Thirty years ago today, Elvis Costello pissed off his record company and got himself banned from Saturday Night Live when he scrapped "Less Than Zero" several bars in and led the Attractions through this incendiary version of the then unreleased "Radio, Radio". Declan MacManus and Lorne Michaels have since made ammends, but this remains one of the greatest musical performances in the history of SNL.......

"Come light the menorah, raise your hands in the air. Sip that Manischewitz like you just don't care." For an, um, alternative, Hanukkah celebration.......

The AMPTP's offer is laughable enough, but Fred Armisen's take on it makes me laugh in the right way.......

How much money would it take for you to go on tv night after night and be wrong about things? Millions? Tens of millions? Even if they gave you $10 million a year could you really enjoy the caviar, Hummers, and grillz if you knew that you were rollin in your 6-4 due to bullshitting America? Especially about war? Well every night Bill O'rly says something stupid or lame or embarrassing and the next......

The overwhelming support the writers have received during the strike has been really encouraging. Look who's showing their solidarity now!......

In 1994 I fell in love with this Soul Coughing song about Los Angeles, and to this day still snicker with a kind of savvy delight when frontman Mike Doughty gets to the line: "We are all in some way or another going to Reseda someday...to die." Come on. You totally get it, too. This LA Times piece from last month revisiting the iconic spoken-word song deflates my memory balloon a tad, since in......

What do we want? Nothing! When do we want it? I trust the studios to decide that!......

You wont see this on MTV, but you can see it here.......

Fires in Malibu are nothing new. But tonight while procrastinating we thought we'd revisit the old Hole tune - Courtney's last really great hit(?) - and we were sorta stunned by all the fire references in the lyrics and in the video. It's something we don't remember being so prevalent even though it was on the album cover, etc. But still, it's sorta eerie seeing it today. "Malibu" was the second single off Hole's......

For some reason we thought that this video got eaten by our technology, but look, there's Alicia Keys belting out "No One", her second and final song from the Writers Guild march and rally and mini-concert in Hollywood today. We also have video of her other song too. Do we love her? Yes. Do we have a few more bonus pics of her for your collective asses? Find out after the jump :)......

It's interesting how creative people just can't stop being creative. You'd think that during a strike some people would just take it easy, catch up on whatever they've saved on their Tivo, or start that new workout routine they promised they'd start 11 months ago. But instead YouTube is bursting with cute and funny little videos about the writers strike from people who are clearly bursting at the seams to get back to doing......

Despite all the competition that's around it and new clubs that are constantly popping up, the Roxy has continued to be a major player in the LA rock club scene. It was just a year ago yesterday that the Red Hot Chili Peppers played a rockin show at the classic venue - and not only was LAist there, but we gave out a dozen free tickets to lucky wieners. Keeping the hope alive, the......

This video was taken in the traffic after last month's huge truck pile-up in the Newhall Pass tunnel on the 5 Freeway. It's good to have a moped when traffic doesn't move. It's even better to force gridlocked drivers to become your interview subjects when you pull up to their window.......

Last month LAist was lucky enough to be invited to the Nissan Live studio on the Fox lot to see PJ Harvey perform one of her very few live appearances in support of her new cd, White Chalk. From what we heard, Polly Jean played once in NYC, once in LA, once on the Tonight Show, and once for Yahoo's Live Sets. It was an intimate, eerie, and fragile hour in West LA. PJ......

Unintentional cacophony at it's finest. The pre-taped keyboards kick in a hair faster than they're supposed to, throwing the entire song into a beautifully out of tune dissonant noisefest. What does the band do? Finish the song, of course. All 6 and a half horrible minutes of it. If this was Ashlee Simpson, you would have heard about it by now. But this is Van Fuckin' Halen!......

Earlier today we noticed that none of the Van Halen shows in LA sold out yet. In fact all but four on the whole tour appeared to have sold out, so we wrote a post and within hours the first Staples show had sold out. You're welcome. In that post we also made a joke about how Santa Barbara band Nerf Herder should be opening the show and that would help sales, no offense,......

