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A Los Angeles Primer: West Hollywood

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

 

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.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E19: Nothing Works, Everything Moves with Juan Carlos Cano and Paloma Vera

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Condesa with Juan Carlos Cano and Paloma Vera, founders of the architecture and urbanism practice CANO | VERA. They discuss how everything in Mexico City’s built environment exists “behind,” being interesting in irregular ways; all the untrue superlatives you hear growing up about how Mexico City is the biggest in the world, and what an abstract concept “the biggest city” turns out to be anyway; the miracle of Mexico City’s continued improvisational operation, especially as regards garbage collection; the amount of architect-less building going on in Mexico City, and what they’re doing to help make it easier and more efficient; the creation of cities through the creation of connections, rather than through the building of beautiful things; where best to walk in the giant soufflé that is Mexico City; the intrinsic sense that Mumbai, Bangkok, or São Paulo make when you come from Mexico City, and how you feel at  home when you have to discover, anonymously, what a place is about; the meaning of Condominio Insurgentes to the urban environment, and the question of who built the thing in the first place; the city as a mirror of society’s favorite ideas in one particular moment; the contradictory image of Mexico as a place where nothing works, but everything moves; the historical Mexican relationship to space as it appears both in Teotihuacan and Ciudad Universitaria, in pre-Hispanic markets and downtown today; how Mexico City grew and ego; and the Zócalo, the best place in town to both feel and fill the void.

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

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Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Margot Lachlan White

Friday, March 29, 2013

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Bookspodcast, I have a conversation with Margot Lachlan White, author of Waking Up in Tehran: The Untold Story of Iran’s Revolution, coming this summer.   Her eyewitness account of Iran’s Revolution tells of political resistance to dictatorship, civil war against the Kurds, arrest, interrogation and imprisonment, all of which occurred during the years she spent in Iran as a human rights observer. She also has a few things to say about the accuracy of Argo. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.

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A Los Angeles Primer: Koreatown

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

 

“So they put chapulines in their kimchi?” a friend in Mexico City asked about my neighborhood. I do hold out hope that eateries in Koreatown, the district of Los Angeles it makes the most (and the least obvious) sense for me to live in, will one day offer its fermented cabbage topped by roasted grasshoppers. For now, the dish remains one we prepare at home. The Chilango’s half-joking expectation came in response to my explanation of Koreatown’s demographics: a sizable wedge of Koreans, as you’d expect, but an even larger one from the chapulin-rich southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Yet these groups, despite living at the highest population density the entire city, seldom mix. If I want my kimchi sprinkled with chapulines, or my street-grilled sopes topped with kimchi, or my bulgogi served in mole, I’ve got to do it myself.

Looking over the Los Angeles map in search of a home, I understood only in the abstract how much the city would, for better and worse, ask me to do myself. But I did know full well that few if any other cities in the world have blocks that put busy makeshift sincronizada griddles right up against coffee shops pouring six-dollar sweet potato lattes with equal briskness, or utilitarian panaderias against bass-leaking, quasi-legitimate noraebang (that is, Korean karaoke bars). This occurs without much of a normalizing flow — or diluting flow — of what the purely theoretical average American might recognize as average Americans. All this sprouted in the remains of what the 1930s called the Ambassador District, which former resident and well-known food critic Jonathan Gold describes as a place “when the old ballroom around the corner hosted big bands, when a romantic night out in the neighborhood might have involved a show at the Cocoanut Grove, big steaks at the Brown Derby, maybe cocktails afterward at the Town House or the Cove.”

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E18: First-Rate “Second World” Eating with Nicholas Gilman

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma with artist-turned-food writer Nicholas Gilman, author of the book and blog Good Food in Mexico City: Fondas, Food Stalls, and Fine Dining. They discuss the culinary importance of places like Mercado Medellín; how Mexico City’s art, not its food, first brought him here (make a beeline though he did to the handmade tortillas when he first arrived at 18); all the warnings about “what you shouldn’t do” in Mexico City — or, for that matter, the New York City of the seventies and eighties in which he grew up; the strides Mexico City has made in the past fifteen years, especially as regards cleaning up pollution and opening up small business and culinary opportunities; his career switch from painter to food writer, and his discovery that you simply “don’t have to suffer so much” in Mexico City; his realization that no useful English-language food guides to the area existed, how that prompted him to publish his own, and the great deal of attention it soon drew; what people get wrong when they first go eating in Mexico City, such as understanding the “timing” of the food; the dismantling of the car culture, the institution of bicycle programs, and the conversion of Mexico into at least a new “second-world” country; his eating strategies in a new city, including looking for their markets; the importance of tapping into a city’s social knowledge, especially that possessed by taxi drivers; how to convince people you want to eat “the real thing,” i.e., the food they themselves eat; bringing a necessary outsider’s perspective to another culture; the various misconceptions that linger about Mexican food; the usually unhappy experiences of foreign cuisines that make it to Mexico; and when best to eat huitlacoche.

