UNDERRATED / OVERRATED

Underrated

The phrase “community theater” usually has pejorative connotations, but when you’ve got a community like the Fake Gallery’s, it’s a high compliment. On any given night, pedigreed alt-comics such as Patton Oswalt, Mary Lynn Rajskub and Fake’s impresario, Paul Kozlowski, may be found inside the latter’s cozy Melrose live/work space performing stand-up, music or one of the gallery’s offbeat theatrical productions for a criminally small audience at bargain-basement prices. This weekend’s offering: a Fake radio “broadcast” of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” originally performed by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre in 1938. (323) 661-0786.

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FAKE GALLERY

MELROSE AND HELIOTROPE INTERSECTION

The new hub for fringe culture includes Sacred Fools, an indie theater company; Scoops, a gelato shop specializing in vegan, offbeat recipes like sun-dried tomato; Bicycle Kitchen, a DIY locus for Critical Mass types; Il Corral, an experimental music loft; a great little hole-in-the-wall pub with a seasonal vegan menu and a few other odds and ends. It’s Sunset Junction 10 years ago.

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BRAND LIBRARY AND ART CENTER

Forget Netflix. This is your new audio-visual megalopolis. The art and music section of the Glendale Library offers dirt-cheap rates and a transcendent selection. Video recordings of David Hockney, Maria Callas’ 1959 Hamburg concert and George Romero’s classic zombie flick “Dawn of the Dead” scrape the surface of the diverse multimedia collections, all housed in a beautiful mansion. www.brandlibrary.org---

Overrated

PINKBERRY

Those twee little shops satisfied many a sweet tooth this summer, but seriously, how many more franchises can one city take? As for the supposed health benefits: If the sugar doesn’t get you, the cutthroat parking battles will.

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OVERSIZED LAMPS

Sometimes the design world operates like a contagious disease. Remember when every restaurant was beige and brown and looked like a hotel? Now it’s attack of the supersized lamps (latest incarnation: the Mad Hatter monstrosities designed by Philippe Starck for Katsuya). Whatever happened to everything in moderation? Very underrated.

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VIDEO GAMES LIVE

Words like “groundbreaking” are used to describe this event (Friday at the Nokia), a performance of the greatest hits of the video game era featuring a symphony orchestra and, yes, opera singers. Here’s another word: silly.

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INTERPOL

Even serial swingers’ club patrons would balk at adopting a motto like “No. 1 in Threesome,” but Interpol (which plays Tuesday at the Forum in Inglewood) made a single out of it. A deeply meandering and bloodless single that no concertgoer should listen to while leaving their drink unattended. Did we learn nothing from that “Carlos D. Has Herpes” blog?

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THE GUIDE

Pompous, authoritarian title? Inverted text layouts, for godssakes? Just wait for the Vegas issue.