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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E3: Family-Guyization with Jordan Morris

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down at Fat Dog in West Hollywood with comedian and actor Jordan Morris, co-host of the comedy podcast Jordan, Jesse, Go!, writer on the web series MyMusic, former host of Fuel TV’s The Daily Habit, and creator of satirical commercials for “Gamewave” and the “Action Circle.” They talk about growing up in Orange County with the solace of ska music; The Simpsons‘ un-overstatable influence on the current generation of young comedy writers; whether and how “Family-Guyization” is affecting comedic culture; the usefulness of college as “a place to be bad for a while”; how those who move to Los Angeles from other major cities have gone blind to their hometowns’ sources of suckiness; the prohibitive cost of a bedazzled T-shirt; what kind of a golden calf Conan O’Brien’s show represents for today’s comedic minds; “gab podcasts” and the rapidly diminishing viability thereof; the temptation to pander to your audience, whichever audience your medium determines you have; whether working at an “action sports” channel made for a living hell; how and why fifteen-year-olds maintain their alienness to non-fifteen-year-olds; and how best to satirize the troubled relationship some hardcore gamers have with human sexuality.

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

(Photo: Pat Weir)

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Podthoughts: The Vinyl Countdown

Sunday, February 19, 2012


Vital stats:
Format: Canadians talking about everything and nothing, continually ratcheting up the stakes of elaborately unappealing sex or general disgustingness, usually in public
Episode duration: 30m-1h30m
Frequency: 3-9 per month

“A bunch of guys get drunk at a bar, and some dickhead keeps recording it.” The prospect does not immediately appeal. Several of you may find the deal sweetened if I reveal the identity of that dickhead as Keith McNally, the podcast auteur behind XO, one of the shows I’ve respected the very most in all my years Podthinking. XO repays your listening time with both its high-caliber production — some of the most intricate craft I’ve heard in a podcast that doesn’t also air on the radio — and its seemingly untrammeled access to the psyche of one not-particularly-inhibited young man with a lot on his mind, a high-intensity way of saying it, and the inexplicable ability to combine those qualities without descending into obnoxiousness. A real marriage of the raw and the refined, you might say, which most conceptually strong podcasts officiate in one way or another.

The Vinyl Countdown [RSS] [iTunes], now. This show sits on the opposite end of the production spectrum from McNally’s other brainchild: a bunch of guys get drunk at a bar, and some dickhead keeps recording it. For half an hour, an hour, two hours, two and a half hours, you can hear McNally and a handful of dude- or lady-friends gross each other out; reminisce about antics past; swirl the ice in their glasses; and speculate about what, in a series of made-up realities, each with their own rigid rules, does or does not count as gay. His friends have names like “Robocop Craig” and “Mustard Mike.” When something or someone comes up a lot in these conversations, McNally will occasionally splice together an episode illustrating it, as when he made one out of Louis C.K.’s visits to Opie and Anthony [MP3] (hosts whose manner, worn to a featureless dun by years upon years of morning-zooishness, makes you especially grateful for a challengingly personal program like this one).

To think this began as a video game show. I hadn’t actually started listening back when — if — McNally and his coterie stuck to that agenda; when I first tuned in, things had clearly long fallen into the kind of free-for-all that, listened to from certain angles, almost sounds like chaste formalism. But catch me on a good day, and I just feel delighted at the very fact that, at the touch of a button, I can listen in on a couple hundred hours of some Canadians talking about everything and nothing, continually ratcheting up the stakes of elaborately unappealing sex or general disgustingness, usually in public. I tend to think that certain types of podcasts have grown popular because they give us a line to the sort of conversations that have fallen out of our lives; it certainly hasn’t fallen out of these guys’.

Read the whole thing at Maximumfun.org.

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E2: “Graduate Education” with David L. Ulin

Friday, February 17, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down at the La Brea Tar Pits with David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic, editor of the anthologies Writing Los Angeles, Another City, and Cape Cod Noir, and author of The Myth of Solid Ground, The Lost Art of Reading, and the upcoming novella Labyrinth. They talk about his attitude as a young New Yorker moving to Los Angeles; his approach to everything in life through the filter of books; his “graduate education” writing for the mythologized oasis of writerly cool that was the Los Angeles Reader; the importance of competition in print journalism; criticism as the search for the most important questions; how to talk about a city that doesn’t know how to talk about itself; how to have a coherent conversation about a city that resists coherent conversation; the “sacred ordinariness” of Los Angeles; how literature of exile became literature of place; ersatz public and protected pseudo-urban space; whether the city will feel the same ten years from now; whether we’ll still have what architectural critic Reyner Banham described as an “autopia” ten years from now; how narrative offers our only hope of meaning, yet only offers meaning up to a point; and what happens when our narratives go bad, assuming we notice.

