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Books on Cities: A. N. Wilson, London: A History (2004)

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

London is a world city. Los Angeles, where I used to live, is less a world city than, as I once saw a banner at the airport call it, a “city that’s a world in itself.” Seoul, where I now live, is not a world city, despite strenuous promotional efforts on the part of its officialdom to convert it into one. By none of these descriptions do I mean to deliver a judgment either positive or negative; indeed, Seoul’s not being a world city counts among the reasons I enjoy living here. But recent decades have made “world city” into a highly desirable label: so highly, in fact, that the failure to qualify for it — that is, the failure to be a large, multiethnic metropolis sustained by international commerce and immigration — is now seen in many quarters as a mark of shame.

World-city hood as understood in the twenty-first century also requires widespread use of the English language. (This has done its part to keep Seoul out of the running, as has the not-unrelated ethnic homogeneity of the population.) It’s hardly a surprise, then, that the very worldliest of cities would happen to include the capital of England. But in any sense apart from the strictly geographic, is London in England? “Some years ago, I opined that London was not really an English city anymore,” John Cleese tweeted in 2019. “Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation.” To my mind he didn’t necessarily mean this in, as they say, a bad way — especially given his well-documented professional history of ridiculing Englishness — but the tweet nonetheless sparked a predictably harsh backlash whose contributors including London mayor Sadiq Khan.

“Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength,” Khan responded. “We are proudly the English capital, a European city, and a global hub.” This political marketing-speak belongs very much to our age, one that mandates an increasingly great distance between the statesman and the man of letters. And so it is to a man of letters we must turn for a more serious articulation of the quality in question. “I deposit my daughter at school with her Mexican classroom assistant and her friends whose parents are, to name but seven, Italian, African American, Japanese, Chinese, Palestinian, German, and Indian,” writes A.N. Wilson of a typical day in early-twenty-first century London. There follow encounters with a Sikh upholsterer, a Malaysian barber, waiters French, Bulgarian, and Indian, and a Polish carpenter, among other citizens who form a cast it would now cause grave offense to call colorful.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Taras Grescoe, Straphanger

Monday, February 21, 2022

I moved from Los Angeles to Seoul a bit over six years ago, and it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say I did so because Seoul has the better subway system. It still surprises some people to hear that Los Angeles, a city globally perceived as synonymous with American “car culture,” has a subway system at all. Yet the city put into service the first of its modern urban rail lines in 1990, and four or five more have opened since. Though still inadequate to the size of its territory, Los Angeles Metro Rail as a whole tends favorably to impress the visitors who ride it. Those visitors include no less a public-transit connoisseur than Taras Grescoe, whose tough-but-fair evaluation constitutes a chapter of his book Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, first published in 2012.

Back then I was still living in Los Angeles, and indeed first having my eyes opened to the urban itself. Lacking experience of adult life within a major city proper, I was intoxicated with the possibilities newly opened to me: that, for instance, of catching a subway train to Little Tokyo from my home in Koreatown whenever I pleased. The vague notion I had of buying a car once I got to “L.A.” soon evaporated, and I began avidly to track the progress of not just Metro’s construction but also the city’s development in general, especially where it produced greater density. Even then it would have been difficult for me not to like Straphanger, which offers clear-eyed assessment of Los Angeles’ urban condition as well as evocative accounts of travel and transit in about a dozen other world cities, from New York and Toronto to Copenhagen and Shanghai.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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New Yorker: Regular Car Reviews and the Semiotics of a 1999 Toyota Corolla

Sunday, February 13, 2022

Despite the ever-increasing might of South Korea’s automobile industry, it’s a dull place for the car connoisseur. The occasional Ferrari or Lamborghini always looks freshly delivered in the loud yet basic color schemes beloved of the Gangnam nouveau riche. More tasteful but rarer are the domestic survivors of the scrappy nineteen-eighties: the Kia Pride, for instance, a mass-produced modernity symbol marketed in the West as the Ford Festiva, or the Daewoo Maepsy, the last Korean car branded with a genuinely Korean-sounding name. For the most part, the streets of Seoul offer up a halting parade of just-this-side-of-generic vehicles stamped out by local automakers in (besides the signature orange of the city’s taxicabs) black, white, and gray, none of the designs liable to quicken the pulse of anyone but a development economist.

Most passenger cars on Korean roads are of recent vintage, dating overwhelmingly from the past ten to fifteen years. Even the stalwart Spectra, Kia’s budget-priced compact, has become a rare sight in its homeland since its discontinuation in 2003. Test-driving a model of that year, my favorite car-review channel on YouTube once summed up the Spectra’s lack of distinctiveness by likening it to “the fictional idea of a regular car, a completely made-up symptom of the ridiculousness of the human condition.” Nor has the channel’s host praised other Korean automobiles much more effusively: Hyundai’s somewhat design-forward 2013 Veloster Turbo is “an economy car in a Men’s Wearhouse dinner jacket”; the chintzily hip 2016 Kia Soul 6MT is “the official car of wearing fake Gucci to a deposition.” Of Hyundai’s sleeper 2020 Elantra GT N Line, he declares, “Fine: the very definition of it.”

