Breaking the Fourth wall
By Mel Yiasemide

I wanted to belong, so I drove around looking for a crowd.

The Hollywood Bowl didn’t want me — I wasn’t rich, or organized, or popular enough to be a $149-a-seat party of four at July 4 fireworks with the Dodgers.

I drove around, like I said, listening to the boom of distant warfare and doing what I do every year I've lived in this country: downplaying the significance of American Independence Day to a Londoner in L.A.

In a previous millennium, my ex–father-in-law made a yearly joke about how my side lost. He had three chances to make that joke with me and it wasn’t funny the first time, but I loved his Brooklyn accent.

Bang, bang, bang, I heard, as I filled up at a Los Feliz gas station, while fireworks shot up behind the houses. Good night for a gangbanger to pop someone and slink away.

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Now I Know What You’re Thinking, But
by Seth Pierson

Observation: The term “slam” conjures two images: a multi-headed hydra of shitty improv “poetry” that sounds an awful lot like lame hip-hop, and a delicious Denny’s menu selection.

The Moth StorySLAM, first Tuesdays each month at the club Tangier, has qualities of the finest species of events in Los Feliz. It’s affordable ($6 cover) and fun, and it spins an idea that could be exclusive into a uniquely participatory event.

It sounds either twee or obstinately hipster: an open-mic vaguely competitive and intimate storytelling show at the dinner club Tangier (Los Feliz Blvd. and Hillhurst). Not to mention the show is the younger sibling of a curated and older Moth that is a six-year strong fixture in New York, with captivating podcasts and CDs of the best stories at www.themoth.org.

Chart-topping pretension potential.

But 7:30 pm came, and off went ten members from the audience, their self-submitted names drawn from a bag at random. The show demonstrated why “slamming” (ref. Observation) should be ignored in every iteration but storytelling and hangover breakfasts.

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By Ryan Colditz
Photos by Timothy Norris

"Did that REALLY just happen?" Oh yes it did. Lucha Vavoom is in town. Last night anything and everything happened except for a donkey show, which I was expecting for the finale (It didn't happen). This was sensory overload to the tenth degree, as high-flying masked men beat each other up while super-sized chickens body-slammed massive Shamu whales. Yea, I'm serious.

Want more action-packed and sexy photos? Click here for a gallery from Lucha Va Voom by Timothy Norris

The excitement level never dipped below maximum insanity all night, as classic rock cover songs in Spanish served as the soundtrack for the show. It was brilliant and set the mood perfectly for what ensued. Ringside ticket holders were left to fend for themselves as masked wrestlers were thrown into the crowd, knocking over precious and pricey drinks, while male strippers ran into the crowd looking for a hump. No one knew what to expect next. Hot striptease dances packed with full-figured wiggles and jiggles and midgets jumping off huge speaker towers onto lifeless opponents lying in the front row were just a small piece the action that took place inside the unassuming Mayan Theater. So much insanity. All the time. It was so much fun.

Between matches burlesque dancers performed some oddly sexy stripteases. One of them being the trapeze act by the Wau Wau Sisters. Starting off as your typical trailer-trash striptease, the sisters quickly turned it into a girl-on-girl trapeze extravaganza suspended high above the stage. It was everything you wished Olympic gymnastics could be.

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Photos and text by Guelda Voien

While Vice magazine represents many things, most prominent is the value on stupid, constant debauchery.

Crystal Antlers do their thing

In terms of pointless excess, their unlimited beer-fueled event Monday evening, "Tales of Colt 45," met the requisite expectations, though the odor of marketing ploy was almost overpowering. The King King hosted the Moonrats and the Crystal Antlers for a night of music and malt liquor. The bands were mostly an annoyance, though the venue was pleasant, and the mime (yes, mime) could only be described as indefatigable.

Above and below: The mime. Really, the mime.

