Longtime Los Angeles literary nonprofit Beyond Baroque may lose its lease. It’s been in its location, in Venice, for decades.
This isn’t simply a matter of changing real estate realities. Apparently the organization is in a city-owned building, and their city councilman recommended a 25-year lease extension. With these nonprofit leases, Beyond Baroque’s website says, a rep’s recommendation usually holds. But Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo is recommending against the extension.
I’m not sure what Delgadillo is thinking. He had trouble this summer — including covering up an accident his wife had in his city-owned vehicle — and for some reason this has compelled him to … crack down on literary nonprofit leases?
As I tended to be an LA eastsider (Pittsburgh=very east), Beyond Baroque, way across town, never became my favorite lit place; their claim that they’ve been LA’s “only literary center for four decades” is certainly hyperbole. But the organization certainly deserves to go on, and I don’t see why they should be evicted from their current location. I hope Delgadillo has a good reason for countering the city councilman’s recommendation to extend Beyond Baroque’s lease. Either that, or that he soon changes his mind.
Very sad. In the eighties I saw artist Mike Kelly there, doing something creepy in a lab coat, while Mary Woronov behind him pretended very convincingly to be Godzilla. And of course Exene and John Doe met at a poetry workshop there. But this kind of thing in L.A. always seemed anomolous. L.A. isn’t about building a community, it’s about everybody being weird in private.