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

(Photo: Noah Ulin)

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Bernhard Roetzel: The Gentleman’s Guide to Grooming and Style

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

I don’t know — I just feel like the most authoritative guide to gentlemanism must come translated from the German. Despite, or maybe thanks to, four credited translators, Bernhard Roetzel’s Gentleman’s Guide to Grooming and Style (known in other editions as Gentleman: A Timeless Fashion) retains a certain steely yet askew exactitude. When the translated Roetzel pronounces that, putting on a pair of genuinely good shoes for the first time, “as a consequence the need for a good suit arises almost out of necessity,” or that “creative professional groups wear the black polo-neck sweater almost exclusively,” or that a gentleman “will not profane his frugal but perfect breakfast by consuming it in a baggy T-shirt, boxer shorts, and rubber bathroom slippers,” I unquestioningly believe him.

In this language, the Gentleman’s Guide explains everything from suits to shaving to sunglasses to sheep, how they get the wool from. Even accounting for the general textual barrenness of the field we might call “men’s style books,” this men’s style book takes its explanatory mission seriously; Roetzel gets his hands so deep into the nuts and bolts of the male appearance that I at times forget I’m holding such a glossy, photo-laden production. (In my edition, the same Teutonic-looking fellow poses for each sub-chapter’s for lavish introductory shots. As with so many volumes on menswear, the distant observer will lack the evidence to decide whether I’m looking at sartorial examples or niche gay pin-ups.) No man will need every section of the book at once; only a freakishly quick study could, in one sitting, blow through all Roetzel has to say on shirt cottons, open lacing versus closed lacing, and how to tie a necktie, then feel crisp-minded and ready for his history of English sporting dress and his details on the august outfitters of Jermyn Street.

Throughout the book, Roetzel oscillates between two audiences: the aspirational menswear neophyte, and the reasonably established dresser who might like a little more information on the knobs of JP Tods driving shoes or the proper selection criteria for hip flasks. So if the stylistically awakening fellow in your life needs a gift, this one will keep on giving through the years. But as much utility as the Gentleman’s Guide’s ground-level instructions offer — the longer you go without knowing when to iron a shirt, why not to let your sleeve cover your cuff, or how to fold a jacket, the more harrowing the inevitable revelation of your ignorance — they leave a certain bitter aftertaste. What on Earth has reduced us to learning these simple things, these elements of self-presentation so fundamental to life, from a book?

The age when a young man went off to college in gilt-buttoned blazer and gleaming Oxfords has gone, I realize, and we surely delude ourselves about the extent to which it once obtained. (But like every semi-trad, complexly Japanophilic menswear enthusiast on the internet, I sometimes catch myself yearning for Take Ivy’s particular point on the space-time continuum.) I myself washed up on UC Santa Barbara’s campus without so much as a single collared shirt. Doesn’t the specter of a grown man — biologically grown, anyway — with a dresser full of graphic tees and white sweatsocks make you reflect on whether we and the last couple of generations, no matter how much progress our revisions otherwise brought about, perhaps ditched one tradition too many?

Almost everyone I know under the age of sixty (and several above) began their adult lives in a Stylistic Year Zero, thrust into the world in a brittle armor of jeans, sweatshirts, and shoes engineered for sports would never play. In their closets hung a sole suit, if they were lucky, but usually solid black and hence damned to uselessness outside funerals. We’ve had little choice but to approach the problem of dress — when, indeed, we realize we have the problem of dress — in entrepreneurial, autodidactic ways, becoming “self-made men” in an unusually literal sense. Roetzel seems to understand this full well. For every condemnation of a potential faux pas, he includes an assurance that the reader isn’t alone in his struggle: “It is a process which usually takes several years, and it is better that way. A wardrobe must grow like the decoration of an apartment. This is a highly individual process, which can, and should, lead each of us to a unique style.”

