News:
  • A History of Asian Americans
  • I Am Not A Virus
  • The Third Line
  • LIFE AFTER MILKBONE
  • eating the gods
  • Kaduna
  • Contact us
  • About
    • What is Cultural Weekly?
    • Advertise
    • Contributors
    • Masthead
    • Subscribe
    • Submissions: Write for us
    • Cultural Weekly Style & Formatting Guide
  • Contact us
  • About
    • What is Cultural Weekly?
    • Advertise
    • Contributors
    • Masthead
    • Subscribe
    • Submissions: Write for us
    • Cultural Weekly Style & Formatting Guide
Cultural Weekly logo
  • Film
  • TV + Web
  • Poetry
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Literature
  • Theatre
  • Music
  • Dance
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • Food
  • Film
  • TV + Web
  • Poetry
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Literature
  • Theatre
  • Music
  • Dance
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • Food

They Write By Night:
Pandemic Noir No. 3, City Gone Missing

By Suzanne Lummis on September 2, 2020 in Film, Poetry

Click Here To View Comments

Pandemic Noir No. 3, City Gone Missing

Businesses disappear, your favorite restaurant (the Cha Cha Cha on Virgil!), or the last remaining news stand in that part of town. People disappear, maybe a rogue husband who’s cleaned out your bank account—the money You earned—and skipped town. Vanished. Happened to a college teacher I knew, back in the day. Species have a way of disappearing. On occasion, a section of a city, one with people in it, goes missing, and not by accident.

What lies behind most of these disappearances? Money, usually, or something like it. When that guy said, “Follow the money,” he said a thing worth following. Yet, I’ve heard stories…. Sometimes even the money goes missing. Or tax returns. Something like money.

It’s good that Mike Hammer pursued a suitcase stuffed with radioactive material through and around Bunker Hill, so we got some of that storied neighborhood on film before it went missing. And, here’s another good thing—William Archila caught the noir mood, atmosphere, landscape, and glimpses of the City’s dark-running, and disappearing, narrative, in his poem “Cine Negro.”

– Suzanne Lummis

Top image credit to www.Poetry.LA

Click Here To View Comments

TagsCine NegroKiss Me DeadlyMike HammerWilliam Archila

Previous Story

A Thirst for Seeing

Next Story

Poets on Craft: Amanda J. Bradley and Raymond P. Hammond

About the author

Suzanne Lummis

Suzanne Lummis

Suzanne Lummis, noted practitioner and exponent of NOIR POETRY, unpacks a genre infused with the ethos of mid-20th Century hard-boiled fiction and crime movies, presenting examples from poets both living and “quite dead.” An influential teacher through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and co-founder of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, Lummis produced a 2011 city-wide, 25-event series, “Night in the City: L.A. Noir Poetry, Fiction and Film.” Her 2012 essay “The Poem Noir — Too Dark to Be Depressed” (Malpais Review, Vol. 3, No. 3) is essential reading on the subject. Lummis was awarded a 2018/19 C.O.L.A. (City of Los Angeles) fellowship to create a series of new poems. Her most recent collection is Open 24 Hours (Lynx House Press). Her poems have appeared in three Knopf "Everyman's Poetry" anthologies, including Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem, and in The Antioch Review, New Ohio Review, Plume, The American Journal of Poetry and The New Yorker. She edited the anthology "Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond" (Pacific Coast Poetry Series/Beyond Baroque Books) named one of the Ten Best Books of 2015 in the Los Angeles Times. (Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher)

Support Our Friends

Follow Us

Join Our Mailing List

Latest Tweets

Tweets by @CulturalWeekly

Comments

  • Lisa Segal Lisa Segal
    Valentine’s Day Redux: a Second Chance at True Love
    Marvelous!!!!!!!
    2/14/2021
  • maurice amiel maurice amiel
    Shakespeare on Despots, Power, and Finally… Transition
    Timely and educational this post Your scholarship...
    1/31/2021
  • maurice amiel maurice amiel
    Abigail Wee: “Growing Home”
    A first place well deserved While the particular...
    1/24/2021

New

  • How to Add Texture to the Wall and the Wall Hangings for Decoration
  • A History of Asian Americans
  • I Am Not A Virus
  • The Third Line
  • LIFE AFTER MILKBONE

Tags

art dance film Los Angeles music photography poem poems poetry tomorrow's voices today

Like us

Please Help

Donate

Who are we?

Cultural Weekly is a place to talk about our creative culture with passion, perspective and analysis – and more words than “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Our mission is to draw attention to our cultural environment, illuminate it, and make it ... read more

Site map

  • About
  • Advertise
  • Contact us
  • Contributors
  • Cultural Weekly Style & Formatting Guide
  • Food
  • Home
  • Masthead
  • Privacy Policy/Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Submission Form
  • Submissions: Write for us
  • Subscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Thank You

Links

Adam Leipzig
Entertainment Media Partners
This Is Crowd
CreativeFuture
Plastic Oceans Foundation
Arts & Letters Daily
Alltop
Alexis Rhone Fancher
Jack Grapes
Ethan Bearman
Writ Large Press

Mailing List

* indicates required


  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy/Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Contact us
Cultural Weekly is the digital magazine and public platform of Next Echo Foundation. DONATE HERE.
Copyright © 2010-2020 by Adam Leipzig. All Rights Reserved.