Leonard Koren on Life as an Aesthetic Experience

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Leonard. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

LEONARD KOREN: Thank you.

SB: I think we have to start this conversation on the subject of bathing—it’s an obvious place to start with you—and specifically the relationship between time and bathing. In your recently reissued book, Undesigning the Bath, which you originally published in 1996, you note, “To bathe is to fall into step with your biological rhythms: in and out breathing, the speed of blood coursing through your veins, the slowness of tiredness…. The mechanical world of objective time—seconds, minutes, hours—is irrelevant here. Taking a bath properly requires being able to guiltlessly linger, hang out, and/or do nothing whatsoever.” Tell me how you think about bathing from a temporal perspective.

LK: Well, I think that’s the way I still feel about it for myself. Frankly, I enjoy bathing the most when I bathe alone because then I could actually tune in to all these things. Recently, I was in an experience where I took saunas with people once or twice a day, a group of really beautiful, wonderful people, but the social dimension of it was paramount. All that concentration on inner processes and the metaphysical aspect of bathing dissolved—it was totally a social experience. It really depends on the context and the purpose of the bathing experience. But again, in any bathtub, any shower, no matter what it looks like, as long as the water doesn’t make me shiver, yes, time is suspended.

SB: Have you found that many of your best ideas come to you in the bath?

LK: I think that when your blood moves in a certain way and your brain gets oxygenated and supercharged and bathing is one of the modes of doing that, yes, I have ideas, but I don’t know about best.

SB: [Laughs] On the subject of this book, Undesigning the Bath, you note how, “the manner in which timelessly beautiful inns and temples in Kyoto continually renew themselves is illustrative.” Pulling out this time notion, how do you view that in connection with the bath, these inns and temples?

LK: Gosh, I haven’t thought about that in a long time. Hmm. It’s a book called Undesigning the Bath, and it was a little bit polemical. It was a reaction to the slick Modernist baths that I experienced many times, which are formally very beautiful to me, but don’t seem to need a bather to fulfill their mission. In other words, they are complete in themselves. So part of the book Undesigning the Bath is a kind of poetic guide to making baths that have the superior qualities that I think bathing environments should have. And the inns of Kyoto—the way they’re maintained—is a good example of maintaining environments. So that’s the context for that phrase.

SB: I read in one of the footnotes that it was this bathing experience you had at a Norman Foster–designed bath that sort of led you on this path of writing the book. Is that right?

LK: Yes. It was gorgeous, in a real estate sales brochure sort of way.

SB: [Laughs]

LK: But the experience was almost dehumanizing, and it made me feel really bad. And subsequent to that, I’ve been to Vals, Switzerland, which is Peter Zumthor’s bathhouse, which, again, is formally beautiful, and I admire it in so many ways, yet both times I’ve bathed there, I’ve come away feeling like, “Ehhh, that was a shitty bath.”

SB: [Laughs] You don’t hear that take often, but people so focus on the visual aesthetic qualities of Vals and maybe less the sensual ones—or sensory.

LK: Yeah, probably. I mean, Vals itself— Have you been to Vals?

SB: No.

LK: Okay, so what you look out on when you’re in the outdoor pool and you look out on the hill on the opposite end of the valley, it’s the most bizarre landscape you could imagine. It’s diabolical. It’s not paradisiacal—there’s something strange. You have this magnificent architecture plopped down in an environment that it is not harmonious with it. I think there’s a big disconnect. That’s part of it for me, cerebrally processing it; things just didn’t make sense. The surfaces are very hard, the space is very grand. I think a lot of people feel what I did on a subliminal level, but they may not allow themselves to actually express it because it’s certainly a contrarian point of view.

SB: On that tip, what would be one of your greatest bathing experiences of all time? And then, excluding Vals and the Norman Foster project in Tokyo you mentioned, what would be the worst?

LK: I had one bath when I was involved with a tea ceremony. I was the tea master in a hot spring in Oregon in the middle of winter during a snowstorm with all the tea utensils floating on the surface. That was quite a beautiful image, but that wasn’t my greatest or favorite bathing experience. The one that comes immediately to mind is really crazy. It was last winter or the winter before in a rental apartment for a few days in Zurich, Switzerland, that had this large bathtub in the apartment and great hot water. I would take a bath early in the morning, and I felt my whole being coming together in that bath. That was an ideal bathing experience.

