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How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Andy Garcia

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How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Andy Garcia

When actor Andy Garcia arrived in Los Angeles, seeking a career in entertainment, he had no idea that he’d end up becoming a longtime resident.

“I moved to Los Angeles in 1978, looking for work as an actor,” Garcia says. “I lived in Hollywood in a storefront apartment on Sycamore and Fountain. I lived there a couple of years, moved, and have been in Los Angeles ever since.”

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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The early years were hard, with Garcia working various jobs including stints as “a professional waiter, mostly at the Beverly Hilton, and loading trucks for Roadway at their distribution docks in the City of Commerce,” he says.

Today, the actor is known for roles in “The Godfather Part III,” which garnered him an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor; “Ocean’s Eleven” and its sequels; and the title role in the 2022 “Father of the Bride” remake. Currently, he stars in Paramount+’s drama “Landman,” playing the dangerous cartel boss Gallino, who holds a powerful position opposite fixer Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) in the series’ oil industry and cartel feud.

Los Angeles is also the setting for “Diamond,” a movie written and directed by Garcia, that pays tribute to 1940s Los Angeles. The contemporary film noir story, which just wrapped production, stars Garcia as a private eye who operates like a 1940s Raymond Chandleresque detective in present day Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles has been our home for many years,” Garcia says. “I never thought it would be my home for this long, but it has been. I’m fortunate that I have all my family living nearby.” Ideal Sundays for the actor are built around family, watching football games on TV, eating Italian cuisine or a good steak, and finding time to play golf at Lakeside Golf Club.

7 a.m.: Coffee first, then Pilates

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I’m always up by 7 a.m., regardless. After I wake up, I do Pilates at home with a Gratz reformer. But not before coffee! After that, it’s breakfast at home and football time.

10 a.m.: Golf with a stop at the drink shack

Usually on a Sunday, we get ready for football on the East Coast, like watching the Miami Dolphins, which starts at 10 a.m. If there’s not a game on, I’d squeeze in a little golf at Lakeside Golf Club in Burbank, where I’m a member. It’s a great walking course. The membership is a great hang. It’s very family oriented. There’s always a lot of kids around on Sundays and the weekends. There’s a shack in the middle of the course that serves sandwiches, beer, cocktails, soft drinks and so forth. After several holes, if you want to stop, you can get a snack or a drink there. For me, it’s to get a drink.

2 p.m.: Late lunch

It’s a four-hour round, and since breakfast was at home, lunch would be in the clubhouse. I recommend the Cobb salad, which comes as a very large serving, so you don’t need anything else with it. They also have a junior cheeseburger. It’s somewhere in between a big burger and a slider. It’s quite delicious. If I want to go a bit on the unhealthy side, that would be my go-to.

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3:30 p.m.: Back home for family plans

I’d then head home for more ball games on TV. The grandkids are there. We just hang out at the house, and decide what to do for the evening. We either cook at home, or if we’re up for a road trip, we’ll pick one of the restaurants that we like.

7 p.m.: Dinner out for gnocchi or ribeye

We usually have dinner early, so if we’re going out, we head for one of our favorite restaurants. In the Beverly Hills area, we like to go to Via Alloro because our friend Tanino Drago runs the place. Tanino’s the chef and owner, and is a very old friend of ours. He actually did my daughter’s wedding here at the house. I tend to always get their spinach gnocchi bolognese, as part of the arrangement on the table. The menus change but they always have it or regular gnocchi. We’ve known the Drago family for years and it’s a place a lot of our friends frequent. We love Tanino and the way he cooks, the atmosphere. It’s like going to a place that’s like family.

Another favorite is Angelini Osteria on Beverly Boulevard. Gino Angelini, the chef there, is a neighbor, so we go there a lot. When the family goes, it’s my wife and I, four kids, the kids have two husbands and a significant other, and three grandkids, so that’s 12 around the table.

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We also love going to Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood. We try to order the ribeye cap steak. It’s a limited supply, so sometimes they run out of it. For me, it’s a martini and a ribeye cap. As soon as I could afford to go out to dinner, in the early ’80s, I started to go to Musso. It’s easy to get to. Parking’s right behind the restaurant, and they’re great people. I love the history of the place, and the food is terrific. It’s a classic steakhouse.

9 p.m.: A nightcap and a little piano music

After dinner, we go home. I’d have a nightcap. Sometimes it’s a little bourbon, or an Italian digestif like Amaro Averna. Then I’d do a little piano playing. I play original material because I don’t read music. That’s how I learned the instrument, so it’s themes I’ve developed, or improvisation. I started as a percussionist when I was very young. I play all the Afro-Cuban percussion instruments that are inherent in Cuban music. I started to play piano at age 30 for a film I directed called “The Lost City,“ which I wrote the original music for. I was always interested in piano. My aunt played classical piano and it always called to me.

11 p.m.: Off to bed

I go to bed no later than 11 p.m. My ideal Sunday is always around the family. What are we doing today? Are the kids coming over? Are we cooking? Do you guys want to go out to dinner? It’s always about gathering the clan.

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.

“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”

The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”

L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.

The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.

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Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.

“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”

A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.

The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”

Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”

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The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”

The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.

All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.

Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.

At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.

“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.

Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.

But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”

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The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.

Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.

With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.

The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.

When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.

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“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.

Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)

In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.

“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.

The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.

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These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.

Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”

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Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden

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Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden

Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.

It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.

“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”

Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.

Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.

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“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.

“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”

Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”

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