Essayist, interviewer, public speaker
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Category Archives: Los Angeles
The shingle’s out
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Soot Bull Jeep has fast become my go-to joint for friends who visit me in Koreatown filled with curiosity about this “Korean barbecue” stuff. Repeated endorsements from no less a food luminary than Jonathan Gold got me in the door in the first place. “Dinner at Soot Bull Jeep is an atavistic thing,” he writes, […]
To Los Angeles by iPhone
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
I have entered an esteemed rank: unemployed people with iPhones. More on that tomorrow, but in the meantime, observe a bit of what I’ve been doing with it: Los Feliz Koreatown Miracle Mile Koreatown Santa Monica Koreatown Hollywood Koreatown Echo Park Koreatown Downtown Koreatown Hancock Park Koreatown Koreatown Koreatown Koreatown
Katherine Yungmee Kim: Los Angeles’ Koreatown
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
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 […]
The Marketplace of Ideas: into sound, food, performance, Japan, and the world city with Alan Nakagawa
Thursday, December 15, 2011
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, I talk to Alan Nakagawa; sound artist; visual artist; installation artist; founding member of Los Angeles’ long-running, multi-disciplinary, multi-ethnic, soon-to-be-dissolved arts collective Collage Ensemble; director of the experimental music Ear Meal webcast; L.A. Metro public art executive; member of Otonomiyaki, the Southern California Soundscape Ensemble and Ear Diorama […]
David Byrne: Bicycle Diaries
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Sometimes you run across books that happen to ring a whole row of your intellectual cherries. I’ve actually had Bicycle Diaries on my shelf for a couple years, slowly fueling the fire of my readerly anticipation all the while. When my interests came into unprecedentedly close alignment with the book’s own, I couldn’t resist de-prioritizing […]
Afri-Cola emphatically rejects anything that is not Afri-, and fully supports anything that is
Friday, December 9, 2011
Madelaine inadvertently released a Proustian memory cascade in my mind when she played me this German soda commercial from 1968. While it looks and sounds like a perfect example of one of those distant cultural artifacts, made strange by time and nationality — which it exactly is, I suppose — it exhumed a part of […]
Four views from my rooftop
Monday, November 21, 2011
At Psychanaut (“a portmanteau of “psychonaut” [mind-explorer], “cha” [茶/tea], and “chan” [禪/zen buddhism]”), my friend Nick writes about the adventures he’s having after a recent move to Taipei. He drinks mango juice, studies Chinese, plays guitar at open mics, searches for tea houses, haunts jazz clubs, takes trips to Hong Kong and Seoul, eats turnip […]
Stop, stop, the New Yorkers will hear
Thursday, November 17, 2011
After moving to Los Angeles, I found myself woken up on Saturdays and Sundays by a woman out on the street repeatedly singing, with a faintly surreal rare-bird intonation, the phrase, “Tamales! Y champurado!” In Mexico City, I discovered the filling wonders of a breakfast of tamales and champurado. (We actually drank strawberry atole, but […]