A DEEPLY involving and bittersweet presentation at #LAPL’s Central Library on Saturday afternoon. Annie Laskey and her mother Marlene hatched a plan to walk the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard from its downtown high-rises and mid-town department stores to the edges of the sea. Annie mentioned that the thrill at first was less about the walk and more about getting to operate the Minolta SLR. Annie shot and Marlene made note (see the notebook in the grid below). While Marlene and many of the iconic locations that the Laskeys recorded are no longer with us, the absences were filled with vivid stories. Grateful for the Laskeys and their. sticktoitiveness Hundreds of sites have now been preserved on Kodachrome slides. The Wilshire Boulevard — the Carnation Building, Mutual of Omaha, Ambassador Hotel– that still exists in my head flickered to life with her stories. You can glimpse 100 of those images in a new book, “The Wilshire Slides 1978–1979” put out through LAPL’s Photo Collection and Photo Friends the nonprofit organization formed to support & promote the collection.
books
After/Image
ON TOP of the world!
So I’ve got some news. Excited to report that Angel City Press will be publishing my new book, “After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame” For more info you can check out ACP here.
Looking forward to the adventure.
Shifting Tenses
AND THE NEWS keeps coming today —
I’ve been trying to get all the blogs caught up with upcoming projects. It’s been a bit of a logjam lately around here and so I hope to be getting back to some regular posting.
I’m happy to announce my new (and very first!) chapbook, “Shifting Tenses” from the wonderful Writ Large Press, Founded in 2007 by Chiwan Choi, Peter Woods, Judeth Oden Choi and Jessica Ceballos, the press’ mandate has been to publish, connect and promote overlooked voices and communities across the region and beyond. A limited number of copies will be available today at L.A. Zine Fest in downtown Los Angeles. 100% of the proceeds go to nonprofit/social justice organizations.
If you’re not able to make it downtown, you can still order it directly from Writ Large by clicking over here.
Voice (30)
“West Side” — image by Lynell George
Grocery on Venice Beach
by Denis Johnson
Thank you salesperson I see your heart
quivering redly in its gossamer
I with this fiery whirling atomic
symbol where I used to have a stomach
lighting my dead shoes
down the aisle
Briefly the gauzy but legible
future veils the place and is beheld
I can talk inside the mind
of my great-grandchild Oh unconceived
monster hurting your teeth on our dead Disneylands
we were here we touched this radioactive food
We didn’t have the claws and then something in our hearts sufficed
We didn’t have X-ray eyes we knew what was inside of everything
Descendants
I have paid and I have left
walked out of the little store onto a white beach
the light declining and lavender
walked past two women
as they knelt covered with gooseflesh
beside the Tarot dealer
past a man pretending to be a machine in a circle
of laughter
alongside but not too close
to people who no longer
live indoors or hide their thoughts
past the child
born in a towaway zone
the mother’s eyes like
a creek
numbers
and curses going by in the water
I leave you this record
of an invisible monstrosity and this
report of sadness
a semi-truck against the bruised roses
of sunset
emeralds in the velvet wound
the lights
of Malibu the cold
small lights
from –The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly — Poems Collected and New
“Watching, Thinking, Listening, Assessing”
SOME NEWS:
Excited to now officially report that I’ve been awarded the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship to support the next leg of my research this summer in the Octavia E. Butler archive. I’m so grateful that she’s left so much of her story to learn from. Now looking forward to delving deeper.
It has been an honor to spend time in the archive and see a much more complex portrait of this Southern California native slide into view.
Stay tuned for more info about Butler here.
“Telling My Stories”
SCENES FROM last week’s opening festivities for “Octavia E. Butler — Telling My Stories” at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.
A special thank you to curator Natalie Russell who carefully selected 100 objects out of a vast archive of 8,000 to illustrate Butler’s life, work and struggle. It’s a beautiful survey of a singular life. We are all grateful to Butler for gifting her papers to the Huntington so that so many more people can learn about her way of looking at and being in the world. Most affecting is her depth of curiosity, her blinders-on focus. For all the sacrifice and sense of mission, her dedication at moments feels matchless.
The exhibit is up through August. Come early. Give yourself enough time to wander through. There is much to linger over, digest and celebrate.
Jamming to the 70s
JOIN US tomorrow afternoon at 826LA Echo Park for Roar Shack. On the bill: Chip Jacobs, Dana Johnson Geza X, Steve Hodel, David Kukoff and yours truly. The event: “I Remember That: L.A. in the 70s.” We’ll be reading pieces looking back at when L.A. was a bit more open, wild and it took only 30 minutes to get just about anywhere…. See you there.
Details here.
Patience, Survival, Mind: Inside the Octavia E. Butler Archive
IN CASE you missed it. Last week, I took over the Huntington Library’s Instagram and led their followers through science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler’s massive archive. I wanted people to have a sense of what it was like working with her papers, which also meant being privy to her hopes and fears and drive.
I’d been commissioned by Julia Meltzer at Clockshop to write a piece for their year-long Radio Imagination project, and my starting point was full immersion into Butlers personal papers — her journals, commonplace books and busy marginalia. I’ve learned much about her in my time here. What has struck me the most however, is just how vulnerable she felt within the writing process.
You can take a look at my Huntington Takeover here.
Also, the lovely Julia Wick at LAist interviewed me about archive and you can view that here.
Thanks so much, Kate Lain at the Huntington for inviting me to take part in this. I really did have a blast.
Stray Cards from the Octavia E. Butler archive, Courtesy the Huntington Library.
Voice (28)
“In the meantime the Bottom had collapsed. Everybody who had made money during the war moved as quickly as they could to the valley, and the white people were buying down river, cross river, stretching Medallion like two strings on the banks. Nobody colored lived much up in the Bottom any more. White people were building towers for televisions stations up there and there was a rumor about a golf course or something. Anyway, hill land was more valuable now, and those black people who had moved down right after the war in the fifties couldn’t afford to come back even if they wanted to. Except for the few blacks still huddled by the river bend, and some undemolished houses on Carpenter’s Road, only rich white folks were building homes in the hills. Just like that, they had changed their minds and instead of keeping the valley floor to themselves, now they wanted a hilltop house with a river view and a ring of elms. The black people, for all their new look, seemed awfully anxious to get to the valley, or leave town, and and abandon the hills to whoever was interested. It was sad, because the Bottom had been a real place. These young ones kept talking about the community, but they left the hills to the poor, the old, the stubborn–and the rich white folks. Maybe it hadn’t been a community, but it had been a place. Now there weren’t any places left, just separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones and less and less dropping by.”
from Sula, by Toni Morrison
“So be it! See to it!”
THANKS TO everyone involved and to all of those who attended Clockshop’s “Radio Imagination” reading honoring Octavia E. Butler last Saturday night. Our goal was to pay fitting tribute, but by all accounts we conjured her. From teaching herself — “guiding her own hand,” to warring constantly with isolation, to writing herself into being, Butler steered herself through a professional universe that could be as aloof as it was alienating.
She found an opening in a seam and made a place for herself. A roadblock was something to circumvent, just another plot-pont puzzle on a page By articulating her desires, goals and plans — for decades — she built a sure path toward them.
“So be it. See to it!”
It was an honor to be a part of keeping her personal story aloft.
There will be more Radio Imagination events to come in this year-long celebration. A podcast of Saturday’s program will be available shortly. Stay tuned.
(Photos courtesy Clockshop)
native to the place 