Conversations about menswear writing kept coming to the same book: Anne Hollander’s Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. Though led by a promising title, the content comes as something of a surprise. While enlightened enough to realize that a woman can, possessed of inherently fresh perspective, put together a men’s style book, I wouldn’t expect it to take this form. Sex and Suits has less in common with Cally Blackman’s highly visual 100 Years of Menswear, which primarily shows, than with Nicholas Antongiavanni’s thoroughly textual The Suit, which (in the male manner) primarily tells. Yet like fashion historian Blackman, art historian Hollander has an interest in the evolution of dress, and like Antongiavanni, she centers her analysis around what we today call the men’s suit: how it came about, how we wear it now, and what may become of it in the future.
We live in that future, since Sex and Suits came out in 1994. A curious age: the suit hardly enjoyed a heyday in mid-nineties America, nor do we look back to that era for high watermarks in other areas of men’s dress. But Hollander acknowledges writing at the suit’s low ebb, seizing the moment for Gauguin-ish reflection: where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? She asks not just on behalf of male dressers, but for females as well, dealing with both sex and suits by tracing the relationship of men’s and women’s fashion from the seventeenth century to the then-present, a tale of separation, envy, imitation, and, finally, a new exchange. She establishes early on her sense of “something perpetually more modern about male dress that has always made it inherently more desirable than female dress.” She cares not about its supposed status or power, but “a certain fundamental esthetic superiority, a more advanced seriousness of visual form.”
Read the whole thing at Put This On.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation about revenge, sexual jealousy, and screenwriting with novelist Nick Antosca, author of Fires, Midnight Picnic, The Obese, the new short-story collection The Girlfriend Game, and the upcoming The Hangman’s Ritual. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.
“So many people wanna cruise on Crenshaw on Sunday,” raps Skee-Lo on his 1995 hit “I Wish”. “Well then, I’mma have to get in my car and go.” He even gives directions: “You know I take the 110 until the 105” — from the relatively venerable Harbor Freeway to the then-brand-new Century Freeway — “get off at Crenshaw, tell my homies, ‘Look alive.'” You can still follow Skee-Lo’s route, but don’t expect to emerge into the very same neighborhood you saw in the music video for “I Wish”. Head north on Crenshaw for about six more miles, though, and there you’ll arrive: Leimert Park, just over one square mile of late-1920s planned community which would become, as LA Weekly music critic Jeff Weiss puts it in a profile of Skee-Lo (who still resides nearby), “the Left Bank of early-90s underground hip-hop.” I’d recommend against doing much cruising, though; since Skee-Lo’s summer days on the charts, sternly official signs have appeared: “NO CRUISING,” they read. Then, in case of ambiguity: “2 TIMES PAST THE SAME POINT WITHIN 6 HOURS IS CRUISING.” Last I went down to Leimert Park on a Sunday, I couldn’t resist passing the same points repeatedly, daring each time not to let six hours elapse. My defiance raised little in the way of police attention.
Then again, I did it on a bicycle, not in the 1964 Impala of Skee-Lo’s underdog longings. But even in a car, I’d find the neighborhood too intriguing to move simply through rather than around, and besides, cycling has precedent there. I seem to recall that Jody, Tyrese Gibson’s feckless 20-year-old father at the center of the Leimert Park-set “Baby Boy”, relied on a bike to get around. Its director, John Singleton, has called Leimert Park “the black Greenwich Village.” He also made “Boyz N the Hood”, a better-known, more heightened cinematic tale of the perils of life in south Los Angeles, but this particular area feels more or less free of the air of menace movies and television have, imitating all the wrong aspects of work like Singleton’s, liberally applied to so much of Los Angeles below Interstate 10. (When Tom Cruise’s visiting assassin has to take out a jazz club owner with a shadowy past in “Collateral”, he does go straight to Leimert Park. That film, however, found its 21st-century noir sensibility by looking back, past the thug years, to what fueled the city’s first wave of noir: the Leimert Park-connected Black Dahlia murder, for instance.) But given both the Left Bank and Greenwich Village comparisons, it makes sense that people almost instinctively use the word “vibrant” to describe the place. I get the sense that when Angelenos who live far from Leimert Park come to it, they come in search of that elusive vibrancy, manifest as it may in music, murals, literature, or shops filled with African collectibles.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Colin Marshall sits down in the Los Angeles Central Library’s Maguire Gardens with Nathan Masters, writer interested in all things Los Angeles, especially the history of the city, about which he writes as a representative of L.A. as Subject, hosted by the USC Libraries, for KCET and Los Angeles Magazine. They discuss how he regarded the distant downtown Los Angeles skyline while growing up in the Orange County town of Anaheim; the changing ways the county of his youth has regarded itself relative to Los Angeles; how far back you can go into the history of southern California and still have it bolster your understanding of the place, even to the era of allegedly “sleepy little village” of Mexican Los Angeles; why observers have insisted that this city has had little interest its own history; how he didn’t need to spend time away from Los Angeles to appreciate it; the debate over whether actual orange groves inspired the “Orange” in Orange County, and his grandfather’s home-movie footage of the uprooting of said groves; why observers have insisted that this city stands atop a desert; the competing boosting and demythologizing narratives; where he finds the greatest historical surprises, especially in the “old, weird” American 19th century; why knowing your history might get you driving more safely down the Arroyo Seco Parkway; how each foreign culture engages with Los Angeles in a different way, and how Los Angeles has no one way of accepting, absorbing, or digesting these influences; the seeming impossibility, given all this, of writing an overarching narrative of the city; the eternal struggle here between optimism and nostalgia; readers’ love of stories of “lost geography”; the creek bed hidden in Koreatown; his own love of stories about trees; and the elusive stories of history’s ordinary Angelenos.
