Reading a ten year-old book of essays about popular culture is likely to be a cringe-inducing experience, doubly so when that book is your own. But in tidying up these essays for republication here, I mostly find that they make me perversely nostalgic for life in late 20th-century Los Angeles. Nor have I been this exhausted since watching a marathon of Deadwood.

It has been ten years since Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge was published by Buzz Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press. I was a columnist at Buzz Magazine, and many of the essays in the book first appeared there. Buzz was a little like Fitzcarraldo's Opera House in the Amazon jungle, a wildly improbable bastion of intelligence erected in the least likely of locales. Too improbable, perhaps; Buzz had a good seven year run, and while the magazine may be long out of print, anyone who was involved with it will tell you that Buzz still exists as part of LA culture at the DNA level.

I live and work in the Bay Area these days, and when I go back to LA, it's often to camp with my 16 year-old son, Tyrone. This summer, we were doing just that when we were rousted at 5:00 a.m. by the Parks Service. Malibu was on fire, just a mile or two from where we had pitched our tents, and another mile from Tyrone's dad's house. We spent the rest of the day helping Tyrone's dad and his wife clear brush from around their house, an eye on the plume of smoke just downwind. Tyrone and his dad wanted to stay and defend the house, should the wind shift. Tyrone's stepmom and I were for cutting and running. Fortunately it never came to that decision point, but I was secretly proud of my son's innate sense of honor and bravery.

I mention this story because many people will tell you that Los Angeles is an «artificial» town. My experience of it is as a place where one lives uncomfortably close to nature and the elements. Including at times an uncomfortable proximity to the unbridled forces of human nature.

LA is the last American frontier town. As such, it tends to attract the rapacious and the naive in equal measure. It also fetches up its share of genuine outliers, not because they're drawn to LA specifically, but because they've used up every other place. That would accurately describe the circumstances of my own arrival, which you can read about in Chapter One. The natives are of course the most interesting of all, people who grew up in a fantastically broken home. When I think of my son at sixteen defending his homestead with a garden hose and a chainsaw, I think that there are far worse places to be from.

This web edition will appear a chapter at a time, with a new installment appearing every Monday. Somewhere along the way, a print edition will be available for purchase through this site as well. This effort is a shakedown cruise, a dry run for what I hope will turn out to be a good way to publish new books.