If a fun-loving public was looking for a break from a tense political season, the West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval was not the place to be. "No on 8" signs, buttons, and stickers were impossible to avoid, and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin appeared in the form of multiple look-a-likes. Republican presidential candidate John McCain, though, could not be found, although one young man bravely wore a McCain-Palin T-shirt as he walked through an estimated crowd of at least 250,000 people.

A look-a-like of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, surrounded by drag queen friends, attended the Halloween Carnaval in West Hollywood on Friday night.

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By Tom Christie

Miami City Ballet, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Oct. 24-26

You don't have to know a lot about dance to know when you're in the presence of dance genius. It took all of one second after the curtain rose last Friday night on the Miami City Ballet's performance of George Balanchine™'s Symphony in Three Movements: A chorus line of young, pony-tailed women in white leotards, one arm aloft against a sky-blue scrim, each raised hand delicately falling. The image seemed of its time and place – New York and all that signifies (the theater and all that jazz) in 1972 and perhaps earlier, with Balanchine reflecting on his 40-some years there. Likewise the movement that followed: casual but sassy, energetic and buoyant; almost cute -- no, definitely cute, as if these young women (and men) were padding (quickly!) around their Manhattan apartments barefoot. Life here and now, it seemed to say.

I was reminded of George Gershwin, and the American (or, more to the point, the America) in him, in his work. One doesn't necessarily think of Balanchine and the lighter side of dance but in fact he had an extensive show-biz resume, having choreographed "Ziegfeld Follies of 1936" on Broadway and worked on four films, including Goldwyn Follies with Gershwin, during which the composer died. (Balanchine would later create a ballet, Who Cares?, to several Gershwin songs.) Given the opportunities to return to ballet, of course, Balanchine did, but he did so with those American pop influences – he greatly admired Fred Astaire, for instance -- in tow.

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BY MARC COOPER

I've got a lot of nervous friends. They refuse to believe what now seems obvious: an imploded Republican Party facing a veritable electoral Waterloo on Tuesday.

They fret.

They worry.

They wonder aloud about dirty tricks, hinky voting machines, and the Bradley Effect.

I have a different view.

I worry only that Barack Obama will not rack up more than 325 electoral votes. Something like 370 would be more comfortable.

My friends in Las Vegas who approach professional gambling as mathematically sound "short-term investments" tell me they are willing to put up $150k to win $20k on an Obama victory. That's how confident they are. That, I find, is very re-assuring.

But my biggest charge tonight comes from seeing Arizona -- home state to John McCain -- having just turned from bright red to pink, from solid McCain to barely leaning McCain. Indeed, the latest polls of Arizona now show Barack Obama trailing by a slim 3 points -- within the margin of error.

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While the margin is getting tighter, a new Field Poll, released this morning, finds that Proposition 8 will lose on Election Day. The poll, however, shows declining support for the "No on 8" campaign over the past month, which is when the "Yes on 8" side started a vigorous TV ad campaign. Based on the numbers, voter turn out in California for the presidential election could be a deciding factor in the passage or defeat of the ballot measure that will eliminate the right of gays and lesbians to legally marry.

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On Saturday, out-of-state evangelical Christian leaders will finally appear in the flesh and press for the passage of Proposition 8. The Call co-founder Lou Engle, a resident of Kansas City, and Dr. James Dobson, a Colorado Springs resident, will be among the heavy weights who will take the stage at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego on November 1. The day-long event, called "The Call," may be a total success...or a complete and utter fiasco.

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By Max Taves

There’s a lot of complicated stuff on next week's ballot, billions of dollars in spending contained in 12 statewide and a half-dozen local measures filled with extremely confusing wording. (See “How to Spot the Loopholes, Legal Doozies and Loose Phrasing in California’s Ballot Initiatives” or my article on the incredibly consequential legalese behind Prop. 6 or Paul Teetor's on the L.A. City Council's "Proposition B: The Sneakiest."

