Community invited to submit unique, fun names that reflect Long Beach; submissions accepted through Sept. 12
LONG BEACH — The Long Beach Baseball Club or LBBC Sept. 2 kicked off a team-naming contest as part of its mission to bring a new era of high-level independent professional baseball to the City of Long Beach. Fans are encouraged to help shape the club’s identity by submitting name ideas at https://www.longbeachbaseballclub.com/lbbc-name now through Sept.12.
The LBBC is looking for a name that reflects the people and culture of Long Beach. The LBBC would like to invite the people of Long Beach, across all age groups, neighborhoods, and demographics, to be part of the naming process.
o Unique: Not used by any pro or college team in any sport; suitable for trademark registration.
o Long Beach Roots: Recognizable connection to the Long Beach area.
Helpful to include: A short description of the inspiration and any visual ideas (optional).
Following the submission window, LBBC will review entries and share select finalists with fans for further feedback before announcing the official team name. The club reserves the right to adapt or modify submissions to best fit the team’s brand and community goals.
A New Era of Independent Baseball in Long Beach
Backed by Innovation Baseball Partners, LBBC is working with the City of Long Beach and California State University, Long Beach or (CSULB to make Blair Field the club’s home, with a target of beginning play in the 2026 Pioneer Baseball League or PBL season. Inspired by the Oakland Ballers’ community-driven model, LBBC is developing a game-day experience that blends baseball with Long Beach’s unique culture—through music, food, and city-proud events for fans of all ages.
Fifteen years ago, in the darkness of the Great Recession, when my family, like millions of other families, was losing everything—including the house I grew up in—when I was hopelessly broke, crushingly depressed, and working 12-hour days in different warehouses and factories in Southern California as a temp, I never would have imagined life would someday put me in rooms like this.
Over the years—on my podcast Working People, on The Real News Network, in my book The Work of Living, on channels like Breaking Points—I’ve interviewed workers from all walks of life, from industries across the economy, from just about every union you can imagine. Railroad engineers and conductors with SMART-TD and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. VA nurses with National Nurses United. Young baristas with Starbucks Workers United. Strippers in Hollywood who unionized with Actors’ Equity. Longshore workers with the ILWU. Public school teachers with the Chicago Teachers Union. UMWA coal miners and UPS Teamsters. Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh workers at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette who have been on strike for over two years. UNITE HERE hotel and hospitality workers from the Las Vegas strip to colonial Williamsburg. Legal aid advocates and attorneys with UAW Local 2325, UAW graduate student workers, UAW autoworkers at the Big Three automakers. And so many more.
Maximillian Alvarez is the editor-in-chief at The Real News Network, podcaster and author.
I’ll be honest, when I started doing this work, I didn’t really know shit about unions. I did not grow up in a union family. And the dominant consensus in the Southern California I knew in the ‘90s and early aughts was that unions, at best, had served important functions in the past but were unnecessary today; at worst, they were corrupt, self-serving, bloated bureaucratic institutions that hurt businesses and held individual workers back from advancing in their jobs. By the time I started my podcast in 2018, a lot of those anti-union sentiments I absorbed as a kid had melted away, and I myself was part of a union for the first time—shout out to the Graduate Employees Organization, AFT Local 3550 at the University of Michigan.
Still, I knew way less about unions and the labor movement then than I do now. And while I have since become a staunch advocate for both and become known as a fierce, unapologetic advocate for workers’ rights, that is not what I set out to be—and Working People was never intended to be a show about unions. As the title makes clear, it was and is a show about people; it was and is a “podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today.” I did not start the show because I hoped to one day be speaking in rooms like this to union members like you. I started the show because I did not want my father, Jesus Alvarez, to live the rest of his life and to go to his grave feeling like a failure. Pops was the first working person I interviewed for the podcast, and I often joke that I basically started the show as a ruse to get my dad to talk about the trauma he and our family had experienced, because I could see the shame and hurt eating him alive, destroying his sense of self, destroying my parents’ marriage, destroying our family.
What I saw happening to my own father was what I had seen happen to so many of my coworkers at the restaurants, retail stores, and warehouses I worked at; what I myself had felt as a low-wage worker in America. He had become convinced that his life was as small and worthless as this rigged system trains us to believe by beating and cheating and wearing us down until, eventually, we stop dreaming of a better life, we stop believing we deserve better, and we accept “getting by” as good enough. From that first interview with my dad to every interview I’ve done and every report I’ve published since, my primary goal has been to honor the humanity of working people, to remind us that we do deserve better, that our lives are beautiful and every life is precious, that our stories are worth sharing, worth listening to, worth remembering, worth celebrating, and that we cannot and must not keep internalizing as personal failures the indignities and injustices of economic and political systems designed to fail us.
It was in that context that I came to learn much more about unions, the history of organized labor, and the existentially vital role unions play in our individual and collective struggles to believe we are worth more—to not only dream of but demand better workplaces, better lives, and a better world, and to fight to get them together. I have also learned about and railed against the many real problems unions have, from the local to the international level, the unfathomably restrictive and boss-friendly nature of US labor law, and the failures of organized labor to live up to its promise to union members and to the working class writ large as the ruling class takes back all that our ancestors fought for and won. But I have never wavered in my understanding that we will not get to the world we deserve without unions, or in my belief that unions CAN live up to their promise when they are more democratic, more accountable to the rank and file, more militant, and when they understand and take seriously the responsibility unions have not just to their members, but to the entire working class. Unions are one of the only institutional forces we have for working-class people to independently organize themselves and fight for our needs as workers, as a class.
That is what I want to talk to you about with the time I have left. When I was initially invited to speak at this convention, I researched the proud and incredible history of the National Organization of Legal Services Workers—you guys have a hell of a history. I planned to talk to you about the importance of your roles as justice workers in our unjust society, the specific issues you could lead the way on in your contract bargaining and workplace organizing, the specific challenges you all are facing now under the current administration and the specific opportunities you have to empower the powerless, the poor, and the exploited, as you have done for so many decades. And I cannot overstate how vital the work you all do in your day-to-day work and in your union is. It’s so, so important. But a lot has changed in our world these past few months.
As a reporter myself and as editor in chief and co-executive director of The Real News Network, I have seen these monstrous changes up close. Again, I’m not just a labor reporter, and I don’t just report on unions. You could say that I and everyone at The Real News are class-war correspondents, reporting from the front lines of the ruling class assault on working people’s lives, our health, our communities, our freedom, our democracy, our planet, and on life itself. I don’t need to tell you that we are losing this war, but I need you to understand all that we are losing with it. I am here to report back to you from the front lines of struggle, without hesitation or hyperbole, that we are at risk of losing everything. And so I am here not to extol the virtues of your union or the value of unions in general, but to ask you bluntly: What good is a union in Hell? How much can an organization of the damned do in a future no one wants to live in? What good does a collective bargaining agreement serve when the world as we know it is dying?