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

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Podthoughts: Longform Podcast

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Vital stats:
Format: interviews with writers and editors of long-form articles
Episode duration: 35m-1h
Frequency: weekly

Say 3:00 a.m. has rolled around. I’ve walked my lady home, downed whatever wine remained in the night’s bottle, sent the day’s last few dangling e-mails, read two or three page-downs on Twitter, glanced at Facebook, and checked the New Yorker for anything new from Anthony Lane. Icould go to bed. Or I could check Longform.org. Though I rarely admit it, I only direct my browser that way in hopes of finding a 3,000-, 5,000-, or — jackpot — 10,000-word article so interesting as to deprioritize sleep and the dull preparations it demands. I imagine you’ve done this too. If you happen to have a day job, maybe you’ve burned hours of your employer’s time — even days of it — reading articles aggregated by Longform and its ilk (Longreads, say), luxuriating in a combination of boredom, fascination, and sheer spite. I had to ditch my own day job after envisioning the decades ahead melting into an ocean of text, often damned interesting but essentially opiate.

Though I no longer rely on Longform as that sort of drip-feed, it has remained in my night-elongating rotation — no morning pressure to get to “the office,” after all — and I took notice when the site began putting out a podcast [RSS] [iTunes]. The show delivers not audio versions of long-form articles but interviews with the sort of people who write and commission them: folks from New York magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine… you know, the publications whose sites you pull up after dark looking for an extended distraction. (Also publications with “New York” in the title. Longform does have its office, I believe, in New York, but guys, come on — America has two cities.) Built at the intersection of an addiction to long-form articles and a compulsion to listen to interview podcasts, the Longform Podcast should sit right in my personal (and thus professional) wheelhouse. Yet I approached with trepidation.

Read the whole thing at Maximumfun.org.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E17: Youth Is Overrated with Brenda Lozano

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma with novelist and essayist Brenda Lozano, author of the Todo Nada and contributor to Letras Libres. They discuss the space Spain’s troubles have opened for Latin American literature; the passion for Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde she learned from one particular teacher; how she began seriously reading in English, and only later in her native Spanish; the difference in enjoyment of Spanish versus English literature, and how the languages ultimately behave like two different animals; the importance of the pleasure of reading, as well as the acknowledgment thereof; poetry as pure sugar; Mexico City’s combination of high culture and bad parties; how, when she began writing essays, she found ways to have a good time writing about even assigned topics, and what it revealed about the general skill of having a good time wherever you happen to go; the three years of her early twenties she spent writing a “terrible novel,” and what they later gave Todo Nada; her conviction of the overestimation of youth, which led her to build the novel around an aged character, but a young narrator; what could possibly be the sales pitch for Dorian Gray stockings; the newly widened Mexican generation gap; her need to “close the door” when writing, so literary influences like Jorge Luis Borges or Clarice Lispector can’t step right in; her first, worldview-changing encounter with Fernando Pessoa, when she asked, “Is this literature?”; what she felt standing next to a wax Octavio Paz; the current absence of non-wax literary fathers; her Mexico City literary community, a group of argumentative friends; getting to know places through literature, like Japan through Banana Yoshimoto, 1930s Los Angeles through John Fante, or indeed Mexico City through Roberto Bolaño; and, despite her having been born and raised there, her continued excitement about writing in Mexico City.

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

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A Los Angeles Primer Debuts on KCET Departures

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Each Tuesday, KCET Departures, a site about Los Angeles run by the city’s well-known public television station, will run essays adapted from my book-in-progress A Los Angeles Primer. The debut features Dennis Hopper, David Hemmings, and the reasons I got here in the first place:

No two people have ever lived in exactly the same Los Angeles. Sheer size has something to do with that, not to mention practical boundaries. With four million inhabitants and 500 square miles in within its bizarre-looking official border alone, the city takes on barely thinkable proportions when you include everywhere someone might live and still call “Los Angeles.” This dilution of effective residency does strange things to the city’s psychology; ask someone who claims to hate living in Los Angeles where exactly they call home, and half the time it lays as far from downtown as Parsippany, New Jersey does from Manhattan. Parsippanites, like everyone else, blame their frustrations on many things, but not, surely, that they live in New York.

