Randall Mills

Cast of Monster Party, winners of the Sketch Cage Match at the 1st Annual LA Scripted Comedy Festival on the iO West Theater Mainstage

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Over the weekend, Improv Olympic became a Scripted Olympic. From Thursday through Sunday, Hollywood's iO West Theater hosted its first annual L.A. Scripted Comedy Festival, featuring a collection of talent from across the country showcasing sketch, variety, storytelling, stand up and short films.

The event marked a departure from the improvised comedy that defines iO. According to James Grace, the coordinator of SFC, this venture was an organic evolution for the theater.

"iO West has had an explosion of sketch, solo, storytelling and stand up shows over the last year," explained Grace during a pre-festival interview. "So featuring all the talent at this theater in L.A., and across the country, seemed like a natural progression. The industry is always looking for product and scripted comedy is the best way to consistently showcase talent."

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Offerman (left) in Somebody Up There Likes Me

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Last night Zach Galifianakis helped close an opening weekend of showings and conversations about Nick Offerman's film and 2012 SXSW darling Somebody Up There Likes Me at Cinefamily. Offerman, the film's producer and co-star, brought out the likes of Jason Schwartzmann, Chris Pratt, and Galifianakis over the course of the weekend to trade quiet musings and add a little star power to the film's release.

"I love the movie, it has a lot of very beautiful women in it...and also some guys...," said Offerman mugging at the fact that his wife Megan Mullally had a small but hilarious role as an absurd therapist. "I think he really has a smart sense of humor through which he protects his heart from the world," he said earnestly of writer-director Bob Byington. To which Galifianakis responded, "Woah."

I don't think Zach was quite so prepared for candor. Or maybe he was.

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Laughing ANONYMOUS, one of the performers in La Ribot's Laughing Hole from Saturday

I suppose your first thought on walking into a cyclone might be "what the ----?" Or it might be nothing at all. You might be so overwhelmed at trying to orient yourself that your brain snaps into some other mode of consciousness. Spanish artist La Ribot's six-hour performance Laughing Hole performed at LACMA on Saturday evoked this kind of disorientation.

Taking up half of the 3rd floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum on LACMA's campus, the piece made you feel vulnerable. Constantly whipping around, following the three performers across their constant zig-zagging, falling down, posing, sign-waving and sign-posting was a task. Their incessant laughter, amplified by speakers placed at the room's perimeter and intermixed with the sound of wind -- a cyclone -- by a sound engineer completed an uneasy environment.

But for all of the confusion it produced, the performance was compelling. It was mesmerizing. It put you out of your comfort zone and prompted you to participate, to find an empty patch of wall to sit down and watch, or to stand in the center of the room and feel watched yourself.

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A real live zebra

With the internet slowly becoming a cat-photo-based economy and content providers creating human work days filled with animal cuteness overloads, it's a wonder that a slow, pensive film like Denis Côté's Bestiaire didn't come along sooner. Or perhaps, given it's thoughtful observation of beast behavior, it's really not that surprising.

Bestiaire, a 73-minute documentary, was the centerpiece to Friday night's Cinefamily and Mastodon Mesa-hosted evening of animalian panopticism that also included two short films, Primate Cinema: Apes as Family and Moving Stories , as well as an animal cognition expert and a live goddamn zebra.

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Paul T. Bradey

Eddie Pepitone

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Who is Eddie Pepitone? If you're not aware of the man they call the Bitter Buddha, you've clearly got a life, well-adjusted friends or an upwardly mobile job -- likely all three. If you've got none of those, he's the comedian-slash-prophet whose shrill screams of truth and tribulation might just briefly soothe your angst-ridden nightmare of an existence.

He's the lye-spiked balm created from the ashes of Bill Hicks and Harvey Pekar, suspended in the colloidal tears of every brilliant but commercially failed social comedian. He's healing your wounds while opening up new ones you never knew were there -- mostly by yelling.

But, as the saying goes, comparisons are odious. That's fine -- so is Eddie Pepitone. Ok, he's really just odious to look at. Ok, and probably to sleep with. And be around socially. But that's about it. The rest of him is perfectly charming. And on Friday night, he suppurated that charm all over a packed house of well-wishers and semi-celebrity roasters at the premiere of his own documentary, Steven Feinartz's The Bitter Buddha.

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Douglas Campbell

Rick Santati vs Jason "Mayhem" Miller

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Last night, in a downtown warehouse, pugilists and pawns united to raise money for a worthy cause. The unorthodox fundraising organization Tuxedo Tyrants teamed up with the LA Chessboxing Club to present Brain Meets Brawn, a charity event showcasing the nascent sport of chessboxing. All proceeds contribute to The Tiziano Project, which teaches citizen journalism in war-torn regions of the world.

