Go HERE for more photos by Austin Roque and tag yourself and your friends!

Thursday night, the country’s biggest street art collection to date was revealed at the grand opening of new La Brea gallery, LAB ART Los Angeles. Within the last few years, there’s been a rapid movement from subversive to mainstream in street art, between Shepard Fairey’s iconographic images and rise to household name status, an Oscar nomination for Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop, and most recently, MOCA’s controversial Art In The Streets exhibition currently on display. Now, street art earns even further validation as a legitimate art movement with the opening of LAB ART, a gallery solely dedicated to showcasing street art and installation. Read the full story

Heidi Klum, Seal

Go HERE for more photos by Brent Harrison and tag yourself and your friends!

There ain’t nothin’ wrong with being an Anglophile. Just ask Heidi Klum. In honor of BritWeek, some famous faces stepped out to celebrate the contributions of fellow Angelenos who hail from the U.K. at the “Rankin’s Rubbish” opening reception last week where we learned Heidi has a real soft spot for Brits. …And mononymously named individuals. Read the full story

As you may have heard, early this morning, Lenny Dykstra decided to bare his soul to, and lay some truth on the asses of, “the people of the great city of New York.” The last couple years have been a bit of a whirlwind for LD, culminating in his being arrested and indicted on charges of bankruptcy fraud for ripping the toilets out of his foreclosed on house, which was precipitated by, among other things, filing for Chapter 11, living out of his car and bouncing a check to a hooker. But there are other things you don’t know. Things you probably can’t even imagine. Things you probably think are made up but that LD promises are not. Like that he has hundreds of millions in assets. Like that prison wardens tortured him. Like that he didn’t steal that car.  Like that he didn’t get this way overnight. Why is he telling this story now? Because God came to him in the middle of the night and commanded him to do so. If you’re ready to listen, Lenny- whose story has undeniable parallels to that of Christ- is ready to talk.

I address the people of the great City of New York:

You need to buckle your seat belts, because what you are about to read could not be made up. What I have somehow lived through the past 2½ years, and continue to live through now, makes me fully understand that God would never make someone endure what I have endured unless there was a reason for it.

That being said, I was wrong when I thought God put me on this earth to entertain people at Shea Stadium. (Remember? I was pretty good at that.) However, I have come to realize that God put me on this earth to help people, to be a factor. And that, my friends, is what I intend to do — because at the end of the day, it’s all about results. The kind of results I will bring to the party will be unlike any seen before. Talk is cheap; I am about walking the talk.

You need to know, now that the “shock factor” and the disbelief of what these people did to me has worn off. What I am forced to endure with the FBI and the US attorney sets the stage for me to tell my side of the story, so that all of America will finally hear the truth surrounding my particular set of circumstances over the last two years.

This is exactly the platform needed for me to get my story out, to get the real truth out. Bottom line: When all of the evidence is brought forward, the jury will be told by the judge to make an example out of these corrupt people so this does not continue to happen to other Americans.

THE TRUTH, NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, SO HELP ME GOD:

To begin with, I had $100 million in assets when I filed my Chapter 11. It is also important for you to know that I did not get stupid overnight. I didn’t make bad investments; every company that I have ever created or owned was and still is a winning company. And I sure as hell was not going to get on my knees, put my hands behind my head, and let this corrupt group of people masquerading as attorneys execute me — as that is what bankruptcy is all about. Just because they do this to everyone else does not mean I was going to let them do it to me. The corrupt world of bankruptcy is best described as “the death chamber.”

The so-called “grand theft auto” was never even brought; the case was dismissed. The theft was committed by them, as they stole a car I was leasing from Ford. Heck, it was only a Ford Flex.

Are they allowed to steal it when they brought no charges? Are they allowed to shuffle me from jail to jail in what was left of my street clothes that they made me wear for seven days without even being permitted to take a shower? Are they allowed to then lock me up in a cell at three different courthouses, on three different days, and not even let me see a judge? Are they allowed to physically and mentally assault me and tie me up like I was some kind of animal “because they thought it was funny?” Are they allowed to torture me to the point where two nurses happened to be walking by and saw me — came to my rescue — took my blood pressure and registered it at 180 over 120?

