Tom Scocca has known difficult times of late. Earlier this year, he published an essay in New York magazine detailing his struggle with a fierce and mysterious — and, as of the piece’s writing, still unexplained — autoimmune disorder. This health crisis struck amid “some normal midlife stuff, some normal parent stuff, some abnormal and menacing stuff that I truly can’t even get into,” but also as the effects of the professional apocalypse in the journalism industry reached his own career. “I gambled on a job I wanted, as the editor-in-chief of a small magazine, and it ran out of funding.” (This seems to have been a short-lived, garishly designed, murkily blockchain-driven venture called Popula.) Another position was not forthcoming: “abruptly, all that my connections could offer were gigs.”
Despite only ever having had gigs, I’ve felt some of this myself; over the past six months or so, for reasons I still don’t understand, it’s become awfully hard to get a reply out of any editor. Being a dozen or so years younger than Scocca, without a family to support or a body suddenly bent on dissolving itself, this hasn’t put me into a much worse position than usual. Regardless, I can’t help but pay more attention to what I do have in common with him, especially when I consider where he was back in the mid-two-thousands. I mean that not in the sense of where he was in his career, exactly, but where he was in the world: Asia, and more specifically China, gathering the experiences that would go into his first (and, to date, only) book, Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future.
Read the whole thing at Substack.
In 2017, Elon Musk called consulting public-transit planner Jarrett Walker an idiot. This happened on the the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, before Musk himself took its helm. It began with a criticism of public transit Musk lodged while promoting the notional Hyperloop: “Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer.” Walker tweeted that Musk’s “hatred of sharing space with strangers is a luxury (or pathology) that only the rich can afford. Letting him design cities is the essence of elite projection,” which in turn drew Musk’s blunt riposte.
This was a dispiriting exchange, not least for what it underscored about the conduct of today’s elites. (No matter how deep I get into the twenty-first century, I’ll never let go of my expectation that the wealthiest members of society should also be the most refined.) But like Donald Trump, Musk’s impulsive baseness and aura of deep eccentricity belies his ability to express the psyche of the American everyman. Real or perceived, the inconvenience and danger of public transit is — to use Musk’s odd phrasing — why everyone doesn’t like it. Even if that American everyman goes to certain cities in Europe or Asia and sees, let alone rides, bus and urban rail systems that are cleaner, safer, and more efficient than he’d ever thought possible, he’ll still believe that they couldn’t possibly work back home. And for all I know, he may be right.
Read the whole thing at Substack.
1년 전 이맘때쯤 유튜브로 영어를 공부하는 많은 한국인은 제일 좋아하는 원어민 선생님을 잃었다. 그 선생님은 2011년부터 ‘잉글리쉬 인 코리안’이라는 인기 채널을 진행했던 미국인 마이클 엘리엇이었다. 잉글리쉬 인 코리안의 구독자들과 마찬가지로 나도 겨우 몇 살 위였던 마이클의 사망 소식에 큰 충격을 받았다. 물론 영어 원어민으로서 영어를 가르치는 유튜브 채널을 볼 이유가 별로 없어서 마이클을 선생님으로 아는 것이 아니었지만 지난 한 해 동안 그에게서 배운 것은 적지 않았다.
마이클은 내가 처음으로 만난 ‘한국에 사는 외국인’ 중 하나였다. 그의 이름을 처음 들은 건 한국으로 이사 오기 전이었다. 로스앤젤레스의 한인타운에 살 당시 매주 꾸준히 한국어 공부 모임에 참여하곤 했다. 모임에 참여한 사람들의 대부분은 나처럼 한국어를 배우고 싶어 하는 외국인이었지만 몇 명의 한국인도 항상 왔다. 그들 중 한 명은 나에게 마이클 엘리엇을 아느냐고 물어봤다. 유창한 한국말로 영어를 깊고 명확하게 설명해 주는 그로부터 영감을 받아 그는 유튜브에서 영어로 한국어를 가르치는 꿈을 가지게 되었다면서 말이다.
동아일보 사이트에서 이어지는 내용을 볼 수 있습니다.
여전히 미국에 계시는 어머니를 몇 년 전에 처음으로 한국 국립중앙박물관으로 모시고 갔다. 우리가 전시를 볼 때 주변에 있었던 어린 여자애는 우리를 가리키면서 “외국인이야!”라고 소리쳤다. 나는 그 말을 듣자마자 웃지 않을 수 없었고 어머니께서는 뭐가 그렇게 웃기냐고 물어보셨다. 내가 여자아이 말의 뜻을 설명해 드리자마자 어머니의 반응은 예상 밖에도 충격을 받으신 것 같았다. 그 당시 한국에 산 지 2년이 넘은 나는 외국인으로 여겨지는 것에 익숙해졌지만 어머니는 그 경험이 놀라울 뿐만 아니라 기분도 나쁘셨던 것 같았다. 그 이유는 미국에 평생 사시면서 외국인이라고 불린 적이 한 번도 없었기 때문인지도 모른다.
모든 한국인이 알다시피 외국인을 영어로 ‘foreigner’라고 말할 수 있다. 그러나 대부분의 한국인이 모르는 것은 미국에서는 이 단어가 거의 들리지 않는다는 것이다. 보통 미국인은 다른 나라에서 온 사람에 대해 이야기할 때 그 사람의 모국을 구체적으로 언급한다. 예를 들면 “반에 중국 유학생이 있다” 아니면 “러시아 사람이 운영하는 마트에 자주 간다” 같은 문장들을 자주 접할 수 있다. 이러한 언어 습관은 모든 언어적인 차이점과 마찬가지로 근본적인 문화 차이점까지 반영한다.
동아 일보 사이트에서 이어지는 내용을 볼 수 있습니다.
In 2011, Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne launched into a yearlong book-blogging project called “Reading L.A.” The earliest of its 27 titles about the city was Louis Adamic’s The Truth About Los Angeles, published in 1927; the most recent was by Robert Gottlieb’s Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City, published in 2007. Between those books came a couple that I’ve since written about myself: Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, whose 45th and 50th anniversary I observed in the Guardian and at Archinect, respectively, and the late Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, a subject here on Books on Cities in 2022. Hawthorne’s inclusion of Holy Land by D. J. Waldie got me reading all of Waldie’s writings, and in 2021 I even reviewed his latest book Becoming Los Angeles for the New Yorker.
Hawthorne’s post on Holy Land inspired me to interview Waldie on my podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture, just as his post on Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-rays of the Body Public led me to invite on that book’s author, architect Doug Suisman. When I took the show to Portland, I even attempted to interview (but ultimately couldn’t pin down) Richard Meltzer, who wrote Richard Meltzer’s Guide to the Ugliest Buildings of Los Angeles and L.A. Is the Capital of Kansas, which I read on Hawthorne’s recommendation — a recommendation he gave me when he appeared on Notebook on Cities and Culture himself. I could go on, but suffice it to say that “Reading L.A.” had a considerable influence on me. Part of that owes to Hawthorne’s having done it the same year I moved to Los Angeles, but even now, in Seoul, I’m still reading through his selections.
Carey McWilliams’ Southern California: An Island on the Land came third onHawthorne’s chronologically organized syllabus,having been published in 1946. At the time, this put it outside my immediate field of interest: though obsessed with Los Angeles, then as now, I thought of the nineteen-forties as belonging to a period of the city’s history when the cultural and urban phenomena that interested me — Ed Ruscha, dingbats, Koreatown, the Bonaventure hotel, neo-noir movies, Jeffrey Daniels’ Kentucky Fried Chicken on Western, the subway — had yet to manifest. In a sense, I conceived of Los Angeles as beginning anew around the early-to-mid-sixties, which isn’t entirely out of alignment with McWilliams’ historical scheme: he regards Southern California as having been shaped since the late nineteenth century by a series of distinct booms and subsequent waves of migration, each of which had mostly, but not entirely, overwritten the one before.
Read the whole thing at Substack.
이상하게 들릴지도 모르지만 제 모국어가 아닌 한국어로 쓰여진 제 첫 번째 책인 『한국 요약 금지』가 이미 출시되어 있습니다. 외국인의 눈으로 보는 한국에 대한 다양한 짧은 에세이가 수록되어 있습니다. 예를 들면 영화와 문학을 비롯하혀 문화의 토대가 되는 건축과 생활 그리고 사고 방식을 포함한 신념 과 언에에 이르기까지 제가 관심 가지고 있는 분야를 소개했다.
제 관점에 너무 구해받지 마시고 재미있게 읽어 주세요. 전국 서점에서 온라인을 포함한 대부분의 오프라인 채널을 통해 구매가 가능합니다.
Thursday, February 22, 2024
About a year after its publication, Tim Cocks’ Lagos: Supernatural City received a positive review in the Los Angeles Review of Books with the unfortunate headline “When a White Man Writes a Good Book About Africa.” I call it unfortunate not because of its untruth — for indeed, Tim Cocks, a white man, has written a good book about Africa, or at least a part of Africa — but because of its tendentious clickbait-adjacency. That belies the nature of the review itself, whose author, a New York-based Nigerian journalist called Kovie Biakolo, concedes the potential advantages of Cocks’ “outsider perspective.” She also admits that he actually does know Lagos “more fully and better than I do,” in the face of the assumption to which fashionable lines of thinking tend to lead: “I am Nigerian, he is not, and therefore I should know Lagos better than he does.”
An Englishman with South African roots, Cocks has been (as his Twitter bio indicates) reporting from the “mother continent” for a couple of decades at this point. He now lives in Johannesburg, but previously lived in Dakar and before that in Lagos, where he worked as Reuters’ Nigeria bureau chief from 2011 to 2015. He makes that clear right at the beginning of the preface, shortly before stating that “this is not a book about my own experience of Lagos.” As a reader, I always find such a declaration somewhat dispiriting, though it’s also unsurprising coming from a writer of Cocks’ professional formation. For better or for worse, reporters get habit drilled into them of staying out of (or minimizing their presence in) the “story,” which, of course, should involve only their interviewees and the people to whom those interviewees are connected, a cast in this case 100 percent Lagosian.
Read the whole thing at Substack.
In a 1991 episode of Seinfeld, Elaine frets over the potential consequences of breaking up with an older boyfriend who’s just had a stroke. “I’ll be ostracized from the community,” she says to Jerry. “What community? There’s a community?” he asks in response. “All these years I’m living in a community; I had no idea.” Though Jerry Seinfeld himself later named this episode as his least-favorite of the series, those lines still deliver one of the most memorable social insights in a sitcom known for memorable social insights. I’m no Seinfeld scholar, but from what I’ve seen, all its best jokes flatly reference conditions we seldom if ever acknowledge, but that all of us know, on some level, to obtain. Sensing that there is not, in fact, a community, we recognize the absurdity of our continued use of the word in the absence of its referent.
Two years earlier, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg published The Great Good Place. The book would become his best-known work, due not just to its unusual success by semi-academic standards, but also to its popularization of the concept of the “third place.” The first place is the home; the second place is the office, the plant, the store, or wherever else one may earn one’s wages. The third place, in Oldenburg’s words, “is a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work,” all of them endangered. More concrete categories appear in the subtitle: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. Such places, to Oldenburg’s mind, are necessary — if not sufficient — to sustain public life.
Read the whole thing at Substack.
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto is not exactly a book about Palo Alto. Or rather, you won’t come away from it having learned as much about Palo Alto as its 720-page bulk might have you imagine. I don’t mean that as a criticism, since the book has greater ambitions: indeed, its very subtitle promises A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, which the text does go on to deliver. If you were just looking to read about Palo Alto, you’d probably put it down after a couple hundred pages. I myself picked it up expressly to write about as a city book, but despite the square-peg-round-hole category fit, one factor that kept me reading (and taking what came out to nearly 20,000 words of notes) was both my and Harris’ being northern California-born millennial writers with an interest in the course of civilization.
In his first book, Kids These Days, Harris made a study of our generation and its tendency toward less-than-impressive personal and professional outcomes. I’ve been aware of him at least since it came out in 2017, when reviews made it sound intriguing if somewhat ideological and hyperbolic. (One oft-quoted line, perhaps taken out of context: “We become fascists or revolutionaries, one or the other.”) Palo Alto, his third book, was published this past February, but I only became aware of it in the summer, when he drew a wave of attention by tweeting about bananas. “Pro-growth lefties accuse their opponents of being out of touch with working-class preferences and focused on consumption instead of production but what do they imagine planning support looks like for, say, ‘fresh bananas at every American 7/11’ among the world’s banana workers?” he asks at the top of the thread in question.
Read the whole thing at Substack.
Saturday, December 30, 2023
For nearly a dozen 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 3,000 so far, and here are ten of my favorites from the more than 250 I wrote in 2023:
- The Surprisingly Long History of Auto-Tune, the Vocal-Processing Technology Music Critics Love to Hate
- Jancis Robinson’s Wine Course: Explore the TV Series That Introduced the Wines of the World (1995)
- Discover The Plastics, the Influential Japanese New Wave Band from the 1980s
- RIP Norman Lear: Watch Full Episodes of His Daring 70s Sitcoms, Including All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, and More
- David Byrne Explains How the “Big Suit” He Wore in Stop Making Sense Was Inspired by Japanese Kabuki Theatre
- Wes Anderson Re-Creates The Truman Show, Armageddon & Out of Sight as Stage Plays Performed by the Cast of Rushmore (1999)
- An Introduction to Vince Guaraldi, the Jazz Composer Who Created the Best Christmas Album Ever, A Charlie Brown Christmas
- Jerry Garcia Explains How Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Changed His Life (1995)
- Revisit Turn-On, the Innovative TV Show That Got Canceled Right in the Middle of Its First Episode (1969)
- What Is Postmodern Architecture?: An Introduction in Three Videos
See also my ten favorite Open Culture posts of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.
