Wednesday, November 20, 2013
How many degrees could possibly separate any given Angeleno from someone who lives, or has lived, in Park La Brea? The well-known, highly visible apartment complex, located just north of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, seems to bring forth an anecdote from just about everyone. At a Q&A session after a screening of his documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” I heard filmmaker Thom Andersen mention having once moved there after regarding it for years as the most glamorous place imaginable. (He has since climbed what many Los Angeles architecture buffs would consider more than a rung or two up the glamor ladder, to a Rudolf Schindler house in Silver Lake.) A friend of mine told me about a girl he briefly dated years ago; as soon as he made it into her apartment, high in one of Park La Brea’s eighteen thirteen-story towers, he took one glance at her awful furniture and knew they would never work out. Another regularly gives tours there to Los Angeles-transferred professionals in need of living space. My own girlfriend also put in some time there, albeit as a little kid.
Everyone comes to Park La Brea for their own reasons; I, as a non-resident but regular visitor, have linguistic ones. In the course of my Korean language study, I met a Korean family who, impressed at my determination to practice their mother tongue — impressed, I assume, for the same reason Dr. Johnson regarded the proverbial upright-walking dog as impressive — they generously invited me to stop by their home each week for additional instruction in Korean language and culture. With the wife on sabbatical from her job teaching economics at a Seoul university, the family had decided to spend the time off in Los Angeles, moving into one of Park La Brea’s two-story garden apartments. The first time I tried to stop by, I promptly lost my way in the complex’s series of roundabouts and radiating diagonal paths. Luckily, I’d allowed time for just such a navigational struggle. Flying into LAX, I’d always taken note from above of Park La Brea’s geometry which, though precise and immediately recognizable, gave me a sense of trouble. I count myself lucky that I haven’t lived there yet and haven’t had to go through the nighttime ordeal of getting home drunk.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Friday, November 15, 2013
Colin Marshall sits down before a live audience at the New Urbanism Film Festival at Los Angeles’ ACME Theater with Tim Halbur, Director of Communications at the Congress for the New Urbanism, former Managing Editor at Planetizen, creator of the two-disc DVD set The Story of Sprawl, and author of the children’s urban planning book Where Things Are from Near to Far. They discuss the anti-Los Angeles indoctrination he received in San Francisco, and what that indoctrination might have had right; the two “nodes” of Hollywood and the beach that outsiders tend to recognize in Los Angeles, and why people claim to live here even when they live thirty miles away; why cities actually build for the car aren’t as often derided as “built for the car”; the hard-to-place unease we grew up with in the suburbs; his past producing museum audio tours, and how he would produce an audio tour of Los Angeles that navigates by subcultures; whether Los Angeles is too big, and what it means that we continually try to define and connect it all; what the Congress for the New Urbanism does, and how it addresses the way we once “carved out” our cities for parking lots and freeways; the Jetsonian vision of the future that carried us away after the Second World War; what Disneyland gets right about urbanism; the constant change that defines a living city, and San Francisco’s unhappy experience trying to halt it; the Beverly Hills 90210 model of denser-than-suburbia living he found in Los Angeles; his weekly commute to the CNU in Chicago, and what he learns from living in these two quite different cities at once; how he’d like to see Los Angeles change in the next ten years; how Eric Brightwell‘s neighborhood maps surprise people, and what that means for neighborhood awareness; and the importance of “theming” urban places.
Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast I have a conversation with Michael Krikorian, longtime Los Angeles gang reporter and author of the new crime novel Southside. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
If we call the seaside Santa Monica, home of Third Street Promenade, one of Los Angeles’ major “satellite cities,” then we must also grant the title to Pasadena, which goes its own way in the opposite setting, under the San Gabriel mountains. Both incorporated in 1886, both boast populations around 100,000 (Santa Monica a few thousand lower, Pasadena a few thousand higher), and both have gained reputations for substantial, if not outlandish, wealth. Both independent municipalities have also, in their separate ways and positions — Santa Monica to the west, Pasadena to the northeast — maintained a psychological disconnection from, not to say a disdain for, the metropolis between them. In Robert Altman’s The Player, Tim Robbins’ movie-studio VP undergoes casual police questioning. “You’re putting me in a terrible position here,” he says, nervously. “I’d hate to get the wrong person arrested.” “Oh, please!” responds Whoopi Goldberg’s detective. “This is Pasadena. We do not arrest the wrong person. That’s L.A.!”