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation with Leslie Cockburn, a reporter-documentarian-novelist, most recently the author of Baghdad Solitaire, who has entered more war zones than any of us have entered bars. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB‘s site, or download it on iTunes.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
We must make peace with the fact that some people arrive in Los Angeles expecting to spot celebrities. Nine times out of ten, though, they board the plane home disappointed; this city fosters a secretive, detached celebrity culture, the uppermost sector of which somehow walls itself off completely from open society. Public figures of slightly less renown make their way through Los Angeles as any other resident would, but this everyday conspicuousness renders them, in many cases, inconspicuous; I sense they take pains to avoid places “celebrities would go.” Visitors from other states, other countries, and other continents alike, thus roam the likes of Hollywood Boulevard and the Sunset Strip in vain, encountering only the occasional reality television star, a class of performer whose very existence owes to their readiness for the spotlight. If you wish to bask in the aura of proper celebrities — the kind who don’t want you to notice them — go somewhere like the Farmers Market, which for nearly eighty years now, at the corner of Third Street and Fairfax Avenue, has offered a collection of produce dealers, food stalls, larger eateries, coffee shops, and souvenir stands.
Perhaps this already sounds like a tourist trap, and I haven’t yet mentioned its abundance of palm tree-filled postcards and its vintage gas pump, enshrined and gleaming just as it must have back when the Gilmore Oil Company kept a functioning station there. Yet the whole operation has, over time, settled into the kind of hybrid appeal enjoyed by Seattle’s Pike Place Market (the kind that has, in recent decades, eluded San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf): it draws locals and outsiders in seemingly equal measure, inspiring in them seemingly equal enthusiasm. Seated at one of the many tables scattered around the Farmers Market, practicing the ancient art of people-watching, I’ve seen day-long waves of obvious regulars making beelines for long-preferred seats, politics-arguing old-timers, Los Angeles-unsavvy new arrivals wondering if they’ve stumbled upon the city’s center, hungry employees of nearby CBS Televison City, and foreign nationals with cameras in hand. One day at the Farmers Market, two such tourists, young girls from Japan, approached me very slowly. “Take a picture with me?” one asked, gesturing toward her friend who stood ready to capture an image of her traveling companion and this specimen of the elusive Homo americanus.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Vital stats:
Format: Jeff Garlin talking before a live audience with people he respects and/or people who interest him
Episode duration: 1-2h
Frequency: 2-3 per month
I suppose we must live in the Age of Conversation. Podcasts gave me that impression, and podcasts — the ones I listen to, at least — have given me no reason to deny it. Despite having rejoiced at the seemingly limitless formal possibilities newly opened up by the medium, especially against the seemingly numberless limitations under which many radio programs still labor, I notice that my most memorable podcast listening experiences come from nothing more innovative than people talking to one another. Then again, the least memorable podcasts I’ve heard (to the extent, of course, that I can recall them) also featured nothing more than people talking to one another. Indeed, most podcasts, the enjoyable and the less so, need nothing more than a few microphones and enough people to speak into them. Out of this easiest of all configurations comes, it seems, podcasting’s both highest and lowest moments. Into this peaceable ring of extremity Jeff Garlin dares to throw his hat with his very own conversation podcast, By the Way, in Conversation with Jeff Garlin [RSS] [iTunes].
