The Long Beach Playhouse, after many years of straight plays, has ventured into the world of musical comedy twice in the past six or so months. Their first comedy was a spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed production of Stephen Sondheim’sA Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.Now they have come back with that same author’s work, but very different from the first,Into the Woods, which opened to a sold-out house at the Playhouse last weekend. It continues there through July 29.
Summer Coffee Talk with Councilman Garcia Join Long Beach District 1 Councilman Robert Garcia for “Summer Coffee Talk,” a series of community meetings.
Summer Coffee Talk will provide residents and the general public an opportunity to ask questions and dialogue with Garcia as well as representatives of the police and city management.
In the wake of changes to federal immigration policies, Congresswoman Janice Hahn issued a warning to constituents.
The new immigration rules mean that young people who were brought to this country, through no choice of their own, who meet several key criteria will be allowed to remain in the country without fear of deportation and allowed to work.
As changes are implemented, some individuals may attempt to use this as an opportunity to take advantage of young people and their families.
The Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council District has selected 17 at large board members to serve the July 2012 to June 2014 term of office. The members, who will be seated July 10, are: Marcey Abrons, Linda Alexander, James Preston Allen, Frank B. Anderson, Pat Carroll, Sue Castillo, Harvey Contreras, Mark Contreras, April Jappert, Leslie Jones, Annette McDonald, Kali Meredith, Carrie Scoville, Andrew Silber, Ron Tanimura, Phillip Trigas and Allyson Vought.
The meeting will take place at the Port of Los Angeles High School, 250 W. 5th Street, San Pedro. Details:www.sanpedrocity.org
Sacramento — California’s Legislature voted, July 2, to pass the Homeowner Bill of Rights.
The California Foreclosure Reduction Act — Assembly Bill 278 and Senate Bill 900 — passed 53–25 in the Assembly and 24–13 in the Senate. The bill, introduced by Attorney General Kamala Harris and championed by homeowners and consumer advocates, awaits Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.
Several thousands of people — including union and civil rights activists —marched, June 30, through Chinatown in Los Angeles to protest Wal-Mart Stores’ plans to open a neighborhood grocery store.
Union activists say that Wal-Mart abuses the rights of its workers to unionize, pays low wages and provides inadequate health benefits.
By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor, with help from Assistant Editor, Zamná Ávila
Updated: The text was corrected to note that Joel Guzman will not be performing with Sarah Fox at the Accordion Festival.
On July 6, Grand Performances, a project of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs is putting on the San Pedro Squeeze: An Accordion Festival that aims to celebrate the many communities that call San Pedro home.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision finding the Democrats’ health-care reform law constitutional has been a source of confusion from the very beginning, when CNN and Fox News both mis-reported the decision as striking down the law. In fact, Chief Justice Roberts only said that he found the individual mandate (requiring people to buy health insurance) was not supported by the Commerce Clause of the Constitution—since people would be taxed for not engaging in commerce.
Adding one more twist to Roberts’already quirky, questionable opinion,Northwestern law professor Paul Campos, writing at Salon, argued that Roberts had only changed his mind at the last minute—citing textual evidence in the conservative dissent, including more than a dozen references to Ruth Bader Ginseberg’s opinion as a dissent—which it would have been if Roberts had sided with the conservative dissenters.
If this sounds to you like a state of pervasive confusion, you’re right. But it’s only the beginning. No one really knows what Roberts was doing or why, and whether or not his decision will have much impact on future cases. Some see his decision as refuting claims that he’s a partisan ideologue, others see it as a Machiavellian political move, designed precisely to seem non-ideological, while still advancing the conservative agenda—although opinions differ about how. “He made it a point to affirm the once-radical arguments that animated the conservative challenge to the legislation. But then he upheld it on a technicality,”Ezra Klein wrotefor the Washington Post. “It’s as if an umpire tweaked the rules to favor his team in the future, but obscured the changes by calling a particular contest for the other side,” Klein concludes,quotingconservative Red State blogger Erick Erickson, “John Roberts is playing at a different game…. We’re on poker. He’s on chess.”
Yet, it’s not really clear if Roberts’ ruling will have much impact, given the unique circumstances of the health care law. Others think Roberts is more concerned with other issues. “Next year, Roberts is almost certain to lead majorities to strike down the Voting Rights Act, which will help southern states suppress the votes of poor, black, and Latino voters; and to gut what remains of affirmative action in higher education, among other things,” Gordon pointed out. These are things only the Court can safely do politically, while a Romney presidency could not only undo health care reform, but also further pack the court with extreme conservatives. This would be an even more Machiavellian than Klein imagines. While Roberts’ limitation of the Commerce Clause was itself limited, the same isn’t true of the conservative dissent. Add just one more extreme conservative, and their arguments could overturn the entire New Deal political world—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal labor and environmental law, etc., etc., etc., again, something that only the Court could safely do politically.
