Back to L.A., virtually

When LA Observed was just a toddler of a blog, I watched Nancy Rommelmann chronicle her anxiety-filled but hopeful (and ultimately happy) move to Portland in a blog she called Leaving L.A. It's being turned into a book, but that's not the point of this post. I'm happy to announce that Nancy is the newest author contributing to Native Intelligence. Now a dedicated Oregonian, she still blogs and writes with passion and deep insight about L.A. Her first post for us calls on her days as a young rock journalist in L.A.—who shared an office dubbed the Super Vixens’ Dymaxion Lounge—with an affection for John Doe of the band X.

I’d also liked Doe since college, when a friend called me my freshman year and said, “You have to get down to New York; I got us tickets for X.” I didn’t know who X was, but they’d just released "Under the Big Black Sun," and I knew, as I watched and listened to Doe and Exene Cervenka mesh those harmonies that should not have worked but did that they were ripping up old ground and making something new, and letting us walk around on it. Cool.

Four years later, I was living in Los Angeles. Eight years after that, Exene was eating dinner at my house, our kids in my daughter’s room building a fort made of blankets, onto which they beamed Mickey Mouse flashlights. Two years after that, Doe was singing me on my way out the door.

Nancy also has the cover in tomorrow's LA Weekly on Laura Albert, who invented the alter ego of transgender teenage drug addict turned literary darling JT LeRoy—not unlike the way she tormented the best friend of Nancy's brother as a teenager back in Brooklyn.