Gendy Alimurung

Hardcore hikers and backpackers typically go to two places for expedition equipment: REI or Adventure 16. REI’s stuff tends to be less expensive, but Adventure 16, particularly the larger West Los Angeles location, is the place to go if you want to talk to someone who really knows a Marmot......

The happeningest place at any museum, aside from the courtyard coffee cart, is the gift shop. The one at MOCA in New York is almost as legendary as the museum itself. The shop at Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood has a stellar collection of whimsical toys and modern doodads, and......

Cameo Bar, inside the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, is a swanky California seaside hotel’s take on a traditional English lounge, which is to say, laid-back enough that the pretty waitress will look the other way if you’re wearing flip-flops, yet classy enough to put even the most pretentious dandy......

It’s a favorite of hipsters, artists, scholars, scientists and pretty much anyone with an interest in natural history, dimly lit rooms, mysticism, bees, Wunderkammer, biology, archaeology, pyramids, taxidermy, Victoriana, the notion of what makes a museum a museum, and/or a general sort of elegant weirdness. The Museum of Jurassic Technology,......

The Cinespia film screenings at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, otherwise known as “I see movies with dead people,” started in 2002 with a handful of hardcore film buffs and has evolved into a several-thousand-people weekly summer pilgrimage. On Saturday and Sunday evenings through mid-September, people traipse across the cemetery lawn......

Everyone has their own favorite neighborhood thrift store, the name and location of which they guard with the close-lipped fervor of Allied operatives keeping state secrets from the Nazis. Each store specializes in merchandise subject to the individual whims of its proprietor. Aardvark’s Odd Ark has long been the place......