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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E1: Affinity for the Dead with Nate DiMeo

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down at the West Hollywood Library with Nate DiMeo, public radio producer and creator of the podcast The Memory Palace. They discuss American history’s unique wealth of inventors, fakes, geniuses and eccentrics, such as serial impostor Stanley Clifford Weyman and child prodigy turned streetcar transfer taxonomist William James Sidis; the odd satisfaction of stories that arrive at “close enough” rather than classic success; the issue of the right historical moment for a creation, whether that creation is a podcast, a radio show, or the music of Slash; podcasting’s theoretically ideal function as public radio’s “indie underground” feeder system, and its failure thus far to perform that function; his own realization that The Memory Palace probably wouldn’t take the public radio path, and the freedom that gave him; the enduring appeal, no matter podcasting advantages, of the “kismet” of radio, which can deliver unexpected information, entertainment, and delight; why a relatively high degree of public radio innovation has gone on in Los Angeles, and how a public radio producer can become the hit of any entertainment-industry party here; why the older public radio generation hasn’t yielded to the younger; and what it takes for him, as an avowed non-history buff, to draw certain feelings from moments in American history and then reconstitute those feelings in audio form.

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

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Peter Hyun and the Space Group of Korea: Seoul: The Magnetic City

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

“Taller and more ruggedly built than their counterparts in Tokyo, Manila, or Bangkok, the people of Seoul exude a sense of resiliency and vitality,” writes Peter Hyun in this book’s introduction, “so much so that they make the other Asians look downright indolent.” Ah, perhaps we have here a publication of the Korean History Channel. “Seoul’s women, with their well-scrubbed, rosy-cheeked faces, look strikingly healthy and beautiful.” Read books from Korea on Korea printed in a certain era, and you’re never far from propaganda, but the country’s peculiar flavor of nationalism merits study. “The Koreans are a people with a strong sense of historically justified fear that their own fate has rarely been in their own hands,” Hyun writes toward the end. “This sober fact explains much of their drive to build economic and social stability as well as to preserve their own cultural identity.” A few pages on, he finds room for a parting shot: “Furthermore, the Koreans are the only people in the world who make even the Japanese — often accused by Westerners of being maniacally devoted to their work — look lazy.”

In between Hyun’s words come pages and pages of pictures, making Seoul: The Magnetic City essentially a photo book sandwiched between a few very short essays. The images cover the usual stuff: weddings, festivals, street scenes, colorful traditional dances, kids running around, old people shopping in complicated-looking grain markets, rush-hour traffic, historical landmarks, hulking new towers sometimes still under construction. While traveling, I, like many others, tend to turn my head for new things amid old or old things amid new. The long-standing (for varying definitions of “standing”) but rapidly and recently developed Seoul, with its gates and temples surrounded by sweeping infrastructure and futuristic high-rises, seems to provide just these sort of contrasts in great abundance. On a side-trip to Seoul during a stretch in Taipei, my friend Nick filled an entire blog post with pictures of the traditional and the modern coexisting there.

Written — or shot, if you like — in 1984, the book examines a Seoul clearly on a bewilderingly fast rise but still not quite as far open as it would crack after the 1988 Summer Olympics. East Asia of the eighties fascinates me; I’ll read any book or watch any film from that slice of the space-time continuum. (Most of the language-learning videos I use date from that era, too, and I watch them every day.) Don’t let the Korean History Channel hear, but eighties Japan fascinates me most of all. Presented with the opportunity to simply drop myself into a time and place, I feel I’d have no choice but Tokyo from about 1960 through 1990. Until that technology comes along, though, good old photo books still offer the next best experience. Using Seoul: The Magnetic City’s sometimes strangely dim and indistinct but large and often striking pictures for that purpose, I found myself surprised by the look of the townswomen. Well-scrubbed and apple-cheeked though they may have been, they dressed so… frumpy. The ladies of the Japanese eighties must have inflated my expectations for aesthetic boldness.

