On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation with Gabe Durham, author of Fun Camp, a polyphonic novel of the American summer-camp experience, and the work-in-progress Meanwhile. He also publishes the video game-themed series Boss Fight Books. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB‘s site, or download it on iTunes.
The stories of certain Los Angeles neighborhoods seem easy to tell. Sometimes their geography, architecture, and apparent population practically tell it for you. Boyle Heights, for instance, located just east of downtown over the river, looks and feels like a district that has drifted far from its original purposes. Like Westlake, the neighborhood around MacArthur Park, Boyle Heights built up its identity in the early- to mid-twentieth century as a more or less Jewish community, original home of Canter’s Delicatessen. More recently it has, also like Westlake (which remains the home of Canter’s distant rival Langer’s Delicatessen), gone overwhelmingly Latino. While this has, speaking on the most superficial but nonetheless most accessible level, filled it with choice places to eat, most of my recent trips to have started or ended with visits to Libros Schmibros, the used bookstore founded by bookseller David Kipen, who refers to himself as “the first Jew in decades” to move back to Boyle Heights. If more have followed, they haven’t made themselves commercially known. None of my trans-river lunches have brought me to a new-wave delicatessen, though I have noticed a spot called Thai Deli on Cesar Chavez Avenue, well known for its teriyaki plates and macaroni salad. Clearly, the tale of Boyle Heights has more nuance than we assume.
The employees of the nearby White Memorial Medical Center know Thai Deli well, anyway; those coming from anywhere farther away would presumably feel put off by its uncomfortable proximity to Interstate 5. Yet keep walking east on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, the continuation of Los Angeles’ wearily iconic Sunset Boulevard, and you find what architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne calls “a model for other neighborhoods eager to make their major thoroughfares friendlier to pedestrians, cyclists and local business” with “all the urban-design amenities the average L.A. boulevard is desperately missing.” My mind has come to conceive of this particularly welcoming mile, along with the parallel run of First Street two blocks to its south, as Boyle Heights — its core, if not its entirety. Certainly not its entirety: set out to see the entire neighborhood, and you could find yourself walking across it for nearly two hours. Like Los Angeles itself, Boyle Heights looks big; you just don’t realize exactly how big until you decide you want to see it up close.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Colin Marshall sits down at the intersection of Los Feliz, Thai Town, and Little Armenia with Caleb Bacon, writer on the TBS sitcom Sullivan and Son and host of the podcast Man School (as well as the podcast Sullivan and Son: Behind the Bar). They discuss his feeling in his own guest seat; his move to Los Angeles from Albany purely in search of “good times and good weather”; the deliberately old-school-sitcom nature of Sullivan and Son, and the opportunity its Pittsburgh setting provides for racist jokes; how it feels to work simultaneously in “old” and “new” media; how he fell into television, and how he deliberately entered podcasting during the Great Podcasting Boom of ’09; why he even focused his first podcast The Gentlemen’s Club on men’s interests; how he soon came to interview, alternately, comedians and pornstars, and what the overall combination taught him about humanity and the Los Angeles entertainment industry; the conversations he had with other men as he pulled his own life into shape, what he learned from them, and how that experience fueled Man School; the riches of “real stuff” yielded by genuine-curiosity-driven conversations, even outside of podcasting, as when he once met a retail clerk who mentioned getting kidnapped in Africa (and then invited him to come on Man School); whether our generation has become worse at being men than previous generations; how social fragmentation, of Los Angeles’ type and others, has led men to have less meaningful communication with one another; his interest in the rules that new-media creators, in their ostensibly rule-free environments, inevitably create; Thai Town’s enduring Seinfeld billboard; Man School’s first live show at the Los Angeles Podcast Festival; the grand lessons he’s learned from man-to-man conversations, such as the importance of slight progress adding up to big progress, and what travel teaches you about yourself; and the value of simple suggestions like “Hey man, just be cool,” or, simpler still, “Don’t be a jerk.”
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.
