Colin Marshall talks to Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor , creators of the new men’s style web series and blog Put This On , which explore all facets of the art of “dressing like a grown-up.” Thorn is also the host of Public Radio International’s The Sound of Young America as well as the comedy podcast Jordan Jesse Go ; Lisagor is also a co-host and producer of the comedy podcast You Look Nice Today ....
Sep 03, 2010•58 min
Colin Marshall talks to novelist Joshua Cohen , author of Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto , A Heaven of Others , and now Witz . The new book follows the cross-country (and international, and possibly even interplanetary) journey of Benjamin Israelien, born with a beard and glasses, already nearly a grown man. After a Biblical plague on Christmas Even 1999, Benjamin becomes the last Jew on Earth. He’s first celebrated, then marketed, then turned upon....
Aug 27, 2010•52 min
Colin Marshall talks to Tyler Smith and David Bax , hosts of the film podcast Battleship Pretension . For over three years, Smith and Bax have explored on the show all aspects of cinema history, cinema appreciation, cinema technique, and cinema criticism, doing so with the freewheeling, humorous sensibility of the best late-night film school conversations.
Aug 20, 2010•59 min
Colin Marshall talks to Jack Hues , lead singer and, alongside Nick Feldman, primary collaborator of the rock group Wang Chung . Throughout the 1980s, Wang Chung released such albums as Points on the Curve , Mosaic , and The Warmer Side of Cool , as well as the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s film To Live and Die in L.A. . Now they’re back recording and touring again, having recently completed one U.S. tour and about to launch another in support of their new double EP, Abducted by the 80s ....
Aug 13, 2010•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall talks to music journalist, critic, and observer of America Greil Marcus . Though they span countless subjects, Marcus’ past books have been rooted in examinations of icons like Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Presley, and Bill Clinton. In his latest release, When that Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison , he takes on the Irish singer-songwriter’s vast, varied catalogue, documenting his own responses to Morrison’s music as well as the far-flung cultural and psycholog...
Aug 06, 2010•56 min
Colin Marshall talks to Steven Moore , author, critic, former managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction . In his latest book, the first volume of The Novel: An Alternative History , Moore traces the development of long, adventurous fiction from its origin to the year 1600, paying special attention to unusual works that make innovative use of language.
Jul 30, 2010•55 min
Colin Marshall talks to Suzanne Jill Levine , noted translator of creative, innovative, adventurous Latin American Fiction from authors like Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig. She’s also a professor at UCSB and the general editor and co-translator of Penguin Classics’ five new volumes of nonfiction and poetry from widely respected Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges: On Writing , On Mysticism , On Argentina , The Sonnets , and Poems of the Night . Her own book The Subversi...
Jul 23, 2010•58 min
Colin Marshall talks to David Lipsky , contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace . Crafted out of transcripts of a five day-long conversation between Lipsky and Wallace on the tail end of the publicity tour for Wallace’s breakthrough novel Infinite Jest , the book reveals facets of the beloved author that have never before been seen publicly.
Jul 16, 2010•55 min
Colin Marshall talks to Tan Lin , professor of English and creative writing at New Jersey City University and author of the books Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe , BlipSoak01 and Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) . His latest book, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking , uses its form to escape the notions, conventions and structures of the traditional reading experience. Tan Lin’s Tumblr Tan Lin’s books: Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (New American Poetry) , Blipsoak01 , Heath (Plagia...
Jun 29, 2010•58 min
David Toop is a composer of sound, writer about sound, curator of sound and research fellow at the London College of Communication. His works in text include Ocean of Sound , Exotica , Haunted Weather and the Rap Attack books. His latest is Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener , which explores the sound of silent art. David Toop’s web site David Toop’s books, Rap Attack, No. 3: African Rap to Global Hip Hop , Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds , Exotica...
