A young, recently married woman named Norma Jeane Dougherty is shown in this 1944 photo from a San Fernando Valley aircraft factory. It ran in Yank magazine, and is reproduced in the current Blue Sky Metropolis show at the Huntington Library. Its subject later changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. Read the Full Story at [...]
This photo of a Rose Parade float from the 1930s celebrating Albert Einstein in flowers, trumpeting his “achievement” with blooms and angelic little girls, hangs in a hallway of the Courtyard by Marriott hotel in Old Pasadena. The physicist at the time was a frequent visitor to Caltech before he was snatched away by the [...]
This apparently half-joking warning sign is up on the window of a lab at the Oak Crest Institute of Science on Foothill Boulevard in East Pasadena, where President Marc Baum gave me a tour this week and about which I’ll write about in my Friday — perhaps my Sunday — column, considering how much great [...]
After we pulled the branches back from its tailgate, this was how our station wagon looked Thursday morning after the winds knocked several huge oak tree branches down on it it. Later, after hundreds of pounds of good firewood was removed from the front, the report is that there are only superficial scratches on what [...]
You know it’s Nov. 30 in Pasadena when you’re driving up Raymond Avenue and have a close encounter with The Odd Fellows & Rebakahs 59th Rose Parade entry “Shining Knights Still Exist.” The flakage: “showcases a lone Knight aboard his loyal steed in full gallop above the ancient 17th Century English Crest armed with a [...]
As Occupy Cal protesters wrangle with campus police and Alameda County sheriff’s deputies over the hallowed protest grounds of Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, I drove by Wednesday this art piece that had been catching my eye on Colorado Boulevard in the Playhouse District. It’s Susan Stilton’s new piece “Utitily” — posted on a utility [...]
On a recent Sunday afternoon in Pasadena the stars of a s’lon chez Sandra Tsing Loh were Vanity Fair Hot Type columnist, co-founder of Tin House and author of the new short-story collection “Blueprints for Building Better Girls” Elissa Schappell in conversation with Henry Alford, the Vanity Fair contributing editor, former Spy humorist, and author [...]
USC Annenberg J-school student Rosa Trieu is reporting on the recent spate of tragic deaths among novice hikers in Eaton Canyon, and says she heard from the staff at the Nature Center that I was the go-to guy on musing about how and why it happens. As in my theory, based on youthful experience — [...]
There are many reasons to get up to Stephen Nowlin’s “Worlds” show at Art Center’s Williamson Gallery, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, and Richard Selesnick and Nicholas Kahn’s wall-sized projection called “Liftoff, from the Apollo Prophecies,” a silent movie about landing on the moon and finding a new world of ineffable objects and creatures, including an [...]
Tuesday night we were in downtown Los Angeles anyway and so drove by the City Hall campground staked out by the young and hearty protesters of Occupy Wall Street, Los Angeles branch. This mask — don’t buyers really pay a royalty to “Vendetta”‘s producers, Fox? — was on the back of a fellow’s head, so [...]
