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Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E18: First-Rate “Second World” Eating with Nicholas Gilman

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma with artist-turned-food writer Nicholas Gilman, author of the book and blog Good Food in Mexico City: Fondas, Food Stalls, and Fine Dining. They discuss the culinary importance of places like Mercado Medellín; how Mexico City’s art, not its food, first brought him here (make a beeline though he did to the handmade tortillas when he first arrived at 18); all the warnings about “what you shouldn’t do” in Mexico City — or, for that matter, the New York City of the seventies and eighties in which he grew up; the strides Mexico City has made in the past fifteen years, especially as regards cleaning up pollution and opening up small business and culinary opportunities; his career switch from painter to food writer, and his discovery that you simply “don’t have to suffer so much” in Mexico City; his realization that no useful English-language food guides to the area existed, how that prompted him to publish his own, and the great deal of attention it soon drew; what people get wrong when they first go eating in Mexico City, such as understanding the “timing” of the food; the dismantling of the car culture, the institution of bicycle programs, and the conversion of Mexico into at least a new “second-world” country; his eating strategies in a new city, including looking for their markets; the importance of tapping into a city’s social knowledge, especially that possessed by taxi drivers; how to convince people you want to eat “the real thing,” i.e., the food they themselves eat; bringing a necessary outsider’s perspective to another culture; the various misconceptions that linger about Mexican food; the usually unhappy experiences of foreign cuisines that make it to Mexico; and when best to eat huitlacoche.

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

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Podthoughts: Longform Podcast

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Vital stats:
Format: interviews with writers and editors of long-form articles
Episode duration: 35m-1h
Frequency: weekly

Say 3:00 a.m. has rolled around. I’ve walked my lady home, downed whatever wine remained in the night’s bottle, sent the day’s last few dangling e-mails, read two or three page-downs on Twitter, glanced at Facebook, and checked the New Yorker for anything new from Anthony Lane. Icould go to bed. Or I could check Longform.org. Though I rarely admit it, I only direct my browser that way in hopes of finding a 3,000-, 5,000-, or — jackpot — 10,000-word article so interesting as to deprioritize sleep and the dull preparations it demands. I imagine you’ve done this too. If you happen to have a day job, maybe you’ve burned hours of your employer’s time — even days of it — reading articles aggregated by Longform and its ilk (Longreads, say), luxuriating in a combination of boredom, fascination, and sheer spite. I had to ditch my own day job after envisioning the decades ahead melting into an ocean of text, often damned interesting but essentially opiate.

Though I no longer rely on Longform as that sort of drip-feed, it has remained in my night-elongating rotation — no morning pressure to get to “the office,” after all — and I took notice when the site began putting out a podcast [RSS] [iTunes]. The show delivers not audio versions of long-form articles but interviews with the sort of people who write and commission them: folks from New York magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine… you know, the publications whose sites you pull up after dark looking for an extended distraction. (Also publications with “New York” in the title. Longform does have its office, I believe, in New York, but guys, come on — America has two cities.) Built at the intersection of an addiction to long-form articles and a compulsion to listen to interview podcasts, the Longform Podcast should sit right in my personal (and thus professional) wheelhouse. Yet I approached with trepidation.

Read the whole thing at Maximumfun.org.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E17: Youth Is Overrated with Brenda Lozano

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma with novelist and essayist Brenda Lozano, author of the Todo Nada and contributor to Letras Libres. They discuss the space Spain’s troubles have opened for Latin American literature; the passion for Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde she learned from one particular teacher; how she began seriously reading in English, and only later in her native Spanish; the difference in enjoyment of Spanish versus English literature, and how the languages ultimately behave like two different animals; the importance of the pleasure of reading, as well as the acknowledgment thereof; poetry as pure sugar; Mexico City’s combination of high culture and bad parties; how, when she began writing essays, she found ways to have a good time writing about even assigned topics, and what it revealed about the general skill of having a good time wherever you happen to go; the three years of her early twenties she spent writing a “terrible novel,” and what they later gave Todo Nada; her conviction of the overestimation of youth, which led her to build the novel around an aged character, but a young narrator; what could possibly be the sales pitch for Dorian Gray stockings; the newly widened Mexican generation gap; her need to “close the door” when writing, so literary influences like Jorge Luis Borges or Clarice Lispector can’t step right in; her first, worldview-changing encounter with Fernando Pessoa, when she asked, “Is this literature?”; what she felt standing next to a wax Octavio Paz; the current absence of non-wax literary fathers; her Mexico City literary community, a group of argumentative friends; getting to know places through literature, like Japan through Banana Yoshimoto, 1930s Los Angeles through John Fante, or indeed Mexico City through Roberto Bolaño; and, despite her having been born and raised there, her continued excitement about writing in Mexico City.

