Steve Appleford

Sally Mann’s Examination of Life, Death and Decay

2010-12-12T04:00:00.000-08:00

Mann’s book and exhibition, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” at a Richmond, Va., museum, ranges from crisp early work to later chaotic meditations on death.

By Steve Appleford, Special to the Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Lexington, Va.

The meandering path to the cabin where Sally Mann once photographed her young children is through a forest of towering oak, maple and hickory. It’s on the Maury River, a mile and a half from the house and studio she designed for herself, and as she walks loudly through a thick layer of leaves and branches, she mentions something about bears.

She saw a couple of black bears here just the other day while on horseback. “They’re perfectly harmless,” she insists, still crunching through the leaves, her dogs barking around her in the fading afternoon light, “but they shake you up a little bit.”

The cabin is empty now and her three kids grown, each the subject of ongoing curiosity whenever spotted at one of their mother’s openings, art stars by birth. The period when she made those photographs was just the briefest of moments, a time of bloody noses and feral nudity at home and by the water, documented to great acclaim and discomfort in the 1992 book “Immediate Family.”

Her interests have since expanded from that youthful, naked idyll to images of mortality and inevitable decay, of ancient Civil War battlefields and cadavers rotting in the wild. She’s turned the camera unflinchingly on herself and photographed the progression of late-onset muscular dystrophy in her husband. At 59, that makes Mann the ultimate nature photographer, facing the raw and unthinkable of life experience with an 8x10 view camera. “The body is fraught,” she says. “It’s dangerous territory.”

This is the theme of “Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit,” a book and exhibition that examine the through-line from her crisp early work to her murkier, almost chaotic later meditations on death. Hosted by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, with a vivid catalog published by Aperture Books, it is not a true retrospective, but a gathering of images that cohere on the business of life and its end.

“She takes what’s close to home and makes that stand for universal themes,” says John R. Ravenal, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia museum. “If it’s not her children, then it's herself or her husband or the landscape around her. They’re nurtured by the land and their connection to the culture and community.”

“Every time a death occurs in my life, I’m just stunned by the emotional impact it has on me and the void that is left behind by that person,” Mann says. “There is a great line from Laurie Anderson: 'When my father died, it was like a whole library had burned down.' The power of death just knocked me flat. I thought it was something I better look into.”

Early this decade, that exploration took her from the 425-acre farm of rolling hills and forest she shares with her husband to the Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center (a.k.a. “the Body Farm”), where donated bodies are left to the elements so scientists can better understand human decomposition in criminal cases. On one of her three visits, there were 40 cadavers on the grounds. “And they were gorgeous. Beautiful,” she recalls. “Nature is really efficient, and she doesn't spare on the aesthetics.”

In some pictures she made there, she operated from a respectful distance, but in others she forces the viewer to take in the full ravages of nature on the human form. There are close-ups of torn flesh and faces drawn back into ghastly smiles.

Homebody

On the anniversary of her father’s death — he died in 1988 — she sits in her kitchen, dining on a casual meal of venison and fried apples harvested from her property. He was a country doctor and local eccentric, a noted gardener of trees and shrubs and the maker of playfully lewd abstract sculptures. He also passed on his 4x5 view camera to Mann.

She rarely leaves the premises, Mann admits happily, and she's clearly relaxed here, chatting seriously but unpretentiously about her work. She’s dressed in jeans and a black sweater, her long, brown hair streaked with gray and tied loosely behind her. In the next room is her library, crowded with books on Walker Evans, Nan Goldin and other photographers, below the mummified carcasses of rats and cats nailed artfully to the wall.

She was further awakened to an interest in mortality after a horse-riding accident in 2006. While riding on a nearby trail, her Arabian suffered an aneurism, threw Mann to the ground and then stomped on her before collapsing, breaking Mann's back. The horse died and the photographer was immobilized for months. “I felt completely smashed,” she says. “When you can’t move properly and everything hurts, you feel like you're 100 years old. And I thought, oh man, this is what’s right around the corner.” Her response was a series of shadowy self-portraits, shot up-close and mercilessly. For this and much of her later work, she turned to the archaic collodion wet-plate process, and the results were characterized by smudges, scratches, accidental chemical reactions and frayed edges, all suggesting the passage of time.

It's also how she has photographed her adult children and her husband, Larry, as he weakens from muscular dystrophy. In one portrait, titled “Was Ever Love,” he's bearded and on his back, still strong but as still as a battlefield casualty. In others, his muscles are wasting away. “We’ve been married for 40 years,” she says of the pictures, “so I think he knew it was coming. It really is about trust.”

She never relocated to New York to become part of the art and photography establishment, meeting curators and buyers, but chose to remain in rural Appalachia, where she found her greatest subjects and purpose.

Until Mann was 7, she refused to wear clothes and ran naked through the isolation of her parents' 30 acres with a pack of dogs. It's largely how she raised and photographed her own kids. “The Flesh and the Spirit” includes lesser-known color images of her family, shot with a medium-format range-finder camera (in contrast to the 8x10 black-and-white vision of “Immediate Family”).

“They were made in such a unique set of circumstances,” Mann says now. “America being a fairly suburban country at this point, people can't imagine a situation where children can live as freely with nature as those kids did. It seems jarring and forced and strange. But it would have been jarring and forced and strange to tell my kids to put on a bathing suit to swim in a river when there's not a living soul for five miles in any direction.”

The realization that her own children could be an important photographic subject came as the result of an accident in 1985, when her daughter Jessie came home with an eye swollen nearly shut from a bee sting. The picture Mann made that day was “Damaged Child,” still one of her best-known images.

“When you’re a parent, you don’t think it’s so remarkable, and you think you’re going to see that stuff all the rest of your life and you're stuck with diapers and you’re stuck with wet beds and you’re stuck with bloody noses,” Mann says. “I look back on those pictures and even I have a little involuntary gasp when I see them. They were the most ordinary things in the world then.”

Major galleries were initially uninterested in showing the work, but when Aperture published “Immediate Family,” it arrived during a season of outrage over museum showings of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most explicit pictures and Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” The San Francisco home of Jock Sturges was raided by the FBI for his photographs of young nudists. And Mann found some of her own family pictures condemned by critics.

The atmosphere had an effect. “I was resolute and I wanted to put forward this face of complete commitment and belief in the work,” she says. “But looking back on it, I second-guessed myself all the time. I didn't take pictures that I might have taken.”

She took the photographs off the market six years ago, determined to focus on new work, but the family work remains popular. “I bet we could reignite the culture wars with one little, tiny match. It’s right under the surface of conservative America.”

Odd workplace

“Oh, Jesus, there’s a bird in here!”

Mann steps into her barn workroom just as a sparrow rushes past. The walls are already spattered with the black marks of light-sensitive silver nitrate from the last bird that got in, and the room smells of ether. Her big cameras stand high on tripods and jugs of chemicals are collected everywhere.

Hanging from a hook is the pelt of her beloved greyhound, Eva. The dog’s death led to an early exploration of mortality and the body. Her husband skinned the animal and Mann photographed the decay process. It’s a subject she's still looking at.

Mann turns 60 in May, and is already contemplating how much longer she can work. She has much more to do. “I try not to examine the muse too closely. I do tend to go off on tangents and head off into strange territory with no concern that this doesn’t ‘look like a Sally Mann,’” she says. “I just really want to grow and change and evolve, and not take the same thing over and over again.”

Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2010

Photographs by Sally Mann/Aperture Books

Master of the House of Playboy

2010-08-07T03:09:00.000-07:00

Hef, still doing it his way (does he really have a choice?)

By Steve Appleford

The young women assembled on the lawn have come from around the country for this moment, delivered to the Playboy Mansion by mothers and boyfriends, each girl prepared for the day in extravagant states of undress. Standing on stiletto heels, they wear G-strings and micro-bikinis, lingeries of lace and silk, while showing off golden tans or blindingly pale skin beneath a warm, cloudless sky. They are here for a Playboy casting call, 225 of them ready to be chosen for a new generation of naked girls next door, to land on the glossy pages of an intimate magazine pictorial. By tomorrow another 300 will have arrived, flying in from Boston, New York, Florida, Australia. But today's search has come to a halt as the young women anxiously await the imminent appearance of the man of the house, the esteemed publisher and chief lothario, Hugh M. Hefner, or, simply, "Hef."

The front door opens to a round of girlish cheers when Hefner steps from his castle with a wave, a video crew documenting the boss in his red-satin robe and white captain's hat. He is 84 now and walks with the stiffness of age, but he moves quickly past the stone cherubs in the fountain, past the wishing well where he married his second wife (now divorced), and through this crowd of young admirers. He does not linger.

"Hi, Hef! We love you!" shouts a petite woman with auburn skin and bleached-blond hair, nearly bursting out of her frilly bikini top and panties. Hefner smiles again but keeps leaning forward, walking with an entourage that includes several security men and his new No. 1 girlfriend, Crystal Harris, the magazine's Miss December for 2009, an athletic blonde a fraction of his age, strolling beside him in a little black dress.

In a moment, Hefner is at the tennis court, where temporary photo studios are erected inside white tents, as models wait their turn to disrobe for a quick test in front of a Playboy camera. (One asks photographer Arny Freytag if she can fill out an application to be Hef's girlfriend.) Hefner poses for a quick snapshot with a crowd of would-be Playmates, and sits for a brief interview for Playboy Radio. It's there that he is presented with a large, jovial portrait of himself, created by an artist who paints exclusively with his penis.

Hefner has hosted scenes like this for more than five decades: all the parties and political events, the nude sunbathing by the pool and roller disco on the tennis court, mingling with actors, athletes, presidential candidates and an endless rotation of young women. It is a life and image he invented for himself, and it continues to define the Playboy dream. The man and the brand remain inseparable.

It has been a long run of high style and decadence, a nonstop pajama party at the Mansion, his personal Shangri-la. Hefner rarely leaves the premises, and he will tell you with a satisfied cackle, "Life is tough here, as you can see."

There are the expected "aches and pains," the occasional trouble with the ex-wife and girlfriends, and his hearing is going. He also hosts fewer of the famous house parties now, citing the cost of all that hedonistic fun. More ominous is the health of Playboy Enterprises Inc., which he took public during boom times nearly four decades ago, and which now faces the same declining fortunes and circulation numbers as all print media. Playboy magazine's current 1.5 million circulation represents a staggering drop from its 1971 peak of 7 million.

The stock price has been in a steady fall for years. Rumored attempts by the board to sell the company or find new partnerships have stalled, with Hefner's ongoing role the ultimate complication. He remains majority owner with 70 percent of the stock, and he is not about to sell, or to abandon his role as the living symbol of the empire. That would kill him. This month, Hefner surprised the board and financial analysts with an offer to buy back the company stock he doesn't already own, reasserting himself as the master of the house of Playboy, with no intention of leaving the mansion or the life.

The dream that sustains him, as it does his most committed readers, is a small one. It is not movie star Hef. It is not Hef in the White House. Hef on the moon. It is a dream that can fit comfortably inside the mind of any American male: big house, naked girls. This is a dream that can carry you for many years, from adolescence and apparently well into your 80s. But is the dream still a dream after half a century of uninterrupted wish fulfillment? Does Hef still look at his bedside bottle of baby oil with the same level of enthusiasm?

On the walk back from the tennis court, Hefner and Miss Crystal chat happily about the day's big turnout of would-be Playmates, as a brown-and-white spaniel named after Charlie Chaplin runs beside them. Once inside, the couple pauses at the bottom of the stairs. Hefner turns to his lady and says quietly, "See you later tonight?" It's a simple, ordinary question, but he says it with such vulnerability, a fragile whisper from an older man still craving romance and affection. It's almost breathtaking to witness.

Of course she will be there, Harris tells him. Then she has to repeat it, shouting loud enough for him to hear.

*

He enters the mansion library abruptly, a vague sense of impatience about him. Despite the permanent leisure wear, the satin and slippers, Hef keeps to a tight schedule. It's an afternoon in early April, and his 84th birthday is only days away. The signs of time passing are inescapable.

His good friend actor Robert Culp had just died suddenly from a heart attack, another longtime pal and mansion regular to pass away in the last year. "This is a time of reflection. I have some very dear friends in the last handful of years who are gone," Hefner says. "You get to a place where you reflect on the life and look back over the good times. That, in a very real way, makes this as good a time in my life as I've ever had."

What goes on behind that impish grin is unknown to most of us. While he is a dependably charming and intelligent interview, Hefner's not about to bare his soul to another visitor sitting across from his backgammon table. But he is always ready to reexamine the events of his life and career. There is a new documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, directed by his friend Brigitte Berman, who won an Oscar in 1986 for Artie Shaw: Time Is All You've Got. And Taschen has released a five-volume, encyclopedic history of the man and the magazine, from his baby pictures and earliest cartoons to Playboy's 25th anniversary, at the end of the '70s.

He looks and sounds exceptionally fit for a man of 84, but Hefner is quick to acknowledge that he no longer cuts quite the same image he did during Playboy's rise. "Of course not. The image now is the image as it really is," he says. "But I think one of the messages of my life is that age is just a number, and you can define your life in a lot of different ways. What my life has been all about is that there is more than one way to do it, more than one moral way, and a lot of the traditional ways are suspect.

"Retirement is the first step to the grave if you're doing what you enjoy. My work is a pleasure."

Arrayed behind him are framed pictures of his children, his mother, the second wife, and a new one of Hef with Crystal. There is a model of his Big Bunny jet, his stretch DC-9 painted tuxedo black, which he sold back in 1976, and a life-size porcelain bust of Barbi Benton, his girlfriend from the good times of the late '60s and early '70s.

The 30-room Playboy Mansion is a home as Hollywood-famous as Pickfair or Neverland, and Hefner's brother Keith predicts that after Hef is gone, the property will become something like Graceland, a shrine. Hefner bought the 6-acre property in 1971 for $1.1 million, with another $14 million in capital improvements in the years since, but none of the recent renovations has altered the flavor and mood of the residence. It looks essentially as it has for decades.

The house is lived in, and an unlikely candidate as a showplace for modern living in Architectural Digest. Nothing here can be found in Dwell. Hef will receive an iPad for his birthday, but a lot of the fixtures and décor date back to the Nixon administration. Hefner is a man who hates change.

Even the paintings by Picasso, Pollock and Dali — long since sold at auction — have been replaced by reproductions and hang exactly where the originals once did. (The original Matisse drawing with a cigarette burn left by John Lennon remains.) His leather footrest in the screening room is well-worn, and the drapes by the dining room fireplace are stained from ash.

It is the same with his life. Nothing changes except the names of his women, and Hefner keeps to a rigid schedule.

"Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays — they all have to be the same as last week's and the weeks before," says Kendra Wilkinson, his former girlfriend and an original cast member from the hit reality series The Girls Next Door. "He has to have the exact drink at the exact time. He has to have his chicken noodle soup at the exact time, and he has to have his movie at a certain time. You can't be late. He's always on a schedule. Always — except for girls."

He also remains deeply involved with the creative and entrepreneurial side of Playboy, on the phone with his editorial director in the magazine's Chicago headquarters. Hefner has his reasons for remaining in Los Angeles, in his big house on Charing Cross Road, atop a hill with his zoo and swimming pool and tennis courts. He spends almost no time in any office other than the one he keeps in the upstairs living quarters. He hates meetings.

Back in the '50s and '60s, there were speedy, all-night Benzedrine binges, enough to keep him going nonstop two or three days at a time. All those hours weren't spent humping bunnies. He was working, bent over text and cartoons and photographs, the makings of Playboy scattered on the floor around him, actually editing, a pencil in one hand, a pipe in the other, sometimes spending his nights alone in his infamous round, rotating, vibrating bed. Which doesn't sound very leisurely at all.

"I still pick the covers, still pick the centerfolds, still pick the cartoons, the party jokes, edit overall pacing of the book and what goes into it," Hefner says. "I'm probably the oldest working editor of a major magazine in history, I imagine.

"About six months ago I started Twittering," he adds, about to repeat his favorite new joke. "I used to be a jitterbug, now I'm a Twitter-bug."

Last year his estranged wife, Kimberly Conrad, threatened to sue over his selling of her house; Hefner later settled "by giving her more money." His three original live-in girlfriends from The Girls Next Door are long gone, and two of their replacements, the Shannon twins, were invited to move elsewhere. With Harris, he is down to a single female companion for the first time since the breakup of his second marriage, in 1998.

Those changes are less traumatic than the existential threats to print media in an era of free online content. Even though Playboy was the first magazine to establish an Internet presence, the publication has suffered from an industrywide fall in circulation. "I thought it was the future," Hefner says of the company's early steps online, but blames "the business end of our business" for ignoring the potential and falling behind. He fully expects to survive.

Leading the magazine for him in Chicago is editorial director Jimmy Jellinek, who came to Playboy after a decade of gigs as editor of the exploding Maxim, FHM, Stuff and Complex, the kinds of next-gen young men's magazines once expected to eclipse Playboy. Jellinek now dismisses each of the surviving lad mags as "really just a pamphlet serving as a marketing vehicle to get Pepsi products advertising."

Jellinek grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and remembers seeing the original Playboy tower above the city as he rolled along Lakeshore Drive. "It was the Playboy building, man. You're talking about one of the world's most resonant brands, you see the name, you see the bunny — it's imbued with a certain sense of values, and you immediately know what it stands for. When you saw the building, you'd get excited. We'd take our pictures out in front of the building. It was something very much part of the fabric of the city."

The editor is now an aggressive, almost defensive advocate for the historic publication, and has no patience for critics who have questioned the viability of a lifestyle magazine for virile men on the prowl when its symbol is a wrinkled man in his 80s.

"I don't see any prevailing wisdom from anybody else in the magazine world," Jellinek says. "All these analysts have never worked on a magazine. ... These guys just sit and throw rocks without any basis for conversation whatsoever."

He meets with Hef on occasional trips to Los Angeles, but "the bulk of our relationship is on the phone and is through memos." They agree on the ongoing direction of the magazine, changing little from its heyday, still drawing attention for the monthly Playboy Interview. (Rocker John Mayer got in as much trouble this year for his racial/sexual wisecracks as Jimmy Carter did while a presidential candidate, with his 1976 admission to "lust" in his heart.) There is high-end fiction, pop culture and investigative journalism in the classic mode, beneath the notable bylines of Martin Amis, Bill Zehme, Stephen King, Paul Theroux, John Waters and Roger Ebert, even if the general magazine audience has forgotten it's still there amid the nude women.

"Success and popularity by their nature are like a bell-shaped curve. You have the high point and then there's an aging process, etc. The remarkable thing in terms of Playboy — certainly in terms of my own personal life — is how this thing has gone on and on," Hef says. "We sell fewer magazines in the old-fashioned way than we did in the '70s and '80s, but we reach a larger audience now on a global level than any other time in history. ... I must be doing something right."

Hefner does not deny the economic problems facing his magazine. "That's real. We live in the real world. But it's more interesting and newsworthy when it's related to Playboy. We're doing better than some, and not as well as others."

It is the running theme of recent news coverage of the Playboy empire, with serious implications for Hefner's future. After two decades as CEO, his daughter, Christie Hefner, stepped down, and new corporate leadership began to make changes, cutting costs through layoffs and consolidation. "It wasn't just business as usual," Hefner says now of the move. "We had to do some dramatic things."

More alarming was discussion of a sale, and the possibility of real changes in Hef's rigid schedule, with outsiders suggesting the Playboy Mansion be sold, his legacy dismantled, as if the central figure throughout Playboy's history were as interchangeable as the CEO of General Mills.

Then came Hefner's surprise July 12 announcement of his interest in taking Playboy Enterprises private, offering to buy out minority shareholders for $5.50 a share (for a total of $123 million), which represents a 30 percent leap over the stock's most recent closing price. Within days, a lawsuit was filed in Delaware State Court against Hefner and members of Playboy's board of directors by a group of irritated investors, who had watched with horror as stock value plummeted. The share price was at $15 as recently as 2006.

In the current climate of fading media giants, Hef's offer might seem like a way out of further losses for long-suffering investors, but the suit calls the plan "the product of a flawed process designed to sell ... on terms detrimental" to stockholders. And when a much-rumored sale to clothing corporation Iconix was derailed last year over unresolved questions about Hef's continued role, stockholder David Brown filed another suit in Los Angeles, accusing the founder of maneuvering to preserve his lifestyle at all costs.

"He controls 70 percent of the vote of the company, so the fate of the company is really in Hef's hands and nobody else's," says David Bank, global media and research analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

The most brutal assessment came from analyst David Miller of the investment bank Caris & Company, whose most recent report on Playboy Enterprises Inc. predicted good times for stockholders once the old man is gone. "We believe Mr. Hefner's death could result in a material stock-price uptick on the notion the mansion could eventually be sold, which would leave the company net-debt-free," Miller wrote.

There goes Graceland.

Hef is of the old school, more Mad Men than Mad Money, comparable to George Steinbrenner and other outsize corporate owners whose cults of personality are not incidental to the high profile of their companies. So says Todd Harrison, CEO of Minyanville Media and a former investment banker. "There comes a point where you have to hand the baton to the next generation, but there's a bit of a dichotomy. He's built this franchise and it's his life's work and he should be able to live out the rest of his years in his home."

Hef may also be on to something, ignoring the media gloom and hand-wringing, maybe sensing untapped value in Playboy, the brand. The bunny remains one of the most recognizable logos on the planet. It is on women's underwear and energy drinks, on pillowcases and shot glasses, on T-shirts, handbags, cigars and lingerie. There is a Playboy maid's costume for your little terrier ($22), a bobble head of young Hef circa 1953 ($18) and bunny-logo hardware for your tongue and navel piercings (at Sears for $18). You can run to a local 7-Eleven for a bottled shot of Playboy Passion Enhancer to get your lady friend back in the mood — for a mere $2.99. All exist for good reason, earning Playboy Enterprises $37 million in licensing revenue alone last year.

Even if all print media, including the centerfolds of Playboy, were to disappear, there is reason to believe the bunny brand would survive, with or without Hefner's iconic presence. "He's important to the brand," says Bank, "but I think it outlives him."

