FULL BLEED: DIS/RE/APPEAR

These things used to be popular. But I'm behind the times so maybe it's not anymore. At any rate, maybe it's a way for people get a sense of the texture and origins of this particular work. And I do want to jump in for a second and talk about historical accuracy or inaccuracy in all the Hazeland works.

The books aren't strictly biographical. Some of these things I was heavily into around the time when these books were supposed to have taken place (ie when I was anywhere from say twelve to twenty or so years old.) I dug punk rock. I wasn't part of any punk rock scene. I was too weird and gawky and out in the suburbs and frankly fine being a dork and geek and nerd. Also the timing of things where punk had mostly burned out or changed into something else by the time I'd gotten tipped to it. I wasn't a goth. I listened to 91X from San Diego and was a little confused when it switched formats from what we'd call classic rock (contemporary rock in 1982, which really wasn't as calcified as classic rock is now, but let's not get in the weeds) to new wave or college rock or what we'd call it now.

I didn't read Love and Rockets until many many years after those first groundbreaking issues came out. I was never that cool. I was too busy tracking down junky Bronze Age Marvel comics.

So yeah, I was never cool. I'm still not cool. Merely a good student.

And for that matter, Hazeland is a confection of past history and my own experience and where we all are now. There's some projection of the present (which is the future of the time portrayed in the work) and yeah, nostalgic impulse or acknowledgement or however you want to label it. I never said it was a work of historical accuracy, though I certainly try to bring a sense of how today and yesterday are different countries to things, but I'm not writing a textbook or even an oral history.

Hell, I won't even tell you what year these books actually take place. You might want to guess from some of the music cues, but I might just be head-faking you. It's been known to happen.

Now on with the show.

Fake Believe itself was written a little while ago, but I've carried around the germs of these things for some time before that. At least in the case of the influences I can directly identify.

Detective Stories

There's only a handful of these that I've really sat down and read, primarily those of Hammett and Chandler, I think a few of Willeford and Thompson, too. That said, I'm old enough that I saw some of these lurid men's adventure magazines on stands when I was a kid. When I was older there was sort of a renaissance of them with more respectable presentations, an elevation, if you will. I'm not saying that I channeled any of that sort of fervid energy and let's face it, shamelessness in tone and content. But it was sitting in the back of my mind. It's most evident in "Cut/Paste" which takes the PI concept and turns it a little sideways, running things down weirder corridors than the earlier generations of these stories might've had in mind.

Folk Magic

I love magic systems. Mana. Crystals. Recharge times. The whole nine yards. Kidding. They're death. They're Anti-Life. They belong in RPG rulebooks and cheat guides for AAA games so that the numbers can go up just a little bit more. But I love reading about folk magic, which is more a way of engaging with the world than it is a way of measuring character power levels or min/maxing your warlock. So things like rings of salt and ways to deal with water or keeping the authorities away from your land or what you should/shouldn't be doing on the night of the full moon is the kind of stuff I love. Or even the best way to keep a ghost in a Coke bottle.

Tommy's

This won't be the first time I've invoked this Los Angeles landmark. Hopefully it'll stay open until all of us are long gone, as opposed to the Pantry which is closing forever as you read this. Anyways, Tommy's is a special place for me, particularly the shop on Beverly and Highland, which I've been going to since the early-middle eighties. There's probably no reason for it to be special, right? It's a hamburger stand that's maybe remarkable for refusing to change its model (too much -- it offers breakfast sandwiches now) or with the times. Anyways, go there and get a double chili burger. Hang out on a Friday night and see everyone who comes by. Get a taste of how things were done fifty years ago and haven't changed all that much.

Love and Rockets

One of the greatest American comics, if not the greatest. I don't want to say that it's a simple book, because it's not. But it's put together in such a way that it doesn't need pyrotechnics or anything more than what it does with sturdy linework and keen observation and heart. Everyday people who you've never before met all living and breathing on the page. There's a reason why the kids in "Third Saturdays" are trying to track these comics down, even though they shouldn't be all that hard to find.

