BOOKS: LA ALTERNATIVE PRESS

COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS AND MAKE MY BABY
By Cole Coonce
KBP

Los Angeles, they say, is a siren. Calling all of us not born in this in this city, like the Whore of Babylon to an end-of-the-world orgy. It's easy for those of us recent additions to this freakshow-sex party to ignore that this city is followed by an immense history that still lingers along the streets (and the gutters) we walk everyday.

New Angelenos truly enthralled with their home have years of reading ahead of them, starting with the apocalyptic Day of the Locust. For the slackers just mildly interested in getting some head from Los Angeles, there is only one book: Come Down From the Hills and Make My Baby.

Reading Cole Coonce's pornographic love letter to Los Angeles is like skipping ahead in the history textbook straight to the Rodney King beating. After all, those of us here and now really cannot do without a little knowledge of the decade from which our city has not recovered.

Loosely factual, this novel follows the indifferent musical career of the experimental-punk-noise outfit Braindead Soundmachine, the drunken exploits of the band members in East Hollywood when it was actually seedy, and the narrator's post-modern love for Los Angeles as he watches it burn on TV during the L.A. riots from a sports bar in Oregon. This book is worth picking up for its sexy, nihilistic description of transvestite strippers alone. But as a historical document, it's priceless. (Evan George)

7-8-05