Louisette Geiss

ROLL UP ROLL UP FOR THE MYSTERY TOUR! RIGHT THIS WAY!!!!!!!!!!

You're standing on the corner of Third and San Vicente in a silly hat on a Sunday morning, sipping a Bloody Mary from a blue Solo cup, ready for anything. You were told to bring a beach towel, a $2 bill, a vegetable and your favorite movie candy, among other things, but you have no idea why. This is a Mystery Trip, after all, and you've placed control of the next six and a half hours of your life in the hands of Chief Mysterious Officer Dave Green, 41, also known as Mysterious Dave.

"We're going into Cedars[-Sinai Medical Center], to massage people's bed sores!" Green tells the 35 Mysterions who gathered May 6 for a private tour to celebrate Tara O'Brien's 33rd birthday. Just kidding! Instead, the group heads across the street to Third Street Dance studio, where Dancing With the Stars is filmed, for a private break-dance lesson with JT Tyler, an assistant choreographer on So You Think You Can Dance. Tyler pops and locks in reptilian black-and-red sneakers, dark jeans with a red belt and a red hat with a black brim, urging Hollywood-thin women in animal prints and klutzy overweight men alike to push out their pelvises for a closer approximation of the aggressive b-boy style.

Mysterious Dave is the type of boisterous guy who thinks the adult world should be more like summer camp -- more cheesy bonding, more goofy competition, more unexpected field trips -- and so in 2003 he began organizing an alcohol-laced version of his favorite activity from Camp Saginaw: Hop on a bus without knowing where you're going! What began as an annual excursion for friends to learn more about L.A.'s quirky nooks and crannies transformed a few years ago, with a $1,000 grant from the Awesome Foundation, into Mystery Trip L.A., a raucous BYOB bus tour customized to fit the needs and hobbies of participants using Green's database of hundreds of potential destinations, including eccentric neighborhoods, museums, performances, restaurants and attractions ("L.A. Weekly is my bible," he says).

Past Mystery Trips have mostly been private affairs -- birthday parties or corporate retreats -- featuring stops at offbeat tourist spots like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, picnic dinners at Barnsdall Art Park and behind-the-scenes tours at Dodger Stadium, but this summer Green plans to host monthly Mystery Trips open to the public; $65 tickets are already on sale for the first of these, to be held June 9.

More >>

Ted Soqui

Ashley Ross, left, and Lindsay Klimitz at the Colony Nightclub with their shoe vending machine.

Salvation has come to the high-heeled hordes of L.A. nightlife, in the form of the city's first flat-shoe vending machine. Squat, unobtrusive, the size of a dresser, the thing is currently located beside the women's restroom at the Colony in Hollywood.

"We did six or seven pairs last week, not a whole lot," says distributor Ashley Ross, glancing brightly at the machine. "But it's still early. We're a little bit new to the L.A. scene. This is the first of many, is the plan."

It's a Thursday night at the club, and Ross and business partner Lindsay Klimitz are restocking shoes. Called Rollasoles, they cost $19.95 (or "an easy $20"). They are basically ballet flats. Soft and squashy, they drop out of the machine rolled up in a plastic can.

"The first time we came to L.A., we had no idea the streets were so bad," Klimitz says, popping cans into the machine.

More >>

[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

John Halcyon Styn

So you couldn't get a ticket. Join the club. Burning Man has been a rich man's game for a while now, and since BMORG, the group behind it, can't seem to figure out any way to prevent scalpers (such as, say, printing your name on your ticket), prices surely will be jacked up even higher between now and August (until they suddenly drop again at the last minute).

Maybe it's time to explore alternatives, like:

More >>

Tova Carlin, Ania Diakoff and Katerina Llanes' Sub-Standard installation

If Los Angeles is a car culture, then the parking garage of the Standard Hollywood represents that beastly reality's bowels.

Art in the Parking Space, a project by Warren Neidich and Elena Bajo held in the parking garage of the Standard Hotel Hollywood as part of Pacific Standard Time's Performance and Public Art Festival on Tuesday night, was a mash-up of video, dance, walking tours and installations.