6th Street Coming and Going

The thing about cities is that they're changing and alive, just on a timescale that humans don't necessarily adhere to particularly well. When a structure goes up, we expect it to stay up for our lifetime and past that. So when one comes down, particularly an iconic structure like the 6th Street Bridge (made famous in too many films and drives through the city), one's reminded of the passage of time in a fundamental way. Even if that bridge is taken down and then replaced with a new, contemporary, replacement, that recognition of time passed sticks around. Sure, enough people will eventually die and forget the original, but for a handful of perhaps obsessed weirdos. Or those who are watching a Fast and Furious movie, or even Maniac Cop 2 (which does not take place in LA at all, but in New York. Maybe these things never go away.

Industrial/Goth

Goth is one of those things I came to later on, even though I lived through what some folks would regard its heyday in the middle-late eighties. It was in the air around me. I had a classmate in some English and Sociology classes who was either goth or deathpunk or whatever. There were weirdos in high school, but mostly they were just listening to Nick Cave and not out there in black leather glooming it up. So yeah, I was never in the subculture. Leather makes me sweat and want to pass out. That said, sometimes only Siouxsie hits the spot. Or even Drab Majesty. Or any of the other hundreds of bands who are making goth and industrial sounds and darkwave (including the weekly show of the same name over on SiriusXM radio). I don't fit in the lifestyle at all, being a weird and gawky kind of middle-aged white dude. I can't live the life. But I love the music and I wanted to play around with it some, particularly in the story "Suicide Jewelry" with its new-to-town star hungry for fame no matter what the cost.

Beauty in Ugly

So that picture of the razorwire imposed over the neon signage of the old Rialto Theater (don’t be fooled, it’s an Urban Outfitters inside and hasn’t been a theater for several decades) is one of my favorite pictures I’ve taken in LA. It’s the contrast and tension between what’s easily described as beautiful and what’s casually tossed away as ugly. And how those things are side by side in Los Angeles every day, every minute, every second. It’s that friction that makes this place great and weird and upsetting and strange. Sure, every city has their own brand of that going on, and LA’s is unique. Yes, there’s more than aesthetic tension. That sometimes snaps into periods of great change, even traumatic change. Even when the money and developers want things to stay one way or to become one way, reality steps in and shifts things around some.

In Search Of

I think this is actually a repeat from the influence board I did for The Queen of No Tomorrows, several years ago. And it's funny, because I'd never intended to include them at all in the original plan. And by "include" I mean "base the main character's old job on a show I liked as a kid." But yeah, as a kid in the seventies with any interest in the paranormal and weird shit, you were glued to the TV on Saturdays when the latest episode of In Search Of would run. Almost-real paranormal activity and weird history and real-world phenomena all delivered by Leonard Nimoy (and his fabulous dresser). Yeah, that was the good stuff. I still dip into the show from time to time, mostly as background or pure texture. And yeah, clearly Quest4 is my tribute to In Search Of. I'm glad that I get to play with the show and its crew a bit more now. A long ways from a casual aside and bit of background texture that just worked its way into a book a few years ago, yeah? Anyways, you'll get to meet 'em in the story "In What Furnace" which takes our crew out to the wilds of... Yucaipa? Yeah, it's a real place. Look it up.

The End of Bunker Hill

The 6th Street bridge was a place I got to visit more than in just movies. Spent a morning walking back and forth over it, just taking pictures of the spalling concrete and the cityline under the gray summer clouds and heat. It's a place I touched. Not so with Bunker Hill, which was a formerly-wealthy and gradually turned to working-class neighborhood that got eradicated in time and development (particularly the placement of the 110 Freeway, which runs right adjacent to the heart of downtown and through what was once its outskirts.) Bunker Hill is a place I've only seen in films: Kiss Me Deadly, Angel's Flight and in particular, The Exiles. The place had developed a reputation for being run-down and shabby, which just means it was more than rich white people living there. Eventually the whole place was sacrificed so we could sit in traffic trying to get from the 101 to the 405. Progress! The neighborhood made a last appearance in a Darren McGavin show called The Outsider, an episode of which featured houses up on flatbed trucks waiting to be preserved, and yeah, that's where the beginning of "Crate of Bottle-Fed Ghosts" comes from. It was all real.

