Photo by Joshua White

Mike Kelley's Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites

This week, an army of minimalist sculptures emits the sent of Pine Sol, a composer uses dry ice to make music and MOCA PDC becomes an arcade.

5. Climate controlled concert
The Quartz Cantabile is an instrument powered by heat. Flames send hot air through tubes of various lengths and sizes, which come out the other end as loud, clear sounds. Another instrument, the dry ice chimes, is played by touching cubes of dry ice to suspended brass chimes, then letting the carbon dioxide from the ice turn to gas and put the brass in motion. Composers Todd Lerew and Liam Mooney will play these two strange instruments at Machine Project this weekend. 1200-D N. Alvarado; Sun., Nov. 18, 8 p.m. (213) 483-8761, machineproject.org.

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Nanette Gonzales

The heat kept away all but two of the neighbors' cats

Writers, novelists in particular, often have a cat or two attending them as they go about the terrifying business of setting words to blank page. Novelist Sandi Tan had 11. One by one the cats began to appear at her doorstep as she was writing her debut novel, The Black Isle.

Tan's novel is about a young medium who moves with her family from Shanghai to a remote, fictional Indonesian island called the Black Isle. The island is overrun with ghosts. Chaos ensues. The darker the scenes Tan worked on, the cuter the creatures that showed up in real life.

She scrolls through photos of them now on her iPad. "That's the thing about writing, you're just this grim creature," she says in her clipped, melodious, Singaporean accent. "And you post these cat pictures on Facebook. And suddenly you seem like less of a goblin, you know?"

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W.B. Fontenot

From porn star to UCLA women's studies major

"What is sex?" the professor asks her class, deadpan, on a hot August day.

The room is quiet except for the steady tapping of a nervous foot, belonging to a tan blonde. It's the first day of class -- summer session at UCLA. The students in "Sex and the Cinema" are a mix: curious female underclassmen, perplexed Asian foreign-exchange tiger children, a back row of overly excited young males in backward caps and board shorts.

Three groups, and then one person who breaks the mold. The blonde. Rachel. Her hair is in pigtails, one hand wrapped around her rhinestone-encrusted iPhone, the other fingering her pink pen. She fidgets and she giggles, her light green eyes glancing from phone to professor constantly. She stashes her Louis Vuitton bag below her desk, tucks her feet under her petite frame and curls up in her seat.

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Courtesy of the artist

Performers on the set of Emily Mast's B!rdbra!n

This week, there's a concise, color-coordinated performance that's kind of about a bird, an art show that unfolds over the telephone and a slightly surreal stairwell in Pasadena.

5. Dangerous dreaming
"Learn to Dream," written across John Baldessari's new print five times in five different colors, sounds cliche -- not as bad as "dare to dream," maybe, but something an after-school program might have on a banner over its doorway. But repeat the words in your head as you move from 1301PE's downstairs gallery, where Baldessari's print hangs, to the upstairs space. There, Rirkrit Tiravanija's slick enamel-on-steel text pieces say things like "All You Need Is Dynamite" or "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker," and the dreaming Baldessari alluded to doesn't seem so cute and catchy anymore. 6150 Wilshire Blvd.; through Sept. 15. (323) 938-5822, 1301pe.com.

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Chivas USA had last won the SuperClasico in 2007.

See also: Don't Call Them Hooligans: Meet Ultras, L.A.'s Major League Soccer Superfans

Ten minutes into the second half at Home Depot Center on this Saturday night, the P.A. booms "¡Arriba las Chivas!" so loud the ushers flinch. The grito over the loudspeakers whips up the sold-out house of 18,800, almost of all of them here to cheer for the opponents of the L.A. Galaxy, Los Angeles' star-studded Major League Soccer team.

The Galaxy's rivals haven't come far for the match -- the fans that send "¡Arribas!" up to the roof are here for Chivas USA, L.A.'s other soccer team. The team, which also uses Home Depot Center as its home field, was formed in 2004 as an L.A. outpost of Mexico's most beloved club, Chivas de Guadalajara. Tonight's game, the SuperClasico, is held twice a year, pitting Chivas against its cross-hallway adversary.

