The Brief

On the corner of Fifth and Spring street, in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles’ Historic Core, TJ Johnson is cooking up good eats and beats at “Wax On Hi-Fi” — her restaurant serving fusion comfort food with a vinyl listening bar on the side. Inspired by her studies abroad, it was there in Japan, where she picked up on the cross currents between Japanese and Black American culture.

“People across the globe have very similar cultural touch points, and I really found a cultural resonance there because a lot of the technology that I use as a hip hop, R&B DJ comes from Japanese technology. I wanted to keep building on it," Johnson said.

Wax On Hi-Fi: Into the vision of one chef’s downtown

Wax On Hi-Fi opened this past June at the junction where the disparate areas of the Jewelry District, Skid Row and Little Tokyo rub up against each other. But for Johnson, who calls downtown home, the wide access to culture is the heartbeat of her business. The venture is Johnson’s space to share her expanding worldview.

”It is a very personal and emotional endeavor to be between so many cultures, to provide a positive cultural hegemony.” Johnson told LAist. “It’s especially great for downtown because we’re so close to Little Tokyo, and for me as a person, I can see Skid Row is notoriously African American like myself… customers will tell me this is unlike any other place they’ve seen around here.”

When Johnson isn’t filling orders, she moonlights the space as a DJ, spinning artists from Sadao Wantanabe, MF Doom, to Common. Whatever the endeavor, it's a wholehearted effort to meet customers from all walks of life, through the hospitality of her native Georgia by way of the restaurant’s omotenashi — the deeply instilled sense of Japanese hospitality.

A typical day begins with a quick bike ride to Little Tokyo to restock on ingredients from local bakeries and the Nijiya Market before she rolls out some biscuit dough in the restaurant’s back kitchen. As a passerby, she’s picked up on the lack of accessible spaces where locals can share a meal.

“Along 5th Street, there's not many, nice sit down restaurants,” Johnson said. “People tend to look out for the up and coming businesses because we don't have too much since the pandemic.”

TJ Johnson behind the restaurant's sounds system, including an Isonoe ISO420 mixer, Technics SL-1200 turntables, McIntosh MA8950 amplifier and JBL speakers.

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Erin Grace Kim

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Filling the gap

At one point DTLA was a booming metropolis, with 750,000 people passing through each day between 2012 and 2017, according to Blair Besten, the executive director with the Historic Core’s Business Improvement District, a nonprofit designed to improve the quality of life for residents, property, and business owners within its boundaries. Then the pandemic drastically altered the trajectory of its growth.

“It’s hard to create any revenue when you’re forced to close,” Besten said.

The Historic Core has never been without its share of challenges, but Besten said it’s a place where people still want to be, making it an attractive place for entrepreneurs.

The problem, Besten said, is the red tape — lengthy bureaucratic processes, licensing issues, permits, and approvals — to acquire and develop such historic physical property.

“You can pull up a cart on the sidewalk, and have a blooming business in Los Angeles. They've made that very easy,” Besten said. “What they have not made easy is to operate, open and operate a brick and mortar.”

The Historic Core's district boundaries that run between 4th street and 9th.

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Small businesses as the culture bearers

"If we want sustainable, cultural neighborhoods, they need to be able to hold onto the property,” said Annette Kim, an associate professor of public policy at USC, referring to the neighborhood’s rising rent. “We need to capitalize small businesses to be able to hold onto space, and call to foundations to make this a priority."

Kim’s work focuses on urbanism and said “cultural mixing” — distinctive cultures living alongside each other — is a signature of Los Angeles. Key to this are the small businesses as the “culture bearers.”

“They’re not just the official museums or community associations, but the everyday spaces where people go," Kim said. "It's important for the life of the city, but also politically, to the question of the day: ‘How are diverse people going to live together?’”

To love this city is to push for its potential

For residents like Westley Garcia-Encines, a walkable experience is why he moved to downtown Los Angeles.

“There was apprehension moving there,” Garcia-Encines told LAist. “But after my first year, I hope to eventually buy and make it a permanent place for me in Los Angeles.”

