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Seattle Diary I

Sunday, October 14, 2012

You can prepare no better for Seattle, to my mind, than by reading Tao Lin’s Stranger article “What I Can Tell You About Seattle Based on the People I’ve Met Who Are From there (I Live in Brooklyn),” at once the most and least informative piece ever written about the city:

When I make myself think concretely about Seattle, I get an image of a 12-year-old Native American boy reading a Sherman Alexie story collection in a Starbucks and it’s raining outside, then I seriously think, “The harsh reality of growing up in Seattle. Seems bad. Hard.” But if I think abstractly about Seattle, I feel a strange emotion like I’m currently living in a clean, well-furnished house with expensive electronic equipment in Tennessee in May by a small river on a green hill with no other houses nearby and that I have a steady cash flow and am working on multiple projects each day with a lot of excitement and no obligations. It feels really good and the opposite of hard. So “Seattle” abstractly means to me something like “basking in the sunlight of overwhelming gratitude for life and art” but concretely means to me something like “feeling like there’s no possible routes for escaping a life of poverty and alcoholism while staring at sentences written by Sherman Alexie in an environment of people shouting things like ‘quadruple soy latte.'” I don’t know. I feel “tricked.”

I grew up in Seattle, or rather, in one of Seattle’s eastern suburbs. (The one where Microsoft is.) But I went to school in Seattle proper for a sizable chunk of my childhood and subsequently spent most of my weekends there, so I’ve logged many a memory within city limits. Coming up in this part of the Pacific Northwest inured me to the psychological damage its harsh gray sky tends to inflict on transplants. (Hell, garments in varying shades of “harsh gray” make up a full third of my wardrobe.) The DSM-IV terms this condition I have avoided “seasonal affective disorder,” and when you type that into Google, two  suggested searches pop up immediately: “seasonal affective disorder pacific northwest,” and “seasonal affective disorder seattle.” My girlfriend packed me off on this trip with a bag of delights that included a hip flask; were I SAD-susceptible, I’d have taken one look upward upon deplaning, sought the nearest source of liquor to fill it, and started taking slugs right away.

My friend Nick, who grew up in California, once told me of his love for Portland. “I’d move there in a heartbeat,” he insisted, “but I just can’t deal with the light cycles.” I had only known “light cycles” as those things the guys ride in Tron. But I imagine that whatever bothers him and so many others hits its nadir during this particular season, the fall. Having entered the PNW at such an early age, I’ve actually come to enjoy the flattened, steely, early-darkening autumnal Seattle condition more than any other. The rain, of which I have yet encountered none, can make it trying to get around, but when it pours, just stay home and drop the needle onto some old-school. I can imagine no more suitable setting.

As soon as I moved from western Washington to southern California, I noticed one stark difference: teriyaki joints do not dot the southern Californian cityscape. Neither native western Washingtonians nor southern Californians will immediately understand this, since the phrase “teriyaki joint” means nothing in particular to the southern Californian, and a western Washingtonian notices the actuality of teriyaki joints no more than a fish notices the water in which it swims. The standard greater-Seattle-area teriyaki joint — and here you’re seldom more than half a mile from one — offers a fairly utilitarian menu of plates involving rice, a pile of something like salad, and meats typically limited to beef, chicken, and pork. Shrimp and tofu if you get lucky. I snapped the above menu at Teriyaki Bowl in Madison Park, the off-campus lunch spot of choice at the school where I did junior high, but I could’ve done it anywhere. Few businesses in Los Angeles serve the particular segment of eaters that these teriyaki joints do; you either have to go way down the scale, where you find the purveyors of atrocious Mexican-geared Chinese food, or considerably up it, to the sushi specialists which might grudgingly and perfunctorily serve you a plate of sweetened chicken if you demanded it. But why would you?

If you really want to experience a city, give yourself missions to complete within it. My own missions typically arise, when not from interviewing, from my failure to pack certain essential items in my luggage. This often leads me into fruitful clothes-shopping expeditions, as it did this week in Seattle’s Westlake Center. Knowing I needed another jacket, I semi-consciously and semi-unconsciously did not bring one with me, hoping on some level that Seattle’s fast roughening weather would force my hand. (In any given Los Angeles moment, one never really needs needs a jacket.) Even as I was purchasing one, my friend Julian’s co-worker berated him for not lending me one. “He’s from California,” she said. “He don’t know.” Despite having lived twelve formative years up here, I get treated like a naturalized Angeleno whenever I visit. What’s more, I actually feel like one.

