as a writer on almost 600 episodes of “Chelsea Lately” between 2011 and 2014.

“She was putting people on TV that no one else was putting on TV,” Feimster told The Times in 2023, “and not really caring if you fit the mold of who should be on TV. … She was the first person who gave me the ‘yes’ when everyone was telling me ‘no.’”

Maria Reva creates beautiful, purposeful chaos. Informed by deep personal loss, her startling metafictional debut novel, “Endling,” is a forceful mashup of storytelling modes that call attention to its interplay of reality and fiction — a Ukrainian tragicomedy of errors colliding with social commentary about the Russian invasion.

A poorly planned crime serves as the anchor. “Endling” throws three strangers involved with Ukraine’s for-profit international matchmaking market together for a quixotic kidnapping caper in a nation on the brink of war. There’s a twisted, postmodern “Canterbury Tales”-like quality to these proceedings: Like medieval pilgrims, its central characters are each on a journey they hope will change their lives. And everyone is suffering some level of delusion.

If “Endling” has a main character, it’s the woman whose mission is to save the nation’s endangered snails; another key player is a lone wolf terrorist who hopes her political orchestrations will spark a family reunion. Then there’s the lonely, disaffected expatriate bachelor on the hunt for a quiet, traditional wife. Through their perspectives, black humor flows freely, as the motivations and experiences that brought this motley crew together rise to the surface.

Context is crucial in “Endling.” These characters cross paths early in 2022, when mass violence threatens to overwhelm every other concern. But despite the amassing of Russian troops on the border, the military invasion of Ukraine seems so surreal that no one knows what to believe or how much to fear. So these quests march on even as the crack of explosions grows louder.

The stories that emerge about our three key players are evocative, provocative and absurd — a contrast to looming darkness. Between those narratives, there are commentaries about the history and politics of Ukraine and on publishing and writing about Ukraine, plus the author’s family and its plight at the time of the book’s writing. As Reva, a native of Ukraine, writes in an early, epistolary section, in response to a magazine editor’s critique of the irreverence of her solicited essay about the war: “You’d asked for the type of reporting/response that would differ from that of a non-Ukrainian. In Ukraine, dark humor dates back to the Soviet days, giving people who live in uncontrollable circumstances a sense of power. If you can laugh about a dark reality, you rise above it, etc.”

No story better exemplifies that ethos than that of the teenage fake bride turned kidnapper who aches for her mother. Young, beautiful Nastia (a.k.a. Anastasia) — just 18 years old and six months past high school graduation — brings the group together. Ostensibly to stop the exploitation of women, this daughter of a fierce feminist activist who has long protested the tourist marriage market resolves to make an unforgettable public statement by kidnapping 100 male clients of the matchmaking service “Romeo and Yulia” at the start of one of its romance tours. Though the stunt is nominally aimed at exposing and ending degrading matchmaking practices, what Nastia really yearns for is her missing parent’s attention. When Nastia decides that a mobile trailer van in the guise of an escape room would be the perfect means of the men’s abduction, she begs Yeva, a fellow bride in possession of an RV, to rent it to her.

Like Nastia, Yeva is a “bride” with an agenda. A scientist who’s lost her grant funding, Yeva uses the marriage mart grift to sustain her life’s work. Her story exemplifies the mercenary nature of the international marriage market. While Romeo and Yulia’s “brides,” as the women are called, aren’t paid a salary, they regularly receive gifts from suitors. In exchange for allowing the agency to use her as “shimmering bait” on the website, women like Yeva “could also return tour after tour and, without bending any rules, make decent money. In fact, the agency endorsed the practice: any gifts ordered by bachelors through the agency — gym membership, cooking class, customizable charm bracelet — could be redeemed by the brides for cash from the agency office.”

Yeva’s story gives the novel a melancholy moral center. And it’s from Yeva’s quest that the book derives its title: An “endling” is the last individual in a dying species, the kind she is dedicated to protecting. After losing access to institutional support, Yeva equipped the trailer as a roaming laboratory and storage site where (at the peak) she sustained over 270 species of rare gastropods. Though she prefers mollusks to men, it’s Yeva who insists on reducing the kidnapping target from 100 to 12, a number that the trailer could humanely accommodate.

Pasha, one of the men Nastia lures to the trailer, has his own ambitions. Born in Ukraine and raised in Canada, Pasha’s secret is that he doesn’t plan to return to the West with his bride like the other clients. Instead, he fantasizes about resettling in the Ukraine and forging a life that might command the respect he craves from his parents. Pasha is the sympathetic face of Western men beguiled by nostalgia for “traditional” wives unsullied by feminism and high expectations. His motives are sincere even if his relationship with women and his family might be better served through therapy.

“Endling” isn’t an easy read, but it is brilliant and heart-stopping. Authorial interludes can feel like interruptions, but by breaking the fourth wall, Reva forces us to pay attention to the ongoing devastation behind the narrative while unpacking the compromises of storytelling. Plus, Yeva, Nastia and Pasha and the merchants of romance spin their own fictions: They have trouble telling the difference between truth and make-believe even as the sounds of war grow near and even when bullets penetrate flesh.

This building up and breaking down of artifice forces reflection on how we use fiction to explore and bend reality while undermining the comforts of distance. As the author confesses, “I need to keep fact and fiction straight, but they keep blurring together.”

Bell is a critic and media researcher exploring culture, politics and identity in art.

A claim by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that an immigrant threatened the life of President Trump has begun to unravel.

Noem announced an arrest of a 54-year-old man who was living in the U.S. illegally, saying he had written a letter threatening to kill Trump and would then return to Mexico. The story received a flood of media attention and was highlighted by the White House and Trump’s allies.

But investigators actually believe the man may have been framed so that he would be arrested and deported from the U.S. before he got a chance to testify in a trial as a victim of assault, a person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press. The person could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Law enforcement officials believe the man, Ramon Morales Reyes, never wrote a letter that Noem and her department shared with a message written in light blue ink expressing anger over Trump’s deportations and threatening to shoot him in the head with a rifle at a rally. Noem also shared the letter on X along with a photo of Morales Reyes, and the White House also shared it on its social media accounts. The letter was mailed to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office along with the FBI and other agencies, the person said.

As part of the investigation, officials had contacted Morales Reyes and asked for a handwriting sample and concluded that his handwriting and the threatening letter didn’t match and that the threat was not credible, the person said. It’s not clear why Homeland Security officials still decided to send a release making that claim.

In an emailed statement asking for information about the letter and the new information about Morales Reyes, the Department of Homeland Security said “the investigation into the threat is ongoing. Over the course of the investigation, this individual was determined to be in the country illegally and that he had a criminal record. He will remain in custody.”

His attorneys said he was not facing current charges and they did not have any information about convictions in his record. The revelations were first reported by CNN.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s records show Morales Reyes is being held at a county jail in Juneau, Wis., northwest of Milwaukee. The Milwaukee-based immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera, which is advocating for his release, said he was arrested May 21. Attorney Cain Oulahan, who was hired to fight against his deportation, said he has a hearing in a Chicago immigration court next week and is hoping he is released on bond.

