Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City's Colonia Roma with novelist and essayist Brenda Lozano, author of the Todo Nada and contributor to Letras Libres . They discuss the space Spain's troubles have opened for Latin American literature; the passion for Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde she learned from one particular teacher; how she began seriously reading in English, and only later in her native Spanish; the difference in enjoyment of Spanish versus English literature, and how the languages ultima...
Mar 21, 2013•52 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City's Colonia Condesa with Kurt Hollander , photographer, filmmaker, magazine editor, and author of Several Ways to Die in Mexico City: An Autobiography . They discuss his microbiologically informed view of life; the presence of death in Mexico, especially since people there now die developed-world deaths and , to an extent, developing-world deaths; his first enjoyment of Mexico's working-class culture, and his perspective, as an American, on American cultural...
Mar 17, 2013•59 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City's Colonia Roma with Diego Rabasa, co-founder of Sexto Piso press. They discuss why this might make for the most exciting moment in Mexican, or even Spanish-language, literature; Mexico's past era of invincible intellectual giants, from whose shadow writers now emerge; these writers' response to their country's "total social meltdown"; how Mexico City got more secure as Mexico itself got less secure, a process that has by now made Mexico City the safest pla...
Mar 11, 2013•57 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Echo Park, Los Angeles with Roland Kelts , lecturer at the University of Tokyo, co-editor of the literary journal A Public Space , and author of the book Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. They discuss whether Japan has yet really figured out how to sell its pop culture abroad; the success of CrunchyRoll.com ; his time growing up as a partial outsider in the white northeastern United States, and how anime and manga's focus on the outsider thus...
Mar 06, 2013•1 hr 7 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake, Los Angeles with Vincent Brook, teacher at UCLA, USC, Cal State Los Angeles, and Pierce College, and author of books on Jewish émigré directors and the Jewish sitcom as well as the new Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles . They discuss the difference between Los Angeles obsession and Los Angeles chauvinism; his time in Berkeley, when Los Angeles became the enemy; the Christopher Dorner incident and the old racial wounds it has re-...
Mar 01, 2013•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood, Los Angeles with Kevin Smokler , author of Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven't Touched Since High School . They discuss what makes him think of Holden Caulfield as a Bing user; why we study novels in high school at all, and what it might have to do with Renaissance classics scholarship; how we got turned off to these books the first time around, and the radical notion that we now have time to properly absorb them; his hymn to his ob...
Feb 21, 2013•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Clive Piercy, founder and principal of design studio air-conditioned and author of the photo book Pretty Vacant , an appreciation of Los Angeles "dingbat" apartments. They discuss Reyner Banham's enduring definition of the dingbat; his time growing up in England enamored with American culture, and his surprise to find Los Angeles existed in color; the glory of freeways and the guilt of driving them, and the sense of failed utopia they share with ding...
Feb 17, 2013•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Nishinomiya, Japan with translator, writer, and former Kansai Time Out editor Christopher Stephens. They discuss whether higher Japanese skills get a foreigner more suspicion; the nearby presence and touristic effects of novelist Haruki Murakami's elementary school; the older writers, like Yasunari Kawabata, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima, who stoked his interest in Japan; the experimental music to be found in Japan, such as the work of Keiji Haino and the Bore...
Feb 13, 2013•1 hr 3 min
Colin Marshall sits down overlooking greater Kyoto on Mt. Ogura with Stephen Gill, poet, BBC radio scriptwriter, and executive director of People Together for Mt. Ogura . They discuss the mountain's place in a traditional Japanese poetry card game; how, after scores of Japanese noticed in it an opportunity for free trash disposal, the mountain generated the headline "Ogurayama, gomi no yama" (Mt. Ogura, Mountain of Trash); the compilation of a collection about Mt. Ogura featuring verse by one hu...
Feb 09, 2013•47 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Koreatown with filmmaker Rob Montz, director of Juche Strong , a short documentary about North Korea and its propaganda. They discuss reaching the same age as Kim Jong-un without a hermit kingdom to rule; the question of why North Koreans continue to believe in their state, despite having good reason not to; his early fascination with North Korea's World Cup showing, and how pursuing that fascination led him from standard opinions on the country to newer,...
