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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E13: The Trash Compactor of Reality with Scott Jacobson

Friday, March 30, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in Atwater Village with comedy writer and music video director Scott Jacobson, who has written for programs like The Daily Show, Squidbillies, and Bob’s Burgers, and made videos for artists like Nick Lowe, Superchunk, and The National. They discuss the comedic style of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and whether a place exists for it today; expectations, the enemy of comedy; what it means that the likes of Adult Swim and Tim & Eric can thrive in today’s world, or if they indeed thrive in it; The Daily Show‘s rise alongside George W. Bush’s, and the trickiness of presenting its voice as the voice of reason; the feeling of finally getting a foothold in New York, and the sense of personal failing that comes from not loving it; whether anyone else misses the obscure cruelty of Craig Kilborn’s Daily Show; the “journalistic vamp” and other news filler, up to and including Glenn Beck’s moment of popularity; the “trash compactor of reality” that is political coverage, and the solace offered by a Squidbillies or a Bob’s Burgers; his childhood love of the divisive Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist; the way critical opinion eventually came to elevate Carl Barks’ Scrooge McDuck Comics, and the joy of bringing something in “low art,” like Hospitality’s “Friends of Friends,” to the public’s attention; using ridiculous contexts to smuggle genuine content; New York’s manic energy that insistently pushes you forward; and the phenomenon of “really smart people doing really stupid things” that, championed by the David Lettermans and Conan O’Briens of the world, has risen to prominence in modern comedy.

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

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E12: We Care About Everyone with William Flesch

Monday, March 26, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood with William Flesch, professor at Brandeis University and author of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. They discuss José Saramago’s way with obscure Biblical episodes; literary Darwinism and its discontents; why and how we get concerned with what happens to fictional characters at all; the difference between stories we care about versus stories we don’t; how we recommend books, films, and shows to friends, thus caring about how they care about how characters care about one another; Michael Haneke’s scary Funny Games viewed with an audience and Michael Haneke’s ludicrous Funny Games viewed at home; what’s so great about Wittgenstein; the trade-off between humanizing and monsterizing your villains, as with Hitler in Max and The Boys from Brazil; the perfect biological pitching of Onion‘s 9/11 headline “Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell”; what makes the 19th-century novels of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray so gripping; our desire to feel we’ve misjudged characters; Buffy, Angel, and our bets about liking them; and characterization and reversion to type all the way from Shylock to Stewie Griffin.

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

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Podthoughts: CB Radio

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Vital stats:
Format comedian interviewing comedians (but in Austin!)
Episode duration: 12m-45m
Frequency: twice weekly

Cameron Buchholtz interviews comedians. This places him alongside several well-known podcasters, including public radio’s own Jesse Thorn (and public radio’s nearly nobody else). Cameron Buchholtz also does comedy, which places him alongside several well-known comedian-podcasters, including Marc Maron, Pete Holmes, Dave Hill, and Julie Klausner. He sets his own podcast apart in three ways, first and most obviously by giving it the delightfully punny name of CB Radio [iTunes]. (You’ll also notice its site’s sweet design.)

Second, he tends to record interviews in Austin, Texas, his city of residence. You might assume that this choice would limit him to marginal if nevertheless funny interviewees, but nope; for better or for worse, Buchholtz talks with a great many of the same comics that Los Angeles or (to a lesser extent) New York podcasters do. By catching them when their circuit — or, less often, a to-do like South by Southwest — rolls them by, he’s interviewed the likes of Jimmy Pardo [MP3], Doug Benson with Graham Ellwood [MP3], Paul F. Tompkins [MP3, Jackie Kashian [MP3, and even fellow comedian-interviewers like Pete Holmes [MP3]. I don’t need to tell you about these comics’ conversational skills; if you’ve listened to podcasts for any time at all, you already know. Holmes, in fact, somehow gets Buchholtz to publicly admit his schoolyard nickname: “Crammin’ Buttholes.” Once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.

Read the whole thing at maximumfun.org.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E11: How Serious Are You? with Megan Ganz

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in Larchmont with comedy writer Megan Ganz, who’s written for the Onion and Important Things with Demetri Martin, and now writes for NBC’s Community. They talk about easing her transition from New York to Los Angeles with the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink; Los Angeles as an unfurnished apartment to New York as a furnished one; her fond memories of aimless subway trips; what we don’t know about growing up in Michigan, especially regarding the preparation of vegetables and local pride in Tim Allen; the Onion as something to aspire to in adolescence; the best comedy’s tendency to happen naturally, without being in on its own jokes; what one would get wrong by assuming Community, the “show that can get away with anything,” represents a model of sitcoms today; her use of the voices of various characters and institutions rather than he own; the comedy gold to be mined from misalignments between tone and content; community college-going as a hobby; and the lingering question that hangs over certain people, places, and operations: “How serious are you?”

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

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Podthoughts: Dave Hill’s Podcasting Incident

Tuesday, March 20, 2012


Vital stats:
Format: Dave Hill talking to comedians and other people he knows, bracketed by Dave Hill talking (or shredding)
Episode duration: 45m-2h
Frequency: one or two per month

I feel the time has nearly come to define a new genre of podcasting: comedians interviewing their friends and, if they seem entertaining enough, their acquaintances and friends-of-friends. Marc Maron’s Los Angeles-based WTF became a notable early example of this, though he’s found even more success by widening his mandate to include people he doesn’t much like or simply has a curiosity about. More recently, Pete Holmes gave the idea his own peculiar spin with You Made It Weird, and Julie Klausner’s How Was Your Week transplanted it into rich New York City soil. A couple years back, comedian Dave Hill launched a similar project from his own NYC base: Dave Hill’s Podcasting Incident [RSS] [iTunes].

Then again, “comedian” doesn’t quite cover it. The man also writes articles, contributes to This American Life, and plays guitar or bass in a bunch of current, former, and semi-fictional bands. He also maintains a faintly Wildean personal style, on display when he hit fashion week as a correspondent for Put This On. Hill, in other words, has made himself into a man of many skills. This would have gotten him all kinds of traction in, say, the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but in our debased modern era, this sort of thing seems to drain one’s notoriety rather than boost it. But I suspect this very range has allowed him to cultivate such a striking podcast guest list: accompanying the comedians like Tig Notaro [MP3] or Rob Delaney [MP3], we’ve got New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell [MP3], no-longer-uptight (so he claims) musician Moby [MP3], and charter Culture Club member Boy George [MP3]. See a mix of names like those, and you more or less have to download a few episodes, just to hear what could possibly be going on.

 

Read the whole thing at maximumfun.org.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E10: A Roomful of Strangers with Wade Major

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Wade Major, senior film critic at Boxoffice, co-host of IGN’s Digigods, and regular participant on KPCC’s Filmweek. They discuss what Sucker Punch represents the coagulation of; whether it is a greater crime for Zack Snyder to make Zack Snyder movies sincerely, or for Zack Snyder to make Zack Snyder movies cynically; the importance of spontaneity, not formula, to creative business; the simultaneous democratization of criticism and of filmmaking itself; the world he emerged out of film school into; his father’s career in silent pictures; the philosophical differences between the film schools at USC, UCLA, and CalArts; the possibilities of a new business model for criticism meant to be read after seeing the movie; Pauline Kael’s conception of criticism as a means of keeping filmmakers honest; bigtime directors’ assumptions that they can’t make films about their real passions; The Artist as it taps into both filmmakers’ and critics’ fears of getting left behind; how without taste, you’ve lost; feeding off the energy of a roomful of strangers in actual theatrical screenings, and learning something about yourself at the same time; the “dysfunctional family” that is the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; the critic’s mandate to move film into a larger cultural context; and the director’s mandate to get out into the world and live before ever shooting a frame.

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

(Photo: Kristi Lake)

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E9: Suggested User with Alison Agosti

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Feliz with comedy writer, baseball reporter, and Twitter “suggested user” Alison Agosti. They discuss the preferred pronunciation of “Los Feliz”; Rancho Cucamonga’s chief industry of teenage pregnancy; how Los Angeles looked while she was growing up in the Inland Empire; the promise of New York as a land of letters, art, and coats; her mass childhood purchase of used Woody Allen tapes, including but not limited to Husbands and Wives; the morning she woke up to 1500 e-mails from Twitter in her inbox; her realization that comedy writing could count as a job; what it takes to get on a Maude team; her struggle to coming up with new ways to write “hit the ball” or to present a narrative in a 2-1 game against the Diamondbacks; her music blog Headphones In; finding humor in the complicated, as unworkable as it can end up in a sketch; raking in the Twitter stars by mentioning eating something weird by yourself; her weariness of apologizing for Los Angeles, a city that doesn’t work against you except when you can’t find parking; Venice, either the “weirder” or “non-shitty” Santa Monica; how we only children who refuse to network or compete can explain ourselves to actual grown-ups; the appeal of the intelligent, loud, brilliant but unself-aware Woody Allen-type character; what she likes to satirize in herself; playing (but not beating) Ecco the Dolphin on the Sega Genesis; and “the woman-in comedy thing,” which turns out not to be a thing at all.

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

(Photo: Philip Eierund)

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Little Tokyo Historical Society: Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo

Friday, March 9, 2012

Only natural, I figure, to go from the Images of America book on where I live in Los Angeles to the Images of America book on a neighborhood that first fired up my interest in Los Angeles. Before I moved, visits to Little Tokyo underscored Santa Barbara’s failure to provide certain necessities: ramen shops, sit-down arcade machines, Kinokuniya, fresh-griddled imagawayaki, 1-Man Band Arthur Nakane. After I moved, I would often ride the subway to Little Tokyo in the mornings just to eat snacks and explore. Some Los Angeles visitors might ask what there is to explore, given that, even at its height, Little Tokyo covered not much more than a square mile. I reply that the neighborhood’s tininess and the distance from its boom years make it a richer experience, not a poorer one. As I wrote about the view from Cafe Dulce, a Little Tokyo coffee shop I frequent, you sit below the hotels Miyako and Kyoto Grand, those aging hulks of near-colonial seventies and eighties Japanese prosperity, you defocus your eyes a little, and you almost feel like that Bubble never burst.

A friend once asked me what I’d change about Little Tokyo. “Nothing,” I replied. He followed up, incredulous: “So you think it’s perfect?” Well… certainly not, but better to live amid distinctive imperfection than perfection, am I right? This makes intuitive sense to me, but I remain unsure quite how to explain it. I suppose it fits in with that whole notion of wabi-sabi — the appreciation of beauty in the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete — which, in this context, at least has the credibility of coming from Japan. As in Little Tokyo, so in greater Los Angeles: an interviewee once observed that, looking at the city, you often can’t tell whether it’s coming up or falling down. To get the most out of either the larger or the smaller place, you must appreciate that ambiguity in itself. You must also lay down enough shoe leather to get closely acquainted with the streets. To know Los Angeles or Little Tokyo is not necessarily to love them, but if you don’t know them, you won’t even stand a fighting chance of liking them.

It helped that, before even moving to California, I’d logged years of listening to Hiroshima, the Japanese-American jazz-funk band known for their allegiance to Los Angeles in general and Little Tokyo in particular. They named their eighth album after the city, and their fourteenth after the neighborhood. At least every couple weeks, I drop the needle on their second album Odori (featuring a piece of cover photography, shot on a downtown Los Angeles rooftop, which still ranks among the most strangely compelling I’ve seen) and hear it begin with a number called “Cruisin’ J-Town.” J-Town is another name for Little Tokyo, and Cruisin’ J-Town is also a short documentary about the band; I recently caught a screening, totally by accident, when volunteering at a Sunday-afternoon Filmforum show. Hiroshima also put out a ninja-themed music video for their 1983 song “San Say,” parts of which look to have been shot in or near Little Tokyo.

