You Ignorant Sluts California's election results brought out the fury and glee in L.A. Weekly readers — in particular, the defeat of Proposition 46, a plan to raise the medical malpractice cap ("Consumer Watchdog Gets Blown Out on Health Care Propositions 45 and 46," Nov. 5) and the Weekly's "California...
Known for his indie-infused electronic remixes, RAC (an acronym for the original name, Remix Artist Collective) focuses on making his music interesting and eclectic rather than danceable. Still, we can’t help but have a good time listening and swaying along to this guy’s silky beats. Very little of what RAC does is predictable, and his performance at the Fonda promises to be consistently surprising and full of feel-good vibes. With support from The Knocks and other guests, it will be a night of chill indie-pop with an electronic flair.More
The late Larry Sultan, whose LACMA retrospective just opened, photographed his father and mother with the same curious distance he employed when photographing porn stars in the valley, which says a lot about his work. It’s all about style, posture and personality, but it’s best when those personalities have some moral ambiguity to them, so that the humanity of a subject doesn’t distract you from Sultan’s fantastic eye for detail. Hours vary, closed Christmas and Thanksgiving.More
Respect Drum and Bass has been going on since 1999, and prides itself as L.A.’s longest running weekly drum 'n’ bass event. The pop-up club typically comes to Dragonfly in Hollywood on Thursday nights, but it has also showed up at Avalon and, soon, at Exchange LA. The crowd at Respect’s events is famously considerate; you don’t need to know anything about the genre itself in order to feel accepted by the scene. If you do need some liquid courage to dance, Dragonfly has the added bonus of offering $4 drink specials before 11 p.m.More
Death founder Chuck Schuldiner passed away in 2001 from brain cancer. The vocalist/guitarist is considered one of the most influential figures in underground metal. In the early ‘90s, Schuldiner was a pioneer in stretching the boundaries of musical technicality within the death metal genre. This tour features ex-members of the band paying tribute to his legacy — most notably, drummer Sean Reinert (now of Cynic) and bassist Steve DiGiorgio from the era most known for Schuldiner’s experimentation.More
When it comes to the life of Bruce Haack, separating truth from fiction is not easy. The groundbreaking electronic music composer and inventor is said to have taught himself to play piano by age 3. By 8, he apparently was escaping his abusive mother's wrath by sneaking off to Indian...
Visual allure often isn't a virtue we value when chasing obscure flavors in L.A.'s international neighborhoods. In fact, adventurous diners tend to appreciate the opposite: The grungier the location, the more accomplished we feel for having sought it out. Looks be damned — let the fireworks happen on the flavor...
The Los Angeles art world has been saying a collective "hallelujah" since the arrival in January of Philippe Vergne as MOCA's new director. Although some East Coast commentators condemned the appointment — citing in particular a budget crisis scandal in which Vergne resorted to selling off a number of works...
The late Larry Sultan, whose LACMA retrospective just opened, photographed his father and mother with the same curious distance he employed when photographing porn stars in the valley, which says a lot about his work. It’s all about style, posture and personality, but it’s best when those personalities have some moral ambiguity to them, so that the humanity of a subject doesn’t distract you from Sultan’s fantastic eye for detail. Hours vary, closed Christmas and Thanksgiving.More
Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays-Sundays. Continues through March 22
Thirty years ago, manga artist Akira Toriyama embarked upon a hero’s journey with his warrior-in-training Goku. The result, Dragon Ball, became a global phenomenon that launched multiple TV series and films. Decades later, the franchise remains one of the staples of anime conventions. Even the critically reviled, live-action flick Dragonball: Evolution couldn’t quell the fan’s love for Goku and company. Saturday night, QPop and friends presents a Dragon Ball 30th anniversary tribute in their new Q2 space. More than 80 artists are already scheduled to take part in the exhibition, which will cover Toriyama’s full body of work, with emphasis on Dragon Ball. Q2, 319 E. 2nd St., Suite 121, Little Tokyo; Nov. 15; 7-10 p.m.More
Tales of the Old West continue to make up a significant portion of our cultural narrative, mostly because we still like to comfort ourselves with stories showing that ours is a land of opportunity. Making the trek to the American frontier promised a new life or, at the very least,...
