Since its monumental debut in March, “sister dreamer lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles” has been active.

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

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That’s the official name of Lauren Halsey’s public sculptural park nestled at the corner of 76th and Western in South-Central. In its first few months, the park has hosted intimate jazz shows, Kemetic yoga classes, art workshops and album listening parties where artists like Childish Gambino and Vince Staples have performed. For Halsey, a contemporary visual artist who began dreaming up the space 17 years ago, it’s all been part of the plan.

“At a museum or a gallery, I can program in a context that makes sense there, but at the park, it becomes a venue that is limitless,” she says. “So I can have a music series. People can roller skate. It can be a classroom. It can be a dance floor. It can be a theater, so I’m getting to know it every day, which is just so cool.”

She adds, “It’s just very alive so I love it.”

Now, Halsey is plotting on her next project: “emajendat,” a music festival that merges fine art, music and community activation all in one night. Featuring live performances from Erykah Badu, the Alchemist, Flea (of Red Hot Chili Peppers), DJ Pee .Wee (a.k.a Anderson .Paak) and the Charles Gaines Collective (with Black Nile and Devin Daniels), the immersive event will take place on Sept. 29 at the Hollywood Bowl.

Ahead of the big night, the South-Central native shared her itinerary for a magical day in L.A. It involves listening to rare ‘70s funk and soul music at her favorite brunch spot, supporting all of her favorite vendors (including a henna artist) in Venice Beach and bowling at Lucky Strike.

6:30: Coffee and produce at the Westchester Farmers’ Market

I wake up early no matter what. I’m out of my door between 6 to 6:30 a.m. I’d do my walk around my neighborhood and wait until my partner gets up then we’re off to the Westchester Farmers’ Market, which we go to sometimes. There’s this really amazing vendor called Gus’ Coffee. He makes coffee with his daughter. I’d get a black coffee with a tiny bit of milk or a horchata-based coffee and we’ll just shop for produce. We’d get some yellow watermelons, which are in season right now.

11 a.m: Brunch and ‘70s funk music at RVR

I’m going to my favorite restaurant RVR in Venice for brunch. I’m talking to the chefs, Travis and Ian. I’m listening to amazing music because they have this wonderful vinyl program led by Carlos Niño. So I’m listening to this rare B-side of the B-side ‘70s soul and funk while eating amazing plates. They change their menu quite often because it’s a call and response to what produce is available seasonally. No matter what, I start with the pickled vegetables then I get one of the hamachi rolls. Right now, I’m getting the melon salad, egg plate and the spotted prawn. Depending on the day, they’ll have six or 21 of the prawns, so sometimes they’ll hold me one when they know I’m coming in. Then I’m getting the dessert. Right now it’s banana ice cream with blueberries and it’s heaven.

2 p.m.: Get blasted with henna tattoos in Venice Beach

Then we’re racing to Venice Beach, which has been my favorite since I was a kid. It’s just so wild and grungy and weird and fun yet family friendly and safe. My girlfriend’s best friend lives on the boardwalk so we’ll go see him. I’ve always loved the vendors there so I have my favorites. Right now I’m really into Martha who is a henna tattoo artist, so I just get blasted with henna tattoos. She has a fat notebook of [inspiration], so I’ll pick some and then I’ll remix them with her. It’s this really cool collaboration. I do it every few weeks. I’ll sit with her for like two hours while life is happening, watching the roller skaters, the families, the cool outfits, the riffraff. Sometimes I’ll go to a lady to get the back of my hair wrapped in thread, which I used to do as a kid. It’s just another way I can adorn myself with color. Also, I love a hat, so I’ll go to everyone who’s selling a hat and maybe we’ll buy some fruit.

5 p.m.: Bowl and live my WNBA dreams at Lucky Strike

We’re going bowling at Lucky Strike, which used to Bowlero. We have the summer season passes and we just go ham. We go to the arcade first and I just live my WNBA dreams. Then we’ll go bowl two or three games. My partner usually orders the chicken wings. I don’t eat meat, so I’ll do a beer, French fries with “truffle,” shrimp tacos and maybe some candy.

8:30 p.m.: Head home to prepare for the week

Next, we’re going home. I’d look at my calendar for the week and answer emails. Then I’d take a shower and watch something with my partner. I’m into heist films and basketball. She’s into the psychological thrillers and those sort of crime investigation shows, so we meet in the middle. It’s going to sound so silly and I don’t care, but the last good show I watched was Tyler Perry’s “Beauty in Black.” His imagination is wild, so we just can’t wait until Season 3. It’s ridiculous that it’s so good. We’d watch something until I fall asleep usually by 10 p.m.

