Elizabeth Herndon

Just in time for Halloween, Gothic Beauty magazine (not to be confused with the ever-popular Goth Beaver Hunt magazine) has published the results of the 2006 Dark Cities Survey and reported that Los Angeles is the Number One place in America to be a goth. Huh. Well, not to sound ungrateful for the honor, but if we're to judge by such goth gatherings as Bats Day at Disneyland, we're a little underwhelmed by the...

We never thought it would come to this, but it seems we have a genuine case of Halloween costume ennui. It just seems so wrong. Halloween is the gayest, sluttiest holiday of all, and here we are in one of the gayest, sluttiest cities in America, and we just can't... get it up to think of a good Halloween costume this year. We try to probe our impacted pop culture memories of the recent...

We'd meant to give you a weekly offering of storefront art, but it's been a tough couple of weeks for us. First, we noticed that the bakery on Glendale Blvd. -- who had already painted over their wonderful rendition of the Cream of Wheat man with a plain white wall, only to replace it with a more freeform, swarthy, eerie version even better than the original -- had once again painted over their wonderful...

We're not going to say that the Solutions audio repair store in Silver Lake drove Elliot Smith to suicide, because 1) we don't know that he actually ever took anything in the shop, 2) readers of this site don't seem to cotton to death-associated levity, and 3) wasn't there some speculation that he was actually murdered? But if somebody else happened to say that it did, we would have to say we understand completely....

Gracious. We just got back from the Fifth Annual Interfaith Blessing of the Animals in Long Beach, where we took our beloved Pet Sematary refugee for a spiritual boost. We knew we were really in for something when we almost immediately ran into the pig pictured above, who obviously had no concept of a traditional luau menu main course. We'd write more, but right now we're suffering from acute Cute Overload. Enjoy the photos....

Yeah, we see that the LA Times already provided us with plenty of food- and container-based puns regarding this event, but for some idiotic reason we can't resist telling you to get off your can and check out what's happening at the Westfield Fashion Square this weekend. Phew. Glad that's out of our system. It's the Canstruction design competition/canned food drive, come to our fair city at last. Competing teams work to make giant...

Oh man, Mom's in town and already she's all wah wah wah about how she wants to visit a museum. A real museum. Last time she was here she declared the Museum of Online Museums "not a real museum," and she got so confused in a bad way by the Museum of Jurassic Technology that she forgot to pick up the bill at dinner that night. Damn. You're not gonna let that happen again....

On this day in 1979, a two- to three-kiloton nuclear bomb explosion (or something) was detected in the Indian Ocean about halfway between South Africa and Antarctica. No country to date has claimed responsibility. On this day in 1958, Joan Marie Larkin was born in Philadelphia. Upon relocation to Hollywood, Ms. Larkin became better known as Joan Jett and was responsible for blowing up the rock establishment with her all-girl band The Runaways. Now...

So, you get into work this morning, and the first thing that happens is you hear Janine from Finance complimenting the "fine, muddy grog" as she gestures toward her coffee mug. Then Andre claims his papercut is actually a swashbuckling injury. Uh oh. It's International Talk Like A Pirate Day again already? Your attempt last year to participate by adding "arr" to the end of every sentence came off a little limp, and your...

We're big proponents of the idea that art is in the eye of the beholder. Questioning the definition of art is nothing new - Marcel Duchamp and his gang with their altered Mona Lisas, Jasper Johns with his flags and Ballantine Ale cans, and Richard Lair with his Thai Elephant Orchestra are but a handful of artists who have forwarded the idea that art is where you find it. In the city, there's a...