Arts & Entertainment

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• Best Lady Hopheads

  Eagle Rock Brewery

  Leave the appletinis and gossip to the Sex and the City gals — this ladies' night is more about IPAs and home-brewing tips. Every third Wednesday of the month gals are invited to Eagle Rock Brewery for the Women's Beer Forum, to taste, learn about and discuss rare and delicious craft beers. You need not be a microbrew enthusiast to… More >>

• Best Screenplay Treatment for Lost Weekend II

  El Capitan Theater

  Harsh morning sunlight bouncing off unforgiving concrete makes Hollywood hangovers a little bit crueler than the rest. Escape your unfortunate present by hauling your half-drunk ass up the El Capitan Theater steps to a 1920s movie palace balcony — a creature all but extinct — and into a Hollywood past preserved in amber. Leave the world of screaming kids and… More >>

• Best Magic in the Air

  Museum of Neon Art

  Although the Museum of Neon Art is moving to Glendale, its incredibly fun downtown bus tours continue. Start out with a little social and liquid lubrication, aka drinks and appetizers, before climbing onto an open-top double-decker bus to cruise the streets of L.A. for two hours in search of the city's best neon art. Well-versed docents help you discover both… More >>

• Best Handmade Museum

  Craft and Folk Art Museum

  I am always amazed at how many people don't seem to know about the Craft and Folk Art Museum. With a fascinating history — it began in 1965 as The Egg and The Eye, an avant-garde café and shop — and a forward-thinking philosophy, this incredibly intimate gem of a museum was capturing the beauty and artistic integrity of the… More >>

• Best Place to Barter With Your Kids

  Kidspace Museum

  Sure, you've let your children blow off steam running through the outside spray fountains. And I know you've explored the interactive exhibits about bugs. But did you know you also can barter some of those curious seedpods and snakeskins you found on your last hike? Kidspace Museum's Nature Exchange allows you to trade your wild discoveries for other natural treasures… More >>

• Best Chamber Music in Historic Sites

  Da Camera Society

  For anyone who thinks local history is limited to the Walk of Fame, Disneyland and Grauman's Chinese, the Da Camera Society unearths L.A.'s best hidden landmarks with its live performance series Chamber Music in Historic Sites. Founded at Mount St. Mary's College in 1973, the Da Camera Society takes its name from musica da camera, a 17th-century Italian term for… More >>

• Best Historic Film Theater

  Egyptian Theatre

  Before he dreamt up the Chinese Theatre or El Capitan, legendary entertainment impresario Sid Grauman built the Egyptian Theatre, two years before the 1924 discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb ignited a worldwide design craze inspired by King Tut's treasures. The lavish, artfully decorated theater was the site of the first Hollywood film premiere, screening Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks in 1922.… More >>

• Best Ghostly Get-Togethers and Weirdo Tours

  Ghost Hunters of Urban Los Angeles (GHOULA)

  On the 13th of each month, this band of urbane spook-splorers converge for cocktails at a different haunted SoCal locale, from a hanging tree in Calabasas to the coffin-shaped pool of the Figueroa Hotel (a suicide jumper favorite). The "Spirits With Spirits" mixers, like all Ghost Hunters of Urban Los Angeles (GHOULA) events, have "a certain ghoul-rilla aspect" to them,… More >>

• Best Street-Art Gallery in a Swanky Hotel

  Maximillian Gallery

  Maximillian Gallery at the Sunset Marquis might at first blush seem like an anomaly — a gallery in an upscale boutique hotel showing Shepard Fairey, Destroy All Design, COPE2, CYRCLE, Gregory Siff and Desire Obtain Cherish instead of bejeweled eggs, bronze cheetahs and happy landscapes. But in reality, this model is the harbinger of the future wherein street art has… More >>

• Best Corazon

  Corazon del Pueblo

  Boyle Heights' Corazon del Pueblo bills itself as an arts, education and action collective, which is another way of saying it's a bilingual clubhouse for the neighborhood, and the city beyond. Contemporary local art adorns the walls. A variety of classes meet regularly. The semiweekly "Flowers of Fire" open-mic Wednesdays spill over onto the sidewalk and into Thursday morning. Like… More >>

• Best Free Photography

  Annenberg Space for Photography

  If you've ever stopped in at 2000 Avenue of the Stars — the Century City monument that houses CAA — you know it resembles a spooky megachurch, a temple devoted to the glory of the Hollywood hustle. But climb a nearby flight of stairs and cross a small courtyard, and you'll find a chapel of an entirely different sort. The… More >>

