Gas already got you down? Salvage your summer with these 20 local events

PHOTO by bill90814

JUNE
JUNE 14 | PAUL OAKENFOLD World-famous DJ and producer Paul Oakenfold sails over to the Queen Mary for a special set of hits and remixes (likely sourced from his recent release of the same name, which showcases Oakenfolded versions of the [...]

Heavenly Couture has you covered
Maybe you’re trying to clean up your act. Maybe you just got a job as a student teacher and have to look “respectable” by Monday. Or maybe there’s only 40 bucks in your pocket and you have to make it work. Try Heavenly Couture in Belmont Shore, offering designer jackets, shirts, [...]

Reviving a Belmont Shore Spanish Revival

PHOTO by ZACK PIANKO
When Mark Estrada was a kid in ’60s-era Rowland Heights, developers had just begun to harvest a bumper crop of tract homes from L.A. and Orange County farmland. He went to work for a lumber company in Corona, a city where “Spanish Revival” means a suburban tract [...]

Tues | Jan 15 Mayor Bob Foster gives his State of the City address and tells the folks who’ve paid like $100 a plate that we need money. Somebody get on that.
Wed | Jan 16 Alumnus Terry Rhodes donates $1.25 million to Cal State Long Beach saying the lessons he learned at the school helped [...]

I’m an idiot.
Last week, I gushed about how well this city’s government worked, how sensitive and in touch it was with the wishes of its residents. Yeah, well, that was a bunch of crap because apparently city officials are once again engaged in that behavoir where they say something and that something turns out not [...]

And an alleged central Long Beach revenge killing

One of Long Beach’s jewels, the Second Street retail strip in Belmont Shore and on Naples Island fairly sparkles during the day.
But according to the Press-Telegram’s Joe Segura, the area changes after dark. Bar fights in the wee hours there are on the rise, according to the P-T, [...]

Tues | Jan 8 Oh, what a simpler pursuit politics must have seemed for Arnold Schwarzenegger when all it required was gathering together a few star-struck rubes and intimating your opponents were either homosexual, transgendered or didn’t smoke cigars. Back then, 2003, the thing he told us he could do best was handle money. The [...]

I’m still amazed at the meeting I went to last night in Belmont Shore. Amazed at how quickly nothing happened–and by nothing, I mean a whole lot. So much, in fact, that by the time Marine Bureau Manager Mark Sandoval said “I think we’re done here,” the meeting broke out into the kind of cheering [...]

Lieutenant governor’s office weighs in on 2007 Veterans parade controversy

Remember the 11th Annual Long Beach Veterans Day Parade? So do a lot of people, especially members of the three veterans groups–Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out and Veterans For Peace–who were told they couldn’t march in the Nov. 10 parade. Organizers said [...]

Or twice, I don’t remember exactly. But I’m not proud of it, believing as I do that there are certain businesses – record shops, flower shops, running-shoe stores, breakfast spots and coffee houses — that just ought to be indie operations. But a story in Slate presents evidence that the proliferation of Starbucks (15,000 stores and expanding [...]