I relish the menswear enthusiast’s life for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being that we get less homework than women’s wear enthusiasts do. This very idea may strike you as ridiculous, especially if you keep up with Put This On and countless other sites like it, but remember: they strive, often frantically, […]
“Taller and more ruggedly built than their counterparts in Tokyo, Manila, or Bangkok, the people of Seoul exude a sense of resiliency and vitality,” writes Peter Hyun in this book’s introduction, “so much so that they make the other Asians look downright indolent.” Ah, perhaps we have here a publication of the Korean History Channel. […]
This book came recommended by no less an authority than Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin when last I interviewed him. It’d intrigued me on runs to the downtown library to replenish my supply of Los Angeles-related reading, but I kept reshelving it; the subtitle Painful Lessons in Post-New York Living made me […]
We used to have the greatest public transportation system in the world, so goes the oft-told Los Angeles lore. Then, a shady consortium, their own strings pulled by automakers and road-builders, bought all the trains and the tracks just to rip them out and scrap them. I don’t know about that; I sense a few […]
I confess to not quite knowing Details’ place on the landscape of gentlemen’s magazines. While glancing at its issues reveals a more deliberately tasteful publication than blunter, intensively airbrushed “lad’s mags” like Maxim (or its countless late imitators), it also lacks the pedigree of comparatively venerable midcentury-man staples like GQ or Esquire. Yet Details must […]
Los Angeles’ Korean Cultural Center put on a quiz on Korea, and I picked this book up ostensibly as study material. Frankly, though, I’ve wanted to read it for years. The tradition of the traveling English writer — as distinct from the English travel writer — draws me in without fail, although I tend to […]
Angelenos, you can catch me live-interviewing Todd Shimoda, author of Japanese- and Japanese-Amercan-themed “philosophical mysteries,” at Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood this Thursday, May 31st. You may remember my first interview with Todd on The Marketplace of Ideas, when I talked to him about reading Kobo Abe, integrating art with text, and writing his novel […]
When I noticed this book on a downtown library shelf, the prospect of a twenty-year-old assessment of Los Angeles by Susan Sontag’s “polemicist” son did not immediately appeal. Thinking of Sontag’s cultural affiliations with New York and Europe, one easily envisions nothing more than a prolonged dismissal of this city as a vast, backward hellscape […]
Upon hearing that I’d never read it, an interviewee with three Los Angeles years on me pressed his personal copy of Ask the Dust into my hands. I had felt some responsibility and curiosity about the book, since it occupies the unusual position of a 1930s Los Angeles novel that “everyone” is suddenly reading again. […]