Roetzel frames the way of the gentleman with what I tremble, slightly, to call a holistic approach. He writes not just about what you choose to wear, but about a mindset. In his introduction, Nick Yapp invokes “an old proverb that defines genius as ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains,’ and the same description would serve to define a gentleman.” The Gentleman’s Guide, on some level, offers a primer on painstaking, one that just happens to express itself in the particulars of “grooming and style.” But then, such are the clearest, most apparent indicators to immediately separate those who take pains in life from those who don’t. Though you can’t always know how many hours a man puts into his craft, you can’t help but absorb and react to the overall aesthetic impact of his person.

The true mastery can begin, according to Roetzel, only when the outward unites with the inward. “Style is revealed in little things,” he writes, “like how you dress when there’s nobody to see you. A gentleman’s clothing is not a costume. He wears what he wears because he likes it. And not in order to impress anybody.” This book’s definition of gentlemanliness comes at the intersection of discernment and integrity, where the aspirant must abandon any ideas they have about compartmentalizing their life. As in suits, shoes, socks, shaving, and shampooing, if you go by the Gentleman’s Guide, so in social conduct, work, recreation, and breakfast. Care in anything follows primarily from care in everything else.

I actually have picked up worthwhile pointers on breakfasting and shampooing from this book, but to focus on them would be to cast it in the same light you’d shine on much more disposable handbooks — the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy companion, say. Roetzel’s manner has an increasingly rare — and, in our moment, refreshing — unreconstructedness about it, a spirit of disciplined decadence (or decadent discipline) that discusses the barber shop as “a paradise for men,” that insists that a real gentleman’s “doctor, his tailor, and, indeed, his hairdresser, must be male,” that the wearing of substandard shoes means “an otherwise perfect appearance is destroyed, irreparably and at a stroke,” and that, of a choice like the Dalí mustache, remarks only that “a real eccentric will rarely be satisfied with copying someone else’s trademark.”

The most revealing example of this sensibility comes near the end of the book, somewhere after the material on wristwatches but before the discussions of canes and lap robes. The Gentleman’s Guide features a substantial section on the proper enjoyment of cigarettes, pipes, and cigars, citing no less an authority than Thomas Mann, who “describes the pure bliss of dabbling in tobacco at many points in his works.” Roetzel himself approaches his own kind of translated near-breathlessness on the subject, asking, “Who can forget the excitement of the purchase of the first packet of your own cigarettes — for many the first step towards many years or a lifetime of this habit and passion?” Whatever your own opinions about smoking, can you resist exhilaration at his sheer lack of shame? Many would feel repulsed even by the earlier chapters on lapel widths or the comparative thicknesses of knitwear, dismissing such attention as fetishistic. But to apply the label of fetishism says more about the labeler than the labeled. Roetzel shows us that it’s the attention itself that matters.

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Guys, I write for Open Culture now

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

… and the first of my daily posts, featuring a BBC documentary on Haruki Murakami, just went up:

 

Haruki Murakami holds the titles of both the most popular novelist in Japan and the most popular Japanese novelist in the wider world. After publishing Norwegian Wood in 1987, a book often called “the Japanese Catcher in the Rye,” Murakami’s notoriety exploded to such an extent that he felt forced out of his homeland, a country whose traditional ways and — to his mind — conformist mindset never sat right with him in the first place. Though he returned to Japan in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo underground gas attacks, he remained an author shaped by his favorite foreign cultures — especially America’s. This, combined with his yearning to break from established Japanese literary norms, has generated enough international demand for his work to sell briskly in almost every language in which people read novels.

I myself once spent a month doing nothing but reading Murakami’s work, and this BBC documentary Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer makes a valiant attempt to capture what about it could raise such a compulsion. Rupert Edwards’ camera follows veteran presenter Alan Yentob through Japan, from the midnight Tokyo of After Hours to the snowed-in Hokkaido of A Wild Sheep Chase, in a quest to find artifacts of the supremely famous yet media-shy novelist’s imaginary world. Built around interviews with fans and translators but thick with such Murakamiana as laid-back jazz standards, grim school hallways, sixties pop hits, women’s ears, vinyl records, marathon runners, and talking cats, the broadcast strives less to explain Murakami’s substance than to simply reflect it. If you find your curiosity piqued by all the fuss over 1Q84, Murakami’s latest, you might watch it as something of an aesthetic primer.

