Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

The girl with the pretty face and the big ass -- that's what they called model Rosie Mercado in high school. To become a model, she didn't lose the weight. She embraced it. Mercado is 5 feet 9 inches and weighs 293 pounds. She actually weighed 350 pounds when she was chosen to be the face of Full Figured Fashion Week 2010, barely a year after she started modeling.

As a kid growing up in Riverside, she always wanted to be the girl on the catwalk but never imagined it was possible. Instead, she was the one beautifying her skinny friends, doing their hair and makeup. She didn't date, or dance, or go to concerts or prom.
Things only changed for her when she stopped hiding and started living. She turned her makeup skills into a career. Her confidence grew. Now, at 31, her motto is: "If you close the door, I'll find a window."

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

If you've been to the website of a buzzy new tech startup in the last few years -- Groupon, Airbnb, Square -- chances are you've seen the work of Adam Lisagor. Not just his short videos, which are passed around the Internet to promote and teach you how to use these products, but also Lisagor himself, the 34-year-old creative director who stars in them. He's the guy in the thick-rimmed glasses and frizzy beard, an uber-accessible Everyman who walks you through a complicated idea with refreshingly deadpan yet thoroughly earnest delivery.

"The purpose of the videos is to make the information exciting," he says. The result is somewhere between a Michel Gondry movie and an OK Go music video: highly visual, rich with metaphor, giddily clever.

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Photo by Michael Parker

The "steam egg"

Ever been inside a disco ball-esque "steam egg" with a bunch of sweaty, half-naked strangers? Talked to Filipino inmates who wrote, directed and starred in their own musical, filmed within prison walls (and that went viral with more 50 million YouTube views)?

Writers for KCET's new arts journalism initiative Artbound have. This project, still in its nascent stages, aims to bring attention to Southern California's cultural and artistic scene across 11 counties, providing in-depth criticism and analysis and by taking a "transmedia" approach, incorporating multiple platforms like video and photography in the telling of a single story.

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Katie Gould

(Left to right) Terence McFarland, Alice Tuan, Steven Leigh Morris, Frances Baum Nicholson, Deidrie Henry and Don Shirley at L.A. Stage Alliance's recent arts criticism panel

On the heels of a panel discussion on arts criticism at KPCC's Crawford Family Forum last week, hosted by Los Angeles Stage Alliance, blogger Colin Mitchell of the website Bitter Lemons critiqued the critics by posing "the question nobody asked: How are theater critics going to remain relevant in a climate where their opinions simply mean less and less?"

Mitchell did praise critics as being vital as historians and contextualizers. But to support his assertion about the growing irrelevance of educated critics to the larger culture, he alluded to so many newspapers' decisions to ax veteran critics, citing the recent, infuriating exit from Back Stage of two highly respected senior local critics and editors, Dany Margolies and Les Spindle. He also noted the ascent of blog critics to fill the void left by the diminishing ranks of print media critics. "All I'm saying is they, the [remaining print] critics, better find a way to remain relevant to an audience that is slowly but surely leaving them in the dust."

Mitchell's Bitter Lemons site has been around four years now, aggregating stage reviews from print and online sources, serving as a community bulletin board and serving up hefty portions of commentary in a fearless, funny and unabashedly vainglorious manner. Anybody who can prompt serious discussion with such personal animation as Mitchell does provides a valuable service.

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Illustration by Jimmy Geigrich

"Stephen, how's your eye?" Ethan Lindsey asks.

It's 3:30 a.m. Outside in downtown Los Angeles, it's the dead of night, but inside the Frank Stanton Studios on Figueroa Boulevard, it's the heart of the work "day" for the Marketplace Morning Report overnight shift. And things are bustling.

While most of the world sleeps, Lindsey, the show's 34-year-old producer, spearheads a close-knit team of six, which churns out seven newscasts and more than 40 minutes of original programming nightly. This is the fast-paced world of public radio: There's no time to be tired when 5.9 million listeners depend on you for the morning news every week.

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Our home page yesterday

If you visited L.A. Weekly's home page yesterday, you might have noticed a few stories that seemed a little off -- our contribution to April Fools' Day.

