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8 days away

Dinosaur Jr. with Stef Chura

In 8 days · Oct 11 $49.50+ Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Loud can be tender - a wall of distortion so thick it gives you somewhere to hide while J Mascis mumbles the saddest, sweetest thing you have ever heard underneath it. Dinosaur Jr. invented a lot of that: the template for every band that ever buried a broken heart under a guitar solo, forty years deep and still playing at a volume that rearranges your organs. In the close quarters of the Belly Up, that famous three-amp roar becomes a physical fact, and the crowd — lifers in faded shirts, kids discovering it new — just leans into the wave together. Stef Chura opens. Bring earplugs and do not use them. Sunday, October 11, 2026, 6:30pm, Solana Beach, 21+. Come stand inside the loudest tenderness in rock and let it drown out, for a couple hours, whatever you walked in carrying. Bring the friend who taught you what a fuzz pedal was, or the kid who needs to learn — this is the source.

Hokus Pokus Live! at Observatory North Park

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9 days away

Hokus Pokus Live! at Observatory North Park

In 9 days · Oct 12 The Observatory North Park, 2891 U…

The lights go down and something impossible happens in front of your face and for a second you are seven years old again. That is what Hokus Pokus Live does — it finds the part of you that still believes in things you cannot explain and gives it permission to come out. This is not a birthday party magician. Hokus Pokus Live is a full-production stage show that blends illusion, comedy, and spectacle into something that works on adults the way Cirque du Soleil works on adults — you know it is not real, but your body does not care. The acts rotate so even if you saw it last year, this is a different show. All ages, which means the energy in the room is half screaming kids and half adults trying to act like they are not screaming too. Monday, October 12, 2026. The Observatory North Park. Doors at 7 PM, show at 8 PM. Tickets from $70 on Ticketmaster. This is a Monday night out that earns its keep.

The Blasting Company – plays Over the Garden Wall

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9 days away

The Blasting Company – plays Over the Garden Wall

In 9 days · Oct 12 Lodge Room, 104 N Avenue 56, Los A…

Every autumn the light goes long and gold in the late afternoon and something in you starts looking for a wood to get lost in. Ten episodes aired in 2014. That was the whole thing. And somehow a generation now marks the turn of the season by rewatching them, in order, with the good candle lit. The band on this stage is the reason. They wrote the score — the frog songs, the tavern rounds, the glass-harmonica dread underneath the pretty parts — and they play it live with the same battered instrument cases and close harmony that made a children's cartoon feel like a folk record somebody found in an attic. Expect the room to sing back without being asked. Expect people in cloaks who did not coordinate and are delighted anyway. The crowd here skews people who found the show alone, at night, and assumed nobody else knew. They were wrong, and that discovery is most of the joy of the evening. Music at 8:00 PM at the Lodge Room in Highland Park. There is a second night after this one, and it sells out the same way.

RISE of the Jack O'Lanterns — Los Angeles

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39 Gathering

10 days away

RISE of the Jack O'Lanterns — Los Angeles

In 10 days · Oct 13 Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

Somewhere between the pumpkin you carved as a kid and actual sculpture sits this thing, and it lands much closer to sculpture than you are ready for. More than five thousand hand-carved, illuminated pumpkins line a timed walking path — not triangle faces but full portraits, scenes and figures glowing in the dark, set to an ambient score. Nothing jumps out at you. No roaming monsters. It is Halloween for people who love the craft and the glow more than the fear: couples on a date, families with small kids, anyone who wants October to feel like wonder instead of adrenaline. Entry runs in fifteen-minute intervals so the path never bunches up. Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S Figueroa St. October 13. It is gone in four nights, and it is the rare seasonal thing that is genuinely worth the drive.

Angel City Brewery Tacos & Trivia Tuesday

Every 2 weeks

37 Gathering

10 days away

Angel City Brewery Tacos & Trivia Tuesday

Every other Tuesday · Next Oct 13 Angel City Brewery, 216 Alameda St…

Every useless thing you know has never once helped you at work. No promotion has ever hinged on remembering which planet rotates backwards or what year a band broke up. Once a week, in a brewery in the Arts District, all of it finally pays. King Trivia runs the format — several rounds of general knowledge, a host who keeps the pace honest, teams of up to six, prizes at the end that nobody actually came for. The crowd is Arts District regulars, downtown workers arriving straight from a desk, and people who have kept this as a standing weekly commitment for years. Full bar, rotating taps, tacos from whichever vendor is parked outside. Tuesday evenings, free to play, and the Gold Line drops you a short walk away. Turn up without a team and the host will fold you into one. Bring the friend whose brain is a landfill of unusable facts. This is their one shining hour of the week.