Clearly all strategic marketing maneuver, "Tales of Colt 45" was supposedly conceived by the malt liquor distributor in response to Vice's 2006 "stories" issue. The success of the first-ever stories issue apparently gave the beer retailer, emboldened by the recent ironic embrace of its close relative Pabst Blue Ribbon (same brewer), an immediate grassroots marketing hard-on. Because they selected the demographic with expert precision, and are, after all, offering lots of free beer, I can excuse the blatant gimmick. Apparently poverty, real or pretend, has gotten malt liquor distributors excited: they can shamelessly peddle their poison to white people now!

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By Guelda Voien

Global climate change put the brakes on that celebrated preamble to summer in Los Angeles - the inaugural screening at Hollywood Forever cemetery - on Saturday as only the most loyal moviegoers made it out for the lost Billy Wilder film Ace in the Hole. Generally, young Angelenos are rabid for the carefully selected classics screened in the classic setting, but temperatures in the 50’s and earlier rain deflated much of the usual enthusiasm.

The weekly L. A. event, now in it’s seventh year, kicked off on Memorial Day weekend, a fitting time for a cemetery-based occasion. But no one seemed cognizant of the holiday’s meaning, as couples huddled on technology-forward lawn chairs, swilling wine from glasses, - not plastic cups - lit candles and ate hummus in the Hollywood Forever ritual.

The night's film, Ace in the Hole, a seldom seen Billy Wilder movie, was shelved for decades because Paramount thought it too dark for release in 1951. In the movie, a young Kirk Douglas orchestrates perhaps the original media circus around a story he helped construct: a man buried by a cave-in at a New Mexico mineshaft. The film's dark tone was appreciated by the loyal contingent, who lapped up the comically stark moral dichotomies of 1950’s cinema with all the irony you’d expect of this demographic.

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They're so sweet and innocent. Photos by Rena Kosnett.

Writing about the experience of seeing Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show Great Job! live on tour would be akin to dancing about architecture—some weird, fucked up architecture. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.

One certainty is that the live show is a thousand times better than seeing Tim & Eric on TV, or watching videos on Youtube, because in addition to watching and hearing them, you can smell and taste Tim & Eric as well. Some highlights: an instructional video about properly poisoning your child clown slave, Papa John’s email upgrades, a prayer for Robin Williams, enlarged testicle bodysuits, a video with John C. Reilly eating paninis prepared with horse grease and then saying "Ooh, it smells like horse."

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Another Day of the Ninja has come and gone, leaving us all a bit sad for its passing, as this holiday season can sometimes do.

Hundreds of budding young ninjas, cleverly disguised as 20-something nerds and geeks, converged on the El Rey Wednesday night for the first ever live performance of Ask A Ninja, a venerable day-job timekiller, dating all the way back to 2005.

Ask A Ninja co-creator Kent Nichols ran through the crowd letting dozens of folks pose their ninja questions rapid-fire, mimicing the internet episodes: "Why don't penguins fly?" It turns out they do, and soon the penguins will rise up against us. "What's the Ninja's favorite movie?" It's Casablanca. Who'd have guessed? "Why do Ninjas hate pirates again?" Because pirates are loud, have drinking problems, and it's a little pathetic the way they bury their treasure somewhere only to have ninjas find it and give it back to their owners.

Oh yeah - and lots of killing. While the questions went everywhere, the answers inevitably came back around to how the Ninja would kill his victims, and frequently the questioner. He plans to wipe out most people attending Coachella next year by the way. The Ninja was projected on a large screen on stage switching between several cameras filming him from different angles every couple of seconds. If it sounds like that would be annoying and headache-inducing, you're absolutely right. What works okay on a 3 inch box on your computer screen can get annoying very fast when it's 12 feet high.

The Ninja's biggest problem is that he just wasn't very funny. Patton Oswalt on the other hand, who went on before the Ninja, killed the audience in a way the Ninja can only dream about. In full-on computer geek mode, Oswalt dreamed about only communicating with the world through MySpace messages. YouTube, he said, allows us to act like demented Roman Emperors, demanding to see gay pandas and farting Republicans for our enjoyment.