Since announcing his intentions to the board, Hefner has stepped back from his usual heavy interview schedule. On the phone just days ahead of his offer this month, Hefner revealed nothing of his plans but sounded upbeat about the company that began at his kitchen table in 1953: "Things are looking up significantly."

*

A young woman steps discreetly from a backroom, leaving behind the throw pillows and mirrored walls, the convenient box of tissues and the vintage dimmer switch on the wall. She walks unsteadily in a yellow dress, rust-colored dreadlocks bunched on her head. She makes it past the pool table and across the games room to a man in plaid shorts trying his luck at a Playboy pinball machine. "How are you doing?" he asks her.

"Great," she replies, with a flushed, crooked grin. "I just got laid!"

They arrive by the busload and stretch limo, rolling up the driveway past the "Playmates at Play" traffic sign, the men in black suits or resort casual, the women in bras or pasties, stepping out onto the hilltop Shangri-la right beneath Hefner's bedroom window. Girls pose for quick snapshots by the front door and the fountain they've seen on TV before they're sent around to the party in the mansion backyard, with the tents and buffet, the go-go dancers and DJs. It's like a nightclub back there.

Hef is in a cabana with Crystal and some girls, as a huge crowd of guests gathers in front of him, raising cameras and cell phones and just staring at the great man, the center of attention. But this isn't one of his parties. He throws fewer events than he used to but allows outsiders to take over the property for a night, bringing their own guest list and female eye candy, tonight charging $1,000 a ticket or $10,000 a cabana, with a portion going to charity.

This night is the annual Kandyland event, another party hosted by the Karma Foundation, an upscale networking and nightlife business. Close to $50,000 will be raised here for Star Education, an environmental program for children, according to Karma President Marvin Epstein. Parties at the mansion are a hot ticket, fueled by stories of painted ladies and wet, naked encounters in the grotto. Young women are invited to submit photos and apply for free admission, described on the Karma casting site as an "opportunity for beautiful and classy people to attend the most sensational and breathtaking" of events. And the event, not hero worship, is the point for many.

"We don't come for Hefner, we come to party," says Dayna DeVorre, 24, wearing a bikini made from strings of hard candy.

Guests enter through a glowing portal, greeted by tiny actors dressed up as green-haired Oompa Loompas from Willy Wonky and the Chocolate Factory. Seven guests dressed as cowboys in matching black twirl a woman in bunny ears on the driveway, and she falls partly out of her bikini top.

Back in the games room, Kally Wyatt, 18, sits at the upright piano playing "Moonlight Sonata" and some "retarded" Justin Bieber, along with her own music. Her cheeks are pierced and she is wearing black fishnets. Next to her is friend Laci Kay Somers, an aspiring model in a pink bikini top who is considering trying out for Playboy. "I want to," says Somers, "but I can't tell if I really want to."

Both Somers and Wyatt have been running into people having sex all night, out on the grounds and in one of the mirrored cubbies of the games room. "Five minutes ago, I saw them!" says Somers, 18. "They were very loud. I've seen, like, 5 million people having sex so far tonight."

The proximity to Hef and his sexual playground has some of the guests crossing boundaries they might not elsewhere. "This guy, like, grabbed my butt hole! I've never been touched like that at a club," says Wyatt. "He stuck his hand in me and I pushed him. They think they can do whatever they want, just cuz they're here. They're crazy."

Hef's own sex life has been the subject of great interest since the debut of Playboy, his healthy complexion owing much to the baby oil he's slathered over himself and a thousand girlfriends over the decades. That interest only grew after he reemerged as a single man at the end of the '90s, making the rounds with seven blond live-in girlfriends.

"Complicated, yes," he recalls of the arrangement, "though not as complicated sometimes as one wife."

It is a lifestyle perfected decades ago, back at the old Playboy Mansion in Chicago, with the fireman's pole, the indoor swimming pool. Age does factor into this. After a decade or more of testing in his second-floor boudoir with a long line of volunteers, Viagra remains Hefner's rocket fuel of choice, a brand he can trust.

When Kendra Wilkinson first arrived for a party at the mansion, she was 18, and Hefner immediately asked her to move in as one of his girlfriends, as she recounts in her just-released book, Sliding Into Home. She went back home to San Diego instead. Hef kept calling.

This is how it's done: "I called her, and said: 'This may be a little presumptuous. This summer, unless you're otherwise involved in a serious relationship, I thought you might like to spend the summer here as my girlfriend,' " Hefner says today. "I only learned more recently, when she received the call, she was sitting there in bed with her then-current boyfriend. Obviously, it wasn't a very serious relationship because she was here in short order."

By the time she was 20, The Girls Next Door had made cable-TV stars of Wilkinson as well as co-stars Bridget Marquardt and Hef's No. 1, Holly Madison. The questions they got from journalists and the curious were often the same, focused on age and sex, and Wilkinson includes in her book moderately graphic scenes of weekly group-sex sessions with Hef. She participated but recalls those nights as a crowd of girls taking turns for a joyless 60-second hop on pop, not romance. She now calls him her "mentor," and one of her closest friends, and was worried about his reaction to the book. Wilkinson says she got an e-mail from Hefner after the book came out, thanking her: "You wrote a really great book."

Wilkinson is unimpressed with young men who openly crave his life, who want to emulate the man. "If they really knew the gentleman, if they really knew the type of man Hugh Hefner really is — the gentleman and the great guy — do they really want to be Hugh Hefner? Really? Come on."

*

Another side of Hugh M. Hefner is the focus of Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, which documents the publisher's role during the turbulent postwar period. (For a review, see Film openings.) In it, director Berman makes that case for Hef as crucial figure and spokesman for not only the sexual revolution but civil rights and human rights. That was not the prevailing wisdom of the time.

During a vintage television interview, future 60 Minutes icon Mike Wallace drilled into Hefner and Playboy: "I think you'll agree that it's a sniggering kind of sex. It's a lascivious kind of sex. It's certainly not a healthy approach to sex, but you suggest that it is."

Gloria Steinem has ridiculed Playboy's revolution as being about "Making more women sexually available to men," and refused three times to be interviewed for the documentary, but feminist Susan Brownmiller appears in the film, in footage from her withering 1970 debate with Hef on Dick Cavett's show and in a new interview. Brownmiller's views on the man are unchanged.

"She still thinks he's the devil," says Berman. "I don't agree with her, but I respect her opinion. She fought for that. Indirectly, I was also helped and affected by that whole feminist movement. ... It still is a man's world. Getting less so."

Playboy began during a time of social and cultural upheaval, and Hefner chose to embrace change. He hired Dalton Trumbo to write for the magazine during the blacklist era, defended the confrontational work of comic Lenny Bruce and allowed African-American Dick Gregory onstage in front of a visiting white, Southern audience at his Chicago Playboy Club. The publisher debated loosening sexual values with William F. Buckley on public television, hosted Martin Luther King Jr. at the mansion in Chicago and published the last essay King wrote before his death.

There were consequences. Hefner was arrested in Chicago after printing a 1963 pictorial on Jayne Mansfield. "The real reason behind the arrest," Hefner says now, "was because I had spoken out in an editorial in the magazine protesting Chicago's too-friendly connection to the Catholic Church, and the fact that they had arrested Lenny Bruce. When I objected to that, they came and arrested me."

Berman first met Hefner years ago as a result of her films on jazz greats, including his favorite, Bix Beiderbecke. For the new film, she spent many nights working deep into the early morning in the mansion's third-floor scrapbooking room, reading the history Hefner has kept since adolescence, filled with drawings, snapshots and every article written about him, good or bad. Many times, Hefner was up there too, working on another scrapbook of memories, adding another page to his recorded history.

Berman's most recent visit included a screening of Chinatown, accompanied by an introduction read by Hefner and a lengthy discussion afterward. He is a movie fanatic, hosting screenings at the Mansion three times a week. He produced some feature films in the 1970s but is now more fan than player, donating millions to the USC and UCLA film departments, and he's twice written checks to preserve the Hollywood sign.

There have been discussions of a feature film based on his life going back to the '50s. A movie is in the works, with Robert Downey Jr. expressing interest, and a screenplay to be written by Diablo Cody. "It looks like it's going to happen," Hefner says hopefully. "Brian Grazer has the project, and I said to him not too long ago, 'I don't want this to he a posthumous tribute here.' "

Hefner has his plans for eternity already mapped out, entombed right beside Marilyn Monroe. He owes much to Norma Jean. Her prefame nudes in the first issue of Playboy turned the magazine into an immediate sensation, sending the young, untested publisher on his momentous journey toward becoming Hef. They were born within months of each other in 1926, but he never met Monroe, and only spoke with her once, on the phone in the weeks before her death. He wanted her to appear again on the cover. When Hefner discovered the slot to her left was available at Pierce Brothers Westwood Memorial Park, he reserved the crypt. "It seemed to be a natural," Hefner says.

He has other friends buried on the grounds there: among them, Mel Torme, Buddy Rich and Dorothy Stratten, the 1980 Playmate of the Year, murdered by her husband. Hefner's mother lived to 101, but his father died of a stroke at 80, so the future remains uncertain, and the end is inevitable, though he likes to quote the key lyric to Sinatra's "Young at Heart": "If you should survive to 105/Look at all you'll derive from being alive."

Some things at Playboy are eternal. At the magazine's West Coast offices in Santa Monica, another naked lady is having her picture taken. She is Rachel Summer, a regular over at the Mansion, and her Playmate test is being photographed in Studio A by Arny Freytag, a 34-year veteran at the magazine, with more centerfolds shot than anyone. He will shoot at least 500 pictures of Summer today.

Freytag is working with three assistants, including a female intern, on a simple set of soft pinks and white. Summer stands in a bathrobe, but her nude image from earlier is still on the digital monitor. In it she is kneeling on a white-leather chair, facing the lens with a warm, inviting expression, wearing nothing but a pair of pink socks.

"Most girls don't walk in with a body like that," Freytag says, looking at the screen. "That's pretty rare. That's a pretty awesome body." This is a man who loves his work.

The pinups of Freytag and photographer Stephen Wayda have been at the magazine's visual core these last few decades, hardly shifting with contemporary trends seen in the evolving starlet images in Esquire and GQ — just as Hef likes it.

"I can make any girl look really good," Freytag says. "I believe there is one angle on every face that will look fantastic, and I will go until I find it."

The old man doesn't micromanage the making of these pictures, but once the day's test is done, Summer's session will go directly to Hef. The publisher rarely makes an appearance at Playboy Studios West, but his presence is felt, with stylish framed photographs of the young Playboy founder in the '50s and '60s lining the hallways. And his surprising move to retake full ownership of Playboy is fresh news.

"I hope he gets it," says Freytag. "It's impressive that he's still interested in keeping it going his way at this stage of his life."

If Hefner prevails, the bunny brand may spread into new venues, but content at the magazine will still unfold the old-fashioned way — Hef's way, just as it always has.

L.A. Weekly, July 29, 2010.

Photograph by Steve Appleford

3rd Degree: Harvey Pekar

2010-07-17T02:12:00.000-07:00

On the plague of superhero comics, fighting, and the let-down of being a film character
Harvey Pekar is a comic hero, the hard-luck central character of his ongoing autobiographical American Splendor, an illustrated chronicle of his life so far. He doesn’t draw, but he delivers his words and stick-figure storyboards to a wide range of comic artists – from R. Crumb to Tony Millionaire – who help make sense of the ordinary struggles of an ordinary guy in Cleveland, Ohio. Crumb himself once described the result as “so staggeringly mundane, it verges on the exotic!” But it has touched a nerve for three decades. And it has brought Pekar fame and no fortune.

Not much changed even after his life story was turned into 2003’s acclaimed film version of American Splendor. But, now that he’s retired from his job as a civil-service file clerk, he keeps even busier as a writer. He has a wife and kid to support, he keeps saying. Pekar has just released The Quitter, which recounts the internal struggles of his young adulthood – his first book for the Vertigo wing of DC Comics (which will also publish the next volume of Splendor). He recently contributed a story to author Michael Chabon’s comic book The Escapist, and he continues to write about music and politics for his hometown weekly, The Free Times. The personal stories keep rolling on, feeding his comics pages and bad attitude.

“You gotta go through shit, man,” Pekar says. “You gotta go through it all your life. There’s no end to it.”

–Steve Appleford

CityBeat: I noticed you blogged for a while in 2003.
Harvey Pekar: You want to know why I’m not blogging anymore? Because they were paying me to blog. And I hate computers and stuff like that. They drive me nuts. My kid would get me on the thing, and then I would type out some type of a blog, then she would send it in for me. But when the money stopped coming in, I didn’t keep it up.

Do you think anyone’s life can be made interesting to a reader?
Yeah, virtually anyone’s life. If they live long enough.

How did The Quitter come about?
The guy who illustrated it, Dean Haspiel, hooked me up with the people who made the American Splendor movie. I asked him what I could do in return, and he said he would like to illustrate a long work of mine. He had connections at DC Comics, and they were interested, and they wanted me to do a graphic novel. I’ve been covering my life pretty closely since I started doing autobiographical comic books in 1972. But I hadn’t been doing a lot of stuff about my life prior to that. I decided I would do a narrative about my life, mainly from when I was a little kid to when I was in my 20s. Obviously, for everybody those are pretty important years.

It surprised me how tough a guy you were as a kid.
I was brought up in neighborhoods where the toughest guy was the guy who got the most respect. And I was having to wade through armies of guys to get back home from school every day. It turns out that, as I grew up, I found that I wasn’t a bad athlete and I was real strong for my size. When I had to fight, I just got into it, because I got prestige from it. I’m not into hurting people; I’m not a sadist or anything. But I just like to win; I wanted to get praise for something. Anything.

Did you imagine a time when you and Crumb and the alternative side to comics would become so well known?
I thought it would be better known. I’m not exactly a household word yet. It took that movie to get some people to know me. I thought that alternative comics – once they got going back in the ’60s, there was going to be a big change in comics. Now that people saw you could do anything in comics, I thought comics were going to be transformed. I saw Crumb’s work, and it occurred to me that there’s no limit in what you can do in comics.

It took a while, as it turns out.
It’s happening way too slow. I’m pretty disappointed that at this point superheroes are still the most popular form of comic books. Regardless of my opinion of superhero comics, no subgenre should dominate a medium, like they dominate comics. That’s just ridiculous.

It got caught in a rut that it couldn’t get out of.
I thought everybody would realize that you could do this stuff with comics, and there would be all these good writers and illustrators that would just gravitate to comics. They’d say, “Wow, here’s a new area for us to work in,” you know. I was tickled pink when I realized, “My God, here I have a chance to be an innovator.” Like I discovered a field of gold or something.

When did you realize that it wasn’t the field of gold?
Well, it was and it wasn’t. I took a great deal of satisfaction from just writing the things that I did. And that made me feel really good. The thing that bothers me now is that it’s still not very lucrative, at least the kind of stuff that I do. And now I depend on the income that I get from comics.

How did you feel about being known as a movie character?
I’d rather they knew about my books. A lot of people have a lot of notions about me because of that movie that aren’t really true. That lovable-curmudgeon stuff is really starting to choke me. For a while, you couldn’t read my name without “curmudgeon” preceding it. They’re sort of laying off that a little bit now -- they’re switching over to “dyspeptic.”

Is that a step up?
I don’t know.

But were you generally happy with the movie?
Yeah, sure, I thought it was an excellent movie.

And you went to the Oscars?
I went to the Oscars. I went along, and tried to help promote the thing. It’s not my favorite thing to do. The Oscars were just a big drag. Who could possibly enjoy that? I mean, God!

When you were doing David Letterman’s show in the ’80s, you once came out to criticize General Electric on camera. That was a political act.
I’m real interested in politics, but I’m not an activist usually. That came about as a result of my realizing that I had nothing to lose by doing anything I wanted to do on the Letterman show. I wasn’t getting much money, my books weren’t selling. It was fine with me to try and make jokes with Letterman, try and create some humor on the show, but I didn’t particularly like being stereotyped as the parody of the rust-belt worker.

What are your feelings about politics right now?
I’m very disturbed that so many people are supporting George Bush that are being hurt by him. Like they’re masochists or something. They don’t benefit. They give rich people tax breaks, and poor people still love him. He’s just done everything wrong, and still he benefits. He obviously lied about Iraq, about the rationale for going in there, and they don’t care.

People are starting to care now.
I hope they do. And then the big thing to me is, we’ve got all this global warming – we’ve got all these serious problems. Even if we start with the best of intentions and spend a whole lot of money, we’re probably going to be in for a whole hell of a lot of trouble as a result of all that shit in the atmosphere. But it’s like Bush doesn’t even recognize it exists. I mean, how fucking stupid can you get?

Los Angeles CityBeat, November 24, 2005.

Illustration by Jordan Crane.

Dreams of Life and Death Looking Back With Patti Smith

2010-02-18T22:41:00.000-08:00

Patti Smith steps onstage with a shy, joyous grin, as if still surprised by the applause. At the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater to perform a tribute to her friend, the late folk archivist, filmmaker and painter Harry Smith, she rests her coffee cup on a stool and reads passages from Just Kids, her newly released memoir of her years as friend, lover and confidante to the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989 of complications from AIDS. The three of them had once lived in New York's Chelsea Hotel — "a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe" — and when Harry first met young Patti and Robert, he'd asked them, "Who are you? Are you twins?"

Harry was of a tradition to which Patti and Robert aspired, scraping by in the days before the mass distribution of credit cards, making art with few resources and no rewards. "If we didn't have money, we just didn't eat. That's when men were men," Smith says, playfully making a fist. Bohemia wasn't a romantic notion but stark reality, even for the likes of Harry Smith, a beloved resource of Americana, whose 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music album was a crucial influence on Dylan's generation. He died at the Chelsea in 1991. "I don't know if Harry died in obscurity," Smith says, "but he certainly lived it."

She skips through the book, reading of a lobster dinner at Max's Kansas City with Sam Shepard, already a recognized playwright, though then known to Patti only as a hillbilly drummer named Slim Shadow. (After Smith discovered the truth, Shepard drawled, "Eat your ice cream, Patti Lee.")

Smith recounts her first meeting with poet Allen Ginsberg, who immediately expressed great interest, taking her out for a sandwich but then suddenly asking in alarm: "Are you a girl?"

The theater is packed, with an overflow crowd watching from the courtyard on video screens. Smith picks up an acoustic guitar and begins strumming the simple, disarming chords of "Grateful," shifting from one foot to the other as she sings in a voice of gentle force. "Harry and Robert were the first people who had me sing to them," she says with a smile, patches of gray in her long, auburn hair. "Harry would say something that would embarrass me then, but now I like it: 'You are quite the chanteuse.' "

Smith dedicates a song to the late J.D. Salinger, another to Howard Zinn, more losses to mark and signify. And she performs one last song for Harry Smith, "My Blakean Year," (from her 2004 LP, Trampin'). It erupts from her as a howl, raging and wise: "So throw off your stupid cloak, embrace all that you fear/For joy shall conquer all despair, in my Blakean year."

*

Smith and Mapplethorpe were barely 20 when they met, a couple of androgynous hippies newly arrived in New York City to live among the bohos and Beats, the Factory divas and "extravagant bums" swirling around the boroughs, the Bowery and the Chelsea. He introduced himself as Bob, but she preferred to call him Robert. They spent their first night together paging hungrily through books of art. Smith was a South Jersey girl turned on by Rimbaud and rock & roll, driven to write and sketch each day, laying a foundation for her future as a poet and rocker. Mapplethorpe had been a Long Island altar boy and was naturally gifted with a pen and brush, a classicist who would become the most notorious photographer of his generation. They inherited a lineage of art and confrontation, with Smith discovering her voice and confidence under the influence of Beat poets Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. For Mapplethorpe, the model initially was Warhol, and he was determined to be noticed.

"I always expected to be a starving, suffering artist who would die young and hopefully leave good things behind. But Robert didn't share that romantic notion," says Smith, now 63. "He really wanted us to do well in our lifetime. The irony of Robert only living until he was 42 is that I was the sickly one. I had gone through tuberculosis, I had gone through various childhood diseases. I was considered the fragile one of the two of us. I wound up the survivor."

Just Kids isn't written in the electrified lingo of Smith's early, prefame poetry or her essays for the likes of Creem and Rolling Stone. It's a gentler tale, direct and unguarded, thoughtful and deeply emotional, with subtler turns of language. It arrives years behind schedule, delayed simply because she took the project so seriously as a work of art, not a memoir of celebrity nostalgia. Just Kids reveals the process of becoming an artist, and bearing witness to the flowering and internal conflicts of her beloved Robert.

"I was a bad girl trying to be good and ... he was a good boy trying to be bad," Smith writes of their relationship. But already, she recalls, "He was an artist and he knew it."

As young, starving artists in Brooklyn, they often chose between buying food and art supplies, sometimes buying the food and shoplifting the ink and brushes (inspired by tales of Lee Krasner doing the same for Jackson Pollock). She worked in bookstores, he sometimes hustled on 42nd Street. They lived and created together, and by 1969 had moved into a tiny room at the Chelsea. He was so nervous about meeting Smith's parents the first time in South Jersey, he dropped acid. They "noticed nothing unusual except his continuous smile," she remembered later. He told his strict Catholic parents they had eloped to Aruba and got married.

The couple disagreed about Warhol: Mapplethorpe idolized him; Smith did not. "His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid," she writes. But they understood and encouraged one another. It was Smith who first suggested that Mapplethorpe pick up a camera. He was given a Polaroid instant camera, and he responded to the immediacy of the process, progressing to the square formality of a Hasselblad. It was an unexpected turn.

"I actually thought it was a phase," Smith says now. "I thought he would pass through that phase and get back to installations and collages and drawings, but he became completely devoted to it. He was smitten with the elasticity of photography, how in a photograph he could say so much."

