David Cotner

Allegories of the Caves

David Cotner
ARGGHHH! I AM A SPACE MONSTER! I LIVE IN THE BOTTOMLESS PIT! I WANT TO SLURP THEM BRAINS OUT WITH MY LONG TONGUE! Even the meekest milquetoast or shirking violet can entertain whacked-out fantasies when entering these singular recesses. Long the favored shooting location for umpteen Westerns and sci-fi films......

X-Man

David Cotner
That free rag with all the jack-off ads and snatches of content throughout. That one. Bill Margold — an XXX producer/director/star and journalist — embodies the waning moments of humor and double-entendre of a male world in which love means coming in a girl’s mouth and not her eyes. His......

The Loneliness of the Non-Distance Runner

David Cotner
The former Desmond’s Men’s Clothing building (5514 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.) became a beautiful vantage point for a moment in 2001 to behold a planeless sky when 9/11 stopped all air traffic. In this Deco monument there are but a few floors. Despite this, there is an elevator operator. He’s been......

Cult Fiction, Pulp Nonfiction

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......

Fangs for the Memory

David Cotner
Forrest J. Ackerman, sage of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, ur-movie fan and coiner of the term “sci-fi,” still gives tours of his memorabilia collection every Saturday morning. Moved from its longtime, multiroom opulence in the Los Feliz Hills to a side street in the flats off Hillhurst, the Ackermansion......
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Inconspicuous Consumption

David Cotner
Friendly Percussion Just off Sepulveda near LAX is Noisy Toys (8728 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Westchester, 310-670-9957), a store selling the greatest collection of percussion instruments this side of Pacemaker in Concert. Bill Tabot has run this storefront cornucopia of drums for more than a dozen years, offering friendly advice about......
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Dive Bombing

David Cotner
Incredibly, this dive bar in Manhattan Beach still sports a small, decades-old passenger airplane crashed into its roof. The Hangar Inn, so near to the South Bay aerospace hub of Northrop, McDonnell-Douglas and Xerox (paper airplanes), harks to a swiftly receding time of no terror and lots of laughter from......

Porn Yesterday

David Cotner
Ever since the Pussycat Theater on Western was torn down in 2003 to build the aesthetic concentration camp that is Walgreens, and Santa Monica developers decided a Buca di Beppo would be better suited to serve sausage with cream than the Pussycat on Second Street, L.A.’s straight porn theaters have......

The Children's Hour

David Cotner
On KXLU’s The Kids Are Alright Show, Mitchell “Professor Cantaloupe” Brown and Don “Germs Drummer” Bolles play nothing but kid music for an hour, its “tasty morsels spelunked from records used by parents in the 1960s to scare their children into Obedienceland,” in Brown’s words. Most notable is an LP......
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Shellac

David Cotner
SHELLAC at the Echo, August 21 Shellac equals Steve Albini plus Bob Weston times Todd Trainer — primeval Chicago noisemen who are perhaps better known for their non-Shellac productions and performances. They unveil their dense, compelling thud with some songs from the new LP (rumored to be packaged in a......