W.B./Neighbourhood of Infinity by Brad Zukovic (excerpted from DR. BUCK'S LETTERS) From a counter seat at Gower Denny's, I watched Jack Ternan emerge from an oily blur of super-heated air. The heat was really shattering off the boulevard now, and Ternan's bowed legs were massive in the glass distortion, his shaved head craning high above traffic. From thirty feet, I made out a brow with a mouth-slash--a pissed-off 40's freak somehow still walking around. An unemployed actor was with him: a Viet Nam vet who'd ordered a coffee at Denny's and saw the same cup staring at him twenty years later. Next to me, McCaw had the maps out, and not the usual USGS topos of the Mojave desert either. These were military topos of places where they lit cobalt shots. He had Plutonium Pass circled in blue felt pen--that's west of the Skulls where you find the Epson Salt Works if you feel like pushing the rental up a 20 mile wash through sand traps. There were maps of China Lake and the Nevada Test Site...dry lakes where the dust devils follow you...uranium dumps...and the unobtanium of a cheerleader's hips moving timelessly in time, mortar in the the pestle of her gold country. Jack Ternan barged into Denny's and a couple of sleepers at the counter lurched up to greet him. He looked like a thing from film noir, which he was--a heavy who had pissed away a run of Warner's gangster flicks when he started caving in the jaws of his co-stars. Jack's comeback began when his billy-clubbed mug appeared in "Hollywood Sodom", a hipster coffee table book. That mug shot caught the attention of the young director Carlton Spigarelli, who hired Jack as the gangster chief in the first of his neo-noir hipster blood baths--the ones with the spaghetti western sound tracks. On screen, Jack played flat and real, and at age 78 he was back in the chips. Unfortunately, Jack had gotten into it with Spigarelli, sending his teeth through his septum. Jack was blackballed again, bunkered in a day hotel near Hollwyood and Vine, watching tourists through a tinted window and masturbating. "We makin' a run" "We are making a run Jack," said McCaw. We drank fresh drip coffee and it was the first morning of the world. McCaw was two months from a shallow grave in Trona -- explaining how the military copped an algebra off Banach spaces to send a drone down a chimney. Jack was doing a Walter Brennan shtick for the waitress and plowing down French Toast. At that moment I felt the cold breath of the future, but just as surely, the scene froze in a defensive reflex -- entering the permanent record. I looked at the collar bone of the waitress, thinking: "There is a Moment that crosses all moments, even as they flow." I must have said it out loud because McCaw answered: "The Dedekind infinite--William Blake was onto it and that's what they're modelling with quandles in 3-space--running analog drones off of knots. That's what we want to see." "I don't give a fuck about drones," Jack said, stabbing a finger at the map. "I want to find some gold." At that moment, Duce walked in, two months from being killed by a train in the yards East of downtown. Duce was a homeless, late 70's punk--flush with cash, having just appeared in a hipster documentary wherein he fingered a former Clown Room stripper in the death of Kurt Cobain. Jack got up and embraced him. They had gotten tight playing Donkey Kong at the Cahuenga 7-11. "Now," said McCaw, speading maps. "We are going to need water for this trip -- lots of it."

BOOKS: LA ALTERNATIVE PRESS COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS AND MAKE MY BABY By Cole Coonce KBP Los Angeles, they say, is a siren. Calling all of us not born in this in this city, like the Whore of Babylon to an end-of-the-world orgy. It's easy for those of us recent additions to this freakshow-sex party to ignore that this city is followed by an immense history that still lingers along the streets (and the gutters) we walk everyday. New Angelenos truly enthralled with their home have years of reading ahead of them, starting with the apocalyptic Day of the Locust. For the slackers just mildly interested in getting some head from Los Angeles, there is only one book: Come Down From the Hills and Make My Baby. Reading Cole Coonce's pornographic love letter to Los Angeles is like skipping ahead in the history textbook straight to the Rodney King beating. After all, those of us here and now really cannot do without a little knowledge of the decade from which our city has not recovered. Loosely factual, this novel follows the indifferent musical career of the experimental-punk-noise outfit Braindead Soundmachine, the drunken exploits of the band members in East Hollywood when it was actually seedy, and the narrator's post-modern love for Los Angeles as he watches it burn on TV during the L.A. riots from a sports bar in Oregon. This book is worth picking up for its sexy, nihilistic description of transvestite strippers alone. But as a historical document, it's priceless. (Evan George) 7-8-05