The present challenges downtown faces has only reasserted his responsibility — joining his residents association and going to city planning meetings — to raise concerns with city officials to make housing and retail spaces more affordable.

I’m seeing this effort from organizations and businesses to invest in downtown,” Garcia-Encines said. "Wax On Hi-Fi opened up a couple blocks over, and there’s another gay bar going up on 4th street — it shows progress, and it keeps me hopeful that the Historic Core will continue to develop in a positive way."

For meaningful progress, the work starts everyday, not just with major events like the looming 2028 Olympics.

As Angelenos look ahead, it will take ideas from all corners of the city to maintain its momentum — for restaurateur Johnson, who spent 18 months to start Wax-On Hifi, it’s just one plate and beat at a time.

“When you speak to anyone down here, there's definitely a big shift happening whether they feel it’s for better or for worse,” Johnson said. “On this block alone, we’ve built a nice rapport with our neighbors; it's become a place where people love to stay.”

I wasn’t expecting the internet’s biggest Chinese rapper to make his Southern California debut (we are not counting the earlier San Diego show) at a sprawling, sterile business park in Santa Ana.

But there I was Wednesday night along with hundreds of people at the Observatory to watch the viral sensation perform his brand of hip-hop blending Memphis trap with lyrics rooted in Cantonese folk and everyday culture across southeastern China.

You may not know the name, SKAI Isyourgod, but if you have been on Instagram or TikTok in the last couple years, you can’t escape the sound — or the memes.

" He's really famous on Instagram," said Julie Sun, who came to the gig from Irvine. " He popped up a lot throughout all different kinds of video content."

That’s how I learned of his music — through a reel that had nothing to do with his music. But it was grabby from the first note, opening as it did by sampling a vintage Cantonese opera. That inventive touch sent me searching for the whole song, “Blueprint Supreme,” which turned out to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek send up on the nouveau riche.

It’s a theme the 27-year-old from Guangdong Province goes back to with humor and deft wordplay in the track “Stacked On All Sides.”

Throughout the night, the crowd yelled out the name of that tune. When it was finally performed, all the phones were raised.

“His lyrics [are] mostly very positive and kind of give the good fortune to people,” Sun said.

Like Sun, the vast majority of the audience were Chinese.

"Where’s everyone from?" SKAI asked during one of his interludes, and the crowd shouted back: "Dongbei…. Fushan…."

But there were also plenty of non-Chinese speaking fans at the club, a testament to the rapper’s global virility.

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Fiona Ng

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SKAI Isyourgod performs in Santa Ana in 2025.

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Noah Rosen lives in Santa Ana, but he first learned about SKAI two years ago through friends and people he worked with at the company he cofounded, which has a satellite office in China.

"We blasted [it] in carpool karaoke and stuff like that," said Rosen, who doesn’t speak Chinese.

"There's something so catchy and so inventive, and it's a fantastic melody," he continued. "Which is why they're so good on TikTok and Instagram and everything. Doesn't matter if you understand the lyrics or not."

Some of the red ink in California’s budget deficit is coming from unplanned spending in state prisons, according to a new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is on track to exceed its budget by roughly $850 million over three years despite recent cuts that include four prison closures and some labor concessions that trimmed payroll expenses. The state budget included $17.5 billion for prisons this year.

The office attributed the corrections department’s shortfall to both preexisting and ongoing imbalances in its budget. The analyst’s annual fiscal outlook projected a nearly $18 billion deficit for the coming year, which follows spending cuts in the current budget.

The corrections department last year ran out of money to pay its bills. In May, it received a one-time allocation of $357 million from the general fund to cover needs including workers’ compensation, food for incarcerated people and overtime.

Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco in a June 17 letter to the Department of Finance said he was “shocked and disappointed that (the corrections department) overspent its budget by such a significant amount” while the state faced a $12 billion general fund shortfall that resulted in cuts to key health care and social service programs.

“These were dollars that could have been used to provide basic services to some of our most underserved communities,” wrote Wiener. “While this year’s budget included measures requiring departments to ‘tighten their belts’ and reduce state operating expenses by up to 7.95%, (the corrections department) did the opposite, and overspent by nearly three percent.”