Redevelopment of DTLA

One of the themes that keeps popping up in a few of these stories is how downtown LA (DTLA, natch) was really left to go to seed in wake of the sixties and through the seventies. There were still busy streets and Broadway still hosted the best collection of neon signage concentrated anywhere in town. It was also run-down and not the best place to hang out. When I was a younger teen it felt dangerous. Or maybe that was just the vibes that my dad gave off when taking us through there. Towards the end of the seventies and the advent of the coming Olympic Games in 1984, redevelopment began to move back in to snap up real estate and attempt to re-gentrify. That was an ongoing process, still continuing. After all, is a city like Los Angeles ever in a final state of completion? Nope. For a time, though, it was a much wilder place, with low rents to support artists and musicians and a much more bohemian kind of life than what it shook out to be.

Luis Rodriguez the Republic of East LA

The Republic of East LA is a collection of short stories by writer Luis Rodgriguez, who really opened my eyes up to the range of stories and lives folks living in parts of LA I never really visited were living. Not much more to say on that other than they have a vibrance and vitality that I'd be happy to muster a quarter of. Something I should probably revisit, now that I stand here writing these words.

Vertigo Comics

Honestly, I'm gonna do a much longer post on the intersection of the Vertigo (and really pre-Vertigo horror/weird comics that filtered out of DC from the mid-eighties all the way to the early two thousands.) So, around this period, DC imported a whole bunch of creators from the UK, some who'd worked on 2000AD and similar titles, some who were from fanzines and the like. This led to a major reinvention of what kinds of stories superhero comics could tell, the atmosphere they could generate and the ideas they could grapple with. Outsider characters were reborn in much stranger forms and with editorial freedom. Now, the truth of it is that some of this had its roots in the Bronze Age of comics, Marvel in particular, with weird genre combinations. But the arrival of this British invasion meant that things were really going to change, at least for a little while. And these stories really hit me at the right time, particularly in combination with the art experimentation that was allowed for by refinements in print and paper, finally yielding fully-painted comics filled with delicate and beautiful and horrifying art. It was a great time to put a couple bucks down and read something new and wild. It's still stuck with me.

70s Loser Renaissance Films

Original concept, do not steal. Lots of folks have written about this period in American studio films, where stories about criminals and outsiders and folks who'd just plain run out of luck and you were there to watch it, were allowed to be told. We got some of this in the 30s-50s with the heyday of film noir, of course (and this period dovetails with a reinvention of noir, or neo-noir depending on who you're talking to.) The studios finally broke away from the need for a happy ending or telling stories that would sit well with happy suburbians. Now we were getting stories about people who were out there on the margins (granted, the margins were a lot easier to live in, economically, back then as opposed to after a few decades of pretty muscular inflation and competitive real estate markets). We could get stories like Cisco Pike, where Kris Kristoffersen plays a down on his luck former dealer trying to make it in country music, being roped into one last deal (no, it's never that) by scheming cop Gene Hackman. Or Vanishing Point, where a former cop who's walked away from the corruption of the force turns to a life or wandering only to deliver a package from Denver to San Francisco and ends up on the wrong side of the law merely for existing in the margins. There's a thousand more and they all seem like relics of a lost age because they are. They weren't written to be chopped and stretched over ten hours of prestige. Short, sharp shocks with their blend of optimism and hopelessness, shot on streets and in cars and in the smog that you'd escape if only you could.

Night Walks in DTLA

I miss the world before Covid. Back then I used to travel to LA a couple times a year and visit friends, get great food. And detournement. Yeah, that. If you're not familiar with the term, it's just glorified wandering. Now the Situationists turned it into a political process, or would use it to hijack a piece of art, for instance, and repurpose it. But in the sense I'm talking about, it would be just to go out and walk around. And take pictures. Decontextualize pieces of the city or sidewalk or texture on a wall or green neon glowing on a quinceñera dress behind metal roll-up grates. The signage would come on and things would take a new life, making even trash look beautiful and alien and wonderful. I've been able to do a little of that since the world broke, but not enough.