He photographed Smith constantly, and many of the pictures from that era remain some of his most lasting, striking images: Patti as a boho Mary Magdalene, or cool and coiled by a radiator in a rare nude. Mapplethorpe's cover photograph for her 1975 debut album, Horses, was a landmark for both of them, drawing as much attention as the revolutionary rock music inside. The photo session unfolded in the apartment of Sam Wagstaff, by then Mapplethorpe's patron and lover, but the cosmic connection that day remained between photographer and subject, an intimacy reflected in the startling part-poet, part-Sinatra figure in the frame. He was done shooting after a dozen pictures.

"Then in the mid-'70s he was given entrance to the sadomasochist community, which I knew nothing about," Smith says. "They trusted him in this community, and he had it in mind to do something that no one had ever done. Which was to raise certain areas of human consent into art. That was his mission, to take the very difficult pictures with the same classic view as he would taking flowers or a portrait."

Just Kids is also Smith's antidote to the thousands of pages written on the photographer since his death, in many cases depicting him in ways Smith says she does not recognize. She publicly condemned the portrait painted by 1995's authorized Mapplethorpe: A Biography, written by Patricia Morrisroe, named his official biographer in the weeks before his death. That book cast Mapplethorpe as a dark and perverse figure, more a cruel hustler and self-promoter than any kind of artistic visionary. "... if he had demonstrated any talent as a painter," Morrisroe wrote in one typical aside, "he probably never would have picked up a camera."

Smith remembers things differently.

"Robert and I were not avant-garde–type people," she says. "Both of us studied art in a classical, even self-taught way. We looked at art books for hours on end: William Blake, Michelangelo, surrealism ... I've always studied classical literature, classical music. We were modern kids, thrown into a modern era, but I was quite a romantic and Robert had a real sense of the importance of history. To be a great artist, I believe, is to understand the importance of history and to assimilate it but then do something new."

One night, Smith went to see the Doors perform at Fillmore East, where Mapplethorpe worked briefly as an usher. She found herself observing the singer analytically, recognizing something in the Lizard King prowling the stage. "I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that," she writes. "I felt both kinship and contempt for him."

*

The opening and closing chapters of Just Kids recall the impact and heartbreak of Mapplethorpe's death, in New York, years after Smith moved to Detroit for marriage and family with Fred "Sonic" Smith, onetime protopunk guitarist for MC5. Near the end, Mapplethorpe regretted that he and Smith never had children. She promised to one day tell their story, clinging to her memories and a lock of his hair, still fueled by the self-confidence he helped her discover.

In the 1970s, Smith became the "punk priestess" who helped to reinvent rock as a setting for bold, literary revolt. And death was a recurring theme. Horses acknowledged and celebrated the passing of Morrison, Hendrix and the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. In the album's opening moments, she famously declares, "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," words she wrote at age 20. She embraces life and death in equal measure. On the epic title song, she roars with intensity and release: "Life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain/And I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud/And go Johnny go, and do the watusi!"

Even the album she called Dream of Life, recorded at a time of contentment in Smith's life, includes "Where Duty Calls," a chilling meditation on the killing of 220 U.S. Marines in Lebanon by a suicide bomber in 1983.

Smith reemerged in 1996 with the jaggedly mournful Gone Again, in the aftermath of her husband's fatal heart attack and the deaths of her brother, Todd, her keyboardist, Richard Sohl, and Mapplethorpe. There was also sadness at the suicide of Kurt Cobain, whom she'd never met but recognized as a kindred, troubled soul. The music and delivery on Gone Again were weighted with experience and implication that even her best '70s work didn't carry. She now calls the album "the most painful record I ever did.

“The pain of singing those songs," she says, "I wouldn't want to have to go through that again."

Yet the tributes to fallen friends and heroes have only continued, as Ginsberg, Burroughs and other comrades fell in the '90s. Mapplethorpe was rarely far from her mind. In 1996, Smith published The Coral Sea, a collection of poetry inspired by his life and passing, mingled with his photographs. A decade later, that work was translated into a live improvisational reading set to brooding, shimmering waves of sound from Kevin Shields, leader and guitarist of My Bloody Valentine. The effect was something like her first recital with Lenny Kaye at St. Mark's Church in 1971. On the new recording, Smith performs this memento mori to the scraping reverberations of guitar strings and organ: "He was destined to be ill, quite ill ... art, art, not nature moved him ... His delicate eyes saw with clarity what others did not."

*

At KCET studios in Hollywood, Smith sits at the very edge of a plaid couch in a room left over from the silent era, her round, wire-rim glasses sitting next to a bowl of fruit. Her jeans are tucked into purple socks and boots as she awaits her moment with Tavis Smiley.

"I write every day," Smith says. "I wrote this morning. I've written four or five books that aren't published. But I also had a lot of little diaries at the Chelsea Hotel, which would chart everything we did every day. Simple things, like, 'Cut Robert's hair like a rockabilly star,' 'Met Janis Joplin,' 'Went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw the de Kooning.' These notations were like stepping stones."

Wyclef Jean is talking with Smiley on a TV mounted on the wall. Smith reluctantly submits to a brief session with the makeup artist and soon enters the studio, where Smiley awaits, muscles bulging beneath his suit and tie. "You chose me," she tells him with a smile, noting the few interviews she has granted, "but I chose you." The makeup lady takes another look, and Smith jokes, "Maybe I'll find a husband." And as the countdown to taping begins, she smiles at the host. "Nice shoes."

Behind Smith and Smiley is a huge blowup of the downtown L.A. skyline, and a large boom camera sways across the floor in front of them as she tells of her awakening as an artist, how she coped when Mapplethorpe told her he was gay, and the love she still feels for him: "We sat and we cried with each other many, many, many times. ... But the fact is, we had much to save, much more than a physical relationship."

When the TV interview ends 30 minutes later, Smith gives the host a hug. "She speaks in prose," Smiley tells his producers, nodding his head with an amazed laugh.

Smith has been a poet and an essayist for decades, publishing small chapbooks early on. Her magazine work celebrated the Stones and Dylan, or the bop jazz men and the great singers she heard while growing up. In that, she was an early-'70s contemporary of literary rock crits Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs. (She was familiar enough in that circle that when Tosches was assigned an interview for Creem years later, she suggested that he already knew her well enough to just make it up. And he did.)

"Criticism is kind of a funny word, because I never wrote anything bad," she says now. "I only wrote about things that I liked. I thought that a critic was there to open people's eyes, not criticize. I only wrote about things I wanted to share with people. It could be Clifton Chenier or Lotte Lenya or Albert Ayler. I truthfully wrote on the side to make money to eat. You'd make $10. I had a really nice piece in Rolling Stone, I got $20 for that. Twenty dollars back in 1971 was real money." Rent at the Chelsea was $65 a week.

*

Barely a year after his death, Mapplethorpe became a rallying point for opposite ends of the culture war, a dividing line between free expression and the conservative campaign to abolish federal funding for the arts. His most controversial pictures were already years old by then but were quickly caught up in the same moment of moral outrage that surrounded Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and the family pictures of Sally Mann, and led to the FBI raid on Jock Sturges in 1990.

Throughout his short career, Mapplethorpe explored a small but diverse variety of subjects, with graceful, sensuous images of flowers, sculpture and nudes, with evocative portraits of himself and others. In 1990, all that was eclipsed by his most difficult work, the pictures of rough sex, and of abused and bloodied genitalia. Not all of it was unprecedented. His Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, from 1979, had a leather-clad male couple in a relaxed living room setting, one of them in chains, not unlike a classic Diane Arbus portrait of the unseen. There were also pictures of very young children au naturel, which critics interpreted as grimly as possible. A scheduled exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., was abruptly canceled, which didn't stop U.S. Senator Jesse Helms from tearing up the show catalog on the Senate floor. The same exhibit was shut down by police in Cincinnati.

"I think the controversy would have deeply disturbed Robert on one end, especially the idea that he was taking forbidden pictures of children," Smith says. "I remember when he took those pictures. He said, 'Look at this picture. Isn't it so cute?' And I said, 'Oh, Robert, that's so sweet.' We just looked at them as really cute pictures of kids. And having looked at so many pictures of the Victorian photographers and their pictures of children, to me they expressed Robert's love of children. That kind of sensibility never occurred to either one of us. It's the only thing that I'm happy he was spared."

Her own relationship with photography continued. Smith became a compelling subject and muse to Annie Leibovitz and others. Magazine photographer Steven Sebring spent 11 years shooting documentary footage of Smith for his film Dream of Life, released to acclaim in 2008. Smith has also devoted creative energy to her series of ghostly Polaroids, which she began soon after her husband's death.

"I couldn't do anything else. I really couldn't write. I used whatever energy I had to take care of my kids," she says. "So these photographs are really to give me a sense of self-worth. Then, like Robert, I got hooked on it. And I started taking Polaroids seriously at the end of the '90s, and devoted time to them, and then developing them as silver prints and then platinum. It's become an important part of what I do."

She asked the monumentally influential photographer and Beat comrade Robert Frank to create the music video for her "Summer Cannibals." At the shoot, Smith dared to show him the Polaroids she had been making. "I see what you're doing," he told her. She liked that.

Smith is now well into the recording of a new album with her band, with guest appearances by Tom Verlaine, Flea and her two grown children, pianist Jesse Smith and guitarist Jackson Smith. But the wide attention Just Kids has already received has been encouraging. Other books are likely, exploring other facets and periods of her life and work.

"I was hoping for Robert's sake that people would like it," Smith says. "I thought I could probably count on a certain hard-core audience, but it seems like it has spread. Robert would like that. He always wanted me to be successful. If the book does really well, it will be in Robert's name. So it's perfect that it's probably the biggest response I've had for something in some years. It figures Robert would be behind it."

L.A. Weekly, Feb. 18, 2010

PHOTO COURTESY OF PATTI SMITH ARCHIVE
Patti and Robert on the Coney Island boardwalk, circa 1969

Photographer: Julius Shulman 1910 - 2009

2009-12-19T05:04:00.000-08:00

Function and Imagination at Human Scale

By Steve Appleford

Photographer Julius Shulman lived high up in the hills of Laurel Canyon, where visitors to his landmark 1947 steel-frame modernist house would usually find chocolates and a big jar of peanuts amid the organized clutter of his office. That’s how Shulman, who died in his sleep July 15 at age 98, liked his architecture: lived in, with function and imagination rendered at human scale.

His pictures were, of course, idealized images of modern homes and other buildings, but the human figure often played a crucial role, perhaps most spectacularly in the startling elegance of his “Case Study #22.” In that 1960 photograph, two young women sit comfortably in the corner living room of a glass-walled Pierre Koenig home as it extends out over the lights of nighttime Los Angeles, interior and exterior in vibrant harmony. It was powerful evidence of a rich culture in Los Angeles — though too many of his pictures have outlived the original structures.

Shulman was an enthusiastic champion of other L.A. photographers and was still shooting during his final years with the help of collaborator Juergen Nogai. He’d traveled the world, but never felt the need to relocate to Manhattan or any other city bursting with architecture. He found his greatest subject right here.

LA Weekly, July 29, 2009

He Was Wrong

2009-12-17T04:39:00.000-08:00

Strange Rumblings from the Gonzo Afterlife … Ralph Steadman Ink Stains and Battle Scars … Flashback to a Final Campaign … The Suicide Solution … New Books and Old Photographs … One More Fling in Hollywoodland … An Outlaw’s Farewell, A Son’s Revenge

By Steve Appleford

"Would you like a drink?” It is still an hour before noon, but the man is thirsty and British and far from home, with a mountain of books still to sign and a speech to make about his old friend and tormentor, author Hunter S. Thompson, dead now for nearly two years. It will be fun tonight, another celebration at another bookstore, greeting the fans of gonzo journalism at one more stop on the road. But his friend is gone now to the afterlife, a “road man for the Lords of Karma,” as Thompson liked to say in his final years. Game over. So Ralph Steadman orders us a couple of beers. Mrs. Steadman will have a Manhattan.

This is a peaceful moment on the patio of the Sunset Marquis Hotel, but Steadman looks weary. His hair is completely white. And his left eye is swollen and red from this week’s trip to Los Angeles, a blazing, ghastly eyeball that could have come from one of his own violent drawings. Around his neck hangs a clay talisman shaped like a primitive ceremonial head, a gift from Thompson: “Wear this, Ralph. It will ward off evil spirits.”

Steadman does an excellent impression of his old friend and slips into it easily, his voice deepening and flattening into a serious monotone of authority, like a newsman teetering over the edge: “Ah, Ralph, you filthy little animal. You nasty little beast, I have a job for you ….” And who better? For 35 years they had shared an appetite for dementia and savage humor in their work, beginning in 1970 with an outrageous magazine article on the Kentucky Derby for Scanlon’s Monthly. Thompson’s piece was a vivid deconstruction of Southern high-society and low morals on derby day, and Steadman responded with great splashes of ink and paint that unmasked an America of bruised flesh and gnashing teeth. The horror, the horror ….

The article was “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” a pivotal moment in what Tom Wolfe would soon call the New Journalism, a movement of nonfiction writers who used the literary tools of novelists to tell a more vibrant true story. Thompson preferred to call his stuff Gonzo. And Steadman remained his occasional collaborator, illustrating Thompson’s pieces in Rolling Stone magazine and his most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Wolfe would later declare Thompson “the greatest comic writer of the 20th century,” a Mark Twain for a new age, and Steadman’s role was to create an equally dangerous new visual style.

“There was lots of fun about it all,” Steadman says now with a grin. Thompson was a unique collaborator, a man with insatiable appetites way out on the margins. “There were a lot of strange contradictions. He had a kind of violence, but a gentility as well. It was a relationship I don’t think would happen now. People are far too politically correct. You can’t even get started. It’s fascist, in many ways.”

That was before February 20, 2005, when, at age 67, Thompson shot himself in his kitchen, with his new wife on the phone and his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson in the next room. They were horrified. But the last few years had been dark days for Thompson. He suffered through elaborate surgeries on his spine and hip, and was frustrated with the inevitable dulling of his art after decades of drink, pranks, and extremely dangerous drugs, plus the trauma of one more presidential election gone terribly wrong. He spent months in a wheelchair, and then could barely walk. He spoke of suicide, as he always had. This was understood. And he wanted his ashes shot from a cannon on his property in Woody Creek, Colorado. Steadman hoped he wouldn’t resort to suicide, but often drew images of Thompson with a gun to his head, or with his brain simply exploding off the page with ideas and intensity.

Only the timing surprised him. “He was a guy who knew how he wanted to die,” Steadman says. “He’d already told me he knew he’d commit suicide one day. He said he’d feel real trapped in his life if he didn’t know that he could commit suicide at any moment. And he had an arsenal of weapons. He was a frontiersman, pioneer type. He would have been one of the first to go into Indian country crossing towards the West in a covered wagon.”

Thompson’s sudden exit made a memoir inevitable. Steadman began considering it on the train west from the Colorado memorial service and finished it a year later. He has published many illustrated books, but the Thompson memoir, The Joke’s Over, is his first book of extended writing at nearly 400 pages. The result is a chronicle and character study, a clear-eyed assessment of his time with the outlaw journalist, and not always pretty. As he wrote, Steadman says he often heard Thompson’s voice, repeating one of his frequent admonitions: “Don’t write, Ralph. You bring shame on your family.”

They were comrades forever, and there was occasional friction. “Did people notice the writing before they noticed my pictures, or did my pictures get noticed before the writing? I think that was always a bone of contention,” says Steadman. “He’d say, ‘It was me, Ralph. It was always me doing it. You were along for the ride.’” Steadman has said as much himself. He was like artist Sir John Tenniel to Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, or the E.H. Shepard to Winnie the Pooh’s A.A. Milne. Except with blood and beasts and broken bone. These weren’t kid stories.

“We were like chalk and cheese,” Steadman notes, “but it worked.”

They often communicated by fax, with letters sent over the mojo wire at 3 a.m. Woody Creek time. Steadman kept all of them, and is traveling with some of that correspondence on his book tour, carefully preserved in plastic folders. A letter from Thompson could be read as either rage or affection, if one knew how to interpret it. Steadman pulls one out, this one written on letterhead for the Woody Creek Rod & Gun Club, and begins reading, again in Thompson’s voice: “Ralph, your Baroque style of psycho gibberish is appreciated here. What I really need is a six-month loan of $50,000 at whatever rate you can handle. Keep your advice and send money ….”

Those days are over, but there remains a hunger for more, to find an afterlife for gonzo. The Joke’s Over is merely the first book to respond to Thompson’s suicide and the life and career he left behind. There is also GONZO, a massive, elegant volume of photographs by and of Thompson. His widow, Anita, will have a book early next year. There will be another volume of letters, an oral history from Rolling Stone, and a book by his son, Juan, in 2008.

A film version of The Rum Diary, Thompson’s only published novel, is planned. And new documentaries, including Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (a portrait on the Starz pay-TV network), and an upcoming authorized documentary, with access to the author’s film and audio archives, directed by Alex Gibney (the acclaimed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). In July comes the Hunter S. Thompson Symposium on Literature, Law and Politics at the Aspen Institute.

Looking back is all anyone can do now. More than a decade ago, Steadman and I had talked once before, as he passed through Los Angeles on another book tour. There was an edge to his voice then, a spark of excitement in his eyes, and he talked openly of his desire to join Thompson on one more gonzo super-adventure. Maybe on a slow boat to China. Steadman liked that idea, but it never happened. He is busy on other projects now, and all that’s left is to cope with what it meant. He still wonders about that. In his book’s closing chapter, he writes a letter to Thompson, questioning the reasons and timing of his suicide, conceding that in the wake of Bush’s reelection, “Your America had gone.”

His wife, Anna, looks up from her drink. “I kind of liked that, really. Maybe it sounded more philosophical.”

Ralph nods. “I’d like to find out for sure what is the gonzo essence.”

Anna notes that he has attempted to understand that legacy before, in his 1998 book Gonzo: The Art, which collected much of his work with Thompson. Steadman agrees.

“I said there was ‘banzo’ as well, which is bad gonzo,” Steadman says. “That’s something I don’t want to do: lousy gonzo.” Thompson himself often said there was nothing worse than reading a writer trying to ape his style, even if those he influenced have a hard time escaping that urge.

There is also, of course, a School of Steadman, the generations of imitators who have adopted the Welshman’s intense scrawl, splashed and slashed across the page, and not always to good effect. “The worst thing for me is for people to try and imitate my style of drawing. But you can’t stop it, can you?”

* * *

“Who are you? Are you smart?” Thompson wants to know who I am. It is October 2004 and he’s just landed on the Sunset Strip. I am here to observe him in action, just as he once traveled to the feet of McGovern, Ali, etc., in search of wisdom and adventure. Now Thompson is himself that source of all-knowing craziness.

He appears to be in excellent spirits, at 67 a grandfather but no less determined and ready to indulge his whims in a blaze of broken glass and burning lighter fluid, if it comes to that. And he has come to meet the reading public, to sit at a bookstore counter with a tall glass of golden fluid and a collection of pens and exploding props, as 250 of his Los Angeles fans line up with copies of his newest book – the longest line on the Strip this night. Just minutes ago, as his van passed the long line in front of Book Soup, he leaned out a window to shout: “You commie bastards!”

“He’s in a good mood,” his wife Anita says anxiously, and it seems true enough as Thompson signs the books and teases his admirers one by one, poking them with a fork or drawing a line across their faces, and accepting their gifts: a bottle of whiskey, a book, a sweater, a joint, a hug.

“Is anybody in this room going to vote for George Bush?” he asks suddenly, and the room goes quiet. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

He is a cultural hero to these people, an outlaw and social critic with a demonstrated obsession with sports and politics, a man who has known presidents and openly cursed his most beloved sports teams. Hey Rube is his newest book, a collection of short essays from his sports column on ESPN.com. But he is not well. His body is broken. Thompson’s left leg is a mess and has been for a year, ever since breaking it in a fall by the minibar in a Honolulu hotel suite. So he’s arrived late, after hours of physical therapy on his leg, which still seizes up at the bookstore, leaving Thompson to laugh and moan between signatures.

Joining him is actor Benicio Del Toro, Oscar-winning Method man and genuine Hollywood celebrity. But here he is most recognized for his alarming presence in the film version of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as the crazed and insatiable attorney Dr. Gonzo. It was the portrait of a desperate man about to burst, overstuffed with drugs and madness and the weight of post-’60s malaise. He put on 50 pounds for the role. But tonight the actor is a quiet presence in a black suit and fedora, hovering beside Thompson with a burning cigarette as the great man signs books and pours himself another drink. “Don’t take any shit from these people,” Thompson tells him.

On a nearby CD player, Mick Jagger yowls an ancient lament of real folk blues, a lovely tune raw and dreamy (“I felt so sad so lonesome, that I could not help but cry”). It is a fitting soundtrack to this scene of pain and celebration. Soon Thompson’s leg seizes up again, and he’s led out the back door for a smoke. He notices me there, sees my note-taking, remembers that I am here as a journalist. “Who is he? He better be fucking good,” he begins shouting, slapping Del Toro on the shoulder. “He better be fucking righteous!”

I am the least of his problems. One by one, his fans are led out back to meet him, to get an autographed book or two. Veteran political wizard Pat Caddell stops by to say hello, suggesting they meet for a drink later. Thompson has only signed about 100 books, and he suddenly needs to leave. His leg, his whole body, is turning on him, and he is led to a waiting SUV downstairs, his posture degenerating into the shape of a gnarled claw. The 150 gonzo fans still waiting to meet him are about to be seriously disappointed. Some are angry. As he is driven away, Del Toro follows in his own car, which is when a young woman in black appears and throws a full can of Tecate beer in his direction, just missing the car as he turns the corner.

Two nights later, Thompson is in his 5th floor suite at the Chateau Marmont, settled at a table by the window, a jug of Chivas Regal at his feet. Also on the floor are the three galley pages from his upcoming essay on the presidential election for Rolling Stone, the venue for some of his greatest work. Anita is cooking linguini in the kitchen and Thompson is talking with Laila Nabulsi, his one-time fiancée and the long-suffering force behind turning Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into a movie, a 10-year quest that ended up as an epic black comedy starring Johnny Depp and Del Toro in 1998, terrifying matinee audiences across the country.

