Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Erratic Printing - the Evolution of Phony Lid



The First Phony Lid Book


The first book published by Phony Lid was a collection of poems by Marie Kazalia. I'd first started publishing Marie's work while I was still in Birmingham, in the pages of Vagabond Review and the FYUOCUK broadside. But Marie had so much material, all relating to her experience living in a run down hotel in the Mission District of San Francisco, that I wanted to put a collection together, the first Phony Lid book. 

Marie sent me numerous emails fulls of poems and I read them all, making a short list and then my final selections. These became the book. Since I had no idea how to make a book, I handled the printing the same way I handled the printing of Vagabond. I was only doing 200 copies, so I went the OfficeMax and ran off the pages on their self service machines. I had the covers done behind the counter. They didn't come out that great, but I figured the work out, over saturated look went with the material. 

I knew the photographer, a friend of Marie's, wouldn't be too thrilled with the result... he'd gone through a real hassle trying to get a decent shot of the actual hotel in the Mission District written out in the poems, The Crown.


I found a bindery in Pasadena and dropped everything off. 
When I picked up my order, I was dismayed that the ink on the cover came off on my fingers. 

I didn't know what to do at first. The covers looked horrible. I set them out in the sun, hoping to dry the ink. But after a day, there was no improvement.  I went back to OfficeMax and complained and a guy I had dealt with several times before agreed to print new covers for me on the color printer. Since I couldn't rebind the book and I had 200 copies of the book already printed, I ended up printing dustjackets and solved the problem that way. 

The black and white photo came out great on the color copier and I was satisfied with the result. The dustjacket was a little annoying, but it was better than having the ink come off on the reader's fingers. 

When it came time to reprint the book, I knew for sure that I wasn't going to handle the printing on my own. I had already redesigned the entire book, from the interior pages to the cover, and found a printer in East LA that would do the covers offset. The bindery in Pasadena would print the inside pages and do the binding. 

The final product came out great. Though over the years, the covers have become incredibly rubbed, since the printer didn't use a coating. But I kind of like how they look worn out, not due to some printing mishap, but through use, even though they've mostly been in books on on shelves.  




ONE LAST HURRAH!



ONE LAST HURRAH!

by Kelly Dessaint




That night, after we gave the social workers the stack of Polaroids, which was all the proof they needed to put the old man and Rick in jail, we sat around the house, twiddling our thumbs. Without a single distraction to take our minds off the uncertain future, we could only worry about what would happen next.

“You know what would be really cool right now?” I pondered aloud. “Some Super Mario Brothers.”

“Yeah.” Joey sighed. "Too bad it's locked up."

“I mean, if we’re gonna take off anyway,” I said thoughtfully. “I don’t see why we couldn’t have a little fun before we go.”

“What are you talking about?” 

“Follow me.” I walked to the bedroom he shared with Rick and pointed at the footlocker where Rick had stored the VCR, the cable boxes, the phone and the Nintendo along with his BB guns and knives. “I wonder what it would take to bust that lock?”

We contemplated the silver braided Master. 

“Pick it?” Joey suggested. 

“What do I look like, a fucking locksmith? Nah, there’s only one way into that footlocker.”

“Smash it?”

“Now you’re thinking, Johnny! Get the hammer!”

It only took one blow, but I gave the lock another for good measure. We hooked up the Nintendo and put a six-pack of Dr. Pepper in the freezer to get cold fast. We each ripped open our own bags of Doritos and shared a box of Russell Stover. 

Once the sugar rush took hold, we grabbed Rick’s BB guns and started taking pot shots at the crap on his dresser. I made a bull’s-eye on the wall and we took turns practicing our aim until we ran out of BBs. Then we switched to the knives. After the bedroom walls were full of holes, we moved on to the rest of the house. 

I stood at one end of the hallway and tried to see if I could hit the kitchen wall. I missed, but took out a lamp. Joey was a better shot. On his first throw, the blade pierced a cupboard door. 

We howled with delight at the destruction. For hours, we went from one room to the next, leaving our mark. We emptied the kitchen cabinets onto the floor and smashed Rick’s Nintendo into tiny fragments of plastic, wires and shards of motherboard. 

