The 5th Annual San Pedro Music Festival®, happening May 16, promises to be an unforgettable celebration of music, culture, and community. The event features an exciting blend of jazz, blues, reggae, and more to keep audiences dancing all day long.
This milestone year showcases an outstanding lineup of talent, including Jazz in Pink, Castella, Sunny Daye, Chazzy Green, the Chillie Willie Groove Band, and several special surprise performances.
A highlight of this year’s festival will be a special tribute to the late, great Brenton Wood. In partnership with community leaders, an official proclamation will recognize Brenton Wood Day on July 26, with its inaugural celebration taking place during the festival.
This beloved community event continues its tradition of bringing residents, artists and visitors together through the power of live music—completely free to the public. Enjoy a variety of cuisines from food trucks, along with indoor vendor booths including some offering exclusive Brenton Wood and Dear Amy memorabilia.
Now in its fifth year, the San Pedro Music Festival® celebrates the rich diversity of the community through music and shared cultural experiences.
“This is truly a rewarding experience—seeing how one idea can grow into something that brings thousands of people together through the universal language of music,” said Windy Barnes Farrell, founder and executive producer of the festival.
Festival goers can also enjoy a wide range of amenities, including a vibrant Kid Zone, VIP parking and private entry, and an exclusive VIP seating area with delicious cuisine provided by select local restaurants. As always, professional on-site security ensures a safe and welcoming environment for all attendees.
The plot is paint-by-numbers. Many of the best melodic and rhythmic ideas are repurposed to greater effect in Hamilton. A few songs get a bit redundant; a couple might qualify as filler.
That’s pretty much an exhaustive list of the shortcomings of In the Heights. If it isn’t a work of genius, it’s the product of an artist who was on his way there, in places peaking above the clouds and into that lofty realm. And on just about every level, Musical Theatre West enables that greatness to shine through.
It’s July 3, and a Washington Heights barrio is on the cusp of change. Three businesses at the neighborhood’s heart may relocate or close forever. Two long-simmering romances will finally boil over. One beloved community member will pass on — but not without leaving more than her memory behind.
The axis of this little universe is Usnavi (Reubén Carbajal) — drolly named after the first signage his parents saw after emigrating from the Dominican Republic — and his De La Vega Bodega is the hub. An In the Heights production without a good Usnavi is in big trouble. Musical Theatre West could never find a better talent than Carbajal to take on any role that Lin-Manuel Miranda writes for himself. Carbajal is funny, agile, sings great, raps with a seemingly effortless staccato smoothness, and gives us the feels. And when tasked with a little clunky exposition, we barely even notice.
But In the Heights is really an ensemble piece, so there are plenty of places for it to fray at the seams. No problem for this cast, though. Whether in full voice or character singing, each company member has whatever vocal flair they need, along with the acting chops to invest their character with enough idiosyncrasy to make them easily definable from the word go.
Moreover, everybody does well with Marissa Herrera’s vibrant choreography. Perhaps because over the last few years Musical Theatre West has staged more than its fair share of jukebox and film-based musicals, to me it has felt like shows with sweeping choreography have been few and far between (2023’s spectacular An American in Paris was a notable exception). But In the Heights brings it, not so much because the dance numbers are especially demanding (though there are flashes of wow), but because each number is so well conceived, to the point that often enough you don’t know where to look (in the best sense). That mindfulness extends to the blocking, as director Jesse J. Sanchez has his cast active at every moment in every piece of onstage real estate, even if all they’re doing is talking amongst themselves back in the bodega or the salon or the cab dispatch while such an extravaganza of song and dance is taking place out on the street that most audience members will never notice.
This little corner of Washington Heights is lovingly rendered by Anna Louizos. From the street and shops to the facades and fire escapes to the George Washington Bridge looming in the near distance, there’s nothing that’s not a pleasure to behold. Even the interiors are decked out with such care that I’m reminded of those stories about film sets where the art direction is so meticulous that the insides of desk drawers are not neglected despite the fact that they’ll never be onscreen.
From the outset, Paul Black’s lighting bathes the proceedings in misty sunrises and sweltering afternoons, before a riot of purple transforms the street to “The Club” without so much as a new piece of scenery being wheeled on. A flood of which commands our attention at stage right, then left, then to both sides simultaneously, until accents of yellow brings a crescendo before the dark cacophony of “Blackout” Exciting stuff.
Simply because they’re so predictably good, Musical Theatre West orchestras often get short shrift from me. They get special mention here simply because in many ways In the Heights is atypical musical territory for them — steady maraca and clave rhythms, soulfully sliding fretless electric bass — and they’re as good as ever.
The magic is the gestalt, the cumulative effect and the juxtaposition of individual elements. The mournful beauty of Atención > Alabenza is all the more sublime for coming on the heels of Carnival del Barrio and after the humor of It Won’t Be Long Now and the frenzy of 96,000. In partnership with Quiara Alegría Hudes (book), Miranda has plotted his stylistic shifts to perfection, just as Sanchez has connected all of the production’s nodes into a nearly perfect nexus.
The one and only glaring exception is the fireworks at the end of Act One, which are basically drab, static projections that might have been drawn by a 12-year-old with no particular artistic talent that fails to close the show’s first half with a the bang it deserves, completely out of keeping with the excellence of the mise en scène. Not sure what happened there.
