David Cotner |
Collage artist and proprietor of the den of literary iniquity that is Koma
Books (formerly Amok Books), Dan Wininger is the closest thing
Los Angeles arts and culture has to a living laser. For more than a decade, his
satanically heroic energy has turned on the innocent droves to new worlds and
new words — from the cheery mutilated-baby art of Trevor Brown, to the collected
works of urban author Donald Goines, to Charles Platt’s 1968 sexual fantasy The
Gas, a novel about a nerve agent that envelops London in an orgy of sex-soaked
murder and incest. After he’d built up a faithful clientele that includes Marilyn
Manson, Courtney Love and Genesis P-Orridge, Wininger escaped the hipster tsunami
that engulfed Vermont Avenue in the mid-1990s, moving Koma briefly to a once-stately
downtown Los Angeles office building and then a bit further west. He now splits
space with like-minded Creation Books, eschewing all things that might make him
exclaim, as he once did about the speeding ticket this writer received for trying
to get there before close, “How boring!” 1228 W. Seventh St., downtown,
(213) 623-6995.
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