AP:

Masked soldiers deployed on domestic soil and an air of conspiratorial paranoia give Adam Wingard’s not-quite-grindhouse siege film Onslaught a contemporary pulse, even if this lean, B-movie thriller doesn’t deliver much more than a flicker of its throwback promise.

Wingard, though, does seem freshly liberated in this return to his low-budget thriller roots ( You’re Next, The Guest). He has since spent the last decade in more IP-managed releases: the 2016 Blair Witch sequel, a Netflix adaptation of Death Note and a pair of Godzilla vs. Kong movies.

But the 92-minute Onslaught, written by Wingard and his regular collaborator Simon Barrett, is intentionally straightforward — to the point, you could say, of brainlessness. It’s aiming for a very simple slasher setup in the mould of John Carpenter: A single mom and PTSD-riddled former Army sniper, Celeste (Adria Arjona), living in a desert trailer park, defends herself and her young daughter (Blake Kennedy) from an invasion of three highly programmed super-soldiers who have sprung out of a nearby military contractor facility.

Even though Onslaught begins with a clock that’s already ticking below 12 hours, the movie takes its time leading to a bloody finale that isn’t quite worth the drumbeat. But Wingard is in no great hurry, and he lingers in the anticipation, for better and for worse.

So early on we get Dan Stevens (deliberately hammy) as a suspiciously old, white-haired Nazi scientist crawling across the room to lick the stiletto-heeled foot of his wife and co-conspirator (a queenly Rebecca Hall, suggesting great depth in her few minutes on screen). From the bodies of dead soldiers, Stevens’ mad scientist has engineered three elite killing machines. They are devoid of personality, with beady lights for eyes. Still, he’s given them nicknames: the Butcher (Alex Pereira), the Cockroach (Dave Campbell) and the Crybaby (Tyler Hall).

They get out, of course, and begin causing trouble. Onslaught likewise lingers on the quickly dispatched operative, Cyrus (Drew Starkey), sent to clean up the ensuing mess. Wingard delights in introducing the character, who’s more drugged up and charmingly laid-back than your usual cleanup expert. It’s a lot of set-up for a guy who, ultimately, doesn’t do much.

But what’s the rush? Wingard also takes his time surveying the female bodies at the S&M club Cyrus is attending when we meet him, just as he does looking over some of the bloody wreckage left by the super-soldiers. He even, momentarily, takes one of their perspectives in a random killing at a gas station convenience store — a point of view that’s hard to justify, considering there’s no other attempt to consider the inner horrors of the brain-dead soldiers.

They start unleashing mayhem across a Western plain that looks like it could either be where Wile E. Coyote chases the Roadrunner or the setting of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland.

Onslaught has a bit of both. The movie is best in its leisurely depiction of life at the Windy Oasis, the trailer-park remove where Celeste has found some rough-hewn sense of peace — away from society and with plenty of room for target practice.

Reginald VelJohnson and Eric Wareheim gamely play Celeste’s neighbours, adding to the eccentric ensemble. But Onslaught is most of all a chance for Arjona, a supporting standout in Hit Man and Splitsville, to show some leading-woman grit. And she does that in Wingard’s quirkily contradictory movie: gleefully violent despite its military satire, curiously unhurried despite its title.

Onslaught, an A24 release is rated A-18 for strong bloody violence, some gore, sexual material/nudity, and language. It is coming soon to theatres.

Running time: 107 minutes.

Rating: Two stars out of four.

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Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and writer whose work advocated fiercely for working landscapes and working people, died “suddenly and peacefully” on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky., according to his family. He was 92.

His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed his death. On Thursday, she told The Times that her father, until about six months ago, was still writing regularly in his cabin on the banks of the Kentucky River, a place he called “camp,” where many of his more than 50 volumes of poetry, short stories, essays and novels were written.

Berry championed sustainable farming and rural community preservation and railed against industrial agriculture and corporate agribusiness.

“He was fierce and he was fearless, and he remained fearless,” she said, explaining that her family taught her the erosion of rural places wasn’t inevitable but “destruction by design,” engineered by corporate interests and political policies.

Berry, whose writings were often fueled by an anger toward the forces that have driven the destruction of the rural land and communities that he dedicated his life to defending, softened in his final years, according to his daughter. “He was always a tender man, and that part of him got stronger. He was rereading a lot of books that he had loved in his life, and he told me he was looking for the tenderness in the books, and that’s a lovely thing.”

Berry’s most influential work began with a list of the problems he’d observed in modern agriculture, scribbled onto a legal pad as he traveled the long stretch of road between Kentucky’s Henry County and Spokane, Wash., where Berry would deliver a speech at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium in 1974.

