Skip to content

Books on Cities: Michael Sorkin, All Over the Map (2011)

Sunday, January 3, 2021

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the United States, Michael Sorkin became one of its earliest high-profile casualties. He died in New York City, where he’d lived since 1973 and about which he’d written since at least the early 1980s. Throughout that decade he was the architecture critic for the also-late Village Voice, a position in which he could fairly be said to have drawn on the experience of both of his master’s degrees, in architecture from MIT and English from Columbia. Not that his written work, well-known in the city for its needling tendentiousness, smacked of the academy: Paul Goldberger, New York Times architecture critic and Sorkin’s erstwhile enemy, once wrote that it was “to thoughtful criticism what the Ayatollah Khomeini is to religious tolerance.” Sorkin put that quote on the cover of his next book, an anecdote that obituaries have retold as representative of his character.

Sorkin was elsewhere remembered as a “bomb thrower,” and by the editor-in-chief of Architectural Record at that. Pieces written for that magazine constitute most of All Over the Map: Writings on Buildings and Cities, the volume I picked up in search of a belated introduction. Despite having known Sorkin’s name for years, I’d somehow never spent much time with his writing — an especially surprising oversight since it would seem to offer a model of city criticism, a form I attempted to define not long ago. City criticism is not architecture criticism, as I emphasized, and Sorkin seems to have approached the same point from a different direction, seldom writing about an individual building without also writing about the city. This could mean the actual city (usually New York) in which the building exists, “the city” in a more conceptual sense, or — least fashionably — the “good city.”

The sine qua non of the good city, in Sorkin’s view, is density, “the enabler of propinquity, the coming together of bodies in space. This density of encounter is the substrate of sociability and the material basis of democracy,” and the “frequency, character, and controllability of such encounters define the quality of urban life.” But the good city must “offer the possibility of avoidance as well as a hedge against uniformity of experience. A good city is clearly one that cannot be completely learned but must also reward the study produced by everyday participation. And a good city is one in which freedom of movement is facilitated, not impeded.” Cities are “civilization’s mnemonic, a contract in stone between past and future,” and the preeminent value of the good city “lies in its neighborliness, its respect for the other, for existing and historic patterns of life.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

Filed in Books on Cities, New York | | Comments (0)

My ten favorite Open Culture posts of 2020: Ed Ruscha’s Sunset Boulevard, Roald Dahl’s writing hut, France’s 80s internet, and more

Thursday, December 31, 2020

For nearly nine years 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 2,300 so far, and here are ten of my favorites from the more than 250 I wrote in 2020:

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

Filed in Open Culture | | Comments (0)

Korea Blog: Leenalchi’s Pansori at the Disco

Monday, December 28, 2020

Last month my girlfriend and I visited Mokpo, a somewhat down-at-the-heels port town on Korea’s southwest coast, hoping to have a look at its Japanese colonial architecture and a taste of its tangtangi, a local specialty involving raw beef and still-twitching squid. Though Mokpo lacks Seoul’s density of screens, it has just enough of them to make us notice the same music video playing all over the city — and that its hot pink-suited dancers were cavorting through the very places we’d put on our itinerary. The production was, of course, part of a campaign to promote Korean tourism; more surprisingly, it had racked up well over 30 million views on YouTube since that campaign launched last summer. Driving the phenomenon was less the video itself, however picturesque and amusing its imagery, than the music, the work of an overnight sensation called Leenalchi (이날치).

Like all overnight sensations, Leenalchi’s roots run deeper than they appear to; this holds true even in the notoriously capricious popular culture of 21st-century Korea. Some run all the way to 17th-century Korea, where the traditional form of musical storytelling known as pansori has its origins. Though an unlikely source of inspiration for dance music popularized through YouTube, pansori has enjoyed its moments of modern-day popularity, the most notable having occurred after Im Kwon-taek’s Seopyeonje (서편제) in 1993. That film takes its title from a regional form of pansori; Leenalchi, in turn, take their name from 19th-century pansori master credited with developing it, Lee Nal-chi. Most of the band’s members have studied under pansori masters themselves, but their music has none of the rigorous purism of government-funded gugak, or “national music”: they’re pop artists first, creators of songs to be enjoyed in the moment.

