Escape to L.A.
An interlude and an update
Today is Roberto Bolaño’s birthday. He would be 71 years old today. Perhaps I should finish Cowboy Graves tonight. Who am I kidding? I’m in the home stretch of my book and it’s all SST all the time here at Casa Ruland.
I took my first research trip up to Los Angeles this weekend though that’s overstating it a bit. My first stop was at Razorcake headquarters to see Todd Taylor and Jen Federico, who just celebrated their first anniversary—congratulations Todd and Jen!
The last time I saw Todd I was putting the finishing touches on the book proposal for Corporate Rock Sucks, which incredibly now has a page on the publisher’s website. Oh, there’s also a pub date, April 12, 2022, which is less than a year away. Excuse me while I go hyperventilate.
*Breathes into a paper bag, retires to fainting couch, feels like Mr. Earbrass on a bad day.*
OK, I’m back.
In a normal year I would have met with Todd five to ten times over the course of the year and talked his ear off about the project, so it was a bit strange to do that now when I’m so close to the finish line.
We’ve been doing this since we were roommates in the early ‘90s at 56 Calle Contenta in Flagstaff, Arizona. We met in a creative writing workshop and realized we had a lot in common (but mostly a mutual feeling that creative writing workshops are a scam-and-a-half). We’d sit across from each other at the kitchen table and write with our gargantuan laptops (though if memory serves Todd may have used an actual typewriter). We’d bash out our stories with Down By Law on the CD player and a gallon of Jim Beam on top of the refrigerator.
Todd left Flagstaff to go work and write for Flipside fanzine in 1995. I stayed in Flagstaff for another year and Todd started sending me packages stuffed with CDs to review. That’s how I became a punk rock writer.
The following year I moved back to L.A. and started interviewing bands and writing reviews. I got my own column (Money Talks), which was filled with shoddy participatory journalism and gratuitous T&A that inspired fan mail from felons. (Hello, you know you are!)
Flipside went by the wayside in 2000, a casualty of Y2K. Todd, along with Sean Carswell, started up Razorcake in 2001. When Todd and Sean invited me to be a regular contributor, I resolved to be a less shitty punk rock zine writer, changed my column’s name (Lazy Mick), and threw myself into the SoCal punk scene all over again.
While my contributions to Razorcake didn’t directly lead to collaborating with Keith Morris on My Damage, there’s no doubt in my mind that my decades of writing for zines opened the door to the possibility. That book did lead to the next one: Do What You Want with Bad Religion, and my relationship with the editor of those two books led to the one I’m writing now.
In addition, Todd nurtured my writing along the way. He’s the only person in the universe who has written every word I have ever written for Flipside and Razorcake. (And he did the same for countless other writers.) He was an early reader of My Damage and Do What You Want, and he’ll read the first draft of Corporate Rock Sucks in a few weeks and make it a much better book.
Long story short: I owe every bit of my punk rock writing career to Todd.
So it was great to see Todd and Jen last weekend and hang out in their garden when everything is blooming and eat delicious food from Cena Vegan and watch Dodgers baseball. A brief, blissful return to normalcy. The kind of weekend I once took for granted, but won’t anymore.
Thank you, Todd. For everything.
A highlight of my trip to L.A. was visiting Edward Colver. Todd and Edward live in the same neighborhood so we walked from Todd’s house to Edward house like it was a punk rock episode of Mayberry R.F.D.
I’ve talked about Edward and his work here before so if you don’t know who he is you’ve got no one but yourself to blame. I went to his house for the first time while working on My Damage and have visited on a few other occasions over the years, so it was a relaxing, informal visit.
(This profile that ran in New Noise last year provides an overview of his work and does a nice job of describing what it feels like to sit in his backyard. Or you could follow him on Instagram.)
Edward is going to contribute photos to Corporate Rock Sucks and we reviewed hundreds of images, discussing which ones to include. Edward had multiple iPads that he passed around the table and it was like walking into history. Plus, Edward serves up a mean cup of coffee with Alta Dena milk and Abuelita Chocolate y Canela syrup. A beautiful day.
I concluded my trip to L.A. with a secret meeting regarding a potential project down the road because the hustle never ends…
But I’m back in the saddle and the saddle is where I’ll be for the foreseeable future.
No PssSST feature today since the whole column was kinda sorta about the book. I listened to The Blasting Concept (SST 13) and Everything Went Black (SST 15) while writing this newsletter. I came into this project partial to Keith Morris and after listening to Side One of both of these records several years later…
