David L. Ulin

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“Kim Fowley Came Out Of A Hollywood That Doesn’t Exist Anymore”

January 16, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kim Fowley is dead, and now they’re coming to take him away, ha-haaa! Such a bag of sleaze that he could make even record-industry professionals blanch, Fowley most famously formed and managed the teenage girl group the Runaways, and the nicest way to put it is that he certainly had an eye for young talent. The opening of David L. Ulin’s knowing 2013 Los Angeles Times review of Lord of Garbage, Fowley’s mental memoir:

Kim Fowley came out of a Hollywood that doesn’t exist anymore, the Hollywood of Kenneth Anger and Ed Wood. Best known for cooking up the Runaways, he began to work in the music business in the late 1950s and since then has turned up in more places than Woody Allen’s Zelig, producing for Gene Vincent, writing with Warren Zevon and introducing John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band when they performed in Toronto in 1969.

Fowley turned 73 in 2012, and by his own admission has been suffering from bladder cancer, so it’s no surprise that he might choose this moment to look back. But his memoir, Lord of Garbage (Kicks Books: 150 pp., $13.95 paper) may be the weirdest rock ’n’ roll autobiography since … well, I can’t think of what.

The first of a projected three-volume set (Fowley claims the follow-ups have already been delivered), “Lord of Garbage” covers the first 30 years of its author’s life, from his early years bouncing between a model mother and a B-movie actor father, through a high school membership in the 1950s gang the Pagans and on to his involvement as a songwriter and producer in 1960s L.A.

How much of it is true is hard to say, exactly: Written in  bombastic prose, it follows the broad parameters of Fowley’s biography while also insisting that, at the age of 1, his first words were: “I have a question. Why are you bigger than me?”

“Kim Fowley could talk at ten months,” he tells us, “could read and write by one and a half.” It’s no coincidence that he refers to himself in the third person, since Lord of Garbage is clearly the work of someone who considers himself larger than life. “You already know the genius music,” Fowley declares in a brief head note. “Now, know the genius man of letters.”

And yet, as self-congratulatory as that is, as sadly confrontational, it’s also, in its own weird way, slightly thrilling — not unlike Fowley himself.•

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“I Can Write A Better Story In Twenty Minutes”

August 28, 2013 in Books, Videos | Permalink

Writer Harlan Ellison, a brilliant wiseass who has never taken any shit from anybody, even that insecure thug Frank Sinatra, recently made a public appearance in Los Feliz, getting a haircut and addressing an audience. Patton Oswalt and David Ulin were there. (Thanks L.A. Review of Books.)

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“His Uncle Takes One Of His Daughter’s Dresses And Orders The Boy To Wear It To School”

August 11, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening David L. Ulin’s Los Angeles Times review of the first comprehensive biography of Charles Manson, who remains as inexplicable as he is despicable four decades after this scar of a man taught American parents that their children were, to an extent, unknowable–strangers, even:

“Early in Jeff Guinn’s Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, the first full biography of the infamous mass killer, there’s a moment of unexpected and discomforting empathy. It’s 1939, and Manson — 5 years old, living with relatives in West Virginia while his mother is in state prison for armed robbery — has embarrassed himself by crying in a first-grade class. To toughen him up, his uncle takes one of his daughter’s dresses and orders the boy to wear it to school.

‘Maybe his mother and Uncle Luther were bad influences,’ Guinn writes, ‘but Charlie could benefit from Uncle Bill’s intercession. It didn’t matter what some teacher had done to make him cry; what was important was to do something drastic that would convince Charlie never to act like a sissy again.’

That’s a key moment in Manson — both for what it does and for what it cannot do. On the one hand, it opens up our sense of Guinn’s subject, establishing him in a single brush stroke as more than just a monster, as a broken human being. On the other, it ends so quickly, without revealing what happened once he got to class, that it never achieves the necessary resonance.”

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“What These Books Have In Common Is A Sense Of Mass Illusion”

March 19, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events." (Image by Weegee.)

Even in the 1930s, Nathanael West could see that media was becoming mass, that the Horatio Alger myth, a cruel hoax that pretended the exception was the rule, would soon be oppressively disseminated to all of America–to all of the world. From “He Foresaw History,” David Ulin’s 1997 Los Angeles Times article about West’s prescient prose:

“For West, the very substance of modern life exists in the place where the medium and the audience connect. His aesthetic was firmly rooted in the idea of mass communication, which by the 1930s, he recognized, had begun to change American culture in unpredictable ways. It’s one of the things that sets him apart from his contemporaries, and, as such, may have contributed to his marginal status.