Toward the end of my sixth-grade school year, a couple teachers spent a week taking a small group of us around town by bus. They aimed, I suppose, to teach us feckless pubescents how to navigate an urban environment, but since most of my classmates there seemed primed to drive minty fresh SUVs to school on the morning of their sweet sixteen, the intended lesson probably didn’t take. I had fun, but came away from Seattle’s bus system even more bewildered when I started, not intending to rejoin what I saw as a farrago of unpredictable routes, indecipherable transfer slips, and interminable standing-around sessions any time soon. Despite having a much easier time navigating the city as a Google Transit-equipped 27-year-old than as an essentially technology-bereft preteen, I can now say for sure that Seattle suffers serious transit problems. The worst of these is probably that a bus ride costs $2.25. If you want to buy a smartcard — and I collect few other souvenirs — it will set you back an astonishing five bucks. (Compare San Francisco’s two-dollar Clipper card, or Los Angeles’ one-dollar TAP.) And the card doesn’t even work on the poor old Seattle Center Monorail. And the card is named after a whale.

I find Seattle pretty cool, really I do. At least most of the time. But at moments — and maybe only because I come from around these parts — I just have to facepalm.

 

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

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E12: Good Old Shareware with Stan James

Monday, October 8, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco’s Mission at the Noisebridge hacker space with Stan James, founder of Lijit, creator of the first browser-based massively multiplayer games, co-host of the 7th Kingdom podcast, and author of a book in progress on technology and our minds. They discuss Noisebridge itself and its almost Utopian qualities; how the supernormal stimuli of cat videos create addiction; how his early multiplayer games could created addiction; San Francisco’s position as the American city to be in for those with technological interests, not exclusively technological interests; the optimal Mission-style burrito ordering strategy; how we’ve left the concept of immersion in virtual reality behind in favor of always being at least a little bit on the internet, and how we can see it in the ways we navigate and even date; stepping outside our reactions to new technological developments by going back to Plato; parental disregard for the protocol of Skype calling; his life in Berlin, another city where people go to do projects and make things; how and why he became “Wandering Stan,” and the importance he’s found of digging into others’ lives when he’s in actual places; whether younger so-called “digital natives” can better handle technological addictiveness; how wide a swath of the human experience San Francisco offers; how he discovered the difference between his engaged-in-a-project face and his dead-eyed Reddit-browsing face; and how Avril Lavigne reached Nepal before she reached him.

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

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Portland Diary III

Sunday, October 7, 2012

With a “greater” area of nearly 500 square miles and blocks that can feel 500 yards long, Los Angeles has instilled in me a certain sense of distances. Rarely in that city do I need to ride my bike anywhere farther than twelve miles away, but on its roads that can take an hour. Portland, by contrast, had me believing I could reach any point from any other within fifteen minutes — and often I could! Luxuriating in this ease, I began turning up late to things by day four or five. Portland’s much-discussed Urban Growth Boundary no doubt plays a part in this, as does the fact that I didn’t have any business to do out in the sticks. Some, like Dorothy Parker famously pronouncing on “72 suburbs in search of a city,” consider any business in Los Angeles sticks business, but I think of it like this: how many other cities offer neat stuff in places that would anywhere else come to no more than bedroom communities? I saw little evidence of Portland offering equivalents of oysters in San Pedro, barbecue in Compton, or soup dumplings in Alhambra, but I’d be fascinated to find out if it secretly does.

One should begin the day in Portland, my instincts told me, with a lavish vegan breakfast. I ate one at the Vita Café on northeast Alberta Street, a neighborhood several Portlanders described to me as the current locus of much of both the city’s interestingness and its gentrification. (I then proceeded to satisfy my sense of incongruity by interviewing the founder of the Portland Meat Collective.) Not long before, I found myself pedaling down southeast Division Street, kombucha in hand, texting. Clearly, it didn’t take me long to get about this Portland life. Spend so much as a weekend in the city and you’ll feel how easily you can relax into the Stumptown sensibility, a filter that for me both enhances and reduces everything passing through. Biking from coffee shop to coffee shop, buying artisanal bacon chocolates, and browsing stacks of used books, I felt personally enhanced — and, somehow, personally reduced.

