BRASS TACKS PRESS

SURFWRITER.NET 2-11-11

2011-02-11T22:05:00.000-08:00

"Thanks for the Memories…"

by Robert R. Feigel

Photos by Frank Lamonea, John Puklus, Anthony Friedkin, and Woody Stuart

TOPANGA BEACH EXPERIENCE: 1960s - 70s

Author: Paul Lovas (as told to Pablo Capra)

Publisher: Brass Tacks Press

For me, reading this small, but potent book was both strange and exciting.

Strange, because Paul - who is 7 years my junior - became part of the beach community I know so well at a time when I was in the process of leaving it. As a result, much of what he experienced either happened after I'd left or involved a younger generation.

Exciting, because he fills in so many of the gaps that were missing from my own experience.

For example, I finally found out what led to my friend Woody Woodward's near fatal stabbing and what happened to the houses just south of "The Yellow Submarine" house that used to belong to the Roach family.

After reading through Paul's smooth, often humorous, narrative and looking at the photos from that period, I'm almost sad that I missed the transition from the Topanga Beach of the early-mid 60s to that of the late-60s after I'd moved to Maui.

Paul's book sets the scene for some wonderful counterculture exploits that have since become part of coastal legend and shouldn't be missed. Take George's narrow escape from the cops. It is one of the funniest things I've ever read and Shane's ongoing battles with the fumbling, frustrated dogcatcher is classic. They must have driven the authorities mad more than once.

On the other hand, some of the antics were already part of local beach culture years before they were reinvented by later arrivals.

No rocks on the roof for me. When the noise from one of the band's practice sessions would drive me bonkers, I'd sneak out of my little room above the garage at Dr Schweiger's house (just north of the "Yellow Submarine") and slightly loosen one or two of the fuses that powered the living room in the main house so all the lights and amplifiers would suddenly die. Because I'd only loosen the fuses just enough to disconnect the electricity all the fuses looked just fine when George or Davey or Jay or Jeff would come out to check with a flashlight. By the time someone finally thought to test if they were screwed in tight (probably Craigy), I was half-way to Costa Rica.

We'd also wreak unmentionable havoc on trespassers (aka "outsiders") with pellet guns, slingshots, deflated tires and dog poo on their car seats. But I'd like to think our generation was just a bit more original and a lot less obvious.

After all, Topanga Beach was a more balanced little community back then.

By balanced, I mean it was made up of a wide assortment of different people: old, young, rich, poor, families, gay couples, loners, lovers, artists, business people, actors, cops, ballet dancers, models, surfers, students, teachers, carpenters, filmmakers, lifeguards, writers, musicians, stuntmen, lawyers, sailors, even a professional golfer cum poacher and an award winning soundman. And, for the most part, we all got along, accepting each other's differences and respecting each other's space.

All that was starting to change by the time I left for Maui in 1968 and I returned two years later to a fragmented, harder, less open community made up mostly of people under 30.

Not that this is in any way meant as a criticism of Paul's photo rich book or the period it covers. The times they were a changin' anyway. And not just on Topanga Beach or in Southern California. American society was in the midst of major changes from sea to shining sea, and the laid-back, easy going lifestyles and optimistic expectations of post war America had finally given way to overdoses, suicides, flag draped coffins, blind patriotism and thoroughly corrupt politicians and their supporters. In other words, it was replaced by cynicism, hedonism and me-ism.

Paul's book is a must read for anyone who wants to taste the magic of a beach community that was completely eradicated just for being different, as well as by everyone who ever lived at Topanga Beach before the bulldozers and remembers how special it was.

For me, the book's last paragraph says it all:

"Leaving was sad, but moving on for many was a good time to explore. People went out and started seeing new places to surf and live their lives. There was a new era coming, and it wasn't bad, but the old one ... boy, you couldn't beat it if you were at Topanga."

Thanks for the memories Paul....

CITIZEN TLEILAX 1-18-10

2010-01-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

FIRST! – A Book of YouTube Comments
Edited by Pablo Capra
Published by Brass Tacks Press
Zine/Booklet – 23 pages

"YouTube Comments Have Literary Merit"

by D. Bene Tleilax

Well, perhaps “literary merit” is an overstatement – however there is certainly a value in such expressions, however base they may predominantly be at first glance. The comments referred to here are mainly those which are posted as instantaneous reactions to what has just been viewed, requiring probably less than 2 seconds of thought on the part of the authors. These types of comments are of course not limited to YouTube; they can occur in various places across the internet: Facebook statuses, 4Chan (and related) forums, etc. Taken as a whole, the myriad collections of such comments on all manner of topics across the web present a revealing view into the state of mind of a mass segment of our internet-infused culture. I view them as a sort of collaborative folk art, combining to create a humorously absurd, abstract tale of the frivolity and often intellectually stunted nature of many of the internet’s denizens. These negative aspects abound, certainly, yet a keen sense of highly developed and succinct comedy appropriate to its environment is perhaps just as frequently displayed, if one has the correct mind to interpret it.

While one need not look far to read multitudes of such commentary in their natural habitats, Capra’s published collection recognizes that this incidental output from our society deserves more than a cursory glance as we wander through these very spaces on our own missions. Presenting these small blips of text on paper as a uniquely modern form of automatic poetry or literature imbues them with the strength of cultural documentation, a strength which allows them to outlive their inherently unstable environment where all might be lost when a video is removed or a thread deleted. I have myself thought on many occasions that similar things should be published, and I am glad to see it done here in this small booklet.

(Link to Citizen Tleilax)

...

OPEN MIND DEAD SOUND SYSTEM 12-23-09

2009-12-23T17:10:00.000-08:00

Dicso Bunny talks about FIRST!: A Book of YouTube Comments (edited by Pablo Capra) on the radio...

LA DOWNTOWN NEWS 12-7-09

2009-12-09T11:36:00.000-08:00

"The Write Stuff"

by Ryan Vaillancourt
Photos by Gary Leonard

Downtown’s Growing Collection of Published Authors Finds a Home at Metropolis Books

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - Most urban bookstores have a local writers section, though “local” can cover a vague, regional set of boundaries. That’s not the case at Metropolis Books: At the small, independent bookstore in the Old Bank District, local means, quite specifically, Downtown Los Angeles.

The nearly 3-year-old bookstore stocks all the bestsellers, the classics, the hot titles of the month — these days, it’s anything Julia Child related — and the usual tomes from the Los Angeles literary pantheon of Chandler, Bukowski, Didion, etc.

Then there’s the locals section, where a collection of relationship-focused short stories is mixed with a youth-oriented, ecological adventure book, some self-published poetry books and a series of contemporary mysteries written for American Anglophiles.

“It’s nice to feature people who are from the neighborhood,” said Metropolis owner Julie Swayze. “We’ve had authors from England and Australia who included us on their tour, but I think it’s nice that someone can walk from upstairs to a book signing.”

Swayze has also made a habit of inviting published local authors to hold book launches, readings and signings at the store. Next up is Hannah Dennison, who on Thursday, Dec. 10, will read from and sign Exposé, the third installment in her Vicky Hill Mystery Series.

Lending shelf space to local authors is not entirely altruistic: They sell well, too, Swayze said.

“If it’s a local author people are sort of drawn to that,” she said. “I can sell them very well just saying that they’re local.”

Los Angeles Downtown News caught up with five Downtown authors whose works are in stock at Metropolis to talk about their craft and writing Downtown.

Hannah Dennison: Dennison, a native of England, didn’t set out to be an author. She came to Los Angeles as an aspiring screenwriter, then tired of the pursuit and took what was supposed to be a temporary gig as an assistant to a corporate CEO. It ended up being more permanent, as Dennison has now worked in a Downtown officer tower for 10 years. But in the early morning hours, Dennison, 51, writes installments of the Vicky Hill Mystery Series, about a young newspaper reporter outside London (Dennison used to write obituaries for a small English paper) who dreams of being an investigative reporter.

“It’s basically a cross between Bridget Jones and Agatha Christie with a splash of Nancy Drew; it’s in a small town, and murders take place,” said Dennison, whose Dec. 10 reading begins at 7 p.m. and coincides with the Downtown Art Walk. The stories also explore eccentric English traditions like hedge-laying (competitions for farmers trimming hedges), or in Exposé, snail racing.

“Oddly enough it seems to appeal more to American readers who are Anglophiles,” Dennison said. “They find English tea and English traditions sort of nice. England seems to want the stabbing and incest and hardcore stuff. My stuff is more like cozy mystery. It’s supposed to make you feel good; you curl up at the fire with a box of chocolates and a cat.”

Dana Johnson: Los Angeles native Johnson has lived all over the county, and in Downtown for about four years. She remembers strolling up Main Street three years ago and seeing paper in the windows of the future Metropolis space, wondering what new retailer was investing in the area.

Today, the paper is long down and the window instead features her collection of short stories, Break Any Woman Down. The first-person accounts won the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction.

“I was experimenting with voice at the time so there’s all different kinds of people,” said Johnson. “One story, for example, is a white punk Irish musician guy, one character is a black female stripper, and one’s an older black woman in the south.”

Johnson, 42, who is a professor of English and creative writing at USC, has also co-written two “chick lit” works under a pseudonym. Metropolis stocks those books, Eye To Eye and Flyover State.

Though her work isn’t necessarily set Downtown, Johnson said she takes plenty of inspiration from living in the area.

“For any artist of any kind, Downtown is a fascinating place to be living and working because there’s just always something to see and something to hear and something to smell,” she said. “There’s something about Downtown that’s really confrontational, in a good way.”

Richard McDowell: McDowell and his circle of Downtown poets didn’t need a publisher to get their work out. They formed Brass Tacks Press, hooked up with a Santa Monica printing company, and published their prose themselves. McDowell is behind a series of “chapbooks,” or self-published, pocket-sized books, containing poetry by himself and other L.A. writers.

McDowell’s self-illustrated 30 Days on Spring is his stylized reflections on life along the Historic Core street before gentrification.

“On any given day on a walk from Fifth down Spring, you can buy next to anything, cigarettes at bootleg prices two-fifty a pack, Marlboro, Marlboro Lights, Newports, pickup a lighter, pack of chewing gum, mango’s [sic] bus tokens, corn-on-the-cob, plastic animals or planets, and if your [sic] so inclined a man or woman to fulfill you sexual desires,” he writes in the book.

McDowell wrote 30 Days on Spring while living, under the radar, in an abandoned Historic Core building. The 44-year-old now resides in a Wall Street loft in the Toy District and is looking to compile work from Downtown poets to publish as a collection.

Diana Leszczynski: Leszczynski, an 8-year resident of Downtown, is a former film industry worker who later found her voice as a professional writer. Her Fern Verdant & the Silver Rose is an ecological adventure for children. Its young protagonist shares a secret ability with her mother to communicate with plants.

The book bounces from Oregon to France to Sri Lanka, a fact that Leszczynski admits is somewhat ironic, since she wrote it while living in the San Fernando Building in the Historic Core. The closest she comes to an ecological adventure is having an indoor garden, she said.

Leszczynski, 44, did not have long-seeded dreams to write fiction for children.

“It’s one of those things where something just comes to you, where your brain is ricocheting around in a million different places and this seemed like the most logical way to tell this story,” she said. “And also one of my favorite books when I was growing up was Alice In Wonderland, essentially the story of a girl going into a different world, which is what [Fern Verdant] is.”

Fern Verdant & the Silver Rose, which was named a Smithsonian Notable Children’s Book of the Year in 2008 and was a Green Earth Book honoree this year, encourages young readers to protect the environment, but it’s not “heavy messaged,” she said.

Local sales have been strong too.

“I have a wide circle of friends down here, and people knew me when I was going through the anguish and torture of writing my first draft, so I think people were genuinely supportive having seen that and then seeing me have the good fortune to get published,” Leszczynski said.

Daniel Olivas: For almost 20 years, Daniel Olivas has spent his weekdays working for the state Attorney General in the Ronald Reagan State Building at Third and Spring streets. The neighborhood was already familiar to him from childhood bus trips with his grandmother to Grand Central Market.

The 50-year-old deputy attorney general, a second generation Angeleno, was an English major in college and has published five works of fiction, including the short story collection Anywhere But L.A. He’ll sign copies of and read from the collection next April.

“It’s a collection of short stories where essentially the characters are either trying to escape L.A. or they have completely left L.A.,” Olivas said. “I found that over the years I started accumulating stories that seemed to want to pull out of the city.”

Still, Olivas’ characters maintain a close connection to the City of Angels, and often Downtown, he said.

“I get distressed with outsider views of Los Angeles,” Olivas said. “There are so many stereotypes out there, including that the classic L.A. novel has to be about Malibu and movie stars, forgetting about the people who have no connection to Hollywood or the movie industry, people who go to work every single day. Those people, I try to address.”

Metropolis Books is at 440 S. Main St., (213) 612-0174 or metropolisbooksla.com.

LOT'S O' CRAP (ISSUE #5) 10-24-09

2009-10-24T23:09:00.000-07:00

Lot's o' Crap publishes art by Toilet from The Last Nowhere (2006).