The Expo Line may not come to stop in the middle of Sawtelle, but it can already carry you somewhat closer to the center of an even better-known west-side neighborhood: Culver City, which — the name doesn’t lie — actually counts as a city on its own. People seem, generally, to know that it enjoys this status in a way they don’t always know it about, say, West Hollywood; despite encirclement by several areas we call “Los Angeles,” Culver City has retained a noticeably separate identity. Ten miles of distance from downtown have no doubt helped it to do so, but in the century since developer Harry Culver took the first steps to establish his eponymous municipality, the place has also cultivated something else. Having resisted strong bids for annexation, the way the likes of Venice didn’t find themselves in the position to do, Culver City has even made a fair few annexations of its own, resulting in a confusing zig-zag of a border, but one that has apparently done no harm to its brand. Not that this comes as surprise; if anyone can build a brand, movie studios can, and you’ll find a great deal of studio activity in Culver City’s history.
The modern robustness of the Culver City brand draws much from twentieth-century film production. You recognize this early, provided you enter on the right street; one particularly notable sign doesn’t just present the words “CULVER CITY” inside a stylized film strip, but places the silhouette of a motion-picture camera beside it, and over that, the motto “THE HEART OF SCREENLAND.” You get the impression, looking into the matter, that the local city fathers never really got over how “Hollywood” became the synecdoche for greater Los Angeles’ entertainment industry. One especially telling late-1930s struggle saw the Culver City Chamber of Commerce adopt the slogan “Where Hollywood Movies Are Made,” not quite managing to push through a proposed change of the city’s name to, simply, Hollywood. But whether you consider its center Culver City or Hollywood proper, the glamorously polished old American film machine would soon thereafter achieve peak performance in its annus mirabilis, as acknowledged by many an observer and insider alike, of 1939. These days, I imagine such historically distant territorial disputes weigh none too heavily on the minds of either the Hollywood tourists flocking compulsively to Graumann’s Chinese Theater, or the workaday Culver City studio employees just looking for a decent lunch panini.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation about the man who made Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Ghost Writer, and many more pictures to this day with James Greenberg, author of Roman Polanski: A Retrospective, and James Morrison, author of Contemporary Film Directors: Roman Polanski. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.
In 1965, the New Yorker published a series of articles on Los Angeles by “far-flung correspondent” Christopher Rand, then known by the magazine’s readers for his dispatches from other such exotic locales as Greece, India, Hong Kong, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two years later, these became the book “Los Angeles: The Ultimate City,” which, despite its age, I often recommend to friends looking to understand the place. Very few to whom I mention the title have heard it before, and Rand himself, who passed in 1968, rings a faint bell at best, even to other New Yorker writers. “He was a man of intense curiosity and strong perceptive powers, whose writing showed the results of a quest for understanding through the amassing of relevant detail,” reads Rand’s obituary in the magazine, which adds, “he once walked a hundred miles over rough Himalayan terrain in two days.” When this highly skilled and now unjustly forgotten writer of place came to seek his own thorough understanding of Los Angeles almost half a century ago, he set up base camp in Sawtelle, a small west-side neighborhood centered on that boulevard between Olympic and Santa Monica.
“The place is a dozen miles west of Little Tokyo, toward the ocean, and it has been a satellite Japanese quarter since the thirties at least,” Rand explains. “Japanese truck-gardeners and nurserymen moved out there from Little Tokyo because the land was cheap, being mostly open country then, and the weather was good for growing.” Though not enthralled by all Los Angeles has, sometimes aggressively, to offer — but clearly always fascinated by it — the writer takes pleasure in this neighborhood he makes his temporary home. “In July the Japanese Buddhist Church of Sawtelle put on a fair to celebrate the festival Obon,” he writes, with a quaintly touching use of use of italics. “The fair was complete with paper lanterns and scores of kimono’d women dancing old Japanese dances; it also had food-stalls, and Mexican tacos were sold there along with Japanese delicacies like sushi and chicken teriyaki. Mexicans of all ages came to it, too, as did several Anglos or Caucasians, and an air of intercultural friendliness prevailed.”
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Vital stats:
Format: conversation’s about the man’s life with men who’ve lived it (including quite a few entertainers, comedians especially)
Episode duration: 30m-1h
Frequency: weekly, plus shorter supplementsWhat, exactly, happened to my generation? We got off to a promising start, but at some point in the past few years took a hard look in the proverbial mirror and found our reflection badly wanting. This tidal wave of self-doubt causes problems of its own — most of our problems, perhaps — but no smoke comes without fire: have look at film and television, its Judd Apatow characters standing as unkempt, juvenile evidence of men so feckless they can no longer even romance women, its Lena Dunham characters not worth romancing in the first place, and tell me how much confidence we can possibly have left. For all our high-profile technological and cultural successes, many of us thirty-ish-year-olds feel dogged by something obscurely yet manifestly broken in our capacity to lead self-respectable lives. In America, some of this has to do with coming of age in an economy crippled by nostalgia for the postwar years and of inheriting a social contract between the sexes torn up long before we got here. Blaming such broad conditions, alas, just makes us lazier about rectifying our individual situations.
To vaguely gesture toward Candide, then, we must grow our own gardens. Maybe, just maybe, we can cultivate ourselves out of the reach of greater generational dissolution. How my distaff peers can manage this I haven’t had the time to learn, since I’ve had so much catching up of my own to do. Hearing Glenn O’Brien on The Sound of Young America and reading his book How to Be a Man helped. Writing about other men’s style books for Put This On has certainly done its part, but most of the knowledge there has come, of course, through the particular lens of clothes. Not that clothes make for a disadvantageous place to start; take one look at modern man’s hoodies, greying tube socks, and jeans with walked-on hems, and you’ll sense a serious underlying problem. (Modern woman puts on a far superior display of outward maturity, though in many cases a display with deliberate intent to conceal.) But now we Millennial males have one more broad-spectrum resource for our quest: Man School, a new podcast from Caleb Bacon, television writer and former host of The Gentlemen’s Club.
Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.
From Los Angeles, California, which has become both my home and main subject, I connected with Peter Hessler in Cairo, Egypt, which has become both his home and main subject. He moved there with his wife, journalist Leslie T. Chang, and twin daughters after a stint living in and writing about southwestern Colorado, which itself succeeded his years based in and observing China. Though by now a relatively distant era in his career, Hessler’s China period, and the books River Town, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving which sprang from it, made his name. Roughly half my Middle Kingdom-savvy friends, casually polled, credit him with firing up or bringing a new clarity to their own interest in the region, and the announcement of his 2011 MacArthur Fellowship cited his keen observation of “such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China.” But with little desire to become a writer of place associated with only one place, let alone an old China hand, he has, in the past decade, cast his eye outward. For a bridge between his observations of the East and the West, we readers can cross his new essay collection, Strange Stones.
Almost all written under the aegis of the The New Yorker, the book’s pieces find Hessler bushwhacking along the Great Wall, patronizing the dueling rat restaurants of Luogang, keeping up with a hard-drinking Tokyo crime reporter, seeking out Yao Ming’s Houston barber, and assessing the legacy of uranium mining and role of the independent pharmacist in Colorado’s small towns. This gave us an array of colorful subjects to discuss, but then, Hessler also had a revolution to cover; we spoke in mid-July, not long after the forcible unseating of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated President Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected head of state. Had things quieted down enough over there for us to settle into a conversation? “Last night there were like seven people killed, street fighting,” Hessler told me. “It’s still going on.” In the heat of the Cairo protests, Open City author and observer of Lagos Teju Cole had this to tweet: “’Hope this one will be a good coup’ is a pretty accurate summary of my childhood in Nigeria. Over and over again. It never was.”