I told them, “If you are trying to kill me, then you better put a bullet in my head because I am not backing down. Torture me all you want, I am stronger than you will ever know.” So, they kept going, almost like the movies, except this was a real, living nightmare!

Over the last two years, they have basically stolen everything from me — my family, my kids, my homes, my cars, my businesses, my reputation, my money, my life. But what they can never steal is my HEART and my FIGHT — and at the end of the day, I will win and I will win big!

Dykstra Writes Exclusive Column About Recen Troubles [NYP]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Go HERE for more photos by William Juliano and tag yourself and your friends!

Saturday afternoon, Hollywood’s Siren Studios was transformed into a stoner’s paradise when it became a magical kingdom of wallet-friendly, delicious eats of all kinds as host to the Food Truck Derby presented by Antenna and Hyundai. Not that we’re suggesting anyone there was in a purple haze or needed to be to enjoy themselves, just that if they happened to be, this would have been the prime destination to get one’s munch on. Read the full story

Go HERE for more photos by Douglas Neill and tag yourself and your friends!

When we think of film festivals, visions of raging and generally rowdy, wild times don’t come to mind. Except in the case of James Franco who simply cannot resist singing karaoke in drag no matter where he is. And we certainly don’t associate that kind of behavior with galas. But maybe we should in light of what we saw at the Newport Beach Film Festival Opening Night Gala. Read the full story

Go HERE for more photos by Ardy Ala and tag yourself and your friends!

Last night, the weekly Thursday throwdown AFEX lit up Winston’s, but this time with a Prince twist that had absolutely NOTHING to do with that royal wedding everyone is pooping their pants over. For the AFEX edition of All Prince Everything Vol. 3, the night was about His Purple Highness who is currently in the midst of his 21-night L.A. concert stint. Read the full story

…unless you are “a leftist who hates liberty, or a snob who enjoys destroying civilization with your superior-sounding mendacity.” But if you’re neither of those things, “you will love this movie.” Do not believe the reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, they know nothing.

Date: Apr 27, 2011 10:58 AM

Subject: A movie recommendation: Go see Atlas Shrugged

To:

I’ve sent to this distribution list essays on limited government, and wonky quant finance papers. Now a movie recommendation (that is itself kind of a mini-essay on limited government).

Go see Atlas Shrugged. I did and loved it.

The critics hate it like socialist cats in the bath. The movie’s producer, a hero of mine, is close to shrugging (see link below).

It’s hard to spend money, time, and blood on something, and have the critics savage it (which sadly matters a lot to success if not at all to truth), and go on.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2011/04/atlas-shrugged-producer-critics-you-won-hes-going-on-strike.html

I am telling you it’s good. Particularly if what you’re looking for is a rather straight (though adopted for modern times) telling of the story. Does it have its amateurish moments and characteristics?

Sure. It was made for a trifle by Hollywood standards. The same critics that, if this tiny amount of money was spent on a poorly produced and acted “Indie” film, that happened to be about a hermaphrodite Palestinian boy who after escaping fascist Israeli persecution moves to Texas to face fascist American persecution (and isn’t immediately granted his full “right” to all the healthcare the USA can afford), would sing it’s praises and laud it’s signs of a tight budget as “authentic.”

I’m not sure if we have art imitating life or the other way around, but the critics are themselves Randian characters. They have an agenda—punish those who love liberty and have the temerity to defend it, then go to parties and be lauded by their friends for their heroic progressivism. And if they can make some snobby lies about cinematography along the way, more the better. (note—a small minority of critics have not seemed ideologically motivated, with them I simply disagree thinking they are using the wrong standard)

The book was also savaged by critics of the left and right in 1957, but loved by its giant number of readers beyond almost all others.