...

TOTALLY MAG! (ISSUE #18) 10-17-09

2009-10-17T23:02:00.000-07:00

Totally Mag! publishes art by Toylit from Craplexity (2006).

...

FOXY DIGITALIS 9-1-09

2009-09-01T23:30:00.000-07:00

From "An Interview with Penny-Ante Publisher Rebekah Why"

by Jon Lorenz

I read that you initially started Penny-Ante with a focus on poetry and you said at the time that you "saw it as something that was completely dead," could you elaborate on that?

Poetry has never died and I find is hilarious that the first time I’m misquoted is by one of my own editors! (Laughs). I think when I said that I was referring to my own surroundings and friends, who don’t really find contemporary “big name” poetry as something they connect with… But with that said, there will always be poets, and people interested in poetry. Byron Coley’s been doing it with the Ecstatic Yod’s poetry journals, or Brass Tacks Press out of Topanga… There are people carrying the torch from one generation to the next and with that, it’s not completely dead, and thank goodness....

Penny-Ante website

Foxy Digitalis website

...

PENNY-ANTE, THREE 8-1-09

2009-08-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

3 Brass Tacks Press poets published in Penny-Ante, Three!

List of contributors:

Loto Ball, Sean Bonniwell (The Music Machine), Caleb Braaten (Sacred Bones Records), Billy Bragg, Heather Brown, Mark C (Live Skull, Int'l Shades), Robert Campbell (poet), Pablo Capra (poet), Victory Cayro (Bald Eagles), Mathew Cerletty (artist), George Chen (KIT, 7 Year Rabbit Cycle, Chen Santa Maria), Sharon Cheslow (Chalk Circle), Billy Childish, Circle, Helios Creed (Chrome), Nathan Danilowicz, Joe DeNardo (Growing), Jason Diamond (writer), Arrington de Dionyso (Old Time Relijun), John Dwyer (Thee Oh Sees), Phil Elverum (Microphones, Mt Eerie), Jill Emery (Hole, Mazzy Star), Jad Fair (Half Japanese), fey, Mick Farren (writer, The Deviants), Larry Fondation (writer), Jessica Lee Garrison (writer), Evan George (writer), Aaron Giesel (photographer), Wynne Greenwood (Tracy+The Plastics), Liz Haley (artist), Robert Hansen Jr. (artist), Maya Hayuk (artist), Casey Henry (writer), Julian Hoeber (artist), Christopher Ilth (artist, Daily Void), Gregory Jacobsen (artist), Mason Jones (writer), Dawn Kasper (artist), Dana Kline (poet), Chris Knox (Tall Dwarfs, The Enemy, Toy Love, The Nothing), Bettina Koster (Malaria!), Dirk Knibbe (artist), Terence Koh (artist), David Jacob Kramer (Family/Hope Gallery), Hanna Liden (artist), Matt Maust (artist, Cold War Kids), Ian MacKaye (Dischord Records, Fugazi, Minor Threat, The Evens), Stephen McCarty (Dead Meadow), Roger Miller (Mission of Burma), Irene Moon, Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Naked on the Vague, Ashley Nelson (writer), Martin Newell (poet, Cleaners from Venus), Lora Norton (Chuck Dukowski Sextet), Jed Ochmanek (artist), Honey Owens (Valet), owleyes, George Parsons (Dream Magazine), Alia Penner (artist), Martin Phillipps (The Chills), Pocahaunted, Andrew Pogany (writer/poet), Robert Pollard (Guided by Voices), Cassie Ramone (Vivian Girls), Robedoor, Rob Roberge (Urinals), Steven Salardino (writer), Silver Apples, Danny Simon (artist), Anna Spanos (writer), Spires That in the Sunset Rise, Jessie Stead (artist), Sumi Ink Club (aka Lucky Dragons), Ann Summa (photographer), Jason Burke Sutter (writer), Drew Tewksbury (writer), Toylit (poet), Lia Trinka-Browner (writer), Brian Turner (WFMU), Michael Andrew Turner (Warmer Milks), TV Ghost, Matt Valentine (MV/EE, Tower Recordings), Steve Vanoni (artist), John Whitson (Holy Mountain), Bett Williams (writer), Allison Wolfe (Bratmobile, Partyline)

Flyers for the "street date" party:

HEIDE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 7-22-09

2009-07-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from the Heide Museum of Modern Art's catalog for the show

Ern Malley: The Hoax and Beyond (July 22 - November 15, 2009)

Curated by Kendrah Morgan and David Rainey

[The poems of Ern Malley] next appear in California in 2004 in volume seven of the little magazine from Brass Tacks Press, Life as a Poet (Plate 20)....

With at least 20 versions in all -- not only in Australia but in London, Paris, Lyons, Kyoto, New York, and Los Angeles -- this "black swan," this "darkening ecliptic," is indeed still trespassing on many "alien waters."
...

A THANK YOU... 6-13-09

2009-06-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

...from Lots o' Crap zine (issue #4).

A THANK YOU... 4-20-09

2009-04-20T12:39:00.000-07:00

...from musician Nicole Kidman.

TOPANGA MESSENGER 4-9-09

2009-04-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

"Lower Topanga Redux -- ca. 1970"

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.

TOPANGA MESSENGER 2-12-09

2009-02-12T11:02:00.000-08:00

"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

2009-01-09T18:59:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T23:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-10T11:33:00.000-08:00

"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

2008-11-06T00:44:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from
"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

2008-10-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

"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.

COST: $5
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

2008-10-23T00:15:00.000-07:00

"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")

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.

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- October 9, 2008

2008-10-09T20:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

"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.

PALISADIAN-POST -- September 18, 2008

2008-09-18T00:44:00.000-07:00

"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.

DOWNTOWN LA LIFE MAGAZINE -- August 12, 2008

2008-08-12T19:40:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-07-01T00:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

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

"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

2008-05-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-05-16T23:47:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-05-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-05-01T00:52:00.000-07:00

"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 po

etry'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 i

t 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.

—Two, Nothing Next to Nothing (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.”

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!

—Log, Toylit, & Two

POETIX -- April 2008

2008-04-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-12-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

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

2007-09-14T18:01:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-07-11T17:29:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-04-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

"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.

HIGH TECH HIGH SCHOOL -- March 2007

2007-03-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

"Lower Topanga Video Game"

by Seniors at High Tech High School
(Van Nuys, CA)

Inspired by Brass Tacks Press publications Idlers of the Bamboo Grove, Rat Tales, and Voyage of the Timeship Medusa, as well as ongoing news coverage in the Topanga Messenger of the eviction of the Lower Topanga community.

More info at:
www.webelonghere.com
www.idlersofbamboo.com

eBLIPS -- February 9, 2007

2007-02-09T17:46:00.000-08:00

"Book Two of ToyLit Epic Out"

by Twist

Last episode, we saw ToyLit evicted from his Rodeo Grounds Smurf Kingdom by the BlueMeanies, his nudie pagan followers dispersed across the megasprawl of LaLaLand. In this installment, Cmdr ToyLit ventures to design a timeship out of nothing but Poetry. And lo and behold, a parking lot full of timeships from the future materializes on his doorstep. Followed by the black hole timeship containing Zomborgish Pyrate Shadows from Anti-SpaceTime… but I shouldn’t give it all away.

A work of gleefully demented, raunchy, rabble-rousing genius. [That’s my blurb for the day it hits the shelves of Borders.]

ToyLit is definitely one of our foremost exponents of the Backwards Theory of Time–which he images as a rampaging elephant. Why not? Religions have been founded, and foundered, on sillier metaphors.

The tome — a graphic novel, to be precise — is hard to find, unless you stumble across ToyLit at some dissolute moshpit of Angeleno bohos. But Beyond Baroque does carry them for $5 a pop. Try googling Brass Tacks Press.

THE MALIBU TIMES -- December 21, 2006

2006-12-21T22:13:00.000-08:00

Artwork by James Mathers

THE MALIBU TIMES -- November 16, 2006

2006-11-16T20:59:00.000-08:00

"Party On, Dudes!"

by Kim Devore
Photos by Gary Graham

Kim Devore, who is celebrating her 10^th anniversary this year as a staff writer for The Malibu Times, looks back at the wild Malibu of the '60s and '70s. This was an era of "anything goes," from beach blanket bingo to love beads to bongs.

In the 60 years that The Malibu Times has been the city's newspaper of record, locals of every stripe have had something to celebrate; the end of WW II, the Elvis era, the Woodstock nation, the AMC Pacer, the Reagan revolution, the baby boom presidency of Bill Clinton.

But many long times say the beachside community was at its mind-blowing best during the '60s and '70s. You can just ask local realtor Jim Rapf, or you can at least try. "I was there," he says of Malibu's decadent, free-wheeling days, "but I'm not sure I remember it."

Actually, Rapf is a fountain of knowledge on local lore. His family has been in Malibu since the 1920s. He spent weekends at the family beach house and move here on a permanent basis in 1956. "When I was a kid I'd spend a lot of time in Serra Retreat or Surfrider or fishing on the pier," he recalls. "It was different, all open fields back then."

When it was time to refuel, Rapf and his pals headed out to the Malibu Inn for ice cream or Neenie's Famous Weenies (now Gladstone's) for a famous Neenie weenie.

Suddenly the '60s were in full swing. Rapf found himself living with a bunch of guys on Topanga Beach, and from that moment on life became a full-on 24-hour fiesta.

"It was wild," he recalls. "Everybody was living on the beach in these rentals. I had 11 other guys living with me and everyone had converted garages."

His groovy gang and nearby neighbors shared common goals, hopes and dreams; most having to do with getting babes and getting buzzed.

"We had a party for every occasion," he says. "Daylight Savings Day, Arbor Day, Memorial Day, any reason we could think of to party." And they had no problem persuading other to join in the festivities. "On Sunday we'd sit on the roof with a keg of beer, play Credence Clearwater and the girls would just pull over. Then the hippies would come down from the canyon and smoke pot and drop LSD."

Lloyd Ahern was of Rapf's party pals. "You had the surf culture and the music culture and the drug culture and it all merged at the beach," Ahern recalls. "Everybody had at least two dogs and we all just walked in and out of each other's houses."

Ahern says some of their trippy-hippy happenings were legendary. "one time we had this band on the roof. Everyone was in the water. We must have had 400 people on the beach and half of them were naked."

After a hard day of merry making with buddies like Steve Spina and Beer Can Larry, Rapf would pop across the street to unwind at The Raft (now the Reel Inn). From time to time, he'd venture to Chez Jay in Santa Monica. And when he did, he took the party on the road.

"No one thought twice about driving around with a beer in their hand," Rapf says. "The back seat of my VW was full of cans."

There were plenty of other Malibu party places like Ted's Rancho, Don the Beachcomber and Tonga Lei. Moonshadows was called the Big Rock Beach Restaurant, there was a gay establishment called La Mer. And Alice's was known as The Sportsman's Club. The Sea Lion (now Duke's) was famous for seals in the parking lot. The Albatross next door was infamous for offering not-on-the-menu items in the upstairs bedrooms.

For Pete McKellar, there was nothing like The Cottage. "That was the place," he says, "sawdust on the floors, pot-belly, pool table in the back, all the people of the day. You're talking a lot of miscreants when you're talking old Malibu. It was more fun than you could ever imagine."

But nothing and no one managed to keep up with life on Topanga Beach. Like all good things, the high times had to come to an end. In 1979, the State seized control of the beach, knocked down the homes and put up a parking lot.

No one's exactly sure what happened to Beer Can Larry, but Rapf, Ahern, Spina and others went on to successful careers and put their wild days behind them.

Today, Rapf can't drive by the old neighborhood without recalling some kind of outrageous adventure. But more than nostalgia, he feels a sense of relief. "We all thought we were immortal back then," he says, reflecting on his far out follies. "I feel lucky I survived."

Ahern remembers the Purple Haze daze a bit more fondly: "Everything was new back then. Everyone was so free. It was Camelot, just a magic moment in time."

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- October 19, 2006

2006-10-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

"Lower Topanga Life Forms Framework for Two Newly Released Graphic Books"

By Pablo Capra
Artwork by Toylit

Brass Tacks Press, which published “Idlers of the Bamboo Grove: Poetry from Lower Topanga Canyon” (2002), released two new books about Lower Topanga—”The Snake Pit” by Baretta and “Prevenge of the Androgynous Cyborg Pyrates from the Future: Part 1, Voyage of the Timeship Medusa” by Toylit in September.

“The Snake Pit” is a collection of short stories based on Baretta’s life as a cocaine dealer in the eponymous Lower Topanga neighborhood in the late ’70s and ’80s.

“‘The Snake Pit’ got its nickname because there were always a lot of snakes down there,” Baretta explains. “But that nickname was also coupled with the fact that everyone from Charlie Manson to Johnnie-Satan to Kilroy to Big Dude to Eater to Baretta, and maybe people before us, were considered kind of like snakes because of the personalities and stuff that went on there.”

