Friday fun and more

The Long Beach Museum of Art, which has an ongoing California landscapes exhibit, offers free admission on Fridays. So does the nearby Museum of Latin American Art, which is free on Sundays, too.

Starting Friday, the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach hosts “Holiday Late Nights.” From Dec. 26 to Jan. 2, admission drops to $10 after 5 p.m., and the aquarium is open until 9 p.m.

The annual migration of Pacific gray whales from Alaska to Mexico officially begins Friday, too. Working with the aquarium, Harbor Breeze Cruises includes naturalists on excursions that take you up close to whales, dolphins and other sea life. Press Telegram.

Updated: What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

Savoring the holiday weekend in SoCal

I did an interview this week with LAist Editor Zach Behrens, who asked about SoCal getaways for the holiday weekend and my new project, the Seal Beach Daily website.

On long weekends I like to escape up the coast or plan a kickback retreat to the desert. But this tumultuous season of fires, storms and economic meltdowns feels like a good time to stick closer to home. So I suggested a handful of day trips. Among them: the California landscape exhibit at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Orange County’s timeless Crystal Cove. Southern California’s other Wine Country. Bargain hunting in LA’s Fashion District.

Browse the entire LAist interview here.

More buzz: Check out Shelby Grad’s nice take today on the LAist interview at the LAT’s LA Now blog. Michelle Vranizan Rafter also writes about Seal Beach Daily at the excellent Word Count website.

**Photo of the Seal Beach Pier by Kate Cohen/Seal Beach Daily

Soul of the City

Thumbing through a map book one day, Los Angeles painter J. Michael Walker noticed just how many of the city’s streets are named for saints. Santa Monica Boulevard. Santa Rita Street. San Ysidro Drive. San Vicente Boulevard. San Julian Place. San Remo Way. He eventually chronicled 103 saintly streets in all.

“Walker had a brilliant idea: he found all the L.A. streets named for saints, retrieved their stories and illustrated them in works that draw from Goya and folk art and 1920s real estate ads,” says Peter Fish, an editor at Sunset Magazine. “…each saint street tells a story, tragic, hopeful, beautiful, violent, that together form a remarkably powerful panorama of L.A. You’ll never look at your Thomas Brothers guide in the same way.”

Heyday Books has just published Walker’s book, All the Saints of the City of the Angels: Seeking the Soul of L.A. on its Streets. The Autry National Center at Griffith Park has a companion art exhibit that runs through September 7.

“The saints’ names are common enough, we drive them every day,” Walker says in an interview with The New York Times. “But we see them without looking, without thinking of the resonance of names.”

Next Vegas visit

I’ve never been to the Pinball Hall of Fame. But I wanna go after reading Derek Powazek’s review of the airline magazine he devoured on a flight to Phoenix. 
Derek writes, “My favorite story in the issue was “Sure Played a Mean Pinball” by Spirit editor Jay Heinrichs. It was part personal confessional, part history of the game, part review of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and part interview with the iconoclastic proprietor of the museum. Very entertaining with an elegant NY Times Magazine-style design.”