Many people don’t buy this, of course. On the one hand areconservative activists, media figures and politicians, outragedby what they see as a betrayal by Roberts, whom they now regard as a traitor to the conservative cause. On the other hand are those praising Roberts for his statesmanship, and deriding those who have seen him as a conservative ideologue. This latter group seems blissfully unaware that they are helping to make the case for Roberts’ Machiavellian genius.
Why is everyone confused on so many different levels? Why is there so much chaos and uncertainty? No doubt there multiple different reasons, but one of them certainly is that the conservative legal challenge—focused primarily on the individual mandate—was widely seen as frivolous and ridiculous a mere three years ago, a viewpoint that’s still widespread within the constitutional law community today. As Yale law professorJack Balkin explainedat the Atlantic website well before the decision came down, “[I]n three years’ time, the argument that the mandate violates the Constitution has moved from crazy to plausible,” a shift he also characterized as going from “off-the-wall” to “on-the-wall”, which he then explained: “Off-the-wall arguments are those most well-trained lawyers think are clearly wrong; on-the-wall arguments, by contrast, are arguments that are at least plausible, and therefore may become law.”
Such a change isn’t unheard of, Balkin explained. Arguments against racial and gender discrimination are classic examples that went from being “off-the-wall” to “on-the-wall”—but that took generations, not just three years.
So how did such a rapid shift take place? It all turns on “judgments by legal professionals about what is reasonable” which in turn “depends in part on what they think that other people think”. In a highly polarized political climate this only had to happen within the conservative Republican universe, a point that’s only implicit in Balkin’s article. But the actors he cites in the process are conservative intellectuals (“including lawyers and legal academics”), social movements (“the Tea Party”), and establishment politicians/the party system (“Thus, the single most important factor in making the mandate opponents’ constitutional claims plausible was strong support by the Republican Party, including its politicians, its affiliated lawyers, and its affiliated media.”)
The individual mandate was originally a conservative Republican idea. It originated with the Heritage Foundation. It was the Republican’s counter-plan opposed to Clinton’s employer mandate (employers had to provide health insurance). And, of course, it formed the foundation of RomneyCare in Massachusetts. But as Democrats dropped their own more ambitious plans (including Medicare For All and the public option) and moved to embrace the Republican individual mandate, Republicans fled from it in horror, erasing all memories of their past.
No wonder there’s been so much confusion on so many different levels. If you’re not confused, you’re just not paying attention.
“Gourmet” food trucks and communities with budding art walks have increasingly developed a relationship that’s akin to a newly-wedded marriage.
Everything is golden at first and that is so because each bring gifts to the table that complement the other and allows both to thrive.
Food trucks are their own marketing machines, each drawing hundreds of their fans to wherever they may be with a single tweet or a single post on their blog. Art walks provide the perfect festival-like venue that complements and maximizes a food trucks drawing power.
Aside from the expiration date of the delirium of USS Iowa fever, which has its grand opening on the July 7, there’s an equally important date fast approaching: The grand opening of Crafted — potentially the largest and most significant showcase for handmade crafts in Southern California.
This isn’t a venue for cheap knockoffs and mass produced trinkets with “Made in (fill in the blank)” stickers slapped on them. We’re talking about handmade crafted objects made in the United States that are utilitarian in nature while embodying the crafter’s inspiration. These kinds of crafted works range from wearable art to furniture, and from soap to desserts made from liquor.
In the past, the Artwalk has flirted with the idea of incorporating a crafted dimension to the First Thursday event, only to watch it devolve into something closer to a swap-meet. In downtown San Pedro, where division is as common as liver spots when it comes to the direction of the arts district, there is uncommon unity in the belief that hordes of imported trinket peddlers do not fit the vision of a destination town.
Once fully established, Crafted is expected to serve as an incubator space for up to 500 micro-businesses and drawing up to 500,000 visitors a year. This is project number two for the three-person development team, Wayne Blank, Howard Robinson and Alison Zeno in Santa Monica. Since opening in 1997, Bergamot Station has become a destination point in the art world for both collectors and artists, drawing 600,000 visitors annually.
Zeno has been the face of Crafted from the start, pitching the idea to the Port as well as to the community. With gravitas garnered from Bergamot Station’s success, she has been able to inspire a degree of confidence and comfort in the Harbor Area.
Random Lengths News caught up with Zeno at FinDings Art Center during First Thursday’s Artwalk this month and picked her brain about the vision of Crafted. She had just fought through the 6 o’clock traffic after an already long day to pass out handbills for the Crafted grand opening, and then touch bases with various community members amidst the throngs of people there for the Artwalk.
So far, there are more than 70 crafted business listed as sponsors that will have booths at the super marketplace for crafts. By opening day, Zeno expects to have close to 100 crafted artists locked in and ready go.
