The City of Carson June 28, has hired Crystal Williams as the city’s new human resources director.
Williams is an accomplished, forward-thinking human resources leader and consultant with more than 20 years of experience implementing and impacting human resources functions in the private and public sectors. She has long experience in the areas of employee relations, recruitment, workplace injuries, investigations, discipline and equity matters. With a leadership style that is committed to growing and motivating an organization’s most valued assets, she champions an inclusive workplace where all employees can thrive.
Williams earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Texas Woman’s University and a Juris Doctorate degree from Western State University College of Law.
For more than a month, we knew how the US Supreme Court was going to rule in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, thereby overruling Roe and Casey. When Random Lengths News spoke to Dr. Jessica Kiss of Palos Verdes Medical Group, a frontline doctor in the fight for abortion healthcare rights about the ruling, she identified the language in Dobbs v. Jackson as very dangerous.
“Particularly for healthcare practitioners, because it says if there is not a precedent in this country for this, then we don’t necessarily have a right to it,” said Dr. Kiss. “Well, most of modern medicine there was no precedent for because the vast majority of modern medicine did not exist. And the rights in bodily autonomy have been wiped away in that one statement.”
Dr. Kiss practices gynecologic care. She is the first stop in her office when a woman is pregnant and needs to figure out what to do next, whether to go to the OB/GYN, particularly for HMO patients who have to see her first.
Dr. Kiss has counseled several young women in pregnancy options who have found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy or unexpected pregnancy from a myriad of different circumstances. None of which are good, she said. It has had a direct impact on her practice.
In the last week it’s been reported that California expects 9,000 to 16,000 people to come to the state seeking abortion healthcare, and in Los Angeles alone, between 9 to 10,000 people are expected to arrive in the next year.
How is the medical community moving forward and preparing for the amount of people who are expected to travel here to get their abortion healthcare needs met?
Dr. Kiss said physicians across the country are working together to help and mount resources right now as a group, and using resources that have networks in place already from organizations like www.reproductive access.org. Physicians are trying to network together across the country to assist each other with information, such as sharing at which locations patients can find particular reproductive care.
“We’re really trying to mount those things,” said Dr. Kiss. “I’m doubling down on the amount of counseling I’m doing for my patients who have a uterus of a reproductive age, in what’s called a long-acting reversible contraceptives or LARCs — like IUD and Implanon which goes under the arm, or Depo Provera which is injected — in case they move to another place or they find themselves on a long trip and have a complication from an unknown pregnancy and find themselves in a place where they might not be able to get emergency access.”
Dr. Kiss is attending several conferences to refresh her skills on the IUD and Implanon placement, in hopes that in the fall she’ll be able to provide some of that care herself.
Abortion Pill The doctor said over the counter Plan B, which most people are familiar with, is essentially equivalent to taking a higher dose of pills that physicians use for reproductive care already.
“Now, a consequence of (this ruling) too, is that places like Amazon are limiting the amount you can buy because they are worried about shortages — which is terrifying on a different level.”
Further, Dr. Kiss recently spoke on AskDrMomabout another instance where this is a problem. Physicians often use Methotrexate for abortions. It’s most commonly used in chemotherapy and to treat auto-immune disease, “like rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis and some of these other debilitating conditions, which, without this medication, (patients’) lives are incapacitated,” she said.
“And in trigger states they are now limiting access to that to people of reproductive age who have a uterus, and that’s terrifying because the consequences of that are absolutely debilitating to these patients.”
Proactive Solutions
Dr. Kiss has already called reproductiveaccess.org to help further. She is also looking into possible resources outside of the country. She has contacted multiple clinics in Tijuana to go there to identify one location that a pregnant person might need. And the doctor has friends in the north looking to Ontario, Canada to see what resources could be provided.
“This is the headspin,” she said. “The thought that we’re having to find resources for something that has been such a basic part of healthcare is astonishing.”
Doctor’s Advice
“If you are of childbearing age and you’re not ready to conceive a child, you need to remember a couple things,” said Dr. Kiss. “Anytime that you are not actively preventing, you are actively trying to get pregnant. And if I can stress nothing more, that is the statement. When I talk to my kids going off to college I always tell them, if you hear one word, you hear the word condom today. But condoms don’t always prevent pregnancies, as we know. So, if you are of reproductive age, you should consider a longer-term birth control option which would be an IUD or something like the Implanon. Have those conversations now with your physicians. Don’t wait.