It’s missed opportunity, yes, but a minor cavil overall in an outstanding piece of art whose immigrant/American story would be timely anytime, though never more so than this sad juncture in our history, when America has viciously turned on its Latino community and tried to make nightmares of so many dreams. Kudos to Musical Theatre West for clocking the value of revisiting this great show for a second time less than a decade after the first.
I get a bit misty whenever I am conscious of seeing artists enjoy the good fortune of getting to perform great material and fully meeting the moment with their talents. I was there with In the Heights a quarter of the way through Act One. Joyous.
In the Heights at Musical Theatre West Times: Fri 7 p.m., Sat 2 p.m. & 7 p.m., Sun 1 p.m.; plus Thurs Apr 16 at 7 p.m. and Sun Apr 19 at 6 p.m.The show runs through April 26. Cost: starting at $25 ($15 for student rush tix) Details: 562-856-1999,musical.org Venue: Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 W. Atherton, Long Beach
Just off a parking lot on the Cal State Long Beach campus, two willow poles bent into an arch are a portal to a different world. A dirt path snakes through waist-high white and purple flowers to a clearing sheltered by oak and eucalyptus trees.
This is Puvungna, an active ceremonial site, ancient village and sacred place that holds great significance for the Tongva and Acjachemen — the two tribal nations Indigenous to LA and Orange County — as well as several other nations in Southern California.
“It’s our creation site,” explained Rebecca Robles, an Acjachemen tribal elder and retired nurse who grew up in Long Beach. “Two of our deities came to us here: Wiyot, the creator, and Chinigchinich, the lawgiver. This is where we changed from spiritual beings to having a physical form.”
But despite its cultural and archaeological importance — which has been recognized by the National Register of Historic Places and California’s Native American Heritage Commission — the university has repeatedly harmed and endangered the site.
In the early 1990s, Cal State Long Beach planned to build a strip mall there. Native activists and allies camped on the land to protect it. When the university came in to bulldoze a beloved community garden that had been created on Earth Day in 1970, one part-time instructor chained herself to a fence, got arrested and lost her job over it.
Decades later, the fight to protect Puvungna continues. CSULB is more than two years behind on its legal obligation to appoint a long-term caretaker for the sacred land.
The strip-mall project in the ’90s led to two lawsuits, one filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which said the university was violating the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. The university spent over $2.3 million in public funds on the lawsuits before finally abandoning its development plans.
Then, in 2019, CSULB dumped more than 6,000 cubic yards of construction soil and debris onto the Puvungna meadow. Numerous trucks rolled onto the site, damaging cultural and archaeological heritage and possibly disturbing ancestral remains.
That same year, Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation-Belardes — one of three Acjachemen groups — partnered with the California Cultural Resources Preservation Alliance (CCRPA) to sue the university for violating the California Environmental Quality Act. The Native American Heritage Commission also joined the suit.
In 2021, that lawsuit led to the 22-acre meadow on the CSULB campus — the remaining undeveloped portion of a site once that once spanned 500 acres — being placed under a “restrictive covenant” preventing future construction, and a settlement requiring the university to “make a good faith effort” to appoint a caretaker within two years.
Over a 10-month period, the lawsuit’s petitioners and their attorneys worked closely with the university to develop a request for proposal (RFP), which was finally issued in April 2024.
Friends of Puvungna — a nonprofit spearheaded by Robles — then submitted an application in partnership with the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, a Tongva-led organization.
It was the only application the university received, and it seemed like an obvious fit. Friends of Puvungna was already doing much of this work informally, hosting volunteer cleanups, ceremonies, food distributions, poetry readings and other gatherings. Becoming the official conservator would safeguard the site in perpetuity and allow the organization to undertake proper restoration of the land, which is plagued by invasive plant species and pollution from the soil dumping.
After decades of grassroots organizing, it seemed like at last victory was close.
A month later, the university rejected the application, backtracking on its own request for proposals. The university said it had failed to properly outline requirements regarding applicants’ prior experience, conflicts of interest, and funding required for the site. The university also said the RFP “failed to generate an adequate number of proposals.”
Sarah Lucey, an attorney with Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger who represents the tribe and CCRPA, was baffled. “We had taken so long to draft the RFP, and now they were saying, basically, in hindsight, the RFP wasn’t good enough.”
Ever since, the situation has been in limbo. Communication with the university has stalled, said Patricia Martz, president of CCRPA, the preservation alliance involved in the lawsuit.
Chris Reese, associate vice president of university relations, told Random Lengths News that “a funding source [needs] to be identified before another RFP is issued.”
However, the university is already spending money on Puvungna. The RFP states that “CSULB’s current annual cost to maintain the Property is approximately $60k.”
In 2023, Robles says the university spent around $1 million on a soil treatment plan that tribal members urged the university to delay until a caretaker was appointed.
Sarah Lucey doesn’t understand the university’s stance on funding. “If there’s already money earmarked for the maintenance of Puvungna, why can’t you [appoint a caretaker] now?” In the meantime, the university could continue its search for long-term external funding — such as an endowment — to eventually replace the $60k, while the caretaker could fund anything above that sum.
In response to a query about the budget currently allocated for Puvungna, CSULB’s Chris Reese told Random Lengths that “There are many factors [sic] affecting maintenance costs to address those questions with specificity.”
For Robles, at times the stalemate feels like “a continuation of disregard for Native Americans, Native history, and a continuation of injustice towards us.”
“What really kind of amazes me,” Martz said, “is that the university has so little appreciation for [Puvungna]. I would think they’d be proud of having a sacred site on their campus, but instead they look at it as a liability.”
