Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Bernal Heights with Peter Orner , author of the novels Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and the short story collection Esther Stories as well as co-editor of the nonfiction collections Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives . They discuss the heightened Americanness of Chicago and what it has offered his literary sensibility; our tendency as Americans, for ...
Oct 20, 2012•1 hr 4 min
Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens with Cariwyl Hebert, founder of the community-based classical music appreciation society Salon97 . They discuss New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross' hatred of "classical music"; her project of pretension removal and safe-place creation; how she identified a need in the way her work in classical music proved a reliable conversation-ender; developing and implementing the idea of the classical listening party around which Salon...
Oct 17, 2012•57 min
Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Mission at the Noisebridge hacker space with Stan James , founder of Lijit , creator of the first browser-based massively multiplayer games, co-host of the 7th Kingdom podcast, and author of a book in progress on technology and our minds. They discuss Noisebridge itself and its almost Utopian qualities; how the supernormal stimuli of cat videos create addiction; how his early multiplayer games could created addiction; San Francisco's position as the Am...
Oct 09, 2012•58 min
Colin Marshall sits down somewhere in between San Francisco's Chinatown, Nob Hill, and Russian Hill with conceptual artist, experimental philosopher, and writer Jonathon Keats, author of the upcoming book Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age . They discuss his own role as, above all, a fake; his attempt to epigenetically clone such celebrities as Lady Gaga, Michael Phelps, and Barack Obama; Forged , forgery, pursuit of simulacra, and Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes ; conten...
Oct 04, 2012•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Mission with Ethan Nosowsky, Editorial Director at McSweeney's. They discuss security breaches at the McSweeney's office by overenthusiastic fans seeking a physical connection to their favorite publisher of physical books; his tendency to act as "the Joe Lieberman of publishing" in his editorial career, carrying unchanging tastes through changing times; Geoff Dyer , the writer with whom he has worked the longest, and how the subject-independence of Dye...
Sep 28, 2012•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down at downtown San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum with monologist Josh Kornbluth . They discuss the proper pronunciation of the word "monologist"; his simultaneous return to the practice of oboe-playing and late entry into things Jewish; the question of whether Andy Warhol is "good for the Jews," and how he spun it into a monologue; the qualities of faith shared by Judaism and the communism of his childhood, which still releases endorphins when he thinks about it; t...
Sep 24, 2012•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Castro with Daniel Levin Becker , member of the experimental literary group Oulipo, reviews editor at the Believer , and author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature . They discuss whether Oulipo membership impresses the ladies; his earlier, long pre-Oulipo days, when he would make mixtapes consisting entirely of songs without the letter "e" in the title; his fascination with taking mundane patterns, applying enough work to them, a...
Sep 20, 2012•54 min
Colin Marshall sits down in a back room in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury with Christin Evans and Praveen Madan, owners and transformers of The Booksmith , and now Kepler's in Menlo Park. They discuss being deemed "corporate refugees" by their employees for their tech consulting past; creating a positive, aspirational experience that doesn't make bookstores seem like broccoli; what they learned from spending date nights in other cities, having dinner and then visiting the local independent books...
Sep 12, 2012•55 min
Colin Marshall sits down in a Wallace Neff dome in Pasadena with visual and sound artist Steve Roden . They discuss whether art can exist without constraints; his enthusiasm for "dumb ideas," such as painting with his mouth; the influence of Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth , which he found in a gutter as a kid; the inspiration a Jimi Hendrix impersonator gave him, and how he went on to enter the Los Angeles punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties; his punk b...
Sep 07, 2012•1 hr
Colin Marshall sits down in Sliver Lake with Karina Longworth , film writer at the LA Weekly , co-founder of the film-culture blog Cinematical, and author of the upcoming Masters of Cinema: George Lucas . They discuss the public fascination with criticism versus blogging; J. Hoberman 's notion of criticism as reporting what it feels like to be in the screening room; how she promoted a version of herself in her blogging days, and what she regrets about doing so; the pre-YouTube video essays she w...
Sep 01, 2012•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Echo Park with Carolyn Kellogg , writer on books and publishing for the Los Angeles Times and their literary blog Jacket Copy , board member at the National Book Critics Circle, and formerly the blogger and podcaster behind Pinky's Paperhaus . They discuss what happens when the interviewer becomes an interviewee; her use of early internet radio as a social skill-free way to penetrate the Los Angeles literary scene; that scene's coherence through the internet, and its ...
Aug 25, 2012•54 min
Colin Marshall sits down below the mid-Wilshire offices of Los Angeles magazine with its associate editor Chris Nichols, the man behind the Ask Chris column and blog , former chair of the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee, and author of The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister . They discuss the importance of the now-empty Johnie's Coffee Shop on Wilshire and Fairfax; what being a civic booster means in Los Angeles; the remains of the postwar American car culture of easy, breezy livin...
Aug 17, 2012•58 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Ocean Park with Frances Anderton , host of KCRW's Design and Architecture and Dwell magazine's Los Angeles editor. They discuss how her countrymen Reyner Banham, David Hockney, and Christopher Isherwood opened up the idea of Los Angeles to England, vague as the understanding of its cityscape remained; the modernism of Los Angeles then emblematized by its freeways and its architectural freedom from the crushing burden of history, as unlike her native Bath as possible; ...
Aug 11, 2012•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down at the West Hollywood Library with Nate DiMeo, public radio producer and creator of the podcast The Memory Palace . They discuss American history's unique wealth of inventors, fakes, geniuses and eccentrics, such as serial impostor Stanley Clifford Weyman and child prodigy turned streetcar transfer taxonomist William James Sidis ; the odd satisfaction of stories that arrive at "close enough" rather than classic success; the issue of the right historical moment for a crea...
Aug 07, 2012•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down in West Hollywood with novelist Joshua Henkin , author most recently of The World Without You , for their first conversation in four and a half years since his previous appearance on The Marketplace of Ideas . They discuss how the new book makes a space for characters to converge rather than occupying the space between two people, like his last one; the authorial balance between knowing too much and knowing too little, and the need to address the same question in fiction...
Jul 24, 2012•1 hr
Colin Marshall sits down on top of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles with Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times and co-author of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture . Last year, he conducted Reading Los Angeles , a yearlong study of the city through the books written about it. This year, he's doing a series of essays and video explorations of Los Angeles' boulevards: first Atlantic , then Sunset , and soon Crenshaw and beyo...
Jul 19, 2012•53 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Boyle Heights with David Kipen, founder of that neighborhood's combined bookstore and lending library Libros Schmibros and a true man of both letters and Los Angeles. He gives commentary on books and literary culture on KPCC-FM and Sirius XM's The Bob Edwards Show , he's written the book The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History , he recently translated Cervantes' The Dialogue of the Dogs for Melville House Books, and he spent over four years as...
Jul 13, 2012•49 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Alissa Walker , writer on urban design, architecture, and the cityscape — especially Los Angeles' — for publications like GOOD , Dwell , the LA Weekly , and more. She also associate-produces KCRW's DnA: Design and Architecture . They discuss Sunset Triangle Plaza , the area of reclaimed street where they sit, and what it says about the Angeleno "mind shift" toward getting out of the car; how many small, cheap improvements can alter the urban experienc...
Jul 08, 2012•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down at UCLA with urban planning professor Donald Shoup , author of The High Cost of Free Parking and the man who's made us aware of the fact that our cities' problems come not from too little parking, but too much. They discuss the academic tendency to believe, without verification, anything bad about Los Angeles; how this city became the densest car-oriented one in America, as well as the most car-oriented dense one; falsely perceived parking "shortages," how they led to mi...
Jul 02, 2012•1 hr 7 min
Colin Marshall sits down nine stories above Westlake with Jesse Thorn, host of Public Radio International's Bullseye , proprietor of the Maximum Fun radio and podcast empire, and host of the men's style web series Put This On . They discuss what it takes for GQ to introduce you as a guy who hates Los Angeles; the points of starkest division between northern and southern California, including burritos and new-aginess; his time growing up in San Francisco's inner Mission district, where he was spo...
Jun 19, 2012•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Del Rey with David C. Sloane, professor and director of undergraduate programs at the University of California's Price School of Public Policy and editor of Planning Los Angeles. They discuss the book's obvious contrarian marketing angle against the widely held idea of Los Angeles as the most chaotic, least planned U.S. city; how people assume Los Angeles to be both older and newer than it really is; the city's much-discussed "polycentricity" coming from trains, not c...
