Category Archives: Adventures in L.A.

Adventures in L.A., Live Music

Maria Somerville Plays an Extraordinary Shoegaze Set at Zebulon

Maria Somerville live at Zebulon in Los Angeles on Saturday, May 24, 2025 (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
Maria Somerville concluded her five-week tour, which included the singer’s first U.S. jaunt, on Saturday, May 24 at Zebulon in L.A. (Pic: Liz O.)

On Saturday, May 24, Maria Somerville closed out a five week tour, which included her first U.S. jaunt, at Zebulon in Los Angeles. Playing with a full band, the Irish musician transformed the sublime, often atmospheric, sound of her two albums into a shoegaze blowout. It was loud and cathartic and I’m really glad that Zebulon keeps a bowl of earplugs near its entrance. 

I grabbed a spot right in front of the bassist’s zone on stage, next to some dudes who were investigating the pedals. (I told you this was a shoegaze show!) A hodgepodge of tunes played as the small, Frogtown venue filled with people. Hearing “French Disko,” the Stereolab song, was an appropriate way to prepare for the show that was about to start. I noticed a My Bloody Valentine t-shirt in the crowd too, which was both completely expected and probably a bit of foreshadowing.

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Adventures in L.A., Books

Subverting the Algorithm at Printed Matter’s L.A. Art Book Fair

Printed Matter L.A. Art Book Fair at ArtCenter on Sunday, May 18, 2025 (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
Inside ArtCenter for Printed Matter’s L.A. Art Book Fair (Pic: Liz O.)

In a world ruled by tech bros and geriatric shitposters, going to a book fair is subversive af. Think about it. You have to actually stop scrolling and go to an IRL location. When you’re there, you’ll flip through print publications that weren’t recommended by an algorithm. You might purchase some of them too. You may even read them, an act that would require you to divert your eyes from screens teeming with slop and rage posts and ads— so many ads!— and all the other garbage that makes rich dudes richer and the rest of us broke and miserable. 

Certainly, I’m not the only person who thinks reading paper > reading screens because Printed Matter’s L.A. Art Book Fair was slammed on Sunday afternoon. Now, this is a long-running, well-attended event. In fact, I wrote about the size of the crowd on this very blog two years ago. But, the weekend-long indie and DIY book extravaganza has since moved from MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary to ArtCenter’s South Campus in Pasadena. It appeared to be a bigger venue, given all the rooms at the art school that were in use, but it was still overflowing with people. There were corners of some exhibit halls where crowds were so thick that they were virtually impassible, but that might have had more to do with the layout than the amount of people.

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Adventures in L.A., Live Music

Caravan Palace Live at The Novo in Los Angeles

French group Caravan Palace live at The Novo in Los Angeles on Monday, March 24, 2025. (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
Caravan Palace live at The Novo (Pic: Liz O.)

A little more than an hour had passed since Caravan Palace launched into their set at The Novo on Monday night. The French group, a trio in the studio now six people strong on stage, had already pumped up the crowd with a near-seamless mix of older tunes, like their version of “Black Betty,” and material from last year’s album, Gangbusters Melody Club. The stage was now saturated in blue light that moved like a wave as singer Zoé Colotis talked the audience. 

“Let’s get crazy for a while. Forget all your troubles, just spread good energy and craziness,” she told the crowd. 

White lights burst from the strobes, pulsating with the beat that had just kicked the crowd in the pants. They pumped their hands in the air and jumped in unison. The floor vibrated. My phone started to shake as I tried to record video. 

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Adventures in L.A.

Intuition Festival at The Broad with Michael Rother and Money Mark

Michael Rother live at The Broad in Los Angeles for Intuition Festival on Saturday, March 22, 2025. (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
Michael Rother live at The Broad in Los Angeles for Intuition Festival on Saturday, March 22, 2025. (Pic: Liz O.)

When Michael Rother, who co-founded Nue! and Harmonia, played Intuition Festival at The Broad on Saturday night, I had a mini-revelation. This might have happened during a Harmonia song, but I can’t be sure since it was well past the point where everything Rother played on the stage outside of the museum converged into one giant piece of music in my head. I was dancing and, suddenly, something in the tone of the guitar made me think of New Order. It’s not as random a thought as you think. 

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Adventures in L.A., Art

The Social Justice Pop Art of Corita Kent Has a New Home

e eye love by Corita Kent at Corita Art Center in Los Angeles (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
e eye love by Corita Kent at Corita Art Center in Los Angeles (Photo: Liz O.)

Corita Kent was L.A.’s own pop art star. Back in the 1960s, when she was still a nun and known as Sister Mary Corita, she was named one of L.A. Times’ women of the year and landed on the cover of Newsweek. While she was creating serigraphs with social justice messages, she also taught at Immaculate Heart College and became head of the school’s renowned art department. Kent continued making art long after she left her religious order and moved to Boston. In fact, her best known work was the massively popular U.S. postal stamp that read “Love,” which was released in 1985, one year before her death. 

Last week, on International Women’s Day, a new home for Kent’s legacy opened in the Arts District. A few days prior to that, I headed to the new Corita Art Center for a press preview. During my visit, and in the days that followed, I kept thinking about one specific piece. It’s called e eye love, which is part of a series called circus alphabet. In it, an eye is superimposed on a capital letter E. Underneath it is a snippet of a quote from the philosopher and writer Albert Camus, “should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” Kent made this piece in 1968, a tumultuous year in  U.S. history. More than 55 years later, I’m looking at it in a gallery-like setting thinking, “Same.” 