I took out Rick's Polaroid, the very camera he'd used to document his perverted crimes, and snapped some shots of us in the midst of the rubble.

It was a beautiful mess.

As we surveyed our handy work, we laughed until our sides hurt. I got a magic marker and scrawled “FEEL THE WRATH OF THE INNOCENTS!” in giant letters on the living room wall. I knew that would fuck with their heads. 

Big time. 

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Erratic Sleep in a Cold Hotel


by Marie Kazalia

In this collection of 46 poems, Marie Kazalia, whose work has been described as "hellmouth candids," offers a vivid reality of a disengaged life through sometimes disturbing yet intriguing images of a woman immersed in the urban struggle, faced with compromising accommodations in run down hotels in San Francisco's Mission District, encounters with street derelicts, homelessness and her own sense of sexuality. The poems capture with poignant vitality the observations of the author as she readjusts to American life on her return to San Francisco from 4 years as an expatriate in the Orient.

As she says in the introduction:"When I arrived, I entered into such a state of culture shock I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. Stayed in a tourist guesthouse South of Market. I made friends there who were living rent free because they managed to stay past the 28 day limit, and had become legal residents so couldn't be kicked out. They taught me lots. I stayed for 27 or 28 days then the manager asked me to leave. … so ended up going to a shelter for women, not even knowing what a shelter was or what to expect. Right away I became interested in the lives of the people there. Stayed 3 months, at what the staff psycho-logist called my "free rent gig," which it basically was."

From there she bounced around until she came to the Crown Hotel. Here, she found "the conditions under which I can write."

"And so I lived and wrote in that tiny room at the Crown Hotel— an old wooden 4 story structure— hammering under my feet, below my single bed— the health food grocery in the street level storefront under construction for months, replaced by too loud new-age muzac coming up through the thin old carpet on the floor when the store finally opened. Cold air seeping in through every crack visible and invisible— the antique steam heater in a corner of my tiny room hissed for about 30 minutes most evenings— unless I heard the manager—one of the members of the endless Patel family of India—finding his wrench, disengaging the old elevator to take him down to the basement where he clanged on pipes and did something to the ancient boiler to get it going yet one more time."

Like black and white photography, these confessional poems explore, without contradiction, the reclusive and sacred, elements akin to the struggling class. They will draw you into a world that is frighteningly beautiful and deeply personal.

"Ugly People Fucking" from Erratic Sleep in a Cold Hotel, as printed in the vis-a-septic zine

"[Marie Kazalia] "has a real, strong voice. I'm tempted to say she writes like a female Bukowski but I'm not sure that's a compliment or not... Some of those poems make your skin crawl with their immediacy and intensity - you just know that she lived the life... I can't say that I remember ever reading anything of hers before but I honestly say, I certainly will look forward to reading whatever I see of her." -- Alan Catlin, author Killer Cocktails

"Marie Kazalia's evocative and powerful narrative poems take the reader through pockets of intriguing urban ecology, poverty hotels in near Third-World conditions in our cities for a revealing look at the cheap hustles of drug addicts, dejects, schizoids, and the unfortunate. Her acute observations are tempered with an understated humor to all the more poignantly engage the reader in a woman's struggles with the disengaged lives of substandard conditions of American life where her courage is evident in every poem..." -- Koon Woon, author The Truth in Rented Rooms

"Marie Kazalia has gone out of her way to experiment with the low brow life, and these bin-rummaging poems stand testament to the value thereof. They also provide a surprise-inspection glimpse into some of the low-lifes to be found on the other side of the globe, as well." -- Mark Brimm, editor Royal Vagrant Press

"Marie's book carries on the tradition of writers going to the society's underbelly to capture the reality of the outcasts...she does it chillingly" -- Frank Moore, The Cherotic (r)Evolutionary

"Kazalia finds the perfect poetic medium between saying too much and not enough. Her poems end like a severed reel of film leaving the rest to resonate in the reader… Sometimes sad; sometimes funny or witty, yet always on the mark, these poems made me feel the full extent of my posh, suburban white-boy existence and step outside into the terrors of the poor and forgotten… Kazalia establishes herself not only as a fine poet, but a competent story-teller as well." -- Nathan Graziano, editor The Brown Bottle