Not as sexy as the title would imply, but in honor of Halloween being around the corner, enjoy this "scary" trailer for a living dead triple feature.......

People talk about Britney, but Dave Navarro went from being the shirtless guitarist in Jane's Addiction, to being married to Carmen Electra, to hosting a tv show where they weed out cheesy singers to find one that doesn't completely suck. Now we find Dave interviewing people buying Halo 3 on Sunset & Vine. Rock is officially dead.......

On Friday night, Bill Maher spoke to Michael Scheuer, former head of the now defunct C.I.A. Bin Laden Unit and author of the upcoming book,Marching Toward Hell: America & Islam After Iraq. His previous book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, was mentioned in one of Bin Laden's recent tapes mentioning that if the U.S. wanted to understand why the Iraq War is a losing war, then they need......

We know the UCLA taser fiasco didn't start the taser party, but some wacky kids have remixed the audio from the "don't tase me, bro" guy with your favorite MC Hammer track. It made us smile for some devious reason. Hopefully you'll get the same reaction. To us it was just a lighthearted end of a taser-happy week that included an OC cop tasering an autistic child. Dark humor, but humor nonetheless.......

"We're gonna take you on a little trip to a land called 'Hoogie Boogie Land"! And you will want to visit again and again.......

This is a weird little movie, but the lesson here is: the Valley needs more street musicians.......

I know this is hardly a controversial opinion. A few years ago, I had the “pleasure” of seeing Ted Nugent open for Kiss. The show was raw, sweaty, and blissfully loud. As the Motor City Madman powered through hit after hit, I was amazed at how much I was enjoying his brand of gloriously primitive bonehead rock. The massive crowd cheered, pumped their fists, and banged their collective heads to the seemingly endless stream......

It's called "Lane Splitting" and although it's legal, the CHP warns that "Lane splitting by motorcycles is permissible but must be done in a safe and prudent manner." We're not sure if this example was either safe or prudent, in fact there were a few tight squeezes that made us yell at the screen, but it sure did open our eyes to the possibilities of commuting via motorcycle in this fair city. Yes, we......

Really, who doesn't love robot sounds and music about outer space? The 900 Number sample at 2:49 ain't bad either. This is clearly the Beastie Boys' world and we're just livin' in it. Ps: Adam Yauch is a dreamboat.......

The NSFW video above shows the sweet (and sweaty) scene inside the Golden Gals Gone Wild art opening held Saturday night in Hollywood at the World of Wonder Storefront Gallery. It was so hot that some of the go-go dancers decided to take their clothes off and get more comfortable. Who can blame em. Read our review and view a photo essay of the event here, and click here for an interview with the......

The most popular story on reddit yesterday and this morning was this blast from Texas Congressman Ron Paul who denounced the continued, failed practice of the United States to involve ourselves in unconstitutional, undeclared wars. After waving off Mitt Romney who tried to interrupt his roll by asking "what about 9/11?", Paul said that he was in Vietnam for five years and saw how pulling out of there did not end in disaster, neither......

We can't count the times, restless and strange, we've walked the empty city streets during those nameless hours between midnight and dawn. Ingmar Bergman captured that feeling precisely, in this nightmare sequence from Wild Strawberries. Catch the rest of the movie, as well as 1960's The Virgin Spring, at the Bergman double feature, playing tonight and Thursday at the New Beverly.......

Kwik-E-Marts popped up all around the US yesterday and if you missed it, LAist contributer Elise got a bunch of pics at 4am in Burbank and then went again in the daytime. Our pals over in DC took pics of their Kwik-E-Mart and someone tried to show us pics of another location in LA, but their link didn't work. D'oh! So here's a short little vid from the famous Simpson's episode where poor Apu......

It's a shame when good shows aren't even given a chance and then they die on the vine. HBO marketed the hell out of "Entourage" and gave it time to develop and grow and now it's poised to be the reason that people keep the premium channel through the summer. But while that show was rising, an even funnier sitcom, Lucky Louie which had a fraction of the budget, was struggling. Not because it......