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CANNES, France — You see and hear the films of Scottish-born Lynne Ramsay long after you first take them in. They have a way of burning into your brain. Sometimes it’s a question of immersive soundscapes or settings, as with her brutal 1999 debut “Ratcatcher” or the euphoric post-boyfriend girls’ trip “Morvern Callar.” Elsewhere Ramsay makes violence grippingly personal, as with 2011’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” about the dissociating mother of a school shooter, or 2017’s “You Were Never Really Here,” a coiled revenge tale spurred by a kidnapping.

It’s good that we remember these movies so well because Ramsay’s output has never been steady. She’s had some bad luck with turnarounds and fickle producers (notoriously on the projects “The Lovely Bones” and “Jane Got a Gun,” which swallowed up years).

But today, sitting in the sunlight garden of a quiet Cannes hotel blocks from the action, Ramsay smokes and sips coffee contentedly. Her latest movie, “Die, My Love,” a marital psychodrama starring an impressively unhinged Jennifer Lawrence, has just hours earlier been acquired by Mubi, the upstart distributor that released last year’s “The Substance,” in a deal reported at $24 million.

It’s a cheering turn of events for a director who inspires devotion not only from critics and A-listers such as Tilda Swinton and Joaquin Phoenix, but from a generation of young filmmakers who see in her work a defiant, punkish way forward, especially for women in artistic control. We spoke to the 55-year-old Ramsay about her process and making “Die, My Love.”

I was very happy to hear you had a film at Cannes. It’s such a rare thing.

Hopefully less rare now.

So let me ask you directly about that and I hope you take this in the right spirit: Do you wish you’d made more films by now?

Oh, yeah. There was one I was just about to shoot called “Stone Mattress,” based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, a little short story in a novella. We were just about to do that. But the producers were pushing for Iceland as a location — it’s meant to be in the Arctic. I wanted Greenland. It just felt like we were cutting the lines down. The actor, Julianne Moore, would do a couple of lines in one location, fly four hours and do the rest of the scene.

And I just don’t work like that. I can’t do it all broken up in pieces and it’s not good for the actors either. So I was like, I don’t think this is the right thing. And then I was like, maybe I should have just done it. But I’ve written a lot. I’ve got three scripts, one that’s totally ready, one that’s almost ready and then another that’s in development.

I think people really want to know from your point of view: Are you just uncompromising or especially picky?

I don’t know. I was speaking to my friend Jonathan Glazer about that. Everyone says to him, “Why don’t you make many films?”

It was basically 10 years between “Under the Skin” and “The Zone of Interest.” He’s going to disappear now for another 10 years.

I don’t know if he will. We were both talking, like, We’re not getting any younger. We’ve got to hurry up. [Laughs.] But yeah, no, it’s not by design. It’s just life takes over. I have a daughter, there was COVID, stuff nearly gets there and falls through. It’s just a tough industry. I am picky in the sense that if you’re going to stick with a project for two or three years, then you want to know that you’re doing the right one. You don’t want to be down the line with it and think, God, I wish I hadn’t started this.

Jennifer Lawrence in the movie “Die, My Love.”

(Festival de Cannes)

Meanwhile, it must be exciting when a star like Jennifer Lawrence reaches out to you about a film you made 25 years ago, as she did about “Ratcatcher.”

Well, it was funny. She said she wanted to work with me. That was nice. She was talking about this particular book [“Die My Love” by Ariana Harwicz] and I was like: Look, I’ve just done “Kevin.” I don’t want to do more postpartum things and I won’t do that. And then I think I was doing “Stone Mattress” for a while and I probably was just being terrible and didn’t get back for ages.

But then I was like, OK, I have an idea. If it’s a love story — a bonkers, crazy love story — if it’s got many layers to it, I’ll do it as an experiment. We’ll see how it goes. And then it kind of worked.

A postpartum story isn’t the whole picture. Neither is a love story.

Right. I suppose it’s a bit of a lot of things.

I know that you like mashing up genres. Do you still want to make a horror film, like you’ve said in the past?

I’m making a vampire movie.

Really?

Yeah. I can’t tell you much. It’s with Ezra Miller who was in “Kevin.” He’s the main character. That’s in development.

I feel like I may be waiting a while to see that one.

[Laughs] You won’t wait for 10 years. I don’t have 10 years. I’ve got to do it quicker than that. That’s what Jon [Glazer] said. We need to speed up. He’s one of my favorite filmmakers. And PTA as well.

How does it feel being at Cannes again?

Actually, this time I feel quite relaxed. I think the first time I came, I got quite nervous. You get really wound up. My husband was a musician and I remember squeezing his hand so hard at “Kevin,” he said, “You’re going to break my guitar hand.” People were coughing. It was a real Cannes audience — they’re pretty hardcore.

But now I feel quite relaxed because I like the film myself. Sometimes you’re super self-critical. I was watching it in that big theater and I’m going: Change that, change that. We’ve only been editing for four or five months and that’s not long. So we’re still tweaking it. I did a mix in five days.

When you’re working with actors such as Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence, they bring so much iconography. How do you strip that away and be like, I’ve got this piece of work that I want to do here?

I think they were very willing participants. There was a lot of trust. I try and create an atmosphere of trust and I just threw them into the fire. I did the sex scene on the first day. I thought it’s a risk. It’s either going to work or it’s going to be a disaster. But I could see there was chemistry. And when they arrived, I was getting them dancing. They were dancing together, synchronized. And it was fun. And then I think Robert was a little nervous, but then something just kind of broke the ice.

Doing a sex scene on the first day will break the ice, I imagine.

The first day I was scared. I was like, oh, my God, was this a good idea? But it actually was a good idea. Sometimes I’ve left those scenes for later and then it builds up so everyone’s gotten all nervous. You start this scene and they’re all thinking about it and overthinking it. So I just chucked them in the deep end.

Then there was a different scene, a longer one, and there was loads of dialogue and we only had a few hours — the light was going, maybe an hour-and-a-half left. And I saw the DP lying in the grass, Seamus McGarvey. And we both looked at each other and were like: There’s no way we’re going to finish this scene. There’s no way we can do it.

And we’re both lying in the grass and we look down at the grass and I look at him and I go, “Well, what if they’re like cats in the grass? Why don’t we just do it here?” So I’m running back to the bloody actors and I’m going, “Right, OK, we’re changing the whole scene, taking all the dialogue out. And you’re both cats. You’re both like cats.” And they’re both like, what the f—?

You just discovered that in the moment?

Yeah. Because we didn’t have the time and I’m really glad I did. And they were so trusting. Robert was like, “That was a good scene.” Then Jen went, “Yeah, I can see it.” It was all at breakneck speed. We shot it in an hour or something.

Lynne Ramsay on the set of “Die, My Love.”

(Kimberly French)

And you’re giving them an experience they will never have with a director who follows a plan to the letter.

Yeah. A film’s a film but a script is a script. I mean, it’s a different beast. You’ve got be able to throw things out if they don’t work or you don’t have time. So you go to think of something and often that’s better. But after that first day, I knew they thought, oh, God, what are we in for?

I’ve heard that Jennifer Lawrence was pregnant in real life at the time.

Yeah. I didn’t know that until about four weeks before [the shoot]. I think she was a bit nervous about telling me. I was like, “You OK about this?” I was worried. But she was glowing and was so happy to play crazy. And she was excited by the ideas. She was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” She’s a punk, man.

Your vision of America is very interesting to me. It’s never super realistic so much as an amplified America from the point of view of someone outside it. What do you think about America these days?

Well, I wouldn’t want to live there right now, but I always loved America. I lived in New York for quite a long time when I was making “You Were Never Really Here,” when I was making “Kevin.” I’ve always loved New York. It’s got a crazy, wild energy. L.A. I find a bit more difficult. I feel it’s like “Mulholland Drive.” But there’s a beauty to it as well. The light is amazing.

Your Montana of “Die, My Love” is also unique, filled with local color but almost an abstract place where a marital unraveling can take center stage. What was important to you to emphasize, setting-wise?

We actually shot in Calgary but Montana’s just down. My backstory was that they lived in New York — he was trying to get in a band, it didn’t really happen for him, he was kind of a slacker. And she’s written a couple of things that got published. Now there’s this idea that they’ll have a new life, because the house is free and a lot of young couples, if they get something like that, they’re like: I moved because New York’s expensive. And then the house becomes its own entity, in a way. We shot the beginning already inside the house, not from the outside [going in], and for a reason: The house is looking at them. There were elements of “The Shining.”

I picked up on those. And when you have actors like Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte as parents, they create a kind of gravity of their own. Were they familiar with your films like Jennifer Lawrence was?

No, I went to them because they both meant a lot to me growing up. My dad loved Nick. Since “Badlands,” I’ve loved Sissy Spacek, In the book, the mother-in-law’s kind of gone crazy, but she played it much more that she saw exactly what was happening.

When we first meet the main characters, we hear them telling each other the lies they’ve probably been saying for a while: I could really record my album here. You can write your Great American Novel. Do you think that they end up in a place that’s more truthful by the end of the film?

I had writer’s block as well for a while and I was like Jack Torrance in “The Shining” writing the same sentence again. Recutting it. You get stuck in things and then when you’ve got a baby as well, it’s much harder to do anything. Your life completely is turned upside down. So I think they’ve got all these aspirations: It’s going to be great and wow. And then she just feels really isolated and she’s stuck with a baby. And she’s bored and she’s just gone nuts. I suppose I did think about “Repulsion” and, of course “A Women Under the Influence” — that sort of tragedy where they love each other but don’t understand each other.

Do you ever feel trapped by the massive reputation of your early films?

I love when I rewatch them, like, 25 years later. I saw “Morvern Callar” with a young audience a year ago or something. A couple years ago, because the film was 20 years old, and it was really nice. It still played and they were all laughing and they really got it. I think that film was kind of dumped at the time because I think I pissed off the financiers. I wanted a different poster and I made a big deal about it — and I love the poster still. And they wanted something much more conventional.

The poster for that is so perfect, though. I still remember it. It’s flush with a kind of heat, an intimacy.

I kind of fought for that. They wanted something that looked like a Mexican western or something. It was nice. But I’ve still got that poster in my place in Scotland against a black wall, where it really pops. And these kids were really getting it — even though she’s got a Walkman, which is completely, I mean, a million years ago.

It’s a little dated, but it works. You captured something essential about Samantha Morton and now with Jennifer Lawrence too. Do you ever find yourself thinking in terms of awards or Oscars?

No, I gave that up a long time ago. In fact, my mom had all my BAFTAs, so I hadn’t seen those BAFTAs for ages. We were cleaning out her house. I gave all them away.

Were they in her closet or something?

No, she had a little cupboard that she just put them in, but I just kind of forgot about them.

She was proud of you.

Yeah, they were in a little glass cabinet and I forgot all about them. Then I got them back and it was weird.

Where is home? Is it still Scotland?

London, actually. And Scotland. I have a place in Scotland too, but my mom passed away quite recently — it was only a couple of weeks ago. So I had the funeral as well as filming and then it’s been quite a challenge.

Is she the one the film is dedicated to?

Yeah.

“Die, My Love” is very explicitly about motherhood. What do remember about your mother? What did she teach you, in terms of being an artist?

She taught me how to be a filmmaker, to be honest. She taught me to sit. I watched the best films when I was a kid and they thought I was deaf for a long time because I just ignored everybody else. It was a big noisy family. And I think she just showed me these cool films. Her big one was — I mean it sounds so random for me — but she loved “Imitation of Life.” She watched that a million times. “Mildred Pierce.” And “Vertigo.”

She taught you how to give yourself over to a film?

