Siran Babayan

Big Fun in Little Bavaria

Siran Babayan
In a culturally crowded city like L.A., where Little Armenia cohabits with Thai Town in East Hollywood, and the Byzantine-Latino Quarter is just a stone’s throw from Koreatown in Pico-Union, the existence of a neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood is hardly unusual. Except, perhaps, when that home away from home is made to look......
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Nellies On Fire

Siran Babayan
What greater homage to Joan Crawford is there than having a gay sketch-comedy troupe (who named themselves after a petticoat-wearing bully from Little House on the Prairie, a sappy TV show about farmers in the 1800s) reincarnate her as either Evita or Annie Sullivan teaching Helen Keller to spell O-S-C-A-R?......
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Shopping the ’Bank

Siran Babayan
Away from the AMCs, P.F. Chang’s–fronted malls, coffee-shop chains and packs of teenybopper wolves lies a sleepy hamlet of Burbank that’s a shopper’s alternative, nay paradise, to the ever-bustling downtown. Each one of the mostly vintage and antique shops that line Magnolia Park’s quaint and quiet (so quiet you can......
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Gonorrhea Gorgonzola

Siran Babayan
Photo by Ian JenningsThey were almost disconcertingly chummy with each other on KROQ the other night — all that backslapping between DJ Stryker and members of System of a Down, who conspired to turn KROQ into System Radio for a full hour to promote their new album, Mezmerize. It was......
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Bitch Bitch Bitch

Siran Babayan
“Someone has called me a bitch every day of my life since I was 11 years old,” proclaims Alison Arngrim, who accepts the fact that she has never been able to shake off her TV alter ego — mean, bratty Nellie Oleson from Little House on the Prairie. And in......
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Roseanne Barr’s Domestic Policy

Siran Babayan
Photo by Michael Hiller While in search of a network for a sitcom he was producing about two blue-collar workers, Michael Moore was once quoted as saying, "After Roseanne ended, what else is there?" Anyone who was a fan of Roseanne Barr’s nine-year show and recognized the warmth, earnestness and......

Let There Be Light

Siran Babayan
The eight members of Armenia’s Shoghaken Ensemble (the name means “source of light”) are folk-music ambassadors, representing not only their country’s biggest musical export but a bright torch of cultural pride that dates back to pagan roots, before Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion......
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Ancestral Sounds

Siran Babayan
Photo by Ari Michelson Some musical collaborations are best left unexamined. And when a duo like Serart goes into the studio for only six days (because “true and spontaneous stuff shouldn’t take so long”) and comes out with an almost wordless and completely improvised album incorporating every sound from man,......
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Boomslangers

Siran Babayan
Johnny Marr once said he was more content with being the guitarist of a band than a singer. But now, long after his 1987 departure from the Smiths -- the group that put him on the map as one of Britpop’s greatest axmen -- he‘s not only finally formed his......
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Bedazzled

Siran Babayan
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES at the Palladium, August 11 At the risk of giving in to silly cliches about a macabre madwoman, one can easily forgive such things as lousy acoustics after finally putting a voice to the face -- ruby red lips, kabuki pallor, blackened raccoon eyes -- that’s......