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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Alissa Walker

Daniel González hand-carved these porcelain scenes of Ballona Creek history, from Native American settlements to oil rigs. Each stop's signage features public art about the surrounding area

A forecast of insultingly high gas prices, paired with a buoyant burst of car-free optimism (including an ambitious bike-share program just announced by the city), make the timing perfect for L.A.'s newest rail line to debut. Starting April 28, the Expo Line will travel the eight miles from downtown to La Cienega and Jefferson in less than 30 minutes, relieving some commuters from the daily migraine that is the 10 freeway, and creating access to a corridor of transit-adjacent food and culture. After months (and months) of delays, it turns out the Expo Line was worth the wait.

It's possible that some people -- up to 27,000 people a day, Metro says -- will ride our new Expo Line for transportation: to run errands, to go to work or school. But our transit lines are also urban theme-park rides, rolling us into different corners of the city for $1.50 per trip.

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Courtesy of Marianne Williams Photography

Meaghan Monster models Dapper Cadaver

See also "10 Oddball L.A. Museums Worth Seeing"

Looking for a book about the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society? Perhaps you need a Jolly Roger doormat for the house. Maybe you just want to pick up some time-travel-sickness pills, a spray bottle of barbarian repellant or a few fresh dinosaur eggs before you blast to the past. Whatever your needs, Los Angeles is definitely not lacking in the quirky-shop department.

Our city's diverse population and its reputation as an arts metropolis give local merchants plenty of opportunity to sell unusual goods. Since many stores are independently owned, most of them don't just reflect unique tastes -- they are physical manifestations of someone's life work.

Like the Eagle Rock Rock and Eagle Shop, some stores are temporary pop-ups, while others, such as the L.A. County Coroner's Skeletons in the Closet and the Bodhi Tree metaphysical bookstore, have packed up and moved online (though Bodhi Tree's new owners plan to open a new location).

But a few brick-and-mortar gems continue to offer a selection of weird material, affording Angelenos a kind of public-art experience while promoting an overall creative mission. Here are 10 of our favorite strange boutiques.

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Overduin and Kite

James Lee Byars' The Red Tent (1989) and The Chair for the Philosophy of Question (1996)

The artists on this week's list have endearing idiosyncrasies: James Lee Byars' obsession with the perfect atmosphere, Cai Guo-Qiang's spiritual pyromania and Dasha Sishkin's perverse approach to glamour.

5. Clothing-optional fantasies
If Shel Silverstein, who brought the same twisted humor to his children's books that he brought to his Playboy cartoons, had collaborated with stylishly dark Truman Capote, the results might have been something like Dasha Sishkin's paintings at Susan Vielmetter Projects. These crudely glamorous images show topless or bottomless figures with Pinocchio noses and eyes on their behinds immersed in one long, confusing party. 6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City; through May 12. (310) 837-2117, vielmetter.com.

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Melodie Mousset

"Removing Boulders," from The Rock and Eagle shop

Everything's social this week -- jokes with friends spur a pop-up shop, a four-course meal becomes an exhibition and a group of artists tries to figure out why time can terrify.

5. Dinner-party graveyard
In late March, Jason Kraus invited 12 people to dinner. Everyone had to commit to come seven nights in a row and eat the exact same four-course meal. Each night, Kraus set a new, specially constructed wood table with identical but different china, glasses and silverware. After the final dinner, he cut up the tables and turned them into cabinets. All seven tables-turned-cabinets now hold the stained napkins and cleaned plates, cups and utensils. They're on view in "Dinner Repeated" at Redling Fine Art. It's like a shrine to a party you missed. All you can do is spot the anomalies -- the red wine stains on one shelf, the lipstick marks -- and guess at what happened. 6757 Santa Monica Blvd.; through May 12. (323) 230-7415, redlingfineart.com.

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Bettina Hubby

The eagle side of the Rock and Eagle Shop

Last Saturday, less than a week after she opened the Rock and Eagle Shop on Eagle Rock Boulevard, artist and curator Bettina Hubby heard a man outside the door. "I'm just going to make sure it's not just an adult rock and eagle shop," he said to his children.

The exterior is painted a bright, pot-dispensary green, and the store's name is written in a graffiti-like font, so it's hard to know what to expect. But when the man walked in and saw shelves of rock and eagle paraphernalia -- eagle magnets, eagle do-rags and other eagle-related stuff to the left, and pet rocks, sling shots and rock-related stuff to the right -- he dashed out to get the kids.

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Amanda Lewis

Past and present clash at Echo Fuels, where the new owners were pressured to put back up the station's quirky old sign.