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

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A Los Angeles Primer Debuts on KCET Departures

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Each Tuesday, KCET Departures, a site about Los Angeles run by the city’s well-known public television station, will run essays adapted from my book-in-progress A Los Angeles Primer. The debut features Dennis Hopper, David Hemmings, and the reasons I got here in the first place:

No two people have ever lived in exactly the same Los Angeles. Sheer size has something to do with that, not to mention practical boundaries. With four million inhabitants and 500 square miles in within its bizarre-looking official border alone, the city takes on barely thinkable proportions when you include everywhere someone might live and still call “Los Angeles.” This dilution of effective residency does strange things to the city’s psychology; ask someone who claims to hate living in Los Angeles where exactly they call home, and half the time it lays as far from downtown as Parsippany, New Jersey does from Manhattan. Parsippanites, like everyone else, blame their frustrations on many things, but not, surely, that they live in New York.

You could argue, as cinephiles do about Hemmings himself, over whether Los Angeles delivered on its youthful promise. A decade before “The Simpsons,” Matt Groening self-published a comic book, later to become a Los Angeles Reader strip, called “Life in Hell.” He meant to provide an introduction to Los Angeles, a project like Hemmings and Hopper’s optimistic one of the 1960s, but reflecting the notably less exuberant mood of the late 1970s. Growing up, I pored over all the “Life in Hell” comics I could get in the Seattle of the nineties, a city dosing the national zeitgeist with equal parts Nirvana, Microsoft, and Starbucks. Seattle was “young,” “high-tech,” “edgy,” “hip,” and “livable.” Los Angeles was, well, hell. Yet the waves of emigration to Los Angeles from every other city in America, Seattle included — from nearly every city in the world — never stopped. Openly loathed yet so obviously attractive; that town had to have something going for it, and something unusual indeed.

Read the whole thing there. And why not bookmark the column itself, so you won’t miss my coming postcards from Koreatown, West Hollywood, La Brea Avenue, and the subway?

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Menswear books: Hardy Amies, ABC of Men’s Fashion

Monday, March 18, 2013

Whether in its original 1964 Newnes edition or its handsome 2007 Abrams reissue, ABC of Men’s Fashion strikes an elegant balance between authority and personality. Despite taking a more compact shape than an encyclopedia (128 small-format pages, to be precise), it does take an encyclopedic form. Beginning with a brief explanation of “Accessories”, Amies ends, several hundred elements of male dress later, with a plea for acceptance of the newly popular “Zip fasteners”. 21st-century Americans will recognize these, assuming their universality hasn’t yet turned them effectively invisible, as zippers. “Few people know how they work,” Amies notes, “and many are still therefore wrongly suspicious of them.” There we have a very late hint that this book may not exactly hold a flat, clear mirror to modern sartorial thought. Its neatly arranged entries and sober illustrations suggest unimpeachable objectivity; its text delivers one man’s opinion, and it does so without shame.

But as opinions go, especially those held in the England of fifty years ago, we could do far worse than those of a man who founded a respected label in his own name, dressed Queen Elizabeth II (for whatever relevance that may have to menswear), and spent the Second World War arranging the assassinations of Nazi sympathizers. “The snobbism for which he was famous was primarily an act disguising a much more complicated mixture of vanity, humor, and pragmatism combined with social, creative, and commercial ambition,” writes Ian Garlant in his 2007 introduction. Yet from my 21st-century readerly perspective, Amies’ book displays negligible snobbism, genuine or invented. “All short sleeve shirts look ghastly,” Amies writes on holiday wear. “Sandals are hell, except on the beach where you want to take them off: or on a boat. And, worn with socks are super hell.” These today come off less as judgments than statements of fact, if exaggerated fact.