Tales of fame and its trappings — and the way they're never enough to build a life — are as old as show business itself. Maybe for that reason, almost any story about discovering the hollowness of fame is written off as a cliché. But what's the difference, really, between...
Erik Peter Carlson's The Toy Soldiers is a pitch-black spin on American Graffiti, set in a brightly colored place during what's remembered as a brightly colored decade.
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2014 has been a good year for redemption-through-music stories, with high points such as God Help the Girl and My Little Pony: Equestria Girls — Rainbow Rocks and lesser efforts such as Rudderless.
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The Occupy movement persists in fits and stutters around the globe, and though its inability (stateside at least) to resolve internal issues around race, class, and gender shouldn't be ignored, neither should its successes.
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It's one thing to watch sturdy, dexterously charming Jean Gabin as a working-class joe who doesn't mind dangerous manual labor, figuring that's his lot in life.
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Beneath the rom-com pacing and peppy underscoring of a Lifetime movie, Delusions of Guinevere is a surprisingly dark satire of modern celebrity.
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From the opening robbery in a hard-land gas station, Simon Hawkins and Zeke Hawkins' Bad Turn Worse floors it straight into the past -- it plays like one of the best of those chatty, reflexive, standoffs-and-monologues crime indies every young dude in L.A. whipped up after Tarantino hit.
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Only in fusion-forward Los Angeles is something that smells like a bowl of pho and steams like a bowl of pho not necessarily an actual bowl of pho.
At the two brick-and-mortar outposts of the Komodo food truck, Southeast Asian–inspired Chef Erwin Tjahyadi has created a hand-held version of the traditional Vietnamese beef noodle soup, which stuffs all its savory, crunchy, spicy goodness into your everyday flour tortilla. It's name? The Phoritto.
The brand is already known for its combining of Thai, Indonesian and Korean with Latin and American cuisines — its menu includes items such as kimchi nachos and Hawaiian-style fried chicken — but the Phoritto is easily Komodo's most adventurous fusion yet.
Originally meant to be one of the restaurant's temporary chalkboard specials, which rotate out every few weeks, the Phoritto has been such a hit (even selling out on some days) that its residency has been extended through the end of November.
They Innate potato compared to a standard potato, 10 hours after being cut.
A new potato has been genetically modified to produce less of a potentially cancer-causing chemical when fried.
The Innate potato, which was just approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for commercial planting, produces up to 70% less acrylamide, a chemical that is emitted when potatoes are fried to make such snacks as French fries and potato chips. The chemical causes cancer in rodents and is a suspected human carcinogen. The potato, whose "innate" DNA has been altered, also resists bruising.
Food documentaries serve a lot of different purposes. Sometimes they're almost culinary porn, with sumptuous photography and lovingly detailed preparation. Other times, the films can be informative, recounting the horrors of the American diet or the shady dealings behind agribusiness.
These films can also be celebratory, focusing on dining establishments and their community. Another great genre of documentary is character driven, though of course this only works if the person can hold the audience for a whole hour and a half.
After spending hours in front of our television watching films about everything from bananas to tongue cancer to food Nazis, we've compiled this list of the best food-based titles made since the beginning of this century.
Whether you are looking to be educated or moved or even laugh until you cry, there is something for everyone. And thankfully, chefs, kitchens and restaurants make for great drama.
Jess Schenker does nothing to dispel the romance of the badass chef in his new culinary memoir All or Nothing: One Chef’s Appetite for the Extreme. In fact, in Schenker’s frank and poignant telling of wretched to riches, gustatory archetypes only get reinforced.
Now the successful owner and executive chef of two New York City restaurants, Recette and The Gander, Schenker was born with a compulsive personality that worked both for and against him. Even as a toddler his parents noticed an unusual obsessiveness. One morning his mother went into his room and found all of the wallpaper ripped from the walls. “Strip by strip, I’d torn it down all the way from the ceiling to the floor in clean, straight lines.”