When Victor Abraham's friend Stan bought a troubled gas station on the corner of Echo Park Avenue and Morton Avenue in early February, everything seemed to be broken. Defunct credit card scanners irked customers on a daily basis, all the snacks inside the mini-mart had expired and the dysfunctional pumps were so old that replacement parts were no longer being manufactured. The place screamed makeover.

And yet when Stan, Abraham and Abraham's brother, Leo, replaced the equipment and renovated the station, "Some guy came in and actually told us that, 'No no no no, this is not good. The old thing was better!'" Abraham says, bewildered as to why anyone would prefer busted pumps to gleaming new ones.

But the backlash didn't truly begin until the men took down the faded white, blue and orange Magic Gas sign and rebranded the station with bright red paint and a slick new name and logo: Echo Fuels.

"People were so offended. ... Everybody was, like, in an upheaval," explains Susina Bakery & Café owner Jenna Turner, who, together with Fix Coffee owner Marc Gallucci, purchased Chango Coffee, across the street from Echo Fuels, in early January. "We were bummed," she added. Turner even joked with Brent Harris, who works at the convenience store next door, about renaming Chango "Magic Coffee."

"I just hated that change over to that bright red," says Erin Tavin, adding that her boutique, Tavin, a few doors down from Chango, has been abuzz in recent weeks with complaints and comments about the loss of Magic Gas. "Aesthetics mean a lot to me, and I thought it was so much more old-fashioned looking before, and I loved that."

Most Angelenos encounter the city through a windshield, elevating idiosyncratic local signage like Magic Gas and Happy Foot/Sad Foot, on Sunset Boulevard at Benton Way, to sacrosanct icons of the daily commute. But what happens when time passes, businesses fail, owners sell and the signs come down?

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Hydee Abrahan/Studio 1003

The magnificent Romance of Magno Rubio at [Inside] the Ford

When it comes to public support for theater in Los Angeles, it would be an understatement to say that times are tough.

Twenty-five years ago, when the city lavished money on downtown's newly launched Los Angeles Theatre Center, Spring Street became the epicenter of a dynamic and exciting theater scene that seemed to rival the experimental and literary fecundity of New York's Off-Off-Broadway movement of the 1960s. Today LATC is a dispiriting ghost of its former glory -- made even eerier in January when its two long-feuding tenants, the Latino Theater Company and the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture, had their 20-year leases revoked by the City Council.

Sure, local politics is a slippery business and budgetary belt-tightening has hit the arts particularly hard, but is there something inherent to the government funding/theater mix that dooms it to an oil-and-water relationship?

Don't tell that to [Inside] the Ford, the small theater affiliated with the Ford Amphitheatre, on Cahuenga Boulevard near the Hollywood Bowl. On Saturday, the theater will host Circle X Theatre Company's world premiere of Naked Before God, writer-director Leo Geter's farce about pornography and religion. This marks the third year a Circle X show has made the cut of the [Inside] the Ford's 4-year-old Winter Partnership Program, created by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

Never mind that no other company has even returned for a second WPP season. The Ford's support has helped Circle X grow from an interesting if itinerant actor-supported membership company into one of the city's most critically acclaimed producers of small theater.

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Will Brown Hernández

LACMA's famed 340-ton rock, part of its new public sculpture Levitated Mass, will arrive at the museum tonight. But will it attract the same kind of party that it did in Bixby Knolls?

Tonight at around 10 or 11 pm, the rock will depart from its location on Figueroa Street just north of Florence Avenue and head to LACMA. Museum staff don't know exactly when the rock will arrive at its location at 5905 Wilshire Blvd., but are giving a broad estimate of between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.

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Catherine Wagley

Children get their picture taken with the LACMA Rock in Bixby Knolls

"You remember the Emperor's New Clothes?" asked B.T. Tuggle, secretary of the Bixby Knolls Kiwanis Club. He set up a table Wednesday on Atlantic Avenue for Rockapalooza, the party Long Beach neighborhood Bixby Knolls threw during the LACMA rock's daylong stay on its main drag. The 340-ton granite boulder left a Riverside quarry on Feb. 29 for the museum, where it will become part of Levitated Mass, a sculpture by artist Michael Heizer. Right now, it's covered in white plastic and suspended in a 260-foot transporter. "Only in America would we throw a block party for a wrapped rock," Tuggle said.

On its way to LACMA, the rock is passing through 22 cities, traveling at night at around 5 miles per hour. People have come out to see at every stop, but Bixby Knolls is the only place to stage an official celebration.

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