The worst one was during the WET days, I’d say. We had one investor in WET magazine, and it was a very wonderful, curmudgeonly billionaire named Max Palevsky; he was an early investor in a lot of tech companies that are famous today. He had Craig Elwood design a compound for him in Palm Springs, and they traveled all over the world to various places, Morocco, Budapest, many places, to make sure that the bathing environment was in alignment with the highest standards of the time. There was a cruciform-shaped hot tub next to the swimming pool outside, and he said, “WET, I’m in New York, so you guys, if you want to use my Palm Springs compound while I’m gone, please do.”

The problem was that the water temperature in the cruciform hot tub was just a few degrees below the temperature you need to sustain your body temperature. It was cold, in other words. It was like hell. Finally, we managed to disturb Max—he was getting maybe a massage at some exotic place—and he told me where his maintenance person was and in twenty-four hours we fixed it. But those twenty-four hours, to have a very appealing environment—and in fact, the whole purpose of the trip was to bathe—and then not being able to do so was unpleasant.

SB: Back to the connection between how perhaps the visual reality might not actually add up to what is occurring in the real world.

LK: Exactly.

SB: In that case, though, it’s just a very specific moment in time and the thing’s not working.

LK: Yeah, no, no, I think that’s often the case. Our whole world has become so visually attuned and we assume that what we see is what is, and that’s a shame. I remember reading once that roses, once they started putting roses in catalogs so you buy your new roses, that the smell of roses became of much less importance than the way they look. So that’s why roses don’t smell as much as they used to.

SB: Yeah, some are practically smell-free now. I mean, there’s no scent.

LK: But there’s a spray that you could spray on them to make them smell.

SB: [Laughs] And a color.

LK: Yeah, and they’re even caffeinated.

SB: So you’ve spoken so much about WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing over the years, including with me in the Slowdown newsletter, so I don’t want to overdo it today. But, for the uninitiated, this was a magazine published between 1976 and 1981, mainly based out of Venice, California. You produced thirty-four issues with covers featuring the likes of Mick Jagger, Richard Gere, and Debbie Harry, amongst other provocative covers. It was, as you’ve put it, “a wholehearted embrace of the absurd.” Share a bit about the publication with the listeners and also what you think about its staying power over the past five decades? Because I think that’s really fascinating. Why do you think WET still holds so much attention and fascination?

LK: Well, WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, if you haven’t heard of it—it still seems a little absurd. It seems less so now because even the idea of a magazine about gourmet bathing has been absorbed by the culture. About a year and a half ago in Rome, I was asked to do a show about WET. I usually say no, but I thought it might be a good way to meet people in my new hometown. I put a number of the images from WET up very large in this museum space. I was surprised that they’re still potent and relevant. I think that, in some weird way, I tapped into some kind of archetypical mode of design—similar to Louis Kahn or Irving Penn—that transcends the particular cultural moment. In other words, it’s archetypal imagery. I think that’s part of what visually makes WET still relevant to some people.

I also think that the approach to making WET, there was a good methodology, it was accidental methodology, but a good one, and allowed the creators a lot of freedom. There were some guidelines: no gratuitous violence, no “inferior work.” It was a venue for people to experiment, and a lot of interesting creators contributed to WET. So that might be part of it, but other than that, I have no idea.

SB: If you could pick one anecdotal moment or experience or thing that happened from your WET era, what would come to mind for you? What would you say is a standout anecdote?

LK: Gosh. Well, actually, the best ones I can’t say because I’d embarrass some celebrities. Yeah. No, I would say that, instead of answering that question, I’ll just say that it was a really seminal learning experience for me. I learned about business; I learned about relationships with other artists and creative people. I learned about all the things you could do wrong in business. I learned about immorality—not in a standard Judeo-Christian sense, but in a real human-exchange sense. I think it set me on the path to do better afterwards.

SB: While we’re on the WET subject, we do have to talk about “gourmet bathing.” What a great phrase. You’ve written that gourmet bathing is “a means of enjoying the world. Not a system or a therapy or a philosophy; at most a view of having something to do with sensuality, humor, humility, and taking such pleasure in small things that they stop being small.”

