Picks – August ‘26

Some things you can do in Los Angeles (and beyond)

Picks is a monthly selection of California happenings, goings-on, and general commotions we’re excited about. This August, we encourage you to move within the heat waves. Let the sun blind, the mosquitoes bite. Rejoice in their sting and your blood and our sweat and this life.

✸ A pink convertible flits past you on the 101 and your heart jumps in your throat because you know: that’s her. That’s Angelyne. American Cinematheque presents a uniquely Los Angeles film series, Watch Local: Angelyne the Billboard Queen, celebrating the local legend who watches over us from above and occasionally among us, sitting in traffic, and all the times her billboards have been destroyed on the silver screen.

✸ Celebrate 25 years of independent record label Post Present Medium over three nights at the Smell. Highlights include sets by Early Dog (4/5 of Mika Miko), Gun Outfit, and Abe Vigoda (their first show in 14 years)!

✸ Sojourn to the second tallest peak in California and its most mythic: Mount Shasta. Mystical Mt. Shasta Sacred Site Tours will journey into nature and the soul, probably. As John Muir wrote of his stormy trek up the mountain, “The wild beauty of the morning stirred our pulses in glad exhilaration, and we strode rapidly onward, seldom stopping to take a breath—over the broad red apron of lava that descends from the west side of the smaller of the two cone summits, across the gorge that divides them, up the majestic snow curves sweeping to the top of the ancient crater, around the broad icy fountains of the Whitney glacier, past the hissing fumaroles, and at 7:30 A.M. we attained the utmost summit.” Worth the trip.

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THINGS

Sunday, 8/9
✸ Los Angeles Historic Park Riverfest • 2:30 PM • A river runs through us, and we ought to celebrate it. Friends of the LA River return for their annual community festival celebrating our concrete-encased ribbon of promise, with a marketplace, food, and entertainment.

✸ Alice Coltrane Eternity’s Pillar at Brain Dead Studios • 6:30 PM • Originally broadcast on late-night LA television, Coltrane’s rarely screened series invites you to slow down. These recently restored episodes provide insight into Coltrane’s artistic genius, a creative process made meditative. As the LAnd noted in their 110 Greatest Los Angeles Albums list, Coltrane understood that “beneath the seeming vulgarity of it all there was an energy in Southern California worthy of communing with.”

Wednesday, 8/12–Thursday, 8/13
✸ Again, if it were up to us, the whole gang would be deep in the desert at Anza-Borrego State Park to witness the Perseid meteor shower at its peak—but since it’s the middle of the week, we’ll settle for these spots a little closer to home.

Saturday, 8/15
✸ We couldn’t tell you why, exactly, but Lance Bass will be at Stater Bros. in Yucaipa (the original home of Stater Bros. Markets) from 9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

Sunday, 8/16
✸ Pinyon x Rasarumah • 4 PM • It’s no secret we love Pinyon, so it should come as no surprise we’re recommending the latest in their Sunday Summer BBQ series. Chef Johnny Lee (Rasarumah, Pear River Deli) will bring his Cantonese and Indonesian flavors to Pinyon’s Ojai location with a menu focusing on wood-fired versions of his classic Hainanese chicken and charsui. Don’t skip!

Tuesday, 8/18
✸ Welcome Space Brothers at Vidiots • 7:30 PM • Directed by Jodi Wille, Welcome Space Brothers tells the unbelievably true story of the Unarius Academy of Science, an extraterrestrial-channeling spiritual school that became a prolific filmmaking collective and public access phenomenon during the 1980s. Only in California, y’all, only in California.

Saturday, 8/22
✸ Laraaji at Ambient Church • 7:15 PM • Laraaji’s radiant music will transform the radical site of Founders Church. Designed by Paul R. Williams, the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects and one of LA’s most influential architects, Founders Church features circular walls meant to inspire inclusivity. Paired with Laraaji’s heavenly soundscapes and Ambient Church’s light projections, that’s transcendent togetherness.

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ICYMI

✸ Surface Tension, a photographic survey presented by the Downtown Los Angeles Psychogeographical Association, has been extended at These Days through 8/29. The participating artists approach the city’s center through distinct visual languages, each producing a kind of provisional report on the pressures, textures, and unresolved tensions that define contemporary downtown life.

✸ The Banana Fosters Fritter is back at JD Flannels in San Juan Capistrano for the month of August. Take the train and bring one back for us!

That’s it for our August picks. Follow us on Instagram for the ideal road trip, nostalgic-but-not-too-nostalgic playlists, and freshly shucked oysters with a stone fruit mignonette. If we dropped something, let us know in the comments!