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John Waters turns 80, English at the Wallis, a punk panel for the ages and more of the best things to do this week.by Orange County’s own Sanaz Toossi is clever, poignant and utterly original. The play is set in a TOEFL class in Tehran in 2008 where a sparse classroom serves as the setting for an intergenerational, cross-cultural conversation.
Punk fans won’t want to miss this free panel with USC’s Visions and Voices, featuring punk legend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, queercore icon Bruce LaBruce, filmmaker and AfroPunk Festival founder James Spooner and Limp Wrist singer Martin Sorrondeguy. Your most chill lunch hour is back. Grab your sandwich and head to Colburn Plaza for free weekly classical concerts with the musicians of the Colburn School. Chef Sean Sherman was a pioneer in bringing indigenous cooking into mainstream fine dining with his groundbreaking Minneapolis restaurant Owamni. He’s in town for a conversation moderated by L.A. Taco’s Javier Cabral alongside Maydan founder and chef Rose Previte, chef Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez, and activistare both about to undergo extensive renovations ahead of the 2028 Olympics. So it’s a good thing we have all these new spaces opening, like LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and Dataland, to keep us occupied. Kudos on the smart timing, arts administration friends! Whether you’re recovering from Coachella or heading out for weekend two or neither, there’s plenty of music in town this week.recommends outlaw country legend Dale Watson at Zebulon on Monday, while on Tuesday, Lykke Li is at the Fonda and Herbie Hancock plays Disney Hall. On Wednesday, local heroes Redd Kross bring their"peach kelli pop" to the Lodge Room, Swae Lee plays the Novo, Wet Leg catches these fists at the Fox Theater Pomona, coldwave duo Lebanon Hanover plays their first of two nights at the Vermont Hollywood and Grammy-winning jazz diva Samara Joy plays the first of two nights at Blue Note.by Orange County’s own Sanaz Toossi, is clever, poignant and utterly original. The play is set in a TOEFL class in Tehran in 2008, where a sparse classroom serves as the setting for an intergenerational, cross-cultural conversation that explores the feelings of being an outsider while considering and reconsidering what is home. The show is almost entirely in English; in a genius move, the actors seamlessly use their fluent, comfortable American accents when “speaking” Farsi and more stilted English when in the classroom. Knud Adams directs the production, which comes to the Wallis straight from Broadway and stars most of the original cast.NYC sometimes gets all the credit for being the home of punk rock, but L.A.’s punk history is loud and clear. Fans won’t want to miss this free panel with USC’s Visions and Voices, featuring punk legend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, queercore icon Bruce LaBruce, filmmaker and AfroPunk Festival founder James Spooner and Limp Wrist singer Martin Sorrondeguy.I know I’m a little biased, having lived in Venice all these years, but Kenny Harris’ paintings make my little neighborhood feel dreamy, historic and real all at once. This solo show at Billis/Williams Gallery in Culver City is just a stone's throw from the real-life beach and canal scenes that Harris so lovingly depicts.Weird and wonderful John Waters turns 80 this year, and if you caught the Academy Museum exhibit on his work, you won’t want to miss this live birthday extravaganzahonoring Baltimore’s most out-there filmmaker. Waters himself will be there to reflect on eight decades of “gleeful provocation” and share the stories and inspirations that shaped his career., looks at the world of the Ifugao people in northern Luzon. It just opened this past weekend, and along with it comes a series of talks delving into Filipino culture and history. This one features archaeologist Stephen Acabado and community leader Marlon Martin exploring how rice terraces flourished as acts of resistance to colonial intrusion, highlighting agriculture, ritual exchange and environmental design as adaptive systems that continue to shape contemporary climate discourse.Your most chill lunch hour is back. Grab your sandwich and head to Colburn Plaza for free weekly classical concerts with the musicians of the Colburn School, supported by the Downtown L.A. Alliance.Chef Sean Sherman was a pioneer in bringing indigenous cooking into mainstream fine dining with his groundbreaking Minneapolis restaurant Owamni. Lucky for us, he’s in town for a conversation moderated by L.A. Taco’s Javier Cabral, alongside Maydan founder and chef Rose Previte, chef Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez and activist, and the “intersection of culture, identity, and politics through the lens of food.” A dinner at Maydan will follow, where Previte, Martinez and Sherman will host a one-night-only communal “Tawle” feast, featuring Maydan’s signature Middle Eastern dishes alongside special, fire-based creations from Sherman and Martinez, celebrating Indigenous American and Zapotec cuisines.A round stingray, the most common type of stingray living along our shores — and the most likely to sting you.Warming ocean waters are helping stingrays expand their range. That may sound good for stingrays, but it's a bad sign for the ocean's health.I recently had the excruciatingly painful experience of being stung by a stingray while swimming at Bolsa Chica State Beach. It was my second time being stung, so as soon as I felt the familiar stab in the bottom of my foot, dread arose. But at least this time I knew what to do.Ironically, I’d just been telling her about the “stingray shuffle” — the strategy to shuffle