Martz hopes the arrival of new CSULB president Dr. Loren J. Blanchard on May 1 might bring change.
“It has the potential to have a world-class Native American garden, be a living museum, a center for teaching,” Robles said. “We’re carrying a vision of healing that will benefit many people.”
CSULB has a thriving American Indian Studies program and the annual powwow on campus uses the Puvungna name — yet the site itself is not even marked on campus maps.
Gathering places like Puvungna are particularly important because most of the coastal tribes in California don’t have their own land base. A number of treaties signed in 1851-1852 were supposed to guarantee reservation lands, but those treaties were never ratified by Congress and were hidden under an injunction of secrecy for more than 50 years. Today, reservations make up less than 1% of the state.
Recent years have seen growing efforts to restore tribal ownership and stewardship of ancestral homelands — a movement known as Land Back. In 2022, California State University Chico returned 93 acres to the Mechoopda people. Cal State Long Beach has the opportunity to be the next CSU to take reparative action.
For the people advocating for Puvungna, it’s been a long and hard fight. But at a talking circle hosted last month by Friends of Puvungna and a collective of students from the Master of Social Work program, CSULB student Ian Johnson aptly summed up why this work is so important.
“We aren’t just fighting for organizations or against construction,” he said. “We’re fighting for a way of being together.”
The concept of farm to table has existed for a long time, well before Alice Waters popularized it through her restaurant Chez Panisse. More and more establishments seem to now embrace this philosophy. But beyond the trend, farm to table is above all about connection — a connection to the land, to the seasons, and to those who cultivate it.
I have always loved the balance of sweet and savory. The pairing of meat and fruit is one of the simplest and most elegant expressions of that harmony. Yet we often tend to overstock — whether at the supermarket or from our own gardens — without realizing the creative potential these ingredients hold. With a bit of inspiration, the most familiar products can be transformed into unexpected dishes.
For a chef, meeting an exceptional producer feels almost like serendipity. A true coup de cœur on one instance was a gentleman farmer whose orchards yield an almost magical abundance each year: fruit grown without pesticides, harvested at perfect ripeness, bursting with flavor. There is something deeply inspiring in such generosity. In that moment, farm to table became a living reality.
Our conversation lasted nearly half an hour, but it changed the way I think. We imagined everything a freshly picked apple could become: roasted apples with onions, simmered with chicken stock and a leg of chicken or other dark meat that allow the juices flow more freely; apple fritters; chaussons aux pommes; a delicate tart; compote… The possibilities felt endless. I can say, the chicken with apples is the dish I learned from this producer of earth, a recipe, which came from his family, a very generous gesture and a dish I treasure and will redo time and time again. I also rediscovered the Reinette Grise du Canada, so often used in French pastry, and confirmed how the tartness of a Granny Smith elevates a Tarte Tatin, served with a quenelle of crème fraîche. That was farm to table in its purest form.
Why limit such beautiful fruit to dessert?
Instead of preparing a large batch of pastries, I chose to roast the smaller apples in a cast-iron skillet. The result was rustic, authentic, and deeply comforting: chicken with apples, sweet and savory, slowly simmered in cast iron, reminiscent of the iconic cocottes by Staub. The dish reflected the land it came from — simple, generous, sincere.
And of course, I transform the fruit he cultivates with such care, and he receives it back in the form of delicacies, offered in another expression. The last time we met, we simultaneously made an exchange at the same time, unexpected but full of unassuming generosity which comes full circle.
My true coup de cœur was not only these extraordinary apples, but the passion, and the abundance that comes from land cultivated with love and patience.
Dozens of times each year I have the privilege to find myself at events — theatre opening nights, art walks and receptions, office parties and private gatherings — where food and drink is served. Often enough I am acquainted with the organizers. And because of my own political and environmental leanings, almost no-one in the circles I travel in any way believes that climate change is a “hoax” or that humans are not negatively, perhaps irrevocably impacting the environment through our wanton reliance on oil, including plastics.
Nonetheless, without fail these events glutted with single-use plastics — cups, forks, knives, straws, plates, ramekins, bottled water — even though every last person there (host, staff, guest) knows that eco-friendlier single-use alternatives exist, not to mention perpetually reusable options.
While it’s puzzling enough that anyone refuses to get off the plastic tit where alternatives are readily available, when we’re talking about people who have or want children, grandchildren…. Mom, Father, Papa, Meemaw all know that we’re already suffering from the results of the status quo, and they know it’ll be worse for the young’uns — and a huge part of how much worse depends on how much we persist in our petroleum folly.
It’s a little bit of a “fuck you” to your own flesh and blood, intentionally and knowingly choosing to needlessly contribute to the ruin of the world in which they must live.
In Ian McEwan’s most recent novel, What We Can Know (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025), the world of the early 22nd century limps along in the wake of global warming caused by humankind, with a rise in sea levels having claimed the likes of Glasgow, New York, and Lagos. The people of that time have a term for our early-21st-century choice to “do little, even as they knew what was coming and what was needed”: the Derangement (capital D, like “the Depression”). “Such liberty and abandon. They were brilliant in their avarice […] and they were idiots who were throwing it all away, even as their high culture lamented or roared in pain” (p. 59).
Truly, we are deranged. To dread the visitation of anthropogenic environmental disaster upon your progeny and yet to do your part to make sure that’s exactly what will come to pass….
And for what?
