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.

Marc Norman: Bike Riding in Los Angeles

My search for “alternative” Los Angeles novels, which began with Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, continues. Though I only saw Marc Norman’s Bike Riding in Los Angeles pop up twice or thrice in my preparatory reading of books about L.A. books, it always stood out to me. One obvious explanation: when I move to L.A. myself in August, bike riding’s what I’m gonna be doin’. Lacking anything like the money to buy a car — or even to operate and maintain a free car — I shall remain two-wheeled for the foreseeable future.

Luckily, my limited experience has revealed a sound bikeability in L.A., which runs counter to just about every casually held opinion. I suspect most of the sentiment that “you can’t bike in L.A.” comes from the many, many people who use the city’s geography inefficiently, living in Manhattan Beach but working in Pasadena or whatever. Andy Bowers has my back on this:

It's very easy for an L.A. driver to think that our city is as choked with humanity as Manhattan. From the driver's point of view, that's increasingly true—there are more and more evenings when every major street is stopped dead, and going a few miles can take hours. At work the next day, people grimly shake their heads and lament what's becoming of the city.

Not only has riding my bike enabled me to glide past all this gridlock (in fact, I'm often not even aware it's happening), but it has made me realize that it's an illusion. The city itself is not gridlocked—merely the narrow asphalt ribbons onto which we squeeze all our single-occupant cars. On the back streets I now take, everything is quiet and serene. The main roads may mimic Times Square on New Year's Eve, but the areas between L.A.'s clogged arteries comprise mile after square mile of low-density, low-stress residential bliss (the same is true, I suspect, of most American cities).

I plan to live somewhere in the Koreatown-downtown range, which should place me close to Metro stations. My secret weapon of rolling my bike onto trains (which Metro’s cool with) leaves very few worthwhile parts of the city inaccessible. Seeing as Metro Rail didn’t open until 1990, Norman, writing this novel in the early seventies, wouldn’t have enjoyed that option; for him, bike riding in Los Angeles meant bike riding in Los Angeles.

Rather, I should say that the Bike Rider wouldn’t have enjoyed that option. This guy, a protagonist who’s only sometimes around, seems to hold Norman’s place in the story. His supporting cast includes the Drag Cop, Derby, Flon, Marshal T — — — —, Sunny, and the Phantom Bike Rider. They live out their dramas, such as their dramas are, in a rapid succession of short chapters with titles like “Street of Worries,” “Famous Bicycle Mechanics,” “Corn in the City,” “In Ventura County,” and “In Ventura County (Again).” These blow by in 122 pages — though they feel like less — behind a now-oh-so-retro orange-and-brown cover.

Needless to say, Bike Riding in Los Angeles would look, to most eyes, like a supremely strange little book, and I haven’t even mentioned its being set entirely in a rounded, Helvetica-ish font. It doesn’t cross my own threshold of true weirdness; I recognize it more as a Silent Generation fever dream, though one built out of unusual components. Yet I feel something in its ghostly set of characters who pass laconically in and out of the bits-and-pieces narrative run through with L.A. history (an ill-fated 1890 Pasadena Bicycle Club excursion has an especially continuous presence) drawing me back for a re-read. No objection, since that’ll maybe take 45 minutes, and I’ve gotten into short novels lately.

(Coincidentally, I also just read about how how Norman got bullied by Harvey Weinstein over his writing credit, alongside Tom Stoppard, for Shakespeare in Love. Peter Biskind talks to him about it in Down and Dirty Pictures, his book on the U.S.’ nineties indie film movement, about which more later.)

Albert Brooks: Modern Romance and Defending Your Life

I recently recorded an interview with film critic Dave Kehr about his new book When Movies Mattered, which includes a few articles praising Albert Brooks as not just a funny guy but one of the most formally adventurous filmmakers in the eighties U.S. mainstream. Kehr singles out 1985’s Lost in America as an achievement that especially earns this praise. Naturally, this got me excited for the American Cinematheque’s Brooks retrospective. I couldn’t make it to Lost in America, but how much less could I find in Modern Romance and Defending Your Live, the chunk of the Brooks oeuvre playing on the night I showed up?

During the screening of Defending Your Life, I kept hearing a scratchy yet high-pitched voice piping up from the row behind mine: “This is hilarious!” “They could never make this today!” “Oh, wow, did they really say that?” “This is hilarous!” “There’s so many nuances!” I kept turning toward the source of these exclamations, but could only see the curve of obesity behind me. Assuming the chatterer to be a slow or insane middle-aged woman, I thought, “Will somebody please wheel her out of here?” When the house lights came up, I realized I’d been hearing the enthusiasms not of an organically damaged matron but of a twelve-year-old boy. I instantly forgave him everything. Which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about me.

The more revival cinema I attend, the more I find it increasingly difficult to disagree with this sort of expressed joy. Something just feels so viscerally delightful about sitting down in a theater and watching an actual film print of movies from other times, even times not too terribly far in the past. Modern Romance and Defending Your Life came out in 1981 and 1991, respectively, meaning I had yet to be born during the earlier film’s theatrical run and remained too young to care during the later film’s. Even my dad, a longtime Albert Brooks fan, didn’t catch these two entries in the canon As They Were Meant to Be Seen. For me, it always feels like time travel. For those few hours inside the Egyptian, it could well have been twenty or thirty years ago — assuming everyone had their cellphones properly stowed.

That loud kid didn’t stick around for Modern Romance, and what a shame. That got the crowd laughing even harder and longer than did Defending Your Life, and in the old the-negative-warehouse-is-burning-down thought experiment, it’s the one I’d save. In Defending Your Life, Brooks plays a dead ad man who must justify his actions in life to a couple of judges in a Los Angeles-like version of purgatory. He puts a bunch of solid ideas into the story, no doubt — I especially like how the judges evaluate not his morality but his intelligence, which, by their definition, comes down to a kind of unflinching bravado — but the ending both gets him the girl and ties every loose end at the last possible minute as (so my memory dictates) the orchestral swell rises.

Modern Romance, though; even Kubrick had to give this one its props. While neither it nor Defending Your Life (but especially not Defending Your Life) have quite as high a time with the cinematic form as Lost in America does, Brooks still makes a lot of bold moves within it. He strings everything along this line: his character, a film editor named Robert Cole, dumps his girlfriend. But then, feeling (Quaalude-intensified) regrets, he proceeds to spend the rest of the movie getting her back and driving her away again, oscillating between rapture, jealousy (disapproving of the dress she wears out: "There are people who only rape. That's all they do!"), panic, despair, and cutting work on shambolic sci-fi picture starring George Kennedy. In telling this simple tale, Brooks makes choices that only reveal just how daring they are upon reflection. This movie exists apart from the rules of romantic comedies. It doesn’t rebuke those rules directly; it just seems only vaguely aware of them.

Modern Romance really focuses not on romance, or even modernity, but on the debilitating neuroses of the standard Albert Brooks protagonist. Not for nothing has the long L.A.-based Brooks so often received the Woody Allen West tag, but his own neurosis feels different, and he gives it another sort of cinematic expression altogether. I kept having Sullivan’s Travels moments throughout the screening, cracking up at Brooks’ psychological pratfalls amid the laughter feedback loop of everyone else in the theater cracking up as well. Sharp-edged humor, I realize, makes an ideal companion to experimentation, adventurousness, inventiveness, whatever you want to call it. I found that Jean-Philippe Toussaint knows this when I wrote a primer on him. And Gabriel Josipovici and Lee Rourke show in interviews that they know it better than I do. But still!

But however severe his twitchy inability to function in humanity — and I thank my lucky stars I haven’t come down with an equivalent of the terrified Baby Boomer sexual flightiness diagnosed by Brooks and many others — I do feel a certain admiration for Robert Cole. Even knowing how the screenplay dooms him, I couldn’t help thinking, watching him walk from his house to his Porsche to edit that crappy George Kennedy movie, “Damn, even deeply neurotic, this guy is actually a guy. With a house. And a car. And a movie to edit. And he’s just going from one of those things to the other to do that third thing. By his own volition!” But maybe this says more about my own growing psychodramas about feeling a crushing lack of autonomy than about anything else.

In conclusion: there’s so many nuances!

Christopher Isherwood: A Single Man

Searching for books to include in an article about alternative Los Angeles novels, I sent out a call for suggestions of “adventurous,” “lesser-known,” “experimental” and or “weird” pieces of literature set in or somehow shaped by the city. Not until I’d piled up a few of those did a relatively well-known title occur to me which could head up and offer a “way in” to the list: Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. Despite having drawn currency from Tom Ford’s film adaptation last year, it rarely makes lists of L.A. or even Southern California novels. I suspect Isherwood’s English origins and the book’s status as a work of gay literature (because it couldn’t fall under two headings) have something to do with this, but to my mind, these make it exactly the novel-of-place to read. Seeing that place through a foreign cultural sensibility while flying under a separate literary radar altogether allow it to approach the place more obliquely — more interestingly, in other words.

Isherwood sets the novel in the Los Angeles of the early sixties, a Los Angeles he experienced and one I wish I could’ve. (At least I have internet videos.) Just as Isherwood taught at Los Angeles State College, his protagonist George teaches at the fictional San Tomas State College. Just as Isherwood drove almost all the way across town — if you, like me, use a semi-purist 25-mile-by-25-mile definition of town — from his coastal Santa Monica home to his fairly deep-inland school, George commutes with the Utopian of someone raised on European roads. (“It is one of the marvels and blessings of the Los Angeles freeway system that you can now get from the beach to San Tomas State College in fifty minutes, give or take.”) Isherwood preferred and George prefers the company of men, although, unlike Isherwood, George has lost Jim, the one man he especially prefers, to an auto wreck in distant Ohio.

Breakfast with Jim used to be one of the best times of their day. It was then, while they were drinking their second and third cups of coffee, that they had their best talks. They talked about everything that came into their heads — including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you’re about to die. But now George can’t for the life of him remember what Jim’s views were on this. Such questions a hard to take seriously. They seem so academic.

The novel covers just one day of George’s post-Jim existence. (Perhaps it covers the final day of his existence, period; Isherwood writes an ambiguous ending in which most readers seem to see an absolute, necessary finality that I don’t, quite.) I understand Southern California offered more permissiveness than did most of the United States and much of Europe back then, but stern whispers still float thick enough in the air to keep George — a white, 58-year-old, homeowning college professor, but nonetheless gay! — laboring under a burden of secrecy. He only tells his closest friends about Jim’s death, letting everyone else think he moved back to live with his parents. To most of the bits of society that immediately surround him, George just looks like a culturally refined unmarried man who may or may not contemplate death a lot.

I actually feel more resonance with George than I have with most other literary characters, especially the ones crafted to share my age, nationality, professional interests, time period, or sexual orientation. I can’t quite tell you why, though we may have to chalk at least part of it up to the way Isherwood opens up George’s consciousness on the page and thus universalizes him, or makes him universally connectable. Bear in mind, we’re talking about a character who zones out while driving and fantasizes himself as a Big Brother-like dictatorial figure, clutching the world in his iron fist, brutalizing with extreme prejudice those who would persecute him. Or do we all wallow in own versions of this fantasy?

The population will slowly begin to learn that Uncle George’s will must be obeyed instantly and without question.

But does Uncle George want to be obeyed? Doesn’t he prefer to be defied so he can go on killing and killing and killing — since all these people are just vermin and the more of them that die the better? All are, in the last analysis, responsible for Jim’s death; their words, their thoughts, their whole way of life willed it, even though they never knew he existed. But, when George gets in as deep as this, Jim hardly matters any more. Jim is nothing now but an excuse for hating three quarters of the population of America...

In this particular day, George wakes up; drives to school; lectures on Aldous Huxley; argues with colleagues in the faculty dining room (“My God, you sound like some dreary French intellectual who’s just set food in New York for the first time! That’s exactly the way they talk! Unreal! American motels are unreal!”); visits Doris, a dying woman who once attempted to steal Jim from him; makes an extra, off-regimen visit to the gym; abandons grocery shopping for a dinner at the home of his other ex-pat friend, a divorced middle-aged woman named Charley; rebuffs Charley’s drunken advances; darts off to a favorite bar in the middle of night; goes skinny-dipping with one of his particularly enigmatic students; and does or does not die.

I don’t want to get too thematic about this, but Isherwood repeatedly alludes, throughout the course of George’s day, to the question of what it is to be among the living. George defines himself as one of the living against, obviously, Jim, but also against the fast-on-her-way out Doris. Certain things blow gusts of living-ness right in his face: crossing the entire city on a freeway; throwing himself into an impromptu sit-up contest; plunging into the ocean, drunk, in the wee hours; ogling a couple of tennis players; running laughingly to a bar instead of dutifully returning home. George rides these sudden waves of vivid sense experience into bouts of spontaneity. You don’t see many corpses doing that.

