James Flames

Artist James Flames designed Brouwerij West's first label for the Tripel brew.

Beer talk runs the gamut from the frat-boy refrain "Beer is beer" to craft beer enthusiasts sparring in fermentation terminology. If there is any "art" to the drink, it lies within the bottle, and rarely will the conversation veer to what's outside it: the label.

"It's not like you can open up the beer and try it in the store. So what is that other thing that's going to make them buy it? It's the visual aspect," says James Flames, the artist who designed the label above for L.A.-based microbrewery Brouwerij (a Dutch word pronounced like "brewery") West. "I look at rows and rows of labels, and it's a real feast for the eyes. Like being in the world's smallest gallery where all the artwork is squished together."

Flames' design for the Tripel brew -- as with all of Brouwerij West's upcoming labels -- is more artfully conceived than many of the other hops-and-grains, typography-heavy, St. Pauli girl-style or simply bizarre labels that tend to dominate the beer shelves. To avoid this worn-out iconography, Brouwerij owner Brian Mercer has given all the artists on his roster almost total creative freedom.

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Photo by Calvin Lee

Main course inspired by Ed Ruscha's painting LACMA on Fire

"You screwed up," chef John Rivera Sedlar told Getty curator Andrew Perchuk in the months before Pacific Standard Time began. The sprawling, Getty-funded celebration of postwar SoCal art should have included food. But Perchuk, already working to facilitate exhibitions at 60-plus institutions and organizing his own show, felt he had plenty to worry about besides appetizers and entrees. Later, though, after the frenzy surrounding PST's launch subsided, he decided Sedlar was right: PST should include food.

After all, didn't gallerist Everrett Ellin open the Chez La Vie café beside his original West Hollywood gallery in 1958, to serve the art-viewing public? Didn't dealer Virginia Dwan install working fountains by sculptor Jean Tinguely in homes of collectors before hosting a progressive dinner, plying guests with Champagne as they bussed from house to house? And hasn't Al's Café, the 4-month-long pop-up restaurant artist Al Ruppersberg staged in 1969, where he sold plates of art rather than food, become almost mythic for the way it made conceptual art a social experience?

The official PST menu, which debuted Saturday at Sedlar's year-old West Hollywood restaurant Playa and will be available to all diners starting Tuesday, Feb. 7, is far sleeker, honed and literal in its approach to food-as-art than anything I imagine Ruppersberg, Ellin or even the posh Dwan served when they dabbled in dining years ago.

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Carol Cheh

Night Gallery in Lincoln Heights, where artists come for their after-hours nightcap.

We all know that a good drink -- or two, or three -- sometimes help to make high-minded cultural events somewhat more, let's say, palatable. Or it's a good way of convincing your friends to come along to the gallery exhibit you've been meaning to see for months. Either way, L.A. is a city where cocktails and culture are ideally matched, and our Best of L.A. issue happens to have a few suggestions as to where to find the best combination of drink and art in town.

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Nanette Gonzales

Breakfast for dinner

Also check out our slideshow by Nanette Gonzales on The Pancakes and Booze Art Show
Some gallery owners organizing a show might draw inspiration from their college degrees in art history. But when Tom Kirlin curated his first art show, he was inspired by college memories of drunken pancake breakfasts.

Three years ago, Kirlin, a 33-year-old Arizona native, was working in Hollywood as a cameraman when he rented a warehouse downtown and threw an art, alcohol and pancake party for an artist friend.

"It was something that I always did in college," Kirlin says. "You'd go out and drink all night long, and then the only place that's open for 24 hours is IHOP."

The Pancakes & Booze art show, billed as the largest underground art show in Los Angeles, takes place locally about once every three months now. The latest installment, a "Best of" show representing over 100 Pancakes & Booze artists, happened this past weekend.

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Simone Paz

Brett Schlank, left, Natalie Lynch and & Tara Jayn, producers of A Drinking Game

Never let it be said that the actors in A Drinking Game refused to suffer for their craft. A live reading of classic movies turned interactive drinking game, the monthly production features actors sitting on folding chairs on a minimal, setless stage with their scripts ... and their booze.