LK: Actually, those very specific words are not mine. They’re one of the wonderful people who worked for WET named Charlie Haas, who— I asked Charlie one day, “Can you write an essay about what gourmet bathing is about?” 

SB: Well, they’re beautiful, and I love this sentiment, and I just feel like we should all be using more of that in our lives. I think we could all use a little more gourmet bathing, in other words.

LK: Yes, of course. I mean, some people are able to use words that propel us into these wonderful realms of imaginative, contemplative, higher-order being. Charlie was one of those people. He is one of those people. What was your question?

SB: There wasn’t a question. I was just bringing up gourmet bathing, but if I were to turn it into a question, I did want to quote from this piece in The New York Times that the design journalist Pilar Viladas wrote in 2005. She wrote, “You could say that Koren has spearheaded the design equivalent of the Slow Food movement.” I was thinking about that in the context of the term gourmet bathing, and wondering if you think that there is some connection between gourmet bathing and Slow Food, even in an outstretched way, and what would that be? How do you see it?

LK: Well, gourmet bathing pre-existed Slow Food by many years. In fact, well, okay, so the way the term gourmet bathing came about was I used to make bath art pieces. Instead of becoming an architect after my graduate architecture school experience, I decided to make art about bathing environments and experiences. Many lovely people modeled for me and, to repay them, I convinced the owners of a funky old Russian Jewish bathhouse in L.A. to let me throw a bath party for the night. 

I made the invitation purposely ambiguous; people didn’t know what to expect. They had never been to a bath party before, and there were a hundred and fifty people. It was just crazy enough—and the people were in a really good frame of mind, and they were all good people—that it created a lot of what I called “social energy.” I had never created anything that was so successful before. I was 29 and I felt, “Jeez, I did something right. I got to do something with it.”

Again, it took me a while to process it, but when I was taking a bath one afternoon—because that’s when I usually would take a bath, not in the morning and not in the night, but in the middle of the afternoon during this period of my life—it just popped into my head: “I should start a magazine about gourmet bathing.” Now, in terms of the influences, my girlfriend at the time subscribed to Gourmet magazine, which was about food, which I thought was an utterly absurd magazine, the way they venerated special sauces or preparations that took many hours to complete. It was embedded in my consciousness. I admired it. I mean, I didn’t think it in a demeaning way, I greatly admired that people were so committed to their niche interests. Also Vogue magazine, the dogmatism—I think maybe it was the Diana Vreeland era, I just loved it. I just loved that somebody could be an aesthetic guru and just say, “It’s red. It’s red. It’s red this year,” and people would follow.

SB: [Laughs]

LK: “Gourmet” probably comes from Gourmet magazine, when some words are cojoined, there’s just a kind of spark that comes to your mind. I came out of the bath and I told my girlfriend, “I’m thinking of starting a magazine about gourmet bathing. What do you think about the idea?” She knew what a kind of person I was, and she said, “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”

SB: [Laughs] Then you had WET, which also led to this, in a roundabout way, engagement with Japan—or vice versa. Post-WET, one of your bathing-related projects was this book called How to Take a Japanese Bath, from ’92, and that had followed an earlier book about Japan. I wanted to transition here to your ongoing, long-term relationship with this incredible country, Japan. I know that around age 16 or 17, you had been digging through this pile of books your dad brought home from Japan. These were books about traditional Japanese design and architecture, and then, while you were studying at U.C.L.A., you became interested in the Japanese teahouse. Tell me about this journey into Japanese culture, how you think about it across time. It seems like it’s this ongoing, enduring thing for you, and maybe how do you view your “Japan time,” if I can call it that?

LK: My mother and my stepfather were quite interested in Japanese art and design, and the home that I grew up in was definitely Japan-influenced. There’s that basic familial veneration of things Japanese—we even had a Japanese gardener. This is not to say— It sounds like we were rich. We were not rich, we were sort of just basic middle class, but there were certain aesthetic predispositions that my family had.