Yeah, she just loved movies and so did my dad. But my dad would be a bit more annoying because he’d tell you the end. He’d be like, “This is going to happen.” You know what I mean? And I’d be like, Dad! I wouldn’t watch it. But I think she was a really interesting smart woman. Not from a film background. They were working-class people, blue-collar people. But they loved images, they loved cinema.

Glasgow is a place of blue-collar intelligentsia. It’s a really good education system there. So my dad was so bright — my mom as well. They used to say, “Let’s go to the movies, the pictures.” Really cute. And my mom had a photographic memory, so she would be like, “This film is from 1940,” blah blah blah. And then this actor’s in it. She’d know all these obscure actors. And it was great. They were excited and it made me excited. She just was a very kind person. Everyone was devastated.

I’m sure you’re still feeling it. I hope you don’t mind me asking about her.

I am. But I’m feeling a bit more at peace. It was quick and it wasn’t expected. And funnily enough, the music supervisor’s mom died one week later. I didn’t know it was coming. So we’re all a bit in shock. My mom, she was 88. She had a life.

When will be the appropriate age for you to show your daughter your movies?

[Laughs] I don’t know, 18?

How old is she now?

She’s 10. Maybe “Ratcatcher.” Maybe about 16 or 15. I don’t know. They’re all kind of hardcore.

You probably made it when you were 25.

I did, somewhere about that or 26. My daughter’s a really bright child. The one thing I’ve shown her that she came in for — I was watching it late at night and she woke up — was “The Shining” and she was glued it. And I said, “I don’t think you should watch this — you’re too young.” But there’s only one killing in “The Shining.” You know what I mean? And there’s not a lot of horror. She loved it. I mean, it was like the best. She said, “I might watch ‘The Shining’ again.” She’s super artistic.

Do I have a promise from you that I’m not going to have to wait 10 years for the next film?

Nah, definitely not. I’m on it. Jon Glazer too. We’re both like, we need to rock and roll, man.

About 80 years ago, guitarist and inventor Les Paul built a home recording studio in his Hollywood garage on North Curson Avenue and began developing his “new sound,” which incorporated cutting-edge recording techniques such as overdubbing, close miking, echo and delay.

Dissatisfied with the quality of the day’s commercial recordings, Paul, who’d worked with pop stars including Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, and was a guitar virtuoso and bandleader, endeavored to push the practice forward — to make recording a kind of erudite art form. His instrumental single “Lover” became the first commercial pop record to incorporate multiple layers of music, all of which were performed by Paul’s dexterous fingers. “Sextuplet guitar-ing,” Billboard magazine declared in its Feb. 21, 1948, review, “… technique so good it’s ridiculous.”

Today, a new studio in Hollywood celebrates the former Angeleno’s legacy as a recording pioneer. Over the last three years, the Les Paul Foundation and a team of engineers have gone to extraordinary lengths to build the Les Paul Recording Studio, housed in United Recording on Sunset Boulevard. The facility includes Paul’s original equipment, such as the first-ever multitrack Ampex tape machine and multitrack recording console, as well as a selection of Paul’s customized guitars, including his namesake model for Gibson.

Paul’s recording equipment is monumental for its historical value but also because it still works. “We have the Wright Brothers’ plane in there and it actually flies,” said Michael Braunstein, executive director of the Les Paul Foundation, by way of comparison. The new studio is essentially a rare hands-on museum where students and commercial artists may study and perform the same techniques Paul employed, using his tools.

Los Angeles-based musician Dweezil Zappa interviewed Paul on MTV in 1987, which created a fondness between the pair. During a phone call from the road — Zappa was on a tour celebrating his father’s album “Apostrophe” — he explained the importance of Paul’s innovations. “He was so far ahead of the game in so many ways, not only as a great guitar player, but also how he figured out ways to record music live,” he said. “The foundation of the sound capture is still better than anything else that you would find today. The products that were put into use and the way that it was machined … it’s unmatched.”

Zappa says he’s visited the new studio and intends to use it to record some of his own music after his tour concludes. The studio also has an educational mission.

“This is also a real opportunity for students to learn about analog recording from the master,” said Steve Rosenthal, a Grammy-winning producer who serves as the head archivist and music producer for the Les Paul Foundation. Rosenthal’s also known for his Manhattan recording studio the Magic Shop, which closed in 2016, where he worked with David Bowie, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Ramones and many others.

Tom Camuso, director of audio engineering at the Les Paul Recording Studio, is photographed in Hollywood on May 15.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Groups from Carnegie Mellon University and Syracuse University have already participated in seminars at the studio led by Rosenthal and Tom Camuso, a Grammy-winning engineer who’s also the Les Paul Foundation’s director of audio engineering. “The console looks like it’s from a battleship, and we let students record on it and see how hard it is compared to today’s digital audio workstations,” Camuso explained. “The connection they make is that this is where it started, this is the first of all of it.”

The idea for the studio began in 2022 amid Rosenthal’s quest to source, organize, curate and restore Paul’s vast catalog of music from the Library of Congress archives. “It became clear to me that the best solution would be to mix the music on Les’ original gear,” he said. He brought in Camuso, a longtime associate who’d worked at the Magic Shop, and the pair endeavored to repair the eight-track recording console nicknamed “The Monster” that Paul built with engineer Rein Narma, which featured leading-edge in-line equalization and vibrato effects.

They also retrieved Paul’s Ampex 5258 Sel-Sync multitrack tape machine, familiarly known as the Octopus, which sits alongside the console, and was the first-ever eight-track. The studio also has a three-track machine that was in Paul’s home in Mahwah, N.J., which he used to play tapes recorded at other studios. At the time, Paul was the only person with eight-track capabilities. “That was his way of communicating with the outside world, so to speak,” Camuso said.

The first-ever multitrack tape machine, called “The Octopus,” resides at the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

The equipment was in varying stages of disrepair, and there was no documentation accompanying it. Many of the recording console’s wires had been cut, and some of its modules were missing. Camuso and a group from Thump Recording Studios in Brooklyn spent 10 months replacing and repairing pieces that were missing or had failed, without changing anything about the way the machine was originally made. “We had to source old stock parts from the ’50s,” Camuso said, “and there were little plastic pieces that had disintegrated. The team would drum scan those and then 3D print them in their original form.” An Ampex expert from Canada broke down the tape machines and then rebuilt them from the ground up, exactly as they were when Paul used them.

Before he used the multitrack tape machine and recording console, Paul’s early experiments with overdubbing, or what he called “sound on sound,” involved two recording-cutting lathes, a record player, a mixer and hundreds of blank wax discs, all of which he used to layer tracks manually. In 1948, Bing Crosby gave Paul his first mono Ampex recorder, to which Paul added a second playback head, which enabled him to record multiple tracks on the same reel of tape. He and his second wife, Mary Ford, took this machine on the road, recording their songs in hotel rooms and in apartments.

Ford was a skilled singer with perfect pitch who could execute lead vocals and harmonize with herself in very few takes using Paul’s early version of multitracking, which was revolutionary but primitive and didn’t allow for mistakes. Given the analog nature of Paul’s setup, she had to sing everything live and unmanipulated. The pair recorded a string of 28 hit singles between 1950 to 1957, beginning with a cover of the jazz standard “How High the Moon.” They were so popular that Listerine sponsored a widely syndicated television show, “Les Paul & Mary Ford at Home,” during which they performed their intricate songs live.

A photograph of Les Paul inside his recording studio in New Jersey is displayed at the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“Their discs sell like dimes going for a nickel,” Florabel Muir reported in the Los Angeles Mirror in January 1952. The pair’s “Vaya Con Dios” spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Best Sellers in Stores chart (which was discontinued in favor of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1958). Paul and Ford’s sultry version of “Smoke Rings,” released in 1952, features in Todd Haynes’ 2015 film “Carol.”

“The only singer I’ve encountered in my life who can compare to Mary is Aretha Franklin,” said Gene Paul, Les’ son from his first marriage, who became a recording engineer for Atlantic Records. “Neither one of them ever hit a bad note. You couldn’t pay them to.” The younger Paul learned about recording in his father’s home studio in Mahwah and played drums in his touring band from 1959 to 1969. “It took me years after my dad died to realize he was a genius,” he added. “Yes, he had a studio in his house, and built his own guitar and his own eight-track, but I thought every dad did this.”

Rosenthal and Camuso are in the process of restoring Paul’s original recordings, including his hits with Ford. The pair is using demixing and speed correction software to create new stereo mixes of the songs, which don’t have any of the crunchiness or distortion that were a byproduct of Paul’s original experiments in multitracking. It’ll be the first time any of Paul’s music has been released in stereo. The project has created a library of multitrack stems, which is another singular feature of the new studio. “Lana Del Rey could come in and sing with Mary Ford, or she could sing ‘A Fool to Care’ with the original Les Paul guitar parts,” Rosenthal said.

Guitars on display inside the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Camuso says a number of famous musicians have already expressed interest in using the new studio. “There’s lots of people who would be in your record collection for sure,” he said. Its historical significance and superior sound quality is a major draw, but the Les Paul Recording Studio also provides a chance for musicians to work more intentionally. Though its equipment was once cutting-edge, by today’s digital standards — in which there are unlimited tracks and effects and every mistake is erasable — Paul’s console and tape machines are limited. To work with them, musicians must think about what they want to record ahead of time. “The average person may not know what they’re hearing, but they will feel it because the performances will be better,” Zappa pointed out.

He views the new studio as a welcome counterpart to the too-perfect sonic monotony that can occur from every commercial recording artist using the same software. “There’s just so much music that’s disposable today,” Zappa added. “We’ve never had as many amazing tools to make stuff, and then have it be used in the lamest way possible.”

This story contains many spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 6.

The infected have learned to stalk and sprint. The Cordyceps fungus is now airborne. And Joel (Pedro Pascal) isn’t immortal. The first five episodes of “The Last of Us” offered up several new threats and at least one major death. Deep into its second season, HBO’s series adaptation of the popular video game remains true to its namesake by sending its protagonist Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and her partner Dina (Isabela Merced) on a revenge mission from their fortified compound in Wyoming to the wilds of Seattle. Their aim is to find Joel’s killer, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). But the Pacific Northwest presents challenges beyond cauliflower-headed flesh eaters and deadly mean girls. The brutal conflict between the Washington Liberation Front and the primitive religious cult the Seraphites makes Ellie’s mission all the more dangerous and complex — and the show’s imagery more gruesome.

Episode 6 brought Joel back from the dead in a series of flashbacks that gave insight into his unique parenting skills, revealed the event that triggered the rift between Joel and Ellie and uncovers what happened to therapist Gail’s (Catherine O’Hara’s) husband, Eugene (Joe Pantoliano). While on patrol, Eugene was bitten by the infected. Ellie made Joel promise he would not kill Eugene until he had the chance to say goodbye to his wife. But when Ellie leaves for a moment to retrieve their horses, Joel breaks the promise.

Like Episode 3 of Season 1, Sunday’s installment of the series was the rare episode that deviated from the game’s narrative to tell a deeper story about the characters. Beginning at Ellie’s 15th birthday and moving through subsequent ones, the episode chronicled the shifting dynamic in the main characters’ father-daughter relationship, from a tight bond between orphan and her adopted protector to near estrangement.

Lorraine Ali, Tracy Brown and Mary McNamara gathered to discuss the latest episode of the spore-filled thriller.

The source of tension between Gail (Catherine O’Hara) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) is revealed in Episode 6.

(Liane Hentscher / HBO)

Ali: “The Last of Us” features flesh-eating zombie-like things and death-worshipping cults, but I love that the true terror at the heart of Season 2 is the prospect of parenting a teen. The theme at the core of Episode 6 was largely centered on the fraught father-daughter dynamic between Joel and Ellie and the dangers of passing down generational trauma. We even get some backstory on Joel’s rough childhood, though I wish there had been more on that front.

