See also:
*Top 12 LGBT Movies You Need To See, as Picked by Film Fest Organizers
*Our Queertown column

In her highly illustrated, keenly observed book Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America, Chicago-based editor Tracy Baim looks at how gay magazines and newspapers helped to win over hearts and minds in mainstream America while also informing LGBT folks about their own community and countering mainstream media coverage of gay issues.

Los Angeles played a key role in the rise of the gay press: The national gay newsmagazine The Advocate started up in L.A. in 1967 and the first pro-gay magazine in the United States, ONE magazine, first published in 1953. Baim talked with L.A. Weekly about the importance of her book and the gay press in the United States.

How did the project start and why did you want to do it?

I originally wanted to do profiles of the longest-running gay newspapers remaining in the U.S., but quickly expanded it to include the reason gay media was formed, how it thrived and survived, who were some of its key journalists and publications, and where it is going now.

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Wikimedia Commons

Wanna get rid of that breakup letter? Give it to Colin Dickey -- he'll take it to the Arctic.

See also:
*D3, an Artist Collective That Will Destroy the '90s Mixtape Your Ex-Boyfriend Made You
*Five Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament

When writer Colin Dickey goes to the Arctic this summer, he will be bringing two pairs of long underwear, insulated boots and a whole lot of misery. The misery is not his own — he has been dying to go to the Arctic for as long as he can remember — but that of others.

"The idea is if you have things you want to get rid of — break-up letters, crappy news, a terrible health diagnosis — I will take them up to the North Pole and read them out loud to the frozen, terrifying wasteland, banishing them forever," Dickey says.

Dickey, 35, is participating in a residency called the Arctic Circle, which takes 12 scientists and artists up to the Svalbard Peninsula, a small cluster of islands 10 degrees shy of the North Pole. In exchange for help with banishment, people are giving Dickey money to fund his trip.

A week after launching his Kickstarter campaign, he is sitting in a nice, warm café in sunny Los Feliz thinking cold thoughts. Not only will he banish things into the snow, he will preserve them. "It's the opposite," he says, "but practically speaking it's the same thing." He will read a piece of good news, a love letter or anything else you'd like "locked away in a frozen time capsule."

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Juan Tallo

"Transmedia for Change" panelists, left to right: Moderator Henry Jenkins, Katie Elmore Mota of Pranja Productions, writer/producer Mahyad Tousi, Creative Director of Sandpit Sam Haren & documentary filmmaker Katerina Cizek

I was a little nervous about attending USC and UCLA's joint annual Transmedia Hollywood Conference, whose focus this year was on how social media and storytelling are changing the face of digital marketing and philanthropy. Sure, I'm interested in web entertainment, but am I eight-hours-of-panels interested? I didn't want to fall asleep and embarrass myself. Especially not wearing a press pass.

The minute the moderator introduced the panelists to the packed UCLA auditorium by means of video clips and more humorous slides, I knew we were in good hands. For the rest of the day, the audience of professors, students, movie studio execs, digital consultants, filmmakers and I were treated to a fast paced crash course on how the companies and technologies we interact with every day are transforming the way they market and how that affects us as consumers and as potential employees. Who knew your Instagram account might be part of your next job application? Or that MTV's 16 and Pregnant is acting as a vehicle for social change and was pitched as such?

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Courtesy the artist

A still from Kelly Sears's film Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise (2011)

This week, haunting films about cold-war America play for 15 hours straight on Alvarado and an artist sells cellphone holders that make your phone as unwieldy as one from landline days.

5. Holes in the walls
Urs Fischer, the Swiss artist who stuck a fake tongue out of a hole in the New Museum's wall five years ago, does iconoclastic things in an almost-too-smooth way. He will cut into the Geffen Contemporary's walls for his new show at MOCA and display rough clay sculptures made onsite with the help of about 1,000 local volunteers. The show's opening day will be a multipart affair. Curator Jessica Morgan will speak about working with Fischer, KCHUNG radio will broadcast live and artist Morrisa Maltz, a kind of smooth iconoclast herself, will invite people to have "Mofone Emotional Moments." She'll let them call family or friends using her "Mofones," smartphone holders that look like old-school rotary phone handsets, seashells or tree trunks. 152 N. Central Ave.; Sunday, April 21, noon-5 p.m. (213) 626-6222, moca.org.

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Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was an American film critic, screenwriter, and journalist, whose columns and reviews appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and were syndicated in more than 200 newspapers across the country.

Ebert made a name for himself in the candid and no-apology approach he had toward film review, earning him a Pulitzer Prize and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2006, Ebert suffered complications after a thyroid cancer surgery that left him unable to speak, but he continued to write, review, and participate in interviews. Ebert died Thursday morning. He was 70 years old.

Here are just a few lessons he left behind ...

See also:
- Five Favorite Nora Ephron Movie Moments
- Seven Art Lessons Learned from Robert Hughes (1938-2012)

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Courtesy Young Projects

Still from Ulu Braun's The Park (2011)

See also:
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, a new gallery debuts on Melrose, a film by and about a lover of life screens in West Adams and a light show plays out in a corner in Culver City.

