By CHARLES ANDREWS GREAT NEWS! Legendary jazz bassist STANLEY CLARKE is putting together the Santa Monica International Jazz Festival for May of this year, promising big names, master musicians, and he can deliver it. He […]

By CHARLES ANDREWS NOW, HOLD ON… Before you blow a fuse and frantically start looking for the phone number for The Mirror, and the Mayor, and the Pope, let me assure you I am trying […]

This year S.M.a.r,t, wrote about the Civic Auditorium, the Airport, City governance, Preservation, overdevelopment, and its impact, among many other topics listed below. We hope you enjoyed reading our 52 weekly articles, and if you […]

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 […]