Uncommon Law

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

Photograph by Nathaniel Welch

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."

Anita Ekberg, publicity shoot, 1953.
Photograph by Phil Stern
Courtesy powerHouse Books

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.