The Razor’s Edge : Simi Valley Magazine Will Dissect the ’92 Verdicts, the Violence That Followed and Race Relations

Less than half a mile away from the Ronald Wilson Reagan Presidential Library, and wedged within an innocuous Simi Valley housing tract that boasts a parade of cheerful two-story townhouses, a one-man, cottage-industry revolution presses onward.

At the end of a cul-de-sac, mild-mannered Jordan Jones, bespectacled editor of razor-edged Bakunin magazine, cranks out his perfect-bound, indisputably left-of-center journal in the Spartan rooms of, he likes to joke, his “ancestral manse.” Jones, 29, doesn’t boast the rough-hewn countenance of the textbook revolutionary: No black beret, no urgent leaflets to distribute; his is a quiet, studied infiltration.

Admittedly a civic anomaly, Jones seeks to expand political and social thought--not just within the Ventura County borders (home of the first trial in the beating of Rodney King), but far beyond. By day he writes marketing materials, software documents and press releases as a technical writer for Teradyne, a company that produces semiconductor testers in Agoura; by night, he tests the boundaries (and potentially the patience) of his conservative birthplace.

His own trial, and what just might blow his cover, Jones knows, will take place in the matter of the next few weeks. He will put the final touches on what most certainly will be the most controversial of Bakunin’s eight issues to date: The Simi Valley verdicts, the violence that followed and the conundrum called race relations. For this event, he has cajoled and convinced a diverse lineup of writers from throughout California to contribute poetry, memoirs, fiction and essays for the issue that he hopes to complete by early June.

Besides stirring up progressive thought locally, Jones has taken an equally burdensome charge to move the publication one step further--using the pages as a lively forum to examine the limits of the Left, zeroingin on its stepping-on-eggshells, politically correct proclivities. The latter practice, he believes, critically hampers honest, thus truly progressive, dialogue.

Jones started Bakunin in 1990 as a stapled, 48-page earnest quarterly, while he worked on a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis. It quickly became a vivid conflation of art, poetry, fiction, criticism and photography that now weighs in at more than 100 pages. Publication was reduced to semiannually and distribution has since grown from 400 copies to 750. (Jones plans to publish 1,000 copies of the upcoming issue.) Priced at $5, it is available at independent bookstores throughout the state or directly from Jones.

Funded mostly out-of-pocket--there are few advertisements or subscriptions--Jones’ journal takes its name from the wily figure Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist ousted from Marx’s inner circle about 1890 for opposing the party line.

“What I most admire is his tenacity and vision,” says Jones. “He believed that communism would concentrate power into an even smaller group of hands.” Exiled to Siberia, Bakunin managed to travel the globe “to continue his struggle,” he says. “A lot of people would give up, and I guess in a sense it’s the same thing with literary magazines. Most magazines don’t last for very long. So I’m doing a kind of play on that.

“We’ll see how tenacious I am.”

The lively response within the literary community has been more than just a series of polite nods. Critic Robert Peters announced in the Small Press Review that “few contemporary lit journals have the intelligence and flow of Bakunin,” while Lee Rossi in the Los Angeles Times Book Review called Jones’ endeavor feisty.

Jones, whose first book of poems (“Sand & Coal”) was recently published, says he’s somewhat discouraged despite Bakunin’s glowing notice: “Most people want Stephen King, and if that’s . . . what they occupy their time with, they’re not going to want to deal with something like this, something that’s going to challenge them to read deeply, and think about social and sexual issues.”

The response in Simi Valley, he says, “has been complete and utter silence.”

Donna Anderson, owner of Simi Valley’s sole independent bookstore, Book World, believes it’s too soon to tell. She adds that although she sold four copies of Bakunin’s Fall/Winter issue in the first two days she stocked it, there hasn’t much more of a response than people struck by a wave of recognition upon glimpsing a familiar name.

“The cover attracts them,” she says. “They remember Jordan as a child. ‘He was so quiet,’ one woman recalled, ‘you would have never known he was there.’ ”

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What will more than likely thrust Jones and Bakunin front and center in his hometown is the upcoming issue, which will confront and deconstruct the above-ground seismic activities jolting L. A. and many of its bedroom environs.

