Keith Moon, Drummer of The Who, Passes Out at 1973 Concert; 19-Year-Old Fan Takes Over
In November 1973, Scot Halpin, a 19-year-old kid, scalped tickets to The Who concert in San Francisco, California. Little did he know that he’d wind up playing drums for the band that night — that his name would end up etched in the annals of rock ’n’ roll.
The Who came to California with its album Quadrophenia topping the charts. But despite that, Keith Moon, the band’s drummer, had a case of the nerves. It was, after all, their first show on American soil in two years. When Moon vomited before the concert, he ended up taking some tranquilizers to calm down. The drugs worked all too well. During the show, Moon’s drumming became sloppy and slow, writes his biographer Tony Fletcher. Then, halfway through “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” he slumped onto his drums. Moon was out cold. As the roadies tried to bring him back to form, The Who played as a trio. The drummer returned, but only briefly and collapsed again, this time heading off to the hospital to get his stomach pumped.
Scot Halpin watched the action from near the stage. Years later, he told an NPR interviewer, “my friend got real excited when he saw that [Moon was going to pass out again]. And he started telling the security guy, you know, this guy can help out. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere comes Bill Graham,” the great concert promoter. Graham asked Halpin straight up, “Can you do it?,” and Halpin shot back “yes.”
When Pete Townshend asked the crowd, “Can anybody play the drums?” Halpin mounted the stage, settled into Moon’s drum kit, and began playing the blues jam “Smokestack Lighting” that soon segued into “Spoonful.” It was a way of testing the kid out. Then came a nine minute version of “Naked Eye.” By the time it was over, Halpin was physically spent.
The show ended with Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Scot Halpin taking a bow center stage. And, to thank him for his efforts, The Who gave him a concert jacket that was promptly stolen.
As a sad footnote to the story, Halpin died in 2008. The cause, a brain tumor. He was only 54 years old.
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Read More...The World’s First Medieval Electronic Instrument: The EP-1320 Lets You Play the Sounds of Hurdy-Gurdies, Lutes, Gregorian Chants & More
At this time of the year, the Swedish island of Gotland puts on Medeltidsveckan, or “Medieval Week,” the country’s largest historical festival. According to its official About page, it offers its visitors the chance to “watch knights on horseback, drink something cold, take a crafting course, practice archery, listen to a concert or picnic along the beach, while waiting for some ruin show or performance in some moat!” If next year’s Medeltidsveckan incorporates electronic-music sessions as well, it will surely be thanks to inspiration from the EP-1320 sampler, or instrumentalis electronicum, just released by Swedish electronics company Teenage Engineering.
Billed as “the world’s first medieval electronic instrument,” the EP-1320 is modeled on Teenage Engineering’s successful EP-133 drum sampler/composer, but pre-loaded with a selection of playable musical instruments from the Middle Ages, from frame drums, battle toms, and coconut horse hooves to bagpipes, bowed harps, and, yes, hurdy-gurdies.
Users can also evoke a complete medieval world — or at least a certain idea of one, not untainted by fantasy — with swords, livestock, witches, “rowdy peasants,” and “actual dragons.” To get a sense of how it works, have a look at the video at the top of the post from B&H Photo Video Pro Audio, which offers a rundown of its many technical and aesthetic features.
“Even the design of the sampler and music composer looks medieval, from the font style all over the board” — often used to label buttons and other controls in Latin, or Latin of a kind — “to the color, presentation, packaging, and imagery,” writes Designboom’s Matthew Burgos. “The electronic instrument is portable too, and the design team includes a quilted hardcover case, t‑shirt, keychain, and a vinyl record featuring songs and samples.” Clearly, the EP-1320 isn’t just a piece of novelty studio gear, but a symbol of its owner’s appreciation for the transposition of all things medieval into our modern digital world. It’s worth considering as a Christmas gift for the electronic-music creator in your life; just imagine how they could use it to reinterpret the classic songs of the holiday season with not just lutes, trumpets, and citoles at their command, but “torture-chamber reverb” as well.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Carl Jung Offers an Introduction to His Psychological Thought in a 3‑Hour Interview (1957)
In the 1950s, it was fashionable to drop Freud’s name — often as not in pseudo-intellectual sex jokes. Freud’s preoccupations had as much to do with his fame as the actual practice of psychotherapy, and it was assumed — and still is to a great degree — that Freud had “won” the debate with his former student and friend Carl Jung, who saw religion, psychedelic drugs, occult practices, etc. as valid forms of individualizing and integrating human selves — selves that were after all, he thought, connected by far more than biological drives for sex and death.