Inside the Official Voter Information Guide, California Attorney General Jerry Brown has written up short summaries of statewide initiatives so people don’t have to read the fine print — 60 pages of near-complete obfuscation in 10-point font courtesy of the best lawyers Sacramento lobbyists can buy.

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*Proposition 6: The Most Implosive
By Max Taves
October 30, 2008
A tiny, unnoticed clause could allow the use of much looser hearsay in trials.

*Questions Still Surround Oliver Stone's W.
By Nikki Finke
October 30, 2008
Winner or loser? Original or borrowed? Investors or Chinese gangsters?

*L.A.'s Proposition B: The Most Sneaky
By Paul Teetor
October 30, 2008
It repeals a ban on low-income housing taller than two stories. It just doesn't say so.

*Proposition R: The Most Expensive
By Daniel Heimpel
October 30, 2008
Suburbanites hold the cards in approving a countywide sales-tax increase for mass transit.

*Election '08 Voting Guide: Endorsements From a Freethinker — No on 8, Yes on 11. And a Nod to Mark Ridley-Thomas
By Marc Cooper
October 30, 2008
Why siding with Arnold on redistricting makes sense, and other ballot notes.

*Proposition T: The Most Divisive
By Jorge Casuso
October 30, 2008
Things get absurd between slow-growthers and pro-growthers in Santa Monica.

*Barack Obama's Slippery Fund-Raising Slope
By Patrick Range McDonald
October 30, 2008
Small donors aside, he's awash in cash from big labor and business. Can he say no?

*What Could Stop Obama: Secret Racist Democrats
By Jervey Tervalon
October 30, 2008
The AP-Yahoo poll on race and what it says about our prejudices that still remain.

*Proposition 5: The Most Threatening (to the Prison Industrial Complex)
By Mark Groubert
October 30, 2008
More drug treatment means fewer criminals, and fewer criminals could mean fewer prisons.

*The Red Scare and Average Joes
By Joe Donnelly
October 30, 2008
What we talk about when we talk about socialism.

*Proposition 7: The Most Confusing
By Judith Lewis
October 30, 2008
Why environmentalists are against solar power.

*It's Going to Take a Whole Lot More Than a Democratic Majority to Save Us
By Marc Cooper
October 30, 2008
Hope, not faith.

*Proposition 11: The Most Misunderstood
By David Ferrell
October 30, 2008
The League of Women Voters, Common Cause and AARP seek change in Sacramento.

*Diane Watson: Hillary's Gal
By Mark Groubert
October 30, 2008
A talk with the 68-year-old congresswoman.

Day 2 of Anand Jon Trial's Closing Arguments

Prosecutor Mara McIlvain delivered the D.A.’s closing argument Wednesday, followed by the first of three Anand Jon lawyers with the defense’s side, presented by Donald Marks. Marks had only begun his comments when court adjourned yesterday, and picked up where he left off Thursday afternoon. The photogenic McIlvain appeared somewhat ill at ease as she ticked off the particulars of each of the case’s nine alleged sexual assault victims, never straying far from the laptop that held her PowerPoint notes. The white-haired Marks, however, appeared to have stepped out of an old Reginald Rose courtroom drama.

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Words and photographs by Timothy Norris

Va Voom! Click the image or check the sideshow here for all the Sexo Y Violencia you can wrap your head around.

Last night, monsters and other creatures of the night made their way to the Mayan Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles for the annual Lucha Va Voom Halloween Extravaganza.  Just after the audience recited the secret Lucha pledge, things got started with a little Va Voom Halloween-style with a raising of the dead.  Lucha Va Voom happens only three times a year and if you've not been, I highly recommend you get your ass down there.  If you have been, you'll remember that just when you think you've seen it all, some crazy new shit will go down like Prince showing up on stage or Medusa bringing a man back from stone.  Insanity. Of course, I couldn't hardly wait to see what the sexy Poubelle Twins had in store, either. Did I forget to mention Chupacabra? Yeah, he was there too.