Morales Reyes had been a victim in a case of another man who is awaiting trial on assault charges in Wisconsin, the person familiar with the matter said. The trial is scheduled for July.

Morales Reyes works as a dishwasher in Milwaukee, where he lives with his wife and three children. He had recently applied for a U visa, which is carved out for people in the country illegally who become victims of serious crimes, said attorney Kime Abduli, who filed that application.

The Milwaukee Police Department said it is investigating an identity theft and victim intimidation incident related to this matter and the county district attorney’s office said the investigation was ongoing. Milwaukee police said no one has been criminally charged at this time.

Abduli, Morales Reyes’ attorney, says he could not have written the letter, saying he did not receive formal education and can’t write in Spanish and doesn’t know how to speak English. She said it was not clear whether he was arrested because of the letters.

“There is really no way that it could be even remotely true,” Abduli said. “We’re asking for a clarification and a correction from DHS to clear Ramon’s name of anything having to do with this.”

Balsamo, Bauer and Licon write for the Associated Press.

CNN’s chief national security correspondent Alex Marquardt, whose 2021 story on a military contractor led to a defamation suit loss in court, announced Monday he is leaving the network.

“Tough to say goodbye but it’s been an honor to work among the very best in the business,” Marquardt wrote on X. “Profound thank you to my comrades on the National Security team & the phenomenal teammates I’ve worked with in the US and abroad.”

Earlier this year, a Florida jury awarded $5 million to former CIA operative Zachary Young after a jury found he was defamed in a November 2021 report by Marquardt on how Afghans were being charged thousands of dollars to be evacuated after the U.S. military withdrawal from their country.

After deliberations began on punitive damages, CNN attorneys reached an undisclosed settlement with Young.

A CNN representative declined to comment on Marquardt’s departure, calling it a personnel matter. One network insider who was not authorized to comment publicly said there was a feeling among many people at CNN that Marquardt had to go after the loss in court.

Marquardt has served as CNN’s chief national security correspondent since 2017. He was previously a foreign correspondent for ABC News.

Young lives in Vienna and has his business based in Florida. He was seeking $14,500 for getting people out of Afghanistan after the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal. He claimed his services were limited to corporate sponsors.

The business was described in Marqurdt’s report alongside interviews with Afghans who spoke about desperate efforts by people to escape, but they had no connection to Young.

Young’s suit said his inclusion in the story, which used the term “black market” in an on-screen banner, implied that his activity was criminal, even though Marquardt’s segment made no such charge. “Black market” was also used in the introduction of the report when it first ran on “The Lead With Jake Tapper,” other CNN programs and the network’s website and social media accounts.

CNN lawyers argued that the term “black market” was used to describe an unregulated activity, even though the dictionary definition describes it as illegal.

Young claimed the story destroyed his reputation and ability to earn a living — driving his annual income from $350,000 to zero — and caused severe emotional and psychological distress.

Shohei Ohtani was about halfway through his home-run trot when Taro Abe stood up from his second-row seat in the Vin Scully Press Box and tucked his green scorebook under his right arm.

“Let’s go,” Abe said in Japanese.

Abe, a writer for Japan’s Chunichi Sports newspaper, was followed into the concourse of Dodger Stadium’s suite level by four other reporters from his country. They were on a mission: Find the person who caught Ohtani’s home-run ball.

There was nothing special about this blast, which was Ohtani’s second on Friday in an eventual 8-5 victory over the New York Yankees. The homer was Ohtani’s 22nd of the season and reduced the Dodgers’ deficit at the time from three to two.

“We have to do this every time,” Abe said.

This practice started a couple of years ago, when Ohtani was still playing for the Angels. The appetite for Ohtani content was insatiable in Japan, but the two-way player started speaking to reporters only after games in which he pitched. Naoyuki Yanagihara of Sports Nippon and Masaya Kotani of Full Count figured out a solution for their problem: They started interviewing the fans who caught his home-run balls.

The feature was received well by their readers and gradually spread to other publications. Now, besides the homers that land in bullpens or any other place inaccessible to fans, a group of Japanese reporters will be there to interview the person who snagged the prized souvenir.

Neither Yanagihara nor Kotani was on this particular journey into the right-field pavilion, as Yanagihara was temporarily back in Japan and Kotani remained in the press box. Both of their publications were represented by other reporters. I was there too.

One of the reporters, Michi Murayama of Sports Hochi, looked at me curiously.

“You’re coming?” she asked.

Abe joked: “He’s coming to write how ridiculous the Japanese media is.”

As we walked down a carpeted hallway by the suites down the first-base line, Abe turned around and asked if anyone had seen who caught the ball.

No one had.

Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani hit a pair of home runs off Yankees starting pitcher Max Fried on Friday night at Dodger Stadium.

(Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)

Before departing from the press box, reporters usually study replays of the homer to find identifying features of the ballhawk. But in this case, the scramble for the ball was obscured by a short barrier that divided a television cameraman from the crowd.

Abe led the pack out of an exit near the Stadium Club. When we re-entered the ballpark at the loge level, we heard a familiar chant: “Fre-ddie! Fre-ddie!”

The reporters stopped to watch the game from behind the last row of seats. Freeman doubled in a run to reduce the Dodgers’ deficit to one, and pandemonium ensued. A young woman clutching a beer danced. Strangers exchanged high-fives. Others performed the Freddie Dance.

Yankees manager Aaron Boone removed Max Fried from the game, and called Jonathan Loáisiga from the bullpen. It was time for us to move on.

Seniority heavily influences professional and personal interactions in Japanese culture, which was why when we reached the top of the right-field pavilion, the two-most-junior reporters were told to find the ball-catching fan and return with him. Iori Kobayashi of Sports Nippon, 25, and Akihiro Ueno of Full Count, 27, accepted their fates without question.

However, the veteran Murayama noticed they weren’t making any progress, and soon she was in the middle of the pavilion with them. She came back soon after to tell us we were in the wrong place.

“We have to go down to the Home Run Seats,” she said, referring to seats directly behind the right-field wall that are in a separate section as the rest of the pavilion.

The ushers there were helpful, describing how the ball struck the portable plastic wall behind the cameraman, rolled under the barrier, and was taken by a boy in a gray jersey. Murayama found the boy and said he would speak to the group when the inning was over.

“They usually come after the inning because they want to watch the game too,” Abe said.

While we waited, Eriko Takehama of Sankei Sports approached Abe and showed him a picture of a fan holding up a piece of the plastic wall that was struck by Ohtani’s homer. The piece had broken off, and the fan told Takehama that he was taking it home.

“Do you want to talk to him?” Takehama asked Abe. “He said he caught a ball three years ago.”

Abe declined.

While watching Max Muncy taking first base on an intentional walk, Abe said, “Everyone has a story. You ask them where they live, where they work and there’s usually something interesting. We’re writing human-interest stories with Ohtani as a cover.”