Now Jung’s insights permeate the culture, in increasingly popular fields like transpersonal psychology, for example, that see humans as “radically interconnected, not just isolated individuals,” psychologist Harris L. Friedman argues. Movements like these grew out of the “counterculture movements of the 1960s,” psychology lecturer and author Steve Taylor explains, “and the wave of psycho-experimentation it involved, through psychedelic substances, meditation and other consciousness-changing practices” — the very practices Jung explored in his work.
Indeed, Jung was the first “to legitimize a spiritual approach to the practice of depth psychology,” Mark Kasprow and Bruce Scotton point out, and “suggested that psychological development extends to include higher states of consciousness and can continue throughout life, rather than stop with the attainment of adult ego maturation.” Against Freud, who thought transcendence was regression, Jung “proposed that transcendent experience lies within and is accessible to everyone, and that the healing and growth stimulated by such experience often make use of the languages of symbolic imagery and nonverbal experience.”
Jung’s work became increasingly important after his death in 1961, leading to the publication of his collected works in 1969. These introduced readers to all of his “key concepts and ideas, from archetypal symbols to analytical psychology to UFOs,” notes a companion guide. Near the end of his life, Jung himself provided a verbal survey of his life’s work in the form of four one-hour interviews conducted in 1957 by University of Houston’s Dr. Richard Evans at the Eidgenossische Technische Hoschschule (Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich.
“The conversations were filmed as part of an educational project designed for students of the psychology department. Evans is a poor interviewer, but Jung compensates well,” the Gnostic Society Library writes. The edited interviews begin with a question about Jung’s concept of persona (also, incidentally, the theme and title of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece). In response, Jung describes the persona in plain terms and with everyday examples as a fictional self “partially dictated by society and partially dictated by the expectations or the wishes one nurses oneself.”
The less we’re consciously aware of our public selves as performances in these terms, the more we’re prone, Jung says, to neuroses, as the pressure of our “shadow,” exerts itself. Jung and Evans’ discussion of persona only grazes the surface of their wide-ranging conversation about the unconscious and the many ways to access it. Throughout, Jung’s examples are clear and his explanations lucid. Above, you can see a transcribed video of the same interviews. Read a published transcript in the collection C.G. Jung Speaking, and see more Jung interviews and documentaries at the Gnostic Society Library.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...David Bowie Predicts the Good & Bad of the Internet in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Something Exhilarating and Terrifying”
“We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.”
The year is 1999 and David Bowie, in shaggy hair and groovy glasses, has seen the future and it is the Internet.
In this short but fascinating interview with BBC’s stalwart and withering interrogator cum interviewer Jeremy Paxman, Bowie offers a forecast of the decades to come, and gets most of it right, if not all. Paxman dolefully plays devil’s advocate, although I suspect he did really see the Net as a “tool”– simply a repackaging of an existing medium.
“It’s an alien life form that just landed,” Bowie counters.
Bowie, who had set up his own bowie.net as a private ISP the previous year, begins by saying that if he had started his career in 1999, he would not have been a musician, but a “fan collecting records.”
It sounded provocative at the time, but Bowie makes a point here that has taken on more credence in recent years–that the revolutionary status of rock in the ‘60s and ‘70s was tied to its rarity, that the inability to readily hear music gave it power and currency. Rock is now “a career opportunity,” he says, and the Internet now has the allure that rock once did.
What Bowie might not have seen is how quickly that allure would wear off. The Internet no longer has a mystery to it. It’s closer to a public utility, oddly a point that Bowie makes later when talking about the invention of the telephone.
Bowie also approved of the demystification between the artist and audience that the Internet was providing. In his final decade, however, he would seek out anonymity and privacy, dropping his final two albums suddenly without fanfare and refusing all interviews. He also didn’t foresee the kind of trolling that sends celebrities and artists off of social media.
Paxman sees the fragmentation of the Internet as a problem; Bowie sees it as a plus.
“The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.”
There’s a lot more to unpack in this segment, and let your differing viewpoints be known in the comments. It’s what Bowie would have wanted.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965)
Howlin’ Wolf may well have been the greatest blues singer of the 20th century. Certainly many people have said so, but there are other measurements than mere opinion, though it’s one I happen to share. The man born Chester Arthur Burnett also had a profound historical effect on popular culture, and on the way the Chicago blues carried “the sound of Jim Crow,” as Eric Lott writes, into American cities in the north, and into Europe and the UK. Recording for both Chess and Sun Records in the 50s (Sam Phillips said of his voice, “It’s where the soul of man never dies”), Burnett’s raw sound “was at once urgently urban and country plain… southern and rural in instrumentation and howlingly electric in form.”
He was also phenomenal on stage. His hulking six-foot-six frame and intense glowering stare belied some very smooth moves, but his finesse only enhanced his edginess. He seemed at any moment like he might actually turn into a wolf, letting the impulse give out in plaintive, ragged howls and prowls around the stage. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” he said, “so I turned to howlin’. And it’s done me just fine.” He played a very mean harmonica and did acrobatic guitar tricks before Hendrix, picked up from his mentor Charlie Patton. And he played with the best musicians, in large part because he was known to pay well and on time. If you wanted to play electric blues, Howlin’ Wolf was a man to watch.
This reputation was Wolf’s entrée to the stage of ABC variety show Shindig! in 1965, opening for the Rolling Stones. He had just returned from his 1964 tour of Europe and the UK with the American Folk Blues Festival, playing to large, appreciative crossover crowds. He’d also just released “Killing Floor,” a record Ted Gioia notes “reached out to young listeners without losing the deep blues feeling that stood as the cornerstone of Wolf’s sound.” The following year, the Rolling Stones insisted that Shindig!’s producers “also feature either Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf” before they would go on the show. Wolf won out over his rival Waters, toned down the theatrics of his act for a more prudish white audience, and “for the first time in his storied career, the celebrated bluesman performed on a national television broadcast.”
Why is this significant? Over the decades, the Stones regularly performed with their blues heroes. But this was new media ground. Brian Jones’ shy, starstruck introduction to Wolf before his performance above conveys what he saw as the importance of the moment. Jones’ biographer Paul Trynka may overstate the case, but in some degree at least, Wolf’s appearance on Shindig! “built a bridge over a cultural abyss and connected America with its own black culture.” The show constituted “a life-changing moment, both for the American teenagers clustered round the TV in their living rooms, and for a generation of blues performers who had been stuck in a cultural ghetto.” One of these teenagers described the event as “like Christmas morning.”
Eric Lott points to the show’s formative importance to the Stones, who “sit scattered around the Shindig! set watching Wolf in full-metal idolatry” as he sings “How Many More Years,” a song Led Zeppelin would later turn into “How Many More Times.” (See the Stones do their Shindig! performance of jangly, subdued “The Last Time,” here.) The performance represents more, however, than the “British Invasion embrace” of the blues. It shows Wolf’s mainstream breakout, and the Stones paying tribute to a founding father of rock and roll, an act of humility in a band not especially known or appreciated for that quality.
“It was altogether appropriate,” says music writer Peter Guralnick, “that they would be sitting at Wolf’s feet… that’s what it represented. His music was not simply the foundation or the cornerstone; it was the most vital thing you could ever imagine.” Guralnick, notes John Burnett at NPR, calls it “one of the greatest cultural moments of the 20th century.” At minimum, Burnett writes, it’s “one of the most incongruous moments in American pop music”—up until the mid-sixties, at least.
Whether or not the moment could live up to its legend, the people involved saw it as groundbreaking. The venerable Son House sat in attendance—“the man who knew Robert Johnson and Charley Patton,” remarked Brian Jones in awe. And the Rolling Stone positioning himself in deference to “Chicago blues,” Trynka writes, “uncompromising music aimed at a black audience, was a radical, epoch-changing step, both for baby boomer Americans and the musicians themselves. Fourteen and fifteen-year-old kids… hardly understood the growth of civil rights; but they could understand the importance of a handsome Englishman who described the mountainous, gravel-voiced bluesman as a ‘hero’ and sat smiling at his feet.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...37 Hitchcock Cameo Appearances Over 50 Years: All in One Video
Early in his career, Alfred Hitchcock began making small appearances in his own films. The cameos sometimes lasted just a few brief seconds, and sometimes a little while longer. Either way, they became a signature of Hitchcock’s filmmaking, and fans made a sport of seeing whether they could spot the elusive director. From 1927 to 1976, Hitchcock made 37 appearances in total, and they’re all nicely catalogued in the clip above. Enjoy!
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Read More...Sex and Alcohol in Medieval Times: A Look into the Pleasures of the Middle Ages
Playing video games, road-tripping across America, binge-listening to podcasts, chatting with artificial intelligence: these are a few of our modern pleasures not just unknown to, but unimaginable by, humanity in the Middle Ages. Yet medieval people were, after all, people, and as Terence put it more than a millennium before their time, humani nil a me alienum puto. For us moderns, it’s a common blunder to regard distant eras through the lens of our own standards and expectations, which prevents us from truly understanding how our listeners lived and thought. But perhaps we can begin from a considerable patch of common ground: medievals, too, liked their sex and booze.
