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San Francisco Diary II

“Might I suggest checking out the rainbow to the east?” an interviewee texted, on his way to meet me in the Castro. Looking up from my phone, I indeed saw a rainbow to the east. Glancing around, I saw the even more compelling sight of everyone on the street pulling out their iPhones, iPads, Droids, and what have you to take pictures of it. “You only see people staring at the sky like this in disaster movies,” my guest pointed out when he arrived. That, I added, is where so many films of futuristic apocalypse got it wrong: they failed to foresee how we’d all point mobile devices at the source of our destruction. (And yes, unwarranted chants of “double rainbow” began immediately. Here we have a difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles: San Francisco’s pedestrians have been on the internet.)

In the north of the city, Google Transit often recommends I ride a cable car to reach my next destination, but I no longer listen. Only on this trip have I finally accepted that cable cars, while quaint — because quaint — do not count as a viable means of conveyance. Every few years comes a motion to dismantle the system, but the forces defending San Francisco’s beloved historic identity always swoop in to defeat it. (Besides, the cable cars must shake considerable revenue out of European pockets.) The first time I tried to catch one, it passed me right by. “Car’s full,” insisted the conductor, though how they determine capacity on vehicles nearly always laden with excess side-hangers I fail to understand. The second time, the car I waited for never turned up. The third time, I did manage to hop aboard, though the car ground to a halt almost immediately due to another broken down on the track ahead. I disembarked, amid a throng of formerly thrilled Germans.

“Man knows how to sit,” muttered a bum after a few minutes of hanging out in my peripheral vision, staring at me. He then approached the cafe’s cashier, demanded to use the “loo” without purchase, and flew into a psychotic rage when she said no. I want to turn this into a humblebrag but can’t quite figure out how. Still, a highly agreeable place to work. Notes from Underground. Green and Van Ness.

Whether you come from Los Angeles and visit San Francisco or come from San Francisco and visit Los Angeles, your brain will automatically and frequently make direct comparisons between the cities. The instinct of the urban Californian demands this, but I don’t endorse it. You can only hope to minimize the invidiousness of these comparisons. Half the time, in any case, I feel as if San Francisco represents the incomparable apple to Los Angeles’ incomparable orange; the other half, I find the cities so basically similar that any contrast seems born of minor-difference narcissism. But I admit that San Francisco retains, at least for the moment, absolute superiority as regards the allure of the ladies riding its public transit. One day, Los Angeles will attain parity in this most vital metropolitan indicator. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but one day — and tears of joy shall fill my eyes.

“Everybody in New York is a little bit Jewish. Everybody in San Francisco is a little bit gay. everybody in Los Angeles is a little bit Mexican.” – a friend theorizing, correctly, about American cities.

Of all the overtly San Franciscan musicians in my collection, I listen to Bart Davenport the most. Three years ago, he put out an album called Palaces that took me by surprise — have a listen to its first two cuts, the title track and “Jon Jon”, and get an idea of his range — and I’ve kept an ear on his career ever since. Walking west on the Embarcadero, I decided to enjoy a geographically relevant earbud soundtrack and fired up Davenport’s new song “Cheap Words”. In its Los Angeles-set video, he drives past the chrome head of Vladimir Lenin on La Brea and 4th, which thrills me. I thought I might invite him to record an interview while in town, but looking up his contact information, I found that he had actually relocated to Los Angeles. Perhaps this explains, or is explained by, his sonically apparent decision to participate in the early-eighties revival now underway. I’ll make him a “home” interview.

Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E6: Inconsiderable Things with Steve Roden

Colin Marshall sits down in a Wallace Neff dome in Pasadena with visual and sound artist Steve Roden. They discuss whether art can exist without constraints; his enthusiasm for “dumb ideas,” such as painting with his mouth; the influence of Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which he found in a gutter as a kid; the inspiration a Jimi Hendrix impersonator gave him, and how he went on to enter the Los Angeles punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties; his punk band’s catalog, including such songs as “Kill Reagan” and “Jesus Needs a Haircut”; his skill set consisting primarily of patience and the ability to evolve slowly; working in forms that admit the most failure, and thus produce the most interestingness; the days when he would hang out at the Westwood Tower Records until midnight, and the clerk that gave him an all-important copy of Brian Eno’s Another Green World; the beauty of playing an instrument you know nothing about, and of other ideas born of incomplete information; his involvement with languages he doesn’t speak, including researching Walter Benjamin without German, studying in Paris without French, and translating Swedish poetry without Swedish; finding the unknown in Los Angeles, and what it means to be able to traverse the city with ease or difficulty; the importance of maintaining a one-man practice; and his uncommonly fruitful experiences reading liner notes.

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

San Francisco Diary I

I once hated and feared San Francisco. Then again, I did so from three feet off the ground, in an era that saw the city’s struggles with filth and homelessness reached their most vicious. Upon growing up, I began calling San Francisco “an amusement park for 36-year-olds.” Indeed, the closer I get to that age, the more I approach the place as a welcome diversion instead of an aggressive, bewildering hellscape. If you want clean streets, observed my friend Chris (the Livejournalist formerly known as Cobalt999), you could have found them in any communist capital. San Francisco may lean well left, but not in quite that way. San Francisco may still flaunt its remaining patches of urban strife, grime, and decay, but it doesn’t fully embrace that kind of cityhood. San Francisco offers something else.

Having grown so accustomed to the built environment of Los Angeles, I’d wondered how San Francisco’s would now strike me. As I made my way back into this city I used to visit so often, two contrasts jumped right to the fore. First, everything looks somewhat older. Second, everything looks considerably more… undulant.

Transit having become an urban fascination of mine, I’d looked forward to spending more time than ever before (and I’d spent none before) riding the various vehicles run by BART, Muni and whatnot. As it happened, I found occasion to get around by bus, surface train, and subway all within the first few hours. BART, though analyzed as a great planning disaster by no less an authority on these matters than Sir Peter Hall, seems serviceable enough and has a homely seventies-ish appeal. (Certainly the station announcements could make you believe that text-to-speech technology has stood still since then.) Muni’s trains, though I’ve heard they routinely fall into agonizing slowness, have a similarly homely seventies-ish appeal. I have yet to determine the era of which San Francisco’s buses bear the mark (some look retro, restored from distant glory days), but they seem wearier than Los Angeles’. Then again, Los Angeles’ bus riders seem wearier than San Francisco’s, and deeply so — by which I mean utterly defeated.

Should you find yourself in Haight-Ashbury and in need of a place to sit down and do some writing, The Red Victorian Peace Center has a reasonably accommodating cafe. Be apprised, though, that their strength must lay in their capacity as a Peace Center, since it sure doesn’t lay in their cappuccino-making abilities.

Two or three times a week, Angelenos comment on my Chrome bag. Usually the strap’s gryphon-emblazoned buckle catches their eye. (“Hey, cool Ferrari thing!” said a middle-aged lady on western Hollywood Boulevard whom I did not acknowledge.) The globally peripatetic French-Canadian-Korean polyglot cinephile expressed surprised at this. “Everyone has them in San Francisco,” she said, drawing upon very recent memories of having lived there. Walking around the Mission, I can confirm that, yes, everyone has them in San Francisco. Turns out Chrome has its headquarters here. I imagine they’ve partnered up with the city government; real San Franciscans can probably pick up free messenger bags, as many as they like, at some depot.

Ending my first day of San Francisco interviewing in the Mission, I thought I’d mark the occasion by eating a genuine Mission-style burrito: you know, those overstuffed, foil-wrapped monstrosities that, consumed late at night, test the limits of human digestion. While technically available in southern California, Mission-style burritos aim for a far different demographic than do even the most burrito-oriented Los Angeles eateries I frequent, so I hardly ever encounter them. Daring myself, I went all the way and ordered a corruption of the Mission-style burrito, a “California burrito” bursting with steak, avocado, sour cream, and, yes, French fries. You wouldn’t have wanted to watch the ensuing ordeal, my indulgence in a perfect yin-yang of pleasure and disgust, savoring and self-loathing. “Were this the only image in the world, you’d be forced to give it your full attention,” as David Sedaris wrote, “but fortunately there were others.”

Not having spent deliberate or meaningful time away from Los Angeles in nine months, I watched downtown pass through the windows of the LAX Flyaway shuttle and wondered how quickly I would begin pining away. The answer, obviously, is that I won’t, not in five days. But the feeling didn’t rise from the isolated prospect of this trip; it rose from the symbolic acceptance of a career, and thus a life, designed around — indeed, dependent upon — ultimately spending as much time “away” as “home.” Even that distinction will blur, as I suppose I accept that it must.

One year in Los Angeles; three showings of Los Angeles Plays Itself

 

Being someone for whom aloneness feels like living burial, I suppose I could have chosen a more suitable life than one involving so much reading, writing, and filmgoing. True, you do sit among dozens to hundreds of others when you see a movie, but that strikes me as isolation by other means. I suppose I could also have chosen a more suitable city than Los Angeles, whose endemic lonely-crowd cultural and intellectual alienation detractors have reflexively (if not rigorously) asserted for decades and decades.

Yet I’ve taken few other options seriously, geographically or existentially speaking, and the moments of near-true connection that have come along thus far just about convince me to stay the course. Over the year I have now logged in this city, Los Angeles Plays Itself has, in the three times I’ve seen it, reliably catalyzed such moments, and the very act of attending its showings has shed light on, if not my obscure object of desire, then the obscure desire itself.

The documentary, directed by CalArts professor and longtime Angeleno Thom Andersen, mounts something a defense against all the cinematic abuse Los Angeles has taken since the invention of the medium. The movies have remorselessly mangled its distinctive geography; they’ve routinely, and often shabbily, tarted it up to simulate other, more “real” cities; they’ve reduced it to a vast, multi-purpose nowhere, at once bland and garish. Once you start noticing this custom, whether you learn of it through Andersen or elsewhere, you can’t stop noticing it.

One of the many, many film clips Los Angeles Plays Itself marshals in the argument comes from Cobra, a neon-drenched mid-eighties Sylvester Stallone vehicle and staple of my own teenage late-night cable viewing. One of its elaborate car chases jumps, with a single cut, from the cement canals of Venice thirty miles south to Long Beach harbor. Even if you can’t describe that sleight of hand, you can feel it. Perhaps you’d expect even worse from a picture in Cobra’s league, but that brazen manhandling of reality startles me every time — and it seems to raise a rather more complicated reaction in Andersen.

Against this geographically lazy car chase, the documentary summons a geographically fastidious one from H.B. Halicki’s 1974 Gone in 60 Seconds, which speeds in a rigidly “literalist” fashion through greater Los Angeles’ South Bay. The narration flatly proclaims that film “Dziga Vertov’s dream: an anti-humanist cinema of bodies and machines in motion,” a line which never fails to draw a laugh from me. It also drew one, I couldn’t help but notice, from the girl sitting next to me, a globally peripatetic French-Canadian-Korean polyglot cinephile who moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco two months ago and will soon decamp to rural Colorado to — as I understand it — tend to horses for a few weeks.

This screening of Los Angeles Plays Itself happened to come at the right time: two weeks after I met her, and one week before the farm calls. While I’ve come to regard Andersen’s film as an essential first phase in the grand, futile project of understanding Los Angeles, something inside me also insisted that she, in particular, would find it a highly resonant viewing experience. That hunch and others, even though two weeks would seemingly provide little to go on, proved correct, almost frighteningly so. Locked in to the right subject, it seems, the subconscious mind figures things out.

As with people, so with cities. It took very few visits to Los Angeles before I echoed, albeit quietly and only to myself, Brigham Young’s pronouncement upon reaching Salt Lake Valley: “This is the place.” I could lay out countless minor reasons why — specific places, foods, experiences, and notables that feel tailored for me, and I for them — but the irreducible gestalt, despite taking the form of a place sometimes referred to not like hell but as hell, really made the choice for me.