This story would be about a 14-year-old eighth-grader from Monrovia named Fisher Luginvuhl. With his mother standing nearby, the Little League catcher gushed, “It’s like the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

The reporters circled the boy and photographed him holding up the ball. They exchanged numbers with Luginvuhl’s father so they could send him links to the stories they produced.

While the reporters worked together to locate Luginvuhl, they were also in competition with each other to post the story first. Murayama wrote hers on her phone as she walked. Ueno sent audio of the six-minute interview to the Full Count offices in Japan, where the recording was transcribed by an English-speaking reporter, who then used the quotes to write a story.

Walking to the right-field pavilion and back was exhausting. I mentioned this to Abe, and he reminded me, “This was my second time doing this today.”

Abe wrote 13 stories on Friday night, 10 of them about Ohtani, including two on fans who caught his homers.

Just as we returned to the press box, the next hitter was announced over the public-address system: “Shohei Ohtani!”

Abe laughed and braced for another long walk.

The sculptor Robert Therrien had a deep connection with the Broad museum. He was among the first L.A. artists that founders Eli and Edythe Broad began collecting almost half a century ago, and the museum holds 18 of his works in its collection. Those pieces, along with more than 100 others, will go on view at the Broad beginning in November in “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story,” the largest-ever solo museum show of the artist’s work.

Therrien, who died of complications from cancer in 2019, is best-known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects. His sculpture of a giant table and chairs, “Under the Table,” is among the Broad’s most photographed — and Instagrammed — pieces. Intimate work — drawings of birds, snowmen and chapels — will be on view, as will a reconstruction of Therrien’s downtown L.A. studio.

The Broad’s founding director Joanne Heyler once told The Times that Therrien’s studio was among the most fascinating she had ever visited. In an email shortly after Therrien’s death, she described the ground floor as “the ultimate tinkerer’s den, with endless tools, parts and found objects awaiting their role in his work, while upstairs were these perfectly composed galleries, every surface painted a warm, creamy white, including the floor, which charged the sculptures, paintings and drawings he’d install there with a dreamy, floating, hallucinogenic effect. That studio was his dreamland.”

An L.A. story

Like his studio, Therrien’s work exists in a liminal space — where memory fades into time. Standing beneath one of his giant tables evokes vague recollections of what it feels like to be a very small child in a world of legs and muffled adult activity above. A ruminative melancholy arises when viewing a precarious stack of white enamel plates. Therrien’s artistic voice is at once singular and universal — and specific to art history in L.A.

Robert Therrien, no title, (stacked plates, white), 1993.

(The Broad Art Foundation)

Exhibition curator Ed Schad summed up Therrien’s importance to this city in an email.

“Los Angeles is one of the most dynamic places in the world to make sculpture, and for 40 years, Robert Therrien was vital to that story while also hiding in plain sight,” Schad wrote. “From the spirit of experimentation and freedom in the 1970s, to the rise of fabrication and the expansion of scale in the 1980s and 1990, to Los Angeles’s ascendant presence on the global stage of contemporary art in recent decades, Therrien’s work has not only mirrored every shift but also has maintained a singular, unmistakable voice. This exhibition aims to show both the Therrien people know and love — his outsize sculptures, tables and chairs, and pots and pans, rooted in memory — and the Therrien that is less often seen: the brilliant draftsman, photographer, and thinker, whose work in these quieter forms is just as enchanting.”

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, remembering the time I spent an entire meal hiding under a table in Nogales, Ariz., when I was five. Or was that a dream? Here’s this weekend’s arts headlines.

Here come the Tony Awards

Director Michael Arden photographed in New York.

(The Tyler Twins / For The Times)

Times theater critic Charles McNulty sat down in New York City with the directing powerhouse Michael Arden, 42. In a wide-ranging profile, McNulty discusses Arden’s path to becoming among the most sought-after directors on Broadway — and why his latest Tony-nominated musical, “Maybe Happy Ending,” is the season’s “most surprising and heartwarming.” He also writes about Arden’s new company, At Rise Creative, which he founded with scenic designer Dane Laffrey. Their production of “Parade” begins performances at the Ahmanson Theatre on June 17.

McNulty also checks in with L.A. Theatre Works, which celebrated its 50th anniversary and has found fresh opportunities for its radio plays through the rise of podcasts and on-demand streaming. “Currently, LATW’s program airs weekly on KPFK 90.7 in Southern California and on station affiliates serving over 50 markets nationwide. But the heart and soul of the operation is the archive of play recordings,” writes McNulty. This archive has almost 600 titles that can be accessed via a recently launched monthly subscription service.

The SoCal scene

Times art critic Christopher Knight examines the curious case of the art museum that wasn’t. Despite having a social media presence and a webpage, the Joshua Tree Art Museum has not manifested as an actual space for art. This is because, writes Knight, “the charitable foundation sponsoring the project was issued a cease and desist order two years ago by the California attorney general’s office. All charitable activity was halted, a prohibition that has not been lifted.”

“Forest Therapy Class” led by therapist Debra Wilbur at the Huntington.

(Yuri Hasegawa / For The Times)

Along with other organizations across the country, the Huntington recently lost its National Endowment for the Humanities grants. The money funded the Huntington’s research programs, and the institution is nonetheless determined to honor its awards to this year’s recipients. The Huntington will welcome more than 150 scholars from around the world this year and next, granting nearly $1.8 million in fellowships — a notable achievement in a climate of shrinking opportunity for research and innovation. “Supporting humanities scholars is central to the Huntington’s research mission. Here, scholars find the time, space, and resources to pursue ambitious questions across disciplines. The work that begins here continues to shape conversations in classrooms, publications, and public discourse for years to come,” Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence said in a statement.

Skirball Cultural Center has announced its 2025 season of Sunset Concerts. The popular series began in 1997 and takes place at the Skirball’s Taper Courtyard. This summer will feature two acts each night, including Brazilian singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante, the Colombia-based all-female trio La Perla and the Dominican band MULA. Click here for the full lineup and schedule.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles announced that it has acquired Cynthia Daignault’s “Twenty-Six Seconds.” The artwork is a series of frame-by-frame paintings based on Abraham Zapruder’s famous 26-second 8mm color film capturing the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Through 486 painted frames, Daignault’s work further interrogates the tragedy, imbuing it with modern context.

And last but not least

This past weekend I took my daughter to the Summer Corgi Nationals at Santa Anita Park. It was more adorable and more ridiculous than you could imagine — with the short-legged dogs racing for the finish line in a chaotic competition that sometimes found contenders chasing one another back to the starting line.

Fresh storylines are waiting TV fans this week, with new series hitting screens and streaming platforms alike. From powerful documentaries to suspenseful dramas, get the lowdown.

Ups and downs are ahead for drama lovers with new action-packed shows being released this week – but that’s not all the TV landscape brings.

Channel 5 dedicates a documentary to the royal family feud between Prince Harry, Prince William and King Charles III, recalling the trio’s tense conversation at Sandringham following Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave the Firm.

Over on Channel 4, former motorcycle racer Guy Martin embarks on road trip across Vietnam, while Matt Baker pays tribute to the people behind the UK’s bustling life.

