Skip to content

Podthoughts: The Dana Gould Hour

Sunday, July 22, 2012

 
Vital stats:
Format: thematic comedy gab, broken up with prepared segments
Episode duration: 1h-1h30m
Frequency: 1-2 per month

“Why do you want to do a podcast? You ain’t gonna do no podcast. You just a johnny-come-lately. You spent too much time on The Simpsons and you lost it, and now you’re trying to get it back, and everybody thinks it’s pathetic. You ain’t no Marc Maron.” Those words come in the voice of Little Richard, as performed by Dana Gould, to convey to us what the discouraging disapproving-dad voice inside his head sounds like. (His theory says that such a voice gets much easier to ignore when it sounds like Little Richard.) This happens on the very podcast that discourages, The Dana Gould Hour [RSS] [iTunes]. Luckily for Gould, and for us, Little Richard can only take that Marc Maron comparison so far. It pleases me to report that Gould has opted not to crank out yet another comedian-interviews-comedians podcast, but to put on more of a… production.

Its episodes, with come out once or twice a month, offer segments, scripted stories, recurring characters, and historical sound clips. I would draw a comparison to Paul F. Tompkins’ Paul F. Tompkast, but I haven’t heard that show yet. The Dana Gould Hour makes the unusual structural choice of interweaving these bits and pieces with group conversations like you’d hear on more standard comedy-gab shows. Each time out, Gould surrounds himself with colleagues — Eddie Pepitone usually shows up, to my increasing delight — and they all riff on a theme. These themes have included the apocalypse [MP3], carnies and theme parks [MP3], and Woody Allen’s wife, Soon-Yi Previn [MP3]. That last one usually gets me onboard, whatever the situation.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

Filed in Podthoughts | | Comments (0)

Richard Meltzer: L.A. is the Capital of Kansas

Sunday, July 22, 2012

This book came recommended by no less an authority than Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin when last I interviewed him. It’d intrigued me on runs to the downtown library to replenish my supply of Los Angeles-related reading, but I kept reshelving it; the subtitle Painful Lessons in Post-New York Living made me envision chapter after chapter of ragging on Hollywood provincials by, worse, a Manhattan provincial. Sure, Meltzer rags on Los Angeles, David explained, but he rags on everything. While ceaseless rendering of harsh judgment does not itself intrigue me, Meltzer’s credentials did: wunderkind rock critic of the late sixties and early seventies, writer for such “cool” publications at the Los Angeles Reader, alleged suggester of the umlaut in Blue Öyster Cult.

Meltzer’s thinking on aesthetics also seemed to stretch well beyond music — beyond, as the title of his famous debut put it, The Aesthetics of Rock. After reading (other interviewee of mine) Christopher Hawthorne’s writeup of the much lesser-known Richard Meltzer’s Guide to the Ugliest Buildings of Los Angeles, I made a mental note to really check this guy out. Even if he just complains about Los Angeles, I figured, he complains about it in the eighties (he left for Portland in the nineties), a period in this city that still seems not only opaque to me but probably actually relatively crappy.

Opening my checked-out copy of L.A. is the Capital of Kansas, I found it not only signed by the author (“MATT — THANKS, MAN, Richard Meltzer,” beside a doodle of a rabbit head. Could he have meant it for his onetime Reader colleague and author of that rabbit-populated comic strip Life in Hell, Matt Groening?) but defaced by an irked reader. “A stupid, offensive title,” she wrote on the page. Perhaps I’ve judged unfairly in going straight to that particular pronoun, but I can assure you of the message’s neat, rounded hand. And what man — what man without a woman watching, that is — would ever denounce anything for being stupid or offensive?

So I’d gotten the overall impression that, whatever my reservations, Meltzer was doing something right. The jacket copy describes him as “writing in a wildly expressive, disarmingly casual idiom,” and I don’t have any better words for it. Here, flipped to at random, is a sample of Meltzer’s prose:

You sit for five minutes, at most ten, in the Farmer’s Market off Fairfax, all these tourist-priced postcard and jade ashtray shops, you’re reading the paper, sippin’ your tourist-priced carrot-coconut juice and without fail (it matters not what day, season or week) a full-fledged YOKEL from Des Moines, Sioux City, or Dubuque (for inst) will exclaim to a fellow hick he or she has met on the Gray Line bus: “Lookit what I got, Irma — a Bo Derek poster!!!” As if they don’t got ’em back in Walnut Falls and maybe they don’t; I’ve never asked. Three years ago it was blowups of Farrah, the Fonz, now Bo, and they go home smiling that appleknocker SMILE (you’ve seen it in films), blowup in hand and tales on their lips of an unforgettable visit to the land of Dreams: a scumbag town that it beats me how anyone but a walking metaphor from Des Moines or Walnut Falls could actually be dreamin’ about. REAL-LIFE HICKS AS METAPHORS INCARNATE (AS REAL-LIFE HICKS-AND-A-HALF). Or something like that.

