SIERRAFERRELL: SHOOTFORTHEMOONTOUR The Fonda Theatre Los Angeles April 3, 2024.
While I don’t exactly know what a honky-tonk is, I’ve always wanted to attend one. This past Wednesday was the closest I’ve come: blue ostrich cowboy boots, tan and teal Ariat boots, red knee-high cowboy boots, and Frye Campus boots lined up along Hollywood Boulevard in anticipation of Sierra Ferrell, the roots musician who went on to turn the Fonda Theatre into the Grand Ole Opry for a night.
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A.J. Urquidi
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Apr 2, 2024 11:51 am
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SLIDEAWAYFEST featuring NOTHINGPERFORMINGGUILTYOFEVERYTHING and friends The Belasco Los Angeles March 31, 2024
Members of the jury, I understand you have a verdict in the case of Slide Away Fest Los Angeles on this 30th day of March, 2024. As we have outlined, said festival at the Belasco showcased bands in the broad categories of shoegaze, shoegaze-revival, and variations of reverb-soaked guitar alt-rock thereof, with elements of hardcore. These bands convened with assistance from Philadelphia group Nothing, the headliner, who thereby presented 2014 debut Guilty of Everything in a live setting for its 10th anniversary.
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Greg Dillon
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Apr 1, 2024 11:30 am
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KIMGORDON with TWIGHARPER The Regent Theater Los Angeles March 27, 2024
Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep, I imagine I’m a ghost in a strange house. I rearrange wall art, organize the fridge, and try to crank the ignition on a dream. I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately; in the era of hyperstimulation, I don’t think I’m the only one. Out of this moment emerges multidisciplinary noise rock legend Kim Gordon’s brilliant new record, The Collective. Together with No Home Record producer Justin Raisen, who spray-paints industrial trap beats over spoken word and vicious guitar, Gordon investigates the vanishing border between where one feeling ends and another begins.
The hometown show drew a sold-out crowd to the Regent Theater, eager to see commotion in the flesh.
THEBIGONEMAGAZINERELEASEPARTY Heavy Manners Library Los Angeles March 21, 2024
On a cool night in Echo Park, Heavy Manners Library was heating up. The small space, normally filled with books and artwork, was crammed with dozens of people; it felt like anyone I’d had a conversation with or noticed on Twitter over the last five years was in the building. Or, more likely, stranded outside, as the Library had reached capacity and late-coming lovers of alt-lit were relegated to the sidewalk, where they loitered, smoked, and waited for word from inside. I’d never seen such hype surrounding a magazine launch — but then, this was The Big One.
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A.J. Brown
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Mar 24, 2024 10:34 am
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PARASOCIALITEBOOKLAUNCHWITHBRITTANYMENJIVAR Stories Books & Café Los Angeles March 15, 2024
Last year, Brittany Menjivar co-founded the late-night reading series Car Crash Collective.This year, the Best of the Net finalist released her debut anthology Parasocialite via Dream Boy Book Club, which launched at Stories Books & Café on the Ides of March 2024. There, the group that surrounded Menjivar and crowded the Stories patio bore flowers, buzzing anticipation, and well-wishes.
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Emma dePaulo Reid
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Mar 21, 2024 4:29 pm
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ONLYTHEYOUNG: EXPERIMENTALARTINKOREA, 1960s – 1970s Hammer Museum Los Angeles Through May 24, 2024.
Inside the collegiate enclave that is the UCLA-adjacent neighborhood of Westwood, art history is being made.
It might come as a surprise that, though Los Angeles boasts vibrant Korean neighborhoods, the Hammer Museum’sOnly the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s – 1970s marks the first time an exhibit highlighting Korean experimental art has come to the West Coast. On a breezy, sunny Saturday, I rubbed shoulders with carefree undergrads in the light-filled, open-air museum. Their conversations drifted by as I grappled with my ability to discuss an art form whose very purpose is to transcend language. I don’t mind — the reminder that youth continues business as usual in the face of personal semantic challenges is humbling and uplifting.
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Brittany Menjivar
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Mar 15, 2024 3:01 pm
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VAL+ THEAMATEURIST NOWINSTANTIMAGEHALL Chinatown, Los Angeles March 9, 2024
Getting ready for the screening, everything felt like a performance. I slipped on a pair of black leather pants and wondered if I was subconsciously channeling BDSM aesthetics — and if so, whether I was preparing to dominate (as “Los Angeles Review of Books Freelance Reporter”) or be dominated (as “audience member”). I pulled a houndstooth tank over my head and meditated on the marriage of the professional pattern and the low-cut scoop neck — a dangerous intersection of business and pleasure. In the car, I listened to Pulp’s “This Is Hardcore,” a song that casts two lovers as actor and director.
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Brandon Sward
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Mar 14, 2024 5:47 pm
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Anna Frost Photo
Lena Greene performing.
LOSANGELESBAR: SECONDPOUR, EARTH Los Angeles Feb. 27 – March 30, 2024
If you needed me the first weekend of March, I was likely in a smallish concrete box. The space, nestled between two houses on Echo Park Avenue, is hosting Second Pour, a reinstallation of Los Angeles Bar, a reimagination of an earlier solo show at In Lieu in February and March 2024 by Ficus Interfaith, an artist duo consisting of Ryan Bush and Raphael Martinez Cohen. In this new iteration, Bush and Martinez Cohen have curated themselves into a cloud of friends and colleagues.
