By CHARLES ANDREWS BIG CONGRATULATIONS! Especially to Artistic Directors Mike Myers and John Ruskin (Founder), though many were lending a hand. What a slog! Three years? Countless speed bumps from the City. And a cool […]

By CHARLES ANDREWS YOU MAY SAY I’M A DREAMER But doggone it, I’m not the only one. Not even close. Take any peace-on-earth issue you want, and we have the overwhelming, avalanche-burying, white-out arctic blizzard, […]

By CHARLES ANDREWS I DON’T THINK MARK TWAIN Done it this way. Strictly following his outlines? No. But not stream of consciousness Kerouac either. Every writer employs a different, personal method, and it also depends […]

In Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” an explorer describes places shaped entirely by memory—cities that exist as much in recollection as reality. Santa Monica is becoming Calvino’s inverse: a visible city that cannot remember itself, when […]

By CHARLES ANDREWS R.I.P. ROB REINER, JUBILANT SYKES What a loss to the art of storytelling, besides the human loss. No one, except the President of the United States, had anything less than great admiration […]

Every Tuesday, our city council convenes in chambers that embody civic memory—mid-century architecture from when cities believed in public purpose. There, dedicated public servants wrestle with impossible choices between state mandates and community character. Citizens […]

Last Friday (December 5), we lost one of our own: Frank Gehr,y who passed away at age 96, is probably the most recognized American architect. His storied local, national, and international career started and blossomed […]

By CHARLES ANDREWS R.I.P. JIMMY CLIFF I landed in L.A. from New Mexico, 11-year-old son Chris in tow, August 1980, a rocknroll-blues-country-classical-jazz full blown reggae fan (short for “fanatic”), eager to launch my career as […]

Twenty years ago, at dismissal time, school intersections bustled with parents and children, the afternoon ritual of family life. Last June of this year, during the many new mixed-use projects along Lincoln Blvd., I’d expect […]

By CHARLES ANDREWS “GIVING TUESDAY”? Just another day invented to separate us from our money? Probably. But if you were involved with a group trying to improve the world, wouldn’t you jump all over it? […]