Discovery +, on the other hand, delivers a compelling feature about Olympic champion and LGBTQ+ icon Tom Daley – from his beginnings as a young diving whizz to his life with his loved ones. Here’s everything you should keep an eye on.

READ MORE: Large family tent that’s ‘easy to assemble’ drops from £1,100 to £275 in time for summer

Crisis At Sandringham Summit

Saturday, C5

The royal walls shook in 2020 – now Crisis at Sandringham Summit reveals the explosive fallout that fractured The Firm. With Harry and Meghan’s bombshell exit still reverberating, this documentary explores the aftermath of that infamous family meeting.

Featuring gripping dramatisations, royal insiders and top-tier journalism, it digs deep into the tension between Prince Harry, his brother Prince William and their father, King Charles.

What really happened behind closed doors? And how did one discussion spark a global media frenzy? Prepare for a compelling look into palace drama that’s more explosive than fiction.

The Front Room

Saturday, Sky Cinema Premiere & NOW

A sinister houseguest, a haunted pregnancy and a chilling secret – Brandy Norwood stars as Belinda in this taut psychological thriller that will twist your nerves into knots.

When Belinda welcomes her creepy stepmother-in-law into the family home, things spiral fast into gothic terror for her and her husband Norman (Andrew Burnap).

Based on Susan Hill’s short story, The Front Room is a slow-burn descent into paranoia, grief and maternal instinct gone primal. Expect fiendish secrets, surreal horror and tension that’ll cling to your skin like fog long after the credits roll.

Our Guy In Vietnam

Sunday, C4

Guy Martin heads to Vietnam for a riveting, three-part road trip across war-scarred land and a fast-moving culture. From riding the Ho Chi Minh Trail to triggering a dormant bomb, Our Guy In Vietnam unpacks a nation’s trauma with heart and horsepower.

This isn’t your usual history lesson – it’s culture, tech and memory through a mechanic’s lens. Fifty years after the war ended, Vietnam’s resilience roars back to life in this loud, smart and surprising journey.

Tom Daley 1.6 seconds

Sunday, Discovery+

In just 1.6 seconds, Tom Daley must deliver perfection. This gripping documentary follows the Olympic diving legend and LGBTQIA+ trailblazer as he reflects on a lifetime of pushing limits.

With never-before-seen footage and heartfelt interviews with his family, Tom Daley: 1.6 Seconds dives deep into the victories, heartbreaks and pressures behind the podium.

From teenage prodigy to global icon, Tom lifts the lid on the grit that comes with the gold. But more than a sports story, it’s a portrait of resilience and the quiet power of becoming your truest self.

C*A*U*G*H*T

Sunday, ITVX

War, mistaken identity and viral fame collide in C*A*U*G*H*T, where four Aussie soldiers are dumped in the chaos of a war-torn island, where everything spirals out of control.

Captured by rebels who believe they’re Americans, the group become viral sensations after filming a hostage video – then decide fame beats going home.

Created by Kick Gurry, this darkly funny satire skewers celebrity culture with help from stars like Sean Penn and Matthew Fox. It’s outrageous, unpredictable and wickedly smart.

Mountainhead

Sunday, Sky Atlantic

Four billionaire friends, one luxury chalet and global economic collapse – Mountainhead is the end-of-the-world comedy you didn’t know you needed.

Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef all star as filthy rich frenemies navigating doomsday with cocktails and passive aggression.

Isolated from the chaos below, their retreat turns into a psychological (and hilarious) pressure cooker. Who cracks first? Who hoards the snacks? And what’s left when your money means nothing? It’s a sharp and stylish satire on privilege.

Matt Baker’s British Isles

Tuesday, More4

Matt Baker’s got his walking boots on – and his heart firmly rooted in home soil. In this lush four-part series, the Countryfile star treks across the UK, from Kent’s white cliffs to Northern Ireland and Scotland, to meet the extraordinary people quietly shaping Britain.

From sculpture-like mushrooms to engineering marvels in motion, Matt Baker’s British Isles is a feel-good patchwork of unsung heroes, beautiful vistas and big-hearted storytelling. It’s more than sightseeing – it’s soul-sighting. A great reminder of what makes Britain truly brilliant.

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story

Tuesday, Sky Arts

Few writers lived as boldly as Edna O’Brien – and this intimate documentary captures her fire in full. From banned books to literary breakthroughs, Blue Road traces Edna’s fearless path through fame, feminism and family.

With tributes from friends, sons and fellow authors, plus access to her personal diaries, this isn’t just a biography – it’s a final love letter, month after the icon’s death in July, 2024. Filmmaker Sinéad O’Shea honours the Irish legend with grace and grit. Edna may have passed but her voice, spirit and rebellion clearly live on.

The Rookie

Tuesday, Sky Witness

Nathan Fillion is back as the LAPD’s most seasoned recruit, John Nolan. No longer the new kid on the block, John faces fresh pressure in season seven of The Rookie as he recovers from a gunshot wound and grapples with the physical toll of the job.

But there’s no slowing down – especially with two new rookies joining the team and a dangerous manhunt underway for two escaped inmates. Blending grit, humour and heart, The Rookie continues to prove that experience is the ultimate weapon.

What It Feels Like For a Girl

Tuesday, BBC

Heartbreaking, chaotic and unexpectedly hilarious, What It Feels Like For a Girl is the BBC’s Y2K-styled adaptation of Paris Lees’ memoir.

It follows Byron (Ellis Howard), who breaks free from the drudgery of his working-class hometown and dives headfirst into Nottingham’s neon-lit underworld.

There, he meets a crew of new friends, drugs and dizzying nights of rebellion. But when Byron falls for bad boy Liam (Jake Dunn), the fallout is brutal. A raw coming-of-age tale that blends euphoria, trauma and truth in equal measure. You’ll feel every high – and every crash.

Stick

Wednesday, Apple TV+

Owen Wilson stars in Stick, a quirky underdog comedy about second chances and missed swings. He plays Pryce Cahill, a washed-up golf pro whose glory days are long behind him.

After losing his wife, job and mojo, he meets Santi (Peter Dager), a 17-year-old golf prodigy with baggage – and maybe a shot. Together, they form an unlikely bond.

Set in small-town Indiana and full of dry wit, this series mixes sports, found family and emotional redemption. Pryce may be down, but don’t count him out – he’s about to tee off on life again.

The Survivors

Friday, Netflix

When Kieran Elliott returns to his hometown, fifteen years after a deadly storm ravaged the area and left three of his friends dead, he walks straight into a fresh murder that rips open old scars.

The Survivors blends seaside small-town secrets with brooding, slow-build suspense across six punchy episodes. Fronted by Charlie Vickers (Rings of Power), the drama grips like a rip tide, dragging you through trauma, guilt and buried truths.

As the town closes ranks, Kieran’s past resurfaces – and the monster may be someone they all know. Emotional, eerie and impossible to pause.