Some passages read easier; others come off like Finnegans Wake. But unlike Joyce, Meltzer — and I only figured this out a hundred pages in — writes to be read quickly, not deliberately. (William Burroughs might make a more suitable comparison: “He writes about hanging, he writes about colors, he writes about virus,” as Meltzer describes him. “Got (I have) next to no int’rest in such stuff as content, whole lot of int. in such as voice.”) At least I imagine that as his intent. I like to envision myself in 1981, nonchalantly scanning through one of his Reader columns on burgers, easy women, UHF television, or boxing at the Olympic Auditorium while scarfing down an Oki-Dog in the car before flooring it over to a punk show, during that brief moment when, in Meltzer’s words, “this shithole came as close to being a fertile musical oasis as any I’ve stumbled over.”

“Obviously, I hate the place,” he claims, “but I seem to recall hating that other place — what was it called? (starts with an N) — as well.” If Los Angeles holds little appeal for him, his birthplace, the “Smart Town” of New York City, holds even less. The past 25 years of change in Los Angeles and Meltzer’s tendency to deliberately expose himself to only the dumbest, ugliest, and crassest means his experience has little in common with my own, although, as with most writers on this town, his observations on life in motion ring true. Prefacing his trip to Watts Towers, he writes that, “for a town with so many people driving so many vehicles so many places nine days a week, L.A. is still basically mired in a zero sense of automotive adventure. Everybody and his/her aunt/uncle’s always taking the customary spin to job x, restaurant y, and party z [ … ] just about nobody’s willing to follow his/her nose and/or instincts or just pick up a Triple-A map and say, ‘Today I’m driving to Hawaiian Gardens — wherever (and whatever) in hell that may be.'”

Los Angeles punk, I gather, ain’t what it used to be. (You can now buy the building that once housed the Atomic Cafe — and thus Bowie and Byrne and Devo and X — for a dollar, but you have to pick it up yourself.) The freest driving seems to have drained away before I was born; “individual places sometimes griefed me,” Meltzer recalls, “but rarely the drive itself, the process. In those days, up ’til just after the ’84 Olympics (when the world started moving in), there was basically no non-rush hour traffic.” But I can’t imagine Los Angeles ever having been about these things, a home for these things, or for anything, ever, in particular. “Livingwise, home is an overrated concept,” declares Meltzer. “Anyone expecting redemption at home is fucked from the start to, uh, finish.” Amen.

Filed in books, Los Angeles | | Comments (0)

Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E31: Freedom and Ugliness with Christopher Hawthorne

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down on top of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles with Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times and co-author of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture. Last year, he conducted Reading Los Angeles, a yearlong study of the city through the books written about it. This year, he’s doing a series of essays and video explorations of Los Angeles’ boulevards: first Atlantic, then Sunset, and soon Crenshaw and beyond. They discuss the break from the city’s previous connection with the automobile, the single-family house, and private amenity; the unusual number of existential questions Los Angeles has faced and continues to face; outsiders’ visceral reaction to Los Angeles “inconsistent” architecture (especially as manifested by Randy’s and Dale’s Donuts), and the way freedom and ugliness can go hand-in-hand; his having grown up in Berkeley, a process that subjected him to a certain anti-Los Angeles “indoctrination”; the sense that Los Angeles is its “own thing,” and how that motivates deadening choices like freeways as well as enlivening choices like turning away from Europe and toward Latin America and Asia; Woody Allen and his attitudes about cities and urbanism, as revealed in films like Annie Hall and Midnight in Paris; how the stereotype of Los Angeles’ superficiality conceals its layered nature, and whether the city’s best elements can ever be made directly accessible; how to read cities versus reading objects, and how familiarity with Los Angeles helped him read a city like Houston; the complicated relationship between public and private space in Los Angeles, as exemplified by streets that simply give up on sidewalks and beloved midcentury modern houses in terribly alienating locations; and the tendency of tourists to see only the worst of Los Angeles and go no further — unless they go much, much further.

