  25 years after discovery of high-temperature superconductivity (HTSC) in
La$_{2-x}$Ba$_x$CuO$_4$ (LBCO), the HTSC continues to pose some of the biggest
challenges in materials science. Cuprates are fundamentally different from
conventional superconductors in that the metallic conductivity and
superconductivity are induced by doping carriers into an antiferromagnetically
ordered correlated insulator. In such systems, the normal state is expected to
be quite different from a Landau-Fermi liquid - the basis for the conventional
BCS theory of superconductivity. The situation is additionally complicated by
the fact that cuprates are susceptible to charge/spin ordering tendencies,
especially in the low-doping regime. The role of such tendencies on the
phenomenon of superconductivity is still not completely clear. Here, we present
studies of the electronic structure in cuprates where the superconductivity is
strongly suppressed as static spin and charge orders or stripes develop near
the doping level of $x =1/8$ and outside of the superconducting dome, for
$x<0.055$. We discuss the relationship between the stripes, superconductivity,
pseudogap and the observed electronic excitations in these materials.
