A curfew may have been imposed across Downtown L.A. on Wednesday night, but just outside its borders, at Night Gallery off Washington Boulevard, the city’s literati showed up for the launch party of On The Rag — a new tabloid for the social media age, published by Sammy Loren and that went into print this spring.
“None other than the New York Post called us the second-greatest tabloid in the world,” said Loren, quoting the Post after the New York launch party back in March. Loren, late 30s, who looked trim in a tan blazer and a flop of brown hair, began publishing fiction in La Prensa while living in Mexico City. After moving to L.A., “I felt like there wasn’t really much of a literary life that I felt drawn to — so I started Casual Encountersz,” the underground reading series, in 2020. On The Rag grew from there — first as Instagram posts, and now as a fully fledged printed alt mag. “A tabloid is a very popular medium. It’s very working-class. It’s very accessible. It’s cheap to make. It’s very transparent about what it is,” Loren continued. “I don’t like the elitism of the literary and art world.”
On The Rag‘s first issue combines high and low in a way that invigorates both: a letter from a surfer in Gaza describing daily life, followed by poetry, ads for Latina call girls, and a studio visit conversation between art critic Anahid Nersessian and painter Sanya Kantarovsky. The back page is the paper’s gripes section, which On The Rag also posts to its Instagram page. Amidst the collage of gripes and images, one reads “Paris Sucks Cock: not one person has invited me to a reading in their backyard…FUCK THIS PLACE!” The word “tabloid” applies more to the format than the content. On The Rag might not be breaking any news stories, but it’s certain to continue publishing engaging, original fiction from both new and established writers, while peppering in plenty of cheeky (even smutty) fill.
“Imagine if The New Yorker drunkenly knocked up the National Enquirer,” Loren recently told Emily Sundberg of On The Rag for her Feed Me substack. “OTR is also spiritually indebted to Mexico’s highly Freudian tabloids, which often publish pics of corpses beside porn stars.” Here, the juxtaposition is high-brow lit with dirty pics.
At the downtown L.A. launch party, plenty of cigarettes were lit up through the night as those in attendance mixed with Lily Kwong’s environmental installations (art, to be sure) in the Night Gallery’s courtyard. At one point, a dog relieved itself on a chest-high mound of earth dotted with native flowers and grasses. The line for the human restroom never seemed to dip below five people.
Loren kicked off the event’s readings not with his own material but with “one of the greatest art critics in America, named Diva Corp—” a few cheers from the crowd. “They wrote for On The Rag. They’re the arts editor, actually, and I’m really happy to have them.”
Following Loren was Ruby Zuckerman, dressed in a black cocktail dress with black slingback kitten heels. “I wanted to read a short story I wrote about my grandfather, whose native language is Yiddish and is why I learned Yiddish. Sammy instilled the fear of God in me about going too long, so this is just a short excerpt.” After the reading, Zuckerman noted that “Sammy just knows what’s fun. He has the gift of bringing fun to literature and writing, and there’s something tongue-in-cheek about a tabloid.”
Chet Hanks, son of actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, was advertised as a headliner for the night. He was expected to read from a forthcoming memoir. When writer Kennedy Wright got up to the microphone, she announced that Hanks had texted her to say he left town and couldn’t make it to the event: “I wanted to read a chapter from the new novel I’m writing, The Baptism of Abraxas. Can’t wait for the next one. Hope to see you there.” A question lingered in the air: was Chet Hanks ever coming? Was this all a stunt?
Among the night’s other (actual) readers Chris Kraus — author, editor, critic and an editorial director of On The Rag. “Sammy does the best events,” she said near a table selling copies of the tabloid for $10. She was dressed in loose jeans, white tee, and an indigo-dyed blazer. “A tabloid is just what we need. Sammy’s logic is the right logic. His Instagram posts make no sense, but they’re incredibly inflammatory.”
Kraus later read from a new short story that will be included in Reynaldo Rivera’s upcoming collection Propriedad Privada. Kraus: “He asked a bunch of people, friends involved with Semiotext(e), to write stories that were both erotic and also somehow very revealing and personal.”
Zara Schuster, in canary yellow pants with a silk scarf belt, read a bilingual (French and English) poem of hers. “I think it’s about time L.A. has a literary and arts tabloid, and Sammy is the person to do it. I mean, he inspired me to start storming the streets of L.A. to read poetry,” she explained. Schuster’s reading series, Propaganda, has popped up at the Chateau Marmont and on a Hollywood Stars tour bus recently. She serves as the social editor of On The Rag. “There are a lot of up-and-coming writers who want this.”
Rachel Kushner (a well-established writer and the final reader of the night) arrived at the event in flared denim jeans and a denim top. “My outfit isn’t from Target,” she told the audience before she read a poem that appears in On The Rag, “it from Sunday’s Best Vintage in Echo Park, a few blocks from my house.”
After she left the mic, Kushner, who serves as an editorial director of the tabloid, said: “Casual Encounters had been a feature of Craigslist when I moved to Los Angeles in 2003, and I would be trying to buy used furniture, and there’s people on this other feature of Craigslist that are saying things like, ‘hey, who’s awake right now?’ That is the quality they’re looking for in a mate, which is who is awake right now at 3 a.m.” A fan interrupted her to say hi as she spoke. She exchanged pleasantries, then continued: “Sammy tapped into the kind of insouciance, the freedom of that, I think, by naming his reading series after it. And then, when he started On The Rag, I just thought it was a really funny title. It’s kind of vintage phrasing that people aren’t really using anymore. I was in on the project without even knowing clearly what the mission of the project was.”
The readings over, Sammy got on the mic: “Afterparty at El Prado. El Prado in Echo Park. If you’re going, drop your drinks and exit the premises.” And with that, the launch party ended.