Endings & Beginnings
It was the worst of times; it was the worst of times…
2019 was a year marked by sudden departures.
In March I learned that my old friend Stan Hillas passed away from heart failure. Stan was a singer/songwriter who was a big influence on me when I first moved to Los Angeles. I was working at Eagles Coffee Pub in North Hollywood and he was my first flesh and blood example of a real artist: creative, generous, and passionate as hell.
A few weeks later, Nuvia called with the news that our friend Jeremy Richman had taken his own life, a development made all the more tragic by the fact that Jeremy’s daughter was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary in December of 2012. I know that’s a shocking thing to read, and I apologize for being so blunt, but it’s been the kind of year that doesn’t pull any punches. We went to Newtown when we heard the news and we went back a month later for Jeremy’s celebration of life. The people there told us that in 2012 psychologists came to Newtown and told them that divorce, alcoholism, and suicide rates would all skyrocket, and that’s proven to be the case. To say there’s a dark cloud over Newtown would be an understatement, and that’s how I’ve come to feel about America as a whole. So much senseless violence. So much suffering, and that suffering takes a toll. There was even a mass shooting in the community of Paradise Hills just a mile from my home in San Diego.
Nuvia’s grand uncle, Tio Chon, passed this summer from heart disease complicated by diabetes. Then in August my dad’s wife Josephine Vesey succumbed to brain cancer, which she’d been battling for almost a year. There were a pair of memorial services, and I came home early from my residency at the Curfew Tower to attend the one in West Virginia where my father makes his home.
I’d hoped that would be it for 2019, but last month I learned that the English poet Sean Bonney passed away suddenly in November. I didn’t know Sean well. I only met him once during the summer of 2015 during a Vermin on the Mount event in London in collaboration with VLAK Magazine. The reading was held at a tiny little bar called Power Lunches in Hackney and was filled with memorable performances, but Sean’s reading of his poem, “Corpus Hermeticum: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,” made a big impression on me.
Since I know that only a handful of you click on the links in these newsletters, I’ll copy and paste a few excerpts. Here’s the opening:
News blackouts etc. is really happened.
Every Thursday mayhem in weather systems.
Imaginary battles in science and strike actions. The bastards had won
as in Vision overload, fascist analysis of human beings
and a slightly less comfortable suburb. Arts and that.
Or science. Black mirrors. Seven dials. Black mirrors. Seven dials. Prisons.
Out of this Burroughs-esque dystopian cityscape unfolds a social history of Newgate Prison and the British police force—and Bonney is not a fan. When the poem reaches its climax, he pulls out all the stops:
for “I love you” say fuck the police, for
“the fires of heaven” say fuck the police, don’t say
“recruitment” don’t say “trotsky” say fuck the police
Sean wore a bowler hat and a black jacket over an old t-shirt. He held his pint glass in a hand that bore an ACAB tattoo on his fingers. He struck me as an old punk who lived on his own terms and didn’t take shit from anybody.
When I returned to San Diego, I ordered his new book Letters Against the Firmament from his British publisher. He moved to Berlin and I followed his exploits on Facebook for a while but lost touch when I deleted my account. So I was thrilled to see this interview with him in Bomb and that’s when I learned that he’d died.
Although I barely knew Bonney, I was shocked and saddened by the news for reasons I can’t quite explain. Here was someone I respected and admired, albeit from afar, and now he was gone. This was true of all the people I was close to who’d died in 2019, so why did I feel his death as deeply as the others?
Maybe it was because he was a poet. The words he’d written were the last that would ever come from him. There would be no more performances, no more poems. The only thing to do with my despair was to order his new book, Our Death, his first in the U.S.
A lot of the themes from Letters Against the Firmament return in Our Death: surveillance, police oppression, anti-authoritarian activism, drugs. In his interview in Bomb, he discussed how he’d embraced the epistolary form, and many of his pieces are presented as letters to other poets. The overall effect is dispatches from a paranoid prophet in a city slipping under fascist control. “There are those who never appear in mirrors,” he writes, “but only in police cameras.”
Our Death is not a reassuring read. Some of the poems feel like a farewell of sorts. Others take the form of elaborate Blakean visions of a world on the brink of collapse. As the title suggests, these poems are preoccupied with death. Letters to poets who are no longer with us. Letters from a poet who doesn’t have much time. When I finished the book I felt as if Sean had uncovered some dangerous truths about the world, like he was on the front lines of a fight against fascism, the kind of fight that still feels remote here in the United States, though probably not for long.
There are many, many things I’d like to ask my friends and family members who left us this year. It’s a prospect both tantalizing and harrowing, but as Sean writes, “It’s a weird game, to ask advice from the dead as they walk toward us, telling us our fortunes from their enclaves in the landscapes our poems try to describe.”
RIP San Diego CityBeat
This fall, a bush league media conglomerate in Arizona bought out the alternative weekly newspaper I’ve been a columnist for since 2010. They fired the paper’s editor, Seth Combs, and several key staff members put in their two weeks’ notice. I was certain my column, The Floating Library, would get the axe but a week passed and I didn’t hear anything from the new editor. I hate quitting. I’m stubborn and hardheaded. But once it became obvious that CityBeat was just a shell of its former self, I put in my notice, and it’s only gotten worse since then.