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10 days away

The Blasting Company – plays Over the Garden Wall

In 10 days · Oct 13 Lodge Room, 104 N Avenue 56, Los A…

The second night of a two-night run tends to be the looser one, and for a show built around a ten-episode cartoon that people watch every autumn like a liturgy, looser is an improvement. This is the band that actually wrote the score — the tavern songs, the frog numbers, the parts that made a children's program sound like a lost folk record. Playing it live, in costume, to a room that knows every word, produces something closer to a singalong than a concert. The people who come to the second night are frequently the ones who came to the first and could not leave it at that. Highland Park's old Masonic hall is upstairs, wood-floored, with a balcony. Music at 8:00 PM at 104 N Avenue 56, a Tuesday in October. Whether the leaves turn where you live or not, this is how a lot of people in this city mark the season now.

NYC Wine & Food Festival 2026 — New York, NY

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15 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 11 days away

NYC Wine & Food Festival 2026 — New York, NY

In 11 days · Oct 14 – Oct 17 20 Hudson Yards, New York, NY 10001

Picture the chefs you have been watching on television standing two feet away, actively cooking, actually talking to you - and now picture hundreds of them in tents along the Hudson River, in October, in the most food-serious city in the country. Four days of the best culinary talent in America, James Beard Award winners among them. The festival spans dozens of individual events across the city, from Grand Tastings at Hudson Yards to intimate chef dinners and late-night after-parties. The Grand Tastings are the anchor: enormous walkthrough experiences where you sample dishes from hundreds of chefs alongside wines, spirits, and cocktails curated from producers across the world. The programming is organized around themes - ocean-to-table, global flavors, pastry and dessert, fire and smoke - so there is a clear entry point depending on what kind of food person you are. This one is for people whose food obsession is an identity, not a hobby: industry professionals, serious food media, and deeply passionate civilian food lovers occupying the same space. If you follow food the way others follow sports - tracking restaurants, reading cookbooks, knowing what won the James Beard this year - this is built for your specific kind of enthusiasm. General admission tickets are available; VIP tiers offer more intimate experiences. Tickets sell out, particularly for the Saturday and Sunday Grand Tastings, so buy early - the best sessions are gone before October. Individual event pricing varies; budget for both the events and the inevitable great meal you will want afterward. The festival benefits two nonprofits, God's Love We Deliver and No Kid Hungry, so the spend carries an added dimension. Wear comfortable shoes: Grand Tastings are standing events and you will walk miles across the tasting floor. This is where the American food conversation happens in person, once a year - the restaurants, the chefs, the trends - and where that knowledge becomes communal. New York in October, food as identity, the entire industry in one place. The NYC Wine & Food Festival takes place in New York, NY.

Designing Books for Babies with Jon Klassen and Jess Hannigan

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11 days away

Designing Books for Babies with Jon Klassen and Jess Hannigan

In 11 days · Oct 14 ✨ New Free (RSVP) Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave…

The book your kid makes you read for the fourteenth time is never the one you would have picked. It is almost always the one where the pictures are doing something the words refuse to confirm - a hat that is obviously stolen, an animal looking just slightly off to the left. Klassen built a Caldecott career on exactly that withheld joke, and tonight he and Hannigan talk about the actual craft of it: how you design a page for a person who cannot read, how much you can imply with an eyeline, why the funniest thing in a picture book is usually the thing nobody says out loud. This is the rare event that is genuinely for two audiences at once - the illustration and design people who study his negative space, and the parents who have the whole text memorised against their will. Skylight keeps a children's annexe next door, and the staff there will tell you which of his books survives the fortieth reading, which is a different and more useful list than the award list. Free, RSVP, seven o'clock, a Wednesday. Come whether or not you brought the kid.

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12 days away

Shiner, Fotocrime, Nonexistent Night

In 12 days · Oct 15 Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd, San Die…

Too heavy for the radio and too melodic for the hardcore kids was a real commercial dead end, and the bands stuck in it spent the nineties being adored by about eleven thousand people who all still bring it up unprompted at parties. The headliner came out of Kansas City and made that particular trade-off sound deliberate: enormous low end, patient song structures, vocals that stay calm while everything underneath them gets heavier. Then look at who is opening. Fotocrime plays cold, drum-machine-driven post-punk that on paper shares nothing with the band above it, and in sequence makes complete sense — the same appetite for weight and repetition, routed through a different decade and a much colder set of tools. That is the actual reason to go. Bills this well-sequenced are rare, and the odds are good you arrive for one act and order the other one's record from the parking lot afterward. Doors seven-thirty, first act eight-thirty, a Thursday. October 15, Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd. Bring whoever you argue about record production with. The line between heavy nineties rock and the darkwave rooms across town is far thinner here than either crowd will admit.

