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. […]
The Livejournalist formerly known as Cobalt999 came to visit Los Angeles last week, and before he arrived, I thought I’d link him up to a few items on the web to prepare him for the city. Combing through my bookmarks got me thinking about what I’d include in a more general internet-based Los Angeles primer. […]
Only natural, I figure, to go from the Images of America book on where I live in Los Angeles to the Images of America book on a neighborhood that first fired up my interest in Los Angeles. Before I moved, visits to Little Tokyo underscored Santa Barbara’s failure to provide certain necessities: ramen shops, sit-down […]
My series of menswear-related book reviews for Put This On (see also my Marketplace of Ideas interview about PTO with Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor) debuts today with a writeup of Alan Flusser’s Dressing the Man: If I didn’t know the name Alan Flusser, I’d still trust Dressing the Man by virtue of heft alone. […]
Adam Cadre asked for book recommendations a few months back, and I, eager to see a guy whose site I often read collide with a guy whose books I often read, put in a ballot for Richard Yates’ The Easter Parade. I do particularly admire that novel’s craft, but since James Wood calls it the […]
I don’t know — I just feel like the most authoritative guide to gentlemanism must come translated from the German. Despite, or maybe thanks to, four credited translators, Bernhard Roetzel’s Gentleman’s Guide to Grooming and Style (known in other editions as Gentleman: A Timeless Fashion) retains a certain steely yet askew exactitude. When the translated […]
I knew little about Glenn O’Brien before hearing Jesse Thorn interview him on The Sound of Young America, but now my mental shelf of examples of career-life unity couldn’t do without him. Assemble what you can of the man’s résumé, and the full picture looks colorful to the point of unreality: host of the punkisly […]
Here we have a sheaf of dozen-year-old restaurant reviews. Yet here we also have what the New Yorker calls “one of the great contemporary books about Los Angeles.” Sure, the magazine distances itself from that accolade, attributing it to a nebulous group of “people,” but it does so in a profile of Jonathan Gold that […]
You see these thin, sepia-toned “Images of America” books for sale everywhere in Los Angeles. Each one covers a different corner of the city: Bel-Air, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Boyle Heights, Palms, Historic Filipinotown, etc. I’ve even flipped through more than one volume on the old Pacific Electric streetcar system that would eventually become an integral […]