...from Lots o' Crap zine (issue #4).
TOPANGA MESSENGER 4-9-09
"Lower Topanga Redux -- ca. 1970"
by Dennis J. Carlile
___by Dennis J. Carlile
"Tool's Snake Pit"
by Tool, Art by Toylit
Brass Tacks Press, 2007
71 pp., chapbook
Price: $5
www.lifeasapoet.com
___
The days of the Wild Wild West did not end with the passing of the cowboy, nor the demise of the TV series of that name. In Topanga Canyon some 30 years ago, the "Wild West" was thriving in ways Wyatt Earp would never have imagined. In "Tool's Snake Pit," the reader is taken on a wild ride through a particular time and place that is now part of California history.
Tool is the nom-de-plume of "a mysterious guy" who lived near the beach in a Lower Topanga neighborhood called the "Snake Pit." He did a lot of drugs and was an expert craftsman of drug-smuggling equipment in the heyday of pot, LSD, and cocaine trafficking. In an eloquent, casually conversational tone, Tool spins out the story of his life as a "free spirit" and builder of secret hiding places.
"Ever since I was a kid, I'd been making secret hiding places, but my first professional job was working for Martian, the manager of a famous rock band…. [He] really pushed the limits of my abilities. He also recommended me, and I actually went into business with him making fake aerosol cans…. I also did carry-on stuff. Like we made a wheelchair with a fake giant battery that ran the motor. It could hold about three pounds, and it really worked for a few minutes. All my secret panels have to work."
In the late '70s, Tool found himself at a now-gone PCH nightclub called The Sunspot, where a friend told him, "Hey, I got a room for rent." And so he came to the Snake Pit, a collection of bungalows, shacks, cabins, and cabañas in Lower Topanga. It is at this point, a mere seven pages into this incredibly jam-packed book, that the cast of odd characters begins to expand at a dizzying rate. Surf punks, wayward high school girls, motel deadbeats, eccentric artists, drug dealers, beach trollers, the Mafia, and the Topanga Sniper are but a few of the many memorable types encountered here – as well as being the titles of several of the chapters. The word "chapter" is perhaps misleading though, for each section is like a tightly compressed short story with a plotline only marginally connected to the preceding and following sections.
Each vignette portrays a weird, or dangerous, or bleakly hilarious aspect of life in the Snake Pit.
"These guys were doing so much angel dust that it was really scary," Tool says at one point of the people with whom he was living. "And there was this PCP guy who was living naked on the roof below me. He didn't live in a room. The guy would eat only fruits and vegetables and be naked. And he wouldn't remove any of the peels, so it was like this bizarre debris of dried orange peels, and watermelon skins, and him naked doing PCP on the roof…. This was when I had a girlfriend and her kid living with me, and Horseman [a recent arrival] would be down there firing shotguns off and shooting heroin, right below us, in the middle of the night."
The book is also outrageously illustrated by Lower Topanga artist Toylit. His vigorously effective, black-and-white drawings perfectly capture the psychedelic shimmer of those days.
Between romantic moonlit horseback rides on the beach and sabotaging movie crews shooting nearby, Tool has run-ins with police and building inspectors.
"The cops were in full camouflage SWAT gear, and they brought the building inspector in like he needed armed protection," Tool laughs.
And there was also the Halloween when Tool, dressed as the Cheshire Cat from "Alice in Wonderland" (complete with tree), outran the cops… only to watch from a safe distance as his less-fortunate friend, got-up as the White Rabbit, is handcuffed.
"They arrest him, but he can't take off the rabbit costume. He has no clothes underneath, only underwear. So he spent the night in the Malibu jail like that. And the whole time they were busting him, I'm in my Cheshire Cat costume on the hill, going, 'Meow! Meow!'"
The final portion of this little volume tells of how Tool entered a one-man float for the Topanga Days Parade. He made a whale out of latex, wire, and canvas – which he constructed around his bicycle – and rode it dressed as Neptune. He arrives late, but when the crowd sees him, they stop leaving and sit to watch him pedal past.
"I guess they've tried to stop this, but the big thing in the Topanga Days Parade is that they throw water at you. Either they're throwing water balloons or shooting you with water. Well, you're in this heavy [expletive] whale, and the tires are slipping and sliding on oil-covered asphalt. I mean, the worst thing they could do was to throw water at me.
"And it's so funny because it seems like every time I do a parade, I'm usually at the end with the fire department, which is good because they all think I'm going to die of a heart attack…. But the Topanga Days Parade was the first parade where I myself really thought that I might have a heart attack. Honest to God! It's all uphill for all those miles…. I was just panting."
But he keeps pedaling, and at the end, the parade committee gives him a special trophy.
"I tried to tie the trophy to the hood of the whale, but I didn't do a good job, and it fell off, and a car ran over it, and smashed it into three or four pieces. But I still kept the pieces for years after that."
Of all the crazy tales, perhaps the most wacky story is how he built a secret room inside a 53-foot moving-van for the express purpose of transporting pounds of marijuana. This is an epic episode in his career, comparable in his mind to the building of the Trojan Horse.
"This is a [expletive] great challenge…. Half the fun of secret panels is the challenge. You're challenging the best. Your challenging cops and customs people that have all the [expletive] money in the world, and all the time in the world, and all the machines in the world to [expletive] check you out…. And I am so proud of the fact that I have been able to beat the best again and again."
In just 71 pages, a whole panorama of the subculture of the '70s is rolled out before the attentive reader. Bar fights, acid trips, hot tub sex, Quaalude orgies, and scrapes with gangsters, bikers, and the Law tumble one after another in a free-for-all picaresque monologue. It will make you laugh. It will make your hair stand on end. It is a rich feast of man's follies and jollies, and the lawlessness of living on the edge.
This is an authentic peek into a past Topanga that will never come again: a funhouse ride of a book full of dark humor and surreality. And we have to accept the truth of it all because, frankly, it is far too strange to be fiction.
"Tool's Snake Pit" is a companion volume to a previously published book called "The Snake Pit" by Baretta, which shares the same setting. Tool appears as a minor character there, but it is an entirely different tale of wild women, surfers, artists… and, yes, sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Lower Topanga. Both books are $5 and for sale at Topanga Eco Mail, and on the Brass Tacks Press website: www.lifeasapoet.com.
Tool is the nom-de-plume of "a mysterious guy" who lived near the beach in a Lower Topanga neighborhood called the "Snake Pit." He did a lot of drugs and was an expert craftsman of drug-smuggling equipment in the heyday of pot, LSD, and cocaine trafficking. In an eloquent, casually conversational tone, Tool spins out the story of his life as a "free spirit" and builder of secret hiding places.
"Ever since I was a kid, I'd been making secret hiding places, but my first professional job was working for Martian, the manager of a famous rock band…. [He] really pushed the limits of my abilities. He also recommended me, and I actually went into business with him making fake aerosol cans…. I also did carry-on stuff. Like we made a wheelchair with a fake giant battery that ran the motor. It could hold about three pounds, and it really worked for a few minutes. All my secret panels have to work."
In the late '70s, Tool found himself at a now-gone PCH nightclub called The Sunspot, where a friend told him, "Hey, I got a room for rent." And so he came to the Snake Pit, a collection of bungalows, shacks, cabins, and cabañas in Lower Topanga. It is at this point, a mere seven pages into this incredibly jam-packed book, that the cast of odd characters begins to expand at a dizzying rate. Surf punks, wayward high school girls, motel deadbeats, eccentric artists, drug dealers, beach trollers, the Mafia, and the Topanga Sniper are but a few of the many memorable types encountered here – as well as being the titles of several of the chapters. The word "chapter" is perhaps misleading though, for each section is like a tightly compressed short story with a plotline only marginally connected to the preceding and following sections.
Each vignette portrays a weird, or dangerous, or bleakly hilarious aspect of life in the Snake Pit.
"These guys were doing so much angel dust that it was really scary," Tool says at one point of the people with whom he was living. "And there was this PCP guy who was living naked on the roof below me. He didn't live in a room. The guy would eat only fruits and vegetables and be naked. And he wouldn't remove any of the peels, so it was like this bizarre debris of dried orange peels, and watermelon skins, and him naked doing PCP on the roof…. This was when I had a girlfriend and her kid living with me, and Horseman [a recent arrival] would be down there firing shotguns off and shooting heroin, right below us, in the middle of the night."
The book is also outrageously illustrated by Lower Topanga artist Toylit. His vigorously effective, black-and-white drawings perfectly capture the psychedelic shimmer of those days.
Between romantic moonlit horseback rides on the beach and sabotaging movie crews shooting nearby, Tool has run-ins with police and building inspectors.
"The cops were in full camouflage SWAT gear, and they brought the building inspector in like he needed armed protection," Tool laughs.
And there was also the Halloween when Tool, dressed as the Cheshire Cat from "Alice in Wonderland" (complete with tree), outran the cops… only to watch from a safe distance as his less-fortunate friend, got-up as the White Rabbit, is handcuffed.
"They arrest him, but he can't take off the rabbit costume. He has no clothes underneath, only underwear. So he spent the night in the Malibu jail like that. And the whole time they were busting him, I'm in my Cheshire Cat costume on the hill, going, 'Meow! Meow!'"
The final portion of this little volume tells of how Tool entered a one-man float for the Topanga Days Parade. He made a whale out of latex, wire, and canvas – which he constructed around his bicycle – and rode it dressed as Neptune. He arrives late, but when the crowd sees him, they stop leaving and sit to watch him pedal past.
"I guess they've tried to stop this, but the big thing in the Topanga Days Parade is that they throw water at you. Either they're throwing water balloons or shooting you with water. Well, you're in this heavy [expletive] whale, and the tires are slipping and sliding on oil-covered asphalt. I mean, the worst thing they could do was to throw water at me.
"And it's so funny because it seems like every time I do a parade, I'm usually at the end with the fire department, which is good because they all think I'm going to die of a heart attack…. But the Topanga Days Parade was the first parade where I myself really thought that I might have a heart attack. Honest to God! It's all uphill for all those miles…. I was just panting."
But he keeps pedaling, and at the end, the parade committee gives him a special trophy.
"I tried to tie the trophy to the hood of the whale, but I didn't do a good job, and it fell off, and a car ran over it, and smashed it into three or four pieces. But I still kept the pieces for years after that."
Of all the crazy tales, perhaps the most wacky story is how he built a secret room inside a 53-foot moving-van for the express purpose of transporting pounds of marijuana. This is an epic episode in his career, comparable in his mind to the building of the Trojan Horse.
"This is a [expletive] great challenge…. Half the fun of secret panels is the challenge. You're challenging the best. Your challenging cops and customs people that have all the [expletive] money in the world, and all the time in the world, and all the machines in the world to [expletive] check you out…. And I am so proud of the fact that I have been able to beat the best again and again."
In just 71 pages, a whole panorama of the subculture of the '70s is rolled out before the attentive reader. Bar fights, acid trips, hot tub sex, Quaalude orgies, and scrapes with gangsters, bikers, and the Law tumble one after another in a free-for-all picaresque monologue. It will make you laugh. It will make your hair stand on end. It is a rich feast of man's follies and jollies, and the lawlessness of living on the edge.
This is an authentic peek into a past Topanga that will never come again: a funhouse ride of a book full of dark humor and surreality. And we have to accept the truth of it all because, frankly, it is far too strange to be fiction.
"Tool's Snake Pit" is a companion volume to a previously published book called "The Snake Pit" by Baretta, which shares the same setting. Tool appears as a minor character there, but it is an entirely different tale of wild women, surfers, artists… and, yes, sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Lower Topanga. Both books are $5 and for sale at Topanga Eco Mail, and on the Brass Tacks Press website: www.lifeasapoet.com.
TOPANGA MESSENGER 2-12-09
"Three Short Films about Topanga, Free Screening at Froggy's, February 26"Article and Photo by Pablo Capra
Topanga filmmaker Anastasia Fite will be showing three short documentaries she recently completed about Topanga Canyon at Froggy's on February 26.
King of the Creek Rats (2007) follows Boobie, the self-proclaimed "King of the Creek Rats," and his family on a trek into Topanga Creek as they discuss the thriving homeless community living there from the 1960s to present. In the heyday, Boobie claims to have lived in a "luxury" home powered by batteries from car wrecks, and that 200 naked people congregated at his swimming hole every weekend.
Topanga's Attic (by Anastasia Fite and Tom Mitchell, 2008) was commissioned by the Topanga Historical Society. It is a celebration of Topanga Canyon through the ages, featuring prominent faces like Herta Ware, Gerry Haigh, Ellen Geer, Blackie, and Kedric Wolfe; institutions like The Theatricum Botanicum, Topanga Elementary School, Wildworks, and Topanga Days; and archival footage from Topanga's rich musical history, including Little Feat and Canned Heat.
Last Bastion (2009) is a look at the tight-knit former Lower Topanga community, one of the last outposts of the classic Topanga Bohemian hippie lifestyle until State Parks evicted the residents and demolished the area in 2006-2007. Artist James Mathers says, "I hung out with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Internationally, I did the Venice Biennale and the Basel Art Festival. As far as art scenes go, this was second to none."
Fite's three 25-minute films fit naturally together as a whole, and she hopes to complete a full-length documentary about Topanga Canyon one day.