Having now lived here for a year, I’ve built up my stock of descriptors. Los Angeles attracts me with both its statelessness and its aimlessness. The city seems to roll along encumbered by no more pressing claims from the United States of America than from Latin America, or Asia, or even Europe. It periodically undergoes times of great change — we find ourselves in one now — without ever quite displaying awareness of what it means to become. Getting up close, taking one encounter at a time, I’ve often thought of Los Angeles as an ideal match for me. Stepping back, taking in the protean, elusive whole, the very idea turns ridiculous, but I suspect something squares that circle. The subconscious mind figures things out.

Built visually out of only other feature films, Los Angeles Plays Itself includes pieces of Cobra, Gone in 60 Seconds, and 200 others besides. (It always surprises me how much of The Replacement Killers made it in.) This has rendered the documentary effectively unreleasable in any easy-to-find form (though you might find one imperfect solution above). I’ve managed to see it three times in my year here, each instance psychologically aligning with my experience of Los Angeles more closely than the last.

My first viewing came almost immediately, presented by one of the first friends I made in town, a former CalArts film student. As I understand it, people usually face a considerably longer struggle before being all-importantly “invited in” to Los Angeles, whether professionally, socially, or cinematically. My second viewing, one of the picture’s regular appearances at Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre, put me — surely an old hand, after six months here — in the role of the introducer. I brought two friends from Santa Barbara and, straight from Vancouver, Chris, the Livejournalist formerly known as Cobalt999. Chris played an unusual part: the visitor from a high-livability-ranked urban paradise (so I’ve read) genuinely interested in getting a handle on the likes of Los Angeles.

This third time, on my 367th day of residence, I realized I no longer call the place “L.A.” Andersen never did. “Maybe we adopted it as a way of immunizing ourselves against the implicit scorn,” he says, “but it still makes me cringe. Only a city with an inferiority complex would allow it.” He also never professes love for Los Angeles, and neither do I. The proper chemistry arises from time to time, but when I look intently at the city, it stares back expressing a discomfiting oscillation between alluring encouragement and flat disregard.

The sparks that fly between me and the elements of Los Angeles I choose to engage distract from an underlying sense of inevitable rejection made somehow more dreadful by its obvious benignity. Upon first meeting my latest Los Angeles Plays Itself viewing companion, I described this city as “my cruel mistress.” I meant it as a joke, and “cruel” implies too much intention, but clearly, the subconscious mind figures things out. Los Angeles has gradually become a mistress, built up unnoticed in my lower mental tiers, without a legitimate wife to oppose.

Stranger still, she stands, exuding favorable signals all the while, at just enough of a remove — always centered elsewhere, or about to be — to not literally merit the title. Yet I foresee myself linked to her, however tentatively. I foresee myself never quite knowing when I’m throwing good time, money, and faith after bad. I foresee myself leaving, temporarily but as often and as long as possible, pretending to do so not out of compulsion, not out of necessity, not out of fear, but out of choice.

Podthoughts: La Casa Rojas

Vital stats:
Format: a man speaks of many things — in Spanish
Episode duration: 5m-30m
Frequency: maybe not a going concern, but 71 episodes exist

So here’s one entirely in Spanish. If you don’t understand that language, I won’t stop you scrolling on, but if you understand even a little bit of it — or if you want to understand all of it — you might consider having a listen. On La Casa Rojas [RSS] [iTunes], the Peruvian-born, St. Paul-based Spanish teacher Luis Rojas talks about events in his life, events in the world at large, events in history, and the many vagaries of language-learning. A simple premise, to be sure, but I listen to a great many language podcasts, and at least half of them complicate themselves straight out of usefulness. This one has held to a certain purity. You want to learn Spanish? Then hey, listen to a man speak Spanish for a while.

Put the foreign linguistic element aside — not that it makes much sense to do so here — and this show would seem to follow a common but usually unfortunate podcasting form: some guy talking about stuff. But even when I began listening, my Spanish rusted to near-uselessness, the impressive friendliness of Rojas’ personality shone through. You don’t realize the rarity of this until you hear it; I get the sense that most podcasters, eager to quickly scrape together whatever audience they can, affect sour pusses and hope to gather listeners under the banner of common (if exaggerated) prejudices. The strain of this charade, I would guess, has become a leading cause of the disease known as podfade. But Rojas comes across as a genuinely friendly, open fellow, just the sort of person you hope for when you know you’ll miss some to most of the meaning of each sentence spoken. Should I go to a word like “avuncular” here? Or perhaps the closest Spanish equivalent I can find, the awfully literal “de tío”?

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E5: The “Kiss Me, Stupid” Date with Karina Longworth

Colin Marshall sits down in Sliver Lake with Karina Longworth, film writer at the LA Weekly, co-founder of the film-culture blog Cinematical, and author of the upcoming Masters of Cinema: George Lucas. They discuss the public fascination with criticism versus blogging; J. Hoberman‘s notion of criticism as reporting what it feels like to be in the screening room; how she promoted a version of herself in her blogging days, and what she regrets about doing so; the pre-YouTube video essays she would create in school about Moonlighting, Judy Garland’s apocryphal marriage proposal to Frank Sinatra, and Maury Povich; whether it makes sense to ask if we live in an interesting time for cinema, and whether she can even tell through the fog of writing about movies every week; time travel films and the oft-fumbled promise thereof, especially in the shadows of Back to the Future‘s pop mainstreaming of scientific devices; what she’s learned about making Claire Denis and Sion Sono quickly relevant to readers who may well never have heard of them; how New York gets more movies than Los Angeles, how moviegoing means something different in the two cities, and her cover story about the whole dichotomy; her book on George Lucas, and the looming question of what, exactly, happened to him; her fears about her favorite directors getting too much budget, power, and freedom, and her greater fears about the Dodgers falling victim to the same; the strange fate of the rental collection at Kim’s Video; her experience of cinematic burnout, and the subjectivity to which is may lead; Andrew Bujalski‘s Computer Chess, which is actually about computer chess; pictures like Sans Soleil and Kiss Me, Stupid, which so formed their cinematic consciousnesses as to become their representations in film form; and the magical, destructive, entrancing, awful myth of old Hollywood.

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

Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E4: The Maybe Pile with Carolyn Kellogg

Colin Marshall sits down in Echo Park with Carolyn Kellogg, writer on books and publishing for the Los Angeles Times and their literary blogJacket Copy, board member at the National Book Critics Circle, and formerly the blogger and podcaster behind Pinky’s Paperhaus. They discuss what happens when the interviewer becomes an interviewee; her use of early internet radio as a social skill-free way to penetrate the Los Angeles literary scene; that scene’s coherence through the internet, and its tendency to be “nicer” than New York’s, where publishing has cultural primacy; her tendency to strike less of a local-global balance in Jacket Copy than to regard Los Angeles itself as stateless; the city’s unknowability, and the probable facetiousness of anyone who claims to know it; whether books, bookstores, reading, and criticism are or were ever in crisis; solid versus ephemeral media, and the importance of your inability to drop your library in the toilet; publishing’s former status as a “gentlemen’s business,” and how that allowed it the tolerance for failure that every creative industry needs; whether Twitter makes people too nice to produce serious criticism; what makes some social networks suitable for book talk, and others completely worthless; the Los Angeles Times‘ use of blogs, and Tony Pierce‘s influence on it; her days in the Los Angeles of the eighties, working at an all-night Russian cafe downtown; how writers don’t seem to hate it here as much nowadays, though some sort of heartbreak remains; how she filters not just the daily shipment of books to her house, but the onslaught of books that enter existence on a daily basis; and the possibility that someone’s finally getting the multimedia reading experience right.

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

Podthoughts: Excess Baggage

 
Vital stats:
Format: talk with travelers, and talk while traveling
Episode duration: ~28m
Frequency: not a going concern, but 85 episodes exist

Cultural England seems to have always loved a traveler. Perhaps this affinity lingers from the days of Empire, or maybe an island people instinctively understand wanderlust. Just behold the gallery of luminaries that is Wikipedia’s English travel writers page. If its seemingly broad definition of “travel writer” bothers you, any designation that encompasses the likes of Geoff Dyer, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Pico Iyer, Michael Palin, and Evelyn Waugh can’t go far wrong. None of them seem freighted with the same burdens which Sisyphize many of the unfortunates we regard as travel writers in America, haphazardly collecting a third of the information they need in half the time they need so as to make the word count for an “If You Go…” box. Something tells me Colin Thubron never put up with that.

A traveler like Thubron, of course, deals with challenges all his own, and you can hear about them on BBC Radio 4’s Excess Baggage [RSS] [iTunes]. He shows up to discuss his journey up a Tibetan mountain so sacred that the truly faithful can never ascend; they just sort of go around and around the base. [MP3] Such a story could almost have come ripped from the diary of any of the Empire’s finest, but Excess Baggage as a whole attempts to cover a width of the traveling spectrum between these forcefully soul-searching Thubronic adventures to, say, the lure of moonlight [MP3], or knitting in Iceland [MP3].

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E3: Jetpacks and Flying Cars with Chris Nichols

Colin Marshall sits down below the mid-Wilshire offices of Los Angeles magazine with its associate editor Chris Nichols, the man behind the Ask Chris column and blog, former chair of the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee, and author of The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister. They discuss the importance of the now-empty Johnie’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire and Fairfax; what being a civic booster means in Los Angeles; the remains of the postwar American car culture of easy, breezy livin’, and their enduring value; the preponderance of hard-to-explain objects across the Los Angeles landscape, and how he explains them in his writing; the richness and strange inhospitability of La Brea Avenue, currently caught between old and new ideas of the city; architectural preservation, and how much of it in Los Angeles is too much; the surviving Googie coffee shops like Pann’s and Norms, Wayne McAllister’s pre-Googie creations, and their place in the city’s historical palimpsest; his determination to help tourists determine and discover their fantasy of Los Angeles, of which countless many exist; why you have to go out and find the city, and why it will simply never come to you; the wonders of Cucamonga; how he’s used Los Angeles as his own personal party space; the Dutch chocolate shop that became a swap meet, and the spectacular twenties movie palace that became a storeroom; how things filled out when “the world moved in” to places like Koreatown, where you can find, for instance, a cafe that is also a boat; what meaning, if any, Frank Gehry’s much-discussed Disney Concert Hall has; and his desire to get lost in Los Angeles once again.

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

Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E2: The Crushing Burden of History with Frances Anderton

Colin Marshall sits down in Ocean Park with Frances Anderton, host of KCRW’s Design and Architecture and Dwell magazine’s Los Angeles editor. They discuss how her countrymen Reyner Banham, David Hockney, and Christopher Isherwood opened up the idea of Los Angeles to England, vague as the understanding of its cityscape remained; the modernism of Los Angeles then emblematized by its freeways and its architectural freedom from the crushing burden of history, as unlike her native Bath as possible; how Paris’ Pompidou Centre and the mere image of sliding glass patio doors shaped her architectural consciousness; the rise of preservation in Los Angeles, and how it might take an outsider to clearly see the movement’s potential to hinder eccentricity; the American tendency to prostrate ourselves before whatever seems sufficiently old; how stark early-sixties modernism rose in Los Angeles without actually displacing anything, except on Bunker Hill; Chris Burden‘s ideas about the super-fast self-driving car as the transportation of his future, and his generation’s implicit yearning to bring back 1962; how she figured out that radio was indeed a suitable medium for the discussion of design, architecture, and aesthetics, especially when it can include conversations about such subjects with the likes of Moby; and what Moby’s architecture blog says about the surreality of Los Angeles, as well as where she still finds that surreality herself after 21 years in the city.

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