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Little Tokyo Historical Society: Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo

Friday, March 9, 2012

Only natural, I figure, to go from the Images of America book on where I live in Los Angeles to the Images of America book on a neighborhood that first fired up my interest in Los Angeles. Before I moved, visits to Little Tokyo underscored Santa Barbara’s failure to provide certain necessities: ramen shops, sit-down arcade machines, Kinokuniya, fresh-griddled imagawayaki, 1-Man Band Arthur Nakane. After I moved, I would often ride the subway to Little Tokyo in the mornings just to eat snacks and explore. Some Los Angeles visitors might ask what there is to explore, given that, even at its height, Little Tokyo covered not much more than a square mile. I reply that the neighborhood’s tininess and the distance from its boom years make it a richer experience, not a poorer one. As I wrote about the view from Cafe Dulce, a Little Tokyo coffee shop I frequent, you sit below the hotels Miyako and Kyoto Grand, those aging hulks of near-colonial seventies and eighties Japanese prosperity, you defocus your eyes a little, and you almost feel like that Bubble never burst.

A friend once asked me what I’d change about Little Tokyo. “Nothing,” I replied. He followed up, incredulous: “So you think it’s perfect?” Well… certainly not, but better to live amid distinctive imperfection than perfection, am I right? This makes intuitive sense to me, but I remain unsure quite how to explain it. I suppose it fits in with that whole notion of wabi-sabi — the appreciation of beauty in the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete — which, in this context, at least has the credibility of coming from Japan. As in Little Tokyo, so in greater Los Angeles: an interviewee once observed that, looking at the city, you often can’t tell whether it’s coming up or falling down. To get the most out of either the larger or the smaller place, you must appreciate that ambiguity in itself. You must also lay down enough shoe leather to get closely acquainted with the streets. To know Los Angeles or Little Tokyo is not necessarily to love them, but if you don’t know them, you won’t even stand a fighting chance of liking them.

It helped that, before even moving to California, I’d logged years of listening to Hiroshima, the Japanese-American jazz-funk band known for their allegiance to Los Angeles in general and Little Tokyo in particular. They named their eighth album after the city, and their fourteenth after the neighborhood. At least every couple weeks, I drop the needle on their second album Odori (featuring a piece of cover photography, shot on a downtown Los Angeles rooftop, which still ranks among the most strangely compelling I’ve seen) and hear it begin with a number called “Cruisin’ J-Town.” J-Town is another name for Little Tokyo, and Cruisin’ J-Town is also a short documentary about the band; I recently caught a screening, totally by accident, when volunteering at a Sunday-afternoon Filmforum show. Hiroshima also put out a ninja-themed music video for their 1983 song “San Say,” parts of which look to have been shot in or near Little Tokyo.

A group photo of Hiroshima in front of a well-known Little Tokyo mural appears in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, as does one of a lady at the Mitsuru Café making the aforementioned imagawayaki. Those aside, the book actually depicts fairly few of what I would consider the pleasures of Little Tokyo, focusing instead on the ever-shifting social order that made and remade the neighborhood. Some sort of housing discrimination pushed the first wave of Japanese immigration in the late 19th century toward this particular corner of downtown, and when post-Pearl Harbor internment cleared the place out, Little Tokyo briefly became a black neighborhood called Bronzeville; I hear Orson Welles loved to hit the jazz clubs that sprouted along Central Avenue. Despite the local government’s strongest efforts to avoid the reformation of “ethnic enclaves,” Little Tokyo went Japanese again after the war. A great deal of investment rode in on the crest of that high wave Japan set off in the late seventies, creating elements of that still define the neighborhood’s built environment, like the blue-roofed Japanese Village Plaza (which houses the likes of Mitsuru Café, Cafe Dulce, and, usually, Arthur Nakane) and the New Otani Hotel, which would become the Kyoto Grand in 2007 (and inside of which, so I’ve heard, it remains 1987).

