The Brief

Carly Usdin was the kind of kid who spent a lot of time in imaginary worlds: reading comic books, imagining superheroes and watching David Copperfield specials.

Whenever their parents hit the garage door button, Carly liked to stand next to it with their arm out, as if they were controlling the lifting and lowering of the heavy metal gate.

Carly Usdin in 2023.

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Natalie Chudnovsky

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LAist

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When Carly Usdin moved to Los Angeles, they became obsessed with getting inside its iconic members-only club for magicians, the Magic Castle.

The Castle: Part 1

When Carly Usdin moved to Los Angeles, they became obsessed with getting inside its iconic members-only club for magicians, the Magic Castle.

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Carly knew they didn’t have real magical abilities, but in pretending they found something they needed — a sense of power.

“I think many kids feel powerless,” they say, “but especially the kid that I was, getting teased at school for being smart and being queer and being Jewish, and not even knowing I was queer yet, and wanting out of that so badly.”

Carly Usdin as a child.

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Courtesy of Carly Usdin

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Carly did get out. They left their small town in central New Jersey, became a filmmaker and married their now-wife. And then in 2013, at the age of 30, they moved to Los Angeles.

In L.A., Carly was reminded of their childhood interest in magic, and started to get curious about why there were so few famous women magicians. At the time they were identifying as a woman, their gender assigned at birth (they now are non-binary and trans). While in a research rabbit hole, they started reading about the Magic Castle, an exclusive members-only Los Angeles club for magicians and lovers of magic.

Carly had heard of the Magic Castle. They knew it had a reputation for being frequented by celebrities, that its former president was Neil Patrick Harris and that it was invitation-only. And Carly desperately wanted to get in.

Besides being invited by a member, there are several workarounds to getting into the Magic Castle — for example, if you book a stay at the Magic Castle hotel. But gaining longer-term access is more difficult.

“I started doing research into the Magic Castle,” Carly remembers, “and I found the Magic Castle website and it said ‘we offer adult magic classes.’ And the kicker is that while you're enrolled in lessons, you basically have a temporary membership to the castle.”

The Magic Castle in Hollywood on Oct. 13, 2021.

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Valerie Macon

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AFP via Getty Images

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Carly had found a backdoor into the Castle.

And Carly was aware they didn't fit the magician stereotype. Actually, that’s what made them excited about it.

“If you say magician, you get a very specific image in your head," says Carly. "It's probably an older cis white heterosexual man, because that has long been the archetype of the magician in American popular culture. So I was like, I'm gonna infiltrate. I'm gonna take my queer self in there, cause it's a space that's clearly not meant for me.”

Why is the Magic Castle a big deal? 

The Magic Castle , or just “The Castle” as many members call it, is run by the Academy of Magical Arts. Just a few blocks from the tourist center of Hollywood, the Castle, with its stained glass windows and turrets, looks like a French chateau plucked out of a Disney movie. It was built as a private home around 1909. And then in 1963 it opened as a private clubhouse for magicians, complete with a liquor license.

An evening at the Castle requires not only an invitation but adherence to a dress code, an admission charge, parking fees and the purchase of an entree. If you throw in a cocktail, that’s at least a $100 night out. There are no photos or videos allowed inside. The exclusivity of the experience is part of the allure.

Besides its mystique to the layperson, the Castle is an important institution in the world of magic because being a member, or better yet, a booked performer, serves as a stamp of legitimacy.

“There isn't a Ph.D. in magician,” says magician and Castle member Paul Draper. “So, when I'm auditioning for a television show, when I speak to an event planner, the first question I'm asked is, 'Have you ever performed at the Magic Castle?'"

Magician Kayla Drescher performs at the Magic Castle on Oct. 13, 2021.

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Valerie Macon

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AFP via Getty Images

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The Castle is also a coveted and somewhat rare performance venue, especially in contrast to the kinds of gigs that sustain many magicians.

“You know who doesn't wanna watch magic? A bunch of people at their company holiday party. They wanna get drunk and just talk about how weird the year was,” says magician Kayla Drescher.

But at the Castle?

