You wouldn’t know it by the band’s thrashy dance-until-you-break sound, but the first song Hot Hot Heat’s drummer Paul Hawley ever learned was the famous pre-school tune “You Are My Sunshine.” Of course, Hawley has moved on since then. Read more...

The Cooperage is that little UCLA venue that resembles The Max from “Saved by the Bell,” a place where you might find anything from a musician performing on tabletops to a band member sitting down with the audience eating a pizza after the show. Read more...

It’s not just any mall. Sure, the Santa Monica Third Street Promenade has more than its fair share of overpriced bookstores, blindingly lit window fronts filled with back-to-school halter-top specials, and an entire army of hairsprayed preteens ready at a second’s notice to shoot up that flirtatious right eyebrow. But the mall also has something that lures even the broke, the anti-social and occasionally, the police, night after night, mainly between the hours of 6 to 10 p.m. Read more...

Starting off the new Geffen Playhouse season is Stephen Jeffreys’ “I Just Stopped By to See the Man,” a three-person play about the power of the blues. Read more...

UCLA is undeniably one of the most diverse and dynamic college campuses in the country. It plays host to Nobel Prize-winning professors, Division I sports teams, a happening social scene and even an on-campus museum ““ the last being the least obvious. Read more...

The lights go down, the curtain goes up, and for the next few hours you are transported out of your ordinary life. The theater can be a magical, even life-changing experience. Read more...

Why rice? According to Fowler Museum of Cultural History curator Roy Hamilton, the starchy grain is the one commonality on a continent that makes no sense as a single unit. Read more...