Colin Marshall sits down in Glassell Park with comedian and man of cinema Chris Gore, who has talked movies on such television shows as The X Show, The New Movie Show with Chris Gore, and Attack of the Show; has written books including The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide, The Complete DVD Book, and The Fifty Greatest Movies Never Made; hosts the podcast PodCRASH with That Chris Gore; and has a new comedy album and picture book coming up called Celebrities Poop. They discuss how he takes his work seriously, but not himself; his “war” on the top five podcasts; his contretemps with Representative Dan Lungren while editing Videogames magazine; Colin’s Podthought on PodCRASH, and the superiority of essays and films that don’t tell you how to feel; his first television appearances on FX, and how he there learned to read a teleprompter by pretending not to read it; growing up a Michigander and a nerd, discovering alternative culture through film (and building his own eight-millimeter home theater at age seven) while actively not giving a shit what anyone thought of him; his choice to come to Los Angeles because it smelled less like pee than New York; his place in film culture versus nerd culture, and the word “nerd” versus the word “geek”; how he makes a podcast out of his appearances on other podcasts in the podcast Mecca that is Los Angeles; meeting and talking to cool people as a byproduct of a career, or as the raison d’être of one; which of them buys cars and which of them buys bespoke suits; what it felt like being around for the nineties’ American indie film boom, and why only Quentin Tarantino has kept up his auteur’s head of steam from those days; and why he made My Big Fat Independent Movie when that boom got to be too much.
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.
Colin Marshall sits down above Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles with Tyson Cornell, proprietor of Rare Bird Books and Rare Bird Lit, former longtime Director of Marketing & Publicity at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip, punk rocker, and co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection Yes Is the Answer: And Other Prog Rock Tales. They discuss the seeming contradiction between Los Angeles’ image as an “unreaderly” place and its rank as the largest book market in America; this city’s tendency not, unlike other cities, to tell you straight-up what it is; how his study of the American newsstand brought him to Los Angeles, and then to Book Soup; the perspective he gained on Los Angeles through both working newsstands and having as a neighbor the manager of the Laugh Factory; how the reading came first in his life, and then the punk rock; Yes Is the Answer and the supposed antagonism between punk and prog; his time rocking in the both-advanced-and-retrograde Japan alongside former hair metalists; Sparkstastic, the upcoming book on Los Angeles (but England-beloved) band Sparks by Tosh Berman, also formerly of Book Soup; the nature of working at a bookstore, or of trying and failing to work at a bookstore, among the industry’s classically high-functioning freaks; how much crazier crazy writers can get than crazy rockers, and the ultimately tiresome nature of the non-Thompson, non-Bukowski literary wild man persona; the way that books and bookstores seem both unimprovable, in away, and yet somehow headed straight for disappearance; why books cost so much, and the advantage of slapping dogs on their covers; and the implications (and potential conspiracy theories surrounding) girls who make millions on their self-published vampire e-books.
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Los Angeles has a subway. This surprises almost as many visitors as it does natives. First moving here, I only considered apartments within walking distance of a station. Even then, I sensed this criterion, all-important elsewhere, has historically meant little to Los Angeles apartment-hunters. Despite taking four or five journeys underground every week, I understand, without the sneer of the least agreeable sort of public transit booster, why many Angelenos have never boarded so much as a station escalator. The Red and Purple subway lines serve this city of 500 square miles with less than eighteen miles of track, combined. Add in the above-ground train lines and the system’s total comes, as of this writing, to more like ninety miles. Too much of the time, the question of whether you can get from where you are to where you need to go by subway, or by any line to which it connects, meets with a flat “no.”
I never look forward to explaining this to visitors from Europe or Asia. To whose satisfaction can I, or any Angeleno, account for why the westward Purple Line dead-ends thirteen miles from the coast, or why the northern end of the Red Line passes through one side of Hollywood but not the other? Shortly after setting myself up in Los Angeles, I asked a friend, well-placed by day job to know about Metro matters great and small, these very questions. His response, in full: “Politics.” A fair point, but whenever I return home from a trip to Osaka, Mexico City, or even Washington, D.C., I wonder where else politics has so suppressed infrastructure as essential, to my mind, as water pipes, garbage dumps, or power lines.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation with Jim Gavin, author of the story collection Middle Men. The book’s stories examine several different generations of modern Southern California fellows as they slack, work (as plumbing fixture sales reps and otherwise), eat at Del Taco, and settle into mixtures thereof that they never could have predicted. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.
