Lauren Coleman of Pebaluna

Pebaluna's Lauren Coleman at the Rose Bowl Flea Market

 

LAUREN COLEMAN of PEBALUNA

At the Rose Bowl Flea Market

1001 Rose Bowl Drive, Pasadena

Although Lauren Coleman spent most of her years growing up in Las Vegas, she has a few fond childhood memories of coming to Pasadena for the Tournament of Roses Parade when she was young.

"I was born in Torrance, and we lived there until I was 5. My mom says I was still in diapers the first time we went to the parade. I remember coming back when I was a little older and seeing one of the stealth planes over our heads. It was so close that it scared me."

The singer-songwriter and frontwoman for Pebaluna currently resides in Long Beach, but Pasadena is home to one of Lauren's favorite places to visit when she comes up to the L.A. area, the Rose Bowl Flea Market. With over 2,500 vendors, the shopping extravaganza attracts thousands of people, from antique collectors to hipsters looking for unique clothing, every second Sunday of the month (The next one takes place on Jan. 13.).

Even though I lived in Pasadena for several years and heard about the shopping extravaganza, I had never been before, so I was excited that Lauren could show me around. There was plenty for us to peruse as we chatted about her neighborhood haunts, her passion for music and Pebaluna's debut album, Carny Life, which released in September.

Lauren confesses that she usually never buys anything for herself at the Rose Bowl Flea Market. Instead, she often finds pieces of jewelry for friends. As we admire some art-deco furniture, light fixtures/art pieces, phonographs and random knick knacks, I hear her sing, "I'm going to spend all my money here," under her breath. We come across some sort of electrical contraption, and I ask Lauren what she thinks it is. She hilariously replies, "It's a projector … or a time machine. I'm not sure."

One specific item consistently attracts Lauren's attention to booths when she spies it: a vintage telephone. She admits to being obsessed with phones when she was little and always taking them apart to see how they worked. It's evident that the devises still pique her curiosity as she stops, picks up their receivers and puts them to her ear each time we come across one.

The entire flea market is a bustle of activity, and with colorfully costumed unicyclists and stilt-walkers meandering around the front entrance area, it seems like the perfect setting to talk about Carny Life.

"The songs on the album are all so different that I couldn't find a theme other than chaos. I had gone through a few different relationships, lived in a few different places, had a few different jobs and traveled a bunch in the six years it took from when we first started recording to when we finished, so it felt like a traveling circus in my head. If you listen to the title track, the part with whistling and kazoos, that's how I feel on a good day, that's what's going on inside of my head," Lauren says with a smile. "At first I wanted to name it No, I Can't, after the single because I'm extremely hard on myself. I thought, why not come out of the gate self-deprecating. But Matt was like, 'That's too negative.'"

Lauren met Matt Embree, Pebaluna's guitarist, when her band at the time opened for the group he fronts, RX Bandits, in Las Vegas.

"I met Matt when I was 16 at the Huntridge Theater in Vegas. Back then, I had short blue hair and I would wear a prom dress with combat boots for shows. I listened to RX Bandits and had gone to see them, but I was always so busy dancing that I didn't know what they looked like." she remembers with a laugh. "I saw Matt on the side of the stage, not sure if it was him, and said, 'Hey, are you in RX Bandits? I really like your music and your lyrics,' and he was just like, 'Oh.'' As I was walked away he asked what my name was, and I told him. Then, two years later he was recording our band's album. That's when we started playing music together, and he let me do more jazz stuff. He said, 'If you move here to California, you can use this studio.' So the day my band broke up, I was in my car driving here."

Once she landed in So Cal, Lauren took different odd jobs – such as being an adverse loan processor, veterinary technician and currently working on guitar pickups – did some vocals for Matt's other band, the Sound of Animals Fighting, and even performed with a Zombie Pop Rock Opera before forming Pebaluna with Matt, drummer Jessica Lankford and bassist Jon Grillo and settled into an apartment in Long Beach.

When I tell Lauren that I go down to Long Beach to take my dog to Rosie's Dog Beach, the subject of how the band got its name comes up. Pebaluna is named after her beloved Chihuahua Pebbles, who was hit by a car. Since then, another animal has come into Lauren's life, a cat named Loki, whom she met at the vet clinic she used to work at.

