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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Getty House, the mayoral residence, uses 2,100 gallons of water every day — more than five times as much as the average L.A. home, according to figures released by the L.A. Department of Water and Power.
Mayor Eric Garcetti, who moved into the mansion late last year, has called on Angelenos to cut their water use by 20 percent in the next two years, in response to a record-breaking drought.
And while the mayor has taken steps to reduce the mansion's water usage, removing some landscaping from the front of the house, he has a long way to go.
When it comes to drunk driving crackdowns, it's pretty clear the Los Angeles Police Department has its favorite neighborhoods.
Whiter, wealthier areas of the city, represented by the department's West Los Angeles, Pacific and West Valley divisions, don't seem to be targeted half as much as South L.A. and the immigrant-rich communities surrounding downtown.
However: Cops will tell you they use arrest data to help them determine where to focus their efforts. On that basis, it's hard to deny that some of the LAPD's favorite haunts, like Koreatown, are being unfairly targeted. After all, that area has a notoriously dense concentration of alcohol establishments.
The battle over fracking in Los Angeles has become a war inside City Hall.
In February the City Council voted unanimously to have staffers draft a law that would place a moratorium on hydraulic oil and gas extraction within L.A. Environmentalists pressing for the ban argue that fracking, which injects pressurized liquid into the earth in order to force out fossil fuels, can contaminate water supplies and even trigger earthquakes.
Last week the Department of City Planning — representing some of the staffers ordered to come up with an ordinance — returned a report to the council arguing that hiring a "technical expert" would be necessary first and that no-fracking buffer zones around homes, schools and water wells would suffice.
In other words, planning officials decided a ban wasn't favorable. Two councilman who proposed the prohibition are fuming and are laying down the law for their subordinates at City Planning.
A man lured predominantly Korean-speaking women he raped, attacked or tried to assault by promising them modeling jobs, the Los Angeles Police Department officials said last night. In at least one case, he threatened to call federal immigration authorities on a victim because she wasn't complying, they said.
Suspect Jung Park, 41, was arrested Oct. 28 and, even though bail was listed at $100,000, he was released the same day, according to sheriff's inmate data. A police official said he had bailed out and was currently free.
Police publicized the case overnight because they fear other victims could be out there. If they exist, they want them to come forward.
Environmental attorney Robert Silverstein must be one lucky man. He has faced down the City of Los Angeles, its teams of attorneys, its deep pockets. And five times in front of five different judges, Silverstein has prevailed in his legal battle against Mayor Eric Garcetti's push to transform Hollywood into a kind of dense, Century City–meets–Warner Center skyscraper zone.
Then last week, Mother Nature herself sided with the slight but fiery Silverstein.
An official "earthquake fault zone" map, released by the California State Geologist, officially determined that an active surface-rupture fault snakes from the eastern border of West Hollywood through Hollywood and Los Feliz to Atwater Village, running beneath scores of old, low-slung Hollywood buildings and parcels that investors have been buying — or eyeing — with hopes of clearing the land and bringing in more dense development.
But geologists say the Hollywood earthquake fault is powerful enough to split in half any building sitting atop it. The state's official geological map has thrown into legal doubt the future of a number of plans that now exist only on paper, including the Millennium Hollywood project, whose New York developers want to erect twin 35- and 39-story skyscrapers next to the Capitol Records building.
A man who appeared in that viral "drunk girl" video (see it below) says the whole thing was a set up.
Christine Michaels, owner of LA Epic Club Crawls, says employee Mike “Mokii” Koshak told her he was approached by the video's maker and told to act the part of a zealous suitor for what he believed was a student comedy short film. Koshak also says as much on his Facebook page.
The video, a response to the infamous and ugly New York catcall video, shows a woman pretending to be drunk and asking for help finding a bus to Culver City as she walks on Hollywood Boulevard.
If you've lived here for a while then you know it's been some years since the cranes have been rocking and the construction workers have been clocking hours on the job.
Blame the Great Recession of 2007, sure, but even before that L.A. development was relatively stagnant, especially as we looked enviously west across the Pacific and saw Chinese metropolises rising from the dust.
You can blame L.A.'s notorious NIMBYs, who don't like development, sure. But the truth is that it takes an ungodly amount of cash to buy and build these days, particularly when it comes to mega projects of the type we're now seeing in town.
Downtown L.A.'s Made in America festival over Labor Day weekend set city taxpayers back nearly $170,000 in unrecouped costs for policing, street closures, trash pickup and other expenses, according to our analysis of figures from the office of Mayor Eric Garcetti, who aggressively wooed the event.
The numbers were apparently first released to another outlet just before the Veterans Day holiday, after L.A. Weekly, long critical of the event, last month formally requested them under the California Public Records Act. PRA expert Peter Scheer of the First Amendment Coalition says the law dictates that, in general, City Hall shouldn't discriminate between whom gets public information and when.