If these things are upsetting to you, this news with Roe v. Wade is upsetting, you need to take action. And right now it’s not coming up with your own action. It’s taking action with places that have organized these things for many years: making donations to Planned Parenthood and to reproductiveaccess.org who can provide those networks safely and effectively. If you can’t fund them directly, share their information, share their links on social media so that you can “in kind” help them and support the services they provide.
I have three children with uteruses in my house and ironically, as this is starting, we’re dealing with puberty with my tweens and one has just started her period, and having to think, Oh my god, do I need to do these things (birth control devices) now because maybe in 10 years time when she would need these things, it may not be accessible to her is really, really upsetting.”
PORTS OF SAN PEDRO & LONG BEACH — Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed the state’s upcoming fiscal year budget, which includes an unprecedented $2.3 billion for port infrastructure improvements and upgrades. The budget sets aside $110 million each at the San Pedro Bay and Long Beach complexes for the creation of a new Goods Movement Training Campus.
Statewide the budget includes $2.3 billion for goods movement and supply chain projects like the replacement of older trucks with cleaner models, investments in zero-emissions terminal equipment and “high-priority” capital improvements in ports.
The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are working together to create the Goods Movement Training Campus, which will focus on worker skill development, upskilling and reskilling to address the rapidly changing needs of the logistics industry. It will also serve as an industry resource for training workers on emerging green and zero-emission technologies.
The budget includes:
$1.2 billion over two years to support port-specific high-priority projects that increase goods movement capacity on rail and roadways at port terminals, including rail yard expansions, new bridges, and zero-emissions equipment modernization and deployment.
$110 million over three years for a goods movement workforce training center in the San Pedro Bay.
$30 million for operational and process improvements at ports, which includes improving data connectivity and enhancing goods movement.
$159.7 million for the purchase of zero-emission drayage trucks and charging and hydrogen refueling infrastructure.
$760 million for zero-emission equipment and vehicles, including human-operated zero-emission port equipment, short-haul (drayage) trucks and infrastructure.
$40 million to enhance California’s capacity to issue Commercial Driver’s Licenses.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors today unanimously approved amotion by Supervisor Kathryn Barger that will have Los Angeles County join a new High Desert Corridor Joint Powers Agency (JPA) to identify critical funding and facilitate the continued planning, development and construction of the High Desert Multipurpose Corridor project — the first phase of which will connect high desert cities in Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties through a new high-speed, intercity rail alignment.
The 54-mile-high speed rail project is part of a larger vision to connect Los Angeles to Las Vegas and will provide a new transportation mode for some of the fastest growing areas in Southern California, increase access to affordable housing stock, spur significant job creation and economic development, help the state achieve its climate goals and invest significantly in Equity Focus Communities which comprise most of the project’s alignment.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom June 30, signed legislation to take on the gun industry and get more guns off California streets. Gun violence is the leading cause of death among children in the U.S.
This legislation directly targets the gun lobby and manufacturers that are preying on children. Gov. Newsom signed AB 2571, prohibiting marketing of firearms to minors following recent efforts by the gun industry to appeal to minors, like Wee 1 Tactical advertising the sale of a JR-15, an AR-15 meant for kids, complete with cartoon child skulls with pacifiers.
On June 30, the Governor signed AB 1621, which further restricts ghost guns – firearms that are intentionally made untraceable – as well as the parts used to build them. Ghost guns have been called an “epidemic” by the Los Angeles Police Department, contributing to more than 100 violent crimes in Los Angeles last year alone.
Updated: This story has been updated to reflect that a man was killed.
A man was shot and killed by police officers in an alleyway in Wilmington, just before 10 a.m. on July 5.
Officers responded to reports of a man with a gun at the 600 block of West Anaheim St at around 9:45 a.m., LAPD Media Relations Officer Drake Madison stated. Upon arriving at the scene, witnesses redirected officers to Ronan St and Opp St, where they encountered the suspect in an alleyway just south of the intersection.
The suspect pulled out a handgun when confronted by officers, who opened fire on the suspect. He was taken to the hospital in unknown condition, Madison stated. No officers were injured in the shooting, and a handgun was recovered at the scene. It is unclear if the suspect shot his gun.
While responding to the shooting, an LAPD patrol car crashed into a Honda SUV on Wilmington Avenue and Opp Street, only two blocks away from the shooting scene, Madison said.
At least one person in the Honda was injured and transported to the hospital in unknown condition, while an officer was taken to a medical facility for evaluation.
Editor’s Note:Due to unforeseen circumstances the closing reception of Know Justice, Know Peace has been cancelled. However, you may still view the exhibition during normal business hours – between 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through July 22 at the Long Beach Senior Center.