"I was thinking about getting a cat because they're very independent. I wanted a black-and-white cat for some reason, and this person came in who had found these kittens in a box. There was one left, and I was like, 'OK, if it's black and white, I'll take it,' She comes out, and she's the tiniest runt. She's all white with one black spot on her head, and I took her home. I still have her, and she appears in some of the early Pebasodes," she says. "There's a dog park I'm going to later today that's off 7th Street [Recreation Dog Park]. I like to take my aunt and uncle's dogs to this enclosed one because they're very fast. Their white German shepherd is like my wolf dog; she doesn't leave my side when we're out. But their border collie just adopts new families every time we go out."

A Rose Bowl Flea Market stilt-walker

Besides Recreation Dog Park, you can often find Lauren at Viento y Agua Coffeehouse in Long Beach.

"It's pretty much the one place I go. There's Portfolio as well, but I'm very much the kind of person who, once I find my comfort zone, I pretty much stay right there. I've gotten to know the people at Viento."

For shopping, Lauren loves Buffalo Exchange.

"I got to the Buffalo Exchange on 2nd Street, and then you've got 'Retro Row' on 4th Street, which is across from the Art Theatre, an awesome venue/independent movie theater," she tells. "My friend works at Lola's Mexican Cuisine, and there's 4th Street Vine, a great little wine place. They're just great nooks."

Overall, she loves life in Long Beach.

"There is always something awesome to do: There's free yoga on the beach; you can ride your bike any where all the time; there are a lot of cute cafés; people are really enthusiastic about playing music as a community. In Vegas when I first started playing with people who were not in my band, I felt like I was cheating on the relationship. I would say, 'You guys should play with other people, too. It's just going to make us better,' but they were afraid of the band breaking up. Here it's like, 'Oh I've got this band and this project and that, and everyone just enjoys playing together."

After walking around the Rose Bowl Flea Market looking at booths for a while, we take a seat near some rose bushes, and Lauren pulls out her ukulele and starts to sing. It seems like everyone around us stops to listen, as she transforms from a regular shopper to performer, and the fact that music has always been a part of her life is a big reason why the transition is so effortless.

"We listened to oldies all of the time. We would always listen to the oldies station in the car on the way to school. My mom would always sing [Frankie Valli's] 'I Love You Baby' when she picked me up, and my dad would always mimic the crooners with a silly voice. But nobody knew that I could sing until eighth grade. I had this anti-attention disorder," she laughs. "If they came home and I was practicing – I would put on Mariah Carey's Daydream and try to get every lick that she did – if I didn't hear my family come home and I was singing, I would lock myself in my room and not come down for the rest of the night. I was just horrified. Now I just sing wherever I'm at and have fun."

Her mom enrolled her in singing lessons with their church's choir teacher, and Lauren joined her first punk band when she was 15.

"That probably broke some barriers. I played with a band that did a lot of rock/ska punk stuff. Even during the songs I didn't like doing, I would put my hair up in a ponytail and make it my goal to, by the end, have my hair fall down. That's how I kept the energy up," she remembers.

"I still am a little self-conscious; I still have social anxiety. If I'm walking down the sidewalk and there's just one other person, until I pass them I'm like, 'Oh my god, do I look them in the eye, do I say hi or do I do anything? Even when I play music, if it's a room full of people it's more difficult than with a big audience. It's very personal, it's like, 'Hey, I'm going to read my diary to you about one of the hardest times in my life.'"

While performing in front of crowds is a skill that didn't always come easy to Lauren, writing lyrics and poems is something that she has been doing since a young age.

"I have a huge suitcase full of notebooks from high school and have my grade school notebooks in storage. I used to love making videos, too, pretending I had a TV show. When my friends slept over we made a fake set. One of us would be the host, and the other would have to be three different characters. We had commercials and everything. I was always doing something creative."

Even though she cultivated her singing and writing skills, Lauren never picked up an instrument until a certain song inspired her to grab the ukulele Matt had given to her as a gift and teach the song to herself.

