Elizabeth Herndon

There's a lumpy, farting, gum-chewing thing in the art world called outsider art. Outsider art can be many things - art by the disabled or merely unschooled, art in the eye of the beholder, or just art out of fashion. Here in ultra-sophisticated, un-bumpkinish Los Angeles, it seems that outsider art might be something of an endangered species. Thankfully, that just ain't so. You see, once upon a time there was a man named...

Neil Hopper has just made us feel really lazy again. Who is Neil Hopper? Well, he's a guy that walks around LA... a lot. No, he's not that guy, and he's not that lady; as far as we've been informed, he doesn't read while he walks, and his hair isn't styled into a three-foot spike atop his head. Then again, we've never seen him walking. We've just seen the pictures he's taken while walking....

With all our recent focus on drugs, poopie, dead winos, starlets on drugs, tattooed rock'n'roll cellphone exhibitionists, kids on drugs, guys who like young girls a little too much, kid show hosts on drugs, self-lovers, rock festivals with swear words in their names organized by guys who have various terms for self-love in their band names, and more drugs, we figured it might be time to give a little space to some good clean...

We blame Materials & Applications for the regular traffic jams on Silver Lake Blvd. between Effie and Sunset. Anybody who sets up golden Mylar gravity holes and enormous bamboo cocoons along a regular commuting route is going to create a bottleneck. We can hardly be angry for the delay once we drive by whatever amazing and beautiful project they've cooked up, however, and we'd implore anyone else on that route to take a moment...

We love Echo Park's Sea Level Records for many reasons. It's easy to find parking near the historic Jensen Recreation Center Building in which it's housed, it's small enough so we don't get that overwhelmed "oh shit, what did I come in here to get?" brain erase that happens to us at Amoeba, and they regularly have great in-store performances. They also aren't afraid to take chances. Tonight they're hosting a visual art exhibition...

We were going in to work this morning, endangering ourselves and others by trying to find something good to listen on the radio rather than watching the road (hey, at least we weren't on the phone), when it hit us as it has hit us so many times before: LA radio sucks. Not all LA radio sucks, of course. We were very pleasantly surprised to hear, "You mean Bang The Drum Slowly? Bull Durham?"...

Okay, no; we don't have a dumb knock-knock joke here. And you're welcome. We do have a little beef, however. We'd really like to know why nobody's done a documentary about Frontier Records founder Lisa Fancher. We just looked through this year's film schedule for Allison Anders' fantastic Don't Knock The Rock festival, and while we have absolutely no problem whatsoever with the lineup, it seems like every other seminal LA punk figure has...

Ah, summer is here — summer, and the news that the earth's surface temperature is the highest it's been in 2,000 years. Tra la. Not relishing the idea of a monster utility bill, our thoughts turn to finding a public place where the AC is always set to Meat Locker — the movie theater. So, we trundle on down to the local MegaMechaMoviePlex to see what's playing. Click. The Lake House. Garfield 2. Feh....