For 76 years, locals have gathered at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica’s Pico Neighborhood for the bay city’s annual Memorial Day celebration. This year, along with the usual food, music and military flyover, City officials unveiled a new monument to Santa…
Kit Bennett’s problems started six years ago after hiking in Simi Valley. She came down with a “strange flu,” and started doing some odd things around the house. “I was putting books in the freezer,” she recalls. Then came a…
Often overlooked, Santa Monica’s Camera Obscura is a noteworthy relic of photographic history. Stepping into the attraction’s small, darkened space transports today’s media-saturated visitors to a time when the public viewed the projection of images on a screen as a…
Last year was a disappointing one for the music industry. Digital downloads were off, as were album sales. CDs look like a dying format, with sales plummeting last year by 15 percent. One segment of the music industry, however, was…
The death of the printed book—you know, those bound volumes of static pages that you have to manually flip through to read—has been foretold for years. But like some creature from gothic literature, printed books refuse to die. And now…
A beach club suggests an exclusive world of privilege and private cabanas, a place where pampered elites camp under umbrellas and sip gin and tonics. Private beach clubs, once more abundant along the California coast, still exist. And then there’s…
In one photo, a family of four smiles toward the camera on Easter morning, while just off to the side grandpa is seen chugging a can of beer. In another shot, a young boy happily blows out candles on his…
Mayly and Sean Tao may have inherited DK Donuts from their parents, who opened the restaurant in 1981, but they are dedicated to seeing this popular Santa Monica eatery stay open for decades more. This is our first video in…
It began as a grassroots effort to pretty up Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica by decorating it with colorful street murals. Now the Ocean Park group behind this project wants to take its paintbrushes and go global. “Ten thousand murals…
The Santa Monica Airport’s arts community held its annual Artwalk on Saturday, an event presented by the city’s Cultural Affairs Division. Visitors could explore dozens of artist studios in airport hangars, mingle with Santa Monica College ceramic students, view performances…
When Santa Monica hatched a plan to measure the happiness of its residents, Mayor Pam O’Connor admitted that “our idea may seem a little out there to some.” The city’s proposal, however, wasn’t so far out there after all. Santa…
A mutant squid washed ashore in Santa Monica in January, according to reports widely circulated on social media. The story claimed the squid suffered from “radioactive gigantism,” a condition caused by exposure to radiation from the 2011 disaster at the…
The crowd at the Santa Monica bar was relaxed and engaged in friendly conversation. They each held metal tubes a few inches in length. Every moment or so they put these cartridges to their mouths, sucked in, and then exhaled…
A federal judge issued a harsh rebuke last week to Santa Monica’s legal efforts to wrest control of the city’s airport from the federal government. In a word: dismissed. As in, go home, your legal arguments carry no weight here. U.S. …
With Santa Monica buzzing these days with questions about where the city is headed, a dozen people set out last Saturday and turned their attention not to the future, but to the city’s past. The group was led by a…