BY MARC COOPER

Recently Discovered Photo of Obama Circa 1865

In these final, gasping moments of the Reagan Era we have really reached a dismal, dismal low point in our political discourse. The McCain-Failin' campaign has pulled out all the stops in an attempt to stigmatize the notion of any sort of redistribution of wealth. Merely because Barack Obama vows not to nationalize industry, nor seize all private haciendas, nor confiscate your 7th or 8th home, but rather because he wants to raise the marginal tax rate on those earning a quarter of million dollars a year or more from 36% to 39% i.e. where it was in the year 2001. And that's so he can pay for lowering taxes for 95% of Americans. If that's what spreading the wealth is about, then I am for it. And I imagine millions and millions of others are for it too. One more reason why a landslide is coming a week from Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the ludicrous charge that Obama is a Marxist expropriator reveals the ultimate moral bankruptcy of a conservative movement that has totally exhausted itself. It once had a lot of bad ideas (how many of you would presently like to have your social security invested in the stock market?). Now, the Republicans have literally NO ideas, other than to feebly try to scare you. And to brazenly celebrate self-interested greed. It is now apparently a mortal sin to believe there is anything like a commonweal, any notion of mutual solidarity with fellow humans, or any legitimate compulsion to care for the needy.

These folks so lavishly deserve the ass-whuppin' coming their way.

I had to laugh at Drudge tonight who is running a screamer headline that it found an eight-year-old piece of audio in which Barack Obama is caught on tape lamenting that the civil rights movement didn't spend enough energy fighting for "redistributive change."

Since when has it become an un-American act to skew tax rates and other government entitlement programs to help level the playing field between the ultra-rich and the rest of us? Was I absent that day?

Of course, this all distracts from the man most responsible for radical wealth distribution of the last two decades.

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While Mormons have been getting the headlines, the Roman Catholic Church has quietly been a major force in the "Yes on 8" campaign to ban same sex marriage in California. Whether or not Proposition 8 is defeated, it seems inevitable that church officials will face some kind of blow back from gay and lesbian Catholics come November 5, if they haven't already.

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Culty Goodness

What could be better than starting a cult? The power, the accolades, the idolatry, the ritual suicide… At the very least you get the chance to have sex with lithe young vixens who would otherwise be way out-of-your-league. And nowhere are the vixens more lithe and out-of-your-league than in Los Angeles.

From horny hippy Yogis, to murderous musicians, to the former leader of the free world, L.A. is where the charming and insane come to groom their cultish ways. If you can make it as a cult leader here, you can make it anywhere. With the 30th anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre approaching, we figured it might be time to take a look at some of our own homegrown cult masterminds.

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By Ella Taylor

Among the 75 more newsroom staffers let go at the L.A. Times on Monday were three writers who, by any definition, spiffed up the cultural conversation in our city. Film critic Carino Chocano’s best work was embodied in her all too infrequent essays connecting movies to social trends — I’m not the first to notice that her last one, on the kinds of movies we get in hard times, now seems eerily prophetic. The departure of Scott Timberg, whose elegant profiles and think-pieces on literary figures kept Calendar’s pages humming amid the drone of celebrity gossip, leaves only David Ulin and his depleted team holding the fort for books. And Lynell George wrote long-form pieces that took us not only into thriving African-American arts subcultures, but truly all over the L.A. Cultural map. How rotten for them to lose their livelihoods and their platforms; how much the poorer we are for the loss of their voices.

By Liz Ohanesian

Winner of the Elfdoll Halloween contest that took place October 25. Photo by Jackie Canchola.

The popularity of resin-based ball-jointed dolls (BJD), typically made in Japan, South Korea and China, has grown dramatically in the United States over the past five years, creating a community revolving around fan forums like Den of Angels, local meet-ups and a few nationwide conventions. Of the numerous BJD companies, Elfdoll, a subsidiary of South Korean firm Artmaze, is renowned for detailed, human-like features. The company opened its Glendale showroom last year after realizing that roughly 70% of its sales came from the U.S. and has since become the center of the greater Los Angeles BJD community.

Headless Elfdolls. Photo by Jackie Canchola.