Baretta describes how he first moved to the Snake Pit when a friend offered to rent him a flood-damaged house.

“I had to shovel it out, waist-deep in liquid mud like it was soup.”

Cover from a collection of short stories by Baretta, a Lower Topanga cocaine dealer.

The Topanga of Baretta’s stories is older, untamed and often unrecognizable from the present. In one story he writes about actual Wild West showdowns that were held between feuding neighbors: “They threatened each other for years, marching up and down the road with their rifles. The threats were more or less idle but the guns were real, and they would shoot them off in the air sometimes, and I questioned my safety in this neighborhood that I had chosen.”

Then there was the gang problem. According to Baretta, The Heathens—a biker gang whose members lived next door—were notorious for “dumping mutilated women’s bodies in the desert.”

“The Heathens used to love to operate down in the Snake Pit around one or two in the morning. They rode gnarly Harley’s, not nice, pristine, shiny ones but old Heathen ones put together with shoestring and tin cans. They’d be swooping around, pulling 360s, and the dust would be coming up like the Indians were going to attack.”

Baretta says he started selling cocaine because “our little area seemed like the right environment for that clientele,” but soon developed his own drug problem.

“I lost so much time in my life when hours and days and weeks just passed by in a coke blur,” Baretta confesses. “You might clean up for a week or two, and then you’d just slide right back into it because of the money, the high, the chicks who’d come over to exchange sex for a line late at night. Even other people’s girlfriends would tell you, ‘Hey, I kind of have a thing for you, Baretta. Just give me another nice line there and we can make out.’’”

Ironically, the locals were hostile towards Baretta at first because they believed he was an undercover narcotics officer. Hence his nickname (“Baretta” was a TV series at the time about an undercover cop starring Robert Blake).

However, Baretta writes, “I didn’t care about my reputation as a nark. That was part of my mystique. I was into a lot of illegal stuff too and hanging out with the cops was part of my cover. You know like ‘Baretta,’ that sounds all cop! You’re on our side. You must have a gun. Do you know Robert Blake?’ And I’d be like, ‘Not! Don’t look at my scale on the desk there!’ So it was kind of a double cover.”

“The Snake Pit” also describes the histories and communities of a few other Lower Topanga neighborhoods.

“There were actually two main neighborhoods within the Lower Topanga village—the Snake Pit and the Rodeo Grounds. The Rodeo Grounds had picked up that nickname before I was around. It got its name because Tom Mix, the silent film star, the highest paid actor in Hollywood, would party with the real cowboys from the Rindge and Adamson ranches down there.”

Toylit, who illustrated “The Snake Pit,” uses the Rodeo Grounds as the setting for his graphic novel, “Prevenge of the Androgynous Cyborg Pyrates from the Future: Part 1, Voyage of the Timeship Medusa.”

Illustrator Toylit’s take on the Lower Topanga eviction proceedings as portrayed in the graphic novel, “Prevenge of the Androgynous Cyborg Pyrates from the Future: Part 1, Voyage of the Timeship Medusa.” Parents be warned, these are definitely adult-rated comics.

Using a bizarre science-fiction/autobiographical approach, Toylit tells the history of the Rodeo Grounds from the time of the Indians all the way up to his eviction by State Parks earlier this year.

The story begins when he realizes, for some unexplained reason, that he needs to build a time machine.

“Almost instantly I went into an eight-month depression,” Toylit writes. “I didn’t know the first thing about science or machinery. I was a poet, penniless, living in an anarchist squat in the mountains surrounded by hot naked women. I wanted to die.”

But with the help of his “Timeship Crew,” he does manage to build one by using his Airstream trailer—“Timeship Medusa”—and the experiences he collects from taking the powerful psychedelic DMT. The latter are hilarious, mysterious, and combined with mind-altering artwork: “I was shot through this long tunnel made of a sort of webbing of Scandinavian Pop-stars that led to a kind of mechanical salad bar full of butterfly puppets. They were all singing and they wanted me to sing too, so I did. And all these trees started growing out of my mouth.”

It is unclear what time Toylit and his crew hope to travel to. Maybe they’re just looking for a good time. Unfortunately, the Androgynous Cyborg Pyrates from the Future do not appear yet in this first installment of the graphic novel. Instead, Toylit’s book climaxes with the last Lower Topanga party which he threw shortly before his eviction.

Toylit has written one previous comic, “The Children’s Guide to Astral Projection.” He also illustrated “Idlers of the Bamboo Grove” and Baretta’s first book “Rat Tales.” A coauthor of the “Crap Poetry Manifesto,” Toylit has published his poetry in “The Last Nowhere” and “Craplexity,” as well as on actual rolls of toilet paper.

Baretta’s and Toylit’s books are available at Lobal Orning and on the Brass Tacks Press website at www.lifeasapoet.com.

eBLIPS -- September 24, 2006

2006-09-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

"ToyLit Issues TimeShip Medusa Tome"

by Twist

“All we can do is remain present, because the future is too horrifying and the past is too embarrassing.” That’s a quote from James Mathers, aka ‘Toylit,” quoted in Dani Katz’s column in the latest LA Weekly. James has just completed the first installment of his graphic novel, "Prevenge of the Androgynous Cyborg Pyrates from the Future." It kicks off with a re-telling of the glory days at the Topanga Rodeo Grounds TAZ. More on Mr. Mathers at the Institute for ACausal Studies.

LA WEEKLY 9-22-06

2006-09-22T21:52:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from "Black Cats, Soccermoms and Bisquits"

Dani Katz

As things died down, I... got into a meaty dialogue with [James] Mathers, who looked dashing in a tan suit accessorized with orange scarf and sport sandals. He told me about the movement he’s heading up (working title: The Crapture) and the manifesto he’s working on to unify a collective intention among local artists, thinkers, dreamers and weirdoes that would draw upon the brilliance of the Dadaists, who abandoned reason, the Cubists, who bent space, and Mathers’ own prescription for these mad times: “All we can do is remain present, because the future is too horrifying and the past is too embarrassing,” he said before pecking me on the cheek and dashing off to hustle a sale.

PCH PRESS -- April 29, 2006

2006-04-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

"Crap Poetry: A Multi-Media Event"

By Tawny Sverdlin
Photo by Fernando Alonso

VENICE - Last Sunday evening April 23rd at the Sponto gallery in Venice three recent exiles of lower Topanga; Toylit, Log and

Two exhibited artwork and poems from their recent chapbooks "The Last Nowhere", Craplexity", "Nothing Next to Nothing" and the "Crap Poetry Manifesto" (Brass Tacks Press). On the walls of the gallery hung Toylit's drawings and paintings. As the invitation promised " This psychological spaceship includes art, performance, and fake enlightenment by Toylit, Log, Two, and YOU! Wear a costume and bring your favorite stupid musical instrument!"

The small gallery was stuffed with people ranging from mohawked young hipsters to grey-haired hippies, who spilled out into the street talking and drinking wine. Pablo Capra aka Two sat at a table near the entrance to the gallery selling books and rolls of toilet paper upon which poems had been printed. Next to him a woman painted ornate designs on the faces of gallery visitors.

On the walls artist Toylit's chaotic drawings were interspersed with strips of toilet paper upon which poems were printed. One drawing featured a crude drawing of a sad rabbit with red tears. A circle of yellow lines centered around the rabbit's chest while the writing below it stated "I'm not crying my eyes are bleeding/ my heart is the sun". An earlier work of Toylit's was placed on the back wall of the gallery. The large painting was called Krishna and featured kaleidoscopic swirls of yellow and orange around Hindu deity Krishna who was painted in electric blue glitter paint.

Log, a statuesque, tall and thin young woman in her twenties had taken center stage by the time I had arrived. Stripping off her long raven wig to reveal a closely shorn head of red fuzz. She laughed a strange high-pitched cackle that perfected her radiant aura of

weirdness. She proceeded to strip off more clothing until she stood naked and skinny in the center of the room. She and a friend, an equally tall and skinny young man with white blonde hair and a top hat and eye-liner began to stage an 'argument" in gibberish. Both seemed experienced at improvisation.

Next Log and Toylit, a barefoot man in a pin-striped suit, and a handsome, rugged face with thin, light brown curly hair took turns reading from their recent chapbooks. The crowd cringed in disgust and laughed when Log recited a poem entitled "Western Medicine" that chronicled a visit to the gynecologist. It began "Sitting in the OBGYN's Office/ My Orifice about to be Exposed/ Waiting for the Cold metal Prod And the Chalkboard Cervical Scratch".

A memorable poem that Toylit recited was called "Puffy the Clampire Slayer" and included a verse that read "I am a Soldier, I am a Sexually Transmitted Disease, like Language or Syphilis/ I only aim to Please My M

aker/ My Destroyer My Star-Spangled Dracula. / Here They Come to Scrape Me off the Street/ The Brides of Count Spatula." As Toylit read the poem his delivery was dead-on. He yelled the lines a la Ginsberg with a look of concentrated bravado in his brown eyes.

The Crap Poetry Manifesto (Brass Tacks Press) states "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. Because crap 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.'"

FROM A LETTER -- April 26, 2006

2006-04-26T01:06:00.000-07:00

"Crap Poetry at Sponto Gallery"

by Mao Thing Awf

Here it is three days after Shagsbard's biffday and the multimedia Sundae at Sponto Gallery (Venice), featuring Two (at the door w/ books & DVD's), starring Log and Toylit reading Crap Poetry, Toylit's large paintings, and much intervocal permutation.

Log was barenaked, painted partially green with touches of red & blue by the time I arrived after 8 p.m.. She played the clarinet eventually, wearing her trademark bunny-ears and a black plastic strap-on dildo. She delivered poems and exhortations brandishing a plunger, the tip of the handle of which plumber's friend had had a brief acquaintance with her bunghole.

Earlier in the evening a cheez-whizz crucifix had been done on a large black panel (complete with INRI signage & nail-blobs) labeled Cheeziz; this was plungered into a smear-job by Toylit during a free-form lyric tirade on the uses of religion-art-commerce-guilt-redemption.

A length of T.P. from the printed-up rolls of Crap Poetry from "The Last Nowhere" was used to daub the crack of Log's ass while she sang & played. Audience participation was part of the generalized chaos; Log held a woman bent over by the waist and rhapsodized, plunger in hand again: the rubber cup applied every now & then to the buttocks, "saving us from all things artificial," as Log said.

Shaman-like, she had attendees sit on the floor in a circle. This was a gathering of the Church of the Kablahblah (a mystic branch of Muslim heresy) and there were shouts & murmurs of "Holy Kablahblah" while Miz Log sermonized. A shallow cup of her pee was offered (to bestow immortality) as communioned "holy water of the gay pride Jesus of joy and suffering." And an Afro-American guitarist played abstract riffs on squack-box-amplified while Toylit banged a drum & Log riffed liquid ululations on clarinet.

As the evening wound down, more paint was applied to Log's bare torso; and as she writhed on the floor strewn with large white paper, a new painting was effected: blue, yellow, red.

My "good ol' boy" pal Randy (the car salesman) (Porsche these daze) attended with me and had a blast. Needless to say, it was the "weirdness of its bareassed and unembarrassed spontaneity that most intrigued him.

As Poe says (in "The Poetic Principle"), "Poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder Beauty than Earth supplies."

AUSTRIAN NEWSPAPER -- March 26, 2006

2006-03-26T22:02:00.000-08:00

"California Dreamin'"

by Michael Freund

Eulogy for a Utopia: "Malibu Song" by Werner Hanak and Natalie Lettner

The end of the trip has many names. Those that moved to the Western U.S. came to the edge of the Pacific, where they still found no peace, or perhaps only a false silence. Their stations were called San Francisco, the perfect melting pot; Monterey with Steinbeck's "Cannery Row"; the Lala-land of the dreamers and starlets, Los Angeles.

Or Malibu. This place lies close enough to LA that you can see is smog layer. On the other hand, it's far enough away that the beaches are clean and desirable. On the water's edge are the rows of mansions that Malibu can afford. But the rural land has been mostly a half wilderness with canyons.

In one of these, Topanga Canyon, was preserved a special California "ecosystem," an improvised colony of artists, and of aging and upcoming hippies – people who came here when the land was open, Hawaii was too far, and the local spirit was right.

Natalie Lettner and Werner Hanak learned about this idyllic community in the Canyon at the end of the '90s. When they returned to Malibu in 2002, Lettner had the idea to document their life. At the time the filmmakers only thought the project could be made into a eulogy. "Malibu Song" is exactly that: a swan song.

In the middle of the gigantic steel and asphalt kingdom of Southern California, so says one resident, there was a small bubble protected by a fairy without the restrictions of the upwardly mobile existence happening all around it. That sounds like counterculture kitsch, but it come across otherwise. Not only because the bubble bursts, but also because the film enlarges the characters' biographies.

The poet who physically lives in the Canyon, but who lives emotionally on the edge of the Milky Way and reflects upon his Pop-past with Captain Beefheart; the woman who remembers when she saw Malibu for the first time on Independence Day in 1969 and how she never left again; the painter discovered by Warhol who sold really well until he found out "how idiotic art is." And so on.

