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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Flickr/Deepwater Horizon Response

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in 2010, most Angelenos experienced the oil spill's devastation secondhand through TV news reports, newspaper articles and online photos and videos of the damage. In L.A.'s site-specific production of Caridad Svich's The Way of Water, Opera del Espacio is making the disaster tangible -- and implicating the audience in the event.

You might even find yourself pouring an oil-like liquid onto the actors or helping to load company members into body bags by the end of the performance.

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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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Nanette Gonzales

After six years in porn, Crissy Moran is helping women heal from "sexual brokenness."

Crissy Moran holds a pair of drumsticks, her long, slender fingers clanking off-rhythm as she looks up at a monitor above, following along to the directions of Guitar Hero.

Eyes smoky, lips pouty and dark brown hair flowing over her shoulders, Moran, flanked by an all-girl band, shreds "With or Without You" on a dimly lit stage in a bar tucked deep in the Valley. The lead singer, blonde and doe-eyed, hits every note -- off-key. It's so bad that members of the audience join in out of sympathy. But Moran doesn't seem to notice, her gaze trailing off in space as if she's dreaming.

The crowd of a half-dozen at the bar doesn't know what to make of the group's music, FYI, but patrons are enraptured by the beautiful disaster onstage. A few boos are mixed in with catcalls, and then silence.

Moran and her "bitches," as the bar's MC repeats on the mic, are here for her birthday. Her 26th, her girlfriends joke, taking their seats to down Cadillac margaritas and munch onion rings. Rotating in their atmosphere, a steady stream of hanger-on Casanovas crash like asteroids. She looks familiar, they say.

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Ted Soqui

See our previous post, "Occupy L.A. Photos by Ted Soqui, Photog Behind Shepard Fairey's TIME Art, to Show at Gallery Where Cover Protester Sarah Mason Works"

Six weeks after LAPD riot cops cut short the revolution and forcibly cleared Occupy L.A. from its home on the City Hall lawn, nostalgia for the movement's glory days has already begun to set in.

It is thick in the air at the Jan. 14 opening of "Just Occupy," a new photo exhibit at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica. So many people show up that two lines form around the sides of the gallery, like a club on Sunset on a Friday night. Attendees peer anxiously over the heads of earlier arrivals, trying to get a peek through the glass doors and glaring at those cutters whose connections allow them to slip past the gatekeepers.

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Gendy Alimurung

After four decades as Los Angeles' unofficial spiritual/metaphysical hub, the Bodhi Tree Bookstore closed its doors at 5:30 p.m. this past New Years' Eve.

Co-owner and co-founder Stan Madson, in a red beret, shook hands and accepted thanks from customers old and new, celebrities and non-celebs, authors and readers, believers and doubters alike. People hugged him and confessed that the Bodhi Tree was the first bookstore they ever connected with. They'd miss it, they said. They'd miss the books and camaraderie and incense and free herbal tea.

Then they got in line -- a huge line that snaked around the entire store -- to buy books for 90% off.

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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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The reports that the mayor wants Occupy L.A. to leave City Hall raise the question: if they do have to leave, where would they go?

The occupiers have already expanded to obvious places like UCLA and Bank of America Plaza. L.A.'s own Wall Street has been slightly occupied for years now (it is smack in the middle of Skid Row, after all) and most of their other options seem worse than where they are. The city at one point offered office space at a former B. Dalton bookstore, though that offer was rescinded and rejected.

So what about those other places that we Angelenos love to hate, or the ones that we love to love a little too much -- the places that might as well be occupied?

Here are our suggestions for places in L.A. for the occupiers to consider.

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