“Curiouser and Curiouser” June 2024 Festivals, Follies, Fun: The Batette Follies of 1939, Live Oak Fest, Garagiste Fest, Lucidity Fest, X Games, plus Burning Man Artists
Curiouser and Curiouser: Burning Man 2024 theme
Back from three weeks in Italy on a wine press trip for Wine Predator (more on that soon!), this Art Predator sees that summer is certainly heating up with lots of fun activities on the horizon here to help get over missing Europe! Standout events coming full blast this June are The Batette Follies of 1939 in LA running from June 6 through July 14, 2024, the Live Oak Music Festival in San Luis Obispo over Father’s Day Weekend June 14-16, Garagiste Wine Festival in LA June 22, Lucidity Festival June 26-30 and on the same weekend, the X Games returning to my hometown of Ventura, plus free music all over, Dead and Co are still at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and then looking toward August, Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert about two hours northeast of Reno. Here’s a bit about a few of Art Predator’s June highlights and art I’m looking forward to at Burning Man with more details and reports to follow!
The Batette Follies of 1939
June 6-July 14, 2024
The Batette Follies of 1939: A Dark Night Parody, Montalbán Theatre, Hollywood, CA
From the creator of The Empire Strips Back (which we LOVED in LA, will return to the Montalban this fall, and is currently playing in the Bay Area), this Batman parody blends vaudeville, burlesque, cabaret, and contemporary vintage entertainment with Prohibition-era Gotham City. The production merges vaudeville and burlesque with a contemporary twist to bring the Dark K/Night’s world to life. Through live music, dance, and cabaret, Beattie delivers a riotous rogue revue, promising an unforgettable night of laughter, danger, and pure escapism. Time travel from 2024 to 1939 to indulge in a night of laughter, danger, and pure escapism at The Montalbán. Built in 1926, the Montalbán Theatre’s historic, Spanish-style venue located in the heart of Hollywood is the perfect venue to catch the show. Be sure to enjoy a signature cocktail before or during the show! I’m going on Friday June 7 and will be reporting back!
Live Oak 2024
June 14-16, 2024
Live Oak Music Festival, El Chorro Regional Park, San Luis Obispo, CA
Come for the headliners, stay for the community, and fall in love with Live Oak Music Festival! In 1989 in San Luis Obispo, a music festival called Live Oak sprouted sponsored by KCBX Public Radio, and now as a fundraiser for it. As it grew in size and from one day to three, Live Oak Festival moved south to the hills above Lake Cachuma near Santa Barbara becoming one of the most favorite family-style music festivals in California. In 2019, after years of searing June heat, Live Oak relocated to El Chorro Regional Park. With a wide range of music we love, from African to soul to bluegrass, we have attended most years since 2012, and it has become our favorite way to celebrate Father’s Day. We usually volunteer on the Site crew doing cleanup after the evening shows and on Monday following the event, and I’m super excited by headliner The English Beat this year.
Garagiste: Greetings from Glendale
Saturday June 22, 2024
Garagiste Festival, Glendale Civic Auditorium, CA
Garagiste (garage-east), explains the Festival organizers, “is a term originally used in the Bordeaux region of France to denigrate renegade small-lot wine makers, sometimes working in their “garages” (anything considered not a chateau), who refused to follow the “rules,” and is now a full-fledged movement responsible for making some of the best wine in the world.
Unlike other festivals, at Garagiste, winemakers/owners pour their wines, allowing wine enthusiasts to meet and interact with them.
Southern California wine enthusiasts will congregate June 22 at the Garagiste Wine Festival’s Urban Exposure Event at the Glendale Civic Auditorium where they will taste wine from some of the best up and coming micro-production ‘garagiste’ wineries from across California, including Santa Barbara County, Paso Robles, Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Los Angeles. Considered America’s Best Wine Festival by USA Today, The Garagiste Wine Festival, offers Rare & Reserve Early Access 1:00–5:00pm ($100) and Grand Tasting 2:00–5:00pm $79. Ticket sales benefit the Cal Poly SLO Wine and Viticulture program.
X Games Ventura
June 28-30, 2024
X Games Ventura
The 70th X Games takes place beachside in Ventura June 28-30, 2024 (yep, the same weekend as Lucidity!). Debuting in 1995 as the Extreme Games in Rhode Island, X Games is the premier action sports brand. From world-class competitions to lifestyle and culture, X Games has been at the forefront of action sports for 30 years. Last year Ventura hosted most of the competitions at the Ventura County Fairgrounds located on the Pacific Ocean, and this year they’re all here with skateboard, BMX and Moto X featured sports; 19 total medal disciplines will be contested. Want to rent my house or my yard or my driveway or my trailer that weekend? I live a 20-30 minute walk away from the venue! LMK!
