COMING SOON: AN EMPTY LOT

lar_import — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:50:21 +0000

As everyone who’s read about half of anything I’ve written knows, it makes me sick that Acres of Books is going to be demolished. Knocking Acres over makes no sense at all: Building new lofts when we could be about three weeks from the New Depression? Snuffing out a loved (and solvent) landmark business just because screwy deals drafted decades ago demand it? Removing one of the last unique things that keeps Long Beach from becoming just some by-committee tryhard imitation of Santa Monica?

Of course the city will regret this at some point down the line—probably when people who are barely teenaged now climb into power and wonder what happened to the Long Beach their parents loved, and probably when some think-tank study finally discovers years from now that unrestricted construction of dingbat live-work lofts is about as healthy for a struggling downtown as a neutron bomb. I can almost hear the speeches now, and they sound a lot like the apologies the city had to make for the successive generations of fiasco built and rebuilt on the site that’s now CityPlace. But ideas as bad as this one breed too many bulldozers to stop, so Acres gets plowed under. They close for good Wednesday and the maybe-official wake will be tonight in the back at the last Hobo Alley. Bands will play, hot dogs will be cooked and a lot of respects will be paid. My respects below.

MON., FEB. 25: RAY BRADBURY + MORE @ BOOKFELLOWS

lar_import — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:59:35 +0000

Many thanks for Arthur for the tip: Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen and Forrest J. Ackerman appear tonight and together for probably the fantastic monsterist event of the year. Venice boy Bradbury put romance, breadth and vision in his writing that triads with Bester and Dick for some of the deepest and most resonant American lit—not just genre lit, either—and without him there would be a weeping puncture wound in the national capacity for imagination. Harryhausen is a real-life Frankenstein: he made some of the best monsters (Clash Of The Titans, Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad, Ymir from 20 Million Miles To Earth, who shames Cloverfield monster with his dignity and grace) in filmdom and made them come to life with pioneering stop-animation work, and anyone who has ever known the childhood joy of a Sunday afternoon monster matinee owes him (and Toho) a deep psychic debt. And Ackerman (besides being Bradbury’s first agent!) ran Famous Monsters of Filmland (the paper of record of monsterism) and rescued uncounted SF artifacts from total cultural dissolution—a cultural ambassador between this planet and wilder ones who gave lasting form to fandom. These are some giants and putting them in a room together is too rare an occasion to ever happen again. If you miss this, some delicate inside part of you will surely wither.

— Rob Battin

RAY BRADBURY, RAY HARRYHAUSEN AND FORREST J. ACKERMAN AT MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION AT BOOKFELLOWS, 238 N. BRAND BLVD., GLENDALE. 7:30 PM / FREE / ALL AGES. WWW.MYSTERYANDIMAGINATION.COM.

L.A. RECORD » ray bradbury

COMING SOON: AN EMPTY LOT

MON., FEB. 25: RAY BRADBURY + MORE @ BOOKFELLOWS