your feet as you enter the water and therefore scare any nearby stingrays away. I swam as fast as I could to the sand and sprinted to the nearest lifeguard tower. Already, the pain was sharp in my foot, and I could feel it pulsing up my leg, growing more intense. I took deep breaths and tried to keep my face stoic. Now, you lucky folks who have never been stung may be smirking at my desperation. But if you know, you know — a stingray’s sting is no joke. A kind lifeguard wrapped my bleeding foot in gauze and drove me in his pickup truck to the main tower. When we got there, I hopped into a painfully comedic scene: About 10 other sorry souls sat in a semicircle of chairs, each with one foot in a bucket full of scalding water.You’re most likely to get stung by a stingray during low tide on warm water days when the surf is relatively calm — basically when it’s an ideal beach day. The stingray shuffle — or shuffling your feet in the sand as you enter the water — is your best defense, according to Lowe. Also, check for signage warning of high stingray activity, usually posted at the entrance to beaches. We passed around a hose of hot water, taking turns refilling our buckets as soon as the water started to cool. You have to keep the temperature as hot as you can tolerate, to neutralize the venom and stave off the pain. There were so many stings that day that lifeguards handed out shiny bags of hot water when they ran out of buckets. As I waited for my pain to fully subside — it can take more than an hour of soaking in hot water — I watched as a steady stream of people came and went for their stings. A young teen, bawling, was consoled by her frantic dad. Others sat silently, grimacing occasionally as their friends or family patted their backs. When the hose with hot water was hogged by a single party too long, the rest of us grew anxious and a little desperate. Still, everyone treated each other kindly — after all, misery loves company. As I sat with my own foot in a bucket of hot water, I had time to wonder: Why are so many people getting stung? And has it always been this way? We have four types of stingrays in Southern California waters — bat rays, diamond rays, butterfly rays and round stingrays. “The round stingray is the one that most people come to know and love at their local beaches, because they're the most abundant, and they're the ones that people accidentally step on the most and get stung by,” said Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach. Round stingrays come into contact with our feet because they forage on the sea floor for clams, crabs, isopods and small fish. They hide from predators under the sand while they digest. Understandably, they strongly dislike being stepped on, especially with a full belly. I don’t blame ‘em. Round stingrays range from Panama up to Santa Barbara County — the northern tip of their range. Over the last hundred years, their populations have been growing steadily, largely because we killed off many of their predators, such as sea lions, white sharks and sea bass, last century. Now, thanks to conservation efforts and improved fishing practices, many of those predators are making a comeback. “As a result of those predator populations coming back, we expect the round stingray population to get tamped down a little bit,” Lowe said. Stingrays or “white shark pancakes,” Lowe joked, are “the first food we think the juvenile white sharks that hang out off our beaches really take advantage of.”At the same time, coastal development over the last 100 years has destroyed much of the habitat that stingrays prefer, such as lagoons and estuaries, which have calm, shallow warm water and sediment to hide under. Now, the habitat available to them is primarily coastal beaches.beachgoers of an uptick in stingray activity. Down the road in Seal Beach, a popular surf spot has long been known as “Ray Bay.” Here in Southern California, estimates are that lifeguards treat more than 10,000 stings a year, Lowe said. That’s likely a very conservative estimate, he added, since many people don’t seek treatment.Climate change is increasingly playing a role in stingray life too, Lowe said, by warming waters that historically have been too cool for them to survive. Over the last 200 years, human society has pumped an unprecedented level of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is heating up the planet. The ocean has been our main buffer to the worst effects of that pollution — it absorbs about 30% of all carbon dioxide emissions and about 90% of the excess heat generated by those emissions, The marine heat wave known as "the blob" at its near maximum areal extent in September 2014, left. At right, the ongoing marine heat wave at its near maximum areal extent in September 2025.“The pattern at which these marine heat waves are increasing is clearly an indicator of climate change,” Lowe said. “So these are all real true harbingers of climate change, and we're seeing the animals that live in these environments respond to these conditions.” Human-caused climate change is making marine heat waves more extreme and frequent. his graph depicts the increasing surface area of marine heat wave anomalies in the California Current region from 1982 to the present.