Guest Contributor

As art galleries gear up for the upcoming December art fairs in Miami and Los Angeles in January, the rest of us welcome the holidays. The Los Angeles art scene slows down, but merely for a week. There’s still plenty to do and still keep up with holiday celebrations. News for one of our top museum institutions did not come lightly this week, as LACMA announces it’s lack of funds that will now slow down advancements of current construction. The museum hopes to raise $100 million dollars in donations to go on with initial plans.

“Despite the thriving community of artists, Los Angeles has a shitty history of maintaining the kinds of institutions that artists (and the people who care about art) richly deserve.”- Andrew Berardini Through a weekly update, we'll keep you informed of art openings, lectures, performances, new museum shows, and perhaps even an art world rant or two.

The “Monsters of Dub” double-bill of Massive Attack and Thievery Corporation wrapped up two months of co-headlining American tour dates in Los Angeles as part of the “LA 101” event at the Gibson Amphitheatre on Sunday night. The inspired pairing pulled an impressively large crowd that ran the gamut including post-rave survivors, music nerds, a thick swath of the city’s creative class and party people just down for heavy beats and heavier vibes (man).

If there is any burden that comes with being a seminal artist, it’s the slavish obsession and attention perpetually paid to the seminal art. For pioneering UK electronic artist Gary Numan in America, it all revolves around his timeless hit song, “Cars.” Taken from his 1979 album “The Pleasure Principle,” it’s one of the first songs to introduce electronic music to the American masses, reaching #9 on the US charts in early 1980.

Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Concert Series--dedicated to innovative contemporary music--opened last week with a concert featuring music from Bang on a Can composers: Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. It seems fitting that Bang on a Can opened the series, because the collective is responsible for a lot of innovative contemporary music in the US.

The shy and baby faced Chef Mikey Stern may know his own restaurant’s kitchen better than any other 28 year old executive chef in America. And with good reason: he’s spent more than a 1/3 of his life cooking at Michael’s the 3rd street Santa Monica institution.

This weekend, the Getty Villa continues its presentation of the world premiere of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s new translation of Sophocles’ Elektra. [Side note: While the show begins hours after the regular patrons have migrated back home along the PCH, being at the Getty Villa after regular opening hours feels like you’re trespassing on some very rich person’s property. The guards tell you to be quiet and you almost feel obligated to tiptoe through the corridors until you reach the open-air amphitheater. But the production, thankfully, is worth the hassle.]

The last days of summer may be rushing up behind us, but the season’s harvest still overflows in Los Feliz, thanks to the two (yes, two!) weekly farmers' markets that serve this community. One is the Los Feliz Farmers' Market, while the other is the LA Medical Center Farmers' Market, which visits Los Feliz every Wednesday from 12-6pm in the lower parking lot of Barnsdall Art Park on Hollywood Blvd.

It’s the hottest day of the year, and Christian Murcia and his crew of the Crepes Bonaparte food truck are hard at work churning out their popular crepes to eager customers, when a woman drives by and yells out her window, “Oh my gosh, it’s you! You’re famous!” Murcia, a contestant on the Food Network’s Great Food Truck Race series, has experienced an uptick in business (and a few rabid fans) since the show first aired on August 15th, and it’s clear why. Crepes Bonaparte’s charming, beret-wearing team serves up incredibly fresh, made-to-order crepes that rival those of a Parisienne café.

The 48 Hour Film Project marks its ninth year in Los Angeles with a kickoff event at Cinespace in Downtown Hollywood tomorrow. The project offers filmmakers the chance to create a quick movie over one hectic weekend and show it to an audience of their peers the next week at Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica. According to Jimmy Stewart, producer of the festival in LA, “Most ideas never make it out of your head, never mind actually getting developed, shot and projected onto a big screen. Having this kind of structure and deadline can be very exciting and motivating.”