In Los Angeles, at least Los Angeles east of La Cienega, things just sort of present themselves raw, barely affected for either good or ill by their surroundings. It tells you how much I have internalized this atomization that, in Portland, I kept thinking with mild surprise that may have ultimately edged into mild irritation, Hey, they speak English at every business here. Despite all I recommend about it, I could never, ever call the town stateless. Portland exists in the state of Portland, the world of Portland, indeed the reality of Portland. As much as I wish other cities would take pages from its playbook — specifically the ones about cycling infrastructure, street trees, cool bridges, and the soil that allows charming cafés to grow like mushrooms — I fear that the instructions wouldn’t translate, that the innovations which thrive in Portland and in turn help Portland thrive would crumble immediately to dust in the harsh outside air. As David Sedaris wrote in Japan about such fragile, civilized conveniences as outdoor vending machines:

“Can you believe it?” he asked. “In the subway station, on the street, they just stand there, completely unmolested.”

“I know it,” I said.

Our Indonesian classmate came up, and after listening to us go on, he asked what the big deal was.

“In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him.

The Indonesian raised his eyebrows.

“He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Persons would break the glass and cover everything with graffiti.”

The Indonesia student asked why, and we were hard put to explain.

“It’s something to do?” I offered.

“But you can read a newspaper,” The Indonesian said.

“Yes,” I explained, ” but that wouldn’t satisfy your basic need to tear something apart.”

Sports even felt different in Portland. Adam, to my delight, took me to a Timbers game, and there I gazed upon what looked to me like the nuclear core of Portland pride. That core would be located on the end of the window-and-door-manufacturer-sponsored stadium dominated by something called the Timbers Army. My interviewee Mike Russell, in his comic on the subject, describes them as the team’s “very large, very loud fan brigade.” The Timbers struggle — I get the sense that they bear an underdog reputation similar to that of Japanese baseball’s Hanshin Tigers, a team with an equally culturally revealing fanbase that I would pay dearly to watch play were I visiting Osaka in baseball season — but their Army’s enthusiasm never wanes. Up they show, clad in sometimes handmade Timbers gear and waving often handmade Timbers flags. The match ended in a 1-1 tie, but the home goal released, among other bursts of celebration, twin clouds of green smoke. This drew out many a camera phone, not slowest mine.

“KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD,” read occasional patches of inexplicably official-looking graffiti. But what, in Portland, counts as weird? I get the sense that visitors would readily stick that label on, say, a unicyclist rolling down the street in a Utilikilt and a Darth Vader helmet. You no doubt have a nontrivial chance of seeing such a sight on Portland avenues — I myself noticed more Utilikilts than I’ve seen in southern California, uh, ever — but Portland weird strikes me more as a variety of goofiness than deep strangeness. Los Angeles weird, as I soon remembered upon returning home, unsettles you. Go from the City of Roses to the City of Angels, and Utilikilt Vader becomes a middle-aged man who looks normal from a distance but upon closer inspection has a long-dry drool stain running down his shirt, no shoes, several missing toes, and a Bluetooth earpiece into which he yammers neither sanely nor quite insanely. (Take this one step further, and you get Mexico City weird.)

Portland more than anywhere else makes me consider the question of whether a city’s strengths and weaknesses, its points of livability and unlivability, don’t just balance each other but emerge from each other. What you love about a city, in this framework, dictates what you hate about it, and vice versa. If Los Angeles fails at integrating its constituent parts into a coherent common culture, it therefore succeeds at avoiding letting those parts dissolve into homogeneity. (Hence, superior taquerías.) If Portland has succeeded in developing a distinctive yet user-friendly sensibility and avoiding the classic varieties of harsh urban strife, it may have also failed to cultivate an aesthetic and intellectual churn sufficiently exciting to flow over its UGB-defined borders. Not that it makes much sense to speak in this context of “success” and “failure”; were I feeling more Californian, I’d bust out the yin and the yang. I certainly didn’t come to Portland to proclaim that it’s got nothin’ on Los Angeles, although in many senses, it’s got nothin’ on Los Angeles. In equally many senses, though, Portland has everything on Los Angeles. I’ve already got my next visit booked three months from now, which speaks for itself. This time, I’m bringing my lady; someone‘s got to split these Black Tiger milkshakes with me.

