Festivals Los Angeles

Bicycling along the coast one recent morning, I did just about everything wrong. Having predicted that the sun wouldn't break through the gloom, I overdressed. I didn't eat or drink enough. And I miscalculated the crowds, not expecting to have to dodge so many distracted drivers, Roller-bladers, joggers and skateboarders that early.

Only a small slice of Los Angeles is on display Saturday and today, but it is a juicy, savory, aromatic slice, one that you bite into to find the richness of its people revealed. It is seven hot blocks of Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, cordoned off so that someone like Woranut Nimnuansakun, a Thai immigrant, can stand over her fiery wok in a food booth furiously stirring a mountain of pad thai noodles. It is the courtyard of St.

As the sky sets pink over curling blue roofs, green pagodas and a giant papier-mache Buddha, a procession of elaborately costumed Chinese royalty snakes through a lantern-strung street in Chinatown. One empress for the evening is pulled in on her rickshaw. Draped in pink silk, she wears ornamental blue fingernails sharp as claws and blue-tassled silk slippers with a gently curved, centered platform heel. Another empress wears a towering headdress like a phoenix--adorned with pearls and feathers.

Just beyond Chinatown's Gate of Maternal Virtue, nearly a dozen artists propped up easels and umbrellas Thursday to paint their interpretations of the community. Their paintings, combined with others that have been created since April, will be displayed at a gallery as part of revitalization efforts.

Everything's coming up roses in Exposition Park. Of course, this isn't news to anyone who's walked through the park in the last 73 years. To the rest of Southern California, however, the 7-acre Exposition Park Rose Garden, surrounded by one of the most historic neighborhoods in downtown L.A., is one of the city's best-kept secrets.

The Jewish Music Festival opened a four-night run at the Knitting Factory on Tuesday with a rousing set of tunes from Hollywood Klezmer. Although the group's glitzy name may have suggested otherwise, the program had a solidly traditional quality. And that was just fine for the moderate-sized but highly enthusiastic crowd, who reacted in spirited fashion to numbers that embraced such pop-derived numbers as "And the Angels Sing" and "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen."

Where there's a will, there's an Edge. As the Edge of the World Theater Festival enters its second year, event organizers are working to address issues that came up last year--among them the absence of a central staging area, a lack of ethnic diversity in shows and some confusion over what constitutes "edgy." The inaugural festival ran eight days, and featured 50 shows at 20 venues.

Don't be fooled by the neat little catalog for "Air Raids," a monthlong, citywide festival of experimental media arts. All 60 events--film and video screenings, multimedia installations, video-accompanied bus tours, performances, Web sites, television shows and related programs--are listed in the 5-inch-square booklet. But they can't be contained--or easily explained--on paper. "No one can understand the media arts; they never get it," says Anne Bray, director of L.A.

Fernand Jonac is a huge fan of "The Simpsons," and he's got the merchandise to prove it. The 22-year-old says his apartment in Montelimar, France, is filled with "Simpsons" posters, toys, mugs, T-shirts and bed sheets. He's even a nuclear technician--"comme Homer."

The Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills has transformed itself into a house of horrors with its "Monster in the Box: Horror on Television" festival, which kicks off Friday and continues through Dec. 10. During those weeks, the museum explores five decades of things that go bump in the night on the small screen.