Lettner and Hanak's documentary concentrates on how these hold-outs deal with eviction notices. The filmmakers don't judge or dramatize, and they avoid social criticism, as well as the West Coast Euphoria/Pathos. The last part of the film is a sobering picture of how the protagonists live afterwards. While one can't get over the loss of her Utopia, another proudly displays his new grill in his tract home. But the first impression is strongest: these are the days to remember.

DIAGONALE (Austrian Film Festival, Graz) -- March 21-26, 2006

2006-03-21T21:37:00.000-08:00

"Malibu Song"
2006, Digi-Beta, Color, 65 Minutes

Camera: Werner Hanak
Editor: Udo Schuetz
Sound Design: Thomas Kathriner
With: James Mathers, Norton Wisdom, Carole Winter, Herb Bermann, Larry Payne, Pablo Capra, John Overby.
Producer: eurotrashproductions
Grant provided by: City and State of Salzburg
Premiere screening: Diagonale 2006

Natalie Lettner:
Born 1965 in Salzburg. Studied Literature, Art History, and Theater. Working since 2000 at Vienna's Art History Museum.
(natalie.lettner@chello.at)

Werner Hanak:
Born 1969 in Salzburg. Working since 1994 as Curator at Vienna's Jewish Museum.
(werner.hanak@jmw.at)

Beginning of the 21st century: in an almost unspoiled environment near Malibu, California, a community of artists and non-professionals has been living for decades in makeshift buildings dating back to "hippie times." In 2002 the State of California bought Topanga Beach, a prime Malibu site and home of the artists, and is now forcing the inhabitants to surrender their homes and lifestyles – ironically for the creation of a new National Park. This film is their "Malibu Song" made from dissent and life utopias, which they are not prepared to relinquish.

California, beginning of the 21st century: an artists colony with hippie roots in Malibu by LA. The painter James Mathers sits in front of his Airstream trailer and sings the "Malibu Song": "A song for all the lazy poets," then say, "life was not given to us to be productive." Then he stands up and paints a picture.

The artists colony had until now successfully weathered the global neo-liberal storm: Norton Wisdom, both a performance artists and lifeguard in Malibu; Carole Winter, an incorrigible flower child; Herb Bermann, a one-time Rock poet who wrote songs for Captain Beefheart; Larry Payne, a master of 24-hour architecture; Pablo Capra, a young poet for whom his neighbors are fairytale heroes; and John "Baretta" Overby, a homeless man who wrote the "Malibu Song."

Many from the community considered it hopeless to fight a "good thing" like a National Park, and so they dispersed in all directions. Others like James Mathers are fighting for the preservation of this unique colony: "Will they ever get rid of us?"

A film about the end of a chapter of American cultural history that is on the other side of Arnold Schwartzenegger and George Bush: "Everything that's wrong with America is anti what this community is." (Natalie Lettner, Werner Hanak)

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- February 23, 2006

2006-02-23T21:05:00.000-08:00

"The End"

Article and Photos by Pablo Capra
Group photo by Nicolas Amato

Damn! I knew I would have to write this article one day.

After five years of resisting forced relocation by State Parks, my neighborhood is finally coming to an end.

On February 14, Judge Mira at the Malibu courthouse granted State Parks's request to get a police order to forcefully relocate the last residents of Lower Topanga. Now the small group of hold-outs are scrambling to move before the police order goes into effect.

I've lived with my family in the part of Lower Topanga known as the Rodeo Grounds since I was one year old. My neighborhood supposedly got its name because cowboy actor Tom Mix liked to hold rodeos there to entertain the real cowboys from the Rindge and Adamson ranches in Malibu.

William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies purchased Lower Topanga in the teens or ‘20s and also used the property for horseback riding and throwing parties.

Other big names who stayed here include Bertolt Brecht, Johnny Weissmuller, Shirley Temple, Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Ida Lupino, Carole Lombard, and Charles Manson.

Lower Topanga has long been a gathering spot for creative types: from celebrities to eccentrics to outlaws to all-around groovy dudes. Its community has always existed on the fringes of society.

It's true that Lower Topanga was once a hideout for scary bikers and drug dealers, but those days ended in the late '80s. And later, the infamous Snake Pit was the first Lower Topanga neighborhood to be relocated by State Parks. But Lower Topanga still maintained its iconoclast image until the end, thanks in large part to Rodeo Grounds artist Toilet, his consecutive girlfriends Daisy Duck and Log, and the tribe that surrounded them.

At Toilet's place anarchy ruled, everyday was a holiday, and costumes or nudity were the norm. He and his friends embodied the spirit of the "Idlers of the Bamboo Grove" the Brass Tacks book of ten Lower Topanga poets, which Toilet also illustrated and contributed poems to. In the last years, Toilet actually managed to repopulate the Rodeo Grounds by inviting dozens of guests to stay on his property, an act of defiance which State Parks took him to court for several times.

Meanwhile, a surprising number of new neighbors appeared in other ways – mostly house sitting for residents in transition – just to soak up the stoke of the historic community before it disappeared.

One of these new neighbors, Christoph, moved into a house with an outdoor bathtub that he loved. Luckily, he wasn't bathing the day that a huge branch fell on it – one he was never able to completely clear away. He enjoyed his last night in the house by taking a long bath with candles burning all around. The next day, a bulldozer came and rolled over his house, transforming it into a flat dirt lot.

My sister had camped in Christoph's yard one night with her friends and forgotten to take our tent down. Family drama ensued when we realized that the tent had also been bulldozed.

Christoph then moved into another house in the Rodeo Grounds, but complained about the rat problem there. With each house that was bulldozed, more rats seemed to descend upon the remnants of our crumbling community.

This rat invasion became the inspiration for long-time resident Baretta's Brass Tacks book "Rat Tales." Baretta was evicted from his shack almost a year ago and ordered to stay away from the neighborhood.

But with nowhere to go and all his friends here, he chose to sleep in an abandoned van in the Rodeo Grounds anyway, using the facilities at various neighbors' houses. In December, State Parks towed the abandoned van away because it wasn't registered, so Baretta started sleeping outside in the bed of his pickup truck. We worried about him, but weren't too concerned because the nights were warm, so it seemed like a tolerable short-term solution.

But then the weather suddenly turned cold, and he woke up one night shivering and suffered a heart attack. Fortunately, he survived. He now lives in an RV and is working on another book inspired by his life in Lower Topanga.

Farengis moved to the Rodeo Grounds last summer, and for some reason, her first encounters with Baretta turned into angry shouting matches. Christoph once said, "You have to get along with Baretta to live in this neighborhood," and there was some truth to that. Really, everybody had to get along with everybody in the Rodeo Grounds. But Farengis's and Baretta's personalities just didn't mix. Luckily, things mellowed out between them… maybe because Farengis became a fan of Baretta's "Rat Tales."

One night, as Farengis was driving home, she saw a car broken down in the middle of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The driver, a timid college student, was standing outside crying helplessly. Farengis promised to get help to push her car out of the street, then drove down to the Rodeo Grounds to get me.

When we drove back, someone had already pushed the girl's car into the Feed Bin parking lot. The girl was feeling better and said that her friends were coming to pick her up in half an hour. But Farengis said, "Why don't you come stay at my place until your friends arrive?" So, the girl got into Farengis's jeep.

As we turned off of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, the jeep bounced onto the dirt road of the Rodeo Grounds and drove into pitch blackness. We descended into the flood plain, splashed through the creek, then wound through the trees and arundo until we reached home.

When we parked, the girl, who had been strangely silent during the ride, suddenly jumped out of the jeep and backed away.

"What's wrong?" I asked? Visibly shaking, she replied, "I'm so scared right now!" I was like, "Hey, it's okay. Don't worry. Do you want to go back?"

I made a friendly gesture but she backed away again. It probably didn't help that I am 6'7" and she was barely five feet tall. Or that a bunch of trippers and freaks were playing loud music and dancing around Toilet's campfire next door, an almost nightly occurrence.

I realized, "Man, this girl thinks we've kidnapped her and taken her to some kind of Satanic compound! In a moment, she's going to mace me, or faint, or bolt away into the bushes."

So, I just threw my hands up and said, "Look, do what you want. I'm leaving," because I knew that was the fastest way to diffuse the situation.

As I left, I could hear the girl asking Farengis, "Is it really okay here? Are you sure?"

Apparently, the girl chilled out so much that Farengis got her to go to the party next door, where they had a really good time. Then Farengis aroused the girl's interest by telling her that our neighbor Christoph was single and looked like Leonardo de Caprio. So they went to his house and bothered him for a few minutes, but he fumbled. Needless to say, the girl was late to meet her friends, but arrived with a big smile.

The next day when Farengis came home, she found a whole pizza and a thank you note that the girl had left by her door.

Sam, a Topanga teen, didn't actually live in the Rodeo Grounds, but was here almost everyday, hanging out with his best friend Calvin across the street. The two never wore shirts, and when they weren’t at the beach, they were at my house, either visiting my sister or playing videogames. Because the Rodeo Grounds is unpaved, Sam and Calvin liked to pull my carpet up and practice skateboarding tricks on the concrete floor.

Rebecca, a new neighbor, had lived in Mexico for so long that she almost spoke English with an accent. She built a swing in the middle of the house she moved into, and it was the cutest little bohemian place except that, like with all the houses, you knew it was doomed. It got bulldozed a few months after she moved in, but she continued living in the neighborhood with friends.

Now Rebecca is one of the last people here. These nights, she sits alone by Toilet's campfire, wearing a colorful scarf and a man's hat tipped forward, looking like a ghost from a Mexican fairytale.

This neighborhood is full of ghosts. I still see buildings clearly in the corner of my eye that don't exist anymore – all the houses, Ginger Snips, Something's Fishy, the Topanga Ranch Market. And I avoid looking at the empty spaces that try to erase these places from my memory. Sitting in my house at night, I can already hear the shovel of a bulldozer crashing through the walls. It's a terrible sound.

Mailboxes are disappearing from the shelf at the top of my road. Once I saw five or six of them filling a nearby trashcan. A simple image, but jarringly surreal. How often do you see something like that?

Everything in the Rodeo Grounds has become rundown because no one wants to fix anything anymore. The footbridge is weathered and crooked, and boards are falling off it. The trampoline in my yard has rusted and recently fallen apart. The roof of my house has holes that I can stick my foot through. The walls of my room, on which I hung a collection of more than 30 paintings by Lower Topanga artists, are bruised and bare. (I conveniently curated a show to store my art collection, "Art from the Vanishing Lower Topanga Community," which will be up through February at Beyond Baroque in Venice).

A week ago, Toilet was in my yard when he exclaimed, "Oh my God! Look at this!" I rushed over to see a beautiful dead hummingbird hanging upside down, still clinging to a wire fence with its tiny talons. These are ominous days.

Toilet tried to move his Airstream trailer but the wheels don't roll right anymore. It lumbered forward about 50 feet then broke down. Now he has left, but his trailer is still parked in the space between our two yards. That space was once a house.

Ever since the first people started moving out of Lower Topanga, we've had to chase away scavengers. Even when they just want to save plants from people's gardens, it hurts to see them carting off pieces of our neighborhood. Recently, somebody took the sign we put up by the creek crossing that said "Rodeo Grounds Forever," now a lost dream.

I have less than a week now before the police can legally throw me out. I still don't know where I'm going. I'll never understand why the State had to bulldoze my neighborhood to make a park, and I think most Californians (including me!) wouldn’t have voted for Proposition 12 to acquire more parkland in 2000 if they new that this was how the State would do it.

At Toilet's last party, he graffitied his place with references to our neighborhood's demise. On one door, he wrote, "Not enough paper to record all the beauty that this door has opened up to."

That's so true it makes my head spin. And it's only one door out of many!

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- February 9, 2006

2006-02-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

"Crap Poetry of the Rodeo Grounds"

By Pablo Capra
Artwork by Toilet

“Crap poetry is what happens to good poetry after you eat it,” Toilet says.

He and girlfriend Log are responsible for a new scatological chapbook called The Last Nowhere: Crap Poetry of the Rodeo Grounds (Brass Tacks Press). Their book comes just at the eve of the Lower Topanga community’s January 31 eviction date by State Parks, who purchased the property in 2001.

In 2002, ten Lower Topanga poets attempted to preserve and celebrate their community in another chapbook called Idlers of the Bamboo Grove: Poetry from Lower Topanga. Toilet (a.k.a. James Mathers) illustrated and contributed to that book. Now most of those poets have gone. As Toilet and Log watched their community thinning out and being bulldozed, they came up with the idea of writing crap poetry. Revoltingly funny, consistently obscene and wildly inappropriate, their intentionally bad poems are a bizarre sequel to “Idlers” and a satirical reflection of the State’s attitude towards their artist’s community.

“We, the last degenerated vestiges of the infamous Rodeo Grounds, have achieved a new nadir of utter poetic crapness that is truly lame. Put a copy on your toilet and read it while pinching one off for maximum enjoyment,” the introduction to their book says.