Feb 04, 2013•53 min
Colin Marshall sits down near Nara, Japan's Tōdai-ji temple with artist, critic, and teacher Christopher Olson . They discuss his thoughts, as a Winnipegger born and raised, on Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg ; the displacement, discombobulation, and respectable bullshitting of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil , a copy of which he keeps at all times on his phone; high-risk art, and the stuff that requires more time spent absorbing than creating; the still-exciting art school idea of limitations and restricti...
Jan 31, 2013•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down seven stories above Kawaramachi, Kyoto, Japan with John Dougill, professor of British culture at Ryukoku University, blogger at Green Shinto , and author of books including Kyoto: A Cultural History , In Search of Japan's Hidden Christians , and Oxford in English Literature . They discuss the commonalities between the Kyoto geisha and the English gentleman, who practice their respective cultures' ritual, regulation, and repression; form's dominance over function in Japan...
Jan 24, 2013•53 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Nakatsu, Osaka, Japan with guitarmaker Josh Parkin proprietor of Josh Parkin Guitars . They discuss how the intensity of Japanese enthusiasm extends to guitar-playing; how Japanese friends in London urged him not to set up shop in Tokyo, but in Osaka; his early life in Yorkshire, "the English Kansai," where he made his first attempts to build and modify guitars; the importance of finding the best handmade pickups and of learning to see the difference between .2 and .3...
Jan 20, 2013•53 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Osaka, Japan's Senri-Chūō with Brian Ashcraft, Senior Contributing Editor for video game site Kotaku , contributor at Wired , and author of the books Arcade Mania! and Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential . They discuss the kind of arcade gaming best (and now only) seen in Japan; the Expo 70-developed north of Osaka versus the city's "real" south; Osaka's reputation across Japan for brash un-gentility; where best to do one's gaming in Osaka, the the overall continuing rob...
Jan 15, 2013•1 hr 3 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Kyoto, Japan's efish café with Michael Lambe, Deep Kyoto blogger, teacher, and Public Relations Representative for the Kyoto Journal . They discuss the city's flummoxing preponderance of Irish pubs and the "celebrated infamy" of one in particular; the rich cultural heritage that brings foreigners to Kyoto, the modernization that foreigners bewail, and the preservation efforts that certain Japanese now make; his arrival in Japan on the JET program and original intent t...
Jan 10, 2013•1 hr 1 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Kobe, Japan with guitarist, improviser, and sound artist Tim Olive , whose latest album is 33 Bays with Alfredo Costa Monteiro. They discuss Japan's importance to global experimental music culture; his own swerve toward experimentation after a western Canadian childhood spent listening to Black Sabbath's Paranoid ; his early exploration of Javanese music in a Saskatchewan record library; how a Québécois girlfriend took him from Montreal to Osaka, where he lost "the ra...
Jan 05, 2013•59 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Nara, Japan's Nara Hotel with writer of place Pico Iyer , author of such books as Video Night in Kathmandu , The Lady and the Monk , The Global Soul , and most recently The Man Within My Head . They discuss the discovery that Japan looks exactly like Japan, and the "piercing sense of familiarity" the enthusiast feels upon visiting for the first time; autumn in Japan, and its place at the core of The Lady and the Monk , his second book and still his favorite; Japan's d...
Jan 02, 2013•1 hr
Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Tom Lutz, founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books , professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and author of the books Crying , American Nervousness, 1903 , Cosmopolitan Vistas , and Doing Nothing . They discuss whether the internet has brought about a new golden age of the essay; giving writers the word count they need to write about the subjects they want to, such as the literature of Romania; "publish what ...
Dec 18, 2012•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Sunset Triangle with Jay Caspian Kang, editor at sports and pop culture site Grantland and author of the novel The Dead Do Not Improve . They discuss his youthful Midnight in Paris dream of drinking in red leather bars with dead authors; the racy science fiction of L. Ron Hubbard; the current or former importance of New York City as a destination for a youngster with literary ambitions; his avoidance of the role of "tribal writer," tacitly assigned with e...
Dec 12, 2012•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down at Hugo's Tacos in Los Angeles' Atwater Village with Adrian Todd Zuniga, founding editor of Opium magazine and impresario behind the international reading series Literary Death Match . They discuss what might make Los Angeles "the new Berlin"; his aim to make the city the literary center of the world by 2022; the hatred that flows into Los Angeles, but not out of it; Literary Death Match TV , the project that moved him here, and his battle against the idea of its being "...
