The Long Beach plant where Boeing workers not so long ago built their last 717 passenger plane is in escrow and will become “the largest independent [film] production facility in the world.”
That’s according to the company buying the property, Long Beach Studios, LLC, and also today’s Press-Telegram, which chronicles the ongoing purchase in a three-bylined [...]

Mothers, geezers, students and the unemployed explain why we need this place

The large crowd clustered outside the doors of Main Library at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday is mostly just folks–ordinary people—and that comes as something of a surprise, given the city’s claims that Main Library is too big and used only by the homeless.

As a U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class, Virginia Sanchez sees why literacy is vital

Long Beach native Virginia Sanchez was an adult services librarian at Long Beach Public Library when she answered the call of duty and enlisted in the United States Navy.
Petty Officer 1st Class Sanchez was sent to Afghanistan last Fall, where she’s [...]

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
HOW I BECAME THE CRIMINAL YOU SEE BEFORE YOU TODAY
In 1995, before I was old enough to help much, my parents faced one of those classic dilemmas you get in a freshman philosophy course: to save the life of their dying child or to go back to their home country and [...]

This Week: Feral Tenure

PHOTO by DANIEL DE BOOM

Tues | JULY 8 Mental revenge.
Wed | JULY 9 Jesse Jackson mumbles something about cutting Barack Obama’s nuts off into an open Fox News microphone, resulting in a minor scandal and an automatic offer of an auxiliary anchor position on the Fox affiliate of his choice. Jackson later [...]

PHOTO by DANIEL DE BOOM
Mark your calendars in black ink: Acres of Books–Long Beach’s oldest, most thoroughly-, intriguingly-stocked store of used literature–will begin a discount sale of its stock this Thursday.
And how long will the sale go? “‘Til we run out of stuff to sell,” says Jackie Smith, who owns the store with her husband [...]

You think it’s hot here? Shortly after 11 last night, the mercury was still north of 100 degrees at the Barker Ranch in Death Valley–one-time vacation destination of TV reality show stars the Munster family–where KNBC’s Patrick Healy brandished a thermometer the size of a dinner plate as proof.
Why was Healy out there? To cover [...]

Packed with variety and energy, ‘Insights’ makes art look simple

MATTHEW OHM’S ‘UNTITLED’
Pity the folks tasked with installing “Insights 2008,” the Cal State Long Beach Art Department’s annual juried exhibition at University Art Museum (UAM). This show seems to grow every year.
When I visited, the installers were still hard at work atop fiberglass ladders, and everywhere [...]

Gabriela Martinez puts her life on display

EL CALDO DE PATO by GABRIELA MARTINEZ
On average, Gabriela Martinez’s linocuts each take 30 hours of work, but “The World Never Let Us Down,” her MFA thesis exhibition that incorporates them, was a life in the making.
“I always wrote stories when I was young, in journals,” Martinez says. “I [...]

‘Women of Troy’ is a painful lesson on casualties of war

PHOTO by KEITH IAN POLAKOFF
Women of Troy opens on a meeting between gods, Poseidon (Juan Carlos Parada) and Athena (Ivana Karapandzic) considering a just-wrapped 10-year war (victorious Greeks on one side, Trojans on the other) and, here comes the sort of interesting twist for Team [...]