I was sure that there was a Heathers joke to be had in that headline (”Teen Tetricide — Do It”), but you can’t win ‘em all.

ANYWAY.

This Saturday at 8 PM, the underground Echo Park gallery Pehrspace is hosting the opening night of Tetricide, a month-long exhibit of old-school-video-game-inspired artwork. It’s going to be wall-to-wall 8-bit awesomeness, with an emphasis on “interactive and experiential” pieces, with more pixelated imagery than you can swing a flaming arm of fire at. Featured artists include such avant-garde luminaries as J.R. Baldwin (known for creating the “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” board game, which I suppose makes him like the Parker Brother who doesn’t get invited to family reunions anymore) and Sam Yurick (a genre-jumper known for rapping over laptop beats while wearing a homemade Spiderman costume, amongst other great feats of what-the-fuckery.) They’re even hosting the premier of director Felix Lee’s “Back to the Future the Ride” music video, and although I have no idea what that means, I’m deeply intrigued.

The place is extremely difficult to find, detailed directions are here. Plus, it’s free. (Power-ups not included.)

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WHAT: Old-school-game-inspired art show
WHEN: Saturday, July 10th, 8 PM – Midnight
WHERE: Pehrspace
$$$: Free

“The difference between being ‘naked’ and being ‘nekkid’ is, that when you are naked, you have no clothes on. However, when you are nekkid, you have no clothes on and you are up to something.” — Tom Robbins, “Skinny Legs and All”

This Saturday, happening in 70 cities and 20 countries across the globe, is World Naked Bike Ride day — a world-wide celebration of all things bicycle and body-image. Anyone with a bike and a willingness to go balls-out (or, y’know, whatever-out) is welcome to join. And as part of my quest to make the unsuspecting civilians of Los Angeles see things they can’t unsee, I too will be participating. Ladies, please, CALM YOURSELVES.

Is nudity mandatory? Not at all — this thing is “bare as you dare.” (Although for anyone who’s seen me with my shirt off, it’ll be more like “bear as you dare”– zing!) Everyone’s going to meet in Echo Park at 1:30 PM for a body-decorating party, with the ride leaving at 4 PM sharp. It’ll be a medium-paced 13-mile loop around the East Side, ending in a barbecue/after-party at a to-be-disclosed location. (Please say “Pat Robertson’s house”, please say “Pat Robertson’s house.”) RSVP on Facebook to get ride directions and info.

We’re gonna get a medal for this one, kids.

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WHAT: World Naked Bike Ride Day
WHEN: Saturday, June 12th, pre-ride at 1:30, ride at 4
WHERE: Echo Park (rsvp for details)
$$$: Free

The Venice Beach Carnevale will not be televised. Nor will it actually be held in Venice; apparently, tonight’s hedonistic costume contest/dance-party/annual gathering of LA’s freaky people has somehow gotten too insane for the uptight streets of Venice Beach and has been moved to a secret location around Jefferson/Sepulveda. (If this were a grindhouse movie, the announcer would now solemnly intone: “It‘s a party so wild they had to move it to Culver City… where life is cheap!”)

Ok, let’s take a step back and think about this for a moment — how, exactly, does one get kicked out of Venice? Have you been there lately? You could walk around with a severed head and tourists would still ask to take pictures with you. Last time I was hanging out on the boardwalk, a guy in a leopard-print vest and bootie-shorts tried to sell me some meth, as well as (I am not making this up), a live, 5-foot python. Anyway so now I’ve got all this meth and a live python and my friends no longer like to come over. Point that I’m making here, people, it takes a lot to get your ass 86′d from Venice Beach. This event deserves your consideration.

Will there be a full-size intergalactic pirate ship known as the Space Wench to gallivant around? There will be. Will there be floor-shaking beats from the likes of Fatfinger, Todd Spero, and divaDanielle (who I’ve pimped so many times on this site, people are are going to sooner or later think I’m involved in some kind of payola scheme?) Bet your ass. Will there be a masquerade costume contest that lands somewhere between Salvador Dali and Eyes Wide Shut? Most definitely. Will there be a certain amount of public nudity? Yes ma’am. Will there be acrobats and fire performers and go-go dancers? What do you think this is, the Republican National Convention? (Ok, bad example.) Just remember to come in costume — “exotic and erotic attire encouraged.”