Inside, they explore the philistine perspective that poetry doesn’t matter. Such was the case in Lower Topanga where more than a century of history, community, and culture couldn’t save it from being wiped out. And yet Log and Toilet continue to write, humiliating themselves by composing poems with the least possible effort that they see no value in. “There’s nowhere left except failure. Our only regret is our failure to destroy all our talent,” Toilet says. Their anti-poetic approach to writing is explained in the following poem.

From “Play Hot and Cold with My Secondary Function”

The Plasmodium will Rip you to Shreds
You’ll take Back Everything you Said
But before you are Annihilated
Forgotten and Disgustipated
You’ll Produce an Ode”

The Last Nowhere is a reaction to thoughts about time, change, and mortality that have plagued the Lower Topanga community ever since 2001.

“Poetry is the last nowhere. It’s the last place that no one cares about. But because poetry is the least important thing, it’s the most important thing,” Log says.

The Last Nowhere: Crap Poetry of the Rodeo Grounds by Log and Toilet also includes 30 new illustrations by Toilet that complement the poems. It can be found at Lobal Orning in the Pine Tree Circle or online at www.lifeasapoet.com.

LA WEEKLY -- February 1, 2006

2006-02-01T15:51:00.000-08:00

"The Last Rodeo"

By Dani Katz
Photo by Pablo Capra

After a five-year battle with the state parks department to stay where they are, the last dozen or so Lower Topanga holdouts faced their final eviction on January 31 by partying like there’d be no tomorrow.

I wandered down the hill to poet/artist and party host James Mather’s notorious Rodeo Grounds compound just before 8 o’clock Saturday night. The party was already jumping. An artist and Lower Topanga fixture who calls herself Crusty Soup greeted me at the gate with dilated pupils and silver fairy wings.

I wandered over to a Lower Topanga stalwart dubbed Toilet who was wearing his best thrift-store suit and charcoal around his eyes.

“Are you under the influence?” I asked, because with Toilet you never can tell.

“I dropped six hits of acid, but otherwise I’m totally sober.”

Various DJs set up camp in front of the art studio, which was kitty corner to the makeshift bar, taking turns spinning on into the morning while throngs of revelers tripped and wiggled under a hundred million tittering stars.

Lower Topanga is composed of about 1,700 acres of land that extends from the Pacific Coast Highway two miles up into Topanga Canyon. For decades, the Los Angeles Athletic Club owned the land, considered unsuitable for development because it lies in a floodplain, and leased low-cost homes to a thriving artist community. The parks department purchased the parcel in 2001 for a mere $48 million, ostensibly to return it to its natural state, and the eviction process began. Many here call the plan to restore Lower Topanga ludicrous (about 80 percent of the existing flora is scheduled to be exterminated) and insist something more nefarious, like eventual commercial development, is at work.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the air of an era’s end, the compound was packed. I’d never seen so many people at a Rodeo Grounds party (and I’ve seen some doozies). There were kids and old people and fancy people and fuckups, hippies and lawyers and trippers and artists and Creek rats and surf bums and suits and pond scum. No one lost his or her shit. Everyone was happy.

Some of us were huddling in the kitchen, giggling and gnawing on dried mango, when a dark and handsome young man wearing a yellow hooded sweat shirt and an extra-wide grin approached us. He slipped a bottle from his pocket and asked us if we wanted some acid. When questioned about the ubiquity of LSD at this party, Handsome went on to explain that because we Earthlings are in desperate need of some higher vibrational downloads, the FDA was loosening up its restrictions. I was about to challenge Handsome’s theory when a man wearing a black suit appeared, presented me with an outstretched deck of cards and proceeded to wow us with his sleight of hand.

Hours later, while taking five beneath the spiky fronds of a yucca tree, Mr. Magic again approached me.

“I just washed my hands. Can I touch your teeth?”

Frolickers were still arriving as late as 3 in the morning, reporting an endless stream of parked cars winding their way up the canyon, and not just rusted-out Volvos and dented VW vans — new cars, fancy cars, luxury cars, gleaming SUVs.

The band, four young guys called the Animatronics, set up their equipment under the arundo arch, where the ghost of James Mather’s Airstream loomed sad and sentimental. The Animatronics jammed their instrumental grooves into the chilly ocean air.

At 6 in the morning, the Animatronics were still blowing everyone away, the DJ was still spinning and the revelers were still reveling. People bundled up in twos around the fire, coming down, cuddling, trying to warm up, not wanting to leave. The woman next to me, a local with wild red hair and a satin striped djellaba, caught herself mid-laugh as she squeezed my waist and rested her head on my shoulder.

“I’m having so much fun, I almost forgot this was a wake.”

AHADADABOOKS.COM BLOG 1-8-06

2006-01-08T01:14:00.000-08:00

"Received and Recommended – Life As A Poet"

Pablo Capra’s “Life As A Poet” Vol. 8 sits before me as I write this. It features a picture of a gaunt-looking, vatic Robert Kelly. Inside is a poem by Kelly called “Vetch,” a passage of which goes like this:

I miss you so
when the leaves grow alternate
the berries ripen
so far from my lips

That door leads to another thing.
If you go through it
nothing bad.
Only you are not here any more.

But what was the wind called, Daddy?
We called it nothing
it was one more weather

an apple gate
an esplanade

an archaic system of exchane.

If it weren’t for the solids in the world
what would shield us from the look of the sun?
The empty gaze that makes us tremble,
our eyes the feeble answers to that scrutiny.
The house helps us. In its shade
at dawn a structure cherishes the western dew

are you a movie
that you talk that way
language swaying your hips

Interesting stuff!

Capra works in the Beyond Baroque bookstore–an ideal job for a young, aspiring author/publisher. He cast a skeptical (and rightly so) eye at your 51 year old correspondent, and an even more skeptical eye at myself and good friend poet Judith Skillman, veterans of po-biz from at least 1978. “See what you have to look forward to?” I said to Mr. Capra, who chose that moment to begin checking his stock cards. Here’s a Capra poem:

Why do I write “purses,” “tents”?
Tomato the clown screams, “Vertigo!”
in a video his old friend showed me.
Car blasts by my room like a UFO,
already in the future,
throwing out light–
a time-travelling disaster
for the people inside.

Will the pictures turn out right
in my flipbook life?
Or, will they cast long shadows
two different sizes?
How does the world wake again
innocent every morning?
I couldn’t make time stop
so I screamed!

It’s coming from Alaska
to rub it in their faces.
By the gutted gazebo,
a snake like a bracelet
suns its pretty colors
in a glamorous garden.
“Maybe Emily lost it,”
Oly thought. Then it was gone.

Some interesting language. I especially like the “It” coming from Alaska and then leaving the poem. Also liked the abrupt Oly engaged in thinking about Emily. Oh to be young again!

The youngest work in the collection is by the punk poet Ariel Pink, whose punk album “Worn Copy” is available from Paw Track Records. ‘Nuff said, as they say.

For more information about the “Life as a Poet” series–including prices and submission guide, please check out Brass Tacks Press www.lifeasapoet.com, and tell them Ahadada sent you.

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- December 15, 2005

2005-12-15T13:43:00.000-08:00

"Toilet and Log's Rodeo Grounds Art Scene"

by Pablo Capra
Artwork by Dani Katz

In the final years of the bohemian Rodeo Grounds community, artists James Mathers and his girlfriend have created a wild local art scene in their sprawling ramshackle residence on the controversial property that Lower Topangans must finally turnover to State Parks in February 2006. As the clock ticks toward the end, a manic atmosphere of almost ecstatic creativity and partying engulfs Mathers' abode. Looking like a cross between a caveman and a dandy, Mathers has changed his name to "Toilet." His girlfriend is "Log," a tall punk/goth princess.

Before State Parks bought Lower Topanga in 2001, Toilet was a subtenant renting an airstream trailer on a three-acre property in the Rodeo Grounds that was already notorious for its art crowd, annual summer parities, and as a crashing spot for celebrities like Robert Downey Jr. and John Drew Barrymore.

But Toilet's fellow renters were relocated early on. Half of the property that Toilet once shared with them has been boarded up. Although Toilet still lives in his airstream trailer, he hasn't had to pay rent since 2003 (when his landlord was relocated).

The focal points of Toilet and Log's art scene are a large art studio and a campfire pit.

The art studio has high ceilings, a small alcove with a bed, a fireplace, and paints and canvases lying everywhere for anyone who might be inspired.

Toilet likes to collaborate on paintings with any painters who happen to show up. His newest series of paintings is distinguished by its excessive use of glitter. On one of them he has written, "Where we come from everything sparkles and everything is free. Come home."

Toilet's weathered paintings spill out of his art studio and are scattered all around the yard, alongside sculptures by Toilet's friend Jeanbatiste, who sculpts in a garage on the property. Toilet's yard also contains several painted wheelchairs (he prefers them to regular chairs) and rotting couches that are grouped around a fire pit.

"Idlers of the Bamboo Grove" is the title of the Lower Topanga poetry book published by Brass Tacks Press in 2002, which Toilet illustrated and contributed poems to. It is also a way of life that has become the basis for Toilet and Log's art scene.

"I value the social above the productive," says Toilet, who doesn't have a regular job. Log doesn't have one either.

Toilet and Log often invite friends (and friends of friends) to crash at their place for weeks, months, even years. When they're not throwing parties, they hold court by the campfire, hanging out with whoever drops by.

They preside over their scene in costume or in the nude. Toilet likes to get a quick laugh from newcomers with his lewd catchphrase, "I am Toilet and your ass is mine!"

Many come to Toilet and Log's simply to mix with the many different kinds of people who tend to show up. Around their campfire, you can meet the Hollywood elite and eccentric goths; millionaires and beach bums; locals and travelers; gurus and doctors; white-haired hippies and dramatic teenagers; rappers, Rastafarians, deejays, and punk rockers.

On any given day, a crowd may gather at Toilet and Log's for an impromptu drum circle, a movie shoot, or a barbecue. Log may be naked, chanting, and playing her harmonium. Toilet may be holding forth on how the roots of arundo (the bamboo that grows everywhere) is a source one of the most powerful psychedelic on the planet, DMT.

Toilet and Log also hold many sacred and magical rituals at their place. Their latest ritual was a symbolic wedding they performed with 15 others around the campfire.

"We decided to marry the Yang active principle of Voodoo to the Yin receptive function of Dada and gave birth to a new art form called Doodoo, also known as brown magic. Then we anointed everyone as low Doodoo gurus. Afterwards we all smoked pot," Toilet says.

Toilet and Log's anarchist lifestyle has been a constant source of conflict with State Parks, who is trying to depopulate the lower Canyon. But Toilet and Log say that they want to keep the artistic spirit of the Lower Topanga community alive until its last days.

"More than making art, this place has been strongest at making artists," Toilet says. "I wonder what Topanga will be like without us."

THE MALIBU TIMES -- August 4, 2005

2005-08-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

"The struggle of survival told in 'Rat Tales'"

by Austen Tate
Photo by Pablo Capra
Old photo by Phil McMahan
Artwork by James Mathers

A unique illustrated book by a local tells the tale of the old surfer man in the shed's nightly war against the invasion of rats.

As the Lower Topanga community, an artist colony in the Rodeo Grounds, patiently awaits its fate – the final eviction process by the California Department of State Parks – Robert Lynn Overby, who once resided in what is also called the Bamboo Grove, is already out on his own. State Parks officials considered Overby, a.k.a. Baretta, a non-resident and therefore he was not given relocation funds or any assistance in finding a new home.

"Kill or be killed," said the 55-year-old surfer man in the shed of his situation, one that can be compared to his struggle against the nightly invasion of his former Topanga home by rats.

In the midst of the chaos and loss of his home, Baretta – who is also an actor, photojournalist (his photos have been published in The Malibu Times), house painter and now a writer of prose and poetry – recorded his stories of struggle and war against the wild and wily rats that tormented him in his Topanga shed in a storybook aptly titled "Rat Tales." Twenty-six-year-old Pablo Capra, mentor and artist of Lower Topanga, helped Baretta with the narration, and fellow Lower Topangan artist James Mathers illustrated the tales.

Baretta had endured hardships before state enforcement agency officials were sent to his "Grizzly Adams" shed to tear down his misery with pickaxes. It was inside this shed where the "Rat Tales" began and where the old man would have to struggle in the decay and dirt against the vermin.

"They rushed at me with their little claws and they wanted to kill me," Baretta described. "I felt them breathing in my nostrils at night, looking over me and I felt them crawling on my belly.

"It was something I didn't think about before," he added, but "the numbers grew and their offspring flourished in the later years of my shedly life. Rats swarming. I had to punish them for being naughty and that's where the book came from."

In the book, Baretta shows compassion for the lizards that get stuck in glue traps, but shows no mercy to the rats for which the traps were meant to catch. He describes "circus actor" rats, cannibal rats, flying rats and even talks about a "carnivorous species" of squirrels, which he believes eat the rats that get stuck in the traps he laid out.

(Warning for parents: Language and graphic descriptions in the book might be considered inappropriate for children's reading.)

Mathers describes Baretta as a "classic Southern California voice. His whole life is like a Steinbeck novel. He lives like a Bukowski character."

Born in San Diego, Baretta went to Point Loma High School and later majored in Speech at the local state college. He surfed as a teenager – a 1966 front-page photo in the San Diego Tribune showed the now rotund man as a handsome, slender, eager-looking 16-year-old at the World Surfing Championships in Ocean Beach, where he claims to have shaken hands with surf legend Duke Kahanamoku.

His foray into acting came, Baretta said, when he tried out for the play "Grapes of Wrath" with professors who took students to London for a national readers' theater workshop, giving him the opportunity to study acting under the legendary Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson.

However, fame and glory passed him by, and he returned to the West Coast in 1977, settling in the Topanga area.

It was here that he met his new friends, the ones he said inspired him to follow his creative roots.

"They were my new 'earth' friends," said Baretta, reminiscing on the days spent around the "Snake Pit" in the Rodeo Grounds over a 10-year period during the '80s.

Capra, one of those friends, is the founder of Brass Tacks Press, as well as a poet, editor and a writer for The Topanga Messenger. He collects the stories and history of Lower Topanga and compiles them into paperback books with illustrations. "Rat Tales" is the first in a series of the short storytelling books to be published by Brass Tacks Press. Growing up in Topanga with his father in the movie business linked Capra to artist/poet Robert "Jeremy Black" Campbell and Richard McDowell, co-founders of Brass Tacks. In 2002, they published "Idlers of the Bamboo Grove" and "Life as a Poet." "Rat Tales" will be the beginning of capturing the art and culture of the ending days in the Lower Topanga Rodeo Grounds.

Capra describes Baretta's book as a "black comedy with good comic sense, and timing," but the writer also has a deeper understanding of "Rat Tales."

"I think besides being a book about just killing rats, there is a bigger story of struggling to survive, which Baretta is [doing] living in an impoverished situation," Capra said. "And so that comes out in the book, in the way he treats the rats ... there is a parallel with his life and that of the rats."

Capra admires folk art storytelling such as The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales and feels Baretta's book fits in the genre of "literary folk tradition."

Both Mathers and Capra believe Baretta is important as a storyteller in their community.

"Baretta reveals the collective fears and misery of the state we are in here in Lower Topanga in our unconscious minds, being evicted," Capra said.

"Our world needs Baretta, he is a canary in the coal mine. Representing all that is being sanitized and disappeared from beach culture," Mathers summarized. "Rat Tales' is a cold look at what it means to be wild and human and how these two savage paradigms meet on the point of destruction."

And although it seems that Baretta's war against the rats is gruesome and unforgiving, he writes in the "Rat Tales" epilogue, "You must have sympathy for all creatures great and small, even though it was too late for the rats on the glue traps. They're doomed. Why do we doom these little rats?"

"Rat Tales" can be purchased online at www.lifeasapoet.com.

MALIBU MAGAZINE -- August/September 2005

2005-08-01T20:14:00.000-07:00

"The Disappearing Bamboo Grove"

Article and photos by Sonja Magdevski
Old photo courtesy of Topanga Historical Society

The fight to save Lower Topanga

Pablo Capra is a denizen of the Rodeo Grounds, an area of the world that today only exists for a few fortunate souls. He moved there when he was 6 months old with his family, after his father cleaned out a flooded, mud-filled home he had fallen in love with that was devastated by the overflowing Topanga Creek in 1980. Twenty-five years later, Capra struggles with the thought of having to leave his homemade paradise to make way for the expansion of Topanga State Park.

The Rodeo Grounds is one of a few neighborhoods that comprise the 1,659 acres of the Lower Topanga Canyon area, which was purchased in August of 2001 by California State Parks after 64 percent of California citizens approved Proposition 12, the Safe Neighborhood Parks, Clean Water, Clean Air and Coastal Protection Bond Act of 2000. As the largest park bond act in California history, a yes vote gave the state permission to collect $2.1 billion from taxpayers for park acquisition and development, with a majority of the funding allocated to cities and counties for neighborhood projects. A smaller portion of the proceeds was allotted for land acquisition, of which $43 million was used to purchase the Lower Topanga Canyon property.

"We are preserving and protecting a significant ecological corridor for future use and recreation and just as importantly we are preserving the habitat and wildlife of the area," said Deputy Director of California State Parks Roy Stearns. "As Los Angeles expands, more and more of these precious open spaces are being gobbled up by asphalt, driveways, houses and businesses and in the future we will need additional recreation space for people to enjoy."

The area has been coveted by California State Parks for several decades with the goal of creating a hiking trail that links the ocean to the Valley. Starting at Topanga State Beach, the trail would wind its way through Lower Topanga all the way up to Topanga State Park and beyond. The interim plan calls for removing invasive plant species, enhancing the native plant community, removing non-historic buildings, restoring the creek bed, protecting habitat and wildlife, and possibly, some day, restoring the wetlands and the lagoon that once existed before the Pacific Coast Highway was built. State Park officials admit this will be an arduous process lasting anywhere from 10 to 20 years or more. Regardless of the timeline, ecologists, environmentalists and many local residents celebrate the purchase.

The irony of the situation is that Pablo Capra said he was probably one of the state's citizens who voted yes for Proposition 12, because "who doesn't want clean water and clean air?" he asked. One of the main reasons he and his fellow residents live where they do is because they enjoy living immersed in nature, where the door delineating the outside from the inside is often blurred. He and his neighbors most likely also voted yes for Proposition 40 in 2002 which collected $2.6 billion dollars for land acquisition, park development, habitat protection, clean beaches, and more. Stearns stated that there isn't enough money in this lifetime to purchase all of the land that Californians would like state parks to protect. Pablo Capra wondered if Californians would still vote yes to these bond acts if they knew people would be evicted from their homes in the process.

Five million dollars has been allocated by State Parks to provide relocation funds for the area's evicted tenants, two-thirds of whom have already accepted their buy-out offers and have moved out. The average pay-out has been about $80,000 per household, depending on the size and condition of the home, with the highest payment so far reaching well over $200,000. The commercial district along the highway with its staple historic institutions has suffered a similar fate. Stearns said that businesses compatible with future visitor use of the park have a greater chance of remaining in place. The Topanga Ranch Motel closed in 2004 but will eventually be restored as a historic structure. Of the initial ten businesses, half have opted for a buyout, while the other five remain open, albeit somewhat tenuously, as they continue to work through arrangements with State Parks. Wylie's Bait and Tackle has been in business since 1946 and the Malibu Feed Bin is going on 40 years.

A Hidden Paradise

The Rodeo Grounds was, back in the day, an actual rodeo arena in the 1800s on a Mexican ranch. Today, the arena's outlines can still be seen from aerial photos. Before that, the area was once an important economic and cultural crossroads for Chumash and Tongva Native Americans who inhabited the land, and the area is purported by local legend to be a sacred Native American burial ground. At the turn of the 1900s, it was home to a Japanese fishing village, then, in the 1930s became camps for the young men of President Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. Soon after it became the private hideaway for famous Hollywood movie stars in the 1940s who stole away with lovers and friends into the area's wooded seclusion and serenity.

Many of us have driven by Topanga Canyon Boulevard along the PCH numerous times without ever having the pleasure of experiencing the beauty and charm of Lower Topanga. Once inside the canopy of native and exotic species that has created this magical landscape below and beyond the road at the mouth of Topanga Canyon, the outside world seems far away. The sounds of traffic disappear, sunlight dances along Sycamore tops, slight breezes trickle through palm fronds, ducks casually paddle their way down the creek, and narrow, well-worn paths through dense thickets of bamboo beckon one deeper and deeper into this Alice in Wonderland-like world.

"We are fortunate enough to have landed like Columbus in this idyllic setting next to the ocean that does not exist anywhere anymore in the United States," said Robert Lynn Overby, (a.k.a. Baretta to those who know him), a resident of the area since the '60s. "I came from a little town called Ocean Beach near San Diego that had a beautiful pier where my father had a drug store, and when I came here it was just like coming from this little sleek surf town. My friends from UCLA brought me here to go surfing and at that time it was full of thugs, bikers, actors, surfers and artists right it in the middle of Los Angeles where we all lived for cheap. It was unbelievable. It seems like a hundred years ago. There was really special magic about this place."

Before state park acquisition, the area was home to a community of more than 80 households composed of artists, writers, filmmakers, surfers, local business-owners, photographers, families, students and retirees, many of whom have lived there for decades in a lifestyle that has been called eclectic, bohemian, and unconventional. Residents lived in a rural, village environment where everyone knew each other's families, histories, fears and dreams; where neighbors helped one another and the community pitched in for public works projects. In 1981, they collected $2,000 to construct a permanent foot bridge across the creek out of old telephone poles after floods destroyed the previous one. During the Malibu fires in 1993, residents used flares to control burn their own hillside and clear it of brush as fires were fast approaching after the fire department refused to enter the area with their trucks.

"People don't understand why we live here - some people think it is too rustic - sometimes we go through winters when there aren't any exits except on foot, but we still think it is the best place to live in the world," said Ray Casser, who with his wife Renate, has been a Lower Topanga resident since 1965. "I love nature and when I first came here I was instantly fascinated by the beauty and serenity of the place. Each time we come home at the end of the day we are reminded of how we live in paradise."

The Cost of Preservation

Unfortunately this idyllic community that emphasized tranquility instead of materialism has come to pay a high emotional price for this lifestyle. Their previous landlord, the Los Angeles Athletic Club, Ltd., (LAACO), allowed residents to live cheaply as long as they weren't bothered with the typical tenant/landlord grievances such as maintenance, plumbing, roofing, etc. Residents lived in rented homes with month-to-month leases on prime Southern California coastal real estate for $400 to $1,600, but were required to repair everything themselves regardless of the crisis. They even had to maintain their own roads. As a result, LAACO's extreme laissez-faire lease arrangements made it easy for longtime renters to feel like homeowners, as many people constructed beautiful additions to their homes, with bedrooms, offices, sunrooms, and art studios.

"I have lived here for 25 years and I have really grown roots here with my family," said Bernt Capra, Pablo's father. "My son Lucas was born here, Pablo was 6 months old when we moved here and my youngest daughter Michele loves it here. I have buried pets here. We have a vegetable garden and 15 fruits trees with avocado and fig trees and blackberries - it is just a different lifestyle here - and yet we are only 10 minutes from Santa Monica. This place made it possible for me to develop a life that has been very comfortable and full of happiness for me and my family because the cost of living is low. For entertainment you can take your surfboard to the beach and in the summertime lots of friends come to visit. Maintaining a family home as the center of gravity for our activities is very important to me and I don't want to lose that."

The Capra family is one of the remaining households that has refused to leave their home and who, along with the others, are currently in litigation against State Parks challenging the relocation plan. The residents' contend that a proper relocation committee was never formed, in which tenants comprise 50 percent, according to state relocation laws. Tenants and business owners alike have said they feel as if their voices were ignored throughout the planning process, even though they attended all meetings, repeatedly outlined their needs, formed a community association, and hired legal counsel. Ginny Wylie, owner of Wylie's Bait shop (which her grandfather started), also has a home on the property and said that if the process had been fair and equitable most of the tenants would have probably made agreements with State Parks by now. The initial court rulings in the case have not been favorable to residents.

Another impediment in the relocation process is finding equitable housing for residents, which in today's real estate market seems impossible, particularly for anything along the coast for the rates residents had been paying. As Bernt Capra pointed out, the only comparable location that has a surfing beach within walking distance surrounded by a lush, tree-filled environment with a creek running through it is Serra Retreat, which as he also highlighted, is a playground for millionaires.

"Living here has made me very open minded and it made me respect nature and helped me to become an artist with all of the other artists around as role models and inspiration," said Pablo Capra. "It is hard to get back a community that you grew up in so it would be hard to build another community like this because I have been here my entire life."

To read more about the residents of the area, Pablo Capra has published Idlers of the Bamboo Grove, a book of poetry and drawings from Lower Topanga Canyon residents available through Brass Tacks Press and local bookstores. The website is www.lifeasapoet.com. To learn more about Topanga State Parks, call 310-455-2465 and ask for Ranger Tim Hayden, or 310-454-8212 to speak with Park Superintendent Bill Verdery. To view old photos of the area, call the Topanga Historical Society at 310-455-1969 and ask for Ami or Doug Kirby.

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- July 14, 2005

2005-07-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

"From the Shelves of Lobal Orning… Man v. Rat In Lower Topanga Tales"

by Pablo Capra
Artwork by James Mathers

In the 19th century, the Brothers Grimm wandered the countryside to record folk tales as part of a larger study of German culture. They believed that the tales were important as reflections of the popular mind. Novelists and poets could articulate complex emotions and ideas, but the Grimms realized that it was the unlettered storytellers who revealed the unconscious fears and desires of a people. The dangers of traveling through deep forests, for instance, took the form of ogres and witches; and dreams of love and wealth were embodied by dashing princes and beautiful princesses in enchanted castles.

