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Podthoughts: The Champs

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Vital stats:
Format: two white comedians and a DJ interview black guys, a pornstar, and Jose Canseco
Episode duration: 45m-1h35m
Frequency: 2-5 per month

Moshe Kasher, a comedian I’ve seen here and there in Los Angeles, wrote a memoir and became one of the very, very few nonfiction authors to appear for an interview on KCRW’s Bookworm. This alone got me interested in his other projects, a group which includes a podcast called The Champs[RSS] [iTunes]. He hosts it with fellow comedian Neal Brennan, known as the co-creator ofChapelle’s Show, and someone named DJ Douggpound, who seldom verbally interjects but fires off many a sound clip — “drops,” as the radio industry calls them, or called them long ago when the technology was a novelty — using his iPad. So you have these three guys, and then they’re doing an interview show, questioning a different guest each week and everything. While none of these qualities sounded particularly innovative in and of itself, they all combined to give me reason to suspect something… alive in this podcast. Something spirited.

Downloading episodes, I found interviews with quite a few creators, celebrities, and other public figures I don’t normally hear dropping by podcasts: Hollywood Shuffle director (and Meteor Manhimself) Robert Townsend [MP3], noted Eddie Murphy sibling Charlie Murphy [MP3], genre-defeating electronic musician Flying Lotus [MP3 1] [MP3 2]. David Alan Grier [MP3], to whose every appearance on Adam Carolla’s show I download, and The Roots’ Questlove [MP3], whom I still remember enjoying on Aisha Tyler’s Girl on Guy, also grabbed my attention. All guys with brains worth picking, and Kasher, Brennan, and Douggpound do a sharp and energetic job of it, but for a while I just couldn’t see the unifying concept.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

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Halfway through Notebook on Cities and Culture’s S2 Kickstarter drive — with $1091 to go

Friday, July 27, 2012

We’re three and a half days through the week-long Kickstarter fund drive for Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s second season, featuring interviews in San Francisco and Portland. If we can raise $3000 by the end of it, the show will go on. As of now, we’ve raised $1909, with 15 backers. (For reference, the first season’s fund drive raised $3000 with 42 backers.)

If you’d like to get a hand in, you’ve got three and a half days left. Opportunities remain to sponsor individual episodes or the entire season, which means your project or message will get talked about at the top of one or all of the season’s interviews. And after we reach the $3000 goal, each additional $200 means I add another episode to the planned 24. (So if you’ve ever wanted to indefinitely prolong a podcast, then, now’s your chance!) You’ll find all the details on the show’s Kickstarter page. Thanks.

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The Novel Cafe (Koreatown)

Friday, July 27, 2012

Give the Koreatown Novel Cafe this: nobody can object. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily trust an Angeleno who claims to love the place — show me a man who eats here every time they come to the neighborhood, and I’ll show you a man who’s given up — but if you’re meeting someone you don’t know very well for lunch, here’s your effortless go-to. I did just that recently, in fact. She got delayed coming out of LAX — try not to look surprised — so I sat at a table and waited, reading a Murakami novel and drinking their no-frills cappuccinos. “Have you got another person coming?” a waitress asked. “Be fifteen minutes,” I replied, not lying but not exactly not lying either. I think I sat there for a reasonably enjoyable hour and a half, and then for another two after she turned up. In Tokyo they’d surely lock me up for squatting on table real estate like this, but the Novel Cafe staff didn’t seem to mind.

What do you eat here? Oh, salads. Pesto sandwiches. Chicken wraps with lots of beans, corn, and lettuce. Complimentary bread with the faintest sweetness. Nothing to get excited about, and even slightly on the bland side, but somehow an unimprovable exemplar of this modern genre of California lunch food that bothers nobody and actually sounds just about ideal one hot day out of every two or three weeks. The Wilshire-facing window prominently advertises free wi-fi, and I think I glimpsed a room of vinyl records one time I really looked around, but I don’t know if this location qualifies as a much of a workspace or a hangout. If I set myself up to do bear down on some serious writing, I suspect that a staff member — they walk right up to your table and everything — would ask me why I haven’t ordered a wrap yet. I would get over this awkwardness quickly, but not everyone does. Then again, elements of the place do seem geared-toward the hanger-out; I notice many a wall-mounted sports-glowing television and a concert stage with a drum kit already on it, though I don’t know when it sees use.

Those who meet the semi-unknown for lunch all over town, especially on the westside, know that Novel Cafes have multiplied: you’ll find one in Westwood, an astonishing three in Santa Monica, and even one way over in Pasadena. I can’t vouch for those branches, but the Arts District location downtown, more a coffee shop than a full-service cafe, has on many days provided me a space to work and the drinkables to go with it. You can technically get lunch there, too — I ate a burrito of some kind there once, almost certainly containing avocado, and I’d recommend it — but nobody brings it to you. The Koreatown Novel Cafe has more “cool” going for it, or rather, a different kind of cool, a slicker, just-up-the-scale cool. The Arts District Novel Cafe’s cool is the cool of old typewriters used decoratively, a wall of loose-leaf tea, and a wide take-a-paperback-leave-a-paperback shelf. I get the sense that whoever’s running things thinks the Koreatown crowd — a crowd with different aspirations, to be sure — doesn’t want to see that stuff out in the open. They’ve got pesto to eat. But I, too, often have pesto to eat.

(More such writeups on Yelp.)

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Notebook on Cities and Culture season two in San Francisco and Portland Kickstarts now

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

 

Six months ago, we raised $3000 in a week to fund 32 episodes of Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s premiere season: 32 long-form interviews with cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene all over Los Angeles. Starting right now, we’re aiming to raise another $3000 in a week for Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s second season, which will not only offer more of what you enjoyed last season, but will begin the show’s world tour. We’ll take this operation up the west coast to Portland and San Francisco, exploring those cities and getting down into it with their most interesting luminaries.

Kickstarter, as you may already know, makes it exceedingly easy to fund projects like this. If we don’t reach $3000 within the week, you keep whatever money you’ve pledged. Give certain amounts, and you can sponsor the show in a variety of different ways:

  • For $25 or more, I’ll thank you by name in all of season two’s episodes.
  • For $75 or more, I’ll mention your own project or message at the top of one of season’s two’s episodes, and thank you by name in all of them.
  • For $400 or more, I’ll mention your own project or message at the top of all of season two’s episodes.
  • For $1000 or more, you’ll be the guest in one of season two’s episodes. I’ll come to you (within North America only, at least for this season) and we’ll record a conversation about the culture you create and the city you create it in. I’ll also thank you by name in all of season two’s episodes. This sounds like a joke, and I partially made it an option so the other options would look cheaper by comparison, but in the unlikely event of a $1000 pledge, I will totally do it.

For every $200 raised above the $3000 goal, I’ll add one more episode onto the season than the planned 24. (If we raise $5,000, for example, season two will run for 34 episodes.) Want to fund Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s second season? Click here. This season, San Francisco and Portland; next season, the world.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E32: Genuine New York Novelist with Joshua Henkin

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in West Hollywood with novelist Joshua Henkin, author most recently of The World Without You, for their first conversation in four and a half years since his previous appearance on The Marketplace of Ideas. They discuss how the new book makes a space for characters to converge rather than occupying the space between two people, like his last one; the authorial balance between knowing too much and knowing too little, and the need to address the same question in fiction you would on Passover of “why this night is different from all other nights”; his bringing in a divorce, a death, the war in Iraq, and July 4th, and how much is too much; his tendency to throw away thousands of pages when refining each novel, observing the economist’s principle of sunk costs; how character is plot, and how stories go wrong when character isn’t plot; his ways of fictionally repurposing pieces of his own life that few readers would guess; the dangers of writing about recent-past events, and doing so while achieving the universal with a laserlike focus on the particular; the importance of writing no character as an authorial mouthpiece, especially when dealing with sensitive political and religious issues as The World Without You does; his use of teaching as a feedback look for his own writing, and how early in his career he managed to expose himself to a great amount of what doesn’t work in fiction; his writer’s life in Brooklyn, and why that borough has become such a writerly place; his childhood in and return to New York, and what that has to do with his characters existing in perpetual relationships to the place; the writer’s need to hang out primarily with non-writers; his techniques for achieving a sense of place, and the American difficulty of having any sense of place at all about somewhere as distant as Iraq, which seems to have become a theme of the war itself; the press’ eagerness and the author’s wariness to discuss the “aboutness” of a book; and the irreducibility of fiction meaning that the easier you can summarize a novel, the worse that novel is.

