>Postcard on the Run

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

The idea was simple: Take all those moments captured on smartphones and make something tangible out of them, fusing the online and the offline world. That's what Josh Brooks set out to do when he created Postcard on the Run last year.

The application converts any picture on an Android or IOS device to a real-world postcard. Users can write notes on the back and sign their names with a finger. They can choose to add a GPS-tagged location or even a small scratch-and-sniff sticker. "Basically, I cold-called the company that was making scratch-and-sniff back in the '80s and said, 'Please tell me you've innovated, because this is what I want,' " Brooks explains.

The company now offers 11 smells ranging from popcorn to ocean breeze to teen spirit --which, according to Brooks,"smells like a combination of band sweat and rotten stale drinks, with hints of skunk. It stinks, but it's funny."

The postcards are printed at a West Coast printer and mailed -- no need to deal with stamps. The cards cost $1.49, or $1.99 with the scratch-and-sniff. Cards sent overseas cost $1.69.

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Charles Dickens Action Figure Stocking Stuffer

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A cursory glance at last week's L.A. Weekly theater reviews reveals a typical early-December harvest of local holiday-themed shows but without, shall we say, the typical level of enthusiasm for this most traditional and surefire source of seasonal box office revenue.

Call it a collective yawn.

The best that critic Pauline Adamek can muster for ZJU's late-night Christmas Thrills and High Adventure is the backhanded superlative, "short and sweet." Neal Weaver hammers a coffin lid on The Celebration's Christmastime is Queer with pejorative nails like "fitfully funny" and "essentially bland." Rebecca Haithcoat roasts the chestnuts of Archway Theatre's The Many Murders of Kristopher K. Kringle as being timid and "not especially inventive." And I compare Jason Moyer's Dickens update, Gay Apparel: A Christmas Carol, to "lumps of coal in a Christmas stocking."

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Via NBCUniversal

The Headhuntress Wendy Doulton, right, coaches a job seeker.

​I watch the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills every week. I watch New York and Orange County, too. (Though we all agree DC was whack, right?) I watch these shows partly for the ability to laugh at the dippy one-liners handed to me on a platter by out-of-touch flibbertigibbets. But there's also a level of momentary escapism that comes with watching the rich and famous swim in pearl ponds and shit diamonds as they navigate the stormy seas of extreme wealth.

Which makes it all the more ironic and bizarre that a pilot such as The Headhuntress premieres tonight directly after our weekly visit to Housewivesland.

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Star Foreman

Queens of the quinceañera

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The Teen Party Expo came to town recently, and the L.A. Convention Center morphed into what the inside of a young girl's brain must look like: Hot. Bright. Crowded. Confusing. Loud. Sort of like hell, only fluorescent pink.

Picture it, the giddy schizophrenia of a candy booth right next to an orthodontics booth. A bakery booth handing out slices of cake next to a booth hawking Ultra Body Cleanse Plus Pack weight-loss pills. The thump-thump-thump-thump-thumping of dance music. Entering the convention hall, it takes, conservatively, five seconds before your retinas are ready to explode from staring at everything glittered and bedazzled and feather boa-ed and sequined to death.

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​If you watched any of NBC's The Voice this spring, you know it was almost impossible to simply watch the show. There was always something on your TV screen cuing you to Twitter -- or vice versa. It was as if one didn't completely function without the other.

In case it was off your radar, The Voice was similar to American Idol, but with two distinct twists: 1) the four celebrity coaches who managed teams of singers they'd pit against each other in competition and 2) the major presence of social media.

From the get-go at the blind auditions, when a contestant joined a team, usually a tweet from the winning judge flashed across the screen. Something like "So psyched to have you, Javier! #TeamAdam #TheVoice." Always #TheVoice. It was a major trending topic. Along with the judges, the contestants tweeted as well, as did fans, all of whom were brought together in the show's virtual coffee shop known as the "social media room."

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Jena Ardell

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If there's any sign that festival fashion trends are going mass-market, it's that Burning Man, the ultimate outlier festival, has now provided inspiration for this summer's TopShop makeup line. Burning Man is merely the next event in a series of festivals to undergo large-store treatment -- think of LF stores' guide to Coachella, or endless fashion blog posts about "that perfect festival dress from Urban Outfitters."

