Interesting piece from the LA TIMES.... Hope it doesn't get
truncated in the submission.
Later....Kip
By: LYNELL GEORGE TIMES STAFF WRITER
It's a quick-cut, fast-and-furious world: Dom Perignon.
9-millimeter Walthers, shrink-wrapped Benjamins, Ferrari 360
Modenas, skyscraper-cribs with wraparound views.
And women. Of course, women. Wall-to-wall women--ambient and
muted as a background score.
No. Not a Hype Williams rap video. Nor a hidden track from
Mos Def.
This is the world of Jerome Usher, a fictional ice and
granite hit man whose raw, urban drama--"Street Sweeper"
written by Ronin Ro--is the inaugural novella launching a
series of books mingling gangsta rap with the noir essence of
pulp fiction in high hopes of reaching a long untapped
reading market: young black and Latino men.
Publisher Marc Gerald's unconventional yet thorny proposal is
to pick up where pulp cult writers like the late Donald
Goines and Iceberg Slim left off. [S] Affiliated, a new line
of books from Gerald's the Syndicate Media Group, focuses on
the urban underbelly. Packaged with a CD of unreleased cuts
by Def Jam rap artists, the books are aimed at the post-soul
generation looking for something that carries a bit of the
drama, high-life floss and intrigue--something the music
already brings them with lots of deep bass and in 15
cuts.
However, in just a few weeks on the shelves, "Street
Sweeper"--itself packaged in the shape of a CD-jewel box and
stamped with a parental advisory warning--is stirring up ire.
At a press conference on the day of publication, Najee Ali,
director of the Los Angeles-based Project Islamic HOPE,
called the novels violent and destructive. The community
activist is particularly concerned about the Syndicate's
efforts to target the nation's prison population with its
tales of players and hustlers.
Gerald is baffled by the outcry, although it shouldn't come
as a surprise. The Syndicate finds itself in the midst of the
same sort of minefield that minority recording artists and
feature film directors have encountered for years--the place
where fictional and real-life violence intersect. Community
groups that struggle with the daily realities of violence are
fighting hard to pull the plug on projects steeped in such
content--for example, Ice Cube's film "Player's Club" and
Hype Williams' feature film
"Belly"--or, at the very least, trying to mute the impact
with protests.
It's a classic conundrum: To ignore it is to whitewash; to
present it dramatically is to possibly glorify it. How does
one keep it real, so to speak, without adding to the problem?
It's a murky, uncharted middle space that the Syndicate
attempts to navigate.
For decades, mainstream publishers largely ignored black
authors and readers until Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and
most particularly Terry McMillan told them otherwise. But
black and Latino men aged 18 and up, have fallen through the
cracks as a focus of marketing. Gerald's idea is to try to
find an attractive concept and package that not only speaks
in their language but also to their interests and fantasies.
Hooked on Pulp Fiction and Street Stories
Gerald, 33, a college dean's son, grew up in Ohio reading
voraciously--Dostoevsky and Hardy, Goines and Jim
Thompson--with fanzines mixed in for good measure. "For me it
was my principal means of escaping," he recalls. "Columbus
was a very segregated world." Yet by high school, he found
his most "idyllic" moments playing in a punk band and
listening to early hip-hop--Sugar Hill Gang, Kurtis Blow and
Run DMC.
After college, his obsession with street stories and pulp
fiction ultimately led him to True Detective magazine. His
job as a writer and editor there segued into a gig writing
and producing for television's
"America's Most Wanted." And in 1996 he was able to merge his
interest in literature and true crime when he joined W.W.
Norton to launch its Old School Books imprint, dedicated to
bringing back out-of-print seminal pulp novels.
"If you weren't [Richard] Wright, [James] Baldwin or [Ralph]
Ellison," says Gerald, "you were lost to history." While
there, he worked to resurrect authors like Goines, who have
stayed alive primarily through a large, cult readership,
particularly in prisons. He also used the opportunity to
rediscover authors like Herbert Simmons, who wrote
jazz-steeped tales, and Clarence Cooper Jr., whose work,
Gerald suggests, is part Hubert Selby Jr., part William
Burroughs and part Prince.
Though he reintroduced 18 books in three years, Gerald looks
at the project as both "a triumph and a disappointment." The
books didn't do as well commercially as he'd hoped, but in
researching the project, he had begun to connect the dots.
"I'd been reading a lot of remarkable stuff. I knew that
there was a universe of contemporary fiction, talented
journalists, really talented music artists . . . and a
generation reading Iceberg Slim--and there was nothing 2000
about it."
