Let There Be Gwar is open at Beyond the Streets in Los Angeles through November 2. (All photos: Liz O.)
I’m not one for nostalgia, but, damn, that longing for what was hit me hard as I walked through Let There Be Gwar at Beyond the Streets on Saturday morning. Inside the La Brea Avenue gallery is a treasure trove of costumes, props and ephemera from the rock band/art collective. A massive anthropomorphic toilet and plunger stands near the front entrance. Decapitated heads line a wall, a recipe for DIY bloodbags beside them. On the TV screens are flashbacks to Gwar’s time on the 1990s talk show circuit. Joan Rivers! Jerry Springer! Wally George!
Monday Nights: L.A.’s Scene of the Century opens at Leiminspace in Chinatown on August 2, 2025
I’ve been knee deep in work for Monday Nights: L.A.’s Scene of the Century, 2005-2016, the exhibition of photos and ephemera from Sean Carnage’s DIY show series that opens at Leiminspace in Chinatown on August 2. I’m one of the co-curators for the show and wrote an essay for the catalog, so my brain is half-stuck in the ‘00s and half-living in the present day, which is strange. I didn’t think the world could possibly be more grim than it was in the midst of the Bush era, but, here we are. Endless war, Fox News and the Great Recession seem quaint in comparison to the red cap crowd’s brand of reality show fascism.
What made the ‘00s bearable, at least here in Los Angeles, was underground culture. Monday Nights was a big part of that. I think the first one I went to was Halloween of 2005 and I continued to go often throughout the duration of the series. At Monday Nights, I saw so many wildly creative bands/artists play— some of whom I wrote about at the time for L.A. Weekly and other publications— but that was just part of what was happening in the city at that point in time. There were other club nights and venues, not to mention the parties in lofts, warehouses, backyards and living rooms. Once, I even went to a show in a storage unit in Chatsworth.
Heaven 17 “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang”
The right record will always find you at the right time. Take last Saturday afternoon as an example. I was in Little Tokyo, flipping through 45s at Salt Box and just happened to come across “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,” the 1981 single from Heaven 17. Did I have this? Did it matter? Even if I did have a copy, I could use another one because this nearly 45-year-old song is the jam for right now. Or, rather, it should be the jam for right now.
I didn’t even have to listen to the song for the earworm to bury itself in my brain. “Have you heard it on the news?” it goes, “About this fascist groove thang.”
On Monday afternoon, a bit after 3 p.m., I went for a walk through Chinatown. It was the fourth day of the protests against ICE raids in the city and helicopters had been hanging over the neighborhood like gnats all day. The first thing I noticed while walking down Broadway was that I’m not the only person annoyed by the incessant buzz of the helicopters. An older man stopped in his tracks and looked towards one of them. I almost walked into him. Another neighborhood senior sat on a bench, tilted his head upwards and shook a cigarette-wielding fist in the air. I almost busted up laughing while thinking of the “Old Man Yells at Cloud” headline from The Simpsons.
It was business as usual in Chinatown. The Broadway shops remained open with racks of merchandise set up outside the storefronts. The local produce vendors tried to coerce me into buying more avocados and peaches than I could eat in a couple days.
Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra live at The Mayan in downtown Los Angeles for Exotikon 3 (Pic: Liz O.)
Our glasses weren’t 3D. We were watching a live performance inside downtown L.A.’s Mayan Theatre and, like the robot on stage told the crowd on Sunday afternoon, that’s already 3D. These were decoder glasses. Some in the audience had blue lenses. Others, like me, had red ones. The color of the lenses determined what you would see on the screen behind Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra, the human-and-robot duo from San Diego who were playing as part of Exotikon.
Maria Somerville concluded her five-week tour, which included the singer’s first U.S. jaunt, on Saturday, May 24 at Zebulon in L.A. (Pic: Liz O.)
On Saturday, May 24, Maria Somerville closed out a five week tour, which included her first U.S. jaunt, at Zebulon in Los Angeles. Playing with a full band, the Irish musician transformed the sublime, often atmospheric, sound of her two albums into a shoegaze blowout. It was loud and cathartic and I’m really glad that Zebulon keeps a bowl of earplugs near its entrance.