I wanted to go to Japan when I was maybe a teenager, late teens, but my friends told me that it was horrible. Tokyo, the pollution was so bad the policeman had to wear gas masks, and the traditional Japan that I was so fond of really didn’t exist anymore. So I removed it from my list of things I wanted to do. When I was publishing WET, lots of Japanese journalists came and were interested in WET. Finally, we sold the licensing rights to manufacture clothing, with WET logos, in Japan. I was curious, what is this culture about? It was no longer the traditional Japan I was interested in—it was contemporary Japan.

I went during WET time, and I was introduced to a lot of interesting people—it was great. I really liked the way Japanese culture seemed to treat creators. Creators may not have made a lot of money, but they were accorded a degree of respect that they certainly weren’t accorded in America then. If you couldn’t make a lot of money for somebody in America, then you’re not worth much.

When I stopped WET, I wanted to spend more time in Japan—and did—and my life evolved. I wrote a book about Japanese fashion. It was the first book I made and it was great. I mean, [the] experience was great. I ended up marrying a Japanese woman, we decided to divide our time between half the year in San Francisco, half the year in Tokyo. I wanted to penetrate deeper and deeper into the culture. I think that the quintessential—I’d say, ultimate—deep dive resulted in the book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. 

Eventually, I divorced that Japanese woman. My life in Japan came to an end. Although I still am grateful and very fond of many, many things Japanese, it is no longer a central focus of my life.

SB: You did do the Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts book, which came later.

LK: I did, yeah. The first Wabi-Sabi book, wabi-sabi was not an expression that was known outside of Japan. iIt wasn’t even used in Japan, except for a few aesthete types.  When I made the first book, I thought it would be extremely niche, and it was a book that I approached in a very pure way. A Japanese publisher was very interested in publishing it, but then they started making suggestions like, “Well, maybe you should have a color cover. Well, maybe your title is a little gawky. Maybe the black-and-white photographs inside, they’re a little bit depressing.” I realized that I had to publish it myself.

I’d done a lot of favors for the Shiseido corporation and I went to them and I said—a little parenthetically, Japanese are very good at determining obligation and reciprocity, and so they determined that I had given them—it translated into X amount of money. So that’s where the money for the first printing of Wabi-Sabi came out. 

I was very surprised that it resonated among the creative people in many places. I felt at some point, when wabi-sabi, whether it was books like Wabi-Sabi and Your Relationship and Wabi-Sabi Dinnerware, and I decided that I had to go back and address some of the….

SB: Misperceptions.

LK: Misperceptions that I had created, too.

SB: Yeah. Hmm. There are so many different definitions in a way, and your book gets at that, that there are. Do you have a favorite or how do you now define wabi-sabi?

LK: Well, let me just be very clear. In Japanese, there is no term “wabi-sabi.” There’s an old word, wabi, and there’s an old word, sabi. If you look in the Japanese dictionary, you won’t find wabi-sabi, period. Maybe since it’s so popular, yes. I think of it in just the most simple terms, it’s the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Parenthetically, I would say that it’s things of this nature, but in a particular context, and the context is a little tricky to describe or talk about, but I’d say that the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete is a good general description.

SB: You first read about wabi-sabi, or at least this is what I found in the research, in Okakura Kakuzō’s The Book of Tea.

LK: Well, yes and no. He never uses the word wabi or sabi, but I realized, when I was deeper involved in Japanese society, that that was the feeling that he was trying to communicate. But even he wouldn’t use the words wabi and sabi—or conjoin them.

SB: Well, I think this is so interesting about your work. I mean, this book is one example of putting toward something that even someone like Kakuzō couldn’t quite communicate, or communicated without kind of putting language to it. I feel like your practice, or your bookmaking, your sentence-creating has been a sort of ongoing effort of putting language to things that creators, artists, others have long tried to, perhaps, find the right words for. Not really a question, more of an observation.

LK: No, I think that that’s an interesting observation. I think what it’s about is that I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. I’m trying to figure out: What is this world I exist in? Who am I? Where am I going? What does it mean? What is the purpose? I’ve engaged in these explorations and, I think, for myself to focus on a particular term or to create a term that embodies or encapsulates a particular sensibility, it’s been like a compass for me to follow and ferret out the meaning of that thing.