 

[Previous diaries: San Francisco 2012, Mexico City 2011]

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E11: Authenticity v. Utopia with Jonathon Keats

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down somewhere in between San Francisco’s Chinatown, Nob Hill, and Russian Hill with conceptual artist, experimental philosopher, and writer Jonathon Keats, author of the upcoming book Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age. They discuss his own role as, above all, a fake; his attempt to epigenetically clone such celebrities as Lady Gaga, Michael Phelps, and Barack Obama; Forged, forgery, pursuit of simulacra, and Wim Wenders’ Notebook on Cities and Clothes; content’s ongoing release from form, and how it sends out the concept of forgery even as it brings it back in; the enthusiastically forged paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Thomas Kinkade’s massively replicated, “master highlighted” images; authenticity as it relates to spaghetti and meatballs; San Francisco’s intriguing tension between the claims of its own authenticity and its vision of itself as an experimental utopia — or, in his words, its simultaneous tendencies toward the “incredibly smug” and “very insecure”; why Europeans love San Francisco, and whether that has anything to do with the city’s ultimate derivation from their own; his thought experiments’ usefulness as “curiosity amplifiers,” generating larger questions than the ones they came from; the difference between doing experimental philosophy in San Francisco and in other countries, like Italy; and the exhilarating American freedom that also numbs.

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

(Photo: Jen Dessinger)

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Portland Diary II

Sunday, September 30, 2012

“You from one of those… Ivy league places?” A Scatman Crothers-ish TSA agent asked me this, half-accusingly, as I passed through his station, thus continuing the long tradition of my being attributed to regions I’ve never even visited. Not really, I haltingly responded, and the man softened. “Hey, that’s alright,” he said. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.”

Geoff Dyer writes that Friedrich Nietzsche “loved what he called ‘brief habits’ but so hated ‘enduring habits’ that he was grateful even to the bouts of sickness or misfortune that caused him to break free of the chain of enduring habit. (Though most intolerable of all, he went on, would be ‘a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.’)” The passage comes in Dyer’s essay “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition”, in which he describes his perpetually restarting quest, in each city he lives in or visits, to find the ideal cappuccino and donut for his “elevenses.” (That’s a British thing.) Even these few short days in Portland have me reveling in Nietszcheanly brief habits of my own, the most enjoyable of which finds me waking up early, hopping on my bicycle, and riding across one of the Willamette River’s many bridges (I still haven’t counted them) for coffee on the east side of town. Theoretically I could continue this habit in Los Angeles, heading east for a cafe de olla or something, but the Los Angeles River, for all its neglected Repo Man charm, doesn’t offer quite the same experience.

Pulling up a map, I see that eight bridges connect one half of Portland to the other. My first cycle trips across these proved glorious enough that I decided to ride across them all. After interviewing bicycle planning consultant Mia Birk, I immediately rented a Jamis and commenced two-wheeled exploration. This strikes me as the way to most thoroughly figure out a city, even the bicycle-unfriendly ones; hell, almost everything I’ve figured out about Los Angeles, I’ve figured out while biking. A purely psychological advantage accompanies the navigational one. David Byrne, who in part inspired me to do this, writes in Bicycle Diaries that, on a bike, “your unconscious is free to kind of mull over what it is you’ve got to deal with that day or whatever creative stuff you’re working on. Sometimes the problems get a little closer to being solved by the time you get to where you’re going.” Or as Douglas Coupland said, albeit about driving, it’s “the only place where you’re legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It’s enforced meditation and this is good.”

So if you want to start cycling-as-everyday-transport anywhere in North America, start it in Portland. Alas, the city’s relatively astonishing density of cycle-related infrastructure and amenities quickly inflated to ludicrous proportions my expectations for same. Then came the night that I blindly attempted to cross the Fremont Bridge, which is pretty much the 405. That went… ingloriously.