And if you want to get in, RSVP here today to get the address and final details for tonight.

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WHAT: Carnevale masquerade party
WHEN: Saturday June 5th, 8:30 PM – 3:30 AM
WHERE: Culver City (RSVP to get address)
$$$: $15 (or $35 for VIP/open bar)

Because what’s more punk rock than romping around the notoriously kitschy redwood forest themed bar, Bigfoot Lodge? Hanging out in an alley contemplating disestablishmentarian notions you say? Poppycock! (Or perhaps you’ve simply become bored that your only other social options on Tuesdays are being stuck in Hollywood, pretending to be pretentious. Bleh! That’s not punk rock at all!)

Starting this Tuesday, Some Nerve, the new bi-weekly punk rock n’ roll themed night invites you to take a few hours off from your anarchy planning to go have fun dancing around with Smokey The Bear while drinking cheap Colt 45. They’re on special (when are they not?) along with other drinks sure to unleash your wilderness rock monster. The various music providers of the evening (commonly referred to as “DJs”) include Helleion, Jacob Safari, and TNT, along with the roaming photographic stylings of Shadowscene, so don’t forget to get that studded leather jacket and mohawk in tip top shape!

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WHAT: Some Nerve punk rock n’ roll party
WHEN: Tuesday, June 1st – 9pm – 2am
WHERE: The Bigfoot Lodge, 3172 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90039
$$$: Free!!!

Two years ago, a gang of spirited young hooligans armed with MP3 players invaded Mann’s Chinese Theater to hold a very public dance-party. The invasion started quietly, done in plain sight, everyone simply mingling and pretending to examine celebrity handprints outside… until 10:07 PM, when everyone busted out earphones like gunslingers in a Robert Rodriguez movie and danced their ass off to whatever was on their Ipod — a silent, joyous collision between flash-mob and discotheque. There was also a conga-line at one point.

Tourists were mystified. Employees were stymied. Security was unable to stop laughing, even as they escorted us out. Undeterred, the party continued, West Side Story-style, down to Hollywood and Highland, where street performers, celebrity impersonators, and random passerby joined in on the festivities. (A guest appearance was made by several stone-faced, video-camera-brandishing members of the LAPD.) Footage of all this epic-ness is available right here.

Anyway — this year, rather than hold our party at some Hollywood tourist trap, we’re instead going for a prized LA institution, something this city holds near and dear, a place where regular folks go to peacefully shop, dine and take trolley-rides. That’s right, kids: we’re gonna storm The Grove.

Meet-up point is in front of Pacific 14 Movie Theater, by the fountains. Get there by 10 PM. Come ready to boogie in public (do what you need to do here, guys.) Mingle, act normal, do not attract attention from civilians. Headphones go in at exactly 10:07 PM, and then we dance like lunatics until security shows us out, at which point we respectfully go find a new “dance floor” elsewhere and repeat.  Afterparty at The Kibitz Room bar at Canter’s.

RSVP on Facebook here.

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WHAT: Mobile Dance-Club Party
WHEN: Friday, June 18th — dancing starts at 10:07 PM, sharp
WHERE: The Grove, in front of movie theater
$$$: Free

People talk about Runyon Canyon as being an “escape from the city.” Nonsense, I tell you — Runyon is basically a Crunch’s gym with sunlight. I see more Blackberry users there than at Insert Upscale-Beverly-Hills-Restaurant-That-I-Don’t-Go-To Here. If you want a real escape from the city, listen close…

Hidden directly off Los Feliz Blvd, right around the corner where it turns into Western, there’s a hidden woodland oasis that looks like something straight out of J.R.R. Tolkien’s subconscious. I’m talking about a place called Ferndell Park — which, you notice, even has a vaguely Middle Earth-y sounding name. You turn in near the sculpture of the dancing bear, and from here, you follow a densely shaded path, ensconced in California sycamores, winding up along gently trickling streams, past wooden guide-barriers and under stone bridges. The sound of the distant traffic fades out, and is replaced by that of birds, running water, and even — that rarest of LA commodities — silence. And yet you are still only a short walk from snacks.

For short men with hairy feet, i.e. me, this place is a dream come true.