"It was 'Tonight You Belong to Me.' I was trying to get Matt to learn that song, but he was busy with a lot of different projects. I printed out the tabs and started playing it on ukulele. When I started playing that song there were so many different chords, and I realized I could play it by myself," she says. "Then, I started having a writing spree. That's when so many songs with the ukulele, like 'Tell Me Baby,' 'Waking Nightmares,' 'Sunshine Lullaby' and some that we haven't even released like 'Penguin Island,' all came within a matter of months. Once I got that, I started playing the piano and guitar and realized, 'Oh, this isn't so hard.' I suggest the ukulele to anyone who has never played an instrument. It's like once you learn another language it gets easier, less daunting. If you love something, you're just going to get better at it because you're going to want to do it all the time."

The songs on Carny Life are as varied in style as Lauren mentioned when talking about naming the album, embellished with hints of Motown, reggae, country, gospel, folk and funk.

"We do some covers live, too: Motown stuff, we love the Band, Sam Cooke, and we played 'Chain of Fools' at the last show. I'm trying to get them to do the Jackson Five's 'I Want You Back.' Mostly our shows are energetic; we don't usually do the mellow sings. When I play solo shows, I do the mellower material there. We definitely pull out 'Please Me,' 'Sunshine Lullaby' and 'Carny Life.' 'Sunshine Lullaby' is funny because we could be at a bar with a bunch of adults and they will sing along if you ask them to, especially if you pause and look them right in the eye," she laughs.

"I used to be really shy on stage, but now if I'm having fun it's like monkey see, monkey do, and the crowd will have fun, too. And Matt's been doing this for so long that he's really good at engaging the audience, being one on one with them, that it has rubbed off on me."

As for some memorable concerts that she's attended since she moved to Southern California, Lauren mentions seeing Mumford & Sons at the Hollywood Bowl in November.

"That was pretty awesome. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros at the Greek Theatre was memorable. Alex Ebert went out into the crowd and looked up at the moon. He said, 'Whoa, everybody look at the moon. You've got to see this.' He made the whole band come down and look, it was great," she recalls. "I went to see a screening of Big Easy Express about the Edward Sharpe, Mumford & Sons and Old Crow Medicine Show train tour. It was beautifully done but I wanted to see the actual road life. I wished they showed more of the grittiness, like in the Festival Express documentary with Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and Buddy Guy. They did a train tour through Canada, and they showed everything – how they would buy out liquor stores, put a bunch of acid in the bottles and everybody would be drinking it would be playing music all the time."

Lauren actually took on her first film role in Destin Cretton's I Am Not a Hipster last year and enjoyed the experience immensely.

"You have to get up really early, but not having to wear makeup and being able to wear your pajamas to work then sit in a chair and have someone do all that was great. I felt super aware of myself, conscious of my posture, but then you have to act natural and ignore that there's a camera just staring at you. It was a lot of fun because of the people who were working on it. I would love to do it again," she says. "I feel like that's the down side of living in Long Beach: It's so nice there, you can just chill, and then my motivation, my drive is a little bit mellowed. At the same time, I really want to be traveling. That's what I'm saving for."

Yearning to perform has always burned in her heart, even if she was too shy to pursue it at a young age.

"I wanted to do musical theater, but the closest I got was being the spotlight girl. I tried out when I was a freshman, but the great parts went to seniors. We did 'West Side Story,' and I was like, 'I could be Maria!' Then I got my GED and went to college, so I never got the chance to do a school production. Once I got to college, I was like Van Wilder I took every course. I still do. I'm like, 'Next semester I'm going to take sewing and German,'" she laughs. "As long as you're excited about learning and doing something with your mind I think that is the point, because, who knows where that can lead. I've done enough things I don't like for enough time that I know what is just a dead-end road for me."

She pauses to recall a road trip up the California coast when she ran out of money and had to resort to busking for some gas funds to return to Long Beach. She says that the experience reminded her of a man she had met who told her that you could travel around the globe and make money if you could either play music or do hair. After listening to Carny Life and witnessing Lauren captivate the Rose Bowl Flea Market crowd with her voice and ukulele live, I'm quite certain that one of her upcoming courses at community college will never need to be hairdressing.

Carny Life is currently available. Pebaluna performs Jan. 4, 11, 18 and 25 at the Hotel Café. For more information, visit pebaluna.com.