She currently works as the Manager of the Santa Monica Screening Room, where she holds a free monthly event on the third Wednesday of every month called "Meet the Filmmakers / Works-in-Progress." For monthly updates, join the Santa Monica Screening Room Facebook group.
Fite also rents out the 28-seat mini-theater for as low as $150 (or $100 without A/V equipment). For rental information, call (310) 393-8306, or visit the website at www.smscreening.com. The Santa Monica Screening Room is located at 1526 14th Street, Suite #102, between Colorado and Broadway.
Fite's three short Topanga documentaries will play at Froggy's on February 26, at 7:30 p.m. Come early to see her co-filmmaker Tom Mitchell's band, the Self-Righteous Brothers, at 6:30 p.m. Froggy's is located at 1105 North Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Phone: (310) 455-1728. Admission is free.
WOOFCO TV -- January 9, 2009
Mr. Baer of Woofco TV interviews Brass Tacks Press publisher and poet Pablo Capra about how the French novelist Marcel Proust has influenced him.
The Proust Experience - Pablo Capra part 1
The Proust Experience - Pablo Capra part 2
FREE VENICE BEACHHEAD 1-1-09
Excerpt from "Remembering Sponto"Photo by "eye-m-drc"
[From the memorial issue dedicated to Sponto (1949-2008), pictured here in his gallery at the Crap Poetry multi-media event in 2006.]
CINEMA WITHOUT BORDERS -- November 10, 2008
"Malibu Song
Made in Austria: Building Futures – Past and Present"
by Melissa Lavabre
Flower children, crazy mystics, artists en tout genre, eccentrics and dissidents, strange healing rituals and prayers... you're in for a beatnik treat.
“Malibu Song” by Natalie Lettner and Werner Hanak, produced between 2002 and 2006 just had its US premiere at the Goethe Institute on October 30th 2008, as part of the Made in Austria series, presented in collaboration with the Austrian Consulate.
It chronicles the eviction process of a tight community of artists living on the Rodeo Grounds in Lower Topanga, whose land is purchased by the California State Parks. It draws affectionate portraits of many different and unique characters going through this uprooting. Some of them have lived there for thirty or forty years and here must lose their home and way of life, “their deep roots yanked up” in Herb’s words.
While it does deal with painful loss, the film is not a whimpering or melodramatic piece however, rather a celebration of these creative neighbors and their fairy land bubble.
Norton is a lifeguard and artist but really, he is a superhero who travels to the center of the Earth to save the universe.
James, the smelly poet (at least, in one scene) and painter brought to light by Andy Warhol years back, and Pablo, handsome nature child, poet and publisher, both recount their fairy tales of the Rodeo Grounds.
Baretta sings the Malibu song in his baritone voice. He's a big-bellied man, he lives in a shack with his radio and there's a veladora on his table and an assortment of varied things outside the shack – useless to the profane but surely treasures. (One is bound to suspect he must be a superhero too.)
Everyone here seems to be a collector of overlooked treasures.
Herb Bermann lives “on the outskirts of the Milky Way most of the time...” He is an awarded writer, some of his poems were used as lyrics for Captain Beefheart. He recalls some of the many talents coming through Topanga – Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, the Mamas and Papas to name a few.
And there's Carole, the pretty hippie who came one night in '68 or '69 and stayed since; Larry, the mad uncle who invented the flying sword; the girl who jumps on the trampoline throughout the movie; and a few more wild flowers.
The houses, the land have their own tangible life as well, as Werner Hanak, one of the filmmakers, explains in the Q&A.
The Rodeo Grounds were rodeo grounds in the 1800s, then a Japanese fisherman village in the early 1900s, a resort for actors like Chaplin or Humphrey Bogart in the 50s, then purchased by the Athletic club and rented to this community of artists, and now purchased by the California State Parks. They are not the most hospitable though - floods, fires, earthquakes are common.
We have entered another zone, a different world. The mover comes, hired to pack the precious belongings for the departure. He seems so incongruous, so out of place with his little beeping machine that keeps some sort of inventory or whatever it does. He contrasts with the philosophy here.
James carefully chooses his words to describe it: “Life's about being a lazy poet. Life was not given to us to be productive.” Yet, these are all vibrant artists, producing poetry every moment. He's figured out that art is stupid but you still have to do it, Norton says about James.
Norton paints on glass panes. His paintings are live and constantly shifting, constantly changing, evoking impermanence. One picture fades into a new one and a new one and another. It seems like a good parallel for the Rodeo Grounds, which shifted from rodeo grounds to Japanese village to artist community to state park, in progress, in constant progress, evolution...
The Austrian Consulate will present four more films from Austria to be screened these next two Thursdays at the Goethe Institute. Please visit the Goethe Institute’s website.
TOPANGA MESSENGER 11-6-08
Excerpt from
"America is Addicted to Oil — It’s Time for an Intervention"
By Cassandra Wiseman
"America is Addicted to Oil — It’s Time for an Intervention"
By Cassandra Wiseman
...So far this year, film festivals around the country have honored Fuel with seven awards including best screenwriting at the Sedona Film Festival and the IVCA Clarion award for Corporate Social Responsibility. It is an official selection for more than 20 film festivals around the world....
...its producers have emotional connections to the canyon. Rebecca Harrell grew up lying in a hammock in an ancient tree grove with [Brass Tacks Press publisher] Pablo Capra at film director and Topanga activist Bernt Capra's home in lower Topanga....
GOETHE INSTITUTE LOS ANGELES -- October 30, 2008
"Malibu Song Premiere"The inside story on the end of SoCal's last hippie beach colony
(Austria 2005, documentary, 67 min.)
The Austrian Consulate General presents the Lower Topanga documentary Malibu Song by Natalie Lettner and Werner Hanak as the opening film of their documentary film program Made in Austria – Building Futures, Past and Present, inviting you to get to know contemporary Austrian documentary filmmakers close-up.
California, at the beginning of the 21st century: an artists’ colony with hippie roots in Malibu. The painter James Mathers sits in front of his Airstream trailer and sings "The Malibu Song:" A song for all the lazy poets, who were not meant to be productive. Then he gets up and paints... Malibu Song is a film about the end of an important chapter in the history of American culture.
The film also stars Herb Bermann, Baretta, Pablo Capra, Tool, Coliene Rentmeester, Carole Winter, Norton Wisdom, and others.
This will be the LA and US premiere, and the screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers.
California, at the beginning of the 21st century: an artists’ colony with hippie roots in Malibu. The painter James Mathers sits in front of his Airstream trailer and sings "The Malibu Song:" A song for all the lazy poets, who were not meant to be productive. Then he gets up and paints... Malibu Song is a film about the end of an important chapter in the history of American culture.
The film also stars Herb Bermann, Baretta, Pablo Capra, Tool, Coliene Rentmeester, Carole Winter, Norton Wisdom, and others.
This will be the LA and US premiere, and the screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers.
COST: $5
DATE: October 30, 7 p.m.
LOCATION: Goethe Institute Los Angeles
5750 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 525-3388
DATE: October 30, 7 p.m.
LOCATION: Goethe Institute Los Angeles
5750 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 525-3388
TOPANGA MESSENGER -- October 23, 2008
"Malibu Song Premiere"by Pablo Capra
“This film is so ironically funny, full of beatnik philosophy and poetry, and Californian hippie-surfer aesthetic and culture! Don't miss it!”
(Jeff Crowder, "Americans Abroad")
(Jeff Crowder, "Americans Abroad")
On October 30, the Austrian Consulate General will be presenting the Lower Topanga Canyon documentary "Malibu Song" by Natalie Lettner and Werner Hanak as the opening film of their documentary film program "Made in Austria – Building Futures, Past and Present."
Lower Topanga, which includes the first three miles of Topanga Canyon, was home to a colorful artists community with strong hippie roots, standing at the old entrance to Malibu. In 2001, State Parks made a controversial decision to buy Lower Topanga and relocate its more than 100 residents. In 2002, filmmakers Natalie Lettner and Werner Hanak, who had been enchanted by Lower Topanga on previous visits, began filming the residents and their struggle to stay in their beachside paradise.
Natalie Lettner works at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (Art History Museum Vienna). She was dramatic advisor and assistant director for the TOI-Haus-Theater in Salzburg (1992-95); cultural journalist and university lecturer for literature and art history (University of Salzburg and Bard College, New York).
Werner Hanak is a curator at the Jewish Museum Vienna. His previous film credits include the documentary film "Drop Outs" (1990) and the short film "Die Reise des Tellerwäschers" ("The Dishwasher’s Journey," 1988).
Their film focuses on a few unique Lower Topanga personalities, including James Mathers, a painter living in an Airstream trailer; Norton Wisdom, performance artist and lifeguard in Malibu; Carole Winter, diehard flower child; Herb Bermann, former rock poet who wrote songs for Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band; and Robert “Baretta” Overby, who sings the haunting "Malibu Song"...
Malibu's known for its own way of life
Malibu's known for the sun
But if Malibu's all you achieve in your life
Then tomorrow you're walking alone.
These lyrics ring true as the Lower Topanga community is finally broken up in 2006, making the film a historical document of perhaps the last such neighborhood in Southern California.
"Malibu Song" premiered at the Austrian Film Festival "Diagonale," and was featured in Vienna’s art-house theaters and on Austrian TV.
The LA (and USA) premiere will take place on October 30, 7 p.m., at the Goethe Institute Los Angeles, 5750 Wilshire Boulevard, 90036. Tickets are $5, and the screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers. For more information, call (323) 525-3388.
Lower Topanga, which includes the first three miles of Topanga Canyon, was home to a colorful artists community with strong hippie roots, standing at the old entrance to Malibu. In 2001, State Parks made a controversial decision to buy Lower Topanga and relocate its more than 100 residents. In 2002, filmmakers Natalie Lettner and Werner Hanak, who had been enchanted by Lower Topanga on previous visits, began filming the residents and their struggle to stay in their beachside paradise.
Natalie Lettner works at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (Art History Museum Vienna). She was dramatic advisor and assistant director for the TOI-Haus-Theater in Salzburg (1992-95); cultural journalist and university lecturer for literature and art history (University of Salzburg and Bard College, New York).
Werner Hanak is a curator at the Jewish Museum Vienna. His previous film credits include the documentary film "Drop Outs" (1990) and the short film "Die Reise des Tellerwäschers" ("The Dishwasher’s Journey," 1988).
Their film focuses on a few unique Lower Topanga personalities, including James Mathers, a painter living in an Airstream trailer; Norton Wisdom, performance artist and lifeguard in Malibu; Carole Winter, diehard flower child; Herb Bermann, former rock poet who wrote songs for Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band; and Robert “Baretta” Overby, who sings the haunting "Malibu Song"...
Malibu's known for its own way of life
Malibu's known for the sun
But if Malibu's all you achieve in your life
Then tomorrow you're walking alone.
These lyrics ring true as the Lower Topanga community is finally broken up in 2006, making the film a historical document of perhaps the last such neighborhood in Southern California.
"Malibu Song" premiered at the Austrian Film Festival "Diagonale," and was featured in Vienna’s art-house theaters and on Austrian TV.
The LA (and USA) premiere will take place on October 30, 7 p.m., at the Goethe Institute Los Angeles, 5750 Wilshire Boulevard, 90036. Tickets are $5, and the screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers. For more information, call (323) 525-3388.
TOPANGA MESSENGER -- October 9, 2008
Excerpt from "Howell & Green Gallery Back by Popular Demand at Pine Tree Circle"
By Ken Fermoyle
…In case you've never happened by the [Howell-Green] gallery, it is situated in the Pine Tree Circle. On one side sits the Topanga Canyon Gallery and on the other, the new Topanga Eco Mail Store. When they began this odyssey in 2000, "We had only lived here a couple of years," explained Ms. Howell in a recent interview, "but we were blown away by the aura of creativity in the Canyon. The air literally crackled from the creative excitement generated by the local artists, the Theatricum Botanicum, the Topanga Symphony, and the bohemians of Lower Topanga."…
THE MALIBU TIMES -- October 9, 2008
"The Poetry in 'Found Objects'"By Melonie Magruder
Photo by Pablo Capra
How little can you say and still call it a poem? Or, more existentially, "When is a poem not a poem?"
Such questions are explored by Malibu resident, surfer, non-drinking wine aficionado and neo-beat poet Alden Marin in his collection "Little Nuts," published by local publisher Brass Tacks Press.
"The title refers to the little kernels of poetry we see all around us in daily life," Marin said. "But it's also a little about how living in this modern world renders us."
The format of the poems in "Little Nuts" has distinctly Haiku-like brevity and alludes, Marin said, to the serendipity of "found objects," which lend lyrical inspiration to the ordinary.
Accordingly, small moments are captured in free form verse, such as in "Vacuuming the Lawn:"
Just past Topanga, on
Sunday, I saw a woman
in pink vacuuming the
lawn in front of her house.
"You see poetry in weird moments," Marin said. "But when you add them all up, there is beauty to the picture. You start seeking out those small, poetic moments around you, whether it's on top of your roof or at PC Greens."