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WHAT: hidden LOTR-esque mini-hike
WHEN: good all year round
WHERE: Ferndell Park
$$$: Free

You solve one problem, you create another. Take the LA river for example; back in the 1930’s, it was prone to erratic, city-wide flash-floods — most notoriously the deluge of 1938, a catastrophe that killed 115 people, caused $40 million in damage, and caused mayor Frank L. Shaw to resign in embarrassment after running his campaign on the slogan “Get Tough On Floods.” Anyway, in an effort to curb the floods’ infinitely-more-successful campaign of “Get Tough On LA”, the US Army Corps of Engineers undertook the ambitious task of paving the entire river in cement, so as to better control its flow. Which was a brilliant idea that made everyone happy, at least until everyone realized that a cement river is about as aesthetically pleasing as Rush Limbaugh in a tanning bed, and that it would soon become a crime-infested, vagrant-attracting, graffiti-covered, trash-strewn HPV-wart on the ass of the city.

Like I said: you solve one problem, you create another. But sometimes, out of that new problem, you get art.

Which brings us to the Ulysses Guide To The LA River, an exhibition happening now through July 3rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. It’s inspired by the book of the same name by urban explorer Christopher D. Brand, who spent years traversing all 51 miles of the concrete tributary, discovering its hidden pockets of loveliness and horror. Every piece in the show — from graffiti murals, to oil paintings, to algae-covered beer bottles stashed throughout the museum, to live plants and a prerecorded soundscape of river noises, to a full-scale recreation of an under-the-bridge canal — depicts the beautiful/blighted aesthetic of LA’s native waterway. It offers a glimpse of a place most Angelenos never experience up close — a district of overgrown greenery, 50-year-old street art, wildlife both animal and human, enshrouded in a palpable sense of gutter-dwelling danger and subterranean mystery.

It’s the next best thing to simply jumping the fence and checking the river out for real. (Not that I would ever suggest such a thing…)

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WHAT: down-and-dirty LA river art exhibit
WHEN: Wednesday-Sunday, 12 PM – 5 pm
WHERE: Pasadena Museum of California Art
$$$: $7 admission, $5 with student ID

Along one of LA’s ugliest streets — a soul-deadening stretch of Jefferson Blvd that runs through the industrial sector of Culver City, past tinny warehouses and the graffiti-strewn cement banks of Ballona Creek — lies one of the city’s best views.  Not on the street, mind you, but above it, in the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook. From atop that unassuming hill, surrounded by fields of yellow flowers and winding garden paths, you can see from Catalina to Compton, from downtown to the Hollywood sign, from Century City to the Inland Empire, and everything in between.

As for how you get up to there, you have two choices — 1: automobile/bike, or 2: PAIN. And by that I mean, a set of steps that are like the brutish, inked-up, just-got-out-of-jail cousin to the Silverlake Stairs — haphazard slabs of stone, spaced unevenly in a dizzying line straight up the face of the mountain. They’re an infernal test of a workout (you know you’re in for a treat when the Yelp reviews say things like “Do not climb these stairs without first downloading ‘Ms. New Bootie’ by Bubba Sparxxx onto your Ipod; thinking of how nice this is going to make your ass look is the only thing that will prevent your imminent collapse.”) But that ordeal only makes the breath-stealing sights up top so much more rewarding.

You’ll notice the overlook doesn’t offer the same pastoral view of the city you’d get from, say, Paseo Miramar. Instead, it serves up a warts-and-all portrait of everything gorgeous and awful about our city — gleaming sun-bright towers and anonymous urban sprawl, nightmarishly teeming freeways and rolling green hills, blue ocean and beige smog, industrial and residential, rich and poor, the effing terrible and the ineffable.

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WHAT: Urban hike with an amazing view
WHEN: Good all year round
WHERE: West Jefferson Blvd, Culver City
$$$: Free

You haven’t really lived until you’ve gone flying down Wilshire Blvd on a bicycle at 10 o’clock at night surrounded by a speeding mob of 300 hundred other cyclists — and this Friday, you have the opportunity to do just that. Critical Mass is world-wide celebration of bike culture, happening once a month in different cities all around the globe, wherein hordes of pedal-enthusiasts take to the night-time streets and let their freak flags fly. The event’s moniker comes from a phenomenon in which traffic is compelled to a stand-still once a high enough number of bikes take over the road. (This doesn’t, however, give you license to be a dick to passing motorists and/or the cops — this means you, idiot from last month who wowed the world with his creativity by yelling “I smell bacon” at the LAPD.  Guys like you make me wish Daryl Gates was still alive.)