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need me to tell you that independent journalism is both valuable and necessary. The demise of CityBeat is a loss for San Diego just as the collapse of the OC Weekly and the buy-out of the LA Weekly are bad news for their communities. When David Rolland invited me to be the paper’s books columnist in 2010, I agreed because I think it’s important for a writer to have a voice in the city in which she lives, but I’ve seen what’s replaced the old CityBeat, and it’s not good.
RIP La Bodega Gallery
Last month, Chris Zertuche and Soni Lopez-Chavez, owners of La Bodega Gallery in Barrio Logan, announced their landlord had raised their rent and they could not afford to renew their lease. This meant the gallery had a month to shut down and clear out.
This is a devastating loss for the community. La Bodega is one of the most popular galleries not just in Barrio Logan, but in all of San Diego. It was a place where people could support local artists and purchase world-class art from artists all over the world at affordable prices. La Bodega brought people to Barrio Logan, which made it possible for other businesses to thrive. Now they’ve been forced out. This directly affected Nuvia and I because our studio was located at La Bodega and we spent the last days of 2019 moving out.
La Bodega was also the San Diego home of Vermin on the Mount. Our L.A. home, Book Show in Highland Park, is also closing for similar reasons. That means your irregular, irreverent reading series is starting the new decade as a restless ghost, and you know how hard it is to get rid of one of those…
New Beginnings
Despite the many challenges we faced last year, 2019 wasn’t all bad. Far from it. Nuvia started a new job as Professional Learning Coordinator at High Tech High. She’s no longer in the classroom but is still a passionate advocate for project-based learning and equitable education. My daughter Annie is halfway through her junior year in high school and already looking ahead to college, which kind of blows my mind. I finished the Bad Religion book and I’m looking forward to sharing it with the world. In fact, I’ll have some news for you next week.
I’m a firm believer in the adage “When one door closes, another one opens.” For example, shortly after I was laid off in the summer of 2017, I was hired by Bad Religion to write their official biography. Although I don’t have another gig at the moment, I’m confident something will turn up. I’ve taken on some private clients for editing and mentoring and open to doing more. (Hit me up if you’re interested.) The new studio we moved into is three times the size of our old one (and a bit more expensive) but it’s a much more comfortable and welcoming space. I’m excited about the art that Nuvia and I will make there.
But I’ll be honest, the cumulative effect of the closing of CityBeat, La Bodega, and Book Show feels like a message from the universe that the world doesn’t share my values. That’s a narrow and self-serving view. After all, friends and colleagues lost their businesses and jobs. But to quote my favorite movie, “It still hurts.”
It’s really not a shocker that landlords and media owners don’t value art. They value money, and they use that money to get more of it. That’s what they do. In the wake of all this upheaval, I’m more committed than ever to making art, finding the people who share my belief in it, and sharing it with them. Not alone at my desk, but with people like you.
Message from the Underworld is a direct result of my departure from CityBeat. Inspired by my colleague Ryan Bradford, I decided to take on one of the paper’s minor duties by showcasing literary events in San Diego, Los Angeles, and beyond each week. That has value to me. And I’m guessing it has value to you as well or else you wouldn’t be here.
One thing that 2019 has taught me is that we need each other. We’re going to need each other to get through the election and it’s outcome. We’re going to need each other to fight fascism and authoritarianism. We’re going to need each other to fight gun violence and help those whose lives have been shattered by it. We’re going to need every last one of us to save the planet from those who put their own interests above the common good. And when we write our stories, paint our paintings, sing our songs, and dance our dances, we’re going to need the support of our communities. The rich can kick us out of their buildings, but they can’t stop us from being who we are, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them.
Lit Picks for 1/2-1/8
Here are a few recommendations for literary events in Southern California.
Thursday January 2 at 7pm (SD)
San Diego stalwarts So Say We All presents Long Story Short: Nailed It! at Kava Collective Kava Bar at 1731 University Avenue.
Friday January 3 at 7pm (LA)
Aaron Cohen discusses and signs Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power at Book Soup.
Saturday January 4 (SD)
Did you know that Diesel Books has opened a second store in Del Mar? It’s true. There’s a new indie in town and they’re located in the Del Mar Highlands Town Center at 12843 El Camino Real, Suite 104.
Sunday January 5 (SD)
The exhibit Julius Schulman: Modern San Diego in the San Diego Central Library Gallery will close on January 19. This well known architectural photographer shot over 200 projects in San Diego and many of them are on display in the gallery. The gallery is open every Sunday from 12pm-4pm, but click the link for additional hours.
Monday January 6 at 7pm (SD)
Mysterious Galaxy has special hours as they prepare to move to their new location at 3555 Rosecrans Street, but will be hosting a few events at the store on Balboa Avenue. Mystery writers Thomas and Jo Perry will be read and sign from new and recent work.
PLAN B (SD)
The Verbatim Poets Society open mic returns for their first event of the New Year at Verbatim Books at 7pm.
Tuesday January 7 at 7pm (SD)
New York Times bestselling writer Kiersten White will read from Chosen, the second book in the Slayer series, which takes place in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is a ticketed event.
Wednesday January 8 at 11:30am and 7pm (SD)
Warwick’s will be hosting two events with Brad Taylor, author of the new Pike Logan military thriller Hunter Killer. Taylor will participate in the Booked for Lunch series and again later that evening for a reading and signing. Both are ticketed events. For more details, call Warwick's Book Dept. at (858) 454-0347.
Thanks for reading Message from the Underworld. Best wishes for a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year. And remember: we’ve got the numbers.
