DESPITE EXPORTING FOOD, film, advanced gadgetry, and dance music with unprecedented fervor and pride, South Korea has still produced curiously little in the way of an international literature. As Japan rose from the aftermath of the Second World War, so did vital men of letters like Kobo Abe, Oe Kenzaburo, and Yukio Mishima — names discussed in the West to this day. Japanese women of letters, a thread of unusual strength and length for an East Asian culture, running from Lady Murasaki and The Tale of Genji in the 11th century, continues through Yoko Ogawa and Banana Yoshimoto today. Haruki Murakami rose from the 1980s — the bubble era when fear of the Rising Sun’s apparent wealth and drive reached its apex — and would become the most globally appealing novelist alive, which he remains even today, when observers describe his country as well over a decade on the skids.

Now turned outward as far as Japan has often turned inward, South Korea draws enthusiasts from all over the world. But pity the literarily inclined Koreaphile, filled with high hopes and accustomed by Western fiction to at least a thin layer of allegorical padding, for he usually winds up mired in nakedly melodramatic, discomfitingly direct meditations on national suffering in general, and the separation of North from South in particular. One period of national suffering stands out: the years 1910 to 1945, when the Korean Peninsula endured, at the hands of the Japanese military, something between a suppression and an erasure of its cultural identity. Generations of South Korean writers look past that era of occupation with difficulty, and they struggle harder still to find subjects beyond their land’s subsequent split into two.

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

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

Los Angeles once had a Seibu. Those who delve into the city’s history tend to obsess over some obscure happening from the past decade, the past century, the past two centuries. My own transfixing blip appeared just over half a century ago and disappeared soon after. “Even in Los Angeles — the city of gala premières for everything from Hollywood spectaculars to hamburger stands — the ‘grand opening’ last week of the U.S.’s first big Japanese-owned department store created quite a splash,” reported Time magazine on March 23, 1962. “Within 15 minutes after Seibu of Los Angeles unlocked its door, 5,000 shoppers were inside, women were fainting, policemen had to bar all entrances to slow down the rush and traffic was backed up for four blocks along Wilshire Boulevard.” But just two years later, America’s only Seibu, purveyor of the “oishii seikatsu” — “sweet life,” as I’d translate it — gave way to the probably more practical but crushingly less exotic Ohrbach’s. It shut down twenty years before I was born, but I still find myself thinking about the old Seibu whenever I walk by its location at the end of the Miracle Mile.

Though it gives me time and space to reflect on Japanese department stores of bygone days, traversing this stretch of Wilshire Boulevard on foot does perhaps snub its historic spirit. First developed in the twenties by A.W. Ross, a bust of whom still stands at 5800 Wilshire, these blocks between Highland and Fairfax Avenue (which actually add up to a mile and a half) offered prewar shoppers an automobile-friendly alternative to downtown crowding. Ross’ idea, the improbable success of which qualified as the “Miracle,” enjoyed a few good decades of eating downtown’s lunch, as they say. But by the time Seibu set up shop, decline had already set in, and the Miracle Mile’s own lunch got eaten in turn by postwar America’s signature far-flung suburban malls. (You can read more about this process in Nathan Masters’ “How the Miracle Mile Got its Name“.) Today, as city-center shopping and living undergoes a renaissance, many of those distant commercial behemoths look depressingly worse for wear; how long before we see a country-wide wave of mall demolitions? And where does that leave a place like the Miracle Mile, optimized neither for motorists nor pedestrians?

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

Vital stats:
Format: Q&As, often post-screening, with directors, writers, writer-directors, and other filmmakers
Episode duration: 40m-2h30m
Frequency: often weekly, though it varies

I moved to Los Angeles for the filmgoing, sure — how many other cities offer the chance to experience all eras of cinema, theatrically, pretty much every week? — but also for the post-film-Q&A-watching. Enough filmmakers and filmmakers’ collaborators live in or regularly pass through town that theater programmers don’t have to strain to add an enticing liveness to a screening: “Director in person!” “A conversation between the writer and cinematographer to follow!” “Three of the supporting cast will probably turn up!” Some become regulars: the guy who wrote Electra Glide in Blue’s screenplay seems happy to appear whenever and wherever the movie gets projected, for instance, and Los Angeles Plays Itself director Thom Andersen fields an hour of audience questions every time I catch his documentary. And sometimes you hit a surprise jackpot, as when not just Quentin Tarantino but Robert Forster and Pam Grier took the stage after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art played Jackie Brown. That Q&A fired on all cylinders, which not all of them do. But this very element of suspense keeps them interesting, as does the fact that you can never quite know in advance which ones will, to mix the metaphor, give off sparks.