Vital stats:
Format: interviews with writers and editors of long-form articles
Episode duration: ~45m-3h
Frequency: erratic
“TV Made Fresh Daily”: that, to me, remains the core product of the FX network. Then again, I haven’t watched since about the turn of the millennium, but so many of my pleasant televisual memories come from tuning in to FX back in high school that I suppose I don’t need to. I remember staying up “late” to watch their “uncensored” airing of Kevin Smith’s Clerks, for instance, an event I’d anticipated for weeks. This happened relatively early in my development as a young cinephile, that time when you do your movie-watching and knowledge-gathering indiscriminately, whenever and wherever it seems possible. You’d also value any meeting, even if only virtual, with fellow movie-hungry minds. I sensed one of those in the skull of a fellow named Chris Gore, who one day started popping up in FX promos for something called The New Movie Show with Chris Gore, subject obvious. I gathered that, in addition to his duties as a cable host — duties that, in their exuberant marginality, I found weirdly admirable — he’d founded a movie magazine called Film Threat. Cool.
Having mastered the sort of film journalism the hyper-mainstream would call “irreverent” during America’s indie boom of the nineties, Gore gained a reputation as an authority on independent filmmaking and festivalgoing. This he still exploits in a variety of ways, and his television appearances continue, I believe in the form of DVD evaluations, on G4’s Attack of the Show. A dozen years after The New Movie Show with Chris Gore, we expect anyone who makes their living commenting on the cinematic scene, and especially one who compulsively jokes around the way Gore does, to put out a podcast; the medium has suddenly become the spine of so many comedic, critical, and generally Gore-style careers, the likes of which none of us could have explained to our great-grandfathers. He says his fans had hassled him for years to do a podcast. But I’m too lazy to do a podcast. So I’ll just go on other people’s podcasts. This is PodCRASH [RSS] [iTunes]. Or so the theme song goes. Though Gore takes pains to highlight the self-obsession inherent in this premise, I find it one of the few genuinely interesting new concepts going in podcasting.
Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.
“The end is nigh,” tweeted an aphorist I admire, “for all books must now bear the explanatory subtitle — the mark of the beast.” The Suit’s title bears not just that mark, but one of interference before the colon as well. The author wanted to title his book The Dandy; his publisher, afraid that wouldn’t sell, proposedThe Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, which suggests a manual on how to manipulate the corporate world through dress. This puts Machiavelli in a misleading light, but the term Machiavellian sees such misuse that the assumption comes naturally. However, in Nicholas Antongiavanni we have a serious appreciator of Machiavelli as well as menswear. He meant to have his original title reference The Prince, and just as Machiavelli advises a prince, Antongiavanni advises a dandy, “the enemy of the splendiferous and the effeminate” who favors “simple clothes, pristine in cut, immaculate in fit [ … ] never ostentatious, always manly.”
Alas, we live in a time of few princes, and nearly as few dandies. Prince Charles counts as both, and Antongiavanni makes a case study out of him more than once. He also draws lessons from the dress of American newscasters and presidents. “Brokaw is the most elegant,” he observes of the former group. “Rather’s clothes fit well, but he is so slavish in aping his hero Edward R. Murrow — even patronizing the same Savile Row tailor — that he cannot be said to have any style of his own.” President Johnson, envious of Kennedy, “sought out a London tailor whom he told to make him ‘look like a British diplomat.’” Of Carter, Antongiavanni writes only that “it is one thing to wear Hawaiian shirts in Key West or jeans and cowboy boots when splitting wood, and another to address the people from the Oval Office in a sweater.”
Read the whole thing at Put This On.
Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Condesa with Gabriela Jauregui, writer, poet, and co-founder of the publishing collective sur+. They discuss her childhood in Coyoacán and at what point during it she realized she lived in a place with a rich literary history; her coming up reading and speaking Spanish, English, and French; the real beginning of Latin American small presses, and what it means for the excitement of Spanish-language literature; why Mexican books get shrinkwrapped, anyway; how she mastered English while studying in Los Angeles, and the pleasure she finds in writing in a language not quite her own, especially one with weird exceptions, non-rules, and all the qualities of a “pirate language”; what her interest in the mechanics of language has to do with her pursuit of poetry; how you never quite know who’s a poet in Latin America; the way Los Angeles revealed itself to her, and how understanding Mexico City involves approaching it as something between Los Angeles and New York; her memories of growing up in Mexico City’s “dark years,” including but not limited to fake M&Ms; “Malinchismo,” the Mexican idea that whatever is Mexican is by definition inferior, and how it has fallen away, at least in part, where art and literature are concerned; how to read your way into Los Angeles of Mexico City, and if you don’t want to read, how to use Alejandro Jodorowsky movies for the same purpose; and all the layers of history you can experience in Mexico City that, unlike in Europe, you can experience all at once.
Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.
My new syllabus for Bookforum magazine covers four favorite volumes on life in postwar Japan by four favorite literarily inclined Western expats: Pico Iyer, John Nathan, Donald Keene, and the late Donald Richie:
The 1950s through the 80s saw Japan go from post-war disrepair to world-frightening powerhouse, adapting and even improving all manner of Western inventions from cars and consumer electronics to jeans and rock music. While America and Britain observed these developments from afar, a number of expatriate writers registered more thoughtful assessments of the rapidly changing situation on the ground. These Westerners, many of whom first came to Japan during the Second World War, brought outside perspectives to this endlessly fascinating era of unprecedented—and unsurpassed—Japanese development and engagement with the world.
The Inland Sea by Donald Richie
Richie came to Tokyo in 1947 with the American occupation force and effectively never left. By the mid-1960s, he saw the city he loved falling—or rather, rising—into unrecognizability. Discontent with Japan’s rush into the first world, Richie threw himself into domestic travel, documenting the small towns and island outposts he encountered in The Inland Sea. Though I read the book on a trip to Osaka, a center of vulgar commercial energy, The Inland Sea showed me how the Japanese live, or once lived, in humbler places. “I don’t care if I never come back,” Richie announces not once but twice. This “learned, beautifully paced elegy for one of ‘the last places on earth where men rise with the sun and where streets are dark and silent by nine at night’,” Richard Lloyd Parry wrote of the book, “is the only full-length work of Richie’s that will be remembered a generation from now.” But for extra credit, do seek out The Japan Journals, an incomplete but thoroughly entertaining account of Richie’s life as a “smilingly excluded” outsider.
Read the whole thing at Bookforum.
West Hollywood came into official being on November 29, 1984, 25 days after I did. But which of us wears our years with greater dignity? I strain to look timeless, but timelessness, improperly cultivated, slides easily into blandness; West Hollywood can rest assured, at least, that it runs little risk of that. A mixture of the uneasily dated and the insistently progressive, the tiny municipality — an “r” shape containing less than two square miles, surrounded on most of its edges by Los Angeles proper — would seem now to punch above its weight in most of the important modern rankings: food, no doubt; culture, in certain senses, yes; street life, seemingly so; homosexuality, most definitely.
Urban theorist Richard Florida gives the homosexual population serious weight when gauging a city’s vitality, having gone so far as to order the metropolises on something called a “Gay Index.” This goes especially for cities driven by what he calls the “creative class” — engineers, scientists, designers, artists, media-makers — and thus it looks like no coincidence that West Hollywood labels itself “The Creative City.” A walk down its stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, surely some kind of Gay Index in and of itself, presents rainbow-striped crosswalks at intersections, rainbow-striped city logos on police cars, and a variety of specialized bars and sex shops. But unlike, say, San Francisco’s Castro, the neighborhood doesn’t feel like a solemn monument to lost hedonism. By late 1984, Castro-style hedonism had taken its last rites anyway; West Hollywood, at least on certain streets, keeps living, keeps breathing, keeps chatting itself up. (Though not in a way everyone necessarily finds palatable. “The term ‘WeHo boy,'” as a friend and longtime resident of the neighborhood patiently explained to me, “is not meant as a compliment.”)
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
