Scott Groller

Rigo 23 and his collaborators' Autonomous InterGalactic Planetarium (2009-12)

In 2000, members of the Zapatista Air Force launched an attack on Mexican soldiers stationed in Chiapas. Before this, no one knew the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, notoriously ill-equipped and mainly made up of indigenous people who lived in self-governed rural communities, even had an air force. But how they acquired planes was no mystery: they made them out of paper, folding leaflets with messages and poems written across, then snuck up close enough to send a fleet of hundreds into an army encampment.

Six years earlier, in 1994, when the Zapatistas first became known as a movement, they had donned black ski masks ("so that we would stop being invisible") and staged a largely non-violent revolt against the out-of-touch government, taking control of cities throughout Chiapas. No lives would have been lost if not for the Mexican Army's retaliation. "We didn't go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard," said their leader, Subcomandante Marcos. He also called poetry a "favorite" weapon.

The artist Rigo 23, who made the work for his new exhibition at RedCat in collaboration with Zapatista artists, was in San Francisco when the Zapatistas first revolted. He stole a copy of Yo, Marcos, writings by the Zapatistas' leader, from the Stanford Library and devoured its poetic politics. "It was quite attractive, irresistible even," Rigo now remembers.

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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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Mike Ciriaco

OWBC founder AB, aka Mormon Rockwell of the Air Guitar scene

This past Sunday, the Westboro Baptist Church gagged on a spoonful of its own medicine. During its annual demonstration against the Academy Awards show in Hollywood, the homophobic religious group, notorious for its zealous protesting of military funerals, was itself the target of picketing by the aptly named Occupy the WBC organization, at Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

While the WBC brandished placards stating "God Hates Fags," "God H8s Media" and the more event-specific "Whitney in Hell," its political analogs countered with signs of their own. Messages ranged from the positive ("God Loves Everyone," "...And the Oscar Goes to Love"), to the confrontational ("F*** You Haters"), and even the facetious ("I Have a Sign Too"). The OWBC movement leader, who simply answers to the moniker AB, claims the WBC has earned their ire.

"Why not target the WBC?" AB posits. "If you are looking for the most fervent, destructive, vindictive, religious extremist group in America, it's them."

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Courtesy of Ace Museum.

The Gao Brothers' stainless steel sculpture, Miss Mao (Trying To Poise Herself At The Top of Lenin's Head) from 2009, now on La Brea

Pacific Standard Time's "Performance and Public Art" and Liz Glynn's "Spirit Resurrected," two performance art festivals, happen this month, so for once the event and performance lineup will outshine the exhibitions.

5. How I Learned to Draw
A tombstone made of rye bread and eaten with cream cheese; a gunshot; surgery beneath a clothesline; Groucho Marx glasses; a murdered ballerina: All this was part of Barry Markowitz's 1980 performance at the short-lived Provisional Theater of Los Angeles. Saturday, he'll bring back at least the clothesline for a performance at Human Resources, called How I Learned to Draw, about what taught him to represent, then distort, the world around him. 410 Cottage Home St., Chinatown; Sat., Jan. 14, 8 p.m.; free. (213) 290-4752, humanresourcesla.com.

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photo by Colin Young-Wolff

Occupy this...or that...or whatever you damn well please.

Twenty Eleven has been a year of occupies. Occupations. Occupitudes. You get the idea.

Sure, the Occupy Wall Street movement has only been around since September, but since then we've been occupying all manner of whatnot like there's no tomorrow (thanks to the Mayans, there actually might not be one in 2012). We've even been occupying all the bizarre intangibles that the internet and the clever asses behind it can come up with.

Here are the 50 craziest. If you make it to the end, there's a page you can lick that tastes like blue raspberry Kool-Aid.

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Sandra Smith and Fela Kuti, when they were together in 1969-70

At the time of his death in 1997, Fela Anikulapo Kuti was known by many names: Afrobeat pioneer, a political instigator, husband to 27 wives, just to name a few. The Nigerian musician had spread his fiery brand of African party music around the world, serving up biting social commentary sugar-coated with blasting horns, slithering Rhodes keyboards and undulating beats that ignited global dance floors. His incredible life is chronicled in the critically acclaimed Broadway musical Fela! -- opening at the Ahmanson theater this week -- which follows Fela's rise to musical prominence, acerbic political criticism and his deadly clashes with the Nigerian government. But before Fela became an international phenomenon, it was here in Los Angeles that Fela found his sound and vision.

Fela and his band came to Los Angeles in 1969 as just another international act, and left in 1970 ready for revolution. Musician and social activist Sandra Smith (now Izsadore) witnessed it all first hand. She was Fela's guide, teacher and lover while he stayed in the City of Angels. "Sandra gave me the education I wanted to know," Fela told author Micheal Veal. "She was the one who opened my eyes. For the first time I heard things I'd never heard before about Africa! Sandra was my adviser. She talked to me about politics, history. She taught me what she knew and what she knew was enough for me to start on."

LA Weekly recently caught up with Sandra to talk about Fela's L.A. days and his evolution to becoming an African icon.

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Courtesy of the artist, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and L.A. Louver, Venice

Charles Garabedian's 1982 painting, "If You Want Me, I'll Be At The Hairdresser"

With the exception of a panel of artists talking economics, this week's recommendations are all old-school, exhibitions and performances of artists working before Watergate.

5. Highbrow Comedy
Guy de Cointet is one of those stuff-of-myth artists: He grew up in Paris, was friendly with Yves St. Laurent as a child and Warhol muse Viva as a young artist, moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s and died too soon of complications from hepatitis. He was interested in the structure of language and comic scenarios, but stills of his performances always look like magazine spreads, usually with chic women navigating pared-down sets. This weekend, the Getty will restage two of his works: Tell Me, in which two women are seduced by minimal art, and IGLU, an extra-esoteric situation comedy. 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood; Sat., Dec. 10, 7 p.m.; free with reservation. (310) 440-7300, getty.edu.

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Paul T. Bradley

Josh Androsky's Occupy L.A. comedy: this is what democracy yuks like.

"I don't know man, whatever," a sullen and unfriendly guy spits out. I want to know when the Occupy L.A. comedy show is going to start. The sullen guy doesn't have an answer. This is at the information booth. A cheerier dude is chatting up some punky teens who have walked by. He doesn't know either. Do they think I'm a cop?

This is my first trip to the Occupy Los Angeles tent village at City Hall and it's not going well: the info booth doesn't have the information I need and there's an impromptu jam band on the steps drumming and singing. Is that singing? There's also a didgeridoo going full tilt. On top of that, there's a heavy odor of...um...is it the art teacher's office? Is it your uncle's garage? It's weed. I smell weed. You've heard the jokes: This is what democracy smells like.

I'm bummed -- I want this to be better than the other non-Tea Party social movements that fizzled out in the past decade. I want this to not be the caricature that a million shitty hippie-haters have punchlined through since the movement began. But after twenty minutes meandering around City Hall's south steps, I'm panicking that it might be. I'm also pissed that I've fallen for some merry pranksterism and now I'm going to have to listen to my worst musical nightmare.

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