No mistakes By D. Brian Burghart http://www.newsreview.com/issues/reno/2005-01-13/westlit.asp.. Come Down From The Hills & Make My Baby Cole Coonce Kerosene Bomb Publishing I'm going to go out on a limb and say a lot of readers won't like Cole Coonce's new book, Come Down From The Hills & Make My Baby. And while I'm out here, I'm also going to say I did like this book and will probably read it again. On the surface, this is the story of a punk rock band, Braindead Soundmachine, that is so committed to its anti-rock punk-rock ethos that it can't really get a hell of a lot accomplished. (The novel's name refers to an album name in the book.) Or, depending on how success is measured, the band actually gets a lot done, including albums, shows, a tour and a lot of drugs and women, which, when you think about it, is pretty industrious in comparison to many punk rock bands. Financial success comes in a far second place to artistic integrity, although making enough money to continue the band is occasionally deemed important. Artistic integrity for this band means, at its most basic, survival, no chord changes, and "there are no mistakes." The story is told in a fragmented, first-person narrative style, a series of anecdotes pieced together into chapters told in roughly sequential order, although there is plenty of space given to various flashbacks, tangents and besides-the-points. Does it seem like I'm having a hard time laying out the salient aspects of this book? The fact is, it's got so many things going on that I am having a tough time. If I was looking for an overarching theme, I guess it would be "All things tend toward crapification," and this book is just a long indictment of societal trends--and society itself for that matter. Anything from gender to music making to friendship to Los Angeles to technology is fodder for deconstruction, and if I want to be really modernist, I'd say the concept of the "novel" itself is being deconstructed. Hell, I guess that's safe to say since I'm not absolutely sure that this is a novel at all. It might be a straight retelling of historic fact with the band and album names changed to decrease liability, and Come Down From The Hills & Make My Baby may be closer to non-fiction than fiction. And there's, I think, the fulcrum upon which I balance my liking of this book: its memoir quality. This book feels really real to me. The screwed-up, cracked characters remind me of people I know. The ancillary acquaintances who are called by descriptions rather than names--Purple Haired Girl, Missing Eyebrow, Tour Manager--remind me of the "types" of people I run into in the hours when the bartenders start upending chairs onto tables and wiping out ashtrays. Aside from his ability to nail down characters without devoting a lot of words to their characterizations, Coonce writes in a fun-to-read energetic, industrial, pre-Apocalyptic fashion. Kind of like a mescaline hangover. You've got to hand it to him, at least he has style--just don't pay too much attention to punctuation and grammar and such. As long as I am spending time on limbs, I'd guess it's safe to say that Coonce is well aware of the parallels that can be drawn between the non-commercial punk-rock band and the novelist who forsakes the conservative, familiar narrative style in favor of an integritous, anecdote-based plotting structure. But if Coonce doesn't care, then I don't either. The book can be purchased at www.kerosenebomb.com for $14.95.

cf. http://www.prickmag.net/comedownbookreview.html COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS & MAKE MY BABY Written by Cole Coonce Kerosene Bomb Publishing Book Review by Jonathan Williams From the February 2005 issue of Prick Magazine. The second book from journalist Cole Coonce, Come Down from the Hills & Make my Baby, is a semi-autobiographical tale of a band obsessed with drag racing, drag queens and the apocalyptic downfall of the entertainment industry. The first person narrative chronicles the struggles of the Braindead Soundmachine, a disco punk metal band from L.A. that creates artsy noise with guitars, keyboards, and a revolving door of drum machines and whacked out female singers. The band ends up being sponsored by a drag racing pit crew, befriending a down-and-out filmmaker, hiring a manager with one eyebrow, finding spiritual guidance in a Japanese transvestite, and touring with a German industrial band called DMFDM. Throw in a little drug abuse, infidelity, cowboy hats, and technical difficulties and you've got a volatile band on the brink of self-destruction. This angst-filled tale is like a beat novel for today's disgruntled youth.