L’Keg: French for…The Keg
Story by Alexis Hawkins
Living amidst a strict schedule of job rejections, bar tending school and wallowing in self-pity and regret, I managed to dust the Cheetos off my pants, log off Facebook, and make it out to a show in good old Southland!
L’Keg Gallery is a real jewel among the circuit of dank, dark L.A. venues. I can’t show you any pictures because I deliberately left my camera at home like you would any other contraption that made you believe it was a good idea to quit your job with a corner office and benefits in the midst of a bullshit recession where a college grad can’t get a part-time job shipping stationary because the all-female staff doesn’t believe that you can lift 30 pounds of paper. Yes, I blame the damn camera and sadly have no photos to share of this whimsical place.
You’ll just have to imagine L’Keg as The Smell’s little sister – the kind of little sister that smells better and is good at everything. Probably has a job too.
As the name implies, L’Keg Gallery is not just a venue but an art exhibit and multimedia creative space, and it is literally underground, as in subterranean (L’Keg: +1/The Smell: 0).
Hipsters crowded the entry but so too did those first-time looking hipsters, the kind of kids that return from a school holiday decked out in a whole new wardrobe from American Apparel and thus a whole new outlook on life. This being the case I didn’t feel too self-conscious for leaving the skinny pants at home (Not like I had a choice…something about being unemployed just makes you want McDonalds all the time).
The exhibit occupying the gallery was called Space Hell and featured the works of local LA artists and their expressions of:
“A lone astronaut drifts through the cold depths of space unknown – cognitive dissonance and paranoia brood in the trenches of his mind. The solitary explorer’s path into the void challenges and reshapes his core, while mirroring our own sequestered maturation through this collection of contemporary, multi-media space debris.”
I recognized two of the artists’ names as Facebook friends. I think I was in a writing class with one of them. There were maybe only 100 people down there which was as many as they could fit comfortably and yet I knew some of the featured artists, the drummer from the band, Superhumanoid, that guy’s girlfriend, the keyboardist for Superhumanoid turned out to be the girl whose new years eve party I crashed, and one of my best friends from high school (in Massachusetts??) was there as well. Sometimes this city is just so damn small.
The bands Superhumanoid and Hi Ho Silver Oh played and for a show I wasn’t planning on going to, in a venue I’d never heard of, and with a billing of bands I didn’t recognize either, I really loved this show. Hi Ho Silver Oh even began their set with a sing along that delivered me however briefly from the doldrums of a quarter-life crisis.
Props to the bands and props to L’Keg, where they not only distribute independent records, handmade crafts, zines, publications, and vintage clothing, but completely repaint and redecorate the gallery for each exhibit (L’Keg: +2/The Smell: 0). I really did feel like I was in Space Hell at times that evening, and I can only hope that’s where we go when we die. Good music, good art, and everyone’s drinkin’ tallboys.
***The Smell’s bathroom is way more hardcore. I’ll give you that.
