Colin Marshall
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces the podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture. He writes essays about cities, literature, film, Asia, and aesthetics. These columns present essays adapted from his book-in-progress, "A Los Angeles Primer: Mastering the Stateless City."
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Does the Jazz Age linear downtown, "America's Champs-Élysées" which once offered car-friendly shopping (and a huge Japanese department store), have a place in our urban renaissance?
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The freeways fascinate in the same way the crueler university social experiments of the sixties fascinate: they show us something about ourselves, though not necessarily something we want to see.
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Why a walk through this both formerly and currently Jewish neighborhood, recently the incubator of first-rate revival cinema and a world-famous "willfully repugnant" hip-hop group, must naturally end with the contemplation of a tortilla full of chili, cheese, pastrami, and sausage.
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The place to stock up on canned green tea, buy a genuine futon, burn an hour at the arcade, eat a heaping plateful of Hayashi rice, or gaze upon the finest men's style magazines: Little Tokyo remains all these, but does it, strictly speaking, remain Japanese?
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Despite making genuinely credible claims to importance in eating, drinking, and specialty shopping, La Brea remains, on a human being's scale, for much of its twelve-mile length, starkly inhospitable.
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Say what you will about their limited reach; the Red and Purple Lines surely must rank among the cleanest, most comfortable, least urine-smelling systems in America. You may lose twenty minutes waiting on platforms, but you'll have taken a subway - in Los Angeles!
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The tiny municipality seems to punch above its weight in most of the important modern rankings: food, no doubt; culture, in certain senses, yes; street life, seemingly so; homosexuality, most definitely.
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One can technically live an entire life in only Korean or Spanish - or indeed, only English - within these almost three square miles, but it would by no means count as a full one.
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The always multiplying, subdividing, subjective experiences and perceptions of Los Angeles make for an infinitely more interesting city to write about than any single, objective place.
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Does the Jazz Age linear downtown, "America's Champs-Élysées" which once offered car-friendly shopping (and a huge Japanese department store), have a place in our urban renaissance?
-
The freeways fascinate in the same way the crueler university social experiments of the sixties fascinate: they show us something about ourselves, though not necessarily something we want to see.
-
Why a walk through this both formerly and currently Jewish neighborhood, recently the incubator of first-rate revival cinema and a world-famous "willfully repugnant" hip-hop group, must naturally end with the contemplation of a tortilla full of chili, cheese, pastrami, and sausage.
-
The place to stock up on canned green tea, buy a genuine futon, burn an hour at the arcade, eat a heaping plateful of Hayashi rice, or gaze upon the finest men's style magazines: Little Tokyo remains all these, but does it, strictly speaking, remain Japanese?
-
Despite making genuinely credible claims to importance in eating, drinking, and specialty shopping, La Brea remains, on a human being's scale, for much of its twelve-mile length, starkly inhospitable.
-
Say what you will about their limited reach; the Red and Purple Lines surely must rank among the cleanest, most comfortable, least urine-smelling systems in America. You may lose twenty minutes waiting on platforms, but you'll have taken a subway - in Los Angeles!
-
The tiny municipality seems to punch above its weight in most of the important modern rankings: food, no doubt; culture, in certain senses, yes; street life, seemingly so; homosexuality, most definitely.
-
One can technically live an entire life in only Korean or Spanish - or indeed, only English - within these almost three square miles, but it would by no means count as a full one.
-
The always multiplying, subdividing, subjective experiences and perceptions of Los Angeles make for an infinitely more interesting city to write about than any single, objective place.
