Jack Skelley
Poet, journalist, and musician Jack Skelley is the author of Monsters, Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson, and the forthcoming Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing. During the years when Fear of Kathy Acker was written, Skelley produced the music series and coproduced the reading and performance series at Beyond Baroque, while editing and publishing Barney: The Modern Stone Age Magazine, featuring major artists and writers. He is a songwriter and guitarist for the SST surf band Lawndale.
Words, Tunage, and More
Q & A with Los Angeles Review of Books
Punks and Posers: A Conversation with Jack Skelley
“I’ve been reminded of those early encounters with L.A. while reading Jack Skelley’s tribute to youth and art, The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker. The novel follows a twentysomething musician named Jack crisscrossing Los Angeles, hanging around malls and going to parties, bumping into artists, pop stars, and poets. It’s an often manic work, a philosophical acid trip about the nature of identity, literature, and love, as mesmerizing, charming, and maddening as the city that produced it. Skelley wrote the novel in the 1980s, when he was a twentysomething musician himself, and for two decades struggled to get it published. But as he notes in the book’s new preface, “nature and fate conspire against art.” Aside from a few excerpts in chapbooks, Skelley never managed to launch his novel into the world—until now.”
“Some say the nature of youth is to squander it. The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker’s surreal resurrection 40 years after it was first written suggests something more complex—that our youth, seemingly wasted bumming rollies and rides, can, with some luck, echo deep into our future.”
Paper Magazine FOKA Highlight
Paper Magazine: How Queer Gen Z Resurrected a Salacious '80s Novel
“In the mid '80s, a striking, shaggy-haired 20-something named Jack Skelley was living in Venice Beach and doing the things all young bohemians do: starting punk bands, going to exhibitions, writing poetry. In those days Skelley circled around the westside cultural institution Beyond Baroque where he’d party at openings with Dennis Cooper and Mike Kelley. Inspired by his scene and by the radical, cut-up works of Kathy Acker, Skelley abandoned poetry and began writing a novel.
‘You can do more in prose, ironically enough,’ Skelley says from his book-lined home in Culver City. ‘At least for the way that writers like Acker presented it, you could go in any direction and change identities. The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker isn’t just my voice, but my friends’. I could steal identities, steal their stories.””
Lawndale
Legendary SST band Lawndale returns with a new album
Lawndale is back. One of the most entertaining bands ever to appear on SST Records, Lawndale recently recorded 8 new songs. The album “Twango” includes 6 original compositions with 2 cover songs. It features core Lawndale line-up of original members Dave Childs (drums) and Jack Skelley (guitar), with longtime bass/guitar player Phil Van Duyne (Philo).
“Twango” extends Lawndale’s trademark sound: comically twisting diverse genres – punk, psychedelic, metal, Gypsy jazz, tangos, soundtracks, polkas, Western and more – with classic surf-rock melodies.
Lawndale’s two SST albums (“Beyond Barbecue” and “Sasquatch Rock”) were highlights of that famous label’s most adventurous period, joining records by Sonic Youth, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, Husker Du, Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr. and other beloved artists. Lawndale performed with these and hundreds of groups in Los Angeles and around the U.S. And it has remained intact, playing to enthusiastic fans off and on for over 30 years.