beware of lafayette

paperhaus January 7th, 2009

After being misguided by googlemaps past the gigantic, shift-getting-out Halliburton complex on the outskirts of Lafayette, Louisiana, after circling and circling a dark and lonesome area that lacked the connecting streets the map showed it to have, after steering past a set of signs meant to block traffic and then, finally, reaching my destination only to find it was not a restaurant hiding in a trailer park but really just a trailer park — after that and then, eventually making my way to the elusive proper rendevous, being cheerful and having a cvilized dinner and then crashing in a vastly overpriced hotel room featuring, unfathomably, a really big fat pillar in its center — what I wanted the next morning, what I really really wanted, was a large plate of flabby, room-temperature boiled eggs.

Oh, no wait, it wasn’t.

With vision of Hud dancing in my head, I did my best to beat it out of Lafayette, Louisiana.

It took almost an hour.

on the road again

paperhaus December 19th, 2008

Picked up a car in Florida and am bringing it back to LA. Will post more soon, but for now, I’ve uploaded a few pictures to Flickr.

Currently in New Orleans, which, as usual, is all kinds of wonderful. Currently sitting on the porch of an affordable B&B in Faubourg Marigny, where I can’t get out of the front gate until someone with a key comes by. The jasmine is scenting, the laptop is charging, the guys across the way are re-roofing. Not bad at all.

Now, if I could just get some espresso before this deadline….

Correspondences: Ben Greenman’s super-cool bookish thing

paperhaus December 8th, 2008

I got to review Ben Greenman’s Correspondences for the LA Times book section this weekend. It really is as cool as all the New Yorkers say. The writeup is short, so, well, here it is:

Correspondences by Ben Greenman (Hotel St. George Press, 250-copy limited edition) is a beautiful, letterpressed, book-like object containing seven short stories that literally unfold before you. The case is earth-colored cardboard with a wine-red sleeve, almost like a box of stationery. The first story, “What He Was Poised to Do,” is revealed as you open the case; the text includes numbers corresponding to postcards the characters write to one another. You might expect to find those postcards inside; instead there is a blank one there, inviting you to fill in one of those from the story. This is a challenge, because Greenman’s writing is wonderfully intimidating, bountiful yet compressed; one willing lover is “like a penny rolling across the floor.” Maybe you ought to read the other stories first? Each story involves letters — to lovers, friends, a daughter — but few correspondents hope to receive anything in return. Yet one story is set on the impossible border of India and Australia and focuses on a karmic boomerang business (talk about karmic return). The enclosed stories are printed on opposite sides of accordion-style inserts — “Hope,” for example, is a story that is paired with another that has little, a reminder that correspondence is a kind of relationship, connection. “Correspondences” is a gorgeous collection of short stories, integrated in its content and construction, yet unfinished; it waits for your postcard to arrive.

If there’s one thing I should add, it’s that I’m damn glad my editor had a real copy of the book, because the experience of the whole project is framed by that component. If I’d written the review based only on the promo version that was sent to me, it wouldn’t have captured the experience — or importance — of unfolding.

I also got to write about Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, a book of sixties-era photos of LA by Barry Feinstein accompanied by sixties-era poems by Bob Dylan. There wasn’t enough room to mention it, but the cover photo includes a woman who’s a 1963 dead ringer for Amy Winehouse in a blonde wig, cateye makeup, slumped on a couch. At a nudie photo studio.

Goodbye, Forrest Ackerman

paperhaus December 6th, 2008

In 1994, or possibly 1993, I went to the Ackermansion for the collector column of the magazine Fizz. It was my friend Jeanette’s idea — she knew all about Forrest Ackerman. I was just enthusiastic about meeting an enthusiast. And I was excited to see all his stuff.

Forrest Ackerman has died; he was 92. My hastily-written remembrance of that visit is at Jacket Copy with the photos that I took that day. I scanned this photo from the proof sheet - we never printed it. It had a few magazines, but there wasn’t enough of his awesome stuff — no creepy masks or bawdy space babes or visible vintage posters. It does have Mr. Ackerman, though, and I like that he’s not hamming for the camera. He probably thought I was taking pictures of something else –  I ran around trying to snap everything - but it was really him who was the center of it all.

What twitter is, this moment

paperhaus December 4th, 2008

Being on twitter right now feels like passing notes in the class of life.

I’m sure someone else has already said that.

And it won’t stay that way for long. I mention Mad Men and hours later Betty Draper is following me. Betty? If I have to be followed by a television character, could we make it Don Draper, please?

Really, all I want is a library

paperhaus December 3rd, 2008

I don’t mean a public library. I mean a room in my house with shelves and books and a good reading light and a place to rest my bourbon.

Friends of mine have a library. I know it’s possible.

Laura Miller (who is the subject of this Jacket Copy post) wrote about culling her book collection in Sunday’s New York Times. She knows a couple who’ve gotten rid of most of their books; agent Ira Silverberg, who purges the books by the people he’s stopped talking to; and Jonathan Franzen, who once kept a strict read-to-unread ratio. Miller’s collection is more aspirational (may unread books, including a Dickens tome), but she tries to keep a one-book-in, one-book-out policy.