What we do get a lot more of is Ellie’s hostility toward Joel, and it’s exhausting in ways that the showrunners probably never intended. Naturally there is plenty of ire in Ellie as she hurtles toward adulthood in a hopeless hellscape with an assassin/guardian who’s repeatedly lied to her. But now that she’s the lead character of the series, I need more from Ellie than just one or two gears of rage and scorn, especially given the complexity of their relationship.

Joel killed to save her and doomed humanity in the process! A bond forged in such tragedy should inspire a truckload of emotions, even in a defiant teen who’s still clumsy at expressing her feelings. But that depth or nuance just wasn’t there for me, even when the series cued us up for such moments. The flashbacks to Ellie’s birthday celebrations with Joel felt like explainers of how the two grew apart as opposed to emotional snapshots that captured the roots of their estrangement. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the surprising depth and beauty of Season 1? I miss the terror and joy of that abandoned mall.

Brown: It’s interesting that you mention the abandoned mall, Lorraine, because I think that’s what it all comes back to for Ellie. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve spent many hours playing as Ellie in “The Last of Us” games, or because I understand what it’s like to be an angsty teenager much more than being a parent, but I thought Episode 6 did help shed some light on Ellie and Joel’s behaviors and dynamic.

Back in Episode 4, while trying to explain her immunity to the Cordyceps fungus to Dina, Ellie mentions that there are a lot of the times she wishes she wasn’t immune. In this latest episode, we learn that one of the reasons Ellie is angry with Joel is because he lied to her about what happened back in Salt Lake City with the Fireflies. But she’s also mad at him because he took away the one thing she thought could give her life and immunity purpose. “My life would have mattered, but you took that from me,” she says to him on their porch, in what appears to have been their very last conversation.

We know that Joel’s been shaped by the guilt of not being able to save his daughter Sarah at the start of the outbreak. For Ellie, I think the loss that’s affected her the most is Riley and the guilt of surviving their trip to that abandoned mall. If she wasn’t immune, Ellie would have died that day with her best friend and first love. Because she didn’t, she needed something to help justify why she’s still alive. What greater meaning could someone find for their life in a world ravaged by a pandemic than to be the reason humanity is able to find a cure?

McNamara: I’m grateful for the episode if only because it gave my own teenagers what they wanted most — more Pedro Pascal. (I miss him too but with much less passion.) But as you say, Tracy, survivor’s guilt is real and now Ellie is eyeing another emotional burden — Joel was killed for actions he took to save her life.

Revisiting Ellie’s birthdays was very touching, bridging the changes in both characters. How the hard-edge Joel from Season 1 became the softly anguished therapy patient of Season 2. Why Ellie was so rude and dismissive toward him. She knew all along that he had lied to her about Salt Lake City, and he suspected she knew — the presents, especially the trip to the science and natural history museum, seemed equally motivated by love and penance.

On one of Ellie’s birthday’s, Joel takes her to a science and natural history museum.

(Liane Hentscher / HBO)

I also loved their time in the the space portion of the museum because it underlined the vagaries of human history — this is not the first advanced civilization to fall, leaving ruins behind. Joel remembers when humans traveled to the stars (and had the resources to build museums); for Ellie, a journey from Wyoming to Seattle is just as fraught. They were always essentially time-travelers in each others lives.

But most important for me, this episode resolved just how Ellie had left it with Joel before Abby ruined everything. The truth was finally spoken — both Joel’s and Ellie’s. That she didn’t think she could forgive him but she wanted to try. That he was taken from her before she could find her way to forgiveness must certainly drive some of the rage, no?

Ali: OK, I officially feel hard-hearted, especially since we’re discussing an episode designed to plumb the characters’ and viewers’ emotions. I’m glad Season 2 is connecting with you both, and millions more HBO and Max subscribers. Or is it HBO Max? Or plain old HBO? Regardless, this round of the series is not resonating with my adult, parenting self or my inner sullen teen, i.e. the part of my being that guides many of my rash decisions and dictates my slouchy posture. That said, I do love the chemistry between Ellie and Dina. Their love and fierce loyalty toward one another is a high point of Season 2. And it looks like they’re now going to be parents.

Brown: As Ellie says, she’s going to be a dad! The way Ellie and Dina’s relationship developed over the course of the season has been one of my favorite differences between the show and the game. But speaking of the game, the birthday trip to the museum and the porch conversation where Ellie tells Joel she wants to try to forgive him that Mary mentioned are both big flashback moments directly adapted from “The Last of Us Part II” with some minor changes. In the game, Ellie and Joel spend time checking out a dinosaur exhibit before getting to the space exploration exhibit, which I admit I’m a little sad we did not get to see. And Ellie confronting Joel about the truth of what happened in Salt Lake is a separate moment long before the porch conversation in the game.

Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) is shot by Joel after he is bitten, breaking his promise to Ellie to let him live to say goodbye to his wife, Gail. It’s a change from the video game, where the character dies of natural causes.

(Liane Hentscher / HBO)

One major difference between “The Last of Us Part II” and the show is the storyline involving Eugene and Gail. The Eugene in the game was a resident of Jackson who lived out his life until he died of natural causes in his 70s, which is something the younger generation can only dream of. Gail, on the other hand, is an original character, and my response to her introduction was mostly “hooray Catherine O’Hara, hooray therapy.” Catherine O’Hara is always a delight and it’s clear everybody living in the world of “The Last of Us” could use some therapy. But in Episode 6 we see that Eugene and Gail’s story also serves as a flashpoint in Joel and Ellie’s estrangement.

We already knew Joel had killed Eugene from his therapy session with Gail earlier in the season, but what did you think about that whole sequence, Mary? Did it affect your understanding of Joel or Ellie in any way?

McNamara: Well, I have to say that was an example of bad parenting. The patrol has rules, tough but necessary for the safety of the community. Ellie (who is, hello, freaking immune) wanted to bend them. Classic parent/child face-off. But instead of just saying “no” to her and “any last words?” to Eugene before shooting him, Joel allowed her believe she was getting her way, which was just dumb. Of course he was going to shoot Eugene; he had to shoot Eugene. But it honestly did not make sense to lie about it, especially when the lie would be exposed almost instantly. Sometimes a parent just has to be the bad guy, even if it means making Catherine O’Hara really mad at you.

And though I agree with you both about the energy of Ellie and Dina offering love in place of vengeance during their excursion to Seattle, I wish the writers could have figured out a way to bring O’Hara along.

The Chris Taylor era in Los Angeles is over.

On Sunday, Taylor was designated for assignment by the Dodgers after a 10-year tenure with the club, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

In corresponding roster moves, the Dodgers activated Tommy Edman from the injured list and added pitcher Lou Trivino to the 40-man roster. Trivino was in Los Angeles on Sunday — occupying the same locker stall Taylor used to — after fellow reliever Kirby Yates suffered a hamstring injury Saturday night.

Taylor was in the last season of a four-year, $60-million contract with the Dodgers. The former All-Star was the longest-tenured position player on the roster, after the Dodgers designated Austin Barnes for assignment last week. But, just like with Barnes, Taylor’s declining production coupled with the emergence of rookie utilityman Hyeseong Kim left the 34-year-old expendable.

Thus, for the second time in the last week, the Dodgers parted ways with one of the most familiar faces of the team.

I wasn’t expecting a painting of a naked clown to greet me when I FaceTimed Demetri Martin on a Monday afternoon in May. After the longest two seconds of my life, the comedian appeared in front of the camera with an unassuming smile.

For the past few months, Martin has been toiling away in the studio shed designed by his wife, interior designer Rachael Beame Martin, in the backyard of their Beverly Glen home. Lush greenery peeks through the windows above a lattice he constructed to mount canvases of various sizes. His first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings is just days away and he has some finishing touches to make.

Visual art is not new to Martin, a wiz at one-liners who incorporates drawings in his stand-up.

“The cool thing about a drawing is I can share something personal and I can use a graphic to illustrate it more specifically,” he says in “Demetri Deconstructed,” his 2024 Netflix special. In one graph from the special, he plots the inverse relationship between the amount of “past” and “future” time across an individual’s lifespan. The point where “past” and “future” meet is the mid-life existential crisis.

There is a synergy between Martin’s jokes and his sketches, which are more akin to doodles than drawings. Their humor lies in their pared-down specificity. They “make you ponder something on the absurdity-of-life level, which I guess is comedy,” says Martin’s close friend and musician Jack Johnson.

“I brought visual art into my stand-up comedy,” says Demetri Martin. “Can I bring comedy into the visual art world?”

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

With his love of joke crafting, Martin says he represents the comedy old guard as stand-up has become heavily autobiographical in today’s internet age.

“Specifically, it’s jokes that have always attracted me when we’re talking about the comedy world,” Martin says of his aversion to storytelling. “Can you do a joke in 12 words? Can you get an idea across? How much can you take away and it still lands with people?”

“Acute Angles,” Martin’s solo exhibition running Sunday to May 31, takes his obsession with constraint a step further. The experiment: Can you communicate jokes visually without any words?

“I brought visual art into my stand-up comedy,” says Martin, who worked on paintings for two-plus years before he figured he had enough material to fill a gallery. “Can I bring comedy into the visual art world?”

“Acute Angles” — he says the title references the shape of his nose — features large-scale paintings with a unifying color palette of bright red, sky blue and medium gray, in addition to 30 smaller drawings. The paintings depict implausible scenarios: What if the grim reaper slipped on a banana on his way to kill you? What if Superman ripped his underpants on his quest to save you?

The show is a collaboration with his wife, whom he adoringly describes as the muscles of the operation. The two secured a month-long lease of an abandoned yoga studio tucked behind a California Pizza Kitchen in Brentwood. Using her design skills — they met in New York City when she was attending Parsons School of Design and he was pursing comedy — Beame Martin led a rebuild of the studio-turned-gallery.

When Martin’s publicist called to ask if the gallery had a name, the couple turned to Google. They eventually came up with “Laconic Gallery,” for Laconia, Greece, where Martin traces his roots, and because the word laconic perfectly describes Martin’s ethos: marked by the use of few words.

Demetri Martin describes his wife, Rachael Beame Martin, as the muscles of the operation.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

On the day of our interview, Martin is completing the last of 12 paintings for the show and is puzzled why the paint appears differently on the canvas than in the can. He’s trying hard to ensure the color of the naked clown’s pubic hair matches his hair.

The relationship between the viewer and the art is both exciting and scary to Martin. When taking a comedy show on the road, you more or less know your jokes will land, he says. With an art show, there’s more of a vacuum between him and the audience, yet the conceit remains: the show is meant to be funny.

But whether viewers laugh while visiting the art exhibition almost doesn’t matter. For Martin, the reward has been the process of creation — the meditative zone he sinks into, indie rock oozing from his CD player, as he envisions and re-envisions the work. (Many of the paintings in the show are derived from old sketches.)

The show also represents Martin’s re-emergence from his own mid-life existential crisis. At 51, he is older than his dad was when he died and about the same age as his late mom, when she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. “So now, is this like bonus time for me?” he started to ask himself in his late 40s.

In some ways, Martin has always been a tortured artist. After graduating from Yale, he attended NYU Law only to drop out after the second year. But New York City is also where he found himself, spending late nights at the Comedy Cellar and the Boston Comedy Club. His days were spent visiting the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Daydreaming his way through the galleries, jotting jokes in his notepad, is when he first gained an appreciation for the arts.

“He’s not without cynicism once you know him, but where comics so often lead with cynicism, he has this wide-eyed openness, and I think that’s a thread that pulls through all of his work,” says comedian and fellow Comedy Central alum Sarah Silverman.

Demetri Martin’s first solo art exhibition is a collaboration with his wife, Rachael Beame Martin.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Now, Martin is a father to an 8-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son — the same age he was when manning his Greek family’s shish kebab stand on the Jersey Shore. His self-described anger at seeing the world his kids are growing up in, namely their peers’ obsessions with cell phones, seeps into his paintings and drawings. But ultimately, being a father has irrevocably improved Martin’s perspective on life.

“I think sometimes resignation is also acceptance,” he says, on his new appreciation of midlife. “You’re still motivated, but maybe not in the same way. … You still want to make things, but maybe it doesn’t matter as much, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. So that’s where I feel like I’m at, where I’m saying, ‘You know what, I’m grateful.’ I understand how lucky I’ve been now.”

He’s not quite done with touring but “Acute Angles” represents a potential escape. If his comedy can travel without him, if he can make money while foregoing lonely nights on the road, he can prioritize more important moments, like playing catch with his son after school. After all, his kids aren’t at the age yet where they hate him — a joke his kids don’t like.

Still, Martin’s art-making mirrors his joke-writing. It’s a numbers game, meticulously filling notebooks in handwriting Silverman describes as “tiny letters all perfectly the same size,” then revisiting and sharpening material until the joke emerges, like a vision.

“It’s really a privilege to have the kind of career where I can try something like this,” Martin says. “I don’t take that for granted anymore.”

The rock band Foo Fighters has let go of drummer Josh Freese, according to a note from the veteran percussionist.

“The Foo Fighters called me Monday night to let me know they’ve decided ‘to go in a different direction with their drummer,’” Freese wrote on Instagram. “No reason was given. … Regardless, I enjoyed the past two years with them, both on and off stage, and I support whatever they feel is best for the band. In my 40 years of drumming professionally, I’ve never been let go from a band, so while I’m not angry — just a bit shocked and disappointed. But as most of you know I’ve always worked freelance and bounced between bands so, I’m fine.”

“Stay tuned for my ‘Top 10 possible reasons Josh got booted from the Foo Fighters’ list,” he joked.

A representative for the band confirmed the departure but declined to comment.

Freese is a session veteran who first came to prominence in the SoCal punk band the Vandals, and later went on to play in Guns N’ Roses, A Perfect Circle and Devo before joining Foo Fighters in 2023. He won the high-profile job after the death of beloved Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins.

The band previously celebrated Hawkins in a moving tribute concert in 2022, which included Hawkins’ then-16-year-old son Shane drumming in his dad’s place on “My Hero.” More recently, singer Dave Grohl appeared with his former Nirvana bandmate, bassist Krist Novoselic, to perform at the FireAid benefit concert in Inglewood this year.

The group has not announced a new drummer. Its next scheduled performance is in Singapore on Oct. 4.

Spiritually, Gabby Windey is all about Sundays in a hardcore, no-exceptions, day-of-rest sort of way. The “Long Winded” podcast host became the breakout star of “The Traitors” this year after winning the reality TV competition with a series of bold outfits and stereotype-smashing strategic moves. Her stream-of-consciousness podcast monologues continue to boost her star, frequently going viral on Instagram and TikTok for their vocal fry realness. Now she’s booked and busy beyond belief, a mixed bag for Windey.

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

“You know I’m always begging for a break,” Windey says. “It’s things that I want to be busy with, so I can’t really complain. But yeah, I’m always looking for my next nap.”

That makes Sundays feel like a “special occasion” for her, especially since it’s when she gets slow, quality time with her wife, comedian Robby Hoffman. Together, Windey and Hoffman spend their Sundays in the most relatable way possible: scrolling the internet, watching TV and movies, getting high with friends and snacking.

Sundays are also the ultimate example of Windey’s famous “business hours,” the time after 3 p.m. in which Windey’s confidence plummets and she’d rather “gouge my eyes out with a dull chopstick” than FaceTime for work. Woe to anyone who would bother Windey on a Sunday.

“God forbid, if anyone emails you on a Sunday, block and delete, fire them all,” Windey says. “On Sunday I am closed for business. You will not hear a peep from me.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

9 a.m.: Get out of bed, get back into bed

We’ll sleep in until, like, hopefully 9 or something. Robby works nights, you know, she’s a stand-up comedian. I’m like blaming [sleeping in] on her, but I can easily get 10 hours of sleep a night. So yeah, we like a lazy morning.

We’ll go get coffee. We’re right next to Lamill now. Then we’ll come back home and do the New York Times crossword, Connections, Wordle in bed.

Normally, when Robby’s had her fair share of like showing me YouTube clips or Reels, then I’ll start to get antsy. I’m like, “Enough of this. Let’s go.”

11 a.m.: Groceries and tamales

We’ll walk to the Silver Lake Farmers Market. Robby does a lot of the grocery shopping, and I’ll just, like, get a tamale. They’re $5, and they’re huge. I like a red sauce and a green sauce, so it’s like beef with the red sauce and chicken with the green sauce, but I also like a dessert tamale, a sweet tamale. I’m half Mexican, and my mom did not cook except for tamales. So it’s a very comforting food.

Robby’s really good at grocery shopping, so I just kind of let her go. But we get fresh berries. We’ll make veggie sandwiches throughout the week, which is like romaine lettuce, mushrooms, tomatoes and cucumber. We’ll get those ingredients and whatever weird food there is, you know, there’s always like some hippie fermented thing that’s supposed to be good for you.

Noon: Back to bed.

I have to take a break.

1 p.m.: Prerolls in the park

For [the weed holiday] 4/20, we met up with friends in Silver Lake Meadow. First I went to Botanica to get some snacks. They have good snacks, so I got this really good carrot hummus. It’s like sweet. I got some good crackers, some goat cheese wrapped in tea leaves. It sounds better than it actually was. And I’m exploring NA [nonalcoholic] options. So I got some Ghia. People die for it. But I’m like, I don’t know. I wasn’t quite sold. It’s not giving me a buzz. Surprisingly — there’s nothing in it! But I still want a buzz of some sort, which in comes the weed. So then we went to the park to just like get high on Edie Parker prerolls, talk s— with some friends for like three hours and eat good snacks. (Note: Windey has a partnership with fashion and cannabis brand Edie Parker).

4:30 p.m.: Catch a movie

Then we’ll go see a movie. We’ll f— with the Americana [at Brand] hard. We love the popcorn, love the ease. We’ll like sneak food in and out, you know, I don’t even think you need to sneak it in anymore. We haven’t gotten caught, but we always have the backstory of like that we’re gluten-free, or that we’re kosher, because Robby grew up Hasidic. So she knows what it’s like to be kosher, and I guess it’d be a good excuse for sneaking in food to the movie theater.

7:30 p.m.: Eat special-occasion sushi

After the movies, we’ll probably go out, like on a date night. I love sushi, obviously, who doesn’t? So we’ll either go to Sugarfish, because it’s like you get the same thing every time. You know, it’s so reliable. Or Kombu Sushi in Silver Lake. They have a great baked crab roll that I literally crave. But I like to save it for a special occasion, for Sunday.

9:30 p.m.: Call it a night

Back home, I’ll maybe do some skincare if I have any energy left, which after this Sunday it sounds like I won’t. Other than that, we might just watch a show, or I’ll do like a face mask. I’ll read on the Kindle — I’m reading “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.” I can’t wait to be done with it. I’m like, “OK, I just need to get through this. And then I can start fun reading again.” I didn’t get much of the American lit category in school. So I’m trying to kind of move my way through that. I just read Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” I might go to the other book that people think is her best one next.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The strongest field of the majors gave way to a few surprises Thursday in the PGA Championship, starting with Jhonattan Vegas charging into the lead with a seven-under 64 and the top 10 players in the world nowhere to be found among the top 10 at Quail Hollow.

A long day filled with sunshine and mud balls ended with Vegas in the penultimate group playing the best golf hardly anyone saw.

A briefly energized crowd had mostly left when Vegas blazed his way to the finish with five birdies on his last six holes, ending with an 18-footer on No. 8 and a 25-footer on the rugged ninth.

It was Vegas’ best score in 45 rounds playing the majors. The Venezuelan has never finished in the top 20 in a major and hadn’t qualified for this one in three years.

He had a two-shot lead over Ryan Gerard, the PGA Tour rookie who grew up in North Carolina and was the only other player to reach 7 under until bogeys on his last two holes. He was joined at 66 by Cam Davis of Australia.

The biggest crowds belonged to the top three in the world, and it wasn’t nearly as inspiring as four of the last five majors they have combined to win.

Masters champion Rory McIlroy didn’t make birdie over his last 12 holes and had nothing to say about that after a three-over 74 sent him straight to the range.

Scottie Scheffler and defending PGA champion Xander Schauffele had plenty to say about mud balls on tee shots, particularly on the 16th hole that sent both to double bogey. Scheffler at least holed two shots from off the green — one for birdie, one for eagle — and he finished with a 6-iron from 215 yards to three feet on No. 9 that sent him to a 69.

“I did a good job battling and keeping a level head out there during a day which there was definitely some challenging aspects to the course,” Scheffler said. “Did a good job posting a number on a day where I didn’t have my best stuff.”

For the first time in at least 30 years, the top 10 scores after the opening round of a major did not include anyone from the top 10 in the world ranking.

In their places were Vegas, who only got his game back in order last year when he won in Minnesota, and a host of other surprises.

Alex Smalley, the first alternate who found out about 15 hours before he teed off that he had a spot in the field, rolled in a 70-foot eagle putt on his way to a 67. Ryan Fox of New Zealand, who qualified by winning the Myrtle Beach Classic, also was at 67.

They were joined by a large group that included Luke Donald, the 47-year-old Ryder Cup captain for Europe who was the only player without a bogey on his card. The U.S. captain, Keegan Bradley, was another shot behind.

“It’s always fun, bogey-free in a major championship on a course that you wouldn’t have thought would be ideal for me,” said Donald, who is only in the field because of a PGA of America tradition to invite active Ryder Cup captains.

Considering the champions the majors have produced in recent years, this leaderboard more closely resembled the Myrtle Beach Classic. None of the top eight players have won a major, nor have they ever seriously contended.

Gerard looked comfortable playing before a home crowd. He made a tough par on the rugged ninth hole, then ran off four straight birdies on the back nine, and was seven under for the round after holing a 60-footer for eagle on the par-five 15th.

Davis had seven birdies and narrowly missed a 10-foot par putt on his last hole for the lead. Not bad for someone who recently ended a stretch of five straight missed cuts and hasn’t had a top 10 since early February.

“It’s just constantly trying to go back to things that have worked, trying to keep the head in a place where you’re not feeling like you’re banging your head against the wall all the time,” Davis said. “It’s letting it organically come — good processes, good routines, all those little one percenters add up to good golf eventually.”

The others at 67 were Stephan Jaeger and Aaron Rai, who both became first-time PGA Tour winners last year.

Scheffler at 69 had the best score of anyone from the top 10 in the world.

McIlroy, a four-time winner at Quail Hollow, came into this PGA Championship believing that thrill-a-hole Masters title last month that gave him the career Grand Slam would be the highlight of his career no matter what he does from here.

A sloppy round, particularly off the tee, wasn’t going to change that. It was no less surprising to see him struggle at Quail Hollow, posting his highest round since a 76 in the second round of the Wells Fargo Championship in 2018.

Schauffele wound up with a 72 in his bid to go back-to-back in the PGA Championship.

Jordan Spieth likely will have to wait until next year at Aronimink to try for the career Grand Slam. The three-time major champion, lacking only the Wanamaker Trophy for his major collection, ran off three straight bogeys early on the back nine and shot 76.

Ferguson writes for the Associated Press.

On a spring afternoon in 2005, the members of OK Go dressed up in tacky suits, gathered in front of a video camera and awkwardly danced their way into history.

The band’s DIY single-shot clip for its song “A Million Ways” — in which the brainy rock quartet moves through three and a half minutes of intricate choreography on the patio behind singer Damian Kulash’s Los Angeles home — became one of music’s first viral videos, racking up millions of downloads (remember those?) and helping to establish a new way for acts to connect with fans as the internet began to supplant MTV and Top 40 radio.

OK Go doubled down on the approach in 2006 with its video for “Here It Goes Again,” another bare-bones production that had the musicians dancing on eight synchronized treadmills, then went on to make increasingly elaborate clips featuring a Rube Goldberg machine, a zero-gravity plane flight and a pack of adorable dogs.

“As soon as the treadmill thing happened, it was like: Holy s—, we’re pop culture now,” Kulash said the other day of “Here It Goes Again,” which won a Grammy Award for best music video and has been viewed more than 67 million times on YouTube.

Twenty years after “A Million Ways,” the mechanics of cultural connection have transformed again thanks to social media and TikTok, where what you encounter as you scroll is guided by the invisible hand of data analysis.

Said OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind with grinning understatement: “The algorithm has become a bit more powerful.”

“Not a big fan of the algorithm as an arbiter of art,” Kulash added. “It’s sad to see optimization in a space that was once the Wild West.”

Yet OK Go is still at it: Last month the group released its latest one-shot video for the song “Love,” for which Kulash and his co-directors installed dozens of mirrors on powerful robotic arms inside an old Budapest train station to create a kind of kaleidoscopic obstacle course.

The band’s methods have grown more sophisticated since “A Million Ways,” and these days it seeks out corporate sponsors to help bring Kulash’s visions to life. But an adventuresome — and touchingly personal — spirit remains key to its work.

“What I love about the ‘Love’ video is the humans in the room,” Kulash said as he and Nordwind sat outside a Burbank rehearsal studio where OK Go was preparing for a tour scheduled to stop Friday and Saturday at L.A.’s Bellwether. (The group’s other members are guitarist Andy Ross and drummer Dan Konopka.) “The robots are only there,” the singer added, “to move the mirrors so that we can experience that magical thing — so simple and beautiful — of two mirrors making infinity.”

A wistful psych-pop jam inspired by Kulash’s becoming a father to twins — his wife, author and filmmaker Kristin Gore, is a daughter of former Vice President Al Gore — “Love” comes from OK Go’s new album, “And the Adjacent Possible,” its first LP since 2014. It’s a characteristically eclectic set that also includes a strutting funk-rock tune featuring Ben Harper, a glammy rave-up co-written by Shudder to Think’s Craig Wedren and a woozy existentialist’s ballad about discovering there’s no “no deus ex machina working away in the wings.” (That last one’s called “This Is How It Ends.”)

“We’re old people who listen to sad ballads,” said Kulash, who’ll turn 50 in October. “That’s what happens when you become an old person, right?”

Wedren, who’s known Kulash since the latter was a teenage Shudder to Think fan in their shared hometown of Washington, D.C., said that “part of the beauty of OK Go is that they’re so musically omnivorous — that all these things that wouldn’t seem to go together always end up sounding like OK Go.” In Wedren’s view, the band “doesn’t get enough credit for how exploratory they are as musicians — maybe because of the genius of the videos.”

If that’s the case, Kulash doesn’t seem especially to mind. He knew nearly two decades ago that the viral success of the treadmill video — which the band recreated onstage at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards between performances by Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé — threatened to make OK Go “a one-hit wonder whose one hit was an exercise equipment stunt,” as the singer put it. “Or it could be the opening to an opportunity to do more and weirder things.”

Among the weird things the group ended up doing: the 2014 clip for “I Won’t Let You Down,” in which the members ride around a parking lot in Japan on personal mobility devices under the eye of a camera on a drone.

“I remember hearing that Radiohead didn’t play ‘Creep’ for 10 or 15 years because they were too cool for that,” he said. “Had we taken the path of being too cool for treadmills and homemade videos, I can look back and say —”

“We’d have had a much quieter career,” Nordwind chimed in.

There’s a way of looking at OK Go’s emphasis on visuals that depicts the band as a harbinger of an era when “musician” is just another word for “content creator.”

“It’s weird to think about a life in the vertical as opposed to the horizontal,” Nordwind said with a laugh, referring to the respective orientations of videos on TikTok and YouTube.

“What’s difficult about social media is the question of volume — the volume and quality balance is off to me,” Kulash said.

Creators, he means, are expected to churn out content like little one-person factories.

“Day after day,” Nordwind said. “We like to take our time.”

“Also: When I fall in love with a song, I want to hear that song over and over again,” Kulash said. “I will listen to ‘Purple Rain’ until I die. Do people go back and search someone’s feed to replay the TikTok they first fell in love with?

“The relationship that I think people have to their favorite YouTube star or TikToker,” he added, “feels much more like a relationship to celebrity than it does a relationship to art.”

OK Go at its rehearsal studio in Burbank.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

For Kulash, who made his feature debut as a director (alongside his wife) with 2023’s “The Beanie Bubble,” the pursuit of art is bound up in ideas of effort and limitation, which is why AI doesn’t interest him as a filmmaking tool.

“When everything is possible, nothing is special,” he said. “The reason we shoot our videos in a single shot is not purely for the filmmaking heroics. It’s because that’s the only way to prove to people: This is real — we did the thing.”

OK Go’s dedication to costly and time-consuming practical effects has led to partnerships with a number of deep-pocketed brands, beginning with State Farm, which spent a reported $150,000 to finance the band’s 2010 “This Too Shall Pass” video with the Rube Goldberg machine. (Meta sponsored the “Love” video and in return got a prominent spot in the clip for its Ray-Ban smart glasses.)

Kulash said that kind of product placement was “scary as s—” back in the late 2000s, when the fear of being perceived as sellouts haunted every rock band.

“Now, of course, it’s like a badge of honor,” he added, among influencers eager to flaunt their corporate ties.

To explain his position on the matter, the singer — whose band walked away from its deal with Capitol Records in 2010 to start its own label, Paracadute — tried out an extended metaphor: “On the other side of the planet, tectonic plates are moving and the hot magma of corporate money is coming out of the ground. That’s why the MTV Awards exist, that’s why the Grammys exist, that’s why everything you think of as a celebration of high art exists. It’s all advertising dollars, every last bit of it. You’re protected by these continents of middle-people, which let you feel like you’re marking art. But if you can manage to be one of those microbes at the bottom of the sea that gets its energy directly from the thermal vents of the hot magma money, then you get to make something other people don’t.” He laughed.

“There’s no record label in the world that would ever be like, ‘Hey, why don’t you go to Budapest for three weeks and spend a ridiculous amount of money to make this music video at a time when there’s not even a music video channel anymore?’

“But brands know that’s worthwhile, and we know that’s worthwhile,” he said. “You just have to make sure you don’t get burned by the magma.”

Whenever friends or family visiting L.A. ask to go spend a day swimming in the ocean, I always take them to Leo Carrillo State Beach.

Unlike Santa Monica or Venice beaches, Leo Carrillo is not crowded. Parking is usually easy. And it’s a great place to swim and explore, with its tide pools where you can spot a starfish and scramble on its huge rocks (I may have had a goofy photo shoot or two with my friends there).

But until recently, I did not know that the adjoining Leo Carrillo State Park was home to a magnificent series of hiking trails where, when connected, provide you with a seven-mile trek with striking ocean views, wildflowers and birdsong. The halfway point is a pond and wetlands area where you can spot waterfowl and, if you’re lucky, listen to frogs! This is now the hike I take friends on when they want to both hike and have a beach day. I recommend you do the same.

Along with striking views of the Pacific Ocean, the Nicholas Flat Trail includes great vantage points of local peaks.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

The hike that I took through Leo Carrillo State Park — which I would gauge as mostly moderate with a few short but hard stretches — connects a few different trails, and I will explain how you can even just do portions of it and still have a great time before heading over to the beach.

To begin, you’ll park at Leo Carrillo State Park. An all-day pass is $12, payable to the ranger at the gate or via the machine in the parking lot. Once parked, you’ll head northeast to the trailhead. You’ll quickly come to a crossroads. Take the Willow Creek Trail east to officially start your hike.

A western fence lizard perches on a hillside.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

You’ll gain about 575 feet in a mile as you traverse the Willow Creek Trail. I took breaks along the way to gaze at the ocean, watching surfers bobbing on their boards and a kite surfer trying to gain traction. I spotted coast paintbrush and California brittlebush, a flowering shrub that features yellow daisy-like flowers, on the path, along with several lizards.

A mile in, you’ll come to a junction in the trail where you have three-ish options. You can continue west to a branch of the Nicholas Flat Trail that will take you a mile back down to the parking lot. You can head south onto ocean vista lookout point (which, though steep, I highly recommend). Or you can turn north onto another branch of the Nicholas Flat Trail.

Leo Carrillo State Beach is easy to spot from high points along the Nicholas Flat Trail.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

I did a combination, hiking 235 feet up the lookout path, where I had one of those “Wow, I get to live here” moments. The ocean was varying shades of blue, from turquoise to cerulean to cobalt. I could clearly see in all directions, including about eight miles to the east to Point Dume. I was, once again, amazed to be alone in a beautiful place in a county of 10 million people.

Once I finished at this awe-inspiring point, I headed north onto the Nicholas Flat Trail, taking it about 2.3 miles — and about 1,100 feet up 🥵 — through laurel sumac and other coast sage scrub vegetation into the Nicholas Flat Natural Preserve. Along the way, I observed loads of deerweed covered in its orange and yellow flowers along with scarlet bugler (which I spotted hummingbirds feeding on during my way back), Coulter’s lupine and small patches of California poppies.

California poppies growing amid invasive weeds, Coulter’s lupine and Longleaf bush lupine in Leo Carrillo State Park.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

If you need to catch your breath but don’t want to share that fact with your friends, just yell “Look at that view!” which is relevant for the hardest parts of the first stretch of this path, as the ocean grows only more beautiful and expansive as you climb.

About 2.5 miles in, you will see a path on your right that heads south. I’d skip this. It is a lookout point, but is washed out and looked sketchy to me. Instead, continue east-ish for another mile, and you’ll reach the charming little Nicholas Pond.

This is a great spot to sit, have a snack and observe the waterfowl and other birds, like red-winged blackbirds, song sparrows and lesser goldfinches (which are only lesser in their names). As I sat there eating my Trader Joe’s veggie sushi, I imagined decades ago when cattle probably drank from the pond, given a portion of the preserve resembles pasture and not native coastal sage scrub, and thus appears to have been used for ranching.

The Nicholas Pond in Nicholas Flat Natural Preserve near western Malibu.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

I continued north and then west on the Nicholas Flat Trail through the preserve. You could also turn around at the pond and head back the way you came.

The walk through the preserve featured views of the pasture and some shade from large oak trees, but it didn’t delight me the same as the rest of the hike. Additionally, just before finishing this leg of my hike, I noticed a steep, washed out hill and thought, “Please don’t let that be the trail.” Dear Wilder, it was. There was a nice view once I cursed my way up, but I give you permission to, again, just turn around at the pond.

The Nicholas Flat Trail is steep in spots but worth it for the views.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

At six miles in, or when you have only a mile left, you’ll return to the junction with the ocean vista lookout point. Instead of taking the Willow Creek Trail back the way I came, I took a right (northwest-ish) onto the last bit of the Nicholas Flat Trail. This trail also offered tremendous views and had patches covered in brittlebush with its yellow blooms.

I hiked this trail on a Thursday and did not see another human for the first six miles. It was just me, the western fence lizards, California quail and one very shy skinny silver striped snake who, upon hearing my footsteps, bolted into the bushes.

