Ooga Booga

Ooga Booga

Ooga Booga carries handmade books

By Sierra Feldner-Shaw

A compact, energetic young man in a grandpa sweater and flowing mustache is berating Wendy Yao when I walk in to Ooga Booga on a Tuesday in early May. “I notice I haven’t seen you there in a while,” he says. He's referring to Yao's attendance at his weekly DJ night, pretending to joke, but you can tell he means it.

Off coffee for an undisclosed but presumably short period of time, Yao is in no mood for ribbing. “Get out!” she says, her laugh taking the bite out of the note of authority. The friend leaves and Yao settles in behind the counter, turning down the Abe Vigoda music that fills the small space. “I’m in a crazy mood today, sorry.”

No need to apologize to me. Gracious, self-deprecating, and quietly hilarious, Yao, 31, is one of those people that everyone knows, likes, and wants at their weekly DJ night. A regular on the Downtown underground music scene since the 1990s, when she and her sister Amy were teenagers in the Riot Grrrl punk band Emily’s Sassy Lime, Yao and her eclectic store Ooga Booga have since become fixtures in Los Angeles. The store opened in 2004, when there were no other boutiques of its kind in the area, and in many ways helped to grease the wheels of a Downtown revival that is only now picking up serious momentum.

“I like Chinatown, and it was a really affordable place to open,” Yao says of her decision to open the store on Broadway, a few blocks from Chung King Road. “I have these connections. It feels personal. I’m from LA and I came here growing up with my family to get groceries or to eat, and then when I was a teenager I’d come to see bands play at the punk venues, and when I was in college my sister co-founded one of the first art galleries here. So it was this natural thing. And I like that there’s a sense of community here. Like the neighbors, Helen the travel agent, and Eddy across the way. I kind of warmed up to Helen from the very beginning – or she warmed up to you!” Yao swings around to point at her employee Maxwell Krivitsky, artist and creator of the blog “The Catorialist,” who has just walked in.

“She calls him her baby,” Yao says. “She brings him lunch. What did she feed you?”

“Just a sandwich, ham and butter,” Kravitsky says, a little embarrassed. “A double-decker. It was good.”

“She was all, ‘What do white people eat?’” Yao says, laughing. She gets up to walk around the store, straightening here and there while pointing out some of her favorite items. The focal point and distribution center for a thriving scene that encompasses art, music, fashion, design, and zine culture, Ooga Booga mostly carries small labels and lesser-known artists. There is clothing by Correll Correll, Patrick Ervell, Opening Ceremony, and Bless. A “faux fox stole” made of stuffed silk by Slow and Steady Wins the Race sits beside a necklace by jewelry designers Mended Veil that looks like already-been-chewed gum at the end of a long chain. Pipes and beer can sculptures by the conceptual artist Piero Golia stand out, as well as sculpture that looks like rainbow colored poop (“Poops, I Did it Again”) by Jim Drain, who also designed the window display made of pages from old books smeared with melted crayon. Accessories, books, music, ceramics, and all manner of interesting handmade objects are stuffed into a very small second-story storefront. “Grandma’s closet,” Yao calls it, a place where a person could spend hours inside and still not see everything, making it a sort of mini Chinatown gallery of its own.

“When I was little, there wasn’t a specific thing that I wanted to be,” Yao says. “I was kind of happy to be like a leaf in the wind. Which I feel like in a weird way this is, maybe because it’s so ADD. It’s a small store to be carrying so many different categories, but I guess you have to follow your basic gut instinct. When I was in college I did a radio DJ show and some people were like ‘we play blues’ or whatever, and I would just play what I wanted to play. It all made sense, it was all tied together. It was all kind of one narrative for me.”

She picks up a small handmade book from the top of a shelf and fingers through it. “I like ’zines a lot,” she says. “Being a teenager, pre-Internet, mail order was a huge way of communicating with people and getting information out, being part of a dialogue without having to read Spin magazine or whatever. So it was a really vital part of creating and maintaining a network of people who wanted to be making creative stuff in an independent platform, rather than relying on commercial acceptance or support. There’s something really basic and political about being able to self-publish and share what you’re doing.

“Now it’s blogs, but sometimes you can do things with a ’zine that you couldn’t do with a blog. Also blogs are more public, so ’zines can seem a bit more private. Even back when you were mail ordering, they were always kind of this secret, because it was punk and DIY underground culture operating through the [Postal Service], which is a huge governmental organization, but it’s also a secret that your parents probably didn’t know about, so there’s that private exchange.” She looks around. “[Ooga Booga] is kind of like that, too! I mean, we’re on the second floor and we’re small and we’ve got too much stuff. It’s kind of like you’re coming to my apartment and seeing what I have.”

I ask Yao what she likes most about being Downtown. “I like how L.A.’s Downtown doesn’t mean what it means to be ‘downtown’ in New York. It’s just Downtown, it’s not so loaded,” she says. “I like that space Synchronicity where Max did a show. [Krivitsky recently transformed the front window of the Synchronicity space to look like a marijuana dispensary, changing the name to “Chron City” for the event.] The Smell, the Gold Line, Max Karaoke – what else? I used to go to the Little Tokyo Mall a lot when I was a teenager, and now it’s fun again. There are good places to eat, and kids in weird video game role-playing costumes eating Domino’s pizza and playing cards in the courtyard. That’s cool.” She stops to think. “Oh! I love shopping for tissues and stuff, that whole section around Olive and 11th where all those display fixture places are. They just upgraded their steeve – you can design your own tissue! I mean, the tissue shopping is tight right now!”

“Yeah, we get very excited about the tissue,” Kravitsky says.

“Yeah,” Yao says, “that is very cool.”

Ooga Booga is located at 943 North Broadway (213) 617-1105‎. For more details, please visit www.oogaboogastore.com.

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