This Is the Way to Exit Your Youth
by | Oct 16, 2024 11:39 am | Comments (0)
Emily Quintanilla finds at least 13 reasons why you’d not be bored at Wallows’ hometown show at the Forum.
LA
Queer History Redux: “They Learned To Stop Interrupting”
by | Oct 13, 2024 11:58 am | Comments (0)
DISCOVERING LONG BEACH’S UNKNOWN QUEER HISTORY
Hamburger Mary’s
Long Beach
October 5, 2024
The rich queer history of Los Angeles has long been overshadowed by that of San Francisco and New York. That misperception is rapidly changing, thanks to documentaries such as L.A.: A Queer History (2021), historical publications such as Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons’s Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (2009), and now Circa, the nation’s “first and only Queer Histories Festival,” which is currently in its second year and features events in and around the city throughout October.
Continue reading ‘Queer History Redux: “They Learned To Stop Interrupting”’
“God Is Dead. I Believe In Topaz”
by | Oct 11, 2024 10:17 am | Comments (1)
SINISTER SUNDAYS
Jumbo’s Clown Room
Los Angeles
Oct. 6, 2024
If you ask any fun-loving person in Los Angeles who the best Jumbo’s Clown Room dancer is, they’ll be able to come up with an answer. On Sunday night, I find myself partial to Topaz, who, while speaking to me, gives me the nostalgic sensation of eavesdropping on my cooler older sister’s sleepovers as a child. She learned to dance on the job, she tells me while fiddling with a jukebox. My friend jokes that she belongs in a Tarantino movie, but instead, she is here, materialized in front of me in a glittering white jacket and red lipstick. She is funny, charming, and beautiful. She is also a writer. She asks if I would come to her play reading. Yes, of course. At that moment, I would do anything she asked of me. I briefly wonder if this is how men feel all the time. An hour later, I overhear a man mutter: “I no longer believe in God. God is dead. I believe in Topaz.”
Little Weirdos Wait To Die
by | Oct 9, 2024 10:32 am | Comments (0)
NPR
MITSKI with SHARON VAN ETTEN
Hollywood Bowl
Los Angeles
September 28, 2024
“I feel like performing live is practice for living and dying,” Mitski declares several songs into her sold-out show at the Hollywood Bowl. She goes on to explain that in performance, she experiences it all: ecstasy, joy, awe. Then the lights dim, and she’s profoundly empty again. “I walk offstage, I have to let this go, no matter how wonderful it’s been.” This is death — or, at least, how she imagines it. “I’m gonna die. I don’t mean that in a violent way. You can scream all you want. Start facing it now.”
You’re Invited, If You Dare
by | Oct 7, 2024 11:40 am | Comments (0)
THE DARE
El Rey Theatre
Los Angeles
September 27, 2024
The title of the Dare’s 2024 debut album poses a question: What’s Wrong with New York? Here’s my take: they don’t know how to have fun. While Harrison Patrick Smith’s ascent to the indie sleaze throne has been remarkably frictionless — first we knew him as a Dimes Square one-hit wonder, now he’s signed to Republic with a brat shout-out and magazine features galore — responses to his reign have been mixed. Although any event with his name on the flyer will pull in a sizable crowd of party animals, some critics scoff at his sex, drugs, and rock and roll shtick, which goes heavy on the sex part. (Exhibit A: his The Sex EP, anchored by the single “Sex,” features cover art with fully clothed models sporting American Apparel as they simulate intercourse.)
3 Straight Shows, Lost To Gothic Night
by | Oct 7, 2024 11:33 am | Comments (0)
Fontaines DC at Pomona's Fox.
FAKE FRUIT with DOLLY CREAMER, Gold-Diggers, Los Angeles, September 26, 2024
PUBLIC MEMORY with CRUEL DIAGONALS, Gold-Diggers, Los Angeles, September 27, 2024
FONTAINES D.C. with BEEN STELLAR, Fox Theater, Pomona, September 28, 2024
[Publisher’s note: document found morning of 09.29.24 beside abandoned vehicle at Chino Hills strip mall parking lot.]