That was the basic framework. Now, Gerald and his staff of
four have set up shop above what looks to be a dead
storefront along one of Hollywood Boulevard's livelier
stretches--across the street from Frederick's of
Hollywood.
On this particular afternoon, instead of protesters, only a
legless man sits on the sidewalk polishing the stars along
the Walk of Fame with Windex and brass polish. Two flights
up, Gerald, Mykel Mitchell, vice president of marketing and
promotion, and Leah James, director of sales, gather around
the glass conference table in an airy space ringed with
books. Jacin Scott, who serves as prison sales coordinator,
and Mao La Beet, the Syndicate's new media director, tap at
computer keyboards.
Though the books are meant to be raucous and hard-core,
Gerald says, they also are ready-fitted with a moral. "The
idea was to meet these kids where they are," marketer
Mitchell explains. "They may not be ready for the Baldwins
and the Wrights, and this is meeting them where they
are."
But for critics, any positive messages are either too
ambiguous or come far too late to matter.
The key to the project's street credibility, Gerald says, is
the music element. The books should not only reflect rap
culture, but also be an outgrowth of it. "My goal from the
start was to combine the two," he explains. "I was
persistent. I went to labels who were putting out hip-hop and
said: 'You've got to do this.' Def Jam felt like the logical
place because they were the label who were most about the
culture. They don't just produce hits, but the
culture."
The first installment is currently being shipped to
nontraditional bookselling venues: record stores and clothing
stores. Some are already at Tower Records' flagship store on
the Sunset Strip.
Though Gerald won't reveal his start-up figures, he says that
actor Wesley Snipes--who had been involved in talks with
Gerald while at Norton's Old School Books--provided them with
a "significant" investment. "Street Sweeper" will be followed
by screenwriter Antoine Black's "The International," novelist
and forensic psychologist Roland Jefferson's "XXL Money," and
journalist Michael Gonzales' "Platinum." The books retail for
about $15.
But plot lines such as that in "Street Sweeper," about a hit
man who
"smokes" people from a moving bus--then smooths the edges
with copious amounts of alcohol--isn't Najee Ali's idea of
"broadening horizons." Instead, he suggests, stereotypical
violent plots and characters will serve only to keep
readership intellectually boxed in.
And the 1,000 sample books being shipped to correctional
facilities across the country is what has Ali most outraged.
"I'm concerned that these books may possibly be reinforcing
negative behaviors and disrupt the rehabilitation process,"
explains Ali, who is also a Muslim minister. 'When those men
come back into the mainstream, they don't come back into
their communities--Wesley's communities--they come back into
our community. And we're the ones forced to repair our
neighborhoods."
Though the Syndicate says it is developing outreach programs
for juvenile offenders as well as lending its music industry
resources--Def Jam artists and the like--to fund-raising
efforts for organizations like Lynwood's Drive By Agony (a
nonprofit resource center for victims of violent crimes), Ali
says that's not enough. Too Early to Detect Impact of
Books
As of now, it's difficult to measure the impact of the books.
Some Tower outlets have them, but it's too early too tell how
they've been received on the schoolyard or at correctional
facilities.
Gerald next plans to publish self-help nonfiction titles that
will focus on everything from finance to spirituality,
tailored to the same young audience.
James Fugate, co-owner of Eso Won Books in South Los Angeles,
says that he will carry the books--and will be the first
traditional bookseller in the country to do so. "There is an
untapped market of young, intelligent people looking for the
fast read--a good crime or mystery novel." But getting the
segment that isn't so easily inclined to put a book in their
hands will be much more difficult, he said, because "they
just don't come in."
Whether it's disinterest in the discipline or a dearth of
stories that reflect their lives, there is a need, Fugate
says, to find a better cross-section of stories that take
disparate lives and conditions into consideration.
Like Fugate, Gary Phillips (whose novel "Tyson," about pit
bull fighting, is due out next March on the [S] Affiliated
imprint) figures the back and forth is not going to solve the
larger issues--from street crime to inferior schools--that
often bedevil urban centers and the people who live in
them.
"I agree with the criticism on one hand," says Phillips, who
is author of the Ivan Monk series of mysteries and a
community activist. "But there are a lot of white writers
writing about sex and violence, like Donald Westlake or
Elmore Leonard, and they don't get called on the carpet about
uplifting the race."
For writers and readers, says Phillips, the problem "is that
we don't get enough product out there. Books are about ideas
and stories. I'm all for having this debate. But ultimately
these books aren't designed to be the end-all, be-all. What
we should really be putting our energies in is instituting
writing and reading programs."
And when you boil it down, it doesn't take even the most
hard-boiled gumshoe to tell you: "You can't just read 'Street
Sweeper' and then pick up Ellison."
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