For those of you who want to relive the moment, click on the image above to see it bigger, and links to all the stories are here:

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Aerial produced by Interconnected.is in collaboration with Air Evidence, GOOD, Spectral Q.

Volunteers made this formation on the event space's rooftop to kick off the day.

[Note: The previous headline in this story said that the event raised cash for Occupy L.A. It actually raised cash for activist Van Jones' nonprofit organization Rebuild the Dream]

It rained just a little bit last Saturday afternoon, but that didn't stop several hundred people from showing up at the ACE Museum on Fourth and La Brea for All in for the 99%, a mammoth art show, with readings, video, music, activism workshops and calls to action on behalf of the Occupy movement, set to re-emerge with the return of springtime and the onset of election season in earnest.

The show featured nearly 100 painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers, neon artists, performance artists and installation artists involved -- with names as big as Retna, Shepard Fairey, Skullphone, the Clayton Brothers and Jill Greenberg hanging right alongside the work of unknowns and newcomers.

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From Ze Frank's Kickstarter page, in which he wants to revive The Show -- "Same same, but different"

Ze Frank sometimes makes you feel a little stupid. But it's not on purpose -- he's pretty brilliant. In case you've forgotten, Frank was the occasionally singing, speed-talking, non-blinking (he edited out his blinks) online genius from The Show, an early exercise in interactive Internet video intellect, creativity and pop culture. When The Show's one-year run ended in 2007, it had a legion of fans called "Sportsracers" and its own universe of in jokes (i.e., the running fool, duckies and an "earth sandwich," where two people on opposite sides of the earth put bread on the ground).

Setting up on Kickstarter a few weeks ago, Frank began to create what he hopes will evolve into an alternate reality game/show/experience of sorts. We say "of sorts" because Frank's not entirely sure what will happen. We'll get to that in a minute.

Ending Friday, Frank's wildly successful Kickstarter campaign lasted 10 days and included his signature absurd whimsy. (Don't you dare call it "twee" -- the man has an Ivy League degree in neuroscience, after all.) He promised his backers all sorts of Ze Frank-style oddities in return for their contributions, including but not limited to: jars into which Frank himself will whisper words of encouragement, plastic babies that might not "grow up into a Ken doll" without your support, signed signatures, potato stamp art, black-on-black ducky T-shirts, and tons of The Show swag. If you're confused, don't worry, he's more than adept at explaining it -- cool college professor adept.

Basically, Frank's got some new shit up his sleeve and it will blow your mind -- and he told us all about it.

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[Update: the party is at capacity so we will not be taking any more RSVPs.]

As you may have heard, we at L.A. Weekly recently relaunched our arts blog with the new name Public Spectacle. To celebrate, we're having a launch party this Thursday, March 1, from 7 p.m. to 9:30 pm. at Geisha House, 6633 Hollywood Blvd., in the Moon Room.

You'll get free drinks and appetizers, and the opportunity to mingle with L.A. Weekly writers and editors and chat about the blog.

To get in, you must RSVP to rsvplaweekly@gmail.com and let us know your name and the names of any guests you'd like to bring. You'll receive an auto-reply confirming your RSVP. Please email quickly, as we'll cap the list once we've gotten enough to fill the room. You must be 21 or older to attend.

And, as always, you can follow us on Twitter at @LAWeeklyArts and like us on Facebook.

We look forward to seeing you.

Zachary Pincus-Roth
Arts & Culture Editor

This is Pinterest

Pinterest, much like the little black dress or the Birkin bag (depending on your tax bracket), has suddenly become the new must-have for women. It's the latest social media craze -- and it's blowing Google+ out of the water, despite, or perhaps because of, what some media outlets project is a user base that skews about three-quarters female.

I don't quite remember the first time I heard of Pinterest, which is most likely because it was mentioned alongside knitting or pickling or some such activity I only half pay attention to. But once it was on my radar, I quickly developed a bad case of "red car syndrome." Suddenly Pinterest was everywhere, in particular all over my Facebook minifeed next to pretty pictures of homemade fruit tarts and hand-crocheted sweaters. I'm no expert on crafting, but I do get excited about new technology. I signed up.

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