Liana Bandziulis

Doug Cambell, with tutu on his head, surrounded by his Mindshare team and guest speakers

Anarchist writer Hakim Bey once wrote, "The universe wants to play," arguing that one must briefly escape complacency and embrace the unpredictable.

This theory was exemplified on Friday when the creative event planning organization Mindshare hosted the 2nd Annual Rubiks Human Play! Spectacular at V Lounge in Santa Monica. The evening revolved around the importance of play, featuring speakers, demonstrations, interactive exhibits, and, of course, Human Rubiks.

Although named for the Rubik's Cube, the human version is exponentially simpler. Participants don various colored clothing, such as a red top, green shorts, an orange hat, etc. Over the course of the night, players swap articles of clothing with each other. The first person to wear just a single color wins. Mindshare first incorporated the game into last year's April 1 event, but attendees were wary that the activity was a cover for an April Fool's prank and were hesitant to participate.

"Now that the more suspicious attendees know that we're not pranking them, they're more likely to join in," said Mindshare founder Doug Campbell during a pre-party interview. Campbell was proven correct several hours later. While 2012's Human Rubiks stretched on for hours, this year, two highly motivated participants won within minutes of the game commencing. Apparently the only prize was their new mono-hued outfits.

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Bianca Lapin

The Servideo brothers, who helped organized the event, outside the bar

When I was 16 years old, about a week or two after the planes crashed into the twin towers in 2001, I went to a Red Sox game with my father and my little brother. My father refused to give the tickets away, even though the Sox weren't playing well and fear was high.

On Yawkey Way, the famous street outside of Fenway Park, I watched Massholes in Nomar jerseys, chomping down Italian sausages and washing them down with wicked cold beers. It just seemed so easy, then, for a man wearing a vest filled with explosives to blow us all to smithereens. That day, I had never seen Fenway so empty or heard such a small amount of cursing. During the third inning, my father got up to go to the bathroom, and he whispered to me: "If anything happens, run with your brother onto the field. Everyone will be running the opposite direction."

Last Monday, when the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, it was the realization of a terror I had expected, really, since 2002. But this time, I was so far away from my hometown in Worcester County, living in Los Angeles. And I wanted to know how Bostonians were dealing with the recent events. I wanted to feel a part of my community. And I wanted to know if anything has changed.

So on Sunday, I went down to Sonny McLean's Irish Pub -- a Boston bar -- in Santa Monica for the Rally for Boston. It was a party. When I walked into the bar, it was as if I had been transported back to the East Coast: The Sox game was on almost every television, a band was leading the bar through Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline, and the bartenders were passing out beers and shots of whiskey as if it was the end of prohibition.

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Lina Lecaro

See also:
*More Coachella coverage
*The Hottest Dancing Girls at Coachella, as GIFs
*5 Fashion Combos to Expect at Coachella
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying

Festival schmestival. The party scene that's emerged and evolved around the Coachella Music Fest has gotten nearly as huge and musically plentiful as the main event. This year, our Weekend 1 RSVP list consisted of no less than a dozen big-branded DJ-driven, swag-soaked soirees.

Did we make it to all of them? Of course not. But after hitting up about half, it was clear we'd seen all we needed to, at least when it came to the party peep heap. Indeed, Coachella parties always seem to have "types" you start to run into again and again, so much so that we often have to ask the scenesters we snap and rap with, "Did I meet you earlier?"

Here the Top 10 Types we got toasted with under the Palm Springs sun this weekend (at the Revolver/Dub Frequency/Club Called Rhonda Party at the Ace Hotel, the Armani Exchange Neon Carnival, Jeremy Scott's Adidas Party at the Frank Sinatra House, the Guess Party at the Viceroy and the Hard Rock Lounge at Zoso Hotel).

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Jos McKain

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal with hunky bartenders / canvases for artist Alex Chavez, Dave McCreary and Zak Stone at CLOSE at Concord Art Space.

See also:
*25 Alternative L.A. Art Spaces to Check Out Now

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal believes art should be about having fun. But when it comes to her belief that words have the power to connect people, she is not messing around.

CLOSE, her event last Friday at Concord Art Space (one of our 25 Alternative L.A. Art Spaces to Check Out Now) was part book release, part gallery installation, part performance art and part plain good old-fashioned party.

Featuring works by Brandon Andrew, Daniel M. Savage, Alex Chavez, Jesse Malmed and James Roehl, the show did in fact feature a fully-functional The Princess and the Frog bouncy castle, an unconventional clown creating adult-themed ballon sculptures (I was lucky enough to get an orange vulva) and some strapping, half-naked bartenders, as well as an additional gallery with several engaging multi-media pieces for visitors to experiment and play with.

More and more, the art scene is morphing to include fleeting, interactive works. Following in the footsteps of pioneers from the 1960s and 70s such as John Baldessari, Marina Ambramovic and Michael Asher, many emerging contemporary artists are now focusing part or all of their practice on gaining active participation from their audiences. Mainstream galleries and museums are becoming increasingly open to this kind of work, which is called relational aesthetics.

Rosenthal, although petite, is a powerhouse when performing live. A graduate of Vassar and the CalArts writing MFA program, her poems were recently featured in PANK magazine. At the CLOSE event I met up with her to discuss the finer points of this expanding vision of experienced-based art centered in the growing number of artist-run and alternative spaces in and around L.A., and to try and figure out what exactly this all has to do with adults jumping around in bouncy castles...