Straw

Friday, Netflix

Tyler Perry and Taraji P. Henson deliver gut-punch drama in Straw, a searing look at one woman’s spiral through desperation. Janiyah, a single mother with a sick child, faces the kind of day where every door shuts – and survival demands unthinkable choices.

Stark, raw and viscerally emotional, Straw is a bruising portrait of motherhood on the edge. The Color Purple and Hidden Figures star Taraji is phenomenal, anchoring a story that speaks to systemic failure, strength and sacrifice. You won’t be able to look away – even when it hurts.

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Threads.

Three years ago, an armed young man entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 students and two teachers. Hundreds of law enforcement officials reportedly stood around the school campus for more than an hour without approaching the shooter.

In the midst of the inaction, one mom — Angeli Rose Gomez — pleaded with officers to take action or let her go in to get her two children and nephew. She was apprehended and handcuffed, but ultimately talked her way out of arrest before she sprinted inside the school to grab the kids.

Videos on social media captured the moments that Gomez brought her sons and nephew out of the school. The Texas field worker and mother of two was quickly dubbed a hero in national and local publications for her courage.

The new documentary film “Uvalde Mom” follows Gomez after becoming nationally recognized — while examining the forces at play in the Uvalde community which allowed for the shooting to take place, as well as the aftermath of such a tragedy.

“All I wanted that day was my kids to come out of the school alive, and that’s what I got,” Gomez says in one pivotal moment in the film. “I don’t want to be called a hero. I don’t want to be looked at as the hero because the only job that I did that day was being a mom.”

The feature’s director Anayansi Prado was “moved” and “horrified” by what had happened and felt motivated to make a film about the event after seeing members of the affected families on TV.

“I saw that there were Latinos, they were Mexican American, that it was a border town, that it was an agricultural farming town, and that really resonated with me and with communities I’ve done film work with before,” Prado told The Times.

Prado began reaching out to people in Uvalde shortly after the shooting, but didn’t hear back from anyone for over two months due to the inundation of media requests everyone in the city was receiving. The only person to reply to her was Gomez.

Ahead of the film’s screening Saturday at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Prado spoke with The Times about the process and the challenges of making her documentary.

This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.

Was the idea always for this project to be a feature-length film? Or were there talks of making it a short or a series?

I’ve always thought about it as a feature because I really wanted to dive in and understand Uvalde as a character. I wanted to understand the history of the criminal justice system, the educational system. I knew I wanted to make something that was going to be of a longer form rather than just a piece that was about Angeli or something. And a few people told me this would make a great short, but as I uncovered more about Uvalde, I was like, “No, Uvalde itself has its own history, just like a person.”

When it came to choosing Angeli, was she the first and only person who responded to your outreach?

I think the people in town were oversaturated with media coverage, and Angeli was the one that got back to me. What was really interesting is that I learned on that first trip [to Uvalde] about her backstory and I learned about how the criminal justice system had failed her. I saw a parallel there of how the system failed the community the day of the shooting and how it was failing this woman also individually. I wanted to play with those two stories, the macro and the personal. Once I learned who she was, beyond the mom who ran into the school, I was like, “I have to tell this woman’s story.”

How did you go about balancing her personal stuff and the failures that happened on a larger scale?

So much of the way the film is structured is reflective of my own experience as a filmmaker. It was a sort of surreal world, these two worlds were going on: what was happening to Angeli and then what was going on outside with the lack of accountability and the cover-up. So that informed the way that I wanted to structure the film.

In terms of the personal, it was a journey to gain Angeli’s trust. At some point at the beginning, she wasn’t sure she wanted to participate in the film, and so I told her, “You don’t owe me anything. I’m a stranger, but all I ask is that you give me a chance to earn your trust.” And she was like, “OK.” From there on, she opened up and, pretty quickly, we became close and she trusted me. I was very cognizant [of] her legal past and even the way she’s perceived by some folks. I also didn’t want Angeli to come off as a victim and people to feel sorry for her, but I still wanted to tell her story in a way where you get mad at the system for failing her.

What kind of struggles did you have trying to get in communication with some of the officials of the city?

We used a lot of news [archives] to represent that part of the story. The [authorities] weren’t giving any interviews, they were just holding press conferences. So access was limited, but also the majority of the time that we were filming, we were very low-key about the production — because Angeli was on probation and there was retaliation for her speaking to the media. We tried to keep it under wraps that we were filming, so not a lot of people knew about it [besides] her family. Obviously other folks in town [were] part of the film, like her friend Tina and family members. Outside of that, it was too risky to let other people in town know what was going on.

Ultimately I wanted to make [“Uvalde Mome”] a personal portrait. I was just very selective on the people that we absolutely needed to interview. I’m happy with Tina, who’s an activist in town, and Arnie, a survivor of the shooting and a school teacher, [plus] Angeli’s legal team. I felt like those were people we needed to tell a fuller story. But we just couldn’t be out in the open making a film about her and let people know.

What kind of reception have you gotten from people of Uvalde that have seen the film?

We had our premiere at South by Southwest, which was great. A lot of folks came from Uvalde and spoke about how, almost three years later, a lot of this stuff is still going on. Every time Gov. Greg Abbott came on-screen, people would scream, “Loser!” It was really moving to have those screenings.

As was expected from the folks who are not fans of Angeli, there was some backlash. It’s the same narrative you see in the film of, “She’s a criminal, don’t believe her.” It’s a town that is an open wound. I just try to have compassion for people. Ultimately, Angeli’s story is the story of one person in Uvalde of many that need to continue to be told. And I hope that other filmmakers, journalists and other storytellers continue to tell the story there, especially with the lack of closure and accountability. I’m happy that the film is putting Uvalde back into the headlines in some way; that way we don’t forget about it.

Had you ever spent an extended amount of time in Texas before?

I had been to Texas, but I hadn’t done a project in Texas. Because I’m an outsider, it was very important for me to hire a 100% local Texas crew for this film. My crew was entirely Texas-based, from our PAs to our sound to our DPs. I also wanted to have a majority Texas-born Mexican American crew so that they could guide me. We began production in September of 2022 and the atmosphere was very tense.

This is a story that is deeply rooted in the Latino community and the tension about the law enforcement in Uvalde. What was it like dealing with that tension and how did you personally feel that when you went into the town?

When I got to Uvalde, I saw that the majority of the Latino community had been there for several generations. You would think a town with that kind of Mexican American history, and them being the majority, that they’d be pretty cemented and represented, right? It was really eye-opening to see [how] these folks are still considered second-class citizens. A lot of them are being repressed. And then you have folks that get in positions of power, but they’re whitewashed in line with the white conservative agenda. So even those that are able to get into positions of power don’t lean towards the community. They turn their back on it.

I heard from folks that the history of neglect was what led to the response that day at Robb Elementary. And they’re like, “Yeah, that’s what happens on that side of town. You call the cops, they don’t come. Our schools are run-down.” You really see the disparity. This was a Mexican American community that had been there for a long time. It’s fascinating how the conservative white community, even if they’re the smaller part of the population, they can still hold the power.

Long before Clayton Kershaw donned No. 22 and Fernando Valenzuela wore No. 34, another number told fans it was time for Dodger baseball: 76.