Lucidity LineUp 2024
June 28-30, 2024
Lucidity Festival: Aurora’s Glow, Live Oak Camp, Santa Barbara, CA
Founded in 2012, Lucidity Festival fuses music with workshops in a beautiful site for camping to create a personal, collective, and global transformative experience. Drawing performers and people from all over the planet, the festival is a feel-good experience for one and all with a different theme each year marking progress in the narrative arc. The Festival is very family friendly with a camping area devoted to families, and with two performance spaces with offerings geared to families. This is where we have camped for many years with our son, and where I have given DIY mouthwash workshops, writing workshops and more. There’s lots of beautiful crafts for sale as well as mindful eating options. Car camping is sold out but you can tent camp for free with your ticket. If you can, I encourage you to pay a little extra to arrive on Thursday, and if you can, plan on staying over Sunday night and leaving on Monday. While it’s NOT Burning Man, a lot of Burners attend and there’s a lot of Burning Man energy, art, and even art cars like the Pyro Bar and the Mighty Zenith.
Burning Man 2024
Burning Man: Curiouser and Curiouser, Black Rock City, NV
Unlike the other events listed for June above, Burning Man is not a festival in the typical sense but a city with 70k residents actively participating in the experience of creating cool art and activities 24-7 that are free for all to enjoy.
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” – The Mad Hatter
This year’s theme is “Curiouser and Curiouser” which you may remember Alice saying when she visited Wonderland. Black Rock City certainly is a place where you will find yourself feeling like you are in Wonderland. A fantastic assortment of spectacular, wild, and whimsical art installations pepper the spare desert landscape– an actual dried lake bed devoid of much life beyond what we bring to this blank slate. The city traditionally has three artistic hubs of activity– The Man, The Temple, and Center Camp where you could buy coffee until 2022. This loss of purpose led to its demise, but this year Lucidity Founder Jonah Haas is working to resurrect it. Whether you can go this year to Burning Man or not, check out these artists and follow along as they build their wonderlands.
Artist Valerie Mallory with her honorarium project “Secretly Abandoned Spaces”
A Burning Man artist with strong ties to Center Camp Cafe is Valerie Mallory. She began attending Burning Man a few years after I started, but she’s been going every year since her first and she’s been making art there too starting with exhibiting in center camp where she worked in the cafe, then in 2014 growing “Womantree”— and that’s when I met her. Val’s earned two honorariums from Burning Man, one in 2022 for “Secretly Abandoned Spaces” and one this year to bring “Womantree” back to the Black Rock Desert. Check out her website here, and if you can, support her project.
Valerie Mallory and Nate Holben confer at BRC 2023 on “Playful Again”
The next Burning Man artist I’d like to highlight today is Nate Holben. I met Nate in 2022 when he turned up in our camp during his first Burn and helped with strike of the art and camp. He helped Valerie in 2023, and in 2024, he proposed a beautiful piece which got funded with an honorarium. Learn more about Reclamation of a Stolen Heart by Nathaniel Holben and the Strength in Numbers Collective from Martinez, CA here and help fund him if you can.
an artist’s sketch of Nate’s project
Relevé Ladies is by Rebekah Waites from Los Angeles, CA. Rebekah had an honorarium before — Burners will remember “The Church Trap”– and she sold her shade structure from that project to me for us to use for Valerie Mallory’s work support camp last year. “Drawing inspiration from the swirling dust devils of the playa and the mystical folklore of The Nine Ladies Stone Circle in Derbyshire, England, “Relevé Ladies” embodies a sense of empowerment and freedom. At a time when the rights of women, queer, and transgender communities are under threat, the significance of the ballet term “Relevé” – to rise up – holds more relevance than ever before,” writes Rebekah. Learn more and help fund the project here.
Rebekah Waite’s Church Trap 2013
Here’s links to a few additional honorarium artists for 2024:
- A Capsule of Curiosity – Andi Morency and Nikki Wellman
- A Seat on the Throne – Chelsea Odufu
- Always Another Sunrise – Chelsey Hathman
- Apex of Azure – Anna Gribovsky
- ¡¡¡¡Big Spinning Wheels!!!! – Josh (Squash) Cohen
- Coney McConeface: The Life and Death of a Traffic Cone – Chris (Kiwi) Hankins
- COQUÍ – NiNo Alicea
- Hábitat – Mark (Kidnetick) Rivera
- Naga and the Captainess – Cjay Roughgarden, Stephanie Shipman, and Jackie Scott
- Profundity of Surrender (POS) – Jonathan Lim
- The (Middle Path) Bridge (Between Heaven and Earth) – See See Kwan
- The Temple of Together – Caroline Ghosn
- Tree Circle – Eira Mooney and Fabio (Alquem) Garcés
Read more of my Burning Man writings here:
- Burning Man 2023: Animalia and the Mud
- Burning Man 2022: Waking Dreams
- Burning Man Part 1: The Shadow Grows
- Burning Man Part 2: Journey into Community Soul Making
- Burning Man Part 3: 10 Principles
Can’t get to Black Rock City?
Check out Regional events like LA’s BEquinox this weekend June 5-9.
BEquinox
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