5. Mind games
When artist James Turrell rented out Ocean Park's old Mendota Hotel in 1966, he famously turned the rooms into perfect, white boxes with no outside light sources. Then he started experimenting, projecting different colored lights and trying to change the way the space felt. Some of his experiments resulted in his Cross-Corner Projection series, where he would project two planes of light into a corner in such a way that it would look like there was a solid shape in the room with you, or it would look like there was an opening you could fall into. The effect would change as you moved around. Sometimes, the light seemed to be inside the room and sometimes it seemed to be shining in from some mysterious portal to the outside. One early Cross-Corner Projection, a pinkish-orange one shaped like tetrahedron, is on view now at Nye+Brown in Culver City. 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd.; through Feb. 23. (310) 559-5215, nyeplusbrown.com.

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Courtesy of Tyler Dixon

Tyler Dixon and Heather Kasprzak as finalists at the 2012 Super Bowl

See also:
*12 Comedy Acts to Watch in 2013
*'Bark Side' Super Bowl Ad, With Star Wars' Imperial March Sung by Dogs

Tyler Dixon and Heather Kasprzak met as nemeses at the Super Bowl in Dallas in 2011. Both had created award-winning ads selected out of thousands by Doritos to air during the Super Bowl. Both were also hoping to be ranked No. 1 by the USA Today Ad Meter, which would award them the $1 million Doritos grand prize. Neither were successful, so they teamed up in love and in their creative lives. They were finalists last year, and are back with a new ad in the finals, hoping to win the million.

Thousands of filmmakers submit their ads to the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Challenge every year. Five finalists are chosen and those finalists are voted on by the public, this year exclusively through a Facebook app. Two of those five finalists (one chosen by votes, one chosen by Doritos) will win $25,000, a trip to the Super Bowl and have their ad air during the game. Dixon and Kasprzak have gotten that far each of the past two years, and are again among the five finalists.

Here's where it gets complicated, and exciting. If one of the two winners' spots is one of the top three commercials ranked by the USA Today Ad Meter*, they win an additional grand prize: $1 million for #1 ranking, plus the opportunity to work with Michael Bay on Transformers 4; $600,000 for #2; and $400,000 for #3. Last year, Dixon and Kasprzak's ad "Dog Park" ranked #14.

This year, the couple co-wrote and co-directed their spot, "Road Chip." We spoke with them about what they've learned over the last three years and why they think this spot has a chance at the million.

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Yung Jake

Although half of Los Angeles will decamp this weekend to the snowy hillsides of Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, not everyone is going for the movies. Starry-eyed attendees relish access to the suits, the skiing and the swag, but what about the art?

Shari Frilot has curated Sundance's experimental New Frontier films and exhibitions for the past seven years, and this year, rather than pushing anyone to see James Franco's film Interior. Leather Bar, (hint: it involves sexually explicit gay BDSM), Frilot is encouraging us to notice Yung Jake, whose work blurs the lines between memes, hip hop and video art.

"He's young, green and pretty hot," Frilot said. After all, not many visual artists would mention a dislike of rapper-turned-actor Ludacris and race-conscious silhouette artist Kara Walker in the same breath. I want to know more, to talk to Yung Jake himself, but he's back in New York for the holidays. He doesn't want to talk on the phone, and he doesn't want to Skype; he says it's too impersonal. He wants to talk over text.

Well, okay.

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Courtesy of the artists and Melissa Manning

Richard Hoeck and John Miller's "Something for Everyone" installation at MJ Briggs gallery

See also:
*Our Latest Theater Reviews
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament

This week, there's a symposium on what it's like to live at a time when real life is like sci-fi, a portrait of Jayne Mansfield's car on view and a cutout UPS man behind a window on Fairfax.

5. Superstition and sustenance
Thank You for Coming calls itself an "Experimental Art and Food Space," but it doesn't feel experimental in the way a lot of art + eating ventures do -- there are no performances that interrupt your meal, no tasks for you to perform before or after eating. The space, which opened in Atwater Village at the end of last year, is licensed as a restaurant, but the kitchen is exposed, tables are communal and the menu shifts nearly every week, or at least each time an artist/chef in residence takes over. Jennifer June Strawn, the first resident of 2013, will be at Thank You for Coming through Feb. 3 and all her menus are themed around superstition and sustenance. 3416 Glendale Blvd.; Wed-Sun, lunch 11 a.m. -3 p.m., dinner 6 -10 p.m.; $0-9. (323) 648-2666, thankyouforcoming.la.

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Ted Soqui

Marilyn Krieger, with her Bengal cat, holds a seminar on clicker training and cat behavior.

When professional cat writers get together, certain conventions of the English language go out the window. At the Cat Writers Association Annual Conference, you don't say perfect, but "purrfect." Memories are "meow-mories." Newcomers are "kittens." Old-timers who have attended the conference for the past 19 years of its existence are "nine-lifers." 

But don't be fooled by the fluffy lingo. Cat writing is not for the faint of heart.

There's the pay, for starters. "Our cats work for kibble; so do we," says veteran cat journalist Sandy Robins. The trick, she has discovered, is finding a way to relate everything back to cats. Are you traveling? Try a piece on cat statues around the world. Forgot your alarm clock? "Well, our cats are our alarm clocks." 

Even the simplest of time pegs -- autumn -- can be leveraged for cat relevancy. How many college students take their pets with them to school, for instance. Or how about a pet anxiety piece: empty nest syndrome, as experienced by your cat. 

The savvy cat writer doesn't automatically discount publications outside her field. "Car Wash magazine. You think they'd have nothing to do with cats," Robins says. "But they may be interested in a piece on traveling with cats. Where do you strap a cat's carrier in the car so the cat doesn't fly out the vehicle?"

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