{"id":1340,"date":"2013-02-17T15:42:08","date_gmt":"2013-02-17T23:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1340"},"modified":"2013-02-17T15:42:08","modified_gmt":"2013-02-17T23:42:08","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s3e11-sad-characters-with-clive-piercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1340","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E11: Sad Characters with Clive Piercy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1341\" style=\"margin: 5px;\" title=\"clivepiercy\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/clivepiercy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"239\" height=\"300\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Clive Piercy, founder and principal of design studio <a href=\"http:\/\/www.airconditionedla.com\/\">air-conditioned<\/a> and author of the photo book <em>Pretty Vacant<\/em>, an appreciation of Los Angeles &#8220;dingbat&#8221; apartments. They discuss Reyner Banham&#8217;s enduring definition of the dingbat; his time growing up in England enamored with American culture, and his surprise to find Los Angeles existed in color; the glory of freeways and the guilt of driving them, and the sense of failed utopia they share with dingbat buildings; how dingbats crept into his Los Angeles photography jaunts, shaped by his love of Ed Ruscha&#8217;s paintings, and what happened when his fellow immigrants living in them came out to confront him; how his countryman Martin Parr perfectly captures the blandness of modern architectural wonders; his countrywoman <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=832\">Frances Anderton<\/a> and their separate flights from the crushing burden of history; the cars parked under dingbats, and their saddening cheapness that resonates with the saddening cheapness of the home itself; inherent British negativity versus inherent American positivity; his participation in the aesthetics of eighties Los Angeles, the redesign of the Shangri-La hotel, and the newspaper coverage of the 1984 Olympics; how the mini-mall co-opted postmodernism, getting the proportions all wrong in the process; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WlZ0NbC-YDo\"><em>Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles<\/em><\/a>, which brought Banham and Ruscha together; Clive James and Ian Nairn&#8217;s writing on cities, which honor the high and the low together; how neither graphic design nor Los Angeles needs you, and how that&#8217;s the appeal; the current availability of all aesthetics, and his students&#8217; tendency not to discriminate between them and focus on brands instead; and whether he&#8217;s been able to get any of these internet-savvy kids, usually from Asia and indifferent to Los Angeles, excited about dingbats.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview from\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/colinmarshall.libsyn.com\/s3e11-sad-characters-with-clive-piercy\"><em>Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em>\u2019s feed<\/a> or on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Clive Piercy, founder and principal of design studio air-conditioned and author of the photo book Pretty Vacant, an appreciation of Los Angeles &#8220;dingbat&#8221; apartments. They discuss Reyner Banham&#8217;s enduring definition of the dingbat; his time growing up in England enamored with American culture, and his surprise to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1343,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/1343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}