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76 Gathering

13 days away

Temecula Greek Festival 2026

In 13 days · Oct 16 – Oct 18 Promenade Temecula, 40820 Winchest…

The lamb was prepared the way someone's grandmother actually prepared it - not approximated, not scaled down, the recipe that exists because it was the right one - and the people running the booth are genuinely happy you came. A Greek festival is not like any other outdoor food event: the food anchors, the music does not stop, and the hospitality is real. The spanakopita is made in quantity but not at the cost of what makes it worth eating. The loukoumades come out hot. The Greek coffee is strong and served without apology. Live Greek folk and traditional music runs throughout - performed by people for whom this is a gathering, not a performance - and the dancing starts slowly and accelerates until, by afternoon, people who have never done a Greek line dance are in the circle because it would feel wrong not to be. October in Temecula sits in the exact temperature range where outdoor events are worth attending. Come before the lamb runs out. Promenade Temecula, 40820 Winchester Rd. Dates and program at temeculagreekfest.com.

Harvest Festival Original Art & Craft Show Del Mar 2026

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44 Gathering

13 days away

Harvest Festival Original Art & Craft Show Del Mar 2026

In 13 days · Oct 16 $9+ Hangar 858, 3760 Glenn H Curtiss R…

Somewhere along the way, most of what we own stopped being made by hands we could shake. That is the quiet pull of a room full of makers: hundreds of them, under one roof at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, standing beside the glasswork and hand-turned wood and fine jewelry and photography they spent a year producing. You can talk to the person who threw the ceramic bowl. You can watch a woodworker explain the grain. For three days in October the fairgrounds fill with the smell of kettle corn and the low hum of a few hundred conversations between strangers who make things and strangers who want to hold them. There is a kids' zone, live entertainment, gourmet food, and holiday decor that will not exist in any big-box store. Bring cash, bring the children, bring the intention to leave with one thing you will keep for decades. October 16 through 18, 2026, Del Mar Fairgrounds. The 52nd year of a show that refuses to let handmade die.

Daily

51 Gathering

13 days away

OC Japan Fair 2026 — Fall Edition

Every day · Next Oct 16 OC Fair & Event Center, 88 Fair Dr…

Somewhere between the taiko drums shaking the floor and the takoyaki line that hasn't moved in ten minutes, you'll realize you've been here for four hours and haven't checked your phone once. OC Japan Fair takes over the OC Fair & Event Center every fall with 130+ booths, an estimated 45,000 visitors across three days, and a schedule that runs from J-pop performances and cosplay shows to kimono try-ons and Japanese calligraphy workshops. It is not a food fair with cultural garnish — it's a cultural fair with an absurd amount of food. The ramen vendors alone could fill a separate event. The K-PLAY! crossover means the cosplay crowd, the K-pop crowd, and the otaku crowd all land in the same space at the same time, which creates the kind of energy you don't plan. You just show up and it finds you. October 16–18, 2026. Friday 4–10 PM, Saturday 12–10 PM, Sunday 11 AM–7 PM. OC Fair & Event Center, 88 Fair Dr, Costa Mesa 92626. Tickets $14–$20.

Animation Is Film Festival 2026 - TCL Chinese 6 Theatres, Hollywood

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13 days away

Animation Is Film Festival 2026 - TCL Chinese 6 Theatres, Hollywood

In 13 days · Oct 16 TCL Chinese 6 Theatres, 6801 Holly…

Everybody tells you animation is for children right up until the year you work out that most of the films that genuinely wrecked you were drawn. This is the festival built for whoever that happened to. Its ninth edition puts Oscar contenders on the same four-day program as a twenty-six-year-old cult picture nobody's studio wanted, which is the entire argument it exists to make. On the awards side: Louis Clichy's Iron Boy, Leah Nelson's Tangles, The Violinist, and the first theatrical showing anywhere of the opening two episodes of Dana Terrace's Knights of Guinevere. But the reason to clear a Friday is further down the grid — the North American premiere of Shingo Natsume's Ghost: End of Night, and a retrospective print of Yoshiaki Kawajiri's Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the 2000 film that underperformed and then quietly became the thing a whole generation pointed at to end the argument about whether animation was a medium or a genre. Opening day starts with Best of Annecy at four in the afternoon, which means the festival's first act is a room full of people watching shorts that will never get a US release. October 16 to 19, at TCL 6 on Hollywood Blvd. Passes and single tickets through the festival.

