LA PETITE ZINE ISSUE #18, TALKING WITH OUR MOUTHS FULL.

Those we do not speak of. Those capital-P tropes and images so clichéd, so thickly coated in gardenia-scented schmaltz, we can hardly look in their direction. Of all these, I have had, of late, the most sympathy for the unicorn. And while most contemporary writers wouldn’t touch the unicorn with a ten-foot quill, I read far too many poems in which the poor dear is conjured, surrounded by Renaissance Fair seconds, and set about its expected business. The nobly cast lecher of yore. The heaving alabaster bosom. Impounded, its coat full of mites and burrs, its horn askew, the unicorn makes sad eyes through the bars of the lyre. The unicorn’s been done wrong.

Not that there aren’t a few blessed souls doing right by the unicorn. Kirsten Kaschock’s Unfathoms knows there’s a score to settle in its “Unicorn Killer” series. In “A History of Depression,” Rebecca Wolf spurns the tired, Freudian riff of virgin and horned beast. Camille Guthrie’s forthcoming In Captivity figures the unicorn with reverence and fascination. On season one of Twin Peaks, Audrey spies from the closet as Emory Battis presents the perfume counter Jenny with a glass unicorn, a symbol of purity, a token via which she’d enter One-Eyed Jack’s house of ill repute. Lynch capitalizing on the grotesque edge of the cliché. And indeed, no matter how many virgins, delicate lads in dresses, or twee Lancelots have been piled around it, the unicorn has not been wholly penned. This is your call to action, reader. Liberate the unicorn.

Liberate Pegasus and the rainbow. Excavate Persephone, detangle the mermaids, and unhinge the blackened rose. Heck, while you’re at it, free up the lechers and unleash that alabaster bosom. I’ll keep a light on for you.

Editor D

The A-Team Redux

John "Hannibal" Smith = Louis Leakey
Captain "Howlin' Mad" Murdock = Franz Boaz
Lieutenant Templeton "Face" Peck = Margaret Mead
Sergeant Bosco "B.A." Baracus  = Dian Fossey

"In 1899 a crack commando unit of paleoanthropologists, relativistic, culture-centred schools, cultural determinists, and zoologists was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men and women promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as anthropologists of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team."

Episode 23: I Love LA

A group of people approach the A-Team in downtown LA. They've lost their culture. They've been strong-armed into selling it to the mob boss so he can put up a new waterfront development. The site will be very lucrative, as Atlantic Records plans to move in with the Baldwins.

After a very brief flight where Franz drugs Fossey, ethnography happens. Culture is 'saved', though saved = poorly represented in boring-ass monograph format. Hooray for anthropology.

Then the A-Team tells interesting stories about this culture at cocktail parties. By interesting, please understand, it's just shameless ego pumping.

Leaky (while banging a coed): I love it when fieldwork gets funded.

roll credits.

Editor J