But the real issue isn’t how many books you have. It’s about how much space you have, factored against how often you have to pick up all your books and move them.

If I had a big rambling house like my grandmother did, I’d never get rid of any books. OK, some of the books that end up in my possession are throw-awayable, like one Tod Goldberg had to let go, but I would not be forced to triage books I actually want. I do not, like my grandmother, live in a big rambling house with a library — it also had a paleolithic-era TV that I think had ceased to function — I live in a small LA apartment that I will probably leave when my lease is up.

In my current space, my library is everywhere — narrow halls, living room, bedroom. I keep the unread books on a short bookshelf that actually needs to be taller. No matter how hard I try, stacks of books, usually in mid-read, form on horizontal surfaces like stalagmites.

In Pittsburgh I had a ridiculous amount of space, three stories of a skinny row house (plus basement), and I used the attic as a library. But the attic wasn’t insulated, so most of the year I only made forays up there, teeth chattering, to retrieve books as needed. I picked up bookshelves for other rooms and the library expanded. I had a newly-received branch (shelf) inside the front door; a grad-school project branch in the dining room.

Probably, no matter where I end up next — hauling boxes and boxes and many many many more boxes of books — they’ll still live everywhere. Library or not.

But I still want a library.

WPA, in posters

paperhaus December 2nd, 2008

I wrote a short blurb on the new book Posters for the People: Art of the WPA that ran in Sunday’s LA Times. The piece appeared with several illustrations; the online gallery included 13 posters - in color, even.

Everything looks so cool it makes me want to go back to then, when we were living in a depression.

No, wait, scratch that.

OK, to go back to a time when we were living in a depression and the government had these really cool workfare programs for artists and writers. Or, you know, forward to a time like that.

Review of The End at the LA Times

paperhaus November 29th, 2008

That would be Salvatore Scibona’s “The End,” which reviewed last week for the LA Times. It was hard, in a relatively brief review, to describe the book’s complex strucure without getting overly bogged down by it.

Dear LA City Council: cutting libraries is terribly wrong

paperhaus November 21st, 2008

With all of California facing a budget crunch, the city of LA is facing difficult cutbacks. The first round of funding cuts has been proposed — recommended by the city’s top budget official — and will be considered by the LA City Council on Monday. On the chopping block:

* $1.45 million from the $79-million library budget
* $800,000 from the city’s tree-trimming program
* $1 million from the crossing guards program
* $650,000 from the program to install more left-turn arrow signals at city intersections.
* A freeze on new hires at the City Attorney’s Office and City Controller’s Office, with limited exceptions
* $1.92 million from the Los Angeles Police Department program to replace older squad cars

Now I’m not a city budgeteer but I can see that the targets of many of these proposed cuts are things that are considered nonessential. And it kills me that in a big, difficult city like Los Angeles, where one in five children live in poverty, that anyone thinks that public libraries are nonessential.

Just yesterday I blogged at Jacket Copy about Andrew Carnegie and his libraries. Yes, Carnegie was a bad bad capitalist. But when he turned to philanthropy, libraries were one of his top priorities. Without his work, the US wouldn’t have a tradition of free libraries. And Carnegie cared about libraries because he saw them as one of the real ways that individuals could control their own destinies.

The new Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, seems to imply that individuals can’t. Fuck that. People are left out of the big fat clichéd-but-I-still-love-it American dream if we leave them out. If we cut off their resources — like free libraries.

I urge the City Council to not make any cuts at all to our library budgets. Period.

But if they must, here’s an idea: Make cuts to those in the wealthiest communities first.

Someone who lives in Beverly-Hills-adjacent Brentwood is better able to drive their car for library services than the bus-bound parents of kids in, say, El Sereno. People who live in Silverlake — where the median home price is still almost $600,000, more than $400 per square foot — can afford to buy the books they want. Leave the free libraries for the households earning the county’s average income of $36,687.

This would probably be politically stupid — affluent and engaged constituents might well protest losing library hours, library projects, library staff. But that just shows they want their libraries.

Libraries are important. And they should be available to the members of our community who have the fewest resources, the hardest fight, the farthest way to go.

Vermin report: at the Mountain Bar

paperhaus November 19th, 2008

janet fitch reads

Sunday night brought another night of Vermin — the Vermin on the Mount reading series at Chinatown’s Mountain Bar. Poet Dan Kaplan, political chronicler Josh Bearman, and novelist Janet Fitch read. Guess who’s in the picture? Yeah, Janet Fitch, not so hard.

Fitch read from her new novel “Paint it Black”; she is also the author of “White Oleander,” which was an Oprah pick and a movie, too.

OK, this is not much of a report. The Mountain Bar was beautiful, as always. Host Jim Ruland was the most as always, the audience was appreciative as always, the company of Mark Sarvas and David Francis was more charming than I deserved.

I did not take notes. The photo will have to do.

Janet Fitch, author of “White Oleander,” reads from her

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