It’s true that some eco-friendly items are more expensive in the short run. For example, a 500-count package of 8 oz. plastic cups typically runs about 5 cents per cup, while plant-based “plastic” runs about 7 cents and paper (i.e., without a lining that renders them non-compostable) is about 10 cents per. On the other hand, wooden forks can be found for a penny less apiece than plastic, while bamboo and plastic cost roughly the same. And needless to say, it’s far cheaper to provide water for people to fill up their canteens than to give away bottles of water.
Of course, even if single-use plastic is cheaper today, we’re just kicking the costs down the road, saddling our children with far greater bills that must unavoidably come due. A penny saved today is a dollar wasted tomorrow. And while it’s impossible to quantify the financial costs of plastic dependance, a recent study published in Nature extrapolates available data to posit that “emissions associated with the production and use of […] products produced by […] large oil and gas companies” had cost us on the order of $10 trillion as of 2020…and are projected to cost something like an additional $390 trillion by 2100.
But maybe it’s less about money than habit, convenience, and a sense of entitlement. Most of us didn’t grow up environmentally conscious: we were just kids who consumed without thinking about consequences, just like our parents did, a societal norm that was unquestioned in the prevailing zeitgeist. And to be sure, it was a lot nicer to live in ignorance. Who wants to think about fucking product packaging? Who wants to compost? Who wants to take responsibility for my environmental footprint? What a pain in the ass!
But a lot of this shit just ain’t that hard. At Burning Man, they call it Radical Self-Reliance. Going somewhere you might need a cup? Bring a fucking cup. You might want water? Bring some fucking water. Events where bottled water is given away foster bad behavior [see You might want water? Bring some fucking water] — and venues that vend bottled water are literally choosing to profit off keeping that behavior entrenched. If tomorrow everybody stopped giving out or selling bottled water, you know what would happen? Most people would bring canteens, and those who didn’t who got thirsty would go to the restroom sink and cup their hands under the faucet, which wouldn’t be the most satisfying hydrating experience, and so next time they’d bring a canteen.
An argument I’ve heard is: “Hey, I’m just one little person/org/business, what difference do I make, so get off my back.” Sure, and no one vote more or less will sway the election — so why vote, right? It’s the aggregate, dummy. Oil/plastic usage comes down to the cumulative effect of individual decisions made every day. And from the Big Oil exec to the piddling li’l consumer, you shouldn’t contribute to screwing (y)our children over where your contribution to said screwing is easily obviated. Make decisions based on their rightness, not on the magnitude of their impact. If you believe our oil and plastic dependence is wrong, any avoidable contribution to that dependence is clearly wrong. A wrong is a wrong regardless of scale.
As far as it goes, my argumentative friends aren’t wrong: in the Big Picture, this is some lowercase-S small-scale shit. And am I being a bit self-righteous? Well, it’s hard not to be when there’s no argument to be made in favor of persisting in the bad behavior, and when we’re talking about the easystuff, the obvious stuff, stuff you can do with almost literally no extra effort, just a decision not to keep making the same choice simply because that’s the way you’ve always done it or because you can look around and say, “Well, everybody else is doing it, so it must be okay.”
Yes, we can talk about major corporations and conglomerates and lax government regulations and so forth. But today’s sermon is about what you can do right now. That’s where it’s got to start for everyone.
To be fair, “choice” is not always straightforward. Buying an electric vehicle and retrofitting your house so it’s off the grid may not be pragmatic options for you. But there is nobody who cannot opt for bamboo/wooden utensils over plastic, cardboard/compostable cups over plastic. Bottled water is great for earthquake preparedness and disaster relief, but in everyday life nobody should buy bottled water when they can bring a canteen; nobody should be selling or giving away bottled water instead of providing boxed water or simply a place to fill up. These are the easy things.
In many respects, the most significant way we influence kids is through our behavior. If your parents modeled ignorant, selfish, destructive, myopic behavior for you, it’s nearly certain that you followed their lead until and unless you unlearned their bad lessons (which maybe you still haven’t done? See? Modeling!). So the more our kids watch us make the world worse for them, the more they’ll make the world still worse for themselves and their offspring. Not just fucking the kids, but teaching them to fuck themselves.
This includes fucking up their bodies, like we’re fucking up ours, but more so. As noted in a 2025 Stanford Medicine overview of the current scientific data related to microplastics and health, “particles have been found in multiple organs and tissues, including the brain, testicles, heart, stomach, lymph nodes and placenta,” as well as in “urine, breastmilk, semen and meconium, which is a newborn’s first stool.” And while at present “[a]n estimated 10 to 40 million metric tons of these particles are released into the environment every year, […] if current trends continue, that number could double by 2040.”
“All of us need to stop using plastic as much as we can to protect our health, especially single-use plastics,” says a leading Stanford researcher. “[…] Individuals need to recognize that we have a lot of agency, and we can make choices that actually do change things.”
Some choices are easy, both practically and morally. It seems like that should go double when we’re talking about what’s best for our children.
McOsker, Rivers Offer Competing Visions of Equity, Safety and City Reform at Chamber Forum
The April 7 San Pedro Chamber’s city council candidate forum could have been billed as a David versus Goliath story, but it would have been more accurate to bill it as a Young David versus King David if it had to be cast as an adversarial confrontation. Yet even this characterization doesn’t quite capture the candidate’s forum that evening. There was the incumbent, Councilman Tim McOsker, a candidate so strong that if the one challenger had not jumped into the race, McOsker likely would have ran unopposed — and deservedly so, many would argue. That challenger is Jordan Rivers, a 22-year-old, newly minted graduate of Sacramento State University, who majored in international relations while minoring in peace and conflict resolution.
