Forth Issue #5

Editor’s Note:
I know, I know. For any publication, especially in Los Angeles, the practice of putting a celebrity on the cover seems predictable. But the notion of celebrity is not what interests me here; rather it’s what the talent represents. Those who have found great success at a creative craft yet need more, who can’t stop the winds of imagination as they pour through other mediums, challenging themselves, keeping themselves young, firing up old dreams and new hallucinations. Indeed, living, breathing examples of artistic success.
To me, presenting the artwork of John Lithgow is a proclamation: Look! Here is …

SYNOPSIS
Journalist, James Stanley, is faced with the imminent birth of his child. Having decided to forego the test that would determine whether his child is carrying the all-important “Super-S” gene, which differentiates the genetic makeup of a superhero from that of a normal person, James sets out on a quest to interview forty-five super-powered individuals in the hope that their experiences may better prepare him for the birth of a child that is potentially gifted with extraordinary abilities. On his journey, he encounters characters from all walks of life; from single mothers struggling to raise gifted children, to rebellious super-teenagers, all the way through to those reaching the end of their lives. But what starts as a voyage of personal discovery becomes something far more ominous when he crosses paths with an organization known as XoDOS.

“Tricky Dick won. Close, but no squeaker. Carlos threw a bash. His mock-Roman suite, mobsters and Mormons, election returns on TV. Call girls told I-blew-JFK stories. Farlan Brown said [President Nixon] was no headman. He was more like an S&M slave. He’d get stinko and bomb some Third World shit-hole. He’d fry some kids and get all misty then. He’d bring in a sick chick with a whip to retool him.”

- James Ellroy, Blood’s a Rover

In the summer of 1972, President Richard M. Nixon denied any knowledge of the five burglars who entered the office of the Democratic National Committee, the last US combat troops finally departed from a naval stronghold in Southern Vietnam, and I went to Savannah to die. I had never been to Georgia before. I knew of Savannah only from what I’d learned in the tones and faces of oil-painted jazz legends and in the subtle memories spilled quietly by my father years before. But in the sticky climate of that hot, political summer, I was determined to find a peace I had never known.

Daniel Rogers was born on March 22, 2012 at 6:23 a.m. at St. Andrews hospital in Rochester, Minnessota. All the papers had reported it accurately. A picture of the Baby Rogers was on the cover of every local, national, and foreign newspaper, under large headings that read “Wonder Baby” or “Lone Rogers” or, according to translations of the foreign papers, something like “Miracle Baby.”