My brothers, sisters, siblings, we stand here now, on July 20, 2025, on the precipice of oblivion. We are cooking our planet at a blinding pace and life is dying off en masse all around us, war and genocide and imperialist plunder are ripping our world and our people apart, the maga-rich are speedrunning our society to collapse and pillaging everything they can like Earth is having a going-out-of-business sale, placating us with lies and AI-generated fake realities so we keep rejecting the monstrous truth in front of us and keep fighting each other as we lower ourselves into the mass grave of human civilization. We have descended quickly into what sisters Astra Taylorand Naomi Kleinrightly call “end-times fascism.” The levers of power are controlled by a ghoulish death cult of billionaire oligarchs, war hawks, bigoted misanthropes, and religious fanatics who have given up on this world and the very notion that we can have a society that works for everyone.
“Not so long ago,” Taylor and Klein write, “It was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence [against Palestinians] to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom… But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”… Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.”
I see the inhumane results of this dismal, anti-human, anti-life politics everywhere. I see it in the dozens and dozens of documentary reports we have published over the last two years from the Occupied West Bank and from what remains on the blistered earth that was Gaza. I hear it in the stories of working-class people, union and non-union, who are living in sacrifice zones that are multiplying in every state, from East Palestine, Ohio, to here in South Baltimore, from Honolulu to rural Texas. People whose communities have been made unlivable by corporate and government pollution, people whose lives are sacrificed at the altars of greed and deregulation, people whose communities have been abandoned and are being obliterated by the predictable and unpredictable consequences of man-made climate change.
I saw it last week when I returned home to Southern California to report on the terror campaign and fascist occupation of the neighborhoods I grew up in by armed, masked, unidentified men kidnapping people who look like me and my family off the street, from their job sites and bus stops, from immigration courts, from their homes. No one I talked to even knows if these people are agents of the state, bounty hunters, or vigilante impersonators, but they’re being told to stand by and do nothing as they or their loved ones are kidnapped without warrants, disappeared, and possibly sent to blacksite prisons in countries they’ve never been to before without access to lawyers or contact with their families.
Again I ask you, not in an accusatory or presumptuous way, but in desperation and hope that you will find a forceful answer: what good is your union, or any union, to them?
That may seem like an unfair question to ask of any union, any local, but when history calls our number, fairly or unfairly, it is the duty of every person of conscience to answer the call. These are not normal times, and business as usual won’t cut it. For instance, I have seen firsthand the truth of labor’s claims that unions raise the floor for all workers, not just their members. But we cannot rely on such traditional axioms when the end-times fascists and oligarchs are attacking the very right of unions to exist while smashing holes in the floor and pushing more of us into the black abyss below.
From the massive tax cuts to the catastrophic cuts to programs like Medicaid and SNAP, Republicans know that their policies today, like the policies Republicans have been pushing my whole life, will continue to supercharge inequality, will continue to enrich and empower the same oligarchic ruling class destroying our planet and our society, and will continue the 50-year trend of making life measurably harder for poor and working people. While they rob us and our economy in broad daylight, the insurance policy of Trump and the ruling class he represents is the hyper-expansion of an unaccountable police state to execute his mass deportations. You know what was also included in the “big, beautiful bill” Congress passed and Trump signed two weeks ago? $170 billion in new funds for border security and immigration enforcement that will make ICE the largest domestic police force in the US, bigger than most countries’ militaries, and the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the entire government. Trump’s implicit, and increasingly explicit, promise is that deporting or incarcerating immigrants, people who LOOK LIKE immigrants, citizens, dissidents, and an ever-expanding class of “undesirables” will eventually leave only a deserving few for whom the manufactured scarcity of capitalist class war will seem like abundance when there are fewer human beings left around to fight over the scraps.
That is their dark vision. They are executing it now, as we speak, and the traditional checks and balances that have protected us in the past are being gleefully smashed in front of our eyes. I can’t tell you how all of this will end, because that depends on what we all do right now, but I can tell you where we’re going if we do nothing. And the more atomized, disunified, alone, and fearful we are, the easier it will be to break us, control us, disappear us, and deliver us to the dark dystopia on the horizon.
Brothers and sisters, this is the defining moment of our lives and our generation, and what we do or don’t do now will define the course of our future or the lack thereof. Politicians aren’t coming to save us, corporations aren’t coming to save us, it is up to us, the workers of the world, the great laboring masses, to save ourselves.
This isn’t just about fighting for better wages and working conditions. It was never just about that. But it sure as shit can’t be about just that now. This is about who is willing to fight for life itself, for liberty, and for the needs of all met so all can pursue their happiness… Who is willing to fight against the imposing forces of death, control, lies, greed, and destruction?
I have met fighters from all corners of society. I met a group of them in Pasadena, California, last week. They call themselves Grupo Auto Defensa. They’re not part of an official organization, they have no backing from unions or nonprofits or local government; they’re just a group of neighbors from the hood, as they describe it, who saw the fascist terror spreading in their community and decided to band together to do something about it. From chasing ICE cars out of town with bullhorns to setting up security brigades so terrified residents can walk outside and go to the grocery store, from providing know your rights information to reclaiming public space, protecting each other, and rebelliously refusing to live in fear.
These everyday heroes have shown extraordinary bravery by making the decision to get up, organize, and do something. Just like you all or your predecessors organized and did something at your job when they formed a union. And if we’re gonna survive this, if we’re gonna stop this, if we’re gonna keep hope alive that we can still have a future worth living in, we need working people everywhere coming together, forming unions in the most literal sense. You are in labor unions, you have a lot to teach people out there. And the labor movement has a lot to learn from people like Elizabeth Castillo, Jesus Simental, and their neighbors who all formed Grupo Auto Defensa.
What transferable skills, structures, and strategies for bringing people together as a union of the willing can you bring from organized labor and help others harness and develop in their struggles? What support, material, legal, or otherwise, are you as unions willing to give to this fight? What coalitions can you help build to bring working people together in a united front that fights for light and life as such? How can we leverage the positions and different legal restrictions of labor unions, tenant unions, and grassroots unions of all kinds to creatively marshal working-class resistance, apply pressure, and build power on and off the shop floor? What rights and privileges as union workers are you willing to put on the line for those whose rights, from their reproductive rights to their very right to exist, are under attack? What will you do, as unions, to stand up for immigrants, queer and trans people, Palestinians obligated by weapons paid for by our tax dollars, students imprisoned for exercising their first amendment rights? How can we in the movement use our skills, our spaces, our connections, and our resources to physically bring disconnected people together in real spaces where they can know one another, like Grupo Auto Defensa is doing in Pasadena and like you are all doing right here?
Resignation, despair, acceptance of our own powerlessness as a permanent, unfixable state—this is, simply and truly, unacceptable. We will not accept it. We cannot afford to be paralyzed by fear and defeatism; there is too much at stake—for us, for our children, our planet, and for our future. Now is the time for bravery, and history is calling upon all of us to be brave and to instill bravery in others. We must model bravery in our everyday lives by how we carry ourselves, by how we treat each other, and by standing firmly for what’s right, always, even if no one is watching.
Your international union president, brother Shawn Fain, famously said “the working class is the arsenal of democracy and the workers are the liberators.” If that is true, brothers and sisters, then for ourselves, for each other, for our children, this is our time to prove it.
We have been getting a lot of attention on Fox News lately, but here are some cold, hard FACTS you won’t hear on that network.
Middle-class families in California pay LESS in taxes than in states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.
50 million of the 52 million jobs created since the Cold War have been created in Democratic administrations. Republican presidents have one thing in common: recession.
Life expectancy, infant mortality, deaths of despair, wages, and uninsured rates are all worse off in red states.
For Greg Abbott: California is the fourth-largest economy in the WORLD. We contribute $83 billion to the federal government, while Texas takes $71 billion.
California is #1 in manufacturing, #1 in farming, #1 in new business starts, #1 in tech and VC investments, #1 in Fortune 500 companies, and the #1 public higher education system in the country.
California has some of the strongest gun laws in the country and, as a result, has a 43% lower gun death rate than the rest of the U.S., according to data from the CDC, while President Trump oversaw the largest spike in homicides recorded in U.S. history.
Republicans across the country are fanning the flames of culture wars to distract from the fact that on health, wealth, and economic outcomes, they are failing.
When Democrats go on OFFENSE, we WIN.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER,
Gavin Newsom
Sacramento, Ca
They Lied
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies promised to release the Epstein files and bring justice to Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors….They lied.
Back in May, I first raised the concern that Donald Trump had directed the DOJ to conceal the Epstein Files because he was in them. Then Elon Musk and undisputed reporting confirmed that.
In late July, my Democratic colleagues and I pushed for a House vote to force the Trump administration to release the Epstein files. Instead of allowing the vote to take place, Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home early for summer recess — all to avoid a vote that would require the full release of the Epstein Files, including any possible mentions, videos or other recordings of President Trump.
Now, Trump is manufacturing crisis after crisis to distract from his likely involvement — including deploying the National Guard in our nation’s capital.
I warned about this level of corruption years ago when I served as lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment. His presidency was never about public service. It was about power, profit, revenge and retribution.
Donald Trump truly believes that he is above the law. He uses the presidency to enrich himself, punish federal employees who speak the truth, and attack independent reporting. And Republicans in Congress have made it clear that they won’t hold him accountable.
Angel City Culture Quest, in collaboration with Range Projects Gallery, presents Call Freedom: Artists Speak on Sept. 6. Juried by podcast producer and journalist Melina Paris.
The exhibition features more than 30 artists’ expressions on freedom out of more than 50 submissions.
Now is the time to speak louder than ever.
Liberty And Justice For ALL by artist James Muscarello. Photo courtesy of the artist
Art has always been a voice during turmoil, and Angel City Culture Quest presents this exhibition as a fundraiser and to engage and activate ideas around the theme, “Freedom!” We have been told so often that we are free by those in power, but does society accept this declaration without understanding the true meaning of Freedom? In our home, America, and around the world, people’s rights are being dismantled more every day.Call Freedom: Artists Speakinvokes humanity’s inalienable right to CALL FREEDOM and thereby actualize it and speak it, in our communities and our lives.
Featuring the works of both visual and literary artists, this exhibition will explore the ways humanity reaches for and lives in freedom, both internally and within our world. Most importantly, it reminds people of their collective power.
Featured Artists Include:
Visual: Peggy Sivert Zask, Karena Massengill, Eric Almanza, Michael Davis, Peggy Reavey, Veronica Giorgetti, Lowell Nickel, Cora Ramirez-Vasquez, Sung-Hee Son, Samantha Son, Chun Son, William Vaughan, Luretia Tye Jasmin, Nida Amin, Martin Bustamante, Hirotaka Suzuki, Margie Rust, Javier Proenza, Adrianna S.-T, James Muscarello, Minna Philips, Silvia Wagensberg, Patricia Bonilla and Franky Garcia.
Literary: Nancy Lynée Woo, Steven T. Bramble, Spencer Seward, S. Greggory Moore, Audrey Shih, Ajala Sen, Jai Hudson, Eden S. Gonzalez, Macuilquiahuitl Ixeh and Helena Donato-Sapp.
The Sept. 6 opening reception will feature light fare and a curated wine selection. In addition, an Invitational Silent Auction will run during the opening reception until 5 pm. Stay tuned for events to be announced for the closing reception on Sept. 27.
“Trying to speak reason to the ignorant is like administering medicine to the dead”
—Thomas Paine 1737-1809,author of Common Sense
The Fox News punditry is going bonkers over California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mimicking of the Orange Felon. Trying to criticize him for doing exactly the same kind of absurd mockery that seems to inspire the MAGA set with talking points derogatory against anyone who is left of center politically. Newsom’s strategy is the opposite of when they go low, we go high. It’s when the bully punches you, you punch back, and it’s what the Dems have been waiting for since Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. You can’t talk reasonably or rationally to people who are cult followers and who have drunk the Kool-Aid. Their leader must be exposed as naked and powerless, if not inept and a fool, rather than a brilliant businessman.
So, congratulations to Gov. Newsom. Keep swinging at the sandbox bully. The strategy keeps California’s governor in the news cycle, especially among the far right, and threatens their dominance over daily news and commentary. And he’s doing it on their favorite playgrounds — X and other social platforms — which, from my perspective, have devolved into “uncivil” media, where every opinion carries equal weight, even those from the ill-informed, the ignorant, or folks paying attention only to lost dogs, gas prices and groceries.
In a Pew survey from 2016 to 2023, the percentage of Americans paying attention to the daily news cycle has declined from 58% to 38%. Everybody else is probably listening to their favorite influencer, who may or may not be better informed than they are.