SB: I find it interesting, too, that so much of your journey, in some sense—not every sense of course—but some sense did really begin with this fascination of the teahouse. there’s so much embedded in tea ceremony in the teahouse. When I had the craft scholar Glenn Adamson on the show, we opened our conversation about this relationship between time and tea ceremony. He called the tea ceremony “virtually unique in the world of craft in the sense that it’s not multisensory, but all-sensory.” I wanted to ask you about the significance of tea ceremony for you, your life, your craft, the things you create and have done.

LK: Yes, it’s been very important in many respects. The architecture of the tea ceremony, some of the most beautiful tea ceremony environments…. they span a pretty big range of types. The ones that I was initially most drawn to were very, almost primitive, but inside extremely refined. They’re quiet, contemplative environments. The tea ceremony itself, the ritual, it’s fussy, it’s dated, it’s beautiful, it’s everything. 

In my own mind, I’ve deconstructed the tea ceremony ritual, and I think of it, “Well, let’s get rid of the tea. Let’s just make it a water ritual”—in that kind of environment, what would it be? How would you do it? Because the tea itself, when I was first practicing tea ceremony, I wasn’t drinking caffeine. In a caffeinated world, people probably don’t realize how potent a drug caffeine is. When you’re in the tea ceremony and you’re given this hyper-dose of caffeine, all of a sudden everything becomes vivid. It’s like the movies where it goes from black and white to color.

SB: Shot to the head.

LK: A shot to the head, yeah. 

Everything is slowed down in the tea ceremony. You’re focusing on a few objects, a few ritualized behaviors or performance. Theoretically, the people there are all coming together in peace because it evolved during time when there was a lot of warfare; [the] warrior class was very strong in Japan, and the warriors would leave their swords and their knives outside the teahouse, which— I heard that there was a steam room in Detroit that was established by Jewish gangsters, and it was so hot you didn’t bring your gun in, so that’s where they’d meet. It’s a place where you don’t kill each other.

I am very grateful to the tea ceremony. There’s one sort of like the Jesus Christ—or Michelangelo is probably a better analogy—of tea, Sen no Rikyū, but there actually are many people who created the tea ceremony. Sometimes it’s just easier to just say one person, for rhetorical convenience, started something or made it, brought it to its apotheosis, but that’s not really the case; it was a group effort.

SB: [Laughs] I thought we’d go back to your upbringing. What are your earliest aesthetic memories? What stands out to you?

LK: Well, it’s funny, my earliest one was…. I was thinking, I was in kindergarten and I went over to the house of this girl, Julie Altridge, and Jill Warner, they were there, and there was a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons. I’d never seen anything as wondrous before. There were three or four colors that were erotic to me. 

SB: [Laughs]

LK: I thought the only solution was to steal them. I didn’t, I don’t think. That was—

SB: You coveted them?

LK: I coveted them. Then, a few years later, for some strange reason—I think I know why—I was fascinated by anesthesia. I particularly was captivated by the names of anesthetics, ether, and Xylocaine, and Procaine. I don’t know why exactly, but this idea of sensation, removing sensation, consciousness, removing consciousness, it was just something that was fascinating to a 6- or 7-year-old. A little odd, now that I think about it.

SB: [Laughs]

LK: Oh, well, actually when I was 4, I swallowed a container of ant poison. I remember quite clearly—I know memory is always reconstructed every time we recall it—but my memory is that I was in the backyard and I saw one of those little containers of ant poison, and I had it in my hand and I thought, “I’ll take it because I’m going to go back to the place I was before, and that’s fine.” Then I went in the house with the container in my hand, and I told my mother, and of course she freaked out. [I was] rushed to the hospital, had my stomach pumped. I think it’s curious that I had this impulse to…. The nature of existence and the nature of pre-existence and the wonder-ness of just—whatever it is, I don’t even know—the meta existence is always been something that is part of my…. It’s very deep in me.

SB: What about your earliest bathing memories?

LK: Well, the earliest one was being kicked out of a children’s pool—or yelled at for peeing in it. [Laughter] Yeah, I was pretty young then. I remember when I was 9 years old, we took a family trip to New York to visit some relatives, and one of my uncles took me to a bathhouse in Manhattan. I guess it must’ve been some Russian Jewish–like thing. There was a delicatessen, there was a resting room. It was just so exotic to me that this was going into a totally foreign country where they do things in a different way.