Weirdos on Twitter/Bluesky - New Perspectives

Feels like a million years ago that I was on Twitter. I bailed for the same reasons a lot of you did. Mostly it got too depressing. I probably stayed too long as it was. I'm over on Bluesky now (pretty easy to find). One of the things that kept me over at Twitter as long as I was the opportunity to get to chat with and see folks who I probably never would have. Folks will talk about things on these sites that they might not talk about in public (strange I know, but it's true.) So I got to see some real life from gay folk, Black folk, trans folk, anyone who isn't me. You can learn a whole lot if you just sit down and listen and don't pick fights stupidly. And for that, I'm thankful. It's been an amazing opportunity to hear from people who I wouldn't otherwise, and to be exposed to things I wouldn't have been. So thank you for sharing your life with this cringe white guy from the suburbs.

This next section is a little bit of the music that went into things or maybe captures the vibe of the places that get described in the stories of Fake Believe.

Skateland – for Third Saturdays

Originally a playlist put together by the folks at Aquarium Drunkard, Skateland is an imaginary Saturday night party that never really ends. It doesn’t even have to be on roller skates. Just has to want to be young and maybe on the outside and knowing that, not fearing it because the inside is duller than what we got. You can still listen to it here and you really should: Skateland at Soundcloud

Gutterball – “Trial Separation Blues” for Cut/Paste

Originally a one-off collaboration between Steve Wynn and members of House of Freaks and the Long Ryders, the band put out a couple records in the early nineties, but they sound like the seventies filtered through some more (then) contemporary sounds. It’s kinda ramshackle bar rock, but smarter and wiser than all that. Again, it knows what it is and is fine with that, just so long as there’s grocery money in the back pocket when you need it.

Laurie Anderson – “Gravity’s Angel” for In What Furnace

In What Furnace is a story about the folks behind a paranormal television program hunting down and finding something that might be the result of science gone wrong or something far worse than that. This song is sort of a perfect way to see something born out of technology gone more than a little mad but still be strangely beautiful and compelling.

Mazzy Star – “Disappear” for Suicide Jewelry

If you’ve ever wanted to get lost in someone else, then maybe this is the way to do it.

Algiers – “Remains” by Algiers for A Crate of Bottle-Fed Ghosts

A gospel dirge for a world that’s been left behind. Perfect for an entire community that’s been wiped off the map and is desperate for a way to be saved.

Stones – “Tumbling Dice” for Club Closed: Private Party

Yeah, they were a long way from being the scrappy kids who’d listened to a bunch of blues records, but still managed to hold onto their tin crown as kings of the losers. A tough act to maintain when you’re at the top of the charts, I suppose. This is them at nearly their most swaggering, sure that whatever they were going to get into, they’d be able to get out of.

Chameleons – “Swamp Thing” for The Cinderhaus

Perhaps an odd choice of subject or title, but the atmosphere of sophistication in strangeness is perfect for the semi-annual auction of the outré and fantastic, this year held in the dilapidated Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, which might have seen better days at one time, but none more fantastic.

The last one is kind of a cheat. It’s no secret that I’d love to rework some of The Queen of No Tomorrows. Nothing more would I like to fix than how Ariela the titular Queen met her fate. It’s actually perfect in a way. You’ll know if you’ve read it. I’d still like to have done things differently, but this seemed to be the demand of not only the book that I’d pitched to my editor but of the book itself. It couldn’t have been different. I wished it was. I love writing Ariela Ramona Califia Gutiérrez, Nuestra Reina de Sombra y Silencio. And you’re not supposed to love your characters, right? Something about you not letting bad things happen to them blah blah blah. It’s fun to write the scare quotes villain who seems to have everything planned and squared away. It’s fun to write deviousness contrasted with an inability to prevent fate from taking a bite out of you. So I guess I wanted to pay tribute to her one more time, particularly with the story titled Club Closed: Private Party, where you get to see a decidedly different side of her. But no mistake, she’s still the Queen.

She might even appear in another story in Fake Believe, but you can’t blink or you’ll miss it.