Then again, Korea had to more or less rebuild itself from the early fifties, after the Korean War; Japan had more to work with after the Second World War. In any other country facing the kind of historical setbacks Korea has, you’d expect the women to look dowdy even today. In 1984, their style, usually a reliable reflection of development, seems to have been a lagging indicator. The dullness of their dress, then — if you’ll allow me to emulate the voice of this book’s most boosterist passages — stands as a testament to the South Korean “Miracle on the Han River,” an industrialization, technical specialization, and lifestyle modernization so forceful that it left even a sector as aggressively au courant as women’s fashion panting to catch its breath. All reports from the streets of Seoul today, however, assure me the issue has been corrected — possibly too corrected. You can cool it on the plastic surgery, ladies. That eyelid one freaks us out.

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My Chris Marker tribute post for Open Culture

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

 

The filmmaker Chris Marker, who passed away Sunday on his 91st birthday, rose to cinematic respectability amid the storm of press surrounding the French New Wave and Left Bank Film Movement in the fifties and sixties. Publicity-averse and deliberately enigmatic, he always seemed to stand, untroubled, within the storm’s eye, and there found just enough space for his enduring productivity. “Marker struck foreign observers as being by far the best [political] mind of the movement,” wrote Clive James in an essay on the director in his book Cultural Amnesia. “Admittedly the competition wasn’t strong.” Having made such favorites of the international hard left as Letters from Siberia and ¡Cuba Sí!, Marker at some point lost the will to promote the notion that, in James’ words, “there might be such a thing as a totalitarian answer to the world’s miseries.” Only after rejecting the overtly political did he make the picture for which history will most readily remember him: 1962′s La jetée, a science-fiction short on the nature of memory and the fate of humanity (two career-long preoccupations) shot almost entirely with a simple still camera.

 

 

When Marker began traveling to Japan, his work deepened again. In Tokyo to shoot the 1964 Summer Olympics (a project that ultimately fell to Kon Ichikawa), he met Koumiko Muraoka, “over 20, but less than 30,” “not an example of anything, either class or race.” Marker’s investigation into this young lady’s inner life became a documentary — bearing in mind that the form turns into something considerably more elusive in this director’s hands — called Le mystère Koumiko. Through Marker’s camera, we see Koumiko stroll the streets of Tokyo, get her fortune told by phone, light incense at a temple, and stare at westernized department-store mannequins. At the same time, we hear Marker ask her about her experiences, her culture’s changing fashions, and the “mixed up” mind that comes from being a Manchuria-born, French-speaking, postwar Japanese woman. Even in the less-than-ideal condition of the video above, the film retains its stark, untroubled beauty, much like that of the classical, ukiyo-e angles of Koumiko’s face. “I ought to have been born very much earlier,” she laments.

 

 

As for Marker, cinematic colleague Alain Resnais called him “the prototype of the twenty-first-century man.” James wrote that “he was really born for the internet, but arrived in the world of universal information a few decades too early,” citing especially his “brave attempt at the synthetic work that gets everything in,” 1983′s Sans Soleil.  No single medium could contain Marker’s impulse to get everything in, and going into detail about every kind of work it drove him to — from his visual-art installations to his photo book on North Korean women to his CD-ROM Immemory — would take all day. But the ten-minute profile from Short Attention Span Cinema above, featuring interviews with directors Michael Shamberg and Terry Gilliam (whose 12 Monkeys took La jetée as an inspiration), gives you an overview. It even includes a reflection from the man himself: ”The La Jetée bar in Tokyo is one of the things of which I’m proudest. To think that Japanese cinephiles came every night to drink, often more than reason demands, beneath images from this film.”

[I write on Open Culture five days a week, by the way.]

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The final day of Notebook on Cities and Culture’s season-two Kickstarter drive is upon us

Monday, July 30, 2012

Here it comes — the end of the Kickstarter fund drive for Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s second season. As of this writing, we’ve raised $2886 from 41 backers with 28 hours to go. (For comparison’s sake, the first season ended its drive with $3000 from 46 backers.) Of course, if we don’t reach $3000 by August 1st, you all get to keep your money and spend it on other neat stuff. Collectibles and whatnot. Food. Shelter. But if we do, then I’ll fire up the new season as soon as possible, which will feature not only more conversations with the most fascinating cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene I can find in Los Angeles, but in San Francisco and Portland as well.

The remaining day also brings your last chance to sponsor an episode of the show or its entire coming season, meaning that you’ll get your own project or message announced at the top of one or every interview. A $75 pledge gets you one episode, and a $400 pledge gets you all of ’em. (The $1000 pledge option, which would have made you a guest on the show, got snapped up almost immediately.) For every $200 over the goal we raise, I’ll add another episode onto the season’s scheduled 24. Would it amuse you to force me to keep  season two running for a solid year? Fifteen grand ought to do it.