Any who were present at the bell ringing ceremony at the Korean Bell commemorating Juneteenth two years ago would have seen Rivers deliver a short speech marking the end of slavery in the United States. He discussed Sen. Steven Bradford’s work on reparations and publicly declared his intention to dedicate his life to the public good as a public servant. It’s unlikely any who were present that day would have doubted this young man’s promise, confidence, or ambition.
Councilman McOsker was present that day and graciously honored the bold young upstart. It’s not known if McOsker knew he was congratulating his future rival.
Rivers’ emergence reflects broader voter frustration with long-tenured political leadership. He leaned into that sentiment during the forum, noting that skeptics frequently question his age as he campaigns and collects signatures to qualify for the ballot.
McOsker, by contrast, emphasized continuity and experience. He said many residents already see him regularly in the district and added that visibility alone does not require holding office. He said he is seeking reelection to complete major initiatives already underway.
Recalling his branding of Council District 15 as the “One-Five,” McOsker emphasized a unified identity across Watts, Harbor Gateway, Wilmington, Harbor City and San Pedro. He stressed equity across neighborhoods, acknowledged systemic racism and historic disparities, and argued that some communities — particularly Watts — have been underserved. He said the goal is not to shift resources between communities, but to uplift all areas equally by improving environmental conditions, education and overall quality of life.
Jordan Rivers — Key Positions
Small business and economic development: Rivers framed small-business challenges within the broader cost-of-living crisis. He opposed land banking and called for developers to contribute more directly to local communities. He argued housing should be treated as a human right and urged greater public investment in housing and social services to stabilize neighborhood economies.
Measure ULA: Rivers focused on transparency and accountability, supporting audits and stronger voter oversight of how funds are allocated. He said the city should ensure existing revenue is used effectively before making structural changes to the tax.
City budget and services: Rivers called for increased investment in underserved neighborhoods and proposed expanding 311-style systems for nonemergency responses, including mental health and homelessness, to free up law enforcement for serious crime.
Public safety approach: He supported separating social services from law enforcement and expanding community-based response systems, arguing that prevention and equity-based investment produce safer outcomes.
Tim McOsker — Key Positions
Small business and economic development: McOsker highlighted existing economic development tools, including expanding Jobs and Economic Development Incentive (JEDI) zones to provide loans, fee reductions and storefront improvements. He also supported establishing a property-based business improvement district in Wilmington to generate funding for corridor revitalization and address absentee landlords.
Measure ULA: He supported revisiting the measure through a voter-approved process, arguing it has underperformed due to reduced property sales. He proposed exemptions for nonprofit affordable housing developers and possible temporary adjustments to improve effectiveness while maintaining housing funding.
City budget and services: McOsker cited his experience managing a significant budget shortfall. He supported reducing planned Los Angeles Police Department hiring to preserve other services, including infrastructure and neighborhood maintenance. He emphasized rebalancing resources to maintain a structurally sound budget while protecting core services.
Public safety approach: He agreed with expanding unarmed, service-based responses for issues such as homelessness and mental health, calling them more efficient and effective in many cases.
Homelessness Funding Question
Tahia Hayslet, executive director of Harbor Interfaith Services, asked how anticipated cuts to homeless services would affect Council District 15.
McOsker said the impact would be regional and argued the core problem is systemic inefficiency. He called for a clearer division of responsibilities among the city, county and Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, with the county focused on services and the city focused on housing production.
Rivers criticized enforcement-based responses such as “special enforcement zones,” calling them ineffective and costly. He advocated for expanded transitional housing, stronger health care access, and long-term support systems centered on stability rather than policing.
Port Security Question
Arturo Garcia-Ayala asked about security risks at the Port of Los Angeles and emergency preparedness for Harbor Area residents.
Rivers emphasized diplomacy and prevention, arguing that reducing global tensions and investing in education, job training and social services are essential to long-term safety and resilience.
McOsker acknowledged the port as a potential security target but expressed confidence in existing safeguards. He highlighted the Port of Los Angeles Police and coordination among local, state and federal agencies. However, he noted gaps in broader evacuation planning and said efforts are underway to build a more coordinated emergency response system.
Budget and Charter Reform
On the city budget and charter reform, including a proposal to expand the City Council from 15 to 25 seats, Rivers framed the budget as a tool for equity, calling for increased investment in underserved communities. He supported expanding 311 systems and strengthening nonemergency response services to improve public safety and reduce reliance on police.
McOsker agreed with expanding 311-style responses and described efforts to manage a major budget shortfall while preserving essential services. He said the council reduced layoffs and adjusted police hiring to maintain infrastructure and neighborhood services, while working toward a more balanced long-term budget.
On charter reform, McOsker said he is open to expanding the council, arguing that smaller districts could improve representation, though he did not commit to a specific number. He suggested funding the expansion by restructuring the existing council budget and limiting staffing growth to inflation.
Rivers supported reform in principle, emphasizing equitable representation and greater voter involvement in shaping district boundaries. He focused less on the number of seats and more on ensuring fair distribution of resources across all communities.
There were no Davids or Goliaths at this forum, but the contrast remained consistent: McOsker presented experience, institutional knowledge and incremental change, while Rivers offered a message centered on equity, structural reform and a new generation of leadership.