Such are the points emphasized by medieval historian Eleanor Janega in these episodes of History Hit, which examine the more-than-age-old enjoyments in which people indulged between antiquity and modernity. Our received image of Europe in the Middle Ages may be one of Church-dominated, dankly pleasure-free societies, but Janega and historian of sexuality Kate Lister point out that, strict though the religious dictates may have been about sexual activity and other matters besides, many simply ignored them. (And though they may have lacked access to daily hot showers, we can rest assured that they were much more concerned with how they smelled than we might imagine.) In any case, reproduction was one thing, and courtly love — or indeed commercial love — quite another.
As Billy Crystal famously joked, “Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.” In the Middle Ages, the place was often a problem for women as well as men, but also for nobles as well as commoners (though some royalty did enjoy the benefit of a curtain around their four-poster bed, which afforded at least the illusion of privacy). It seems to have been much easier to find somewhere to drink, according to Janega’s episode about alcohol. In it, she visits a fine example of “the humble pub,” where even medieval Brits would go to drink their ale, beer not yet having been invented — and to tell their stories, a practice that would become so deeply ingrained in the culture as to provide a formal foundation for the Canterbury Tales. Even if Chaucer, as a pub-owner interviewee reminds us, invented English literature as we know it, we should bear in mind that sex hardly began with Wife of Bath.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Buckminster Fuller Tells the World “Everything He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lecture Series (1975)
History seems to have settled Buckminster Fuller’s reputation as a man ahead of his time. He inspires short, witty popular videos like YouTuber Joe Scott’s “The Man Who Saw The Future,” and the ongoing legacy of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI), who note that “Fuller’s ideas and work continue to influence new generations of designers, architects, scientists and artists working to create a sustainable planet.”
Brilliant futurist though he was, Fuller might also be called the man who saw the present and the past—as much as a single individual could seemingly hold in their mind at once. He was “a man who is intensely interested in almost everything,” wrote Calvin Tomkins at The New Yorker in 1965, the year of Fuller’s 70th birthday. Fuller was as eager to pass on as much knowledge as he could collect in his long, productive career, spanning his early epiphanies in the 1920s to his final public talks in the early 80s.
“The somewhat overwhelming effect of a Fuller monologue,” wrote Tomkins, “is well known today in many parts of the world.” His lectures leapt from subject to subject, incorporating ancient and modern history, mathematics, linguistics, architecture, archaeology, philosophy, religion, and—in the example Tomkins gives—“irrefutable data on tides, prevailing winds,” and “boat design.” His discourses issue forth in wave after wave of information.
Fuller could talk at length and with authority about virtually anything—especially about himself and his own work, in his own special jargon of “unique Bucky-isms: special phrases, terminology, unusual sentence structures, etc.,” writes BFI. He may not always have been particularly humble, yet he spoke and wrote with a lack of prejudice and an open curiosity and that is the opposite of arrogance. Such is the impression we get of Fuller in the series of talks he recorded ten years after Tomkin’s New Yorker portrait.
Made in January of 1975, Buckminster Fuller: Everything I Know captured Fuller’s “entire life’s work” in 42 hours of “thinking out loud lectures [that examine] in depth all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion car, house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics. Autobiographical in parts, Fuller recounts his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization.”
He begins, however, in his first lecture at the top, not with himself, but with his primary subject of concern: “all humanity,” a species that begins always in nakedness and ignorance and manages to figure it out “entirely by trial and error,” he says. Fuller marvels at the advances of “early Hindu and Chinese” civilizations—as he had at the Maori in Tomkin’s anecdote, who “had been among the first peoples to discover the principles of celestial navigation” and “found a way of sailing around the world… at least ten thousand years ago.”
The leap from ancient civilizations to “what is called World War I” is “just a little jump in information,” he says in his first lecture, but when Fuller comes to his own lifetime, he shows how many “little jumps” one human being could witness in a lifetime in the 20th century. “The year I was born Marconi invented the wireless,” says Fuller. “When I was 14 man did get to the North Pole, and when I was 16 he got to the South Pole.”
When Fuller was 7, “the Wright brothers suddenly flew,” he says, “and my memory is vivid enough of seven to remember that for about a year the engineering societies were trying to prove it was a hoax because it was absolutely impossible for man to do that.” What it showed young Bucky Fuller was that “impossibles are happening.” If Fuller was a visionary, he redefined the word—as a term for those with an expansive, infinitely curious vision of a possible world that already exists all around us.