This, at any rate, is the line taken by Jang Young-gyu, one of Leenalchi’s masterminds. Long established as a film composer, Jang’s body of work includes the score for Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (곡성), which in 2016 unsettled audiences the world over by repurposing Korean shamanism into the material for modern-day horror. He also played bass in Ssingssing, a cross-dressing “gugak fuion” rock band whose style also partook from shamanistic tradition. This seemingly niche act turned out to have global appeal: it was after Ssingssing receiving a hugely positive response to a 2017 show for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, of all venues, that Jang came to understand the potential they’d tapped. The next year he and Ssingssing drummer Lee Cheol-hee played in Dragon King, a pansori-based musical production that put them alongside the skilled vocalists who would become their bandmates in Leenalchi.

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

Filed in Korea Blog, music | | Comments (0)

Times Literary Supplement: Michael Booth, “Three Tigers, One Mountain”

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Were does Europe end and Asia begin? “If someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it’s part of Asia”, the American North Korea analyst Brian Reynolds Myers once quipped. Michael Booth doesn’t pose as an authority on the Koreas, or on the other countries in Three Tigers, One Mountain: A journey through the bitter history and current conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan, but his linguistic strategy is that of many an Asia “expert”: “They don’t speak any English so I attempt a mime”, he writes of an interaction with South Koreans at a historical site, “but that only serves to confuse matters further”.

A Briton resident in Denmark, Booth presents himself as an enthusiastically interested if occasionally befuddled outsider, a safe choice given the sensitivity of his subject. “The Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, along with a fourth tiger, Taiwan, would appear from a distance to have everything to gain from harmonious relations”, he writes, “and yet they seem constantly to be on the brink of a potentially serious conflict. Many believe that if there is to be a World War III, it will most likely begin here”. The author sets off on a journey from Japan to South Korea to China, then to Hong Kong and Taiwan and back to Japan, asking one question: “Why can’t the nations of east Asia get on?”

Read the whole thing at the Times Literary Supplement. See also my previous essay on the book at the Los Angeles Review of Books Korea Blog.

Filed in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Times Literary Supplement | | Comments (0)

Korea Blog: Five Years a Seoulite

Thursday, December 17, 2020

I haven’t lived in Korea long — just long enough to forget that I live in Korea. This presents something of a professional danger, given the supposed subject of so much of my work. But like writing about Los Angeles when I lived there, writing about Korea guarantees me frequent reminders that I do indeed live here. This, in part, inspired me to pitch the idea of a Korea Blog to the LARB just before making the move five years ago: having regularly to consider different topics pertaining to Korea would, in theory, prevent me from retreating into an ersatz West — stocked with Western media, Western food, Western languages, Western friends — of the kind known to entrap Westerners here. It would also record a moment in Korean life, culture, and current events as perceived by one foreigner (and occasionallyothers) with a persistent interest in the place.

As any workaday foreign correspondent would confirm, these past five years constitute a particularly interesting time to have been in Korea. When I arrived, President Park Geun-hye was being protested, but not at the scale — nor for the reasons — that would ultimately see her deposed. The sinking of the M.V. Sewol in the spring of 2014 remained bitterly fresh in public memory, not least due to the release of documentaries like Cruel State (나쁜 나라); the feature Birthday (생일) would come later. And though Korean cinema already commanded a not inconsiderable fan base around the world, nobody could have imagined the unprecedented breakthrough it would make just a few years later, when Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (기생층) would win the Palme d’Or and then four Academy Awards, Best Picture included.

Then again, I’d can’t say it wouldn’t have pleased me had the work of Lee Chang-dong, whose Burning (버닝) also contended at Cannes, enjoyed that victory; or even more so, that of Hong Sangsoo. Having put out eight pictures in the time I’ve been living in Korea, the latest being this year’s The Woman Who Ran (도망친 여자), Hong offers me one way of marking my time here, but he also did more than his part to inspire me to dig into Korean cinema, and consequently the Korean language, in the first place. And yes, even after five years of life in Korea and more than a dozen years of study, Korean is still hard. It’s actually become harder, in that every day here reveals more of my own linguistic ignorance — which, to my mind, is half the fun of expatriation.