Recent race and class issues that have commanded media attention make Jones’ charge that much more immediate, that much more complex. “It wasn’t even something that I thought much about. I couldn’t publish a magazine that was somewhat political from Simi Valley and not have material about the riots,” he explains.

In a wild mix of cogent writings that includes musings from “white suburbia” to the pain and confusion of those watching the flames from the inner city, Jones has carefully assembled a disparate group of writers who generally don’t appear side-by-side in the familiar “round-up-the-usual-suspects” of small presses.

Jones describes their work as harsh and confrontational. Much of the text--up close and unapologetic--captures the tenor and color of those three days last spring; a nightmare moment out of time.

The writer’s roster sparks with names familiar and not so: Keith Antar Mason, Bill Mohr, Sesshu Foster, Joyce Guy, Michael Datcher, Harold Jaffe, Norman Wong and Terrence E. Dunn; Norman Mallory and Miguel Juarez provide illustrations.

Meditations range from Santa Monica resident Mohr’s tense monologue-turned-poem of a person confronted by the barrel of a gun, to poet-performance artist Mason’s commentary on grand-scale civil unrest versus pernicious, inexorable urban violence.

Jones hopes this chorus of brash, yet at once eloquent voices will inspire similar inter-ethnic dialogues in real-world settings: “We really have to change the way we deal with each other,” says Jones. “We can’t just sweep it under the rug.”

Mason agrees. “It’s really important that we don’t do the 1960s thing--talk about it for a couple of years and then forget. These kinds of documents are very important to me. They are important vehicles for understanding.”

Although he would have preferred an African-American embark on a project such as this, Mason enthusiastically supports Jones’ endeavor and admires the breadth of his vision. It might be out of fashion, Mason admits, “but I like multiculturalism,” the idea of a diverse array of voices. “That’s a very important aspect, it’s what L. A. needs to face, the new hybrids. There’s nowhere else like this. We have shattered the mold.”

Jones takes time to piece together his own jagged-edged history in the upcoming issue, “The Simi Valley I Know.” Part essay, part reportage, part personal remembrance, the narrative is Jones’ attempt to explore and reconcile his tenuous connection to a community he traversed with one foot firmly planted inside, and the other poised and ready to wander. “I’ve lived here all my life and I love the place, but,” he admits, “I also have some ambivalence toward it.”

While his thinking is definitely in the minority, Jones says he’s ghosted by stereotypes, preconceptions that have only become, in recent months, more irksome and ugly. “You wouldn’t believe the kinds of looks I got from people,” Jones says, recalling his lukewarm reception at recent American Booksellers Assn. convention: “ ‘You’re from Simi Valley, huh?’ ‘Were you on that jury?’ And then they would see my journal and . . . be pleasingly shocked.”

Jones has plans to debunk a few more things: “There is a small but vibrant community here that is not conservative. There’s a very small NAACP in Ventura County,” he says. And nowadays he’s noticed that the outside world has a myopic view of Simi: “That’s where the verdicts were and everybody’s bad.”

But that, Jones admits, is a small problem “compared to the kind of racial stereotyping that led to the riots. Dealing with both of those things is a way of bridging gaps.”

Last spring’s decision troubled many in Simi Valley as well, Jones explains: “It was a verdict they didn’t understand. Evidence like (the video) made (them) see what people in L. A. had been talking about all along. It made them very sensitive. A group went down to South-Central to help with the cleanup. People felt upset by that, the typecasting; they didn’t want to be labeled racist.”

Jones says he’s more interested in action than in hollow gestures or public relations, and believes an open mind is a critical first step.

“There’s always a concern that if you write or publish things that are political that people of other political stripes just won’t pick it up. . . . But I do hope that people who perhaps don’t agree with my tack . . . will look at the magazine and say: ‘Yeah, I understand where this writer is coming from.’

“And that can translate into a better understanding of where different communities are coming from. . . . That’s the kind of thing you need. That’s how you rebuild L.A.”