Amazon.com Review
Nicole Panter, author of Mr. Right on & Other Stories and a teacher at the California Institute for the Arts, has assembled a collection of odd bits and pieces by a group consisting mostly of Los Angeleno writers. This is not your normal collection of urban scene-setting essays. Panter gives us, for example, Bob Flanagan's "Pain Journal." Flanagan, a performance artist and author, died in early 1996 of cystic fibrosis. "Pain Journal" recounts his struggles with pain medication and the collapse of his sexuality. And then there is Jerry Stahl's tale of a teen's sexual escapade with an older woman on an airplane. And Bernard Cooper's remembrance of the first time he spotted a transvestite (at age 8); "I felt as if everything I understood . . . had been squeezed out of me." Not for the faint of heart. But then, neither is Los Angeles.
From Publishers Weekly
A walk on the wild side, these stories about everything from terminally ill S&M performers to seedy Hollywood types and gangland murders vary from well-written narrative to amateurish sensationalism. In one of the best and lighter tales, Allison Ander's wonderful "I Fall Apart on Planes," the narrator recollects her mother's Great Gatsby-esque love affairs and heartaches. Two other strong stories look sensitively at transvestism. Bursting with anger, love, humor and confusion, "Just Another River in Egypt" by Jill St. Jacques conveys how hard it is for a kid to escape a hatefully repressive and cruel father. The author finds a gorgeous connection between cross-genders and tornadoes, "Anthropomorphic funnel shapes, hysterical transsexuals of the wind and clouds, they leave grooves in the ground, spit out barns like cornflakes." Bernard Cooper's equally compelling "Burl's" tenderly traces a boy's self-discovery and the literal and figurative trouble he has filling his father's shoes: "I'd try on his wing-tips and clomp around, slipping out of them with every step." Also fine is Jerry Stahl's taut and very funny "The Age of Love," which catapults a 14-year-old into the mile-high club when he loses his virginity with a much older woman on an airplane. Unnatural Disasters has many duds as well, stories that mistake baseness for depth. Jim Kalin's dreadfully boring "First" reminds readers that alternative doesn't necessarily mean interesting. Ivan the protagonist goes to a wedding but spends most of the time wrapped up in dreary self-preoccupation. At the end, he and his indistinguishable friends perform a spit-on-penis ritual in the bathroom. However transgressive this is supposed to be, it is simply a grubby scene that does nothing to remedy the story's lack of invention or credible characters.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