Marin grew up in Malibu before heading to Stanford University, then spent a year abroad at Sorbonne University in Paris. While in San Francisco, he came heavily under the influence of cutting-edge literature of the '70s, hanging out at the fabled City Lights Bookstore, where '60s beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti congregated.
"I heard Allen Ginsberg read 'Howl' and discovered Richard Brautigan," Marin said. "When I got out of school and came back home, all I wanted to do was write like them, surf, wear my hair long and play music. Everyone wanted to be Robert Plant or Mick Jagger."
His parents, however, had different ideas, insisting he cut his hair and get a job. "It was the end of an era," Marin said with a sigh.
Marin's father, John Marin, was a publisher of Sports Illustrated and People magazines and recently retired as a top executive from media and entertainment company Time Warner.
The elder Marin helped his son find a position as a copywriter for the global ad network McCann-Erickson.
"It didn't last," Marin said. "I could write a terrific essay on James Joyce, but I couldn't write a 30-second ad. So I was 23 years old, asking myself what I wanted to do with my life. I always loved writing and painting. I also always liked wine and, after my time in France, I knew a lot about it."
Marin went into the wine business as a broker and label designer. But a drinking habit led to DUIs, the breakup of his marriage and the dissolution of a partnership.
"When I was drinking, even my writing wasn't clear," Marin said. "I had good intentions, but the execution was poor."
He has been sober for 11 years now, but still loves wine. "I sip and spit," he acknowledged.
His poetry has matured, yet he is still enthralled with the writings of outside-the-box 20th century authors like Vonnegut or Ezra Pound.
"Guys like Pound and William Carlos Williams had to go to Paris to find that liberal and libertine milieu in which to write new stuff," Marin said. "This is what we want to do with Brass Tacks here, to find those transformative moments that are visual and raw, and risqué. Art should get under people's skin and cause them to question their existence. It should mess up your comfort zones."
Messing up comfort zones sits well with Brass Tacks Press cofounders Pablo Capra and Richard McDowell, who was recently named the 2009 "Downtown LA Life" Poet Laureate.
"I grew up in this artist's community behind The Feed Bin in Topanga with all these people who had cool projects and distinct Southern California voices," Capra said. "So I became the publisher."
He graduated from Malibu High School before attending UCLA and traveling in Europe. His father, Bernt Capra, is a filmmaker and Emmy award-winning production designer who worked on such films as "Bagdad Café" (aka "Out of Rosenheim") and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?"
"My dad's Austrian," Capra said. "Spending a lot of time in Europe lets you appreciate American culture and guys like Alden have a very American voice, like Steinbeck."
Capra and McDowell launched Brass Tacks Press six years ago with the idea of documenting the "hippie, beachy, art culture you find around here," Capra said. They have produced about 50 titles, handmade, hand-folded books with original cover art that Capra usually prints at a local copy shop.
"I want to get them out to the independent bookstores, like Diesel," Capra said. "There's a real West Coast aesthetic to our books that seems effortless and relaxed, but is very strong. Like good Haiku. Poetry should not be inscrutable."
He is also not averse to ruffling the feathers of the contemporary poetry world by publishing titles with markedly scatological titles such as "The Crapture."
"Modern poetry has lost its power," Capra said. "So our 'crap' poetry sort of makes fun of today's poetry world by holding up a mirror to its absurdity. By parodying it, we highlight the problems I see with gutless poetry."
As part of his "crap poetry" philosophy, he actually published one book printed on toilet paper.
"It was a financial loss," Capra conceded. "And it's a source of stress because now I have this gigantic box of unsold toilet paper in the house that we have to be careful not to crush. It was an art thing."
All of this fits right in with Marin's edgy style. "Publishing is too cash-driven now," he said. "I'd rather be part of this kind of press."
"Little Nuts" may be found at Diesel, A Bookstore in Malibu and at Village Books in Pacific Palisades. It can also be found online at www.lifeasapoet.com.
Such questions are explored by Malibu resident, surfer, non-drinking wine aficionado and neo-beat poet Alden Marin in his collection "Little Nuts," published by local publisher Brass Tacks Press.
"The title refers to the little kernels of poetry we see all around us in daily life," Marin said. "But it's also a little about how living in this modern world renders us."
The format of the poems in "Little Nuts" has distinctly Haiku-like brevity and alludes, Marin said, to the serendipity of "found objects," which lend lyrical inspiration to the ordinary.
Accordingly, small moments are captured in free form verse, such as in "Vacuuming the Lawn:"
Just past Topanga, on
Sunday, I saw a woman
in pink vacuuming the
lawn in front of her house.
"You see poetry in weird moments," Marin said. "But when you add them all up, there is beauty to the picture. You start seeking out those small, poetic moments around you, whether it's on top of your roof or at PC Greens."
Marin grew up in Malibu before heading to Stanford University, then spent a year abroad at Sorbonne University in Paris. While in San Francisco, he came heavily under the influence of cutting-edge literature of the '70s, hanging out at the fabled City Lights Bookstore, where '60s beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti congregated.
"I heard Allen Ginsberg read 'Howl' and discovered Richard Brautigan," Marin said. "When I got out of school and came back home, all I wanted to do was write like them, surf, wear my hair long and play music. Everyone wanted to be Robert Plant or Mick Jagger."
His parents, however, had different ideas, insisting he cut his hair and get a job. "It was the end of an era," Marin said with a sigh.
Marin's father, John Marin, was a publisher of Sports Illustrated and People magazines and recently retired as a top executive from media and entertainment company Time Warner.
The elder Marin helped his son find a position as a copywriter for the global ad network McCann-Erickson.
"It didn't last," Marin said. "I could write a terrific essay on James Joyce, but I couldn't write a 30-second ad. So I was 23 years old, asking myself what I wanted to do with my life. I always loved writing and painting. I also always liked wine and, after my time in France, I knew a lot about it."
Marin went into the wine business as a broker and label designer. But a drinking habit led to DUIs, the breakup of his marriage and the dissolution of a partnership.
"When I was drinking, even my writing wasn't clear," Marin said. "I had good intentions, but the execution was poor."
He has been sober for 11 years now, but still loves wine. "I sip and spit," he acknowledged.
His poetry has matured, yet he is still enthralled with the writings of outside-the-box 20th century authors like Vonnegut or Ezra Pound.
"Guys like Pound and William Carlos Williams had to go to Paris to find that liberal and libertine milieu in which to write new stuff," Marin said. "This is what we want to do with Brass Tacks here, to find those transformative moments that are visual and raw, and risqué. Art should get under people's skin and cause them to question their existence. It should mess up your comfort zones."
Messing up comfort zones sits well with Brass Tacks Press cofounders Pablo Capra and Richard McDowell, who was recently named the 2009 "Downtown LA Life" Poet Laureate.
"I grew up in this artist's community behind The Feed Bin in Topanga with all these people who had cool projects and distinct Southern California voices," Capra said. "So I became the publisher."
He graduated from Malibu High School before attending UCLA and traveling in Europe. His father, Bernt Capra, is a filmmaker and Emmy award-winning production designer who worked on such films as "Bagdad Café" (aka "Out of Rosenheim") and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?"
"My dad's Austrian," Capra said. "Spending a lot of time in Europe lets you appreciate American culture and guys like Alden have a very American voice, like Steinbeck."
Capra and McDowell launched Brass Tacks Press six years ago with the idea of documenting the "hippie, beachy, art culture you find around here," Capra said. They have produced about 50 titles, handmade, hand-folded books with original cover art that Capra usually prints at a local copy shop.
"I want to get them out to the independent bookstores, like Diesel," Capra said. "There's a real West Coast aesthetic to our books that seems effortless and relaxed, but is very strong. Like good Haiku. Poetry should not be inscrutable."
He is also not averse to ruffling the feathers of the contemporary poetry world by publishing titles with markedly scatological titles such as "The Crapture."
"Modern poetry has lost its power," Capra said. "So our 'crap' poetry sort of makes fun of today's poetry world by holding up a mirror to its absurdity. By parodying it, we highlight the problems I see with gutless poetry."
As part of his "crap poetry" philosophy, he actually published one book printed on toilet paper.
"It was a financial loss," Capra conceded. "And it's a source of stress because now I have this gigantic box of unsold toilet paper in the house that we have to be careful not to crush. It was an art thing."
All of this fits right in with Marin's edgy style. "Publishing is too cash-driven now," he said. "I'd rather be part of this kind of press."
"Little Nuts" may be found at Diesel, A Bookstore in Malibu and at Village Books in Pacific Palisades. It can also be found online at www.lifeasapoet.com.
PALISADIAN-POST -- September 18, 2008
"Local Press Publishes Poet Marin's 'Little Nuts'"By Pablo Capra
After six years of publishing chapbooks, Brass Tacks Press recently published its first paperback book, "Little Nuts" by Alden Marin.
Marin is a resident of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu, where his family has lived since 1930. He was educated at schools locally, as well as at Stanford and the Sorbonne. In addition to having written 11 books of poetry, he paints and writes music.
"Little Nuts" is written in a distinctly Southern California voice, it challenges definitions of poetry, it's fun to read, and it "gets down to brass tacks" (the expression usually means clearing out confusing details and finding out the real facts about something).
"Little Nuts" is almost the inauguration of a new poetic form. Its short prose poems are the kernels of truth that longer poems tease you into searching for. En masse, they reveal the postmodern dilemma of a man unable to make sense of this life and choosing instead "to live it in little bits and pieces." The game is hypervigilance, breathtaking honesty, and an ability to sum up and move on as quickly as possible. The phrase "little nuts" also describes the mania of being addicted to this game: "At some point... you begin to see everything as poetry."
On another note, "Little Nuts" is a richly sensual book full of poems about food, surfing, hiking, love, bright colors, travel, music, friends, and (for better or worse) drugs.
Buy "Little Nuts", learn more, or read an excerpt at www.lifeasapoet.com.
Marin is a resident of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu, where his family has lived since 1930. He was educated at schools locally, as well as at Stanford and the Sorbonne. In addition to having written 11 books of poetry, he paints and writes music.
"Little Nuts" is written in a distinctly Southern California voice, it challenges definitions of poetry, it's fun to read, and it "gets down to brass tacks" (the expression usually means clearing out confusing details and finding out the real facts about something).
"Little Nuts" is almost the inauguration of a new poetic form. Its short prose poems are the kernels of truth that longer poems tease you into searching for. En masse, they reveal the postmodern dilemma of a man unable to make sense of this life and choosing instead "to live it in little bits and pieces." The game is hypervigilance, breathtaking honesty, and an ability to sum up and move on as quickly as possible. The phrase "little nuts" also describes the mania of being addicted to this game: "At some point... you begin to see everything as poetry."
On another note, "Little Nuts" is a richly sensual book full of poems about food, surfing, hiking, love, bright colors, travel, music, friends, and (for better or worse) drugs.
Buy "Little Nuts", learn more, or read an excerpt at www.lifeasapoet.com.
DOWNTOWN LA LIFE MAGAZINE -- August 12, 2008
"Downtown LA Poet Laureate 2009: Richard McDowell"It is our distinct pleasure and honor to announce the naming of the new:
DOWNTOWN LA LIFE POET LAUREATE
CONGRATULATIONS!
The New Poet Laureate 2009 is Richard McDowell.
Our Selection Board was very impressed with the community support for Richard and the many e-mails that were sent on his behalf.
Richard's poetry is, simply said, excellent.
Richard's term starts January, 2009. We look forward to many events and readings. You will be able to read monthly selections from Richard's works on the website: http://downtownlalife.com in Poetry Connection.
We are very pleased.
Warmest regards New Downtown,
Christian Martinez (Publisher), Gloria Staunton (Director), Wendy Arimah (Poet Laureate 2008), Monica Mendez (Poetry Connection)
EXPANDED BOOKS -- July 2008
An interview with J. A. Homes, author of The Children's Guide to Astral Projection, available at www.lifeasapoet.com...
EUREKA POZ -- May 22, 2008
I am reposting this in support of Richard McDowell's nomination for 2009 Downtown Poet Laureate.I first met Downtown writer and artist Richard McDowell at Banquette on Main Street. He lived in the Canadian Building at the time, but he told me about other places he has lived in Downtown. He also spoke of some of the adventures he has had while living Downtown.
When he found out that I was an English teacher, he went to Parks Market (now closed) and returned with a copy of his book Thirty Days on Spring (A Junkie Needs Relief). He gave the book to me but asked for one thing in return. He wanted my critical feedback as a teacher of writing.
What English teacher could refuse a quid pro quo like that? I gave him a formal, old-school thesis paper based on the symbolism of rain in his book as my end of the deal.
McDowell's book can be purchased from Metropolis Books. I suspect he can sell a copy to you also. He can often be found outside at Banquette early in the morning.
This is what I gave him:
"Richard McDowell's Punctuation of Rain"
A review of Thirty Days on Spring (A Junkie Needs Relief)
By Joe Cornish
Artwork by Richard McDowell
A review of Thirty Days on Spring (A Junkie Needs Relief)
By Joe Cornish
Artwork by Richard McDowell
"It's raining again. The streets, like the source of my difficulty, merge to retain and share a moment of melancholy, a moment of happiness, rejoicing while I believe all is lost. It's quiet out there. Has anything changed? Not really. Only the coming and going of restless souls, the souls of this building, while I remain the same. Some are content, along for the ride, asleep. They've left it to me, to keep watch, to write it all down on scraps of paper, to record what is happening, what comes to pass on this ship of fools."
