There’s always a special place in a writer’s heart for the first editor who reaches out to him with the inquiry, “I’m wondering if you’d like to write something for me.” In my case that man is Jim Lopez, editor of Antique Children. If you’ve never read Antique Children, you’re simply missing out on a truly unique literary magazine, exceptionally compelling and engaging. Jim’s full length book, Abstracts of an American Pageant, is one of those works of art that straddles the line between the depraved and the sublime, often pointing out that depravity is actually sublime while, to the right kind of eyes, the sublime is depraved.

I’d tell you something more about Jim’s work, but I’m afraid Andrei Codrescu cannot be topped:

Jim Lopez is a philosopher/writer who is inventing an extraordinary form of politically radical literary journalism. Violent urbanism and eerily psycho suburban offshoots vein his rich, vernacular prose. Jim Lopez is hacking his own language out of everything at hand, including the work of Friedrich Nietzche, fresh graffiti in a derelict Los Angeles, and kinky sex. Visual, ethnically explosive and unsentimental, Lopez is also fun to read, like Kathy Acker, like an extreme porn mag in history class. -Andrei Codrescu

You should watch this bit of guerrilla filmmaking in his honor: