Review from a Rando: Dazed and Amazed at the 99CENT Craze

Installation view: 99CENT pop up from The Hole x Barry McGee. Courtesy of the author.

By CECE RYDER March 16, 2026

The 99CENT pop up from The Hole x Barry McGee has got me in a chokehold. I am obsessed, I feel both deranged and released from whatever I was doing before. It was a full circle moment where I felt like I was back where I started, back where I needed to be. At the heart of it. And I feel insane because I feel like it was made just for me. The dollar store has been a space of reprieve and small joy for me, ever since I used to work as a cashier at Target and would walk to the dollar tree next door after my shift when I was feeling particularly down-n-out in my bright red shirt with the name tag on. The dollar store would always cheer me up, and at a low cost! I could get everything I wanted. I loaded up with bubble bath bombs, vanilla candles, nailpolish, eyeliner, energy drink, toilet bowl cleaner, sunglasses, glass jars, stickers, pens, notebooks that said “Stuff” in gold cursive on the front.  

“How I feel about the dollar store is like how Holly Golightly felt about Tiffany's,” I said, faded under the eternal red glow of light bulbs below the smog at the 50 hr DTLA New Year’s rave. 

Mentioning Tiffany’s and the Dollar Store in the same breath amused me. Especially in such a godforsaken place, at a godforsaken hour, just off Skid Row. But it was true. I felt as though nothing completely terrible could ever happen to a girl in a dollar store.

99CENT brought art into the very space that is our little sacred mainstay in capitalistic resistance. It was more than a wink and a nod. It was a low hum, a drum beat, a heartbeat that pumped full into the space we all know and love. 

On the scene 

Just to be seen 

And to see 

What’s goin on

I am standing in line waiting. Who would’ve thought I’d be waiting in line for the 99cent store! Even just waiting in line against the magnificent piece of graffiti art, there was a break in the tension.  

What a devastating and delightful blow to my psyche this art pop up was. 99CENT just completely obliterated any sense of self I previously held. I am in awe of it all. I’m awake again. If you’ve ever seriously attempted strapping yourself up with psychedelic drugs and blasting off into the universe, you can compare 99CENT to that, it was like that. But in Real Life. 

The takeaway from the trip: There is a swell of Radical Love and Defiant Joy bubbling to the surface, even as the water boils and we are constantly pushed into turmoil. We are all CONNECTED. And you could FEEL it. The universe WINKED at 6121 Wilshire Boulevard. The art felt familiar in an uncanny way. Like I had seen it all before I was even born. Like I was home, inside someone else’s brain. 

There’s a Trump punching bag at the front and I flipped a record at Devin Flynn’s station.

“Did you see James Franco’s name over there?” somebody whispered. 

In the walk-in cooler behind the cold shelves, I overheard a confession: “There is so much here, it’s giving me anxiety… and I like it.” 

“Is this art too?” A little girl asked her mother. An astute question. 

Installation view: 99CENT pop up from The Hole x Barry McGee. Courtesy of the author.

In other words, what was intentionally placed and what was left behind as a vestige of the decrepit churn of capitalism? It was hard to say. But it all meant something. It all became part of the living breathing thing. The haphazard dusty plastic fork and a tilted bottle of jameson at the checkout counter echoed the misplaced spray paint and the piles of posters and the scraps of wisdom beneath it all. Life imitates art which imitates life and creates an infinite loop of cosmik debris.  

Can I stay here forever?? I literally died and went to dollar store heaven. Trying to describe the buzz of the place, I told Cam: “I wanted to kill myself in there so I could die happy.” It’s almost embarrassing how much I loved it, because loving anything so accessible as “pop art” is a little embarrassing.  But better yet, somehow I’m falling in love with myself again. The “artist healing center” worked on me. I was sure I had stepped into a parallel universe where artists ruled the world. For better or worse. 99CENT harnessed the zeitgeist of repurposed art spaces like a pegasus on the rise, and with it, ascended beyond the confines of time and space. 

Shoppers, the 99c store is closing in 10 minutes, the ironic, crunchy voice of an overhead announcer said. 

Alright, alright I guess I do have to leave here. I saw the screen-printer swiping away and handing out shirts, and I considered buying one. But there was a line and I wanted to soak in the last few moments of the space without being in the position of waiting for something. Cus most of my life feels like waiting for something. Right now was for being in that something. 

Installation view: 99CENT pop up from The Hole x Barry McGee. Courtesy of the author.

I stepped out of the womb of 99CENT and into the rich brooding sunset of west LA. The collective consciousness of the space had reoriented my eyes to see beauty all around me. I strut down the sidewalk feeling like 99 million bucks ;). A smile, a glimmering Labubu grimace, was planted on my face, alone in my car. Galavanting across Los Angeles. My SoundCloud algorithm was behaving itself today. Playing things that made my heart bleed all over the old leather seats. 

The smile turned into tears welling up because my thoughts turned to war and about cities, just like ours, being bombed.  

It is not wrong to love during war, even though it sort of feels that way sometimes. But sometimes, it's all you can do. It is a form of resistance. 

I stopped in Chinatown. Plopped down on a red bench and just took it all in. 

A faint nursery rhyme spoke to me from the tail of a whale swimming on cement: Row row row your boat gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream…

The next day I craved another hit of the 99c craze like a crackhead. I paced around my apartment trying on outfits and sunglasses trying to decide whether to go back or not. I wanted to go back because I wanted… to buy a piece? To get to the bottom of it all? To be part of it all? To meet a fabulous artist who would invite me to a fabulous after party where we continued to live within the dream? To feel that inexplicable buzz? To learn what life’s about?

Our forests are the lanterns aglow 

Suspended in time 

Our oceans are the ceaseless rolling human eccentricities 

That heave and ho and wash ashore on the beaches of the soul

LA is a forest of the mind 

And for now it is more than I could ever ask for 

Suspended in time 

Our wind is the shuffle of old artist feet packing up their street things 

For the night WM