“I know that Los Angeles is—even on its brightest day—temporary,” Brett Grace writes in “Avalanche,” an essay from his forthcoming limited-run zine I HAVEN’T THE SLIGHTEST IDEA. Brett, like many of L.A.’s inhabitants, is a transplant—but he says it’s the same for natives and transplants alike: LA is and always has been a temporary place.
It’s 6:30 AM, and I’m sitting with Brett in the amber glowing lobby of Public, Ian Schrager’s fabulous and accessibly luxurious New York hotel. He’s jet-lagged, fresh off a flight from a friend’s wedding in London, and the coffee shop doesn’t open until 7:00 AM. “I’m always jet-lagged,” Brett says, before bashfully sipping a Red Bull and laughing at his own ridiculousness. This is Brett, in a nut-shell: persistently ridiculous. “I’ve never been good friends with someone who can’t appreciate life’s absurdities. I always like to be rolling with someone who, when someone who’s just beyond ridiculous walks into the room, I can look over to, and they’re looking back at me like ‘That’s f*****g hilarious.’ It can be an out-of-place item of clothing the person is wearing, it can be how they’re behaving, something they’re saying. That one moment will be the call-back; the thing that cracks us up the rest of the night.” Maybe it takes a [self-admitted] ridiculous person to observe and document life’s absurdities. “That’s who I am, and that’s what I do,” Brett says assuredly, “I finally have an answer to that dreadful question ‘What do you do?’”
The barista prepping to open the coffee shop takes pity us and offers us two espresso-shots, to which Brett daintily replies “Oh, you really don’t have to”—and now, the espressos are also on the house. Brett has been writing what he calls a non-existent book: “I’ve been telling people for at least 15 years that I’m writing a book, and it was always going to be a collection of essays—and I’ve got a lot of essays, but it just isn’t a book yet, you know? I’ve never had a blog or anything like that, I just love the art of printing and binding too much—so I thought a zine would be a good compromise; a printed way to share some of my writing… and then my friend Liz Nistico [who performs solo as Revenge Wife, and is the lead singer of duo Holychild] suggested that, in addition to my own writing, I have friends contribute things to the zine as well. And that’s when I knew it’d actually happen, because there’s no question I work best when it’s collaborative. I can let myself down, but I can’t let my friends down.”
So who’s going to be contributing to the zine? “I have at three or four friends who I know will happily contribute,” Brett says that might be the easy part. I’ll just be asking people for anything; a random photograph, a quick sketch, some unused song lyrics. “I know they’ve been around way longer, but there’s something just so inherently 90’s about zines to me—so I’m really just diving in right now, and getting so inspired for the concept, I’m watching things like HI-OCTANE [a short-lived 1994 Comedy Central TV series directed by Sofia Coppola, hosted by Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes]. Like, what was the concept for this?” He shows me a clip on his laptop. “It’s so cleverly illogical, and that’s what I’m going for.”
“Avalanche,” the piece Brett sent me prior to our early morning chat, is an emotionally-charged personal essay likening what attracts people like Brett to L.A., a city always on the brink of disaster, to his attraction to similarly-fated “car crash” relationships. “I don’t think the rest of this first zine, anyway, is going to be that dark, though. I’ve overdosed on darkness, and I’m trying to balance it with what’s clearly my favorite theme: the nonsensical.”
I HAVEN’T THE SLIGHTEST IDEA, “But I might change the title a dozen more times—just now I was thinking, should it be called ‘Merrily We Run Far, Far Away’?,” Brett cautions, will be published later this year in a limited-run by New York’s boutique publishing house Printed Matter Inc.