If you start this hike early enough in the day, you can simply trek back to your car and change into your swimsuit for an afternoon at the beach. And if the tide is out, you might also be able to walk around the tide pools. In the same day, you can hang out with both lizards and starfish, and when lucky, even spy an endangered bumblebee on the trail and an octopus on the beach. Please, go have yourself a remarkable Southern California day!

As the sun sets, golden light blankets the hillsides in Leo Carrillo State Park.

(Jaclyn Cosgrove / Los Angeles Times)

3 things to do

1. Pedal your heart out in Pico Union
CicLAvia will host its 60th open streets event, CicLAmini—Pico Union, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday in Pico Union along Pico Boulevard between Normandie and Union Avenues. Guests are invited to travel the 1.4-mile pop-up park through their favorite people-powered mode of transport, whether that’s walking, jogging, biking, skating or shimmying. The route will feature booths from nonprofit organizations and photo opportunities and food. CicLAvia, a nonprofit whose events are always free, invites participants to show up anywhere along the route during the event to take the time to explore one of L.A.’s most historic neighborhoods. Learn more at ciclavia.org.

2. Observe waterfowl and more in Castaic
An instructor-led bird walk and talk will be hosted from 8 to 10 a.m. Sunday at Castaic Lake. Guests should bring binoculars, sun protection and water, and wear comfy shoes for this relaxing stroll along paved pathways, sand and grass. Participants should meet at parking lot No. 4 and check in at the office. Register for free to this L.A. County site.

3. Fly a kite at Los Angeles State Historic Park
Clockshop, an L.A. arts and culture nonprofit, will host its fifth Community & Unity People’s Kite Festival from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Los Angeles State Historic Park. This free event will feature free arts workshops, live music and booths from local community organizations. There will be a kite competition where contestants will fly their handmade kite, to be judged by kite masters. A $5 donation to Clockshop is requested but not required. Register at clockshop.org.

The must-read

A western fence lizard, also known as a blue belly.

(James Maughn)

Anyone who has hiked for three minutes in L.A. has spotted a western fence lizard. They’re seemingly everywhere, scampering up a hillside, along the trail or on a rock. Turns out, Californians love documenting these little guys. Sean Greene, an assistant data and graphics editor at The Times, analyzed data from the citizen science app iNaturalist and found more than 130,000 verified identifications of the fence lizard in California. That’s way more than the number of poppies observed (almost 47,000) and red-tailed hawk (almost 76,500), two common and beloved things found in Southern California. “Outside California, iNaturalist users focus on other things,” Sean wrote. “Oregonians enjoy snapping pictures of ponderosa pines. In Washington, it’s mallards — the most commonly observed species worldwide. Nevadans have a thing for creosote bushes.” Biologist Giovanni Rapacciuolo told Sean that the fence lizard’s population on iNaturalist almost certainly comes down to “what human beings think is cool.” Like a large sunbathing lizard. As an added bonus, the piece features a video of a lizard doing push-ups, one of my favorite natural phenomenons to observe while hiking. So swole!

Happy adventuring,

P.S.

As we head into summer, the kind folks at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park remind us to check the ground temperature when hiking with pets. I often bring my dog, Maggie May, with me on trails. In the summer, I take the back of my hand and leave it on the ground for five seconds. If it’s too hot for me, it’s too hot for Maggie. If so, we just go find a swimming hole in the shade that we can both enjoy!

For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.

Listen. That’s the low hum of the highway you hear behind me, offset by the rumble of the ice machine down the breezeway. We gather today to celebrate the motel, a uniquely American creature, conceived in California through the unholy embrace of the automobile and the hotel.

Since that beginning in 1925, motels have multiplied like bunnies. They have been implicated in countless crimes and liaisons. They have been elevated by some savvy architects, undercut by assorted chain operations and frequently left for dead by the side of the road.

The motel turns 100. Explore the state’s best roadside havens — and the coolest stops along the way.

Yet certain survivors have done some dramatic social climbing, especially lately. Plenty of motels have moved from budget to boutique, often renaming themselves as inns, lodges or hotels and capitalizing on their vintage looks. Like turntables, typewriters, tiki bars and film cameras, these midcentury motels are back, seducing millennials, Gen Z and baby boomers like the character Johnny Rose on the beloved TV series “Schitt’s Creek.”

“I always saw motels as a last resort, a dreaded pit stop,” said Rose, played by Eugene Levy, pitching Wall Street investors. “But I was wrong. Motels have the potential of offering a window into the unique charm of small-town life.”

He vows “to revitalize the classic roadside motel for a new generation.”

Out here in the real world, it’s happening.

Nowadays you can spend $1,000 a night in a born-again California motel. You can order “eight-minute eggs” with your Champagne brunch (Le Petit Pali, Carmel), browse in a curated bodega (Hotel Wren, Twentynine Palms), nosh on caviar (Skyview Los Alamos), borrow a small car (Surfrider Hotel, Malibu), or ease the planet’s miseries by reaching for tree-free toilet paper (Pearl Hotel, San Diego).

The cursive yellow sign at the Pearl reverberates with ’50s vibes.

(Megan Morello / For The Times)

Yet if you’re nervous about money in these nerve-racking times, you can still find a mom-and-pop operation with high standards, a long family history and — sometimes — rates that dip under $100. You can even find one of those that features concrete teepees (San Bernardino’s Wigwam Motel, run by a family with roots in India).

In other words, it’s a wide, wide motel world out there, too broad to fit into one road trip. And so, in honor of the motel centennial, I took a road trip. Well, a few road trips.

All told, I covered about 2,500 miles, all within California, stalking properties born between 1925 and 1970, avoiding the big chains, sleeping in a new room every night. The way I defined a motel? If a lodging’s guest rooms open directly to the outdoors and there’s a parking lot handy, industry experts say, it probably was born as a motel or motor lodge. Especially if it’s a low-rise building with fewer than 60 rooms, brick walls and a VACANCY sign visible from the street. But owners can call their lodgings what they like — or turn them to other uses.

On the way, I found a few landmark motels that don’t take overnight guests at all. I also learned how the state’s Project Homekey — conceived to house people at risk of homelessness — bankrolled the purchase and conversion of more than 30 Southern California motels and hotels from 2020 to 2024, with mixed results.

Now, buckle up and let’s roll the montage of old postcards, weathered neon signs and swooping Googie rooflines, then zoom to the spot where motel history began.

The Mo-Tel is born

The first stop, I knew, needed to be a scruffy lot alongside U.S. 101 at the eastern edge of San Luis Obispo.

This is where a car-loving Pasadena architect named Arthur Heineman opened his first roadside lodging in December 1925, less than a year before Route 66 connected Chicago to Los Angeles. Having seen the first vacation camps and motor courts spring up across the country, Heineman hatched the idea of building one midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

After a few false starts, he called his place the Milestone Mo-Tel, combining motor and hotel. Later it became the Motel Inn. Heineman gave the buildings Mission Revival features and planned to build 18 statewide, his own mission system.

That never happened. But Heineman’s lodging endured for decades and the word motel caught on. As the automobile transformed American life and roadside commercial culture lit up like a new neon light, that word spread.

But we’re not lingering at the Motel Inn. It shut down in 1991 and much of the old complex has been leveled. Despite a proposal for a new hotel that got local planning commission approval in 2023, the site remained idle as of March 7. An uninspiring sign still stands, along with a Mission-style office building, bell tower and a single wall from the old restaurant. For someone who prizes roadside Americana, this is the visual version of the sad trombone sound.

Fortunately, the Madonna Inn — the visual version of an accordion orchestra — is just three miles away. Under a big pink sign.

When one California castle is not enough

At he Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Alex Madonna drew on his Swiss background and gave the inn a mountain-chalet look.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Nowadays the Madonna Inn is a vast enterprise with restaurants, bakery, bar, stables next door and 110 guest rooms — each different, each with its own postcard in the inn’s three gift shops. It’s so ornate, so frothy with kitsch, you have to smile. But when Alex and Phyllis Madonna opened in late 1958, the inn was a 12-room experiment.

The timing must have seemed right. Motels had been multiplying nationwide for more than 30 years, often adding swimming pools to lure more families or adopting elaborate themes to stand apart.

On Columbus Avenue in San Francisco, a circular Villa Roma motor hotel rose up (until it was leveled in the ’80s). Farther north in Crescent City, a man named Tom Wyllie built the 36-room Curly Redwood Lodge out of a single redwood tree in 1957. You can still sleep there, often for less than $80.

But here’s what gave the Madonnas a crucial boost on their motel in San Luis Obispo: Earlier that year, the state of California had opened the ornately furnished Hearst Castle in nearby San Simeon as a tourist attraction. Once the Madonna Inn opened that December, a traveler from L.A. could sleep at one lavishly decorated only-in-California castle on the way to another. Legions still do.

Scenes from the Madonna Inn. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

(Nic Coury / For The Times)

“It is the grandest motel of them all,” roadside design expert John Margolies once wrote, “and it is the definitive expression of an individually owned and operated hostelry — light-years removed from the almost scientific sameness of the large franchised chains.”

Boom, bust and boom again in San Francisco

From San Luis Obispo I drove on to San Francisco, ignoring Union Square, North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf, heading for the straight part of Lombard Street. That’s the part that carries U.S. 101 traffic through the Marina district on its way to the Golden Gate Bridge, and it’s full of old motels. In their vintage signs and often-weary façades, you can see proof of the industry’s boom and the decline that followed.

How ubiquitous did motels get? By 1964 there were 61,000 motels across the U.S. It’s hard to imagine there were ever so many, until you peek at @deadmotelsUSA or @merchmotel on Instagram or you’ve come across Heather M. David’s splendid 2017 coffee table book, “Motel California.”

Alas, by 1964, they were already beginning to get less interesting. Once the first generation of mom-and-pop motels prospered, the first chain operations arose and followed, targeting travelers who wanted no surprises. Two of the biggest chains, in fact, were born in Southern California — Motel 6 in Santa Barbara and Travelodge in San Diego.

As the national freeway system grew through the 1960s and ’70s, more chain operations positioned themselves to collect freeway drivers. Along the now-much-quieter highway, the old mom-and-pop operations died off or were gobbled up and “reflagged” by the chains.

By 1980, the freeway system and the chain hotels were thriving. Motels, not so much.

But in 1987 — in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, of all places — a 26-year-old Stanford MBA named Chip Conley tried something that changed the motel narrative. He bought a bedraggled old place called the Caravan Lodge and dubbed it the Phoenix, with Miss Pearl’s Jam House as its on-site restaurant and bar. Then he positioned the property as a hotelier’s version of Rolling Stone magazine, all wrapped around a playfully painted pool. And he offered free massages and bus parking to touring musicians’ road managers.

The Phoenix Hotel is part of the hipster-friendly Bunkhouse hotel group. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

And lo, the bands came, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sinead O’Connor, M.C. Hammer, k.d. lang, Laurie Anderson, Etta James, David Bowie, Bo Diddley and Deborah Harry. As the Phoenix flourished, Conley revived dozens more motels and small hotels, conceived a brand called Joie de Vivre, then sold it to Marriott.

The Phoenix has less momentum now. Its restaurant opens only for special events and the Tenderloin’s crime and blight persist. If I were in the city with children, I’d sooner stay near Lombard Street at the Motel Capri or Hotel Del Sol (which charges a staggering $45 for parking but has a pool).

Then again, a new owner took over the Phoenix last August — Michel Suas, a celebrated Bay Area pastry chef. If any Phoenix can rise from the ashes twice, it’s this one.

Rethinking rooms for a new generation

Meanwhile, up and down California, there’s a new generation of motel entrepreneurs and designers following Conley’s lead, rethinking what it means to be a motel. Though the nationwide number of motels dwindled to an estimated 16,000 by 2012, reclamation projects have been multiplying.