A group photo of Hiroshima in front of a well-known Little Tokyo mural appears in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, as does one of a lady at the Mitsuru Café making the aforementioned imagawayaki. Those aside, the book actually depicts fairly few of what I would consider the pleasures of Little Tokyo, focusing instead on the ever-shifting social order that made and remade the neighborhood. Some sort of housing discrimination pushed the first wave of Japanese immigration in the late 19th century toward this particular corner of downtown, and when post-Pearl Harbor internment cleared the place out, Little Tokyo briefly became a black neighborhood called Bronzeville; I hear Orson Welles loved to hit the jazz clubs that sprouted along Central Avenue. Despite the local government’s strongest efforts to avoid the reformation of “ethnic enclaves,” Little Tokyo went Japanese again after the war. A great deal of investment rode in on the crest of that high wave Japan set off in the late seventies, creating elements of that still define the neighborhood’s built environment, like the blue-roofed Japanese Village Plaza (which houses the likes of Mitsuru Café, Cafe Dulce, and, usually, Arthur Nakane) and the New Otani Hotel, which would become the Kyoto Grand in 2007 (and inside of which, so I’ve heard, it remains 1987).

Given how heavily Los Angeles’s Koreatown leaned on group pictures of Korean and Korean-American churches, sports teams, social clubs, it comes as no surprise that Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo triples down on that sort of thing. Little Tokyo’s history stretches further back in time than Koreatown’s, and thus it stretches further into the era when, to warrant something as flamboyantly high-tech as a photograph, you really needed to assemble at least a dozen people, all in their Sunday best. Not being much of a historian, I know little about how to read these photos for significant, non-menswear-related information. Luckily, a photographer by the name of Tōyō Miyatake roamed Little Tokyo in the early 20th century, beret on head and camera in hand, capturing the look and feel of his corner of Los Angeles even when on wedding detail. Such dedication did he cultivate for his craft that, when he got shipped off to Manzanar, he actually secreted his gear in with him and shot internment camp life. Something about the idea of a tireless, faintly eccentric, ever-recognizable documenter of place very much appeals to me. Does Little Tokyo still have them? Does any place? And assuming the oft-told story of the California roll being invented in Little Tokyo is true — there’s the day that will really live in infamy — did Miyatake capture it?

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E8: Can We Talk About Driving? with John Rabe

Friday, March 9, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in the Los Angeles Central Library’s courtyard with John Rabe, host of Off-Ramp, KPCC’s weekend pointillist portrait of Southern California. They discuss the merits of recording in a library courtyard and in Cheech Marin’s house in Malibu; picking a road in Los Angeles and following it wherever it goes; the troubled history of Cypress Park and the truth about the Isabel Street shooting; the Los Angeles “churn” and the effect of constant neighborhood change on the historical consciousness; the historical bounty to be found in the Los Angeles Public Library’s photo collection; the city’s rising optimism and falling crime (and its lack of a mob); the McMartin preschool trial; his desire to live in a place with the word “gardens” in its name; his tendency to look ahead, not back, and to move randomly, not in patterns, and how that shapes Off-Ramp‘s character; his anger at drivers who slow down on the freeway with their brakes; his plan to banish citizens who break the social contract and institute a Waste and Fraud Corruption Lottery to give money to the rest; the lessons of Carmageddon; what makes radio documentaries sustain; and how, if you want to create radio, you should just break out your iPhone (or whatever you have) and record something.

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

(Photo: Karl Rabe)

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E7: Geographical Verisimilitude with David Bax

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood with film and television critic David Bax, co-host of the podcasts Battleship Pretension and Previously On. They discuss his fifth-grade shoving match over Ghostbusters; the difference between criticism and the assertion of one’s opinions; being a film and television critic while living right near the heart of film and television production; Chicago’s advantages as a filmgoing city, including but not limited to the Gene Siskel Film Center; discovering a cinephile community on the bus; St. Louis and other cities’ loss of local critics writing with local sensibilities; whether the aspiring critic must first reject working in production; the sharpening of his critical perspectives on formalism and structuralism as revealed by Michael Mann’s Public Enemies; if a critic should tell an audience why they like a film, why the audience should like a film, why the audience should pay attention to a film, or simply how a film works; why the internet offers a superior medium for television criticism; what television can do that film can’t, and why to watch them differently; whether television shows labor under a corrupting business model; Treme, New Orleans and geographical verisimilitude; the askew real-placeness of many Los Angeles productions; the outdated marketing of television as evidenced by the Whitney billboards that once littered town; how and why to avoid approaching art as commodity; what he would say to those who who don’t consider criticism a “real job” (and how he would agree with them); and the necessity of discussing film and television as if for posterity, just as a program like The Sopranos seems to have been created for it.

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

(Photo: Jenny Smith)

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