Though Crafted is a juried exhibition space, there’s enough flexibility to allow for the diversity that is exhibited by its crafted sponsors, like K.C. Sears who describes her boutique, Make Shop Live, as eco-chic meets funky vintage– a community that supports a lifestyle that embraces process over product, by making wearable and furnishing goods from “up-cycled” materials.
Lindsay Zuelich’s Wood on the Brain, a Crafted vendor that crafts wearable and home décor objects from wood.
Then there are the food related vendors such as the Cake Bar, which bakes any imaginable pastry with its main ingredient being liquor or Hepp’s Salt Co., which has many variety of cooking salts.
Zeno comes from a design background as does everyone on her team and has been in the arts industry for more than 30 years. She explained that her team avoided the traditional jury process of selection, noting bias amongst different disciplines of crafts.
“Everybody has such a distinct point view of their own and then applying that to their peers,” Zeno explained. “And, what we wanted to do was stress a broad definition of craft… So I couldn’t get a committee of people who represented everything from skateboard art to fiber art.
“At the end of the day, what we’re trying to create here is not a juried art affair with prizes, we’re trying to bring together a quality group of visual artists who have an opportunity to make a living making the things they love and they have to have a consumer appeal to do it.”
The concept of raising in importance process to the level of substance is a common refrain amongst Zeno and the craft community. One of the first crafting organizations to sign on to Crafted was FinDings Art Center which sells handcrafted stationery goods, clothing, aprons and handbags made from recycled or reused materials. The makers of these goods are the women who are a part of FinDing’s family literacy program.
“We applied for Crafted and of course they fell in love with our concept and they offered us first contract,” Annette Cicketic, founder of FinDings said. “So we are the first contracted in Crafted to have a booth. And they loved the concept of women and the nonprofit, and community involvement.”
Cicketic explained that the art center really began with the desire to promote family literacy and the recognition early on that with a holistic approach, family literacy could be the catalyst that mitigate some of the more destructive forces affecting low-income immigrant families. For Cicketic, that meant carving out a place for where mothers can have a bit of peace and quiet.
“The result was something like a quilting bee sort of an environment,” Cicketic explained. This space turned out to be a classroom in 223 Street Elementary School in Harbor Gateway, she noticed that most of the women had hidden talents that they took for granted like embroidery, knitting, crocheting and sewing.
Before long, immigrant women from around the world were sharing their native knowledge of embroidery, sewing, crocheting while teaching each other English with assistance from Cicketic, who is a retired Los Angeles Unified School District teacher.
This is what Zeno encountered when she met Cicketic and was introduced to finDings:
“I came down here and talked to Annette and learned about her passion for family literacy, and helping people finding gainful employment and it resonated with the work that we’re doing,” Zeno explained. “You can see it in the quality of work that they’re doing. It’s an excellent example of what we keep saying, ‘It’s about high quality, not high end.’
“It doesn’t matter that some pieces sell for $2.50. It’s not about $1,000 sweatshirts. Everybody should have the opportunity to appreciate their own art. You should be able touch art everyday. It should be a piece of your house. You should be able to find out the story of the object you bought. And I can’t think of a better story than this one [of finDings].”
Zeno, reflecting on potential and the future of said of the artisans leasing with Crafted, “Here’s a group that can help each other learn from experience rather than failure. But at the same time everybody takes responsibility for their business.”
In Zeno’s way of looking at things, no one is coming to the table saying, “I don’t know how to do this, can someone do it for me.”
To Zeno, Crafted is a forum where artisans come to the table and say, “I don’t know how to do this, can somebody give me the benefit of their experience so that I can go sell this.”
Zeno–like all those connected to Crafted–believes passionately that an one should be able to make a living from making things they love, despite a rough economy. She noted historically that people turn to crafting in such economic times to supplement their incomes.
“They’re finding that they don’t have to fit into someone else’s mold,” Zeno explained. “They can have an entrepreneurial spirit and there’s a venue that’s now available to them that is somewhere between their dining room table and a retail storefront on Main Street.
“We hope to grow people up and out of Crafted. The rents are affordable enough to take that leap of faith.”
Though it’s a cliché, Crafted was born out of the idea that if you build it, they will come. There’s a lot of things that will come out of this, Zeno explained. With the presence of gourmet food trucks and live music, Crafted will take on a festival atmosphere without turning into a carnival, allowing it to become a sophisticated event destination.
Zeno stresses that there are also other business opportunities for the folks who plant themselves at Crafted, noting that as they grow, they could grow the wholesale side of their business or form partnerships with people doing like-minded things.
“It shouldn’t be viewed through the, ‘I make, I sell.’ lens,” Zeno explained. “It should be, ‘I make, I sell, I expose myself to the world and see what happens.’”
And that’s the view many observers with hopeful aspirations for the Waterfront are taking.
It opened June 29. Crafted will be open from Fridays through Sundays with all sorts of crafts and fun to get into. Visit Crafted’s website for more info.
In the wake of changes to federal immigration policies, Congresswoman Janice Hahn issued a warning to constituents.