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

Filed in Korea Blog | | Comments (0)

Books on Cities: Jason Horton, Abandoned and Historic Los Angeles (2020)

Monday, December 14, 2020

When you hear something described as “only in L.A.,” rest assured of its being neither unique to nor representative of Los Angeles. Take, mundane though it may be, the definite article preceding freeway numbers — “the 10,” “the 5,” “the 405” — a linguistic tic mythologized, by a kind of soft cultural conspiracy, as unheard outside Southern California’s metropolis, or at least outside Southern California. True, Los Angeles doesn’t look, feel, or seem to work quite like any other city. Both its avowed lovers and haters agree on that, but what exactly sets it apart, and how, remains a matter of active inquiry. Or it would be if more of us actively inquired into it, rather than gesturing toward settled trivialities: frequent driving on the aforementioned freeways, encounters with flamboyant quasi-celebrities, streets lined with palm trees, buildings not shaped like normal buildings.

In recent decades, those avowed lovers of Los Angeles have started to outnumber the haters, or at any rate to speak over them. I don’t consider this an unmixed good, though I think I can claim a greater enthusiasm for the place than most. The enjoyment of Los Angeles holds a contrarian appeal, not just for me but others more firmly rooted there as well. When documentarian Doug Pray said to me that “Los Angeles can be so hated that I actually enjoy it,” I understood at once what he meant, cool though that hatred had even then. I was interviewing him for Notebook on Cities and Culture, the podcast I launched shortly after first moving to Los Angeles myself about a decade ago — a time, I like to think, when moving to Los Angeles and launching a podcast was less of a cliché than it is today.

At least I wasn’t doing a comedy podcast, a genre that even then seemed to emanate an unlistenably huge amount of content from Los Angeles alone. Though I might interview the occasional comedian — an appealing breed of guest, due not least to their habits of observation and perpetual willingness to talk — my primary goal was to get not laughs but a variety of perspectives on Los Angeles in order to better understand the city. Though I’d already hosted radio interviews for years, I thus found my instinct for identifying articulate interlocutors more rigorously tested. Few of the negative preconceptions about Los Angeles were borne out by my daily experience, but those about a certain class of Angeleno speech have, I admit, something to them. Beginning with “so,” sentences stagger through a series of “like”s and “you know”s before eventually finding their unstructured way to a concluding “awesome.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

Filed in Books on Cities, Los Angeles | | Comments (0)

Books on Cities: Rem Koolhaas, “Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan” (1978)

Thursday, December 3, 2020

When Rem Koolhaas published Delirious New York in 1978, he hadn’t yet built his best-known work. Central China Television Headquarters was 35 years away, the Seattle Central Library was 26 years away, and even the Maison à Bordeaux (subject of the documentary Koolhaas Houselife) was 20 years away. In fact he hadn’t yet built anything at all, having established his Office of Metropolitan Architecture just three years earlier. If Koolhaas is to be taken at his word — and the character of his pronouncements suggests he often isn’t — the book laid the foundation of his architectural career. And though he may have written it grandiosely, he didn’t write it frivolously: its origins go at least as far back as his student days at Cornell University, where he received a grant to study in the early 1970s, and which put him in relative proximity to New York.

After growing up in the Netherlands, with three formative years in Jakarta, Koolhaas commenced his architectural education in London. This placed him well to lead, for good or ill, the life of the 21st-century “global citizen.” His physically weighty 1995 book S,M,L,XL presents a chart of all the flights he takes during his hundreds of days abroad in a year. Only such a thorough familiarity with airports could have inspired 2006’s Junkspace, which defines and even pays tribute to the kind of cheap, utilitarian, placeless, and often purgatorial spaces — albeit spaces at the summit of staggering technological development — occupied by the international traveler. This suggests a streak of Ballardian brazenness that takes hypermodern mundanity (or hypermundane modernity) as found, even amid the commercial nondescriptness of Rotterdam, the city of Koolhaas’ birth and the one in which he’s headquartered OMA.

Whatever his current sensibilities, Koolhaas is hardly the only architect to have been captivated in his younger days by New York. But as far as I know, none of the others have written for the city a “retroactive manifesto,” as Delirious New York‘s subtitle declares it. More specifically, Koolhaas wrote it for Manhattan, from the history of whose built environment he attempts to derive the principles of an emergent, implicit ideology called “Manhattanism.” Under Manhattanism, “doctrine of indefinitely postponed consciousness,” each new building strives to be “a City Within a City,” a condition that, taken to its logical conclusion, “makes the Metropolis a collection of architectural city-states, all potentially at war with each other.” The “language of fantasy-pragmatism” lends an appearance of objectivity to Manhattanism’s ambition, that of creating “congestion on all possible levels.” Manhattanism “is the only program where the efficiency” demanded in 20th-century America “intersects with the sublime.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

Filed in Books on Cities, New York | | Comments (0)

Times Literary Supplement: Matt Alt, “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World”

Saturday, November 28, 2020

After overseeing the postwar occupation of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur made a blunt assessment of the cultural and emotional state of the defeated people. “If the Anglo-Saxon was, say, 45 years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite as mature,” said the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. “The Japanese, however, in spite of their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary condition. Measured by the standards of modern civilization, they would be like a boy of twelve.” The popular mind now remembers MacArthur as having described Japan as “a nation of twelve-year-olds”, and many of the country’s high-profile exports – dizzying video games, trinkets and stationery branded with cartoon animals, cheaply produced comics and animation saturated with sex and violence – would seem to retroactively underscore the general’s perceptiveness.

In the annals of Western accounts of Japan, MacArthur’s pronouncement is not without precedent. “From the earliest days of contact, the effort Japanese devoted to devising toys and games shocked Western observers”, writes Matt Alt in Pure Invention: How Japan’s pop culture conquered the world. “One of the first was the British diplomat Rutherford Alcock, who in 1863 dubbed Japan ‘a paradise of babies’. They were even more shocked by how many of these babies grew into adults who unabashedly continued to enjoy the pleasures of childhood.” From here Alt, an American resident of Japan who has spent nearly two decades professionally “localizing” Japanese culture for Western consumers, goes on to give a history of his adopted homeland through the products it has designed to deliver entertainment – in other words, through its toys.

The most telling early example comes not from the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan re-opened to trade with the world after more than 200 years of isolationist government, but from the devastated years following the Second World War. Gathering discarded food tins and beer cans for metal, a toymaker named Matsuzo Kosuge began to manufacture tiny models of the Allied jeeps that had swept into Japanese cities after V-J Day. Impoverished though they were, the Japanese sensed in those utilitarian military vehicles the same alluring modernity Kosuge had, and from the start the toy jeeps sold more rapidly than they could be manufactured. In the 1950s, exemplifying the apparently infinite Japanese capacity for taking pains, Kosuge brought to market a miniature Cadillac so laboriously detailed that Japanese buyers couldn’t afford them. His real customers, the many Americans with the desire for a Cadillac but not the means to buy a real one, lay on the other side of the Pacific.

Read the whole thing at the Times Literary Supplement.

Filed in books, Japan, Times Literary Supplement | | Comments (0)

Korea Blog: Michael Gibb’s Island-Hopping Travelogue “A Korean Odyssey”

Sunday, November 22, 2020

Modern South Korea made its orchestrated debut on the world stage with the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Since that time, the most memorable English-language travel narratives about this country have been written by Englishmen. Simon Winchester’s Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles, which came out the year of the Games, seems to remain the best-known, though as supplementary reading I always recommend Clive Leatherdale’s lesser-known To Dream of Pigs, the chronicle of a journey around the country taken in the same time and published in the early 1990s. Over the past decade, during which Korea has made a fuller return to the global zeitgeist, a few more such books have appeared: Graham Holiday’s culinary travelogue Eating Korea, for instance, or Michael Booth’s Three Tigers, One Mountain, an exploration of northeast Asia given over in large part to Korea. What keeps bringing these Brits?

For the London-born Michael Gibb, author of the new book A Korean Odyssey: Island-Hopping in Choppy Waters, the attraction feels atavistic. “Just as a hiker salivates at the prospect of scrambling over a mountain range or an equestrian glows at the prospect of galloping across a far-flung grassland,” he writes, “I get giddy thinking about ferry trips to remote outlying islands,” especially “the storm-ravaged, history-rich, guano-splattered archipelagos of South Korea.” Even when transplanted to the other side of the world, it seems, a man from an island not known for its pleasant weather will seek out more of the same. Gibb currently lives with his Korean wife and young daughter on Hong Kong’s Lamma Island, where he relishes each summer, which begins “dark and thundery, oppressive enough to transform the jolliest of friends into miserable wretches,” then turns into “clear blue skies and enough heat to melt your brains.”

In the 1990s, Gibb lived here in Seoul — or rather, in the altogether different Seoul that existed in the 1990s. “It was far from easy dealing with a complex language, a feisty cuisine, and complex social etiquette,” he recalls. “The shove in the back while boarding a bus was not welcomed. Testy nationalism and insular world views alienated me. Motorbikes roaring down sidewalks instead of on the street boiled my blood.” By all accounts, the still freshly developed nation was indeed more reckless and slipshod all around in those days. “Planes fell out of the sky, bridges collapsed, gas pipes exploded, the top of a bus was shorn off by a low bridge, and one of my former students and my wife’s cousin were both crushed when a shopping mall collapsed.” The collapse was presumably that of the Sampoong Department Store in 1995, which killed more than 500 people.

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

Filed in Korea Blog | | Comments (0)

Books on Cities: Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (2012)

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Anyone with an interest in American cities today has heard of Walk Score. Launched in 2007, the web site calculates the proximity of any given address to various necessities and amenities — grocery stores, schools, restaurants, hospitals, movie theaters — and assigns it the eponymous numerical rating. When I first heard of it, I naturally punched in all my previous addresses. The neighborhood of Seattle’s eastern suburbs in which I lived throughout most of elementary and all of middle and high school rates a Walk Score of three. That’s three out of a possible 100, mind, but it still beats my first childhood home about thirty miles outside of Sacramento, California, whose Walk Score comes in at a perfect zero. This may go some way to explaining my subsequent choices of location in adulthood: downtown Santa Barbara (85), followed by Los Angeles’ Koreatown (“walker’s paradise” at 97).

Today I live in the capital of South Korea, a country not served by Walk Score. If it were, my address would surely blow up the meter: here everything one could need in life, from coffee shops and bookstores to gyms and shopping malls to major hospitals and universities, lies within a ten-minute walk. (When I say this to Americans in America, I usually have to add the words “without exaggeration.”) After five years, this feels as natural to me as being unable to walk to anything but another house once did, back when I was growing up in the suburban nation. There I borrow from the title of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, a 2000 indictment of post-war U.S. urban planning by Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, founders of an organization called the Congress for the New Urbanism.

The term “New Urbanism” seems to me something of a bait-and-switch, given how many of its advocates go in for labored small-town kitsch of the Truman Show variety. That film was shot, in fact, in Seaside, Florida, a master-planned community designed by the architecture-and-planning firm DPZ, which stands for Duany and Plater-Zyberk. But then they also founded Arquitectonica, the studio responsible for the early-80s sublime of the Atlantis Condominium as immortalized by the opening credits of Miami Vice. Clearly this husband-and-wife architecture team commands a serious Floridian aesthetic range. And if Speck, formerly DPZ’s Director of Town Planning, is to be believed, Duany in particular knows everything there is to know about how to create satisfying urban spaces. Having partaken of this knowledge, Speck frequently emphasizes an intellectual debt to his former boss in his first solo book Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

Filed in Books on Cities | | Comments (0)