Given how heavily Los Angeles’s Koreatown leaned on group pictures of Korean and Korean-American churches, sports teams, social clubs, it comes as no surprise that Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo triples down on that sort of thing. Little Tokyo’s history stretches further back in time than Koreatown’s, and thus it stretches further into the era when, to warrant something as flamboyantly high-tech as a photograph, you really needed to assemble at least a dozen people, all in their Sunday best. Not being much of a historian, I know little about how to read these photos for significant, non-menswear-related information. Luckily, a photographer by the name of Tōyō Miyatake roamed Little Tokyo in the early 20th century, beret on head and camera in hand, capturing the look and feel of his corner of Los Angeles even when on wedding detail. Such dedication did he cultivate for his craft that, when he got shipped off to Manzanar, he actually secreted his gear in with him and shot internment camp life. Something about the idea of a tireless, faintly eccentric, ever-recognizable documenter of place very much appeals to me. Does Little Tokyo still have them? Does any place? And assuming the oft-told story of the California roll being invented in Little Tokyo is true — there’s the day that will really live in infamy — did Miyatake capture it?

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E8: Can We Talk About Driving? with John Rabe

Friday, March 9, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in the Los Angeles Central Library’s courtyard with John Rabe, host of Off-Ramp, KPCC’s weekend pointillist portrait of Southern California. They discuss the merits of recording in a library courtyard and in Cheech Marin’s house in Malibu; picking a road in Los Angeles and following it wherever it goes; the troubled history of Cypress Park and the truth about the Isabel Street shooting; the Los Angeles “churn” and the effect of constant neighborhood change on the historical consciousness; the historical bounty to be found in the Los Angeles Public Library’s photo collection; the city’s rising optimism and falling crime (and its lack of a mob); the McMartin preschool trial; his desire to live in a place with the word “gardens” in its name; his tendency to look ahead, not back, and to move randomly, not in patterns, and how that shapes Off-Ramp‘s character; his anger at drivers who slow down on the freeway with their brakes; his plan to banish citizens who break the social contract and institute a Waste and Fraud Corruption Lottery to give money to the rest; the lessons of Carmageddon; what makes radio documentaries sustain; and how, if you want to create radio, you should just break out your iPhone (or whatever you have) and record something.

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

(Photo: Karl Rabe)

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E7: Geographical Verisimilitude with David Bax

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood with film and television critic David Bax, co-host of the podcasts Battleship Pretension and Previously On. They discuss his fifth-grade shoving match over Ghostbusters; the difference between criticism and the assertion of one’s opinions; being a film and television critic while living right near the heart of film and television production; Chicago’s advantages as a filmgoing city, including but not limited to the Gene Siskel Film Center; discovering a cinephile community on the bus; St. Louis and other cities’ loss of local critics writing with local sensibilities; whether the aspiring critic must first reject working in production; the sharpening of his critical perspectives on formalism and structuralism as revealed by Michael Mann’s Public Enemies; if a critic should tell an audience why they like a film, why the audience should like a film, why the audience should pay attention to a film, or simply how a film works; why the internet offers a superior medium for television criticism; what television can do that film can’t, and why to watch them differently; whether television shows labor under a corrupting business model; Treme, New Orleans and geographical verisimilitude; the askew real-placeness of many Los Angeles productions; the outdated marketing of television as evidenced by the Whitney billboards that once littered town; how and why to avoid approaching art as commodity; what he would say to those who who don’t consider criticism a “real job” (and how he would agree with them); and the necessity of discussing film and television as if for posterity, just as a program like The Sopranos seems to have been created for it.