Neidich and Bajo's statement for Art in the Parking Space, the third installation of a yearlong project on the intersection of these two concepts, reflects their interest in "different environments and sets of cultural parameters that define the Los Angeles basin" -- and parking garages are a bigger part of that environment than we'd often like.

More >>

Need a break from all the credit card-maxing, house-lighting, bad party-attending and general seasonal stressing? Why not try something outside of the gift box this year? Here, five festive, somewhat freaky holiday haps in town that are anything but cookie-cutter Christmas confections.

5. Charles Phoenix's Retro Holiday Show
The holidays are really all about nostalgic accoutrements and rituals. And nobody knows nostalgia -- especially in L.A. -- better than Charles Phoenix, a Cali institution known for his enlightening Disneyland tour guides and kitschy slideshow presentations (see image above). Charles Phoenix's Retro Holiday Show is always a hoot. Phoenix "roasts and toasts" mid-century family life and style during the holidays via old photos and oddball commentary that meshes the wit of Awkward Family Photos with a genuine zest for the season that maybe only St. Nick himself could match. Dec. 18, 7:00 p.m. at REDCAT Theater,
631 West 2nd St.
Downtown. www.charlesphoenix.com

More >>

Nanette Gonzales

Breakfast for dinner

Also check out our slideshow by Nanette Gonzales on The Pancakes and Booze Art Show
Some gallery owners organizing a show might draw inspiration from their college degrees in art history. But when Tom Kirlin curated his first art show, he was inspired by college memories of drunken pancake breakfasts.

Three years ago, Kirlin, a 33-year-old Arizona native, was working in Hollywood as a cameraman when he rented a warehouse downtown and threw an art, alcohol and pancake party for an artist friend.

"It was something that I always did in college," Kirlin says. "You'd go out and drink all night long, and then the only place that's open for 24 hours is IHOP."

The Pancakes & Booze art show, billed as the largest underground art show in Los Angeles, takes place locally about once every three months now. The latest installment, a "Best of" show representing over 100 Pancakes & Booze artists, happened this past weekend.

More >>

Photos by Zachary Pincus-Roth

The moment of truth

On November 11, 1998, when Howard Braham was a student at Columbia University, he realized around 10:30 p.m. that it was about to turn 11:11 on 11-11. He knocked on the door of his friend Steve Schwartz and they decided to gather 11 people, head up to the 11th floor, turn on the television and watch channel 11, which, Braham recalls, was the 11 o'clock news.

Since then, Braham hosted 11-11 parties almost every year, spacing them out so that the 11th of these parties took place last Friday, on on 11-11-11. The venue was George Izay Park, selected because its address is 1111 Olive Ave., in Burbank.

Braham, who now lives in Glendale and works as a Disney Imagineer, arrived just before 11:11 a.m. and stayed until the final moment of truth -- 11 seconds after 11:11 p.m.

More >>

Jeremy Fremaux

It's a party, it's theater, it's a "happening"...or wait, is it fancy art talk? According to Sneaky Nietzsche's creator, Sheila Vand, it's a little bit of all of those, and the runaround is part of the fun.

Billed with the tagline "a theatrical music experiment for the fictionally inclined," Vand speaks of the show as a "multimedia visceral experience," engaging all of the senses. Nietzsche said "There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy," and the bodily senses of sight, sound, smell, touch, taste are innate components of the experience. You might leave not knowing in your brain exactly what hit you, but you're not really supposed to "get it" in that way.

More >>

Star Foreman

Queens of the quinceañera

The Teen Party Expo came to town recently, and the L.A. Convention Center morphed into what the inside of a young girl's brain must look like: Hot. Bright. Crowded. Confusing. Loud. Sort of like hell, only fluorescent pink.

Picture it, the giddy schizophrenia of a candy booth right next to an orthodontics booth. A bakery booth handing out slices of cake next to a booth hawking Ultra Body Cleanse Plus Pack weight-loss pills. The thump-thump-thump-thump-thumping of dance music. Entering the convention hall, it takes, conservatively, five seconds before your retinas are ready to explode from staring at everything glittered and bedazzled and feather boa-ed and sequined to death.

More >>