As Schenker succinctly puts it, “Compulsiveness became my lifeline.” One way the author found respite from his nervous, free floating energy was around food. In cooking, Schenker finds a place to land. “For me, being in the kitchen was like taking a Xanax.”
Mast Brothers chocolate cookie and savory pie at Dinette
At 8 a.m. yesterday morning, the 99 Cents Only store on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park got a shiny new neighbor: Dinette opened its doors — or more accurately, window — serving pastries, cookies and breakfast items.
The sleek, glassed-in space sits in stark contrast to its more worn-down neighbors, and the ultra-hip patrons sitting at low metal tables out front stand out among the bustle of families shopping at nearby stores. This is only a block away from Sage, the popular vegan restaurant that was one of the early businesses to begin changing this stretch of Sunset, but even so, Dinette seems very manicured and curated tucked into this block.
For four sessions stretched out over two days in a warehouse at Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles last weekend, Shelton Brothers — an East Coast alcohol-distribution company — hosted a beer festival so epic, it actually deserved its simple title: The Festival. Partly an excuse to showcase their extensive portfolio of national and international breweries, this weekend-long event also brought various highly coveted beers to Los Angeles for the first time and provided a tasting opportunity unlike any other.
Top-rated breweries like Arizona Wilderness, Belgium's Cantillon and England's Moor Beer (none of which have regular distribution in Southern California) poured samples at this unprecedented event, letting locals not only try some of these rarely seen beers, but also meet the brewers responsible for them.
More than providing an enviable assortment of beers in one place, The Festival left a lasting impact on Los Angeles' beer community, which has become increasingly local-centric in recent years. Here are the top five reasons why a gathering of the world's best breweries was the best thing that could have possibly happened for L.A. beer:
A crowd has been gathering most mornings at one end of a nondescript, old-school strip mall in Woodland Hills. It doesn’t seem like a promising spot for destination dining – but that’s exactly what’s going on, with people in the area lining up for the new location of Blu Jam Café, which opened last month.
With two other sites in Hollywood and Sherman Oaks, the restaurant serves breakfast and lunch daily from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Favorite dishes include crunchy French toast with a vanilla bean sauce, and pan-roasted macaroni scrambled with eggs, smoked bacon, ham, garlic, chives and cheddar cheese.
Fourteen years and more than 600 stories later, Da Capo Press' Best Food Writing series remains the definitive anthology for gastronomical prose.
Edited by Holly Hughes, who each year combs through a diverse range of food-centric publications to come upon the relatively small number of stories worthy of her missive, the 2014 edition features works by everyone from local food bloggers to prominent James Beard Award-winners — including the L.A. Weekly's own food critic Besha Rodell.
Rodell's 2013 profile of L.A. pastry queen Sherry Yard is featured in Best Food Writing 2014 and in celebration, we have a copy of the book to give away to one lucky reader.
Food halls are the new black, the new gastropubs, the new hotness. Eataly is coming to L.A., Anthony Bourdain is opening a food hall in New York, and we are still anxiously awaiting the food hall attached to the Helms Bakery that's forthcoming from Sherry Yard and Sang Yoon. And today, Jet Tila and Mimi Mok open Stir Market, a food hall and restaurant on Beverly in Fairfax.
As SNL's Stefon would say, it's got everything: 4,000-square-feet of minimalist space containing a European rotisserie, expo kitchen, a salad and sandwich station, a wine and snack bar with charcuterie and cheese, a bakery, and an espresso bar. There is also a grocery component offering gourmet retail products, and prepared food to-go.
If you've been drinking beer at events in Los Angeles lately, you've probably seen Bernie Wire, the friendliest man in the room and the only one toting a Canon 5D Mark II on a ten-foot-tall monopod. Maybe he's asked you to pose for a photo, which he then individually edited and uploaded onto his Friends of Local Beer Facebook page. The angle, exposure and coloring on it inevitably looked so cool that you probably made it your profile picture.
For the last three years, Wire has been the unofficial photo-documentarian of L.A.'s growing beer scene, showing up at events as big as the LA Beer Week kickoff festival and as small as a tap takeover at City Tavern, snapping shots of the brewers, fans and, of course, beverages that make drinking beer in this city so great.