The phone rings. Thompson picks it up, shouting: “What?! Oh. Benicio who? … What are you up to? … Well, I’m up here doing an in-depth interview with a scholarly looking gentleman from the L.A. CityBeat. … He’s a big kind of Frankenstein-looking guy who was looming in front of the stage wearing a big, bright, white shirt, caught all the light? … No, no, I’m having a little fun. And I can’t walk and I don’t have a ride back. So, what do you mean, Where am I at? I’m at the – yeah, yeah … I’ve got nothing but time. Laila’s here … Yeah, definitely, we’ll do a stunt! Yeah … If you bring a bunch of lighter fluid and a burning paper, we could hold that out on the front of this balcony and from the edge, shower the lighter fluid on it, it will go down into the garden. All right.” He hangs up.

Our interview has yet to begin. Thompson is distracted, worried about confirming a private jet back home to Colorado, occasionally rising to struggle across the carpet, stretching his leg, hobbling painfully on the cane Anita bought this afternoon at a drugstore. He blames the weather for his trouble. Young hotel bellmen come in and out, carrying food and towels and a vat of boiling water. Soon, Del Toro arrives with some friends. But there is much to discuss: Thompson did not spend 2004 traveling on a presidential campaign bus, as he did in ’72 during the Nixon-McGovern contest, or when he chased Jimmy Carter for an influential magazine profile four years later. Thompson is no longer the most dangerous boy on the bus, though he had planned on attending both political conventions this year (and missed both). He does, however, remain deeply connected to major players in national politics. He knows these people.

He first met John Kerry during the 1972 protests of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and knew Bill Clinton back when he was a young campaign worker entrusted with a losing district near Waco, Texas. Thompson has warm friendships with Democrats and Republicans, with both James Carville and Pat Buchanan. But he knows no one in the current White House. No one except maybe George W. Bush himself.

“I haven’t told this story before,” Thompson says, and the room goes quiet. “I met George Bush in 1976, I guess, in Houston. And my first real memory of him, and only one, is of him passed out in my bathtub.” It was at the Hyatt Regency, where he also remembers dropping a naked blow-up doll down into the Atrium from his hotel balcony. “I knew people who were in the drug business from Houston, and I was there for a Super Bowl and I was looking for drugs. Of course.”

Could this be true? Had a young G.W. just been another party-boy passing through Thompson’s gonzo orbit, or was this something like his conjecture during the ’72 primaries that candidate Ed Muskie’s bizarre behavior on the campaign could only be explained as a heavy addiction to the powerful, obscure drug Ibogaine? Columnist Ron Rosenbaum wrote about witnessing the same Bush-Thompson encounter in the New York Observer on March 27, 2000, though he says nothing of bathtubs and remembers the year as 1974, after Bush had been a classmate of Rosenbaum’s.

Thompson talks of another Bush classmate, now one of the writer’s close associates, who claims to have been personally branded by the future president during a fraternity hazing. “And it was torture,” Thompson says. “Twenty-four hours of sucking raw eggs and no sleep and people telling you they’re pissing on you and pouring streams of hot water on your back. And the final thing was the president branded the goddamn pledges with a hot poker. It was a scandal. It’s a matter of record in the Yale Daily News.”

Then he hands me the galleys to his Rolling Stone piece and asks me to read a long passage aloud, including a crude limerick young George Bush is said to have told over and over again for two years while at Yale:

“There was a young man named Green
Who invented a jack-off machine
On the twenty-third stroke
The damn thing broke
And churned his nuts into cream.”

I read it twice, and it gets a laugh every time.

He was not sentimental when Richard Nixon died in 1994, still calling his former nemesis “a crook … a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy.” But Thompson now recognizes Nixon’s behavior as entirely reasonable in comparison to the current administration. And he is not confident about Election Day, or of the wave of newly registered voters supposedly primed to eject Bush from office.

“I’ve been through elections where people are counting on the youth vote before, but they’re not very reliable,” he says. “People tend to inflate it. I think there are more of us than there are of them in this country. That’s what this election is going to be about. Not whether Bush is a liar or thief or a pig or a murderer or a swine and stealing everyone’s retirement funds, but whether the American people want it that way. This will be a very defining moment for the American people.

“Kerry will win the election. Whether he moves into the White house or not … .” He laughs bitterly. “These people are not going to go willingly or not in any spirit of democracy. They never believed in democracy anyway. Shit, if this election goes against us, I’m not going to believe much in democracy either. If these crooked swine are able to manipulate the election and convince the voters to vote against their own interest … .”

He trails off, the thought unfinished, unthinkable. He rubs his leg. It is 2:30 a.m. and I have been a witness to his pain and his fun, but my interview is over and ruined. Virtually nothing of use was discussed. I borrow a cigarette. Benicio lights it for me.

“He’s all right,” the actor says to Thompson. “I can tell.” And for a moment I feel like that young Okie hitchhiker in the back of the red convertible hurtling toward Las Vegas, in the book and the movie, accepted into dangerous territory. (“We’re your friends … . We’re not like the others.”)

Thompson’s not so sure. “How can you tell?”

“I don’t know. I just can,” Del Toro says, watching me. “Well, we’ll find out later.”

Yes, and nearly three hours after I arrived, I say my goodbyes. I’d had many questions, on presidents and politics, on journalism and the writing process. Instead, I’m left with a tape filled mainly with Thompson in a frenzy over his travel plans and of myself reading his words back to him.

He shakes my hand. “Good luck with the piece,” he says, sitting down. “And if it’s not good, someone will be coming by to take care of you.”

Four months later, he was dead.

* * *

This is a party Thompson might have enjoyed. There is beer, wine, and the music is Hunter’s personal playlist: Dylan, the Stones, Neil Young, the Band. The man has been gone almost two years, but he is very much present at the M+B Gallery in West Hollywood. His face is everywhere, in huge photographs printed on archival paper, with color digitally restored. There are pictures of Hells Angels and Dobermans, of pretty girls and slaughtered pigs. But many more are self-portraits, studies toward creating the public legend of a dangerous literary man, modeled first on Hemingway and the Beats, and then something weirdly his own. The aviator shades and cigarette holder, the weapons and loping gait, an image as easy to caricature as Twain’s, and one he would sometimes come to regret. In the pictures is a man slowly ending his time as an observer and becoming the observed.

The images are from GONZO, a large-scale visual biography of Thompson, now selling briskly at the front desk at $300 each. He took most of the photographs himself, back when he was a working journalist providing art for his own stories, and a young novelist documenting his life.

Tonight’s opening has drawn a good crowd. Chatting in one corner is actor Bill Murray, who portrayed the outlaw author in 1980’s Where the Buffalo Roam, the first film interpretation of “the twisted legend” of Hunter S. Thompson. He had also been the subject of the writer’s final “Hey Rube” column, which was a 3 a.m. dialogue between them about a new sport Thompson invented: shotgun golf.

Standing beside him is Juan Thompson, who can be seen as a toddler in Woody Creek in one picture, a Frisbee in one hand, his other pointing to a photograph of G-man J. Edgar Hoover that’s been blasted with a shotgun. Good times. Juan is now 42, and he wears his father’s Aztec medallion over a white tuxedo shirt. “It means the world to me,” he says, touching it gently.

The gallery show opening is one more family reunion of the HST circle, but it can only be an echo of the gatherings that always swirled around Thompson, a rare blend of politics, art, literature, and heavy weaponry. “The reality is that Hunter was the hub and he connected a lot of people and for a lot of reasons he attracted a lot of people,” says Juan. “And when he died, he left a hole there, and there’s no way to fill that.”

Juan Thompson is writing about growing up gonzo for a book to be published by Knopf. He’s not a writer but a computer consultant. And yet he knew that he would one day write this book. They had discussed it. And Hunter wanted his son to wait until he was dead. He supported the idea, but didn’t want to have to read it. “By that time, he knew I wasn’t gonna do a hatchet job on him,” he says. “It just would have been too uncomfortable to actually read it. But he died. I really wanted to try to portray a different side of Hunter than the public persona. That’s how it started.”

His father wasn’t always around. He was often on the road on assignment, and then, after Juan’s parents separated and divorced, they lived apart. “So a part of this book is how both of us dealt with that, and tried to create a relationship where there hadn’t been one, and also how I gradually came to understand that he was a lot more present than he appeared to be at the time.”

* * *

On his final day in L.A., it was Laila Nabulsi who hustled the wounded antihero onto a private plane. It would be the last time she saw him, waving at her from a window. Just a few nights before, she had helped organize a party for him at the Taschen Bookstore. Taschen was set to publish an oversized version of The Curse of Lono, his long-out-of-print excursion into the depths of Hawaiian culture with Steadman. His editor there, Steve Crist, agreed to host the party, even if Thompson was actually in town to promote Hey Rube. And Thompson gave Nabulsi a long list of friends from across the planet who had to be invited. They included some of his Hollywood pals … Depp, Del Toro, Sean Penn, Angelica Huston. Hugh Hefner would arrive with an armful of Playmates. But Nabulsi told him that others further away would never be able to make it. Still, he insisted, “I just want them to know they were invited.”

Something was different. And for months after, Hunter kept thanking her for the party, that “elegant evening,” as he called it. Back in Woody Creek, he would watch a video from the party often. But as Nabulsi stood at the airport watching Thompson prepare to fly out that day, she sensed a change.

“It was so dramatic, and so like a movie, watching this plane,” Nabulsi says now. “And he said, ‘I wish you would come with me.’ And I almost jumped on the plane. I wish I had,” she says, shaking her head. “But, you know, I had something to do, and I couldn’t leave.”

She met him at the end of the ’70s in John Belushi’s dressing room at Saturday Night Live, where she worked, a young producer of short films for the show. That was the center of the universe in those days, a groundbreaking collision of comedy and counterculture. Belushi was her closest friend. And Thompson fit right in.

They had two great weeks in New York together. It turned out he was married. Must not have come up. Eventually, she moved into his house in Woody Creek, traveled with him around the world, became his fiancée, and then left him in the ’80s. Thompson joked that he always feared the exposé she might write. He talked about it for years after, and he even had a title for her: He Was Wrong.

But they remained close friends, and she began working toward finally making a film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

After a decade of struggle, she managed to put the pieces together, producing a movie directed by Terry Gilliam in 1998. Gilliam saw the story as an antidote to the increasing humorlessness of the endless Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton eras. Gilliam described the book’s dangerous duo as a modern Dante and Virgil, descending into the Inferno of contemporary America, with Vegas casinos as the circles of Hell, while around them raged the Vietnam War, the Nixon presidency, and a disheartened youth movement. He thought the time was right for a reawakening of everything that was irresponsible and politically incorrect. It wasn’t. At a press screening I attended on the Universal lot, the film erupted onscreen to a packed room, and only myself and a strange woman sitting next to me seemed to be laughing. The rest was uncomfortable silence.

The reviews were extreme. Critics called the film either a remarkable translation of an acclaimed book, or a document of unspeakable ugliness. It was brutal. More importantly, it was not a hit, which is worse than death in some circles. The timing was just wrong. Five years later, the DVD version was greeted with rave reviews and was embraced as a cult movie for a new generation not even born when the book was first published. College kids were heard quoting the dialogue. And a band called Avenged Sevenfold, a punk-pop-metal act from the O.C. committed to tattoos and styling mousse, had a career breakthrough with “Bat Country,” a song directly inspired by Fear and Loathing. The accompanying video was thick with images lifted from the movie.

Thompson also loved the film, but by then he was on to other things. A new marriage, more books. “He was serious about his stuff,” says Nabulsi. “You couldn’t just hang out and party. He hated that word. It wasn’t about that. It was about working. And if you couldn’t take it, you were out of there. There was one night where he was trying to work on something so he started talking about it, and there were three or four people there, who were supposedly helping. At one point Hunter said, ‘Is anyone writing this down? If no one’s writing this down, it’s just bar talk!’”

That scene was six months before he died. He had many projects: a sex book titled Polo Is My Life, a collection of short stories called The Night Manager, the film adaptation of The Rum Diary. Weeks before shooting himself, he still talked of future work with Steadman. He was on the phone with Simon & Schuster about more books. And Steve Crist had a plane ticket to see him at his Owl Farm compound the Tuesday after that fatal weekend, to meet and discuss the GONZO photo book (to be published by Crist’s new publishing house, AMMO Books), a huge project co-edited by Crist and Nabulsi.

His mountain of unfinished writing projects was not an uncommon affliction for writers who had set a new impossible standard. It took his New Journalism colleague Gay Talese 12 years to finish his last book. Starting and stopping, tinkering and rewriting, throwing it all out and beginning again. Talese would sometimes then study his words from across the room with binoculars. (The next book could be a while.)

Even so, Thompson left behind an impressive stack of books, including the first two volumes of his collected letters that earned his best reviews since the days of Fear and Loathing and The Great Shark Hunt. He wasn’t finished. Only his body betrayed him, the final revenge for a lifetime of fun and abuse. He is still beloved by his long-suffering friends and family, still read and worshipped by fans. All was well enough in his work, right up until the moment he sat at his typewriter and pulled that trigger. For those who cared, it ended too soon. He was wrong.

Illustration by Ralph Steadman, from The Joke's Over, courtesy Harcourt Books.

Los Angeles CityBeat, December 28, 2006

Uncommon Law

2009-12-16T19:50:00.000-08:00

He's been governor, mayor of Oakland, a presidential candidate and a volunteer for Mother Teresa. Now the confounding Jerry Brown wants to be your top cop.

By Steve Appleford

San Francisco. They know him here. They want to shake his hand, to whisper a word of hello, to hear his voice again. Jerry Brown still has that effect, especially in a room like this, at a crowded gathering of Latino activists and politicians, mingling in an epic dining room with big windows overlooking the nighttime San Francisco Bay Bridge. Brown is just a guest here, passing through from one event to the next on another busy day of politics and contemplation. And he's running for office.

He was California's governor once, from 1975 to 1983, a young politician who openly supported farm-worker rights, who fought for environmental protections, who appointed minorities into real positions of power. He also ran three times for U.S. president, nearly derailing the Clinton juggernaut in 1992. And he is the current mayor of Oakland, where his tenure has been a profound education in government at the ground level, where crime and drugs and poverty are right at his doorstep.

Now he wants to be your next attorney general, the state's top cop. Even in a year when Arnold Schwarzenegger will be vying for reelection as governor, Brown's candidacy inevitably brings some serious political star-power to what is normally a down-ticket race between grim lawmen. The joke that A.G. stands not for “attorney general,” but for “aspiring governor,” does not apply.

It's been an unlikely career trajectory for this former governor, a man who has been in the same room as every president since Truman, and who also mingled with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and a wide variety of artists and poets and holy men. Mayor wasn't a step down, and neither would be the A.G. job. “Some people think I should run for governor,” he says now. “I don't want to do that.”

When he first ran for mayor, it was seen as an almost bizarre act, a lark for an ex-governor, a hobby for a would-be president. Tonight he's relaxed and practically cheery in a suit and tie, standing here at this gathering of the Latino Caucus of the League of California Cities with his new wife and campaign manager, Anne Gust. Across the dance floor is Rocky Delgadillo, L.A.'s city attorney since 2001 and Brown's chief rival in the Democratic primary race for attorney general. At 67, Brown remains energetic, engaged with his thoughts and immediate surroundings. (And you can see it whenever he gets together with former state chief execs for the occasional Governors Summit, chatting up the other ex-governors on stage with a spark mostly absent in Deukmejian, Wilson, Davis — each of them already fading to a nostalgic beige. Which is maybe understandable, now that their political careers are over.) Brown remains restless.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is at the microphone, introducing Brown: “He still makes it across the bridge occasionally. The mayor of Oakland... it's still hard to call him mayor.”

The speeches are only beginning as Brown slips out the door, heading to Herbst Hall and a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the infamous first reading of Ginsberg's “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. He'd known the Beat poet, and was a teenage freshman at the University of Santa Clara in 1955 when “Howl” was first read. But tonight he's been invited to read something from Jack London, who was himself twice a candidate for mayor of Oakland a century earlier. The story is “The Edge of the Abyss,” a social critique about the plight of ghetto children in 1902: “The outlook for children is hopeless. They die like flies and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded.”

When he's finished, Brown removes his reading glasses. “Pretty heavy,” he says, “but it's still going on.” And then he's gone.

Against the Grain

Fox News seems to like Brown, a lifelong Democrat willing and able to underline the errors of his own party (and Republicans) for anyone who asks. So he's in a small TV studio down in Jack London Square on a Saturday morning for a few minutes of political chat across the airwaves, focused mainly on terrorism and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Soon, he's back by his car, pacing slowly as he discusses his comments on a cell phone.

For many voters, he's still hard to pin down. Edmund G. Brown Jr. is a man who can't let go of politics and its potential to make change, but other interests continue to pull at him. It is rooted in his four years of study and contemplation in the Jesuit Order, and the notion of agere contra, the concept of going against one's self, to consider radical ideas, new solutions. He was elected as California governor in 1974 at age 36, beginning an administration that was progressive in ways that were not merely political, but openly philosophical, intellectual and spiritual, following no party dogma but his own.

He wasn't the youngest governor in California history, an honor that still belongs to J. Neely Johnson, 30-year-old partisan of the Know-Nothing Party, and a man who once vetoed a bill for “bad spelling, improper punctuation, and erasures.” Brown had his own quirks, a governor who dated a rock star while living like a monk in a Sacramento apartment with a mattress on the floor. He drove himself to work in an unglamorous Plymouth sedan.

Brown was a puzzlement even to some supporters, who wondered about his calls for solar power and his notion that California should launch its own satellite, ideas few could honestly debate today. Since losing a race for the U.S. Senate in 1983, he's been in and out of politics, taking side trips where few have followed.

“It's a very ambitious, power-oriented occupation,” he says of politics. “I'm unusual in that my father was governor, so it is easier for me to follow this path. I've followed many paths, but I kept coming back to the political, because I like it. But I have other things in my life, and they are against the political, against the grain of that.

“I just got married. I've just got my second wind here as a human being.”

His political second wind perhaps began when he became Oakland mayor in 1998. He aimed to attract 10,000 new residents to the city, and his election was seen by supporters as bringing desperately needed attention to a place troubled by crime and decay.

“Oakland had a lot of empty spaces that needed to be filled up,” Brown says, as he walks through the redeveloped Jack London Square. “To fill them up, you need people to spend money, bring in private capital. Government does not build restaurants and, for the most part, doesn't build houses. That's done in the private sector, so you have to attract it. For 25, 30 years, people weren't investing in Oakland. Now they are. It's dramatic. There wasn't a building built in this neighborhood in more than 30 years. I built the first one. Now there's many.

“Doing that, I have no doubt, is a great positive,” he continues. “It creates jobs, it's vitality. When I first moved to Oakland, this was dead.”

Four cranes tower above the street now, the sign of a continuing boom for which he only takes partial credit, acknowledging the boost provided by low interest rates and a Bay Area real-estate boom. But some who supported him in the past, or backed his initial run for Oakland mayor, suggest Brown has taken a turn to the right with his law-and-order policies. Development meant gentrification. And Brown's support for a 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew for felons currently on probation sparked protests at Oakland City Hall.

At the Oakland-based Critical Resistance, a national penal-reform group, organizer Sitara Nieves mostly dismissed Brown's progressive past. “For the last few years, it seems like Jerry Brown's been more interested in running for attorney general than being the mayor of Oakland,” she says. “He has been trying to make himself look tough on crime. It's had a real destructive effect on the people of Oakland.”

Brown argues that city leadership goes beyond the usual ideological battles between Democrats and Republicans at the state and national level. “Right-wing people don't want to use government as much, more liberal people are comfortable with government — that's true,” he says. “But you'll find most city mayors tend to be more on the independent, pragmatic side, whether that's Villaraigosa, Willie Brown or myself. That's just the way the role of mayor is. We have to do things. We can't sit there and pontificate. They want the potholes fixed, they want the garbage picked up, they want stuff happening. That's why mayor is a good school for practicality.”

His time as mayor required a focus on law-and-order issues, but Brown insists that it's always been there. A speech from 1982 listed a variety of crime statistics, such as the more-than-doubled number of felons imprisoned. “Use a gun, go to prison” was a slogan seen by every Californian endlessly on billboards, buses and televisions. The state criminal recidivism rate was about 15 percent when he left the governor's office, Brown says. It's now above 60 percent.

His views on the death penalty haven't changed, either. “I would prefer that we not have a death penalty,” he says simply. Then he adds, “But I certainly see, when I'm in a place like this, and you see vicious killings, you may say, ‘Well, these guys are certainly getting what they deserved.'”

He also points out that, in California, more death row inmates die from old age and suicide than from execution. There have been just 13 executions in California since Reagan was in the statehouse, a tiny number relative to the likes of Texas (which put to death a record-breaking 40 people in 2000 alone). As attorney general, Brown says, his role would be to simply defend the death-penalty verdicts of juries before the Supreme Court. His own views on capital punishment are irrelevant. “I will carry out my duties as attorney general — as I've always done,” he insists.

That isn't what interests him about the job. He will not be there to flip the switch or buy the chemicals or mail the invitations. The A.G.'s special unit that defends death-penalty verdicts in court will continue to do so as a matter of routine. There are other areas of law and order to consider, though maybe something other than outgoing Attorney General Bill Lockyer's recent suit to put warning labels on French fries.

“I signed 10,000 laws,” Brown says of his terms as governor. “Since that time, there were another 15,000 added. Suffice to say, there is plenty of room for greater protection of the environment, greater protection of education equality, greater protection of worker rights, greater enforcement of corporate accountability.”

He's sitting outside a small coffeehouse, and he's approached by a young law student, a kind of preppy Billy Idol figure with spiky platinum hair and a white T-shirt so bright and crisp it looks dry-cleaned. “I live here in Jack London... and I'm a big fan of yours,” says the student. “I just want to wish you the best on your next run. Attorney general — let's make it happen.”