What I find most aggravating is the Sunday morning political news shows where the commentators bring in a Republican who spouts the party line and then a Democrat to rebut it as if both sides were equal or that there were only two sides. Never fact-checking nor challenging the absurdities that this regime is espousing, and the Dems only retaliating with faint-hearted replies. Put Bernie Sanders back on the weekly pundit rotation to take down the Orange Felon and then give us some true progressives who will poke holes in these rightwing fascists who pretend they are working for the people while they rob the nation blind.
Tell me how anyone can think of this president as being on the side of the working class while his entire cabinet is full of billionaires and sycophants. He has fired thousands of government workers (many illegally), invaded our cities with the military (on false pretenses), he has chased down hardworking immigrants with no criminal records, and then cut police funding in the budget passed by Congress on July 4. This hypocrisy, combined with his economic war on the world through his tariff policies and his willful facilitation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, can’t go on. If the above weren’t enough, he’s been lobbying hard on his own behalf for the Nobel Peace Prize.
And do you remember he was going to get Russia to agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine sometime before Vladimir Putin whispered in his ear about getting rid of mail-in ballots?
If you don’t remember the lies he spread a week or a month ago, you may be suffering from Trump delusionism.
While waiting in line for a sandwich this week at a local deli, I engaged a young deli clerk in conversation and asked him what he thought about the state of affairs. He replied that it’s difficult to understand what’s going on because he can’t trust the news. Well, that’s kind of the idea about how fascism operates: first, you attack the media, then spread false facts and claim that truth is false and good is bad, and when the masses are confused enough, they will trust whoever speaks the loudest, appears the strongest, or says the right buzz words.
This president has overstepped his executive powers so many times that any reasonable Congress would have started impeachment proceedings months ago. However, his latest move is really quite telling. He wants to fire a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook, after accusing her of mortgage fraud by designating two different properties (in Michigan and Georgia) as her “primary residence” to secure favorable mortgage terms — something far less lucrative and sinister than what the Orange Felon was convicted of himself when New York Judge Arthur Engoron last year ruled that he and his organization had engaged in persistent financial fraud — by inflating real estate asset values to secure more favorable loan and insurance terms. Even the Republican appointed majority of the Supreme Court went out of its way earlier this year to protect members of the Fed from presidential meddling. Like a staggering number of people he’s already fired from the federal government, she is Black. And it comes as no surprise that the immigrants he wants to deport are all people of color, while he embraces White Christian Nationalists. What does common sense tell you about this man?
Then, of course, there’s Texas’ mid-decade gerrymandering of districts at the request of the OF. The Texas Republicans line up right behind it, but in California, where Governor Newsom has taken up the battle, state Republicans are calling foul for doing exactly the same thing in Texas.
Yes, my friends, it is going to be confusing, but don’t let yourself be distracted by the Orange feather toy; it’s only a diversion from the Epstein files that might actually take down the bully in the Oval Office.
Editor’s note:In the interest of full disclosure, the subject in this story is the writer’s partner.
What are tessellations?
The quick answer is they are patterns of shapes, such as polygons, that fit together to completely cover a surface without any gaps or overlaps. These repeating patterns are found in mathematics, nature, art and architecture, with common examples including honeycomb structures in beehives, tiled floors and the artwork of M.C. Escher.
Designer, engineer and an artist, Douglas Johnson creates the unexpected with his kinetic, color-drenched tessellation paintings. Each one of his 12 works presents distinctive forms and personalities. Some flow and float on the canvas, as if rushing past you; others display angles, rendering foundation or structure. Only with close inspection will these works reveal intricate layers of certain repeated patterns.
Tessellation Studies is on view at Cherry Wood’s Backdoor Studios through Sept. 4
Douglas said his works represent mathematics. It started by experimenting with basic shapes. This led to a system for creating new forms. A shape cut out of one side of a square and placed on the other side gives a shape that tessellates as it did before the change, and no matter how complex the change, it continues to tessellate.
“This led to further exploration to find a more complex form and more complex rules that would lead to more interesting results,” the announcement read. “The work on display represents an attempt to demonstrate these concepts.”
Douglas spoke to Random Lengths News about his works and what it is about tessellations that have kept him intrigued with creating them for nearly two decades.
“I’ve enjoyed the idea of tessellations and where it can go and how delicate it can get,” said Douglas. “The different possibilities of what a tessellation can be used for.”
At one point, the designer said he was even thinking that it could be used as a possible way to hold molecular engines together.
“If you can build your molecular engine into one of these forms that I’ve been working on, then they’ll hold onto each other and not drift apart.”
He noted that it’s not something he knows very much about, but one possible use for them is to be used for oil cleanup on oceans.
“I’m imagining all these individual, man-made, microscopic machines floating around the ocean, consuming oil and transforming it into a biodegradable byproduct. And they are just floating around so it would be good if they could be held together. I always meant to find somebody who works in this area to discuss it with them but I never have. The point is, I think there’s a use for what I’m doing, I just don’t know what. It’s a solution without a problem. But it’s a good solution so I’m looking for a good problem.”
Creating these was a fun project; Douglas enjoyed what he distilled it into, saying it’s an endless concept that has legs, where he can keep finding more variations of the idea.
His process starts with developing a new shape through sketching, then moving into 3D design software for fine tuning and to ensure a perfect fit from one instance to the next. The 3D design software affords the automatic repetition of the shape to fill space that he can then export into 2D design software for color studies and morphing the top layer to add visual drama. Line work gets transferred to the canvas, and finally he begins the process of filling in each shape with color. He mixes his own colors to match what he designed on the computer and modifies as needed. He aims to make the paint as flat as possible, minimizing any brush strokes. It’s a look that he strives for to make the shapes jump off the canvas.
“I look for color combinations that will shock the eye, so the form becomes the star,” he said. “Like a designer dress, the color is just there to accentuate the form. But I put a lot into the color choices so in some ways, as with a designer dress, the form becomes a vehicle for the color.”
Douglas is also a math fan. When asked if the mathematical aspect of this work seems like he’s working on a different or higher plane, he recalled approaching it with every bit of intellectual exercise he could muster, pushing his cognitive abilities, to come up with the tessellation form that he finally achieved. He thought he might have discovered a new wallpaper group, the mathematical term for the categories of form that make up all possible basic tessellations. He consulted with an expert, who said what he’s doing is a combination of two existing wallpaper groups.
“I enjoyed learning about that side of the idea of a tessellation and how seriously this stuff gets taken in some small circles,” he said.“There have been more than two people who have come up with new areas in that realm. A couple people came up with [the same new tessellation] simultaneously. That happens occasionally in mathematics. Oftentimes with science and math, something will be ripe for discovery and multiple people will make the same discovery simultaneously. Then they will publish right away and the … publishers will get the submissions at the same time from different parts of the world. It’s wild how that happens.”
In mathematical subject matter, which includes tessellations, Douglas said, it’s broken down carefully and is proven. Each wallpaper group is a different type of tessellation; There are approximately 17 or 19 different wallpaper groups (forms that can be repeated and create tessellations) that have been discovered up until a few years ago. He added there’s now two more, but it’s being debated if they are conventional wallpaper groups because “they’re kind of a different animal.” People that follow this regularly know each one by the number.
“Tesselation Studies” acrylic on canvas, by Douglas Johnson. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Tessellation designs
Like so many artistic endeavors, Douglas said, in terms of his designs something has to spark a reaction inside his head.
“It’s a complex thing to figure out, because I can make a shape but it has to fit with another one next to it and they have to work together to be visually pleasing,” he said. “It takes a bit of massaging to make each shape that fits together [do so] in a way that’s pleasing to the eye.”
It boils down to a lot of work. The initial idea is almost completely obscured by the work it takes to finish the form that will tessellate and look good, and be different from any one that happened before, he explained.
While creating and painting tessellations presents a worthy challenge, before Douglas started studying tessellations, he contemplated transferring them into 3D tessellations and what that could mean. He said he tried and tried, but couldn’t find a way to create a tessellation sculpture that made sense.
“Other people have worked on this concept and the results are mixed but it’s really difficult to make something tessellate in three dimensions,” he said. “It’s fascinating to think about. It’s not impossible but it is another level of effort that I can try, maybe after I’ve retired to ponder endlessly. It’s an area that I haven’t gotten bored with. There are different directions [that] I can go, within the same vein and other things I can do with it.”
Something Douglas likes to do intellectually, but doesn’t often get a chance to do, he said, is to take a concept and just stay with it.
“In my work as an engineer, I start out with a concept and carry it through until it’s ready to build and then I transfer the plans to someone else to build it. To accomplish that I’ve got to carry that piece of furniture in my head until it’s done — [then] someone comes by and says ‘hello’ and it’s gone,” he quipped. “Really it’s not that big a deal.”
This is how Douglas came up with these works, he was able to take an entire weekend to just figure it out.
“I’d like to make it clear that I’m not a fine artist,” Douglas said. “I know how to paint a great painting like a traditional landscape or a still life but I’m not good at it. What I’m doing is a representation of a mathematical concept. I try to make it as fun as I can for myself and the viewer but it’s mathematics, an obscure area of mathematics at that. People seem to respond to it from an artistic perspective and a mathematical concept.”
Tessellation Studies
Time: 5 to 9 p.m., closing reception Sept. 4 and Thursdays, Saturdays 12 to 5 p.m.
Cost: Free
Details: Contact: Cherry Wood on Instagram @cherrysgalleryon7th. Or Douglas Johnson @dougified
Venue: Backdoor Studios, 374 W. 7th St., San Pedro
There’s an earthquake coming for labor law in America, and the first foreshock was felt on Aug. 19, when a Fifth Circuit panel ruled that the National Labor Regulatory Board was probably unconstitutional, overturning almost a century of precedent and leaving labor law enforcement in limbo.
“Prior to passage of the National Labor Relations Act, known as the ‘Wagner Act,’ in 1935, there was no legal framework to protect the right to organize, govern union elections and require employers to bargain in good faith,” said Victor Narro, project director at the UCLA Labor Center. Many referred to that previous time as “the law of the jungle,” he noted.
The immediate impact of the ruling is that workers within the Fifth Circuit effectively have no labor law protection, as the judges overseeing law — administrative law judges appointed by the board — are deemed to have no authority, because they can’t be fired at will, in line with the made-up conservative doctrine of the “unitary executive.” The earthquake is that the Supreme Court may make a similar — or even worse — ruling that will apply nationwide.
Simultaneously, Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board so that it can’t reach quorum and thus is powerless to act. The result is a state of lawlessness already, according to Joe Biden’s acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, who previously served as California labor commissioner.
“What’s clear is that all of the rules that we’ve been relying on to protect workers, protect the right to organize — as inadequate as those rules were to date — it’s a whole new world in which none of those rules matter,” Su said on the Majority Report. And Trump’s mass firings of federal workers is setting the tone for the private sector, much like Ronald Reagan did with firing air traffic controllers in 1981.
“The analogy to Reagan is apt,” Su said. “It really was a declaration of war on workers and on unions that private sector employers picked up their weapons and continued to fight. And that resulted in a large decline in unionization. We see the effects of it today, and so this president is doing it again, but with absolutely no holds barred.”
Labor historian and former organizer Shaun Richman, author of We Always Had a Union, is one of the few who have been paying close attention to the threat to the NLRB for some time. Last October, he raised the alarm in an article at In These Times, “The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Overturn Labor Law.” But as he told Random Lengths News, there’s more than one thing going on here.
“I don’t think that overturning the NLRB is Trump’s agenda,” Richman said. “Our crisis of democracy is so bad at this point that the fact that we’ve got this Alzheimer’s patient who wants to be a fascist dictator in the White House distracts us from the fact that we have a Supreme Court that wants an Iranian-style judiciary,” he said. “And one problem goes away quicker than the other one.”
The Trump agenda, laid out in Project 2025, is “very much in keeping with 50 years of right-wing strategy around the NLRB: Keep it in place because it has real utility to them as a union-busting tool. So, reverse any of the good stuff that Biden did, reverse any of the good stuff that Obama did, but keep the machinery intact, so that unions are chastened from engaging in any solidarity activism, and forced to go through election procedures that are wholly unfair. That’s the Trump agenda,” he concluded.
“But once they got their 5-4 majority on the court and then when they increased it even more, that set into motion something that I think is unstoppable,” Richman said. “Now you’ve got right wing organizations and companies pushing the agenda of overturning not just the NLRB, really, but all the New Deal style agencies. And they got the votes and they’re going to do it,” he said. “You’re in a bad place when you’re hoping that John Roberts is going to be moderate on the question or that Amy Coney Barret might break ranks.”
Meanwhile, “I don’t think unions are quite prepared for it,” he said. “When I wrote that piece back in October, they weren’t prepared for it because they were all in on [the] election, and it’s sort of like ‘We got [a] weak little luxury of 20 months’ time here, so we don’t have to think about that now.”
