This week’s Los Angeles Times Magazine Music Issue presents an in-depth portrait of Dave Alvin, original California roots rocker and devoted “Friend of TwentyWonder”…

PHOTO: RAUL VÉGA

Los Angeles Times | June 2011

Troubadour of Troubled Times

Dave Alvin sings of the grittier unspoken California where longing and greed lust and loss all come together

California’s burning
You can smell it in the air
You may be rich or poor
But you know that
fire don’t care

Dave Alvin is one of the seminal figures in California music, a poet and global ambassador for the folk-blues-country amalgam known as roots rock. But on this spring morning, he is playing informal tour guide as a vintage railcar knifes through the San Fernando Valley, north past tract homes, chain stores and fields turned to asphalt.

Peering through the wraparound windows, he offers a narration, highlighting the features amid an ocean of suburban sameness: the hangar where the end of Casablanca was filmed, the craggy rocks where they made old TV westerns, the Chatsworth site of the former Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his cult squirreled themselves away…READ ARTICLE

For more about Dave Alvin, please visit his website.

For tickets to TwentyWonder, please click here. All proceeds from this event will benefit the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles.

Can’t make it to the event? Please DONATE to the cause!

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Meet Konstantin Novoselov, co-recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene, a futuristic substance with many practical applications.

One day soon, when you’re reading this blog on a bendable computer display wrapped around your wrist, you’ll have this smart young dude to thank for making such devices possible.

Oh, and did we mention he’s a friend and supporter of TwentyWonder, a “Carnival of the Mind” benefitting the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles? How cool is that?

For more about Professor Novoselov and his extraordinary achievements, watch this video!

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It’s Saturday night in Historic Filipinotown. Over 1400 fans have gathered in a converted warehouse to watch skaters battle it out in banked track roller derby. Unlike the popular roller derby spectacles of the 70s and 80s, the current derby revival focuses more on athletics than theatrics. There is nothing scripted, rehearsed, or fake about the full-contact sport as it’s played today, and most of the skaters have injury lists to prove it….READ ARTICLE

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