‘In the 1930s,’ Veitch suggests, ‘American literature was dominated by icons of the left, like Ma Joad, but West wrote against that; he was a writer on the left who didn’t write about leftist themes. Instead, he wrote about consumerism. He wrote about the America that was emerging, the America of mass culture. At a time when the left had disdain for that, West homed in on it, using cliches, cartoons, comics, Tin Pan Alley songs. Miss Lonelyhearts is a slap in the face to the left’s fascination with folk culture, as is The Day of the Locust.”

His take on popular culture emerges not just in the substance of his writing, but in its style. Miss Lonelyhearts, for instance, was conceived as a ‘novel in the form of a comic strip’; ‘I abandoned this idea,’ West wrote in 1933, ‘but retained some of the comic strip technique: Each chapter, instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up and down in space like a picture. Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events.’

Writing in a voice that is deliberately flat, West portrays a newspaper advice columnist, caught between the cynicism of his editor, Shrike, and the despair of his readers, who, in a society where God has been replaced by the manufactured images of mass imagination, have nowhere else to turn for meaning. As Shrike declares, ‘The Miss Lonelyhearts are the priests of 20th century America.’ Miss Lonelyhearts becomes a counterpart for Christ, and his column a modern source of communion.

The Day of the Locust focuses the same perspective on the desperate dreams of Hollywood. And A Cool Million--a broad farce that, in tracing the disasters that befall a young man named Lemuel Pitkin when he sets out to seek his fortune, turns the Horatio Alger formula on its ear–touches on this issue. What these books have in common is a sense of mass illusion, of image somehow substituted for reality until there is little difference between the two.

‘West’s subject,’ says Library of America Publisher Max Rudin, ‘is the selling of mass fantasy, the American business of dreams.’

Elaborates Bercovitch: “There’s a sense in West of public life having a stage set quality, of the marketplace as a giant betrayal not just of America but of all human dreams. Yet while he understands this, he remains susceptible to the pathos of human need.'”

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“Isn’t it romantic?”:

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A 1970s Adaptation Of J.G. Ballard’s Crash

May 22, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

An experimental 17-minute BBC version. Better than Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation, I think.

 

From a piece about Ballard in the Los Angeles Times by David L. Ulin: “If J.G. Ballard — the visionary British novelist who died Sunday of prostate cancer at age 78 — ends up being remembered, it will likely be as a science fiction writer who aspired to use genre as a vehicle for art. That’s true enough, in a certain small-bore manner, but it’s ultimately reductive, a way of categorizing Ballard that his entire career stood against.

A member of the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s, Ballard started out writing proto-environmental thrillers that highlighted the prescience of his imagination: The Wind From Nowhere posits a world-wide windstorm that becomes apocalyptic, while The Drowned World is about a planet swamped by risen sIt was really in the 1970s, however, that Ballard found his voice as a writer, focusing on the dangers of mechanization and socialization, the tension between the veneer of civilization and the animal brutality it sought to conceal. “

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“She’s Staked Out Her Own Odd Territory As A Collector Of Earthquake Predictions”

January 7, 2011 in Books, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

New York City has earthquakes, but they’re so minor we never feel them. In most instances, the earth prefers to swallow us up one by one. But it’s different in Los Angeles.

L.A.’s tempermental turf is the subject of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, a volume on the topic by David L. Ulin. I remember Ulin’s writing from back in the day when he wrote book reviews for Newsday. He’s worked at the Los Angeles Times for a number of years now.

Among other earthquake-related topics, Ulin’s book looks at the thorny issue of earthquake prediction, by scientists and psychics, the concerned and the kooky. An excerpt about Linda Curtis, Seismological Secretary of the Southern California field office of the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena:

“Curtis is, in many ways, the USGS gatekeeper, the public affairs officer who serves as a frontline liaison with the community and the press. Her office sits directly across the hall from the conference room, and if you call the Survey, chances are it will be her low-key drawl you’ll hear on the line. In her late forties, dark-haired and good-humored, Curtis has been at the USGS since 1979, and in that time, she’s staked out her own odd territory as a collector of earthquake predictions, which come across the transom at sporadic but steady intervals, like small seismic jolts themselves.

‘I’ve been collecting almost since day one,’ she tells me on a warm July afternoon in her office, adding that it’s useful for USGS to keep records, if only to mollify the predictors, many of whom view the scientific establishment with frustration, paranoia even, at least as far as their theories are concerned.

‘Basically,’ she says, ‘we are just trying  to protect our reputation. We don’t want to throw these predictions in the wastebasket, and then a week later…’ She chuckles softly, a rolling R sound as thick and throaty as a purr. ‘Say somebody predicted a seven in downtown L.A., and we ignored it. Can you imagine the reaction if it actually happened? So this is sort of a little bit of insurance. If you send us a prediction, we put it in the file.'”

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“Plus–the city of Los Angeles and its millions of people”:

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