Colin Marshall

Reading my way into L.A.

My inquest on alternative Los Angeles novels just hit The Millions. Excerpt:

You Millions habitués presumably prepare for life’s big events the same way I do: by gorging yourselves on novels to do with those events, tenuously to do those events, and, well… beyond. Readying myself for a move to Los Angeles, I naturally turned to literature, but I decided to avoid the region’s richest, oldest, most beloved literary currents: its unflinching examinations of Old Hollywood, its hardscrabble outsider odysseys toward the kingdom of celebrity, its hard-boiled tales of murderous intrigue and complex deceit beneath the palm trees. Those novels became iconic for a reason, but I had to ask: given Los Angeles’ practically unfathomable size and diversity, what other kinds of literature does it offer?

So I asked all the readers I could for their recommendations of “alternative,” “adventurous,” “unusual,” “non-canonical,” or just “weird” Los Angeles novels, keeping the question purposefully vague enough to ensure a wide variety of responses. These five books, mentioned by readers based in the city and elsewhere as well as by readers for the city and against it, “clicked” together in my mind to form the beginnings of a new, personal, Los Angeles canon.

And now, please excuse me while I return to panhandling.

Update your Rolodexes (Rolodices?)...

... because I live in Los Angeles now.

Mexico City's Ryugyong

"For all its flaws," writes Dan Visel at With Hidden Noise, "Mexico City seems much more alive, more full of possibility, more creative, than New York does right now." I guess I must agree; despite having spent no time in New York, I now find myself scheduling a fall trip to the Distrito Federal. The project of stuffing my unconscious mind with information about Mexico City led me to discover, along with dozens upon dozens of intriguing galleries and eateries, the Condominio Insurgentes, the D.F.'s equivalent of Pyongyang's Ryugyong Hotel:

 

 

One difference between the Ryugong Hotel and the Condominio Insurgentes: people actually live in the Condominio Insurgentes. The scant information available holds that, once Mexico City's swankest building, it now hosts mostly single mothers, illegal Cuban or Colombian immigrants, squatters, and part-time brothel operators. One upper floor burnt up twenty years ago, never to be restored to livability. Totally abandoned after some disgraced politican jumped to his death out of it — or after someone killed a judge in there; I can't quite figure out which — the top floor holds nothing but dusty old furniture. Mexico City's 1985 earthquake seems to have put the final nail in the building's coffin, though it lives on, zombielike — with about as much maintenance as a zombie gets.

 

 

Given my interest in urban design, disastrous efforts thereof, and the dead buildings that result, I feel amost fated to want to know more about the Condominio Insurgentes. I only have enough Spanish to draw out the broad outlines from forum posts and Youtube comments and such, but from what I can tell, it came up as the first Latin American mixed-use complex of its scale. I've read that, aside from the occasional decades-shuttered bar with half-full beers still sitting on the tables, plenty of shops still operate on the bottom floor. (The letters spelling "CANADA" down the side once indicated the presence of a "Canadian shoe store." Your guess is as good as mine.) Stories conflict as to what goes on on the other nineteen; matters of whether and what sort of people occupy them come down to a haze of conflicting guesses.

 

 

Mexico City first came to fascinate me when I learned that Paul Verhoeven shot most of Total Recall's Earth scenes there, barely bothering to disguise the place. Much of the film's subway action actually happens at the Metro Insurgentes station, not far at all, as you'd expect, from the Condominio Insurgentes. They also burnt a lot of film in a military academy just outside the city which Verhoeven praises on the DVD commentary track for its New Brutalism. This gave me the impression that triumph-of-the-planning-committee architectural statements dominated Mexico City, but my visions of a northerly Brasília turned up false. It just doesn't seem like the kind of place where those projects can get much of a foothold; we have more examples of boldly socialistic architecture in the States.

 

 

Still, word on the street has it that the Condominia Insurgentes stays in disrepair due to what strikes me as a very Soviet-bloc reason: multiple owners and/or managers, none of whom have a specifically delineated set of responsibilities, exist in irresolvable deadlock. I suppose that, when something breaks, none of them wants to address the complaint and thus become the lightning rod for all the other complaints. And jeez, you could find a lot to complain about on the exterior alone. Sure, a fire tore through some of it, but buildings don't just fall apart like this, do they? Even though it comes after decades of neglect, this sheer dilapidation makes me think someone must've taken a very low-bidding contractor, if not Ryugyong low.