After that, I’d say when I was a teenager, going to hot springs in California. Very lucky too…. I can’t tell you how lucky I feel. When you say “privileged,” privileged to me—I was thinking about it this morning—doesn’t mean growing up in a wealthy family. I mean, that’s a fucking curse in a way, in terms of finding yourself, because you think that money and things are the thing to have, and you need more and more. No, being allowed to explore and being in an open environment and being exposed to nature, that is what I am incredibly grateful for. I don’t know why I’m so lucky. Just the luck of the draw, I guess.

SB: Skipping ahead a little bit, I wanted to go to this book you did in 1991. It’s this pamphlet-size thing, but it has a lot to do with time and the mind, and it’s called Noise Reduction: A 10-Minute Meditation for Quieting the Mind. In it I know you wrote that this was a practice you’d been doing for years—I don’t know if this is something you still practice today—but I just wanted to bring it up because it was interesting. This is 1991, and even back then you wrote, “Noise—the ongoing mental chatter and low-level psychic static you never seem to be able to turn off—is an unhealthy byproduct of our fast-paced, overstimulated daily lives.” That was then, and I think about now, post-iPad, post-iPhone, our devices in our pockets pinging us all the time….

I wanted to ask about that book, thinking back, because it is this magical little pamphlet. I’ve tried it and it works, and it’s this great practice. I think more of us should do it, honestly. Could you share this technique with the listeners and maybe just share a bit about how you came to it?

LK: I don’t remember the exact technique. I mean, I kind of vaguely do, but I’ll just say that I’m sure many of your listeners meditate and have a meditation practice, and I have, too. The meditation style that has worked best for me—or works best for me—is just Zen meditation, where I just watch my breathing. It’s, of course, much easier said than done initially.

If I’m going to share something with somebody, it should be honest, because there’s so much dishonesty in the world being shared and propagated. I feel just kind of a moral responsibility. It’s not like moral thinking about it;’ it’s just the way I was raised, that we have a responsibility to make the world a better place, not by making a new app, but by being honest and—I know this sounds really corny—true to humanistic values.

That book was an attempt to… I like making books; I need to do something with my creative energy and give purpose and meaning to my life in a way of making a living, so I made this book. I made it with St. Martin’s Press. I was a little naïve about the contract; the cover that I had designed they didn’t like, so then they had the right to make a cover. The book was manufactured in a different size than the one I had designed. It was, from a book-publishing point of view or experience, it was horrendous and very painful for me and thereafter I decided to embark on the path of independent publishing.

SB: Another book that I got my hands on in preparation for our conversation today, also from 1991, is one you co-authored called The Haggler’s Handbook. This thing—it’s pretty amazing—the subtitle is One Hour to Negotiating Power. I wanted to bring it up because, the deeper I’ve gotten into my own career and learned how to manage and run a business, I was like, “Damn, I wish I had this book a few years ago.” There’s just so many tips in there that I think really— Some of them are reflections on time even but just how to interact well with somebody you might deem an “opponent,” or someone you’re in a negotiation with.

One of the things that I loved was how you wrote that “human interaction is in large part nothing but a series of negotiated arguments,” and this notion of “conscious negotiation,” which is not taking yourself too seriously, learning to stay loose, that this makes you a better player, negotiator. There’s also the notion of what you call the “Risk Zone.” “Negotiation is a process,” you write. “Between the action and the result is a span of time we call the Risk Zone.” I think about that span of time and it is so important; how you play that risk zone is everything. I’ll just do one last one here, which is you write about silence as a strategy tool, which is also something I employ here on Time Sensitive, but the sentence that I pulled out is: “Silence often prompts the other side to speak and may result in their revealing useful information.”

LK: Yes, this is a funny book. In terms of books, my first book was the book about Japanese fashion at a seminal moment in Japanese fashion. It was a wonderful experience, and it pointed the way to books as a medium that I felt most compatible with my way of being and my way of operating. After that, after the fashion book, I made a book called 283 Useful Ideas from Japan. I was living in Japan, there were all these interesting service, product, communication ideas. It was a fun book to do. I worked with a manga artist on it, and it was a lot of fun.