Hessler’s take? “It’s a common pattern. It takes a long time to break cycles. There’s always a lot of hope, and people make the same mistakes again and again. This recent incident I’m not sure how to evaluate yet, but the government run by the Muslim Brotherhood was incompetent — unusually so. I just didn’t see a future for them: they showed so many signs of being incredibly insular and incapable of dealing with anybody else, a weak group that had alienated all the security forces, the police, the army. You could see it on the street. It wasn’t a big shock. Whether or not it’s an improvement I’m not sure, but the way they were managing the country and their relationships with other powers… you’re not going to last. It’s a lesson in realpolitik.” Critics of the Chinese government, under which Hessler lived for over a decade, may ascribe to it a variety of failings, but rarely do they call it incompetent. “Some things, they handle poorly,” Hessler said. “Because they’re not in a competitive political environment, they don’t understand how to present a good face, especially overseas, but it’s a minor issue compared to stuff we’ve seen here.”
“Living in Egypt makes me — I don’t know if appreciate is the right word, but — respect the strength of the Chinese government. For years, people there have talked about all this unrest, all these protests, and my perspective was always that that was exaggerated, in terms of whether the Party was in trouble. Being here makes me realize how relatively stable China is; the Community Revolution actually changed Chinese society. I’ve been spending time in Upper Egypt, in a village, and none of these cycles — the Mubarak regime or the Morsi regime or whatever’s going to come now — has changed the structures there. It’s still based on clans, on families. Things just continue the same way they always have. People talk casually about the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China, about overthrowing the Communist Party, but it’s a deeply entrenched organization and political system, functional in a way that’s not even in the same conversation as what goes on in Egypt.” The Egyptian village situation brings to mind the scene in Monty Python in the Holy Grail where Arthur, King of the Britons, encounters a group of his peasants who, having heard neither of Arthur nor Britain, insist to him that they constitute an “anarcho-syndicalist commune.”
Hessler didn’t observe the quite the same disconnect in China, which underwent “this incredible material and physical change. The landscape and everything totally shifted. Here you don’t have that. The economy has been decimated, so you don’t have people improving their lives in a material sense, but you do have this incredible political change, leaders coming and going, rising and falling.” How much of turbulence could he have foreseen before moving to Egypt in late 2011? “The revolution began while we were making our plans. I could see it was pretty intense from the events in January that year. The very first month I was here, they had major protests near Tahrir Square, and I wrote my first piece for [The New Yorker] about them. It’s been a series of these episodes. It’s moving quickly.” But he spoke to me from a relatively safe place: his home in Zamalek, a Cairo neighborhood on the north end of Gezira Island in the Nile. “There are a fair number of foreigners here and a lot of embassies, so it has good security,” so he described it. “If big things happen, if there’s unrest, Zamalek remains quiet. It has bridges that can be shut down by security forces, which happens periodically. It’s also just a pleasant place, greener than most of Cairo, a mile and a half from Tahrir Square, a mile from downtown. One nice thing about Cairo you don’t have in China: old buildings. We’re in an Art Deco building with high ceilings and a lot of neat touches. I really like it.”
Yet he and his family’s relocation didn’t happen without a struggle. “We showed up with just what we could carry on the plane. Of course, we also had twin babies, about a year and a half old at that point. we really didn’t have the support system here. It was a tough initial period.” And then, of course, they had the language to grapple with. “We decided to start with [an Arabic] program in the states; we didn’t want to show up totally cold. My wife and I enrolled in the Middlebury College Language School course, an intensive summer program: eight weeks of immersion. They’d never had anybody do it with kids before. It was brutal, just incredibly hard. It turned out to be an efficient way to get started, though quite painful. Now I can get the good basics from anybody, talk about politics, get a sense of their opinions. I still get lost after a certain point, so I can only do a simple interview, but it’s improving all the time. The hardest part is done.” He did admit that he and Chang immediately broke Middlebury’s “language pledge” not to use English — “we had to take care of these babies; it’s not like we were going to fumble through Arabic with each other” — which highlights the contrast between his Egyptian linguistic situation and that which he first enjoyed in China.
“I was thrown in there in the Peace Corps, 27 years old, in a small, remote place, pre-internet,” he said. “We didn’t really have functioning phones. Of course no cellphones. No distractions, a lot of time, and I was able to learn Chinese quite quickly.” Some of writers of place have little interest in local languages, and even dismiss studying them as a distraction from rigorously observing their surroundings in English. Hessler stands firm in the opposite camp: “It’s essential. “I wouldn’t live in a place for an extended time without studying the language, trying to gain some facility with it. It’s a mistake not to do it. Even if you can’t learn the language fluently, just do the best you can. You have to make it a priority. I haven’t done a lot of writing my first year and a half here, because I’ve been trying to do language.” For him, mastering a foreign language means not just gaining a tool to learn more about a culture, but gaining sight of a reflection of the culture itself. “There was a period of Alaskans-have-40-words-for-snow and all that kind of stuff, which linguists then felt was exaggerated. But you do feel the different priorities of a culture through the language. Here, it’s simple things like insha’Allah: any time you talk about the future, you have this phrase, “if God wills it,’ just an automatic thing you do. You use it here all the time; it’s not something you do to fit in. Now, in English or Chinese, I want a phrase for that.”
Hessler’s preferred language practice happens out in the streets. “I prefer to wander around and talk to people. My work schedule has been so demanding, I’m not out wandering as much as I’d like. This incident in the last two weeks, you just spend all your time trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s not the relaxed lifestyle I had in Fuling.” In that Chinese hamlet, his life in which provided the subject of River Town, Hessler could build routines that simultaneously helped him improve his Chinese and give him an excuse to engage closely and regularly with Chinese people: “On Tuesdays I’d go to the park at the top of the hill, and on the way down I’d stop at this guy who had a little photo shop and chat with him. Then I’d go to a noodle restaurant I liked. I’d have these days with three or four stops. I didn’t have to repeat the same conversations, could deepen friendships over time, and would learn new things as well.” Such a social practice, he finds, “makes you more outgoing. In China or here, I’m more interested in talking to people than in my home culture. I’m trying to learn, trying to practice, learning what’s going on. You can’t do it with a translator. You have to have natural, normal, one-on-one conversations to get a sense of how people think.”
Hessler has drawn acclaim as an observer who can capture politically sensitive places while writing primarily about people and rarely about politics, but Egypt’s current troubles dare him not to approach them head-on. “I’ve had to do a lot of straight politics here,” he said. “I finished a long piece right before this latest round of events looking at the politics, but it’s actually more to do with archaeology in rural Egypt. You can write about it both ways, and that’s my goal.” He operates on the premise, in fact, that you best understand the political through the human. “Politics is not a black box. If you talked to all these people, you could see what was going on in the last six months. You could feel people unhappy with this government. I wouldn’t have predicted a coup by any means, but I did send a note to my editor five days before: ‘There’s going to be a lot of protests. It could turn into something big. We need to be ready.’” And you shouldn’t, to his mind, do this talking only in major cities, even though, “if you’re going to write about and understand Egypt, you have to spend time in Cairo. It matters more than Beijing or Washington D.C.”
But when he and Chang moved to Egypt, “it was the country we wanted to move to. I’m not a huge city person. I’ve always written about places outside the main cities, and even when I lived in Beijing, most of my stories were not from Beijing. After my first year here, I started to go to Upper Egypt to get a feel for a different part of the country.” It echoes his experience in China where, “after more than a year freelancing in Beijing, I realized I needed something more intimate, a smaller place I could feel part of. I would rent a car and drive around the regions of the Great Wall. I like to be in a place with a long history — China, of course, had that. It gives you more directions as a writer, more to investigate. The story’s bigger, richer. I met people working on a dig in Upper Egypt in a place called Abydos, and on the first visit I saw a story I could do. I started making trips back. In a city, there’s so much else going on, it’s hard to pick out those echoes of the past. In a smaller place, it’s clearer; in Abydos, there are two big structures in town: a temple from 1500 B.C., and a massive mud brick fort which dates to almost 3000 B.C. It’s tangible. You feel connected to that ancient past, and notice the same behavior patterns you recognize when you read about that past.”
Egypt also provides him with a very different feeling of personal foreignness than did China. “It’s much less intense here,” he said. “In China I was more conscious of my identity as a foreigner. I stood out more. Egypt is a pretty mixed place: people who look blonde, who look black, who look like me. My wife is Chinese-American, and people don’t stare at her. It’s not like China, where they’re yelling at you, following you, totally freaking out. It makes me realize that China having been closed for so many decades traumatized the place and its relationship with the outside world. In China, when I went to protests, I always felt on edge. People were often antagonistic toward me, even if the protest had nothing to do with America. Here, the protests are incredibly violent — I’ve been to so many where people die in large numbers, which does not happen in China — but I don’t feel things directed at me, even in protests that are anti-American. Egypt is in the middle of the world, a crossroads: people have always come in and out. They’ve had a lot of contact with foreigners. They’re just more comfortable with it. China has natural boundaries: go north and you’ve got the Gobi Desert; west, you’ve got the Himalayas; east, you’ve got the ocean; south, the jungles.”
“It’s like America,” he continued, “also a place that isn’t very comfortable with the outside world.” This he learned during his Colorado period, which came after China and before Egypt. But he found on the other side of this discomfort with the foreign an endearing quality: “Americans are storytellers. I guess ‘self-centered’ and ‘egotistical’ is one way you could say it, but there’s also something neat about people intensely connected to their own stories, trying to figure out their place in the world. In China, it could be a frustration. Chinese people don’t like to put themselves in the center; it has something to do with a strong tradition of group culture, family culture, which is great, but which can make it hard for people to articulate their feelings, where they see themselves, what they really want. I had to observe people over years before I would learn key details. Going back to America, you sit down with somebody at a bar, and they’re telling you within five minutes: he just got out of prison, his wife did this or that, just incredibly personal, detailed things. I do like that storytelling tradition; I grew up in Missouri reading Mark Twain. That is a deep part of what America is and what, as a writer, I connect to.”
As one British character said to another about Americans in Evelyn Waugh’s California-set The Loved One, “They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.” Hessler finds a great deal of truth in that. “It was also amazing how little people wanted to hear from me,” he added. “We told people we lived in China for eleven years, and they said, ‘Oh, were you in the military?’ That was always the first question. They had this vision of, I don’t know, a big Marine base in the Forbidden City. They didn’t have a lot of curiosity about it; it was kind of beyond the pale. But from my point of view, that was great: after being in China so long, publishing books and articles, one of the reasons I left was that I felt myself become ‘the expert.’ If you move to New York or San Francisco, some city with a big China community, you get called on to meet other people who’ve spent time there, to give talks on China. It just keeps going, and we wanted a break.”
Not that Hessler’s time in the Middle East, however long he and his family remain there, will constitute much of a break from his craft. He first dedicated himself to writing, albeit writing fiction, in high school, and found his way to the essay form while taking a class under elder New Yorker contributor John McPhee. “The main thing is the research,” Hessler said. “That’s what I would miss if I were doing fiction. Nonfiction forces me to get out, to talk to people, to be attentive, to read, to try to understand history, to take notes to organize things. That keeps me grounded. Fiction would’ve been too isolating a routine.” In Egypt, he’s found one particularly friendly escape from writerly isolation in conversations with his garbageman, Said. “I spend a lot of time with him. He’s interesting and funny. I’ll probably write a piece about him. He seems instinctively to understand what you’re doing as a language-learner. Sometimes a very educated person who speaks other languages is an absolute terrible person to speak with in Arabic, because they don’t adjust. For some reason, this guy who can’t even read gets it. Both my wife and I talk to him a lot. He comes by and has dinner.”
Said counts as one of the many outsiders to whom Hessler naturally gravitates. “[Strange Stones has] an essay about my former student Emily, a migrant in China living in the south, one of these tens of millions who have moved to factory towns. There’s another essay about a six-foot-seven American who spends all his time obsessively researching the Great Wall in a totally idiosyncratic way. I’m fascinated by people who are out of place but have created a world of their own. Outsiders are observant; they can tell you a lot about a place.” As a writer and traveler, Hessler has built up not just a robust body of international work, but a robust group of international friends — friends with whom he stays in contact long after he tells their stories in print. “It’s part of the job, part of my responsibility as a writer. I’m not comfortable with becoming intensely involved in somebody’s life for a few months, writing the story, and never having contact again. Emily was sometimes concerned I was too much the foreigner analyzing the interesting Chinese person. You never have the right to do this. You’re a good writer, good at talking, good at analyzing — it still doesn’t give you the right to take their life and put it on the page. When they talk to you, it’s an act of generosity.”
[You can also read a version of this piece at Bookforum.]
People turn up in Watts with all kinds of expectations, most of them fearful. Not-so-recent films and even less recent news stories having prepared them for the worst, they still find themselves unready for the most unsettling quality of all: the way that, despite living under the burden of such a loaded place name, it still exudes to the visitor a kind of placeless anonymity. Clive James tried in a 1979 piece for the Observer, writing that “Watts isn’t even a ghetto. It’s nothing. The inhabitants of Chinatown, Little Mexico, and Little Japan at least know where they live. But Watts is Little Nowhere.” All of this does injustice, of course, to the countless real lives lived there, existences of the type I first came to know through Charles Burnett’s detail-rich, Watts-set 1977 piece of Los Angeles neorealism “Killer of Sheep.” The first time I watched the movie, I didn’t recognize its location, and indeed, Burnett doesn’t underscore it. But when I told “Los Angeles Plays Itself” director Thom Andersen that, he rightly asked, “Where else could it be?”
Jan Morris, even more of a world-traveling literary product of the British Empire, tried capturing this quality of Watts three years earlier, in 1976. “All around are the unpretentious homes of black people, so that you might easily suppose yourself to be in some African railway town, in the Egyptian delta perhaps. Few cars go by. You can hear children playing, and dogs barking, and neighbors chatting across the way.” The description suits many scenes from “Killer of Sheep”, or indeed, any of my own walks around Watts. I tend to go inward from the Blue Line train station, usually unbothered by human, animal, or vehicle. These all exist, but they tend to pass me slowly — or I tend to pass them slowly — on my way to the Watts Coffee House, a small cash-only diner operating, unexpectedly, within the same building that houses one of the area’s many schools. There you can sit amid walls festooned with the sleeves of classic soul albums and chisel away at your vast heap of hot sausage, biscuits, gravy, grits, salmon croquettes, and chicken-fried steak.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Colin Marshall sits down at the University of Southern California with Richard Rayner, author of the novels Los Angeles Without a Map, The Elephant, Murder Room, The Cloud Sketcher, and The Devil’s Wind as well as the non-fiction books The Blue Suits, Drake’s Fortune, The Associates, and A Bright and Guilty Place. They discuss the three or four Los Angeleses in which he’s lived since arriving in the city from England in the early eighties; the “up-for-it-ness” of the Los Angeles he first discovered; the reporting he later did from the 1992 riots, and the “geographical apartheid” he saw; his lack of a driver’s license, and how he addresses the question of where the buses go; his observations of how the city once flung itself outward from downtown, and now flings itself back inward; Los Angeles’ simultaneously unsurpassed optimism and pessimism; USC’s Doheny Library as a metaphor for blunt capitalism in action; why we crave stories about Los Angeles’ foundation on wrongdoing; how Los Angeles gets liked more in deed than word; how the current wave of interest in local history began; Los Angeles’ era of booster books against anti-booster books; his escape from English history only to plunge into Los Angeles history; what his unfinished novel of a man who loses his memory in Wales revealed to him about his own life in America; how his English hometown diversified, and how Los Angeles did the same; his cycle through “dustbins of jaded cynicism,” and the different sensibility his students (one of whom has written “the gay Korean Los Angeles novel”) bring to bear; his favorite bus lines to take notes on overheard conversations; and how his enjoyment of the riots, in a sense, got him writing about his own criminal past.
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.