Read the whole thing at Put This On.

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Podthoughts: The Japan Show

Monday, March 18, 2013

Vital stats:
Format: two expats on the news from Japan, especially of the irksome variety
Episode duration: 35-55m
Frequency: erratic

They call it “Seidensticker Syndrome”, in a tribute of sorts to famed translator and Japanologist Edward Seidensticker. Seidensticker, to put it far too uncomplicatedly, had a love-hate relationship with the country and the people who made the subject of his career. Ian Buruma described it with more nuance, in The Missionary and the Libertine, as “the love that can turn to hate and then back to love again at enormous speed.” I still see these ever-mounting levels of both attraction and frustration today in the eyes of some Westerners who take up residence in Japan. Those who avoid Seidensticker Syndrome do so by pre-emptively abdicating all desire to fit into Japanese society, relishing instead the clear perspective of the permanent outsider. The late Donald Richie, a friend of Seidensticker’s, stands as the locus classicus of this strategy. Seidensticker to Richie: “You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.” Richie, in his diary: “He really hated himself, not these people [ … ] he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing.”

Despite having no sense of whether the hosts of The Japan Show [RSS] [iTunes] suffer from Seidensticker Syndrome themselves, I should note that they spend most of their time talking about the subject that can most readily induce Seidensticker Syndrome: Japanese politics. Westerners who’ve just set foot in the country seem reasonably able to keep a safe psychological distance from their adopted land’s shifty, confusing government, but over the years the irritation evidently mounts to indigestible proportions. On each episode of The Japan Show John Matthews and Gavin Dixon make a meal of the distinctive behavior of Japanese politicians, an improbable-sounding mixture of the clandestine and the intransigent, the pathologically sly and the incompetent. And when an expat in Japan gets to talking about politics, they usually get to talking about political apathy, which there reaches levels disengagement close to absolute. As a Japan specialist recently asked me, what other country has burnt through six prime ministers in six years without any social disruption whatsoever? What other country could?

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E16: Autobiology with Kurt Hollander

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Condesa with Kurt Hollander, photographer, filmmaker, magazine editor, and author of Several Ways to Die in Mexico City: An Autobiography. They discuss his microbiologically informed view of life; the presence of death in Mexico, especially since people there now die developed-world deaths and, to an extent, developing-world deaths; his first enjoyment of Mexico’s working-class culture, and his perspective, as an American, on American cultural encroachment; his earlier life on New York’s Lower East Side, a barrio which prepared him for the one-huge-barrio that is Mexico City; the importance of “doing New York right” to subsequently spending time in other major cities; what he learned publishing the magazine The Portable Lower East Side; what kind of immigration makes a place more interesting, and what kind of immigration makes a place less so; how moving to Mexico City presented him the greatest learning curve of his life; when, and how, he got sick and didn’t seem like he would get better; how danger makes culture, which he considers to be the accumulation of survival strategies; what it means to adapt to a culture, and what bearing doing so has on your survival; his strategies for seeking out the remaining strongholds of working-class culture, such as riding the Metro and exploring the miniature economies that grow in its stations; the importance of the pulqueria, and other places Mexicans warn foreigners away from; and how he has never felt in harm’s way in Mexico City, despite respecting nothing, criticizing everything, and always going with the more dramatic story.

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

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Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Gabriela Jauregui

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation in Mexico City with Gabriela Jauregui, a writer who crosses not just the boundaries of genre but language (Spanish, French, and English) and city as well. She has a poetry collection out called Controlled Decay, and co-founded the publishing collective sur+. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E15: The Mexican Reality with Diego Rabasa

