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Domesticated Weirdness

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Those madcap jokesters - Anthony R. Lovett and Matt Maranian - have updated their bestselling L.A. Bizzaro for the new millennium. It's the "All-New Insider's Guide to the Obscure, the Absurd, and the Perverse in Los Angeles," and it's now in color.The 1997 edition delivered all the L.A. weirdness the lurid green cover promised. In a review in the Times, I said that "L.A. Bizzaro continues the tradition of seeing Los Angeles as a toxic playground, best observed slightly unconscious. The book is largely about body parts, cracks (wise and otherwise) and drinks. L.A. Bizzaro! approves of consuming them all."

Censorious and prurient, like a Calvinist at the Pussycat Theater, the L.A. Bizzaro of more than a decade ago was appealingly plastered for a post-earthquake, post-Rodney King city. Just below the cheerful pornography, however, was a cranky satire of hipsters in search of authenticity.

Back then, before the Bobos were lured downtown by the "noir adjacent" vibe, the bars on the fringe of skid row weren't sanitized for your protection the way motel toilets are. "Cole's has always reminded me of a filthy stinking Parisian public urinal trough, the kind you can't flush," Maranian noted of one past and present landmark. "If you like the acrid aroma of a real honest-to-goodness dive, you'll absolutely adore Coles."

Time and domestication have changed Cole's and the authors. The new edition of L.A. Bizzaro isn't as shrill as it was. And there's real regret in it too, as if a melancholy Ralph Story ("Things That Aren't Here Anymore") had teamed up with the authors to mourn vanished alligator farms, shuttered burlesque museums, and other lost roadside attractions.

'The quintessential 'Bizarro' place, Maranian told a Times reporter recently, "is really hard to get to, slightly disappointing upon arrival and pretty much unlike anything you're likely to stumble upon anywhere else." Which is pretty much all of L.A., lost seekers of the real city would agree.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user jericl cat. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

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