09.25.24, 11:33 p.m. Long Beach
Dear diary, I’m embarking inadvisably upon a three-day marathon of unrelated shows around Greater Los Angeles, including on workdays. Sounds tough, but if we’re ever to push the concertology field forward, I must survive! Pocket contents include notebook, camera phone, merch money. Wish me luck …
Place Out Of No Place
by | Sep 26, 2024 11:46 am | Comments (0)
Alice Neel
Dennis Florio, 1978 (detail)
AT HOME: ALICE NEEL IN THE QUEER WORLD
David Zwirner
Los Angeles
Sept. 24, 2024
On a scalding Saturday afternoon — peak heat wave in Los Angeles, temperatures around 107 outside — a small crowd of art writers gathered around a seersucker-suited Hilton Als inside the main gallery at David Zwirner. Als had flown in to introduce a new exhibition of Alice Neel paintings he’d curated.
What Steve Ballmer Can’t Buy
by | Sep 23, 2024 11:45 am | Comments (0)
INTUIT DOME ART PREVIEW
Intuit Dome
Inglewood
We made long, slow shadows, watched them bleed into the pallid concrete. For what felt like an hour, we’d be waiting for “Jenna.” Only she, I was told, could get me to my car.
It was late afternoon, early August. Intuit Dome, the new Westside arena, still had weeks until its christening by Bruno Mars, but we were there for the unveiling of its art. For reasons I was now finding hard to remember, this had seemed like a funny thing to go to.
Queering The Way
by | Sep 20, 2024 11:23 am | Comments (0)
SCI-FI, MAGICK, QUEER L.A.: SEXUAL SCIENCE AND THE IMAGI-NATION OPENING RECEPTION
Fisher Museum of Art at University of Southern California
Los Angeles
Sept. 5, 2024
A map at the entrance to the USC Fisher Museum of Art’s newest exhibit, Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation (SFMQLA), weaves meandering pathways among the names of pivotal figures, organizations, and works representing Los Angeles’s storied past, from the early gay rights group the Mattachine Society to the Scottish Rite Freemasons, from the muscle magazine Physique Pictorial to silent film star Jane Wolfe, from French erotic novelist Anaïs Nin to the painter Frieda Harris to Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, and more.
What follows, as one explores the exhibit, is an ambitious interdisciplinary project — the first of its kind — a collaborative effort between two USC stalwarts, the ONE Archives, one of the world’s largest collections of LGBTQ+ historical materials, and the Fisher Museum, home to a diverse collection of American and European artworks.
Unhinged Freak-Out Scramblers, Grizzled & Reunited
by | Sep 18, 2024 10:55 am | Comments (0)
SOUL COUGHING PLAY THE SONGS OF SOUL COUGHING
The Bellwether
Los Angeles
Sept. 13, 2024
They said it would never happen, admitting as much on their tour announcement and promo materials this summer. It makes sense they’d embrace the flip-flop: after mastering, during their brief taste of cult success in the late 1990s, several music-industry narrative tropes — Wandering Minstrel; No-Hit Wonder; Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll — NYC’s Soul Coughing had grown too self-aware to not inhabit one more milestone, the Unlikely Reunion Tour, ironically and full-throatedly.
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Shaking Up The Scene
by | Sep 16, 2024 1:30 pm | Comments (0)
Kai Schreier photo
The Big One: Issue Two Launch Party
The Earl
Los Angeles
September 6, 2024
It seems the season of earthquakes is upon us. After a series of small tremors, a 4.4 on the Richter Scale shook the Eastside in August; just today, I was roused from my sleep by a mysterious rumbling. Now the Big One has come to town — although this time, it wasn’t the shifting of tectonic plates that created a disturbance but the emergence of a new literary magazine founded by born-and-raised California girls Gabrielle “Gabby” Sones and Johanna “Jo” Stone.
Out of the Closet, Over the Hedge
by | Sep 12, 2024 3:07 pm | Comments (0)
BANANA REPUBLIC/FRATRICIDE
Tom of Finland House
Los Angeles
Aug. 22, 2024
The Tom of Finland House is separated from Laveta Terrace by a tall green hedge. It’s not immediately clear whether this is to shield the outside world from what is going on inside or the inside world from what is going on without. Either way, whenever I come to the House, I feel as though I’m passing through a membrane to another universe. Butch lesbians roam in button-ups or harnesses, a given individual simultaneously sports a beard and a visible thong, top surgery scars flash through the open sides of DIY muscle shirts, and — like a cherry on top — a jacked man clad in dark leather vest, shorts, and canine muzzle-mask searches for a master.
Keeping an Opa Mind
by | Sep 6, 2024 11:13 am | Comments (0)
LONG BEACH GREEK FOOD & MUSIC FESTIVAL
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Long Beach
Aug. 31 – Sept. 2, 2024
In the Aquatic Capital of America™, it’s easy to gaze seaward and visualize the lifestyles of ancient Mediterranean empires. Before the destructive Spanish arrived in the 16th century, the thriving Gabrielino-Tongva locals utilized maritime routes to trade between the scattered Channel Islands, paralleling the Phoenician sea-merchant empire 7,000 miles away. Today, you can hop on a ferry to horizon-dominating enclaves like Catalina to buy wares, eat seafood, and dodge vicious beasts,then head back to your wife and son, all on an odyssey spanning far less than a decade. From the water, you’ll see coastal bluffs descending to bustling man-made ports, dramatically reemerging as dynamic cliffs that wrap around San Pedro and the commanding Olympus of Palos Verdes, as late winter’s enigmatic fog licks dry rocks until they crumble to coves below — then Scylla flings your skiff into the breakwater, and the Coast Guard arrives to slay her, all in a day’s work.
As someone heavily influenced by Edith Hamilton’s Mythology (1942) but lacking present-day Hellenic acquaintances, I couldn’t resist attending the annual Long Beach Greek Festivalfundraiser to learn more.
Outside The Lucky Few
by | Sep 4, 2024 1:31 pm | Comments (0)
Eli Diner Photo
Kevin Bouton-Scott, in front of a painting of Saint Francis of Assisi looking at a painting of Saint Francis of Assisi.
A Painting Retrospective by Kevin Bouton-Scott
Towne Square
Los Angeles
June 23, 2024
On Fourth Street in Los Angeles where it becomes Skid Row, east of San Pedro Street, there’s a club called Towne Square that usually has grindcore and black metal shows but in June hosted a one-night retrospective for painter Kevin Bouton-Scott. “Don’t park your car here,” it said on the flyer. I wasn’t sure if that was just a warning or the title of the exhibition. The club is next door to a needle exchange, and next to that is an SRO building. The street is a dense spectacle of the kind of misery you probably otherwise encounter in dispersed arrangements — in the shadow of an overpass, on a Hollywood sidewalk — and out of a car window. I arrived in the late afternoon, and it was stifling inside. I can only imagine what it was like in the tents.
The Dog Ears of Summer
by | Aug 30, 2024 7:19 pm | Comments (0)
Brittany Menjivar photo
Friday Night Mixer
A Good Used Book
Los Angeles
August 23, 2024
Certified bibliophiles will know that there are two distinct varieties of used and rare bookstores. Some stock autographed copies and first editions that go for thousands of dollars. Others appeal to novelty seekers, carrying lesser-known paperbacks whose low prices belie their compelling contents. While I appreciate the preservational purpose of the former category (especially after my trip to a rare book convention earlier this year), my wallet is certainly grateful that A Good Used Book belongs to the latter. Lately, I’ve seen the Historic Filipinotown shop all over my Instagram feed — the booksellers are known for sharing pictures of customers with their new finds via Instagram Stories, the perfect formula for word-of-mouth hype in a city that can’t stop posting. On Friday, I stopped by their August mixer to scan the shelves — and, of course, pose for my own glamour shot.
