Matthew Marks Gallery

Charles Ray's Sleeping Woman (2012), made out of solid stainless steel

This week's list includes an awkward, bearded voyeur in West Hollywood, a picture of a white horse in a Chinatown basement and stereoscopic images of made-up archeology in Crenshaw.

5. Underground Malibu in 3-D
The name "Malibu" comes from "Humaliwo," a word the Chumash Native American people used to mean "where the waves crash loudly." Benjamin Lord calls his new portfolio of stereoscopic photographs the Humaliwo Chambers, because they imagine a web of chambers and tunnels in the Malibu hillside. The photographs -- dense archeological fantasies of miniature coliseums in sand or rock formations covered in graffiti -- are meant to be seen in 3-D through a sterescope viewfinder. Lord has set one up and laid out his portfolios at the end of the main hallway in "Pale Fire," the new show Lily Siegel curated at Latned Atsar. 3222 W. Jefferson Blvd.; through June 4, by appointment. latnedatsar.com.

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Wendy Gilmartin

The building that housed the LAPD's headquarters between 1955 and 2009 starred in TV shows like Dragnet in its heyday, but its slow, 50-year slide into disrepair gave it a real-world stigma that's left it tarnished and crumbling from the inside out -- most obviously because the community doesn't care to defend it.

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Jeri Koegel

Hello handsome! You're a good-looking fellow, do you know that?

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As the lease was set to expire on the Pasadena condo we're currently renting, I, my husband and our young spawn were in the market for a home to buy. Spring selling season is upon us and we wanted to buy while the market is still crapped out. Plus, having just closed escrow on our old place back in Chicago, we were eager to again experience that thrilling sensation of taking a multi-thousand-dollar hit on a home investment. It's a character builder, y'know?

We putzed around on the real estate website Trulia. And we've been in touch with a Realtor friend who set us up to receive automated emails from the MLS for listings that match what we're looking for.

Have you guys seen some of the shit people have done to their houses? Perfectly good Spanish revivals, midcenturies and Craftsman-style bungalows in perfectly awesome locations, cankered by a grotesquely out-of-proportion marble fireplace here, an arbitrary Doric column there and, eye-rape of eye-rapes, sponge painting all over the walls.

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Wendy Gilmartin

There's a Waylon Jennings song called "Too Dumb for New York, Too Ugly for L.A.," and that goes for these twin towers, dubbed Elleven and Luma (yes, that's how it's spelled), in downtown's quickly developing and gentrifying Southpark district too.

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Wendy Gilmartin

No doubt oodles of festive fun have been had within this faux fortification in the heart of the Valley. But Anoush's banal, mixed references to the gateways and stonework of historic Roman, Persian and Islamic architectural forms is confused at best, tacky at worst, and amounts to a cultural stereotype on par with Bravo's new reality TV series Shahs of Sunset.

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Tanja M. Laden

Wilshire Boulevard Temple

If you've ever cruised along Wilshire Boulevard between Western and Vermont, you've probably noticed a massive, domed structure at Hobart Avenue, kitty-corner to an indoor golf driving-range. That building is the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, aka the Best Jewish Reform Synagogue Built by Hollywood, according to our 2011 Best of L.A. issue.

You might have also noticed that, these days, the temple is covered in scaffolding -- signs the 1929 landmark is in the middle of a multimillion-dollar renovation. The large-scale extended project includes a cleaning and restoration of the Warner Murals, commissioned by none other than Jack, Harry and Albert Warner, otherwise known as the Warner Bros. The artist, Hugo Ballin, would have been a whopping 133 years old today, so what better time to revisit his work than the present?

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Alissa Walker

Quick, let's play urban planning Jeopardy!. For $100: These places in our cities are most likely to be called "dirty," "dark" and "dangerous." How about for $200: All the bad stuff happens here, from drug deals to prostitution to murders where dismembered arms are found dangling out of Dumpsters. I'll answer both, Alex: What are alleys?

Alleys have a worse connotation than any other place in our street lexicon (no offense to Jeremy Oberstein, whose pet project is photographing L.A. alleys). No other place comes close to receiving such disdain -- maybe the freeway overpass is a distant second. So to reclaim an alley as the most vibrant, happy place in our city would be, technically, one of the greatest achievements in urban design. It would take a place that not only is frequented by the scum of the earth but is actually covered in the scum of the earth, and transform it into a place people actually want to go.

A tall order. But it's happening right now in Hollywood. Last week saw the opening of the East Cahuenga Alley, or EaCa Alley, a clean, revitalized alley that runs between Cahuenga and Cosmo Street, just north of Selma Avenue.

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Alissa Walker

Crazy Hook

At the center of the city, there is a 100-foot-long ocean liner dry-docked in a parking lot. It would seem out of place in many if not most L.A. neighborhoods. Except here. Landlocked Koreatown is bobbing with nautical-themed restaurants, and you can't walk the length of a plank without stumbling into a pirate reference. Which, on a recent Sunday night, arrrrrr-med with a sailor's tolerance and 10 mateys, was exactly what I aimed to do.

We focused on three ports of call within a one-mile radius: the H.M.S. Bounty, a gloriously divey institution anchored with tall ships; Crazy Hook, a zany, pirate-populated theme restaurant; and Café Jack, the giant ocean liner in the parking lot. There are others: a deli named Café Mermaid; R Bar, which is only abstractly boatlike (but has epic karaoke nights); beer den Hite Kwang-Jang, which has a big anchor and other ocean paraphernalia, plus a sign for Moby Dick beer; and, at Eighth and Western, a brand-new building that looks like a giant steamboat tugging the chicken joint Pollo a la Brasa in its wake. Why the porthole windows and coiled rope decor, 12 miles from the Pacific?

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Wendy Gilmartin

Did you ever go to a SuperCuts and ask for the cheapest haircut? 816 Pacific Ave. in Venice is the building equivalent of that bad decision.

Or maybe you've been the lucky recipient of one of those free do's from a local beauty school -- the kind that leaves you considering a wig? This apartment building is like that, too.

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Wendy Gilmartin

Between Frank Gehry's house, the Bergamot Station complex and countless other condo developments, parking structures and strip malls around Santa Monica, the city could stand to implement a 10-year ban on corrugated metal-clad buildings.

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