“Well, OK. Did you sign up on my website?”

He hasn't, but he does read Brown's blog. “I'm moving down to L.A. next year to practice law, but I could help you out down there. I'm in pre-L, so I'm kind of in that slump where I'm not doing a whole lot of anything.”

“Is that right? Well, maybe we'll find something.”

Staying clean as things get dirty

After losing the U.S. Senate race to Pete Wilson, Brown disappeared to Japan for six months to study Buddhism. He then flew to India and became a volunteer for Mother Teresa and distributed food in areas inundated by floodwaters in Bangladesh. “I've met a lot of people in my life,” he says. “I've read a lot, I've encountered a lot, from Mother Teresa to the Dalai Lama to Pope Paul VI to the head of the Jesuit Order. I've seen a lot, and it gives me a perspective that is very valuable for a prosecutor. Because the power of the office — you can destroy somebody's life, you could destroy a corporation. To have this power, I think you need a sense of restraint, and I've studied restraint.”

His A.G. campaign office is in the same converted Sears building where he lives with his wife and their black Labrador, Dharma, in a neighborhood where he has found needles and spent bullet casings on the ground. “There have been a number of shootings,” he says, and he stands up, pointing out the window. “Right over there. You see Colonel Sanders? A guy was killed there two years ago. Gunned down in the parking lot. Down there on 32nd, we had two people killed.” And there were others, a total of six people within two years just in Brown's immediate neighborhood.

His wife is a lawyer and former executive with the Gap. They met 15 years ago, though Gust was mostly oblivious of the famous Gov. Brown during her years at Stanford. They were married in June in a ceremony conducted by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, with 600 guests and a camera crew from CNN and coverage in The New York Times. Brown chose the soundtrack: Gregorian chants and medieval music.

“Jerry has always been an independent thinker, and he's a creative thinker,” Gust says with a smile. “He doesn't take to control all that much. He hasn't run traditional campaigns in his life. Not that he's running one now.”

Brown is moving around the room, from one desk to another, shuffling through papers, making calls, as Dharma sleeps on the floor. I'm sitting nearby with Gust, talking strategy in her capacity as campaign manager. Inevitably, the death penalty comes up, and how to counteract use of the issue by his likely Republican opponent, state Sen. Chuck Poochigan of Fresno. Brown hears this and stops in his tracks.

“I've got to tell you something for the fifth time,” he says, standing over me. The man is yelling at me, but not in anger — more like a frustrated college professor. And he brings up an example from this year's election, this one concerning the recent governor's race in Virginia, which was won in an upset by Democrat Tim Kaine. “They had a campaign in Virginia — they executed twice as many as California, in a smaller state. They love the death penalty. They have a Republican attorney general who took ads out saying, ‘This guy would not even execute Hitler!' and he lost. That's a fact. In a state where the ads were vicious, where the governor can issue clemency, has the power of life and death, is the key to capital punishment, people still voted for the Democrat. And he was behind in the polls. He went on and said, ‘These are my feelings, but I will carry out the law.' They believed him. So I think this is a total non-issue. And I've been around this business for 40 years.”

That's true enough, but some ugliness is inevitable if he wins the nomination. Just because that's how politics is played now. And maybe because Jerry Brown will bring out the worst in certain Republicans with long memories.

He breaks it down. “What you do is spend a lot of money, and they dig up as much dirt, and then they throw it as cleverly and as cleanly as they can,” he says. “And in the end, the least dirty one wins, at one level. I don't do that.”

So I ask him, “Does the least dirty one always win?”

“No, but many times that happens.”

Brown seems disappointed in all this talk of the death penalty, when there is so much else to consider. “You guys are sort of counterculture. Aren't you going to get more into the more poetic aspects of the campaign?”

Gust laughs, but he's serious.

“This is the biggest cliché. It's cable-news stuff. Your worst adversaries just wallow in this stuff,” he adds.

Either way, Brown's presence in the election will shift the equilibrium of an already heated election cycle. He almost seems to believe the race won't be noticed much in the shadow of Schwarzenegger's ultimate judgment day next November. “This is very limited exposure,” he says. “If you have three weeks of television, it will be a miracle.”

But there is a certain perverse poetry to Brown's decision to reach for the one office where his views on the death penalty might actually be a factor. Anything else would just be too easy. Too boring. And he's counting on his other accomplishments, and the basic intellect and logic of his argument. He's counting on the public being able to see a man working agere contra, against himself, and to agree that's really the way to move the culture another step toward the future.

Los Angeles CityBeat, Dec. 15, 2005

Photograph by Steve Appleford

In Ravaged Croatia, a Reunion in the Ruins

2009-12-16T19:06:00.000-08:00

Balkans: Expatriate in Canoga Park rejoins his family and witnesses his homeland's catastrophe. First of Two Parts.

By Steve Appleford

OSIJEK, Croatia — Civil war in the former Yugoslavia has scarred both Zvonko Kutlesa's country and his family these last two years.

It has made refugees of cousins and aunts, soldiers of friends and in-laws, has devastated the ancient landscape and culture of this region and has split Kutlesa's own young family between two continents.

As he travels by rail toward a reunion with his pregnant wife and two small children in the eastern front-line city of Osijek, old villages and farmland rush past his window seemingly untouched by time or war. Yet he feels a mix of euphoria, melancholy and anger as he journeys far from his home in Canoga Park across newly independent Croatia.

Just last night, his mother had told him of more destruction at his childhood home of Prijedor, Bosnia, where Serbian occupation forces have leveled the Catholic church to make room for a parking lot.

"They took a piece of my childhood," Kutlesa says quietly. "I'm sure I'm not going to Prijedor anymore. That's life — you have to accept that.

"In Prijedor, three nations lived together, three religions," he says of the Croatians, Bosnians and Serbians, the Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox, who have been locked in violent conflict since 1991. "Now everything's changed. When you are sleeping and the dreams come from your childhood, the next day you are sick."

After five years of living and working in the United States and finding some success with a small construction business in Canoga Park, Kutlesa, 38, had hoped this trip would finally bring him home permanently. A trained civil engineer, he expected to participate in the rebuilding of Croatia. But the weak economy here has made jobs scarce, meaning he'll be forced to return to Los Angeles by August to earn the money his parents, wife and family desperately need.

For Kutlesa, there would be trips to the front in the days ahead, visits to local refugee camps for Croatians and Bosnians, talks with retired men contemplating the prospect of rebuilding their destroyed homes without materials or money. First, though, he would be with his family again in Osijek, a small, elegant city of about 100,000 inhabitants, threatened on three sides by Serbian forces. Many here expect the ravages of war to return yet again.

That lingering threat seems far away the moment Kutlesa leaps from the train at the sight of his wife, Vlasta, and daughters Maya, 8, and 16-month-old Dorotea. He looks very much the casual Southern Californian in his Ray-Bans, Reeboks and baseball cap as he runs toward them, his thick mustache only partially obscuring a smile. It is their first embrace since December, when Vlasta returned to her job as a specialist in brain infections at Osijek Hospital, after a year of living with her husband in the San Fernando Valley.

She had been unhappy in Los Angeles. This professional woman found herself isolated in their apartment, with few English skills, unable to legally practice medicine in the United States without undertaking two years of study and exams. And then there was the war, every night on television. "It was terrible," Vlasta remembers. "We were separated from relatives. I was worried."

For most of those 19 months after their Los Angeles wedding in 1991, "I stayed all the time at home," sometimes walking to the park with the baby and Maya, her daughter from a previous marriage. "It was a prison for me."

Like many Croatian expatriates in Southern California, the Kutlesas were moved by the war at home, giving what they could to charities through St. Anthony's Catholic Church in downtown Los Angeles. Kutlesa became president of the Croatian Benevolent Society, a 70-member local group that gathered tons of food, clothing and medicine for eastern Croatia, one of the hardest-hit areas of the war. And he was spending more and more nights at meetings in San Pedro, after long days at work.

"It happened many times that (Vlasta) was upset because I didn't spend a lot of time with my family," Kutlesa says.

On New Year's Eve, drawn partly by a physician's sense of duty to her troubled country and partly by the feeling that Croatia was where she belonged, Vlasta left for Osijek with the children.

They planned for Zvonko to follow a few months later. "But things change very quickly," he says, mulling the financial concerns that will compel him to return to Los Angeles.

Among those concerns is support for an extended family of 15 cousins, aunts and uncles from Bosnia whom the war has transformed into refugees. One cousin is staying with Kutlesa's parents in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, after a dangerous trip through Serbia and Hungary. Others are missing.

Outside the train station, Kutlesa is again reminded of the tragedy he had only witnessed helplessly from Canoga Park. The open wounds of this civil war sparked by Croatia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991, are scattered everywhere in the old city. A year-old cease-fire between Croats and Serbs has spared Osijek further mortar attacks, though automatic gunfire is often heard in the distance.

The city stands on the south bank of the river Drava, which acts as a natural defense and dividing line against Serb forces now holding the lush Baranja region to the north. United Nations Protection Force troops from Belgium patrol the area. Last summer, a fisherman was killed by a sniper as he glided along the Drava, but swimmers and sunbathers have slowly returned to the river.

In town, young men in battle fatigues struggle across wide streets on crutches and incomplete limbs, past tall 19th-Century houses gutted by fire. Others spend the afternoons watching subtitled reruns of the American soap opera "Santa Barbara," for a display of Southern California decadence and misery.

Vlasta has been living on a road to nowhere, a four-lane street called Vukovarska. It was once a major thoroughfare to Vukovar but is now a dead end, stopping miles short of the devastated city held by the Serbs. During the war, Vlasta's house was hit by mortar fire, destroying the roof and windows. Across the street, another house, a charred shell without a roof, is beyond repair.

"They didn't have a particular target, so they started shelling civilians," Zvonko says, throwing up his hands on his first full day back with his family. He is blurry-eyed this drizzly morning as he steps outside to walk Maya to school. "What kind of military target can you have here? Look, it's only houses!"

By the time he and Maya arrive, youngsters are already chattering on the steps in their colorful T-shirts and backpacks, oblivious to the shrapnel damage around them. It is everywhere here, in spite of massive repair work — in halls and classrooms, walls and ceilings. During the war, this primary school was hit four times. Last year, children were in class for only two months.

Six hundred and seventy students attend, including 200 refugees, just one mile from the front.

"Most of the children here are by themselves," says Elizabeta Banpin, an English teacher. "Their parents are in Germany or Austria working, and they are here with their relatives. Of course, that's a trauma for them, and that's reflected in the work they do here."

Others have had parents killed. One boy watched his sister die in a mortar explosion, and later attempted suicide with pills. One 12-year-old girl was killed just outside the school while running to pick up a videotape from a friend.

Thunder rumbles outside, and Banpin laughs wearily. "When we hear this we are all frightened. We think, ' That is the sound — maybe they are starting again.' "

It's a common sentiment in Osijek. The entire city had been a battlefield, and now, with the cease-fire, its population rests uneasily between war and peace. Serbian forces are still within easy mortar range, with only a thin line of civilian police and U.N. troops protecting the new border.

Across the Drava one rainy night, not 50 yards from the thick oak forest that marks the beginning of Serbian-held Baranja, a quintet of young Croatian police reserves stands guard. Some huddle around a fire outside or sit with a deck of cards in the cramped guard shack.

One of them, a 31-year-old father of two, relaxes over his meal of bread and onion. Like the others, he had lived in Baranja and worked in a factory before the war. Now he wears a blue-gray uniform, collects bullets pulled from the trees, and waits to go home. "We feel good here," he says. "But we feel insecure, too."

*

Vlasta Kutlesa is due to deliver her third child in just a few weeks, but moves her pregnant form energetically and gracefully through the halls and offices of the department of infectious diseases. She's come with her family to Osijek Hospital for a visit. Friends and colleagues greet her with smiles and kisses, doting over young Maya and the baby.

She arrived in Croatia after the cease-fire, but missed little of the war's aftermath. She still remembers one young soldier who arrived at the hospital missing both eyes and his right arm. "I cried," she says.

Before the cease-fire, almost 320 bombs had fallen on the hospital complex, one of the largest medical centers in the country, with 1,500 beds.

During the war, 110 doctors left the hospital, some for their own safety and others for the Serbian side. Among the latter was Vlasta's closest friend. The two had traveled together, co-written medical articles, taken their children to parties and the theater. It had been a friendship far from the caldron of politics and ethnic animosity.

"The bridge of friendship is broken," Vlasta says. "I cannot stay cold of all this. I am human, a doctor, an altruist. I've seen soldiers, children, civilians die."

On one of their weekend outings since his return, Kutlesa and the family visit Volpovo, to see the old castle and walk through Narodni Park, where Vlasta's parents had their first kiss. Even on these quiet streets are scars of war.

Kutlesa pushes the baby stroller down a pebbly path, while Maya makes the usual jokes about her father's English.

The front line is only a mile away. Parked nearby is a military truck loaded with potatoes for the families of wounded soldiers, donated from Germany and Hungary. The Kutlesas chat with a young soldier in the park, and he tells them how the village brought out a World War I German machine gun from storage when the newest war came.

The soldier, 24, was born here. At his side he carries the small Serbian-made pistol his father bought back in 1960. "I'm not a warrior," he says. "I like riding a motorcycle and women more."

Just a few years ago, this soldier with the cropped hair and snug fatigues wore a Mohawk, listened to gloomy post-punk music and rode a BMW motorcycle.

Despite the bleakness, Vlasta can still smile contentedly beneath her short, tousled hair. She's with her family today, finally. The couple have spent nearly as much time separated by continents and time zones, work schedules and relief projects, as they have been together since their marriage.

"For me," Vlasta says, "now is the honeymoon."

Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1993

A Croatian's Tour of Desolate Homeland

2009-12-16T18:47:00.000-08:00

Second of Two Parts

By Steve Appleford

OSIJEK, Croatia — These are the scenes of war's aftermath Zvonko Kutlesa has witnessed today: shattered neighborhoods and churches, a mother and her small children surveying the wreckage that was once their home, armed local men in battle fatigues standing lonely guard on the front line against Serbian forces.

For two helpless years in his Canoga Park apartment, Kutlesa has had to watch images like these from the war-ravaged former Yugoslavia. And he has come these thousands of miles to Croatia not only for a too-brief reunion with his pregnant wife and two children, but also to finally see firsthand what has befallen his country since the beginning of civil war in June, 1991.

He's brought an amateur video camera with him today, determined to document the continuing horrors for the Croatian and Bosnian communities in Los Angeles, where he will grudgingly return by August to earn money for his extended family here. Leaning against the heavy sandbags of a Croatian national guard post in the village of Jovanovac, Kutlesa aims his camera east, toward the Serbian flag flying high above enemy positions just 200 yards away.

The soldiers here, all refugees from the Serb-held village of Tenja six miles away, pass a bottle of warm orange juice between them and trade painful wisecracks about the war and the year-old cease-fire. Kutlesa laughs, though his mood is subdued later. "I didn't lose anything in the war," he said. "And when you're standing there with these people, I felt some shame, because I was in America."

Kutlesa, 38, came to Los Angeles five years ago, eventually joining another Croatian expatriate to form a small but thriving construction firm. During subsequent trips back and forth between the United States and his homeland, he married Vlasta, a college girlfriend. But the last two years have been the most difficult, watching the struggle of a newly independent Croatia and seeing his own relatives turned into refugees.

He remembers speaking by telephone with a sister huddled in a Zagreb basement during a bombing raid while her husband faced Serbs armed with Soviet-made tanks on the battlefield. One bomb fell in an open field 200 yards from his parents' home in Zagreb.

In Jovanovac, the cost of civil war has been much higher. The army estimates that about 50,000 mortars fell here, killing 33 villagers and wounding many. Homes damaged or destroyed during the war are scattered along the main road, some of them reduced to nothing more than mounds of broken clay and splintered wood.

The town stands in a crucial tactical position for the defense of nearby Osijek, where Kutlesa's family now lives. The city of 100,000 already faces Serbian forces on three sides and is protected only by civilian police and United Nations troops. If Jovanovac were to fall, Osijek could be quickly surrounded, with roads and communication lines cut off to the rest of Croatia.

Dragolaub Todoravic commands this post. The 33-year-old ethnic Serb's younger brother wears the uniform of the enemy and faces him across the contact line. Their mother has fled to Hungary. But Todoravic seems to shrug it all off. He jokes that perhaps his brother just likes to celebrate Serbian holidays.

What Todoravic wants are his belongings in Tenja, particularly the photographs of his children.

"That's all I want from my brother," he said. "Then the next time we talk, it will be with weapons."

A plastic figurine of the Virgin Mary rests on sandbags behind him, and soldiers with binoculars scan a raw no-man's land covered with brush and cut power lines. Todoravic prefers to identify himself as Orthodox--by religion--rather than Serb, because his family has lived in this part of Croatia for 300 years. "I feel like I am at home," he said.

This village next to the front line was devastated in a massive attack launched in November, 1991. The people here were mostly farmers and commuters to Osijek. Nearly 300 telephone lines demonstrated an uncommon affluence for so small a village.

Now little works as it once did--not the phones, not even running water. But one woman has returned to the unstable shell that was her house with her two children and a neighbor. "Have you ever seen kids on the front line?" one soldier asked, watching. "They have heart, no fear."

Valerija Bijelic, 29, has brought her children back to visit this house twice before. So Renata, 6, and 3-year-old Ivana have grown accustomed to the sight of destruction. Their mother said she is certain that the neighborhood will one day be rebuilt and resettled by the families that were here before.

"We all went through the same thing," she said, her red and orange blouse flapping in the wind. "Each house has problems. I think we'll feel much stronger for each other than we did before the war."

It is far from certain how long her family will have to wait before the house is rebuilt. Money is scarce in the Croatian economy, private loans rare and building materials expensive. In a country where a doctor's salary is as little as $150 a month, Bijelic's factory worker husband cannot hope to earn the money needed to rebuild.

Only about 760 villagers--of the 1,600 who lived here before the war--have returned permanently since the cease-fire.

Today, 51-year-old Stijo Klasan slowly works on the rubble of his house with a pickax. He's hoping to somehow recycle as much of this crumbling brick as possible when he rebuilds, though he's not sure when that will be. "I have to do this because I need a place to live," he said. "It's very close to the front. I don't feel secure. But where can I go?"

All that survives of his four-bedroom house is a garage, where his wife now sits, cleaning vegetables in the shade. In the attack that finally destroyed everything, Klasan fell with three shrapnel wounds to his upper body. He spent the next six months in a German hospital.

"I'm expecting better times," his wife said confidently. But the money needed to re-create their home seems far away. Klasan's monthly pension is just over $40. And replacing one window could cost him 10 times that.

"This war put me back 30 years," he said. "I'm old. How am I going to rebuild without help?"

The local Catholic priest here, Andrija Vrbanic, 38, must contend with rebuilding a church that once was the tallest structure in the village, thus becoming a prime target for rocket and mortar fire. At his home across the road, he pours brandy for guests and tells Kutlesa that the church was hit 64 times before its roof finally caved in.

This same village survived both world wars with little damage. For the present conflict, Jovanovac was evacuated, its women and children put on seven buses to a safer area on the Adriatic coast. When they returned months later, children were more aggressive than before yet easily frightened by loud noises.

"I believe within the next 10 years the village will not be the same as it was before the war," Vrbanic says. "I tried to get help to rebuild the church, and the first question is, 'How safe is it?' No one is going to invest in a high-risk zone.

"These are very hard times. People outside don't want to understand the situation here. They ask, 'If the shooting starts again, how are we going to pay it back?' "

For Kutlesa, hearing these stories and seeing these people struggle to return home is difficult. The destruction is far worse than anything he had seen in Osijek. Sympathy seems inadequate. "When someone asks you for some kind of help, how can you say, 'I don't have it?' "

In many ways, the Slavonia region of eastern Croatia remains unchanged since Kutlesa's last visit, shortly before the start of civil war. Green and yellow farmland stretches to the horizon, interrupted by tall oak forests. He had traveled through such scenery on his way to Jovanovac, welcomed by a bullet-riddled metal sign warning: "Ratna Zone."

And he found more en route to the village of Gasinci, passing dozens of the ubiquitous roadside statues of Christ nailed to the cross, standing watch over rich fields of corn, wheat, onion, potato and other crops.

At the Gasinci refugee camp near the Bosnian border, a toddler runs between small bungalows, waving a toy machine gun fashioned out of wood scraps. About 2,200 Bosnians live here now. Most have come during the last painful year of war, which still rages across Bosnia, often bringing with them only a plastic bag of belongings.

The difficulties for these Muslims are increased by occasional cultural differences with their Croatian hosts, says camp director Branko Vukoja. And memories of war are a recurring nightmare. "We have a lot of problems. Many people cry, or destroy everything given them at the camp--tables, furniture.

"We have a social worker here, but not a psychiatrist because we don't have enough money." One woman weeps so deeply for her husband killed in the war, a doctor is regularly called to give her an injection.

Children at the camp's primary school decorate their classrooms with bright drawings of flowers and battlefields. In an adjacent bungalow are gathered the old and infirm, many of them lonely and abandoned by their families.

Kutlesa captures much of this on videotape, squinting into his camera and panning across the camp, over to the few cars and tractors brought here from Bosnia, to the laundry hanging over rugged fields, to old men quietly congregated on shaded benches. The camp handyman sits on an old television outside his concrete hut, reading a newspaper. And men and women sit glumly in doorways, watching.

It's a sad, disturbing scene for Kutlesa. Though an ethnic Croatian, he was born in Bosnia, in an area now devastated and under the control of Serbian forces. He is still shaken by news of the destruction two months ago of an ancient mosque in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka.

"It was part of the history of Bosnia, it was part of architectural history," Kutlesa said with quiet anger. "And they destroyed it because it was a mosque and not a Serbian church. That mosque was built by the people and belongs to the people."

He said he will never return to Prijedor, the Bosnian town of his childhood. So Kutlesa will never see the grave of a close friend who died while he was in Los Angeles. And he will never return to the place where generations of his mother's family are buried.