“As the ocean continues to warm, that range gets pushed farther north, which means the habitat in Southern California just becomes even more pleasant to the round stingray,” Lowe said. Over the last 50 years, round stingrays have had periodic pulses as far north as Monterey. And with an El Niño weather pattern likely year this year, ”we might start seeing animals even farther north,” Lowe said.Last year’s extreme marine heat waveA frontrunner for California governor, Swalwell suspended his campaign Sunday after a series of women accused him of sexual assault and harassment.Eric Swalwell, who had emerged as one of the top candidates in California’s crowded governor’s race, suspended his campaign this evening after a series of women accused him of sexual assault and harassment, including allegations that he raped a former staff member twice.In the short statement posted on social media, he did not address whether he will remain in Congress. “To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past,”. “I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made — but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.Swalwell, a married father of three, faced swift calls to resign from his House seat and leave the governor’s race after the allegations werefrom the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York and possibly Alameda County — where the 2024 and 2019 alleged assaults each took place.Eric Swalwell, who had emerged as one of the top candidates in California’s crowded governor’s race, suspended his campaign Sunday evening after a series of women accused him of sexual assault and harassment, including allegations that he raped a former staff member twice. In the short statement posted on social media, he did not address whether he will remain in Congress.from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York and possibly Alameda County — where the 2024 and 2019 alleged assaults each took place. “To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past,”. “I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made — but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s. The reports by the Chronicle and CNN included allegations by an unnamed former staffer who said Swalwell sexually assaulted her when she was too intoxicated to consent in both 2019 and 2024. CNN also reported allegations of misconduct from three other women involved in Democratic politics, including one who said Swalwell kissed her without consent and two others who said that he sent them unsolicited nude photos and explicit text messages. Swalwell flatly denied the allegations of sexual assault in a video he posted on social media Friday, and vowed to fight them. But he seemed to acknowledge at least some infidelity, adding that any mistakes are between him and his wife, and apologizing for “putting her in this position.”. Top House Democrats, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, called for his exit, and he lost 21 endorsements from fellow Democratic members of Congress. Over the weekend, senior staffers from both his congressional office and campaign resigned, and major labor groups like the California Teachers Association and SEIU California pulled their support. His campaign website no longer contains links to donate or a page listing his donations. In a joint statement Sunday, 55 of Swalwell’s former staff members called the allegations “serious” and “credible” and urged law enforcement to investigate. They also called on Swalwell to resign from Congress and withdraw from the governor’s race, and apologized to their former colleague “for not knowing what you were enduring.”. “What has been described is not a political attack. It is the account of a young woman who trusted her employer, who was targeted and exploited by someone in a position of power over her, and who has carried this burden for years.” Swalwell, 45, had a meteoric rise in politics — and a fall that came just as fast. A former Alameda County prosecutor,He rose to national prominence during President Donald Trump’s first term when he was tapped to help investigate Trump during both impeachment inquiries. The roles — as an impeachment manager during the first impeachment, and again as a House manager during the second — led to frequent appearances on cable news and made him one of the Democratic Party’s most high-profile Trump critics., joining a crowded field to replace the termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom. Other leading Democrats include former Rep. Katie Porter and billionaire Tom Steyer, though the race had remained wide-open and a clear Democratic favorite had yet to emerge. Over the past five months, Swalwell quickly amassed endorsements from most of his congressional colleagues, state lawmakers and some of California’s largest labor unions. They all abandoned him after the allegations were made public.If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.California Republicans embrace Trump at their convention this weekend while candidates in competitive races keep him at arm’s length to win over voters.California Republicans are optimistic a handful of GOP legislators can hold onto their seats — but only if they keep President Donald Trump at a distance.: GOP candidates have been careful not to align themselves too closely with the president, whose affiliation can activate California Democrats to vote against anything from a candidate to a ballot measure.The Democratic candidate, Clarissa Cervantes, the sister of the outgoing assemblymember, was favored and had spent more than 10 times as much as her.“I’m accessible to my constituents and they like that,” Castillo said at an evening reception outside a San Diego resort. Republican strategists, legislators and advocates are meeting for the party’s annual convention in downtown San Diego, one month before mail ballots for the June primary appear in mailboxes. California Republicans are optimistic Castillo and a handful of other GOP legislators can hold onto their seats — but only if they keep President Donald Trump at a distance. It’s emblematic of a tension between leaders who are focused on strategic campaigning and party conservatives’ unabashed embrace of Trump. GOP candidates have been careful not to align themselves too closely with the president, whose affiliation can activate California Democrats to vote against anything from a candidate to a ballot measure. Inflation and America’s entry into another war have cratered the president’s popularity among voters nationally. And the California party is listening. Officials over the weekend repeatedly downplayed him and his influence in state politics. But between bedazzled sweaters featuring his name and cardboard cut-outs of him, delegates’ support for the president was on full display. Trump remains deeply unpopular in California. But his support among hard-line conservatives activists has rarely, if ever, wavered since in the last decade. That remains true among California Republican activists, whose devotion has not waned despite Trump’s controversial decision to enter a war with Iran that has caused record-high gas prices. “I love what he’s doing. I love all the s— he’s saying,” Los Angeles delegate Mary Boston said about Trump and the war in Iran. “The whole establishment — all the Democrats, all the judges — they just hate him because he’s trying to make a difference for you and me.”“I think people here are tired of California. They know that the federal government is doing nothing to harm or help California,” Riverside County sheriff and Republican candidate for governor Chad Bianco said in an interview. Trump last week endorsed his Republican rival Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, instead of Bianco. “For the last week, people haven’t cared what President Trump is doing,” he said of Trump’s endorsement. Bianco and Hilton have been reticent to mention Trump. In a state where Democratic voters vastly outnumber Republicans, it’s an imperative. State party Chair Corrin Rankin said she was surprised to see Trump “weigh in on anything in California,” and refused to comment directly about voters’ discontent with his policies.“Just as quickly as the gas prices went up, I think that we’ve all seen in California how quickly gas prices can also come down,” state party Vice Chair John Park said. “Many of the problems that are on the front burner, the ones that people will instinctively tie to President Trump, will subside by then.” At the convention, the divide between the party establishment and its rank in file was on display. Trump merchandise could be seen all across the convention — at vendor booths, on the walls and on people’s clothes. At some sessions, Trump’s footprint was large. A “Make California Great Again” session was spearheaded by Jo Reitkopp, from Orange County, who founded a group of the same name shortly after Trump was inaugurated in 2016.that would require voters to show proof of citizenship to vote. The ballot measure is modeled after a voting restriction bill Trump is pushing in Congress.. Democrats continue to hold a commanding supermajority in Sacramento, where Republicans are fewer than a third of state lawmakers. No Republican has been elected to a statewide office since 2006. Things briefly looked different in 2024 after voters shifted to the right in nearly every county as part of the backlash to President Joe Biden. Predominantly Latino and working-class voters in Imperial County backed Trump, the first time they had backed a Republican presidential candidate in decades. Republicans alsoThose trends quickly evaporated. Voters in Imperial County and across the state overwhelmingly approved Prop. 50, complicating the narrative that Democrats were losing Latinos in California. Imperial County GOP Chair Sayrs Morris said candidates’ approach will be to keep mum on Trump because of voters’ frustration with the economy. “We’re not going out there saying our candidates are MAGA candidates. We’re keeping it focused on them,” said Morris, a Trump supporter. “Right now things are tough. The economy’s not super great. And we’re at war.”will be a test case. He flipped his district two years ago, despite a registration advantage that favors Democrats by 12 percentage points. Among Gonzalez’s challengers are Indio city Councilmember Oscar Ortiz and former El Centro Mayor Tomás Oliva. So far, he’s outraised all of them withBrian Jones ’ San Diego district, where the GOP holds only a slight advantage as voters in north and eastern parts of San Diego County trend leftward. He terms out at the end of this year.The debate over who should succeed Jones, a moderate Republican, has been a tension point among Republicans in San Diego. Jones and U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa have backed San Marcos City Councilmember Ed Musgrove. Meanwhile, Reform California, a multimillion-dollar political organization led by Republican AssemblymemberModerate Republicans fear Lane is too conservative for what will be the most competitive district this year. Neither candidate gained enough support for an endorsement at a February San Diego County GOP meeting after hours of heated debate. “We’re spending a lot of money against each other just because of that,” said Schlaefil, a friend of Jones. “It is winnable, but it is very tight.” Back in Riverside, Castillo has a much larger war chest than two years ago when she narrowly clinched her seat by a few hundred votes against Democratic City Councilmember Clarrissa Cervantes.“I get people just want to continue to say, ‘Trump, Trump, Trump,” she said. “At the end of the day, we’re in California, and Trump doesn’t rule here.”Rain will continue throughout most of the day, with a possibility of isolated thunderstorms, according to the National Weather Service. Steady rain is expected to give way to intermittent showers by the afternoon.The region is expected to dry out by tomorrow, with the cool weather sticking around, but temperatures should pick up as the week progresses.
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