In this tradition, Brass Tacks Press recently recorded Robert “Baretta” Overby, a Topanga storyteller, and the result was published in a slim pocket-sized chapbook called “Rat Tales.”

A 28-year resident of Lower Topanga, Baretta was evicted from his home without compensation by State Parks in May. He works as a house painter and photographer for The Malibu Times, specializing in accident shots, as well as portraits of the firemen and lifeguards who deal with accidents. His stories are distinguished by their black humor and Schadenfreude.

“This is a story about Baretta, the old surfer man who lived in a shed by the beach. And it was about time that he took care of those rats that were bothering him so he couldn’t be dreaming about the perfect wave in Tahiti,” the back cover of his book explains innocently.

Inside, Baretta recounts in horrifyingly obsessive detail his attempt to eradicate a bustling rat community. At first, he uses glue traps, but as money, luck, and patience run out, he resorts to more gruesome alternatives like sticks, knives, soup cans, and even his own hands and feet! The graphic action unfolds in 25 micro chapters (or tales), each one like an appalling prose poem.

Those familiar with the history will soon realize that Baretta’s rats are symbolic of Lower Topangans and their painful experience of being evicted to make way for a park. The parallels are obvious in certain quotes like, “Why do we doom these little rats?” and “They should be given counseling by the State.”

The marginal existence of the rats especially reflects Baretta’s situation. His rickety shed with mud floors was not deemed a legal dwelling by State Parks, and eventually he was kicked out as a trespasser. Since his eviction, he has been living in his car.

But “Rat Tales” is also unique for its lightning-fast transitions between tragedy and comedy. A crude and obstreperous Falstaff, Baretta’s imaginative analysis of the rats and their behavior is hilarious: “The rats had learned to fly earlier in their childhood. Now they would just hang onto the walls, and leap to the bags of food [hanging from the ceiling]. And it was driving me crazy at night as they did acrobatics and somersaults like circus actors.”

His rats also have many positive qualities. They are called “amazing” and “valiant,” and described as being intelligent to the point of having a sixth sense. And in the end, when Baretta finally gets rid of the rats, he’s actually sad that they’re gone.

“Rat Tales” could even be considered educational in its study of different methods for catching rats. For instance, do you know about the tricks of the Mexicans?—“They capture their rats with a bucket filled with water, a little ramp leading up to a diving board, and a fresh morsel of bacon at the end.”

Or, that mousetraps are strong enough to catch a rat? “If they catch it on the nose, it’s history.”

In the process of telling his “Rat Tales,” Baretta also describes two Lower Topanga parties, and mentions several people in the community like James (“the center of freaky attention”), Christoph (“the German lad”), and an anonymous “pot-growing maniac” from Hawaii.

Rudimentary studies are also made of several other animals like lizards, ground squirrels, bobcats, coyotes, and even chupacabras!

In addition, “Rat Tales” includes nine dirty, sadistic, confrontational illustrations of rats in their death throes by Lower Topanga artist James Mathers (illustrator of “Idlers of the Bamboo Grove: Poetry from Lower Topanga Canyon,” and author of “The Children’s Guide to Astral Projection”).

DO NOT READ THIS WHILE EATING!

“Rat Tales” is the first in a series of non-fiction prose works and oral histories that Brass Tacks Press is compiling about Lower Topanga. It is available at Lobal Orning, Topanga Video or online at www.lifeasapoet.com.

Baretta is currently working on another book in this series about his arrival in Lower Topanga in the late ’70s.

LA WEEKLY -- June 16, 2005

2005-06-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

"Semi-Naked Defiance"

by Dani Katz
Photo of Log by unknown photographer
Photo of Toilet & Log by Lyf

My girlfriend and I arrived late to the Topanga Beach Resistance Sexy Costume Party. We drove through a creek, wound our way around a tree and parked behind an economically diverse assortment of mud-splattered cars.

Charlotte noted in sotto voce the Amazon woman wearing a string of Barbie dolls around her waist and silver rings through her nipples.

“That’s Log,” said a bare-midriffed but otherwise well-shrouded Berber nomad passing by. “She’s a performance artist. She sticks vegetables in her ass.”

I thought she looked familiar.

“I wonder what her in-laws think of that,” mused Charlotte.

“Well, her boyfriend’s name is Toilet and he eats the vegetables out of her ass,” the Berber replied. “It’s part of the performance. So they probably don’t mind.”

Charlotte made an abrupt and hasty farewell, leaving me to brave yet another Rodeo Grounds extravaganza on my own.

The ancient Chumash gathering spot has hosted (and boasted) many legendary parties and Sunday night’s fund-raiser was no exception. L.A.’s motley liberal vanguard — a colorful assortment of creative types — gathered in sequined droves to support the community and to celebrate the magic of the Rodeo Grounds. Tourists in telltale Gap gear happily mixed in with the tattooed and mohawked in-crowd to make for a weird, groovy harmony.

The hootenanny was called by the residents of Lower Topanga — a tight-knit community of artists, writers, filmmakers and families — who have been fighting eviction ever since the State Parks Department bought the beach-adjacent parcel and gave them the boot a few years back. The land grab is ostensibly to turn the area into a park and wetlands, but many here see a conspiracy at work to rid some of L.A. County’s most prized real estate of smelly hippies.

While most of the locals took their paltry payoffs and ran, others are refusing to budge, preferring bucolic bliss and community values to petty cash and urban sprawl. Following State Parks’ most recent maneuver (it’s rescinded trash service and instructed local sanitation to repo residents’ trash bins), the holdouts held a fund-raiser Sunday night to raise money for their fight to stay put.

Costumes ranged from slutty to sluttier. I had gone vintage for the occasion.

“Are you supposed to be a librarian?” queried a passing drag queen.

He was the third person to ask.

I talked coincidence with a hotshot director. I cradled a homeless man’s polished log, which I was told needed my energy. I swayed giddily to Magic Box’s improvisational grooves while hometown hero and Rodeo Grounds legend Norton painted and a dominatrix shimmied. A sarong-wrapped black man with crooked nipples put something in Log’s butt. Toilet shouted. Everyone was smiling.

There was “Burt Reynolds,” a barefoot clown and a sprinkling of nudity. Some guy was running around the compound for over an hour before I realized that, aside from being nekkid, he was also an old friend (never quite sure of appropriate etiquette when interacting with the publicly nude, I usually just ignore them).

The State Parks thugs watched from across the road. The police came. An illegal fund-raising citation was issued. By 2 a.m, the vibe had mellowed. Shivering revelers bundled up by the fire. A shirtless man with dreadlocks strummed a guitar.

Leaning against a fat, happy yucca tree that the state wants to cut down to make way for the wetlands, I inhaled the jasmine and dizzily surmised that none of these people had jobs. I guess that’s why they’re smiling.

THE MALIBU TIMES -- May 5, 2005

2005-05-05T01:41:00.000-07:00

"Topanga Poet's Work Performed at UCLA"

Article and photo by Baretta

A poem by Malibu High School 1997 graduate Pablo Capra was set to classical music by UCLA student Daniel Gall, and performed in the Undergraduate Composers' Concert at the Jan Popper Theater on April 27.

Capra's poems is about the sad life and death of John, a bum who hung around Topanga State Beach for many years. John's story was sung by four imaginary characters whose everyday lives he had touched: a businessman, a valley girl, a student, and a beachgoer.

The musicans who performed the piece were Danielle Crook (soprano), Athena Greco (alto), Arian Khaefi (tenor), Jesse Rosenman (baritone), Andrea Chang (piano), and Gillian Singletary (cello).

This is the second collaboration between Capra and Gall. Their "Life as a Poet" was performed by The Los Angeles Cello Quintet last year. Capra's work is published by Brass Tacks Press (www.lifeasapoet.com), and Gall's work can be found online at www.danielgall.com.

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- April 21, 2005

2005-04-21T18:03:00.000-07:00

"The More Ado About Floating"

by Pablo Capra

Recently, the second installment of the graphic novel “Floating,” by “Idlers” poet Robert Campbell, was published by Brass Tacks Press under the title “The More Ado About Floating.”

Like the first installment (reviewed in the Messenger Vol. 28 No. 21, October 21, 2004), “The More Ado About Floating” was drawn in meticulous ballpoint pen shortly before Campbell lost his eyesight to diabetes in 2000 and turned to poetry. It remained unfinished after his tragic death from diabetes at age 53 last year.

A painter for most of his life, Campbell called his artistic style 'Real Fantasy' and attempted to show how our fantasies spill over into reality.

The story of “The More Ado About Floating” is episodic, exploring different variations of how intoxication can float one away to a fantasy world.

Campbell abstained from intoxication in real life, and when you read his graphic novel you can understand why. Although his graphic novel is extremely amusing, his fantasy worlds are too real for comfort, and his characters are usually tormented by their tenuous grasp on reality.

“The More Ado About Floating” begins when a young man named Chris gets stoned and starts flying around the room with two pets who have inhaled his secondhand smoke. “They’re my twin engine jets armed with doo-doo bombs, which I fire at the enemy!” he shouts at his distressed mother, before making a crash landing.

Another tormented character is Coco, a famous actress and a pothead. When her boyfriend comes to pick her up at Channel Two, the secretary tells him that “[Coco] was here all morning long, but by midday she started dissipating, till by one she’d dementiaed off to another dimension.” Later, we learn that Coco has been whisked away to a doll house where she is imprisoned by a giant terrifying clown. She manages to escape on a toy train, but just when she thinks she’s made it back to reality, she turns to ask directions to Channel Two and is confronted by weird insect creatures.

At one point, Santa Claus appears as a character in the story when he discovers that Witch Hazel is hanging around long past Halloween to ruin the Christmas season. Despite her rude manners—she calls Santa “numb nuts” and “porky face”—Witch Hazel manages to seduce Santa back to her coven for a nightcap where he really gets into trouble.

“The More Ado About Floating” is unique because of Campbell's imaginative way of looking at the world. Even in the ordinary setting of the final episode—about a working-class family trying to make their Christmas the best ever—the odd perspective and oversized drawings make it seem as if something fantastic is going on.

“Can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something about this place!” one of the characters comments.

Campbell’s years of working in the movie business as a scenic painter probably influenced the creative angles and close-ups in his storytelling, as well as his idea to include outlandish commercials for real and imaginary products like Raid and The Coffee Bean, and an aging actress’s old dreams.

His way of describing the ordinary world verbally is also imaginative, and reflects his poetic ability. In “The More Ado About Floating,” a cat’s paw is seen as “a fist full of switchblades that could fray the fabric of reality,” and a beach ball becomes “a ball full of cold wind.”

Campbell successfully disrupts our notion of reality by mixing in these ordinary fantasies with more extraordinary fantasies like spiders who play poker, and the witch who flies over the Hollywood sign on a vacuum cleaner.

Both installments of the “Floating” graphic novel by Robert Campbell are available at Lobal Orning, as well as his poetry chapbooks “Idlers of the Bamboo Grove: Poetry from Lower Topanga Canyon” and “Life as a Poet presents: Anesthesia Lake.” Campbell’s books are also available online at www.lifeasapoet.com.

MEPHISTO 97.6 FM (Leipzig, Germany) -- January 2005

2005-01-01T15:13:00.000-08:00

"Thirty Days on Spring Radio Interview"

Translated from the German by Pablo Capra

INTRO: Mephisto 97.6 FM. Mephisto brings the love to Leipzig. [ENGLISH: "Where you at? Where you going? How you feel?"…]

DJ: The skyscrapers of downtown are an undesirable area of Los Angeles to live in. However, the writer Richard McDowell moved into a skyscraper half legally, half illegally with a handful of other artists. He lived in an old office space, making a new life for himself in a seemingly unpleasant neighborhood, and from this experience came his book, Thirty Day on Spring. With me on the telephone is Richard's friend and publisher Pablo Capra. Hello.

PABLO: Hello.

DJ: How did Richard come to live in this skyscraper? He already lived in downtown LA, correct?

PABLO: Yes. First he ran and lived in an art gallery in a better part of downtown. But his building was sold, and he had to close his gallery. He didn't have a place to live anymore, so he asked the landlord of an abandoned skyscraper if he could move in there.

DJ: And how high was this skyscraper?

PABLO: It was about 14 stories. It was an old bank building, and he rented a cheap office there. He lived in this building together with other poor artists. It was a strange experience. There was only one bathroom per floor, and the elevator was broken. The higher floors were dark, empty, and spooky because no one wanted to climb that high. There was also no fire alarm, and so the landlord sometimes asked Richard to stay up all night on fire watch. It was a chaotic but very creative environment, and Richard documented it all in his book Thirty Days in Spring – Spring being the name of his street.

DJ: What does he write about in his book? What were his experiences? What was his life like?

PABLO: He takes an interest in how low people can sink. Everyday he watches the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the crazies, the bums, the sick, the dirt, the rats, the criminals... and the artists try to wrestle meaning from all this. The book records 30 days in this hellish part of the city.