But please, don’t take my word for it. Why not read blog posts from a couple nice young men who can break it down for you? Erik G. writes that, in Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s conversations, “a lot of ground is covered in a way that other interviewers can’t hope to manage on a broadcast interview show,” and that “this is a show that could only be done in podcast form (despite the high level of polish and production).” He concedes that “that 25 dollars might be a lot to ask, but any amount of money donated will be to an independent voice with a unique perspective that enriches my life and many, many others.”

Timothy Nunan calls the show “exactly the kind of intellectual and sophisticated but still eminently accessible conversation about books and contemporary culture that I had been looking for for a long time,” adding that, “in an age when, bizarrely, cultural critics see in nepotistically-cast, New York-centric, navel-gazing television shows the great message for American women” — his links, by the way — “Marshall is a refreshing voice: outward looking, not the scion of Society, and based in Los Angeles, a city whose many charms once escaped me but Marshall helps to rediscover.” Sound like something worth continuing to you? If so, let’s take it to the finish line and then rack up some bonus rounds.

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Podthoughts: The Champs

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Vital stats:
Format: two white comedians and a DJ interview black guys, a pornstar, and Jose Canseco
Episode duration: 45m-1h35m
Frequency: 2-5 per month

Moshe Kasher, a comedian I’ve seen here and there in Los Angeles, wrote a memoir and became one of the very, very few nonfiction authors to appear for an interview on KCRW’s Bookworm. This alone got me interested in his other projects, a group which includes a podcast called The Champs[RSS] [iTunes]. He hosts it with fellow comedian Neal Brennan, known as the co-creator ofChapelle’s Show, and someone named DJ Douggpound, who seldom verbally interjects but fires off many a sound clip — “drops,” as the radio industry calls them, or called them long ago when the technology was a novelty — using his iPad. So you have these three guys, and then they’re doing an interview show, questioning a different guest each week and everything. While none of these qualities sounded particularly innovative in and of itself, they all combined to give me reason to suspect something… alive in this podcast. Something spirited.

Downloading episodes, I found interviews with quite a few creators, celebrities, and other public figures I don’t normally hear dropping by podcasts: Hollywood Shuffle director (and Meteor Manhimself) Robert Townsend [MP3], noted Eddie Murphy sibling Charlie Murphy [MP3], genre-defeating electronic musician Flying Lotus [MP3 1] [MP3 2]. David Alan Grier [MP3], to whose every appearance on Adam Carolla’s show I download, and The Roots’ Questlove [MP3], whom I still remember enjoying on Aisha Tyler’s Girl on Guy, also grabbed my attention. All guys with brains worth picking, and Kasher, Brennan, and Douggpound do a sharp and energetic job of it, but for a while I just couldn’t see the unifying concept.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

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Halfway through Notebook on Cities and Culture’s S2 Kickstarter drive — with $1091 to go

Friday, July 27, 2012

We’re three and a half days through the week-long Kickstarter fund drive for Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s second season, featuring interviews in San Francisco and Portland. If we can raise $3000 by the end of it, the show will go on. As of now, we’ve raised $1909, with 15 backers. (For reference, the first season’s fund drive raised $3000 with 42 backers.)

If you’d like to get a hand in, you’ve got three and a half days left. Opportunities remain to sponsor individual episodes or the entire season, which means your project or message will get talked about at the top of one or all of the season’s interviews. And after we reach the $3000 goal, each additional $200 means I add another episode to the planned 24. (So if you’ve ever wanted to indefinitely prolong a podcast, then, now’s your chance!) You’ll find all the details on the show’s Kickstarter page. Thanks.

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The Novel Cafe (Koreatown)

Friday, July 27, 2012

Give the Koreatown Novel Cafe this: nobody can object. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily trust an Angeleno who claims to love the place — show me a man who eats here every time they come to the neighborhood, and I’ll show you a man who’s given up — but if you’re meeting someone you don’t know very well for lunch, here’s your effortless go-to. I did just that recently, in fact. She got delayed coming out of LAX — try not to look surprised — so I sat at a table and waited, reading a Murakami novel and drinking their no-frills cappuccinos. “Have you got another person coming?” a waitress asked. “Be fifteen minutes,” I replied, not lying but not exactly not lying either. I think I sat there for a reasonably enjoyable hour and a half, and then for another two after she turned up. In Tokyo they’d surely lock me up for squatting on table real estate like this, but the Novel Cafe staff didn’t seem to mind.