I’ll recommend another city exploration strategy, if you can swing it: adhere to a schedule not dictated by where you feel like going or where you think you “should” go, but where your interviewees can conveniently meet you. Coming to my Notebook on Cities and Culture guests has taken me to neighborhoods, and often those neighborhoods’ finest coffee shops, that I never would have otherwise considered visiting. In Portland specifically, I’ve tended to meet people way out east, right up to 82nd Avenue — past which, as one guest assured me, the really troubling meth crimes begin.

Sitting down for drinks with those friends and guests who happen to be interviewers, full-time or occasional themselves, I’ve picked up several useful techniques lately. (For this is how I live my life: my interests include literature, film, food, cycling, drinking, cities, making friends, and cycling to city bars to have drinks with friends where we eat and talk about film and literature.) One mentioned starting off with explicit follow-up questions  to those asked by previous interviewers. Another described how, given his interest in architecture, he thinks about conversation as a means of discovering the structures — intellectual, aesthetic, social, commercial — his interlocutors see themselves operating within. (Yeah, I totally get off on ideas like that.) Another praised Jon Stewart’s technique of setting down his hand on the  table before him to subtly signal that he has a question about what his guest’s saying at that moment. I’ve been trying these out here in Portland. They work!

Only bring up Portlandia when absolutely necessary: I set this policy before even leaving Los Angeles. Yet most of the Portlanders I talk to bring up the show before I do, and they seem of a surprisingly unified mind about it. Yes, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein exaggerate the place, but only just. And yes, everyone has real-life stories to tell that could appear, with little alteration, as Portlandia sketches. I can report that the dream of the nineties is alive in Portland. Though that dream has much to recommend it, I never myself dreamt it. (By the same token, Portland girls really do look like that, and then some, but I go for something quite different.) The line about this city being “where young people go to retire” carries a chilling truth, and it seems to me that what happens in Portland tends to stay here. Portland has created its own reality, and pleasingly so, but how seriously are you  supposed to take someone who lives in their own reality?

As my friend Adam, dozen-year Portland resident, said, “Yeah, Portlandia‘s a great show about this city. Next season they should do a satire.”

But Portlanders really do drive Volvos. More specifically, Portlanders drive maroon Volvos and early-eighties Volvos. More specifically still, Portlanders drive maroon early-eighties Volvos. Because my ex-girlfriend drove just  such an automobile, I assumed that my familiarity with them prompted me to notice each one that passed by. But then I realized that I noticed one every hour or two. This gave me a useful organizing photographic principle; I took many more maroon early-eighties Volvo shots than you see here. Snapping one in motion remains my white whale. My girlfriend girlfriend, by contrast, drives a green Mini, of which I have seen exactly one in Portland. But it wasn’t the right shade of green. (British thing.)

 

[Previous diaries: San Francisco 2012, Mexico City 2011]

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Portland Diary I

Friday, September 28, 2012

“Black Tiger milkshakes!” This my girlfriend exclaimed after I brought up my imminent trip to Portland. “It would probably be an exaggeration to say that a Black Tiger shake is made with vanilla ice cream, eight shots of espresso, and two pounds of ground coffee beans,” food writer Matthew Amster-Burton says about the drink about which she enthused. “But that’s what it tastes like.” Promising that night to pound one as soon as I landed in Portland, I proceeded to do just that a mere quarter-mile from my arrival gate. (Portland’s airport has at least one Coffee People stand right in there.) I worried that the cashier would look at me funny when I demanded a hypercaffeinated milkshake at 10:00 in the morning, but figured the same suspension of social rules applies to airport Coffee Peoples as to airport bars: who knows what time zone you’re coming from? (The very same one, in my case.) In the event, she looked at me a little funny.

Waking up at 4:00 a.m., I downed a French press of coffee to ensure alertness enough to catch my flight. On the plane itself, I accepted at least one further cup of coffee. Then the Black Tiger attacked soon after I set foot on Portlandian soil. I promptly made my way to an interview, at a coffee shop, where I naturally purchased an iced coffee to keep me on my game. A couple years back, Brian Eno gave a lecture at Long Beach State, and during it — apropos what, I can’t remember — he told of the severe panic attacks he used to experience. It turned out that they’d simply been brought on by his ever-intensifying coffee habit. This struck me as faintly implausible at the time, but on this particular day I internalized exactly what he meant. Watching my hands shake, it suddenly felt inexplicably urgent that I make sure the same lady who recommended I down the bulk of this caffeine megadose was still alive back home. I had no reason to believe she wasn’t (although I did find myself shaken earlier upon witnessing horrific auto wreck, featuring a corpse still slumped in an exploded-looking vehicle, on the still-dark highway to LAX), but she was off camping, out of cellphone range, which only fed the flames.