DroneArt Show: Harry Potter™ — Del Mar Fairgrounds

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26 Gathering

13 days away

DroneArt Show: Harry Potter™ — Del Mar Fairgrounds

In 13 days · Oct 16 Del Mar Fairgrounds, 2260 Jimmy Du…

You remember the first time the Great Hall ceiling opened up and the candles floated. Not the plot. Not the dialogue. The ceiling. Some images lodge somewhere logic cannot reach and simply stay there for decades, quiet, until something cracks them open again. Twelve hundred drones rise off the fairgrounds and draw that ceiling across the real sky. Not a screen. Not a projection. The actual night, rewritten in light, while a live violinist threads the original score underneath formations that shift from the Sorting Hat to the Whomping Willow to a Patronus wider than the field you are standing on. The band on your wrist pulses in time with all of it, so you are not really watching the show. You are inside it. Two nights only, in October, outdoors. Parents who read the books aloud fifteen years ago will stand beside those kids, now grown, and neither one will say a word for a full minute.

Sex Pistols featuring Frank Carter at SOMA — San Diego

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15 Gathering

13 days away

Sex Pistols featuring Frank Carter at SOMA — San Diego

In 13 days · Oct 16 SOMA San Diego, 3350 Sports Arena …

Steve Jones is standing ten feet away from you playing the riff that started everything. The Sex Pistols — original members Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock — return with Frank Carter on vocals for a North American tour that stops at SOMA on October 16. Carter, the ferocious frontman of Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes and ex-Gallows, brings the dangerous energy that this music was built on. Support from LA's Militarie Gun, whose post-hardcore sets have been tearing through SoCal basements for years. This is not nostalgia. This is the band that detonated the blueprint for every punk show that followed, playing a room small enough that you can see the sweat. SOMA's concrete floor and low ceiling were built for exactly this volume. The people in this room are not here because they read about punk in a textbook. They are here because the first time they heard 'Anarchy in the U.K.' something clicked and never unclicked. Doors 7 PM. Show 8 PM. Tickets from $114 via Ticketmaster. All ages.

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72 Gathering

14 days away

Zine Fest San Diego 2026

In 14 days · Oct 17 The Woo, 3038 University Ave, San …

Someone made a zine for an audience of twelve. It's going to find you today. NTC Park at Liberty Station on July 11 — 100+ independent artists selling directly, no publishers, no gatekeepers, no algorithms deciding what gets seen. Just the people who drew it, printed it, and stapled it together, sitting behind a table waiting to talk about it. Zine Fest San Diego is one of the best annual gatherings in the city for anyone who makes things or wants to understand the people who do. The range runs from hand-drawn perzines to risograph-printed mini-comics to political art books to poetry collections to things so specific you wonder how they knew. Free to attend. Cash recommended — most artists have card readers but limits. NTC Park is outdoors; dress for the sun. Liberty Station has parking and is accessible from the 8. Budget a few hours: the best tables are the ones you didn't plan to stop at. Artists table next to each other, talk to each other, buy each other's work. The community in this room is the entire point.

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330 Gathering

14 days away

330 2 saved

Taste of Soul LA 2026

In 14 days · Oct 17 Free Crenshaw Blvd (Martin Luther King …

The smell reaches you before the stages do - barbecue and catfish and soul food covering a mile-plus of Crenshaw Boulevard, because every major Black-owned restaurant in South LA has a booth out here and the food is the center of the whole thing. For one Saturday in October, this stretch between Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Leimert Park Village becomes one of the largest street festivals in Los Angeles. More than 300,000 people move through in a single day. The format is street vendors, restaurant booths, live music stages, a car show, health screenings, and community organization presence - but it is the food and the crowd that make it. Founded by the Los Angeles Sentinel, the oldest Black-owned newspaper in California, it has run for over two decades and stayed a genuine community institution: multigenerational, neighborhood-rooted, and enormous. This is Leimert Park and Crenshaw at their fullest. Free to attend. Crenshaw closes to traffic for the day. The Metro K Line stops at Leimert Park Village and is the easiest way in and out. Arrive early if you want to move - by noon the crowds are deep.

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196 Gathering

14 days away

196

Little Italy Festa 2026 San Diego

In 14 days · Oct 17 – Oct 18 Free admission India Street & Fir Street, San Die…

Handmade pasta, cannoli, imported cheeses, and a chalk-art mural taking shape on the pavement under someone's knees - this is one weekend a year when India Street stops being a dining district and becomes a whole Italian-American neighborhood turned inside out. San Diego's largest annual street festival draws over 100,000 people across the weekend. The Little Italy Association organizes it, filling India Street and the surrounding blocks with cooking demonstrations, bocce ball tournaments, live Italian folk music, traditional dance, and an extraordinary spread of food. The Gesso Italiano brings local artists creating chalk-art murals on the streets; the cooking competition and wine garden are the peak-hour draws, and neighborhood restaurants run festival specials throughout. Little Italy is one of the city's most walkable districts - bounded by the waterfront, lined with bistros and gelato shops. Free to attend. Parking is limited - the Little Italy trolley stop on the Green Line is the easy way in. Mid-October along India Street and Fir Street, San Diego.

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