Chess, as a sport, has never attracted heavy television coverage. The focused intensity of former NASA engineers and fashion-starved mensa kids does not project the kind of sex appeal provided by a pair of 34C’s bouncing their way through, well, any kind of environment you can imagine. Chess is not in the movement; it is the spaces in between, the slowly honed strategy emerging from the mists of muscle-less rigor, the quick, agile hand darting across the serious white and brown squares of the playing field.

Someday Thinking of Moving On

Four months ago, sometime last fall, I began
drinking with the complete intention of drinking.
Binge drinking holding the complete intention
of being a waiter. What better way to wait
than to drink? I don’t recommend waiting drunk,
but drinking after, pass the time ‘til someday something better.

As of my experience at the Electric Daisy Carnival this summer, I can’t say the latter opinions have been all that much altered. What has been altered is my sense that rave is dead. I was astonished by the phenomenon that flooded the downtown Coliseum. You can tell a lot about a culture when 70,000 young people show up barely wearing anything . Teenage rave is a massively developed subculture that I had no idea about. It was a 12-hour teenage pop-culture Halloween.

Editor’s Note:
Welcome to the color-rich dusk of Los Angeles Literature and Art, where “we are all shadows in the night,” as Marco Mannone reminds us in his feature story. Certainly the idea of being alive though shadowesque is a common theme throughout this issue of Forth. Of course, the motif resonates in Marco’s “Shadowscene” piece about cover artist Ellei Johndro, who has her photographic eye on the electrode of an underground art-party collective, not only documenting, but also creating a young art phenomenon in the hills of Hollywood and beyond. And W.C. Jennings, in his investigation of California’s spending problems, …

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.