Keep up with everything at openculture.com. If you haven’t been reading Open Culture, know that, over the last five years, I’ve encountered no more consistently interesting curator of documentaries, documentarettes, and documentary-ish videos on the internet. Their archive of language-learning resources has taken me pretty damned far by itself. Dare I consider myself fit to uphold their standard of intellectual and aesthetic filtration?

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Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E1: Shinin’ with DC Pierson

Monday, February 13, 2012

Colin Marshall sits down in Hollywood with comedian, actor, and novelist DC Pierson, man behind the one-man show DC Pierson is Bad at Girls, one-third of the Mystery Team of Mystery Team, and the author of The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To. They talk about innate, unchanging age; teenage blogging; Daria; the compulsion to read criticism; moving to Los Angeles from New York; avoiding falling into the standard complaint-driven narratives of young New York writers who move to Los Angeles; whether and how Los Angeles is shinin’; the mysteries surrounding how many Hollywood residents earn their income; building things rather than tearing things down; becoming the butt of your own jokes; blogging one’s first hundred days in Los Angeles; and the inherent criminality of existing in one’s twenties.

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

(Photo: Zac Wolf)

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Glenn O’Brien: How to Be a Man

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

I knew little about Glenn O’Brien before hearing Jesse Thorn interview him on The Sound of Young America, but now my mental shelf of examples of career-life unity couldn’t do without him. Assemble what you can of the man’s résumé, and the full picture looks colorful to the point of unreality: host of the punkisly and cultishly beloved public-access show TV Party, music critic at Interview, creative director at Barneys, writer and producer of the film Downtown 81, associate of Andy Warhol, Artforum columnist, High Times editor-at-large (allegedly he coined the title), stand-up comedian, editor of Madonna’s infamous Sex, and, more recently, GQ‘s “Style Guy.” This winding path leads to How to Be a Man, a handsome green hardcover filled with short essays ostensibly about dressing, decorating, smoking (or not), eating, marrying (or not), drinking, and dying (or not), but effectively about how best, in the mind of Glenn O’Brien, to lead one’s life.

O’Brien has admitted to this thematic sleight of hand. You can’t write like Montaigne anymore, so he and other essayists have lamented; today’s readers shrink away from overt discussion of How to Live. The reasons for this shift in popular taste over the last 400 years remain opaque, but it forces those who would dare to think, speak, and write directly on life into a kind of fake specialization. O’Brien, having accrued experience and notoriety from years of answering letters from GQ readers nervous about whether to match their socks to their shoes or their pants, surely saw his strategy with all possible clarity: sell a style book, write a life book.

But he wrote How to Be a Man for those of us for whom life and style have grown inseparable, men for whom the major questions — what to wear and how to wear it, what to eat and how to eat it, what to work on and how to work on it, where to go and how to get there, when to stare and whom to stare at — all come, of a piece, as the enterprise of existence. Despite the fun of making broad pronouncements about life in general, though, rarely do I find said pronouncements coming in handy in the day-to-day — or, for that matter, sticking in my memory as anything more substantial than a profound-smelling mist. O’Brien spends the most useful half of his book on the details, the specifics, the nuts and bolts of all this. And he accepts, with evident rue, that he must first do some damage control.

“Man has been reduced everywhere,” O’Brien writes, “serving the hive like an ant or bee, toiling away at mechanical tasks and never approaching a knowledge of the whole, or performing the great work. There are no Renaissance men because there is no Renaissance. Or is it the other way around?” He spies both signal and cause of man’s fall — a devastating feedback loop indeed — in man’s wardrobe. “The barbarian revolution of the last half-century” has, in O’Brien’s assessment, made it “possible for men to dress like boys or adolescents for life. We see these fellows around us every day. They are the chaps in comfy running shoes, worn jeans, tracksuits, sweats, t-shirts, and caps advertising the sports teams to which they hold allegiance. These men are dressed not for success but for existence.”

