Joshuah Bearman

Shadow of the Colossus: Looks like a film

Colossal

Joshuah Bearman
Another holiday season, another God-knows-how-many video games lining the shelves. This is a business that has more efficiently monetized entertainment than at any other time in human history, and the only thing louder than the vast din of E3 each spring is the ringing chimes of cash registers the following......
(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

Up Deep Creek Without a Paddle

Joshuah Bearman
The 2.5-mile trail from Bowen Ranch Road to the Deep Creek Hot Springs is the shortest official route in the San Bernardino National Forest, and still we managed to get lost. Deep Creek is a remote thermal spring and hippie hideaway halfway to Barstow, and we’d driven the two hours......
(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

Best Nonembarrassing ­Peanut-Butter Crazies

Joshuah Bearman
Best Nonembarrassing ­Peanut-Butter Crazies Every day they come, from far and wide, making the pilgrimage to the Downbeat Café with one thing on their minds: peanut butter. Or, more precisely, peanut-butter cookies: crispy, flaky, slightly crumbly, sand-dollar-size handmade cookies, pasted together with preternaturally smooth peanut-butter filling, that have developed a......
(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

Best Gelato Snafu, a.k.a. the Neo-Neapolitan

Joshuah Bearman
Best Gelato Snafu, a.k.a. the Neo-Neapolitan As ever, the gelato wars rage. It’s a free-for-all: Il Cono versus Boule versus Al Gelato versus Bulgarini versus Scoops — each has its strengths and weaknesses and a field of fighting partisans. Let us stay above the fray; instead of planting flags on......
(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

Back to Old School

Joshuah Bearman
Game Land is never stumbled upon; it is always sought out. There is no storefront, and only one small sign, far from the door. Tucked in an empty hallway adjoining a Western Union on Santa Monica just off La Brea, Game Land is so well hidden that I was standing......

Not-So-Mean Streets

Joshuah Bearman
It happened by accident, I swear. After spending several months in Florida, managing a family crisis — a tangled combination of mother, brother, hospital and jail — I had just arrived in New York. I hadn’t eaten in 10 hours, so I walked from Redhook, where I was staying, to......
No switching sides allowed

¡Viva Border Volleyball!

Joshuah Bearman
California’s most desolate and unknown beach is desolate and unknown for a reason. It has no name, no facilities, no parking lot. There are no signs for it inside Borderfield State Park. There are no signs for the park either. To get there, you depart the 5 freeway 10 miles......
Poor man's Palm Springs no more: Poolside at the Hacienda Hot Springs Inn

Some Like It Hot

Joshuah Bearman
Locals say that no one arrives in Desert Hot Springs by accident, but that’s exactly what happened when Cabot Yerxa first settled the place in 1913, after prospecting in the Klondike, building houses in Cuba and watching a citrus investment in Riverside go bad from frost. It was also an......

Vintage Skiing

Joshuah Bearman
“I never show up before lunch,” said Christopher James, a Northern Californian recently relocated to Los Angeles by way of a decade in New York, as well as a back-country skier and a dedicated mountaineer. He is also a Mount Baldy devotee, and organizes afternoon expeditions there whenever there’s snow......

ArtStation 2

Joshuah Bearman
William Henry Fox Talbot launched modern photography when he developed his negative-positive process, which he called “the art of fixing a shadow.” That was 1839, and the optical curiosity of the “sun picture” was on its way to becoming the dominant visual medium, joining the realm of fine arts along......