They take a swig each time certain words are spoken -- say, "school," "car" or "sick" -- and each time their character's name is called. There's no secretly spitting the beer back into the bottle, or feigning sips or substituting water instead. This is serious, Method acting.

Founder Natalie Lynch's poison of choice is Jack and Coke, while the rest of the cast prefer beer. Drink slowly, she advises. Take small sips. "It's a marathon, not a race."

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Courtesy of City Lights Publishers

"You must be Charles Bukowski," he said.
"Yes. Poet, and lover," I answered."

L.A. Skid Row's unofficial poet laureate is back again, with outrageous boozy adventures of staring up women's skirts and, more often than not, ripping them off.

On September 15, City Lights will be publishing a new collection of Bukowski's essays, culled from the infamous Notes of a Dirty Old Man columns that he wrote in various forms from 1967 through the eighties.

These columns garnered Bukowski an international reputation as an outsider avant la lettre when they were first published. He wrote them for San Francisco's Open City, Nola, and the Los Angeles Free Press, small weekly papers that ran his writing virtually unedited. His brutal and visceral view of life blasted through many taboos of the sixties and seventies: suicide, outrageous alcoholism, rape, anal sex, and fetishistic fantasies were all fair game for Bukowski's pen.

More Notes of a Dirty Old Man comprises a second, and until now uncollected, series of essays. Most date from his later years writing for the Free Press in Los Angeles. To anyone familiar with Bukowski's work, they're more of the good stuff -- essays on pure desire that demonstrate his lust for the physical world. And of course, they're shot through with Bukowski's admirable denial of a higher meaning to his work -- to an earnest interviewer, he writes, "When I die they can take my work and wipe a cat's ass with it. It will be of no earthly use to me."

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This is what it's like at a Beer Pong tournament. (You can read about it in our A Considerable Town section.) These shots are from the Southern California Beer Pong Open in Fullerton. Lots of beer. Lots. I'm getting drunk just looking at them.

Lester "Facetime" Marks earned his nickname by popping into photos like this one.

Grabbing some mannequin butt

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From old downtown theatres to dives to dance clubs, LA continues to be a bonanza of burlesque. Big or small, demure or trashy, themed and prop-filled or bodaciously bare, seems like there's always a gaggle strutting -and stripping off- their stuff somewhere in town, and has been ever since The Velvet Hammer troupe emerged in the early '90's

Though Hammer is no more (Lucha Va Voom splintered from the group with much success, though) another gal who came up around the same time remains one of, if not the, queen of the scene: Ms. Dita Von Teese. When it comes to illustriousness (and we're not even counting the notoriety of once being married to a certain shock rocker), retro appeal and most notably, blindingly gorgeous production value, Teese, who was born and raised in Michigan and started her performing career while living in and then emerging from Orange County, always delivers.

On the eve of her first major production in Los Angeles in over two years, the performer speaks with Style Council about why she hasn't performed in LA for a while, how she put together her new one, her new signature cocktail for Cointreau, and other projects she's got up her bedazzled sleeve.

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Boxing fans crowded into Downtown's J Lounge on Friday December 26 to celebrate boxer Manny "PacMan" Pacquiao's win over Oscar De La Hoya at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on December 6.

Filipino sports icon Pacquiao, who turned 30 on December 17, spent most of the event in an upstairs suite that only friends and boxing mafia were allowed to enter. He emerged later for a photo op in the J Lounge courtyard that had paparazzi and fans scrambling to get his picture. Also present were Pacquiao's longtime trainer Freddie Roach (who used to train De La Hoya), Pacquiao's very pregnant wife, Jinky Pacquiao, and Dean "Irish Lightning" Byrne, Pacquiao's sparring partner as he prepared for the De La Hoya match.

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RUMMAGE! It was a splendid lazy Sunday at 4th & Main's premiere dive bar, with an in house yard sale/silent auction/bake sale, etc. benefitting the excellent School on Wheels, which assists in educating homeless kids downtown. In addition to the secondhand gets, $2 Bloody Marys and Mimosas flowed all morn' long.

Shhh, respect our neighbors! (who are sleeping in, hung over, rather than trying to get to sleep...)

Signups for the silent auction.

Oooooooh, pretty. *hiccup*

Cupcakes...

...and beer: Breakfast of champions

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