HOME: Stories From L.A.

I started this podcast in the fall of 2015 with a notion to tell stories of the many ways people think about home. For 27 episodes, that’s what I’ve done. I don’t think that going in I ever conceived HOME as a project that would go on in perpetuity, and now, in the fall of 2017, I’m finding that it’s reached the end of its natural lifespan. So I’m putting the show on an indefinite hiatus.

Producing this show has been one of the best and happiest experiences of my working life. I’ve learned so much about the world of podcasting, where there’s such excellent work being done by independent producers of all kinds, and about the place where since 1990, I’ve made my home. However you came to the show — whether it was via my friends and partners at Boing Boing, particularly Mark Frauenfelder, or through the flattering press the show received in LA Magazine, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor and The NY Times — however you got here, I’m grateful that you did. I’m deeply appreciative for the early support from friends in the podcast community, like Devon Taylor, Harry Duran and Dan Lizette, and for the advice I’ve received from podcasters I admire, like Nate DiMeo of The Memory Palace. And to the people who’ve let me stick a mic in their faces and tell a version of their stories — my thanks as well.

One more thing.

Podcasting has enjoyed explosive growth over the two years I’ve done this show. It isn’t going anywhere. And neither am I. I have ideas for a couple of new series and I’m planning to bring at least one of them to you in 2018. They’re sort of like HOME, but also sort of not. I hope you’ll keep an eye peeled on the Facebook page or the Twitter feed, or you can follow my personal account at Twitter and I’ll keep you updated there.

Thanks for your support, thanks for listening, and I’ll see you with a new show in the new year.

“Jackie” and “Ah Clouds” are by the generous and talented Chad Crouch, a/k/a Podington Bear, whose music has been a big part of HOME. 

HGTV and glossy magazines have sparked a boomlet of interest in tiny homes, but they’ve also made them look fun, cute and easy. The realities of a tiny lifestyle can be more daunting. Municipalities often don’t know what to make of tiny houses, and living in one legally is, in many places, challenging. There’s a lack of infrastructure for people who want to build them. And although they’re in many ways an imaginative solution to some of the most vexing urban housing issues, they don’t yet have a high profile in cities. Is there a place for tiny homes in Los Angeles? One woman thinks so, and has founded a collective of like-minded people to make it happen.

Learn more about LATCH Collective here, here and here.

Music:

Top: Photo by Ben Chun: Creative Commons

Photo of Tessa Baker courtesy of LATCH Collective

“The best historians in L.A. are storytellers. They’re gangsters in east L.A., they’re ex-cons, they’re guys who worked in their garage their whole life, they’re guys who’ve worked at one business for forty years, people who’ve lived on one street for forty years… “

“All Night Menu” started with a question: What is a well-known photograph of William Faulkner not telling us about his time in Hollywood? Since then writer Sam Sweet has spent four years prowling LA for its most closely-held stories. The result is a lovingly-produced, meticulously-researched and gorgeously-written three volumes of the city’s secret history.

Top: Photo of the Maravilla handball court by Sam Sweet. Read Sam’s remarkable story on the Maravilla court in its entirety here. 

Music:

Audio assistance for the episode was provided by Sameer Sengupta.

Summer 1942: William Faulkner at the Highland Hotel, 1922 Highland

Thanks to Sam Sweet, whose non-fiction novel “Hadley Lee Lightcap” will be published in September by All Night Menu Books. You can order the three volumes of “All Night Menu” published so far direct from Sam, or if you’re in Los Angeles, find them at Skylight Books and South Willard.

The original Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in the hills above Glendale, may be best known outside California for inspiring the sledgehammer satire of the 1965 cult comedy “The Loved One.” For tourists and curiosity-seekers, it’s the gonzo life’s work of Hubert Eaton, who memorialized himself as The Builder in the park’s every corner. For the families of the people interred there, though, it’s something more, and harder to joke away: A place of their own, green and quiet, and eternity-adjacent.

Take a video tour of Forest Lawn.

MUSIC:

The Builder

Thanks to Adam Papagan, Adrian Glick Kudler (whose excellent story “Los Angeles Is Killing Us” is here) and Elizabeth Harper.

How will we live in 20 years? Or 50? Or 100? A one-of-a-kind, only-in-LA plot at the very end of Mulholland Highway inspired some of the world’s best designers to think hard about the home of the future, in Los Angeles and beyond.

MUSIC:

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Welcome back for Season 5 of HOME! You can follow the show at Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to the mailing list here. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show feed — it’s just above, it’s one-click-easy, and you’ll get every new episode in your favorite podcatcher the minute it’s released. Finally, if you get a second, please visit the iTunes Store and leave the show a review and a rating. It’s a small thing that makes a big difference in helping to spread the word. Thanks! — bb

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For more information about The Last House on Mulholland, visit the web site. 

There’s more information about The Ambivalent House here, and about the Hollywood competition here.

Photo: Steve Alper at the Last House site, May 2017

Rendering of The Ambivalent House by Hirsuta: Jason Payne, Michael Zimmerman, Joseph Giampietro & Ryosuke Imaeda

Special thanks to Steve Alper, Jason Payne and Nick Graham.

Join me, won’t you, as I peel back the curtain on this podcast and kick around some thoughts about its future. (TL;DR: I’m slowing the production cycle a bit to make the project sustainable over the long haul. New season is coming this spring. Also, if you’re a social media wizard and would like to help me flack this thing, drop me a note. )

MUSIC:

Photo: Cape Town, January 2017

HOME is going on a between-seasons hiatus, but will return in the New Year. Sköl!

Who were we? How did we live, and what did it look like? The vast archive of castoff slides captures, in vivid colors, images of the American family at midcentury. But the stories that go with the pictures are most often lost, and we’re left to create our own, and reflect on millions of conscious decisions to untie the knot of memory.

(Click slides to embiggen)

MUSIC by Podington Bear:

Thanks once again to Charles Phoenix.

Color slides were once the state of the art in family photography — vibrant, immersive, ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in fact, that millions, maybe billions of them survive. This week it’s a conversation with midcentury pop culture expert Charles Phoenix: What can we learn from the vast shadow world of orphaned slides about the way we used to live in our homes?

Music:

Thanks to Charles Phoenix, whose “Disneyland’ Tour of Downtown Los Angeles returns on November 27. Tickets are also on sale for his Retro Holiday Slide Show in Brea, CA December 17 and 18.

Read Richard Baguley’s essay on Kodachrome color slide film at Medium. There’s also this lovely video by Deborah Acosta at The New York Times.