Saturday night April 16th, 2011, in the Coachella valley, hundreds of thousands of people celebrated their third consecutive night of watching the back of people’s heads watching their favorite bands. They waded through piles of drug-addled sixteen year olds, and prayed to Ra that they wouldn ’t die of heat stroke for the right to hear a pretty good version of that song they like for $400 dollars.

But we couldn't go. We're pretty poor.

Here’s what we did instead: Brokechella.

Saturday night April 16th, at The Airliner, (where Thom Yorke played a secret show the week prior), hundreds of people piled into a two-story bar near downtown LA for a night of drinks and art and music inspired by and topping Coachella. It was like Street Sharks to TMNT: the cheap knock-off that’s obviously way better than the original.

There were PBR sculptures, food trucks, free otter pops, and drunkenness, all with the music as good as the Coachella line up, but as played by the affordable-for-now-but-not-for-long-so-see-em-while-you-can talent of LA.

FOR 5 DOLLARS! Yay! You have that amount of money! Dancin'.

*****

Brokechella is part of cARTel’s Community Pool series, downtown art parties designed to bring the youth scene of this city together in raucus celebration of art, music, comedy, food, drink and the fact that we’re lucky enough to live somewhere where we are free to pursue our artistic endeavors and be surrounded by like minded individuals dedicated to supporting those endeavors.