History is repeating, but that’s because sadly little has changed. We have to fix that. On Rotten Tomatoes (wouldn’t the left love for me to have left off the “e”?) the critics have been running, wait for it, 6% for the movie, 94% against. The people have been running 85% for the movie. Now, you could argue that the people have tended to be Rand fans so that’s biased. That’s a bad argument. Rand fans would be the first, the absolute first, to savage it if it wasn’t a good movie (have you ever seen Rand fans agree on anything except loving Rand?).

If you love the book, if you like the book, if you are at all open to the arguments in the book, you will love this movie. If you’re a leftist who hates liberty, or a snob who enjoys destroying civilization with your superior-sounding mendacity, you probably won’t like it so much.

Go see the movie.

—Cliff

p.s. The movie superbly preserves a message from the book that gives the lie to so much the left says about it. The heroes are not “businessmen” and the villains “government”. The book and movie clearly show the heroes are liberty loving creators and the villains totalitarian thieves—and those thieves come in the form of big business crony capitalists (those who don’t create but use the state’s power to steal to enrich themselves) as often as government apparatchiks (and never the defenseless poor). Look for this. The movie and book are honest, the critics are not.

Cliff Asness: Go See Atlas Shrugged [NetNet]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Go HERE for more photos by  Austin Roque and tag yourself and your friends!

Have you gotten down with the dubstep movement at Dim Mak Studios yet? What was once and for many years an underground music style has exploded onto the mainstream in the last year in a big way. Like, even Britney did dubstep. We get it, it’s kinda like a funkified techno with a heavier bass and probably sounds really cool when you’re on drugs. Not that we’d know what that’s like or anything, just if we had to guess. Read the full story

Go HERE, HERE, and HERE for more photos from Coachella weekend and tag yourself and your friends!

Ah, Coachella. The things you make us relatively sane individuals do. Especially when it comes to desert fashion. In case you have never seen a single photograph from the weekend festival, Coachella compels males to don a certain article of clothing they otherwise (and by the grace of God) wouldn’t dare wear in public.  We’re talking about manks, male/man tank tops. For some reason manks are not only a completely socially acceptable garment for the duration of the weekend but also the preferred choice. Read the full story

Los Angeles startup TreatFeed just launched a new spin on the crossover between social networking and e-commerce — it wants to reward users for their social recommendations with prizes and cash.

Scott Roback, the company’s senior vice president of strategy and business development, said that where companies like Facebook are trying to build a social graph, TreatFeed is trying to create “the commerce graph, or the monetization layer of the social graph.”

Here’s how it works: TreatFeed aggregates deals from across the Web. Users come to the site for the deals, then ask their friends and family to join too. When users find deals they like, they can recommend them to their connections on the site. And if someone actually acts on a deal, then TreatFeed gets an affiliate commission, which it then splits with users. The user who signed up for the deal gets a percentage, and the user who brought them into TreatFeed gets a smaller percentage, and so on, up through four “generations”.

Technically, the commission for shoppers takes the form of points, but those points can be redeemed for prizes or cash. Roback estimated that half of the money TreatFeed receives for each deal will eventually go to users.

This system takes advantage of the fact that shoppers are already recommending products and deals to each other, Roback said. And the fact that TreatFeed is rewarding people for bringing in more users, rather than for recommending specific deals, seems smart, because it will help the site build out its user base quickly. It might also avoid criticisms that this system (like other “multilevel marketing” programs) starts to look like a pyramid scheme.

Even though TreatFeed is building a social graph (er, “commerce graph”) of its own, it also integrates with Facebook, allowing users to find friends from Facebook and post deal recommendations on the social network. And it will work on affiliate programs with publishers, allowing publishers to make money not just on the shoppers who sign up directly from their site, but on the larger SocialTree that builds as those shoppers continue using TreatFeed and bringing in their friends.

TreatFeed was incubated by Lagovent, the firm created by Konstantin Glasmacher and Brett Markinson. Markinson is the new startup’s chief executive. The pair has already successfully launched one e-commerce company, HauteLook, which was acquired by Nordstrom. TreatFeed raised $5.4 million in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners.

Tags: social e-commerce, social shopping

Companies: Lagovent, TreatFeed

People: Brett Markinson, Konstantin Glasmacher, Scott Roback

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals