Colin Marshall sits down in West Hollywood with Michael Silverblatt, host of the literary interview program Bookworm from KCRW in Santa Monica since 1989. They discuss how he's managed to host a book show for so long "in Los Angeles, of all places;" the near-racist tradition of New York writers savaging Los Angeles in the thirties and forties; introducing the likes of Edward St. Aubyn to Angelenos and others well beyond; radio as a dreamlike "mad tea party," whether dreamt in one's car or at one...
Apr 17, 2012•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall walks through Larchmont with Molly McAleer , co-founder of HelloGiggles and writer for CBS' Two Broke Girls . They discuss the definition of internet fame, especially when one's internet debut comes in a photo funneling a beer; whether moving to Los Angeles after graduating from the disappointingly party-free Boston College counts as a betrayal of Boston; her avoidance of the label "humorist," and thus any association with Mark Twain; her time at Defamer, which gave her a "magical...
Apr 11, 2012•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down in downtown Los Angeles with Pico Iyer , writer about place — both our dreams of it and its realities. They discuss his new book The Man Within My Head ; how best to introduce Graham Greene's The Quiet American to new readers; how he started a book on being a pleasantly bewildered foreigner in Japan and finished a book about Greene, brush fires, and his own father; the roles of fathers both chosen and unchosen; the ultimate unknowability of other people, and the form of ...
Apr 04, 2012•1 hr 1 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Atwater Village with comedy writer and music video director Scott Jacobson , who has written for programs like The Daily Show , Squidbillies , and Bob's Burgers , and made videos for artists like Nick Lowe, Superchunk, and The National. They discuss the comedic style of George Herriman's Krazy Kat and whether a place exists for it today; expectations, the enemy of comedy; what it means that the likes of Adult Swim and Tim & Eric can thrive in today's world, or if ...
Mar 30, 2012•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood with William Flesch, professor at Brandeis University and author of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction . They discuss José Saramago's way with obscure Biblical episodes; literary Darwinism and its discontents; why and how we get concerned with what happens to fictional characters at all; the difference between stories we care about versus stories we don't; how we recommend books, films, and shows t...
Mar 26, 2012•1 hr 4 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Larchmont with comedy writer Megan Ganz , who's written for the Onion and Important Things with Demetri Martin , and now writes for NBC's Community . They talk about easing her transition from New York to Los Angeles with the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink ; Los Angeles as an unfurnished apartment to New York as a furnished one; her fond memories of aimless subway trips; what we don't know about growing up in Michigan, especially regarding the preparation of vegetables an...
Mar 22, 2012•1 hr 3 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Wade Major, senior film critic at Boxoffice , co-host of IGN's Digigods , and regular participant on KPCC's Filmweek . They discuss what Sucker Punch represents the coagulation of; whether it is a greater crime for Zack Snyder to make Zack Snyder movies sincerely, or for Zack Snyder to make Zack Snyder movies cynically; the importance of spontaneity, not formula, to creative business; the simultaneous democratization of criticism and of filmmaking it...
Mar 19, 2012•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Los Feliz with comedy writer, baseball reporter, and Twitter "suggested user" Alison Agosti . They discuss the preferred pronunciation of "Los Feliz"; Rancho Cucamonga's chief industry of teenage pregnancy; how Los Angeles looked while she was growing up in the Inland Empire; the promise of New York as a land of letters, art, and coats; her mass childhood purchase of used Woody Allen tapes, including but not limited to Husbands and Wives ; the morning she woke up to 1...
Mar 14, 2012•58 min
Colin Marshall sits down in the Los Angeles Central Library's courtyard with John Rabe, host of Off-Ramp , KPCC's weekend pointillist portrait of Southern California. They discuss the merits of recording in a library courtyard and in Cheech Marin's house in Malibu; picking a road in Los Angeles and following it wherever it goes; the troubled history of Cypress Park and the truth about the Isabel Street shooting; the Los Angeles "churn" and the effect of constant neighborhood change on the histor...
Mar 10, 2012•52 min
Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood with film and television critic David Bax, co-host of the podcasts Battleship Pretension and Previously On . They discuss his fifth-grade shoving match over Ghostbusters ; the difference between criticism and the assertion of one's opinions; being a film and television critic while living right near the heart of film and television production; Chicago's advantages as a filmgoing city, including but not limited to the Gene Siskel Film Center; discoverin...
Mar 06, 2012•1 hr 3 min
Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood at midnight with film critic Tyler Smith, co-host of the podcast Battleship Pretension and host of the podcast More than One Lesson . They discuss the strong associations between diners late at night and talk about movies; his struggle to stay in Chicago and ultimate move to Los Angeles; his choice between screenwriting and film criticism; film criticism's relationship with the kinds of conversations film geeks have; the impulse to start a podcast, and...
Mar 02, 2012•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down at the Los Angeles Central Library downtown with Map Librarian Glen Creason, author of Los Angeles in Maps . They discuss the point at which Los Angeles becomes not just a place to live but a subject; riding the old Pacific Electric streetcars that prompted the city to grow so large in the firs place; using maps to see the influence of trains, water, the movies, and oil on the city's spread, growing up in the " Leave it to Beaver territory" of South Gate; early Los Angel...
Feb 28, 2012•1 hr
Colin Marshall sits down at Bourgeois Pig in Hollywood with Eliza Skinner , comedian, musical improviser, comedic rap-battle impresario, writer, and the woman of the one-woman show Eliza Skinner is Shameless . They discuss a Scotsman who left his wife possibly due and possibly not due to what he felt in her onstage spirit; the one-way intimacy of performance; the proper cultivation of one's personal brand; the odd confluence of skills required for the non-career (absent an eccentric billionaire)...
Feb 24, 2012•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down at Fat Dog in West Hollywood with comedian and actor Jordan Morris, co-host of the comedy podcast Jordan, Jesse, Go! , writer on the web series MyMusic , former host of Fuel TV's The Daily Habit , and creator of satirical commercials for " Gamewave " and the " Action Circle ." They talk about growing up in Orange County with the solace of ska music; The Simpsons ' un-overstatable influence on the current generation of young comedy writers; whether and how "Family-Guyizat...
Feb 21, 2012•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down at the La Brea Tar Pits with David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic, editor of the anthologies Writing Los Angeles , Another City , and Cape Cod Noir , and author of The Myth of Solid Ground , The Lost Art of Reading , and the upcoming novella Labyrinth . They talk about his attitude as a young New Yorker moving to Los Angeles; his approach to everything in life through the filter of books; his "graduate education" writing for the mythologized oasis of writerly coo...
Feb 17, 2012•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Hollywood with comedian, actor, and novelist DC Pierson , man behind the one-man show DC Pierson is Bad at Girls , one-third of the Mystery Team of Mystery Team , and the author of The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To . They talk about innate, unchanging age; teenage blogging; Daria ; the compulsion to read criticism; moving to Los Angeles from New York; avoiding falling into the standard complaint-driven narratives of young New York writers who move to Los Ang...
Feb 14, 2012•1 hr 7 min
Colin Marshall talks to Alan Nakagawa ; sound artist; visual artist; installation artist; founding member of Los Angeles' long-running, multi-disciplinary, multi-ethnic, soon-to-be-dissolved arts collective Collage Ensemble ; director of the experimental music Ear Meal webcast ; L.A. Metro public art executive; member of Otonomiyaki , the Southern California Soundscape Ensemble and Ear Diorama Ear ; and very serious eater indeed ....
Dec 15, 2011•1 hr 6 min
Recorded on location in Mexico City, Colin Marshall talks to David Lida , author of First Stop in the New World , Las llaves de la ciudad , Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico , and the blog Mostly Mexico City . A native New Yorker, Lida moved to Mexico City in 1990 — a year considered by many to have been the megalopolis' absolute nadir in terms of crime, crowding, and pollution — and hasn't looked back, becoming the best-known English-language chronicler of el Distrito Federal in the 21st centu...
Dec 01, 2011•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall talks to L aurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly , founding editors of the new Los Angeles literary journal Slake . The magazine, which has just released its third issue, combines fiction, poetry, essays, reportage, photography, and several different kinds of visual art into a regular exploration of Los Angeles from every angle — and an exploration of the rest of the world from a Los Angeles angle....
Nov 13, 2011•1 hr 7 min
Colin Marshall talks to J. Hoberman , senior film critic at The Village Voice and author of books on such cinematic subjects as 8mm and Super 8 pictures, Dennis Hopper, the 1960s, midnight movies, and Yiddish tradition. In his latest title, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War , he examines the American decade from 1946 to 1956, a time of "cavalry Westerns, apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars, atomic tests on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Jo...
Oct 14, 2011•1 hr 1 min
Colin Marshall talks to Chris Andrews , Katherine Silver , and Rosalie Knecht , English translators of the Argentine novelist César Aira , whom some readers in the Anglosphere are now finding as exciting as Borges. Despite having published over fifty books since 1975, Aira has only recently broken into English with novels such as An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter , How I Became a Nun , Ghosts , The Literary Conference , and the new The Seamstress and the Wind that showcase his abilit...
Sep 22, 2011•1 hr 7 min
Colin Marshall talks to Peter Toohey , professor of Greek and Roman studies at the University of Calgary and author of Boredom: a Lively History . You don't need to keep your finger on the pulse of the contemporary scene to realize how important a subject boredom has become. We've all felt the emotion often — or at least we all think we feel it often. But we've also long felt the absence of a serious exploration of boredom, one that drills down to its true nature. Could Toohey have explained wha...
Sep 08, 2011•54 min
Colin Marshall talks to musician, writer, and artist Nick Currie , also known as Momus . Having recently relocated from Berlin to Osaka, he returns to the program to discuss his brand new book Solution 214-238: The Book of Japans . The novel follows up his previous book Solution 11-167: The Book of Scotlands with a similarly humorous exercise in social geography but one within a richer narrative framework — a narrative framework that pits twelve Japan "experts" against twelve Japan "idiots" — de...
Aug 17, 2011•1 hr 1 min
Colin Marshall talks to essayist, novelist, traveler, and "global soul" Pico Iyer . Since Video Night in Kathmandu , his journey through the rapidly changing Asia of the mid-1980s, Iyer has told us all about what it feels like and what it means to exist in and pass through places from Atlanta to Kyoto to Asunción to Pyongyang. Having been born to an Indian family and grown up equally between England and Santa Barbara, California, he both embodies and tirelessly describes the hybridized, cross-po...
Aug 10, 2011•1 hr 7 min
Colin Marshall talks to Daniel Hernandez , bilingual bicultural binational journalist, blogger at Intersections , and author of Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the 21st Century. In 2007, the Mexican-American Hernandez moved to Mexico City to explore its spirit of adventure, its multitude of youthful subcultures, its undercurrent of chaos, and its sheer day-to-day surrealism. His first book collects pieces on Mexico City subjects as far-ranging as fashion parties, kidna...
Aug 04, 2011•52 min
Colin Marshall talks to Merlin Mann , thinker, writer, and speaker on time, attention, and creative work. Following up on his June 2009 visit , he's back on the show to talk about a great many things, not least his new podcast Back to Work with Dan Benjamin, a program about productivity, communication, barriers, constraints, tools — and, nearly always, fear. The conversation also ventures into other, unusually personal topics, including dealing with entrepreneurs, trying not to hate the internet...
Jul 26, 2011•1 hr 4 min
Colin Marshall talks to Tim Harford , also known as the Undercover Economist. He wrote the book of the same name as well as The Logic of Life and now Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure . In this latest book, Harford examines the value of numerous small-scale experiments — numerous enough to try many different things, and small-scale enough to fail without serious consequence — in business, technology, medicine, finance, climate change, and even his own life and career....
Jul 19, 2011•59 min
Colin Marshall talks to Steve Himmer , editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction and author of the novel The Bee-Loud Glade , wherein an eccentric millionaire named Crane picks Finch, a former corporate blogger, out of a rapidly deepening post-firing squalor. Finch finds himself in a very particular future on Crane's intricately landscaped grounds: employed as a decorative hermit, he must do little more than eat, sleep, meditate, and accomplish occasional (if sometimes inexplicable) Crane-assig...
Jul 08, 2011•56 min
Colin Marshall talks to Dave Kehr , former film critic at the Chicago Reader and Chicago Tribune and current DVD columnist for the New York Times . In his first collection, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade , he brings together his writings on some of the finest films and filmmakers of the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, including Jean-Luc Godard, Manoel de Oliveira, Blake Edwards, and Albert Brooks....
Jun 29, 2011•56 min
Colin Marshall talks to Susan Bernofsky , author, scholar, and translator of such German-language writers as the Swiss Robert Walser, the Japanese Yoko Tawada, and the German Jenny Erpenbeck. New Directions recently released a strong lot of Bernofsky-translated books from Walser, including the novels The Assistant and The Tanners , as well as Microscripts , a collection of short, hard-to-categorize works originally written in a one- to two-millimeter-high pencil script of Walser's own devising....
Jun 17, 2011•1 hr