I did a few books in a time where I was trying to figure out who I was or what I was, and I thought of myself, for a brief period of time, as an information designer or information architect. I thought, well, as an information design exercise, what would be a good book to do? I went to a bookstore and looked at all the genres and said, “Ahh, okay, negotiating. Oh yeah, there’s some great books there. Maybe I could do a book [where] you could assimilate all the information even faster and with a little bit of humor.” That’s how the concept for that book came about. That is not the way I conceive of books now. I’d say that, after the meditation book, my process of determining subject matter totally changed. It has to be personally relevant to me, and it has to help me further my search for who I am and the nature of existence. But it was a fun book to do, and negotiation is important.

I’d say that the one takeaway, the biggest takeaway from that, for me, the whole thing is that the best frame of mind to have when negotiating is that you don’t give a shit. In other words, if things go south, you don’t care. In other words, “I am really not that attached to it, so I’m going to ask for this.” Because when you’re attached to it—“I must have this; I must have this”—then you’re in a very vulnerable place.

SB: Oh, man, beautiful. There’s so many other places I want to go with this conversation. You’ve done so many books. 2005, you did a book called The Flower Shop about this retail operation in Vienna called Blumenkraft. You also, of course, have done so much about aesthetics, including your books On Creating Things Aesthetic and Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean?

Maybe we’ll point to the aesthetics tip, which I think all three of the books I just mentioned kind of connect to. I would say all your work—or most of your work, anyway—is in the realm of aesthetics, is dealing on some level with defining this subject, exploring it. Maybe the latter two, when it comes to the word aesthetics, there are many definitions, similar to wabi-sabi perhaps. which is your favorite? How do you think about the definition of aesthetics?

LK: My favorite one really is one that I discovered in New York maybe thirty years ago. There was some wacky organization…. Well, that’s demeaning. There was an organization in SoHo that, basically, its mission was to educate people about the relationship of aesthetics and psychological health or the integration of the self as an aesthetic enterprise. What I realized for myself, is that my life is essentially an aesthetic experience. Everything that I know, everything I take in, every idea I have comes to me through my senses, and then it’s processed. I think about it, I think about it, I might smell it. I mean, smell it in the metaphorical sense and in the actual sense. I look at it, also in both senses of the word. So that’s my favorite definition of the word, that it’s the context, let’s say, the intellectual and the sensual context in which life is lived.

SB: In On Creating Things Aesthetic, you write about this experience of moving from Marin County in California to this small hilltop town in Italy, and then ultimately to Rome. This California-to-Italy period, I wanted to sort of dig into this period of time for you, and if you felt a temporal shift or what it felt like to move from California to Rome, and how do you define your Rome time?

LK: I’m one of these people who never felt that any one place was my home. The closest I came to it was when we lived in the narrow canyon in Los Angeles in the Japanese-style house, and there were three hundred acres of wilderness behind us. 

Our neighbor was a lawyer, part of a development team to develop that land, eventually, many years after we lived there into what was going to be the Beverly Hills golf course, or country club, which went bankrupt, and then ultimately they built houses there. I saw how easily it is to destroy the earth. This was my sacred place, and then I saw the bulldozers come in. At the time, I wasn’t traumatized, but I think it’s kind of a very deep—let’s say, affectless—trauma that I’ve experienced that I see that we humans are so powerful now that we could destroy nature—we could destroy ourselves—and we don’t seem to care. We’re nuts. What was your question?

SB: [Laughs] I was asking you about California to Rome. Which connects to this, actually.

LK: After WET, I felt liberated from Los Angeles, which, again, I’m very grateful for the experience of having grown up in Los Angeles. But after WET, I felt irrelevant in L.A. Like many of my friends, I wasn’t in the film business, I wasn’t in TV, I wasn’t in real estate, I wasn’t a doctor. What am I? So I moved to San Francisco, which at the time seemed like the quintessential iconic city, it had a real center. I had a life in San Francisco for many years, maybe forty years in the Bay Area, Marin County. 

