​Ever had questions about Hell, Satan or various and sundry demons? Then TV writer Martin Olson's Encyclopaedia of Hell: An Invasion Manual for Demons Concerning the Planet Earth and the Human Race Which Infests It will prove most edifying, as it sheds some much-needed comedic light on the dark side.

Purporting to be a detailed manual for demons who are invading the Earth, with a truly encyclopedic glossary of terms featuring often hilarious definitions, fastidious, Sears catalog-Gothic artwork by Tony Millionaire and Mahendra Singh and interesting cosmological stories and sidebars, the comedy is close-to-the-vest and sophisticated enough that the exceedingly pious and godly may still take offense at its flirtation with the Satanic and demonic.

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Mistress of the Shattered Path

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The circus came to Venice on Saturday night, where an almost exclusively female coterie of performers enchanted a small crowd under the stars with a bill of sultry music, inspired clowning and acts of derring-do.

An accordion-heavy array of Bulgarian drinking songs performed by the trio Demonite Na Khaosa set the otherworldly tone of the evening, which unfolded in an Abbot Kinney lot transformed by sculptor and Mistress of Cermonies Robin Murez into the moonlit fairyland of Robin's Sculpture Garden, an intimate performance space where the organic and the industrial collide to great effect.

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Photo by John Frame, courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

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When people ask John Frame what his work is about, the curators of "Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame" write in the show's catalog, "he feels that the real answer should be that it isn't about anything. That is not to say that the work is meaningless, rather that it carries the meaning in its own ways and on its own terms."

The particular 'works' the curators are referring to are not the sculptures this California artist started producing in the early 1980s, when he first emerged as a historically and literary-minded figurative artist, but a collection of movable, posable dolls, stages and props that Frame has been working at since 2006 out in his idyllic home studio in Wrightwood, deep in the Angeles National Forest.

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Shannon Cottrell

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Last month at Gothla US, the annual gothic belly dance festival at Cal Poly Pomona, we stumbled across these adorable mini top hats. Yeah, this sort of neo-Victorian headgear can be found anywhere from goth fashion websites to anime conventions these days, but Madame Yvette's House of Hats' offerings are different. They're crocheted, "handmade beginning with the pattern," we were told, and largely customizable. You can pick the color, or colors if you're daring enough to try something like stripes, and add touches like feathers or lace.

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