Recently in Notes of a Native Daughter
Pinstripes and swirls. Nine-foot flames lifting from custom hoods. The percussive revving of engines. Custom upholstery, gleaming chrome and candyflake paint. It must be spring, and time for one of the best parts of being a Southern Californian -- car shows!
I went to visit my rock last week. I hadn't actually touched it since I was about five, though I salute it every time on that freeway, and the other rock's celebrity journey had me staring at the hundreds of other huge obelisks of stone where we grew up.
Doug's photos and my essays have been some of the most transformative fun I've ever had. Now our work for KCET is on display at Venice Arts -- Doug's photos, and my stories.
Here in Southern California, especially in the old citrus-growing regions, the first week of April is a picture-postcard replica of most lyrics in "America the Beautiful."
Something many Americans believe about Southern California is that people here came from somewhere else. In Riverside, every day I see people I've known since kindergarten, and every time I go to a North High game, it's like a family reunion.
None of this would be in this long desert valley without two essentials brought from other places years ago, or months ago, or yesterday: water and workers.
Imagine it is late August, and 120 degrees, and you have to climb the hundred feet of ladder to cut each heavy bunch of dates with a knife fashioned out of steel and lower the bunch on a hook to a man waiting at the bottom. Now imagine that you have to climb the ladder a hundred times.
County Fairs in America usually make people think of late summer or early fall -- harvest of corn or apples, prize pigs like Wilbur in "Charlotte's Web" along with horses, cows, and chickens on display. Who would expect a county fair in February?
Coming out of the Ontario Airport, travelers can see just beyond the railroad tracks a vast stone building with arched windows and the skeletal remains of a wooden roof. Nearby are smaller buildings wrapped incongruously in shiny white plastic,...
It can be historic, as it remains the nation's first-ever master-planned retirement community where seniors could buy their own plot of land, move onto it a single or double-wide mobile home, and run this world.
The nighttime security officer arrives when the sun sets and the Santa Ana River is lit by floodlights at the construction site. Here in March of 1774, a party formed by Juan Bautista de Anza to form a trading route in New California crossed the river for the first time.
A lovely irony that many of us here in Southern California might have forgotten - the California Dream, the envy of the rest of the nation with our endless run and outdoor living, requires shade.
I went to my grandmother's house in the San Jacinto Valley last week, praying that there would be sheep because I have missed them.
Listen to the names of what we have here and think of the beauty of what people might think of as weeds, often overlooked.
Katherine Siva Saubel, a Cahuilla elder stateswoman, was legendary in this part of Inland Southern California.
I like to look around at Andulka for the classic American landscape.
Thomas McGovern teaches photography at Cal State San Bernardino, and for years has been preserving the beautiful, quirky and singular murals of this area through his photos.
Fall doesn't really fall in southern California until long after the traditional September date on the calendar.
Their maternal grandmother's family has been in Santa Ana since the late 1700s, when that place was still Rancho Santa Ana, and its citizens called Californios.
By 1895, Riverside had the highest per capita income in America, thanks to the citrus industry.
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