Striving To Enter Through a Narrowing Gate
Thought y’all might care to take a gander at an appreciation Joseph Mailander wrote at Street Hassle yesterday regarding the series of posts about my recent return visit to L.A.:
I have now known Rodger Jacobs for about four years—a college degree’s worth of time. His body of work crosses classes, crowds, cultures; it’s not the Authorized Version, and that’s its special place: it’s LA, unauthorized and unrepentant. For fiction, he will squeeze a character named Bukowski next to a cartoon figure, perchance Pinocchio or Woody Woodpecker; as a critic, he snarks in a way that gives more rise to laughter than bitterness, even if the first anecdote he turns to is a desperately private one. He does not suffer fools gladly, and these tend to feel sheepish on approach.
Read Jacobs’ L.A. Unauthorized
Oh … I stayed at the remarkable Beverly Garland Hotel (yes, that Beverly Garland, for you film geeks out there) during my business trip, hence the photo.
May 10, 2008 at 9:50 am
It was simply a chance to use one of my favorite German Kompositums: Torschlußpanik.
German has all the good compound words for things that have a foreboding edge.
May 10, 2008 at 10:05 am
Joseph,
I used to write for a now-defunct “alternative” monthly published out of Long Beach called Panik.
May 10, 2008 at 11:39 pm
I think I remember that one. Did it do some fetish art stuff? I think one of Lynn’s art department girls used to source it on occasion for bad-girl print designs she did on the side and especially after she left the company.
I remember, oddly enough, because they asked me to find some Latin or German text to put on the print for them (by the way, such a print is called a “conversational” in the trade). They were also kinda knocking off Von Dutch. I came up with “Deus ex Machina” which pleased everyone. But I have no idea how the shirt or the line did.
May 10, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Yes, they did fetish art stuff, JM. That’s the same mag. Funny story: one time I wrote a profile of Luke Ford for them called Luke Ford Suffers For Your Sins. Luke was excited to be profiled in an actual, physical and tangible newspaper. But then the issue hit the streets and, as I recall from my conversation with Luke, his heart sunk when he saw the cover illustration: a pen and ink rendering of Jesus Christ, crown of thorns on his bleeding brow, on his knees with a supplicating gaze as he licks the navel of a hooker in a tank top, erect nipples jutting out beneath the fabric.
That particular issue also featured articles by Anton La Vey and Jim Goad.
Ah, the good old days. Michel Berandi eventually closed up shop in Long Beach and shuttered the paper– around 2000, I think — and headed back home to his wife in France.
I wrote a couple of Trace stories about the Panik experience: “Rockville” and “The Kill Fee”.