The ride starts at 7:30 PM sharp, at the Western/Wilshire metro station. Bring your wheels, helmet, an extra tube, water, and learn the call-outs.  And most importantly, bring front and rear lights — crucial for obvious safety reasons, as well as being part of the magical visual effect you get when you crest a hill and look down upon a moving river of blinking red luminescence. For the three hours of contained anarchy that go along with CM taking to the streets, there’s no better way to spend a Friday night.

For more information, check out their Facebook page.

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WHAT: Crazy night-time bike ride
WHEN: Friday April 30th — meet up at 6:30, ride at :730
WHERE: Wilshire/Western metro station
$$$: Free

Culver City is decadent and depraved! Well, no, that’s not entirely true, it’s actually kind of New Jersey suburb-ish and really rather pleasant… but on May 8th, there’s an underground festival going on that will set those earlier words in stone. That’s when the Mystikal Misfits, a hardy tribe of LA-based Burning Man fanatics, are throwing COLLECTION! – a dance party that promises such high levels of giddy debauchery, anyone who hopes to someday have a political career should avoid getting photographed there.

There will be mysterious cocktails.  There will be fire-dancing. There will be adorable, scantily-clad boys and girls running around in “Mad Max” gear and neon fur.  There will be a giant Twister board, for those of you who need a socially acceptable reason to get in compromising positions with aforementioned adorables. There will be amazing house and electro DJ’s, headlined by DivaDanielle tag-teaming with Todd Spero, spinning the kind of beats that will later have your doctor admonishing you to include less funkiness in your diet. There will be an aromatherapy booth, and classy dames selling cigarettes (not in the aromatherapy booth.) It’s being held at Mission Control, adjacent to Jefferson Ave and the 405, the exact building address of which is being kept under wraps until the night of the party — RSVP on the Facebook page to get all the details.

Culver City will never know what hit it.

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WHAT: Underground Burning Man dance party
WHEN: Saturday, May 8th, 9PM – 4 AM
WHERE: Mission Control
$$$: $15

Have you always wanted to be famous, but know you don’t have what it takes to become a star (i.e. a sex tape where Ray-J pees on you?) Fear not — because on April 24th, we’re all getting famous. No, this does not involve guns, put those down. STOP THAT.

Full disclosure: I’m one of the guys throwing this event. Now here’s how it works: we meet at noon in front of the WME building, where we run a winding, three-mile obstacle course through Beverly Hills. Hidden throughout the course will be packs of photographers. Your goal is to make it to the finish line without them getting a picture of your full face.

Scattered along the way will be hidden caches of “identity concealers”, i.e. low-brimmed hats and those sunglasses that put a black bar over your eyes. (We were going to offer ski masks, and then remembered ski masks + sprinting through Beverly Hills in broad daylight = “Officer, these cuffs are too tight.”)

Got a camera and the ability to be sneaky? We want you. Got a pair of running shoes and a well-developed flight sensibility? We want you. (Costumes are also encouraged.) The race starts at noon, but paparazzi are required to show up at 11 AM so we can get you vultures in your respective hiding places.

Afterward, in a stirring tribute to something that would totally happen in real life, the celebrities and the paparazzi will meet up for a beer at the Writer’s Bar in the L’Ermitage Hotel.

Be sure to RSVP for the event on Facebook.

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WHAT: Celebrities Vs. Paparazzi footrace
WHEN: April 24th, noon-1 PM (Paparazzi to meet at 11 AM)
WHERE: Starting at the WME building
$$$: Free

Hold your breath and dive – dive – dive!  In the truest sense of the term, Jumbo’s Clown Room is a dive bar.  On Hollywood Boulevard near Thai-Town Jumbo’s is a skeazy little bikini bar (essentially a strip club where no one gets naked) with nothing to prove.

