Anton Zaslavski, aka Zedd

Anton Zaslavski, better known by his DJ alias Zedd, is no stranger to the music world growing up in Germany with two musician parents. By age four, he'd began playing the piano and drums and receiving training in classical music. "I played classical music until I was 12 years old and realized it wasn't as cool," says Zaslavski. "Then I joined a rock metal band and played the drums with them for almost 10 years." He played in Dioramic, signed by Lifeforce Records, even once he began his electronic music producing career in 2009. "Once I started touring as a DJ I flew back to Germany to make another album with the band, but it just didn't make sense for me to stay in the band if I was always away," Anton says. With hardly any accent, you could barely tell he's only been touring the States for a year.

Zedd's interest in electronic music came from hearing Justice's "Cross" which made him want to produce electronic music and incorporate it with his band. "I knew Daft Punk and Justice but that's it," he says. "I really just did it for fun. Then one day I sent Skrillex a remix and next thing you know he brings me on tour and my life is changed." Anton went from playing a show with his band once or twice a week to DJing for three months straight after releasing songs on Dim Mak Records and OWSLA (Skrillex's label). "I do miss my family and friends from home but you kind of get used to it," says Zedd adding that when he does get a break he goes straight to the studio.

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Ryan Ritchie

​The Spell, Mr. Elevator & The Brain Hotel and Ambush Freqs
Blue Cafe
Dec. 31, 2011

You know you went to a good show when you're 100 percent sober on New Year's Eve, your date flakes on you a few hours before leaving, no girls even come close to kissing you at midnight and you still have a really great time. That's exactly what happened to me Saturday at the Blue Cafe, which made me the happiest sober dude in all of Long Beach.

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Stephen Eckert's Flickr

​Bing.com, Microsoft's search engine, recently compiled its 2011 search trends for musicians and came up with some interesting results.

Their list of the top ten most searched musicians is entirely made up of femme powerhouses (Who run da world?), save for the top slot, which was nabbed by Justin Bieber (get it, girl). Biebs stole No. 1 from Lady Gaga, who has fallen to fifth place over the course of the past year.

Whether these results indicate a shift in the power dynamic within music industry or Bing's girl-heavy consumer base remains a mystery. Regardless, we hope JB is celebrating his new title as top bitch, and the fact that his baby mama drama seems to finally be coming to a close.

The full list is after the jump.

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Henry Denander

​Poetry readings are boring. And I'm not just saying that as a guy whose sole exposure to the genre was a force-feeding of Maya Angelou in community college. Nope, I actually read -- and try to write -- the stuff and even I think most of these gatherings are really great if you are
suffering from insomnia and not much else.

Gerald Locklin agrees. The 70-year-old Long Beach writer (who also spent approximately two decades in Seal Beach) doesn't just get behind a podium, stick his face into a book and mumble through some poems. This guy goes for it, and by that I mean he makes this shit come alive. During a Locklin reading, audiences are bound to get a handful of really solid narrative poems about life in academia (of which he knows something about seeing how he begin teaching at Cal State Long Beach in 1965), jazz, art and day-to-day slices of life, but the highlight of these shows is when Locklin puts down the poems and moves away from the podium for a song-and-dance routine that never fails.

Locklin's repertoire is limitless, but lately he's been almost guaranteed to tap dance, sing a Lady Gaga routine and tell the story about the time he auditioned for a talent show when he was in elementary school. 

For the uneducated, it's easy to dismiss Locklin's showmanship as his way of hiding the fact that he can't write. Nothing could be further from the truth. With more than 125 published books and 3,000 published poems, short stories, articles, reviews and interview, Locklin is a master of the written word. Don't believe me? Well, you should because Charles Bukowski agreed. The two were friends and anyone who knows anything about Bukowksi knows his persona leads us to believe that he A. didn't care much for people and B. cared even less for other poets. To give a detailed account of his career would take up too much space, so visit his website at www.geraldlocklin.org. Trust me, I ain't getting paid to plug his site, so that must mean there's something worth checking out there.

In the meantime, Locklin is reading tomorrow night at Golden West College Community Room 102 (15744 Goldenwest St., Huntington Beach) with John Brantingham and Pam Arterburn. The reading begins at 8.  


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Christopher Victorio/OC Weekly

​Lady Gaga brought together her love of rubber and charity work in a recent effort to support Japanese tsunami victims--and is now facing a lawsuit.

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​Remember your first day as a freshman in high school? The unbearable weight of what seemed like countless eyes on you like a ton of fleshy bricks (ew)? That helpless feeling almost always accompanied by an urgent rush to the nearest restroom, where you strategically planned your day to avoid uncomfortable social situations and make the best of what seemed then like the rest of your life?

Well, ladies and gents, the days of analyzing the complicated levels of loserdom to see where you fit in is coming to a dwindling and encouraging end. That's thanks to Lady Gaga, Glee and other celebrities using their social clout to re-construct social perceptions of so-called "losers."

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Christopher Victorio/OC Weekly

​And we thought she just plagiarized Madonna's "Express Yourself." This YouTube clip juxtaposes Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" and South Korean girl group Girls Generation/SNSD's "Be Happy"--and they sound almost exactly the same. SNSD's "Be Happy" was taken down two pitches for this comparison. Listen after the jump.

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​How does Lady Gaga keep topping herself visually? No matter what you may think of Lady Gaga's latest, "Born This Way" (at first listen, I was pretty sure I was hearing a methed-up version of Madonna's "Express Yourself" crossed with Cher), it has a pretty bombastic video.

It's epic in every way--and for some reason, it's able to make all kinds of disturbing visual imagery delightful and . . . kind of funny--the same way the Rocky Horror Picture Show does. Lady Gaga shows off her rockin' bod AND fake buck teeth. There are alien birth scenes, orgiastic dance sequences, some machine gun tomfoolery . . . Heck, judge it for yourself after the jump.More »