The concept is simple: Two combatants play a 3-minute round of chess, immediately followed by a 3-minute round of boxing. This pattern is repeated until one of the competitors either checkmates or defeats his opponent in the ring.

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Genesy Mendez

Teen cast of Musical Fools, comprised of students from The Ramon C. Cortines High School for the Visual and Performing Arts

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A new musical based on the work of Neil Simon has been placed in the hands of children.

This weekend, Musical Fools, a musical adaptation of Simon's 1981 Broadway comedy Fools, held its world premiere in Los Angeles. One would assume this would include a troupe of veteran actors and a flashy venue like the Ahmanson. Instead, Phil Swan and Ron West, who co-wrote Fools' music and lyrics, took a risk by casting students of the Ramon C. Cortines High School for the Visual and Performing Arts and staging the production in school's theater.

The concept of Musical Fools originated from another student production. In 2004, Swann attended a student production of Fools at Birmingham High School in California, where his wife Amanda worked as a theater educator. The play depicts a young teacher named Leon Tolchinksky who stumbles upon Kulyenchikov, a provincial Ukrainian hamlet under a 200-year-old curse that causes the townsfolk to behave idiotically. Leon has 24 hours to break to enchantment or he too will suffer the same inhibition of intelligence. While watching this comedic fable, Phil jotted down the note "This would make a great musical" on his program.

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Ceci N'est Pas

Alexandra Grant's work in the window of Here is Elsewhere gallery opening night of "Ma Prochain La Vie", a three-location show Isabelle Le Normand curated with Jon Bernad

Last week, New York-based, French artist Davide Balula picked the lock of Hammer curatorial associate Elizabeth Cline's house while a small crowd stood by. Paris-based artist Michel Blazy, or his proxies, cut the lawn of L.A. collector Danny First and affixed the loose, cut-off grass to the wall of a small room at First's house. In addition, seven Paris galleries, most of which had never exhibited there, had booths at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the fair at Barker Hangar.

All of this fell under the umbrella of Ceci N'est Pas, a five-month initiative organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S., funded by the Institut Francais (the French government's cultural arm) and meant to bring Paris and Los Angeles artists together. French curator Isabelle Le Normand, who has spent the last five years finding and sometimes creating Paris-L.A. convergences, had a hand in at least a third of the week's events.

Le Normand came to Los Angeles for the first time in 2007, looking for an art internship. She had reserved a rental car. But spread-out, segmented LAX confused her, and since she never found the car, she took the bus instead. Because she did, she met Jon Bernad, who noticed her putting a twenty dollar bill into the unsophisticated Metro ticket dispenser and advised she use smaller bills in the future.

A recent college graduate, he had just moved to L.A. to live in a traveling movie producer's back house and care for two French bulldogs (an arrangement that was supposed to last two months but ended up lasting six years). "I had all this free time, " he remembers. He had been using it to explore the city. "I wanted to share the experience." He helped Le Normand navigate on that first visit and then again on visits to come.

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Collection of Miriam Kove, New York (on display at Fowler Museum, UCLA)

Painted doors, 19th Century Iran

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Though Jews and Iran have had their differences, it might be surprising to learn that the history of Jews in Iran is as old and rich as Hugh Hefner.

That 2,700-year history was recognized and honored this weekend at a conference held at UCLA's Fowler Museum in conjunction with its "Light and Shadows: The Story of Iranian Jews" exhibition.

David Yerushalmi, professor of Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University, articulated, in a jet-lagged stupor no less (he had arrived just a couple of days ago from Israel), an introduction to Iranian Jewish culture, dating back to the 16th century, and moving forward to the Pahlavi dynasty, from 1925 until 1979, when these exiled city dwellers went from being "an oppressed and marginalized community, to an enterprising, active and powerful section of broader Iranian society."

From the original 80,000 Jews living in Iran, about 25,000 have remained. The others are in Los Angeles, New York and Israel.

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Clare Brown

Dream Time Dancing

Clare Brown says she might be the first artist ever to coordinate specific color hues into all of her paintings. It's a bold claim, but the Topanga transplant knows a thing or two about color. As a 10-year-old growing up in the late '60s, Brown spent her days immersed in giant plastic colored eggs. The zany cocoons of color were the invention of color theorist and healer Theo Gimbel, who worked with Brown's mother, who was blind, in his Gloucestershire, England laboratory. "They were massive -- say about 10 feet by 10 feet," recalls Brown. "You walked into it and sat down on the seat and it was like, boom! Yellow. You couldn't see anything else but yellow. I'd stay in there for ages."

"My mother's blindness really influenced me in the sense of, she made me see more, in a way," Brown says, before admitting how odd it must sound.

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