Kenny Osehan’s Ojai-based Shelter Social Club manages six reclaimed California motels in Ojai, Santa Barbara, Los Alamos and Solvang.

The Beverly Hills-based Kirkwood Collection includes 11 redone California motels and hotels.

The Southern California-based brand Casetta has opened four redone Southern California motels and hotels, with two more opening soon in Los Angeles and Taos, N.M.

The San Luis Obispo-based Nomada Hotel Group has relaunched five motels and hotels along the Central Coast.

None of those companies existed before 2012. All are still growing and trading on the idea that a lodging with 30 rooms feels friendlier than one with 300.

Drive south from San Francisco with a motel geek — which you’re now doing, by the way — and the born-again motel variations roll past like Kodachrome images in a slide show.

At the Glen Oaks Resort Adobe Motor Lodge in Big Sur, the rooms huddle at the edge of a thick forest. You turn an old-school metal key in your door and find a room full of stylishly recycled furnishings — woodsy but luxe, with yoga mats leaning in a corner.

A vintage-style key at Glen Oaks Motor Lodge in Big Sur.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

At the Cambria Beach Lodge, where once you might have found a bedside Gideon Bible or a Magic Fingers vibrating mattress, now you borrow a bike to ride by Moonstone Beach or bathe with some of the motel’s goat’s milk soap.

Rolling through Paso Robles, you confront a generational motel choice. You can seek reassurance at the Melody Ranch Motel with its tidy, basic rooms, Gideon Bibles, second-generation family management and rates around $100 a night. Or you can head to Farmhouse Paso Robles or the River Lodge, both of which have been updated dramatically by the Nomada Group.

“It’s not that we set out to refurbish motels, necessarily,” Nomada partner and creative director Kimberly Walker told me. “One thing we are passionate about is giving old buildings a new chapter. We can’t ever see ourselves buying a piece of land and starting from scratch.”

Clockwise, from above: In April 2024, River Lodge reopened as a retro-chic boutique lodging. (Jacob Tovar / For The Times) Melody Ranch Motel has a prime spot on Spring Street, the main artery of Paso Robles. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) A cocktail at the River Lodge. (Jacob Tovar / For The Times)

With the best old motels, “There was just so much personality and thought put into what these buildings look like that they’re able to be reconceptualized again,” Walker said. “You can always find one thing to start your design journey with, and then build off of that.”

Two of the biggest challenges, Walker said, are parking and bathrooms. At the River Lodge, Skyview Los Alamos and Hotel Ynez in Solvang, Walker’s team moved the parking area farther from rooms, making more space for greenery and patios. In small bathrooms, the team has deployed fancy tiles, lots of light and glass partitions instead of shower curtains.

Especially at Skyview, the combination of Modernist and farmhouse design elements yields entertaining results. Agrigoogie, anyone?

And then there’s the question of those cool old signs that say motel.

“When we first bought Skyview, and I hate that I did this, but I was like, ‘Maybe we should change the sign from “motel” to “hotel,”‘” Walker confessed. “I’m so glad that I didn’t follow through with that, because the motel sign is the beacon. Guests love taking their pictures with the sign.”

In Cayucos, design veterans and hospitality newbies Ryan and Marisa Fortini faced a similar question when they bought and renovated an old motor inn on the main drag. They chose to lean even harder into the m-word and called their project the Pacific Motel. It opened in 2022.

And now the Fortinis are doing it again. In 2023 they bought the nearby Cayucos Motel. So far, that still-open property remains as beach-rustic-plain as the Pacific Motel is beach-rustic-chic. But more changes are coming and Ryan Fortini shared with me a new word that may help describe them.

“Motique,” he said. “A boutique motel.”

The Pacific Motel in Cayucos. (Jacob Tovar / For The Times)

(Jacob Tovar / For The Times)

Motel variations: Hot springs, beachfront perches and iconic signage

The farther south you go, whether on the coast or in the desert, the wider the variety seems to get.

At the Surfrider Malibu, guests ordinarily have exclusive access to a roof-deck restaurant, several loaner surfboards and a pair of Mini Coopers — but some amenities are on hold as the hotel accommodates many guests displaced by the Palisades fire in January.

In the boulder-strewn hills between San Diego and Calexico, the revivers of the once-moribund Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel have rebuilt that resort (which opened in 2023) with geothermally heated pools and a global desert theme.

On a pier in San Diego’s Pacific Beach, there’s been no dramatic rebirth — because none was necessary. The tidy cottages of the Crystal Pier Hotel, run by the same family since 1961, still look much as they did in the 1930s, tide lapping below, reservations required months ahead. (And you have to make them by phone or in person.)

“The motel thing is coming back,” said general manager Julie Neal, sounding surprised. “It’s actually kind of cool now.”

Out in the desert, where Midcentury Modern design has never gone out of style, there were revived motels left and right.

The most subdued of those was one of the most tempting: Hotel Wren in Twentynine Palms, which only opened in March, a 12-room, high-end retreat with muted colors, enormous rooms, custom furniture and poolside mountain views.

The least subdued? That would be the former Ruby Montana’s Coral Sands Inn, in Palm Springs.

My family and I booked most of the place with friends several years ago, and I was struck then by how entertaining it was to sleep, read and play in a seven-room motel that had been painted pink and filled with thrift-shop tchotchkes and vintage furnishings.

Well, Ruby’s gone now, and the Trixie Motel (its name since 2022) is proof that even if one hotelier goes wild, there’s still room for the next one to go wilder. Especially if that next owner is a drag queen.

The motel is still pink, but now staffers wear pink outfits, every room has its own custom thematic wallpaper (Atomic Bombshell, Pink Flamingo, Yeehaw Cowgirl). Barbie dolls cavort in the office and trendy persons fill the motel’s Barbara bar. Next to all this, the Madonna Inn looks like just another Ramada.

Drag queen Trixie Mattel, David Silver and Team Trixie (including interior designer Dani Dazey) bought the motel, renovated and reopened it in 2022. It’s now pinker than ever.

(David Fotus / For The Times)

(David Fotus / For The Times)

The road ahead runs through the middle of nowhere

Because the point of a motel is to help you toward someplace else, there’s no perfect way to end a motel journey. But Amboy works.

It’s a 20th century ghost town along Route 66, about 45 miles northeast of Twentynine Palms. Roy’s Motel & Cafe stands there like a forgotten stage set, topped by an iconic 1959 sign whose promises are all false.

Roy has been gone for decades. With potable water in short supply, neither the cafe nor the motel nor its six roadside cottages have been open since the 1980s. But Roy’s has gas, snacks and souvenirs, which is enough to attract film crews, selfie snappers and legions of drivers (especially desert-smitten Europeans) on their way between Las Vegas and Joshua Tree.

With Route 66 turning 100 in 2026, Roy’s owner Kyle Okura and manager Ken Large are doing their best to somehow get the six roadside cottages up and renting before that year is over. (Who can resist a centennial?)

It’s too soon to tell if that rebirth will happen. Still, the road warriors come, including off-duty trucker Chris Birdsall, 51, of Omaha, who turned up shortly before sunset one recent day.

“I want to see the sign lit up,” he said.

Soon after, Roy’s assistant manager Nicole Rachel called Birdsall into the old motel office, showed him the three switches that control the 50-foot sign and invited him to do the honors.

Birdsall did his bit, then grinned like a kid as the motel sign blinked to life in red, blue and yellow like a neon mirage or a road-tripper’s dream.

Rachel often invites visitors to throw the switches, she told me. But even if you don’t get that privilege, I can’t think of a better place to stand on the blacktop and imagine what might be down the road.

Just north of Magic Mountain’s roller coasters, hidden within the vast, anonymous industrial parks of Valencia, lies the secret lab where the murderous doll M3GAN was born.

“Born” is putting it a touch dramatically — but only a touch. Though she’s taken on a prankish life of her own since the 2022 runaway horror hit made her dance moves iconic, M3GAN is a product of several teams, primarily the animatronic makeup and design company Morot FX Studio, but also a human actor, 15-year-old Amie Donald, several puppeteers and a swarm of technicians performing in concert like a group of modern dancers.

And while the nondescript row of beige offices I pull up to doesn’t scream “secret lab,” that’s not far off either. Just last night, Christian Bale was here, testing out some face-changing prosthetics for his forthcoming role in “Madden,” about the Oakland Raiders football legend. Nicolas Cage dropped in a day earlier. Both will be returning in the days ahead.

“You want a popcorn?” asks Adrien Morot, 54, the shop’s boyish proprietor in a baseball cap. It’s a Saturday in April — the only available time he has in a typically job-crammed week to show us some of the new work he’s done on “M3GAN 2.0,” due in theaters June 27.

There’s a noticeable pride Morot takes in touring me around his geek’s paradise: a two-level office crammed with shelves of scowling latex heads, furry creatures and a pair of giant gators overlooking it all. You see posters for horror movies like Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” as well as more elegant, perhaps unlikely gigs: Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” and the Bale-starring “Vice,” for which the actor was transformed into Dick Cheney. (Morot’s task: turning Steve Carell into Donald Rumsfeld.)

At Morot FX Studio, makeup jobs from the company’s past productions are displayed.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Scattered pizza boxes left on workbenches lend to the air of dorm-room fantasy but Morot is quick to open one up: no leftover slices, only delicate pieces of fabricated skin applications. Pizza boxes are perfect for those.

“I have to admit that, especially for somebody like me that grew up just doing this — this was my hobby, really — there’s never a day where you don’t come into the shop feeling: This is so cool,” Morot says.

Once upon a time, he was a kid in Montreal, horror-obsessed, making his own creations. “F/X,” the deliriously fun 1986 thriller about a special-effects man on the run, is one he watched as a “dumb 16-year-old, very cocky, like a teenager thinking that I was better than everything,” but also a movie he can recount beat for beat.

Also picking her way through the shop is Kathy Tse, Morot’s longtime creative partner and wife. Soft-spoken, with a mind for specifics that complements and protects Morot, her presence immediately makes the space feel more like a serious studio shared by two contemporary artists. She explains that Valencia was “family-friendly” and a better real-estate value.

“Because we have good chemistry — we have trust — we work well together,” Tse, 44, says. “That is so important when you are under duress, under stress. And because of that, they always end up calling us back.”

Morot puts the finishing touches on Brendan Fraser for “The Whale,” work that won his team an Oscar.

(Niko Tavernise / A24)

Hollywood has called back, noticing them in a big way. The Oscar they won for the fleshy organic work they did with Brendan Fraser on “The Whale” is nowhere to be seen. It’s in a closet somewhere, Morot admits, sheepishly.

“Winning an Oscar has never been in the list of accomplishments that I was seeking, truly ever,” he says. “My only goal that I was really dying for was to have one of our creations on the cover of Fangoria magazine. That’s the only thing.” (They line the shop’s business office.)

Tse steers us around to the notion of a certain intimacy they like to work at, a realist aesthetic that might be called the Morot house style.

“What was great about the Oscar that year was how Brendan and Adrien really bonded,” she adds. “They were like brothers, with the constant support and dirty jokes and texts going back and forth. I think that was such a nice, beautiful relationship. To this day, they still text.”

“That’s always how we saw our work,” Morot says. “We’re there to help the actor if we can with what we produce — to help them find the character.”

And with that, the pair take me up to the second level of their shop, followed by their border terrier, Jasper, and there she is, the girl of the hour.

Allison Williams and an animatronic M3GAN in a scene from the movie “M3GAN 2.0,” directed by Gerard Johnstone.

(Universal Pictures)

“M3GAN 2.0” is exactly the sequel fans will be wanting. It embraces the essential ridiculousness of the concept — a vicious AI in the robotic body of a pissed-off tween — as well as the folly of tech bros who would move fast and break things before heeding some fairly obvious warnings.

It’s more of a comedy. The laughs are constant (yes, M3GAN sings another of her awkward songs). Also, reading the room, the filmmakers realize that we’ve come to love her and want to root for her. To that end, she’s been turned into something of a force for good, drafted into doing battle against a military-grade AI called Amelia, also built into the body of a young woman.

For the sake of our visit, Morot and Tse have set up two full-size M3GANs, one from the first movie, another from the upcoming film, the latter more muscular and a good several inches taller. That change was motivated by the realities of their human actor.

“Amie, she keeps growing so quickly and within a year grew over two inches,” Tse says. “The first one she was yay high and then six months later, she grew. We had to readjust all of our dolls.”

Says Morot, “She is such a joy to work with — a real trouper. And I think that everybody was enamored with her and it just made sense to bring her back in the second movie. So I think that the script was altered or adapted to make sure that she would fit within the story.”

One of the several M3GAN masks at Morot FX Studio.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

When M3GAN is running or doing one of her viral swirly-arm dances, it’s performed by Donald, a young actor from New Zealand, wearing a mask designed by Team Morot. He shows me the mold. “That’s her face on the inside,” he says. “That’s a negative impression of her face. It’s quite heavy, actually.”

But when it’s a medium shot or close-up, you’re seeing an animatronic puppet operated by several people. Usually Morot is working the mechanisms in the eyes and lubricating them — he can speak excitedly at length about “eyeball pivot” — while Tse is manipulating arms and doing a fair amount of hand-acting.

“In my naiveté, I never quite understood just how much this was basically an elevated Muppet movie,” says “M3GAN” director Gerard Johnstone, calling from the editing suite at Blumhouse’s post-production facility in Koreatown, where he’s finalizing the sequel’s cut. He remembers learning about Morot and Tse’s skills in 2019 before the pandemic hit and being convinced by their commitment to lifelike illusion.

“I found that hugely inspiring,” the director says. “I thought, Why are we making something that looks like a toy when these guys can make things that look human? Wouldn’t that be really fun if we went further into the uncanny valley than we’ve ever gone before? And Adrien and Kathy were the perfect people to partner up with on that.”

Tse’s M3GAN designs, these days rendered by a phalanx of digital printers (a single head can take up to 50 hours), became proof of concept and helped green-light the first film, not an everyday occurrence.

In the room with us in Valencia, the dolls eyes’ are hypnotic, carrying a trace of malevolence. “There’s a presence,” Tse offers.

“I thought, Why are we making something that looks like a toy when these guys can make things that look human?” says “M3GAN 2.0” director Gerard Johnstone. “Wouldn’t that be really fun if we went further into the uncanny valley than we’ve ever gone before?”

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Watching them finesse each strand of M3GAN’s hair, every neck tilt and eye motion for our photo shoot, Morot and Tse look like nothing more than devoted stage parents, grooming a promising theater kid. It’s a natural thought that begs an obvious question.

“Oh, for sure,” Tse agrees, owning up to parental affection for her creations. “Look how we care about our dolls. There’s so much pride and you’re protective of making sure that they look good, that they’re well cared for.”

The pair have a 20-year relationship, tying the knot around the time they were working on the first “M3GAN,” a watershed moment for them.

“I was a young flower at the time when we first met,” Tse says without a trace of sarcasm. “He was doing a film and I was just graduating from university. I was working in banking and we met that way. So he was already working in film and he brought me into it, actually.”

“I could have went into banking,” Morot cracks.

Morot and Tse operating animatronics on the set of the first “M3GAN.”

(Geoffrey Short / Universal Pictures)

In each other, they found kindred spirits of perfectionism, going on to corner the Montreal makeup market, which was then booming with Hollywood shoots. Years of work came without days off or vacations.

But they knew a relocation to Los Angeles was inevitable. In the 1990s, Morot had given the town a shot, apprenticing with other designers, learning his craft and drinking in the city until he needed to move back to Canada for family reasons.

“I was really bummed when I had to move back,” he says. “For me, L.A. always felt like home. When I landed here at 21, I was like, oh, my God, everything is here.”

It’s not lost on them that their specialty has come to represent something increasingly rare: an actual craft with an emphasis on real-world tactility in a moment when digital spurts of blood are becoming the norm. Prosthetic makeup effects have become a last stand, a bastion of the old ways.

“This is a massive extinction of the entire movie industry,” Morot says, alarmed. “We’re losing the human process behind it. That’s going to be a tragedy because we’re going to lose the communal experience of movies. We’re already there with all the streaming platforms and YouTube, where people are all on their own, silo-watching. There’s no longer the watercooler discussion about what show is in right now because everybody’s watching their own thing.”

Tse strikes a more pragmatic tone. “I think you have to in a way embrace it,” she says of AI. “Some parts of the industry will unfortunately lose work, but then you’ll have to find your way into another area.”

Morot, right, and Tse prepare a metallic M3GAN for action in “M3GAN 2.0.”

(Geoffrey Short / Universal Pictures)

“M3GAN” and “M3GAN 2.0,” for all their enjoyable sci-fi nuttiness, are expressly about these questions of AI’s prominence. They may be horror movies with training wheels, but they’re also teaching PG-13 audiences to maintain a healthy skepticism about the future. Their lineage goes back to “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the prescient 1970 nightmare “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” about two AIs that take over the world’s nuclear arsenal, a plot that reemerges in the new “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”

“The reason I did ‘M3GAN’ was out of frustration as a parent,” says Johnstone. “I was bringing my children up in this age of devices and trying to figure out where the balance lies and seeing everyone around me kind of accept it and thinking, Wait, there’s got to be a middle ground here. Why aren’t schools having a conversation?”

If Morot and Tse, both at the bleeding edge of their field, end up making AI palatable for a younger generation, with M3GAN as their mascot, they’re at least doing it the old-school way, with tools that inspired them from the start. They’ve brought out a mechanical head for me to see — it’s actually the first doll they ever built (just without the skin) and it has a rather large speaking cameo in the new movie: an unsettling scene about rebuilding in an underground bunker and saving the world before it’s too late.

“We were lucky,” Tse says — by which she means, lucky that they saved this prototype for the moment. The glistening jawline and lidless eyes are giving unmistakable Terminator vibes. Morot cradles the head, still that boy dreaming of Fangoria covers.

It’s the kind of thing you hold onto in a lab in Valencia.

Bertolt Brecht wrote that, in the dark times, there will also be singing. In Susanna Kwan’s debut novel, she asks whether those songs may be sung if there are no choirs to sing them. Choirs require community, and the role of community during environmental disaster is one of the themes that runs through this thoughtful novel about art, creation and the ways we care for one another.

Bo is a 40ish woman living in a San Francisco high-rise in the mid-21st century. The city is underwater after being swamped by the rising Pacific Ocean and incessant rain. But the city continues to exist. Those who have not fled inhabit the upper floors of skyscraper apartment blocks. Bo’s cousins have lined up work opportunities for her in Canada, but when the novel begins, she is insistent on staying. What keeps her there is grief; two years before, her mother disappeared during a storm. Bo clings to the hope that one day she will be reunited with her.

Like Bo before the rains, Kwan is an artist and she conveys what goes missing in her character’s life after environmental disaster: In the perpetual rain there are no longer seasons. And without seasons, there are no holidays or festivals to mark the changes in the year. Bo marks time with her twice-weekly visit to the rooftop markets, where merchants sell food they’ve grown or had brought in by boat. But it’s also where she scans the bulletin boards filled with photos of the missing and lost in search of her mother.

Kwan’s novel hones in on the ways that isolation and boredom sap vital parts of ourselves. The book captures America’s recent history: 2020 and isolating in our apartments and houses while outside, the dead piled up in freezer vans and mass graves. The ways that anxiety and loneliness caused many to turn inward, to make what was happening personal, as if no one else was affected. The loss of community and empathy for others drowned in the waves of fear, uncertainty, and for many, anger. Bo herself struggles with her individual feelings of frustration and grief, but then reminds herself that she hasn’t been singled out for bad fortune.

“What made her special in the long human history of crisis and displacement?” Bo wonders. “She had followed reports of heat waves that never subsided, outbreaks of anthrax and smallpox and malaria, continents dried to deserts, genocidal regimes, military blockades at borders that prevented passage to hundreds of thousands of people with nowhere to go, children drowning at sea. And yet the matter of her own privileged leaving felt extraordinary and without precedent, even as she registered this delusion.”

Before her mother disappeared, Bo worked constantly as an illustrator and painter, a source of joy that sustained her. But after her mom dies — and it is clear that her mother has most likely been washed out to sea — she is paralyzed. “Art, she’d come to feel, served no purpose in a time like this. It belonged to another world, one she’d left behind.” Grief has grayed-out her love for colorful creation.

One day, a neighbor slips a note under her door. It is a request that Bo come help out Mia with household chores. Mia lives alone, and at age 129, is struggling.

Bo has supported herself in the constricted economy as a caregiver. Many of those in the high-rises are the elderly, in some cases abandoned by their fleeing children, but sometimes just too fragile to be moved. By 2050, people are living past 100 and living to 130 isn’t rare. But 130-year-old elders have elderly children and even elderly grandchildren. Weaker bonds with third- and fourth-generation descendants has left many to look after themselves.

Bo is the daughter of Chinese immigrants; Mia came from China with her parents. Mia’s daughter and further descendants live thousands of miles away. Caring for Mia reminds Bo of the time she spent with her mother when they made frequent treks to check in on family elders, a way of paying respect, her mom told her when Bo was a child.

In Mia’s apartment, the two women begin to bond in the kitchen. Bo prepares food while Mia tells stories of her life in San Francisco. She had been born in the 1920s, not that long after the earthquake and devastating fire that leveled the city in 1906. Mia’s life parallels the growth of San Francisco and her memories of how the city changed through the decades in the 20th century intrigues Bo. So much was lost, first in the wave of explosive population growth and wealth, but when the rains came, entire parts of the city disappeared, their histories swallowed by the relentless rise of the Pacific.

Bo’s memories have already been dulled by perpetual grayness. But hanging out with Mia loosens something inside of Bo, and she notices that her senses can serve as “time machines,” and give her access to her own past. There are obvious reminders — a photograph — but songs are especially evocative even before she recognizes the tune. “A song provided passage from the present station back to a place and time, distinct and palpable. The trip was quick, a sled tearing down a luge track, the body sensing its arrival before the mind could register the journey.”

Bo’s occasional lover is a man who visits San Francisco as part of his job working in natural resources. He spends much of the time counting and cataloging what species remain, or what is about to be lost. When he arrives back in town after she has started working for Mia, Bo finds that her growing sense of purpose, her desire to return to art-making, is motivated by a similar impulse.

She wants to catalog Mia’s experiences, her memories of the city that no longer exists. In their long conversations, Mia summons images and histories of places that Bo never knew existed. Inspired by Mia, Bo goes to the city’s archive and searches for the photographs, newspaper articles, blueprints, maps and other ways that the now-missing city documented its existence.

For Mia’s approaching 130th birthday, which Bo senses will be her employer’s last, she decides that she will use her skills as an artist to bring the old city back to life one more time — a gift for her employer, but also a means by which Bo can recapture the wild energy that is creation.

Survivalists preparing for an imagined catastrophic future hoard food and supplies and stock up on guns to “protect” themselves from those in need. But as Kwan shows, such visions of the future are the refractions of nihilism and the American belief that individual survival and success is due solely to individual effort. But that’s never been the case. What preserves human life — even a life in horrific circumstances — are relationships of caring and cooperation. Community built on taking care of each other is the only way that we will thrive. The networks we build to support others eventually becomes the social safety net we will ourselves need.

In dark times, the songs that will comfort us will not be the cacophony of individual voices wailing their grief. The darkness will be lifted by the harmonies of those who recognize each other’s humanity.

Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.