“People actually put in the effort to come watch magic,” says Kayla. “They're all dressed up and they're so excited to see you.”

Membership at the Castle comes with other benefits: access to its library, spaces to workshop tricks and a place to connect with some of the best magicians in the world.

“You have all these magicians that have performed here, you have all this history,” says Kayla. “There's a library of all these books with secrets. The guy who made the Statue of Liberty disappear for David Copperfield? He's just sitting at the bar. All the people, all the tricks, all the stories, it all just exists in one place.”

Beginner's magic

Carly was full of nerves driving to their first class at the Magic Castle in the fall of 2014.

Inside, there was a small reception area lined with bookshelves and no doors. Unsure of what to do next, Carly examined the bookshelves, drawn to one particular statue of an owl.

“The people working at the front told me you have to say the magic word in order for the owl to grant you admittance to the Castle,” says Carly. So they spoke the magic words (“Open Sesame”) and the bookshelf pulled back to reveal the Castle.

“Just that moment alone, I was giddy,” Carly says. “Basically you're in a parlor-looking bar area and there's like a big old timey fireplace. The color palette is like reds and golds and purples. All the wood is old, dark wood. It is Victorian, dark, moody, so much old art and old artifacts of magic. It feels like exactly this thing that's plucked out of time.”

The Close-up Gallery at the Magic Castle, in Hollywood on Oct. 13, 2021.

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Valerie Macon

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AFP via Getty Images

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The Castle can feel maze-like, with its various floors and bars. Every week there’s a new schedule of booked magicians performing at the many theaters, from the intimate Close-up Gallery to the larger stage at The Palace of Mystery. There are tables for magician members to set up impromptu shows. And a self-playing piano takes song requests (if they’re directed to the ghost of Irma — and yes, she also takes tips).

After several wrong turns, Carly found their way to a small instructional classroom. And they were delighted by every aspect of that first class.

“It felt like being back in school,” they say. “We went over the rules of being a magician. Some of the primary ones being, you don't do the same illusion for the same audience more than once. Obviously, you do not reveal your secrets.”

Carly remembers the initial classes being focused on card tricks: how to handle a deck, different ways of shuffling and grips. And Carly was delighted that they learned it all easily.

Carly has obsessive compulsive disorder — OCD. In high school, before they got proper care, they had a tough time focusing because of it. But learning magic tricks engaged their attention in a very specific way.

“When I was doing these tricks, I wasn't experiencing my OCD symptoms," Carly says. "It's just this perfect blend of mental and physical working in harmony where you have to be paying attention on both levels really closely.”

Carly Usdin practicing close-up magic, circa 2014-2015.

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Courtesy of Carly Usdin

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Courtesy of Carly Usdin

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Carly was in love. They didn’t want to become a professional magician, but they were constantly thinking about magic, carrying a deck of cards everywhere to practice, savoring the feeling of delight that came with successfully pulling off a trick.

After the beginner course ended, Carly took Magic 2 and then Magic 3 and Magic 4, learning coin tricks and more complicated illusions. After class, Carly would catch magic shows at the Castle with their classmates.

And they noticed that the Castle’s demographics matched their initial assumptions.

Stepping back in time

Several current and former Magic Castle members have described the experience of going to the club as stepping back in time, which comes with charms and also, drawbacks. Most glaringly, the demographics of the Castle.

A shelf hangs at The Houdini Seance Room at The Magic Castle on Oct. 24, 2008.

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Angela Weiss

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Getty Images North America

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Several members have described the club as mostly white and mostly male. In an email, a Castle representative said the club doesn’t keep data on the race of its members and did not provide data on the gender of members, either.

But according to one former member who gathered numbers from a Castle membership representative, in 2019 magician membership was 12% women.

Numbers of women performers at the Castle are even lower — the Castle’s own records identify only about 8% of performers over the last three years as being women.

That tracks with national estimates of women magicians in the U.S. For much of its history, performance magic in the Western world was exclusively male.

For magic historian and Magic Castle member Angela Sanchez, the story starts as far back as the Witch Trials in 16th century Europe.