The drinks here are nothing special; just your run of the mill mixed drinks and bud light on tap.  What is special about Jumbo’s is something intangible.  On the surface it is a tiny, dirty, seedy strip bar, but when you are inside nothing about it feels that way.  The staff

The Jumbo's Girls do The Time Warp

and the dancing girls are extremely warm and friendly, they seem to really just want you to have a fun time.  I have only been to Jumbo’s in mixed company and the ladies always have as just as much fun as the fellas.

The thing about Jumbo’s Clown Room is you either get it or you don’t.  Do you get it?  Bring some ones and  head to the Clown Room to find out.

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WHAT: Friendly burlesque dancers cultivate your good time.
WHEN: Daily till 2am
WHERE: Jumbo’s Clown Room
$$: $6 for a can of beer, bring some cash to tip.

“There’s something wrong with my ass — I need to shake it.”  This was the bound-for-immortality quote my friend delivered to me as we headed out to a Shade party last summer. And if there is ever a better reason to shake your ass in a grassy park on a Saturday afternoon, I have yet to find it.

The brainchild of LA-based DJ’s DivaDanielle and Porter Tinsley, Shade is a once-a-month “day party”, kicking off this Saturday from noon til sunset  in Woodley Park. It’s the kind of place where you’ll find yourself drinking strange libations with friendly strangers on picnic blankets in the afternoon sun; where you can go ballistic with squirt-guns during impromptu water-fights; where you can try your hand at hula-hooping or spinning poi (being met with, if you’re anything like me, hilariously mixed results); where you’ll watch silk-rope acrobats slowly gyrate in the trees, like an NSFW Disney cartoon; where DJ’s you’d normally have to venture out deep into clubland (or into Burning Man) to find, are happily spinning funky house and ghetto-tech to their hearts’ content. It’s one of those things that reminds out-of-towners why they moved to LA, and reminds locals why they love it here (and for me, why I ever got into event-blogging in the first place.) It’s a secret too good to keep.

Summer’s here. Stop dilly-dallying. Go shake it.

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WHAT: Daytime dance party in the park
WHEN: Once a month, Saturdays from noon til sunset
WHERE: Woodley Park
$$$: Free

I am totally not the guy for this.  In my seven years in LA, I never once booked myself any kind of massage, no matter what kind of ache-causing weekend shenanigans I got myself into; I simply went by my dad’s credo of “When sore, drink more.”

Then, after doing the LA Marathon (and thus becoming the first person in history ever to run 26.2 miles while sobbing continuously), I discovered that my body had magically invented new ways to be in pain, causing me to walk like Frankenstein after having his prostate examined by Captain Hook.  It was bad.

Luckily, a friend suggested the Pho Siam Thai Spa,  and let me say: this place turned out be populated with miracle workers.  Tiny, middle-aged, Asian miracle-workers that step on you. A dimly lit, teak-walled, two-story enclave situated just south of Echo Park (by the late, great L’Keg Gallery), Pho Siam has three major things going for it.

1: THEY’RE CHEAP.  $30 bucks for half an hour, or $50 for an hour. Which, by LA massage studio standards, is practically ski-ball tickets.

2: THEY’RE AMAZING.  You know that scene in Fight Club where Helena Bonham Carter has just finished having sexy-time with Brad Pitt, and she has that look of exhausted, marrow-deep satisfaction as she flops down next to him? That’s what you look like when you walk out of here.  It will make you want a cigarette, regardless of whether you actually smoke.

3: THEY’RE OPEN LATE.  Not, like, sleazy late (they close at 10:30 pm); it’s a cool spot to take a date.

Trust me: let them walk all over you.

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WHAT: Nighttime Echo Park massage studio
WHEN: Monday – Sunday, 9 AM – 10:30 PM
WHERE: Pho Siam Thai Spa
$$$: $30 for half an hour — cash only

Let’s pretend it’s a Sunday morning.  The weather is beautiful, the skies are bright, your hangover has started to dissipate, the half-dressed stranger has been kicked out of your house, and by God, it’s time to carpe the damn diem.  My advice: first carpe your bike (or rent one), and then head down to The Strand.

A stretch of winding concrete path spanning 30 miles south from Will Rogers State Beach, The Strand offers a perfect way to take in the case of Multiple Personality Disorder from which our coast suffers so gloriously.