Jun 12, 2012•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Lakewood City Hall with D.J. Waldie, author of books like Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles , collaborator on books like Real City with photographer Marissa Roth, and a 34-year employee of the City of Lakewood as Public Information Officer and Deputy City Manager. They discuss the importance of Wallace Stevens' "work and walking" to his own writing; his advice to the latest wave of Los Angeles newcomers looking for solutions to ...
Jun 07, 2012•1 hr 4 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Little Tokyo with novelist Todd Shimoda , author, in collaboration with visual artist L.J.C. Shimoda, of "philosophical mystery" novels with science, engineering, Japanese and Japanese-American themes. His latest, Subduction , follows a disgraced young physician into his four-year exile on a tiny, earthquake-prone, mythology-freighted island off the Japanese coast. They discuss Japan's very real earthquakes in Kobe and Fukushima; the book's obsessed characters, whethe...
May 31, 2012•1 hr 1 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Barnsdall Art Park with Hollywood Steve Huey, writer and media personality, former critic at All Music Guide and host of the web series Yacht Rock . They discuss his introductions to the likes of Michael Jackson , Yngwie Malmsteen , and Barry Manilow ; elements of his home state of Michigan, including Big Rapids (not to be confused with Grand Rapids), Ann Arbor, and the urban ruins and $5,000 mansions of Detroit; the All Music Guide's shaping force on his musical cons...
May 25, 2012•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Eric Brightwell, proprietor of both Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography , which offers hand-drawn maps of neighborhoods in Los Angeles and beyond (and posts them to Amoeba Music's Amoeblog ), and Brightwell , which offers luxury and craft items to the discerning cosmopolitan gentleman. They discuss the days when Silver Lake was Ivanhoe; the distinctively shifting and disputed nature of Los Angeles neighborhoods; the differences between neighborhood ma...
May 19, 2012•1 hr 4 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with comedian, writer, and comedy writer Todd Levin , who's written for Late Night with Conan O'Brien , The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien , Conan , and the Onion News Network . They discuss using comedy performers as tools; the advantages of being a cipher; deliberately bewildering the audience, listening for reactions beyond laughter, and in the process becoming a connoisseur of silence; the comparative humorous possibilities of Tetley and Bigelow tea b...
May 16, 2012•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down at KPCC headquarters in Pasadena with Tony Pierce, the station's blog editor, former editor at LAist and blog editor at the Los Angeles Times , and author of the Busblog . They discuss the time when he was the only English-language blogger to ride the bus; the longing for Los Angeles that brought him out of the Chicago suburbs; his years in the collegiate Eden of Isla Vista; making like the rich young prince in the bible and selling all his stuff in order to leave San Fr...
May 11, 2012•1 hr 4 min
Colin Marshall sits down in an undisclosed Hollywood-ish location with Mark "Frosty" McNeill, co-founder and creative captain of the internet radio "future roots music" collective Dublab. They discuss founding an internet radio station in 1999, when everything sounded like a tin-can phone; the nature of future roots, where the very old meets the very new, the very traditional meets the very experimental, and everything sounds different yet retains a common undercurrent; Dublab's mission to curat...
May 05, 2012•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down at NPR West in Culver City with Andy Bowers, Executive Producer of Slate 's podcasts and fourth-generation Angeleno. They discuss his status as a "secret Angeleno"; what it takes to introduce microphones into entertaining conversations without things getting tiresome; the difference between podcasts as podcasts and podcasts as imitation radio; discovering the joy of biking in Los Angeles ; the city's troubled downtown bike lanes and what they emblematize about local civi...
Apr 30, 2012•1 hr 3 min
Colin Marshall takes a trip to the 99¢ Only Store and beyond with Billy Vasquez, better known as the 99 Cent Chef . They discuss the store as a prime venue for peoplewatching (whether the people dress in their Sunday best or in pink-striped miniskirts); the appeal of midcentury Googie diner architecture; how he drove out to Venice Beach on the 10 and stayed in Los Angeles for 37 years; the meaty usefulness of both chorizo and soyrizo; asparagus, a product you'd never have found at any 99-cent st...
Apr 24, 2012•1 hr
