Stories Books and Cafe
1716 W. Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026
Los Angeles is Slake’s city, but Echo Park is our neighborhood. Come join us in our backyard when we gather some of our Issue 2 contributors at Stories Books and Cafe, where we had a spill-over crowd for our reading there last summer.
Standing at the mic next to the dope mural will be:
• John Albert (Wrecking Crew) on Van Halen:
“It is a style of playing that will so dramatically alter the musical landscape that thirty years later it will sound normal, even rote. But in 1978, this burst of unabashed virtuosity and noise, something we’ll later learn is appropriately called ‘Eruption,’ earns unexpected respect from three punk rock children and one middle-aged country rock musician. As the whole thing reaches a frenzied crescendo of undulating distortion, the four of us start to laugh.”
—from “Running with the Devil”
• Greg Burk (MetalJazz.com) on the sanctity of blanco tequila:
“It goes without saying that when you’re drinking cheap white tequila, ice and mixers must be avoided. There is purgation to be accomplished, and a penitent does not affix pompoms to his flagellum.”
—from “Absolution”
• Hank Cherry on the fallout, psychic and otherwise, after the flood in New Orleans:
“After Hill’s murder I became convinced that going back was folly. By all reports, the town had turned into a swamp of violent dysfunction, something it teetered on when I lived there. At the end of this past April, though, I turned forty just as BP’s oil rig exploded, sending the region into disaster mode once again. I knew I had to get back there before they sold the last of the oyster po’ boys. It was only half a joke.”
—from “Bayouland”
• Jackie Gorman (The Seeing Glass) on final moments:
“The worst part about being a sick, fat, smelly old woman who chases everybody away with her stink: the worst part is just being stuck inside of me. And
not anybody else but me. Where is a real out-of-body experience when you most need it?” Birdie sighed. “But the best part is that I don’t have any more nightmares. In my dreams I am always dancing.” Birdie closed her eyes.”
—from “Ghost Dance”
• James Greer (The Failure) on the subtle art of fabrication:
“Now that she thinks of it, Oscar isn’t even sure that the drug-addled motorcyclist in George Allen Parker’s story was male. For some reason, the details have already started to withdraw from her memory’s outstretched arms into the kind of dense fog one normally associates with London, but which in fact occurs in Paris regularly, though not as regularly as one might wish. In fact, this fog can happen anywhere, though no cases have been reported for many years in Valdux, South Dakota.”
—from “A Yellow Coincidence”
• Joseph Mattson (Empty the Sun) on a cloudy night in Little Tokyo and Chinatown:
“Because my soul was old, because I was ruination incarnate—or perhaps by default—I became the patron whiskey saint of the Bar That Cannot Be Named. The Warlords of Little Tokyo took a shine to me and appointed me their tyro. And, like true masters on their apprentice, the old men put me to task when I finally hit bottom.”
—from “The Warlords of Little Tokyo”
• Amy Scattergood (Squid Ink) on going missing:
“Exposition: Abandoned car, dirt road, collapsed
coat, single shoe on the shoulder. Her husband
memorizes the horses in the sky while police
detectives lift her fingerprints from the wheel
and the wind lifts the last of her perfume.”
—from “Fugue in D Minor with Dissociative State”
• Laurie Wheeler on matters atmospheric:
“My clothes feel like friends again
Catching like cotton sails
I drive with the windows down
Along dark streets
The dry leaves bound out of their piles on the side of the road
Running alongside the car like excited dogs
Trying to keep up and then
Whirling behind my wheels
In a cloud of goodbyes”
—from “In the Air”