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ESAW FEATURE ARTIST by Rachel Reeves Interviewing Damian Fulton is like studying one of his paintings: the first thing you notice is there’s a lot going on. He talks fluidly, articulately, and fast, pinballing ideas that span decades and genres and Southern California subcultures. Sometimes he’ll stop himself mid-sentence. “Wait,” he’ll say, “you’re not even […]
by Rachel Reeves Jessica Patay can easily return, in her mind, to the night in the summer of 2003 when a doctor called with her newborn son Ryan’s diagnosis. She and her husband, Chris, had returned to their Rancho Palos Verdes home a week earlier. They’d been in the hospital for a month, as doctors […]
by Rachel Reeves In 1939, when Peter Serrato moved to Redondo Beach from Boyle Heights, plots of land were $50, the drugstore was closed on Sundays, and Mexican-Americans like him had to sit in the corner of the classroom if teachers overheard Spanish words. A truck selling vegetables came through neighborhoods, announcing itself with the […]
ESAW features a rare exhibit of work by a legendary aerospace artist. It was made possible by a passionate local collector by Rachel Reeves To spend time in Carol Low’s El Segundo home is to feel, by proxy, the exhilaration of the Space Age. You feel it in her energy, in the rapid pace of […]
The festival as a community reunion by Rachel Reeves For those of us who grew up in Redondo Beach, BeachLife Festival still feels surreal, even after its fourth cycle. It’s still weird and wonderful to watch tens of thousands of people stream into what we knew as Seaside Lagoon, the site of our elementary-school field […]
by Rachel Reeves When Brandi Carlile was in high school, she’d never met an openly gay person. Everyone in her town of Ravensdale, Washington, which at the last Census had 555 people and 257 households, went to church. Carlile came out when she was 14, inspired by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres’s public coming out. […]
by Rachel Reeves In the summer of 2018, at Gracias Madre, a vegan Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood, she started to see him differently. Scarlett Curtis sat across the table from her longtime friend, Jason Cervantes, who was then the director of food and beverage at Hotel Maya in Long Beach. She met him in […]
by Rachel Reeves Five-year-old Devan Velez was excited for weeks about seeing Sheryl Crow at the BeachLife Festival. In preparation, she watched the documentary, Sheryl, which premiered in early May. Devan selected her outfit ahead of time: jeans, a pink T-shirt featuring a zebra wearing sunglasses, and a cowgirl hat. Velez loves music. She likes […]
by Rachel Reeves Programs include Music Mobile van, recorders for schools. The year the Peninsula Committee Los Angeles Philharmonic was established, children were dying of polio and Mr. Potato Head was America’s hottest new toy. In the seven decades since, the organization has become one of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s most generous donors. The Peninsula […]
by Rachel Reeves Seven months before the coronavirus became a global pandemic, Erika Fleury learned that 42 chimpanzees in the Angeles National Forest were losing their home. In her field, the news heralded a disaster. “This is an emergency,” she thought. Fleury, who moved to Rancho Palos Verdes from Redondo Beach last year, is […]
by Rachel Reeves For Brett Dennen, who’s been touring for 15 years, the coronavirus pandemic was bittersweet. Like anyone else who performs live music for a living, he had to cancel a lot of paying gigs. But he also had time to write songs and paint pictures and hang out with his toddler, Van, in […]
by Rachel Reeves The Redondo Beach City Council voted Tuesday night to keep the pallet homes, which currently houses formerly unhoused people, where it is on Kingsdale Ave. in North Redondo Beach. The pallet homes opened in December of last year thanks to pandemic-related relief funding. The plan proposed last October was for them to […]