“I was asked to talk about labor-intensive microsystems agriculture. That’s not my language, and it’s not the sort of language that I wish to use because it’s the way people speak when they don’t want to be understood by most people,” he began.

Berry spoke of the six generations of farmers who worked his land before him, and the concerns for farming communities and their agricultural economy that he inherited from his father. He decried “the experts and politicians who have prescribed, encouraged, and applauded the disintegration of such farming communities all over this country into our allegedly miraculous modern American agriculture.”

The speech would later become Berry’s 1977 manifesto “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture,” which launched a sustainable-farming movement and cemented Berry’s authority on agrarian issues on the national stage.

Beyond his cultural critiques, Berry wrote notable novels including “The Memory of Old Jack,” “Jayber Crow” and “Hannah Coulter.” He was a prolific poet as well. His verse included his debut collection, “The Broken Ground,” and his celebrated Sabbath Poems series, which explored living in harmony with the land.

Over the course of his career, he was honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among other accolades. In 2010, Berry was awarded the National Humanities Medal by then-President Obama for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist. In 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.

Wendell Erdman Berry was born on Aug. 5, 1934, in Louisville, Ky., to John Marshall Berry Sr., a lawyer and tobacco farmer, and Virginia Perry Berry. Wendell was the eldest of four children, two boys and two girls. In high school, his parents shipped him off to Millersburg Military Institute, a former military boarding school in Kentucky, where rather than conform to the teachings, he later wrote that his takeaway was, “Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligence — and you have a tyrant.”

He went on to study English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky. There he met and wooed Tanya Amyx, who would become his wife and the mother of his two children, Mary and Pryor. He landed a Wallace Stegner writing fellowship at Stanford in 1958, and in 1961 he was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to pack up the family and live in Tuscany and southern France.

After Berry’s scholarly pursuits took him to the West Coast, then Europe, then the East Coast, where he taught at New York University, he accepted a job at the University of Kentucky, allowing him to return home and back to his roots, on a farm near the river.

“Within a few years, Mom and Dad were raising 85% of the food we were eating,” Mary told The Times. “We had a milk cow, raised hogs for our own use, and by the time I was a teenager, I resented the whole thing pretty seriously, and I remember saying to them more than once, ‘I did not choose to live this way, and I don’t know why we have to do everything the hardest way possible.’ We had no television. … But I was in a heck of a position with my parents because I never really thought they were wrong about anything, and I still don’t.”

When Mary would gripe, she said, her dad would laugh or “just keep working.” But “he talked about what we were doing and why we were doing it,” she said. “He told my brother and me from the time I can remember to look and see that this is good and don’t forget, and I have not forgotten.”

In 2011, when Berry was nearly 80 years old, he joined a high-profile sit-in at the office of Kentucky’s then-Gov. Steve Beshear to protest the destructive mountaintop strip-mining of coal. In an interview with Bill Moyers shared by the Berry Center in 2025, Berry said that he and his compatriots had had enough of the state government ceding control of resources to the coal companies. “In our society,” he said, “people with money are bigger and more powerful and more noticeable and count more as citizens than people without much money. … So we did confront the governor and tell him we weren’t going to leave.”

His attempt at civil disobedience was turned on its head when the governor invited Berry and the Kentucky Rising activists to stay.

“We did stay,” he said. “The whole weekend.”

“We were beautifully treated by the security staff and people who sent us food and bedding and good wishes and even came in and gave us massages. And it was altogether one of the loveliest weekends I’ve ever spent in my life.”

Berry continued writing into his old age.

Next month, Counterpoint Press will posthumously release “Dispatches From Rural America,” a collection of 15 essays. In one, “The Problem Is Industrialism,” Berry wrote about a 2021 conversation he had with a friend of more than 40 years, author Wes Jackson.

“To the extent that we were talking in earnest, our subject was the set of calamities that the media and the commentators frequently take up, typically dealing with each one in isolation from the others and representing each as an emergency more or less apocalyptic, and in tones recalling a number of vernacular alarms, from ‘Last chance for beer’ to ‘Prepare to meet God.’”

He continued later that the two discussed how industrialism “grows only by consuming, once and for all, the living world.”

Mary said she wanted people to know that, yes, her father was worried and wouldn’t have written so much if he weren’t terribly concerned about the future of rural America, but she wants people to understand that he was a man of great hope.

“Hope he felt was a duty, and I learned that from him,” she said. “As he said in one of his many poems, hope is what we owe people younger than ourselves.”

Mary said she was continuing her father’s work through the Berry Center, a nonprofit that aims to put Berry’s writings to work and advocates for farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional economies.

Berry is survived by his wife of nearly 70 years, Tanya, his daughter Mary, son Pryor, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.