Read "Erratic Printing - The Evolution of Phony Lid" about the printing of Erratic Sleep in a Cold Hotel


"Mother Adventure Krim Kramed in theCity" broadside

the first printing - the ink came off on your fingers

the first printing with the dust jacket, to solve the ink problem




Tuesday, April 16, 2013

SUCKS, ALABAMA


SUCKS, ALABAMA: 

The Unexpurgated Adventures of 

Louis Baudrey in Small Town Alabama

Part One of A Masque of Infamy

By Kelly Dessaint

Louis Baudrey is a teenage metalhead who moves from LA to small town Alabama in 1987. At Saks High, he tries to fit in, but the rednecks and the Bible-thumpers don't take too kindly to his outlandish wardrobe and burgeoning punk rock attitude. At home, it's even worse, as Rick, his father's "friend," tries to coerce him into conforming to something even more insidious than the social mores of high school. 


Only available as an eBook free from the Apple iBookstore or as a PDF from Scribd.



Before I left California, all I knew about the South was what I’d seen on TV: The Dukes of Hazard,RootsDeliverance… So that’s what I expected: racist, good ole boys, playing banjos and speeding around the countryside in souped-up muscle cars, murdering and sodomizing strangers. Despite the old man’s assurance that I shouldn’t believe everything I saw on TV, my enthusiasm waved from one moment to the next. But the truth was, I was ready for a fresh start. 
I wasn’t leaving much behind in Rosemead. Just bad memories and the rest of my crazy family. I figured I could write my own ticket in a podunk Alabama town. Nobody needed to know that I was born in the crappy part of a crappy suburb on the wrong side of Hollywood. But while Rosemead was nothing like the Los Angeles depicted in movies and television, I looked totally LA. It was 1986. My style was an amalgam of punk and heavy metal. My hair was long and my pants were tight. My ears were pierced three times in my left and once in my right. I wore the same Iron Maiden shirt almost every day and never left the house without at least one bandana tied around my ankle. 
How could I not ride into town and just take over? 
Shit, in my mind, as soon as these bumpkins in Alabama got a look at me, the guys would idolize me, the girls would lust after me and all their parents would fear me.
I would finally become the person the audience in my head had always cheered for.
All the way across the country, as I sat in the backseat of my father’s low-rent Cadillac, alternately picking fights with Joey, talking back to Rick and zoning out to the soothing sounds of heavy metal on my Walkman, I felt it in my gut, a rising excitement that everything was about to change. 
For better or worse, once I fulfilled my destiny, the name Louis Baudrey would be synonymous with infamy. 
– from Sucks, Alabama

a phony lid ePub

the vis-a-septic zine


vis-a-septic - fact · fiction · fuck-ups

The inaugural issue of this simple 28 page zine (dubbed vagabond #4 incognito), features a wrap-around cover by Ang Kiukok, tightly packed with artwork and comics by Mike Tolento, Bitter Pie, G. Tod Slone and Brian Hagen, among many others, comic and zine reviews, some letters, a short story and a couple poems for good measure... the printer dude at Copy Max, upon scanning through the pages as they were being copied, ceased looking me in the eyes... he actually flinched when I offered him one at the end and said "OH NO!"

Perhaps the material was a little harsh for joe schmoe the copy guy. With images of dudes jerking off, getting blow jobs, talking to hags pissing on the street... the Karl Koweski story JESUS FUCKER illustrated by Low Down, religious zealots shoving a cross down somebody's throat... the poem by Gary Goude that begins "God sucks dick / Fuck you / God" ... Colin Delzell's sketches of iggy pop and deborah harry bar-b-queing, joey ramone and richard hell sitting on a couch hanging out with yoko ono and blondie, patty smith, lou reed's lincoln lean ... and straightjacket fashions by Jennifer Stanley ...