Union Oil Co., the 76 gasoline brand’s former owner, helped finance Dodger Stadium’s construction. The brand’s current owner, Phillips 66, remains a major sponsor. Through six World Series titles, orange-and-blue 76 logos have been a constant presence at Chavez Ravine. They tower above the scoreboards and grace the outfield walls.

So when 76 recently posted on Instagram that it had begun sponsoring L.A.’s rivals in San Francisco — with an orange-and-blue logo on the center field clock at Oracle Park — some Dodgers fans weren’t pleased.

“THE BETRAYAL,” one fan wrote on Instagram.

“bestiessss nooooo,” another lamented.

76 was unfazed, responding: “Still a bestie, just spreading the love!”

Strange as the reactions may sound, it’s not unheard of for long-lived ad campaigns to take on a life of their own, evolving from paid promotions to cultural touchstones. Outside Fenway Park in Boston, Red Sox fans have fought to preserve the massive Citgo sign, with its logo of a Venezuelan-owned oil company.

Nor is it shocking that Houston-based Phillips 66 would market itself through another baseball team. The 76 gasoline brand, after all, evokes the patriotism of 1776 — a clever marketing ploy. And what’s more American than Major League Baseball?

Still, the timing of Phillips 66’s decision to start sponsoring the Giants is intriguing.

Since last summer, nearly 30,000 people have signed a petition urging Dodgers ownership to cut ties with the oil company. California is currently suing Phillips 66 and other oil and gas companies for climate damages, accusing them of a “decades-long campaign of deception” to hide the truth about the climate crisis.

Climate activists protest outside Dodger Stadium before a game May 15, 2025, calling on the team’s ownership to drop Phillips 66 as a sponsor.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The Sierra Club Angeles Chapter held its third protest at Dodger Stadium before a game against the Athletics on May 15. Activists cloaked in sackcloth marched outside the parking lots. One played a bagpipe.

“It was a bit hard for the fans to comprehend,” organizer Lisa Kaas Boyle acknowledged.

Still, she believes the cause is righteous.

A former environmental crimes prosecutor and a co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, Kaas Boyle lost her home in the Palisades fire. She’s also a Dodgers fan, having caught the bug from her husband, whose 89-year-old mom grew up cheering for the team in Brooklyn. She has a special place in her heart for Kiké Hernández.

So when the Dodgers joined other sports teams in pledging $8 million to wildfire relief, she felt the organization was “speaking out of two sides of its mouth.” She pointed to a study concluding that the weather conditions that helped drive the Palisades and Eaton fires were 35% more likely due to climate change.

“If you really care about us fire victims, you wouldn’t be promoting one of the major causes of the disaster,” Kaas Boyle said. “If you really care, you wouldn’t be boosting their image, greenwashing it through baseball.”

At least one member of the Dodgers ownership group cares about presenting a climate-friendly image.

Tennis star Billie Jean King posted on Facebook, Instagram and X in the fall promoting a climate summit being held next week at the University of Oxford, co-hosted by an arm of the United Nations. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called on all countries to ban fossil fuel advertising.

So, what does King think of the 76 ads at Dodger Stadium?

Hard to say. Her publicist didn’t respond to my request for comment.

Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas scratches a message in the dirt near second base at Dodger Stadium on May 18, with a 76 logo on the outfield wall in the background.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

The Dodgers also declined to respond. Same goes for the Giants and Phillips 66.

So why is the oil company “spreading the love” to the Bay Area?

Again, hard to know for sure. But Duncan Meisel has a theory. He runs the advocacy group Clean Creatives, which pressures ad agencies to stop working with fossil fuel clients. And he suspects that lawmakers and regulators based in Sacramento are less likely to attend a baseball game in L.A. than in nearby San Francisco.

“If you’re 76, and you’re worried about decision-makers in California, that’s where you’d want to be,” he said.

Indeed, Phillips 66 may have reasons to be worried.

The company plans to close its Los Angeles County oil refinery this year — a troubling sign of the economic times for Big Oil as California shifts toward electric cars. Lawmakers are also weighing a “polluters pay” bill that would require fossil fuel companies to help pay for damages from more intense heat waves, wildfires and storms.

Phillips 66, meanwhile, was arraigned this month on charges that it violated the U.S. Clean Water Act by dumping oil and grease from its L.A. County refinery into the local sewer system. (It pleaded not guilty.) That followed a win for climate activists in March, when state Senate Majority Leader Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) wrote to Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter, urging him to dump Phillips 66.

Hence, perhaps, the newfound relationship with the Giants.

“That’s why you advertise,” Meisel said. “If you’re a company like Phillips 66 that’s under threat from political and cultural pressures in California, it’s hard to get a better deal than sponsoring a local sports team.”

If you look closely, you can see the 76 ad on the digital clock high above the center field fence at San Francisco’s Oracle Park on May 4 (Star Wars Day, hence the Stormtroopers).

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

It’s not just California turning up the heat on Phillips 66. Executives have been battling a pressure campaign from Elliott Investment Management, which won two seats on the company’s board last week.

As Elliott ramped up the pressure on Phillips 66 earlier this year, executives announced an expanded sponsorship deal with their hometown ball club — another Dodgers nemesis, as it happens, the cheating Houston Astros.

Phillips 66 now sponsors the home run train atop the high left-field wall at Houston’s Daikin Park (formerly Minute Maid Park). The train is filled with 25 oversized baseballs, each representing a special moment in Astros history — yes, including the World Series title they stole from the Dodgers.

As Phillips 66 brand manager John Field said in an April news release: “Sponsorships like these are more than just fun — they’re a strategic investment.”

Fun and strategic, sure, if you’re mainly invested in oil industry profits. If you care about watching baseball games in safe temperatures, without choking on wildfire smoke, you might reach a different conclusion.

One thing’s for sure: Fossil fuel companies will keep pumping money into baseball so long as teams let them. The Astros, Texas Rangers and Cleveland Guardians all wear jersey patches sponsored by oil and gas companies.

In California, meanwhile, Phillips 66 will keep reminding Dodgers fans how much they love looking at 76 logos — a playbook so successful it once inspired a campaign to save the rotating 76 balls above gas stations.

“This is a heavy play on Americana,” Roberta J. Newman said.

A Yankees fan and professor in New York University’s Liberal Studies program, Newman wrote the fascinating book, “Here’s the Pitch: The Amazing, True, New, and Improved Story of Baseball and Advertising.” There may be nobody with a better understanding of the cultural and political power of baseball-linked advertising.

The former 76 gas station in the Dodger Stadium parking lot, seen in 2003.

(Alex Gallardo / Los Angeles Times)

When a brand like 76 associates itself with the Dodgers — through special ticket deals, joint promotions with the team charity and TV commercials starring Vin Scully — it’s engaged in “meaning transfer,” Newman said.

“Your positive associations of the Dodgers will become positive associations with 76,” she said.

