BRATTLEBORO — As the last stubborn leaves gently fall in Vermont, thoughts turn to snow-filled holidays, or at least to shoveling and the wood stove. But 3,000 miles away, Los Angeles sprawls more or less eternally under a relentless sun.
A new version of a book co-written by a former L.A. resident turned Brattleboro businessman can help readers escape from a pragmatic, taciturn, and melancholy New England winter, during which the maintenance of image often seems to take second-place behind mere survival.
It takes an investigative and incisive eye to find the reality behind the image in Los Angeles. Emerging from a lengthy and fruitful exploration of the backwaters of the City of Angels, Matt Maranian has written L.A. Bizarro with co-author Anthony Lovett.
The intellectually sophisticated cultural critique masquerades as a guidebook to L.A.'s often grotesque, always surreal, off-the-beaten-path scene.
The idea for the project was born during a casual living room conversation with his co-author.
“We were just sitting around his house one night, talking about these obscure…arcane places in and around L.A. that we just sought out, explored, rooted out, and investigated just because we liked to,” recalls Maranian, a one-time resident of the city who now operates Boomerang, an Elliot Street boutique, with his wife, Loretta. “And we said we should write a book.”
And so they did. The result is a colorful, 368-page tour through behind-the-façade Los Angeles. Maranian describes it as “our sardonic, irreverent, skewed, sometimes loving, mostly loathing treatise on L.A.”
In the course of the book, Maranian and Lovett:
• Chat with Dungeon Furniture Master Sonny Black, an incongruously nondescript craftsman holding a niche position, design-building BDSM accoutrements, like custom cribs for the big baby of the house.
• Spend some time ogling the “world's largest painting” (it happens to be of the crucifixion). An 800-seat viewing theater is provided for those who want to take some time looking.
• Get insight into the origin and evolution controversies at the Museum of Creation and Earth History.
• Dispense with worries of torn clothing or sweat stains at the (now-closed) Academy of Nude Wrestling. Apparently its clientele may have been less concerned with wrestling study than with the on-site, nude, female “opponents.”
With its first edition published in 1997, L.A. Bizarro reached the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, where it remained for 21 weeks, periodically occupying the #1 slot. The latest edition landed in the top five on the list within a month of its release.
Bursting with color and dry, ironic writing, the book attracted sympathetic comments from reviewers. People described it as “ribald fun,” the Los Angeles Times pronounced it a “classic,” and southern California comedian Richard Lewis remarked, “This psychotically funny book makes it dead certain that I will continue to see nothing in L.A. until I'm buried here.”
Maranian, who counts design work, film, and television acting as well as non-fiction writing on his resume, provides a compassionate cautionary note for those who would use the book as a bona fide tour guide.
“It's hard to use in that way. It doesn't have an index. It has no maps. It's not a Fodor's guide, it's not a TimeOut, it's not a Lonely Planet, and it was never intended to be,” he says. “There are a lot of places that we cover that, after reading the entry, you'd be pretty certain you wouldn't want to visit.”
Maranian goes on to speak in more significant terms of its intent and focus. The book is an expose of sorts, a pen-stab at L.A.'s essence: its preoccupation with surface.
“All we do is scrape the crud out of the cracks in the façade and put it under a microscope,” explains Maranian.
“In L.A., there's an obsession with appearance and image,” the author elaborates. “And that permeates the culture.”
That obsession “shows up in a lot of perverted ways,” Maranian says. “Every 15 feet there's a billboard telling you why you're not good enough, why your life isn't good enough the way it is.”
“Everyone, from the guy who parks your car to the woman working the cosmetics counter, has a headshot for you,” recalls Maranian, who also wrote and designed two thick coffee-table volumes, Pad and Pad Parties. Both books celebrate, with rich visuals, a semi-retro form of urban living.
What explains Maranian's transformation from L.A. actor to Brattleboro businessman?
“Ultimately Los Angeles wasn't giving me what I needed anymore,” he says. “I felt like I had done it. We wanted to make a change. I tend to be a person of extremes. We had discovered Vermont on a road trip a few years prior and just fell in love with this area and had developed a big circle of friends before we even really landed here.”
These days, when he isn't managing Boomerang, Maranian has done work with the local Strong Coffee Stage Company. He's also writing a collection of essays and developing the book's Web site (www.labizarro.com).
“The reason we did this new edition is to get the name out there, get the brand out there, get people reminded of it again, and to channel that towards the Web site,” Maranian said, pointing out the opportunity for keeping the information up to date online. “The Web site will then become L.A. Bizarro. It will become the living, breathing, current entity.”