But nearly a year later, little has changed, Richman noted. “I think union leaders, particularly at the national and international level, they’re still very much paralyzed in the same way that the Democratic leadership are — still grappling with ‘how deep is this problem?’ ‘How reversible is this problem?’ ‘Is this something that the midterm elections can put some restraints on Trump or even impeach him out of office?’ That sort of stuff,” he said.
Even the circuit court decision doesn’t seem to have grabbed their attention, but in a way that’s understandable, Richman reckoned. “Unless and until the Supreme Court takes the case and puts it on the docket for next term, it’s only natural that you’re going to see most union leadership not really grappling with what do we do the day after,” he said. “The ‘what do we do the day after’ conversation begins to happen in earnest the day the Supreme Court takes the case, and says, ‘We’re going to do this next term.’” But even then, he believes those advocating for a day-after strategy will be in a minority, though they’ll at least be able to force a discussion.
Meanwhile, things are hardly normal. “The Fifth Circuit is doing real damage by taking what is, or what should be a really crazy position: For 90 years, it’s been constitutional. Whoops! We just noticed! Are you kidding me?” he said. “You can imagine that there are some people [who] were thinking well, at the end of the day, there’s enough people on the Supreme Court who are going to look at this and say ‘Oh, there are so many unintended consequences. We really would grant the union new powers if we did this. This is overreach. We’re going to shut it down.’”
But there’s really no telling what’s going to happen. If the Wagner Act is thrown out entirely, then all the organizing limits built into it originally or added later would be gone, including the prohibition of solidarity strikes. “This could be really good for warehouse organizing,” as one example, Richman noted. A comprehensive port-to-trucking-to-warehouse strategy would become possible.
What’s more, state labor laws in eight blue states could be dramatically strengthened. Many states still have “baby Wagner acts that suddenly become very real, even without passing legislation,” he said. “There are labor boards that unions could start filing representation petitions,” for example. “There is an opportunity here to take lemons and make some lemonade. But let’s not just re-create the Wagner Act in eight states. Let’s create something that surpasses it, let’s start digging into sectional bargaining,” which California has already begun doing in the fast food sector. Another idea is “day one unionism, or the idea that every company is going to be covered by industrial standards that are set at some sort of regulatory or bargaining level.”
More broadly, Richman is an advocate for a road not taken in labor law history: rather than grounding labor law in the Commerce Clause, as the Wagner Act does, fundamental union activities “are, or should be, protected by the constitutional rights of free speech, due process, equal protection and even the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on “involuntary servitude,” as he wrote for In These Times.
While such a proposal might seem novel, it’s not without precedent. Even before the New Deal, the Norris-La Guardia Act substantially changed labor law, banning yellow-dog contracts, barring federal court injunctions against nonviolent labor disputes, and creating a positive right of noninterference by employers against workers joining trade unions.
This was partly the fruit of labor movement constitutionalism similar to that articulated by Richman, as University of Texas law professor William Forbath explained in a 2024 seminar this reporter covered for Salon.com. At the time, the judiciary had “squander[ed] its own legitimacy. Too many working-class Americans had come to see the courts for what they were: They were the place where the ruling class went to rule, dispensing class-bound decisions in the name of the Constitution,” Forbath explained.
We’re in a strikingly similar situation today. The big difference is that labor hasn’t engaged in nurturing this sort of broader vision. There’s been very little public discussion of it. But if the Roberts court were to sweep away the Commerce Clause foundations of existing labor law, that could change dramatically. The case for grounding labor rights in the constitutional rights Richman cites would become much more urgent and compelling. It’s a shift in thinking that some would say is very long overdue.
“If you are what you eat, I only want to eat the good stuff” – Remy the Rat
By Ari LeVaux
If you squint, Ratatouille is practically indistinguishable from summer itself. It’s a dish you make when the tomatoes, eggplant, and zucchini are all accumulating faster than you can use them. Thus, it is both a way of enjoying this abundance and also of dealing with it by preserving its components at their peak freshness. Those components are zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, onion, garlic and fresh herbs. Cooked together with olive oil and salt, these earthy treasures add up to something greater than the sum of their parts.
In Ratatouille the film, Remy the Rat made a similar point when attempting to give a lesson on food theory to his hapless brother. “Each flavor is totally unique. But combine one flavor with another, and something new is created.”
So it is with ratatouille the dish, where the diverse flavors of the mature garden do amazing things to each other as they melt together in a brine of tomato juice and olive oil. The mushy eggplant and zucchini surrender their forms, as garlic and aromatic herbs permeate the whole business, and all of the garden flavors combine in your mouth as you chew. Each ingredient is at its best, thanks to the presence of the others.
That film has an extra-special place in my heart because I have a son named Remy, who like the film’s star happens to be a culinary genius as well. He’s seen the movie enough times to recite many of its scenes from memory, and more than enough times to be less than impressed by a recent batch of ratatouille I made, which did not glow like a rainbow as it did in the movie.
Remy’s criticism was understandable, as that batch was pretty chunky. But I had an excuse. It was, by design, destined to be a sauce batch, not built for looks. As soon as it cooled, I planned to liquify it into a pinkish orange slurry that does great on pasta, pizza, and on its own as a salmorejo-like soup. Liquified ratatouille freezes particularly well, and is arguably the most versatile and useful form of ratatouille. I assured Remy that when it came time to construct my masterpiece, a double-ratatouille lasagna, that I would use the mandolin and make perfect slices.
I call it Double Ratatouille Lasagna because it requires making two batches of ratatouille, a sauce batch like the aforementioned, and a batch with thin-sliced ratatouille components layered in with the noodles, sauce and cheeses, so it cooks into a fresh, second batch of ratatouille.
To my relief, Remy the human was impressed with my ratatouille lasagna. He marveled at its hybrid nature, being equal parts French and Italian cuisines. While double ratatouille lasagna is a way to enjoy the beautiful fleeting moments of summer, having ratatouille sauce in the freezer will allow you to make a damn good lasagna all winter long. And if that doesn’t capture the dual nature of summer — a time to enjoy the sunshine and squirrel some away for later use — I don’t know what does.
If you are what you eat, then this time of year I am ratatouille.
Ratatouille
Here is a recipe for the most ordinary, average form of ratatouille. Consider it a starting off point. I have listed the principal ingredients in equal parts, but the reality is you can use whatever you have, in whatever quantities you have. If you only have one eggplant, don’t put off the recipe or go shopping. Just make it with whatever is available. That is the true spirit of ratatouille.
