Pastel pink proved to be one of the favorite colors of the season, with many designers casting…
Phoebe Neuman

The designer is changing her look.

We’ve wrangled the list of suspects who could be dressing Britain’s most notable bride to be.

Everyone is doing a version.

In a bid for the same level of notoriety as Pizza Rat, Melissa McCarthy recently donned her now-signature Sean Spicer costume and hit the streets of New York City in a motorized version of the podium familiar from her serial press secretary skit. By any measure, the stunt is inherently funny — reaching back to comedy’s fundamentals of surprise, daring, slapstick, and the clever act of focusing attention while paradoxically lowering the stakes.

And so it’s a welcome respite from comedy’s grueling recent past, which has fallen into a rut of ideological ritual and deadpan cynicism where the high-end humor of wit and the low-end humor of yuks both once flourished.

The templates that define today’s comedy industry are now so well defined they hardly need review. There’s the flat anti-humor of so much television and film, where one character grinds another’s remarks to a halt with some meta criticism or another, turning the moment into a non-conversation that’s intended to get more laughs the more awkward it gets. Example: the agonizingly stilted and crushingly boring dialogue about one character’s hots for another given pride of place in the trailer for the new “Guardians of the Galaxy” sequel.

Then, there’s the weaponized identitarian performance that has leached its way into the traditional late-night TV format, where Samantha Bee, John Oliver and even Stephen Colbert get their biggest laughs not through actual jokes but by assuaging the identity of their anxious and angry audiences, sometimes through cultural coddling, sometimes simply talking about designated enemies in whatever way it’s imagined those enemies would least like to hear themselves talked about.

Entertainment is entertainment, of course, and to each his or her own. But these kinds of amusement are being confused with humor — oftentimes, it seems, on purpose — and the effect is that Americans are losing conceptual contact with comedy.

Notably, there’s more at work here than the so-called “coarsening of the culture,” or of politics. We’ve known since at least Shakespeare that comedy can get very crude without squeezing out clever jokes, happy endings, or recognizably human characters. Although watered-down postmodern theory, amateur value relativism, and the social disturbance of the Trump presidency clearly factor into pseudo-comic entertainment, they’re probably not at the root of the problem.

To figure out what is, we might look back to Don DeLillo, the grumpy, apocalyptic novelist of the 20th century who saw the Boomers take over American culture from a generational distance. (He was born in 1936.) DeLillo once remarked that the humor in his novels wasn’t “intended to counteract the fear. It’s almost part of it,” he explained. “We ourselves may almost instantaneously use humor to offset a particular moment of discomfort or fear, but this reflex is so deeply woven into the original fear that they almost become the same thing.”

On a surface level, this idea might help suggest that many entertainers and their audiences are simply afraid that they’re losing control of the culture — that their most prized values are being challenged by a more or less malevolent faction. Here, the Trump controversy would be just one part of a broader reactionary movement that many Americans refuse on principle to be curious about. Drained of curiosity, comedy becomes brittle and dull in one way or another. What we see today could be the latest manifestation of that.

On a deeper level, however, a culture critic might suggest that the fear involved in replacing comedy with today’s other form of entertainment is an internal fear, a fear that the dominant culture is actually hollow and without safe harbor. “Pure Comedy,” Father John Misty’s new album, gets across something like this idea, challenging members of the dominant entertainment culture to reckon with the low-grade terror that permeates lives so often spent performing in great comfort and self-satisfaction. But this approach jumps into a hard argument to win.

So much of what has replaced comedy today perversely uses awkwardness and popular nihilism as a form of collective self-care. Experienced individually, our recognition of being senselessly unmoored from anything in life that’s redeeming in an ultimate sense may be crushing; experienced together, however, it becomes a source of solidarity and forbearance. This is more or less the lesson of “Seinfeld,” and the lesson of today’s casual but durable quasi-cult of Seinfeld.

Nevertheless, someone with a little more interest in solidarity and forbearance than the average culture critic might ask whether the fear fueling today’s entertaining avoidance of actual comedy comes from a different source. What if the root issue is that so many of us are simply losing the ability and the confidence to risk meeting one another as strangers?

We complain about the politicization of everything, yet fail to recognize how politics is becoming the last comfortable way to socialize. Not that long ago, a whole host of social and civil organizations gave us a range of safe-but-not-too-safe, real-life realms where we could get to know other people. Now, those social oases are drying up.

