{"id":764,"date":"2012-07-19T13:02:33","date_gmt":"2012-07-19T20:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=764"},"modified":"2012-07-19T13:02:53","modified_gmt":"2012-07-19T20:02:53","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s1e31-freedom-and-ugliness-with-christopher-hawthorne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=764","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E31: Freedom and Ugliness with Christopher Hawthorne"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"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\u00a0The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture<\/em>. Last year, he conducted\u00a0Reading Los Angeles<\/a>, 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\u00a0Atlantic<\/a>, then\u00a0Sunset<\/a>, 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\u00a0Randy’s<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Dale’s Donuts<\/a>), 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\u00a0Annie Hall<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Midnight in Paris<\/a><\/em>; 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\u00a0midcentury modern houses<\/a>\u00a0in terribly alienating locations; and the tendency of tourists to see only the worst of Los Angeles and go no further \u2014 unless they go\u00a0much, much further<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Download the interview from\u00a0Notebook on Cities and Culture\u2019<\/em>s feed\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0or on iTunes\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture. Last year, he conducted\u00a0Reading Los Angeles, a yearlong study of the city through the books written about it. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764","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=764"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":768,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions\/768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}