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Adventures in L.A., Record Stores

Salt Box Records Is Now Open in Little Tokyo

Inside Salt Box Records at Hello Stranger in Little Tokyo
Inside Salt Box Records at Hello Stranger in Little Tokyo.

There’s some good news for L.A. crate diggers. Salt Box Records is back IRL. The record shop operated by modern funk musician and DJ XL Middleton recently reopened inside Little Tokyo venue Hello Stranger after focusing on Instagram drops and pop-up events for the past few years. The soft open was last week. I stopped by on Friday afternoon and left with some heat. 

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Adventures in L.A.

The Death of the 1990s Coffee House and the Third Place

Mike Meyers So I Married an Axe Murderer coffee House screenshot
Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer ordering a ’90s coffee house cappuccino

There’s no shortage of irony in the news, but I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when I read a New York Times piece about how Starbucks wants to bring back the “third place.” A third place is not a corporate imitation of a coffee house that serves the same menu at every location. It is not a carefully cultivated vibe of Brand Safe Boredom that extends from its forgettable decor to the inoffensive playlists played at a volume that ensures you will never actually remember what you heard. 

If you’re on the chattier social apps, then you’ve probably seen people describe the third places they wish they had, which, for some reason, always seem to sound like the public libraries they clearly don’t patronize. But, third places were a real thing. Once upon a time, people did have their own, local versions of the DoubleR or the Central Perk. Technically, they still exist. Underground, where I often guest DJ, happens every week. If you’re a regular there, it is a third place. Last year, I wrote a story about the pinball tournaments at Revenge Of.  For pinball players, that absolutely falls into the category of “the third place.”

The whole concept of the third place, though, began its death spiral well before the pandemic. I suspect that there are multiple reasons for that, but let’s start with Corporate Coffee. 

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Adventures in L.A., Live Music

CSS Live at The Regent January 19, 2025

Marquee for sold out CSS show at Regent Theater in Los Angeles on January 19, 2025
Pics: Liz O.

Near the end of CSS’ set at The Regent, singer Lovefoxx reminisced with the crowd about the band’s previous gigs in Los Angeles. There was their first show in the city, somewhere in the Fashion District. At least one person in the audience was there. There was some back and forth about a show where Lovefoxx lost her voice. As for this show, it was jam packed. But, Lovefoxx said to the crowd, the love for CSS in the room might not have been about the band itself. 

“We were playing in the background of your life,” she said. “And I think that you’re all here because you just love your history and your songs. We’re just lucky to have been in the background on your MySpace page.” 

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Adventures in L.A., Live Music

Mary Ocher Live at 2220 Arts + Archives January 16, 2025

Mary Ocher live at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles on Thursday, January 16, 2025 (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
Mary Ocher live at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles on Thursday, January 16, 2025 (Pic: Liz O.)

“It feels like the apocalypse,” Mary Ocher said on stage at 2220 Arts + Archives. “But,” the Berlin-based artist added, “it feels like the apocalypse everywhere.” 

It’s Thursday night, one week and one day after the wildfires began, and we’re in a small, indie theater on Beverly Blvd., just outside of downtown Los Angeles. In all honesty, the city looks better than it did a week ago. Last week, the downtown sky was orange-gray, casting a haze over streets, still littered with the debris from the windstorms, that made everything look like a 1970s photograph. Even with a mask, it was hard to walk around those first few days without feeling ill. Headaches, sore throats, coughs— the sort of things you might expect when wildfires loom in the distance— came and went with open windows and errand runs. 

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Adventures in L.A., Live Music

Ride at The Fonda, You Had to Be There

Ride live at The Fonda in Los Angeles on Thursday, December 19, 2024 (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
Ride live at The Fonda on Thursday, December 19, 2024 (Pic: Liz O.)

Early on in Ride’s set at The Fonda on December 19, as the band played “Dreams Burn Down,” the spotlights danced furiously with every wave of guitar noise that crashed over the crowd. Small specks of light flickered across the dark walls of the theater, burning out as soon as the shoegaze interludes cut back to the song. Everything was tightly choreographed, the lights and sound so in sync with each other that it was as if I had been swallowed by the music. When you can imagine the music as this living, breathing entity and you are, if only for a moment, existing in the belly of it, it’s an amazing, and rare, feeling. 

This was my first Ride concert and, honestly, I think it’s an ideal time to see the band. While I love the now-classic albums, Nowhere and Going Blank Again, Ride released an album this year, Interplay, that’s a career best. It’s a fantastic collection of psychedelic guitar pop and one of my favorite albums of 2024. If you haven’t heard it yet, you should fix that asap. 

I’ve been listening to Interplay since it was released earlier this year and had wanted to finally catch Ride on this tour. In fact, I was about to check for tickets when my friend Melissa was all like, just won tickets to see Ride, want to go with me? Of course, I did. This was an even better opportunity. Melissa and I have been friends since sometime around Y2K, when we crossed paths nerding out over British bands first in a chat room and then IRL at places like Cafe Bleu, a club night in West Hollywood at the time where you could actually dance to “Twisterella” and sway to “Vapour Trail.” Yet, neither of us had seen Ride before, so this was bound to be a memorable night. 

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