--From "This Sinking Ship," Thirty Days on Spring
Rain, a recurring symbol in Richard McDowell's Thirty Days on Spring (A Junkie Needs Relief), is used in two traditional symbolic ways. It sometimes reflects the unhappiness or desperate confusion of the author, while serving at other times as a nourishing force from above. Rain in this latter role not only mirrors good things for the protagonist, but also contributes to his outlook and emotions in a positive way. These contrasting symbolic interpretations of rain clearly punctuate the author's reflective narrative in significantly meaningful and important ways.
The journal's first use of rain is in the beginning entry "I'm Wearing a Hat." It has been cold lately, the author writes, a cold partly caused by his surroundings of "insane to soulless, poverty, drugs, trash, filth, dirt and garbage." The chill is also due to his personal anguish, deprivation and search for answers. All this time the rain is constant for a day and a half while it provides a backdrop for his uncertainty and disturbing environment.
The nature and effect of rain change when it falls again in "The Lady in Black," a chapter with a theme of relief. McDowell's mood and outlook now is mostly positive; he mentions the comfort of home for two people he gifts with twenty dollars, all the money he has with him. He perceives that this act "makes(s) (them) feel better" and when he walks out into the rain, he senses it as being good, something that "washes away the scuzz of this heaven." Even as a woman's urine mingles with the rain on the concrete, the author feels "relief, an untimed release" while the cleansing "drops of rain (fall) from the trees."
The rain falling again in "This Sinking Ship" functions in duel symbolic ways within just one sentence. The wet streets hold "a moment of melancholy (and) happiness" for his content neighbors even while the damp streets are "the source of (his) difficulty," leading to the author's "belie(f) all is lost." He is cold again and metaphorically links water to an iceberg. Now the rain floods overhead while the wet night accompanies his feelings of loneliness, deprivation and near madness.
The duel symbolic uses of rain are similarly summed up in the later entry "Like Dying Rats" when the journalist writes of rain's misery even as he longs for the descending water's companionship.
When McDowell wakes to rain's sound in "Listening to Raindrops," it symbolically serves as a good friend, an enchanting escort. Here the rain assumes its nourishing function; the writer likes it and finds peace and comfort in its real emotions as he listens to it and watches its fall. He now feels like writing. Rain, "come sit with me," he asks. It is an enjoyable rhythm, one that gives him pleasure and dances with his appreciative mood.
Just as Richard McDowell's Thirty Days on Spring (A Junkie Needs Relief) reflects two sides of his personal feelings, observations and reactions, the dominate theme of rain is similarly paradoxical. In just thirty days it periodically supports, enhances and accompanies even as it chills, floods and causes misery. These polar uses of rain clearly constitute important and parallel elements in McDowell's journal.
Joe Cornish: I'm a retired high school English teacher who lives in Eureka, California. I have been HIV+ (POZ) and healthy for over 23 years and I am addicted to weight lifting. I live with a bull terrier named Ruby. Read more at citycenterpoz.blogspot.com.
Thirty Days on Spring available at www.lifeasapoet.com.
MALIBU ARTS JOURNAL -- May 20, 2008
"From Lower Topanga, Tool's Snake Pit"By Josh Hastings
Tool’s Snake Pit, published by local Pablo Capra’s outlet, Brass Tacks Press. You know him. He is the publisher who brought us the little green covered poetry book, Idlers of the Bamboo Grove. You’ve seen it in a bucket at The Reel Inn and all over Topanga , Malibu and Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center. Most of us here know the Snake Pit as part of Lower Topanga near the Rodeo Grounds. Most outside of the area have not even heard of Lower Topanga. They know Topanga as a whole, as a place of Hollywood movie and music star history, past and present. After all Oingo-Boingo’s old place is here, along with a multitude of other icons. There is a part of Topangan history that the outside only knows from some old, crinkled newspaper articles or the take-over of the Rodeo Grounds – that is Lower Topanga.
Tool is an alias for a man who lived in the Snake Pit in a house that did not even have a real roof. It was “just quarter-inch plywood that was warped and never nailed down.” He was in the business of making secret doors. His secret doors were works of art for drug dealers and those who wished to traffic drugs across the border. He got into the idea of manufacturing fake aerosol cans that could traffic drugs across the border. And he could manufacture a spring-loaded gun holster.
But Tool is not all hardcore. He had a heart. He fell for a lady named Holiday. When he could not get in touch with her because she left for Palm Springs with another guy, Tool went on a binge. He was dealing and doing LSD (“L”), at the time of this bad news. He decided to head up his hill, a place we’ve all seen but rarely trek up. He went up there specifically to “forget” about Holiday via a drug-trip. Once there, his walkman ran out of batteries. He had to try and high-tail it to George’s Market for a battery refill before the trip set-in. Unsuccessful he made it back to his sleeping bag on the hill on his hands and knees only to be arrested as a Topanga Sniper. Mistaken for a freeway sniper shooting people in Los Angeles, off to the local pen Tool went.
These are merely excerpts from an ongoing series of beat prose stories about Surfers, drug dealers and artist who lived together in Lower Topanga in the '70s and '80s. At once nostalgic and realistic, the prose is moving, revealing and a hippie rhythm of modern times. Panoramic and lacking self-indulgence, the work is true and refreshing vintage prose. There are not many left who can tell the tale of Lower Topanga from a been there, done that perspective. Tool was there, lived it and survived to tell the story.
Along with the beat prose is a series of comics from the underground by Toylit. In true subculture motif, these are original works of art in an authentic and humorous, hippie-inspired comics that deal with social and political subjects like sex, drugs, rock music and various forms of protests. Toylit is the author of the "Crap Poetry Manifesto," The Last Nowhere, Craplexity, The Children’s Guide to Astral Projection, and Prevenge of the Androgynous Cyborg Pyrates from the Future; and the illustrator of Idlers of the Bamboo Grove, Rat Tales and The Snake Pit, the issue prior to Tool’s Snake Pit. Toylit’s work is part of the re-emergence of a strong California subculture that has made its way back up from the cracks.
Tool’s Snake Pit is available from Brass Tacks Press at www.lifeasapoet.com for $5.
LA WEEKLY -- May 16, 2008
"LA People 2008: James Mathers"by Dani Katz
Photo by Kevin Scanlon
Art-Fiend Love-Bunny
As subtle as a glitter-caked brick to the forehead and as sharp as a Samurai sword etched with butterflies, Mayan glyphs and Hindu deities in compromising positions, James Mathers has this to say for himself: “My name is Toylit. I am a fuck-off scientist. I make rectangles for money.”
As an ontological terrorist/wordsmith/anarchist, Mathers exists so far outside the proverbial box that standard characterizations such as artist/poet/writer/philosopher prove reductive and bland, while the apt ones, such as idiot-genius/slacker/art fiend/neologist/love-bunny extraordinaire sound sensational. But he’s earned them.
In the ’70s of his youth, Mathers was a Topanga Canyon rabble-rouser. He migrated to New York in 1981 at the age of 17 to pursue painting and was noticed by Andy Warhol, who organized Mathers’ first solo show in 1983. Soon, Mathers was showing on both coasts and in Europe. He spent the ’90s as an ex-pat filmmaker living in Ireland.
The shadow of the impending millennium brought our slippery hero back to Topanga’s own Rodeo Grounds, an infamous, idyllic art community, where he set up camp in the Airstream he still calls home (though since the community’s tragic demise, he’s moved his trailer to a Venice parking lot). Mathers has directed films, made countless paintings and drawings, and written and illustrated several comic books, including the local cult classic The Children’s Guide to Astral Projection.
These are but résumé bullet points. Mather’s real mojo is in his mind, perspective, presence, style, and above all else, his words, which he uses, through lolling leaps of intellectual gymnastics and lingual acrobatics to stretch the paradigm to its outermost limit until it’s taut and transparent and provides glimpses of the transcendent beauty and magic that are Mathers’ everyday reality. James Mathers is, hands down, the best conversation in town.
These days, Mathers, 43, is a Venice staple, flitting between his “office” (a patio table at Abbot’s Habit), and his “home” (the parking lot behind artists’ collective Cre8ivity). He is easily recognized in his signature thrift-shop suit and flip-flops, crayon in one hand, hand-rolled cigarette in the other.
Between conspiring to redevelop Lower Topanga Canyon as an Eco-Arts Park (a no-brainer for any local art institutions paying attention and looking to invest in the community) and working with his cohorts at the Psycho-Iridescent Space/Time Agency to launch us into space with “whatever resources we can find, from the chemical binoculars of hallucinogens to standard scientific tools — rocketry, optics, semantics, linguistic tools . our neology department is especially fecund,” Mathers draws, paints, writes and “enjoys the journey.” You’re as likely to find him panhandling on Main Street as you are to see him on the red carpet at a celebrity-studded film premiere. Mathers embodies the incongruity of Los Angeles, which he laughingly describes as “the narcissistic wound of the planet — a beautiful vacuum where anything is possible, and nothing has any value or significance.”
Sitting cross-legged on a tiny expanse of grass on a Venice sidewalk in a waning patch of late afternoon sun, Mathers launches into an inspired diatribe on the relationship between our desperation for fame and loneliness. “What if our narcissism is actually a twisted expression of our desire for community? If everyone around you acknowledges and recognizes you, is that not fame? I think it’s the ontological crisis of not being recognized in your community that drives us to seek a broader and broader form of acknowledgment in the press or on film. It’s the absence of community that has created the mechanics of the fame game. We’re consumers on that basis, we employ services on that basis, we undergo surgeries on that basis, we seek objects, possessions and properties on that basis. It is really the core isolation, the annihilation of the paradigm of community that is driving us into narcissistic bondage and ecological collapse. It’s sort of amazing. The Permian event may or may not have been a meteorite or a shift in the weather, but our extinction may actually be an outcome of loneliness.”
“Where’s the hope?” I ask.
Mathers wrinkles his nose, grins his mad-hatter, cute-as-a-maniacal-bunny grin and says, “It’s as close as your little friend in front of you. It’s as immediate as the people who live across the street. The answer is in caring and sharing, right?”
ARTHUR MAGAZINE -- May/June 2008
"Bull Tongue:Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds Since 2002"
by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore
An interesting batch of small 'zines and booklets arrived from Brass Tacks Press, out L.A. way. They've got an extensive list of publications, and the few we saw are pretty whacked. The Snake Pit by Baretta is a memoir of life in a weird derelict surfer/hippie commune/village in Lower Topanga Canyon. It's a casual read, but presents a side of the greater L.A. experience that had previously eluded us. The Last Nowhere is a collection of "Crap Poetry" by Log and Toilet, who also authored the bilingual 5 Poèmes Crap de Los Angeles. The poetry isn't particularly good, but we're not sure it's supposed to be. What it actually reminds us of is record reviews by the great Rev. Norb in the pages of his legendary Sick Teen fanzine. Last up is Voyage of the Timeship Medusa, a comic book by Toylit. Voyage is a very stoned-feeling post-hippie image/word blur about rabbits and cops and puke and we-know-not-all-what. Suffice to say, it's good readin'. Also extremely notable from a visual standpoint…
POETIX -- May 1, 2008
"Crap Poetry"by Pablo Capra
The defining characteristic of poetry these days seems to be that it's crap.
The word choice is provocative, but coldly accurate if taken to refer to poetry's worthlessness, not only in society but even among poets themselves. Most poetry has become so obscure, narcissistic, or banal that it has lost the power to really the grab reader.
In fact, I don't think you can write real poetry anymore without acknowledging how worthless it is. Or, at least, I'm very wary of poetry that doesn't somehow address this concern.
Poetry has truly become "the last nowhere," as Log and Toylit put it in their book of the same title, kicking off a small literary movement of authors with funny pseudonyms called Crap Poetry (see the "Manifesto" below).
The point of their book is that because poetry isn't sexy, lucrative, or even that entertaining, it's the last place where an artist courageous enough to renounce these things can work with complete freedom and integrity.
As the publisher (Brass Tacks Press) of Log and Toylit's book, I immediately became a promoter of, and participant in, the Crap Poetry Movement, helping them to republish their work in French (to make it more obscure) as well as on rolls of actual toilet paper.
The first thrill that writing Crap Poetry offers is the freedom to be playful, to not take anything seriously, and to rub it in the reader's face. When was the last time you had this much fun writing a poem?...
The word choice is provocative, but coldly accurate if taken to refer to poetry's worthlessness, not only in society but even among poets themselves. Most poetry has become so obscure, narcissistic, or banal that it has lost the power to really the grab reader.
In fact, I don't think you can write real poetry anymore without acknowledging how worthless it is. Or, at least, I'm very wary of poetry that doesn't somehow address this concern.
Poetry has truly become "the last nowhere," as Log and Toylit put it in their book of the same title, kicking off a small literary movement of authors with funny pseudonyms called Crap Poetry (see the "Manifesto" below).
The point of their book is that because poetry isn't sexy, lucrative, or even that entertaining, it's the last place where an artist courageous enough to renounce these things can work with complete freedom and integrity.