Lesson learned: Brian Eno is never wrong. Lesson reinforced, I mean.

Traveling solo, I demand little in the way of creature comforts: hostel bed, hostel shower, transit pass, and a decent density of wi-fi enabled coffee shops (which can make a cappuccino worth a damn) in which to work. Never one to eat at a real “sit-down restaurant” alone, I tend to limit myself to the fruits of trucks, stands, and whatever the sandwichcraft of those wi-fi enabled coffee shops can muster. Validatingly, a friend who lives half his year in Japan swears by that country’s convenience stores as a food source, and the frequency of my Los Angeles lunchtime visits to Nijiya, Marukai, and Famima! have set me in good stead to pick up that habit. In Portland, I have thus far relied upon the town’s recently famous food carts, not-especially-mobile trailers clustered into a series of parking lot-based “pods” throughout the city. The one near O’Bryant Square offered up a pulled pork sandwich on my first night. On my second, a tired-looking lady from the Philippines (“It’s been a long day”) served me up a heap of chicken adobo and whatever pancit she could find around. I have heard tell of Thai pumpkin curry. I have heard tell of poutine.

The caffeine disaster combined with the displacement of an early-morning flight combined with the mental bandwidth consumption of my still-forming interviewing schedule did, briefly, strike the fear into me that absolutely everything — everything — had gone to shit. You have known this feeling, surely, and you know that it tends to pass. But don’t you sometimes wonder if it simply comes as a function of diet, fresh air, and exercise? As soon as I’d had a night’s sleep, eaten something leafier than a milkshake, and rented a bike to ride around, I could hardly remember what had so distressed me before. We vainly pin our malaise on grander concerns, even as the evidence of terribly mundane physiology mounts behind it all.

(My traditional visit(s) to Voodoo Doughnut will therefore have to wait until my final day in the city. As for that poutine cart… I’ll try, sans promises, to hold it down.)

Hands shaking, words barely forming, I interviewed cartoonist and film critic Mike Russell mere hours after landing in Portland. Two weeks ago, he happened to make an illustrated blog post about travel; specifically, about having found and read “the Angst-Journal I Kept During A Eurail Vacation 20 Years Ago.” He draws ten lessons from this harrowing journey into his youthful mind, and I find number six particularly resonant:

Look around. Observe. Get outside yourself. I was disappointed during the re-read to learn that I spent most of my angst-journal dumping my sensitivities on the page instead of, you know, writing down the names and addresses and stories of the people I met and the incredible vistas I was seeing. “Feeling” might be less important than “looking,” as it turns out.

Having never done the traditional young American’s extended trips — Eurail zig-zagging, Southeast Asia backpacking, Central America-traversing — I often wonder if I’ve missed out on important formative experiences abroad. Then again, I avoided those prescribed excursions precisely because of the age-related expectation. I just couldn’t bear the idea of being another Freshly College-Graduated Early-Twentysomething (or worse, Freshly High-School Graduated Late-Teenage) American in Europe. All told, now that making up for lost travel time has become the order of the day, I suppose I prefer doing so as a late-twentysometing: one who has at least scraped together a serviceable amount of maturity, one who has shed the armor plates of identity that enable what Russell calls the “I-get-artfully-drunk-and-write-Linklater-scripted-poetry-in-my-journal, Ethan Hawke brand of angst,” and one who has awfully serious interviewing work to do. We get to know ourselves at this age, however tentatively, and as such — pace those C8H10N4O2 freakouts  — we don’t get so worked up and upset, not like before. It’s a good time to start things.

Despite expressing great general satisfaction with the city, nearly every Portlander I’ve talked to admits mild to great dissatisfaction with its lack of diversity. Los Angeles, by contrast, offers diversity as an advantage and perhaps little else. But damn, what an advantage.