A kind of cultural desertification is taking place, wiping out sites for people to take structured gambles that can deliver bearable psychological shocks that can lead to happy endings — that is, gambles that take the form of comedy as it has so long been understood.

Without those cosmic risks, which still capture our imaginations so strongly in fiction and in person, life will become not only a terribly boring business, but a terribly fragile one too. To rediscover comedy and truly save us all, many more entertainers need to slap some wheels on their podiums and brave the mean streets of being fully human.

James Poulos is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.

Numbers can tell a story, and the California state budget is a murder mystery.

On Thursday, Gov. Jerry Brown stood between two easels stacked with charts and warned that the good times can’t last forever.

There’s no money for new spending, he said as he unveiled the annual May revision of his January budget proposal, because although state revenues are a little higher than he thought they’d be back in January, they’re still $3.3 billion lower than state finance officials projected last June.

If these are the good times, why are state revenues lower than expected?

State Finance Director Michael Cohen said the revenue shortfall is mainly due to sales tax revenue coming in below expectations. People just didn’t make purchases at the rate that was anticipated.

Why not?

The answer to that question is on page 5 of the state’s “Revenue Estimates” document. “The level of wages has been revised downward,” it says. The Economic Research Unit further explains, “In the updated 2015 taxpayer data from FTB (Franchise Tax Board), the level of taxable wages was revised downward. This supported our interpretation of the weak cash data for sales tax receipts.”

In other words, Californians are earning less money and buying less stuff.

And these are the good times. We’re in “an economic recovery that won’t last forever,” the governor said.

California is spending record sums on anti-poverty programs, $19 billion per year more than in 2012. We have the highest poverty rate in the nation, over 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau, when the cost of living is taken into account.

But taxpayer-funded programs can never catch up to the problem, because higher taxes are part of the cause of the problem. Where are the jobs that allow people to climb out of poverty and enjoy a rising standard of living, instead of declining wages and never enough money to buy things?

Those jobs are being driven away to other states with better business climates, and the jobs that are left in California pay less than our budgeteers expected.

What can we do about it?

We could repeal the costly and restrictive climate legislation recklessly passed a decade ago. Assembly Bill 32 and Senate Bill 375 should be re-examined in the harsh light of current data showing declining wages and purchasing power.

AB32 has added extra costs to manufacturing and energy production in California, and SB 75 has limited construction of new homes in affordable areas by trying to contain “sprawl” and reduce driving.

As a result, we have fewer high-paying jobs and a shortage of housing. Combined, these have driven home prices out of reach, which further discourages employers from locating here.

This is actual harm to California residents. Weigh that against what we’re accomplishing with the climate legislation.

“Even if California were to eliminate carbon dioxide emission entirely, it would have no effect on global climate change,” says the state Senate analysis of SB150, yet another bill to restrict growth in the name of preventing climate change. “California only accounts for roughly 6-7 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the USA and about 1 percent of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.”

We are standing on our own oxygen hose. The governor’s budget says wages are lower and people have less money to spend, and these are the good times, without a recession.

There’s no mystery in this whodunnit. We dunnit to ourselves.

Susan Shelley is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com.

Twenty years ago, the elected officials who served on the boards of the Orange County Sanitation District and Orange County Water District had a visionary idea to recycle treated wastewater to drinking water standards and percolate that water into our underground aquifer where it could eventually be used again for drinking water.

The project — which would be known as the Groundwater Replenishment System — was not without opposition, much of it surrounding the cost of the project and the water it would produce. I served on the OCSD board at the time in my position as a council member in the city of Orange and I took my position of fiscal responsibility seriously. Being fiscally responsible means forecasting not just the value of the project in today’s dollars, but the value of building infrastructure for future generations.

Admittedly, when GWRS came online in 2008, the cost of the water it produced was more expensive than the alternative of buying imported water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. However, as imported water continued to increase in cost over the past decade, the GWRS water became less expensive and we now have local reliability at a lower cost.

Today, Orange County is considering the same investment with seawater desalination, and there is a value to building a project that will provide drought-proof, reliable, high-quality drinking water.

