Martin Booe

Praise & Blame in 1990s Los Angeles Martin Booe

Praise and Blame in 1990s Los Angeles: Collected Non-Fiction tells the story of Los Angeles in the last decade of the twentieth century. As a collection, these profiles, features and essays form a work of journalistic collage. Random glimpses of a city in flux are juxtaposed in a way that tell a unique kind of story capturing the fading flame of mid-century culture as the nineties gave way to the vaunted New Millennium. There is a behind-bars interview with Eric Clapton's drummer and co-writer on Layla, who's in prison for putting a hatchet in his mother's head. Meet Ruth Webb, a savvy old-time Hollywood Talent Agent who reinvents herself as the rep for those like Tonya Harding and John Wayne Bobbit who found fame in shame. Accompany Booe on his visits to downtown "taxi dance clubs" where lonely men pay by the minute to dance with smiling young women, the last to uphold a time-honored if shady pocket of American culture. Follow the 11-year-old winner of contest to visit the MTV Awards (when the channel was still about music) as she stalks Axl Rose and plots her revolution against adults. Martin Booe is a journalist, musician and visual artist who has lived in Los Angeles since 1986. A prolific freelance writer during the 1990s, Booe wrote about popular culture for numerous national publications including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan and Bon Appetit.