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

(Photo: Jenny Smith)

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Put This On menswear books: Alan Flusser’s Dressing the Man

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

My series of menswear-related book reviews for Put This On (see also my Marketplace of Ideas interview about PTO with Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor) debuts today with a writeup of Alan Flusser’s Dressing the Man:

If I didn’t know the name Alan Flusser, I’d still trust Dressing the Man by virtue of heft alone. Its size, shape, and weight could deal serious damage, although those cumbersome qualities keep me from carrying it around to test in a street fight, and even if I could easily carry it around, would I? I don’t mind learning how to dress in public — we always have to, in some sense — but it feels somehow inappropriate to reading a big, shiny book on how to dress in public. Then gain, if you’re going to learn how to dress that way, make it with a big, shiny book by a guy like Flusser, who dressed Michael Douglas for Wall Street and, more importantly, appeared in the sixth episode of Put This On’s first season (as well as an interview minisode).

But does this one rise above its closest-looking relative in publishing, the coffee-table book? All the lush, often page-filling photography of the Fred Astaire, the Duke of Windsor, and Luciano Barbera, not to mention the jaunty vintage illustrations, makes you wonder. After so many school years of bloated, distraction-laden textbooks, my alarms sound at the sight of splashy chapter-opening spreads, fonts a little too large, lines set a little too far apart, or boxes which may or may not enclose information. The aesthetics of Dressing the Man outshine most educational publishers’ strongest design efforts, but a confusion of purpose remains: is this an analysis of the best men have worn, or a primer for those who need to know how a shirt works? Reaching for both audiences, the book generates a certain friction: experienced dressers will wonder why they’re opening fold-out sections showing which fabrics are which, while learners like myself will, buoyed by how nifty they find those fold-outs, proceed to mire themselves in a discussion of dinner jacket trousers versus full-dress trousers. (Something to do with stripes.) Flusser includes a glossary to help us find our way home, deepen the feeling of textbookishness though it may.

Hence my suggestion that the next edition be titled something like Permanent Fashion: Theory and Practice. Flusser introduces this concept, which should ring familiar to longtime Put This On followers, with an explanation born of a paradox. “Menswear has enjoyed three decades of unprecedented growth and freedom to configure and reconfigure the sartorial tastes of several generations,” he writes, “yet there are fewer genuinely well-dressed men now than before. There has been nothing permanent about recent fashion.” He roots his proposed alternative as deeply as possible in the era between the World Wars, noting that, despite the “considerable economic tumult for America,” this time produced, regardless of wealth or class, “the best-dressed generation in the twentieth century.” This opens the door to 21st-century man’s standard objection: he fears looking like an octogenarian on his way to a costume party. But the book’s images seem curated to dispel just these reservations; who, even today, would laugh a Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. or a Leslie Howard out of the room? (Even the Howard wearing an unflatteringly narrow collar in a photo Flusser uses as a negative example commands respect.)

Read the whole thing at putthison.com.

(And hey, do any of you Tumblr people know how to add HSPACE and/or VSPACE to an image you upload into a Tumblr post? I’ve tried inserting the code directly into the HTML, but it doesn’t take.)

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Podthoughts: How Did This Get Made?

Monday, March 5, 2012


Vital stats:
Format: discussion of the various unbelievabilities of non-respected movies with comedians — and sometimes the filmmakers themselves
Episode duration: 35m-1h30m
Frequency: biweekly (with previews on the weeks between)

When I grew old enough to watch, I began watching films. When I grew old enough to read, I began reading film criticism. I’ve never slowed in either pursuit, but only lately have I realized that I don’t care if a movie is “good” or “bad.” By that I mean not only that it doesn’t matter to me if a critic, even one I read religiously, thinks a movie is good or bad — I figured that out first — but that it doesn’t matter to me if I think a movie is good or bad. We build no more rickety structures than opinions, instinctively slapping them together in the heat of the moment on foundations of shifting sand. Thumbing a picture up or down may make for a satisfying declaration of self — “I feel this way about this movie, and moreover, I exist!” — but I need to hear more. I long to discuss film as an experience, not as a mere object of acceptance or rejection — and I suspect, on some level, that you do too.