Jun 21, 2010•58 min
Colin Marshall talks to novelist Todd Shimoda , author of 365 Views of Mt. Fuji , The Fourth Treasure and now Oh!: A Mystery of Mono No Aware . Shimoda calls his stories “somewhat experimental, post-modernish, dealing with Asian or Asian-American themes to some degree, but also broad questions of existence,” or “philosophical mysteries.” His latest novel documents an embodies a search for the elusive Japanese literary concept of mono no aware . Persons/places/works/sites referenced in this inter...
Jun 10, 2010•59 min
Colin Marshall talks to Sharpham College for Buddhist Studies founder Stephen Batchelor , author on, scholar of and educator about Buddhist topics. His latest book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist , recounts his journey from young spiritual seeker to devoted monk to questioning student to holder of the complex hybrid of principles and practices he has achieved today. This personal narrative builds upon and provides a background to his famously controversial Buddhism Without Beliefs ....
Jun 03, 2010•55 min
Colin Marshall talks to Andrew Bujalski , the young director of the films Funny Ha Ha , Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax , which is newly available on DVD. Though Bujalski’s funny, realistic movies are often considered by critics to be of a similar genius to other independently-produced pictures of the 2000s focusing on the personal relationships of twentysomethings, they possess an intellect and an aesthetic all their own.
May 27, 2010•55 min
Colin Marshall talks to Lee Gutkind , founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction , the premiere journal of the eponymous genre of writing that combines the literary techniques of fiction with the reality of life itself. With its spring 2010 issue, it’s undergone a radical revision in look, feel and sensibility, shifting from academic journal to wider-interest magazine. He’s also the author of many books that fall under the creative nonfiction heading, exploring subjects like baseball, transplant ...
May 20, 2010•55 min
Colin Marshall talks to David Shields , professor of English at the University of Washington and author of fiction, nonfiction and various hybrids thereof about sports, autobiography, celebrity and death. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto , uses collage writing to challenge preconceived ideas about form and genre in art, especially as they pertain to literature. Shields advocates disregarding these hardened constraints, a move which will allow art to use more of and become more like life...
May 06, 2010•56 min
Colin Marshall talks to musicologist, writer, microtonal composer and educator Kyle Gann , author of No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″ . The former new music critic at the Village Voice , Gann turns his eye and ear in the book to Cage’s most well-known composition, four minutes and 33 seconds in which no notes are played. Famous and infamous in equal measure, 4′33″ has been variously considered a work of genius, a game-changing musical revelation and a charlatan’s publicity stunt....
Apr 22, 2010•50 min
Colin Marshall talks to Peter Brunette , Reynolds Professor of Film Studies and director of the Film Studies program at Wake Forest University. The author of books on such beloved filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-Wai and Roberto Rossellini, Brunette has now written a book on Austrian cinematic provocateur Michael Haneke. The latest published entry in the University of Illinois Press’ “Contemporary Film Directors” series, Michael Haneke examines in depth the art of and the ideas beh...
Apr 15, 2010•57 min
Colin Marshall talks to speaker, writer, blogger and entrepreneur Seth Godin . Having already built a large body of published work on the nature of ideas, how they’re conceived, how they’re spread and how they’re executed, Godin has expanded his intellectual purview with his new book Linchpin . Extending the thoughts and observations he applied to marketing in books like Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars , his latest work examines how individual human beings, not corporations or organizatio...
Apr 01, 2010•57 min
Colin Marshall talks to Chris Bohn , editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire . Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and the generally non-mainstream since 1982, featuring a span of artists from Ornette Coleman to Björk to David Sylvian to Jim O’Rourke to field recordists like Lee Patterson to emerging Chinese sounds artists like Yun Jun. The magazine is also well known as a rarity in it...
Mar 25, 2010•55 min
Colin Marshall talks to James Donelan , lecturer and Program Coordinator in the English department and College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He's also the author of Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic a study of composer Ludwig van Beethoven, poet William Wordsworth, philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and poet/philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin and what their work reveals about the development of the idea of the autonomous mind and its interaction with the external world, es...