See Fuller’s complete lecture series, Everything I Know, at the Internet Archive, and read edited transcripts of his talks at the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
Everything I Know will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...When the Grateful Dead Played at the Egyptian Pyramids, in the Shadow of the Sphinx (1978)
In September of 1978, the Grateful Dead traveled to Egypt and played three shows at the Great Pyramid of Giza, with the Great Sphinx looking over their shoulders. It wasn’t the first time a rock band played in an ancient setting. Pink Floyd performed songs in the middle of the Amphitheatre of Pompeii in October 1971. But Floyd performed to an “empty” house, playing to no live fans, only ghosts. (Watch footage here.) The Dead’s shows, on the other hand, were real gigs, attended by Deadheads who made the journey over, and they could thank Phil Lesh for putting it all in motion. Lesh later said, “it sort of became my project because I was one of the first people in the band who was on the trip of playing at places of power. You know, power that’s been preserved from the ancient world. The pyramids are like the obvious number one choice because no matter what anyone thinks they might be, there is definitely some kind of mojo about the pyramids.”
Logistically speaking, the concerts weren’t the easiest to stage. Rolling Stone reported that an “equipment truck got stuck in sand and had to be towed by camels.” Because the electricity in Egypt was an “a winkin’, blinkin’ affair,” Bob Weir later recalled, the jetlagged band had difficulties recording the first of the three shows. But, as with most adventures, the inconveniences were offset by the wondrous nature of the experience.
Weir captured it well when he said: “I got to a point where the head of the Sphinx was lined up with the top of the Great Pyramid, all lit up. All of a sudden, I went to this timeless place. The sounds from the stage — they could have been from any time. It was as if I went into eternity.” The Sphinx and Great Pyramid date back to roughly 2560 BC.
The Dead were joined on this trip by the counterculture author Ken Kesey (not to mention Bill Graham and Bill Walton) who apparently captured footage on Super‑8 reels. (Watch it above.) Kesey himself later tried to explain the symbolism of the visit, saying: “The people who were there recognized this as a respectful and holy event that went back to something we can all just barely glimpse, them and us both. Our relationship to ancient humans. To this place on the planet. To the planet’s place in the universe. All that cosmic stuff is what the Dead are based on. The Egyptians could understand that.”
At the very top of the post, you can see the Dead performing “Ollin Arageed,” with Egyptian oudist Hamza el-Din and other local musicians, before seguing into “Fire on the Mountain.” The clip gives you a good feel for the awe-inspiring scene. Just above, we have a longer playlist of performances that took place on September 16, 1978 — the same night there was a lunar eclipse. The complete 9/16/78 show can be streamed on Archive.org, as can the shows from 9/14 and 9/15. A 2CD/1 DVD package (Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978) captures the Dead’s visit and can be purchased online.
To get more on the Pyramid concerts, read Chapter 43 of Dennis McNally’s book, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. And here you can see Dead & Co’s homage to the Egypt adventure at the Sphere in Vegas. Enjoy.
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Read More...When Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson Debated Capitalism Versus Marxism
Karl Marx was a German philosopher-historian (with a few other pursuits besides) who wrote in pursuit of an understanding of industrial society as he knew it in the nineteenth century and what its future evolution held in store. There are good reasons to read his work still today, especially if you have an interest in the history of economic and sociological theory, or in the time and places he lived. But in the almost century-and-a-half since his death — and more so during the twentieth century, during which the ostensibly Marxist project of the Soviet Union rose and fell — he’s turned from a historical figure into an iconic specter, representing either penetrating insight into or catastrophic delusion about the organization of human society.
It was surely Marx’s tendency to inflame strong opinions that got him placed at the center of a debate between the psychologist/cultural commentator Jordan Peterson and the philosopher/cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The event took place in 2019, at Toronto’s Sony Center, billed as a clash of the titans on the subject of “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism.”
In fact, it ended up covering a wide range of twenty-first-century issues, with each of the two unorthodox, highly recognizable public intellectuals giving characteristic performances on the economic and political ideologies of the day. Yet they aren’t as opposed as one might have imagined: “I cannot but notice the irony of how Peterson and I, the participants in this duel of the century, are both marginalized by the official academic community,” Žižek remarks early on.
Indeed, writes the Guardian’s Stephen Marche, “the great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had. One hated communism. The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. The first one agreed that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions.” Nevertheless, as in many a debate, the surprising common ground is more interesting than the predictable points of conflict, especially on themes broader than any set of ‑isms. “My basic dogma is, happiness should be treated as a necessary by-product,” says Žižek. “If you focus on it, you are lost.” To this proposition Peterson later gives his hearty assent. As for what, exactly, to focus on instead of happiness… well, that’s a matter of debate.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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