“In a patriarchal society, for women to know something that men do not, is a bad thing. And so to be accused of being a witch is to be accused of having secret knowledge that a man does not have access to,” says Angela. “And so this notion that a witch, a woman who holds power, is adverse to what a woman should and ought to be, is something that cues you into how women in magic are generally treated in Western European societies.”

At the same time as women were being burned at the stake for witchcraft, there were men who earned money doing magic tricks at carnivals. In the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and the U.S., magic made its way from street entertainment into Broadway theaters and the parlor rooms of upper classes.

There were some famous women magicians, notably English performer Adelaide Hermann, who was billed “the Queen of Magic,” as well as female assistants who would vanish or levitate, but many onstage assistants at the time were boys and for the most part, magic was a field for men.

And then in 1921, magic introduced a new role for women: being in peril.

John Shryock and his daughter Jasmine, 16, rehearse before their performance at the Magic Castle on Oct. 13, 2021.

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Valerie Macon

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AFP via Getty Images

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In 1921, illusionist P.T. Selbit specifically called for women to participate in what would become an iconic trick: sawing a woman in half.

“This was very much a situation that would go forward in branding magic with very clear gender roles,” says Angela. “The magician is a guy in a tux and a woman on stage is the individual who gets sawed in half, split apart and lit on fire.”

Carly was seeing echoes of this history at the Magic Castle in the ways that some magicians spoke about or interacted with women onstage, but they also saw signs of progress. They recalled their magic class being fairly diverse, and were inspired by a women magician’s group at the Castle, co-founded by Angela.

Carly dreamed about starting a group for queer magicians. Of getting to spend as much time as they liked in the immersive magical space of the Castle. And of being able to invite whomever they wanted.

Carly realized that they wanted to become a member.

The audition

There are different levels of membership at the Castle (for example, Junior, or Associate for magic-lovers) but to become a Magician Member requires several steps, including an application with essays and, most nerve-wracking for Carly, an audition.

Carly Usdin at the Magic Castle.

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Courtesy of Carly Usdin

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Carly had heard horror stories about people bombing auditions and about how hard it was to impress the panel.

They picked out four tricks that they practiced for months.

“I was full of fear and dread driving there,” Carly says.

Carly remembers about five other people auditioning. All of them, hanging out at the bar, getting called downstairs, one … by one. Until finally … it was Carly’s turn to go before the panel.

“And I went in and there was like, I wanna say four or five magicians in there. I don't believe any of them were familiar to me, but they were all cis men. It was an incredibly intimidating room. They do a little interview. And then they're like, all right, show us your tricks.”

It didn’t go as smoothly as Carly had practiced.

Carly Usdin with a spread of cards.

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Natalie Chudnovsky

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LAist

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“The thing with close-up magic especially, is that it's all about your hands,” Carly says. “And the thing with anxiety is that my hands were shaking. I felt like I fumbled stuff and it wasn't as clean as it could have been.”

The panel stopped Carly, telling them they had seen enough. Carly felt like they’d blown their chance and went back to the bar to wait for the bad news.

“And then they came and, and got us. And so we had to go back to the room downstairs. And they're like, congratulations, all six of you made it. And I wanted to cry.”

Carly was officially a member.

They were on the inside of this private, exclusive, prestigious magicians club. For Carly it was like being handed a golden key, because members can invite any guests they want. It meant Carly could open up the Castle to their friends ... people who didn’t necessarily look like the typical magic showgoer.

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Courtesy of Carly Usdin

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“I had no misgivings of like … I'm gonna change the face of the community,” Carly says. “It was on a very small scale of like, I just wanna bring my friends and then from there, if I can start a group for queer magicians, that would be really cool.”

Did Carly think the Castle would be receptive?

“I really didn't know.”

In Part II, Carly finds out. Coming Dec. 6, 2023. 

A three-judge panel ruled Wednesday that the new congressional maps created by California voters in the fall are legal and should remain in place, handing a win to state Democrats who hope the new districts will swing five congressional seats for their party next year.

The ruling denies a request by California Republicans and the Trump administration for the federal court in Los Angeles to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the maps created by Proposition 50.