The channel is Regular Car Reviews, which I discovered after moving to South Korea in 2015. I’d come from Los Angeles, a city reflexively associated with a car culture of which I never partook. The same transportation-dissident impulse that kept me from driving in Southern California now compels me, in Seoul—a city whose subway system is as good as its car spotting is bad—to watch videos about the Chevrolet Camaro, the Dodge Neon, and even the Ford Pinto. It could simply be a way of securing one hoped-for benefit of expatriation: a fresh perspective on my homeland, the United States of America. Each of the more than five hundred episodes of Regular Car Reviews evaluates an automobile’s design and performance, but also reflects on that automobile’s sociological significance, goes off on non-sequitur comedic riffs ranging in vulgarity from mild to bestial, and unfailingly delivers a shot of pure twenty-first-century America.

Read the whole thing at the New Yorker.

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Books on Cities: Donald Richie, Tokyo (1999)

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Donald Richie closes his most personal book on Tokyo by quoting from his own diary. The entry dates from the summer of 1978, more than twenty years before. One of his generation’s best-known American expatriates in Japan, Richie first arrived while working for the U.S. occupation force after the Second World War. He returned to Tokyo to live in the mid-1950s, and there he remained until his death in 2013. The only exception was his stint as Film Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, which lasted for a few years of the late 1960s and early 70s. Toward the end of that decade, he writes in his diary of being back in Tokyo, taking in a heartily atavistic summer festival in his neighborhood of Ueno:

Japan in the summer is always more Japanese and never more so than at this fair. Families in summer yukata, clacking along on geta, gang boys hawking in cummerbunds and shorts; old gentlemen shuffling about in suteteko and underwear tops, carrying fans; girls back from the bath with wet hair sleeked back, towels in hands. This is what Japan once looked like. Summer brings it back again. And old attitudes as well. A sudden interest in nature, here in the bowels of the city. Exclamations at the size of the lotus buds. And a much slower tempo. No one striding, everyone strolling. And with it the old politeness. People standing to one side for each other.

Writing in the late 20th century, Richie finds this memory bringing to mind the memories of another Tokyoite: Nagai Kafu, who chronicled the life of the city in the early 20th-century. Even then, Kafu “was regretting the passing of the latter part of the century before. And in the middle of this century, he was complaining, remembering the early part of the century. Fifty years from now, this time about which I am complaining will probably have become someone else’s golden age.” I myself first visited Japan a decade ago, and never could have experienced the 70s there, much less the immediate postwar years. But Japan’s 90s would be a tempting decade to revisit, at least according to the stories of a slightly older American friend who studied abroad there at that time — and took film classes taught by Richie himself.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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콜린의 한국 팟캐스트: 「한국인의 맛」 저자 정명섭 작가님

Sunday, January 23, 2022

청소년, 공상과학, 역사, 추리와 좀비를 포함한 다양한 장르의 소설을 쓰시는 정명섭 작가님께서 소설과 에세이를 합치는「한국인외 맛」에서 20세기 동안 하국화된 외국 음식의 역사를 기술하신다. 인터뷰를 여기나 애플 팟캐스트를 통해 다운받을 수 있다. 유튜브에서도 스트리밍할 수 있다.

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My ten favorite Open Culture posts of 2021: Hitchcock Meets Borges, Brian Wilson Meets George Martin, and KFC Meets Japan

Friday, December 31, 2021

For nearly a decade now, I’ve written a post every weekday at Open Culture, usually to do with literature, film, music, art, architecture, television, radio, or language. The total comes to more than 2,600 so far, and here are ten of my favorites from the more than 250 I wrote in 2021:

See also my ten favorite Open Culture posts of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

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콜린의 한국 팟캐스트: <정말 있었던 일이야, 지금은 사라지고 말았지> 저자 이주호 작가님

Thursday, December 16, 2021

<도쿄적 일상>과 <오사카에서 길을 묻다>를 쓰신 이주호 작가님의 최신 작품은 <정말 있었던 일이야, 지금은 사라지고 말았지>이다. 소설식 에세이라고 묘사할 수 있는 그 책은 2000년대 초의 서울에서 사는 20대 주인공의 무기력하지만 되게 인상적인 생활을 다룬다. 글 쓰시는 행동 외에도 이작가님께서 여행매거진 <브릭스>의 편집장으로 일하신다. 인터뷰를 여기나 애플 팟캐스트를 통해 다운받을 수 있다. 유튜브에서도 스트리밍할 수 있다.

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Pretty Much Pop podcast: The Beatles and Get Back

Monday, December 13, 2021

I appear on the latest episode of Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast to discuss Peter Jackson’s new documentary Get Back and the legacy of the Beatles. Having first listened seriously to their music just last year at the age of 35 (as documented in this Twitter thread), I at least had the relevant material more or less fresh in my mind. The episode was recorded, as its official description notes, on “the anniversary of John Lennon’s death. We consider the arc of their career, the various post-mortem releases that keep our interest, why Beatles solo work remains a cult interest, and much more.”