What do you eat here? Oh, salads. Pesto sandwiches. Chicken wraps with lots of beans, corn, and lettuce. Complimentary bread with the faintest sweetness. Nothing to get excited about, and even slightly on the bland side, but somehow an unimprovable exemplar of this modern genre of California lunch food that bothers nobody and actually sounds just about ideal one hot day out of every two or three weeks. The Wilshire-facing window prominently advertises free wi-fi, and I think I glimpsed a room of vinyl records one time I really looked around, but I don’t know if this location qualifies as a much of a workspace or a hangout. If I set myself up to do bear down on some serious writing, I suspect that a staff member — they walk right up to your table and everything — would ask me why I haven’t ordered a wrap yet. I would get over this awkwardness quickly, but not everyone does. Then again, elements of the place do seem geared-toward the hanger-out; I notice many a wall-mounted sports-glowing television and a concert stage with a drum kit already on it, though I don’t know when it sees use.

Those who meet the semi-unknown for lunch all over town, especially on the westside, know that Novel Cafes have multiplied: you’ll find one in Westwood, an astonishing three in Santa Monica, and even one way over in Pasadena. I can’t vouch for those branches, but the Arts District location downtown, more a coffee shop than a full-service cafe, has on many days provided me a space to work and the drinkables to go with it. You can technically get lunch there, too — I ate a burrito of some kind there once, almost certainly containing avocado, and I’d recommend it — but nobody brings it to you. The Koreatown Novel Cafe has more “cool” going for it, or rather, a different kind of cool, a slicker, just-up-the-scale cool. The Arts District Novel Cafe’s cool is the cool of old typewriters used decoratively, a wall of loose-leaf tea, and a wide take-a-paperback-leave-a-paperback shelf. I get the sense that whoever’s running things thinks the Koreatown crowd — a crowd with different aspirations, to be sure — doesn’t want to see that stuff out in the open. They’ve got pesto to eat. But I, too, often have pesto to eat.

(More such writeups on Yelp.)

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Notebook on Cities and Culture season two in San Francisco and Portland Kickstarts now

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

 

Six months ago, we raised $3000 in a week to fund 32 episodes of Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s premiere season: 32 long-form interviews with cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene all over Los Angeles. Starting right now, we’re aiming to raise another $3000 in a week for Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s second season, which will not only offer more of what you enjoyed last season, but will begin the show’s world tour. We’ll take this operation up the west coast to Portland and San Francisco, exploring those cities and getting down into it with their most interesting luminaries.

Kickstarter, as you may already know, makes it exceedingly easy to fund projects like this. If we don’t reach $3000 within the week, you keep whatever money you’ve pledged. Give certain amounts, and you can sponsor the show in a variety of different ways:

  • For $25 or more, I’ll thank you by name in all of season two’s episodes.
  • For $75 or more, I’ll mention your own project or message at the top of one of season’s two’s episodes, and thank you by name in all of them.
  • For $400 or more, I’ll mention your own project or message at the top of all of season two’s episodes.
  • For $1000 or more, you’ll be the guest in one of season two’s episodes. I’ll come to you (within North America only, at least for this season) and we’ll record a conversation about the culture you create and the city you create it in. I’ll also thank you by name in all of season two’s episodes. This sounds like a joke, and I partially made it an option so the other options would look cheaper by comparison, but in the unlikely event of a $1000 pledge, I will totally do it.