I started at the Redondo Pier and headed north, pedaling past the frat-tastic beach parties of Hermosa, cruising by a beached ship that street-artists had turned into a mural, watching surfers ride the (possibly radioactive) waves beyond the power plants, floated through the laconic East-Coast-fishing-village vibes of Manhattan, gliding under howling jetliners and through the boombox soul music and mouth-watering barbecue smoke of Dockweiler, zipping alongside sailboats in Marina Del Rey, dodging meth-heads and performance artists (po-tay-to, po-tah-to?) in Venice, stopping to play Tarzan on the swing-rings in Santa Monica, before finally heading up through the windswept sands adjacent to the PCH, where the trail died out.

Turning around to ride home in the afternoon sun, ocean air whistling past, I found myself mentally stealing (and slightly misappropriating) a line Edward Norton said in Keeping The Faith: “Anyone who doesn’t live here must, on some level, be kidding themselves.”

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WHAT: Bike path along every beach in LA
WHEN: Good all year round
WHERE: Starts in Redondo, ends at Will Rogers State Beach
$$$: Free

Ok, so — who wants to spend an entire day walking up and down an endless series of concrete stairs?

You do, if you want to see multiple sides of this crazy, beautiful, depraved city all at once.  Back before cars became the primary mode of transportation in LA (like way back in the day), residents of Silverlake/Echo Park had to access their homes via a series of staircases built directly into the hillsides. Because they didn’t have roads, or cars to drive on the roads, which didn’t exist. Shit was rough then, son.

Luckily for us, the past’s necessity has become the present’s excellent-way-to-kill-a-Sunday — part urban adventure, part scavenger hunt. Here’s the map.

You start just off of Sunset Blvd, by one of those Mexican polka-nightclubs that you secretly have always wanted to go into, and head up the Music Box Stairs, made famous for Laurel and Hardy’s inability to get a piano down them.

From here, you spill down across the Junction, and up into the hills where the houses become smaller, hobbit-like, obscured by vines and greenery.  You tramp up along Griffith Park and resist the urge to go into Hard Times Pizza. (Or you don’t; I’m not judging.)  You pass a glass-walled stilt-house where someone told you Scarlett Johansson lives. You wait for Scarlett Johansson to come out. She doesn’t. You ramble onward, along the reservoir and past hidden parks. You dodge crack vials on the steps leading down to a gypsy-camp ensconced off Glendale. You take in views of the city that look like something Terrance Mallick might shoot. You get lost a lot, and feel a strange sense of accomplishment every time you track down an elusive set of steps. “I’m never using a stairmaster again,” you think to yourself.

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WHAT: Urban adventuring in Silverlake
WHEN: Good all year round
WHERE: Start on Vendome St, just south of Sunset
$$$: Free

A couple miles north of Sunset Blvd in the Palisades lies Paseo Miramar, a five-mile hike that gives you some of the most gobsmacking views of the Pacific Ocean you’ll ever witness.

But first, you must pay a price.

I’m not going to lie to you: the first two miles of this thing — a steep, winding, seemingly endless incline up the canyon, with each corner promising relief that never comes — are going to kick you in the face.  They are going to kick the faces of your friends, your pets, your distant family members, and your unborn children.  Add a ponytail to them and they’d be Steven Segal in Out For Justice. Your suffering is going to be legendary.

But then, after about 45 minutes, something magical happens: your body accepts its fate. And before you know it, the incline levels out, and you’re slaloming down through green tree-tunnels and past wetlands and up through fields of high, honey-colored grass. Finally, you hit the top and there’s a wooden bench waiting for you. You flop down and drink in the views of the rolling Palisades, the muted sprawl of the city, the toy-sized Santa Monica Ferris Wheel in the distance, and that sheet of blue rippling from the crescent edges of the continent.  It’s all yours.

Masochism: it has its upsides.