“We think that we are not a doll company, we are artists,” says Elfdoll Foreign Trade Manager Yeounjoo Lim, best known to her customers and friends as Ms. Cholong.

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By Christopher Miles

Image source: www.patriciafauregallery.com

Gallerist Patricia Faure, a mainstay of the Los Angeles gallery scene for
decades, died in her sleep on October 21 at the age of 80. Faure began as
art dealer Nicholas Wilder’s assistant in the 1970s. For fifteen years, she
and friend Betty Asher ran the Asher/Faure Gallery, one of a handful of
venues that helped raise the profile of the LA gallery scene in the '80s. In
1994, she opened her own gallery at Bergamot Station, where her corner space
was a cornerstone of the complex for ten years before she began phasing out
of the business.

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There's a bit of advice I want to share with you readers this fine Monday morning: never drink red wine and whiskey in the same night. Never, ever. Not even if it's free. You see, over the weekend I hightailed it out of L.A. and up to San Louis Obispo for a friend's wedding where I made the aforementioned mistake. Perhaps it was the Mötley Crüe and Guns N' Roses blasting through the speakers during the reception... or perhaps it was just the Irish wedding-at-a-winery thing... whatever my excuse was, I spent Sunday paying for it dearly. But don't worry; I promise none of the wedding photos or video footage will end up in this weekend roundup. Luckily, while I was off researching brain damage, some of L.A. Weekly's finest hit the town for three events you're bummed if you missed:

Beyond the Stage with Flogging Molly

Group hug. Photo by Timothy Norris. Click image for entire slideshow.

Timothy Norris got up close and personal with Flogging Molly backstage and on stage at the Palladium.

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Doing the "Thriller" dance at Hollywood & Highland. Click image for entire slideshow.

Despite a serious lack of dark musty alleyways, overgrown graveyards, smoke-machine fog and Ola Ray, the spirit of funkified undead was alive and well in the courtyard at Hollywood & Highland Saturday morning, part of an online-organized public performance of the iconic zombie dance in Michael Jackson's "Thriller." This Los Angeles chapter of "Thrill the World '08" -- across the globe, dances in 91 cities in 12 countries took place the same day -- was up and at 'em at an hour that ought to make the dead crawl back into their tombs and whimper. In an attempt to hold the world record for the most people to do the "Thriller" dance at one time, dozens of aspiring zombie strutters gathered in the bowels of the shopping complex's garage -- level 6E to be exact -- with coffee and donuts, makeup and hairspray, costumes and boomboxes to pump up, dress up, and get in last minute practice. More >>

BY MARC COOPER

My old comrade Christopher Hitchens rips it up on MSNBC's Hardball calling out McCain as "weird" and "borderline senile." Hitch also issues some pungent words about Failin' Palin and notes how Obama has outflanked McCain on the right when it comes to Pakistan. You may not always agree, but what a razor sharp tongue -- and mind.

See below to view video:

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Apple, the company that created the iPod and the iPhone, has given $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign, Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish reports. Apple very publicly stated its position on its start page today, which may make a whole bunch of gay men wear their iPods in the gym with a little more pride these days.

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Amy Sedaris gets naughty with butter. Photo by Erin Broadley. Check out entire slideshow here.

A cross-section of enthusiastic crafters and comedy fans -- bespectacled students, gay couples, and hipster moms pushing their progeny in strollers -- gathered on the third floor of Barnes & Noble at the Grove on Thursday night for a Q&A and signing with Amy Sedaris, whose immensely useful (and spit-take hilarious) party-planning tome, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, is out now in paperback. With the seating packed and a line of fans snaking through the aisles all the way back to the Starbucks counter, Sedaris arrived smartly dressed in polka dots, red platform pumps and her favored chunky Buddy Holly specs. She immediately launched straight into a craft demonstration with an eager fan ("Yes, you! The Chinese one on the end!"), teaching her how to make a bean bag cozy with nylons and felt -- just the thing for getting that puffiness out of your orbits after a long day. (If it helps relax you, she added, "You could add lavender to it. Or coconut, whatever.")

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