At Gasinci, Kutlesa meets 13-year-old Adis Mujkic, who lost six members of his family last year, including a twin brother, when a mortar hit his house. Now he sits with his grandmother, who knits from a ball of red yarn and speaks of her lost son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren. "I have six wounds," says Senija Mujkic, tears welling in her gray-blue eyes. "I am going to have those wounds my whole life. I can't forget that."

Life here otherwise isn't unpleasant for her, her husband and grandson, she said. Some semblance of community has emerged. But it isn't home. "I'm just waiting for the decisions of politicians, for permission to go back."

Kutlesa finds similar frustration at the refugee camp for Croatians in the town of Cepin, where many struggle to resume their lives as before. They do so by farming small plots of land behind their bungalows, or by commuting to jobs or school in nearby Osijek. Others have found only more depression here, because their homes are very close but in Serbian-controlled territory, and out of reach.

"How do you destroy a civilization?" Kutlesa asks angrily. "You clear the land of the people and all the buildings, and in 20 years it's all gone. Nobody knows what was there before."

Of the nearly 2,600 refugees here, many have been without a home for two years. They were moved repeatedly from one refugee site to another, in hotels, gymnasiums and elsewhere across the country. At Cepin, each family is given one of two small apartments in a bungalow.

Behind the closed bedroom door of one unit, Tomica Balentovic, 15, listens to old punk rhythms by the Clash and to other Western recordings. His mother, Ruzica, sits at a kitchen table and tells Kutlesa the story of their family's arrival here two months ago, of the bombardment of their home city of Vukovar, of their capture by Serbs and the beatings suffered by her husband and eldest son.

"I want to go back," she said tearfully, in spite of widespread reports of mass destruction in Vukovar. "Nobody expects it to be like it was before. The best place is home."

Two weeks after his return to Croatia, Kutlesa is back at the front line, this time in the village of Nustar. A national guard escort brings him to the remains of a house on the farthest edge of town, where a narrow road leads to the captured village of Ceric, once home to 1,500 Croatians. The road is empty of traffic, blocked ominously by a dozen Croatian tank mines.

Vukovar can barely be seen at one horizon. And it is toward that city, and Ceric, that Kutlesa points his camera from the second floor of the house. His escort warns of Serbian sniper activity in the area, and Kutlesa moves carefully across a floor covered with shards of clay and concrete.

"Why die for nothing?" he said a moment later. "If I am going to die, I will die with a weapon in my hand."

Outside the house, retired Nikola Culjak has come to the front to look toward Ceric, his home for 40 years. He is a regular visitor here, traveling from his new home in Vincovci, despite the snipers, mines and warnings.

He stands watching in his tinted glasses and chuckles in resignation. "Almost everyone from that village comes here to take a look," said Culjak, 60. "Everybody wants to go back. You can't imagine how strong this feeling is."

Kutlesa stops nearby to speak with a young man holding his baby son beside their ruined home. With his parents, wife and two children, Nica Cikac lives in two surviving rooms in back. Most of their belongings were destroyed in the war.

A large stack of donated bricks are nearby; the family plans to rebuild. "The situation is dangerous, but it's best for us to be together," said Cikac, 32. He served in the army during the war, while his family was scattered to safe areas across Croatia. "The problem is we have children here, and I have to watch them. We don't feel secure because we are on the front line."

Later, in the car, Kutlesa smiles to himself. "I'm proud of these people, you know, because they're rebuilding. They're not just sitting around and waiting. They're trying to do the best they can. They have some spirit. This country is going to live longer than Serbia thinks."

Nothing in Nustar was safe during the war. Even the cemetery became a target, and it still shows the marks of attack. Tombs and headstones of Croatian, German and Serbian dead from several generations are scarred by shrapnel.

Luka Perica is here now, as he is most days, smoking a cigarette beside the grave of his son. Etched in the marble headstone is a portrait of 26-year-old Zdenko, an Osijek police officer who was among the first casualties of the ethnic conflict in Croatia.

"I didn't care about my house," said Perica, 53, referring to the bombing during the war. "But I wanted to save this graveyard because it belongs to me. It's everything that I have."

It's quiet as Kutlesa listens to this father describe the ambush of his son and his commander, who had gone to help two officers captured by Serbs. Kutlesa pauses for a moment on his way out of the cemetery and comes near to tears as he translates the father's last comment: "I am very proud of my son." Then Kutlesa turns and walks silently past the graves.

Los Angeles Times, July 05, 1993

Robert Frank Goes From Ignored to a National Treasure

2009-06-29T03:10:00.000-07:00

The photographer's stark, unvarnished photos depicting life in the U.S. are at the National Gallery of Art.

By Steve Appleford

He was a foreigner with a camera, a young artist newly arrived on the streets of Manhattan from the Old World, muttering over and again, "What a town, what a town . . ." Robert Frank came from Switzerland in 1947, and he was in America to stay, eager to apply his ideas about art and photography and new ways of seeing.

In a letter to his parents that first year, the photographer marveled: "Only the moment counts, nobody seems to care about what he'll do tomorrow. . . . Whether you've been here for eight days or eight years, you are always treated like an American! There is only one thing you should never do, criticize anything."

Frank found not only a home in the United States but also his greatest subject. By the end of the 1950s, he had traveled some 10,000 miles of road between the coasts and taken a hard look at the country for a book called "The Americans." In 83 pictures of grainy black-and-white, he revealed a darkness behind the postwar euphoria, a tension and isolation amid fat American cars and bulging jukeboxes, cowboys and gray flannel suits.

"The Americans" was neither a critique nor a celebration. Frank's natural interests lay at the margins, showing the new superpower in ashen shades of gray. His utter lack of sentimentality may have been the most shocking thing of all. This wasn't Life magazine or Norman Rockwell. If there was something familiar about the pictures, it was that their starkness was reminiscent of the way many Americans viewed the Soviet Union, as a dark and inhuman place, marked by drudgery and low expectations.

"The Americans" was published in France in 1958, and the next year in the U.S., where it was not greeted warmly. Photography magazines hated it, and most art critics ignored it completely, as they did virtually all photography at the time. But the book was highly influential, marking a dramatic shift in the content and approach of street photography, inspiring wave after wave of visionary image-making in the work of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and every generation of photographers since.

Fifty years later, Frank -- who is now 84 -- has come to be seen as a national treasure. Recently, he opened his archives to Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, which is hosting an exhibit around "The Americans." There's a new edition of the book (reconstructed from new scans of vintage prints) and a comprehensive program to republish all of Frank's books and his other photography, much of it never before collected in book form. There is even a series of DVDs of Frank's groundbreaking work as an independent filmmaker, beginning with his playful 1959 Beat Generation parable, "Pull My Daisy," featuring Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, with narration by Jack Kerouac.

At the center of all this is "Looking In: Robert Frank's 'The Americans,' " a catalog to the National Gallery of Art show. Running more than 500 pages, it is a remarkable examination of Frank's greatest work and the two-year road trip that transformed him into a kind of photographic De Tocqueville for the nuclear age. Featuring correspondence with mentors Walker Evans and Edward Steichen, drafts of Kerouac's original introduction and full-page reproductions of vintage contact sheets with Frank's original markings, "Looking In" is easily the most significant, insightful study of an important photographer's work since 2003's "Diane Arbus Revelations." It opens up Frank's process of patience and instinct without diminishing the mystery or effect of the finished work.

Frank shot 767 rolls of film for "The Americans" before editing all that material down to the final images. There were pictures of stars and stripes, funerals and crucifixes, a sad-eyed young elevator operator gazing into space as a blur of passengers rushes past her. A Butte, Mont., hotel window overlooks a landscape of grime and industry. A baby crawls beneath a jukebox dropped into a South Carolina shack like the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

The book featured brief captions -- "Trolley -- New Orleans," "U.S. 285, New Mexico." If any collection of photographs didn't require words, it was "The Americans." It hardly mattered that it was in Charleston that he photographed a white infant in the arms of a black nurse. The same scene was being repeated from Dixie to Beverly Hills to the Upper East Side.

These were not accidental compositions or chaotic snapshots but evidence, as he later put it, of a powerful "vision of hope and despair. That is what I want in my photographs." It's an aesthetic that is becoming as distant in this digital age as the daguerreotype, and there is no better evidence of what's being lost in the transition than Frank's book.

His sole authorship of a new kind of photography is often overstated. Others, such as William Klein and Louis Faurer, worked in a similar fashion that same decade, unafraid of grain and blur and visual confrontation. (Klein's daring book of pictures, "Life Is Good and Good for You in New York," was published in 1956, two years before "The Americans.") Frank was part of a movement, an accelerating shift in postwar perception, but it was his book that made the most coherent statement.

What's interesting is how his earlier work, from the 1940s and early 1950s, set a clear path as to what was coming. Even before he got the first of two Guggenheims and set out on his cross-country journey of discovery, Frank had already produced brooding images of Europe and the New World. His photographs of England (collected in "London/Wales") were dark, elegant, foreboding, with bankers in top hats or bowlers gliding along the misty alleyways of financial London.

Although the photographer would enjoy a long association with the Beats, he wasn't easily defined. Instead, he stood apart, a peer and not a follower, an individual on his own parallel track. In a piece unpublished until 1970, Kerouac recalled a 1958 drive to Florida with Frank: "I suddenly realized I was taking a trip with a genuine artist and that he was expressing himself in an art form that was not unlike my own and yet fraught with a thousand difficulties."

After "The Americans," Frank was determined not to repeat himself and searched for a means to expand on what he'd done. There would be other photography projects, including a haunting, abbreviated series of pictures shot entirely from within New York City buses. And yet the bulk of his work as a still photographer was done before 1960.

He was largely a filmmaker from that point on, with notable side trips into deeply personal mixed-media art, videotape and Polaroids. "Looking In" examines "The Americans" in the context of that later work, with several informative and thoughtful essays by, among others, Luc Sante and the book's editor (and exhibition curator) Sarah Greenough.

For years, Frank seemed interested in pushing "The Americans" away, which only mythologized it more. Still, he couldn't help coming back, sometimes as protector, other times as an avenging force. In some later work, he tore his early pictures into pieces and nailed them into new collages. Through it all, he has remained suspicious of fame, which Kerouac once described as being "like old newspapers blowing down Bleecker Street."

And yet, there is his influence, which has done nothing but expand with time. The rough edges he helped introduce are everywhere now, framed by new photographers for maximum tension and effect. Their shared journey is like Frank's picture of an empty road halfway through the last century, a strip of asphalt and mystery unspooling into the infinite horizon. "Looking In" offers us a look back, to the place where that horizon begins.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 15, 2009

The Metal Family Moshes On

2008-08-14T03:00:00.000-07:00

By Steve Appleford

The boy looked to be about 4 years old, a smiling little kid in spiky hair and green camouflage short-pants. And all around him were dozens of ecstatic young men, swirling in the usual violent circle, pushing, shoving, tumbling into one another in either rage or brotherly affection. A preschooler was in the mosh pit.

He was too young to pay attention to the signs posted outside the Hyundai Pavilion box office in Devore: “Enter moshing at your own risk.” He’d been led there by a shirtless, reckless father figure holding a beer in his other hand, a cigarette burning between his lips. The kid was thrilled, and he definitely didn’t belong there. Another metal generation was taking its first baby steps.

That was one interpretation of Family Values, the name of Korn’s traveling hard-rock festival, which landed Saturday at the outdoor venue for nine hours of very hard rock.

Standing outside one mosh pit, a 22-year-old man who called himself Nathan P. was picking apart bits of marijuana on a paper plate. Five minutes before, he’d been in the pit himself, feeding off the music and adrenalin of the moment. “There is so much electricity in the … air,” he said, “it’s beautiful.”

As he spoke, a tall man with shaggy dark hair fell hard to the ground and was immediately surrounded by several shirtless young men. A few kicked him where he lay. His eyes rolled back, but soon he was on his feet, stumbling out of the pit.

Nathan has been there. “Everybody gets hurt, bro,” he said. “All you can do is get up and just wipe it off and get back going, dude. It’s like life.”

Most do get back up, but not everyone. At the July 30 tour stop in Atlanta, a fan suffered a fatal brain injury after being sucker-punched during an argument. Andy Richardson, 30, died two days later. Police have since made an arrest.

It was no Altamont. Blood is spilled at metal concerts every weekend, just as there are drunken brawls at county fairs and baseball games. Even Depeche Mode fans will riot under certain conditions (and have). There’s one in every crowd. And some crowds have more than one.

Earlier in the day, singer Chino Moreno of co-headlining band the Deftones expressed real regret over Richardson’s death.

“I always make a point, when we’re playing, if I see someone fighting we’ll stop the song and tell them to chill out. Then we’ll continue with the music. The music is secondary to people’s safety.”

“We were real sad,” said Korn guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer of the death, reclining backstage hours before the night’s closing set. He looked up with a knowing expression and suggested that rock concerts can sometimes be like that. “It’s not the safest place to go, no matter who you are. Last night onstage I got hit in the back with a quarter, also with a cellphone. I get [stuff] thrown at me all night long.”

But the contact with fans is mostly positive. Only minutes earlier, Shaffer and the rest of Korn were greeting fans and signing autographs for a long line of contest winners. He was typically upbeat but tired, after recent tours of Europe and Asia. Family Values was the band’s second tour of the U.S. since the December release of its album “See You on the Other Side.”

Korn meets with fans at every tour stop. “I’ve been fortunate enough to learn a lot from different people, being around the world,” Shaffer said. “Everybody has the same problems, the same four or five things that they all struggle with: relationships, finance, personal issues. It keeps me grounded, you know?”

During Korn’s 90-minute performance, the band faced a wide landscape crowded with excited fans raising up the devil’s horns salute or middle fingers at the band’s creep-show melodies and explosive slabs of guitar. The messages could be agonized, dark, confused, but what might be reasonably scary to some is a thrill to others. A fan has got to know his limitations.

Rage is easy to come by in metal, so it takes more than volume and a bad attitude to last. The best hard rock is fueled by a singular, even deviant point of view, a striking voice and persona to transform the obvious into the provocative. Korn has had that from the beginning.

During the Deftones’ set, Moreno showed himself to be – like Korn’s Jonathan Davis – one of hard rock’s most distinctive voices. His desperate groans and whispers wandered and wailed across the grinding foundation of guitarist Stephen Carpenter, outclassing much of the rest of the day.

The remainder of the bill did have its moments, from the melodic hard rock of Flyleaf and Stone Sour to the wild-eyed thrash of Japan’s Dir en Grey, which roared with hard rock stripped down and incomprehensible.

Between band performances, fans strolled amid the food merchants and booths offering jewelry, shades and bandanas. In the booth selling glass pipes for smokers, a young woman in a shirt boasting “Yes … they’re real” lifted her shirt to demonstrate.

Later in the evening, a trio of 17-year-olds from nearby Fontana slumped at a table, taking a break before the final set by Korn. This was the first concert for Matthew Macias, who had his arm around a girl in braids. He tried stepping into a mosh pit but was bounced right out. He’ll be back.

“It was awesome,” he said. “People bouncing off of each other, going off each other, just going off. It was crazy.”

Earlier, a man with a bruised face had sat near him and his friends. “A big ol’ black eye and everything,” Macias said. “His whole face was just purple. Didn’t bother me.”

Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2006.

New Wave or the Truth?

2008-08-14T02:16:00.001-07:00

Writer Joe Carducci relays the story of iconic L.A. punk label SST Records through the eyes of its photographer, Naomi Peterson

By Steve Appleford

The secret history of punk sneaks up at unexpected moments. It’s well after midnight on the Loyola Marymount campus, and the place is deserted, except in the little fourth-floor studio of KXLU, where a couple of punk-rock vets and impresarios are the guests on Stray Pop, a weekly radio show. One is a punk-rock intellectual, the other is not. Joe Carducci smiles beneath the fluorescent tubes but looks damn serious with his graying beard and Jack Nicholson hairline. He’s here with a bag of CDs and ancient LPs to share some choice cuts of noise and dysfunction, of sounds ingenious and unlistenable, and songs of brilliant melody and attack. There is punk and original-recipe hardcore, some avant-garde, even a bit of Wyoming bluegrass.

And the dude sitting next to him is called Mugger.

They once shared ownership of the mighty SST Records with founder Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, back when the label was a center of the secret rock & roll underground, home to Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, the Meat Puppets and other musical malcontents. Back then, Mugger “loved trouble and laughs,” Carducci remembers, and you can still see some of it in this fit, surf-city joker with his on-air raunchiness. But he’s also the father of an 11-year-old son in Long Beach who goes to Catholic school on the weekend, and whose name is definitely not “Little Mugger.”

Carducci hands an album to host Stella Voce, a champion of outsider rock and indie sounds since she first took the FM microphone, in 1980. It’s called Chunks, a DIY, punk-era Nuggets-style punk compilation from 1981, and on the back cover is the familiar, cryptic handwriting of artist Raymond Pettibon: “Guns don’t kill people, songs do.”

Soon, we hear Mugger’s voice on the vinyl, a track from a quarter-century past by his old band, the Nig-Heist. His snarling “Fuck!” is blown right over the early morning airwaves. Carducci looks up. “Oops.”

This stuff is dangerous, and that was part of its charm, before punk became a fashion statement and major-label marketing plan, instead of what it first represented: a venue for unpredictable aggression and the avant-garde. SST in Hermosa Beach was about something else. And in 1990, Carducci wrote his own history lesson and 300-page manifesto, fueled by a desire for a return to the carnality of pure rock & roll, and fearing that the whole movement would be forgotten otherwise. His Rock and the Pop Narcotic was as startling and obsessive a statement on rock and its impostors as Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock had been for another generation of disagreeable rockroll thinkers.

Carducci’s now done the same for Naomi Petersen, the house photographer for SST, who died in 2003. His memoir, Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That, takes a hard look back at his time in L.A., at the music and contradictions of that scene, and what it meant to be a woman in the uncompromising world of Black Flag. He’s talking about this on the air with Voce, as the clock edges toward 3 a.m. and the next DJ is anxiously setting up. Mugger has a flashback to another time in local punk-rock cuisine as he leans into the mike: “So, are we going to Oki-Dog’s tonight?”

It was art, not politics, that fueled the SST revolution, that sent no-frills van tours by Black Flag and others rocketing across the country, planting seeds even they were unaware of. “If you were after money, you just weren’t in our scene,” Carducci says now. He arrived at SST in September 1981, right before Black Flag’s Damaged hit the street, selling a quick 60,000 units locally but facing ambivalence from East Coast distributors. “They couldn’t imagine punk rock coming out of L.A.,” he says. “It’s hard to believe, but it was conventional wisdom.”

Money was tight. Ginn and his partners lived at the office, sleeping under their desks, on couches, sleeping bags, with no money and no regrets in their strange commune. If they were hungry, they might walk over to the nearby home of Ginn’s parents for a sandwich.

One night in ’82 at SST, Naomi Petersen, then just 17, hooked up with Mugger in his van. He immediately retreated under his desk, leaving her to drive back to Simi Valley at least a little drunk. When she got home at 2 or 3 a.m., her father locked her out of the house. Then the phone rang at SST. Dukowski answered. It was Petersen, calling from a phone booth, her wrists slashed, “throwing herself again on Black Flag’s mercy,” writes Carducci. She was told to come back, and she slept there. No one could tell if she’d been serious, but friends could still see the scars a decade later.

Carducci heard she had a Nikon camera, so the next morning, she was hired as a photographer. Her first assignments were Saccharine Trust and St. Vitus. And Carducci was thrilled to have photos to send to the fanzines and college papers hungry for SST news, even if the mainstream media were generally oblivious. Petersen became a key figure there, a rare female peer in the Black Flag orbit and something more than another momentary conquest. By 1985, she had her own rep on the national indie scene, while keeping her day job as hostess at the Black Angus restaurant in Northridge, where she worked with her friend Duff McKagan, bassist from a new band called Guns N’ Roses.

“There was something of a toll that women or girls paid when they got next to Black Flag,” Carducci writes. He spoke also with Black Flag singer Henry Rollins. “He said if you were a girl around Black Flag, you were going to get fucked. Not raped, but fucked,” says Carducci. “The girls who came up to them, some were troubled or drunk, some were extremely intelligent and were operating on the same level we were: art and action.”

The label was home to a full roster of sonic revolutionaries, bands that were freeform and unique and shared a true DIY ethic. The Minutemen were “fucking corn dogs” from Pedro led by the great singer-guitarist d. boon, and the Meat Puppets “were a mix of heady and redneck,” writes Carducci, and the only band everyone at SST could agree on.

I got to be a tourist in that world for a time, as a student journalist as obsessed with the SST roster as any miscreant or college boy looking for raw kicks on the fractured punk-rock scene. There were other bright spots smoldering within the underground during those years just before punk (and Nirvana) broke, but SST was the only brand that mattered, a real stamp of approval for an alternative state of mind. So there were far-flung shows and interviews with Sonic Youth, the Puppets and Minutemen, and then my pilgrimage to the Ginn family home in Hermosa to interview Rollins himself.

We would talk in the backyard, where a large pair of plaid pants hung from a clothesline, and then step for a moment into the Shed, Rollins’ elevator-sized hovel on the Ginn property that was crammed with cassette tapes and a cot, all beneath the burning gaze of a menacing Charles Manson poster. But on the way in, as we passed through the living room, he introduced me to Pettibon, who is Ginn’s brother and the unpaid SST artist and inventor of the ominous Black Flag logo, still one of the most distinctive trademarks in rock: four black vertical bars in the abstract shape of a flag rippling in the breeze, a design that also suggests pistons at work. Pettibon’s art didn’t come out of punk rock, but it was a crucial venue for him, with an audience of freethinkers and misfits hungry for dangerous images. He sat in an easy chair. But he didn’t look up when Rollins and I passed by. He just glared into space.