Having held no particular expectations for a conversation between Looper director Rian Johnson and someone named Jeff Goldsmith, I in the event found them far exceeded. Were I inclined to listen again and scrutinize what, exactly, so impressed me, I could do so by downloading the very same Q&A as an episode of the podcast The Q&A [iTunes], Goldsmith’s own. Instead, I listened to a whole range of his other Q&As, one-on-one and sometimes one-on-two sessions with a variety of directors and writers, writer-directors, and occasionally producers and actors working today, creators as rooted in the mainstream as the writing team behind Horrible Bosses and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and ones as strictly independent as Man Push Cart and At Any Price auteur Ramin Bahrani. Most often, Goldsmith engages people like Johnson, established filmmakers entrenched in neither Hollywood nor the arthouse. I saw him do so at Cinefamily, a theater on Fairfax Avenue that, before I actually moved to town, displayed such acumen screening rarities and bringing in guests (and especially bringing in guests who had a hand in these rarities) as to force me to pull the trigger and rent a U-Haul. “This reminds me of the sixties,” a well-known broadcaster friend who lives in the neighborhood said of Cinefamily during their potluck showing of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, “the last time life was unquestionably good.”

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation with traveler and writer Anna Stothard, author of the new non-driving-Brit-in-Los-Angeles novel The Pink Hotel. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

To better understand the tragedy of man’s inhumanity toward man, first observe any motorist regarding any other motorist. Dramatic though that may sound, I do think about the finer points of mechanized depersonalization whenever I ride the Los Angeles freeways. Behind the wheel, the sweetest, most forgiving person you know appoints themselves humanity’s stern judge, unanimous jury, and zealous executioner. No possible set of circumstances could put them in the wrong; any unpredictable movement from another car signals the incompetence, malice, or hopelessly diminished mental capacity of its driver. I find the rare occasions I actually drive the freeways myself endlessly fascinating, though in the same way I find the crueler university social experiments of the sixties fascinating: they function as designed, sort of; they express a kind of frozen-in-time fashionable genius; and they show us something about ourselves, though not necessarily something we want to see.

Some find negotiating the freeways a harrowing experience. You could chalk that up to the supposedly unparalleled aggression of the driving Angeleno, but I wouldn’t; that sounds suspiciously like one of those mythically harsh urban creatures, like the legendarily brusque New Yorker, with tales of whom big-city residents reassure themselves. Despite finding other drivers’ behavior mild enough, my own glimpse of the abyss comes whenever I can’t quite suspend my belief that these freeways actually function. That cars generally flow through as we expect them to strikes me as little short of a miracle; why, I tend to wonder, don’t they constantly careen against one another, metal and rubber endlessly striking metal and rubber, a horrifying pinball machine on a colossal scale? Yet we know the system, with its infinite number of failure points, does fail: we’ve all caught nauseating flickers of the grisly wreckages that routinely occur at freeway speeds, especially in the late nights or early mornings. During these same dark hours, though, untroubled by traffic jams or even slowdowns, we glide across these sweeping concrete arcs recapturing, if only for a moment, the elusive promise of the midcentury American dream. The midcentury American road engineer’s dream, anyway.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation with Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, and Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith, frequent patron of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and a man who knows his skulls, his obsessives, his haunted hotels, and his Stephen Kings. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.

“I AM THE FEDER,” read the banner above. The feder? Oh no, I thought: another Jewish tradition of which I’ve gone through life ignorant. Maybe it has something to do with seder, which, as I understand it, involves a ceremonial meal. Or maybe it doesn’t; all I know about it I inferred from an advertisement for “The Last Seder”, a production at Fairfax Avenue’s Greenway Court Theater. The banner, too, appeared on Fairfax, though further south, and only when I moved a few steps to the side did I realize that the message continued on another segment of which a tree had blocked my view. “I AM THE FEDERATION,” went the full declaration, as in the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, which I like to think validates the spirit of my first assumption. The other banners along this stretch of Fairfax, known as the Fairfax District, promoted the Anti-Defamation League. For a moment, but only a moment, the neighborhood’s character seemed easily understood.

A San Franciscan friend of mine has a saying: “Everybody in San Francisco is a little bit gay. Everybody in New York is a little bit Jewish. Everybody in Los Angeles is a little bit Mexican.” We might thus call the Fairfax District (which, strikingly and almost uncomfortably by the standards of Los Angeles, comes off as not Mexican in the least) a little bit New York, albeit a version of New York that never rises above four stories, and reaches that height only grudgingly. Kosher sandwich shops, challah bakeries, diamond dealers, something called the “Diamond Bakery”: this texture comes from an enduring density of traditional Jewish businesses, not to say stereotypical Jewish businesses. (I imagine the Anti-Defamation League themselves would have something to say about The Bagel Broker, were it a fictional location on a television show and not a real one just down Beverly.) Over all this the formidable Canter’s Delicatessen has presided, all day and all night except on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, since 1931.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.