But unlike most summer festivals, Burning Man is less about watching beautiful people and more about turning yourself into one by means of "radical self-expression," one of the ten official principles of the festival. That translates to kitting yourself out -- the crazier, the better. An additional challenge is dressing to survive the desert conditions of Black Rock, Nevada, in which 100+ degree weather, sandstorms, winds, rain and even ice are all fair game.

In that case, what do you wear? LA Weekly spoke to longtime Burner and self-styled playa expert Dusty Bacon (his Burning Man pseudonym), who runs Dustycouture.com, a blog dedicated to fashion at Burning Man.

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Blind Grasshopper

Two men kiss at their wedding in California in July 2008, during the brief period when gay marriage was legal in California.

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His date had been loud and arrogant throughout dinner, but Harrison Levy, 26, was still surprised when the man whose photographs and messages had seemed so enticing raised his "outside voice" another level, drawing stares from the rest of the patio. "He yelled something about masturbating, or about someone's dick, and there were like people all around us, and even kids," Harrison remembers, over a month later. "I just didn't really react. I kind of said to myself in my head, this guy is not getting a second date."

Intimidated and uncomfortable with the West Hollywood scene, Harrison turned to online dating shortly after graduating college and soon met a boy on J-Date, the site for Jewish singles, whom he dated for three years. After they broke up five months ago, Harrison quickly dove back into dating, this time through the popular free site OkCupid, spending so much time scrolling through profiles and scheduling so many hikes and coffees and dinners that his roommate recently told him he's dated more than anyone she's ever known.

Despite an exaggerated stereotype that gay men are online looking only for sex, most are actually looking for something more serious, and conversations with numerous twenty-something Angelenos reveal that the negative stigma attached to finding a relationship online is far less prevalent among gay guys than it is among straights.

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Sophie Duvernoy

Rethink L.A., the new exhibition at the A+D Museum

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On Thursday, people from all over Los Angeles biked, walked or took the Metro to the Architecture and Design Museum on Miracle Mile. Surprisingly, many still managed to arrive wearing fashionable shoes. They were greeted with bike valets, a photographer and an invitation to document their journey on "alternative transportation."

The occasion was a car-free party for the opening of "Rethink LA: Perspectives on a Future City," an exhibit that is on display until September 4 and dreams up utopian answers to what the future of Los Angeles might look like. Co-directed by Jonathan Louie and Kellie Konapelsky of Rethink LA, a creative collective focused on promoting sustainable lifestyles in L.A., the exhibition was hopping not just with hipsters on fixies, but people from all over town interested in urban design (as well as in scoring some complimentary "I heart Metro" tattoos).

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Photo by Silje at siljeohlala

The Hopper posters that are popping up all over town.

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You must have noticed his eyes, with their slightly mournful, softened edges. And his beard, which looks like a bristling, black-and-grey hedgehog. Or at least the slogan in giant white letters, spelling out a simple "Hopper Lives." It would be a wonderful poster if it weren't an ad.

Dennis Hopper's face is showing up all over town as part of an advertising campaign for a Hopper-inspired clothes collection by skater brand Vans. The Easy Rider star, artist and counterculture icon signed a deal with the clothing company a year or two before his death to work on a clothing and shoe collaboration. His daughter Marine Hopper, along with the Hopper Foundation, helped to finish the line, which was still in its early design stages when her father passed away on May 29, 2010.

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Courtesy of Simon Reynolds

The cover of Retromania, released in May

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Isn't it ridiculous that it's now fair game to recycle the nineties and call your product retro? We've entered a phase where mashing up the sixties and the seventies is overdone -- now, the recent decades are up for grabs in the contemporary pop culture machine.

Esteemed music critic Simon Reynolds, who writes for The New York Times, Slate and Spin, has taken up this question in his new book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (which he'll be signing at Skylight Books in Los Feliz this Sunday), and shown that the answer is much more dense and thorny than one might expect. Reynolds, who grew up in the UK during post-punk and was a hardcore champion of rave music in the nineties, is essentially a futurist at heart.

In Retromania, Reynolds voices the worry that pop music doesn't seem to be moving forwards in the same way anymore, but is now simply content with recycling and resampling past music to create a sense of nostalgia. At the start of his book, he dauntingly asks, "Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is ... its past?"

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