I grabbed a spot right in front of the bassist’s zone on stage, next to some dudes who were investigating the pedals. (I told you this was a shoegaze show!) A hodgepodge of tunes played as the small, Frogtown venue filled with people. Hearing “French Disko,” the Stereolab song, was an appropriate way to prepare for the show that was about to start. I noticed a My Bloody Valentine t-shirt in the crowd too, which was both completely expected and probably a bit of foreshadowing.
Inside ArtCenter for Printed Matter’s L.A. Art Book Fair (Pic: Liz O.)
In a world ruled by tech bros and geriatric shitposters, going to a book fair is subversive af. Think about it. You have to actually stop scrolling and go to an IRL location. When you’re there, you’ll flip through print publications that weren’t recommended by an algorithm. You might purchase some of them too. You may even read them, an act that would require you to divert your eyes from screens teeming with slop and rage posts and ads— so many ads!— and all the other garbage that makes rich dudes richer and the rest of us broke and miserable.
Certainly, I’m not the only person who thinks reading paper > reading screens because Printed Matter’s L.A. Art Book Fair was slammed on Sunday afternoon. Now, this is a long-running, well-attended event. In fact, I wrote about the size of the crowd on this very blog two years ago. But, the weekend-long indie and DIY book extravaganza has since moved from MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary to ArtCenter’s South Campus in Pasadena. It appeared to be a bigger venue, given all the rooms at the art school that were in use, but it was still overflowing with people. There were corners of some exhibit halls where crowds were so thick that they were virtually impassible, but that might have had more to do with the layout than the amount of people.
A little more than an hour had passed since Caravan Palace launched into their set at The Novo on Monday night. The French group, a trio in the studio now six people strong on stage, had already pumped up the crowd with a near-seamless mix of older tunes, like their version of “Black Betty,” and material from last year’s album, Gangbusters Melody Club. The stage was now saturated in blue light that moved like a wave as singer Zoé Colotis talked the audience.
“Let’s get crazy for a while. Forget all your troubles, just spread good energy and craziness,” she told the crowd.
White lights burst from the strobes, pulsating with the beat that had just kicked the crowd in the pants. They pumped their hands in the air and jumped in unison. The floor vibrated. My phone started to shake as I tried to record video.
Michael Rother live at The Broad in Los Angeles for Intuition Festival on Saturday, March 22, 2025. (Pic: Liz O.)
When Michael Rother, who co-founded Nue! and Harmonia, played Intuition Festival at The Broad on Saturday night, I had a mini-revelation. This might have happened during a Harmonia song, but I can’t be sure since it was well past the point where everything Rother played on the stage outside of the museum converged into one giant piece of music in my head. I was dancing and, suddenly, something in the tone of the guitar made me think of New Order. It’s not as random a thought as you think.
e eye love by Corita Kent at Corita Art Center in Los Angeles (Photo: Liz O.)
Corita Kent was L.A.’s own pop art star. Back in the 1960s, when she was still a nun and known as Sister Mary Corita, she was named one of L.A. Times’ women of the year and landed on the cover of Newsweek. While she was creating serigraphs with social justice messages, she also taught at Immaculate Heart College and became head of the school’s renowned art department. Kent continued making art long after she left her religious order and moved to Boston. In fact, her best known work was the massively popular U.S. postal stamp that read “Love,” which was released in 1985, one year before her death.
Last week, on International Women’s Day, a new home for Kent’s legacy opened in the Arts District. A few days prior to that, I headed to the new Corita Art Center for a press preview. During my visit, and in the days that followed, I kept thinking about one specific piece. It’s called e eye love, which is part of a series called circus alphabet. In it, an eye is superimposed on a capital letter E. Underneath it is a snippet of a quote from the philosopher and writer Albert Camus, “should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” Kent made this piece in 1968, a tumultuous year in U.S. history. More than 55 years later, I’m looking at it in a gallery-like setting thinking, “Same.”