In one telling moment, Rivers referenced the last 22-year-old who joined LA’s city council, likening himself to the trailblazer. Councilman McOsker provided a quick history lesson, noting that the councilmember’s name was Roz Wyman, who was noted for bringing the Dodgers to Los Angeles. The late councilwoman died in 2022 and given McOsker’s depth in political connections, it’s likely he knew her personally.
Arts Open and First Thursday Redefine the Waterfront District
By Devonte Barr, Columnist
The last time I wrote about the Waterfront Arts District, I was asking something simple — whether it would ever gather enough attention to matter.
Now it will.
Arts Open San Pedro is set to return, opening studios and galleries across the city. First Thursday continues its steady expansion, drawing crowds into the streets. This month, the 11th, 12th, 25th, and 26th sit close enough together to feel less like separate dates and more like a continuous stretch of activity.
One weekend moves into the next. There is always somewhere to be, something opening, something beginning again, before the last thing has quite finished.
The change will be unmistakable. The streets will fill more quickly than they have before. The sense of occasion, once tied to a single evening, begins to repeat itself across multiple days. What was once intermittent starts to feel constant.
There is a certain excitement in that. For years, the concern was whether the district could draw attention at all. Now it can. But the shift introduces another question, quieter and harder to answer: what happens when these events begin to overlap in experience, if not in name?
Inside the galleries, the work will be waiting. People will move through in steady currents — pausing, looking, continuing. It is the weight of abundance itself that carries them forward. There is simply too much to take in at once. Too many rooms, too many walls, too many small invitations competing for the same limited attention.
Outside, the rhythm changes. The streets fill, the energy builds, vendors and music and conversation spill outward. The distinction between an art walk and something closer to a festival begins to blur—not because either has changed on its own, but because of how closely they now arrive.
Each of these things has its place. Arts Open invites a slower kind of engagement, drawing people into studios and conversation. First Thursday pushes outward, turning the district into a shared public space. But when they are scheduled within days of one another, the experience shifts. The pace quickens. The space between moments disappears.
None of this is accidental. It reflects a district that has worked to be seen and now is. But success brings its own pressure. Without spacing, even attention begins to thin.
The schedule will move quickly. It already is. What remains afterward will matter more than the crowds themselves — whether the work was truly encountered or simply passed through.
Because when events begin to stack, it becomes harder for any one moment to linger.
A few weeks earlier, my partner and I were walking through downtown when we passed Solo. I pointed through the window — Peter Scherrer was inside, the same person I had mentioned days before, the one who had complimented my shoes at a meeting.
The opening had already ended. The room was empty, still holding the faint trace of wine and conversation. We stepped in anyway. He looked up, recognized me, and let us take a look.
There was no pace to it. No crowd, no movement pulling you along. Just the work on the walls and the space around it. It didn’t take long — the room isn’t the Getty — but that wasn’t the point.
You could stop. You could look. And for a few minutes, that was enough.
After we left, I found myself looking up the artist, Moncho, following the work a little further than I might have otherwise. There was time for that. The show is still up at Solo, and I know I can go back, stand with it again, see something I missed the first time.
That kind of return — the ability to leave and come back — is harder to hold onto when Arts Open, First Thursday, and the rest of the month arrive all at once.
In America, with Donald Trump’s double-barreled war on science and the environment, the future of saving the planet from the worst ravages of climate catastrophe can seem bleak. From day one a major objective of his administration has been rolling back advancements in clean energy and efficiency made under Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
But from a broader perspective, Trump’s efforts may prove futile — renewable energy is just too cheap — and the possibilities for reaching a carbon-neutral world economy by 2050 are more abundant than commonly realized. In fact, there are nearly 7 trillion ways to do so, as described in a paper published in the journal Science in March. The purpose of the paper was to help people have more say in how we get there, while making the choices clearer.
“There are lots of very complicated models to produce lots of scenarios but none of them take into account people’s preferences for different decarbonization pathways, and so that, in a nutshell, is what we are trying to address,” lead author Nathan Johnson told Random Lengths.
Instead of the standard way scientists and policy-makers think about the problem, using complicated models, the paper updates a decades-old alternative approach focused on specific kinds of activity, called “wedges,” that can reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 by about 4%. Examples include generating 6.6% of global electricity from wind or solar power, reducing tropical forest loss by 40% compared with historical rates, using electric vehicles for 17% of global passenger land transport, reducing meat consumption by 30% globally, or doubling building insulation to significantly reduce heat loss. All these very different examples have similar impacts.
“An integrated assessment model [the standard approach] is an enormous cost optimization model. It takes in thousands, if not millions, of assumptions about how the world will change in the future and tries to reduce emissions at the lowest possible cost,” Johnson explained. “So it optimizes based on a single objective function, and that is minimizing cost. The wedges prescribed no objective function. No means of optimizing. Rather, they ask humans to optimize. They ask humans what they prefer of all these possible solutions.”
The paper identifies 36 examples that can produce at least one wedge, while some can produce as many as just over four. Just 20 wedges are needed to stabilize the climate by 2050. As a result there are almost 7 trillion different possible ways to achieve the desired result.
Global decarbonization can be divided into climate wedges, with 36 strategies able to deliver at least one wedge. A wedge saves 2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions per year by 2050. Deploying 20 wedges reduces global emissions by ~80% over 30 years, consistent with the Paris Agreement goal. Shaded wedges (left) show the median share of emissions reductions across integrated assessment model pathways, colored according to economic sectors.
The reason for this approach is straightforward.