We must here define a subgenre: within the bounds of the conversation podcast, we have the more specialized celebrity conversation podcast, in which a certain celebrity, presumably feeling they can hold, in their own personae, conversations of interest to audiences wider than those actually at their dinner parties, hold them and turn them into MP3 files. Sometimes this assumption works out; sometimes it doesn’t. Alec Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing stands out in my mind as a particularly successful example of recent years, though he takes the strategy (with assistance from WNYC) of making the proceedings sound as public radio-y as possible. Conan O’Brien’s Charlie Rose homage Serious Jibber-Jabber strikes me as ranking in a similar league, despite appearing only as videos, and sporadically at that. Garlin goes the route of maximum rawness, recording in front of a live audience at Los Angeles’ Largo — a place I tend inexplicably to conflate with Los Angeles’ Spago — and cutting out, apparently, only what absolutely needs currently out. But he has taken this on as a mission: a mission, he says, set against the highly produced, thoroughly pre-interviewed, rigorously edited interview programs so prevalent today. I can sign on to that.
Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation with Gabe Durham, author of Fun Camp, a polyphonic novel of the American summer-camp experience, and the work-in-progress Meanwhile. He also publishes the video game-themed series Boss Fight Books. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB‘s site, or download it on iTunes.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
The stories of certain Los Angeles neighborhoods seem easy to tell. Sometimes their geography, architecture, and apparent population practically tell it for you. Boyle Heights, for instance, located just east of downtown over the river, looks and feels like a district that has drifted far from its original purposes. Like Westlake, the neighborhood around MacArthur Park, Boyle Heights built up its identity in the early- to mid-twentieth century as a more or less Jewish community, original home of Canter’s Delicatessen. More recently it has, also like Westlake (which remains the home of Canter’s distant rival Langer’s Delicatessen), gone overwhelmingly Latino. While this has, speaking on the most superficial but nonetheless most accessible level, filled it with choice places to eat, most of my recent trips to have started or ended with visits to Libros Schmibros, the used bookstore founded by bookseller David Kipen, who refers to himself as “the first Jew in decades” to move back to Boyle Heights. If more have followed, they haven’t made themselves commercially known. None of my trans-river lunches have brought me to a new-wave delicatessen, though I have noticed a spot called Thai Deli on Cesar Chavez Avenue, well known for its teriyaki plates and macaroni salad. Clearly, the tale of Boyle Heights has more nuance than we assume.
The employees of the nearby White Memorial Medical Center know Thai Deli well, anyway; those coming from anywhere farther away would presumably feel put off by its uncomfortable proximity to Interstate 5. Yet keep walking east on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, the continuation of Los Angeles’ wearily iconic Sunset Boulevard, and you find what architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne calls “a model for other neighborhoods eager to make their major thoroughfares friendlier to pedestrians, cyclists and local business” with “all the urban-design amenities the average L.A. boulevard is desperately missing.” My mind has come to conceive of this particularly welcoming mile, along with the parallel run of First Street two blocks to its south, as Boyle Heights — its core, if not its entirety. Certainly not its entirety: set out to see the entire neighborhood, and you could find yourself walking across it for nearly two hours. Like Los Angeles itself, Boyle Heights looks big; you just don’t realize exactly how big until you decide you want to see it up close.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Monday, September 23, 2013
Colin Marshall sits down at the intersection of Los Feliz, Thai Town, and Little Armenia with Caleb Bacon, writer on the TBS sitcom Sullivan and Son and host of the podcast Man School (as well as the podcast Sullivan and Son: Behind the Bar). They discuss his feeling in his own guest seat; his move to Los Angeles from Albany purely in search of “good times and good weather”; the deliberately old-school-sitcom nature of Sullivan and Son, and the opportunity its Pittsburgh setting provides for racist jokes; how it feels to work simultaneously in “old” and “new” media; how he fell into television, and how he deliberately entered podcasting during the Great Podcasting Boom of ’09; why he even focused his first podcast The Gentlemen’s Club on men’s interests; how he soon came to interview, alternately, comedians and pornstars, and what the overall combination taught him about humanity and the Los Angeles entertainment industry; the conversations he had with other men as he pulled his own life into shape, what he learned from them, and how that experience fueled Man School; the riches of “real stuff” yielded by genuine-curiosity-driven conversations, even outside of podcasting, as when he once met a retail clerk who mentioned getting kidnapped in Africa (and then invited him to come on Man School); whether our generation has become worse at being men than previous generations; how social fragmentation, of Los Angeles’ type and others, has led men to have less meaningful communication with one another; his interest in the rules that new-media creators, in their ostensibly rule-free environments, inevitably create; Thai Town’s enduring Seinfeld billboard; Man School’s first live show at the Los Angeles Podcast Festival; the grand lessons he’s learned from man-to-man conversations, such as the importance of slight progress adding up to big progress, and what travel teaches you about yourself; and the value of simple suggestions like “Hey man, just be cool,” or, simpler still, “Don’t be a jerk.”
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.