In any case, the cash is relatively inconsequential for a city that has an $8 billion budget. Even fiscal hawk and City Hall critic Jack Humphreville calls the $169,971.84 we ended up spending on the two-day, Jay Z-curated concert "a drop in the bucket."
The West Coast's response to the New York City catcall-video-gone-viral is one, recently posted on YouTube (see it below), that has a woman acting drunk on Hollywood Boulevard to see what happens.
"I've had a little too much to drink," she says, holding a beverage in a brown paper bag. "Let's see if anyone will help me get home."
As she stumbles around a well-trafficked Walk of Fame, the actor who calls herself Jennifer tells men "I'm trying to find the bus to Culver City."
Corn syrup has the dubious distinction of being bad for both our bodies and our land.
While studies have long tracked the parallel timelines between corn syrup's inclusion in mass market sodas and our expanding waistlines, environmentalists have also decried the damage done by single-crop monoculture, like most of the corn grown in America, that requires extra pesticides and depletes soil nutrients.
If you've been a consumer of carbonated corn sugar, a.k.a soda, at least you can redeem your environmental credentials. A little.
A man lured predominantly Korean-speaking women he raped, attacked or tried to assault by promising them modeling jobs, the Los Angeles Police Department officials said last night. In at least one case he threatened to call federal immigration authorities on a victim because she wasn't complying, they said. Suspect Jung...
When it comes to drunk driving crackdowns, it's pretty clear the Los Angeles Police Department has its favorite neighborhoods. Whiter, wealthier areas of the city, represented by the department's West Los Angeles, Pacific and West Valley divisions, don't seem to be targeted half as much as South L.A. and the...
Getty House, the mayoral residence, uses 2,100 gallons of water every day — more than five times as much as the average L.A. home, according to figures released by the L.A. Department of Water and Power. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who moved into the mansion late last year, has called on...
Environmental attorney Robert Silverstein must be one lucky man. He has faced down the City of Los Angeles, its teams of attorneys, its deep pockets. And five times in front of five different judges, Silverstein has prevailed in his legal battle against Mayor Eric Garcetti's push to transform Hollywood into...
The Republican-led voter-ID movement has widely been seen as an attempt to discourage minorities and poor people, who are less likely to have government identification, from going to the polls. Perhaps the biggest evidence of this is, first, that the pursuers of this policy are almost always folks on the...
The battle over fracking in Los Angeles has become a war inside City Hall. In February the City Council voted unanimously to have staffers draft a law that would place a moratorium on hydraulic oil and gas extraction within L.A. Environmentalists pressing for the ban argue that fracking, which injects...
If you've lived here for a while then you know it's been some years since the cranes have been rocking and the construction workers have been clocking hours on the job. Blame the Great Recession of 2007, sure, but even before that L.A. development was relatively stagnant, especially as we...
You're still hungover from Halloween weekend, we know, but the Los Angeles Police Department and other agencies are like unstoppable zombies when it comes to busting drunk drivers. They've planned a long weekend of DUI enforcement that actually starts tonight in Koreatown and downtown. Lucky for you the LAPD believes...
A man who appeared in that viral "drunk girl" video (see it below) says the whole thing was a set up. Christine Peters, owner of LA Epic Club Crawls, says employee Mike “Mokii” Koshak told her he was approached by the video's maker and told to act the part of a...
A man accused by federal authorities today of operating an online drug bazaar called Silk Road 2.0 allegedly did so as he worked briefly at Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket and spacecraft concern in Hawthorne. SpaceX communications director John Taylor says 26-year-old Blake Benthall was employed at the company from Dec...
The State of California shook Mayor Eric Garcetti, the L.A. City Council and Hollywood developers today, releasing a legally binding map of the Hollywood Earthquake Fault Zone which shows that the active "surface rupture" fault runs under the lower part of property for the proposed Millennium Towers skyscrapers. State law renders...
The matter of whether or not condoms should be required equipment for porn stars on the job could be on the 2016 presidential ballot in California. After failing to get such a law through the state legislature in 2013 and 2014, the L.A.-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation says it will announce...
They come to take our jobs? Then we don't pay them? What has this country come to? The U.S. Labor Department Wage and Hour Division said this week that Los Angeles was, by far, the nation's capital of underpaying garment workers, a group largely comprised of immigrants. Garment workers were shorted $3,004,085 during...
The prospect of finding a mate through DNA testing seems a little agrarian to us. Compatible DNA? What if you end up with a long, lost cousin? Well, the fascinating thing about Singldout's use of DNA testing for its matchmaking service is that opposites attract, especially when it comes to...
Shepard Fairey, L.A.'s unofficial street-art laureate, has in recent years reaped a lot of publicity and fame from Time magazine's use of his work. There was the "Hope" cover image of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, based on a poster that put Fairey in hot water because he lied after it was...