“What we should be striving for are decarbonization pathways that are most societally acceptable, and not necessarily least cost, because the two are not the same thing,” Johnson said. “If cost were king, everyone would drive small super-efficient vehicles that are cheap to buy and cheap to run, but they don’t,” he pointed out. “They find value and a premium on having a larger, more comfortable vehicle.”
And it’s not just cars. “Anytime somebody goes into a shop that makes a decision, that’s based on many things other than just cost and I guess we can apply the exact same to climate change mitigation.”
In the extreme, things that may make sense long-term, using cost as the sole guide, don’t always make real-world sense.
“One product of integrated assessment models, for example, in older generation scenarios, was that they produced scenarios with lots of technologies like carbon capture storage, bioenergy capture and storage, which reduced costs in the far future more than other technologies,” Johnson said. “But unfortunately those technologies have some pretty important ramifications, in the case of bio-energy storage, for the natural world.”
The wedge approach was first introduced in a 2004 paper, but it’s not well-known outside academia. “I first heard of the wedges framework when my co-author, Iain Staffell, introduced us to it in a masters lecture some 8 or so years ago,” Johnson recalled. “It’s been used in classrooms and schools and universities to educate people about climate change mitigation.”
The original framework identified 15 wedges, with seven needed to achieve net zero. The more refined modernized version that Johnson developed has 36 wedge strategies that fall into five broad sectors: electricity (eight), land use (12), transport (seven), buildings (three), and industry (six). Since some strategies can produce multiple wedges, the numbers possible are larger than indicated, but all possible wedges can’t be possible at once because of physical limitations and interaction effects. In part because such limitations are strongest within a sector, it makes sense to consider them distinctly for some purposes.
The wedge strategy presents individuals with an organized framework for choosing from a vast range of possibilities, and is supported by an online tool that allows users to construct their own preferred pathway. But it doesn’t address the next necessary step of collective decision-making. Yet it seems to suggest a next logical step. The 2019-20 French climate assembly was organized into working groups on five issues to produce concrete proposals: food, housing, employment, transportation and consumption. So it would seem straightforward to replace these with the five wedge sectors, and use the same process to arrive at a shared decision of what wedges to choose.
When asked, Johnson was enthusiastic. “I think that’s an absolutely fantastic idea,” he said. He was already working with graduate students speaking to experts to get their views on which set of wedges to choose. “Similarly, people are going out and talking to the public,” he said, with the goal of “trying to synthesize all of those different viewpoints,” which is conceptually a main goal of the climate assembly.
But formalizing the process, making it public and ensuring a representative sample of the public is involved can help further the larger goal of getting broad public support for the selection of wedges decided on. And it could lead to government action. Each working group could prioritize the wedges in its sector, and then the whole assembly could decide on the balance of wedges to be used from each sector.
For a better idea of how this could work, Random Lengths asked Johnson to summarize the constraints each working group would have to consider.
Wedges By Sector
In the electricity sector, “If there are a maximum of 50 wedges achievable in the power sector, but potentially 23 wedges that could be achieved by deploying all of the things to their max, well, we can’t deploy all of those things, we have to choose,” Johnson said. Running lectures three times a year with students construct their pathways, “people tend to favor renewables, but then you also have people that advocate for carbon capture and storage,” but a broader public might choose differently. It’s worth noting, however, that Texas leads the nation in windpower generation because of a citizen assembly process run all the way back in 1999.
The land sector has 12 strategies with 18 total wedges, and no de facto limit. “Land theoretically has enormous potential because you can continue sequestering carbon just by growing more trees or growing more grassland or restoring more peatland,” he said. The main constraints “are just the land availability.” For example, “The more forest you plant the less land you have available for growing food.” But there are wedges for just adding trees to tropical and temperate pastures and to tropical and temperate croplands. And just reducing food loss and waste can produce two wedges, while eating less meat compared to the global average can produce another three.
In the transportation sector, there are 7 strategies, with 11+ total wedges, and a practical limit of 6-10 wedges. “The constraint now is basically how many fossil fueled vehicles you have.” Johnson said. “You can’t get rid of more than all of the fuels that were projected to burn.” But here there are also clear indications of different priorities. In the developing world, people are moving more away from public transportation, while “In the developed world you see more people actually shifting towards public transport in some places, as it becomes more efficient and easier to use,” Johnson noted. “China’s a really good example, building thousands of kilometers of high-speed railway.”
In the buildings sector there are 3 strategies with 4 total wedges, but a practical maximum of 1-3 wedges. “The key constraint is how much fossil fuels we’re currently using in buildings,” Johnson said. Wedges can be gotten by installing heat pumps and clean cookstoves, as well as by reducing building heat transfer.
Finally, industry has six strategies with 12+ wedges total, and a de facto maximum of 11. The constraint on how much can be achieved “depends fundamentally on how efficient we are with material and energy uses, how much fossil fuels are being used in 2050.” Johnson said. Decarbonizing cement and steel production can produce one and two wedges respectively. Producing clean hydrogen can produce four wedges. Reducing oil and gas methane emissions can produce two wedges, while reducing refrigerant emissions can produce one.
Summing all these up, the total number of wedges possible total at least 51, more than double what’s needed. Despite current conditions — including Trump’s war on all things climate related — this suggests enormous cause for optimism. Building a consensus pathway to stabilize the climate by 2050 is clearly an achievable goal. The main barriers in practice seem to be economic and political — organized actors (primarily, but not solely the fossil fuel industry) with immediate benefits at odds with necessary change benefiting all of humanity. So overcoming that is a prime concern.
