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trade paperback, 145 pages: $14.99 | Always Not There Poems. Los Angeles writer and sometimes wronger Rip Rense presents a collection of 71 utterenses published by Rensart Productions. Among the subjects considered: Ravel’s “Bolero,” a portrait of actress Sarah Bernhardt by Alfred Stevens (hanging in the UCLA Hammer Museum), the singer-songwriter Chuck E. Weiss, the fifth symphony of Jean Sibelius, the late comic Jonathan Winters, the deeply diseased state of world culture, the tyranny of marketing, a man returning home after his son leaves for college, a terminally ill neighbor, a struggle between Jesus and the saxophone, a house in Isla Vista in 1968, a café named for a vagina, guitar notes played by Jerry Garcia, kitty-cats, ambivalence, and jackhammers. There is also a tribute to the late, beloved Los Angeles poet, Scott Wannberg. The book is dedicated to Wannberg, a lifelong friend of Rense. "Rense's style is unshackled by convention and expectation," said Santa Monica writer Cordelia Wong-Rogers. "It exists to serve the subject at hand." More here. © 2007-2015 Rip Rense, Rensart Productions. All rights reserved. |
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Strange
Places of the Heart. Twenty-five short stories by Rip Rense. illustrations by Keith Snider. Love is a many bended thing. It is not roses and chocolates, and it is not sex, and it is not undying devotion, though those things are all better when love is involved. Love is cryptic and perverse, sneaky and strange. It happens when it shouldn’t, and doesn’t happen when it should. It happens inside heads where no one can see it, and it happens between the living and dead, people and cats, people and food, people and delusions, people and hope, people and themselves. And love is not even love. It can be hate. Yin-yang, the notion of everything carrying its opposite, is too often simplified as two halves of a whole. But the Chinese symbol of yin-yang has some yin in the yang, and some yang in the yin. Was the hatred that drove humans to destroy Nazi Germany an act of love? Well. All of which is to say that there are strange places in the heart, maybe nothing but strange places. Here are twenty five stories about them. © 2002, 2015 Rip Rense, Rensart Productions. All rights reserved. |
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The Last
Byline The decline of newspapers. "You'll help me, Mr. Bogle. You're a good man!" says Mary McAbee, silent film star. "You ain't the type to work for nobody, Charlie Bogle," says the street sax player, Jumping Jimmy. "You lack grist," spits managing editor Louise Abigail Francis. "You're nuts," says reporter Beryl Mahoney. Charles Bogle is a lot of things---too many, maybe. And he finds himself at the heart of absurdity, always---whether spending nights in an easy chair, nursing old drunks, or trying to break his city editor's wrist. This is the story of a few months in his life, circa 1980, at the Los Angeles Chronicle, popularly known as the Chronic Illness. Between funerals of children, attempted seductions by nymphomaniacs, bottles of Scotch, Bogle reluctantly chases down the strange secret of Elmer Cruickshank, Ruler of the Cosmos---despite being played for a fool by the LAPD, FBI, and his own paper. He is beaten, burned, and bamboozled---all while anchoring the Chronic Illness's "Back Row," a gallery of journalistic gallantry disguised as a black militant, cokehead, and hothead. Then there is Bogle's avuncular colleage, Shag Hanson, who between chewing his pipe stem to splinters, observes, "The thing to remember about condescension is that we are all descended from the same con." In the end, Bogle casts the deciding vote in the destiny of all concerned. Or does he? This rambunctious book is a grand tale of what newspapers used to be, and will never be again. Reviews "Bogle is an Atlas figure, whose shouldered burden is not his alone; this is part of the book's greatness."---Barry Smolin, KPFK. © 2002, 2015 Rip Rense, Rensart Productions. All rights reserved. |
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International shipping: $10
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The Oaks A Town, a Boy, and the Sixties. There was something oppressive, malignant in Charlie Bogle's idyllic world. Something he did not understand. Something that left him feeling loathed, exploited, worthless. Something that he was instructed to introduce as. . .his mother. Well, at least there were the oaks. They were outside his window at night, and in the fields he walked through on his way to school, in old tennis shoes with cardboard in the soles. They were his pillars, his bulwark, his friends, his family, and it crushed the boy when he finally had to leave them. “The Oaks” is the story of Charlie's sad, crazy, hilarious and heroic struggle as he grows up in Beatles-echoing, 1960’s California bedroom-community America. A miraculous, almost magical country town where lions roar like morning roosters, rockets break the late night sky, and the gigantic summer days are made of nothin'-to-do. Rense writes with grace and poignancy in this lyrical, touching novel of triumph. Reviews, Reader comments "Within its pages are to be found a cast of characters who breathe and move with such passion that one can only find comparisons in the writings of John Steinbeck." ---Gary L. Coffman, retired English teacher. "This book deserves to be read by hundreds of thousands of people. It is a gem." ---Susan Christian Goulding, columnist, Daily Breeze. © 2007-2015 Rip Rense, Rensart Productions. All rights reserved. |
International shipping: $10
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Less Than
Satisfying Encounters With Humanity (LTSEWH) The Decline of Western Civilization---Illustrated. Rense's
long-running LTSEWH column is now a fully illustrated book. You read it in the L.A.