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PHOTO BY SIMONE PAZ

Lisa Vanderpump and her Bravo boss, Andy Cohen, walk the blue carpet into his book party.

See also: Did Andy Cohen Go Too Far With Kim Richards?

Ken Todd, husband of Real Housewife Lisa Vanderpump, looks nervous. He's walking around the couple's Beverly Hills restaurant SUR Lounge, making sure everything's in order. He totes their dog, Giggy, who's outfitted in a purple, gemstone-encrusted suit that might weigh more than the pocket dog itself. Giggy appears ready to greet royalty.

And royalty is on the way, in the form of Andy Cohen, on-air personality and Bravo network executive. The Cohen camp (Bravo, his publishers and Giggy's parents) is throwing a party here to celebrate the launch of his new memoir, Most Talkative. The list of "Bravolebrities" scheduled to appear is staggeringly long: Kathy Griffin, Patti Stanger, Jeff Lewis, practically every Real Housewife from Beverly Hills and O.C.

It's a weird setup, when you think about it, since Cohen plays two roles in the life of any Bravo star: a friend, who jokes with them on live TV while knocking back late-night cocktails, and the boss, who could fire their asses. For them, a party like this isn't just about supporting a pal in his moment of glory. It's more akin to Michael Scott's office Christmas party, and you'd look like a jerk if you flaked.

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Illustration by Jimmy Geigrich

"Stephen, how's your eye?" Ethan Lindsey asks.

It's 3:30 a.m. Outside in downtown Los Angeles, it's the dead of night, but inside the Frank Stanton Studios on Figueroa Boulevard, it's the heart of the work "day" for the Marketplace Morning Report overnight shift. And things are bustling.

While most of the world sleeps, Lindsey, the show's 34-year-old producer, spearheads a close-knit team of six, which churns out seven newscasts and more than 40 minutes of original programming nightly. This is the fast-paced world of public radio: There's no time to be tired when 5.9 million listeners depend on you for the morning news every week.

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Nanette Gonzales

Rabbi Mark Borovitz in his office at Beit T'Shuvah

It seems like the setup for a corny joke: A rabbi and an ex-con walk into a room. Except here's the punch line: They're one and the same.

Rabbi Mark Borovitz, 60, runs Beit T'Shuvah, a residential treatment center and Jewish congregation in an otherwise nondescript building in an equally average section of Culver City. And though he looks every bit the part now -- he has the gray suit, full beard, glasses, steady eyes, calm voice -- as a teen growing up in a lower-middle-class Jewish home in Cleveland, he didn't necessarily exhibit traits one associates with a rabbinical scholar. More »

Nanette Gonzales

Cafe Jack, a Titanic-themed restaurant in Koreatown

The restaurant looks like an ocean liner that's run aground in the middle of Koreatown, with the survivors building ramshackle additions and living out their lives right where they landed. But the clue is in the name emblazoned on the ship's bow -- Café Jack. As in Jack Dawson, the young artist played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, a guy who comes from the wrong deck of the ship but captures Kate Winslet's heart just the same.

This part of Fifth Street was an empty 6,500-square-foot lot when owner Jack Shin, 48, invested what he shyly admits was around $500,000, and -- with just one "helper" -- built his homage to the blockbuster weeper. They used real boating material for the exterior, and it took a year of "painting and nailing" and scouring antique stores and Pasadena flea markets to find just-like-the-movie tables, chairs and nautical touches before Shin opened the doors in 2007.

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Courtesy of RingADoc

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

It's Sunday afternoon, and you've got chest pain. It could be the four Pink's chili dogs you hoovered at 3 a.m. after a night of mezcal and Tecate, or it might be something worse. Your primary-care physician is off on Catalina for the weekend, and you're leery of astronomical emergency-room costs. You've checked every medical website -- even Wikipedia -- to no avail. You need a doctor, but what kind? Where?

Cue RingADoc, the startup telemedicine service that bridges the gap between your paranoia and your primary-care physician. RingADoc soothes your burning question (or burning organ -- eww!) by providing on-call doctors 24 hours a day via phone, smartphone or tablet. Through a phone call or digital face time, you can renew a prescription, double-check your symptoms and get some peace of mind.

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