In Carlsbad, Poseidon Water built a 50 million gallon per day seawater desalination plant for $1 billion in private financing. The Carlsbad Desalination Plant has produced and delivered over 20 billion gallons of drinking water since December 2015 at a cost of approximately $.007 (just over half-a-penny) per gallon. The public-private partnership project delivery method allowed for the San Diego County Water Authority to develop new, capital-intensive public-serving infrastructure without incurring debt or negatively affecting bond ratings. Successful delivery of the project without significant impact to water rates or debt burden was a factor that led to improvement in the San Diego County Water Authority’s credit rating. On the flip side, because the price of desalinated water was determined prior to construction of the plant, public water agency customers have a greater certainty in projecting long-term water rates. In contrast, since 1978, the cost of water imported into Southern California by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has escalated annually by average of 6.4 percent.

The San Diego ratepayers only pay for that water if it is produced at the quality and quantity specified in Poseidon’s contract with the San Diego County Water Authority. While it is slightly more expensive than imported water today, by 2025 — after 10 years of operation — that water is expected to be less expensive than treated imported water.

In addition to providing an affordable new local water supply, the project would create more than 300 on-site jobs over its three-year construction process and nearly 10 times that amount in indirect jobs. The project would also provide tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue to the city of Huntington Beach and the county of Orange. At a time when companies are fleeing California, we need to embrace companies willing to invest in quality infrastructure projects that benefit us all.

As the CEO and president of the Orange County Taxpayers Association, I will be looking closely at the final water purchase agreement between Poseidon Water and the Orange County Water District to ensure the protection of the ratepayers. But — as with GWRS — it is critical to understand the difference between cost and value. And there is a significant value to Orange County becoming more water independent and less susceptible to California’s “boom and bust” climate that is prone to long-term droughts.

Carolyn Cavecche is CEO and president of the Orange County Taxpayers Association.

We need to have a frank discussion about mental health in our community. Each May during Mental Health Month, we, as a nation, come together to raise awareness about mental health; yet for far too long we have missed the opportunities to speak up, as individuals and communities. As mental health become more visible, the need for this dialogue is more important now than ever.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, one in 25 live with a serious mental illness. Further, only 44 percent of adults with diagnosable mental health problems and less than 20 percent of children and adolescents receive needed treatment. One of the main reasons people go untreated is the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Red flags indicating issues in children and adolescents’ mental health are often overlooked and dismissed. The unfortunate reality is that 50 percent of mental health conditions begin by age 14 and 75 percents begin before age 24 according to a report by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In addition to this, approximately 50 percent of students age 14 and older with a mental illness will drop out of high school. This demonstrates the need for more early childhood mental health screenings and access to comprehensive support systems throughout a child’s education. We have also seen an 84 percent increase since 2008 in the hospitalization rate for children with serious mental illness according to the county’s own Conditions of Children report. These statistics are indicators that we need to be doing more for mental health. That is why locally the Orange County Health Care Agency has launched #UpliftOC to shine a spotlight on mental health because each mind matters.

Since assuming office a little more than two years ago, it has been a priority of mine to address our mental health needs. I serve on the county’s Mental Health Board and I have witnessed great strides toward addressing mental health in the county. Just this year, I voted to approve the addition of more Crisis Stabilization Units for children and adults. These facilities will provide medical beds for children and adults who are experiencing mental health crises that require supervision of a medical professional. For the past 36 years the county only had one CSU with 10 beds serving patients 18 and up exclusively. By providing more facilities to receive specialized care instead of visiting an emergency room, we can begin to more appropriately link patients with the necessary treatments to improve their quality of life, eventually facilitating a healthy transition into adulthood.

Mental health has also been addressed in our fight to end homelessness. The county has allocated $33 million to the pilot Whole Person Care project, which includes programs supporting mental health for those experiencing homelessness. Additionally, I’ve pushed for the opening of the Courtyard Transitional Center in Santa Ana and supported the fast-tracking of the Bridges at Kraemer Place in Anaheim, both of which include wrap-around services on-site, such as access to county mental health programs. Mental illness is among the most important root causes of why people become homeless in the first place. We will never be able to properly address homelessness in an integrated and comprehensive way unless we make mental health a cornerstone of our approach.

While continuing these efforts is a good starting point, it is crucial that we step up and #UpliftOC. So talk about mental health with your families, your neighbors, your friends and together let’s end the stigmatization of mental health. Let’s bridge the gap for those suffering from mental health issues. Let’s work together to address this need in the county, the United States and the world.

If you would like more information on mental health and how to #UpliftOC, please visit www.ochealthinfo.com to be connected to services that may help you or your loved ones.

