Veronica Gonzalez was born in Mexico City and raised in Athens, Ohio and Los Angeles. After getting a degree in art history she studied writing at NYU and while in NY co-edited Inflatable Magazine, a zine which enabled her to work with many of her artschool heroes, including Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Chris Kraus and Lynne Tillman. Always interested in bringing artists and writers together, in 2004 she co-edited Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings, an exciting cross-genre anthology published by Soft Skull press. In 2005 Veronica began rockypoint press, which produces books of truly collaborative artist/writer pairings in association with 1301PE Gallery in LA.
Poetic, sensuous and witty, Veronica Gonzalez’s debut novel unfolds like a fairy tale spanning the dusty hills of Los Angeles and the glittering nightlife of Mexico City. Raised in northeast LA by her widowed immigrant father, a baker, Mona has grown up believing her mother died minutes after her birth, and her twin brother was simply given away. Stifled by unnameable doubts as a child, when her father dies, Mona sets off on a quest to discover her long-lost twin brother. The journey takes her into the labyrinth of her own fabulations about her parents’ lives, and a dreamy Mexico City that exists only as cultural imagination. In the process she encounters a band of Nordic men, her Chinese double, a lascivious giant, and a tribe of feral children. Gonzalez masterfully probes the oddness of Mona’s interior world until it becomes a twisted parable for all kinds of displacement.
Steve Erickson was born in Santa Monica in 1950. Except for the mid-Seventies and early Eighties when he sometimes lived in Europe and the New York area, he’s spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He’s the author of eight novels: Days Between Stations (1985), Rubicon Beach (1986), Tours of the Black Clock (1989), Arc d’X (1993), Amnesiascope (1996), The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999), Our Ecstatic Days (2005) and the upcoming Zeroville (2007). He also has written two books about American politics and popular culture, Leap Year (1989) and American Nomad (1997). Numerous editions have been published in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Russian and Japanese. Over the years he has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Spin, Details, Elle, San Francisco, Bookforum, Frieze, Conjunctions, Tin House, Salon, the L.A. Weekly, the Los Angeles Reader, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the New York Times Magazine and other publications and journals, and his work has been widely anthologized. Currently he’s the film critic for Los Angeles and editor of the literary journal Black Clock, which is published by CalArts where he teaches in the MFA Writing Program. He’s received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2007 was awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He lives with his wife, artist and director Lori Precious, and their son.
101 Crustaceans
This seminal outfit has been compared to a crumbling silo meticulously recorded. And, in its more pristine moments, lichen. Crush together Ligeti, Lennon, Tristano and Lee (Peggy) and you might get a porridge like this. Tonight a subset consisting of Indigo Street (Partyface, Lulu and the Trivets) and Ed Pastorini (Beth Orton, Elysian Fields, Badly Drawn Boy) will be presenting standards and themes from film. Listen as this duo, known as Dwarf Heart, wade through Capra, Truffaut, Fellini, Anderson. Bring your own trivet.