You could argue, as cinephiles do about Hemmings himself, over whether Los Angeles delivered on its youthful promise. A decade before “The Simpsons,” Matt Groening self-published a comic book, later to become a Los Angeles Reader strip, called “Life in Hell.” He meant to provide an introduction to Los Angeles, a project like Hemmings and Hopper’s optimistic one of the 1960s, but reflecting the notably less exuberant mood of the late 1970s. Growing up, I pored over all the “Life in Hell” comics I could get in the Seattle of the nineties, a city dosing the national zeitgeist with equal parts Nirvana, Microsoft, and Starbucks. Seattle was “young,” “high-tech,” “edgy,” “hip,” and “livable.” Los Angeles was, well, hell. Yet the waves of emigration to Los Angeles from every other city in America, Seattle included — from nearly every city in the world — never stopped. Openly loathed yet so obviously attractive; that town had to have something going for it, and something unusual indeed.

Read the whole thing there. And why not bookmark the column itself, so you won’t miss my coming postcards from Koreatown, West Hollywood, La Brea Avenue, and the subway?

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Menswear books: Hardy Amies, ABC of Men’s Fashion

Monday, March 18, 2013

Whether in its original 1964 Newnes edition or its handsome 2007 Abrams reissue, ABC of Men’s Fashion strikes an elegant balance between authority and personality. Despite taking a more compact shape than an encyclopedia (128 small-format pages, to be precise), it does take an encyclopedic form. Beginning with a brief explanation of “Accessories”, Amies ends, several hundred elements of male dress later, with a plea for acceptance of the newly popular “Zip fasteners”. 21st-century Americans will recognize these, assuming their universality hasn’t yet turned them effectively invisible, as zippers. “Few people know how they work,” Amies notes, “and many are still therefore wrongly suspicious of them.” There we have a very late hint that this book may not exactly hold a flat, clear mirror to modern sartorial thought. Its neatly arranged entries and sober illustrations suggest unimpeachable objectivity; its text delivers one man’s opinion, and it does so without shame.

But as opinions go, especially those held in the England of fifty years ago, we could do far worse than those of a man who founded a respected label in his own name, dressed Queen Elizabeth II (for whatever relevance that may have to menswear), and spent the Second World War arranging the assassinations of Nazi sympathizers. “The snobbism for which he was famous was primarily an act disguising a much more complicated mixture of vanity, humor, and pragmatism combined with social, creative, and commercial ambition,” writes Ian Garlant in his 2007 introduction. Yet from my 21st-century readerly perspective, Amies’ book displays negligible snobbism, genuine or invented. “All short sleeve shirts look ghastly,” Amies writes on holiday wear. “Sandals are hell, except on the beach where you want to take them off: or on a boat. And, worn with socks are super hell.” These today come off less as judgments than statements of fact, if exaggerated fact.

Read the whole thing at Put This On.

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Podthoughts: The Japan Show

Monday, March 18, 2013

Vital stats:
Format: two expats on the news from Japan, especially of the irksome variety
Episode duration: 35-55m
Frequency: erratic

They call it “Seidensticker Syndrome”, in a tribute of sorts to famed translator and Japanologist Edward Seidensticker. Seidensticker, to put it far too uncomplicatedly, had a love-hate relationship with the country and the people who made the subject of his career. Ian Buruma described it with more nuance, in The Missionary and the Libertine, as “the love that can turn to hate and then back to love again at enormous speed.” I still see these ever-mounting levels of both attraction and frustration today in the eyes of some Westerners who take up residence in Japan. Those who avoid Seidensticker Syndrome do so by pre-emptively abdicating all desire to fit into Japanese society, relishing instead the clear perspective of the permanent outsider. The late Donald Richie, a friend of Seidensticker’s, stands as the locus classicus of this strategy. Seidensticker to Richie: “You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.” Richie, in his diary: “He really hated himself, not these people [ … ] he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing.”

Despite having no sense of whether the hosts of The Japan Show [RSS] [iTunes] suffer from Seidensticker Syndrome themselves, I should note that they spend most of their time talking about the subject that can most readily induce Seidensticker Syndrome: Japanese politics. Westerners who’ve just set foot in the country seem reasonably able to keep a safe psychological distance from their adopted land’s shifty, confusing government, but over the years the irritation evidently mounts to indigestible proportions. On each episode of The Japan Show John Matthews and Gavin Dixon make a meal of the distinctive behavior of Japanese politicians, an improbable-sounding mixture of the clandestine and the intransigent, the pathologically sly and the incompetent. And when an expat in Japan gets to talking about politics, they usually get to talking about political apathy, which there reaches levels disengagement close to absolute. As a Japan specialist recently asked me, what other country has burnt through six prime ministers in six years without any social disruption whatsoever? What other country could?

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

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