Monday, March 11, 2013

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma with Diego Rabasa, co-founder of Sexto Piso press. They discuss why this might make for the most exciting moment in Mexican, or even Spanish-language, literature; Mexico’s past era of invincible intellectual giants, from whose shadow writers now emerge; these writers’ response to their country’s “total social meltdown”; how Mexico City got more secure as Mexico itself got less secure, a process that has by now made Mexico City the safest place in the country; his dull but well-off childhood in a PRI family, his university studies of engineering, and his subsequent discovery of literature, culture, and books; what Juan Rulfo revealed to him about his country; Sexto Piso’s early mission to translate foreign writers, and its publication at first of hardly any Mexican writers; who, given Mexico’s high illiteracy, supports Mexico City’s cool bookstores; the correct pronunciation of “Donceles”, the finest street for used books; Sexto Piso’s presence in Spain, a much more conservative literary market; the upside and downside of taking government funding; the importance of throwing parties unlike the standard dull publishing cocktail affairs; having, as a publisher, to cover for only semi-professional booksellers and journalists; what to read to best understand the Mexican reality; how Mexico City became a “completely different place” from where he grew up, with its citizens now “getting the city back”; the enduring need to keep an eye on the politicians even as arts movements offer encouragement; and how he gets his mind off the corruption by reading Bruce Chatwin.

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

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Diario de la Ciudad de México 2013

Friday, March 8, 2013

 

Last time I visited Mexico City, I recorded a single interview for The Marketplace of Ideas and spent the rest of the time exploring and hanging out (mostly with Japanese people). This year I had a whole slate of Notebook on Cities and Culture conversations to record, not much time in which to do it, and a truly nasty sore throat. But I also had a fairly nice apartment just off a park in Colonia Roma, my lady with me, and the ever-more-certain knowledge that, what with the seasonal change in weather, even genuine Chilangos felt the dolor in their own gargantas. The trip offered a brief opportunity, in one of my favorite cities in the world, to test a theory I’ve developed: if you want to get to know a place quickly, make a podcast where you not only interview people living and working there, but meet them at locations of their choosing, and ask them for recommendations of what to do on your off hours. (You’ll have to call your podcast something else.)

By contrast to Japan, I meet very few Brits in Mexico. (Aside from the aforementioned Japanese, every expat I know there comes from the United States.) How pale Londoners must go — how much paler, I mean — upon taking their first taxi trip in el D.F. The driving itself raises no particular hairs; though cars do go wherever they want, whenever they want, every driver on the road understands and accepts this. Every cabbie I’ve hired in Mexico has displayed great politeness, reasonable friendliness, and no inclination toward kidnapping, none have passed the Knowledge. I’ve had to get out of one taxi and find another after the first driver finally admitted to not knowing of my destination. This time, in from the airport, I handed our driver a map with our rental highlighted, but he still kept pulling over to ask fruit-sellers the direction of the street — and most of them didn’t know, either. Yet we ultimately found out way there, just as most of Mexico City’s systems, in their ad hoc, improvisational, theoretically unworkable ways, eventually produce something like the desired ends. (Or maybe they just need cheaper dashboard GPS systems.)

 

 

In healthier moments, I savored the elements that made me come back to Mexico City, and will make me come back again: delicious things to eat sold on half the sidewalks in town, the now-aesthetically retro Metro, Cuban ice cream without the promise to buy, scary dead yet somehow living buildings like Condominio Insurgentes. In fact, I couldn’t resist bringing up the Condominio Insurgentes in an interview, though the fact that I was talking with a couple of architect-urbanists made it fair game. They agreed to its reflection of something important yet difficult to define about the capital’s often wonky urban landscape. Conversations like these tend to make me forget that I have the chills, can barely swallow, or need desperately to slink off and collapse. Consider credence lent to the Noël Coward pronouncement I quote more frequently all the time: “Work is more fun than fun.” Helps if your work involves exploring world cities, talking, and making friends. And it would help more if my own work involved a bit more proper, actual-lifestyle-supporting money. But you’ll hear no complaints from me.

Despite enjoying the company of Japanese people in Mexico City, I’ve never braved its Japanese food. Serious eaters tell me that world-class Japanese eateries have opened there in the past decade, but casual eaters still report sushi filled with cream cheese and topped with thick dollops of hot sauce and mayonnaise. You’ll know I’ve attained supreme world-weariness when you catch me at one of those waterless street tents under the beating sun advertising “SUSHI RECIEN HECHO.” I have nothing against the hybridization of cuisines — in fact, few processes fascinate me more — but certain food traditions have unhappy encounters with Mexico. (Not that I consider American-style sushi rolls, leaden with every possible flavor and texture then fried whole, a point of national pride.) One foreign food writer described to me what he called “Mexican Chinese food”: greasy fried rice, greasier chow mein, glops of orange sweet-and-sour sauce, all presented in exposed steam trays. We have those in Los Angeles too, I told him, which got him thinking about standard American Chinese food: chop suey, General Tso’s, and what have you. No, no, I corrected; even in Koreatown, we’ve also got Chinese joints only for Mexicans.

