This is not the magic bullet for syphilis. / Photo by William Hook via flickr. Today we celebrate the life of César Chávez. So in honor of the great activist, get up off the couch and go out and enjoy these events. LEARNING As part of its Chavez week festivities, the Library's San Fernando branch offers the program, "Adelante! Let's Go!" by Makinto. It's a bilingual musical tour of the history of Hispanic Americans.......

Yeah, this is how I feel. / Photo "Supervisor Zirves" by db via LAist's flickr pool. This morning was a rough start for everyone and we still got a little sleepies in us, but we'll definitely be awake for these events tonight. After another latte. CLASSICAL* The LA premiere of "The Axe Manual" happens tonight at Zipper Concert Hall as part of the Monday Evening Concert series. The program includes important recent works by......

Do you think this is part of the Reno 911! marketing campaign? / Photo by Bernard Mickey Wrangle via flickr. COMEDY* Paging Reno 911! fans: Robert Ben Garant, who plays Deputy Travis Junior, hosts The Armando Show tonight. (It’s an hour-long improvised comedy show inspired by an audience suggestion). He’ll be joined by a few other Reno castmates: Carlos Alazraqui, Thomas Lennon, Niecy Nash, Kerri Kenney and Cedric Yarbrough. 8 pm // iO West......

Pickle just about anything at the Machine Project tonight. / Photo by ccarlstead via flickr. Sure there are a lot of places closed for President’s Day, but nightlife does exist in LA...even tonight: FILM Roman Polanski’s Chinatown focuses on an intricate water scandal and an even more twisted family backstory. Starring John Huston, Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson as Detective Jake Gittes – the city of Angels plays a major part of this nourish......

Cellos take center stage at the Colburn School tonight | Photo by Lachlan via flickr. FILM Before Alan Alda brought the character Hawkeye Pierce to homes everywhere in the M*A*S*H television series, Donald Sutherland (Keifer’s dad) played the role on the big screen in the Robert Altman-directed film (MASH). In both, though, the plot remains the same: the men who lived in “The Swamp” didn’t care much for military decorum during the Korean war.......

It’s kinda quiet on the event front, a perfect day to reflect on Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy. But if you're into going out tonight: CLASSICAL Southwest Chamber Music continues its Musical Imagination and Color series with a concert featuring 20th century composers, including Stravinsky, Milhaud, Berg, and Bartók. Violinist Lorenz Gamma, clarinetist Jim Foschia and pianist Ming Tsu are on the bill tonight. 8 // Colburn School Of Performing Arts: Across The Street......

Rainy days and Mondays may get you down, so check out these events tonight to make the first night of the workweek no so ho-hum. FILM As part of the LA Phil's Concrete Frequency series, the Arclight Hollywood gets into the game with screenings of films that are "designed to examine and celebrate the elements that define a city, and how they are affected by, and reflected in, music." On tap tonight is Fritz......

CLASSICAL: There's other classical music about town tonight besides Chanticleer. The Calder Quartet is the Colburn Conservatory’s first quartet-in-residence, and these new faculty members will show their chops with a program that includes Philip Glass, Quartet No. 2 “Company” by Philip Glass; Quartet in A minor “Rosamunde” by Franz Schubert and Terry Riley's “Cadenza on the Night Plain.” 7:30 pm // The Colburn School: Zipper Hall // 200 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles //......

If you like classical new music, then why aren't you coming to Monday Evening Concerts? This is the real deal and a one of the kind music series in Los Angeles. Last Monday night's concert was our Classical Pick of the Week and there was good reason for it. The nearly sold out concert of the young and elderly gathered at Zipper Hall at Downtown's Colburn School of Music. The night started with the......

There's no such thing as a quiet Monday in this town. Here's a quick look at what's happening: FILM: If you're a historic film buff, then head over the Academy Linwood-Dunn Theatre for A Century Ago: The Films of 1907. The event celebrates the year 1907 and its developmental contributions to motion pictures with a program of selected films. The evening will present a partial survey of turn-of-the-20th-century international filmmaking with trick films, actualities, primitive......

There's a lot of quality going on in classical this week in Los Angeles. Deaf percussionist superstar Evelyn Glennie is coming to UCLA Live, the Steven Stucky 20th Anniversary at the Green Umbrella Series with the LA Phil and a crazy four hour concert tonight featuring 18 Squared, LA's resident Steve Reich ensemble, among others. However, the obvious choice for this week is Monday Evening Concert's season opener, Primitive Force (we spoke about Sunday......

Southwest Chamber Music The season opening concert will feature Southwest Chamber Music’s percussionist Lynn Vartan, the Grammy-nominated Tambuco Percussion Ensemble (an LAist pick of the week earlier this summer) and the soloists of Southwest Chamber Music in a colossal program of the "Encounters, part 1" by one of Los Angeles’ most important composers and percussionists William Kraft, who was an LA Phil member (percussion, timpani), composer-in-residence, and conductor for three seasons. Monday, October 15 @......

Best line of the day: "If L.A. Unified can't figure out the math on employee paychecks, can it be trusted to teach more than 700,000 students?" It's been 231 days since the whole fiasco began at the LAUSD. Teachers aren't being paid while dead people are being issues paychecks. Autumn officially begins on Sundaysays the Griffith Observatory's Sky Report, which also states Mercury, Jupiter, Mars and Venus can all be seen in the sky......

I call it Performance Row. That stretch downtown along Grand Avenue between Temple St. and the California Plaza. You can easily walk between 9 performance spaces in 5 minutes. Starting at the Music Center Plaza at Temple and heading South, you first are at the Ahmanson, Center Theatre Group's (CTG) proscenium stage that is used for dance, musicals and other traditional performances. Next is the Mark Taper Forum, a theatre used for newer theatrical......