The congenial Christopher Noxon knows what it means to be a Plus One (something about weed, the color orange, and a talented woman called Jenji). Anyway, we talked about this subject and Chris' new novel Plus One for The Believer. You can buy the book here: http://www.amazon.com/Plus-One-Christopher-Nox…/…/1938849426 But you can read our interview by clicking here.
So many silly faux-facts in this LA Weekly listicle about Autumn in LA, so let it be said, this naturalized Angeleno born in New York longs not for "the seasons" or Autumn in New York" but rather for the winds Raymond Chandler mythologized in the following quote the Weekly is so smart to remember: "There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Ana's that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen..."
In the course of researching my recent VQR essay about architect John Lautner, I interviewed the Lautner scholar and architect Frank Escher, who Benedikt Taschen chose to restore the "Chemosphere" house displayed on the cover of the VQR winter 2013 edition. Escher, who wrote a book about Lautner and was present to chronicle the rebirth of love for the architect's work in the late 1990's*, gave me a great interview, and some of that conversation, of course, could not make it into the piece.
One of the more interesting bits that had to hit the cutting room floor concerned Lautner's apparent love for the act of photography. Sure, Julius Shulman and many other professional photographers shot gorgeous pictures of Lautner's work. But according to Escher, Lautner was a "great photographer himself." The architect apparently took thousands of photos over the course of his lifetime, which may not be unusual for an architect now but was not always the norm.
"He used the camera the way other architects use a sketchbook," said Escher. "He constantly documented what was around him. There are thousands of studies of clouds, caves, rock formations, waves -- sometimes quite abstract. And if you look at those subjects and realize what he was looking at through a camera you start to read where his architectural forms come from."
"There's a very clear interest in the sort of natural biomorphic form in Lautner's work, and it comes from his really intense connection to nature," Escher continued. "This starts when Lautner is very young -- the way he's brought up, what he enjoys. Throughout his life, he traveled a great deal."
Escher told me about how one of Lautner's trips may surprise people who associate him with Southern California, heat. "Lautner once took a trip to Alaska and photographed glaciers, producing gorgeous images," Escher said. "These almost formal studies of ice formations, how glaciers melt, or how ice melts on water, or clouds, or those desert landscapes -- these are where he developed his formal interests."-- Adam Baer
*And who generously shared his contacts in the Lautner world.
My recent Harper's essay, "Speak Malady," in which I rock, roast, and melt at medical tourism meccas Boston, M.A., and Rochester, M.N. [PDF link] --Adam Baer
Upon moving back to Manhattan after my collegiate and early professional sentence to Baltimore, I wrote an essay about finding specific movie sites close to my new apartment, and how it was far easier to lose oneself in a film's faux-reality than to engage in a new adult life, especially in post 9/11 Manhattan. Well, one of those essays will reappear soon in the new anthology "Lost and Found: Stories from New York," edited by writer Thomas Beller, an influential colleague, founder of MrBellersNeighborhood.com, and editor of the literary journal Open City. Pre-order the book and you'll get more than just my post-adolescent ramblings: other contributors include Philip Lopate, Jonathan Ames, and Alicia Erian.
"There's part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn't
really make very much difference to me. Because I learned in my 20's
that it just doesn't change anything. And that whatever you get paid
attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about
yourself anyway. So a lot of my problems right now is that I don't
really have a brass ring. And I'm kind of open to suggestions as to what
one chases. There are real abstract ideas about, you know, what art can
be, the redemptive quality of art, and you know, kindness to animals.
All the cliches that we can invoke. But ...the people who most interest
me now are the people who are old and who have sort of been through a
midlife criss. They tend to get weird, because the normal incentives
for getting out of bed don't tend to apply anymore. I have not found
any satisfactory new ones. But I'm also not getting ready to jump off a
building or anything."
David Foster Wallace, 3/27/97
Yvette Siegert, the young and exceedingly talented Columbia instructor, poet, and New Yorker editorial staff member, has finally been given a public forum in the form of, yes, a blog. New Yorker blogs may be obvious references, but what you should know about Siegert, the author of The Book Bench, is that she's not only a voracious and reliable book-scene correspondent; she's eminently qualified to tell us the backstories behind the books while remaining highly literate in the world literature field and so damn likable that you would never go wrong following her advice about what to read. Way to go, New Yorker! You've got a blogger who will literally change the way the magazine reaches the online book world and the readers to whom it caters. See The Book Bench as soon as possible, and watch for much, much more from Shallot friend Siegert.
In order to set up shop in this here Los Angeles, I drove across the country in well under a week a number of years ago. My only companion was my brother, and if it wasn't for his devotion to putting the heartland on our odometer in the wee hours of the morning, it might have easily taken us an extra month. Or worse, we would have had to stop in Missouri. I mention Missouri because it's hard to forget. I don't remember the road we took to pass through the state, but I do remember that before a biblical-level storm, we passed only two types of establishments, which alternated on the interstate every 20 to 30 miles. First it was a church. Then it was a pornography village. Rinse. Repeat. And by village, I mean community: As I recall, the little porn compounds included adult video stores, strip clubs, and other types of establishments for the one-stop shopping every God-fearing Missourian needs. Well, maybe I dreamed some of that up but I don't think so. And if Daniel Radosh, author of the excellent new book "Rapture Ready," has anything to say on the matter, I'm sure he'd agree that there are some major contradictions in the world of evangelical America. In fact, "Rapture" discusses the commercialization and proliferation of this idea of devoted faith as represented in pop culture. Funny? Sometimes. Scary? Sometimes. Truthful? Always. I pray that you check the book out and visit the bitchin' multimedia appendix.
On Peter Scoblic's blog, the prescient TNR editor and now lauded author explains the motivation behind his very important new book, "U.S. vs. Them," taken from a post he submitted to a book club from the Talking Points Memo.
But after watching way too much of HBO's "John Adams" and Showtimes's "The Tudors" (What can I say: my wife likes the historical TV; I'm not much better for my "Top Chef" and "Magnum, P.I." obsessions) I have to wonder if the history of conservatism doesn't also fuel the creative decision-making in Hollywood, from the nearly historic writers' strike to all of last year's pro-life movies (think again if you thought Juno was "alternative") to the forthcoming Stone movie "W" and even Mssr. Ironman, portrayed by the perhaps most liberal actor Hollywood has seen since, well, Charlie Chaplin.
From Scoblic's post:
"[W]hat I found was that the Bush administration's foreign policy bore a striking resemblance to the conservatism that developed after World War II under the tutelage of William F. Buckley, Jr. and the magazine he founded, National Review. Buckley and colleagues like James Burnham advanced a view of the Cold War not as a struggle between superpowers but rather as an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil..."
Buy the book for a lot more, and when you're done with the truly important issues, see if you don't find some parallels in every form of entertainment--politically related or not--that's marketed to the world. What's frightening about the Bush policies is that they aren't even original. And that they could very well continue. As for Magnum Tom Selleck sitting on the board of the NRA, well, there are some elements of conservatism I will just have to live with.
In the current issue of Nextbook, Emily Barton's essay from the forthcoming anthology "Brooklyn Was Mine," takes us into a forgotten world of true Brooklyn seltzer-love, introducing us to Eli, the seltzer man. Finding this old-world, high-end delivery service that puts store-bought seltzer to shame, she writes:
Eli’s seltzer is more expensive than the kind we got in the store, so we don’t drink it with the same abandon, and the taste is different: saltier, more metallic, sharper. Learning to control the pressure was trickier than we’d expected; we had a few days of wet countertop before we mastered it. Even with soy milk, it makes phenomenal egg creams. But more important, we like having the crates and bottles in our kitchen, a tie to this city’s past. I like the connection to my father’s childhood, my aunts’ and uncle’s childhoods, and a world that was based around neighborhoods, where you knew the people who lived next door and ran the shop around the corner.
No beverage was more prominent in the home of my Sheepshead Bay grandparents than true, high-end seltzer (without the high-end price), and for the record, my Long Island born father still romances about properly carbonated egg creams. I used to even think as a little kid that seltzer was a specifically Jewish drink. But upon visiting my wife's Abruzzo-born Italian family in Bay Ridge last week, guess what I was served? One hint: It wasn't Pellegrino.
Why Glass Shallot?
Because we spit out "club soda" with verve!
There was a time when Umberto Eco meant the world to me. I was a young college student, flooded with the "brilliance" of the postmodernists, and eager to lap it up. But I always found it sort of funny, all this meta-thinking about meta-thinking, all these linguistic symbolisms and academizing of pop culture. I even remember a friend and I mocking the titles of our new university classes: "Towards realizing deconstructionist comprehensions of the French fry's representation in popular culture as a symbol of both deliciousness and death." '"The Popular Semiotics of "Is": "To be" in our political theater." You get the idea.
At any rate, Umberto Eco was often our voice of reason. He took the postmodern movement somewhere sensible. He made us laugh, he laughed at himself, told great tales, and he qualified what soon became a rampant nonsense-parade.
So I wanted to like his new book: "Turning Back the Clock: Hot wars and Media Populism." That's why I reviewed it in today's S.F. Chronicle Book Review. But things didn't go exactly as planned.
Have a read: "Eco takes critical look at war, Mel Gibson in 'Turning Back'," San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 2007
There's probably nothing better for your spirit when you're foxholed up in a medical society--and this *is one contained medical community; everyone here has something to do with Mayo--than to escape it as thoroughly as you can. That proved physically impossible for us over the past few days. But thankfully we arrived with an academy screener of Sean Penn's "Into the Wild." I don't know that the movie was the best I've seen. But I do think Penn outdid himself in terms of visual and visceral scope. The film transports you (and in my case, reminds me why I've avoided a fulltime corporate job since the year following my undergraduate degree). I also don't believe like others that the flick necessarily glorified its protagonist: it showed him in frequent states of potheaded smuchkification for all his innate intelligence, ascetism, and Emory degree. Some people are just goofballs, and the film seemed to be honest about that. That Supertramp died so closely to supplies, a highway, and help seems only to enforce that notion. Maybe Penn could have made that more explicit about those facts. And maybe there could have been less original Vedder in the soundtrack. But locking up in a dark hotel room with a laptop DVD viewing session of this film after spending a day grappling with the unique blend of Mayo invasiveness and impersonality really brought Lina and I back home. L.A. may have the worst air in the country but it provides a lot more access to nature than Hell's Kitchen. After the flick, I put myself to bed re-reading Krakauer's Outside article, and thought yet again: This man is an extremely clear writer, but I don't know what his prose legacy will be. Which is not to say that every writer needs to be a great stylist. I love my plain sentences, my purist storytellers, my adventurers who return with tales that defy linguistic elan. But it seems to me that Krakauer's greatest feats have been finding (or living) content and packaging material with his pen. No pun intended. Still, "Into the Wild," the film, was about the best thing I could have watched last night, and Penn deserves some serious recognition for his work. Perhaps Krakauer or the new gen of Krak-type writers should look into the young pioneers who venture into the depths of the elite medical world as patients; these extended trips and transfixing diagnosis procedures should be viewed as intensely as wilderness. There are certainly more ways out of Denali--if you're smart.
A little birdie tells me that an awesome new anthology of writing edited by Shallot supporter and writer extraordinare Bonnie Tsui will make its way into stores this April. The book is called "A Leaky Tent is a Piece of Paradise," and it will feature an essay by yours truly on tennis courts, their identities as built landscapes, and how they can serve as stages for people to play out social dramas. Want more info?
Here's the catchy description:
Warning: This is not your parents' nature writing! A distinctly contemporary take on the genre, "A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise" features original essays by twenty gifted writers, all 30 and under, whose strong and diverse voices redefine nature writing for the 21st century. Editor Bonnie Tsui's cast of accomplished contributors wrestle with integrating nature into daily life while putting down roots—often in urban environments. Included here are The New Yorker's Andrea Walker on learning to hunt with her father; noted fishing author and painter James Prosek on the mythology and mystery of eels; writer Hugh Ryan on being taught how to pitch a tent by a six-foot-tall drag queen at a Radical Faeries camp in Tennessee. Other stories are unusual in subject, like Christine DeLucia's meditation on life cycles in Massachusetts's Mount Auburn Cemetery, and Adam Baer's argument that the outdoor tennis court -- carefully constructed as it is in a natural surround -- is the built environment in which is he is allowed to be primeval and, at last, to grow into a man. Theirs and the other writings in this collection illuminate questions about self and place, belonging and rootlessness, and the meeting of created and natural landscapes. Brimming with insight and humor, "A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise" rewards us with new perspectives on personal identity in relation to nature, and on the impact of landscape and place on our lives.
Want more? How about an excerpt from my piece? Oh, fine, you convinced me.
A tennis court isn’t nature dressed up but nature objectified, manipulated, pounded even by bulldozers and will. .... A tennis court, explicitly manufactured—grass courts don’t look like grass, chain-link fences offer views of what's outside—feels open and closed. You can often see a tennis court's limits and setting at once. It’s an honest construct...A tennis court placed in the outdoors is as much a way to think about your place in the world as it is a space to think about your place in the service box. ...In the end, a tennis court is a metaphor for humankind’s progress and the limits of that progress: it’s a product of the industrial, and yet it’s most useful to people interested in accessing their primal selves... For all of their civility, tennis courts are revelatory, confessional spaces that, in their uncommonly organized nature, expose contradictory elements, forcing powers to struggle with one another or vibrate in rhythm, or both. Tennis courts are like music staffs. Systematic but open to invention, they’re breeding grounds for anomie and communion altars at once—natural imaging centers where you can’t help but submit to a CAT-scan of your spirit.
I've obviously left out all the juicy stuff: the blood and guts, the fights, the sex scenes. Pre-order the whole book for this story and a whole lot more from Bonnie's impressive karass!
I try not to review too many films on this blog, but I find myself needing to discuss certain aspects of Todd Field's "Little Children." I found his first hit film "In the Bedroom" quite overrated--it seemed absolutely appropriate for ABC Sunday Night Movie programming but not for Oscar consideration (and neither Tom Wilkinson's stoicism or Sissy Spacek's melodrama helped that cause). I felt differently about "Little Children," though. Kate Winslet's portrayal of a woman learning how to become the woman she'd like to be--to say nothing of Jackie Earle Haley's return to cinema as a sex offender one can actually feel for--absolutely keep the narrative churning at high octanes. I wasn't so much a fan of how the movie began with a third-person voice-over--though the opening sentences weren't terribly disturbing, the film's closing commentary, which tells one how to think about the story that has just been told, isn't necessary--but it did lead me to explore a section of the novel by Tom Perrotta on which the film is based. And guess what? I found the book absolutely unremarkable. In the first few pages, Perrotta quickly goes dime-store-meta and references both the Farelly Brothers and the film American Beauty. Which shouldn't be necessary in a book that roasts suburban disillusionment. And let's be honest: How many readers are going to understand those references in fifty to a hundred years. I liked a comment Ian Parker recently made about Christopher Hitchens in a recent New Yorker article. He reminded us that everything Hitchens writes, regardless of its pro-war buffoonery, is written to be read after the writer has passed. I appreciate a writer who thinks about his words this way (let's forget I'm speaking about Hitchens specifically). I say if you're going to make literature, why not take that approach? Usually I find that movies made from books fail the narratives they adapt. In this case (and yes, Tom Perrotta played a hand in "Little Children's" script), I think the movie is far more eloquent. Without the voice-overs.
I don't know how (alcohol? smack? that drinking chocolate they sell at Whole Foods?) Glassshallot compatriot Sacha Zimmerman managed to get both Bill Clinton and George Bush V1.0 to write forwards to her new Reader's Digest book, "For America: Simple Things You Can Do To Make The Country Better," but onion-skins off to her. Sacha's written "a call to action,volunteerism, and passion in a country where citizens are the life blood of a prosperous nation--not politicians and not celebrities." I might disagree with her on one point. Sacha: Don't tell me Beyonce isn't the vital, nutrient-rich plasma of that sexy hematologic soup called Hot U.S.A. Red.
There's just so much genuis here, the *glassShallot staff often has to nap every 30 or 40 minutes just to remain fresh enough to take it all in. Don't believe us? Be gone! For the reverent, however, we couldn't help but notice how many bonafide GENiuses we were able to cover this year. Geniuses, at least in the estimation of those who dole out the $500,000 MacArthur grants. In no particular order, this year's *glassShallot/MacArthur geniuses are:
1. Marin Alsop (see Brahms CD, second from top, reviewed in LA Times)
2. Jonathan Lethem (who got a great *gS review in the SF Chronicle)
3. Aaron Dworkin (ok, we never wrote about this influential music educator, but he seems to be a genius to us!)
4. Ted Ames (an uncommonly virtuous assistant in the Great Gefilte Fish-off)
5. Joseph Curtin (a luthier who makes violins far too great and expensive for the virtual factory workers bringing you this enlightening Web content to ever slack off, lest they never upgrade their instruments to wooden boxes of the sweetness-caliber that Mr. Curtin produces).
6. Claire Gmachl (the subject of a forthcoming lead profile article to run in Stuff Magazine's new babe-a-liscious quarterly scientist-shopping insert, "Laser!")
Other geniuses [MacArthur]
Lesson No. 4678 in How to Option Your New Novel For Big Bucks and Then Some: Write a "complicated" multi-character narrative about Hollywood evils, and then go on the Huffington Post talking about how the book is utterly unfilmable and you never, ever, want to direct.
I had my Hollywood moment. It's not that I would turn down an opportunity to be adapted (there are a couple of stories by me optioned at the moment), but I don't need it. It's just icing on the cake. As I said in 1997, movies are a particularly good billboard for a book. Movies need fiction and literature more than vice versa, because literature is where most of the genuine takes place. I don't want more fame, power, or influence. I sort of get uncomfortable with that kind of thing. I just want to be able to keep writing.
From Maria Sharapova's revelatory blog, which should, I hasten to say, have been updated post-U.S. Open:
I also listen to my iPod all the time. I love music. The new Coldplay is sooo good. I can’t stop listening to that. Also, I’ve been into a lot of Dance and Club music. It keeps me moving. Sometimes I have to dance on the plane cause I can’t control myself.
What am I reading? Fashion magazines. Lots of them. All that I can get my hands on. After reading a good novel, it’s great to flip through magazines. As everyone knows I love fashion. I can’t get enough of it. It makes me want to go shopping. Doesn’t that sound fun?
Um, yes. But not as fun as reading her take on Tolstoy would be. That, not the new chicklit tome of the month, is what teenage Russian tennis stars built in Florida's Blonde Tennis Star Factory consider good novels, right? Let the gossip start here then. I'm breaking the NDA I signed with Sharapova Enterprises to leak to the world the luminary's newest media move: intellectual. Look for a 3,000 word Sharapova essay on Isaac Babel in an October issue of the The New York Review of Books. And remember, you didn't learn that here. Not unless you want a visit from Yuri and Slava.
Entertain yourself with the following pop-culture events, slated for arrival this week. They all come with one-line endorsements cooked up in the *glassShallot gefilte factory (unfortunately not in Portugese).
The writer Ken Foster (The Kind I'm Likely to Get, The KGB Bar Reader, Dog Culture) has an unusually interesting discussion with Aimee Mann (pictured above) in today's Westchester Journal News -- and one detour finds the literary songstress naming F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of her influences. Read more.
Reason #311 to pursue that Pulitzer Prize with merciless determination: Your employer will eventually let you write poems about German luxury cars -- in the newspaper! The L.A. Times's Bard of Cars Dan Neil on Mercedes's new SLK350:
Attend me well, lords and ladies,
And my song of brave Mercedes,
A company that's struggled a bit, of late,
With reliability most unfortunate.
Though recent reports from J.D. Power
Have been as depressing as Schopenhauer,
One thing our fathers found,
You can't keep a German in a lab coat down.
Tomorrow my review of Jonathan Lethem's "The Disappointment Artist" will run in the S.F. Chronicle Book Review. You can read it now by clicking on the above link. I just did, and I'm surprised, as I often am, to see a record of what I thought about a piece of cultural writing. In my review I hint at how Lethem really helps establish the personal culture essay as a pulsing, worthy form, and though the argument arrives in passing, I'd say it's the most important part of the thought process Lethem's book inspired in me. Where can you read personal culture essays anymore? You can read critical reviews written in a literary manner (oh, if I had just another $.50/word for the amount of times an editor had stricken my personal experiences from a piece about a work of art). You can certainly read personal essays about life experiences in all types in magazines (though even they are becoming more and more rare). But seldom now is it that you can find an essay about a writer interested in examining him or herself through the culture he or she consumes, studies, enjoys. The revelation makes me sad, for that's in part what I wanted to do with my writing from the get-go.
I don't read enough. Certainly not now that I'm a writer. It's a problem I'm quite embarassed about and often view as my ironically Woody Allenish "film director who goes blind" achilles heel. The fact is I did read voraciously as a student, but as I've grown up (or down, depending on your view), I've just had trouble both making the time and concentrating on a book once I've got a few free minutes. Yoga is helping me be less easily distracted. So is leaving my laptop in my trunk overnight so I can't check my e-mail for 12 hours a day. Still, since I've decided that returning to books as much as possible is very smart for me, I ocassionally review some. (Not that I don't read books I don't review, but there's nothing like having to say something intelligent about a book to get you to read it carefully more than once and then, you know, think about it.) Which brings me to my thoughts on Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming collection of personal culture essays entitled "The Disappointment Artist." The book, which I highly recommend, is due out soon, and my review of it will run in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review (stay tuned for its online posting). For now I will simply say that it really caused me to think very carefully about why, in fact, I may not obsess over books (and even music) anymore. How did it accomplish this feat? Here is a choice quote from the book about a child who never felt like he fit in and who therefore indulged in obsessive cultural consumption to craft a better, more friendly and stimulating imaginary world to call home: "Attempting to burrow and disappear into the admiration of certain works of
art,” he writes, “I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my
integrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to
the art… I downloaded art into myself, but I was also downloading myself out of
my family, my body, and my life, onto a bookshelf of Complete Works… I asked too
much [of the works]: I asked them also to be both safer than life and a better
family… The disappointment artist was me.”
I'm not a crazy Sedaris fan, but I did enjoy his Santaland Diaries back in the day, and a friend points out to me that it's available on demand at NPR.org. We all know we want the next 48 hours to go by quicker -- here's an innocuous distraction.