“You have to have a combination of bottom-up and top-down.” Johnson said. “You need strong climate policy, national, international climate policy pushing from the top down, but also you need consumer action pushing from the bottom up. I think the wedges show how effective both of those things can be,” he argued.
“It’s very difficult for an individual to go out and build a one or two megawatt wind turbine in their back garden. It’s something that has to be driven by energy and utility companies, guided by government policy,” he noted. “Conversely, you have really strong opportunities for individuals when it comes to dietary or other behavioral change, or when it’s a unit-level technology change, buying an electric vehicle or buying a heat pump.”
Wedges At The State Level
It’s a global problem, but the wedge approach can also be applied at the national level — as the example of France’s climate assembly suggests — or even at the state level here in California, where we have the fourth largest economy in the world. To do so requires a few adjustments, Johnson explained.
“Firstly, the size and scale of the wedge has to change,” he said, though how to do that — by what combination of population size and economy — could be subject to debate. Next, “The selection of strategies changes. Some strategies won’t be available in certain regions.” Nothing regarding the tropics applies in Canada, for example. There are, of course, indirect and spill-over effects. In the latest revision of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standards, for instance, impacts on tropical deforestation were among the issues raised by environmental justice advocates.
Next Johnson said, “You are fighting against different levels of what we would call baseline ambition, what’s already going to happen.” An extreme example is Britain. “They’re already targeting net zero emissions in 2050 and so a wedge framework is not redundant within that scope, it’s different,” Johnson said. It can serve to assess progress. “Do you like the way the government is decarbonizing or do you not?”
With all this in mind, there’s a lot to recommend the idea of convening a California Climate Assembly using the wedge framework to establish a comprehensive state climate policy that could then serve as a model for others to follow. California likes to think of itself as a leader in policy generally, and on environmental matters in particular. More than a century ago, we led the way in introducing the initiative process into American state politics. A state climate assembly would be a much-needed way of breathing new life into that leadership reputation, while taking on the most daunting challenge facing humanity in the 21st century.
Artemis II Completes Its Mission Amid Global Upheaval
On April 1, the Artemis II mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Center aboard NASA’s powerful Space Launch System, carrying the Orion spacecraft and its crew into the early morning sky. In just under eight minutes, Orion broke free of Earth’s atmosphere and entered space, soon settling into a high Earth orbit. There, the crew began carefully checking every critical system—life support, navigation, and communications—ensuring the spacecraft was ready for the journey ahead.
Meanwhile, a fool waging war on a fool’s errand at the American people’s expense in Iran referred to Medicare and Medicaid as scams, saying the federal government couldn’t take care of them, but had to focus solely on military spending. You’re excused if you felt like you woke up the victim of an April Fool’s prank as we enter Day 451 of our “Find Out” phase.
After breaking through Earth’s atmosphere, Orion coasted through the vast quiet of deep space. The crew carried out experiments, monitored onboard systems, and adapted to the rhythm of spaceflight, all while watching Earth shrink into the distance behind them.
By the fifth day, the Moon loomed ahead. Orion swept around its far side in a dramatic lunar flyby, passing just a few thousand miles above the surface. At its most distant point, the spacecraft reached more than 250,000 miles from Earth—the farthest humans had ever traveled. There would be no landing this time; the mission was designed as a test, a proving ground for future journeys.
On Earth, Iran rejected a U.S. temporary ceasefire proposal and instead pushed for a different long-term deal. Then the U.S. renewed threats to bomb Iranian infrastructure (bridges, power plants) if demands weren’t met.
On the tenth day, Orion plunged back into Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 25,000 miles per hour. The heat shield endured searing temperatures in a critical trial by fire. Moments later, parachutes deployed, slowing the capsule for a safe descent. It splashed down gently in the Pacific Ocean on April 10, concluding a journey of roughly 700,000 miles.
In just ten days, Artemis II had carried humans deep into space and back again—not to land on the Moon, but to ensure that when the next missions do, everything will be ready.
Meanwhile, the felon in the Oval Office and his regime, like villains in an episode of Pinky and the Brain, scheming and plotting their takeover of the world as they swindle Americans out of their money, clean air, clean water, and clean energy.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors April 14 approved a motion to support two new state legislative measures aimed at strengthening transparency, governance, and consumer protections for private mutual water companies serving communities like Altadena.
The motion directs the County to support Senate Bill 1417 (Pérez) and Senate Bill 1291 (Gonzalez), both of which seek to address gaps in oversight and public access within mutual water companies—private corporations that provide essential drinking water services but are not subject to the same governance and financial regulations as public water agencies.
In Altadena, where recovery from the Eaton Fire remains ongoing, water access and infrastructure stability are core to rebuilding efforts. Three mutual water companies serving the area have faced severe operational and financial challenges following the disaster, including infrastructure damage, revenue losses, and the need for significant capital improvements. These pressures have resulted in rate increases and recovery-related charges that directly impact residents—many of whom are still displaced or rebuilding.
Unlike public agencies, mutual water companies operate with limited regulatory oversight beyond water quality standards, and gaps in governance practices can restrict customer participation, especially for fire survivors navigating displacement and recovery.
The supported legislation would improve transparency by enhancing open meeting requirements, expanding access to company records, standardizing notice procedures for rate changes, and strengthening consumer protections. These reforms are intended to ensure that residents have clearer insight into decision-making processes and greater ability to engage in them.