Without having any new dedicated funding to align its actual costs with its budget, Wiener warned, deficits “will likely persist” and put additional pressure on the general fund in years to come.

That’s despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s attempts to save the state money through prison closures. Newsom in May moved to close the state prison in Norco in Riverside County next year, the fifth prison closure under his tenure.

Newsom’s administration estimates it saves about $150 million a year for each prison closure, which lawmakers and advocates regard as the only way to significantly bring down corrections spending. A spokesperson for Newsom’s Finance Department declined to comment on the analyst’s projection. Newsom will release his next budget proposal in January.

“We are allowing wasteful prison spending to continue while Californians are being told to tighten their belts and brace for deep federal cuts to core programs,” said Brian Kaneda, deputy director for the statewide coalition Californians United for a Responsible Budget in a statement to CalMatters. “We are spending millions on prisons that could be safely closed. That is government waste, not public safety.”

A new electric streetcar service connecting Garden Grove and Santa Ana is currently undergoing testing. If all goes as planned, the new service will be in operation starting next summer.

The nearly $650 million project — funded through a combination of state, federal and local funds — was originally set to begin service in 2021, but has been beset by rising costs and delays.

A train operator sits inside one of the OCTAs OC Streetcars for safety testing.

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Back on track

Darrell E. Johnson, Orange County Transportation Authority's CEO, told LAist that the service is 95% complete. The current testing phase could take anywhere between six and 12 months.

That means testing the train pulls out of the platform properly, control systems are operating properly, and that the train system interfaces with the street signal system along its route.

All aboard

Each car is over 90 feet long and has the capacity to carry up to 211 passengers.

“The fleet itself is eight vehicles. The service that we plan to run will take six of them every day.” Johnson said.

The new service will travel across some of densest areas of Orange County, ferrying an expected 5,000 passengers a day across the route's 10 stops.

The eastern side of the route starts at Santa Ana Regional Transportation Center, where over 50 Amtrak and Metrolink trains pass through daily.

The Civic Center for the county — which houses state, federal and county courthouses as well as Santa Ana City Hall — is in the middle of the route.

The service will end at the Harbor Boulevard — a heavily used bus route that sees more than 10,000 passengers a day.

The front view of an OC Streetcar on tracks.

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Transportation future

OCTA says it plans to charge the exact same amount as their bus system to ride the streetcar service — $2 one way or $5 for a day pass.

The service is slated to run every day from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., with extended hours on weekends.

Officials are hoping for an Aug. 1 launch next year. And they don't anticipate stopping there.

“This is the beginning of something, whether we go north on Harbor Boulevard or South on Bristol Street or we continue westerly towards Artesia, Cerritos and LAX,” Johnson said. “That’s probably a decision that will be discussed in the next two to five years.”

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene became a household name in the run up to the 2020 election for divisive rhetoric, political stunts and enthusiastic support of President Donald Trump. But after growing disagreements with Trump during his second term, Greene announced she will leave Congress in January before her term is up.

Greene said it would not be fair to her northwest Georgia district, one of the most conservative in the country, to have them "endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for" while noting that "Republicans will likely lose the midterms."

Greene's split with Trump widened in recent weeks as she pushed for the release of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

For months, Greene had been publicly pressing Trump and top Republicans in Congress to release all files from two federal investigations into Epstein. She was part of a small cadre of Republicans who helped force a vote on the House floor to release the files — a process that drove Trump to reverse his position on the documents and led to near-unanimous support for the measure this week.

But before Trump reversed course, he lashed out last week, calling her "Marjorie Traitor Greene," and told reporters, "Something happened to her over the last period of a month or two where she changed politically."

In her post Friday night, Greene defended her decision to fight for the release of those documents.

"Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for," Greene wrote.

Greene's defiant push against Trump

On a brisk morning this week, Greene stood outside the Capitol with some of the women who say they were abused by Epstein.

"I've never owed him anything," Greene of the president on Tuesday. "But I fought for him and for America First. And he called me a traitor for standing with these women."