Soon after, I was at the SST offices to interview Ginn, a bong at his feet, his hair long and tangled, barely a year before Black Flag disbanded. And before leaving, I briefly met Naomi Petersen, whose name I knew and envied from the series of publicity photos she created. Those raw black-and-white images were a crucial document of an otherwise unknown scene, whose lasting impact would not be fully appreciated until the ’90s, when it was all gone. Petersen’s pictures could be grim or silly, depending on the mood of the band and the moment, created during low-rent photo sessions at a time when major labels typically spent thousands on an artist’s photographs.

Carducci left SST back in 1986, amid growing tension at the label. He wanted to get back to writing. He kept in touch with Petersen for another decade by mail after returning to his former home of Chicago, then moving to Wyoming. She contributed some photographs to his Rock and the Pop Narcotic. But he lost touch with her until hearing of her death, after years of fading health and heavy drinking.

Carducci wrote Enter Naomi not simply because Petersen had died, but because it took two years for him to even hear about it. “It really was like a gut punch,” says Carducci, now 52. “And it goes back to that night when she was bleeding on the floor from her wrists. I was afraid of this in some way.”

Enter Naomi is lovingly researched and bluntly told in rich detail, sometimes lifting from Petersen’s journal entries (“Fucked day — someone shot my car”). It’s also an impressionistic view, at times requiring some awareness of the SST scene and certain events to fully grasp. But Carducci takes it deeper, as only one who knew the players could.

Petersen never made the leap to solvent rock photographer. Some of her earliest work was lost in a shipment to Zurich in the early ’80s, and she was evicted from an apartment in D.C. several years later, her possessions dumped on the street. Petersen and Rollins had talked of doing a book of her pictures in the mid-’90s, but it never happened.

A day after his KXLU visit, Carducci is at Book Soup preparing to read from Enter Naomi. In the crowd is Petersen’s older brother, Chris Petersen, who has a small collection of her pictures in his hands. The book was difficult for him to read, and impossible for their parents, but he and Carducci hope to see a collection of her photos published soon.

“I know it’s important,” says her brother, a real estate investor who, with some partners, recently bought the old Club Lingerie on Sunset, where Petersen once spent so much time. “It would be a shame to hide it.”

Voce has brought her teenage son. And in the front row is Saccharine Trust singer Jack Brewer in a leather blazer, a graying high school dropout who still can’t understand why “all these intelligent people would throw themselves into this thing.” Carducci understands, but there remain a few unanswerable questions from that time, about that scene, about Petersen.

“The music scene is full of pretend nihilists,” Carducci says from behind the podium. “And maybe we didn’t catch the real thing in our midst, because she was such a bright spot.”

LA Weekly, July 4-10, 2008.

Civil War in Reagan Country

2008-08-13T13:42:00.000-07:00

The battle between conservatives and moderates could still cost Arnold the race

By Steve Appleford

This line is definitely not moving. It stretches down the block, a crowd of fans and the curious here to see Arnold Schwarzenegger, muscleman and movie star, and the season's great Teutonic hope for the California Republican Party. They haven't realized that virtually none of them will get past the doors at the actor's Santa Monica volunteer headquarters. And now they're getting restless, pressing against the storefront windows, knocking on the glass, watching anxiously for the candidate's grand entrance with a very special surprise guest.

For now, they'll have to be content with the bootleg Arnold T-shirts and buttons being sold on the sidewalk. Inside, a smaller gathering of media and loyal volunteers presses against a small stage surrounded by large photographs of Arnold the Republican fitness and education action hero: posing with an American flag, posing at the Special Olympics, posing beside a young student at a computer. Just like a real politician.

Right up front is Pati Miller, committed volunteer, a wife and mother living large along the canals in Venice, an ex-Democrat now "grown up" at 52. Her 10-year-old son plays football with Schwarzenegger's boy, and she's met the candidate from time to time. But that's not why she is here this morning, proselytizing even now to the women around her.

"We know he's not going to be bought off," she tells them, a "Join Arnold" button on her white Izod polo shirt. "He has his own money. You are his special interest."

The day before, she was in downtown L.A., watching as ex-candidate Bill Simon endorsed Schwarzenegger. Miller is a believer, even if her assurances that Arnold is financially independent - a true outsider! - ignores the $5,683,959 in contributions he's collected for the campaign as of September 29 (besides putting in $6 million of his own money). At least the $2 million he's spending every week on advertising seems to be paying off.

The newest polling finds the actor on the rise, particularly since his single debate appearance on September 24, seemingly on the road to returning the statehouse to Republican control. Which is where it had been for nearly two decades under governors George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, before things came unglued within the party over taxes, abortion, and Clinton. Even now, the race to recall and replace Democratic Gov. Gray Davis once again reveals a Republican Party split and embittered over ideological lines.

So this morning's event is an important one, as Schwarzenegger finally marches to the podium, joined by Congressman Darrell Issa, who had personally bankrolled the statewide petition drive to recall Davis. He had also hoped to replace him. Now, Issa is a supporting player on Arnold's stage. "Darrell has been a great man," Schwarzenegger says. "He has been a uniter and, at the same time, a fantastic friend who is going to be by my side all the way to October 7." And soon they are gone, exiting to the screeching pop metal of Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It."

Standing beside the stage is Ron Nehring, president of the California Republican County Chairmen's Association, which has just announced its endorsement of Schwarzenegger. It is the group's first-ever endorsement. "We want to have a decisive victory in the governor's election because we have to send a signal to the legislature that it's not going to be business as usual in California anymore," Nehring says. "A united Republican Party stands the greatest chance of achieving that decisive victory."

This was a not-very-subtle hint that State Sen. Tom McClintock should do the same: stand firm with the Terminator. But the Thousand Oaks Republican has promised not to quit the race, committed to stand for the once-dominant conservative wing of his party. His mantra: Cut taxes, and then cut them again. Both major parties are forever wounded by internal strife and self-destructive feuds. Cruz vs. Gray, McClintock vs. Schwarzenegger, with little love or contact between them. But Democrats have at least been winning and dominating elections since the Clinton '90s. If Arnold or any other Republican succeeds in the recall, it will reverse an anti-Republican trend that just a few months ago looked impenetrable.

California was once home to a Republican dynasty - two terms with Deukmejian, the same with Wilson - but the GOP now holds not a single major statewide office, unless you count one seat on the state board of equalization. Meaning there is no one in power to greet President Bush at the airport. Reagan Country surrendered. Republican money remains plentiful in the home state of Reagan and Nixon, and George Bush is a frequent visitor, stepping off Air Force One just long enough to pick up the check at another million-dollar fundraising dinner. But the leadership needed to turn those resources into votes for exalted state office somehow vanished, leaving a party hopelessly addled and confused, at war with itself.

They curse Davis for spending $10 million on negative ads against Richard Riordan during the GOP primary last year, leading to the nomination of Simon, a far weaker opponent. It was an underhanded and effective move, but if the Republican faithful are so easily duped into embracing the wrong candidate, it suggests deeper issues than can be explained by Davis alone. California Republicans are now little more than the loyal opposition, piously committed to the conservative plan, the dependable gadfly to the Democratic leadership. Unless Arnold pulls off a Hollywood miracle.

Things began to go wrong for California Republicans in the early '90s, when conservatives revolted against tax increases supported by then-Gov. Wilson, who once referred to the troublesome right wing of his party as "Neanderthals." McClintock and other conservatives still talk of the episode as a rallying point, drawing little distinction between the crimes of Wilson and Davis. That break also happened to coincide with the popular presidency of Bill Clinton and a shift in the state electorate, which now has 44 percent of voters registered as Democrats (versus 36 percent for Republicans).

"The Republicans have only themselves to blame," says former State Sen. Cathie Wright, a Republican whose old 19th District seat is now held by McClintock. "Hard-core conservatives want it all or nothing, and they got nothing."

It is the "wingers" vs. the "squishers," as they call one another, and not always with affection. The result has been the nomination of doomed right-wing candidates like Simon.

The recall of Gov. Davis was to be their doomsday device, a short-term solution to the insoluble problem that could either reverse a decade of humiliation or send the party deep into irrelevance. To Democrats, it was just another right-wing conspiracy, like Bush v. Gore or the impeachment of Bill Clinton. But the anti-Davis outrage, at least at the street level, is genuine. It is there that the recall began, a Quixotic signature drive launched by Sacramento gadfly Ted Costa, before it was turned into a big-money operation by millionaire Congressman Issa. This is no conspiracy. It is a crusade.

"There is such a visceral hate - especially among the activists - for Gray Davis," says San Diego Republican consultant Scott Barnett. "He is not liked, and he is an awful governor." Barnett understands those feelings, but he was also alarmed enough by the dangerous precedent of a recall that he founded Republicans Against the Recall to warn party members away from a tempting but short-term solution to Davis.

"Part of the problem of our party has been that no one has looked beyond next week, to the implications to our party, our state, and our system," he says. Barnett also worries that a victory by Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante could lock up the governor's mansion for another eight years and stall the Bush administration's successful efforts to draw more Latinos into the California party.

For his part, Arnold has proven resilient. He's survived criticism for vague stands on issues and for not participating in debates, trotting his campaign from Leno to Stern to Oprah, as aides quoted "hasta la vista" as if it were policy statement.

Today, he is considered the front-runner, gathering endorsements, watching his poll numbers rise. Not all Republicans are enthralled. The party elite may have anointed the movie star, clinging to his hazy commitment to Republican values and raw name recognition. But the conservative core has other ideas.

*

At a weekend fundraising lunch in the suburban foothills of La Canada, Tom McClintock looks like a man convinced he is about to win an election. As he waits to step onto a small stage on the lawn of a large, private home, well-wishers shake his hand. "You got me hooked," one middle-aged man says, catching his breath. "I didn't know you until a few months ago." Nearby, a country & western quartet is playing "Okie from Muskogee" and "Make the World Go Away."

When he finally makes it to the stage, McClintock is defiant and direct, practically formal in a black suit and red tie. Behind him, a banner reads "Go Tom Go." As always, he compares his race to the unlikely victory of the race horse Seabiscuit. It's a crowd pleaser. "Clearly, this message is resonating with the electorate of California," he declares. "All of the momentum of this campaign has been on my side."

His refusal to quit has been recognized and championed by a growing chorus of national conservative groups. Just the day before, McClintock was in Colorado Springs, Colorado, enjoying a fundraising benefit by the likes of Christian conservative Gary Bauer. This afternoon, he has to settle for an endorsement message sent from ancient L.A. broadcaster George Putnam, a newsman and commentator from the Dragnet era. The candidate insists, "We will win this on election day."

After 17 years in office, McClintock now spends most of his time in Sacramento. He won his first assembly seat at age 26, and, despite a thin record of legislative accomplishments, his success with true believers taps into real frustration with the party's attempted drift toward the middle. Commentator and 1992 U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Herschensohn calls himself a fan of Schwarzenegger, but he's endorsed McClintock and is disappointed that more conservatives have not stood with him.

"I'm a Republican because I have particular principles," says Herschensohn, now a foreign policy professor at Pepperdine University. "If we abandon those principles in order to win, in a sense victory becomes a disguise for surrender."

Even Barnett of Republicans Against the Recall is drawn more toward a McClintock candidacy, though his group is endorsing only a "No" vote for the recall itself. He considers himself more moderate on social issues than McClintock but finds commonality on crucial fiscal matters. "We certainly know we will never, ever, ever, ever have any kind of tax increase if he's elected governor," he laughs. "And we will cut the budget significantly."

An arch-conservative libertarian might still have a chance in this state, but ex-Sen. Wright is convinced that McClintock would be no savior, even if elected. "McClintock has been a loner all his life," Wright says. "How is he going to work with a Democratic-controlled senate and assembly? He's made no friends.

"The leader of his own Republican caucus in the senate has endorsed against him. That should tell you something."

She remembers a meeting back in the late '90s, when she was still a state senator and McClintock was in the assembly. He was pushing a bill with all the political finesse of a commando, a hard-headed moment Wright says was typical. "He makes an appointment, and he comes into my office and basically tells me that I have no choice, that I have to vote for it," she says now. "I personally felt that it needed an amendment. He's not willing to work with the committee. So he doesn't get his bill."

This is not a party without leaders who might appeal to the mysterious middle. Consider L.A. Mayor Dick Riordan, who early on had polled higher than Davis and even Schwarzenegger. Or Peter Ueberroth, who emerged as a potential Republican star after leading the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles to profit and popularity. Time magazine made him "Man of the Year." And he had been talked up as a possible candidate for governor or U.S. Senator ever since, but he always declined. Until the recall.

Wall Street and others watched with interest, but his performance at the first debate in Walnut Creek was not spectacular, though it at least showed a businesslike seriousness, focused on what he described as the fiscal devastation of the state's $38 billion deficit. Asked his views on the death penalty, Ueberroth said he supported it, but then insisted that voters didn't care how he felt "about the death penalty. They want to talk about how to protect their jobs and businesses."

Maybe Ueberroth represents the old O.C.: a quietly conservative businessman, culturally moderate, deifying entrepreneurs, politely cursing taxes, but not the type who's about to march on abortion clinics. A competent presence, but not a great comfort to the far right. At a September 6 campaign event in Glendale, he announced he was on the verge of unleashing his TV campaign, which was set to remind voters of his success at the Olympics, as baseball commissioner, as a businessman.

He stood on a royal blue stage, looking like a man about to deliver a Fortune 500 annual report, speaking in the tone of an amiable econ professor. He was also a bearer of bad news, declaring that the outlook for education funds was "very dim. There isn't enough to go around." He simultaneously praised both Reagan and the late Democratic Mayor Tom Bradley, and he promised to do better at the next debate. Two days later, he was out. Moderate, go home.

Even if Schwarzenegger wins the election and immediately takes office later this month, it may open a door to a renewed state party. Or it could just become another very public battleground between Republican moderates and conservatives, dooming the party's prospects for re-election in 2006. But for some Republicans, that fight itself is more important than compromise.

They are not interested in voting strategically for Arnold, or for anyone else. "Don't surrender a philosophy," argues Herschensohn. "I'm old enough to remember the Barry Goldwater defeat [for president] in 1964. But we stuck to our guns. Everyone was saying that the Republicans are dead, certainly conservatism was dead. Well, in the next election, Nixon won, and then Reagan won. If you focus so much on your own time, on the calendar of today, you don't look to the future. And if you continually bend your principles to win, the victory isn't worth having."

Los Angeles CityBeat, Oct. 10, 2003

Triumph of the Paparazzo

2008-08-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

Phil Stern has created some of the greatest celebrity and documentary photographs of all time, but his real love is the sport of getting paid

By Steve Appleford

The kindly old gentleman with the oxygen tank is waiting on a friend. Phil Stern is on the back patio of his Hollywood home, plugged into the tank, just blocks away from the Paramount lot, peanuts scattered on the table in front of him. It's late afternoon, feeding time for Stern's demanding neighbor, a friendly bluebird named Charlie. Phil knows what it's like to wait for the peanuts to fall.

He has called himself a humble paparazzo, as if he were some kind of handyman with a camera, feeding off the celebrity of the moment. But Phil was no stalker with a telephoto. His metier was always about access, not ambushes and flashbulbs. Along with the usual gigs that kept the kids fed and the rent paid, Stern was a master of the strange, unguarded moment, documenting the movie-making world in pictures both raw and glamorous. He could do the set-up shots, too, with the multiple lights and big cameras and grinning celebrities, but his best work was somewhere closer to the edge, more like Robert Frank than a Hollywood propagandist. Not that Stern always realized it himself at the time. Deep into the files the pictures went, for years and years.

"I've taken mountains and mountains of stuff - which I occasionally describe as mountains and mountains of shit," Stern says, grinning as Charlie hovers nearby. "It so happens, there's a little gem here and a little gem there. You dig out those gems. When a photographer has the advantage of close to a century of work, you end up with lots and lots of stuff. So the law of probability is that, since I've been around a lot longer than most photographers, I have a lot of shit to sift through."

At 84, Stern has outlived many of his most celebrated subjects, and by the 1990s he was really sticking it to the big magazine photo editors in New York. Whenever a major Hollywood star died, a Burt Lancaster or a Dean Martin, Phil would get the call, and he would give them the biggest price he could come up with. Money wasn't really the issue anymore. He spent much of it on his adult children. His purpose was sport. His pictures were intimate, unique, and he knew it. So his business card read: Don't fuck with me.

For years, he had a friendly correspondence with Frank Sinatra, a contest to see who would croak first. They had worked together for decades, Stern and his camera documenting the recording of saloon songs at Capitol Records, taking pictures of Sinatra shoveling pasta into his mouth backstage somewhere, or capturing Frank lighting JFK's cigar at the 1961 inaugural dinner. A big payday was coming, if Phil could just hang on long enough, and he would sometimes send Frank a funny note reminding him of the nice profit his passing would provide.

When the day finally came in 1998, the magazines called as they always did, and CNN rushed over one of its top reporters from Atlanta, a man with a shaved head and a black turtleneck, ready to ask the most obvious questions. What was Sinatra really like? What were Phil's favorite memories of the man? He pored hungrily over a stack of Sinatra pictures. And right there on the counter was a cutout of the singer-actor in a crucifixion pose, another one of Stern's visual gags. A gold mine of Sinatra moments.

Phil had some news for the man from CNN. He would have to pay for the use of every one of those photos. The reporter was momentarily stunned, then pointed out that no less than Herb Ritts had in the past allowed the broadcast of many, many pictures, for no charge at all. Phil just stared at the man, gray head nodding slightly. "I don't have Herb Ritts's publicist."

The stars keep dying, but now Stern lets an agent in New York handle most of the daily negotiations, taking the calls from Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly and People and the rest, demanding big paydays as always, maybe bigger. And the photographer has other pastimes now, at the moment looking over a stack of international magazines celebrating his work, pages and pages of pictures, all of them paid for, of course, and drawn from his massive new book, Phil Stern: A Life's Work (powerHouse).

"I never thought I'd live to see the day that I'd have a book published that's over eight pounds," he says with a chuckle, as he signs a copy with a silver marker. "I get a hernia picking it up, for Christ's sakes."

Stern has been mostly retired from shooting for at least a decade. A heart attack last year and emphysema have slowed him down and kept him forever connected to his portable oxygen tank. But it hasn't kept him from enjoying a second career ... as an artiste. Or something like that, since Phil Stern rejects use of the words art or artist to describe him or his work. Call him a photographer. Regardless, his best pictures are as close to art as anything by his most esteemed contemporaries. His images often appeared in Life, back when it was a showcase for the likes of the great documentary photographers, W. Eugene Smith and the Magnum crowd.

He first arrived in Los Angeles from New York City in early 1941 as a photographer for Friday, a national leftist weekly, to help open up a West Coast bureau and cover labor, agriculture, and Hollywood. Its motto: "The Weekly Magazine That Dares to Tell the Truth!" It folded the same year, but Stern was quickly recruited as a freelancer for Life and other reputable magazines, spending much of his time on movie sets and backlots. So there he was on the set as Orson Welles directed The Magnificent Ambersons back in 1942, a time now so far gone that it seems (and is) incredible that anyone who was there is still lucid enough to talk about it. And over the decades, Stern would take his camera far behind the scenes: John Wayne in checkered hot pants in Acapulco in 1959, John Huston duck hunting in Mexico in 1960, Rita Moreno rehearsing for West Side Story in 1961. At their best, the pictures were vivid, usually black-and-white, and filled with humor or subtle drama, evocative of far more than just their celebrity value.

The photographer himself is less impressed, although he enjoys your compliments and all the attention. Stern was an admirer of graphic arts and the great painters, and inevitably the use of shadow and light he saw in Daumier and Delacroix seeped into his pictures. But the man was looking for a paycheck, he insists, and he knew that more complex images were likely to earn a higher fee by appearing across two full pages (i.e., "double-trucks"). "That economic factor was important," he says. "I also learned to feel out the tastes of different editors. So in a way, you can make an allegory of Heidi Fleiss and I." He laughs. "I mean, all this bullshit, any photographer that goes 'I only do what I feel in my gut. I don't do what any editor says.' To me, I'm very suspicious."

Others see it differently. "So many talented working photographers have a hard time seeing their work as something special," says David Fahey, who first met Stern while co-curating Masters of Starlight, a 1986 group exhibition of Hollywood photographers at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He's represented Stern at L.A.'s Fahey/Klein Gallery ever since. "He can't go an hour without making some kind of self-deprecating joke about himself. But he's certainly aware of how important his pictures are, because enough people have told him how important they are."

In 1942, Stern was recruited by the Army Signal Corps as a soldier-photographer attached to an infantry division, eventually known as Darby's Rangers. This time the pictures he made were on the front line of a world war, bearing witness to invasions, villages ablaze, burned bodies. One of his favorite photographs from that period shows the men of his own unit marching through a town, oblivious to the graveyard beside them. Most of the men in that picture would soon be dead or wounded.

Between combat missions, the Rangers were sent out into the field in order to draw German cannon fire, to see what the enemy artillery could do. Lucky Phil. He was finally seriously injured in North Africa, as enemy fire tore apart his neck, one hand, and both legs. As he recuperated in an Army hospital, he was given a choice: return home or go back out to the front to witness the invasion of Sicily. He went to Sicily. "Twenty-one-and-a-half years old, macho, adventurous, all that shit," he says today. "If I had to do this all over again, believe me, I'd run to Canada. Looking back at it, I don't even believe it happened. To me, it was like a big piece of fiction."

One picture not in his new book happened in the Army hospital. Another soldier there had been shot up, his face torn to shreds and pieced back together by plastic surgeons. The final result fell far short of handsome, with thick scars and a misshapen mouth. Stern got him to attempt his first smile since his injuries. He took the picture, an image that is disturbing and somehow touching all at once.

"You point a camera, and you push the button," he says of his time in the Army. "The only trouble is that your life is at stake, and I came close to being killed quite a few times. But it turns out that everything seems to work in my favor. God apparently is very generous to atheists. He fucks the believers. That's my observation."

How else to explain the windfall today? He has been honored by the mayor and knows city politicians on a first-name basis. At openings of his shows in Los Angeles and New York, he is greeted and feted by the biggest names in photography, and even the new generation of photo editors he has tortured for so long. They act like fans. They are charmed by his winking, streetwise remarks. In 1999, he traveled to Havana for a one-man show organized by the photographer Korda. And people keep buying his prints.

More recently, Michael Jackson rolled up to his house in a limo one day, accompanied by two bodyguards and a young son, Prince. ("I looked at that little blond kid, and he looked like a replica of a little Nordic doll.") Jackson went through his prints, stood teetering on a stool, and left with a pile of prints and a bill for $47,000. He never paid, and eventually all the items were returned but one: A lifesized cutout of a swaggering Marlon Brando, in cuffed jeans and leather jacket, printed up in connection with Stern's first book in 1993.

"I've encountered kooky people, absolutely," Stern says of his career. "Jackson is not quite the pink-cheeked American boy that lives next door." But Jackson still has the Brando, and Stern doesn't have another. He rarely gives up on these things. Too much fun to be had. He'll get it back. Don't fuck with Phil Stern.

Los Angeles CityBeat, March 17, 2004.

Photograph by Nathaniel Welch

The Desperate Party

2008-08-13T02:21:00.000-07:00

By Steve Appleford

The girls next door must be lesbians, all seven of them, young and blonde in their soft college sweatshirts, somehow managing to ignore the loud drunk dudes in Room 3108. They are nice enough to these boys from Ohio, amused even, but they will not succumb. Not interested. Not even on this final night of binge drinking and reckless escape from the grim responsibilities waiting for them back at school. The annual Spring Break ritual of Panama City Beach, Florida, is where the sex and booze are supposed to flow cheap and easy for the thousands of acrobatic young men and women arriving every weekend for a desperate good time. So the boys in 3108 have watched with intense frustration as the girls next door spend their days laying on the beach or stumbling back to the hotel to drink heavily after dark, while still refusing to hook-up, feel-up, sex-up with anyone.

Some of the guys have developed a new motto: “Fuck Bitches.” It is both a sneer and a destination, a true double-entendre, depending on their luck with the ladies on a given night. Sex is not guaranteed, no matter what the leering video cameras of MTV and Girls Gone Wild! have promised them. But there is always beer, the crucial tonic and social lubricant, absorbed in truly epic quantities tonight and every night. Hotel rooms across the city are decorated with empty beer cans stacked into great walls and pyramids, standing as monuments to blind drunkenness and pointless endurance. Here at the Howard Johnson’s Hotel and party compound, empty beer cans float in the pool as a boozed-up hooligan climbs down from a second-floor balcony. A window above him is lined with hard liquor bottles, and small rooms all over the hotel overflow with parties fueled on beer, drugs and cigarettes, mingling students from America’s finest schools and its most obscure universities.

Room 3108 has enjoyed the occasional female guests passing in and out tonight, but this is a mostly male gathering. At least 23 of them are crowded inside a room that is about the size of a prison cell. Most of the furniture is stacked against a wall. A portable George Foreman Grill sits in the corner, ready for quick meals and protein. And dresser drawers are filled with supplies: condoms, shoes, balloons, cigarettes, beads, B12 vitamins to fight the inevitable hangovers, allowing these boys to wake up drunk and anxious for more abuse.

Standing on a bed is Brad George, a 20-year-old bouncer from Youngstown, Ohio. His head is shaved, “Slim” is tattooed onto a burly shoulder. The thick plastic tube in his mouth leads to a funnel in the hands of his brother and friends, who pour in three cans of delicious Natural Light beer for instant consumption.

It goes down fast, as everyone shouts: “Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!”

They each take turns at the funnel, sending icy brew into the beer bong as an old Guns N’ Roses CD of “Paradise City” spins on the boombox. All of them wear black wrist-bands required by the hotel for guests older than 21 and legally allowed to drink, but there is plenty of underage boozing here tonight. (Brad has a fake ID that says he is 23.) They are also taking a break from the $25 cover-charge at the clubs down on the strip, looking instead to do their drinking all night at the hotel, stumbling from room to room, as always meeting people on the balconies, in the parking lot, by the ice machine. In the last week, they’ve managed to spend just $700 between them, a small fortune for humble college students looking for a cheap good time in Panama City. And in the morning they will be gone, on the road back to Ohio and their classes on computer programming and high finance after tomorrow’s 8 a.m. check-out time, making room for the next round of fresh Spring Breakers.

Brad has had some luck with the ladies these last couple of nights over at Harpoon Harry’s down on the strip. He was at the bar maybe five minutes one night when a girl called him the sexiest man alive and offered to make-out, right then and there. Fuck yeah. And she followed him around the rest of the night, even into the men’s bathroom, as Brad’s friend demonstrates with a quick look at his digital camera. There on the rear screen is a glimpse of Brad’s face buried in the breasts of some anonymous girl. There are 40 more like it. (“Brad made out with the most bitches!”) The pictures are a common souvenir from Spring Break 2003: Women lifting their tops, dropping their thongs, kissing or licking each other, usually for nothing more than a string of plastic Mardi Gras beads, exposing themselves to the digital snapshot cameras of strangers, from there to be shared with friends back home or scattered to the infinite of the World Wide Web.

The girls in the next room will not be found there. Meghan, 19, did kiss a lot of guys in Panama City last year, all of them brief, anonymous, lusty encounters, but no nudity, no sex. This time she has a boyfriend back home in Virginia, and he’s already not happy about this return trip into the Redneck Riviera, where it is not unusual or even discouraged for a quiet coed to find herself at a nightclub drunk and grinding like a stripper for 2,000 hooting young men. Not Meghan, a speech pathology and art history major at James Madison University.

She has done nothing but drink and sunbathe and drink again, interrupted only when hotel security confiscated her room’s supply of hard liquor. Eight bottles. She and her friends are all underage, and a sloppy, drunken scheme to change their color-coded wrist-bands with a permanent marker convinced no one. But they were already drunk, and some chivalrous young men quickly re-supplied them, so now their room is again scattered with empty and half-empty bottles of plain-wrap vodka and cheap Aristocrat Gin. A copy of Cosmopolitan magazine sits nearby, along with cans of Campbell’s soup and the two small turtles bought today in town and named for two of the girls. All of them face a long drive back to the dorms at JMU 800 miles away in the morning. They will party only until 3 a.m.

Meghan reclines in the bed with Rebecca, Whitney and Jenny, beginning their final night in Panama City slowly. “There’s a lot of obnoxious boys,” Meghan says, her voice not angry but relaxed, a little weary. “When you go to the club you get groped. Then you get thrown-up on at the bikini contest. We see a lot of boobs. There will be circles of people, and inside girls are dancing and about ready to show for beads and stuff, and guys will literally run to the beach to see it. Kind of pathetic in a way.”

Caligula would have understood. The drink, the sex, the desperate frenzy of it all. Spring Break is a festival of sun and sin, where young high school and college escapees wash up on the beaches of Florida like thousands of breeding salmon. For some it’s a final binge of intense irresponsibility before graduation and a life-sentence to the daily paycheck grind. Look closely and you will see the future, tomorrow’s lawyers and chiropractors, would-be psychologists and TV commentators, a policeman’s daughter, all here for one more giddy dance along the edge. No longer kids, not quite adults, and some away from home for the first time, trashing hotel rooms for no reason at all, living like rock stars for a week amid oceans of cheap beer, geysers of vomit and young casualties everywhere.

It is an old tradition, not at all limited to this particular stretch of white sands and old resort hotels. There are foam parties in Cancun and Baja, wet T-shirts in Jamaica and South Padre Island, Texas, beer and hard liquor everywhere, helping another generation shed whatever innocence might be left. In the ’80s, Palm Springs became notorious for televised images of rioting young men stripping the bikinis off girls at mid-day, right on main street, before a police crackdown and showbiz Mayor Sonny Bono succeeded in banning the thong, finally sending serious Spring Breakers elsewhere. And they must always go somewhere in March, to celebrate and ignore the high holy days of Easter, to escape the pressures of school and the impending future. A first date can end in the shower with a temporary friend or tan and blotto in the back of a squad car. The fun never stops.

Panama City Beach is nestled in the swampy panhandle of Northwest Florida, once known as the Redneck Riviera, right on the Gulf of Mexico. The Confederate Flag still waves from the back of the occasional pickup truck here, can be seen in a few apartment windows or painted onto a custom T-shirt for sale at Wal-Mart. A last stand for the old ways. No one seems to care. It is a city of just 7,000 permanent residents, living along 27 miles of beach that during Spring Break attract nearly 500,000 swarming young men and women in urgent need of extreme pleasure. Panama City Beach police make 60 percent of annual arrests during March, the high-tide month for Spring Break, when a good 75,000 kids are in town on any given night. Fights, theft, evictions. City fathers have made some moves to clean up the darker implications of this hedonistic migration, but local businesses still fund a nearly half-million-dollar ad campaign to keep them coming, in 2002 even boasting of cheap alcohol and “booze cruises,” delivering about a third of the town’s annual economy in a single month.

On the beaches in March, the occasional couple with a small child can be seen strolling the white sands, looking lost, out of place, in some kind of unspecified danger. But soon they are gone. Offshore, there is swimming and boating and para-sailing, among other wholesome athletic pastimes, but most of the action is on the beach. It is where young women are held upside-down by their ankles and thighs by grunting young men for gravity defying keg-stands, where a drinker can demonstrate the amount of beer that can be inhaled into his or her body before it comes streaming back out the nostrils. Tossing beer kegs heavily across the beach is a sport for the muscled and macho, though most kegs remain buried in the sand, away from the view of cops, since kegs are illegal on the beach. It is where a heavy dude called Kiwi is sloppy drunk in a grass skirt and a bikini top made of two seashells strapped tight against his chest, as he stomps on the beach, moaning, “Keee-weee! Keee-weee! Keee-weee!”

Girls wear bikinis and shades while guys adorn their bare chests with puca shells and plastic Mardi Gras beads, careful to wear their baggies low, revealing the upper strap of their brand-name underwear: Jockey, Joe Boxer, Tommy Hilfiger, Ambercrombie & Fitch, labels too important to leave hidden. One must always represent. So must corporate America.

Right on the beach is a bikini contest on a small wooden stage, where young women in bathing suits take their turns beneath a banner reading “U.S. Smokeless Tobacco.” Some dude on the sand is having his head lathered up and shaved as women step up to dance to anonymous breakbeats, the true competitors shaking that ass and top onstage hard, except for those who don’t, and they are rewarded with silence from the testosterone crowd. Until the inevitable yell: “Show your titties!”
On a more elaborate stage nearby, two hosts invite up Spring Breakers to spin a carnival wheel, which offers a variety of challenges for some lucky guy or girl: “Kiss a guy,” “Get licked,” “Suck big toe,” “semi-naked.” Up onstage now is Alicia Wichner, 19, all the way from Springfield, Ohio. She is a little blonde chick in a flowery bikini, somehow dragged up onstage to judge a kissing contest: meaning that she is on her tip-toes to kiss the first of five contestants, a young black man with a smile on his face. “He’s got big lips!” she says happily. “My boyfriend would be so mad by now. He doesn’t get here until Monday.”

It is now that one of the hosts feels the time is right to once again lead the daily mantra of Spring Breakers everywhere. “You know, what happens in Panama City,” he begins, and he’s then joined by the entire crowd, “stays in Panama City!”
It is a policy and a prayer, a hope for the future, chanted with a drunken wink as your host drips choco syrup and whipped cream on your near-naked body. And your best bud gets it all on camera as the host declares into the microphone, “Keep in mind, this is for Verizon Wireless!”

*

Enter the foam pit at your own risk. This is what they tell you, printed in bold letters right above the sudsy dancefloor, where boys and girls are getting right down on it, dancing to the hits of the moment, rubbing sloppily against one another. The risks involved depend on your point of view. The chemical content of the foam is perhaps uncertain after several hours of horny dudes and sloshed chicks. And the inevitable groping is either a calculated risk or the whole point.

This is Friday night at Club La Vela, where the downstairs sports bar doubles as the weekly foam pit for young Spring Breakers loaded on booze: squealing, hooting, screaming, panting, giggling, with no immediate plans for this precious week in Panama City beyond laying out, partying every night, and maybe hooking up with a convenient body of the opposite sex. On the TV by the bar, ESPN is broadcasting a poker tournament among weird card sharps at Binions in Las Vegas. No one watches.

One girl eyes the foam from the bar. She is a 19-year-old communications major from North Carolina. She wants to be a TV news anchor. She steps into the foam. “I got six other girls here! They’ll protect me!”

Not everyone is so happy. “Coming here tells me there are fucking stupid-ass whores all over the United States. And I don’t want to touch any of them,” says Craig Platt, a scowling blond in a “Texas Greeks” T-shirt. His friend, Eric Knaver, 22, is a tall Texan with spent bottle caps folded over the brim of his cowboy hat, stepping from the foam with great sudsy muttonchops riding up his face from the layers of beads around his neck. It gives him the appearance of an elegant bluegrass crooner. He is a junior studying finance at Texas A&M. He says, “Yesterday was my fucking birthday, man.”

A week ago, Knaver and his three buddies drove all night from Houston to Panama City, slept a few hours, started partying. He is a sinner, a possibly collapsed Catholic among thousands of vacationing hedonists. But whenever Knaver attempts to light a cigarette, Platt grabs it from his mouth, shouting, “Lent! I’m holding you true, asshole!”

Over at the bar, young Pete Wilson, 21, is not concerned about the foam. He is sipping a drink, still in awe of the epic scene back at his hotel earlier this afternoon, when all Spring Break fantasies and fears collided into a dazzling whole. He has come from the single-digit climes of Rochester, New York, for this, and has arrived at a new appreciation for the barter value of cheap beer, which was enough to entice two young ladies back to his room by the beach. Sex was immediate. “I have experienced things down here that I have never seen before,” Wilson says, still in disbelief, his hair bright red, short and curly. “You walk into a room and you see a girl naked and she’s hooking up with you, a boy of yours, and then another kid behind her. I mean, she’s going crazy. You don’t walk into things like that when you’re in New York. I’m seeing a bitch ass-naked, giving my buddy the nastiest blow job I’ve ever seen in my life. And my other buddy’s strapping a fuckin’ rubber on and is about to stick it right in her fucking cooch, man. She had a friend, too. We brought both of them back, and they were just freakin’. They were spilling beer on my buddy and licking it off his chest. It was absolutely nuts. They were from Mississippi and shit. I couldn’t even tell you their names if I wanted to. I don’t even know. This place is crazy. This was Saturday afternoon.”

This is the best part: One of Pete’s pals couldn’t get it up. Whiskey dick! The thing was useless, soaked with booze and anxiety, a total waste. So as the girls are leaving, he yells out the window: “Whores! Whores!” They didn’t seem to notice. Or care. Because later that same night, Pete and his friends were back at La Vela and those same chicks were there and acting damn friendly. Soon enough, they were coming back to the hotel again, gladly trading sex for beer. And this is only Pete’s second night in town.

This morning, he and his pals picked up three new cases of Old Milwaukee and two cases if Busch Lite at the Wal-Mart, which rests at the hub of Spring Break society in Panama City. It is where all visitors must pass, where suitcases of Budweiser (only $15.17!) are stacked to the ceiling, and deliverymen in gray Bud shirts are wheeling in new supplies a few times a day. The year before, a quarter-million cases of Anheiser-Busch were delivered to the Wal-Mart store in March alone. A thousand more arrive every night. That keeps the parking lot crowded with cars and pickups and motorhomes all day, as Breakers stock up on kegs and cans, wine coolers and funnels, beads and bad T-shirts, surfing across the asphalt to their cars with full shopping carts.

Then, after they have been drunk and vomited on the beach, or partied and screwed at the hotel, many return to the big clubs. To Hammerhead Fred’s or Spinnaker’s or back to La Vela, which still claims to be the largest club in the world, proudly displaying a big fading MTV sign above the entrance from when the network paraded bikini girls and drooling guys on camera in the ’90s.

Club La Vela is a hedonist’s paradise, with a daily schedule of girls in bikini’s and soaked T-shirts, and a DJ blasting the season’s theme, sung by Khia against an ominous frenetic beat, and enjoying endless rotation on this throbbing pool deck: “Suck this pussy just like you should/My Neck, my back/Lick my pussy and my crack.”

Every day is the same. It is formula. The host, a grinning muscleman and former male dancer in shorts and wraparound shades, stirs up the testosterone for the daily bikini and wet T-shirt contests. Girls and guys will grind and rub and shake their bodies on command and hump the stage while surrounded by several hundred cheering hooting whistling Beakers sucking down beers and cigarettes and bucket-size fruity concoctions of hard hooch that go down real easy. Nudity is not allowed, though anything close to it is absolutely encouraged, right up to the limits of the law. So your host bellows into the microphone: “Guys, don’t show anything because even a small one will get us in trouble,” just as he begins the daily parade of perfect and imperfect young bodies onto the small stage. “We are here to insure that you all have the best possible time that you can! And right now it is time to start the WET AND WILD WET T-SHIRT CONTEST! All the guys, if you want to, get in the water and come up around the pool deck right now. The closer you get the more fun you’re gonna have! Are you ready?! Contestant number one in the wet T-shirt is Ruth. Come on up, Ruth! Make some noise!”

Ruth shakes it hard, and soon she stands before the host, her arms stretched out above her, full young breasts heaving below a ripped T-shirt, as the water hose sprays the fabric moist and snug against her skin, nipples hardening and clearly visible. She shakes it some more and the audience cheers crazily, in lust and excitement. Contestants who drift too close to the crowd get pawed by the guys, who are whooping it up. And on a balcony above the pool, a woman leans back over the railing as her shirtless boyfriend of the hour squeezes her breasts beneath a black bikini top, right there beside banners for Chrysler and the U.S. Army, for Arrid Total deodorant and Nair For Men.

Your host once again announces the girls for the finale and calls for “audience response voting” – Lana! (polite cheers), Kristen! (louder), Britney! (polite hooting), Kelly! (more of the same), Tish! (a little louder), Amanda! (big cheers), Ashley! (bigger still, and all for a $25 bar tab for third place, $50 for second, and admission that night into the fabulous La Vela VIP room for the top prize). The winner hardly matters and is immediately forgotten. The hunt continues, for the next thrill or glimpse of skin, with no clear rules or boundaries anywhere. And none desired.

*

The nightly journey to sex, drink and dementia must always pass Front Beach Road, where Breakers spend quality time cruising for dates and thrills. Cars with plates from across the South and all the way up to New England roll slowly down the two-lane boulevard, kids running between moving cars, alongside, hopping onto tailgates. Hot-rodded imports roar for the few feet between cars. A local cruiser blasts “Stairway to Heaven” from his Pontiac, drifting past motels and strip clubs and gift shops selling piercings and T-shirts (“five for $5”). A car filled with girls stops suddenly, freezing traffic behind, and is immediately swarmed by guys, rows of beads across their chests, ready for barter in the skin trade. A police squad car pulls over a pick-up with 11 kids in back, flashing the bright blue lights.

Local men from the ghetto across the bridge watch the street traffic from a Burger King parking lot. One of them has his two pit bulls on chains, his ’76 Impala blasting the newest hip-hop hits. Robert is 26, his hair braided tight, watching the scenery pass by and still talking about the few crazy ones at the big hotels nearby who don’t make it back home, all the “bitches jumping off the building, thinking they could fly. It happens every year.”

One busy stop along the strip is the Beach Package Store, self-proclaimed “Spring Break Headquarters – ATM Inside.” A crowd of locals in their 30s drink Miller Lite and icy shots of Jagermeister. Girls in shorts and halter tops stroll inside for supplies as “Freebird” plays on the stereo. Above the cash register and rows of hard liquor is a TV with the sound off, but a female news anchor stares grimly into the camera, as the headlines “Student Drinking” and “Women Gone Wild” flash above her.

Outside, Christians hand out roses, just five young cadets from the Maryland Naval Academy, down South to spread salvation at Spring Break. A bus filled with 66 of them traveled to Panama City for this. They are among nearly 3,500 Christians passing through Panama City during Spring Break each year, preaching an alternative to drink and debauchery. Much like Bobbie Watson of St. Louis, a 19-year-old stalking the beaches and sipping nothing heavier than Pepsi and Mountain Dew. “I used to drink,” he says. “I was a big partier in high school. If I hadn’t been saved by Christ, I’d probably be here doing the complete opposite. It just doesn’t seem like the kind of life I like anymore.”

*

The end will come, as it always does. Several of the old hotels are already closed, fenced off, ready for demolition. Even some of the bigger buildings have been knocked down, making room for condos and a more affluent clientele, closed forever to future Spring Breakers. Last year’s party spot is this year’s rubble. The ruins stretch out west along the sand. At the old Shalimar, with a sign that still promises a “heated pool,” all that remains is a jagged shell, its west wing ripped open. The few remaining rooms are scraped clean, down to the bare brick and concrete, as local scavengers load pickup trucks with old fixtures and aqua-colored doors.

Spring Break may one day abandon Panama City, just as it did to Fort Lauderdale (after peaking with 350,000 visitors in 1985) or Daytona Beach (which banned thongs), both of them Florida beach communities turning away student debauchery for a more sedate family constituency. Even in Panama City, which remains the largest draw for starving college kids anywhere, the crowds are beginning to shrink, and what’s left is the target of intense competition between clubs and promoters, bars and restaurants, gift shops and tattoo parlors. Longtime promoters can see it already, as rival events now occur at the same time on the same days, ensuring that virtually all fail to hit that legendary massive payday.

It will take time for the tide of college students to finally turn elsewhere, as even the town of Panama City Beach is at odds with itself, embracing the culture and profit of Spring Break while hoping to shift the tone away from wet T-shirts and unlimited drinking. It hardly matters in the end. The excesses of March are as ancient as the Greeks and Romans, as old Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. And not everyone outgrows it. The need to escape is profound and eternal, regardless of the location of your blackout or the size of the party. Even a small one will get you into trouble.

Los Angeles/2004

From Spring Broke: Photographs by Nathaniel Welch. Essay by Steve Appleford. Introduction by Evan Wright, powerHouse Books, 2004.