For every $200 raised above the $3000 goal, I’ll add one more episode onto the season than the planned 24. (If we raise $5,000, for example, season two will run for 34 episodes.) Want to fund Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s second season? Click here. This season, San Francisco and Portland; next season, the world.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E32: Genuine New York Novelist with Joshua Henkin

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in West Hollywood with novelist Joshua Henkin, author most recently of The World Without You, for their first conversation in four and a half years since his previous appearance on The Marketplace of Ideas. They discuss how the new book makes a space for characters to converge rather than occupying the space between two people, like his last one; the authorial balance between knowing too much and knowing too little, and the need to address the same question in fiction you would on Passover of “why this night is different from all other nights”; his bringing in a divorce, a death, the war in Iraq, and July 4th, and how much is too much; his tendency to throw away thousands of pages when refining each novel, observing the economist’s principle of sunk costs; how character is plot, and how stories go wrong when character isn’t plot; his ways of fictionally repurposing pieces of his own life that few readers would guess; the dangers of writing about recent-past events, and doing so while achieving the universal with a laserlike focus on the particular; the importance of writing no character as an authorial mouthpiece, especially when dealing with sensitive political and religious issues as The World Without You does; his use of teaching as a feedback look for his own writing, and how early in his career he managed to expose himself to a great amount of what doesn’t work in fiction; his writer’s life in Brooklyn, and why that borough has become such a writerly place; his childhood in and return to New York, and what that has to do with his characters existing in perpetual relationships to the place; the writer’s need to hang out primarily with non-writers; his techniques for achieving a sense of place, and the American difficulty of having any sense of place at all about somewhere as distant as Iraq, which seems to have become a theme of the war itself; the press’ eagerness and the author’s wariness to discuss the “aboutness” of a book; and the irreducibility of fiction meaning that the easier you can summarize a novel, the worse that novel is.

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

(Photo: Matthew Polis)

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Bricks & Scones (Larchmont)

Monday, July 23, 2012

Santa Barbara lacks many things, but when I lived there, never did I want for pleasant coffee shops in which to work. Coffee Cat on Anacapa, The Daily Grind on Mission, The French Press on Carrillo, Cafe Zoma on State, Santa Barbara Roasting Company on Motor Way, Hot Spots on lower-lower State if the wee hours came and you didn’t mind the scuzz factor… and that was just downtown. While I feel convinced that Los Angeles has equivalents aplenty, it doesn’t present them in any obvious manner (not Los Angeles’ way), nor do they sit particularly close to one another (certainly not Los Angeles’ way). After nearly a year of trial and error, I’ve found that, every day I have several hours of reading, writing, and internet-y work to do, a slight hunger, and no food at home nor any desire to remain at home even if it did have food, I face the same question: do I go to Bricks & Scones, or do I go somewhere else?

Bricks & Scones has become, in other words, my default “third place.” Urban theorist Ray Oldenburg defined third places as, roughly speaking, areas that aren’t your home or your work (this “work” you speak of… ?), and which offer such characteristics as neutrality, status-leveling, conversation, accessibility, regulars, and a low profile. This particular third place also offers a baked good called a “sesame chewy roll,” for which I keep coming back in spite of myself. They charge well over three bucks for the thing, or so I believe; I try not to think about the prices. Little Tokyo’s Cafe Dulce offers a cheaper, arguably superior version — less hollow, with walnuts, and bright green to boot — but that’s five miles in the opposite direction. Bricks & Scones’ Larchmont location does at first seem awfully inconvenient to a Koreatowner such as myself: two and a half miles away, with no direct train route. (You have to connect to the low-frequency local bus on Beverly, and even then you won’t be happy about it.) But the bike ride through Hancock Park lasts just long enough to qualify as “invigorating,” and you can usually lock up right out front.

You can order actual food here — sandwiches, soups, wraps — although eating a quick lunch and splitting won’t really get you the value. I often set up camp, eat a half mango curry chicken sandwich (fruit on the side), work for a few hours, then enter the second phase with a cappuccino and sesame roll. I figure I drop about twenty bucks, all told. Not a painful price to pay for the accommodations, I would argue, to the implicit agreement of Bricks & Scones’ strikingly young crowd: the inner-ish fringe of The Industry, college students, Korean twentysomethings. Sometimes the place starts to feel, comfortably, like an outpost of Koreatown; though no bargain, it does represent a discount from the sometimes flamboyantly expensive coffee shops of my own neighborhood. I willingly pay for the vibe of productivity, though; it just feels like, as slowly as they’re nursing their coffees, people are getting a lot accomplished here. I’ve even recorded interviews on the premises. But given the effects of all work and no play, I’ve promised myself that when next I bring someone here, I’m ordering the menu’s “afternoon tea,” complete with scones and jam. Genuine Britons (or even just people from Victoria) might consider it a travesty, but that’s how we do it in the colonies.

(More such writeups on Yelp.)

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