Andrew Do is vice chair of the Orange County Board of Supervisors representing the First District. He is a former deputy district attorney, public defender and city councilman.

State Sen. Josh Newman, who has been in office less than six months, is the target of a credible and well organized recall election. The recall effort was instigated by reform and taxpayer interests over the passage of Senate Bill 1 which imposes a permanent $5.2 billion annual tax on gasoline and vehicle registration. That tax increase, never approved by voters, has generated vocal public criticism.

But why Josh Newman? Shouldn’t all legislators who cast a yes vote for this regressive tax on California’s middle class be held accountable? That is arguably true and there may be more recall efforts launched in the near future.

Nonetheless, there are several legitimate reasons why Sen. Newman deserves to be at the top of the list.

Opponents of the recall have suggested that a recall is only justified in cases of gross malfeasance or corruption. While those are certainly good reasons to target a legislator in the middle of a term, they are not exclusive reasons. It wasn’t that long ago when Gov. Gray Davis’ attempt to increase the car tax — one of the very taxes at issue here — led to his successful recall. His opponent, Arnold Schwarzenegger, actually dropped a car from a crane in an illustration of how unpopular the car tax hike was. In short, some actions justify a severe political response.

Second, it is readily apparent that Josh Newman is a bad fit for the Senate district he represents. Yes, he was duly elected, but only by the slimmest of margins. This is a district that should have been relatively easy win for a fiscal conservative. However, as we know from the statewide vote, many voters expressed strong negative feelings for the Republican at the top of the ticket — Donald Trump — and even those Republicans and independents who weren’t thrilled with Hillary Clinton, many still couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump. But Donald Trump won’t be on the ballot in a recall election which vastly increases the chances for success.

Third, the 29th Senate District has a large contingent of middle-class voters. Much different from the West Side of Los Angeles or San Francisco, a lot voters in the 29th District have seen their housing costs and other cost of living items increase without a matching increase in their incomes. For them, a huge increase in the gas tax and vehicle registration tax hits the family budget hard. Coastal elites don’t care how much the cost of gas is — most don’t even bother looking at the price — but working Californians do. A recall election will make Newman explain to the voters of his district why he voted against their interests.

Fourth, in addition to sending a message to other tax-happy legislators about the consequences of big middle-class tax hikes, replacing a progressive with a fiscally responsible individual would deprive Democrats of the two-thirds supermajority they need to impose even more tax hikes without voter approval. The California Taxpayers Foundation has calculated that, in the first four months of the new legislative session, progressives have proposed $155 billion in new taxes. Depriving Democrats of the two-thirds supermajority they need to pass tax hikes is more than a legitimate policy objective — it is critical for saving the state from liberal lunacy.

Fifth, the anger among California voters has not subsided from the day Senate Bill 1 was jammed through the legislature. If anything, the more citizens learn about this attack on their pocketbooks, the more incensed they get. Grassroots taxpayer groups have legions of members who are angry drivers reaching for their pitchforks and torches. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association alone has several thousand active members in Senate District 29 and they haven’t been shy about wanting something done and done now.

It would have been preferable for the Legislature as body, and Sen. Newman in particular, to have not imposed a punishing tax hike on California drivers. But they did, so they have only themselves to blame for political retaliation.

Jon Coupal is the president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

BY WAY OF FRANCE: The French Institute Alliance Française will soon be shining the spotlight on two French fashion influencers — Pierre Hardy and Carine Roitfeld.
Hardy will sit down with Melissa Ceria in Florence Gould Hall on June 8 to discuss his ever-changing career. And Harper’s Bazaar global fashion director and CR Fashion Book founder Roitfeld will be honored on June 12 with the Art de Vivre award.
The accessories designer will no doubt share some insights about Hermès’ recent investment in his namesake label. He took on he creative director of shoes role at Hermès in 1990 and added the creative director of fine jewelry title in 2001. A former illustrator, Hardy likes to infuse influences from art, dance and design in his shoes and handbags. The designer started his own signature label in 1999 which has such celebrity fans as Rihanna, Alicia Vikander and Bella Hadid.
Over the years during his career, Hardy has worked with Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga on the house’s shoe collection, as well as Gap and Nars. He is part of the design team behind the handcrafted Apple Watch Hermès. Next month’s talk will be part of the FIAF’s “Art de Vivre” series hosted by Ceria, who also

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