Mar 18, 2010•59 min
Colin Marshall talks to Sean Carroll , theoretical cosmologist specializing in dark energy and special relativity at the California Institute of Technology and blogger at Cosmic Variance . In his new book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time , Carroll explores possible answers to the question, “Why does time always move forward, never backward?” Addressing the issue necessitates drawing from various domains of physics, going all the way back to the origin of the univ...
Feb 25, 2010•56 min
Colin Marshall talks to Brian Reynolds Myers , contributing editor to the Atlantic and professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. In his new book, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters , Myers examines North Korean propaganda meant for both internal and external consumption and through it constructs the closed country’s view of itself, its relationship to other countries and the Kim dynasty that has controlled it for 60 years....
Feb 18, 2010•55 min
Colin Marshall talks to Nick Currie , better known as Momus . Since the mid-1980s he has led parallel careers in music (with 21 albums out so far), prose, art and journalism, exploring the nexuses between them while traveling the world and examining his favorite cultures. He has most recently turned toward traditional ink-and-paper publishing with two volumes, The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands . Since 2004, he has written the blog Click Opera on his life, work and art adventures, which...
Feb 11, 2010•59 min
Colin Marshall talks to cinematic journalist and curator Livia Bloom , editor of Errol Morris: Interviews , a compilation of conversations with the nonfiction filmmaker behind such movies as Gates of Heaven , The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War . The book, which includes two interviews conducted by Bloom herself as well as other notable film writers like Paul Cronin and Roger Ebert, reveals a directorial mind filled with curiosity, love of truth and real or imagined misanthropy....
Feb 07, 2010•56 min
Colin Marshall talks to Robin Hanson, professor of economics at George Mason University, research associate at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and chief scientist at Consensus Point. He’s also the thinker behind Overcoming Bias , a popular blog about issues of honesty, signaling, disagreement, forecasting and the far future, around which a large rationality-centric community has developed on the internet. “Flicking through Robin’s thoughts,” says the Observer , “you start to feel the groun...
Jan 28, 2010•57 min
Colin Marshall talks to Rob Walker , observer of advertising and marketing in all their forms. Author of the New York Times ‘ “Consumed” column and the book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are , Walker is also the co-creator of the “Significant Objects” project, an experiment wherein various authors and media personalities craft fictional stories to accompany everyday objects found at thrift stores. The objects are then auctioned off, revealing the value-adding effe...
Jan 11, 2010•58 min
Colin Marshall talks to Steven E. Landsburg , professor of economics at the University of Rochester, Slate 's "Everyday Economics" columnist and author of The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics . A pioneer in the popular-economics genre with his 1993 book The Armchair Economist , Landsburg now focuses his quantitative mind on issues of epistemology, ontology, morality and otherwise that have heretofore remained mostly untouched b...
Jan 04, 2010•56 min
Colin Marshall talks to Chris Wickham, Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, Fellow of All Souls College and author of The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 , the latest in Penguin’s sprawling History of Europe series. Wickham integrates textual and architectual evidence to craft a new, fascinatingly detailed historical experience of the era beginning at the decline of the Roman Empire and ending at the rise of European nations as we know them today...
Dec 17, 2009•55 min
Colin Marshall talks to Jeremy Haladyna, director of UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music and composer of the sprawling 28-piece-and-counting Mayan Cycle . Drawing upon over twenty years of research and exploration, Haladyna has translated countless concepts from Mayan thought, art and architecture into music that counts strings, flutes, scratch turntables and even sampled paper towel dispensers among its sonic components. An album of selections from the Mayan Cycle is now available from Innov...
Nov 17, 2009•1 hr
Colin Marshall talks to Pepita Ferrari, director of Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary . The first documentary film to concentrate specifically on documentary filmmaking, Capturing Reality features conversations with the likes of Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Nick Broomfield, Albert Maysles, Scott Hicks and Molly Dineen about such important issues in the genre as interviewing, editing, the line between fact and fiction, the evolutionary possibilities of individual projects and the effect o...
Oct 29, 2009•57 min