Oswalt got the biggest applause of the night for announcing his desire to kill George Lucas with a shovel in 1992 before he could make the horrible Star Wars prequels, and he delivered crowd favorites on the KFC Famous Bowl, and their plans to introduce a massive chicken drumstick called the "Megaleg."

The show openers, Hard 'n Phirm reveled in their geekiness even more than Oswalt. The duo sang a song about pi, with a chorus that recites the number hundreds of digits out,
and a patriotic tribute to the American dinosaur, which, being American, couldn't have been green, but was red white and blue.

Through all of this, a crew from the cable network G4 roamed around the room pointing at people with a video camera topped with a blinding light. They were incredibly annoying and oblivious to the fact (or they just didn't care). So when they run the footage on G4, be sure to check out the annoyed shots of all of us shielding our eyes from their goons.

The Ninja can be funny though, when he has time to actually think out his answers. See below for his advice to the striking writers.

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There was something that made me feel sexy about the unveiling of Brian Lichtenberg’s Spring and Summer Collection at the Museum of Architecture and Design. The being in a lingerie store kind of sexy: with a mix of the accomplished and the young shining in everything from classic blacks to outrageous feather head bands, funky let-loose glasses and over-sized fur hats, it was an arousing night. Things got even more sexed up when the designs took stage. The California fierce models had their snap-your fingers faces on and particularly worked the Briangular swim suits. The bathing costumes were fun and functional—with sleek Art Deco-style curves of color.

This swim suit, as well constructed as the model’s abdominals, was applauded with a healthy amount of satisfactory hollers from the crowd.

Top on our hit list was this cotton shift. We would kill to have it as a beach pull over. The back of the dress was super cute too, with a hole for your shoulder blade to peek out of. There were also some hot grey and black stretch pants, a wonderfully androgynous black sleeveless hoodie with bright overlapping colors paired with skinny jeans, a mermaid style glittering blouse, and a sleek transparent black dress over footless tights layered with lace to name a few of the eye catching pieces.

After the show, things got a little kinky at the after party. The night came to a full swing with boozing and boogieing upstairs. I paused, from some serious hip-shaking on the dance floor, to tell Brian Lichtenberg looking more shy than proud, how much I enjoyed the show. He was still downstairs demurely accepting the zealous praises of every one that walked by. The California native designer was sweet and gentle. He looked like someone who you wanted to hold your hand.

Here the red hot redhead Brian is with his handsome friend and the saucy Lisa from “America’s Next Top Model.” Lisa was so friendly she had me feel her ass not once but twice. “No, you have to touch it where it meets my leg!” she scolded. Lisa was set out to prove to me that models do have asses (even though I never really asked). Her bum felt nice though; I scored.

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(Photos by Patrick Range McDonald. Above: Aaron Savvy)

On a chilly Wednesday night, the swanky West Hollywood nightclub Eleven hosted a promotion party for Frontiers magazine to celebrate the gay bi-weekly’s newest issue: “L.A.’s most eligible” singles. It was a theme that instantly alarmed and amused me when I received the invite a few days before, so I decided to walk over to Santa Monica Boulevard—the undisputed epicenter of Boys Town—and see what all of the hubbub was about.

Even at six-thirty in the evening, the club was brimming with an increasingly well-lubricated Happy Hour crowd. They seemed totally indifferent to the shirtless guy handing out glossy fliers at the front door, so I approached him. He introduced himself as Aaron Savvy, who was recently the cover boy for the “Sex Issue” of Frontiers' sister publication, In magazine, and now worked as one of two finely buffed models designated as the evening’s eye candy.

What many of the partygoers and barflies didn’t know about my new muscle-bound friend, however, was that “Aaron Savvy” was a stage name. He was also a Mormon, a former Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant, a personal trainer, and a former porn actor who was obsessed to succeed in the mainstream—a deal for his own TV reality show, according to Aaron, was already in the works.

“I don’t want to name the networks,” he said confidently, “but they have expressed interest.”

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