How Did This Get Made? [RSS] [iTunes] keys into that desire, though it doesn’t announce its mission in quite those words. “Have you ever watched a movie so terrible, so unwatchable, that it actually is amazing?” its iTunes description asks. Admittedly, that question alone hardly gets my blood flowing; I felt forced long ago to, in the manner of Dave Erdman, abandon enthusiasm for the intellectual and aesthetic dead end of the so-bad-it’s-good. But I didn’t replace it with undivided pursuit of “the good,” since, when I try to get my mind around it to define it, the concept disperses like smoke. I began to conceive of all cinema as a circle, with the movies people call “good” and the movies people call “bad” meeting at one particularly fascinating point. I downloaded a slew of this podcast’s episodes when I heard Patton Oswalt, in a guest appearance on How Was Your Week?, tell Julie Klausner that its crew doesn’t just bitch and moan about movies they don’t like; they treat their widely reviled subjects as sources of interestingness equal to their most respected brethren.

This crew, by the way, comprises comedians Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas (who, we are often told, is not on Twitter). They watch recent and recent-ish releases like Sucker Punch, Gigli, and Battlefield Earth, movies whose box-office performances vary but around all of whom the stink of failure hangs heavily. They sometimes discuss them with comedy-type guests like Matt Walsh [MP3], Paul Rust [MP3], and Maximum Fun’s own Jordan Morris [MP3]. In a series of clever coups for a show not about to dole out praise, they occasionally bring in guests involved in the production of the fortnight’s film, like Greg Sestero, co-star and jack-of-all-trades on Tommy Wiseau’s immortal The Room [MP3] or — wait for it — the star of Cool as Ice, the one and only Vanilla Ice [MP3]. (For the last fifteen minutes of the episode, anyway.)

Read the whole thing at Maximumfun.org.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E6: Discernment with Tyler Smith

Friday, March 2, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood at midnight with film critic Tyler Smith, co-host of the podcast Battleship Pretension and host of the podcast More than One Lesson. They discuss the strong associations between diners late at night and talk about movies; his struggle to stay in Chicago and ultimate move to Los Angeles; his choice between screenwriting and film criticism; film criticism’s relationship with the kinds of conversations film geeks have; the impulse to start a podcast, and what it took to understand what makes a fascinating film discussion; how to talk to comedians about film, even if they claim not to care about the medium; his return to his old church in Nixa, Missouri to give a lecture about the film industry in Los Angeles; the concept of discernment not just in criticism, but in Christianity; the power and influence some Christian ideas about film ascribe purely to content; Fight Club and the attitude pictures hold to their own content; whether film reflects the personality of its creators or possesses one of its own; and how much one wants to get to know the personality behind a film when that personality happens to be, say, Orson Welles’.

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 S1E5: The City in 2D with Glen Creason

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down at the Los Angeles Central Library downtown with Map Librarian Glen Creason, author of Los Angeles in Maps. They discuss the point at which Los Angeles becomes not just a place to live but a subject; riding the old Pacific Electric streetcars that prompted the city to grow so large in the firs place; using maps to see the influence of trains, water, the movies, and oil on the city’s spread, growing up in the “Leave it to Beaver territory” of South Gate; early Los Angeles-boosters selling the city by employing mapmakers’ sleight of hand; downtown’s death in the sixties and seventies, and its more recent revival; learning little but having a lot of fun at UCLA during the Summer of Love; when the city “took a breath and reinvented itself,” Los Angeles’ uniquely dramatic geographical setting; how multiculturalism took hold from the very beginning; what it took to build the Third Street Tunnel; how miracles of civic engineering turned into freeway frustration; the non-disaster of “Carmageddon”; where the water in the Los Angeles River went, and how it remains useful as a navigational aid; the American notion of creating an Eden; whether Los Angeles is, as the posters say, “a world in itself”; former Italian and German communities, and current Indian and Chinese ones; the city’s surprising new walkability; whether the “driver’s paradise” days of twenty minutes to everywhere really happened at all; becoming the Map Librarian serendipitously; Los Angeles’ past of rabbits, gambling ships, and Central Avenue jazz clubs; what happened in Chavez Ravine; how good intentions in Los Angeles’ development have often led to reconsideration; how even longtime Angelenos learn from the ways the constant influx of new Angelenos approach the city; and the endless last rites given to Los Angeles that it never quite needs.

