Tanja M. Laden

Fraggle Rock

When she was 12 years old, Beth Barrial had a life-changing experience in a park after dark with some friends.

"A scent passed me by that sparked a strange, unfocused memory from early childhood," she describes. "I had a sudden recollection of one perfect moment of joy and complete freedom, unfettered by worry, responsibility or care, and it was truly a moment of contact with the sublime."

Not unlike in Marcel Proust's famously extended account of eating a madeleine and drinking some tea in his early-20th century work Remembrances of Things Past, Barrial realized that the scent is what triggered her memory, so she immediately became enamored with the sense itself: "I pursued my interests in fragrance the old-fashioned way -- through apprenticeship. I had no intentions of turning my interest in perfumery into a career. It was something I loved, and something I wanted to learn and experience for the sake of that love."

But she has turned it into a career. Together with her brother Brian Constantine, Barrial started Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab in 2000 in the back room of her then-boyfriend Ted's Echo Park apartment. That boyfriend is now her husband, who's since launched Black Phoenix Trading Post, which deals in dry goods, beauty products and other stuff related to the fragrance line. Together, the trio still runs a family-owned business that specializes in making one-of-a-kind products inspired by specific memories, pop-culture icons and a wide variety of other unusual sources.

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Michael Jason Enriquez

Drug possession, driving under the influence, vandalism and theft are just a few of the crimes celebrities commit to earn them a mugshot that lives on forever on the world wide web. Celebrity mugshots have become a part of pop culture due to the poses or distraught looks they have. But in the 1920s, TMZ didn't exist to expose crimes to the whole world so priceless mugshots of interesting faces were not seen unless the person was Bonnie and Clyde or Al Capone.

Local art student Michael Jason Enriquez has made a blog of celebrity mugshots photoshopped onto mugshots from the 1920s. Here are the photos, along with what he has to say about what the criminals did to earn their close ups.

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Paul T Bradley

Typewriters are sexy!

Well, sort of.

Sunday afternoon, Venice's venerable poet headquarters Beyond Baroque hosted a Type-In featuring a dozen vintage typewriters, their vintage repairpersons and a whole slew of other typographic delights -- including typewritten poems on demand and a screening of Christopher Lockett and Gary Nicholson's documentary The Typewriter (in the 21st Century).

For those of us old enough to remember the distinctive clickety clack of the old typewriters (and that industrial oil smell), fear not, there's still a healthy subculture of typewriting enthusiasts keeping those grand old machines from becoming permanent paperweights. They run the gamut from 9-year-old collectors to Pulitzer Prize-winning authors -- all of them in healthy love with the single-function, intricately designed majesty of the typewriter.

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You see ordinary contrails; they see poisonous "chemtrails."

On a recent Saturday morning, a small buzz of activity emanates from the stately Wilshire Ebell Theatre abutting Hancock Park. This is not a theatrical production but rather "Consciousness Beyond Chemtrails," a conference for those sharing belief in "chemtrails" -- a theory alleging that the government is spraying us all with toxic chemicals via the seemingly ordinary condensation trails emitted by airplanes. The roster of speakers includes Roseanne Barr and former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.).

"I would show those who are unfamiliar how to identify the difference between a jet contrail and a chemtrail," declares conference speaker Deborah Whitman, founding president of the Davis-based nonprofit Environmental Voices. "It's affecting our health and our trees and the oxygen that we breathe, and it's serious."

The sturdily built, silver-haired Whitman radiates a wholesome, Middle American, can-do energy. It's hard not to like her. Were she an actress, she could convincingly play Roseanne's plucky older sister in a sitcom.

In her case, chemtrails awareness originated in personal experience.

"I suffer from severe multiple chemical sensitivities," Whitman says. "I was going into emergency on an average of once a month before I found out what it was. I get irregular heartbeats when they're spraying, my heart skips beats, my voice changes, sinuses swell up, skin burns and itches, I can't breathe, and my blood pressure goes to stroke levels."

