The World Has Ended. Let's Party.

I'm not one to resort to hyperbole, but the party I'm throwing on Saturday night is going to be the greatest thing ever to happen to anyone in America. 

Let me break it down for you.

It's called ATOMIKA. It's a all-night post-apocalyptic  dance rager. Everyone is going to get dressed up like sexy Mad Max motherfuckers. It'll be held at a secret location in west LA, that we're decking out with 3-D mushroom clouds, lasers, and insane lighting. We're brewing our own beer for it -- Blitzkrieg Hop IPA and Lord Humungous Hefeweizen. We'll be having adorable ladies (some of whom will be on rollerskates, because safety third) roaming around, offering test-tube shots of declious nuclear waste. There will be a room-sized art installation featuring massive prints of nuclear blasts, courtesy of artist Tiger Phino. We'll have aerial performers (behold, the mighty Emily Pennington!!!), fire spinners, cage dancers, and eye-frying visuals from HaiJak. It's going until 6 AM, so tell your mom you're sleeping over at a friend's house.

I haven't even talked about the music yet, have I?

You know how in Bollywood movies, they have the whole cast come out and do a big musical number at the very end, so you get to hang out with all your favorite characters one last time? To me, our lineup is kind of like that -- an absolute who's-who of every DJ I've loved over the past few years, all together at once.

We've got Solovox, a Portland-based producer whom this blog has a well-documented boner for, bringing his turbo-charged funk to bear. (Seriously, check out the height-of-subtlety that is "Kill You With My Sex"; just don't do it at work.) We've got divaDanielle, aka intrepidLA's fairy godmother, who's new track "Funky Sheriff" sounds like a gang of Burners kicking open the door to Eric Clapton's studio in 1974; Wolfie, the Steampunk Saloon badass responsible for blowing the roof of the Mystikal Misfits party last year, as well as the upcoming Boomtown; breakbeat maestro Loomer, who'll be tearing it up at Lightning In A Bottle later this summer; and Nick The Neck, the mesmerizing tech-house alter-ego of Pumpkin (whom we've written one or two things about.) Also coming to bring joy to the wasteland are Fleetwood Smack (supremely ass-shakey); Squachek (oh-my-god-my-face-what-is-happening); Hippiechick (try not bopping your head, I dare you); and The Fuzz ("sir, please come down off that table and stop rocking so hard.") 

Forget feeling "fine" -- it's the end of the world as we know it, and you're gonna feel awwwesome.

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• WHAT: Atomika
  
• WHERE: West LA -- RSVP to receive address
• WHEN: Saturday, May 18th, 9 PM - 6 AM
  
• $$$: $20 in advance, $25 day of -- get tickets here
  

Our Favorite Back-Alley Bar In Koreatown

When introducing unsuspecting newcomers to Koreatown's Dwit Gol Mok, the key element is surprise.

What you do: gather up some friends and don't tell them where you're going. Just tell them to bring a Sharpie. And say "trust me." If your friends are like mine, they'll say "Fuck that, last time we trusted you, we wound up at a cowboy bar in Fullerton where that drunk Texan tried to force us to invest in bulls." And you tell them that was weeks ago and there is no reason to be bringing up the past, and that spending their life savings on a rodeo bull is a gambit that will eventually pay off. They finally relent.

You park your bull on Wilshire and walk north on Berendo. There'll be a gloomy parking lot on your right. Lead everyone through there. There will be a ramp leading up to a darkened alley portal. Go up that ramp. Ignore your friends' nervous whispers and the murmured accusations that "he's taking us somewhere to sell us into sex slavery." (That was ONE TIME, Mike.) Head through an archway, into a dimly lit courtyard. Walk through a doorway, past a kitchen, up a flight of stairs, and you are finally in...

...the greatest Korean dive-bar in Los Angeles. Think of an early 90's Tony Scott movie about Asian gangsters, imagine where a clandestine criminal meeting would take place, and you've basically got Dwit Gol Mok. The interior is a buzzing shantytown, full of sloped tin roofs, booths private enough to have sex in, the lighting a lurid scheme of blue-and-red-and-cigarette-smoke, and every inch of wall-space covered in Sharpie-scrawled graffiti.

There is soju to be sipped and Hite to be swilled, and sizzling sweet pork ribs to be nommed on. There's a seafood pancake that does right everything that fellow dive-bar legend OB Bear does wrong. The menus are blocks of wood etched with Korean writing. The whole place percolates with conspiracy and mischief.

Be sure to leave a Sharpie message on the wall. One for your friends. Perhaps: "I told you so."

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• WHAT: Dwit Gol Mok
  
• WHERE: 3275 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90010
• WHEN: 5 PM - 2 AM, Mon-Sat
  
• $$$: Typical K-Town bar prices
  

Painting With Laser Light

When I initially heard that some guys out in Venice were building a structure that allowed you to "paint with light", the first thing I thought of was Thomas Kinkade, the "painter of light"/pig-faced grifter whose unnaturally glowing Christian-bait art is something that I'm convinced was originally developed to enrage rodeo bulls. Anyway, after smashing some furniture and trying to trample a matador, I calmed down, and realized "Wait, no, this is actually awesome..."

