{"id":1925,"date":"2013-11-08T09:56:41","date_gmt":"2013-11-08T17:56:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1925"},"modified":"2013-11-08T09:58:19","modified_gmt":"2013-11-08T17:58:19","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e11-style-guide-with-charles-phoenix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1925","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E11: Style Guide with Charles Phoenix"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1926\" style=\"margin: 5px; border: 0px;\" title=\"phoenlxlg-001\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/phoenlxlg-001.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/phoenlxlg-001.jpg 300w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/phoenlxlg-001-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with showman, &#8220;histo-tainer&#8221; and &#8220;Ambassador of Americana&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.charlesphoenix.com\">Charles Phoenix<\/a>, curator of vintage midcentury slides and author of books like <em>Southern Californialand<\/em>, <em>Americana the Beautiful<\/em>, and <em>Southern California in the 50s<\/em>. They discuss the postwar period&#8217;s appealing mix of the highest and lowest American sophistication; how the country&#8217;s new middle class became &#8220;buying machines&#8221; and &#8220;cultural monsters&#8221;; the &#8220;time travel in a box&#8221; he experienced when he found his first set of old slides in a thrift shop; the &#8220;luxurious&#8221; nature of Kodachrome; what makes any given slide a keeper, and how he can tell, say, a 1960 from a 1961; the layers of history visible in a photo, which he looks through as if through a window; the meaning of the first freeway-side mall with fallout shelter-equipped hidden delivery tunnels; the many midcentury innovations Southern California didn&#8217;t invent, but perfected; his Disneyland tours of Down Los Angeles, and Disneyland as both a comparison to and metaphor for much in the human experience; how we gave up the joy of cars and let driving become a chore; the 1950s&#8217; love of speed in contrast to our modern tendency to &#8221; get it over with&#8221;; how he finds the good in every era, the seventies included; our hard-wiring to reject the past and buy new; his more recent interest in processed foodcraft, including work with Cheez Whiz and Jell-O molds; his Los Angeles architecture show, with which he intends to reveal the structures not yet properly acknowledged; how social media empowers the sharing of our aesthetic fetishes; whether modern designs like that of the iPhone express the optimism he sees in midcentury Americana; and the importance, often neglected today, of creating anticipation.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/colinmarshall\/NCC_S4E11_Charles_Phoenix.mp3\">here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or 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 Silver Lake with showman, &#8220;histo-tainer&#8221; and &#8220;Ambassador of Americana&#8221; Charles Phoenix, curator of vintage midcentury slides and author of books like Southern Californialand, Americana the Beautiful, and Southern California in the 50s. They discuss the postwar period&#8217;s appealing mix of the highest and lowest American sophistication; how the country&#8217;s new [&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-1925","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\/1925","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=1925"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1928,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1925\/revisions\/1928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}