• Best Art You Can Dance To

  Create:Fixate

  The original and still the best, Create:Fixate is a bimonthly art and music showcase that's been around for more than 10 years now, and is widely acknowledged as one of the most effective places for young/new-to-town artists to launch careers, and at the same time, for young collectors to get their feet wet. In addition to a spread of large… More >>

• Best Basement in Chinatown

  Pepin Moore

  Basements in Chinatown have character. Dank and unfinished, most feel like they could have been speakeasies or covert crime dens in eras past. But the Pepin Moore gallery on the far end of Chung King Road has a particular below-ground charm. Upstairs, the space is split into two narrow rooms. Each has its own staircase leading down to an open,… More >>

• Best Donation-Only Path to Enlightenment

  Bhagavad-gita Museum

  "Never was a time when I did not exist, nor you," Krishna informs a disillusioned Prince Arjuna, in the first lesson of the Bhagavad-gita. It's one thing to read that "the perishable body and the eternal soul are not the same," and quite another to eyeball the lessons via Bhagavad-gita Museum, the "world's first multimedia exhibition" dedicated to illustrating, in… More >>

• Best Highbrow Architectural Tour Guide

  Los Angeles Nomadic Division

  No offense to conservancies or tour companies, but how much better would it be to experience Los Angeles' architectural treasures as a guest rather than a voyeur? That's what Los Angeles Nomadic Division, aka LAND, makes possible. A transient arts nonprofit founded in 2009 by New York transplants, LAND began hosting its "Nomadic Nights" events in fall 2010. Each one… More >>

• Best Place to Be an Anime Fan

  Anime Los Angeles

  L.A. anime fans know to start off their year right by heading to Anime Los Angeles. The convention is always held on the first weekend of the year (next one is Jan. 6-8), lately at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott. Compared to events like Anime Expo, ALA, as regulars call it, is small, drawing a couple thousand people as opposed… More >>

• Best No-Hassle TV Taping

  Tosh.0

  Sure, New York has The Daily Show, but Tosh.0, which is actually the most-watched show on Comedy Central, is right here, on a regular street in a regular-schmo office building. Getting there is a breeze compared to most L.A. TV tapings. No combing Google maps trying to figure out which entrance to the Warner Bros. lot is Gate 3. No… More >>

• Best Place to Get Your Geek On

  NerdMelt

  Housed in a comic store, NerdMelt hosts nightly experimental comedy shows, writing workshops, comic book Q&As and the occasional video game competition. But the staff won't kick you out if you don't like Star Wars. One of the reasons NerdMelt has a swelling band of followers is the inclusive nature of the community. At one recent MeltDown show, hosted by… More >>

• Best Variety Show for Night Owls

  Steve Allen Theater's The Tomorrow Show

  Scan the seats at the Steve Allen Theater on Saturday at midnight and you'll find them half-empty. The audience members are half-stoned, half-drunk or high on the fact that they're breaking curfew. They are old and young, but mostly bearded and beer-bellied. And they keep coming back, some from as far away as San Diego, for the nutty midnight variety… More >>

• Best Place to Hear a Tom Waits Cover

  Brewery Art Colony

  Ask artist/musician Llyn Foulkes to play his Tom Waits cover song and he'll tell you he was performing like Tom Waits before Waits was on the music scene. An Angeleno since 1956, along with his Tom Waits ditty "Chocolate Jesus," much of the Brewery Art Colony dweller's songs serve as a love letter to our smog-ridden city. Foulkes, perhaps best… More >>

• Best Theater Cocooning on Payday

  Gold Class Cinema

  An escalator ushers you down into a dimly lit lounge area of Gold Class Cinema, where moviegoers, while waiting to be let into the theater, are ordering cocktails, wine, beer and appetizers. A DJ spins esoteric, urban-alternative grooves under the glow of a red light, as servers dressed entirely in black ensure everyone gets VIP treatment. Plush is one word… More >>

• Best Folk Band

  Triple Chicken Foot

  If you think hoedowns are the sort of country-fueled entertainment you only get wind of at a coffee shop somewhere along I-5, you are long overdue for a two-hour serving of Triple Chicken Foot. The "Foot," as the fiddle-banjo-guitar trio is known, is a citified version of an old-time string band that's often served up with a side of local… More >>

• Most Spectacular Spectacle

  Lucha VaVOOM

  Lucha VaVOOM is a mobile ringside spectacle that comes with masked Mexican wrestlers, wisecracking MCs and plenty of steamy stripper acts to help cool down a heated audience. Co-producers Liz Fairbairn and Rita D'Albert are alums of the Velvet Hammer burlesque revue, and their latest vampy, vaudeville-inspired production has both heroes and villains as luchadors in a wrestling ring, pitted… More >>

• Best Place for Free Friday Night Jazz

  LACMA's Friday Night Jazz Series

  It's either totally wondrous or worthy of shared civic shame that the most ethnically diverse, racially mixed, friendly place to chat with Angelenos from all nations is the Canoga Park Costco. And then there's LACMA's Friday Night Jazz Series, a multi-culti/hi-low fashion/blue-red politics powwow set outdoors just a few feet from Chris Burden's city-defining landmark, Urban Light. This wildly mixed… More >>

• Best Retro Make-out Spot

  Vineland Drive-In Movie Theater

  Movies these days — there's those whippersnapper kids and their distracting computer phones, there's those ruffian scenester movie snobs and their jarringly inappropriate meta-ironic laughter. You don't want any of them around while you're necking during the newest talkie — especially if you're keen on the term "necking." Where can you romance your paramour like one did in the '50s?… More >>

• Best Hoof-and-Mouth Free-For-All

  Viva Cantina

  Holy guacamole! There's a free, all-ages hootenanny held monthly at a Mexican restaurant next to the Equestrian Center in Burbank where you can get a heaping dose of supremely riveting live music, not to mention a lungful of horsey goodness for the drive home. The Messaround at Viva Cantina is more than the sum of its rollicking parts. A typical… More >>

• Best Reason to Be Afraid of the Dark

  Urban Death at Zombie Joe's Underground

  You find yourself seated in the pitch black of a locked and lightless room. The whipping winds and pounding rain of a fierce storm ring in your ears. Thunder cracks. A lightning flash reveals a bare stage and 50 other lost, trembling souls who are quickly swallowed by the Stygian darkness. Another crack and this time the lightning freezes a… More >>

• Best Monday Night Stand-Up Show

  What's Up Tiger Lily? at Hollywood Studio Bar & Grill

  Any comedian can host a comedy room at a random bar, but it takes location, circumstance and a comedy curator to keep one running for five years. That's a nuisance for most stand-ups but a vital necessity for Melinda Hill, What's Up Tiger Lily?'s producer-comedian, and wonder twin Jazz Ponce, whose scouting skills rival any late-night TV booker. The ambitious… More >>

• Best 30-Day Trial Castle

  Magic Castle Open Sesame Membership

  While inventing clever ways to snag an invite to the members-only Magic Castle is an amusing parlor game, there's no shame in buying your way past the door. The Magic Castle Open Sesame Membership gives you and a guest 30 days of admission to the mysterious Hollywood landmark for a reasonable $100 (you can bring more guests, but they'll have… More >>

• Best Environmental Artists' Collective

  Metabolic Studio

  After dismantling her infamous 2005 public-art installation Not a Cornfield, artist and Annenberg Trustee Lauren Bon redirected her creative energies to the space beneath the North Spring Street bridge, transforming a strip of warehouses into a think tank for eco-minded creatives. Yes, Metabolic Studio is peppered with bearded dudes in skinny jeans, and sure, new-wave flower children abound, but so… More >>

• Best Art Gallery That's Run Like a Museum

  Overduin and Kite

  Though anybody with a few posters and a storefront can call himself a gallerist (as uber-dealer Larry Gagosian did when he got into the business eons ago in Westwood), an art gallery that makes an impact must provide the same kind of insight, scholarship and engagement as any institution proclaiming some handle on history. Run by former Regen Projects directors… More >>

• Best Hidden Treasure of a Children's Museum

  Zimmer Children's Museum

  Until Los Angeles gets its own proper children's museum again someday, count the Zimmer Children's Museum among the city's hidden surprises that fills an important niche. Yes, we have the big museums at Exposition Park. And L.A. has its own thriving industry of indoor playgrounds, creating yet another subset of private space. Yet the Zimmer, a small museum located on… More >>

• Best Three-Dimensional Publication

  The Museum of Public Fiction

  I've grown used to reactionary magazines looking out into the world and drawing from what's on view — nothing wrong with this time-honored act normally called "journalism." But I've a penchant for publications that push as much as they pull. The Museum of Public Fiction, a brick-and-mortar building, is also a publication, a project of proprietress Lauren Mackler, who wanted… More >>

• Best Eastside Clubhouse for Wayward Artists

  Night Gallery

  Anybody can start an amorphously titled alternative space, but what defines an alternative more than a commercial venture is the community that gathers around it. Night Gallery in Lincoln Heights manages, through spirit and vision, to gather incredible coteries of artists, musicians and other less categorizable cultural practitioners to its events. Open most weeknights after 10 p.m., Night Gallery is… More >>

• Best Damn Sideshow!

  Venice Beach Freak Show

  What Todd Ray and his clan have created is nothing short of astounding: That a pricey slice of Venice boardwalk could offer wonders of the world, with a $5 entry fee, is a feat worth of Ripley himself. But Ray's Venice Beach Freak Show beats the Believe It or Not behemoth on all fronts. Ray possesses not only the world's… More >>

• Best Front Yard for Experimental Architecture

  Materials & Applications

  Nothing better defines the perils of suburban sprawl than the front lawn. One of the scariest moments in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands was not the boy in the S&M gear with the killer fingers but the endless stretch of perfectly manicured green in the town beneath the manse where he was made. Collaborators/spouses Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess have taken… More >>

• Best Secret Gallery on the Westside

  Jaus

  High rent plus large inventories of established names means there's little room for developing artists to show their works on the Westside. It's also why Jaus, a private gallery open by appointment, is the best secret gallery in the community. Housed in one of three buildings in a complex brilliantly designed by architect Ken Tanaka, the space is the brainchild… More >>

• Best Place to See and Make Art Where You Least Expect It

  Beacon Arts Building

  On the part of La Brea Avenue that stretches southward, down near where it crosses Centinela, a curious art experiment has been under way for about a year now in what is arguably one of the most underappreciated parts of L.A. — Inglewood. The goings-on at the Beacon Arts Building, along with its partners at the Inglewood Open Studio Tours,… More >>

• Best Avant-Garde Gallery on a Garage Roof

  Mackey Apartments

  When Schindler built the Mackey Apartments in 1939, he may well have imagined it as a place where artists, architects and students would come from around the world to live, work, get inspired and invite culturati to see their projects. But he probably didn't envision the apparition of a bright, shuttle-size open box, flooded with light, where the public would… More >>

• Best Waxploitation

  Oran Z African Black Facts and Wax Museum

  Don't let the name fool you. While Africa is represented at the Oran Z African Black Facts and Wax Museum, Oran Z — world-class hairstylist, inventor of the world's first and fastest hair weave and head of Black Media Productions (offering "a wide spectrum of services related to the entertainment industry") — cuts the jive in this gem across the… More >>

• Best Elephant Graveyard of Golden Age TV Stars

  Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Sculpture Court

  Park on the street and enter the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Sculpture Court through the Magnolia Boulevard drive. As you walk, enjoy the soothing strains of adult-contemporary pop eerily issuing from the concrete stanchions. Yes, it reassures, you have entered the hallowed grounds of the lowest common denominator. Your heart surges as you sight one of the seven… More >>

• Best Bargain Cinemas

  Culver Plaza Theatres - CLOSED

  It may look a little down-at-heels, but the Culver Plaza Theatres is a great place to maintain your reputation as a movie guru without breaking the bank. First-run hits show up fast enough that it's still cool to talk about them. Plus the five-plex screens some indies, foreign-language films and documentaries, as well as a steady stream of Bollywood hits.… More >>

• Best Dark Arts Gallery

  Hyaena Gallery

  There's an art gallery for absolutely everyone in Los Angeles, even fans of the macabre. Hyaena Gallery carries a large collection of "dark art" prints and original pieces, and frequently hosts similarly themed shows. For those who are fans of the blood-and-skulls aesthetic, Hyaena offers just about anything you can imagine, including Charles Manson's nude-photo collection and even his yarn-knitted… More >>

• Best Down-to-Earth Gallerist

  Jancar Gallery

  Most gallery owners have offices tucked away at the back of their white-walled spaces. If a desk is near the entrance, it's often occupied by a self-conscious assistant or an administrator steeped in paperwork. Not so at Chinatown's Jancar Gallery. The big desk is right there on your left as soon as you walk in, and it's usually occupied by… More >>

• Best Popsicle-Stick Furniture

  David Hrobowski's Riffstick

  To some, postconsumer Popsicle sticks are little more than prime vegetable-garden composting fuel. But West Hollywood artist David Hrobowski looks at each 4-inch piece of discarded birch wood as prime lumber for his latest New Orleans–inspired floor lamp design. These are not dollhouse-sized sofas or hand-held summer camp crafts, but mahogany-stained, 20,000-stick glass-topped dining tables and 2-foot-tall Art Deco table… More >>