Journal of Alta California Fall 2019

PO BRONSON “The Planet-Hunting Machine,” page 22 Were you skeptical going into your story about planet hunting that there is other life out there? Not so much skeptical as blind to the very premise. I hadn’t considered it, because I thought outer space was just an infinite scatterfield of inorganic rocks and gases. I thought all the television dramas of my childhood filled with civilizations on other planets was just wishful dreaming. And I’d been taught that the origin of life, here on Earth, was all due to a random event that was extremely unlikely to ever happen more than once. EMILY UNDERWOOD “The Old Man and the River” map, page 114 You’ve mapped the L.A. River. Do you visit it much? I love to ride my bike along the…

Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. At medieval universities, there were two parts to the curriculum: the trivium, concerning the arts, and the quadrivium, generally covering the sciences. The notion was to define and impart to students the essential thinking skills of a classical education. Alta has a less grand ambition. Our editorial perspective celebrates originality and creativity. The people who migrated to California and the West, and their descendants who prefer to live and work here, have been equally inspired by achievement in the arts and by advances in science. So we…

The story line was always simple: Snow White travels the globe in search of Prince Charming and meets assorted mythical, political, and pop culture figures along the way; hilarity (and big, splashy musical numbers) ensues. But what the cast and crew of Beach Blanket Babylon did with that bare-bones premise has become the stuff of San Francisco—and theater—legend: The ever-changing cast of guest characters, from Darth Vader to Taylor Swift. The royalty in the audience, from Queen Elizabeth to Sidney Poitier. And the hats, those glorious, gravity-defying toppers, adorned with everything from tropical fruit to city skylines. This New Year’s Eve at Club Fugazi, after more than 17,000 performances seen by a total of 6.5 million attendees, the show is ending its 45-year run. Here, seven veterans recall what it…

Maria Ho is so everywhere at the 50th Annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas that she’s almost impossible to find. Look up from the Red Bull–inflamed stampede surging through the hallways of the Rio hotel and casino, and the Taiwan-born, Los Angeles–raised Ho’s face smiles down at every turn. The most telling of the vinyl banners on which her image appears isn’t the one with Ho endorsing a ladies-only game to attract more women to the event. Rather, it’s one featuring Ho as a sponsored player for a streaming video site, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Phil “Poker Brat” Hellmuth and Daniel “Kid Poker” Negreanu, two of the winningest players in the history of the game. With $3.8 million and counting in lifetime winnings, the 36-year-old is working her way…

Kerry Brougher remembers watching The Wizard of Oz on a black-and-white TV as a kid and missing the vibrant Technicolor beauty of the classic 1939 film. The new museum he has been overseeing will make up for what he—and others—missed. When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opens in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile district next year, the first exhibit that visitors encounter, in the lobby and an adjoining room, will offer a startling contrast. “You’ll walk through Dorothy’s Kansas house all in sepia,” says founding director Brougher, “and then come out into the gallery, which will be a partial re-creation of Munchkinland.” “It’s a bit of a metaphor for the whole museum,” says Brougher. “It’s about this little girl who travels from reality into a dreamscape. She goes through adventures…

The Mojave Desert begins less than an hour from where I live on the edge of Los Angeles. When the wind blows out of the northeast, pushing back the ocean’s influence, the Mojave arrives in my yard. The garden crackles with fallen leaves, and the humidity plunges into the single digits. You can smell the plants drying in the heat. I like those days. Because Southern California is as much about the desert as it is the Pacific, and the breezes remind me of the arid lands outside town that connect L.A. to the American outback. When I arrived in Southern California 30 years ago, the first trip I took was out to the Mojave. Retracing that route now, we drop from State Route 14 into the Antelope Valley. The…