 

[Previous diaries: San Francisco 2012, Mexico City 2011]

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E10: Eco Chamber with Ethan Nosowsky

Friday, September 28, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco’s Mission with Ethan Nosowsky, Editorial Director at McSweeney’s. They discuss security breaches at the McSweeney’s office by overenthusiastic fans seeking a physical connection to their favorite publisher of physical books; his tendency to act as “the Joe Lieberman of publishing” in his editorial career, carrying unchanging tastes through changing times; Geoff Dyer, the writer with whom he has worked the longest, and how the subject-independence of Dyer’s writing parallels the subject-independence of his editing; the counterintuitively un-self-indulgent qualities of “Dyeristic” prose; memoir booms vampire booms, and the eternal bad-book boom; how he finds the real action in hybrids of fiction and essay, and how those forms provide the surprises that all art should; his life in New York publishing before his homecoming to the San Francisco Bay area, and how he has come to regard the ecosystem/echo chamber of the New York literary scene at a distance; the dominance of food and technology over books in Bay Area culture; David Byrne‘s new How Music Works, and other books that you want certain authors to write; and the potential usefulness of the authorly switcheroo, as when Dyer planned to write a book about tennis but wrote a book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

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

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My U.S. landmark takedown on 11 Points Countdown

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

 

Above you’ll find my triumphant return to Sam Greenspan’s 11 Points Countdown. This time, he sat me down for a morning Boddington’s-in-hand discussion of the United States’ eleven most overrated landmarks, as voted by his viewership. He’d been to all of them; I’d been to none of them but, bizarrely, EPCOT Center. Had we done the top fifteen most overrated, I would have told all my childhood Space Needle stories. Hell, I think I nearly did anyway.

Other recent press and guest appearances:

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E9: Beautiful Abstractions with Josh Kornbluth

Monday, September 24, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down at downtown San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum with monologist Josh Kornbluth. They discuss the proper pronunciation of the word “monologist”; his simultaneous return to the practice of oboe-playing and late entry into things Jewish; the question of whether Andy Warhol is “good for the Jews,” and how he spun it into a monologue; the qualities of faith shared by Judaism and the communism of his childhood, which still releases endorphins when he thinks about it; the difficulty of dragging beautiful, pure abstractions of any kind into the concrete human sphere; Haiku Tunnel, the “FUBU of office workers”; the implicit premise of perhaps most monologues that everything ultimately connects to everything; how to show you’ve put in the hours on a performance by presenting its artifice just right; building a career in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how the place ratchets the average New York Jew’s stress level down from eleven to ten; New York as his own personal primordial ooze; how San Francisco tends to push out its aspirers, especially where theater is concerned; the outsider’s longing to understand music, Judaism, or both, and how he’s come to experience both as practices; and the wonder of trying, failing, and trying again at one’s craft within a community.

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

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Podthoughts: It Came from Japan

Monday, September 24, 2012

Vital stats:
Format: modern Japanese rock and modern Japanese rock talk
Episode duration: 35m-2h
Frequency: monthly

My friends who taught English in Japan in the nineties insist that the glory days have gone. They describe having stood in the blast radius of the last and most exciting flowering of Japanese popular culture, that which burnt out with the twentieth century. Of course, older Japanese scholars I meet insist that, on the contrary, the country stopped generating exciting works of art around the end of the sixties. I’ve never met him, but somewhere, a supercentenarian Japanophile surely insists that nothing of note has come out of Japan since before the Second World War. Each of these laments applies to a different facet of the culture: the music twenty years ago, the film and literature fifty years ago, and eighty years ago… oh, I don’t know, netsuke?

None of this rearguard action for the mind or minds behind It Came from Japan [iTunes], the music podcast of the eponymous music agency. It Came from Japan itself has the unusual and highly geographically specific mission of, and I quote, “bring the freshest, creamiest Japanese bands to the UK.” Rock bands, specifically. And yes, the UK, specifically. An unusual pairing, you might think, but upon reflection the countries have much in common: small, islands, bound by a vast and often tacit superstructure of position and obligation, valuing politeness yet incubating youth cultures of studied rudeness. In both lands over the past half-century, these last have tended to execute their rebellion in one form especially: rock music.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

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