But Wire isn't just your everyday club photographer turned loose on the beer community. Last year, Mowhawk Bend hung prints of his most timeless human-featuring images in the exposed-brick walls of the Ramona Room for a show appropriately called I Shoot Beer People. And tonight, his next exhibition will open to the public — an assortment of 10 powerful aluminum-printed photographs that remove the human element so present in most of his shots.
If you live in Los Angeles and you're interested in hobbies like raising chickens or baking with locally milled flour, you've got to drive around and do lots of online research just to start out. Roe Sie did that, too, when he first got serious about fermenting foods and setting...
Fergie has a wine. Yes, it’s true. She has her name on shoes, fragrances, Black Eyed Peas, and now grapes. It almost feels as if Fergie is running around sticking her name on everything she can, sort of like that question-mark sticker in the 2003 “Where Is The Love” video...
For four sessions stretched out over two days in a warehouse at Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles last weekend, Shelton Brothers — an East Coast alcohol-distribution company — hosted a beer festival so epic, it actually deserved its simple title: The Festival. Partly an excuse to showcase their...
In a town where choosing which flip-flops to wear can be the biggest sartorial choice of the evening, sometimes its hard to muster the energy for an elegant evening out. But being so incessantly relaxed can become a trap in itself. Tableside dining brings the romance back to eating out,...
Food documentaries serve a lot of different purposes. Sometimes they're almost culinary porn, with sumptuous photography and lovingly detailed preparation. Other times, the films can be informative, recounting the horrors of the American diet or the shady dealings behind agribusiness. These films can also be celebratory, focusing on dining establishments...
Only in fusion-forward Los Angeles is something that smells like a bowl of pho and steams like a bowl of pho not necessarily an actual bowl of pho. At the two brick-and-mortar outposts for the once-roving Komodo food truck, Southeast Asian-inspired Chef Erwin Tjahyadi has created a hand-held version of...
Jess Schenker does nothing to dispel the romance of the badass chef in his new culinary memoir All or Nothing: One Chef’s Appetite for the Extreme. In fact, in Schenker’s frank and poignant telling of wretched to riches, gustatory archetypes only get reinforced. Now the successful owner and executive chef...
Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, coffee expert Jim Schulman sampled some local tap water before testing its mineral content with digital meters he brings on trips so he can brew the perfect cup anywhere. He did not like what he found. "I tried some of your tap water," he says...
It’s Oscar time in the wine world with Wine Spectator Magazine is rolling out its "Top 100 Wines of 2014" list, starting with the top ten countdown, which began yesterday. As the wines' names are released, a few each day this week, retailers and collectors scramble to find bottles of the...
Every day, the cocktail culture grows by leaps and bounds. For a long while, we Angelenos were playing catch-up with cities like London and New York. Now, with award-winning bartenders like Julian Cox and a growing list of classic cocktail bars from the Eastside to the west, there is no...
It's basically always oyster season in Los Angeles, where we're lucky enough to have the bounty of the cold Pacific and are able to enjoy it year-round. But for those of us raised with the adage that you should only eat oysters in months ending in "r," November still feels...
Food halls are the new black, the new gastropubs, the new hotness. Eataly is coming to L.A., Anthony Bourdain is opening a food hall in New York, and we are still anxiously awaiting the food hall attached to the Helms Bakery that's forthcoming from Sherry Yard and Sang Yoon. And...
"A Dinner For Prune" — A Celebration for Gabrielle Hamilton at Lucques Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne, presents a special evening inspired by Prune, the new cookbook by Gabrielle Hamilton. The dinner is Hamilton’s exclusive appearance in Los Angeles.Goin and Styne will present a four course menu drawn from the...
Fourteen years and more than 600 stories later, Da Capo Press' Best Food Writing series remains the definitive anthology for gastronomical prose. Edited by Holly Hughes, who each year combs through a diverse range of food-centric publications to come upon the relatively small number of stories worthy of her missive,...
A crowd has been gathering most mornings at one end of a nondescript, old-school strip mall in Woodland Hills. It doesn’t seem like a promising spot for destination dining – but that’s exactly what’s going on, with people in the area lining up for the new location of Blu Jam...