The cracks between Trump and Greene grew over the last year, as Greene increasingly pointed out where she saw the president falling short: she called the war in Gaza a genocide, criticized Trump's decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, and pressed for expiring health subsidies to be extended, citing the threat of skyrocketing premiums for people in her district, including her own children.

And she was doing it not just on social media or right-wing outlets, but on programs like ABC's The View.

"What Happened to Marjorie?"

"I was thinking, if this was the first time I'd ever seen this person, it sounds like a normal congressperson from Schoolhouse Rock," said University of North Georgia professor Nathan Price after Greene's appearance on the daytime television staple.

For some, this new persona may be hard to square with the Greene many Americans first got to know: the congresswoman who embraced QAnon conspiracy theories, liked a post that called for violence against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. and heckled school shooting survivor David Hogg in 2020, before he became a prominent political activist.

Even Trump has publicly mused in recent weeks: "What happened to Marjorie?"

Georgia Republican strategist Brian Robinson says it's a fair question.

"I am open to the idea that she's had a 'road to Damascus' moment, a conversion, that she sees the errors of the toxicity and wants something that's better," Robinson said in an interview with NPR earlier in the week.

On her own social media and with journalists, Greene has been open about addressing claims from Trump and others that she has changed or abandoned the president. NPR reached out to Greene for further comment.

"Nothing has changed about me," Greene told the hosts of The View. "I'm staying absolutely 100% true to the people who voted for me, and true to my district."

Robinson said the changes could be part of a natural evolution for Greene, a former CrossFit gym owner from the Atlanta suburbs.

"We love to elect outsiders to Congress," Robinson said. "They go to Congress with very little idea of how it works. And if at some point you're like, 'I want to do substantive things that make America better, then I've got to do this a little bit different."

Or, Robinson said, she may be trying to broaden her appeal with an important constituency as she weighs a bid for higher office. Trump said last week he showed Greene polling earlier this year suggesting she would flounder in a race for Georgia governor or Senate.

"Is she intentionally signaling to women, 'The good old boys club ignores us, and I understand your struggles?" Robinson said.

Both Robinson and Price said Greene's evolution was more about style than substance. She has disavowed some of her more controversial views, but not others, like the unproven assertion that widespread fraud upended the 2020 election result.

The anti-interventionist, anti-elite principles that first propelled her to Congress also remain core to her identity. "What she's responding to is believing that the President has shifted on these issues," said Price.

Some potential political opponents see an opportunity in Greene's break with Trump. Robinson, who worked for Greene's opponent in her first primary race, says in the past he has warned potential challengers not to underestimate her.

"You are wasting your time," Robinson said. "She will beat you. And I would have said that into infinity until this week."

How Greene's district reacted to the shift

But in the 14th Congressional District, it was not clear this week that anything had changed. As chair of the Paulding County Republican Party, Ricky Hess spends a lot of time talking with voters.

"The issues that they want to talk about involve high property taxes, high health care costs, whether or not their kids will be able to buy a house when they graduate," Hess said this week ahead of Greene's resignation.

Hess told NPR he believes Greene's "America First" worldview resonates in this heavily working class and rural stretch of Northwest Georgia.

"She's pretty tapped into what her constituents are wanting, and I have to believe that most of her actions are in service to that," Hess said.

Hess said voters saw Trump and Greene as fighters on the same team. Though Martha Zoller, who hosts a political talk radio show that airs across North Georgia, said in an interview Wednesday she didn't believe everyone's minds were made up.

"People are kind of reeling, if you want to know the truth," Zoller said. "We haven't had a lot of listeners discussing it because they're waiting to see what happens."

Georgia political observers noted that Greene has been anything but a predictable politician — including her surprise resignation.

Trump has come to a truce with other politicians he's feuded with, including Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. And his future relationship with Greene could still evolve.

But Zoller said the conflict between Trump and Greene has been about more than just two big personalities falling out on the national stage.

"I think that the big discussion we're going to be having as Republicans over the next few years is what is the Republican movement once it's not Trump?"

Zoller said earlier this week it seemed clear that Greene wants to be part of that discussion. But with her resignation, the answer to that question is may be less clear now than before.

NPR's Stephen Fowler contributed to this report.
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