The zine that was rejected by its namesake, a favor gone awry, the future of phampleteria, and the last of its kind, the vis-a-septic zine remains like roadkill on the ventura freeway, something you don't want to miss. beat that blaspemy, mother fuckers.


Monday, April 15, 2013

ONE TAKE ON THE ORIGINS OF PHONY LID

ONE TAKE ON THE ORIGINS OF PHONY LID


The origins of Phony Lid Publications are kind of shaky. Depending on who you ask, it can get confusing. Basically, it came out of the endless sardonic conversations of Louis Baudrey and Stasia Collins, two unemployed, over-educated transients in the dining room of the only house in a trailer park somewhere in rural north east Alabama.

Despite the lack of a phone, radio, television or car, they were determined to create a new media. It was winter and besides walking to the store for cigarettes in 20ยบ weather, there wasn’t much else to do.

The concept was simple: a magazine with a disposable name characterized by an intelligent irony, self-depracating in all the right places, but with the constant illusion of more than we actually were; a response to the fringe element that exists in contemporary literature… oh yeah, artwork, comics, articles on music, rants, social commentery, short stories and poems... just fill the pages with the best shit we could get our hands on, even if we had to write it all ourselves under a slew of fake names and identities, print the thing up as cheaply as possible to have enough copies to spread around and take over the world.

Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that.

Realizing the lack of motivation or influx of new ideas where they were, Spring showed and they packed the station wagon and set up living in New Orleans. Things picked up from there and the plan began to form.

Some more traveling was necessary, though, and 7 moves, 3 states later (this time in Birmingham, Alabama), they finally got it together and put out Vagabond Issue No 1.
Essentially a collection of the material gathered from artists and writers they had met along the way, it didn’t make much of a ripple but enough positive comments trickled in and it was enough to keep them going. A few months later, Issue No 2 appeared to a more favorable response. But, as the name implies, it was time to move again.

This time the editors parted… Louis made it back to the west coast and Stasia took up residence in the mountains of Tennessee.

The illustrious Phony Lid headquarters is currently located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Stasia sends in her daily dose of hate mail and Louis wanders in once and a while, back haunting the streets of San Francisco where the name Phony Lid has its origin:
Several years ago, in retaliation to the slew of bad drugs going around, Louis began advertising a non-existent band, Bunk Acid, through the distribution of flyers on telephone poles, graffiti and drunken persuasion of its validity.

One day, while walking down Haight Street to a hiss of propositions, an old woman passed him and mumbled “lids.”

“That’s just what I need,” he exclaimed. “If I didn’t already have a collection of fake shit already, I can add my first phony lid.”

Whether she was holding true kind or he just made it up, well… memories fade, the name was passed on and ranked highest on the list of potential tags.

Today, Phony Lid Publications offers the best in disposable verse, adventures from the edge, frenzies of vice and other tales of depravity for discerning readers who want to be entertained rather than moralized or bombarded by more rehashed lyrics and trite sentiment.

Get into the muck of it and find out what can be called trash these days.

Monday, April 8, 2013

A Masque of Infamy


A Masque of Infamy is a horrific and raucous story of teenage rebellion. But instead of “What d’ya got?” fifteen-year-old Louis Baudrey knows exactly what he’s fighting against…

After moving from Los Angeles to small town Alabama in 1987 with his father, his younger brother and Rick, a friend of the family, Louis tries to fit in at the local high school, but the Bible-thumpers and the rednecks don’t take too kindly to his outlandish wardrobe and burgeoning punk attitude. At home, he defies the sadistic intentions of Rick, who rules the household with an iron fist. As Louis begins to lose all hope, he stumbles upon indisputable proof that will free him and his brother from Rick’s tyranny. But just when he thinks his troubles are over, he’s locked up in the adolescent ward of a mental hospital, where he must fight the red tape of the system to realize his dream of being a punk rocker.
“A Masque of Infamy captures the screaming, up-from-the-toes intensity and torment of the United States of Adolescence. No one who reads this book will be left unchanged by its savage and unforgiving beauty.” – Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
“The overwhelming rawness of Kelly Dessaint’s story about children attempting to navigate a world completely fucked up by adults is like a punch to the chest.” – Davida Gypsy Breier, Xerography Debt
“Kelly Dessaint twists the horror of growing up in a highly dysfunctional American family into a hilarious tale of survival. Detailing the trauma of being institutionalized as a teenager after having taken revenge against an abusive father figure, A Masque of Infamy is a story about stubbornly overcoming the odds to live long enough to tell the truth about just how shitty it is to be a kid in this country.” – Lydia Lunch