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WHAT: Hike in the Palisades
WHEN: Good all year round
WHERE: Trail starts at the top of Paseo Miramar Rd
$$$: Free

Check out this unique idea to reinvent city streets through out LA on Sunday mornings: CicLAvia, a group that has previously done this same project in Colombia, successfully if I may add, wants to close down at least three major streets from East LA to West LA on various Sundays this summer and turn them into urban parks. To even attempt to accomplish this plan, they need your vote here. The idea is that they will block off the streets from car traffic from 10am-1pm, only allowing pedestrians, cyclists, families, skateboarders, and anyone else who you would find at a park to enjoy beautiful Sundays mornings outside and in a safe enclosure. They aim to provide this service in areas where parks are extremely lacking, the population is extremely dense, and is near public transportation to allow all to attend. Whether it works or not, it’s a nice idea and feel free to decide for yourself if it deserves your vote! They are currently ranked 53rd and need to be in the top 10 ideas to win the grant.
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WHAT: CicLAvia’s 7-mile Streets to Parks Project
WHEN: Voting ends March 31st
WHERE: Click here to vote!
$$$: Free

Thanks to a tip from our Twitter (why yes, we do have a Twitter page, you should totally follow us!), we now know about this incredible worldwide event entitled, Obscura Day. If you, like me, have never heard of this day, let me enlighten you: all around the world, people rediscover their city’s weird, wacky, and historical places. For instance in Berkeley on this day, you can get up close and personal with the creepy taxidermy and skeletons of the famous Bone Room and talk to the owner about all the stories he’s collected over the years. And then in St. Petersburg, Russia, you can roam the “tower of griffens” that used to lead to a famous druggist laboratory. But let’s talk about Los Angeles’s event shall we? A group of 50 will meet at the Echo Park Time Travel Mart at 11:30am and take off on the Atlas Obscura Bus to discover the lost land of cane sugar soda pop at Galco’s Soda Pop Stop (with free tastes of course), then a picnic lunch at the Old Zoo in Griffith Park where you can crawl through abandoned lion cages. After lunch, you’ll go to the Velaslavasay Panorama (which I just now realized I lived right across the street from and never even thought twice about and now regret it), where you will experience a “360-degree display of the arctic north” and be able to “explore a carnivorous plant garden” in the back. Finally you’ll end up at a puppetry performance and behind the scenes tour of Bob Baker’s Marionette Theater, apparently the oldest theater of it’s kind in America. Wow. This is definitely a whole new look at LA. I think we win for the most obscure event lineup! RSVP soon, they’re almost full!
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WHAT: Obscura Day 2010 in Los Angeles
WHEN: Saturday, March 20th @ 11:30am
WHERE: Echo Park Time Travel Mart
$$$: $30 when you arrive

“Don’t do it. You’ll get eaten by coyotes.”  This is usually the response I get when I tell people I want to go night-hiking in Griffith Park.  “Nonsense,” I tell them, “I am a large, imposing adult male, not Jessica Simpson’s dog.  Besides, the coyote presence up there is seriously over-reported.”

The first thing I saw when I got there was a coyote.  Cold chillin’ in the parking lot by the merry-go-round. Humans — we only pretend we run this town.

Three times a week for the past few years, the Sierra Club has been leading after-dark hikes up into the mountains between Hollywood and Glendale.  A crowd of 60 or so adventurers gathers in the upper carousel parking lot, where individual groups form based on speed/trail difficulty (I chose a “3+” i.e. “medium” hike.) Then, lead by a central-casting Greek grandfather named Yanni, we were off, twenty silhouettes loping into the darkened hills.

Your eyes adjust to the gloom as you ascend a thin, winding trail, up through what Bob Dylan described as “haunted, frightened trees”, branches stripped by last year’s fires and looking like something from a Tim Burton movie in the moonlight.  You climb under giant fallen logs and bushwhack through overgrowth.  The sound of the freeway gives way to a chorus of chirping crickets and croaking frogs, and then silence — the soundtrack best suited to the spooky majesty of the landscape.  You crest a hill and the entire Los Angeles valley, from downtown to the ocean, opens up below like a massive, glowing cauldron.  “I feel like Batman right now,” you think to myself.  (Seriously, you think that.) Two hours and six miles later, you’re back in the city — sweaty, dusty-streaked and happy.

Don’t be fooled, dear humans; the coyotes know where it’s at.

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WHAT: Night Hike
WHEN: Tues, Wed, Thurs, starting at 6:45 PM
WHERE: Griffith Park — meet at the upper carousel parking lot
$$$: Free