In the 117-page ruling, the federal judges rejected GOP arguments that the new maps amounted to racial gerrymandering, which has been prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court. The panel ruled 2-1, with the two Democratic appointees ruling for California and Judge Kenneth K. Lee, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, dissenting.

In the opinion, Judge Josephine Staton wrote that the panel’s conclusion “probably seems obvious to anyone who followed the news” about Proposition 50 last year. She noted that during the campaign, no one ever described the new maps as racially motivated — including the Republican plaintiffs.

“No one on either side of that debate characterized the map as a racial gerrymander,” the opinion states, noting that the California Republican Party called it a “political power grab to help Democrats retake Congress and impeach Trump,” and Attorney General Pamela J. Bondi deemed it a “redistricting power grab” for political gain.”

The judges also rejected Republican arguments that the voters’ intent did not matter. The majority wrote that voters clearly were endorsing the argument that both sides were making: that this was a partisan power grab, aimed at giving Democrats a leg up in the midterm elections and counteracting what GOP-led states were doing with their own districts.

Democrats celebrated the ruling.

“Republicans’ weak attempt to silence voters failed. California voters overwhelmingly supported Prop 50 — to respond to Trump’s rigging in Texas — and that is exactly what this court concluded,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

Newsom pushed lawmakers to put Proposition 50 on a special statewide ballot after Trump set off a mid-decade redistricting scramble by demanding Texas redraw its maps to benefit Republicans.

In his dissenting opinion, Lee wrote that race “likely played a predominant role in drawing at least one district because the smoking gun is in the hands of Paul Mitchell,” referring to a Democratic consultant who helped draw the new lines.

Lee argued that Mitchell publicly “boasted” about boosting Latino voting power in the 13th Congressional District in theCentral Valley, and that voter intent should not be the only basis for the court’s decision.

“To be sure, California’s main goal was to add more Democratic congressional seats. But that larger political gerrymandering plan does not allow California to smuggle in racially gerrymandered seats,” said Lee, who wrote that Democrats likely wanted to create a Latino majority district “as part of a racial spoils system to award a key constituency that may be drifting away from the Democratic party.”

The ruling could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Congressional candidates have until March 6 to file papers to run for office in the June primary.

Huntington Beach’s controversial former city attorney is running for state attorney general.

Michael Gates officially launched his campaign today and he will be going up against the current Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Gates has been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump and his policies — and a continuous thorn in the side of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who is one of the most prominent critics of the president.

Gates was first elected city attorney in 2014 and easily won re-election twice since then. Over the years, Gates earned plenty of fans and enemies as he filed a barrage of lawsuits against California over state housing mandates and the city’s plans to require voters to show ID to cast a ballot, among other issues.

Gates left the city last year to work in the Trump administration and left his D.C. post in November to return to the beach city. He told LAist he missed Huntington Beach and his family and was hired back at the city as a chief assistant city attorney. The circumstances of his return made headlines.

In a video announcing his campaign, Gates said too many lawmakers in Sacramento spend their time "scheming" for ways to raise tax rates while leaving streets unsafe.

“California has lost its way," he said. "When I am your attorney general, we are going to be toughest on crime. ... We are going to restore public safety, law and order, up and down the state of California."

He said he would also prioritize election integrity and giving local cities (and not Sacramento) final say over construction. You can watch his full statement here:

Rene Lynch also contributed to this story.

Progressive forces in Los Angeles are taking aim at companies with bloated executive pay through a ballot initiative.

On Wednesday, a coalition led by hotel workers union Unite Here Local 11 launched a signature-gathering effort for a ballot proposition they called the "Overpaid CEO Tax." If the proposition makes the November ballot, it will ask voters to impose an additional city business tax on large companies with CEO pay that is exponentially higher than worker pay.

Representatives of some of Los Angeles' most powerful unions, including the Los Angeles teachers union UTLA, gathered in Hollywood to announce the launch. They spoke on the sidewalk outside of the Tesla Diner — a recently opened charging station and restaurant owned by world's richest man Elon Musk.

"A growing and dangerous divide is tearing Los Angeles apart. On the one side, corporate CEOs live in their own world," said Unite Here Local 11 co-president Kurt Petersen. "On the other side, workers … juggle two and three jobs, they make impossible choices between medicine and rent."

The initiative takes aim at big corporations. If passed by voters, the executive pay ordinance would impose an additional business tax on companies with at least 1,000 employees whose top executive makes more than 50 times the median worker pay in Los Angeles. Those funds would go toward low-income housing projects, sidewalk repairs and other projects.

The additional tax would be one to 10 times the typical city business tax. According to the city clerk's office, the current city business tax is between 0.1% and 0.425% of gross receipts.

The campaign is part of a bigger political fight over the coming Olympic Games and who will benefit from them.

The executive pay initiative is one of a series of competing ballot propositions launched by union and business interests after the Los Angeles City Council voted last year to raise the minimum wage for hotel and airport workers to $30 an hour by 2028.

That vote set off a cascade of responses from the companies it affected. A business group backed by Delta and United Airlines launched a referendum to repeal the wage increase. That effort eventually failed.

The fight around the so-called "Olympic wage" is still playing out. A coalition of business interests has introduced its own ballot initiative to eliminate the city business tax entirely. In December, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson introduced a motion to delay the $30 minimum wage by two years.

Campaigners for the executive pay tax will be on the ground as hype around the Olympics ramps up. Ticket registration opened for fans on Wednesday morning, the same day union leaders gathered in Hollywood.

To land the ballot initiative on the November ballot, campaigners have 120 days to gather around 140,000 signatures from registered voters in the city of Los Angeles.

Facing a loss of state and federal funding and increased costs, Los Angeles County officials are considering cutting homeless services and programs by more than 25% in the next budget year.

If approved next month, the spending plan presented to the Board of Supervisors Tuesday would trim $219 million from homeless services and programs, slashing county street outreach efforts in half and closing most of the sites for the Pathway Home encampment clearing program.

Several supervisors pushed back on aspects of the spending plan and urged county staff to find ways to avoid some of the proposed cuts.

“ I'm not particularly happy with everything that I'm seeing,” Supervisor Hilda Solis said. “I've heard from my providers that their people are disappointed.”

L.A. County’s new Department of Homeless Services and Housing drafted the spending plan. In a presentation to supervisors, officials said the deep cuts were necessary because of the rising costs of operating existing shelter beds and the loss of tens of millions in temporary state and federal funding.

The proposal comes after county voters approved Measure A in 2024 to increase the sales tax rate and double county dollars dedicated to addressing the homelessness crisis.

“This is really challenging, and we’re making recommendations that nobody wants to be making,” department Director Sarah Mahin told supervisors.

After the department published a draft of the plan in November, authorities changed the proposal to avoid more than $80 million in additional program cuts. They did that by securing $39 million one-time state grants and implementing about $45 million in other cost-saving measures, officials said.

Dozens of homeless service providers on Tuesday thanked county officials for shrinking the initial $303 million shortfall and urged them to avoid further cuts to services.

“We truly appreciate the progress you've made, but now the remaining shortfall is devastating for Los Angeles and for organizations like ours that are already stretched to the limit,” said Georgia Hawley of Midnight Mission, a homeless shelter in Skid Row.

Garrett Lee, of Department of Mental Health's HOME Team, collaborates with LAHSA’s Homeless Engagement Team during outreach in the targeted COVID-19 testing efforts in the homeless community in 2020.

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Courtesy of Los Angeles County

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What’s driving the deficit?

Several factors are driving the budget deficit projected for the fiscal year that begins in July, according to L.A. County’s homelessness department.

• Shelter bed cost increases: The rates L.A. County pays shelter bed operators went up last year. It will now pay 46% more — an increase of $86 million — to maintain the same 6,000 shelter beds, officials said.
  
• Funds expiring: Several temporary funding sources — totaling about $185 million — have ended or will end in the next fiscal year, officials said. That includes $38 million in federal COVID relief and more than $80 million in state funding.
  
• Consumer spending: Sales tax revenue from Measure A is projected to decrease by $14.5 million in the next fiscal year because consumer spending is down.
  
• Carry-over funds: There are fewer one-time funds available from previous budget years that can be rolled into the coming budget year, officials say.  That number is down by $18 million.
  

Measure A looms large

Last year, L.A. County started collecting revenue through Measure A. The additional 0.5% sales tax approved by voters to address homelessness is expected to generate about $1 billion for L.A. County next budget year. That’s double the revenue generated under the county’s previous homelessness sales tax ordinance.

On Tuesday, service providers said the county cuts don’t make sense to voters who approved Measure A.

“This is not what voters intended when they doubled the tax on themselves to address the homelessness crisis,” said Katie Hill, CEO of Union Station Homeless Services, a Pasadena homelessness nonprofit.

Dozens of homeless services employees lined up to echo that message and demanding officials restore the full budget.

" My request is that you please not approve this plan without filling the gap first,” said Erin Thompson of Inner City Law Center, a nonprofit law firm. “Please find the funds.

Deandra Davis, from the homeless service provider HOPICS, said cutting programs doesn't end up saving the county money in the long run. The costs get pushed elsewhere.

“We shift these costs to jails and hospitals," she said.

Under Measure A, about 60% of revenue has to go toward homeless services. That’s about $625 million for next budget year.

Nearly 36%, or $372 million, must go to the L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency to support housing development. County homelessness officials said that agency is expected to take on some of the homelessness prevention functions cut from the county’s homeless services budget.

“Measure A has given the overall system more tools to address the homelessness crisis, but fewer of them are held directly by the county,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said Tuesday.

Proposed reductions

L.A. County’s latest homelessness budget proposal includes a $92 million reduction for the county’s Pathway Home program, which moves unhoused Angelenos out of tent encampments by offering them hotel room beds. Pathway Home would be reduced from more than 1,200 beds at 20 project sites to 460 beds at seven sites, officials said.

Fewer beds for the program will mean more tent encampments in areas it serves, officials said.

Solis and fellow Supervisor Holly Mitchell said the program has been crucial for their constituents.

“This continuing attack on Pathway Home is problematic,” Mitchell said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We are clearly heading in a direction where our ability to ultimately resolve homelessness and address encampments and continue to make the progress we've seen in the last couple of years will be severely constrained."

Holly J. Mitchell, an LA County Supervisor who represents the second district.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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The budget plan also includes $127 million in reductions to other programs, including at least 100 frontline worker jobs. Outreach and prevention-related programs would be hit hardest, officials said.

Street outreach-related programs would be reduced by 60% and staffing in those programs would be cut by about half.

Mahin said parts of the county outside the city of Los Angeles will be disproportionately affected by reductions to outreach programs. Her department recommended reductions to certain outreach teams working outside city limits, but not in L.A.

That’s because of legal obligations under a settlement of a major homelessness lawsuit brought against the city and county by The L.A. Alliance for Human Rights.

“There is a requirement due to the L.A. Alliance for the county to maintain a certain level of outreach services in the city of L.A. through next fiscal year,” Mahin told LAist.

Critics of the spending plan urged supervisors to look at other parts of the budget to help save programs still on the chopping block.

Lily Clark of HOPICS told county officials the cuts would hurt her unhoused clients.

"What we can't do is eliminate the programs that prevent homelessness and expect the crisis to improve,” Clark said. “ Every subsidy cut, every outreach program lost, every navigation team dismantled, each one represents a person who will fall through the cracks.”

Next steps

Solis said on Tuesday that she hopes to see changes to outreach spending and other recommendations before approving the plan next month.

“ I know we're gonna have opportunity to try to make some adjustments,” she said.

Mahin told LAist her department has been “turning over couch cushions” looking for other sources of funding to help address the planned cuts and reductions.

“Unless people are bringing other funding solutions to the table,” Mahin said, “My question is: we can make changes, but what would you like to cut instead?”

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said local programs are getting cut because state and federal dollars dried up and costs rose, not because L.A. County cut spending.

“ We cannot invent dollars we no longer receive,” Horvath said. “We're the only level of government that has actually increased our investment. Every other level of government has decreased, and we cannot backfill these gaps.”

The board is expected to vote on the proposed budget Feb. 3.