Tiphanie Brooke

Artist Tiphanie Brooke in front of Intelligentsia Coffee in Old Town Pasadena

 

TIPHANIE BROOKE

At Intelligentisia Coffee

55 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena [Old Town] 626-578-1270

I first became acquainted with Tiphanie Brooke's work when I was walking through Sunset Junction and saw her All Heart in L.A. mural on Sanborn Avenue. The brightly colored hearts filled with messages of loving life and Los Angeles immediately brought a smile to my face, which is something that the artist sincerely takes to heart.

"That makes me happy to hear," she confesses. "I feel so glad that people like them when they see them."

Although Tiphanie was born in and lived most of her life in Phoenix, Ariz., she spent part of her childhood in Southern California and was happy to finally plant some roots in Los Angeles last May. When she confesses that she "definitely feels much better here," it's evident that she may have grown up in Phoenix, but it's really the City of Angels that's in her heart. Perhaps that is why she is so passionate about spreading the L.A. love around the city through her art.

Tiphanie commutes to Pasadena three days a week to take classes at the Art Center College of Design. We meet up at one of her pit stops on the way to school, Intelligentsia Coffee in Old Town.

"I live in Downtown, and the commute to school is pretty close. I sometimes have to stop and get coffee on my way, though, so I'll stop here," she says. "I usually get an Americano."

I have been to Intelligentsia's Silver Lake coffee bar, and even though Pasadena's outdoor patio is smaller, its interior is a lot bigger and it's less crowded. A long bar made from Douglas Fir is the focal point of the café. An exposed brick wall and tall ceilings give it an industrial feel, which makes it unique from surrounding businesses that have a more corporate, stuffy feel. Intelligentsia prides itself on not just buying the coffees they serve in their cafés, they develop them with their growers. It's not surprising that an artist as unique as Tiphanie feels at home in a coffee shop like this one.

We sit at a table in the back of the café, and Tiphanie shares the origin story for her Love Life-filled hearts.

"It was right before an art show that I was having in Phoenix. It was a solo show, and it had hearts because I had been working on hearts for about two years," she begins. "Then a month before the show started, my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was New Year's Day that he was diagnosed, and the show was in February, Valentine's Day, so it was all coordinated for that. It was a very rough month getting my show together. I was going to community college and working on things, and I just started writing 'Love Life' maybe in response to [his diagnosis]. That's how it all started. After that show, it turned into screenprint, and I did a lot of street art there with Love Life."

Tiphanie is in the graphics program at Art Center, and it's a passion that she discovered in her youth.

"I was already doing a lot of computer-generated stuff at an early age, probably at 10. It progressed into doing things by hand and scanning it into the computer, more with the computer and a whole mixture of everything," she shares. "Now I'm getting more into the environmental graphics, murals and stuff like that. I always just did that as a pastime, a hobby, but now I'm thinking there are spaces in the city that can use that type of work."

Growing up, she found inspiration in the work of several graphic designers.

"David Carson, Jennifer Sterling – more the Digital Revolution-type designers, so from the early '90s," she says. "By the time I saw that work it was the mid '90s, and I was just starting to view type and image coming together. It was my first time connecting it, that it was powerful, with magazines and editorial design."

In 1999, Tiphanie established her brand at antigirl.com, which offers a candid look into her life as an artist through her words, photographs and illustrations. Over the past 13 years, the site has garnered her work with clients from the New York Times, Nylon and Teen Vogue to Showtime, Suicide Girls and Automata Studios.

"Sometimes I'm like, 'What was I thinking'! Even though I was very young and my work wasn't even very good, I just thought that people should see it. I don't know why, maybe because that's what I do, I document what I'm doing," she offers, when contemplating what motivated her to start antigirl.

Besides art, Tiphanie loves to cook and bake goodies. Lately, she's been into baking blondies and brownies. And though school projects take up most of her time, she has found a few favorite haunts while exploring Downtown with her boyfriend.

"There's a place called Syrup, and everything is good there: the desserts, sundaes. Moskatels, for art supplies. They have everything - party supplies, stuff for weddings. We've met friends at Spring St. Bar and also at this other place called the Down And Out, which I guess you should be scared of," she says with a laugh. "It's pretty divey, but we feel pretty comfortable there. I like to be in a non-judgmental environment."

While she often visits museums, such as the Hammer and LACMA, and galleries for shows by local artists like RETNA, Tiphanie often finds inspiration striking her at a most unexpected place.