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

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Adam Cadre and me on Richard Yates’ The Easter Parade

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Adam Cadre asked for book recommendations a few months back, and I, eager to see a guy whose site I often read collide with a guy whose books I often read, put in a ballot for Richard Yates’ The Easter Parade. I do particularly admire that novel’s craft, but since James Wood calls it the only one where he managed to “display a systematic sympathy for a female character” and since I know Adam’s greater interest in female characters than male ones from reading his site for so many years, I figured I could confidently vouch for it in its own right. Rather than writing his usual sort of article on the book, Adam invited me to make it a discussion:

The Easter Parade is a novel that follows a character named Emily Grimes from her childhood in the 1930s up to just short of her 50th birthday in late 1975. What follows is a discussion of the novel that I had with recommender Colin Marshall via email over the course of the past few days.

AC: So I try to plunge into these without knowing anything about them, and since I get them from the library and they usually come in solid library binding I don’t even have back-of-the-book marketing copy to give me a clue what the book might be about. However, that does mean that I end up spending a lot of the beginning wondering, “Hmm, what’s the premise here going to be?”That was tough in The Easter Parade, in that it doesn’t follow the dictates of, e.g., David Mamet in On Directing Film, which I just reread. Mamet says to start with the disordering incident and make the rest of the story about order being restored — no preliminaries, no time for the audience to see the characters going about their day-to-day lives and wonder what the story’s going to be about. Everything that happens must further the story of how the problem gets resolved, and that resolution marks the endpoint of the story. But while the very first sentence of The Easter Parade suggests that the disordering incident of the book is the divorce of Walter and Pookie Grimes, it doesn’t really qualify — the rest of the book isn’t about Sarah and Emily putting their lives back together after the divorce. There’s no fixed endpoint, nothing that makes the audience say, “When I learn the answer to this (e.g., will the man succeed in selling the pig or not), the story’s over.” The Easter Parade is basically just a string of incidents in Emily’s life, and could go on pretty much indefinitely — until she dies, or until we reach the present (i.e., the mid-1970s), or until Yates arbitrarily decides that enough is enough. It’s more biographical than dramatic.

CM: I’ll find no better point to break out Simpsons dialogue from 1991:

Homer: Save a guy’s life, and what do you get? Nothing! Worse than nothing! Just a big scary rock.
Bart: Hey, man, don’t badmouth the head.
Marge: Homer, it’s the thought that counts. The moral of this story is, a good deed is its own reward!
Bart: Hey, we got a reward. The head is cool!
Marge: Well then, I guess the moral is, no good deed goes unrewarded.
Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn’t written that nasty letter we wouldn’t have gotten anything.
Marge: Well, hmm… then I guess the moral is, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.
Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Most of the narratives I enjoy do happen to fall under the “a bunch of stuff that happened” heading; I figure that, if someone wants to teach me a moral, they’d save us both a lot of time by just writing it down on an index card and handing it to me than embedding it in 300 pages of elaborately crafted lies.

AC: That brings to mind the Douglas Adams quote I’ve mentioned a time or six: “If I’d wanted to write a message I’d have written a message. I wrote a book.” But I’m not so sure I agree! Another thing I’ve said a time or six is that, if there’s a set of emotions I want to convey, I can try to describe them — virtually impossible — or I can try to create a set of vicarious experiences for you (i.e., a story) that will make you feel the same way. And they might be very different experiences from what originally brought about those emotions in me. Similarly, there’s something to be said for the notion that experience can change minds in a way that reading an index card, or even listening to an eloquent speech, can’t.

Read the whole thing at adamcadre.ac. (Make sure you get to the bottom of the page. And make sure you get to the bottom of his Greenlanders writeup, while you’re at it.)