Ingredients
3 cups zucchini slices
3 cups eggplant slices
3 cups tomato, sliced or chopped
1 large onion, minced
1 large bulb of garlic, peeled and sliced
Fresh herbs like thyme, rosemary
1 cup olive oil
2 teaspoons of salt
Process
Preheat the oven to 350. Layer the ingredients in a deep dish pan, alternating so it’s more of a mixture than stratifications. Add the salt and olive oil, cover with foil or a tight fitting lid and bake for 90 minutes. You can leave it in the oven to stay warm for hours until it’s time to eat.
That’s the essence of ratatouille. Whether you made perfect slices or sloppy chunks, the flavor will be the threshold of summer.
Liquid Ratatouille
Make a batch of ratatouille, heavy on the tomatoes if possible. Let it cool and liquify it in the blender.
If you want the smoothest sauce possible, peel the eggplant and zucchini prior to cooking.
This sauce will last at least until the following summer, frozen in freezer bags.
To serve liquid ratatouille as a salmorejo-like soup, mix it with some heavy cream or serve with a dollop of creme fraiche. Garnish with chives, basil, or parsley.
Double Ratatouille Lasagna
In winter when fresh ratatouille ingredients are not available, you can make a simpler version of this lasagna by skipping the raw vegetables and simply layering in sauce, lasagna noodles and cheese. It’s almost as good; still completely amazing.
Ladle enough sauce into a deep baking dish to cover the bottom. Then add a layer of uncooked lasagna noodles. Then, another layer of sauce, followed by a layer of ricotta, and layers of ratatouille ingredients, followed by a layer of mozzarella cheese, and another layer of sauce. Repeat this as many times as your ingredient quantities and pan depth allow.
Cover and bake for 90 minutes. Remove the cover for the final 15 minutes to melt and slightly brown the cheese on top. Allow to cool and solidify, and serve while still warm.
At Los Tres Conchitos, a family-owned diner tucked along Wilmington’s stretch of Pacific Coast Highway, Rep. Nanette Barragán slipped into a waitress role for an hour last week. The congresswoman, a lawyer by training, carried plates of enchiladas and bowls of caldo de res to customers at the 24-hour Mexican restaurant that has been serving the community for more than half a century.
The tableside shift was more than a novelty — it was a statement. Barragán wanted to shine a spotlight on the affordability crisis squeezing families in her district and across the country. She blasted what she calls “the Trump Tax,” tariffs, and cuts to social safety net programs that are driving up costs on food, clothing, cars, and medicine.
“Our constituents are scared and worried about the changes coming from Republicans in Washington,” Barragán said. “Parents should not have to decide between buying medicine for their child and putting food on the table.”
Alongside her critique, Barragán emphasized her support for service workers, backing legislation to abolish the subminimum wage for tipped employees and calling for livable wages, equal pay, and stronger labor rights.
W.S. Milner made art and a community out of snark and love
By Evelyn McDonnell
The third act of Wendy Sue Milner-Calloway’s life began with a creative breakthrough and a harbinger of death. In 2004, she and her husband, David Calloway, moved from the San Fernando Valley to San Pedro. They had sent two children into the world and retired from their careers in the film industry. After publishing a novel in 2001, Wendy redirected her interest in mythological and sacred texts into delicate objects she sculpted in the room above the garage at their Point Fermin Craftsman home.
One day, the couple walked into Point Gallery, a space on West 37th Street run by lifelong San Pedrans Victoria and Dominic Abbatiello. Inspired by the conversation and creative atmosphere, Wendy returned with a round wooden cheese box filled with small books and reliquaries made from polymer. The detailed, gilded objets d’art were inspired by illuminated medieval manuscripts, and each told a story — her narrative interests manifested in material form.
“When she opened the box, I’m thinking with Vicki, ‘How good could these be? It’s San Pedro!’” Dominic recalls. “Then, when I saw them, I was whoa! These are really good.”
W.S. Milner, as she called herself, had her first showing at a two-women exhibit at Point (where The Den is now) in 2013. Half her work sold at the opening. A San Pedro art star was born.
But the triumph was bittersweet. Just as her visual artist career was unfolding, Milner began seeing double. She was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer in her cranium and was given five years to live. Not a person to follow orders, Wendy lived another 11 years, becoming a leader in the San Pedro arts community and a respected artist.
The cancer finally won Aug. 9.
“SNARKY SENSE OF HUMOR”
Wendy Milner was born Dec. 5, 1948, in Lansing, Michigan. She grew up in Woodland Hills, California, and got a BA in English literature and MFA in theater from San Francisco State University. There, she met Calloway; they married in a Calabasas field in 1971. She designed scenery for stage and screen and wrote a novel, In Translation, that mystically interweaves the narratives of a medieval French woman and a 21st-century California skater boi.
Milner was smart, quick-witted, a voracious reader, and had an edge. In college, her nickname was Sparky. “She had that snarky sense of humor,” her husband says. He recalls a “what if” conversation they had shortly before her final surgery.
“Life is for the living; I want you to marry again,” Wendy told her partner of 54 years. “You’ve been domesticated way too long to go back out in the wild.”
“Oh, really?” David responded.
“Yeah. But I just don’t want you to be happy.”
The queen of snark was also a nurturer. As a late-blooming artist, Milner didn’t have the sanction or the sanctuary of the gallery system – so she built her own. She moved her studio to Angels Gate Cultural Center, where she became a member of the board and a founder of the annual fundraising party, which she envisioned as a gothic costume ball. She also cofounded the Mossy Rocks Poetry Society, a group that gathers regularly to read and share poetry, and the Sunken City Literary Society, a group dedicated to reading the winners of literary prizes. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and friendships were also a central part of her emotional and social life.
“She was hugely generous to vulnerable women, including many fellow artists,” says her friend and neighbor Heidi Tinsman. “She really took people under her wing and was especially helpful to us because she was so edgy and non-sentimental, but ultimately hugely kind.”
“TIME AS THE GIFT”
Raised by Christian Scientists, Milner didn’t believe in any particular religion but thought they were all interesting, particularly Tibetan Buddhism. “She was a firm believer in the idea that there’s a lot of different ways of defining reality,” says Calloway, author of If Someday Comes: A Slave’s Story of Freedom. “And none of it is any better than the other was her point of view. People live one way in this country, and they live that way in that country, and who’s to say?”
Spiritual inquiries inspired this hard-thinking woman’s work, perhaps because just as she was building her friendships and art, Milner was battling mortality. She lost the vision in her left eye, which she covered with either a patch or special glasses. And she suffered.
