Kevin P. Keating: Fiction, Essays & Commentary

The Quivering Pen : From Culver City in the northeast to Venice Beach in the southwest, the immense concrete slab of Venice Boulevard runs diagonally through some of the least scenic terrain in all of Los Angeles, passing under Interstate 405 and bisecting the Mar Vista neighborhood until it reaches, after seven interminable treeless miles, the freakiest beach in North America where middle-aged men wearing floral pattern Speedos do drug-induced dances on the boardwalk with their 1980s boomboxes pressed to their ears and where thickly muscled acrobats hopping around on pogo sticks mesmerize large crowds of weekend sun-worshipers.   As I boarded the number 33 bus near Culver City I asked the driver, “How long does it take to get to the beach from here?”  The driver was strangely evasive.   “Uh…maybe…oh…twenty minutes or so,” he said, and I knew he was lying.  “Really?  But it’s only seven miles away.”  Standing behind me, swaying back and fort...

From Salon :  As a native of Cleveland, I’ve been fascinated, on the one hand, by the city’s desperate, dystopian “Mad Max” hellscape of shuttered warehouses, gruesome rendering plants and rusted iron ore unloaders. It’s a world that still echoes dimly with the cacophonous clanging of ancient machinery and the inferno roar of steel foundries and blast furnaces. On the other hand, there’s the shining modern metropolis that boasts of having one of the world’s great orchestras, a renowned art museum and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  These disparate worlds can be viewed simultaneously from the observation deck of a building with the inauspicious name Terminal Tower. While many non-residents are aware that the Cuyahoga, that  most notorious of all rivers,  vivisects the city into two roughly equal parts — the east and west sides — they may not know that the city is also divided to a certain degree into north and south by Interstate 90. On the north side...