Hence the presence of one essay titled, simply, “How Not to Look Stupid,” and the presence of a couple dozen others with similar pedagogical goals. You might now think of O’Brien — and, by association, me — as a bitter crank who longs for nothing more than the days when gray-flanneled husbands marched from the house every morning anticipating a two-martini lunch, an afternoon of light sexism, and a roast already glistening on the table upon their return home. But we’ve read Richard Yates; we know how often midcentury man desperately concealed, behind his blustering, boozy façade, an abyss of weakness and shame. This same faulty core rolled out the carpet for Company Man conformity, shot the notion of aesthetic agency full of holes, and reinforced the ultimate suppression of the modernist impulse. It brought us to a generation of men lost in their own ambivalence about being men, the shocking depth of their self-loathing on brazen sartorial display. In an interview, O’Brien reduced it to a question that never drifts far from my mind: “Supposedly we’re created in the image of God, and you’re gonna put on a Steelers Jersey?”

I don’t fully blame my fellow twentysomethings, or even the former iterations (or, I can assure you, the many iterations to go) of myself, for their negligence. Having imprinted on the strange, complicated geldedness of our immediate predecessors, we on one morning or another wake up to the sudden, overwhelming feeling of being unequipped. How could we have reached our age, we ask in panic, without knowing how to find lasting furniture, how to drive a five-speed, how to poach an egg, how to distinguish friendship from (choke) “networking,” how to tie a four-in-hand? And if we lack so much as that  foundation, how can we hope to advance ourselves along more nebulous lines: refining our taste, extending ourselves across times and traditions, and crafting our very presence in this world?

Despite his book’s title — and could I go far wrong in suspecting a clumsy yet insistent pair of hands at the publishing house? — O’Brien has not written a straight-ahead manual for manhood, nor would I trust any such product. If he’s working in the tradition of crypto-Montaigne, he’s working even harder in the tradition of crypto-memoir. His essays present the lessons that one man and one man only has learned, internalized, and re-expressed over sixty-odd years. This one man asks barbers to make him look like a Roman emperor, strictly orchestrates his dinner-party seating arrangements to spark maximum interestingness, urges his ideas to “bubble up” by walking city streets, drinks only wine due to its ancient provenance, marshals Nietzsche to describe the new Prada collection, courts the preferential treatment of a regular at his choicest eateries, advocates a generation gap between man and wife, does not smoke yet maintains household ashtrays, mixes time periods with reckless abandon, and once got turned away from a gay bar in the company of John Waters. Plus, he’s flown on the Concorde, “whose passing seemed to mark a permanent turn for the worse, not only in travel but also in the history of modernism itself.” You either know you can use his experience or you can’t.

It all seems to return, as O’Brien writes it, to aesthetics, and most immediately to clothes. He references in several places the 18th-century code of the dandy, who, per Baudelaire, presents himself with such concentrated attention not out of “excessive delight in clothes and material elegance” but as one manifestation of “the aristocratic superiority of his mind.” Unusually — and for me, refreshingly — O’Brien expresses little regard for the concept of authenticity, highlighting instead the usefulness of the dandy’s fake-it-’til-you-make-it enthusiasm. “A dandy may begin as a poseur,” he writes, “but gradually the pose takes hold and gives him strength, and though he may have begun as a phony, by affecting a grand posture, the power of the posture reforms him and he becomes a real phony.”

The dandy, in other words, takes the career counselor’s recommendation to “dress for the job you want,” a pointer weary for the glue factory, and applies it not just to “the job” but to the life — and how, of course, could he separate the two? This way of thinking and acting, as O’Brien explains it, “applies everything we have learned about aesthetics and from philosophy to our persons and to our environments.” Time and time again, he uses the phrase “sense of occasion” to evoke what we’ve lost and what a man must regain in order to prove himself worthy of the demographic designation. Every facet of our relationship with the world reveals our sense of occasion, though I find it difficult to infer what occasion most fellow guys on the street could possibly have prepared themselves for. Masturbation?

So, sure, sure, sure — we’ve all slacked off on our masculine duties, and we need to act better and dress better and live better and just display a whole hell of a lot more discernment. But if O’Brien writes about what’s gone south about manhood, how our taste reveals it, and how finally paying attention to the latter can patch the holes in the former, he writes equally about taste as a non-normative lens that, peered through, can make your environment that much more interestingness-rich: “Taste sums up what a person is thinking and not thinking. Your carpet and drapes tell us more about you than anything you could possibly say. The books on your shelf, the black plastic twirling on your turntable, the condiment rack in your fridge, your sock drawer: these are the auguries by which we navigate society. Taste is the fingerprint of intelligence and the visible manifestation of personality.” Learn to read the codes instinctively, and I bet it’ll feel like you’ve gained a flâneur’s superpower.

How O’Brien diagnoses the ills of 21st-century man might not sit right with everyone; MetaFilter’s reaction to Jesse Thorn launching his menswear-focused enterprise Put This On (“A Webseries About Dressing Like a Grownup”) comes to mind. Weren’t we assured that the skinless meritocracy was dead ahead? Shouldn’t we have dispensed with superficial concerns the moment we put a man into outer space — or even the moment we built the first aqueduct? Can’t we relinquish this snobbery? Yet it increasingly appears to me that phase one of growing up involves accepting that the skinless meritocracy won’t come to pass; phase two surely must involve accepting that we didn’t really want it to in the first place. How to Be a Man offers a redemption of the snob by redefinition, or by a return to the term’s roots in the phrase sine nobilitate: “We’re all snobs, one way or another. The good snob is the one who uses his upward mobility to improve himself, to develop real character, and to graduate and lose that ‘sine‘ and become ‘nobilitate.’ Since nobility is extinct, we have to invent it. We have to nobilitate ourselves.” So that’s what we’re calling it now.

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Podthoughts: You Made it Weird

Sunday, February 5, 2012


Vital stats:
Format: one-on-one comedy/sex/God conversations
Episode duration: 50m-1h45m
Frequency: 3-7 per month

You’ve surely heard the name Pete Holmes resonating through the halls of alternative and/or podcast-y comedy lately. The words themselves could, by their broad pan-American nature, gain only the loosest purchase on anyone’s memory — far less than the evangelical fervor with which some speak them. Even if that piques your curiosity, casual investigation reveals only one more head in the endless perp walk of white, early-thirties, college improv-bred, sitcom-writing Los Angeles standup comics by way of New York. Yet everyone, as another noted comedy podcaster I recently interviewed put it, seems to be boarding the Pete Holmes bus.

Since this podcaster said that in response to my own salvo of Pete Holmes-related evangelization, perhaps I can offer some explanation. To truly “get” Pete Holmes, I submit that you must see Pete Holmes, like I did at a live Risk! taping. In the aftermath of his punchlines, watch the man twist his open, wholesome features — his name made flesh — into those of a lower-tier Midwestern politician on the brink of a flop sweat, the pressure from a desperate tap just inches too far down into his well of theatrical affability forcing open the stress fractures that will hasten his undoing. A subtle element of Holmes’ performance, yet a harrowing one; it would surprise me if even he fully understands how or why he pulls it off.

Then again, as his podcast You Made it Weird [RSS] [iTunes] reveals, I may vastly underestimate his capacity for (or compulsion toward) self-scrutiny. The show’s simple format drops Holmes into one-on-one conversations with friends, colleagues, and friend-colleagues, like a WTF without the confrontation. The resemblance between the two podcasts actually runs deep enough so as to get tough to explain; suffice it to say that, when Holmes brings Marc Maron on [MP3], the resulting episode could have fit just as well into one show’s feed as the other’s.

Read the whole thing at Maximumfun.org.

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Lessons of Kickstartiness

Friday, February 3, 2012

The Kickstarter fund drive for Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s first season wrapped up this week, earning what I would call a successful $3000. Having entertained many a vision of just staggering over the $999 line by the close of the final day, I look upon the nearly 300% with some satisfaction. Some fun facts about the results, if you’re collecting experiential data for your own potentially Kickstartable projects:

  • 46 backers pledged $3000 total, so the average backer pledged $65.21, the price of a reasonably slick Taschen book or maybe a smaller Criterion box set.
  • The great majority of the backers pledged within eight hours of the drive’s launch, which is about how long it took to pass its funding goal.
  • The $300 pledge level, where I talk about the backer’s own project before every episode, sold out all three slots.
  • The $30 pledge level, where I thank backers by name at the end of every episode, sold 23 slots.
  • The $80 pledge level, where I talk about the backer’s own project before one episode, sold four of 24 slots. Maybe I’ll retool that middle incentive next season. (Kickstarter suggests offering something “tangible,” but I can’t imagine what that would be. Many projects screenprint up some t-shirts, but when was the last time you wore a t-shirt with words on it? Been nearly a decade for me.)
  • Since the drive passed its goal so quickly, I declared that, for each $250 raised over the initial $1000, I would add another episode to the season. (I’ve never found a snappy way to put that.) This resulted in a planned 24-episode season lasting three months growing into a 32-episode season lasting four months.
  • Next season, I might make $3000 the goal and produce an additional episode for each $150 or $200. Then again, I might bump up the goal a little bit more to fund recording in other cities. Perhaps an exploration of the West Coast? Notebook: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver? We’re talking Cities and Culture, after all, not City and Culture.
  • Before the drive had ended, I’d already recorded six or so interviews. Glad I don’t have to explain to those interviewees why the world shall never hear our conversations.
  • Kickstarter and Amazon (who process the payments) combined take almost a ten-percent cut, and you have to wait almost three weeks for the money to land in your account. So allow for that in your budget! Or, y’know, keep a budget. Not that I’m going to lead by example.

Now to make sure the show doesn’t suck. No assurance of quality like the old chorus of “people paid for this” running through one’s mind!

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Twenty-first-century man of letters

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Preparing to record another conversation with (two–time Marketplace of Ideas guest) David L. Ulin, I thought I’d give his recent book reviews a re-read. In his consideration of (one-time Marketplace of Ideas guest) Geoff Dyer’s essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, he writes that “Dyer lays out a quiet kind of writerly revolution, in which ‘the late-twentieth-early-twenty-first-century man of letters’ might best be described as a literary gadfly, unbound by genre or a reader’s expectations, writing about anything that comes to mind.” So that’s me quoting Ulin, quoting Dyer.

I have no small stake in the definition of the late-twentieth-early-twenty-first-century man of letters — or, now that we’re up to 2012, the twenty-first-century man of letters. I’ve occasionally introduced myself as a “man of letters and sound waves” in broadcasts, and indeed, that little-trod pathway offers my only hope, and a vague one at that, of three squares a day. Increasingly, the figures I follow closely — those whose work I can’t stop examining, dismantling, and sweating to re-create — inhabit the spaces where the circles in culture’s Venn diagrams overlap. They absorb as many forms of the stuff as possible and craft their experience for delivery right back out, far and wide, into the world.

Like Dyer, these figures have often carved out reputations primarily or solely as cultural writers — reviewing, essaying, criticizing, reflecting, what have you. They pull ahead of their vast herd of colleagues for the simple reason of not sounding so damned wan. Nine out of ten cultural articles I read come off as 750-word shrugs, premised chiefly on the assumptions that (a) nobody will read this and (b) yeah, but nobody would’ve sought out the films, books, or albums it’s about anyway. B.S. Johnson once sent down an edict, as he was wont to do, to write like you mean it, like it matters, and like you mean it to matter. Those who’ve let the mandate slide — and thousands have, I fear unknowingly — write like they want to make word count, like it barely matters even to them, and like they wonder when their two hundred bucks will get here.

The time has come to capitalize on my compulsion to work the cultural room (as Dyer’s U.K. publisher might say) and my mounting irritation at the volume of would-be man-of-letters product written at a workmanlike plod, heaving under its own inconsequentiality. The task of engineering a new species of cultural writing, one not burdened into meaningless by traditional obligations interpretation and/or evaluation, could well yield fruit. I find myself in a not entirely disadvantageous place to do that, given that my writing thus far has walked me around a sizable patch of that old Venn diagram. My last nine literary primers for The Millions, for instance:

(Even now, Oulipo fans, I labor over a Harry Mathews primer. It’s taking longer than I thought.)

Or my pieces on books for The Quarterly Conversation:

Or my last nine Humanists columns for 3Quarksdaily:

Or even my last nine (as long as we’re doing nines) Podthoughts for Maximumfun.org:

(And let’s not forget the Ubuweb Experimental Video project, found here, on my old Typepad blog, and on Ubuweb itself.)

Sure, the goal of this post lays, ultimately, in clarifying my direction to myself. But, that admitted, perhaps I could be of use? Happen to read any publications lately that feel in need of a bracing shot of interestingness?

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