‘Hancock’: Rarely has a dumb movie struggled to be so weighty

Hancock’s high concept—it’s Super-Hobo!—is a fun one, though it’s already been done in the 1983 Alan Arkin musical The Return of Captain Invincible. And the trailers, with Will Smith as a drunken misanthrope flying into buildings and tossing whales around with impunity, suggested the kind [...]

Parson Red Heads: Family. Redefined

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
If you and your band all want to move to a new town, you’re probably going to end up in Oregon—Portland, specifically—and you’ll regret it.
If you call Oregon home, though, where do you go? The Parson Red Heads drove south and didn’t stop ‘til Los Angeles. There [...]

How ‘Star Trek The Tour’ got stuck in Long Beach over a $200,000 bill

Remember “Star Trek the Tour,” that fantastical Queen Mary exhibit of all things Trekkie–uniforms and phasers and a real live fake Starship Enterprise? The rumor mill had it opening in San Diego last Thursday–but it’s still here, locked up in space jail, [...]

This Week: Schoolgirl Underwear, Uncomfortable Symbolism and American Ingenuity

SAT. APRIL 26: GARY WILSON AND KAREN
Mon | APR 21 President Bush appears on Deal Or No Deal as part of the most conceptually unpredictable presidency since Nixon invited a nation to sock it to him and then sent 24,000 troops back to Vietnam for involuntary second [...]

This isn’t about Long Beach, but it’s interesting.
Seems the long-hyped condominium boom in downtown Los Angeles is over, at least for now–the boom is off the rose, you might say (though, clearly, I never would). But the top story on the Los Angeles Times website now covers just that.
According to DataQuick, which monitors real estate [...]

The lawyers finished picking a jury of Beachcomber newspaper Publisher Jay Beeler’s peers, and his trial opened yesterday in Long Beach Superior Court.
Beeler, as we noted yesterday, and as the Press-Telegram’s Wendy Thomas Russell has been telling you, faces two misdemeanor charges–obstructing a police officer and disobeying the order of a police officer–for his alleged [...]

The city of Los Angeles designated it a historical landmark, no shit. Thanks go to Metroblogging Los Angeles! Thanks!

Attorneys started picking a jury Monday to hear Beachcomber Publisher Jay Beeler’s Long Beach Superior Court trial, the Press-Telegram’s Wendy Thomas Russell writes this morning.
Beeler is accused of two misdemeanor offenses–obstructing a police officer and disobeying the order of a police officer–during last year’s tragic fire at the Galaxy Towers condo complex, 2999 E. Ocean [...]

This ain’t Long Beach, but I found myself attracted to today’s Los Angeles Times story on a venerable L.A. Catholic school–Precious Blood Catholic School–for the school’s historic campus and its, er, sanguine moniker.
The place of learning survives virtually intact from its Eisenhower Era beginnings (Class of 1953 was the first) in a converted house at [...]

Testimony yesterday in the ongoing lawsuit brought against Long Beach Unified School District by a group of parents of female gymastics students suggested Wilson High didn’t have to tear up the tumblers’ practice area to create an all-purpose fitness room.
As the Press-Telegram’s Kevin Butler reports, Wilson planned to remodel the gymnasts’ practice room to help [...]