But the character of the Bay Area changed quite a bit. I never felt entirely at home there, because L.A. is a little bit more of a raucous, free-form kind of place, very inventive, very open. San Francisco is maybe politically liberal, but socially conservative. No matter what it sounds like, the hippies and the gay bars and everything like that, it’s still socially conservative in my frame of references. When the tech mentality just totally permeated every aspect of life in the Bay Area, I became incredibly bored.

When Covid happened, my wife, who was raised in Rome, said—between us, we said—“Well, maybe this is the time to have that one-year sabbatical that we’ve talked about—with our son,” who is a teenager and online school wasn’t working for him; my wife’s parents were getting older. There’s a part of her soul that was still in Rome. Again, I was bored. So I said, “Let’s do it.” In one month, from that decision, we packed up our home and put everything in storage and moved to Rome.

Oh yeah, the one little tiny detail. Ten years earlier, my wife—by the way, this is my Italian wife, not my Japanese wife. My Japanese wife, long gone. My Italian wife said, “Why don’t you just apply for Italian citizenship?” I said, “What for? I don’t want to live in Europe.” She said, “You never know.” So I did, and in the marvelous Italian way, I applied, and then they said, “Well, in three years we’ll give you an answer.” I said, “Well, what’s the tracking number?” They said, “There’s no number.” “Well, what’s the reference number?” “No, no, nothing. We’ll let you know.” Miraculously, they did let me know, after three years.

During Covid, we went to Italy as repatriating Italians. The planes were empty; it was nice. Italy was hit very hard by Covid. In the little village that we initially resided in, her mother and father each had places there, so everything was very rational. We think of the Italians as being exuberantly irrational sometimes, but during Covid it felt very secure, safe and secure, the way they handled it. At first there were the frustrations of the dysfunctions of Italian life and the taxation system, et cetera. Then we moved to Rome, because our son’s school was in Rome, and the schlep every day was too much. I never liked Rome. It was an unmodern city, et cetera, et cetera. I only liked modern cities.

But I began to realize that, Oh, this is the other side of the picture. Ahh, this is the other side of the modern world, the world that…. I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but in Rome the people are not aspiring to become machines. That was what I felt people were aspiring to back in the Bay Area. They didn’t know it consciously, maybe, but with every app, with every time you have to change your password and go through some digital protocol to get to something, you’re becoming a machine. So I feel like, wow, I’m living with human beings who are maybe not as quick, clever, witty, or amusing as my American compatriots, but I feel it’s a saner and slower life. For this phase of my life, it’s quite suitable.

SB: I think Rome is a city, too, that really respects its place in the world and in history and its sense of the past.

LK: Well, that’s what anchors it to the past. I mean, on one hand you could say that it’s too much. I mean, come on, that was two thousand years ago. You’re not great anymore; you’re just some tourist trap now. There’s a Rome that’s not the tourist Rome. Although I like the tourist Rome, too. I like going between the two. It means like you could [say], “Oh, I’ll be a tourist. I’ll see something I haven’t seen before.” That’s fun, too.

SB: I have a closing question for you, which I’m going to bring up that 2005 New York Times story again that Pilar wrote. Thinking about time, it’s twenty years ago. In it you said, “The reason I make books is to escape the tyranny of things.” You called the iPod, to quote the author, Pilar Viladas, “an example of something that isolates people and prevents them from engaging fully in civic life.” You noted how you deplore society’s, “headlong rush into sameness.” Some of the things you just said about when we were talking about Rome and California. So, twenty years later, how do you see things? Is the world generally where you thought it would be back then? Where do you think we stand?

LK: I have a collage a friend made of Giotto’s “The Lamentation” in our bedroom, except our friend took the painting, the poster of the painting, and instead of Christ, there’s the world. I cry for everything on some deep level, but I also have my guiding motto in life, [which is that] there’s no upside to pessimism. So I’m optimistic, but rationally it doesn’t make sense.

SB: You love a good endnote. [Laughs] All of your books have endnotes, and they’re really good actually— I would say, anyone who picks up one of Leonard’s books,definitely read the endnotes because you get a second reading of the book. Are there any endnotes you would like to share with the listeners today based on our conversation?

LK: No, I’m really happy to meet you in person and be in your lovely space. It’s been fun. Thank you.

SB: Thanks, Leonard. [Laughs]

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on January 16, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Emily Jiang, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, Kylie McConville, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak.