Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

An Excerpt From Joe Donnelly’s L.A. Man: “Understanding Craig Stecyk”

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L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World
Joe Donnelly's L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small Worldby Joe Donnelly
Rare Bird Books, 284 pp., $16.95

During his more than 20 years writing for Raygun, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, The Surfer’s Journal or Slake: Los Angeles—to name a few—Joe Donnelly’s profiles of the famous, the underground, and the notorious were required reading. Some of his best and boldest work, which finds him road tripping with Wes Anderson, surfing with the Malloy brothers and shooting pool with Sean Penn, among other adventures, comes together in his new collection L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World (Rare Bird Books | April 17, 2018). [Read more…]

Bush’s War Of Art

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by Joe Donnelly

I was on the phone with my father and I can’t remember exactly how we got to the part of the conversation we were destined to get to—the part of the conversation everyone was destined to get to—as we watched the unfathomable unfold on that morning of September 11, 2001. Two flights out of Boston bound, on paper anyway, for the city I was calling my father from on an otherwise normal Tuesday morning.

George W. Bush had been president for all of eight months. [Read more…]