 

 

You'll find the Condominio Insurgentes in the Colonia Roma — also known as the neighborhood where Peter Greenaway film composer Michael Nyman lives — at La Avenida de los Insurgentes #300, between Queretaro and Zacatecas. I couldn't find it conventionally listed, so I had to tale a little walk on Google Maps' street view to find it. Luckily, the building pops out pretty distinctively on the local skyline:

 

Bottom of the pyramid

Lucas Brunelle and his buddies bike very fast, against the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, through major cities everywhere. Brunelle himself does it with a couple of video cameras strapped to his head. These are what have come to be called “alleycat races.” They’re unofficial and illegal, they’re almost bizarrely nonlinear, and they pass through pretty much everything in the built environment, no matter how non-bikeable. They’re usually raced by bike messengers on their days off, which I suppose is the only group possessed of the necessary skill set and habituation to street danger. It’s easy to call alleycat races nuts and the people who participate in them nuts for doing so, but you know what? I kind of see the appeal.

I learned about Brunelle and alleycat races in one of his videos screened at the 10th Annual Bicycle Film Festival, which came to Santa Barbara last weekend. I caught the final program of the day, “Urban Bike Shorts”. (Whether or not the pun was intended, but either way, it certainly wasn’t lost on me.) I enjoyed its Japan-related segments and Ari Taub’s mid-80s comedy short On Time, which whipped through NYC at its graffiti’d-est, but I knew I’d like those.

Brunelle’s closer I didn’t expect. Its combined elements — world cities, urban environments and the unconventional use thereof, independent media, transport techology, physical fitness, filmmaking, D.I.Y.ism, proximity to one’s own mortality and the resultant feeling of aliveness — made it pretty much exactly what I wanted to watch right then. Not that I’m about to disassemble my bike, fly to Amsterdam or Tokyo or Munich or Sydney, reassemble my bike, and blast straight up a one-way, but still. In examples of extremity there exist many ideas useful in moderation.

The footage reminded me of something that, growing up a hardcore sit-around kind of kid, I never really imprinted on. Because of that, I still regularly forget it today, even when I should know better. It’s that there is great satisfaction in using your body for stuff. Not specifically to the end of making it look better and boosting your self-confidence or whatever; just in the very act of doing things with it. It’s a pretty standard nerd/geek-axis syndrome: when you’re rewarded for your intellectual efforts and your intellectual efforts alone, you tend to slack off on the other stuff, and you miss out.

Not that there’s less satisfaction in exercising your brain; there’s satisfaction in all of it. I would submit that there is great satisfaction in exercising whatever faculties you happen to have — physical, mental, social, artistic, entrepreneurial — in whatever ways you can. This is how I interpret those weary old commandments about how we should all be eternally grateful for what we’re given. I’ve never understood the literal interpretation. How on Earth to you just “be grateful”? What do you look like while you’re doing it? Should you have a straining facial expression, as if you were trying to open a difficult jar?

So I take having gratitude for something to mean using that something as well as you possibly can, pushing it as far toward its limits as you possibly can. I do find, however, that these somethings exist in a kind of pyramid. Physical fitness seems to be at the bottom of mine: if I stop paying attention to it, I have a hell of a time doing anything else well. Theoretically, I should be able to still write or talk or whatever even if I let myself turn into one of those sponge-bathing types who eventually has to be surgically separated from the couch, but I don’t think I could. Even if it’s been a little too long since I last went out for a run, I can barely process two thoughts in a row. So I guess the message here is, don’t be surprised if, a decade from now, you’re driving through Pusan or someplace and see me cycling by in your lane, going the wrong way. I’m just trying to think.

Flickr tourism: Fukuoka

I’ve got big plans for what some call “location independence” — big, heaving plans, I tells ya — but until such time as I magically achieve them, I make do with in-cubicle travel. While “making do” has never been a big interest of mine, at least Web 2.0 and Beyond have made it easier than ever to do longing-inducing stuff like this.

“Walking” around various world cities on Google Street View has been a favorite e-pursuit of mine, but I think I’ve found one I like even better. I call it “Flickr tourism.” Though I’m not particularly interested in what’s normally considered “tourism,” I do find it stupendously fascinating to view all the photos every Flickr user across the world has uploaded and tagged with a particular location. While the city remains the same, the perspectives, the sensibilities, the aesthetics, and the types of curiosity all shift constantly.

It’s fun to do this with cities I’ve personally seen, like Los Angeles, Portland, or Vancouver. But I’ve recently gotten into Flickr-touring cities to which I’ve never been but by which I’m nonetheless intrigued. Today, it was Fukuoka, the biggest city on one of Japan’s smaller islands. I don’t know why I’m interested in Fukuoka, but it probably has something to do with Taichi Ichinose and his invaluable techno resource of the 1995 web, JapanEdge.

Flickr tourism has simple rules. You just search for the city’s name as a tag, view all photos uploaded, and browse until you find ten interesting shots. Here’s my Fukuoka:





















Several of these images come from one dude who goes by “Pokoroto”. He’s evidently walking across Fukuoka and taking pictures of everything odd he comes across. Naturally, I hate him for his freedom to do this.

