Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with comedian, writer, and comedy writer Todd Levin, who's written for Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, Conan, and the Onion News Network. They discuss using comedy performers as tools; the advantages of being a cipher; deliberately bewildering the audience, listening for reactions beyond laughter, and in the process becoming a connoisseur of silence; the comparative humorous possibilities of Tetley and Bigelow tea bag package copy; the inevitable and healthy decision to stop reading internet feedback on one's work; Conan O'Brien's coxcomb of hair; New York's inherent masochism, and Los Angeles' bus stops full of people who look just about to surrender; the pleasures of New York's crosstown buses and the agonies of its garbage trains; Los Angeles' lack of an excuse for shuffling around in flip-flops; his heightened suspicion of venues that aggressively promise good times, and what aggressive promises of laughter can do to comedy; the ultimately fruitless technique of reliable joke insertion, which reveals an anxiety to hold an audience's attention and in so doing loses that attention; that particular Conan O'Brien brand of delivering silliness and lasting memories at once; and the haunting question of telling which of your actions indicate maturity, and which indicate complacency.

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

(Photo: Lisa Whiteman)

For all its relevance to their interests, I wonder how many menswear enthusiasts would, or could, sit down and read this book. Despite coming in the same thickness and glossiness as many standard menswear books do, The Men’s Fashion Reader has no dressing advice to offer, nor does it concentrate exclusively on the history, development, or mechanics of men’s clothing. It does contain a great deal of analysis, delivered in the form of 35 separate articles on everything from dandyism to the Japanese adoption of the western suit to the rise and fall of the Men’s Dress Reform Party. And indeed, any man who takes an active interest in what he wears will find dozens upon dozens of fascinating pages — embedded, alas, within hundreds of academic ones.

Here I use the word “academic” mostly by its neutral definition, “of or pertaining to a college, academy, school, or other educational institution, especially one for higher education,” but not without an eye toward the more pejorative ones. “Of purely theoretical or speculative interest,” “excessively concerned with intellectual matters and lacking experience of practical affairs” — these charges often stick. McNeil and Karaminas make no bones about their book as a product of the academy, for the academy, and a quick glance across online collage syllabi reveals that professors do indeed assign it. Yet its relatively lush printing, complete with two sections of color plates showing off eighteenth-century finery, midcentury California leisurewear, and the unconventional fashion choices of Japanese youth surely makes it one of those burdensomely expensive, beer money-eating pieces of required reading. A peculiar hybrid, this book: its form keeps it from quite belonging on the student’s bookshelf, and its content keeps it from quite belonging on the well-dressed man’s.

Read the whole thing at Put This On.

( Overview/Review )

x-posted to my journal

Long summary from amazon: "I am Catalina, Princess of Spain, daughter of the two greatest monarchs the world has ever known...and I will be Queen of England."

Thus, bestselling author Philippa Gregory introduces one of her most unforgettable heroines: Katherine of Aragon. Daughter of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, Katherine has been fated her whole life to marry Prince Arthur of England. When they meet and are married, the match becomes as passionate as it is politically expedient. The young lovers revel in each other's company and plan the England they will make together. But tragically, aged only fifteen, Arthur falls ill and extracts from his sixteen-year-old bride a deathbed promise to marry his brother, Henry; become Queen; and fulfill their dreams and her destiny.


( the rest after the cut including my thoughts on the book )

Tags: historical fiction

Has anyone used audible.com? Any thoughts on the service? Tech support if any? Are you able to burn the books you download onto CDs(for me specifically, listening while driving)?

Can't remember the title of this book. From what I can recall of the summary on the back its about a woman who is researching something and part of that research involves a grimore or something like that with some numbers in the name, like 187 or 487. There was something about a vampire wanting that particular book, that it had been out of circulation for a really long time. And the novel seemed to have the same sort of historical information theme as The Historian did. Does anyone know of the book i'm thinking of?

( Overview/Review )

x-posted to my journal

Vital stats:
Format: elucidation of oft-name-checked but thinly understood ideas
Episode duration: 9-20m
Frequency: monthly, almost

My brain has filed Benjamen Walker, host and producer of WFMU’s Too Much Information, as one of our time’s major public radio martyrs. Yes, the man seems alive and well, but public radio martyrdom doesn’t require literal death. He can go on breathing, eating, sleeping, and working, making intricate audio pieces for which people express great admiration on the internet; he simply must symbolize the bizarre thanklessness of crafting fine sonic media. When Bill McKibben wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books on just this phenomenona couple years back, he quoted Walker directly:

[Too Much Information is] good enough that 240,000 people have downloaded some of the twenty episodes he’s made so far. That’s a lot of people, but it’s zero money, since podcasts, like most websites, are by custom given away for free. Walker’s previous show, a similar effort called Theory of Everything, was widely promoted on the Public Radio Exchange, and six public radio stations across the country actually paid for and ran it. “I think I made $80,” he says. “If I thought about it too hard, I would just quit. It’s much better not to think about it.”This brings to mind Memory Palace creator Nate DiMeo’s alternately encouraging and debilitatingly discouraging article on public radio production. Walker commented with a j’accuse against stations willing to pay for digital consultants, brand consultants, and “content executives” instead of, uh, content. A bold declaration, you might think, although I personally would have tossed in an indictment of stations’ badly limiting and increasingly shameless tendency to pander to, and only to, listeners’ fear of having their ignorance exposed at the office water cooler. No surprise, then — or not so much of a surprise, anyway — that Walker’s latest high-profile project comes not in collaboration with a traditional public radio outfit, but with the British newspaper the Guardian. Together they bring you The Big Ideas [RSS] [iTunes], a podcast on just those.

Read the whole thing at maximumfun.org.

Upon hearing that I'd never read it, an interviewee with three Los Angeles years on me pressed his personal copy of Ask the Dust into my hands. I had felt some responsibility and curiosity about the book, since it occupies the unusual position of a 1930s Los Angeles novel that "everyone" is suddenly reading again. In fact, so many people suggested it for my alternative Los Angeles literature roundup that I immediately decided not to include it. But since I instinctively trust this the judgment of this particular interviewee, a novelist himself, I soon broke down and took in this story of Arturo Bandini, a fledgling Italian-American writer who pulls up stakes from Depression-era Colorado and drops himself, alone, into in Depression-era Los Angeles.

I often wonder whether a truly insightful Los Angeles book should avoid mentioning either the "car culture" or "the Industry," those two highly visible black holes that suck many a portrayal of the city into mediocrity. Fante does well enough on these counts: the impoverished young literary Bandini lacks the means to buy an automobile until late in the story, and at no point does he look into screenwriting. He spends most of his time downtown, riding the Angels Flight funicular between his boarding house in the dense neighborhood of Bunker Hill to visit/hassle a Mexican waitress (his "Mayan Princess") at an eatery very similar to Clifton's Cafeteria. The year is 1933, the heyday of the Los Angeles and Pacific Electric railways, the latter of which Bandini takes down to Long Beach for an assignation with a middle-aged lush possessed of — I don't quite know how else to describe it — a dead vagina.

That comes as only one of the novel's several unsettling sequences. Afterward, Bandini wakes up alone and walks outside right into the Long Beach Earthquake of 1933. When I think of that particular disaster, I think of a certain photo someone uploaded to Wikipedia that, while capturing the aftermath of the quake in messy detail, does so in a way that makes the scene surrealistically desolate and dreamily horrifying. The most memorable parts of Ask the Dust share these qualities. I'm thinking specifically of one low point when Bandini's emaciated, drink-enfeebled neighbor, claiming to know where they can get a free steak, drives them out to the sticks in the middle of the night, stops at a barn. He steals a calf to kill then and there and, theoretically, cook back at the boarding house.

In the book's film adaptation — shot almost entirely, as you'd expect, in South Africa — Donald Sutherland plays this neighbor. I feel great fascination to see the choices he makes with this character, as any filmgoer would, but I do wonder if the cinematic medium can convey Bandini's personality as well as does the book's first-person narration. Fante has him oscillating between hyperinflated pride (artistic and otherwise), near-solipsistic self-pity, and hair-shirt Catholic guilt with almost mechanical regularity. Bandini's relationship with Camilla, the aforementioned Mayan princess, introduces cycles of impotent aggression, ethnic sniping ("To me you'll always be a sweet little peon. A flower girl from old Mexico." "Look at your skin. You're dark like Eyetalians"), and thwarted longing. He becomes the sort of protagonist a writer of any era would construct to air their anti-Los Angeles grievances: rootless, alienated, gauche, self-serving, striving yet strangely aimless — and, ultimately, hollowly successful.

I report with relief, then, that Ask the Dust doesn't really have grievances to air. If Fante lambasts anything, he lambasts the transplants who delusionally project their own failings onto Los Angeles, condemning it as the very opposite of all the good and the pure left behind in their Edenic hometowns. "Nostalgically he talked of meat, of the good old steaks you got back in Kansas City, of the wonderful T-bones and tender lamb chops." "He was homesick for the middle-west. He talked of rabbit-hunting, of fishing, of the good old days when he was a kid." "He reveled in memories of Memphis, Tennessee, where the real people come from, where there were friends and friends." Naturally, this requires a robust illusion — around a grain of truth though it may have formed — of having been shoved out west by the hand of fate.

Should you arrange your own Long Beach assignation, with a vagina dead or living, you can now take the train there just like Bandini does, although it'll be the Metro Blue Line instead of the Pacific Electric Red Car. After its half-block move south in 1996 and its mechanical upgrade last year, you can ride Angels Flight to Bunker Hill. Bunker Hill itself, which you might know as the site of Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, took a hit from Los Angeles' freeway-building and redevelopment projects of the fifties and sixties. These, among their other unforeseen consequences, turned Bunker Hill into a platform for skyscrapers by the-mid eighties. When those towers fell into unprofitability, 1999's Adaptive Reuse Ordinance opened them up to mixed usage and dense (i.e., parking-light) habitation. We have glimpsed the future Los Angeles, it seems, and it looks like Arturo Bandini's.

Colin Marshall sits down at KPCC headquarters in Pasadena with Tony Pierce, the station's blog editor, former editor at LAist and blog editor at the Los Angeles Times, and author of the Busblog. They discuss the time when he was the only English-language blogger to ride the bus; the longing for Los Angeles that brought him out of the Chicago suburbs; his years in the collegiate Eden of Isla Vista; making like the rich young prince in the bible and selling all his stuff in order to leave San Francisco and come back to Los Angeles; beginning to blog as a way to let all the city's single ladies know he was here; his encounters with different groups of people on different transit lines, and his strategic use of the subway for drinking; how people in Los Angeles can live here for decades without ever bothering to be truly present, and how they might do that in any city in the world; his push, while editing LAist, to tap into as great a variety of voices and experiences as possible; his belief that the Busblog, despite its explosive popularity, never deserved to get known at all; the fixture of Los Angeles literary culture that is the paradoxically positive Charles Bukowski; and how, in all of the Busblog's non-fanciness, he still wants to let the ladies of the world know he's available.

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

The girls, the monster and the Artifact!

More than a year ago I reviewed the first half of what I thought then was a "gentle" children's adventure, Stargazer, by Ottawa indie cartoonist Von Allan. I bought the concluding sequel back in December if memory serves, but circumstances didn't see me get to it until now.

A black and white comic book featuring three pre-pubescent girls in the role of unlikely heroines, Stargazer features a Magic Doorway in the tradition of Alice's rabbit-hole and Narnia's wardrobe (and the Starship Enterprise's warp drive, for that matter).

But what seemed a "gentle adventure" in its first half, proves to be a considerably more spicy brew in its second. What seemed to be turning into an exercise of that hoary old "And then she woke up!" cliché becomes something very different — and very memorable — by the time the story is over.

A little rough-hewn, Stargazer nevertheless has considerable virtues. This story of friendship and loss just might be a gateway drug to comics for that young boy or (especially) girl in your life — but keep a kleenex handy. My full review lives on my site, ed-rex.com/reviews/books/stargazer_volume_two.