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

Filed in Notebook on Cities and Culture | | Comments (0)

Notebook on Cities and Culture S2, in Portland and San Francisco, Kickstarts next week

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Thanks very much indeed, listeners, for a first season of Notebook on Cities and Culture that has exceeded all my expectations. And special thanks to those who backed the first season on Kickstarter; in a mathematically demonstrable way, you exceeded my expectations threefold. That drive raised enough to extend this season to 32 episodes, but since episode 31 comes out today, the time has come to prepare for season two.

I’ve set the fundraising goal for the exact same amount we raised for the first season: $3000. But I’m upping the ante, content-wise. The show’s very title tells you that it’s intended to be a notebook on cities and culture, and its journey outside Los Angeles (and, ultimately, all over the world) begins this coming season. I’ll take my gear up the west coast and record with the most fascinating cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene in San Francisco, California and Portland, Oregon. Interesting cities, so I understand, with a few interesting people between ’em. Let’s find out for sure.

The Notebook on Cities and Culture season two fund drive begins next week, on Wednesday, July 25. It’ll run for seven days. You’ll get the chance again to sponsor individual episodes or the whole season, plus a new top-tier donation option that might seem like a joke but I assure you is real. I’ll post a link to the Kickstarter page right here the moment it goes live. Tell all your most urbane, observational, conversationally inclined friends!

Filed in Notebook on Cities and Culture | | Comments (0)

Spencer Crump: Ride the Big Red Cars

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

We used to have the greatest public transportation system in the world, so goes the oft-told Los Angeles lore. Then, a shady consortium, their own strings pulled by automakers and road-builders, bought all the trains and the tracks just to rip them out and scrap them. I don’t know about that; I sense a few too many viewings of Who Framed Roger Rabbit stoking a conspiracy-minded fire. We do know that, in the Pacific Electric and Los Angeles railways of the early twentieth century, this city did indeed boast the most extensive and beloved local and interurban train service anywhere. And we know that, by the early sixties, all of that had gone. But I figured the hows and the whys of the five decades in between were more complicated than the bitter, empty laments for the old trains I hear from those too young to have ridden them — or that, a few drinks into the night, I’d probably deliver myself.

Spencer Crump’s Ride the Big Red Cars comes recommended by, of all people, Reyner Banham, the well-known English architectural critic and Los Angeles lover who wrote The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Banham found great joy and fascination in freeway driving — he learned to do it so he could “read Los Angeles in the original” — and held out little hope for traditional rapid transit. “Even though [the Los Angeles freeways are] vastly better than any other urban motorway system of my acquaintance,” he wrote, “it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking. A rapid-rail system is the oldest candidate for the succession, but nothing had happened so far. The core of the problem, I suspect, is that when the socially necessary branch has been built, to Watts, and the profitable branch, along Wilshire, little more will be done and most Angelenos will be an average of fifteen miles from a rapid-transit station.”

Things have happened now. The Red Line subway under Wilshire, having made agonizingly slow progress over the past two decades, still has twelve miles to go, but the Blue Line train, though — the “socially necessary branch” — runs to Watts and all the way to Long Beach besides. It actually does so along the same path of the very first Pacific Electric line Southern California-building magnate Henry Huntington opened in 1902. In Crump’s telling, Huntington took only nine months to build it, and build it well; the Blue line took five years. “Crump thinks Los Angeles’ Blue Line is a step in the right direction,” wrote Jim Washburn in a 1992 Los Angeles Times article catching up with the author, ”but says that by running it at street level, it is crippled same the way the PE eventually was by having to contend with automotive traffic crossing its path.”

Here we have one clue as to how Los Angeles let rail transit slip from its hands. Crump’s book covers, in great detail, how the region’s interurban lines and trolleys expanded so quickly and won such a large, admiring ridership. The system’s peak seems to have come in the twenties to perhaps the early thirties, after which, a brief revival during the Second World War notwithstanding, it was all downhill for Pacific Electric’s red cars (and presumably the Los Angeles Railway’s yellow ones, too). Building in the days when automobiles were scarce and roads suitable for automobiles scarcer still, Huntington laid most of his track either at street level or on the streets themselves. But when car ownership came to the everyman, a savage battle for road rights ensued. Badly slowed by having to move in mixed traffic and stop at many new vehicle crossings, the trains went from a public perception as the height of efficiency to its nadir. Soon, the per-mile operating cost of a personal car fell below the equivalent Pacific Electric fares. Then, after the war, came the freeways.

“We’ve created sort of a hell here,” said Crump in that Times article. “We are only faced with a tremendous and complete traffic jam that doesn’t give us anything. This freeway driving is not only lonely, but it makes me uptight and stressed being in that bumper-to-bumper traffic.” But I can understand how appealing a city of gleaming new cars and soaring new motorways must once have seemed. Few foresaw the debased, utilitarian condition of American motoring ahead, and fewer still understood that the further backward a place bends to accommodate the automobile, the less it merits a visit in the first place. If anything has made Los Angeles second-class in the past fifty years, that has. I can’t say I suffer much New York envy, except when it comes to their transit. Yes, New Yorkers complain ceaselessly about it — when asked what he dislikes about living there, Tao Lin memorably cited “the comically unreliable/loud/dirty subway-system” — but at least it’s there.

Both New York and Los Angeles’ “public” transit systems were, before 1940, wholly or in large part, privately owned. But New York City bought and continued to operate the subway lines, whereas the City of Los Angeles passed on the trains in its territory. “The greatest failure,” Crump writes, “came in the slowness of the public and public officials to grasp the fact that the role of providing transportation could not be filled by private enterprise.” The libertarian in me honestly wonders about that, but the deal is done: Los Angeles now has a public agency to handle its trains, and that agency does seem to be building and running new lines. These take their sweet time to materialize — evidently you can’t just throw thousands of Irishmen at the problem anymore — and tend to do so on whichever old rights-of-way happen to remain, the location of current centers of commerce be damned. Yet at this point I see reasons to remain just on the side of optimism, and I imagine Crump — whether he’s still with us, I don’t know — would too.

Filed in books, Los Angeles, transit | | Comments (1)

Menswear books: Daniel Peres, The Details Men’s Style Manual

Monday, July 16, 2012

I confess to not quite knowing Details’ place on the landscape of gentlemen’s magazines. While glancing at its issues reveals a more deliberately tasteful publication than blunter, intensively airbrushed “lad’s mags” like Maxim (or its countless late imitators), it also lacks the pedigree of comparatively venerable midcentury-man staples like GQ or Esquire. Yet Details must harbor comparable aspirations to style authority, since it, like those two older brothers, has a whole book out on the subject: the Details Men’s Style Manual, by the magazine’s editor-in-chief Dan Peres. “In a world of skinny suits and pointy shoes, I was rather content dressing down,” he writes of recently bygone days. “I had adopted a uniform of jeans, sweaters, and tattered Chucks — and the occasional button-down shirt, untucked, of course. I even wore a fleece to a Versace fashion show once.” So we’re working from square one, then.

The unaddressed question of how someone who inspired an entire New York Times trend piece rose so high in the first place does shake one’s confidence in the Details imprimatur. But combine his history of willful disregard with the presumably high caliber of stylistic consultancy at his fingertips, and Peres looks ideal to write a beginner-level manual on men’s dress. Having undergone a Damascene conversion on the road between European fashion shows, he decided to set his own house — or rather, closet — in order, and what he learned from his magazine’s specialized style editors he organizes into this book’s thirteen chapters. All this he explains in the introduction, which spreads fewer than 700 words across four pages in two colors and three different large fonts. It gets noisier: the two-page spread immediately following presents a list of “rules of style” in a flurry of bolding, boxing, unconventional capitalization, and other formatting tricks.

Read the whole thing at Put This On.

Filed in books, clothes | | Comments (0)

Podthoughts: Ask Brooklyn

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Vital stats:
Format: interviews with Brooklyn-based experts about their expertise and how it relates to Brooklyn
Episode duration: ~30m
Frequency: 1-4 per month

When one of my peers — i.e., anyone in that vast age group, “about thirty” — tells me they live in New York, I just assume they live in Brooklyn. Thirty years ago, I suppose they would have lived in one of the more run-down parts of Manhattan, David Byrne territory. But something tells me that no “more run-down parts of Manhattan” remain. I’ve talked to the occasional youngish person who lives in Queens, but they always make it sound as remote as Guam. I’ve never encountered anyone from the Bronx or Staten Island. Then again, I live in Los Angeles, a haven for the rootless, and I suspect Brooklyn provides the same solace. You see a lot of traffic back and forth; for every Brooklynite aspiring to Angelenohood, an Angeleno aspires to Brooklynism.

“Ah, Brooklyn,” I remember Buddy Bradley, protagonist of Peter Bagge’s comic series Hate, saying upon setting foot there. “The worst place in the world.” That issue formed, in large part, my early impression of that part of New York: crowded, inconvenient, dangerous, dirty. I still haven’t visited, though I understand that, somewhere in the past fifteen years, Brooklyn made the transition fromCrooklyn to something of a Portland East. Over this same span of time, though, my appreciation for the crowded, inconvenient, dangerous, and dirty has only grown, so I don’t quite know what to do. Correcting my years of built-up inaccurate third-hand impressions by listening to Ask Brooklyn [iTunes] seemed like the beginning of a solution.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

Filed in Podthoughts | | Comments (0)

Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E30: The Stories of Los Angeles with David Kipen

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in Boyle Heights with David Kipen, founder of that neighborhood’s combined bookstore and lending library Libros Schmibros and a true man of both letters and Los Angeles. He gives commentary on books and literary culture on KPCC-FM and Sirius XM’s The Bob Edwards Show, he’s written the book The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, he recently translated Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs for Melville House Books, and he spent over four years as the National Endowment for the Arts’ Director of Literature, where he got their Big Read program started. They discuss how to sell paper books in neighborhoods the Kindle hasn’t penetrated; his interest in getting into conversations about books on both the low-profile person-to-person level and the high-profile media one; whether we have indeed left an actual lost golden age of American reading; the lack of “slack” in American life to use for reading; how rail makes up a city’s skeleton, and how Los Angeles’ skeleton is growing with new additions like the Libros Schmibros-proximate Gold Line; 1939, the annus mirabilis of Los Angeles literature, and the city’s modern desire, as exemplified by Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, to fetishize its own depredations and destruction; whether it’s hard to keep your mind in the narrative of this city, where even the natives have to immigrate; and that undervalued observer of Los Angeles and the whole of California, Thomas Pynchon.

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

(Photo: Alissa Walker)

Filed in Notebook on Cities and Culture | | Comments (0)

Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E29: Great Mistakes with Alissa Walker

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Alissa Walker, writer on urban design, architecture, and the cityscape — especially Los Angeles’ — for publications like GOOD, Dwell, the LA Weekly, and more. She also associate-produces KCRW’s DnA: Design and Architecture. They discuss Sunset Triangle Plaza, the area of reclaimed street where they sit, and what it says about the Angeleno “mind shift” toward getting out of the car; how many small, cheap improvements can alter the urban experience in the same way as a few large, expensive ones; her friends’ lingering fear of getting “all sweaty” while riding bicycles, buses, and trains; the complacency Los Angeles instilled in its residents in the seventies, eighties, and even nineties; increasing the “stumble upon” factor in a large, spread-out city; her experience building a more accurate narrative of Los Angeles, a city that hasn’t done much to brand itself lately, than the ones in the New York Times; the urban projects that work in this city and the ones, like a “living wall” being torn down right behind them, that don’t; Los Angeles’ tendency to create spaces in which to compress and imitate itself; the lack of markers, literally and figuratively, to show you “where the stuff is”; learning and showing Los Angeles through its architecture, and other works of public design more interesting than the artisanal chairs so popular last decade; her part in the GOOD Ideas for Cities project, especially when it went to her native St. Louis, and how it got her thinking about the possibilities of American cities; and her recommendations on how best to keep your eyes on the streets in Los Angeles.

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

Filed in Notebook on Cities and Culture | | Comments (0)

Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E28: No Such Thing as Free Parking with Donald Shoup

Monday, July 2, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down at UCLA with urban planning professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking and the man who’s made us aware of the fact that our cities’ problems come not from too little parking, but too much. They discuss the academic tendency to believe, without verification, anything bad about Los Angeles; how this city became the densest car-oriented one in America, as well as the most car-oriented dense one; falsely perceived parking “shortages,” how they led to minimum free parking requirements, and how those have worsened our urban experience; Los Angeles’ parking requirement-skirting Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, which made even monstrosities like 1100 Wilshire usable; the development of technology needed to allow parking prices to respond to demand, and how it works in systems like San Francisco’s SFPark; the importance of treating parking space just like any other real estate, and how irresponsible we’ve been about that; how Ventura streets got free wi-fi through their parking program; what ruined Westwood, and what parking policy had to do with it; how he realized parking mattered so much, and why the general public has only begun to; the necessity of humor when you’re writing about parking for 800 pages; and how cycling makes it users happier than any other mode of transportation (perhaps because of its lack of parking complications).

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

Filed in Notebook on Cities and Culture | | Comments (0)