Most fans won’t drive away from Dodger Stadium and immediately choose 76 over a rival gasoline station. But in the long run, they’ll have good vibes when they see the orange-and-blue logo. It’ll feel familiar, friendly.

If that sounds nuts — well, you might want to tell business executives they blew $1 trillion on ads last year.

“People might think, ‘Oil is terrible. But 76 is the Dodgers,’” Newman said.

Now it’s the Giants, too — not that Newman thinks the dual loyalty will hurt the company. As one Instagram user, a Giants fan, wrote: “Hey Dodger fans, it’s OK! … 76 is a California icon and tradition from North to South!”

Fair enough. Wildfires are getting bigger and more destructive up there too.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.

For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Rotating and resting players in secondary cups is not a new phenomenon – but Chelsea took it to a new level in the Conference League this season.

They averaged 8.5 changes per European game, based on their previous Premier League line-up.

In the league stage there was a recognised Premier League team and a Conference League XI – with very little overlap. They were much changed in the domestic cups too, although fell at the second hurdle in both.

England forward Palmer, their star player, was not even registered in Europe until the knockout games.

As the Blues started playing in knockout games they started using more first-team players, like Palmer, Caicedo and Marc Cucurella.

But even through that they never made fewer than five changes from their last league game, including the final.

As the season ends, well, until next month’s Fifa Club World Cup, 18 Chelsea players featured in more Conference League than Premier League games this season.

That includes five players who left the club in January.

Midfielder Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, who played all 15 European games, featured 13 times in the league.

Marc Guiu, whose six goals were two shy of the Conference League Golden Boot, has yet to start a league game.

However, the final saw a stronger XI, with only four outfield changes from the side that beat Nottingham Forest last Sunday to clinch a Champions League spot.

“Chelsea have got so much more money than anyone else competing in this competition,” said ex-Blues winger Pat Nevin on BBC Radio 5 Live.

“But they have respected the competition by saying, ‘we’re not going to put out the softest of teams but we’ll put out enough to make sure we’ll get through’.

“I have to say, looking back on it all now, Enzo Maresca has done a great job.”

The Getty Villa Museum will reopen to the public on a limited basis beginning June 27 after a nearly six-month closure forced by the devastating Palisades fire.

On the night of Jan. 7, reports swirled that the wind-driven conflagration had reached the outskirts of the Villa. A Getty team stayed through the night, putting out spot fires with fire extinguishers and ensuring that the galleries were safely sealed off, while updating a command team at Getty Center that included Getty President and Chief Executive Katherine Fleming.

A few days later, Fleming told The Times that the teams were confident that their thorough preparation — including extensive brush clearing — would keep the museum from burning. The galleries and other buildings did remain safe, but the glittering fountain pools went dark with ash. Extensive work on the property, including intensive cleaning and testing of indoor and outdoor spaces for toxic residue, is nearing completion. The water system has been flushed, and air and water filters have been replaced. More than 1,300 fire-damaged trees were removed.

A burned hillside above the Getty Villa, where the Palisades fire burned around the educational center and art museum.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

“The site may look different to visitors,” the museum warned in an announcement this week, “with less vegetation and some burn damage to the outer grounds.”

The limited visitor hours will be 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday through Monday. The goal will be to help limit traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, which is the only way to reach the campus. (The Villa is not yet accessible via Sunset Boulevard.) Reservations are limited to 500 visitors daily, and free, timed-entry reservations can be booked online. Parking is $25.

Unfortunately, the exhibition on view when the fire erupted, “Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures From Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece,” had to close, but the Getty created a virtual tour. Times art critic Christopher Knight had great things to say about it when he viewed the exhibition in person just before the fire.

The exhibition for the reopening is “The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece,” which will be on view from June 27 through Jan. 12. It will feature more than 230 works of art and artifacts from Messenia, a region in Greece where the Mycenaean civilization flourished during the Late Bronze Age.

Theater fans can breathe a sigh of relief. The outdoor classical theater will return in the fall with “Oedipus the King, Mama!” co-produced by Troubadour Theater Company.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, looking forward to reading a book in the shade by a Villa fountain. Here’s your weekend arts roundup.

The SoCal scene

Omar Ebrahim as Schoenberg and conductor Neal Stulberg in Tod Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood” at UCLA Nimoy Theater.

(Taso Papadakis / UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music)

Does Los Angeles have its own musical style? Times classical music critic Mark Swed answers the question after attending the Hear Now Music Festival and Tod Machover’s opera “Schoenberg in Hollywood.” “Los Angeles is the home of film music. The two most influential classical composers of the first half of the 20th century, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, lived here. … The composer with the most radical influence on the second half of the 20th century, John Cage, was born and grew up here. Ferreting out L.A.’s bearing on jazz and the many, many aspects of popular music, as well as world music, is a lifetime’s effort,” Swed writes.

“A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse gets a mixed review from Times theater critic Charles McNulty, who praises Jason Butler Harner’s performance as Torvald, while noting that costumes and set design did not entirely come together. Lucas Hnath’s play picks up 15 years after the conclusion of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 classic, when Nora famously walks out on her husband and children. Nora’s life is complicated. And so is McNulty’s reaction to the show.

Last week, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art laid off 15 full-time employees, accounting for 14% of its staff. Most were from the organization’s education and public programming team. Seven part-time, on-call employees were also let go, according to the museum. Sources described the morning of the layoffs as chaotic and shocking, with staff being summoned by human resources and being told they needed to be out of the building by 2 p.m. The museum said in a statement, “Education remains a central pillar of the Lucas Museum.”

Lauren Halsey, from left, Jane Fonda and Zoë Ryan attend the 20th Annual Hammer Museum Gala in the Garden on May 17.

(Charley Gallay / Getty Images for The Hammer Museum)

The Hammer Museum raised $2.4 million during its 20th annual Gala in the Garden last Saturday. The fete honored Jane Fonda and artist Lauren Halsey, and it featured a performance by the singer Griff. This marked the first gala for the museum’s new director, Zoë Ryan, who took over in January. Last year’s party marked a heartfelt send-off for longtime director Ann Philbin, who retired after 25 years at the helm of the institution. This year, per usual, plenty of celebrities were in attendance, including LeBron and Savannah James, Usher, Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman, Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen and Molly Shannon, as well as plenty of artists including Doug Aitken, Andrea Bowers, Diedrick Brackens, Catherine Opie, Ed Ruscha and Jonas Wood. Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, paid tribute to Halsey; Danson and Steenburgen celebrated Fonda.

The Fowler Museum on Tuesday returned 11 objects to the Larrakia community of the Northern Territory in Australia. The items, which hold deep cultural and spiritual significance to the Larrakia people, consist of 10 glass spearheads and a kangaroo tooth headband worn by a Larrakia elder. Elders have worked closely with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the museum over the last four years to identify and arrange the return of the objects. This particular return ceremony is the second time the Fowler has returned artifacts in partnership with AIATSIS. Last July, the museum repatriated 20 items to the Warumungu community of Tennant Creek in northern Australia.

