"This is a book about Los Angeles for everyone who already knows about Los Angeles, and also for those who don't know a thing about it, and for those who think they do. It is also for those who think it doesn't exist. What is Los Angeles? The Big Apple it isn't. And to understand Los Angeles, you have to know that it doesn't want to be the Big Apple, and never did. It only wants to be the Big Orange, and nobody understands that better than Jack Smith, the author of this highly personal, highly affectionate exploration of the city that has been more maligned, and more secretly loved, than any other place in history since Gomorrah; not to mention Sodom. Jack Smith ... enjoys some minor celebrity as the columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a man who seems to have a special rapport with this city that escapes the pen of most writers, inside and out. Here's a clue to Jack Smith and this book. He likes Disneyland, and he isn't afraid to say so. But he confesses that a trip to Disneyland makes him feel like a small boy, and also like a yokel who has been out-manipulated by that clever fellow, the late Walter Disney. Here is a book about the places in Los Angeles that everyone makes fun of except those who actually go to see them. Not just to see them, but to experience them, as Jack Smith does. You would have to be with him, on a bird walk at Descanso Gardens, to get the feeling of what Southern California is, and how a bird walk can be more fun than watching the Superbowl game on TV, especially when the Rams aren't in it. This is a book for people who live in Los Angeles or its environs, and for people who have never seen it; and for people who have been here and wonder whether they should come back for a second look. It is a book for people who have only seen the Santa Monica pier on television, in a Cannon sequence, and have a vague idea that the Watts Towers were built by someone named Tishman. Jack Smith takes us not only to Watts and to the barrio of East Los Angeles, but also to the toney shops of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the gardens of the Huntington Library, and the polo matches at Will Rogers State Park. He gives us not only his thoughts about the Blue Boy at the Huntington Library, which he concedes are not final, but also the thoughts of the woman who happened to be sitting next to him, looking at it at the same time. Her thoughts were as important as his, and that may be the point of this book."--Dust jacket.

Your first draft is a work of imagination, but that doesn't mean it's a work of art--not yet. With Jack Smith's technical and inspirational guidance, you can turn your initial draft into a compelling story brimming with memorable characters and a page-turning plot. As Jack states inside Write and Revise for Publication, writing is a complex act, one that calls upon all the powers of our creative resources, imagination, and intellect. Top-notch storytelling is not achieved the first time around, nor should it be expected so soon. But it is possible. Through Jack's detailed instruction and precise methods, you will learn the revision techniques and fine-tuning skills needed to create powerful, polished works ready to submit to magazines, agents, and publishers. "As inspiring as it is practical...combines great advice, apt examples, and a can-do spirit that will excite and improve any aspiring writer." --Ron Hansen, author of A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford "I believe Jack Smith might have written THE BOOK on writing and revising for publication. Clean, direct, succinct--a book that is full of pure wisdom and truth, but also amazing technical advice." --Virgil Suarez, author of Latin Jazz, The Cutter, Havana Thursdays, and Welcome to he Oasis

Reviled, rioted over and banned as pornographic even as it was recognized by many as an unprecedented visionary masterpiece, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures is one of the most important and influential underground movies ever released in America. J. Hoberman's monograph details the creative making--and legal unmaking--of this extraordinary film, a source of inspiration for artists as disparate as Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini and John Waters. Described by its maker as "a comedy set in a haunted music studio," the story of Flaming Creatures is here augmented with a dossier of personal recollections, relevant documents and remarkable, previously unpublished on-set photographs by Norman Solomon. Expanding on notes originally prepared for the 1997 retrospective on Jack Smith at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the monograph includes further material on his unfinished features Normal Love and No President, as well as shorter film fragments.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition: Jack Smith-New Paintings, held at Flowers Central, London, May 2-26, 2007.

The irreverent, tweetable, ludicrous, painful, wondrous work of the L.A. punk poet--widely available for the first time. In Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World, David Trinidad brings together a comprehensive selection of Ed Smith's work: his published books; unpublished poems; excerpts from his extensive notebooks; photos and ephemera; and his timely "cry for civilization," "Return to Lesbos" put down that gun / stop electing Presidents. Ed Smith blazed onto the Los Angeles poetry scene in the early 1980s from out of the hardcore punk scene. The charismatic, nerdy young man hit home with his funny/scary off-the-cuff-sounding poems, like "Fishing" This is a good line. / This is a bad line. This is a fishing line. Ed's vibrant "gang" of writer and artist friends--among them Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, and David Trinidad--congregated at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on LA's west side. They read and partied and performed together, and shared and published each others' work. Ed was more than bright and versatile: he worked as a math tutor, an animator, and a typesetter. In the mid-1990s, he fell in love with Japanese artist Mio Shirai; they married and moved to New York City. Despite productive years and joyful times, Ed was plagued by mood disorders and drug problems, and at the age of forty-eight, he took his own life. Ed Smith's poems speak to living in an increasingly dehumanizing consumer society and corrupt political system. This "punk Dorothy Parker" is more relevant than ever for our ADD, technology-distracted times.

Jack Smith is a retired physician who practiced general surgery for the last six decades. Born in Texas, he grew up on a cattle ranch before leaving to pursue his education. He received his MD degree from the University of Tennessee in the 1950s, completed his surgical training in New York City, and then moved to Southern California, where he practiced until his retirement. A Yale graduate, Ed Marcus has been an attorney for over sixty years and has two offices in Connecticut. Beginning his six terms in the state senate in 1958, he served as majority leader from 1967 to 1970. Appointed to the board of directors of OPIC in 1978, he's since served on many other boards and committees. In 1992 through 2000, he was the state chairman of the Democratic Party and thrice acted as the delegation chairman for the DNC. He lives in Connecticut.

The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression. Fictional Blues unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression. Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.