DJ: Why is life so harsh in downtown LA?

PABLO: Downtown LA had its highpoint in the '40s and '50s, and afterwards most of the businesses and people moved to other parts of the city. Today there are few people who actually live in downtown. At night, it's mostly just the homeless sleeping in cardboard boxes.

DJ: How long did Richard live in this skyscraper? Is he still there, or was it just a short-term thing?

PABLO: He lived in the bank building for almost two years, but in 2003 the fire department threw everyone out. Now he lives in a cheap hotel nearby, and he's working on his next book.

DJ: Has his living situation improved then?

PABLO: Well it's legal, and a bit more normal, but I wouldn't call it an improvement.

DJ: Pablo Capra is the friend and publisher of Richard McDowell, who wrote a book about living in a seemingly unpleasant skyscraper. The book is not for sale in Germany, but if you want to track it down, you can get more information by calling the station. Our telephone number is 97-37-976.

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- December 2, 2004

2004-12-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

"From the Shelves of Lobal Orning: Ern Malley—A Literary Hoax"

By Pablo Capra
Still from David Perry's film "The Refracting Glasses"

When Australian editor Max Harris read the typed coffee-stained sheets containing Ern Malley’s poetry that had been mailed to him in 1943, he knew that he had discovered a major poet.

Only 22, Harris had been a promoter of modernism in art ever since his school days. In a country that still despised writers the greater literary community had embraced a generation earlier, he caused much controversy with his avant-garde literary journal “Angry Penguins.” Once, he was even thrown into a river for declaiming his radical politics. But now, Harris’s struggles seemed to have finally paid off.

The 16 poems of Malley’s only completed work, “The Darkening Ecliptic,” were sent to him by Malley’s uneducated sister Ethel, who wondered if they were any good. She said she had found them in her brother’s room in Sydney after his unfortunate death from Grave’s disease at age 25.

Harris was awed by Malley’s powerful honesty and despair in lines like these from “Colloquy with John Keats:”

Like you I sought at first for Beauty
And then, in disgust, returned
As did you to the locus of sensation
And not till then did my voice build crenellated towers
Of an enteric substance in the air.
Then first I learned to speak clear; then through my turrets
Pealed that Great Bourdon which men have ignored.

“Malley was a poet of tremendous energy, a phrase-maker with no fear of obscurity, and able to manoeuvre a poem in several directions at once,” Michael Heyward writes in his book “The Ern Malley Affair.” “Malley gave the feeling that poetry was rich, rough, rollercoastering speech.”

Ethel explained that she had taken care of Malley after their widowed mother’s death. They weren’t close, and she had disapproved of Malley’s “wildness.” Malley had dropped out of high school to work as a garage mechanic, then moved to Melbourne where he eked out a living as an insurance salesman and watch repairman—and “might have got into some sort of trouble.”

Malley’s poor health exempted him from being drafted into World War II. He never talked with Ethel about his poetry, and had only briefly mentioned his failed romance with a girl in Melbourne—the “Princess [who] lived in Princess St.” from his “Perspective Lovesong.”

He returned to Sydney to die in 1943, passing away quickly at Ethel’s house on July 23.

Harris surprised Ethel by writing back that her brother was “one of the most remarkable and important poetic figures of this country,” and that he planned to devote his next issue of “Angry Penguins” to Malley. The issue came out in 1944, and was a touching tribute to the late genius.

But to Harris’s embarrassment, a few weeks after Malley’s poems were published, poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley made front-page news by declaring that they had created Ern and Ethel Malley as a hoax!

The hoaxers had become disillusioned with the direction modern poetry was taking under poets like T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and now the “Angry Penguins” journal in Australia. They felt that the Surrealist influence of the time was all effect, and had robbed poetry of any real meaning.

So in a single afternoon and evening in a Melbourne army barracks where they were stationed, they had mimicked the kind of modernist poetry that they despised, making it intentionally dense and meaningless, then mailed the result off to Harris to see if he could tell the difference.

The hoaxers crafted Malley’s unique voice from cryptic allusions, bizarre phrases, and lines borrowed from any books that happened to be around, which included the works of Shakespeare and a scientific report on mosquitoes. Their haphazard borrowing is most obvious in these peculiar lines from “Culture as Exhibit:”

Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other
Areas of stagnant water serve
As breeding-grounds ... Now
Have I found you, my Anopheles!
The hoaxers even poked fun at Malley’s nonexistence in lines like these from “Sybilline:”
It is necessary to understand
That a poet may not exist, that his writings
Are the incomplete circle and straight drop
Of a question mark

The name they invented for their modernist poet, Ernest Malley, played on the French word “mal,” and was another way of saying “truly bad.” It also evoked a sense of patriotism because it sounded like mallee, a type of eucalyptus.

But, strangely, their plan backfired. The hoaxers‚ methods of mocking Surrealism by being deliberately obscure and arbitrary ended up producing a kind of poetry that was deeply indebted to Surrealism. Instead of degrading modernism, Malley’s poems surpassed most modernist voices of the time.

It has been suggested that, by approaching the whole thing as a joke, the hoaxers were able to let go of their normal inhibitions and write with dazzling unbridled imagination. The masterstroke was the creation of Malley’s personality, which comes across so vividly in the poems. Instead of suspending belief when you read them, you have to keep reminding yourself that Malley is not real, as in this passage from “Petit Testament:”

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.

Harris weathered harsh criticism and boldly stood by his original assessment of the poems, insisting that “the myth is sometimes greater than its creators.” But the revelation of the hoax wasn’t the end of his problems.

Two months later the police impounded the Malley issue of “Angry Penguins” on a charge that obscenities were hidden in the poems’ complicated language. Harris had to defend the poems in court, and was fined and further humiliated.

Considered the greatest literary hoax of the 20th century, the experience took its toll on Harris, and he was never again the daring modernist that he started out to be. Nevertheless, he continued to defend Malley’s poems until the end of his life.

A decade after the hoax, Harris wrote, “I still believe in Ern Malley. I was offered not only the poems of this mythical Ern Malley, but also his life, his ideas, his love, his disease, and his death. [The life of] someone knowing he is to die young, in a world of war and death, and seeing the streets and the children with the eyes of the already dead. For me Ern Malley embodies the true sorrow and pathos of our time. One had felt that somewhere in the streets of every city was an Ern Malley.”

As for the hoaxers, their friendship fizzled out shortly after the hoax, and both ended up becoming ardently religious. McAuley turned to Catholicism, and Stewart to Buddhism, moving to Japan for good in the 1960s. The hoaxers continued to believe that Malley’s poems were nonsense, but even though they published several books of their own poetry, they never regained the fame of “The Darkening Ecliptic,” which is now included in anthologies of Australian literature.

Ern Malley’s “The Darkening Ecliptic” has recently been reprinted in a local poetry journal called “Life as a Poet: Volume 7” (Brass Tacks Press), available at Lobal Orning. You can also buy it at www.lifeasapoet.com.

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- December 2, 2004

2004-12-02T14:31:00.000-08:00

Artwork by James Mathers

THE MALIBU TIMES -- December 1, 2004

2004-12-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

"The Artist's Dream"

Article and photo by Austen Tate

Lower Topanga draws artists of all kinds.

"What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community" -T.S. Eliot.

Near the mouth of Topanga creek where Topanga Boulevard empties out onto the Pacific Coast Highway, hidden in the canyon filled with bamboo and yucca trees, lie the grounds of the "compound." The Rodeo Grounds was once a meeting place for the Chumash Indians and is now home to a community fighting to keep its art alive and its homes.

Meet the Idlers of the Bamboo Grove (the name of a book of poetry published by the community members): poets, painters, filmmakers, musicians, writers, and eco-conscious visionaries with a mystical flavor. The Lower Topanga community continues past the fork in the road and to the left a door with an old decaying rowing oar stamped Neptune. Inside, winds breeze by the Airstream trailer, an outhouse, old shacks now vacant, through the campfire where artists and their ancestors meet. Past the performance stage to the left, is a garage where tribal metal sculptures are made and to the right, the art studio where vibrant colors hang together as one-an artist's dream.

At one point, the ideal low-rent Topanga community for artists, families and elders consisted of 300 people, but a State Parks eviction (the state bought 1,659 acres in Lower Topanga in 2001 and plans to turn it into a park) has left less than 30 people remaining. The last standing family and friends of the Rodeo community have been there for years and worked hard to build and flourish a rural community of talented entrepreneurs who represent themselves.

Topanga has long been home to James Mathers, a painter who had a rise and fall in the '80s and now has hit the 40 mark. The artist explains himself "as a random piece of the L.A. art underground." Since then, he has continued to paint and write while encouraging a coterie of artists who look to him for help when the creative battle becomes too heavy. Here, in his studio, a temporal art scene can be experienced. By exploring the creative process the artists use each other as inspirational tools and conspire and create collaborative artwork. Day and night, Mathers and his disciples paint, document, photograph, dance, sing and traffic expressions of a new age art wave.

The dilemma they face-what will they do when they must leave? Alternative art spaces are vanishing and to find something within modest means is difficult. To express what they have and may lose, and to help raise funds, the artists are exhibiting their works Thursday, Dec. 2, at X studios, 1503 Cahuenga Blvd. (at Sunset), at 4:20 p.m..

TOPANGA MESSENGER -- October 21, 2004

2004-10-21T20:02:00.000-07:00

"From the Shelves of Lobal Orning… Graphic Novel Review: 'Floating' by Robert Campbell"

By Pablo Capra

“Don’t get me wrong, Bud. I know there’s more to life than what meets the eye,” Sam tells his brother when the smoke from their campfire begins to curl up in a strange spiral.

And Sam is right! Unbeknownst to the teenage brothers, they are being pestered by two bickering spirits named Larry and Sal.

In Robert Campbell’s posthumously-published comic book “Floating,” there always seems to be a fantastic explanation for things that happen in reality. Campbell experienced life in the same way.

Campbell was featured in two previous Messenger articles, and is one of the poets included in the Lower Topanga poetry book “Idlers of the Bamboo Grove.” He was born in Marshall, Texas in 1951—a country town he liked to call “Mar’s Hall,” imagining that it had fallen from Mars. A visionary out of time, Campbell himself seemed to have descended from another planet. He called his artistic style “Real Fantasy” to emphasize the real effects of fantasy in our lives.

In the late ’90s, Campbell drew two graphic novels, both part of a series. The first one is untitled, and will be published at a later date. The second one is the “Floating” graphic novel, which is being published in two installments, “Floating” and “The More Ado about Floating.”

Campbell drew “Floating” in meticulous ballpoint pen shortly before he lost is eyesight to diabetes. His intention was to make one long story out of this graphic novel, but it was not realized before his tragic death from diabetes in May at age 53. Therefore, “Floating” is made up of many different stories, loosely related by Campbell’s fantasy of how intoxication can cause one’s head to float away.

Some of the artwork in “Floating” approaches painstaking realism, while other pages are more sketchy and have stains and cigarette burns. But the surreal stories in “Floating” are unlike anything you’ve ever read before.

Meet characters like Jamal Abernathy of Venice, the Rastafarian salesman of inflatables whose slogan is “Don’t wait! Floatate!” Jamal’s surprise creation is “the inflatable home, complete with furnishings and water purification.”

Then there’s the jobless couch potato with a spoon dangling from his neck (“no tellin’ when I might have to audition for a place in a soup line”) whose head floats up and away from a nagging wife to a space station where a kinky female captain subjects it to bizarre experiments.

And the downtown drug dealer who offers a stressed-out single mother some “Mary Jane, or Peggy Sue” to “patch that crack in your halo,” while her children beg for Butterfingers from the backseat.

And the five-eyed archer who claims to have developed a sixth sense from using cocaine, and demands above all else that people keep his forest clean.

And the farmer who goes out to hunt a flock of chickens that fly by in single-engine propeller planes.

And the untold story of Aunt Jemima who left her familiar place on a pancake box “sad in frustration, exclaiming, ‘I’m more than this’” only to reinvent herself as a supermodel in a leopard-print bathing suit.

These are stories that push the envelope of the comic book genre. They read like an African-American “Naked Lunch.”

After Campbell’s eyesight deteriorated, he turned to poetry to keep his creative flow going, but continued to explore many of the themes in “Floating.” A floating head reappears in one of his poems from “Idlers of the Bamboo Grove,” called “The Rebirth of the Frustrated Artist:”

in a puff of smoke she’ll come and go
vanish and appear
as your brain bloats and floats
beneath a bottle of beer

Two months before his death, Campbell published his own book of poetry, “Life as a Poet presents: Anesthesia Lake.” More collections of his poetry and comics are forthcoming from Brass Tacks Press.

All of Campbell’s books are available at Lobal Orning in the Pine Tree Circle. You can also order them online at www.lifeasapoet.com.

So pick up a copy of “Floating” and treat yourself to Campbell’s mysterious, magical, and humorous vision of the world—a place where, as another character points out, “Virtually anything could happen.”