Times, and The Rip Post. Now, the book. With wonderfully deranged
illustrations. © 2007-2015 Rip Rense, Rensart Productions. All rights reserved. |
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Lingo Czar The Decline of Western Civilization--- measured by its language. Rense's long-running Lingo Czar column (L.A. Times, The Rip Post) is now 210 acid-dripping pages exposing rigidly conformist slang, reflexive outbursts, 'cool' patois, abominable cliches, infantile drivel, smug rejoinders, mandatory peer-enforced buzzwords and idiot-speak that Americans are spewing from 500-word iPhone vocabularies as their knuckles hang ever closer to the sidewalk. The Czar's rulings are rendered with wit, insight, and mildly dyspeptic analysis.
"I thought I was alone. Thank God someone else has not
only noticed, but hilariously documented, the degradation of English wrought
by television and computer. Bless you, Mr. Rense." ---Laurie Dockett,
retired professor of English Literature. |
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LISTEN TO SAMPLES |
the
greatest grateful dead album the grateful dead never made. . . The Persuasions, Brooklyn-grown street singers who became the greatest a cappella group in American history, sing the Grateful Dead---specifically, the songs of Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia. Songs that still are among among the most original in American music. Sheer poetry, meet sheer melody. "Enchanting!" ---grateful dead lyricist Robert Hunter. SPECIAL GUESTS ARTISTS: Country Joe McDonald, Mark Karan (Ratdog), Jackie LaBranch and Gloria Jones (Jerry Garcia Band), Grateful Dead keyboardist Vince Welnick, Dongming Qiao, James King, Alyn Kelley, Eric Thompson, Peter Rowan, Pete Grant, Mary Schmary. "Deadheads, take a hit from this double disc dose of the real thing. Persuasions fans, this may be the last time you'll ever hear a Persuasions line-up with original lead, and once-in-a-lifetime talent, Jerry Lawson. . .These tracks are stories that happen to have been set to song, not songs that happen to have a story." ---Jonathan Minkoff, Recorded A Cappella Review Board. "Album producer Rip Rense calls the marriage of these two acclaimed artists "a surprisingly natural fit." He couldn't be more right. It works because these tracks are more than just covers; they're tributes. Each arrangement is designed to draw something new out of the original. Many of them include actual instruments, such as piano, guitar, and baritone saxophone." ---Nicole Maria Milano,Recorded A Cappella Review Board. PRODUCED BY RIP RENSE FOR ZOHO ROOTS AND RENSART PRODUCTIONS "Hands-down the spiritual event-in-song of 2011."---David McGee, Bluegrass Special. |
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19 SONGS. . .70 MINUTES OF MUSIC AND LAUGHTER. . . BOOKLET. . .ECO-FRIENDLY CD WALLET. . .PHOTO SCRAPBOOK. . .
Sam Cooke, Frank Zappa, Nat King Cole, Kurt Weill, The Mills
Brothers, The Oak Ridge Boys, Elvis, even. . .The Partridge Family.
. .Gospel,
rock, country, classic ballads. . .The ORIGINAL PERSUASIONS:
Jerry Lawson,
"Sweet Joe" Russell (R.I.P.), Jimmy Hayes, Jayotis Washington, plus
"newcomers" Raymond Sanders and B.J. Jones. . . |