MORE INFORMATION HERE

Buy the paperback or the eBook from Amazon.com

a paperback original

Rehab Star

(I'm A) Rehab Star

by Kelly Dessaint


An excerpt from the novel A Masque of Infamy


From the moment I set foot in the Residential Treatment Ward of Hillcrest Hospital, I campaigned relentlessly that since I’d already made it to the second level on the adolescent ward, those privileges should be transferred to the new ward, and I should be exempt from certain restrictions. Like the No Smoking rule.

I pitched my case to Calvin because he was the most likely to bend the rules. It took some convincing, but he eventually let me sneak off the ward to smoke in the woods next to the building. He just looked the other way when I slipped out a side door.

I kept my pack stashed in a log. It seemed like a safe enough place since I’d never seen anybody in those woods. Until the day I was heading down the path and a guy walked past me. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but when I reached into the log, my cigarettes were gone.

I panicked. It was my only pack and I didn’t have the money to buy another. Could that guy have taken them? I wondered. I didn’t know for sure, but I took off after him.

“Hey, dude!” I yelled, as I ran down the path.

When I caught up with him the guy looked terrified.

“Hey, man, did you come across a pack of smokes back there in the log?” I asked, out of breath.

“I uh…” The guy reached into his pocket and held out the pack. His hands were shaking. “I uhh… I found them.”

“Oh, man,” I said with a major sigh of relief. “That’s cool.” I offered him a cigarette but he shook his head. “You live around here?” I asked, to make small talk.

“Uh, I gotta go.” He ran away down the path.


It was only a matter of time before Julie found out that I was sneaking outside to smoke. Shortly after my run-in with the local kid, she posted a notice that stated all residents had to follow the same rules.

“No exceptions.” Calvin read the last part twice. “Any idea who she’s talking about there?”

I laughed it off, but I had to figure out a new tactic to maintain a steady intake of nicotine. Down the hallway from the RTW was the rehab ward. They had their own common room, a pool table, a bunch of couches, a television and even a piano. I was already sneaking in there occasionally to snag butts out of the ashtrays. Once they said I couldn’t go outside anymore, I began to spend more time with the rehabbers.

I hung around the pool table and kept my mouth shut, listening to them discuss how they ended up at Hillcrest. I was worried that I’d get thrown out for violating their sanctity, though nobody seemed to mind my presence. After a week of lurking in the corner, I got to talking with this guy Josh. He was only a few years older than me. Speed freak. He played guitar. But he was into lame stuff like ELO and the Eagles.

One day he asked me why he never saw me at meetings. I knew he was talking about AA.

“Oh, I’d like to go,” I said earnestly. “But I don’t think I’m allowed.”

“They can’t stop you from going to meetings. Meetings are open to anybody who wants to attend. It’s in the bylaws.”

I explained that I was in another ward, thinking I was about to get 86’d. But he said he’d look into it for me.

At first, I thought, Oh great. Now I’ve really stepped in it. Why would I want to attend a bunch of boring meetings and listen to these fucked up old people talk about how bad drugs are? Then it occurred to me that all the rehabbers did was talk. And while they were talking, they were also smoking. Talking and smoking, smoking and talking. It seemed to be part of their recovery or something. So if they were in these meetings all day long, doing all this talking, they must be doing just as much smoking.

All of a sudden, AA meetings seemed like the perfect place for me.

In order to attend meetings, I had to fill a form. On it, there was a space labeled, “Drug of choice.” I wasn’t sure what to write. I made an inventory of the drugs I’d come across back in Rosemead. Weed was everywhere, but it didn’t have the right panache. I needed something that would make an impression with the hardened drug users in rehab. Besides pot, I had smoked PCP twice and snorted cocaine several times. PCP seemed too extreme. So I split the difference and put down cocaine.

