Matthew Duersten

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Angel of Olvera Street

Matthew Duersten
Very soon I shall be gone — I am just a morning glory, A fading flower at dawn. —from Mieko (1969) I first met Leo Politi in 2001, nearly seven years after his death, when Gim Fong, the proprietor of a small Chinatown art shop, produced a transparent plastic storage......
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Pet Sounds

Matthew Duersten
“Roger Daltrey doesn’t like my record, that’s what I heard,” says Petra Haden over the phone, riding in a tour van somewhere through the badlands of Wyoming. “He just didn’t care for it. But it doesn’t even matter.” Daltrey’s not alone — Haden’s new album, Petra Haden Sings: The Who......
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Posuer Nation

Matthew Duersten
Illustration by Ronald KurniawanA writer friend once described the brief history of an advertising campaign she worked on that never got off the ground — and thank God, because it sounded so draconian it could have sprung from the loins of Joseph Goebbels himself. An underarm deodorant for teenage boys......

Who’ll Stop the Reign?

Matthew Duersten
Aryan Brotherhood members in an exhibit in the narcotics-trafficking trial of Michael "Big Mac" McElhiney, top right, who co-ran AB operations at the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. He is currently at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A., awaiting trial for conspiracy to murder AB associate Charles "Bubba" Leger. ......

Gobbing On Empires

Matthew Duersten
(!) Call it the Year of the Punk Rock Opera. Green Day surprised everyone when, five days after debuting theirs in its entirety at the Henry Fonda Theater in L.A., American Idiot took an eyeblink to sell 266,637 copies and hit No. 1 on the album charts. Sure, it overreaches......

13 Great CD Reissues You May Have Never Heard Of

Matthew Duersten
The Conet Project (Irdial) A lawsuit gave second wind to this eerie four-CD box set of shortwave radio transmissions, thought by spy and paranoia buffs to be worldwide, 24/7 code broadcasts by intelligence agents. Originally issued in 1997 by British indie label Irdial, the rock group Wilco sampled the recitation......

Notable Scene Stealers

Matthew Duersten
Ben Falcone (Joey). The life span of NBC’s wan Friends spinoff may hinge on less Kelly Preston and more Falcone, as Joey’s sweaty neighbor Howard. His arsenal of tics, mewls, eye pops and twitches is one of the most cringe-inducing characterizations of a loser hanging onto the bottom rung since......
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Back to the Bass

Matthew Duersten
Photo by Mitchell Haddad “Shit!” In the recording booth, John Heard grips the Bitch by her shiny brown neck and scratches his white beard. “I’m not getting the subtleties here. It’s becomin’ a hang-up now.” At 65, the bassist is one of L.A. jazz’s unsung veterans, documented on over 400......

The Lady at the Bottom of the Groove

Matthew Duersten
Carol Kaye’s earliest musical memory is of sitting alone in her father’s Model-A Ford outside of the Elks Club in Everett, Washington, listening to the strains of his Dixieland band inside. “The hair raised on my arms,” she recalls in her low, jazz-hipster voice. “I thought, ‘Ahhhhh, listen to that......

South of Here

Matthew Duersten
Photo (top) by Debra DiPaolo Greg Leisz has a “road face”: Divots carved in his sallow cheeks and crinkled maps around his boyish eyes make one think of a Walker Evans Dust Bowl Okie. Now in his 50s, he has traveled a long road to become arguably today’s most in-demand......