"Oddly enough, the library. I always go to the one at school and in Downtown," she says. "I'll look at books and get more and more ideas. I read a lot of biographies and design books. I love it at the library. It's productive and quiet at the same time."

Overall, she loves living in Downtown because of the vast amount of people and the culture.

"We live by USC and people are always saying that it's a rough area, but we feel safe over there. We live above some commercial places and the freeway, but it's like a little haven because you can't hear any of it. It's heaven for me to just do a lot of work there," she admits. "Sometimes we ride our bikes down [towards Skid Row] when they're putting their tents up, and the change is drastic. That's what I try to show in my work, negative and positive relationships – how important they are."

The contrast of dark and light, the harsh lines of text juxtaposed with the soft lines of a heart or a woman's body are examined in her past Hearts and Women collections. Looking to her future, creating title sequences for film and television is something that Tiphanie hopes to branch into.

"That's ultimately why I came to Art Center, because I want to go on a motion track. I want to get into doing title sequences. I love print, and I will always be devoted to print, but I definitely want to learn more about technology and how that works with imagery," she says. "I love the intro for 'Six Feet Under' and 'True Blood' – the stuff coming out of Digital Kitchen. Their studio is just amazing to me. When I think of that and the emergence of the movie poster, I can picture bus stops popping out with interactive posters. That's how I see it in the future."

Whether it's a fine art collage, a mural on the side of a building or a holographic film poster in the future, Tiphanie Brooke hopes that her work will, above all, make people happy.

"I want to make people forget what's going on just for that brief moment when they first see [the piece]. It's important to be very aware of what's going on the world, but I want them, for that brief moment, to forget about everything else, to sit there and relax and try to be happier."

For more information, visit antigirl.com.

L.A. HAVENS - Eaton Canyon Waterfall

 

EATON CANYON WATERFALL

1750 N. Altadena Drive, Pasadena

In this heat, what could sound better than a dip in a natural swimming hole at the base of a 50-foot waterfall? I lived in Pasadena for five years and had heard about the waterfall in Eaton Canyon but never tried to find it until a couple of weeks ago. We had a free afternoon and our dog loves swimming, so we decided to check it out.

The Eaton Canyon website is really helpful in planning for the hike. There are two options for getting to the waterfall, depending on how strenuous a trip you want to make. You can park in the Nature Center's lot at 1750 N. Altadena Drive, walk up a slight incline then over the stream bed for a 1.5-mile total trek. Keep in mind, that it is 1.5 miles one way, so your total roundtrip ends up being about three miles.

For a shorter hike, you drive a mile past the Nature Center on Altadena, turn right on Crescent Drive then right on Pinecrest Drive. Just a short way up Pinecrest you'll see the Pinecrest gate, a chain link fence that remains open until sunset. When you're looking for parking, make sure to pay attention to the restricted parking signs posted on Pinecrest (usually you can find a spot on Bowring Drive). After passing through the Pinecrest gate, you're on the Mt. Wilson Toll Road which takes you down to a cement bridge. Keep to the right as you walk the length of the bridge so you end up making a loop to get onto the dry stream bed that is located directly under the bridge.

Whether you take the long or short hike, this is where the journey up the stream bed to the waterfall begins. It is .4 miles to the waterfall (so a .8 mile round-trip for those of you who started at Pinecrest gate). There are lots of rocks to climb over and you have to cross small rivulets of water, so make sure to wear sneakers and bring flip flops or water shoes for the waterfall area. It's not too long of a hike, but it gets a little tiring since it's not a flat path and you have to be mindful of where you put your feet. It's fun to cross the stream, jumping from stone to stone, and there's no chance of you getting lost because the trail ends up in just one place: the waterfall.

We went on a Saturday afternoon, which was actually a big mistake because the waterfall area was packed. Small children swam in the pool at the base of the waterfall, splashing and screaming as water cascaded over their heads. People lounged in the shade of the rock walls surrounding the fall, enjoying picnic lunches and the sounds of teens playing djembe drums. It was the perfect spot to cool off and rest before hiking back to the car. I'm sure that we'll return to the waterfall again soon – just not on a weekend.

For more information, visit ecnca.org/hiking_trails/waterfall.html.