—Will Alexander, author of Kaleidoscope Omniscience
“ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is one of the wildest, most creative and deeply-cutting novels I’ve read in years, a genuine piece of newness in both content and form. Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo have managed, from the mind-bending perch of alternate time and space, to construct a perfect lookout from which to view the deranged spectacle of late-capitalism America. To wade through this surreal narrative archeology—composed of everything from oral histories to inspirational posters to lunch menus—is to experience, in the finest sense, literature as fever dream.”
—Omar El Akkad, author of American War: A Novel
“Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo co-pilot the ELADATL phantasmagoric journey across historic/imagined skies with magnificent views of a post-industrial East Los Angeles wasteland that is dotted with cinematic/cultural phantoms: Raquel Welch, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Anthony Quinn, and Brown Berets who invoke the mantra, ‘Don’t believe the fake dreams of the secret police.’ Human skin, dirigible skin, chorizo skins, are simultaneously celebrated as art while being attacked by Zeppelin gunships. ELADATL lifts the reader into a free intellectual airspace where airships of new thinking reign.”
—Harry Gamboa Jr., author of Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr.
“‘The strange future of war over Los Angeles, zeppelins versus dirigibles …’ Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo capture the uncapturable. ‘Experience levitation and death,’ ‘attune your cellular vibrations to the frequency of Star Beings,’ ‘the merciless winds of the human heart,’ ‘the Atmospheric Trash Vortex.’ Who is the I here? ‘The welcoming hosts at the front door, you want to look inside?’ The nightmare does not erase the comedy. ‘The CIA behind the million faces, hair and fingernails still growing.’ ‘Sign your sorrow over … they’re taking everything; let’s give it to them, the sober whisky of Love.’ Unforgettable read. ‘Isn’t someone in charge?’”
—Sharon Doubiago, author of My Beard: Memoir Stories
“A fierce, bittersweet, and hilarious antidote to our increasingly deracinated personhoods and neighborhoods, ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines inspires us to hold our ground in a here and now that includes futures and pasts we both know and can barely imagine. Set against the absence of Hollywood—that perfect hierarchical structure that occludes most of the actual labor that goes into making the finished product—Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo take us through the hood and under the hood while celebrating and mourning the intimacy of social life in all its vicissitudes. Along the way, our fearless guides introduce us to the living politics of a particular place whose accumulated experience reverberates throughout the cosmos.”
—Ammiel Alcalay, Founder and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative
SKY CITY
In order to advance the proletarian interests of the community, and to counteract the military-industrial propaganda of the oppressor government — which goes so far as to categorically deny the existence of the High Low Radiance Corridor, disregarding cars that disappeared many years ago reappearing nowadays, falling out of the sky to wreak havoc on community members, community gardens, and street traffic—this is pirate radio Ehekatl 99.9 on your dial, broadcasting from various hilltops in Northeast Los Angeles (during our irregular broadcast hours of 2 a.m. to 6 a.m.). Tonight we examine the Mysteries of East L.A., confirm the existence of one of the biggest and most mysterious of them all: the long-rumored but never-before-sighted Sky City. We bring you a live eyewitness investigation by one of our undercover reporters, from her night job as a pilot-trainee at the allegedly phony and/or “clandestine” East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines. Pirate radio Ehekatl 99.9 is ready to provide first-hand evidence that Sky City is real. Our reporter, with her unsuspecting master pilot watching over her shoulder, has assumed the flight controls of a 700-foot-long state-of-the-art postmodern dirigible and has ascended to 11,000 feet in altitude (the signal’s fading in and out due to air-pressure fluctuations, not to mention the engine noise, but we can’t help that). We go live directly to our report in progress:
“Which is it gonna be?”
“Which is what gonna be?”
“Which is it gonna be?”
“What? The heading’s off the compass bearing, altimeter right there in front of you, pitch and yaw, wind direction. Remember there’s two gauges fore and aft, that’s important in a ship this long, both hands on the wheel—”
“Which? Is it gonna be a story or what?”
“You want a story? ‘The ELADATL Agnes Smedley drifts across the misty night above the devastated West,’ too boring for you?”
“You know, your usual, whatever it is, surrealism bullshit. People get tired. That’s not really considered a story, is it?”
“It’s not—”
“Is it?”
“It’s not—”
“Come on!”
“It’s not surrealism!”
“What? That’s not what they call it?”
“No.”
“It’s kind of psychedelic or something, isn’t it? Doesn’t that qualify—”
“Surrealism goes back to World War I. It was French. It’s supposed to be a reaction to the First World War.”
“Thank you, doctor. Doctor Barnswallow.”
“No—thank you! I always like a little European history and iced tea on night flights over the greater L.A. basin.”
“I’d like a little iced tea with my iced tea.”
“Now you can get virtual iced tea with—or in place of—your actual iced tea.”
“Doctor Barnswallow!”
“Mister Doctor Barnswallow to you.”
“So what’s the best love story you know? I mean one that you actually know about. Not—”
“You mean not like Romeo and Juliet or Wuthering Heights or—”
“Exactly. Something that happened to you—”
“Brokeback Mountain, eh? What about, like, The Fly? That’s kind of a love story. There’s a love story in there. The scientist’s wife has to kill him by crushing his fly head to put her husband out of his suffering. I feel like something like that happened to me. Or it could!”
“You know what I’m sayin’. Best thing you can come up with.”
“Something I heard about?”
“All right. Something you heard about. Someone you actually know, though.”
“Personally, eh? Somebody we know personal. Personallike.”
“Who you know. Yeah.”
“The love of a middle-aged Arizona couple for their Chihuahua? The love of a whole people for their land? The love of an old retired dude for a patch of lawn and his lawn chair?”
“For a woman!”
“I thought—”
“Make me spell it out!”
“Thought so. A woman always wants a story about a woman. How about someone you know, someone you and I both know?”
“Let’s