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

(Photo: Matthew Polis)

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Bricks & Scones (Larchmont)

Monday, July 23, 2012

Santa Barbara lacks many things, but when I lived there, never did I want for pleasant coffee shops in which to work. Coffee Cat on Anacapa, The Daily Grind on Mission, The French Press on Carrillo, Cafe Zoma on State, Santa Barbara Roasting Company on Motor Way, Hot Spots on lower-lower State if the wee hours came and you didn’t mind the scuzz factor… and that was just downtown. While I feel convinced that Los Angeles has equivalents aplenty, it doesn’t present them in any obvious manner (not Los Angeles’ way), nor do they sit particularly close to one another (certainly not Los Angeles’ way). After nearly a year of trial and error, I’ve found that, every day I have several hours of reading, writing, and internet-y work to do, a slight hunger, and no food at home nor any desire to remain at home even if it did have food, I face the same question: do I go to Bricks & Scones, or do I go somewhere else?

Bricks & Scones has become, in other words, my default “third place.” Urban theorist Ray Oldenburg defined third places as, roughly speaking, areas that aren’t your home or your work (this “work” you speak of… ?), and which offer such characteristics as neutrality, status-leveling, conversation, accessibility, regulars, and a low profile. This particular third place also offers a baked good called a “sesame chewy roll,” for which I keep coming back in spite of myself. They charge well over three bucks for the thing, or so I believe; I try not to think about the prices. Little Tokyo’s Cafe Dulce offers a cheaper, arguably superior version — less hollow, with walnuts, and bright green to boot — but that’s five miles in the opposite direction. Bricks & Scones’ Larchmont location does at first seem awfully inconvenient to a Koreatowner such as myself: two and a half miles away, with no direct train route. (You have to connect to the low-frequency local bus on Beverly, and even then you won’t be happy about it.) But the bike ride through Hancock Park lasts just long enough to qualify as “invigorating,” and you can usually lock up right out front.

You can order actual food here — sandwiches, soups, wraps — although eating a quick lunch and splitting won’t really get you the value. I often set up camp, eat a half mango curry chicken sandwich (fruit on the side), work for a few hours, then enter the second phase with a cappuccino and sesame roll. I figure I drop about twenty bucks, all told. Not a painful price to pay for the accommodations, I would argue, to the implicit agreement of Bricks & Scones’ strikingly young crowd: the inner-ish fringe of The Industry, college students, Korean twentysomethings. Sometimes the place starts to feel, comfortably, like an outpost of Koreatown; though no bargain, it does represent a discount from the sometimes flamboyantly expensive coffee shops of my own neighborhood. I willingly pay for the vibe of productivity, though; it just feels like, as slowly as they’re nursing their coffees, people are getting a lot accomplished here. I’ve even recorded interviews on the premises. But given the effects of all work and no play, I’ve promised myself that when next I bring someone here, I’m ordering the menu’s “afternoon tea,” complete with scones and jam. Genuine Britons (or even just people from Victoria) might consider it a travesty, but that’s how we do it in the colonies.

(More such writeups on Yelp.)

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Podthoughts: The Dana Gould Hour

Sunday, July 22, 2012

 
Vital stats:
Format: thematic comedy gab, broken up with prepared segments
Episode duration: 1h-1h30m
Frequency: 1-2 per month

“Why do you want to do a podcast? You ain’t gonna do no podcast. You just a johnny-come-lately. You spent too much time on The Simpsons and you lost it, and now you’re trying to get it back, and everybody thinks it’s pathetic. You ain’t no Marc Maron.” Those words come in the voice of Little Richard, as performed by Dana Gould, to convey to us what the discouraging disapproving-dad voice inside his head sounds like. (His theory says that such a voice gets much easier to ignore when it sounds like Little Richard.) This happens on the very podcast that discourages, The Dana Gould Hour [RSS] [iTunes]. Luckily for Gould, and for us, Little Richard can only take that Marc Maron comparison so far. It pleases me to report that Gould has opted not to crank out yet another comedian-interviews-comedians podcast, but to put on more of a… production.