Talking my way through Denver

In New Zealand, I took more or less speechless field recordings. In the "Mile High City" of Denver, Colorado, where I spent last weekend and a healthy chunk of last week, I've recorded a narrative travelogue. There for the 2010 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference — and, of course, to explore some urban terra incognita — I kept my Zoom H4n in tow to yammer into whenever a question or observation struck me. If you think it takes a good deal of mind over matter to unselfconsciously walk around an urban center talking into a recorder, you are right. But the transformation happens quickly. Yet another inhibition shed! Damn inhibitions.

So submitted for your enjoyment is my Denver travelogue (MP3, 17:30, 16.1mb), the first in what I imagine will become an irregular series of city podcasts. Subjects covered include:

• Denver's preponderance of brown-brick-and-glass architecture
• A presentation from artist/animator Kota Ezawa
• The Hyatt Regency's elevator-based ambient television
• Denver's unusually high amount of public sculpture, included but not limited to Claes Oldenburg's "Big Sweep" ("no fondling the broom, no caressing the broom")
• Lessons about publishing and creative work in general learned while browsing the AWP bookfair (more on this to come)
• What a glass-encased Quizno's is a synechdoce for
• What you have to do when you forget to pack any boxers

I now travel somewhere interesting at least once a year — and if things go right, that number will rise steadily — so expect more where this came from. Suggestions are welcome, though I realize I should've captured more conversations with other people. Maybe when I go to Mexico City. I still have some of my, uh, high school Spanish.

Speculative temporary futures, Detroit ed.

Detroit, Michigan's Craigslist apartment-listings page is just... insanity. Look at it. A one-bedroom for $450? A two-bedroom for $525? A three-bed, three-bath house for $1300?

By comparison, here's the Santa Barbara page:

So, a "spacious studio" for $975. If you're quick enough to snag it. And yes, location, location, location: Santa Barbara is a clean, prosperous beachside community, whereas Detroit has become a byword for "burnt-out urban hellhole." But still, such numbers make me wonder. One grinds through quite a lot of inconsequential bullshit to make rent in a town where a reasonably-located one-bedroom might easily run you $1500. What if I was paying only $450 for rent? Or if I split that? Imagine the work — the real work, not the fake stuff — on which I could concentrate. Media is more or less my thang, and Detroit's no media capital, but it's not as if I'd stay there forever.

But, ah, the crime, the decay, the roving gangs of dispossessed auto workers: all valid concerns, and not ones I could pretend to explain away. (Let's not even get into the weather, which forces me consider that whole side of North America effectively uninhabitable.) The fact of the matter is that I've long held the desire to live in a "bad" place, to better balance out the yin and the yang of life, etc. (This active seeking of unpleasantness is different from masochism, for reasons which will come to me.) Bad isn't bad, but nor is it good; it just... is, providing much-needed contrast. I suppose I could simply move to some non-Park Slope part of Brooklyn and wallow in garbage for a while, but that's not particularly enterprising.

I think a lot about (a) the nature of cities, (b) doing bold, unusual "stunts" as a way to live life to its fullest, (c) deliberately time-limiting what I enter into and (d) my ultimate goal of telling geography to take its strictures and shove them. Suddenly pulling stakes up from S.B., driving them into the rich, steel shaving-filled Detroit soil and remaining there for like a year or two would definitely tie those threads together. Not that my chance of actually doing so exceeds, oh, one percent — if that — but it remains a fun thought experiment.

Alas, the fact stands that I haven't yet built up enough fame and/or location-independent viability to move wherever I please, just 'cause. (Or am I only telling myself that, as an excuse not to pack boxes?) But when I do, I'll keep an eye out for the kind of city that's just overlooked, damaged or depressed enough to become a subcultural hotbed of the next decade. With sufficient craft, you can make a tasty meal from dented, discounted cans; by the same token, you can found aesthetic, intellectual and cultural movements in places where they nearly pay you to rent housing.

Detroit's current nowhere-to-go-but-up ethos — city motto: "Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus" — appeals to me on this level. I was talking to a fellow journalist just last weekend, a Detroit native who came to Southern California in the mid-2000s, about the long-running will-it-or-won't-it conversation re: his hometown's potential revival. He didn't seem sorry to have traded the negative aspects of Detroit for those of Santa Barbara. But then, what I don't appreciate about S.B. now, I would certainly appreciate after a stint in a place like Detroit. Kinda like how, after seven years in S.B., I can actually muster enthusiasm for the very sort of stuff from which a Detroiter seeks flight.

(But as long as Los Angeles' Koreatown still offers sub-$1000 one-bedrooms, Motor City's gonna have to wait.)