The Gray Panthers Pop-Up Gallery at the Long Beach Senior Center is presenting a closing reception ofKnow Justice, Know Peace, an iconic photographic exhibition of more than 20 images by Jim Coke and Takashi Suzuki, with Victor Raphael, on July 22.
The light blue paint on the center’s pop-up gallery walls displaying images of the late 60s counterculture, including Black Panthers, The Doors and Allen Ginsberg, elicit serenity as you view California counterculture. This could be a perceived juxtaposition; calm alongside resistance. However, in review — unintentionally so — the tranquil psychology of blue supports these historic scenes of infamous images and figures, like Muhammad Ali, as he’s captured delivering his speech against being drafted into the US Army at the peak of his career. Or the first public use of Mace pepper spray in America targeting the face of a Black Panther. Both images taken by Suzuki, the latter was captured as Suzuki “exited the city bus in downtown Oakland, on his way to the funeral of teenage Black Panther Bobby Hutton, killed by Oakland Police Department after he had surrendered.”
Coke is the photographer who captured the original image for the wheat-pasted, 20-foot replica of Flying Morrison, positioned horizontally with his mic in hand above his head, in Long Beach’s Retro Row corridor. More of his Doors images and other works, including said mural’s progenitor, are on display at the gallery, including the band in concert, performing at “high noon at LA’s first rock festival,” during the Summer of Love at Fantasy Faire, Devonshire Downs, Northridge July 15,1967.
Between the ages of 19 to 23 years old, Coke took these photos as he both lived and witnessed 60s counterculture in all of its beauty and pain. At some point, Coke explained he put all these negatives in a box and forgot about them — maybe a result of collateral damage from the injustices he saw. It was 1991 before he found them again and went on to display them in several iterations at various venues around Long Beach and Los Angeles.
The image for Flying Morrison came from a grouping of photos that Coke took of Morrison performing at Devonshire Downs titled, Jim Morrison Scream Sequence.
“When I found (the photos) in my old darkroom after seeing the film The Doors in 1991, it was at the dawn of the digital graphics revolution,” Coke said in a press release.
He said the work took four years from discovery to completion because technology was evolving so rapidly that by the time it was first finished, it needed to be upgraded with improved scanning and newly archival printing technologies.
The exhibit also includes images from Stop the Draft Week street protests and sit-in at the doors of the US Army Induction Center, Next Stop is Vietnam, in Oakland, October 1967. Actor and donor to the Black Panthers cause, Marlon Brando is displayed as he attends the funeral of Bobby Hutton in Oakland, 1968. And see photographs of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, dressed in a suit and flip-flops, as he reads to an enthralled academic audience at the May 1967 Spring Art Fair at University of Southern California.
Know Justice, Know Peace closing reception will feature readings from:
6 p.m. — Dr. James Sauceda, professor of communication, CSULB,on the context and inspiration of the time
6:20 p.m. — Poet Fred Voss, the blue collar bard of Long Beach, reading his ode to Coke’s Flying Morrison mural.
6:40 p.m. — Performance artist Christine Elaine Vasquez (and her puppet pal, Dirty Patti), riffing on the new generation gap
Time: Venue hours 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. M-F and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sat.
Cost: Free
Details: Text— 562-343- 4967
Venue: Long Beach Senior Center, 1150 E. 4th St., Long Beach
The Long Beach Creative Group is presenting In Memoriam, a week-long silent auction and exhibition featuring important museum-quality works from the estates of esteemed local artists, including Howard Hitchcock, Domenic Cretara, Richard Lopez, Steve Werlick, and Rod Briggs.
Karena Massengill, auxiliary board member for LBCG said, “This memoriam exhibition offers an opportunity for people to acquire well-known artists’ artworks, at very reasonable prices while helping to fund good causes at the same time.”
This is a rare opportunity to purchase a masterpiece, support the gallery, and the estates of these beloved artists. The Long Beach Creative Group intends to donate 10% of their share to Able ARTS Worka local nonprofit established in 1982, whose mission is to provide lifelong learning, therapeutic and vocational opportunities through the creative arts for people of all abilities and all ages in an environment of warmth, encouragement and inclusion.
The namesake of LBCG Rod Briggs, who died in 2017, was a Long Beach Unified School District teacher for decades. When he wasn’t teaching, he spent nights and weekends in his studio, which is now the LBCG/Rod Briggs Gallery. He was a highly skilled, prolific and adventurous artist whose photo realistic paintings depicted familiar and surprising places throughout Long Beach. He also explored abstract expressionism, watercolor landscapes and many other media and forms.
Other artists In Memoriam include Domenic Cretara who completed his Fine Arts degree, graduating magna cum laude, from Boston University, where he also earned his master’s degree. Cretara served as chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the Art Institute of Boston. In 1986, he joined the faculty of California State University, Long Beach, also serving as resident director of the CSU International Program in Florence, Italy.
Howard Hitchcock was an American west coast modernist, and an accomplished printmaker, draftsman, and painter in acrylic and watercolor. His bronzes and linoleum prints depict human forms in architectural and whimsical situations. And his landscapes and drypoint (printmaking) show a keen sensitivity to the natural world.
Stephen Werlick earned a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He went on to receive a Fulbright Fellowship, enabling him to study sculpture and bronze casting with Heinrich Kirchner in Munich, Germany. He earned his MFA from Tulane then for 35 years, he served as a celebrated instructor at CSULB. His work celebrates societal human conditions as depicted in monument-like groupings of figures interacting with and through various angled planes.
The auction begins July 10 and runs from 4 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, Bidding continues on Saturday, July 16, and concludes at 3 pm.
We have no control over who lives, who dies, and who tells our story. But […] I am heartened by the fact that Josh wrote one hell of a tale.
–Abbie Fischel, at her husband’s memorial
Mere hours after the closing of the inaugural Music Tastes Good, a three-day event that transformed a half-dozen square blocks of East Village Arts District into festival grounds the likes of which Long Beach had never seen, musician/organizer/impresario Josh Fischel, a dreamer of sometimes unrealistic proportions, was rushed to the hospital where days later he breathed his last. Many in his orbit knew he was ill, but nobody, nobody — not his friends, not his wife, not the people with whom he spent nearly every day over the previous chaotic year putting together Music Taste Good with more will than skill — expected him to be gone nearly so soon.
But we all gotta go sometime. And despite how painfully shocking it was to lose someone so seemingly permanent as this bear of a man, six years on it’s hard not to appreciate a certain poetry in his exit. For better and for worse, Josh Fischel self-produced the way he left this world.
How to Throw Your Own Goodbye Party chronicles exactly that: a self-destructive creator who drove himself and others to fulfill a dream that was the last act of his life.
Lauren Coleman wasn’t a filmmaker, but as a member of the Music Tastes Good team she had a front-row seat to Fischel’s final year.
“I remember thinking, ‘I wish we could hire a camera crew, because every day something was going wrong,” she recalls. “[…] Usually when I’m doing something I can look down the pipeline and see how it’s going to pan out, but [not in this case]. As things were getting more and more hectic, I said, ‘I need to document this.’ I didn’t think, ‘Later I’m going to do a film,’ but I just thought this was a very pivotal time.”
How to Throw Your Own Goodbye Party not only chronicles that time through use of over 40 interviews and 70 hours of found footage from a wide variety of sources (including audio recordings of MTG planning meetings), but also provides enough background material that even those who never heard of Josh Fischel or Music Tastes Good can come away with an integrated portrait of both.
Coleman didn’t start out with such lofty ambitions. In the wake of Fischel’s sudden death, she helped curate a public celebration of his life — fittingly produced by RIOTstage, a troupe Fischel founded in 2013 to mount ambitious one-off theatrical musical events, including front-to-back performances of Abbey Road, Pet Sounds, The Wall, and an original staging of The Nightmare Before Christmas — and then immersed herself in helping bring off another two iterations of the rechristened “Josh Fischel’s Music Tastes Good.” It was only after MTG went on hiatus in 2018, at dinner with several MTG teammates, that she got the idea to create a document of the inaugural festival. “‘There’s an incredible story here,’ she remembers thinking. “‘If we’re not going to continue the festival that is his legacy, [a film] is a way to solidify that.’”
But as she collected and logged the footage, she realized there was a far deeper and more complex narrative in the offing, one with unavoidably dark undertones relating to Fischel’s alcoholism and the lengths to which he went to hide it as he persisted to drink in secret after being diagnosed with liver disease and told by doctors in no uncertain terms to stop.
“One of the reasons I felt I needed to revisit this was coming to the realization that [during MTG planning] we were watching someone actively die and didn’t realize it,” Coleman says. “[…] Not one person knew the whole [scope….] I thought I was just going to tell the story of the first year of this festival and how this man achieved something huge […] that was his swansong, how he went out big, [etc.]. But then it became a deeper story about addiction.”
Image by Sean Laughlin. Graphic by Brenda López
To tell the Josh/MTG story with any honesty, Coleman had no choice but to confront that addiction — Josh’s addiction, and some painful-to-rehash behavior that came with it — head-on, partly in the hope that others may be helped by hearing the hard truth.