When Julie got the paperwork for my request, she called me into her office.

“It says here you have a narcotic dependency? I didn’t see that in your chart before.”

I told her that I did a lot of drugs back in LA and, since I was going home soon, I was worried that I might be tempted to take up old habits.

“Ah, a preemptive measure,” she said. “Very well then.”

A preemptive measure? I didn’t even know what that meant, but it worked. Like a charm. From that day on, the psych tech on duty had to walk me to my meetings and pick me up afterwards. Calvin almost flipped out when he got the memo. “What kind of scheme is this?” he demanded. But I insisted that it was a preemptive measure and I couldn’t miss a meeting. He just shook his head with bemused resignation.

I went to as many meetings as I could. There was a booklet that listed where and when the meetings were held. All I had to do was plot out my daily schedule of smoke breaks. Besides the AA meetings in the evenings, there were Cocaine Anonymous meetings on Friday and Saturday nights, Narcotics Anonymous every afternoon, and Al-Anon on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

I usually got to the room at least half an hour early so I could start smoking right away. Sometimes there were free donuts with the coffee.

Each meeting began with everybody in the room introducing themselves. Then people went around the circle telling their stories. It was just like group in the adolescent ward, except each story ended with, “And that’s when I hit bottom.” The stories were always tragic, but never boring.

When they got to me, I just said, “My name is Louis and I’m happy to be here.” Even though I didn’t claim to be an addict, it was a little nerve-wracking being a fraud and manipulating them over their misfortune. I knew I had no business pretending to be in their league. These people had real problems. Their lives were falling apart because of a disease. They knew suffering. And there I was, some pissant kid, running a scam so I could smoke. But, I was happy to be there. That was no lie.

Because I was the only kid in the rooms, when the meetings were over, people often came up to me and congratulated me. They’d say things like, “You’re so brave.” And, “You’re an inspiration.”

I had the perfect racket. Things were going great. As long as I kept my trap shut, I assumed I’d be able to maintain my subterfuge indefinitely. But a few weeks later, this guy named Phil called me out in the common room as I was smoking and watching the guys shoot pool. Phil was a one-man pity party. He’d lost it all. His wife, his kids, his high-paying job, his expensive car… everything. Even his self-respect. When he hit bottom he was living in a motel room on Lee Highway outside Sylacauga. He always had to be the star of the down and out. Any time somebody told a sob story, he’d try to one-up their tale of woe by saying, “You think that’s bad. Well, listen to this…” I’d heard the other rehabbers talking shit behind his back.

“What are you doing here anyway?” he asked me. “Shouldn’t you be at home with your parents?”

I didn’t know if he was joking or if I really did have to defend myself. I tried to shrug it off. International man of mystery. That was me.

But he wasn’t letting up. “What’d you do, stay out too late one night and get a whuppin’?”

There was a whole group of rehabbers looking at me. Should I admit that I was just hanging around to smoke? Even if they weren’t totally offended by my deplorable actions, they’d no doubt put the kibosh on my whole scheme. So I told them about what happened with my father and my little brother. Surprisingly, once I started talking, I couldn’t seem to stop. I told them about my brother at the Ranch and the pending court appearance.

“And now I hafta testify against my father…”

After I finished talking, they told me how sorry they were about my circumstances.

“Bless your heart,” Mama Teri told me. She was hooked on painkillers. Said she was thirty-nine, but she looked fifty-four. “Even if you’re not ready to talk, eventually you need to let it out.”

I was quick to brush off their concern. “It’s no big deal. I just prefer not to talk about it. Don’t wanna bum anybody out.”

“Part of working the steps is sharing your story,” Josh said.

“It’s really good that you’re trying to get your shit together so young,” said Gordon, the alcoholic toilet paper salesman. “I wish I had the smarts to do it when I was your age. I’d be a lot better off today.”

Even Phil came up and apologized. “If there’s anything I can ever do for you, just let me know.” 


© 2013 Kelly Dessaint.



Buy the paperback or the eBook on Amazon.com: