Lifestyle
We spent 8 hours at Ebony Beach Club’s ‘Juneteenth on the Pier’
This year is the Ebony Beach Club’s fourth annual Juneteenth celebration. The club’s founder, Brick, is pictured holding the club’s flag above his head.
(Cerys Davies / Los Angeles Times)
The Ebony Beach Club‘s priority is to create a space for Black beachside communities in Los Angeles. So, every year on Juneteenth, they transform a local beach into a full-blown festival, consisting of nonstop DJs, a vivacious dance floor and neighborly vendors. This year, the beach club partnered with Black Lives Matter and took over the Santa Monica Pier. Here’s everything that went down.
12:39 p.m. I arrive early. Ebony Beach Club founder, Brick, runs from vendor to vendor, ensuring everyone is ready for the day ahead. He boasts that there’s “not a cloud in sight” — and that everything is aligning for today’s “historic moment.”
In the corners of the festival, there were several shaded tables where partygoers took refuge from the blazing sun. The pictured couple was swaying to the distant sounds of old school R&B.
(Cerys Davies / Los Angeles Times)
1:58 p.m. I never thought I would be able to say I’ve found a sense of inner peace in the middle of the Santa Monica Pier. The typically chaotic environment is transformed by rhythmic breathing exercises and sound bath frequencies. For a moment, it does feel like I am cooking under the hot summer sun, but still, I couldn’t be more at ease.
Early attendants, including myself, laid out on yoga mats, absorbed spiritual frequencies and set our intentions for the day.
(Cerys Davies / Los Angeles Times)
3:09 p.m. So far, the music selection transcends generations. Anything from Aaliyah to YG and Frankie Beverly fills the beachy air. But after hearing more than one early 2000s Ne-Yo classic, I can’t help but wonder what he’s up to. Why the lack of 2025 Ne-Yo bangers?
3:40 p.m. The crowd is slowly growing. Most partygoers sport a mix of brightly colored swimwear with denim shorts or matching mini skirts. Others wear graphic tees that commemorate the holiday and show L.A. pride. The most standout looks so far have included bejeweled thongs, color-coordinated snapbacks and sneakers and pleated, baggy jorts.
Amid the crowd, Maya Hatcher, founder of Black Market Flea, posed for a quick portrait.
(Cerys Davies / Los Angeles Times)
3:58 p.m. In the flash of a moment, a familiar face glides through the crowded pier. Her grill catches the light and a pair of Labubus hangs from a designer bag. It’s none other than R&B royalty Kehlani. A growing swarm of fans start to catch on. I get my chance to say something as she passes. I compliment her latest single and let her continue on her mission to the bar. Cool, casual and of course, no mention of the fact that I was listening to the Kehlani Spotify radio on the whole drive over.
4:45 p.m. Brick halts the music and offers a quick history lesson from the DJ decks. He speaks of the first Ebony Beach Club, started by a man named Silas White in 1957. That year, 2,000 Black people, including Brick’s own grandfather, signed up to be members. But the City of Santa Monica had barred it from ever opening.
Today’s Ebony Beach Club celebration roughly creates space for around 2,000 people to be at the exact same beach and enjoy the party.
“This is the most Black people the Santa Monica pier has seen in a while,” said Brick, who was met with an echoing applause. “Today, we are Black people who are occupying this space for the first time in a long time.”
As the sun started to hang lower in the sky, the dance floor got more lively by the minute.
(Cerys Davies / Los Angeles Times)
5:30 p.m. The emcee says, “If you’re outside the barricade, I’m sorry. If you couldn’t get a ticket, I’m sorry.” He addresses the consistent crowd of onlookers who have lingered by the barricades. Some appear to be tourists, but most spectators seem like they were too late to grab a ticket. Nonetheless, they are able to indulge in the sights and sounds, even if it’s for only a few minutes.
6:17 p.m. What’s an L.A. party without Los Tucanes de Tijuana’s “La Chona?” The norteño anthem gets mixed into T.I. ‘s “What You Know.” Unexpected, but somehow serendipitous.
Depending on each track, the microphone was passed to different members of Brick’s friend group. At one point, influencer and rapper Aliyah’s Interlude took center stage.
7:25 p.m. I’m starting to seriously question the weight limit on the truck. Though its height is that of a monster truck, it has the feel of a clown car. The truck bed, filled with DJ equipment, is overflowing with people singing along and jumping to the beat. People are perched atop the car, as well as those hanging off its side, in an impressive, partially aerial twerk. I can’t even imagine the kind of core strength that it takes.
7:51 p.m. As the party wraps up, Sexyy Red’s distinctive vocals overtake the crowd. It feels like one final hurrah. If there’s been one consistent feeling that’s marked the entire party, it’s been an infectious sense of joy.
8:05 p.m. On the way back to the car, people yell “Happy Juneteenth” out their car windows. My feet are a bit achy and the tops of my shoulders a little sore to the touch, but spirits are still high. Now for the biggest test of patience — braving the traffic of leaving a Santa Monica parking structure.
(Cerys Davies / Los Angeles Times)
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
Focus Features
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Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
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I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
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