“It is really important to me to tell the truth, for better or worse, but while respecting the monstrous weight of addiction itself,” Coleman says. “I wanted to be careful not to vilify those battling addiction, but also to shed light on the toll it takes. The best way I felt I could do that in this case was to show the impact on the people who are left behind. Sometimes it takes the love we have for others to motivate us to do things we may not do just for ourselves. […] There was a gentleman I met at the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival who shared his struggle with addiction with me after he had watched the film. He is sober now, but he connected with Josh’s story.”
For all his foibles — not a person who loved him (I count myself among the lucky) would one-dimensionally beatify him; he was simply too big and gave of himself too completely for that — How to Throw Your Own Goodbye Party manages to highlight the playfulness and joy that were at Fischel’s core.
For Coleman, making the film allowed her to know Fischel in new ways. She didn’t know him at all c. 2015 when he booked her band Pebaluna for a gig — and only slightly better when a short time later she jumped at his invitation to be part of the MTG team despite her reservations that his vision for the festival sounded “too good to be true.” And when he died not much more than a year later, she knew him mostly as a boss.
“I really like [that through making the film] I got to know him as a son and a husband and a brother and a friend,” she says. “I could have walked away from Music Tastes Good knowing only this one dimension of him, but I’m so glad I’ve got this fuller picture of this man who inspired so many people. […] I’m a better person for [my experience with him], so to get to know him more fully through the eyes of others was my favorite part of [making] it.”
Abbie Fischel, Josh’s wife/partner/constant support, is “overwhelmed” that Coleman “cared enough to capture important pieces of Josh’s story in a documentary.” It’s just the kind of thing she publicly exhorted shortly after his death.
“At Josh’s memorial concert I asked people to honor his memory by going out and creating more beauty for all of us to behold, just as Josh did,” she says. “Lauren took up that calling and created a beautiful piece of art about a fellow artist, Joshie. I am so very grateful to each and every person that contributed to this good work. It was incredibly touching to hear accounts of what Josh meant to others.”
Josh’s mother, Maurine, has a more mixed reaction to How to Throw Your Own Goodbye Party. She was warned by her son Zach before seeing an early cut (Coleman held several screenings for friends and family for feedback during the editing process) that the film would be “difficult to watch.” It was.
“There were a number of revelations in the documentary — answers to questions many of us had chosen not to ask and really preferred not to know,” she says. “I was devastated and a bit angry. This [film] was not what I originally, naively, thought it would be.”
But when she saw the final version with her sister, the pair agreed that it’s well done. Although Maurine feels she has some insights into what was going on with Josh that may differ from what’s presented in the film, she appreciates that it captures Josh’s complexity and the achievement that was Music Tastes Good.
“Josh was […] a big personality, creative and talented, loving and supportive of family and friends,” she says. “[He was] also outspoken and opinionated on everything. He would envision how he thought things should be and then relentlessly figure out how to make it happen. That he figured out how to pull off Music Tastes Good was nothing short of amazing. And it’s pretty obvious he spent the last year of his life pushing to succeed with MTG while spiraling, avoiding dealing with his very real physical issue.”
“I never once thought he would risk his health and his life to do this festival,” Coleman says. “And I don’t even know to this day if he knew that’s what he was doing or just going. […] There’s part of me that felt bad for exposing so much of what he was going through, but it was necessary for the whole story. […] It might not be the film a lot of people are expecting to see, but I hope that the love that it’s told with comes across.”
All in all, Maurine Fischel hopes viewers come away feeling “Josh was a big dreamer with wild ideas and a good heart — which is what he was.”
Abbie has no doubt that it does.
“One of the things I always loved the most about Josh was the way he coaxed beauty from brokenness,” she says. “He was full of grit and fire, and that often served him well, while at other times it worked against him. This film captures much of the beauty and brokenness that was our dear Joshie. I loved every bit of who Josh was, and I miss every complexity of being a witness to his triumph and his struggle. I hope Josh is remembered for all he created, but more than that I hope his legacy inspires others to keep pushing and creating amidst pain and struggle. We are all more than our broken pieces. Josh knew that better than anyone, and he lived his life accordingly.”
The Civilian Oversight Commission is hosting a special hearing on deputy gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The public is encouraged to attend. Community input is vital to the ongoing analysis of the department’s policies, practices and procedures.
On July 1, there are three ways to tune in:
In Person: RSVP and join us at Loyola Marymount University, Albert H. Girardi Advocacy Center, 919 Albany Street, Los Angeles, CA 90015