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Photo by Fresh to Death

Underground Rebel Bingo

It's Saturday night, and there's a guy pacing the stage like a circus lion eyeing his captors. He has barely started his monologue and he's already sweaty. He's explaining the rules, such as they are. "And losers ... " he screams into the microphone " ... will continue to be losers for the rest of their shit lives!" The frenzied crowd shrieks in ecstasy.

They might be here for a postapocalyptic kangaroo court or a medieval execution -- or even a Pentecostal tent revival. But bingo?

Indeed, bingo. Make that Underground Rebel Bingo: a surrealistic version of the game for the hip and hedonistic, held in a Hollywood club and initially promoted as by-invitation-only. There is smoking, and drinking, and shrieking. There are buxom burlesque performers. And yes, there are bingo tickets, and someone calls out G-46, but they rhyme the callout with "dicks" or "pricks" -- this is bingo as they might have played it in the Moulin Rouge while fucked up on absinthe and opium.

The game is the brainchild of one Freddie Fortune, although it's unclear whether Fortune is his real name (he has given the supposedly false surname Sorensen to at least two other publications). There's a lot about Fortune, in fact, that isn't clear -- even after exhaustive research. When we tried to schedule an interview with him, he canceled on us, ignored us and changed our meeting times and locations at the last minute before finally talking, and even then not saying much.

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Screenshot of Harmony Korine's "Rebel"

Brooding Artiste James Franco

See also:
*James Franco's MOCA Show Opening: 'There's Just a Lot of Dicks in There'
*James Franco & Alex Israel: Why Their Obsession With Celebrity Doesn't Pay Off

Who are we to argue celebrity artistic merit -- or any artistic merit anywhere? It is 2012, after all, and it has kinda all been done. We've seen art that maims, art that aborts babies, art that just bores. In this sea of whatevers and what-have-you's, there's that one celebrity who is unaware of the need for an artistic filter -- thus pushing artistic boundaries by not recognizing them. He is, of course, former McDonald's cashier and General Hospital star James Franco.

Wrapping your brain around the walking-talking graduate-thesis-come-to-life James Franco's artistic output may prove too daunting for all but the most itinerant of trustafarians. As a companion to his latest, the MOCA show "Rebel," which closes Saturday, we've put together a short primer on all you need to know about Mr. Franco's art projects. Oh, and lest you get caught having to pretend you know what the word "meta" means -- here's Webster (just to be on the safe side, we also looked up vainglorious and self-absorbed just in case we needed to use them).

So here goes:

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Kevin Scanlon

The capital-A Art World loves its temple-esque grandeur and its Sotheby's auctions where Impressionist Painting Y or Futurist Sculpture Z sells for the price of a small island. Lately, L.A. has been on the ascendant in the art world, and fortunately, the city will always have its art makers who will work happily in the weird spaces where engineering and art make sweet bedfellows, where a parking garage displaces the opera house and where poppy seeds make for better artillery than bullets. And they're all in our 2012 People Issue.

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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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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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See also:
UCLA Professors Say eHarmony Is Unscientific and Its Customers Are 'Duped.' Here's Why.

Remember that time in college you walked into your dorm room and found the weird guy from down the hall sitting on your bed smelling your shirts? This is just like that, but less creepy and more organized.

Last night Cinefamily and art gallery Mastodon Mesa co-presented a Pheromone Party, thrown by Pheromone Party creator, filmmaker, rapper and California native Judith Prays, for those hoping to find love using their sense of smell and faith in science.

The first Pheromone Party was thrown in New York City about a year and a half ago and was a private party, consisting of 40 guests, mostly ad industry folks. It received a great amount of positive feedback and was successful enough (12 people hooked up that night and some formed actual relationships) for Prays to continue the dating science experiment.

For her next party, she told me, she wanted to bring it back to her home state, "the way Snoop Dogg always brings it back to his home town of Long Beach." California love, y'all. Last night was the first Pheromone Party open to the public, with more than 100 attendees, ready to smell strangers' T-shirts in hopes of finding their perfect match. The typical nervous anticipation one finds at organized dating events was in the air, this one having the added weird idea of, "Your future husband or wife could potentially be ... in this plastic bag."

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