Dec 10, 2012•58 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Portland's Pearl District with Camas Davis, food writer and founder of the Portland Meat Collective . They discuss why bacon has hit the zeitgeist so hard; her interest in fostering an "alternative economy of meat"; her former career writing travel pieces, which invariably and instinctively became food pieces; her education in the "meta-meta theoretical" exploration of food; how meat became cool again, after industrialization made it uncool (and not particularly tasty...
Dec 05, 2012•56 min
Colin Marshall sits down in the basement of Portland's Hollywood Theatre with Dan Halsted, head programmer there and founder of the 35mm Shaolin Archive . They discuss fake Bruce Lee films; his adventure of rescuing classic kung-fu film prints, including gems like The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter and The Boxer's Omen from a shuttered, junkie-surrounded theater in Vancouver; his youth in a distant Oregon town with 600 people, his move to Portland, and his discovery of kung-fu cinema; how much more ...
Dec 02, 2012•59 min
Colin Marshall sits down in southeast Portland with Jarrett Walker , public transit consultant and author of the blogs Human Transit and Creature of the Shade as well as the book Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives . They discuss how Portland "turned the battleship" toward sustainable transport in that least likely of all decades, the seventies; the city's discovery of its own extraordinary capacity for self-promotion in the nineties;...
Nov 29, 2012•53 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Portland's Montavilla with Kevin Sampsell , publisher of Future Tense Books , editor of Portland Noir , and author of the memoir A Common Pornography and the novel This is Between Us , forthcoming from Tin House. They discuss the meth crime to be found beyond 82nd Avenue; Portland from the vantage point of his childhood in Washington's Tri-Cities; how he met other writers by publishing his own "lo-fi chapbooks"; how one forges one's own unique voice by maintaining the...
Nov 25, 2012•57 min
Colin Marshall sits down at Portland State University with Carl Abbott, professor there of urban studies and planning and author of Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People . They discuss the debate over Portland's status as a "small city" or a "big town"; the distinctive ease of making connections in the city; how modern-day Portland enthusiasts would look at the place before 1965 and see Akron, Ohio; the oft-made comparisons between Portland, Seattle, and Austin; the history and c...
Nov 21, 2012•57 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Portland's Slabtown with Matt Haughey , founder of MetaFilter , the most civilized community on the internet, co-founder of Fuelly , and creator of several other sites as well. They discuss his escape from San Francisco's "goofball startup culture"; what it means for MetaFilter to be "civilized"; his desire not simply to create "a safe place for people to yell past each other"; the importance of keeping personal identity out of debates ; the strange backend provided b...
Nov 16, 2012•58 min
Colin Marshall sits down in southeast Portland with Mia Birk , author of Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Future and President of Alta Planning + Design , which strives to make biking, walking, and mass transit an integral part of daily life. The discuss exactly how much happier he would have been riding a bicycle to the interview than riding a bus; the way Portland "got the ball rolling" for its cycling infrastructure development in the nineties; the moments of surprising hostility she foun...
Nov 10, 2012•55 min
Colin Marshall sits down in northwest Portland with comic artist and film critic Mike Russell , co-host on the Cort and Fatboy podcast, creator of Culturepulp , Mr. Do and Mr. Don't , The Sabertooth Vampire , and more. They discuss the excruciating process of drawing an interview; his adaptation of a page of David Foster Wallace's "Up, Simba" ; what it's like to artistically live-blog the Portland Opera; the unusual robustness of the Portland comics industry, and its incentivization of "putting ...
Nov 05, 2012•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Thom Andersen, professor at the California Institute of the Arts' School of Film/Video and director of films including Red Hollywood , the new Reconversion , and the well-known documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself , on the truth and falsity of the city's representation in motion pictures. They discuss The Fast and the Furious shooting on his street; the end of the current era of impressive car chases crafted by Nicolas Winding Refn and Quentin Taranti...
Oct 27, 2012•43 min
Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's South Beach with entrepreneur, author, blogger, traveler, and learner Ben Casnocha . His latest book, co-written with Reid Hoffman, chairman of LinkedIn, is The Start-Up of You . They discuss the advantages of hanging an IKEA world map on the wall; his ten days of silent meditation and the feeling of enlarged thumbs that resulted; the San Francisco Bay Area's convergence of Californian spirituality and Californian technological intensity; the three Cal...
Oct 22, 2012•1 hr 6 min