As the publisher (Brass Tacks Press) of Log and Toylit's book, I immediately became a promoter of, and participant in, the Crap Poetry Movement, helping them to republish their work in French (to make it more obscure) as well as on rolls of actual toilet paper.
The first thrill that writing Crap Poetry offers is the freedom to be playful, to not take anything seriously, and to rub it in the reader's face. When was the last time you had this much fun writing a poem?...
Intentional Splooge
Failure is not Random
The Drool of the Sputtering
Nympho Retard Lubricates
The Barf of the Beaten
Addict Decorates
The Endless Processing
PLART PLART SPLURT
of the Insatiate Lesbian Interrogates
and so Love and Poetics
Can Only be Measured in Loss.
Dental Floss. I’m the Boss
of Gently Laying my Scrotum
on Your Eye Socket
—Log & Toylit, The Last Nowhere (2005)
Writing Crap Poetry also allows for more feral expression and darker soul-searching than your wonted comfort level might desire. It takes its appreciation of ugliness from punk rock. Dig these monstrous metaphors….
From "What the Jesus?"
…Broken, I have Found
Almost all of my Extremities
But lost most of my Identity
On the Blood-Wet Chopping Block
Of your sacrificial Anus.
Assassin, Assassin, go find your
Next Mark suck shit
In the Dark
Find a Warm Place to Park
The Liquid Chainsaw
Of your Unwholesome Affections.
—Toylit, Obliterature (2008, forthcoming)
On the other hand, I – and the Crap poet known as Tushy – discovered a feeling of Zen perfection in effortlessly composing lines of utter uselessness….
Untitled
I'd rather just write
this poem than stop
to think about what
I'm going to say.
The pen is moving and
I'm watching it move.
—Crapra, The Tao of Poo-etry (2006)
Lamp
If you think about it,
this word is almost
a girl's name spelled
backwards: Pamela.
—Tushy, Herzog's Pig (2008)
I also find Crap Poetry liberating because it allows me to write without having to wait for inspiration to strike. It helped me realize that there are substitutes. Here is part of an email exchange I had with Michael Lynch, author of Omelet Shark (2005), where he nicely elaborates on this subject….
"I don't have much confidence in inspiration. That shit is for suckers. The sorts of people that are content writing paragraphs about a tree or how sad the death of their dog made them. Plus, I don't have any time to wait around for inspiration. Sometimes I think I write because I just love the way it sounds when the keys on the keyboard go CLACK, CLACK, CLACK. I'm very glad that you brought up stupid inspiration, however, because I think it is a very legitimate concept. It's very anti-serious. Like, “Fuck you – they're my words. I'll do whatever the fuck I want to with them. It's my story, and I like bears, so there's gonna be fucking bears in the fucking story. And magnets. And pizza. Etc., etc….."
Finally, Crap poets Mao Thing Awf and Andy Comess have found that writing Crap Poetry helps to get over the frustration of comparing yourself to history's literary giants, and to exorcize your own self-critical inertia….
21st Sensory
Shakespeare was a Catholic
Rimbaud was a fag
Homer blind and
Sappho on the rag.
Hemingway a redneck
Proust was really sick
and Henry Miller couldn't write
enough about his dick.
Whenever we try to write a line
They make us look like crap.
The 21st century is eight years old
and sitting on your lap.
—Mao Thing Awf, The Crapture (2008)
Untitled
selfish shellfish swim
Slim rocks
cocks are dicks
hicks lick balls
in the hall of fame
I came.
black sluts
have a knack for my nuts.
I write every day
I don't fight
no way.
—Andy Comess, DryJerkHeartbreakNitwit (2008, forthcoming)
New shapes and smells of Crap Poetry are plopping out regularly. To find out where the whiff is coming from, visit the Brass Tacks Press website at www.lifeasapoet.com.
________________________________
CRAP POETRY MANIFESTO
(2006)
Crap poetry is what happens to good poetry after you eat it and you’re left with nothing but a sack of appealing gelatinous goop swelling in a storm of indecision. There’s no place for conclusion, destination, evolution. Just beginnings of turds, partially formed words, badly drawn birds, half-eaten curds, and YOU. What is the redeeming value of the dying screams of an animal except to inspire guilt and make children cry? The Dadaists abandoned reason. We abandon hygiene. Farts for forever!
The world is devolving into the raw sewage slush of a psychological maelstrom. Classicism is the faggy flower of culture, fragrant formalism for fidgety fags. Decadence is the dykish fruit of culture, faggier still and addicted to painkillers. Crap is what’s left of the fruit of culture after all the nutrition has been sucked out of it and it’s been ejected out the anus. If money is the sexuality of the dead and your hair is a tunnel into the past then we have more poetry up our asses than exists in the entire Puniverse.
We are the mighty poetic proctologists, the conquistadors of the mighty brown-out of civilization. As crap poets, our biggest job is to not be watching television. As long as we’re not watching television, we’re winning. We want to poison our own minds, thank you very much. Because poetry is the least important thing, it’s the most important thing. Like the Taoists say, “Know the big, but stick to the small.” Similarly, “Know talent, but stick to the crap.”
The world is devolving into the raw sewage slush of a psychological maelstrom. Classicism is the faggy flower of culture, fragrant formalism for fidgety fags. Decadence is the dykish fruit of culture, faggier still and addicted to painkillers. Crap is what’s left of the fruit of culture after all the nutrition has been sucked out of it and it’s been ejected out the anus. If money is the sexuality of the dead and your hair is a tunnel into the past then we have more poetry up our asses than exists in the entire Puniverse.
We are the mighty poetic proctologists, the conquistadors of the mighty brown-out of civilization. As crap poets, our biggest job is to not be watching television. As long as we’re not watching television, we’re winning. We want to poison our own minds, thank you very much. Because poetry is the least important thing, it’s the most important thing. Like the Taoists say, “Know the big, but stick to the small.” Similarly, “Know talent, but stick to the crap.”
Cough. Catastrophe. Christ-Consciousness. Retards. Raunchiness. Rage. Apathy. Androgynes. Astroglide. Prickle. Prosthetic. Pucker up!
To say that a poem stinks is to make the synesthetic leap from words on paper to a sensual experience. In crap poetry there's no such thing as writer's block. Our motto is "Just push through." There’s nowhere left except failure. Our only regret is our failure to destroy all our talent.
Why wheedle the approval from some fucking intellectual asshole? We’re the shit!
Why wheedle the approval from some fucking intellectual asshole? We’re the shit!
—Crapra, Log, & Toylit
POETIX -- April 2008
Excerpt from "Neighbourhood Music: Poetry in Berlin"by Alistair Noon
…Other magazine or book-published poets who’ve lived in Berlin for periods shorter or longer over the last few years include Catherine Hales, Richard Toovey, Donna Stonecipher, Jesse Seldess, Lance Anderson, performance poets Moon and Anthony Bageete, Daniel Andersson, Josh Robinson, and Topanga Canyon survivor, now back in LA, Pablo Capra. Some of these have read at Poetry Hearings, Berlin’s festival of Poetry in English, which got going in 2005 in the now legendary Cafe Rosa and focuses on Anglophone poets based in continental Europe….
RADIO MULTIKULTI, 96.3 FM (Berlin) -- December 6, 2007
Excerpt from a feature on Bordercrossing Berlin (Berlin's English-language literary magazine) with Brass Tacks Press publisher Pablo Capra...
LA WEEKLY -- September 14, 2007
"Exiles on Main Street"by Linda Immediato
Photos by Kevin Scanlon
Portraits of downtown's endangered artists. Case study: The Canadian Building
The hookers downtown don’t look anything like they do in movies. No fishnets or pushup bras. They are in their 50s and 60s and look like little grandmas — which is why they’ve become known as the abuelas. They dress like secretaries and keep bankers’ hours, working days to cash in on a little lunch and rush-hour action. For years, they were fixtures at the perpetually C-rated greasy spoon known as El Trouble but whose real name nobody seems to recall. It was part of the Canadian, a building on Skid Row’s Main and Winston streets, which also held a XXX movie theater, an adult bookstore, a few empty storefronts and, on its two top floors, a collection of crumbling lofts. The Canadian used to be called the Birdhouse, because pigeons had come through broken windows to roost in a few of the vacated lofts; they covered the floors with bird shit and flapped their wings through the wide hallways.
By 1996 only three people were living in the building.
That same year, the owners began to advertise for tenants to fill the lofts. The raw spaces were dirty, most of the fixtures were broken, there was no heat or gas, and bathrooms and showers were in the hallways. The people who moved in were starving artists picking up the scraps from the boom and bust of downtown's earlier art-loft era in the '80s and early '90s. Living an often overly romanticized hand-to-mouth existence, struggling from painting to painting, freelance job to freelance job, no sign of a steady paycheck in sight, they came for one reason: cheap rent. At first, there were a few residents, basically functioning drug addicts, who were able to hold on to a job, at least for a little while, between benders. One, from a wealthy Santa Barbara family, was a severe alcoholic with a crack addiction, habits made worse by a slight mental illness. He’d often pass out in the hallways or hang from the banisters. Occasionally he brought home male crack whores. Then there was the bona fide nut case — he was paranoid, delusional and occasionally aggressive, particularly toward the female residents. He’d corner them in hallways when no one was around or while they were in towels, skin still wet, fresh out of the shared bathroom showers, to interrogate them about some imagined conspiracy. In his calmer moments, he'd show up in the doorways of male residents, swishing red wine around in a wineglass and making small talk in an attempt to gain allies so that he wouldn’t get kicked out of the building.
What follows are the stories of some of the current residents of the Canadian and about a way of life that’s become increasingly threatened ever since developer Tom Gilmore began packaging “the artist’s life” down the street with a series of luxury lofts now known as the Old Bank District, and other developers followed his lead. Before downtown echoed with jackhammers and cranes filled the skyline, residents of the Canadian spent a decade living with the constant interruptions of film crews shooting car chases, explosions and murder scenes. There were bonfires in the middle of the streets, bicyclists riding through empty thoroughfares in their pajamas, knife-wielding neighbors, clouds of crack smoke, homeless fights, underground art galleries and record stores, and parties that went on for days.
To hear them tell it, downtown L.A. circa 1998 was like Montmartre, the epicenter of bohemian Paris, in 1898. And if downtown L.A. was Montmartre, the Canadian was Le Bateau-Lavoir, the squalid tenement that housed the likes of Pablo Picasso and Amadeo Modigliani in the late 1890s. Before the current attempts to turn it into a yuppie playground, downtown's Main Street was the kind of petri dish of hunger and humanity that artists crave and thrive on. Right in the middle of it all was the Canadian, where crack and abuelas became absinthe and courtesans, and the party never ended.
The Brothers Banales
Back in the late '90s, you could roll a bowling ball down the middle of Main Street and not hit anything. Shadows moved, street lamps illuminated nothing but lonely stretches of sidewalk and deserted buildings. In 1998, whatever functioning businesses that were left would close for the day and silence would descend. Often, the unmistakable hum of a Banales brothers party would rip through that silence. Ground zero was the brothers’ 2,000-square-foot vaulted loft in the Canadian, where a dense graffiti forest thrown up by local artist Vynl wrapped around a stage with pro speaker cabinets and a manned mixing board. The source of the commotion? Maybe it was Deerhoof, or the Minutemen, the Centimeters, the Adolescents or any of the 50 bands that played for free to a packed crowd in the brothers’ loft. The parties usually lasted till the wee hours of the morning. The average bash drew 400 bodies, some of which were still around come morning, sleeping it off in a hallway. The Banales brothers’ parties became the stuff of legend.
They told me their story as we sat on stools at their homemade bar, drinking beers while a DVD of avant garde images looped on a screen overhead. It all began in the spring of 1995, when Dan Banales, baby faced, big boned and clean cut, had just gotten back from Tokyo, where he had spent the previous five years representing a group of psychedelic artists who lived in downtown Los Angeles. These artists’ lofts made an indelible mark on his memory; they were totally different from what he had seen growing up in Pasadena in his self-described Rockwellian existence. There was the Swiss Family Robinson–esque series of wooden platforms in the middle of the loft belonging to a 20-year-old artist named Stravinsky; another had a giant marquee from an old movie theater propped in a corner that really put into perspective just how much space there was. Dan saw in those lofts how young people could own their space, how they could do whatever they wanted. He was on that search for freedom in the spring of ’95 when he found out that his brother, Andrew, had been kicked out of yet another apartment, this time in Hollywood. Andrew paid his rent on time, he just had noise-management issues. He was in a punk band in the late ’80s called the Fin, and the noise has never left him. He needed to find a place where he could get crazy and loud. The brothers realized there was only one place for the both of them, and they headed downtown.
Most buildings they saw were in a weird transitional phase (read: of dubious legality), or empty. Back then a lot of the leases were on the downlow, since most of the buildings were zoned for commercial use, not tenant occupancy, and bringing them up to code was too costly for many landlords. Needless to say, most vacancies weren’t advertised. A modest sign would appear in a window with a phone number, a signal that a room was available. Dan and Andrew went on the hunt. They encountered all kinds of shady situations, like at the San Fernando, where they were greeted by a man in a suit who gave them the grand tour. He told them a developer already had the building in escrow but was only thinking about making it residential. The suited man touched the tips of his fingers together like a villain in a silent movie, asking, “Really, so... you’d live here, then?” The brothers got the feeling he was just conducting some market research. (The San Fernando became part of Gilmore’s Old Bank District project.) Walking to their car, they looked toward the building on Winston Street and saw heads silhouetted in the large windows. People were obviously living there, but what was that place?