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Podthoughts: How Was Your Week?

Monday, February 27, 2012

Vital stats:
Format: Julie Klausner talking to comedians and other people she knows, bracked by Julie Klausner talking about her week
Episode duration: 40m-1h30m
Frequency: weekly

Besides the red hair and gay fanbase, do I have any reason to think of Julie Klausner as “the good Kathy Griffin?” Undoubtedly not, but I can’t force the label out of my mind. Among their countless points of dissimilarity, Griffin lives in Los Angeles, while Klausner remains insistently New York-based. I say “insistently” because of how many comedy people seem to glide inexorably toward Los Angeles these days, as if on rails. Even if you actually do it out of pure inertia, staying in New York always strikes me a choice — as a stand, even. Oh, and Klausner does this acclaimed podcast called How Was Your Week? [RSS] [iTunes], which Griffin doesn’t. That’s a big difference.

Listen to How Was Your Week?, and you will hear all about Klausner’s insistently New York life. Sometimes her weeks involve suffering poor customer service at the hands of a sneering, transgendered Uniqlo employee; sometimes they simply culminate in bed, ice cream, and eleven episodes of something. She offers these details in the solo segments that come at the beginning and end of each episode, which usually bracket an interview. It plays a little like what Marc Maron does on WTF, leading into the day’s conversation with a life’s vicissitudes-inspired improvised monologue, but Klausner gives you more monologue and less conversation. Each installment showcases Klausner the speaker roughly one half of time, and Klausner the interviewer in the other half.

On some days, though, it feels like Klausner the speaker stretches out to overtake most of the runtime. This will delight some and make others wince, since I get an audience-polarizing vibe from the persona she uses alone at the mic, which heavily involves the comedic technique of spinning out a sentence to just a few words too many, or clarifying just a little too much. She might drop a reference to some oft-referenced element of pop culture, for instance, and follow it up with a singsong “Ref-erennnnce!” Or she’ll describe her attempt to end an e-mail argument with a nutty enraged stranger and then add, “You know what didn’t work? That.” Or she’ll mention her “bodarino — because that’s what I’m calling my body now.” I imagine listeners, depending upon their disposition, either eating this up or fasting it forward, though Klausner’s tendency to follow all oratorical lines to their fizzling end does produce moments of what I would call brilliance. That e-mail argument had to do with women who she feels manically affect elements of youthful sloppiness: purple nail polish, Smartie necklaces, rompers, in which Klausner wonders aloud how you’re supposed to urinate. “Are you naked on the toilet?” she asks.

Read the whole thing at MaximumFun.org.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E4: Chitlin’ Circuit with Eliza Skinner

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down at Bourgeois Pig in Hollywood with Eliza Skinner, comedian, musical improviser, comedic rap-battle impresario, writer, and the woman of the one-woman show Eliza Skinner is Shameless. They discuss a Scotsman who left his wife possibly due and possibly not due to what he felt in her onstage spirit; the one-way intimacy of performance; the proper cultivation of one’s personal brand; the odd confluence of skills required for the non-career (absent an eccentric billionaire) of musical improvisation, and the fear some have of practicing them; when New York felt like one big “last call”; the apparent ease of performing in Los Angeles as a buoy for the spirit; breaking the shackles of “musical improviser” as an identity; the women of Shameless like Amy and Karen, who compulsively complicate their lives in ways they don’t understand; matching mother-daughter breast implants; the lack of female characters who are lovable yet not likable; the fact that nobody, given that everyone plays the hero in their own story, thinks of themselves as an asshole; the fears of being misunderstood, of foxholes, and of getting stuck in underwater tubes; Tyler Perry, who honed his craft on the theatrical “chitlin’ circuit,” as the ideal career model; the logistical requirements of setting up freestyle rap battles; and what it takes for RuPaul to deem you “shelarious.”

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

(Photo: Tyler Ross)

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