George’s perspective dominates the novel, understandably so, but I think as often about his students now as I think about him. Not any particular student, though Isherwood gives the skinny-dipping Kenny Potter and his mildly sour Japanese girlfriend outsize positions in George’s thoughts. I think about his students as a vast generational mass, albeit not quite so vast a generational mass as the one that immediately followed them. A Single Man takes place in 1962, meaning most of the college students in it were born between 1940 and 1944. I’ve often read that, in terms of economic opportunity and not getting into wars, the best 20th-century year to be born is around 1938. Some part of me desperately wants to have been a part of the Silent Generation. They seem to have pioneered a lot of the types of lives that attract me, and they got to do it without falling into the black hole of 1968-y agitation. I’ll have to make do with the age cohort I’ve got, but something about the way George looks at their cars always gets me wishing I didn’t:

There’s the beat-up, not-so-white Ford coupe belonging to Tom Kugelman, on the back of which he has printed SLOW WHITE. There’s the Chinese-Hawaiian boy’s grime-gray Pontiac, with one of those joke-stickers in the rear window: THE ONLY ISM I BELIEVE IN IS ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. The joke isn’t a joke in this particular case, because he really is an abstract painter. [ … ] And there’s the well-waxed, spotless scarlet MG driven by Buddy Sorensen, the wild watery-eyed albino who is a basketball star and wears a “Ban the Bomb” button. George has caught glimpses of Buddy streaking past on the freeway, laughing to himself as if the absurd little sitzbath of a thing had run away with him and he didn’t care.

1-Man wisdom

Nearly every time I go to Little Tokyo for a stack of imagawayaki from the Mitsuru Café, I see Arthur Nanake, the 1-Man Band. Madelaine had her camera this time, so she sat down to shoot his performance of an old Korean pop song (video embedded above) while I went to Nijiya for a few cans of UCC coffee. When I returned, Arthur urged her to sing along to the choruses. (“I’m counting on you, Madelaine!”) Then he played us a modified version of “She Loves You”, Beatles songs being a pillar of his repertoire.

As you can see, Arthur mounts all his instruments on what looks like an elaborately handcrafted rig of PVC pipes. This offers a lot to watch beyond the man’s own bold selection of hats, robes, and non-matching socks. My attention always goes straight to the feet in those non-matching socks, with which he compresses a series of almost steampunk-looking bellow-ish bars made out of the same white plastic as the frame itself. From what I can tell, those pipes control a synthesizer which puts out bass notes. This in addition to his guitar, his main keyboard, his drum machine, his harmonica, and the stick on the head of the guitar that he uses to play not just the cymbals but another, smaller keyboard.

After his set, Arthur sat down next to us to talk for about twenty minutes. He kept asking if I played an instrument myself — “You can go slow,” he exhorted, “but never stop” — which led me into this roundabout explanation about how I kind of do, but only when I sit down to record, and then usually when I make movies that need a soundtrack. Having played in Little Tokyo and elsewhere for decades and decades and seeing a lot in the process, Arthur no doubt has a story relevant to any subject, but my mentioning filmmaking rung up three:

• A film student approaches him back in the nineties and asks if he can shoot him playing for a few minutes and answering questions for a few minutes. This student ends up shadowing him for months, winding up with the short documentary Secret Asian Man, which “opens” for every screening of The Eyes of Tammy Faye at Sundance in 2000. (The festival heads see some connection between the two self-styled stars.) Arthur himself gets in on the action, playing “Secret Agent Man” live at the screenings, and, if we can believe the Kenneth Turan clipping he produced for us from one of his many jam-packed folders, knocks the audience so dead that Tammy Faye’s distributors accuse him of limelight theft. Arthur suggests he and Tammy Faye do duets instead, but nothing came of it.

• Thirty-odd years ago, a “bearded man” stands right in front of him has he plays and plays and plays. “After five or six songs, I satisfied him, and he went away,” Arthur said. “I wondered, who was that?” Months later, he gets a call from the producers of One From the Heart by Francis Ford Coppola — a bearded man! They’d like him to appear in the movie. Then more months pass in silence. Suddenly, he gets another call: they need him on the set in two hours. Arthur now maintains that his material remains on the cutting room floor but, had the film included it, it would have explained why “You Are My Sunshine” becomes such a thing at the end. He also told me about a semi-similar scenario decades later, when, only because he waited hours to play at a benefit, he got an audience with a bigtime gospel producer who also possessed a certain looseness with the $50 bills.

• One day, he notices he hasn’t gathered a crowd. In fact, he spots the crowd somewhere else, but he can’t tell what they’ve crowded around. Then a blonde, long-haired entity emerges from the mass and approaches him, but, too busy trying to figure out who’d generated all the fuss, he isn’t playing! Unamused, the creature moves on. He later learns its identity: Gwen Stefani, lead singer of No Doubt. “I thought it was a guy!” Arthur told me. I include this story because I, too, think Gwen Stefani is a guy.

These illustrated his broader point: “You can be in the right place at the right time, but you have to be doing the right thing!” Of course, Momus sang about this on his Voyager album, but it also brought to mind Brian Eno’s reworking of the old line about luck as the intersection of preparation and opportunity: “Luck is being ready.” I would have said it to Arthur, but I didn’t want to have to explain to him who Brian Eno is. Then again, part of me believes that of course this 74-year-old, six-kid-having street musician from Kyoto would know who Brian Eno is. Why? Probably because, in my brief time talking with him, Arthur made a hell of a lot more sense than I expected him to — a hell of a lot more sense than I expect from most of the people I interact with, actually.

David L. Ulin: The Lost Art of Reading

David L. Ulin, former book editor of the L.A. Times and one of my favorite guests from The Marketplace of Ideas’ first year (here’s that conversation), comes back on the program this week to talk about his new book, The Lost Art of Reading. That’s one dramatic title, and I couldn’t help but feel a sharp pang of irony given the book’s context in my life: it was, I believe, the fourth I’d read that week. If the art got lost, I didn’t get the memo.

(I should really stop taking all my communications by memo.)

But Ulin’s argument turns out to be much subtler than its banner. It’s something more interesting, in fact, than an argument. He’s got three threads going. The first began as an L.A. Times article about the increasing difficulty of concentrating on long-form text for those inclined to get hooked on tweets, Google Alerts, Huffington Post dispatches, etc. Laboring under the crusty belief that I am what I read, I’ve practiced just enough strategic abstinence — posting to Twitter but never “checking” it, harshly regulate my inbox-peering, going on Facebook only under certain phases of the moon — not to worry much about this.

The second thread discusses the dynamic between Ulin and his non-reading son when the son is assigned The Great Gatsby and sent, I suspect, on one those pointless high school English symbolism hunts. Ulin comes off as more agnostic about this, but I wild-eyedly cultivate a number of theories about how, for every kid high school English shoots up with Dead Poets Society, it turns a thousand others away from reading forever. I don’t blame anybody for this; it strikes me as systemic a problem as they come. If you try to make the pleasures of literature teachable by mandatory public education’s definition of “teachable,” it’s easiest to part them out in this plodding, alienating way, the terrible scope of which only becomes clear when you step back.

In third thread — my favorite — Ulin writes a short biography of his reading life. Boldly, he devotes a not insubstantial chunk of this small book to describing his abiding love of the work of the Scottish barge driver/heroin addict/novelist Alexander Trocchi, his favorite in a constellation of writers who both lived vigorously and, to some extent, wasted their skill. I never latched on to the Jack Kerouacs or Ayn Rands of the world, the unconventional novelists of extreme views you’re supposed to get into in adolescence, but now that I read up on Trocchi, I wonder if I haven’t found a potential equivalent for my mid-twenties. I wonder if I haven’t found a candidate for a future Millions contemporary novelist primer.

Ulin highlights the moment in his reading life when, in his late twenties, he geared up to move from New York to Los Angeles. We talked about this a bit in our 2007 conversation, where he mentioned making use of the most time-honored New Yorker’s adaptation strategy: hating Los Angeles. The Lost Art of Reading has details his other, to my mind much more useful technique: placing himself in Los Angeles through literature.

Madelaine and I recently showed the visiting Chris/cobalt999 around Los Angeles. Despite his confirmed Man of the World status, he’d never actually spent much time in L.A., so we seized the opportunity to take him through the geography and/or psychogeography of “our” version of the city. This meant Amoeba Music. This meant LACMA. This meant Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles. This meant Koreatown. This meant following John Rabe’s suggestion to “get high on L.A.” by taking a position above the city — Griffith Observatory, in this case —and looking around us. (This would have meant Tokyo 7-7, had it not been for history’s greatest tragedy.) Chris being Chris, it also meant a lot of staring at Los Angeles in Google Earth. We’re talking about a guy who’s been to Africa once yet knows the name and location of each and every one of its countries.

I enjoy maps as much as the next guy — okay, substantially, geekily more than the next guy — but Ulin’s literary self-placement also strikes me as necessary. Since I myself am preparing to move to L.A. at the end of the year — albeit only from Santa Barbara — I need all the self-placement I can get. Me being me, I’ve accomplished some of this with the cinema of L.A., of which there is helluva, and, via Podthoughts with the radio and podcasts of L.A. But I think I could do with much more literature. Ulin’s own two anthologies, Writing Los Angeles and Another City, have proven invaluable. The literary journal Slake, which I actually learned about through John Rabe’s show Off-Ramp when I wrote it up in Podthoughts, will come in handy indeed should it continue to publish issues. Certainly it’s about damn time I caught up on Raymond Chandler. Still, as someone with aspirations of getting a handle on Los Angeles and, even more impudently, aspirations of carving out a place in the city’s book culture, let’s just say I could use some more suggestions.