Some elementary detective work led them to the Canadian, which was once owned by Mort Wexler, who used to own the Linda Lea, Little Tokyo’s mythic Japanese-language movie house on Main. As the story goes, Wexler gave the building free and clear to Robin Linden, who is rarely seen around the Canadian these days but is a life-long friend of the building’s manager, Dave Perry. Fatefully, the Canadian was the only building on a list of 20 that was actually ready for the brothers to live in legally. Once they had proved they were artists, signed a contract and paid the security deposit, a raw 2,000-square-foot space was theirs. It was dirty, decrepit and filled with holes and rats, but it was their new home.
“I was so scared when I first moved here,” Dan remembers. “There was this roof next to us. I’d lie awake thinking someone was going to crawl through the windows and stab me. We didn’t have locks, and we had no frame of reference if we should be scared or not.”
One time their own neighbor, a prostitute, jumped out of her loft in her robe, hair a mess, reeking of crack, and pulled a knife on Andrew and his friend after they accidently bumped into her door.
The people living on the street assumed the Banales brothers were cops. Why else would some well-fed white kids be moving to the skids? “It was all ‘Excuse me, officer’ and ‘All right, officer’ in the beginning,” laughs Andrew, who dresses like a rocker. (You'd have to be on drugs to mistake him for a cop.) Slowly their “street neighbors” accepted them as part of the community. Neighbors like Lisa. Lisa lived on Winston, in a cardboard box that she called her “house.” They would often hear her throwing her husband out.
“Oh, her tirades were poetry,” says Andrew. “When she told anybody off, it was beautiful; it was a soliloquy. I wish I had recorded it.” She called the Banales brothers her “babies.”
After the new buildings went in and started to well up with residents, the brothers started getting noise complaints. Andrew left for Koreatown. The new downtown isn’t for him.
“It didn’t bother me at first,” he says. “We knew it [redevelopment] was coming, but this wasn’t what I signed up for. This wasn’t the downtown I wanted. I have to be realistic — there’s a housing crisis, but it seems like you’re only getting one kind of person down here now.”
Dan wouldn’t dream of leaving his loft — the place where he runs the Web site downtown.la and where he and his brother still operate the Web-hosting company Inhost.com. (They manage servers in data centers around the world, and host Devo’s offical site and fan site, as well as Roger Moore’s and the maybe-not-quite-as-cool Tony Curtis’, along with sites for large-scale corporations and new artists.) But he also has qualms about the changes engulfing his neighborhood.
“I just wish,” says Dan, “that it was more organic. It seemed so planned. It’s as if [downtown developers] were looking at the Santa Monica promenade or Old Town Pasadena, thinking, ‘What do we need to do to get that sort of thing happening here? How do we bring in all the yuppies?’”
They still throw those infamous parties a couple times a year, though with some adjustments, like the addition of security guards.
Lady McGrath
Upon entering Liz McGrath’s loft you arrive in a foyer, a square room with dark-brown walls adorned with black molding and her signature taxidermy creatures hanging in boxes like gothic sepulchers. It’s small and dark, like the elevator in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, but it’s a deceptive introduction to the bright, white and vaulted living space behind it. McGrath, tiny, with an impish smile and bleach-blond hair that is as pale as her skin, and her similarly complected husband, photographer Morgan Slade (who is McGrath’s band mate in the goth-western outfit Miss Derringer), look like a match made by Tolkien. Their space is actually the amalgamation of two lofts. One used to be a gay-porn studio called Chocolate Drop Productions, which eventually got the boot when tenants got sick of feces in their showers and douche bottles littering the floor of their shared bathroom. The other part of her loft belonged to a set director, who left behind the most coveted thing in the Canadian — a private shower and toilet that he had installed himself. Moving into the Canadian was moving up for McGrath.
See, McGrath was coming off a streak of bad housing juju. She doesn’t necessarily see it like that, though, and tends to characterize her adventures in habitation as part of the artist’s life she chose, one that also had her working at fast-food joints and mall shops. As far as previous living situations go, she laughs when talking about the giant mansion she lived in while attending Pasadena City College. Some dude had built an oversize home on Lowell Street in El Sereno that was ruled by the Mexican Mafia. After a series of break-ins, including one in which the burglar left a trail of hand-print smudges down the wall and over the window ledge, the cops eventually apprehended the thief. He was found in the basement, where he’d been hiding for months, high on PCP and surrounded by McGrath’s and her roommates’ stuff, including keys, a VCR and more than $500 in cash. Eventually, McGrath and her roommates got kicked out for failing to meet their rent.
That was in 1994. McGrath’s friend and fellow artist Winter Rosebud invited McGrath to move downtown with her in the Spring Street Studios. McGrath liked how downtown felt dangerous. When McGrath and Winter got kicked out of the apartment because it was being redeveloped, McGrath moved across the street to the Fenton building. The view from her window was obstructed entirely by the flashing sign for the dime-a-dance place below. She paid 100 bucks for the 100-square-foot room that, come evening, was awash in flickering red light. She didn’t have a bathroom back then — she had to head over a few blocks to the Biltmore’s gym to shower. Not that she minded; the Biltmore offered a little old-school glamour to take the edge off her daily hassles.
From the Fenton she moved to the Tomahawk. A guy named Greg St. John owned the Tomahawk, and he had a vision of bringing artists together in one living space. He let McGrath trade rent for paintings — artists downtown would often trade art for shelter, clothes or food back in the day. But the Tomahawk eventually fell into decline, in part because of St. John’s tragic flaw: In his desire to help people, he let in too many crackheads.
“It got crazy,” McGrath says, curled up on her zebra-print couch, her hairless Chinese dog Blue on her lap, and her new pup, King Tut, at her feet. “One night some dude knocked on my window, said his girlfriend called the cops on him and asked if he could stay with me. Then there was the guy who asked me to watch his pit bulls and never came back because he went away to jail. But mostly, I had to move because I had to literally step over people doing crack outside my door.”
By this point, her childhood friends Dan and Andrew Banales (see “Brothers Banales”) were living in the Canadian, which had an advantage over the Tomahawk in that most of the crack was smoked out on the street below. The fighting, the stench of piss and crap rising from the alley behind the building, the pregnant crack whores fighting, all of it was worth it to McGrath, who shows at Bill Shire Gallery and has published a popular book of collected works called Everything That Creeps. “There is no way I’d be doing art,” she says, “no way I’d be doing what I’m doing now if it wasn’t for living here.”
Before the current wave of downtown yuppification went into overdrive, McGrath used to watch the comings and goings of the thousands of workers, bankers, politicos, lawyers and drug dealers who flooded the streets by day and vanished by degrees with the darkening sky. The droning buzz of activity that seemed by day to reach as high as the heavens dissolved into a peaceful underwater silence by evening. McGrath would get a bottle of wine and sit in the park on the grass outside of City Hall, or walk around the Gehry-designed MOCA. She and her friends lit bonfires in the street. The cops would either tell them to put out the fires or just grab a beer and hang out. A white van would come around and sell beer; so did a guy on his bike with a little bell and a basket. He was like the addicts’ ice cream man; you’d hear him start his route around 11 p.m. with his trademark call, “ICE... COLD... BEE-ER!” Sometimes he’d add, “Drug-side service!”
“Back then," she says, her voice singed by nostalgia, "it really felt like the entire world was ours.”
The Expat
Susan Bolles, a delicate, elfin woman, is sitting in her sun-soaked artist’s studio: 1,000 square feet of organized white space. She is staring at the models for her new series of paintings — plastic bottles filled with translucent candy-colored liquids, lined up like a row of half-licked Jolly Ranchers. “They look so bright and happy, so Barbie, don’t they?” Bolles asks, scanning the assortment. “But they’re toxic chemicals.” Even Bolles’ voice is fairylike, soft and high pitched as she explains how she came to be at the Canadian.
She was staring at the black-screened iron gate of the Canadian when she heard the lock turn from inside. She couldn’t see who was on the other side, but as the door opened, a blast of whiskey slapped her in the face. It was coming from a man with stringy hair wearing women’s bell-bottomed, cuffed trousers that flared out about a foot too high at his calves and a way-too-small child’s size flannel shirt. He was nearly falling down drunk. She explained to him that she was there to see the manager, and, teetering a little on his heels, the building's resident trust-fund crack addict made a big swooping bow and slurred, “Wellll, come ’n in!” To Bolles, that pretty much summed up the Canadian in the late ’90s, and downtown in general.
Bolles was one of 17 people who responded to the for-rent ad in the L.A. Weekly, but she was the only one to actually fill out an application. “I had a hard time finding a loft back then,” says Bolles, who paints full time and takes on production work to pay the bills (including a few episodes of Scrubs). “So I wound up renting a postage stamp in the Hollywood Hills.”
Then she found the Canadian, and with some elbow grease and about 20 cans of white paint, settled in to her 1,500-square-foot live/work loft. Bolles’ loft is neat and homey. The kitchen has a European farmhouse feel, with an old enamel stove, enormous windows and a rustic, wooden table. Huge canvases hang in each of the three divided rooms. On an exposed-brick wall in the sitting room, illuminated by a set of 1930s billboard lights, hangs a giant, moody photograph of low-lying fog thick above crossroads that seem to stretch an eternity in either direction. The lights were found on the street, and the photograph was taken by her live-in love of six months, Fridgeir.
“For me, downtown was normal,” says Bolles, who came here from New York City. “The buses, the grime — it was more normal to me than, say, Westwood. That’s a foreign concept to me — security guards and pool boys? That I don’t understand.”
Though the boundaries of normal were often pushed. One night when Bolles had invited a friend over, and they sat on her living room couch sipping wine and catching up, a giant fireball of red and orange light exploded without warning in front of her seven-foot-tall window, filling the loft with heat. A movie was being filmed in the alley. Film crews still shoot in the alley now and again, but with more people living downtown, full-on pyrotechnics have become harder to pull off.
There were loftwide parties every few months, where residents invited friends and sometimes close to a thousand people hopped through the building in a single evening. Some of them were still there the next day. The neighbors rode their bikes down to Al’s Bar, the local crusty punk club, or went on pizza runs. If you needed to bum a cigarette, even at 2 in the morning, you could find someone in the building, door open, awake and painting. The shared bathrooms and showers were not an inconvenience but another chance for community. Though most times it was peaceful, that community was not without drama. Particularly when it came to romances.
“Oh, my god,” declares Bolles, “it’s a crisis when somebody in this building breaks up. You wouldn’t believe it. There have been breakups where the whole building was involved. You’ll know because the chalkboard will have a big note on it: ‘Do not let him in the building!’” The chalkboard is sort of the MySpace of the Canadian, a rectangular slate at the landing of the main staircase. Often, passive-agressive anonymous word wars are carried out in multicolored chalk.
And if there was drama inside, it didn’t compare to the performances going on nightly among the homeless outside Bolles’ door. Grown men clucked like chickens, puffing up their chests, winning imaginary arguments. Women who were worse for wear, toothless, with bad skin and matted hair sashayed down the street as if they were Gisele Bundchen. Artists generally have a live-and-let-live ethos, and Bolles didn’t view the people on the sidewalk outside the building as something to fear, get rid of, or even feel sorry for; they were merely participants in the street theater.
“It was almost performance art,” Bolles says. “People knew they were performing. They were trying to climb street poles, the most outrageous things. We called it ‘the nightly entertainment.’”
The Reformed
Fridgeir moved from Iceland (he went to high school with Björk) in 1986. He briefly settled with his mother in Pacoima, but the pair left for downtown a year later. Fridgeir was 20 and not really sure what he wanted to do with his life yet, so he followed his fashion-designer mother, Stella, to a 3,000-square-foot warehouse off of Santa Fe Avenue, which cost about $800 a month at the time. That was back when Al’s Bar was really happening, when the first wave of artists ran around downtown before real estate speculation priced them out and galleries started moving west, when life down there consisted mostly of parties and underground gallery openings — when Danny Elfman occupied an entire floor of the Canadian.
Six months ago, Fridgeir moved in with Susan Bolles (see “The Expat”). They met at the Banquette, kind of like the neighborhood Central Perk. Sitting in his well-lit, gallery-like loft, he pushes his wire-frame glasses back up his nose and gets kind of excited talking about the old days. “We felt like pirates,” he says. “We did our thing in 1989, then the rents went up and the artists moved to Silver Lake or Echo Park.”
Fridgeir went to New Orleans to learn how to be a chef, thinking he had finally found his calling. He worked there for 14 years. But life began to unravel for him. “I like drugs and I like alcohol,” Fridgeir says candidly. “I got more and more caught up in it. As a chef, it was socially acceptable for me to drink, so I started drinking more and more, until it all crumbled and I came to L.A. to get sober.”
Los Angeles didn’t prove to be the kind of rehab Fridgeir needed, at least not right away. He ended up on Skid Row, on San Julian and Sixth streets, living in a cardboard box, living only to drink. “I drank alcohol like people smoked crack,” Fridgeir says. “My only thought was where will I get my next drink from.”