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Jack Skelley
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Mar 11, 2024 2:02 pm
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GLASSHOUSE VOLTACOLLECTIVE and CENTRALSERVERWORKS G‑SON Studios Los Angeles Closed
You enter not a room but a realm. Dreamlike, the space is bathed in deep, indigo velvet and moody music. In three corners are three discrete sculptural set pieces with dancers: five or so figures encased in a crate of shredded black gauze, two figures embracing tightly — as one — in a water-filled tub, and a queen-sized bed seemingly made of mud where two more bodies entwine. As an audience member, you are encouraged to interact with these installations.
You take a seat and things explode: a narrator appears and delivers a searing, descriptive text about abusive parenting; a hyperkinetic score picks up steam; and the bodies emerge to crash through this psychic space.
You’re in Glass House, a shimmering, shattering, immersive, layered, intermedia performance from Volta Collective and Central Server Works that peers into “the psychological construction of home.”
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Emily Ann Zisko
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Mar 6, 2024 2:40 pm
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Fear of Kathy Acker Illusion Magic Lounge Santa Monica Feb. 29, 2024
A flash of red taillights: The satin stage curtain of the Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica parts, and a member of the Greek chorus in fishnets and silver booty shorts instructs the audience to keep their hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. Play ball!
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A.J. Urquidi
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Mar 5, 2024 4:24 pm
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SQUID with WATERFROMYOUREYES The Observatory Santa Ana, Cal. February 29, 2024
As a lifelong admirer of weird cryptids, sea monsters, and beings of potentially extraterrestrial origin, I’ve always been enamored with cephalopods. I used to proclaim annually to my grade-school classmates that my favorite animal was the squid (alternatively the octopus, if I was going through a phase). I loved its excessive tentacles, freaky beak, projectile ink, camouflage and jet biotech, and unlikely arrangement of organs in a head-looking tube that’s actually more of a torso sack. Living in New York City, I made several pilgrimages to the Natural History Museum’s eerie squid-and-sperm-whale corner. If the Animorphs books ever became reality, I was more than prepared to rain mollusk-metamorphosing power upon invading baddies. In light of my childhood passion, I eagerly nabbed a ticket to the squid observatory pop-up in Santa Ana slated for that most alien of holidays, Leap Day.
Turns out I misread the event info and found myself at Orange County venue the Observatory watching Brighton post-Brexitcore heroes Squid chug through an hour of trippy, chaotic jams.
CEREMONY with INFEST, GOUGEAWAY, and friends Hollywood Palladium Los Angeles Feb. 24, 2024
There’s something serene about a diner after a show. When you saunter through the front door of a Denny’s, belly already full from two overpriced tall cans, the bottoms of your shoes like tape from the paste covering the venue floor, your shirt covered in sweat of various origins, and you’re very ready for a coffee, a club sandwich, and onion rings, it’s almost like a moon hitting your eye. As I slouch towards geriatrics, seeing bands that helped shape my twenties perform at venues that I grew up going to, I feel a little less dead. And last Saturday while Ceremony played their third album, Rohnert Park, in its entirety at the Hollywood Palladium, I was even more reanimated than usual.
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Brook Metayer
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Feb 23, 2024 10:33 am
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MATTHEWBOURNE’S ROMEOANDJULIET Ahmanson Theater Los Angeles Feb. 4, 2024
The Ahmanson Theater in Downtown Los Angeles, twinkling with warm light and towering like a 20th-century castle, looked particularly dramatic on this stormy February night — fitting, for the occasion, as the theater was in the middle of a month-long run of British choreographer Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet.Bourne is known for his interpretations and revivals of classics like Edward Scissorhands, My Fair Lady, and Sleeping Beauty; his new ballet was advertised as a modern reimagining of the Shakespearean tragedy.
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Julian Castronovo
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Feb 15, 2024 1:16 pm
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KOBEBRYANTSTATUEUNVEILINGCEREMONY Crypto.com Arena Los Angeles Feb. 8, 2024
I had come for the reveal, true, but was not there to see the veil lifted. I was outside the arena, surrounded by large, crying men. When it comes to professional sports, crowds are typically figured as thunder and worship and yelling. But those gathered on February 8 in downtown Los Angeles to see the new bronze statue of Kobe Bryant were neither violent nor loud. The mood was half-somber, half-confused. We quietly chanted his name and clutched our offerings: framed photographs, flickering votives, rosaries dyed purple and gold.
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Eloise Rollins-Fife
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Feb 13, 2024 2:13 pm
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CREEPYGALSLAND Superchief Gallery Los Angeles Feb. 10, 2024
Is there any holiday Angelenos won’t use as an excuse to dress up like fabulous little freaks? Just when I thought the pressure to meticulously plan out festive couture was on hiatus, I found myself in a twisted homage to St. Valentine, dreadfully underdressed and shivering from fever in the long line outside Superchief Gallery, eagerly anticipating passage into the Creepy Gals Land opening alongside hundreds of the city’s most dedicated fashionistas. Though the real show was still to come, the parade of costumed attendees in ensembles ranging from “sexy psycho bunny rabbit” to “hot pink life-sized Furby” was a fitting preview of the aesthetic hedonism that awaited us. I felt downright modest in my rose-patterned teddy and KN95 mask, worn to protect my fellow creepy gals from the creepiest thing of all: the flu virus absolutely ravaging my upper respiratory system.