Its episodes, with come out once or twice a month, offer segments, scripted stories, recurring characters, and historical sound clips. I would draw a comparison to Paul F. Tompkins’ Paul F. Tompkast, but I haven’t heard that show yet. The Dana Gould Hour makes the unusual structural choice of interweaving these bits and pieces with group conversations like you’d hear on more standard comedy-gab shows. Each time out, Gould surrounds himself with colleagues — Eddie Pepitone usually shows up, to my increasing delight — and they all riff on a theme. These themes have included the apocalypse [MP3], carnies and theme parks [MP3], and Woody Allen’s wife, Soon-Yi Previn [MP3]. That last one usually gets me onboard, whatever the situation.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.

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Richard Meltzer: L.A. is the Capital of Kansas

Sunday, July 22, 2012

This book came recommended by no less an authority than Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin when last I interviewed him. It’d intrigued me on runs to the downtown library to replenish my supply of Los Angeles-related reading, but I kept reshelving it; the subtitle Painful Lessons in Post-New York Living made me envision chapter after chapter of ragging on Hollywood provincials by, worse, a Manhattan provincial. Sure, Meltzer rags on Los Angeles, David explained, but he rags on everything. While ceaseless rendering of harsh judgment does not itself intrigue me, Meltzer’s credentials did: wunderkind rock critic of the late sixties and early seventies, writer for such “cool” publications at the Los Angeles Reader, alleged suggester of the umlaut in Blue Öyster Cult.

Meltzer’s thinking on aesthetics also seemed to stretch well beyond music — beyond, as the title of his famous debut put it, The Aesthetics of Rock. After reading (other interviewee of mine) Christopher Hawthorne’s writeup of the much lesser-known Richard Meltzer’s Guide to the Ugliest Buildings of Los Angeles, I made a mental note to really check this guy out. Even if he just complains about Los Angeles, I figured, he complains about it in the eighties (he left for Portland in the nineties), a period in this city that still seems not only opaque to me but probably actually relatively crappy.

Opening my checked-out copy of L.A. is the Capital of Kansas, I found it not only signed by the author (“MATT — THANKS, MAN, Richard Meltzer,” beside a doodle of a rabbit head. Could he have meant it for his onetime Reader colleague and author of that rabbit-populated comic strip Life in Hell, Matt Groening?) but defaced by an irked reader. “A stupid, offensive title,” she wrote on the page. Perhaps I’ve judged unfairly in going straight to that particular pronoun, but I can assure you of the message’s neat, rounded hand. And what man — what man without a woman watching, that is — would ever denounce anything for being stupid or offensive?

So I’d gotten the overall impression that, whatever my reservations, Meltzer was doing something right. The jacket copy describes him as “writing in a wildly expressive, disarmingly casual idiom,” and I don’t have any better words for it. Here, flipped to at random, is a sample of Meltzer’s prose:

You sit for five minutes, at most ten, in the Farmer’s Market off Fairfax, all these tourist-priced postcard and jade ashtray shops, you’re reading the paper, sippin’ your tourist-priced carrot-coconut juice and without fail (it matters not what day, season or week) a full-fledged YOKEL from Des Moines, Sioux City, or Dubuque (for inst) will exclaim to a fellow hick he or she has met on the Gray Line bus: “Lookit what I got, Irma — a Bo Derek poster!!!” As if they don’t got ’em back in Walnut Falls and maybe they don’t; I’ve never asked. Three years ago it was blowups of Farrah, the Fonz, now Bo, and they go home smiling that appleknocker SMILE (you’ve seen it in films), blowup in hand and tales on their lips of an unforgettable visit to the land of Dreams: a scumbag town that it beats me how anyone but a walking metaphor from Des Moines or Walnut Falls could actually be dreamin’ about. REAL-LIFE HICKS AS METAPHORS INCARNATE (AS REAL-LIFE HICKS-AND-A-HALF). Or something like that.