When he finally hit rock bottom, he went to the Midnight Mission. “I crawled into the mission,” he says. “I was almost dead.” He came back every day for three weeks to see if a cot had opened and waited for hours in a room with 300 people, watching an endless rotation of Chuck Norris movies. Ironically, the room was called the Reading Room.
He finally got in, and at 8 every night he and his 150 roommates pulled their cots out and went to sleep. Slowly, by demonstrating his commitment to staying sober, Fridgeir worked his way upstairs to the bunks. “And when I got a bunk, I felt like I was really moving up in the world,” he says with a smile.
Fridgeir got a job that paid $2 an hour, working in the mission kitchen. “It was a start,” he says. “I remember when I got that first paycheck, I realized how long it had been since I’d had money to see a movie. That was major.” He went to The Aviator.
He lived at the mission for a year and a half and decided to go to film school, winning a full scholarship to LACC. But it was during a prerequisite photography class that Fridgeir discovered the passion and serenity he was looking for.
To support his new love for photography, he got a part-time job as a personal chef to some bigwigs in Venice and moved to the Rosslyn Hotel, an SRO where, until six months ago, he was renting a room for $300 a month. The hotel was 700 rooms of crack, heroin and insane drinking.
“It was hardcore Bukowski,” says Fridgeir, who's been sober for three years now. But a cheap pad allowed him to concentrate on his art. “But not to concentrate on it as a means to a paycheck,” he says. “Making money is what I do to pay the rent; it’s not my driving force.” He pauses and then jokes, “That’s not very L.A. of me.”
Settled in now with Bolles, he’s been shooting downtown landscapes, a series of 4-by-5 images of lonely and forgotten buildings and areas downtown that he shoots in a palette of grays, of light and shadow. Life at the Canadian now is calming, filled with little luxuries, such as being able to cook at home in his own spacious kitchen. He’ll leave the door open when he cooks, allowing the aromas to circulate through the halls, and generously feeds anyone who shows up at his door. Any inconveniences he’s encountered at the Canadian, like the shared bathrooms or the lack of heat in winter, is a drop in the bucket compared to where he’s been.
“When I lived downtown here in the ’80s,” Fridgeir says, “I saw the homeless guys and I thought, I’m never gonna be that. That’s never gonna happen to me. Being homeless gave me a totally different perspective. Anything that comes after that you feel grateful for. It humbles you for the rest of your life.”
Hacksaw
Brian “Hacksaw” Williams is a heavy-metal vocal coach at the Musicians Institute and the lead singer of the band Damn Hippie Freaks. Looking a little like Meat Loaf and possessing the raspy sound of someone who regularly abuses his vocal chords, he fits the part. In between sips of his Heinekin — ’cause, hey, he’s on vacation — Hacksaw speaks in bullet points about life at the Canadian.
“I came for two reasons,” he says. “The cheap rent, and I could play music as loud as I want.”
When he picked his loft, the rest of the building thought he was nuts or joking. In the 1980s that loft belonged to a famous architect who built structures inside the space, including three little houses with a gravel moat running alongside them connected by a bridge made of iron grating. The space appeared in a book published at the time called The International Book of Lofts. But by the time Hacksaw got to it a decade later, the loft was caked with soot and grime, the little houses’ floors had started to come up and, what’s worse, he couldn’t vacuum or sweep the years of dirt out of the rock moat.
Back in ’96, when the Canadian started advertising for tenants, he paid $370 a month for the space. Prior to moving in, he had been bartending and living in Culver City, floating in a pool and working on his tan more than his music. “So I moved into the Canadian,” he says, pacing in his oversize living room. “I liked the hungriness of it.”
Hacksaw's girlfriend came with him, and it got all Peyton Place when she started shagging Dave Perry, the building manager, and eventually shacked up with him down the hall. “At one point,” Hacksaw says, “I think they were going to get married, but it didn’t happen. And she ended up back here.”
For Hacksaw and Perry, it’s all water under the bridge. “We were all doing a lot of crystal at the time, and it was out of control. But in the end, after we did every bad thing to one another, there was nothing left to do.” (Meanwhile, Hacksaw’s got a 20-year-old daughter from an ex-girlfriend who lives in Arkansas with her mother and visits now and again.)
“I came to this pivotal moment,” says Hacksaw, “where I said if I’m gonna stay in L.A., it’s going to be doing something with music.” He found himself in a band with a guy who scheduled substitute teachers over at the MI, where Hacksaw had studied. Thirteen years after graduating, Hacksaw was back teaching.
“I have to sing a lot of classic metal stuff,” he says. “Once I had to sing Judas Priest for two hours.” To the chagrin of a few of his neighbors, he also gives private lessons out of his home. Hacksaw regularly plays with Damion Wagner (see “The Big Jerk”). He takes a break from singing to play bass. “That’s why I like to come down here and be reminded that music is art.”
Meanwhile, Hacksaw’s mom asks him every year, “How much longer are you going to try this [music] thing?”
The Big Jerk
All of scene number seven on the Collateral Damage DVD was shot in Damion Wagner’s loft. When Arnold Schwarzenegger gets Tasered, look closely and you can see him kiss the black, glitter-dusted floor when he falls. Wagner’s fridge and his silver peg board are in the background. Apparently, a location scout thought Wagner’s loft, with its huge windows, ample light and wide-open space that can host a film crew and equipment looked like the kind of place that would make a fine headquarters for a Colombian drug cartel. Wagner negotiated a large sum of money for that shoot. He and Bob Perez, a former Canadian resident/den mother, would pull a good-cop/bad-cop routine on the production companies that (sometimes without permits!) were looking to blow stuff up or have a helicopter hover 200 feet above the building, causing the windows to vibrate for eight hours. Back in those days, crews kept cash on hand to hush the natives. Wagner would pretend to be an outraged tenant on the verge of going postal, while Perez would play the placator, asking the location manager to grease a few palms. This little skit usually managed to get 100 bucks per day for each loft. But the deal Wagner made for himself with the Collateral Damage shoot bought him a record store.
It was called Metamorphosis Records, and it was part of a 6,000-square-foot space in a warehouse located off Santa Fe that also housed Canadian resident Richard McDowell’s Gallery 835 (see “The Mayor of Main Street”). Back then, Wagner, McDowell and another woman were all given space by the warehouse’s owner to do with as they pleased — no rent required; it was all to enrich downtown. McDowell says Wagner did a great job and that he created a community with “plenty of music, a good vibe, a really nice layout with chairs, and all the knickknacks and trinkets usually found at a bona fide record store.”
Then the building was sold, and they all got kicked out. Which was fine with Wagner, who realized after a year and a half that he “never wanted to be in the retail business again. I got lots of records now,” he says, smiling. Nowadays, the movie crews don’t come as much. The last production inside Wagner’s loft was a movie starring Usher, a straight-to-video that was so low budget the set designer didn’t change a single thing. “You can see my record collection, my bed, you can even see my high school yearbook in one shot,” Wagner laughs.
Some of his neighbors are still a little bitter about his score with the Schwarzenegger film, but that’s not why he’s known as the Big Jerk. “One of the things that makes me the Big Jerk,” he says, “is that I totally play music really loud.” He and his band the Dizzys often rehearse in the loft. And Wagner, who has an entire recording studio in his place, complete with a makeshift sound booth repurposed from someone’s loft bed, will play with anyone — like a local homeless kid named Nicholas, who was in his late 20s, black and good looking when Wagner finally met him. Wagner had seen him for years around the hood, always banging drumsticks on a street sign or what have you. He remembers their first jam session.
“Most of them tend to be older, but when he came up, he reeked of crack. He sat on the drums and he was John Bonham. He’s high and once he’s wound up he can’t stop. After a while, it’s this barrage of drums. I’m playing guitar and my other friend is playing bass, but we can’t keep up. ...He was so good, I invited him back the next week.”
Wagner doesn’t see Nicholas around anymore. “I knew something was happening when Pete’s went in,” he says. To him, Pete’s Cafe seemed like the yuppies’ Maginot line. “They were going into defense mode.”
Recently he got some complaints about the noise. “I had the cops call me a couple of times,” he says. “One time, it was because someone was screaming on the mike and the windows were up. I try to be polite as possible, but those buildings didn’t have anyone in them before, and I was doing this for years before anyone came. It’s not like I’m going to change. I don’t even know them.”
The Orphan
In an Illinois cornfield, getting burned under the morning sun, 14-year-old Aileen Duke would dream of Hollywood as she pulled the top tassels from the cornstalks so that the females could fertilize the males.
“I always thought I was a big fish in a really small pond,” she says. “I always longed for the glitter. I thought I’d find it here.”
She made it to L.A., by way of Tempe, Arizona, where her family moved when Duke was in high school. In Tempe, Duke had her eyebrows, lips and nose pierced, and even got her first tattoo, a star. She decided every time she lived somewhere new, some place farther from Illinois, she’d get another star. She wanted to be a walking constellation.
She remembers her first drive in from Arizona as a 17-year-old with big ideas. “My eyes were as wide as saucers that day,” says Duke, a curvy blonde with a touch of trailer park. You can see the milk-fed wholesomeness under all the makeup and face piercings. But in L.A., she and her friend Casey got kicked out of student housing while attending the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Duke had nowhere to go when a girl she knew from school invited her to share her space at the San Fernando. They got another roommate off of Craigslist, a guy who listened to Bob Marley all day and started to smoke crack.
One day, while she and Casey were watching TV, the roommate came in, unplugged the set right in front of them, and pawned it for crack money. When their lease wasn’t renewed, Duke and Casey were left with nowhere to go except the Cecil, another notorious, drug- and prostitution-plagued SRO.
“We paid extra to have our own bathroom,” says Duke, “and there were many nights where I curled up at the bottom of that shower crying.”
The rule back in those days was that you had to leave an SRO after a month, so when their time was up, the girls carried their stuff in FIDM duffels and plastic garbage bags and moved into the Rosslyn, still another SRO. “Because we had no fuckin’ other thing to do,” says Duke.
One night, when Duke had been up for three days on a meth bender — explained away as a combination of college experimentation and easy access — she thought she had begun to hallucinate while doing her homework. The walls were crawling with cockroaches. Duke realized that it wasn’t lack of sleep causing this vision, but that a steady stream of roaches was streaming out of cracks in the windows and crown molding. She knew she had to get out of there.
In March 2005, she met a 25-year-old girl named Krista who lived with a friend at the Canadian. Krista offered Duke her place since she was always at her boyfriend’s. “I idolized her,” says Duke. “She took me in, ’cause she was made of fashion-design blood also. I thought she was wonderful.” Before long, Krista got married and wanted Duke out. She told her so by emptying the fridge of all of Duke’s produce, and scrawling, “God protect me from my friends. I can take care of my enemies,” across the kitchen wall. But in the end, Krista left, leaving Duke with the loft.
That was the same year Duke started working for Trashy Lingerie, just a month before she was to graduate from FIDM. She was helping a girl named Winter Rosebud, who is also a good friend of Liz McGrath’s (see “Lady McGrath”), make pirate hats for Halloween costumes and do odds and ends. On Halloween, the owners of Trashy Lingerie asked Duke to start designing for the company. Duke was so happy she cried.
“My parents don’t get it,” she says. “So in a way, it makes sense that I’d be here doing this thing that they would never dream of doing in a million years.”
Duke finally felt like she was arriving. She had aced her finals, and she was walking back to the Canadian feeling so good she started singing Sinatra’s “I Got the World on a String” out loud. She turned the corner on Main just in time to see a guy erupting diarrhea. “That kind of deflated me, and I went home.”
Duke thinks of the places she still wants to go and the star tattoos, like passport stamps, she’d collect. She’s been eyeing the Pacific Northwest, but when she thinks about leaving, she starts to cry.
“It’s just that,” she says between sobs, “there’s never going to be another Winter Rosebud in Seattle. There’s never going to be another Liz McGrath. They took care of me when I could have easily been left behind. They are the people who, in a sense, raised me, and it’s hard to imagine life without them.”
The Chef
Dina Chang was all set to move in. All she had to do was deliver the signed lease, and the run-down dirty loft would be hers, all 2,000 square feet of it. “You’re still moving in?” the manager asked from his apartment, eyebrows raised. “Didn’t Valerie tell you?” he asked. “That someone shot himself in that apartment?” No, Chang was not aware of that. Michael Franz was an artist who had lived at the Canadian for years. He used to work off his rent by fixing things around the building. But then the work ran out and he was asked to pay a modest amount of rent, which he refused to do. When the Sheriff’s deputies finally came to evict him, crowbars in hand as they marched down the hall, Franz put a pillow to his chest and shot himself. He left a note blaming the building’s owner. There’s a bullet hole in Chang’s kitchen, but she thinks that one came from the outside. It doesn’t faze Chang.
Prior to moving in, Chang had been living across the street at the Hellman, before Tom Gilmore bought and polished it up. Back then, it was only slightly more glamorous than the Canadian. When she quit her job in postproduction to pursue her dream of becoming a pastry chef, she knew she wouldn't be able to afford the $1,050 monthly rent for her 800 square feet in the building whose hallways flooded when it rained. One day at Banquette, the little coffee shop down the street, Liz McGrath mentioned that she thought a space was opening in the Canadian. Chang got the loft. Rent was $550 a month; there was no air conditioning, no heat or gas. She had to buy and install her own electric stove and refrigerator. It cost her close to a couple thousand just to paint the place.