Check this out: tonight, the Future Bright Collective is throwing A Light Hazing, fundraiser dance-party for what might be the coolest art project I've heard about in ages. The titular project is a "collapsible, pavilion-esque structure" that gets filled from inside with glowing blacklight, and everyone who walks through it is given a UV "pen" to paint with on the walls. Which demands the question, how often do you get to create glow-in-the-dark laser graffiti? Everything about my 12-year-old self loves this. 

The project will be making it's debut at Burning Man in August, and you can look for it at the Venice Art Crawl in the future -- but first they gotta get their funds completed, so get out to Vanguard Hollywood tonight and enjoy yourself some boogie time. IntrepidLA favorite DJ Wolfie, as well as the Cruz Coalition's DJ Eva and Bird Of Prey will be tickling your eardrums. It's gonna be grand.

Thomas Kinkade is not invited. Because seriously, fuck that guy.

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•WHAT: A dance-party for the laser-painting art project A Light Hazing

•WHERE: The Vanguard Hollywood -- 6021 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA

•WHEN: Tonight, July 14th, 10 PM - 2:30 AM

•$$$: $15 presale, $25 at door, $30 after 11:30 PM -- tickets here

Therapy On The 18th Floor

There are two ways of dealing with almost any emotional problem a person can have in this world. The first is to simply change your perspective, look at things from a broader point of view, and see whether or not what's beating you down is really so insurmountable. The second is to drink liberally.

Or, even better, combine the two. That's where The Penthouse comes in -- a glass-walled hideaway 18 stories above Santa Monica, where perspective shift and sweet, sweet booze are yours for the taking.

Go at sunset. On a clear evening, you can see all the way down the neon caterpillar of cars on the PCH and out to sections of Catalina most people don't even know exist, where cliff spires normally hidden by smog reach up from the ocean like stone fingers. The crowd inside is mellow, unpretentious, without the aggressively overcool vibe you'd get at, say, High, Venice Beach's neighboring rooftop hotspot. Find a seat near the window (which is to say, almost any seat in the house.) Order an Apricot & Honey 75 -- a tangy riff on the French 75 where the gin, lemon juice and sugar have been forsaken in favor of apricot liqueur and honey syrup, then swirled in a flute of icy champagne. It's a simultaneously brain-warming and spine-chilling concotion, with a bouyancy that brings to mind Vienna waltzes or the wire-fu battles in a Stephen Chow movie, depending on how quickly you drink it.

Tell me this isn't, on some level, therapy.

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• WHAT: Blues-curing views and libations at The Penthouse
  
• WHERE: Top floor of the Huntley Hotel -- 1111 2nd Street Santa Monica, 90403
• WHEN: Happy hour from 4-7, Mon-Fri, bar closes at 11 PM
  
• $$$: $10 a drink
  

No-Chella? No Problem.

There are plenty of perfectly acceptable reasons to not be going to Coachella this weekend. Maybe it's expensive as balls and you lack disposable income; maybe you secretly didn't have that awesome of a time in the past; maybe, no matter how hard you try, you cannot get yourself to give a mad-ass fuck about Duran Duran. 

Or maybe, you just want to kick it in LA and see what the homefront has to offer. You're in luck -- starting Friday night, 3 of LA's most renowned underground party purveyors -- the DDP, Shade, and The Cruz Coalition -- are throwing No-Chella, a weekend-long bachannalia stretching across the city that doesn't involve $9 cups of beer, 75,000-person crowds where everyone is suffering from skinny-jean-rash, or Whiz Khalifa.

Friday night, divaDanielle (aka intrepidLA's fairy godmother) and Porter Tinsley (fresh off her crowd-pleasing-beyond-belief pool party set at Fuente Eterno) will be tearing it up at The Other Door in Burbank. The venue is practically worth the trip all by itself -- a minimalist hideaway of homemade infused vodkas, with a merry mix of Burning Man freaks and punk-rock lesbians on the dance floor. The festivities pick back up again on Saturday at The Syrup Loft in downtown LA, where Mike Insane, Jacques The Ripper and Ruff Hauser (check out his crunky dubstep M.I.A. remix) will be kicking out the jams until 5 AM -- about 4 hours after Coachella security will have kicked the last stragglers out.

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• WHAT: No-Chella -- a funky weekend-long alternative to that other thing

• WHERE: The Other Door, The Syrup Loft (RSVP to get Syrup Loft location)

• WHEN: Friday April 16th (8 PM - 2 AM); Saturday April 17th (9 PM - 5 Am)

• $$$: $20 gets you into both events -- tix are here