But she created, and showed her work at galleries, including Michael Stearns. “Although she went through all the treatment and through all of that, she still kept her spirits, still kept doing her artwork,” says Victoria Abbatiello. “She was very motivated in that way. She didn’t waste any time. She really saw time as the gift and that she could produce things that she loved.”
From W.S. Milner’s 2018 one-woman show, “Deciduous Gods.” Photo by L. Steelink, Cornelius Projects, San Pedro, Ca
Cornelius Projects on Pacific Avenue gave Milner a one-woman show, “Deciduous Gods,” in 2018. “Wendy was a devoted curious student of mythology and understood the myths and the gods had real world significance and implications, which resurfaced deciduously,” says Cornelius founder Laurie Steelink. “I had natural wood pedestals fashioned specifically for her works, which resulted in elevating the sculptures to a level of sophistication the gods and Wendy’s work demanded.”
As it happens, I was at Wendy’s first opening and bought one of her little books (my husband later built the pedestals for Cornelius Projects). I always enjoyed visiting her studio at Angels Gate and seeing how her work grew and evolved, wishing I could afford more of her physical pagan poetry. I knew about her cancer, but I found this short woman with white bangs and big glasses constitutionally resistant to pity or remorse. Not surprisingly, she was an acolyte of the Stoics.
Milner had a third surgery Aug. 7. The operation took more than a day, and afterwards, the artist suffered a massive stroke. She never woke up.
Milner’s life and death deeply impacted her San Pedro community. Folks who knew her as an artist, an organizer, a friend and a spouse texted, emailed and spoke their remembrances.
Wendy Milner-Calloway and her husband David Calloway. Photo courtesy of David Calloway.
TRIBUTES
“Curious & brilliant, bitingly honest, accomplished artist, Wendy Milner-Calloway gently reached out to me. We were both artists at Angels Gate. I tend to be reclusive, but I trusted her invitations and my life unfolded into a vivid, joyful experience daily! I read & attended with her many women friends the Sunken City Literary Society that she founded to discuss the current Pulitzer/Booker prize winners. Wendy would text poignant and thought-provoking poems from her morning reading — reading that I suspect helped her endure the terrible pain from the tumor pressing on her brain. Wendy reached out to know me later in our lives. I came to trust her, to share intimacies from our long lives as only women will. I came to love her deeply. Friends to the end, Wendy left me cherished new friends and a more vibrant relationship with my world.” Candice Gawne, human artist
“Wendy was and will always be a very close friend, heart-to-heart talks about life, the universe, and everything. She was and is a powerful, multi-faceted human being. One of her greatest pleasures was to spoil her grandkids rotten; she did it with such glee, those fortunate children will hold her in their hearts as long as they breathe. The list of Wendy is absurdly long, more talented than one person should be, and in such diverse areas. Rather than list who she is, what she is to me is a dear and trusted friend, and I love her and miss her. She was a force to be reckoned with.” Phoebe Barnum, visual artist, Angels Gate Cultural Center
“Wendy was my dream neighbor and friend. Her intelligence, kindness and creativity meant we were treated to memorable meals, lovely art experiences and stimulating conversations. Our mutual love of Angels Gate Cultural Center gave us opportunities to work closely together on fundraising efforts. Wendy made everything joyful and engaging. I treasure every day spent in her company and carry her in my heart always.” Susan Davis, artist
“The AGCC community mourns the loss of Wendy Calloway, also known as multi-media artist W.S. Milner, who was a beloved and respected member of the San Pedro arts community with a long history at Angels Gate Cultural Center. A master of her craft, Wendy brought her spunky, unapologetic soul to vibrant, imaginative sculpture and ceramic work that drew from ancient history and legends to forge contemporary artifacts of human experience. Her artistic legacy and spirited presence will be deeply missed.” Amy Eriksen, executive director, Angels Gate Cultural Center
“Wendy was so smart and so interested in seemingly everything! She knew Greek mythology inside and out, a constant inspiration for her art, a voracious consumer of medieval art history, poetry, and fiction of all kinds. … Wendy was sardonic and had a wicked sense of humor, always self-mocking as too hard-edged and needing to moderate her impulse to snarl and snip social situations and remind herself to ask “what would a kind person do?” But, in fact, that was a big cover. She was massively generous, an ultimate form of kindness. In the neighborhood, she was always asking folks over to her gorgeous Craftsman, delighting in cooking a delicious meal. Interested, always so interested, in whatever you were doing.” Heidi Tinsman, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine
“Wendy and David graciously threw our family a “New Neighbor Welcome party” as she called it, when we moved to the Point Fermin area. She made sure we were surrounded by other kind-hearted human beings, like her, and helped us into this amazing community. I think she was also excited that we were an interracial family like them. Often, we relied on Wendy and David to share their expert advice regarding our home, as we both have old Craftsmans. Looking back through our conversations, I’m reminded that Wendy was always truthful, witty, clever, and encouraging. I’ll always respect her tenacity to put her artistic work as a priority in her life, something I admire and want to take forward. Thank you, Wendy!” Denise Lopez, ceramics artist and owner of The Den
“If my discerning four-legged canine soulmate, Rockette, “el perro” Morton liked someone, I knew they were good people. Wendy Milner was one of those people. Upon entering building D at Angels Gate Cultural Center, where Wendy had an art studio, Rockette would always make a beeline to greet her. It helped that she had dog treats and a comfortable chair to sit in. She saw the special being in Rockette, and we saw the special being in Wendy.” Laurie Steelink, artist and founder of Cornelius Projects
“She had that ability to bring out the best in you. And I told her that one day. I said, you know, I didn’t know all this stuff about myself, but you saw it.” Victoria Abbatiello, artist.
Wendy Milner-Callowy. Photo courtesy of David Calloway.
“The last time I shared with Wendy was in her studio where she was fiercely working on six of her sculpted reliquaries. She was saying how urgent it was that she finish this work before she died. Her surgery was days away, and she told me how 11 years ago, she went to the doctor because one eye was seeing double. She said she didn’t want to get old and feeble and demented, so she was not scared.
‘I had a great life,’ she said.
I told her I was feeling a little dizzy, so she gave me a chocolate Builder Bar, which I consumed. Then I asked for ice because I thought I was about to faint. She actually had ice in her studio in a little plastic bag, which I pressed to my neck as I lay on the floor.
‘I wonder if it’s because I’ve been talking about death,’ she said. At the time, I thought it was just a warm day.
Strangely, the shock of her absence — the burst of bright energy gone — could suggest an afterlife. But she would hate me saying that.” Peggy Reavey, artist.