“People have this romanticized view of lofts,” Chang says. “They come in after we’ve all put thousands of dollars into them. Not to mention the love and hours and hours of work. It took me three days just to clean and disinfect it. I had to literally hose it out and suck the water out the window.”
Then there are the fair-weather friends who now want to come hang out in Chang’s place and coo about how “lucky” she is to live there. “I get resentful,” says Chang. “It’s like, where were you when I needed help moving four years ago? When did downtown become the epicenter of cool? When I moved in, it was the epicenter of hood.”
She left a 400-square-foot apartment close to the beach in Venice for downtown because she wanted to be in the middle of nothing. “It was peaceful,” she says. “It felt postapocalyptic when I first moved here. The bankers went home at 5. There was nothing but tumbleweeds and crackheads. My friend Jason and I would ride bikes in the middle of the night and it was like we were the last two people on Earth.”
She recalls the night she was driving home at 3 a.m. after a night of partying and saw the flashing lights of cop cars. As she approached the scene, she could see glass everywhere and then the body, covered in glass. She looked up and saw the broken 12th-story window at the neighboring Rosslyn Hotel.
“Someone must have been pushed,” says Chang. “Usually when someone commits suicide, they open the window first. There was so much violence at the Rosslyn that it gets to a point where you get used to it.”
On Fridays, Chang and her friends would play a game called Hipster or Hobo. They’d guess whether the stringy-haired skinny dude was homeless or a hipster from Silver Lake who’d come down in his beat-up old Benz to score his weekend crack. They’d pour a drink and sit there watching doctors pull up in BMWs; once they spotted a tow-truck driver, with a car still attached, stopping to make a score.
“I’ve seen every type of person smoke crack underneath my window,” Chang laughs.
The Mayor of Main
Richard McDowell, with the worried look of a mild neurotic, is leaving the Canadian. He’s already moved out of the loft he shared with Valerie Davis, who is a photographer, but he was still toying with the idea of keeping his art studio, the 800-square-foot space that was once his bedroom. McDowell sits in a big wooden chair, leaning back with his feet on the type of big metal desk you’d expect to see in a police station. A cloud of black paper bombs are suspended from the ceiling on invisible fishing line, in a frozen state of attack, threatening to rain down from above.
McDowell had wanted to live at the Canadian for the past five or six years. Every six months, he’d call the manager, looking for an opening. He was living at the Baltimore Hotel, a Skid Row SRO, where he paid $270 a month. He stayed in the Baltimore, even though he had a job that paid him enough to live decently in the most gentrified of neighborhoods. He remembers the roaches. “Ah, man,” he says, still shivering, “it took a long time to get rid of those bastards. When I moved in, I slept in the middle of the bed, and I didn’t turn on the light, ’cause whenever I did, I’d see they were right near me.”
He wasn’t staying out of necessity. He actually liked living there. He got a kick out of his 74-year-old neighbor, Art, a retired engineer with a 20-something girlfriend.
“I’d hear the funniest conversations through the wall. I’d hear her say, ‘No, no, no, don’t do that, Art, you’re dancing in my underwear!’ And he’d be singing, ‘Doodle-dee-doo!’” Then, there was the night McDowell was smoking outside the building. Someone tapped his shoulder. He turned, and it was a petite, blonde bombshell in a halter top and a little skirt with a pink-and-purple floral pattern and just enough of a black eye for McDowell to notice how the maroon color matched her outfit. McDowell knew who she was. She came down on the weekends from the Westside, where she lived with her boyfriend during the week, to shoot heroin. She’d let a few of the guys, the ones she either trusted or even liked, have sex with her. For most of the guys, McDowell says, “She’d take off all her clothes and let them do what they do as men without touching her.” She passed out the sexual favors in exchange for a place to “do what she did, as a human being, away from the streets and the jeers and catcalls,” says McDowell softly. “I wish I’d taken her upstairs that night, but I didn’t.”
McDowell came downtown in the late ’90s seeking human interaction. He found shelter in an abandoned bank and opened up a little gallery in the ghost-town streets around Santa Fe Avenue. It was cold and desolate, something out of the movie Silent Hill. People came out of the woodwork to check out Gallery 835. Early Cannibal Flower shows were held there. After getting kicked out of his squat in the bank building, he moved into the gallery to live. He paid only $200 a month for the 6,000-square-foot space. McDowell proudly boasts of how he received a letter from the Mayor’s Office saying he and his gallery were pioneers.
“I don’t know if I was the pioneer of anything,” McDowell says. “But I felt like I was in front of a massive wave.”
McDowell’s gallery caught the attention of the owner of the Spring Arts Tower, on Fifth and Spring streets, a building that housed artists for either cheap or free back in the day. The owner sent him a Christmas card saying he liked what McDowell had going on and should he ever need a place, he was welcome to stay in his building. Eventually, McDowell took him up on the offer. He lived on the third floor of the 12-story building, which was convenient since the plumbing only reached that level. No one ventured above the eighth floor. “It was a real community,” he says. “Everyone was an artist or a writer or a musician, minus a heroin addict or two.”
The Spring Arts Tower was a former law office that had been abandoned and left almost completely intact, as if everyone fled just before the apocalypse. What was left behind — cubicles, lamps, chairs, desks, old doors, a bumper-pool table — was claimed by the new inhabitants. McDowell wrote a book about living there called "Thirty Days on Spring: A Junkie Needs Relief." In 2003, all 37 residents, including McDowell, got the boot. McDowell moved to the Baltimore until Valerie Davis took him in at the Canadian.
But living with Davis wasn’t working for McDowell. He didn’t touch brush to canvas once in the time he lived with her. When it looked like his own loft wasn’t in the cards, he debated going back to the Baltimore but instead moved “further into the mayhem,” as he calls it, to a renovated loft on Wall Street. He says his new space is an artist’s dream: skylights, a freight elevator that opens into the kitchen, private access to the roof. It costs three times what he paid at the Canadian — $550 for his art studio and his shared living space with Davis.
Rocking back in his metal office chair, staring at the bombs overhead, McDowell relates a scene he remembers in some film where Picasso takes the artist Modigliani out to meet Renoir. Picasso and Modigliani lived in meager accommodations in Montmarte, while Renoir lived in a villa with 28 rooms, maids, butlers and a garden. Picasso was trying to show Modigliani that you didn’t have to live like a pauper to be an artist, that you could create and still have whatever you want. McDowell explains, “Modigliani asks Renoir, ‘How are you able to afford all of these things?’ Renoir answers, ‘I traded it for two paintings.’”
What did Modigliani do? He stole a bottle of wine and climbed over the wall.
LA WEEKLY -- July 11, 2007
"Zineland" By Kate Wolf
Artwork by Darin Klein
When Darin Klein made his first zine in high school in the late ’80s — a literary journal full of friends’ poems, writings and photographs — he thought he might have been the first person to ever do so.
“I’m from a very small town in Central California,” says Klein, 34. “I did not know that people went to Kinko’s and made art. I thought they just made copies of their résumés.”
One can imagine, then, the shock of recognition he felt on a trip into San Francisco, when he discovered, under the stairs at City Lights bookstore, the chapbook-and-independent-publication section.
“It was like, oh, other people are doing this!”
Klein immediately began collecting independently printed matter of all kinds, made as far back as the 1950s and with topics ranging from elective amputation to sea life to gay punks.
Now, some 2,000 zines later, Klein is also the author and organizer of 60 or so zines himself, and has curated two shows in San Francisco about independent publications and book art, as well as numerous visual-art exhibitions around Los Angeles. And he brings his passion for and knowledge of zines to the Hammer Museum this Saturday, with “Zineland,” which will feature 15 individual Los Angeles–based vendors, as well as Skylight Books and Family Bookstore, a panel discussion led by ANP Quarterly editor Aaron Rose, an ice cream truck (Heartschallenger), a cash bar, the local band Sounds of Asteroth, and just perhaps a bubble machine.
Vendors are set to include Eden Batki, with a reprint of a zine about lesbian S&M originally made by her mother in 1978; Journal of Aesthetics & Protest; Brass Tacks Press; Eve Fowler selling her own artist’s books and copies of Ridykeulous; and work by Edie Fake, 2nd Cannons Publications, Elk, Insert Press, Christopher Russell, the now defunct Library Bonnet, Mark Todd and Ester Pearl Watson of Unlovable, Trudi Gallery, and ANP Quarterly. There will also be a commemorative zine of the event, with contributions from all the participants available free of charge.
With so much great material for sale on the cheap, it’s no wonder that people like Klein, who began working at the Hammer as programs coordinator in January (he was at Skylight Books for five years before that), can easily build a collection. Zines (or “exhibitions in print,” as Klein likes to think of them) can have a slightly addictive quality. And then there’s figuring out how to display them.
“I’m constantly fantasizing about the perfect shelving situation,” he says.
“Zineland,” in the Hammer Museum Courtyard, Sat., July 14, 6–10 p.m., with panel discussion at 7:30 p.m.; free.
POETICDIVERSITY -- April 2007
"Paul Roessler's 'Eight Years'"by Marie Lecrivain
The number eight in most belief systems holds a special significance. In the Cabalistic terms, the number eight represents a time of suffering and pain, a test similar to the trials of the biblical Job. Paul Roessler's chapbook, Eight Years (copyright 2006 Brass Tacks Press), chronicles the span of time he spent struggling with drug addiction while trying maintain multiple roles as a musician, husband, and father.
Roessler, a keyboardist and seminal influence in the early L.A. punk scene (see bio), has employed the straightforward in your face nature of punk to a series of narrative poems. In "Breathing Crystal (part 1)," Roessler acknowledges the relief and paradoxical newfound freedom he experienced the moment he surrended to his meth addiction:
Life was no longer a marathon of suffering
It became a sprint with the finish line in sight
Power flowed through me
And whatever ash fell from the sky
I relished as part of the absurd journey
My relationships improved or withered away without regret
I no longer feared dying, but welcomed it, prayed for it
I breathed crystal, let's not be mysterious
And lived in a diamond palace
Overseen by an artistic god
Closed my eyes to all doubt and questions of faith
Started my own religion
Joined the pantheon of the greatest composers and thinkers
Solved all the social problems
Loved unconditionally
Stopped smoking
And waited for the end.
Roessler's laconic voice juxtaposes the tragic and triumphant events of his life next to the occasional epiphany: "Sad Songs (part 3)," reveals the disconnected ties between Roessler and his two children as they grew up and succeeded academically in spite of their parents' descent into drugs; "Coach of the Year (part 6)," enumerates Roessler's "Art of War" coaching strategies to transform stereotypical misfits (fat kid, awkward kid, etc.) weaknesses into strengths which enabled his basketball team to achieve a season of victory; "Giving Birth (part 10)," divulges the isolation and joy of a man creating music in an attempt to escape his inner demons; "Manna From Somewhere (part 11)," tells the tale of the fleeting happiness and ultimate price that is often paid with acquisition of ill-gotten gains; "A Semblance of Sanity (part 21)," cynically advises an eldest child how to avoid the pitfall's of a failed parent's life path; and "Noticed this Morning (part 22)," shares the ironic secret to a successful marriage between two irascible people:
I noticed this morning
The reason we've stayed together so many years
Is that she will forgive any monstrous transgression
Any inhuman abuse that I shower upon her
Red pages of dalliances
And call it "entertaining"
How she is wired
And weird
But I hated myself for a while there, man, ugh.
Then I remembered
Oh yeah!
I'm quite a forgiver myself!
She's had her moments
Some might say decades
That I had to write off to
The wrong side of
No Bed
I kept chugging
I still adored her even when she had those horns...
Roessler attributes the time he spent in Mississippi assisting the Hurricane Katrina effort as the inspiration for writing Eight Years. Any poet, like Roessler, who allows the suffering of others to enter his psyche, willingly faces, and then poetically conquer his demons is a one not only worth reading, and but one worth emulating.
Bio: Paul Roessler was born in 1958 in Hew Haven, Connecticut. He began musical studies at age eight and joined early L.A. punk phenomenon The Screamers at age 19.
He continued to play in and record with dozens of other cutting edge bands including the Dead Kennedys, Nervous Gender, Nina Hagen, Twisted Roots, 45 Grave, Mike Watt, DC3, Mark Curry, Pat Smear, The Deadbeats, Celebrity Skin, Duff McKagen (Guns and Roses), Geza X and the Mommymen, Josie Cotten, the Joykiller, Prick, Leah Andreone, Redd Kross, Saccharine Trust, Andy Prieboy, Gene Loves Jezabel, Eric Gales, Tom Sartori, The Carter Brothers, Tyler Hilton, and many , many more; as well as solo albums and movie soundtracks.
In 2005, while working in Mississippi on the Hurricane Katrina disaster, away from his keyboard for the first time, he took up poetry.
"Eight Years," Paul Roessler, Copyright 2006, Brass Tacks Press - www.lifeasapoet.com, 31 pages, $5.
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- BRASS TACKS PRESS
- Los Angeles, California, United States
- Official website at www.lifeasapoet.com.
