West Indian Girl plays The Troubadour tonight | Photo by Ty Parker via their MySpace LA Weekly points us to some hot picks for tonight. About Girl in Coma: "Joan Jett knows a thing or two about rock & roll, and her latest protegees, Girl in a Coma, on her Blackheart label are one of the best and most interesting bands to come out of Texas in a long time," writes Falling James. They......

I didn't want to just do a "best of" list. So this year, I've decided to take a years worth of personal New Year's Resolutions, ask around for those of friends and put a call out to readers (email me here) about things you've always wanted to know, always wanted to do and then take those requests and ask an expert, an insider to help out. The result? Here goes... Today's Resolution: "I am......

Bodega Wine Bar is all about making wine as unpretentious as possible. The owners opened the bar after searching high and low for "a casual place to grab a glass of wine...somewhere that didn't require us to be wine experts, spend a lot of money, or even talk about wine much (if at all)" but found nothing. Ah - a wine philosophy this wine novice can get behind entirely! So, of course, I had to......

While LAist was checking out the malls on Black Friday (Century City and Paseo Colorado were easy to navigate), we stumbled across a live performance by Incendio. The Los Angeles based Latin Guitar band was jamming in Pasadena, playing kind of music that makes us wish we could play guitar. If you want to be treated to one of their performances, check out their schedule on Myspace.......

Summer for us often equals beer. While we aren't beer purists (is there such a thing?) we do know that what gets pumped out of a kegger isn't necessarily top quality, and that there is a whole world of light, dark, ale, lager, microbrew and so on out there. We had some time to kill before a movie recently, so we checked out the Happy Hour at The Yardhouse's Pasadena location, where we wound......

[Editor's Note: Thursday is Grove News Day here at LAist...] Brand Boulevard, Glendale's main shopping drag, is set to get the Grove treatment, as Rick Caruso builds his "Americana at Brand" mixed-use developement next door to the Galleria. Which is bad for the Galleria. That dingy dungeon, a relic of an earlier time, when monolithic enclosed shopping malls ruled the retailing landscape, will probably not survive once Caruso Affiliated is done driving a Grove-esque......