Needless to say, this stretch in Mexico City soon found Jae and I making a beeline to the Zona Rosa, which has a tiny Koreatown of its own. Gorging ourselves on barbecue and makgeolli at Nadefo, a place on Liverpool recommended by my past interviewee David Lida, we reflected, fully, on our great good fortune. Aside from the Mexican waiters (and probably most of the chefs), I looked around at the end of the meal and found myself seemingly the only non-Korean in the room — never a bad omen, if you seek to eat well. Close to 10,000 of them live in or near the neighborhood (often described, question-dodgingly, as working in “import-export”), which serves them not just with restaurants, but internet cafés and noraebang. Then, from the corner, we heard the familiarly clipped syllables of the Japanese language and realized that Nadefo draws a trickle of nihonjin as well. That explains all the posters and table cards advertising Calpis, “el Sabor Original de Japón.”

As a Spanish-language media capital, Mexico City produces a great deal of television meant to appeal broadly across Latin America. However, curiously little of it found its way to our apartment television. Jae tuned the set to, and left it on, something called Classic Arts Showcase, a channel that screens nothing but a loop of short clips from theater, dance, and symphonic performances. This started to look to me, as I sat recovering from the sore throat and various other minor ailments, like a near-ideal realization of an idea I had a few years back for “ambient television.” Some friends suggested I launch the concept as a YouTube channel, but it struck me as the sort of media that doesn’t work if you have to actively seek it out; it needs to present itself as a kind of default. (The 21st century has yet, I think, to grasp the importance of this distinction.) Just as I began wondering why Mexico had gotten to into 20th-century European culture, a message appeared announcing Classic Arts Showcase’s address as just up the road in Burbank. If I had an “Industry” day job, I would surely work at a place like that. Assuming they have employees.

 

 

If you pursue the craft of interviewing yourself and need a challenge to take you to the next level, I recommend conducting an interview in a language other than your native one. I mean, I’ve personally never tried it; in Spanish, I’d still struggle to process each response in a timely fashion, and as for Korean and Japanese, oh, the humanity. But to more easily get at least to the level below that, I recommend conducting an interview in a language other than your guest’s native one. Also unlike my sessions Japan, most of my guests in Mexico actually came from Mexico, several having been born and raised right there in el D.F. I came to find out that, especially among what you might call the literary classes, sending one’s kids to multilingual schools, or even exclusively English schools, has become accepted practice. (“Why don’t they do this in the States?” asked one interviewee. Shrug.) Grown, they wind up with English anywhere between accented but impressively functional and near-native sounding. Still, talking to them as an interviewer, you crank up your clarity, succinctness, and broadness (presumably of the least stupid kind) several notches, and, in my experience, sometimes draw out more expansive answers in so doing.

For myself, I just feel relieved to have passed the crucible of the telephone. As any language-learner knows, if the task of understanding and making yourself understood in person intimidates, the task of understanding and making yourself understood over the phone intimidates deeply. Hence my former practice of having hotels and restaurants call cabs for me; I needed to get to a certain place by a certain time, and didn’t trust in my own linguistic ability to guarantee that would happen. Yet getting ready to catch our flight back to Los Angeles, I rung up a cab company and ordered a ride without thinking twice about it. I hung up the phone — or rather, had it disconnected late in the call by patchy coverage — estimating the chances of the cab’s arrival at a generous 50-50, but it proceeded to arrive right in front of the door, where I had haltingly specified, bang on time, no kidnapping attempted. Will I get so lucky on my next trip to Asia?

 

[Previous diaries: Portland 2013, Kansai 2012, Seattle 2012, Portland 2012, San Francisco 2012, Mexico City 2011]

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