Some passages read easier; others come off like Finnegans Wake. But unlike Joyce, Meltzer — and I only figured this out a hundred pages in — writes to be read quickly, not deliberately. (William Burroughs might make a more suitable comparison: “He writes about hanging, he writes about colors, he writes about virus,” as Meltzer describes him. “Got (I have) next to no int’rest in such stuff as content, whole lot of int. in such as voice.”) At least I imagine that as his intent. I like to envision myself in 1981, nonchalantly scanning through one of his Reader columns on burgers, easy women, UHF television, or boxing at the Olympic Auditorium while scarfing down an Oki-Dog in the car before flooring it over to a punk show, during that brief moment when, in Meltzer’s words, “this shithole came as close to being a fertile musical oasis as any I’ve stumbled over.”

“Obviously, I hate the place,” he claims, “but I seem to recall hating that other place — what was it called? (starts with an N) — as well.” If Los Angeles holds little appeal for him, his birthplace, the “Smart Town” of New York City, holds even less. The past 25 years of change in Los Angeles and Meltzer’s tendency to deliberately expose himself to only the dumbest, ugliest, and crassest means his experience has little in common with my own, although, as with most writers on this town, his observations on life in motion ring true. Prefacing his trip to Watts Towers, he writes that, “for a town with so many people driving so many vehicles so many places nine days a week, L.A. is still basically mired in a zero sense of automotive adventure. Everybody and his/her aunt/uncle’s always taking the customary spin to job x, restaurant y, and party z [ … ] just about nobody’s willing to follow his/her nose and/or instincts or just pick up a Triple-A map and say, ‘Today I’m driving to Hawaiian Gardens — wherever (and whatever) in hell that may be.'”

Los Angeles punk, I gather, ain’t what it used to be. (You can now buy the building that once housed the Atomic Cafe — and thus Bowie and Byrne and Devo and X — for a dollar, but you have to pick it up yourself.) The freest driving seems to have drained away before I was born; “individual places sometimes griefed me,” Meltzer recalls, “but rarely the drive itself, the process. In those days, up ’til just after the ’84 Olympics (when the world started moving in), there was basically no non-rush hour traffic.” But I can’t imagine Los Angeles ever having been about these things, a home for these things, or for anything, ever, in particular. “Livingwise, home is an overrated concept,” declares Meltzer. “Anyone expecting redemption at home is fucked from the start to, uh, finish.” Amen.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E31: Freedom and Ugliness with Christopher Hawthorne

Thursday, July 19, 2012

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 The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture. Last year, he conducted Reading Los Angeles, 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 Atlantic, then Sunset, 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 Randy’s and Dale’s Donuts), 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 Annie Hall and Midnight in Paris; 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 midcentury modern houses in terribly alienating locations; and the tendency of tourists to see only the worst of Los Angeles and go no further — unless they go much, much further.

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

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S2, in Portland and San Francisco, Kickstarts next week

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Thanks very much indeed, listeners, for a first season of Notebook on Cities and Culture that has exceeded all my expectations. And special thanks to those who backed the first season on Kickstarter; in a mathematically demonstrable way, you exceeded my expectations threefold. That drive raised enough to extend this season to 32 episodes, but since episode 31 comes out today, the time has come to prepare for season two.

I’ve set the fundraising goal for the exact same amount we raised for the first season: $3000. But I’m upping the ante, content-wise. The show’s very title tells you that it’s intended to be a notebook on cities and culture, and its journey outside Los Angeles (and, ultimately, all over the world) begins this coming season. I’ll take my gear up the west coast and record with the most fascinating cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene in San Francisco, California and Portland, Oregon. Interesting cities, so I understand, with a few interesting people between ’em. Let’s find out for sure.

The Notebook on Cities and Culture season two fund drive begins next week, on Wednesday, July 25. It’ll run for seven days. You’ll get the chance again to sponsor individual episodes or the whole season, plus a new top-tier donation option that might seem like a joke but I assure you is real. I’ll post a link to the Kickstarter page right here the moment it goes live. Tell all your most urbane, observational, conversationally inclined friends!

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