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Courtesy of LACE

LACE gallery

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*25 Alternative L.A. Art Spaces to Check Out Now
*10 Places in L.A. to Draw Nude Models

With something like 400 modern and contemporary art galleries in L.A., and aesthetic taste being so subjective, picking just ten of the city's "best" galleries is nigh unto impossible. But if you wish to filter your culture destinations through the lens of a swell party -- well, that makes the job a bit more manageable.

Assuming the art itself is quality, what else makes for a good gallery party? The best answer is the optimum balance of culture and fun, energy and sophistication, good art and good crowds. But does it require cocktails? Famous people? Obscure but fabulous people? Events worth dressing up a little for, or ones where you don't have to worry about what you're wearing?

Setting aside for the moment the proliferation of popular pop-ups, neighborhood walks and tours and museum shindigs, we sought out the establishments that, month in and month out, can be counted on to consistently provide your best chance to learn something while you get your art/rock on. It's worth adding yourself to their mailing lists, because each and every show comes with its own guaranteed good time.

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Photo by Joshua White, courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery

Mario Ybarra Jr.'s porcelain sculpture, Mr. Hyde... (2013)

This week, one artist reimagines Michael Jackson's Thriller, another puts the visions of a '70s revolutionary to music and a new film tells the story of a restaurant-running SoCal commune.

5. Panther politics remix
Pictures of Huey P. Newton, the activist who co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966, with his tilted beret, leather jacket and firearm across his chest, make him look severe and single-minded. But hear recordings of his voice and it's soft and careful. He rarely talks about himself -- he's always speaking about groups: "white America," "people of color all over the world." Artist Steffani Jemison gets at Newton's careful generalities in a quirky way in her installation at LAXART. She enlisted adventurous R&B trio Sidetrack Boyz to musically improvise a 1970 speech by Newton, one in which he talks a lot about change that's coming soon. Abstract black paintings on clear paper hang in the gallery, while the trio's voices start, stop, then start again, never hurried. 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd.; through Feb. 23. (323) 868-5893, laxart.org.

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Photo by W.B. Fontenot

Paul V.

Paul Vitagliano, better known as Paul V., is a self-proclaimed "promosexual" — a term he coined and has zero shame about owning. Thanks to social media, of course, self-promotion has become an essential component to party throwing, deejaying and writing/blogging — three things the 50-year-old Vitagliano has been doing for decades.

"I'm proud that what I do is a public convergence of nightlife and activism," Vitagliano proclaims, washing down chips and salsa with a lethal margarita at Casita del Campo, a gay favorite in the Silver Lake neighborhood where he's lived for decades.

In many ways, Casita represents the pan-sexual world that Vitagliano helped bring together in L.A. The crowd here is both gay and straight but always colorful, thanks to the Cavern Club, a theater in the basement, which showcases gay and drag shows helmed by Vitagliano's friend Mr. Dan.

Together, the friends co-hosted the legendary Dragstrip 66 dance party, which started at another Silver Lake restaurant, Rudolpho's, and moved to the Echo and then the Echoplex before ceasing as a monthly in 2010. Now, with Phil Scanlon, Vitagliano is raising money on Kickstarter to film a documentary about its glory days.

The 20th-anniversary party and the "very last Dragstrip event ever," planned for Jan. 12 at the Echoplex, will be part of the documentary.

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Jon Haynes Photography

I'm just going to have one more beer and I'll still be good to drive, right?

Car culture was the last element I embraced in my new life as an Angeleno. The first few months I lived here, filling my gas tank made me physically ill. The cost! The fossil fuels! The hours spent in traffic! I may have cried about it once or twice, alone in my sad sublet behind one of Silver Lake's six thousand hair salons.

Three years later, I relish surface-street shortcut strategies just as much as I once relished plotting how best to escape my high school's Bronx campus to sneak down to IHOP during assemblies, and I crave Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne on my morning commute just as much as I once craved a novel or a newspaper.

And yet I still cannot stomach the casual ubiquity of drunk driving in this city. I see it every weekend among friends, acquaintances and strangers. The stammering insistence that you are cogent. The shrug showing you believe there is no alternative. The sloppy slip into the driver's seat.

Over a thousand Angelenos got DUIs the week of July 4th. Seriously, Los Angeles. We need to talk. Why must you weave a dangerous game of Russian roulette along the freeways and boulevards every weekend?

I have a few theories.

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Micah Cordy

Golden Stag at the Park Plaza Hotel

See also:
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Top 10 Films of 2012

Who says that 13 should be an unlucky number? Help ensure the coming year starts off on the right foot with these celebration suggestions, from comedy clubs to Prohibition-style speakeasys.

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L.J. Williamson

See More: Our full gallery of pictures from Burning Man Decompression by CuriousJosh.

Thumping EDM? Check. Lasers? Check. Fishnets and booty shorts? Check.

Now that we've got that out of the way, we can get on with what the more ambitious scope of the L.A. Burning Man community's goals, achieved through its big fat Decompression event, which was held at Los Angeles State Historic Park on Saturday.

The wildly overgrown desert rave that is Burning Man runs on a philosophy that could be described as "principled partying." Sure, there are plenty of Burners that are there just for the wild bacchanal, plenty that are there for the art, but in the more high-minded corners of the event, taking a piece of the more transcendent aspects of the experience home with you is the crucial goal.

In that spirit, Decompression is a one-night slice of Burning Man, minus the 12-hour drive and the $390 entry ticket. Originally designed as a chance for Burners to "decompress" -- to more slowly ease their way back into the default world after a week at the all-encompassing desert fest -- the Los Angeles event now is well on its way to becoming an end in itself.

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