This Friday, May 15th we invite you to Johnie’s Coffee Shop for a spontaneous buffet of performance for one night only! UPDATE: Doors at 8:30PM!
Kye Alive (@kyealive )
Performing “TIMES SQUARE LAS VEGAS,” a maximalist performance collapsing spectacle and identity into an ever-expanding world.
Hosted by
Megan Koester (@bornferal )
Performances by
Logan Hone (@loganhone )
George Chen (@georgethechen )
DJ Sets by YACHT (@teamyacht )
All of this and it’s FREEEEEEEEEE!
Whatever Next!?
#stunning #magnificent #perfect #entertaining #sophisticated
Our all-time favorite @bobbakermarionettes show is Hooray LA: Bob Baker’s final masterpiece, it’s an epic history of Los Angeles on strings, told through dancing oil wells, romancing mountain lions, and one truly delightful freeway sequence. We love it so much we’re coming out of semi-retirement *this* Friday night (5/31) to host a special evening presentation of Hooray LA at the wonderful Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Friends and followers can use the ticket code 5EVERYDAY for a whopping 20% off tickets! We’ll be there to give an intro and sit criss-cross applesauce to cheer and sob alongside all y’all.
Amazing flyer art by @doodledose 🎨
The Larry Edmunds Bookshop was founded in 1938 and has called Hollywood Boulevard home since 1955, which makes it, along with Musso’s and the Egyptian Theater, one of the boulevard’s great old guard institutions (and that particular trio is a date night waiting to happen, by the way). Owner Jeffrey Mantor started as a stockboy 30 years ago and keeps the shelves loaded with scripts, plays, books on film theory, TV, and video art, movie memoirs and Hollywood tell-alls. The inventory is heavy on cheap and cheerful used books (on our last visit we counted *three* different 70s paperbacks about Dudley Moore) and it makes for a perfect post-movie poke-around for any cinephile worth their salt.
Tucked away inside a walled block in West Adams hides a secret oasis for bibliophiles: UCLA’s Clark Memorial Library. Built as a private library and residence in 1923 by the philanthropist William Andrews Clark Jr.—founder of the Los Angeles philharmonic and the money behind the construction of the Hollywood Bowl—the Clark’s holdings include all manner of 17th and 18th century British literature, rare incunabula, Arts and Crafts fine printings, and the most comprehensive collection of Oscar Wilde materials in the world. The library was decorated by Clark’s lover, Harrison Post, whose face, it’s said, graces the bodies of the thirteen angelic naked men painted on the library entrance’s ornate ceiling fresco. For more about William Andrews Clark’s life and illicit loves, do not miss @evcbrown ’s essential history, Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire (@twilightmanbook ).
The Clark is open to researchers and to interested members of the public by appointment, but the best way to see the library is to attend one of their excellent public programs—the chamber music series, in particular, has a cult following. Check their site for listings.
We finally went on one of @laconservancy ’s downtown Art Deco walking tours this weekend. Biggest wow: the historic Southern California Edison Company building on the corner of 5th & Grand, with its nutty two-story interior lobby decked out in 17 types of marble and filled with period details, from the original wood-paneled elevators and marble drinking fountains to allegorical murals and reliefs. One of the first buildings in the U.S. to have an electrically-powered heating and cooling system, today it’s an office building—and the lobby, complete with espresso bar, is open for public gawking. Peep a few extra details in our Story 👀
Although Hollywood Forever, a stone’s throw from the Paramount backlot, is perhaps better-known as the graveyard of cinema's golden age, the pocket-sized Pierce Brothers Memorial Park, sandwiched between two Westwood highrises catty-corner from the Hammer, might boast the most star power per headstone in Los Angeles: come here to pay your respects to Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe (buried side-by-side), Dean Martin, Natalie Wood, Roy Orbison and Frank Zappa, Truman Capote and Ray Bradbury, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and both Dominique Dunn and Heather O’Rourke (Dana and Carole Anne from Poltergeist), two young actresses taken far too soon. Perhaps because it’s a cemetery full of entertainers, expect an unusual amount of gag headstones—opportunities for the likes of Billy Wilder and Rodney Dangerfield to squeeze in one last laugh from beyond the grave.
h/t to friend of 5 Every Day @blazinnathan for the tip!
Getting the holiday season squirrelies? A day trip is the answer. A 40-minute drive takes you to Vasquez Rocks, a buffet of majestic rock formations on 900+ acres of parkland, so angular and objectively alien-looking that they're regularly used as a cinematic stand-ins for extraterrestrial planets (Trekkies know). Although photo ops on the central rocks tend to be the draw for most, take the day and hike the quiet 4-mile extended loop trail, which links up with the PCT and offers plenty of breezy vantages for your end-of-year meditations.
The entire internet fell in love with Scott Rogowsky when he was “quiz daddy,” the disarmingly charismatic host of the briefly-ubiquitous interactive trivia app HQ. These days, Rogowsky shills his rare t-shirt collection out of a space on Main Street in Santa Monica he calls Quiz Daddy’s Closet—a tiny storefront stuffed with the vintage sports tees, starter caps, and early oughts trash pop culture shirts Rogowsky has been compulsively buying for decades.
Halloween season—which we define as the end of September through Thanksgiving, at least—has just one objective: the fun-sized consumption of empty calories. Jack’s Wholesale Candy & Toy Company is the biggest candy store in Los Angeles, and although the enormous warehouse downtown isn't much to look at, they've got your Hersheys, they've got your Haribo, they've got your Ferrara Pan, they've got your waxy cola bottles and your Cucharita tamarind candy spoons, all stacked to the ceilings alongside just about every other esoteric candy produced in North America and beyond. Buy a pillowcase's worth and make spooky season last until Christmas.
Three cheers for @bobbakermarionettes ’ lovingly updated presentation of Bob Baker’s classic 1966 ¡FIESTA! The theater has worked closely with community partners to make the 50-year-old show a more accurate & inclusive representation of the cultures it reflects. A stunning Día de Muertos sequence is the heart of the revitalized show, with intricate new skeleton marionettes spinning, wheeling and dancing under the black light (and yes, one of them wears tiny Crocs). As always: a guaranteed peak experience for all generations, sweetened by a party cup of ice cream post-show. Running now through mid-September!
Sucker for succulents? Geez, aren’t we all! They’re the apex of creation: thrifty with water, infinitely regenerative, and inspiringly sculptural. Why aren't all plants succulents? Why aren't *we* succulents? This is the line of thinking we guarantee you’ll start spinning on a stroll through Reseda’s one-and-half-acre Cactus Ranch: a sprawling, shambolic nursery full of towering fenceposts, oddball rosettes, saguaro saplings and mutant rarities of all sizes and price points. Open to the public only on weekends. 🌵