Still, residing in a place like Pasadena has never stopped anyone from, when it suits them, claiming to live in Los Angeles — it does, after all, lie within the eponymous county. It also, like Santa Monica, provides something of a pressure valve to those unaccustomed to the too-big city it borders: those bewildered and disoriented by Los Angeles proper can make a retreat there, a return to the more traditional look, feel, and form they can readily comprehend. Nowhere will they feel more at ease than in the original business district, almost without exception called Old Town Pasadena on the street, but now zealously branded, for whatever reason, as Old Pasadena. Concentrated in the blocks around Colorado Boulevard and Fair Oaks Avenue, this historic building-rich core — called, in promotional materials, “The Real Downtown,” — has in recent years reinvented itself as a walking-friendly shopping district, thick with all manner of buying opportunities. One often hears enthusiasm for Pasadena, and the satellite cities in its league, put in terms of the observation that “you have everything here,” a feeling the presence of zones like these no doubt fuels.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Vital stats:
Format: questions about Chicago history, culture, and infrastructure, investigated
Episode duration: 9-23m
Frequency: weekly
“Not so long ago Chicagoans were convinced that their city would soon be the greatest and most famous on Earth, outranking New York, London, and Paris, the centre of a new world, the boss city of the universe,” writes Jan Morris, our most astute observer of place, in a midcentury essay on the capital of the midwest. But now, “the blindest lover of Chicago would not claim for the place the status of a universal metropolis. Too much of the old grand assertiveness has been lost. Nobody pretends Chicago has overtaken New York; instead there is a provincial acceptance of inferiority, a resignation, coupled with a mild regret for the old days of brag and beef. For one reason or another, the stream of events generally passes Chicago by.” Chicagoans, a people still famously full of pride, may take issue with the passage quoted above, but they should note that Morris goes on to sing the praises of their city’s “magnificent art galleries,” “splendid libraries,” “plethora of universities,” “excellent symphony orchestra,” and so on. Why, just last night, I sat down to pizza with a couple of New York- and Los Angeles-loving urbanist friends just returned from the Windy City, both of whom had many strongly favorable impressions of its robustness, cleanliness, and comforting solidity to share. One of them even declared Chicago’s downtown his very favorite in the world.
Still, they laughed when I told the old joke about the discussion among Chicago’s founders: “Okay, we like New York; we like the crime, and we like the overcrowding. But consarn it, it’s not cold enough!” But our conversation, quite pro-Chicago overall, came at an advantageous time, for I’d spent the past few weeks listening to Curious City [RSS] [iTunes], a newish podcast from well-regarded Chicago-based public radio station WBEZ. Each week, the show hits the street in search of answers to questions about the city’s history, culture, and infrastructure submitted by residents: “Are there tunnels under the Loop?”, “What Do Aldermen Do?”, “How do they clean the Bean?” These questions will no doubt make more sense to you — some sense, anyway — if you’ve lived or spent time in Chicago, but the show, seemingly aiming toward even a non-Chicagoan audience, usually takes pains to explain, in simple, outsider-friendly terms, even the most beloved local landmarks and institutions.
Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.
Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with showman, “histo-tainer” and “Ambassador of Americana” 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’s appealing mix of the highest and lowest American sophistication; how the country’s new middle class became “buying machines” and “cultural monsters”; the “time travel in a box” he experienced when he found his first set of old slides in a thrift shop; the “luxurious” 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’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’ love of speed in contrast to our modern tendency to ” get it over with”; 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.
Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
As an Angeleno, no matter of how brief a standing, you tend to want to steer visitors away from Olvera Street. I, for my part, have caught myself wanting to steer visitors away from Olvera Street without appearing to steer them away from Olvera Street. People who live elsewhere have heard of this set of narrow blocks in the very origin point of downtown Los Angeles as a shoppable commemoration of the city’s past as an eighteenth-century Spanish, later Mexican, pueblo, and they often want to see it for themselves. People who live here have heard of it as an unforgivable corralling and sanitization of certain particularly saleable elements of Latin American culture, a tidy serving of “fake” Mexican presence in a town with such a rich banquet of “real” Mexican presence on offer. Yet it has everywhere become deeply unfashionable to appoint oneself a defender of the authentic, and rightly so; in few other places does the concept of authenticity carry so little concrete meaning. I can come to only one reasonable position to setups like Olvera Street: neither for nor against. You can only enter and observe.
I’ve long observed Olvera Street, but usually from what I’ve considered a safe distance, away from the market-filled alley, out on the old plaza. Go in, I figured, and I might as well go in to Disneyland. Charles Phoenix, a well-known “histo-tainer” specializing in the retro, both unprecedentedly sophisticated and deeply unsophisticated mid-century Americana that so flowered in postwar Southern California, has taken the comparison as far as to offer booked-well-in-advance tours premised on the assumption that we Southern Californians have not just one glorious multi-centered theme park, but two: Disneyland, and downtown Los Angeles. Stops include Bunker Hill, Chinatown, and, of course, Olvera Street, of which the latter two (and, in a sense, arguably all) really did appear in their modern incarnations for the express purpose of taking in tourist money. Both came developed at the hand of English-born cultural promoter Christine Sterling, and since opening in 1938 and 1930, respectively, both of these highly deliberate simulacra have regained, or perhaps generated, reality of their own.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
This Saturday, November 9th, I’ll record a live Notebook on Cities and Culture interview on stage at the New Urbanism Film Festival. Running between November 7th and 10th at the ACME Theater in Los Angeles, this first edition of the NUFF aims to “move the conversation about urban planning out of the text book and beyond the council chambers and into the movie theater.”
The conversation, which I’ll have with a senior member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, will happen at 6:30 p.m., with live streaming happening on the festival’s Facebook page. Other events on the schedule include a special presentation of City Walk (whose creators you may have heard me interview), short films on various urban subjects, a downtown Arts District walking tour, and an “urban hike” to Pink’s hot dogs. Get tickets and more information at the festival’s site.
If you’re in Los Angeles this weekend, I hope to see you there. (If not, I hope to have you in the streaming audience.)
On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast I have a conversation about black life in the Inland Empire with Keenan Norris, author of Brother and the Dancer. You can listen to the conversation on the LARB’s site, or download it on iTunes.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Colin Marshall sits down in Hollywood with lawyer turned social dynamics expert Jordan Harbinger, co-host of the Pickup Podcast and co-founder of confidence education program The Art of Charm. They discuss how much time he spends explaining that he isn’t Tom Cruise from Magnolia; how he conceives of The Art of Charm’s mission to teach confidence, which involves teaching emotional intelligence; whether and how our generation of men have come out especially socially inept; the still-strong number of pickup artist types wandering around Hollywood, and the equally strong number of low-self-esteem women with whom they match; the importance of asking oneself the question “What can I learn from this person?”, an entirely different question from “What can I get from this person?”; the Pickup Podcast‘s origin in someone else’s basement, and how that developed into coaching and teaching; the skills of networking through his short law career, and how he realized they also applied to, say, meeting women; the day he found himself ostensibly studying for a law exam while remotely coaching a man for his imminent move from Africa to Denmark; knowing how to use Los Angeles, a land of “towns packed together for tax purposes,” especially its areas of dense “city life” like Hollywood and Koreatown; everyone in Los Angeles’ essential nature as a foreigner, and how that opens up the question, “Where are you from?”; his dull childhood in Troy, Michigan which led to an adolescence of conning and wiretapping, and then into Germany as an exchange student; language and travel as the engines of good social-habit development, and the advantages of becoming foreign and shifting your linguistic context; how “networking” became a dirty word; specificity, the enemy of relationships; the importance of people as vectors; and the sentiment “it’s all who you know — and thank God for that!”
Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.