You can hear my previous appearance on Pretty Much Pop, in conversation about the films of Martin Scorsese, here.

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Korea Blog: Sang Young Park’s Novel of Gay Almost-Romance Love in the Big City

Monday, December 6, 2021

In recent years the internet has launched into the zeitgeist the term “incel,” referring to individuals filled with resentment about their state of involuntary celibacy — i.e., sexlessness. In nearly all cases the incel is a heterosexual male, though some have speculated on the nature of his homosexual equivalent: a tweet I saw a few months ago, for example, posited that “the gay version of ‘incel’ is not finding a long-term relationship.” If so, then the protagonist of Sang Young Park’s novel Love in the Big City is a kind of incel. With opportunities for casual sex perpetually close at hand, thanks not least to smartphone dating apps, Young longs for nothing more than a deep and lasting connection. Yet all the overlapping cultures that clam him — gay culture, “hook-up” culture, social-media culture, Korean culture — seem to have allied themselves against the fulfillment of that desire.

Matters aren’t helped by the company Young keeps. His best friend Jaehee, namesake of Love in the Big City‘s first section, acts as if given over to the pursuit of dissolution, compulsively smoking, drinking, and going to bed with any man who will have her. “Jaehee and I had very little sense of chastity, or none at all, to be honest,” Young tells us in his narration, “and we were apparently known for it in our respective spheres.” Having bonded over a shared penchant for the excesses in which impecunious twenty-somethings can indulge, he and Jaehee fall into a pattern of mutual support, and more so mutual reinforcement. When Jaehee falls pregnant, with predictable uncertainty as to the father’s identity, it is Young who accompanies her to the clinic in hopes of an abortion — and apologizes for the outburst of anger she releases on its moralizing doctor.

Despite sounding more troubled than not in his telling, Young’s time with Jaehee, which even includes a period of cohabitation, comes to look in retrospect like an idyll. When Young goes off to perform his mandatory military service, Jaehee goes off to study abroad in Australia, a choice that appears to plant in her mind the seed of reformation. Park has a knack for this sort of ironically telling detail: such is the disorder of Jaehee’s life that a stint in Australia, of all places, sets her on the straight and narrow. Or at least it sets her on a path just straight and narrow enough to lead to the altar: Park opens the novel with a scene at her wedding, and in it Young fields questions about his weight gain and inchoate writing career from their old French-literature department classmates at the “mid-tier university” from which they graduated.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Korea Blog: Kwon Yeo-sun’s Korean-millennial murder mystery Lemon

Saturday, November 27, 2021

A murder mystery can end either resolved or unresolved. Most writers opt for the former, if only out of habit or crowd-pleasing instinct, though some habitually leave ends just loose enough to lead to a sequel. In the absence of any resolution, a novel’s very status as a murder mystery comes into doubt. It tends not to be described as belonging to the genre, but as using its elements — or, imprecisely, as “deconstructing” it. Reviewers of Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon (레몬), newly published in Janet Hong’s English translation, disagree about whether its central mystery is fully resolved. One could make a fair case either way, to my mind, but in this lack of a resolution over whether it even contains a resolution — its meta-unresolvedness, if you like — lies a clue to the source of its power, which critics have variously but unanimously praised.

The murder in Lemon is that of an eighteen-year-old girl named Kim Hae-on, the enchantress of her high school. “Her beauty seemed not of this world, a kind you rarely encountered,” remembers a former classmate who narrates certain chapters. After a glimpse of Hae-on’s face, “the classroom seemed to have transformed into a fictional, perhaps magical, place.” As for her body, it later turns up lifeless in a park, bearing evidence of blunt force trauma to the head. Her underwear is also missing, seemingly not the work of her attacker — “the autopsy didn’t reveal any traces of rape or sexual assault” — but the result of her own lifelong carelessness about matters of dress. “Before stepping out of the house, I stood her before me and circled her, checking her uniform to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything,” recalls her younger sister Da-on.

Apart from her defining (though vaguely sketched) looks, Hae-on comes across as in no way especially appealing. “It seemed she didn’t think about anything,” says Da-on. “She did nothing and thought nothing. She considered no one and harmed no one. She wasn’t interested in anyone nor bothered by anyone.” When hungry “she became incapable of empathy, of putting herself in someone else’s shoes, and hardly considered another person or the smallest etiquette.” She “seemed like an animal then, or even worse a sociopath, someone who could easily take a piece of bread from a starving child or elderly person.” Somehow, Hae-on’s less than fully human — or simply other than fully human — behavior hasn’t drawn more comparisons to Han Kang’s acclaimed The Vegetarian (채식주의자), which also features an inert woman, withdrawn from human affairs, her actions relayed through the interpretations of others.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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