Bill Raden

Opera experimentalist Yuval Sharon

A funny thing happened to Yuval Sharon on his way to a planned career as a film director. While studying at UC Berkeley, he decided to go to the opera. The production was Wozzeck by Alban Berg. To prepare, he listened to a recording at home and found his imagination fired by Berg's searing, atonal chromatic expressionism. Image after powerful image assailed him as he imagined the staging and what the performance would feel like sitting in the audience. Then he went to the opera house. Compared to his vision, the production seemed boring and bloodless, dispiritingly conventional.

The evening was an epiphany. Certainly such works deserved a better theatrical treatment than this. And he was just the man to do it.

Fast-forward to a recent, overcast morning at the Atwater Crossing complex, where Sharon stands in a raw warehouse he's transforming into the kind of opera house he imagined years before at Berkeley. It's no Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Crisscrossed by wooden ramps and dominated by seven towering, sculptural set pieces, it looks more like an art installation at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.

In fact, it is the stage for the new experimental opera Sharon is directing as the inaugural production of the Industry, the avant opera company he formed this year with his partner, producer Laura Kay Swanson. Now in the final stretch of rehearsals, the production will be a world premiere of composer Anne LeBaron and librettist Douglas Kearney's Crescent City, which Sharon fell in love with when he was programming New York Opera's acclaimed new-works showcase VOX.

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Aaron Frank

Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood doesn't have the slightest objection to the term "commercial artist." Often considered the sixth member of the band Radiohead, the 44-year-old Essex native is responsible for all of the band's artwork since 1994 and has the commercial marketplace to thank, in part, for his success. "It's better than graphic designer," says Donwood, lounging in a leather chair at Subliminal Projects, which is scheduled to host the British artist's first exhibition in Los Angeles. Titled "Lost Angeles," the exhibition showcases Donwood's latest piece, an 18-foot-long panorama landscape of the city flooding and engulfed in flames.

Donwood began collaborating with Radiohead on their first hit record, The Bends, and has worked closely alongside the band ever since, authoring several books, holding gallery exhibitions and selling screenprints in between albums. Thumbing through stacks of vinyl as a teen, he was struck by the artwork of punk bands like the Dead Kennedys and Crass. "The record store was like the most democratic art gallery there was," Donwood explained. "There was all this artwork and it was all treated the same."

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LARB's new look

Tom Lutz is one happy man. He has every reason to be.

This morning, Lutz watched as the online literary behemoth that he founded, the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), finally launched its new website. With more than 250 contributors, including Jonathan Lethem, T.C. Boyle, Jane Smiley, Jeffrey Eugenides and Michael Pollan, LARB is the West Coast's answer to the New York-dominated literary review scene, to the folding of print book reviews across the country over the last several years and to the charge that Angelenos don't read.

Compared to its preview-mode Tumblr site, the new site is classic, clean and easy on the eyes. And it's getting a lot of attention.

"The Twitter's been blowing up," Lutz says, sounding both dazed and relieved. "I just took a look at my Google numbers for the first time and our page numbers are through the roof. By noon we had almost a [previous] month's worth of page views." Though he's quick to demur: "It's partly that we've been kind of like the town crier running through the streets, so it shouldn't be a surprise."

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Natalie Toren

Anyone who attended this year's Daniel Franzese film retrospective at L.A.'s Silent Movie Theater can attest that this actor's career spans a vivid spectrum: From the bloody crimsons of Bully (the 2001 Larry Clark version, not the new documentary), through the pastel pinks of Mean Girls, to the shadowy hues of I Spit On Your Grave. Now Franzese adds a new color to his palette: neon orange, the same pigment that radiates off the skin of Snooki and The Situation.

Last week, Jersey Shoresical: A Frickin' Rock Opera, starring and co-written by Franzese, began its Los Angeles run at the Hayworth. LA Weekly took the opportunity to pick Daniel's brain on this hilarious musical satire, NY Fringe Fest, and never playing the same character twice.

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Liz Ohanesian

Paul Robertson

Paul Robertson makes some of the coolest video game-inspired art you will ever see. In his prints -- several of which are on display right now in GR2's group show, "Diversions" -- the past clashes with the present in a brightly colored, pixelated fashion. Robertson artfully pieces together familiar characters from '80s cartoon and video games with Internet memes and anime girls as if he's reading the minds of the Internet masses.

"When I make a piece, my main goal is to make something I want to look at myself," Robertson says via email. "So I usually just cram it full of characters I like, or things from my childhood or just stupid things that I get a kick out of."

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Photos by Alley Curran & Cody Smith, courtesy Gallery 1988

The line stretched out the door and onto the balmy L.A. streets on Friday at Gallery 1988: Melrose, one of the two spaces set up by Jensen Karp to showcase pop culture-inspired art. Fans waited patiently for a chance to look at and buy work from "Is This Thing On? 2, The Weird Year," with artists creating works referencing alt-comedy heroes both past and present. A velvet painting of Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley, a triptych of iconic Christopher Guest roles, or Darin Shock's insanely want-able 5 color Mr. Show screenprint -- it was a comedy nerd's delight.

In one corner, tirelessly pressing the flesh with an endless receiving line of adoring fans, was the host of the evening, "Weird Al" Yankovic. We slipped in for a few minutes' chat, shortly after former Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz had lined up next to Yankovic for his own fan-boy portrait.

You're coming up on the the 30th anniversary of your first album. How does that feel?

It doesn't feel that long. You look back at the body of work, I guess it's a lot of stuff. You look back at the number of years, I guess the math works out, but it doesn't feel like 30 years.

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Dana Gould

Comic and prolific writer Dana Gould has seemingly done all that Hollywood has to offer: performing on everything from Kimmel and Conan to HBO, Comedy Central, MADtv and The Daily Show; acting roles stretching back to The Ben Stiller Show, The Nanny, Roseanne, Ellen, Seinfeld and The King of Queens; not to mention scripting, producing and helping voice The Simpsons for seven years and appearing as himself in an episode of Family Guy. No less a figurehead than Patton Oswalt even named Gould the founder of alt-comedy on the Comedians of Comedy Live at the Troubadour DVD.

Between frequent live gigs Gould also has jumped into the podcast arena with his retro-radio The Dana Gould Hour and developed a half-hour comedy for FX, co-starring and co-exec produced by Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl. Like their creator, both projects are shaping up to emphasize the more astute, quirky, slightly neurotic and relentlessly eclectic side of the comedy spectrum.

We talked with Gould about these latest projects:

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"It's a funny thing with me. Things seem to go poorly when I am around them."

A little bit clueless egoist (think Larry David) with a little Lucy Ricardo thrown in, Jason Nash plays more or less himself in his web series Jason Nash Is Married , soon on the Comedy Central website, in which he's a struggling comic married with kids. As fuck-ups go, he's pretty charming, and the show boasts loads of talent: Busy Philipps as his wife, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Nick Swardson, TJ Miller, Paul F. Tompkins and Andy Richter.

On Wednesday he'll screen four episodes and be joined for some standup with Rajskub, Miller and Jerry Minor at The Lab at the Improv.

Our interview with Nash:

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Tim and Eric's new movie

Watch any 11-minute episode of Adult Swim's warped, experimental sketch series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, and then try to explain what Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim -- the show's stars and creative engine -- do for a living.

"'Comedians' never seems the right word for it, does it?" asks Heidecker, the team's fair-haired half. "We're not quite filmmakers, either," says Wareheim, the taller drink of water in glasses.

They're certainly craftsmen, with much of their uncomfortable humor coming out of counterintuitive editing and glitchy, grotesque effects that suggest an insane asylum with its own public-access TV studio. We're "multimedia comedic artists," Heidecker concludes with a laugh.

The rubber-faced duo's next medium, then, is the big screen. As freaky, funny and fucked-up as the havoc that they wreak on television is, Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie -- which opens in theaters March 2 but is already available via video-on-demand -- ups it: The two squander the biggest budget in cinema, attempt to reinvigorate a dead mall overrun by a hobo and a killer wolf, and run into a cast of weirdoes, including Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis and Will Forte.

I sat down with Heidecker and Wareheim for a decidedly serious-minded chat about their work at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, where the film held its Brooklyn premiere.

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Photo courtesy of Sam Humphries

Comic book writer Sam Humphries

Today, Marvel announced that L.A.-based writer Sam Humphries will be joining veteran comic book author Jonathan Hickman as co-writer of Ultimates, an alternate-universe version of the Avengers superhero team. Humphries will come on board with issue 10 of the Ultimate Comics series, set for release in May.

For Humphries, who says he had comic book ambitions back when he was 10, this is a rare and amazing opportunity. He'll be working alongside with Hickman, a writer he admires, and he's a longtime Marvel fan. Humphries says he's acquired an impressive amount of knowledge about Avengers, X-Men, Spider-Man and Fantastic Four since childhood.

"The Marvel universe feels like home to me," he says.

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