More culture news

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has announced its 2025-26 theater season — the first with President Donald Trump as chair. “Hamilton,” as previously reported, is out. Offerings include plenty of Trump-approved Broadway fare, including “Moulin Rouge,” “Chicago,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Back to the Future: The Musical” and “Monty Python’s Spamalot.”

Tony Award winner Charles Strouse, who composed the music for “Annie,” “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Applause,” has died. He was 96.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

You can opt to be buried up to your neck in compost at this California spa. I love a good spa day, but this is a hard pass for me.

This Memorial Day weekend marks the five-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death. Floyd’s murder under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer sparked a protest movement that reached the streets of cities across the nation.

In Minneapolis, residents, activists and artists painted murals and messages on plywood boards used to protect storefront windows during the unrest. More than 1,000 of those pieces of art have been collected and preserved by the organization Memorialize the Movement. The Minnesota Star Tribune recently ran a fascinating profile by Dee DePass and Alicia Eler of MTM’s founder and executive director, Leesa Kelly, along with two other community activists, Kenda Zellner-Smith, who created the group Save the Boards, and Jeanelle Austin, who started George Floyd Global Memorial, now called Rise and Remember.

Together, the three women have dedicated themselves to ensuring the Floyd protest art remains visible and accessible to the public. A large portion of their time is spent on fundraising to pay for the costly storage of the boards.

According to the Star Tribune, the rent on Memorialize the Movement’s warehouse is $3,500 a month, and the group spends another $1,500 on utilities and staff. Fundraising for this kind of work may become more challenging with the Trump administration’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion — not to mention the possible elimination of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.

These headwinds have not dimmed the spirits of the women, who regularly stage exhibitions of the protest murals in places such as Minnesota’s Carleton College, Normandale Community College, Franconia Sculpture Park and Roseville Lutheran Church, as well as Watermill Center in upstate New York,

For more information on Memorialize the Movement, click here.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt taking a moment to reflect and remember. Read on for this week’s arts news.

Best bets: Holiday edition

Haven’t yet made plans for Memorial Day? Go to a museum! Here’s a quick sampling of places that are open on the holiday:

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County will be open from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. See the new NHM Commons and the dinosaur Gnatalie. The NHM’s sister operation at the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum also is open, same hours. nhm.org

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in L.A. will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. You can take in the new exhibition “Director’s Inspiration: Bong Joon Ho,” centered on the filmmaker behind “Parasite,” “Mickey 17” and “Snowpiercer.” Make a day of it and walk over to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which will be open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena will be open its usual Monday hours, noon to 5 p.m. Times critic Christiopher Knight offers this exceptionally helpful guide to the collection.

Unless it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s Day, the California Science Center in Exposition Park is always opens, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with free admission to the galleries. Bring kids to the just-opened interactive exhibition “Game On! Science, Sports & Play” or the return of “Dogs! A Science Tale.”

The Huntington in San Marino will be open. “Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits” (read Knight’s praise for the show) and the Betye Saar site-specific installation “Drifting Toward Twilight” are on view, and temperatures in those fabulous gardens should be lovely.

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Sadie Sink in “John Proctor Is the Villain.”

(Julieta Cervantes)

Times theater critic Charles McNulty spent time in New York talking with Kimberly Belflower about her Tony-nominated play, “John Proctor Is the Villain,” starring Sadie Sink from the Netflix hit “Stranger Things.” The play, about students in Georgia reading Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” “casts a mysterious spell that I’m still processing a month later,” McNulty writes.

Meanwhile, back in L.A., McNulty praises a lovely revival of playwright Terrance McNally’s musical adaptation of the 1994 film “A Man of No Importance.” The film starred Albert Finney as a Dublin bus conductor obsessed with Oscar Wilde and amateur theater. The musical team behind “Ragtime” — Stephen Flaherty (music) and Lynn Ahrens (lyrics) — adds whimsical dimensions to the story. Of particular note, McNulty writes, is the “graceful direction of the company’s producing artistic director, Julia Rodriguez-Elliott,” who “finds freedom in Wilde’s iconoclastic example.”

Arnold Schoenberg arrived in L.A. after fleeing Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s, and the composer eventually found himself in a meeting with MGM producer Irving Thalberg about scoring “The Good Earth.” This encounter provided the genesis for Tod Machover’s opera, “Schoenberg in Hollywood,” which staged its West Coast premiere at UCLA’s Nimoy Theater. Times classical music critic Mark Swed was present and wrote this review, noting at the end that despite all of his contributions to the city’s cultural ecosystem, Schoenberg does not have his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks at a news conference in Sacramento on Feb. 27.

(Associated Press)

The Theatre Producers of Southern California, a trade group representing nonprofit theaters, is raising alarms about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed $11.5-million cut to the Performing Arts Equitable Payroll Fund, which was only recently instituted after years of efforts by struggling arts organizations. “We understand that the state faces a challenging budget deficit and are prepared to support you in making difficult decisions,” board vice president Beatrice Casagran said in a statement. “However, the proposed clawback of 100% of the state’s entire investment in the Payroll Fund will eradicate six years of bipartisan legislative efforts to address cascading negative impacts that have led to dire economic instability for workers in the live arts.”

The Actors Equity Assn., under its president, Brooke Shields, also opposes the proposed cuts. “At a time when the arts are under attack in Washington, D.C., it’s deeply disappointing to also be fighting funding cuts again in Sacramento. California, which now ranks 35th in the nation in arts funding, cannot be a leader in the arts if it continues to cut arts funding year after year,” Shields said in a statement.

Concerned voters can ask their senators to sign on to the letter opposing the cuts by state Sen. Ben Allen to the Senate Budget Committee. They also can ask their assemblymembers to sign onto the letter by Assemblyman Matt Haney to the Assembly Budget Committee.

Los Angeles Opera is staging a costume shop sale for the first time in more than a decade, and the public is invited. Expect handmade outfits from shows such as “Carmen,” “The Magic Flute” and “Macbeth.” A news release about the event describes the offerings: “From 16th-century finery to fantastical creations, this sale includes complete costumes in all sizes, along with wigs, accessories, shoes, jewelry, masks, headpieces and more, each piece a work of art designed by visionaries such as Julie Taymor, Constance Hoffman, Gerald Scarfe and Martin Pakledinaz.” The fun gets going in the lobby of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at 9:30 a.m. on June 21 and lasts until 3 p.m.

More culture news

The Washington Post reports that former Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter is defending the finances of the organization prior to President Trump’s takeover. Rutter’s leadership has been under attack by the center’s new interim director, Ric Grenell, who accused her and other former executives of “fraud” during a speech at the White House last week. “I am deeply troubled by the false allegations regarding the management of the Kennedy Center being made by people without the context or expertise to understand the complexities involved in nonprofit and arts management, which has been my professional experience for 47 years,” Rutter said in a statement to the Post.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

The headlines out of Cannes this year feel a bit subued, if not bleak. But leave it to Times film critic Amy Nicholson to open her latest Cannes diary with a Samoyed walking the red carpet in a ruffled gown. And because I love him and I miss him, I also point you to The Times’ former Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, Justin Chang, who has this stellar coverage.