TALL TALES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
TALL TALES FROM THE UNDERGROUND – VOLUME I
BY THINK TANK GALLERY DIRECTOR JACOB PATTERSON
Tall Tales from the Underground is a series of possibly true stories from a blissful and dramatic era before the plague. Throughout my twenties, I lived with over 70 roommates in a secret communal living and experimental art gallery in Downtown Los Angeles. We kept the place running from 2010 to the pandemic, and produced hundreds – if not thousands – of shows, reaching millions of art fans with our often risky and sometimes award-winning programming.
It was a rip-roaring time to launch the company; the City of LA was pouring resources into their Downtown Revival, and we were both poster children and problem children for them with our variety of massively public and extremely, possibly-less-than-legal private programming. It was also what many call the “Golden Era” of Immersive entertainment, and we found ourselves as leaders in the LA art scene at the time. We built skate parks on top of box trucks, sold molotov cocktails out of vending machines on Melrose Ave, and trapped A-list celebrities in elevators with ghosts. That decade shaped our lives.
On March 1st of last year, I suffered a stroke, and everything changed.
I kept it private, but once people started finding out, I shared the news here. I’ve made my IG public temporarily in case you want to read it.
I have recovered greatly since the event, but in short, I have permanent damage to my vestibular nervous system that makes life feel like I am playing a video game with lag. My brain processes information as it enters my eyes at a different rate of speed than that at which time moves. The closest thing to which I can compare the feeling is when you accidentally step off of a curb you didn’t know was there, and get that feeling like you’re about to tumble into the pits of hell; this happens to me 40-50 times per day, for a variety of reasons, like typing this text, for example.
While battling with the insurance companies (#freeluigi) and racking up a ton of medical debt, many people asked me if they could start a GoFundMe to help, and I was humbled by the support but wanted to contribute something worthwhile to those who wanted to help me. With that in mind, I dusted off an old project and put my brain-damaged head down on an idea that would both assist in improving my memory retention and result in a product worth buying for those who didn’t even know me or know what happened.
So I am finally releasing a collection of short stories in the autofiction category, telling the tales of the adventurous DTLA arts scene of the 2010s.
The stories describe the dynamic social experiment of trying and constantly failing to build a democratic system with a bunch of broke artists living in a 13,500 sq ft warehouse while hiding it from thousands of nightly show attendees. Each piece dives into the wild antics of living in that environment, in that time, in that place.
As I release the stories bi-weekly, I will also be publishing Tall Tales from the Underground in zine collections that you can own in hard copy. As we go, I will be structuring the stories into a larger novel, with help from this community as you peek behind the scenes of my journey to rewrite each story to fit into a larger book.
It makes me very uncomfortable to ask for money, but sharing my writing is vulnerable and feels hard-earned. I hope you’ll like it; the stories are gripping and it was fun to write them.
You can become a member by clicking here.
Sincerely,
Jacob Michael-John Patterson
Co-Founder, Think Tank Gallery