Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Jim Benning , travel writer and co-founder of World Hum , home of "The Best Travel Stories on the Internet." They discuss why Mexican food on other continents sucks so bad; the nature of a "weather lifestyle" site he previously edited; the old question of travel versus tourism; his relationship to the label of "travel writing"; whether hatred or love for a place can produce anything but uninteresting writing; our need for "hidden gems"; how Los Angel...
Jul 21, 2014•1 hr 3 min
Colin Marshall sits down in the Hollywood Hills with Geoff Nicholson, author of such nonfiction books as The Lost Art of Walking and its more recent follow-up Walking in Ruins as well as novels like Bleeding London, Gravity's Volkswagen , and the new The City Under the Skin . They discuss which cities contributed to his concept of "the city"; the resonances between the novel's fictional Telstar Hotel and the LAX Theme Building, as well as the significance of their restaurants, revolving or other...
Jul 15, 2014•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down at UCLA with Jon Christensen, editor of Boom: A Journal of California , the recently re-launched magazine from the University of California Press. They discuss the meaning, if any, of the phrase "he lives in California" in an author bio; whether California's east-west divide bleaches out its much discussed north-south one; why we think so little about water, and whether Los Angeles actually has a problem with the stuff; how to see the world not just in this city, but in ...
Jul 09, 2014•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Culver City with Matt Novak, author of Paleofuture , a blog that looks into the future that never was. They discuss what goes through is mind when he sees LAX's Theme Building; why 1960s visions of jetpacks and flying cars have kept their hold on the American imagination; whether we only remember the wrong predictions of the future, or whether all predictions got the future wrong; why you always have to hedge about who predicted or invented what; how a society's visio...
Jul 03, 2014•1 hr 11 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Sawtelle (also known as Los Angeles' "Little Osaka") with Eric Nakamura, founder of Asian-American aesthetic culture and lifestyle brand Giant Robot . They discuss the differences between the Sawtelle he grew up in and the Sawtelle he finds himself in today; how and where he got his doses of Japanese pop culture growing up; Los Angeles as a "gateway to Asia" then and now; the days when Giant Robot began as a photocopied zine, and what zinemaking means in 2014; Giant R...
Jun 19, 2014•1 hr 7 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Venice with Geoff Dyer , author of books all across the spectrum between fiction and non-fiction on such subjects as jazz, photography, travel, World War I, and Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker . His newest book Another Great Day at Sea follows his two weeks aboard the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, and his first two novels The Color of Memory and The Search have just received their very first American editions. They discuss why America needs to land pla...
Jun 12, 2014•1 hr 4 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Mar Vista with Streetsblog Los Angeles founder Damien Newton (and his young daughter). They discuss what Los Angeles transportation culture looked like from a distance before he came here (nonexistent); how he found himself covering the city's "turning point"; the advantages to getting around from just where chose to make his home, and the disadvantages that include having to take "the bus to the bus to the train to the train to the train" to Pasadena; the Expo Line's...
Jun 08, 2014•1 hr 3 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Mar Vista with Edward Soja , Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA and author of such books as Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory , Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places , and now the new My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization . They discuss downtown's Bonaventure Hotel back when he sat for a BBC documentary on it and now; how all of us may only eve...
Jun 02, 2014•1 hr 11 min
Colin Marshall sits down under the cafeteria at Santa Monica College with beloved Los Angeles radio personality Madeleine Brand, now host of Press Play on KCRW, formerly of NPR's Morning Edition , All Things Considered , and Day to Day , KPCC's The Madeleine Brand Show , and KCET's SoCal Connected . They discuss how much easier she has it waking up for noon radio nowadays instead of morning radio; what to call her format, a popular one in Los Angeles, where one host talks to a series of people, ...
May 24, 2014•53 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Miracle Mile district with photographer Mark Edward Harris , author of such books as Inside North Korea , Inside Iran , The Art of the Japanese Bath , and Faces of the Twentieth Century . They discuss filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's introduction to his Iran book, and his rule about always excluding people from his own photographs; the importance of children in images of Iran and countries like it; how Bruce Lee may or may not have started his interest in Asi...
May 19, 2014•1 hr 15 min
Colin Marshall sits down at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law with Ethan Elkind , an attorney who researches and writes on environmental law and the author of Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail System and the Future of the City . They discuss the reason visitors and even some Angelenos express surprise at the very existence of the city's subway; the roots of the assumption that Los Angeles would always have a 1950s-style "car culture"; why something as essen...
May 14, 2014•1 hr 7 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with architect and urban designer Doug Suisman , author of Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public , soon out in a new 25th anniversary edition. They discuss the difference in cycling to his office on Wilshire Boulevard versus Venice Boulevard; the conceptual importance of "path" and "place" in any urbanism-related discussion he gets into; his arrival in Los Angeles in 1983, after years spent in Paris and New York, and the mixture of disapp...
May 09, 2014•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down at Monocle magazine's offices in Marylebone, London with Andrew Tuck, editor of the magazine, host of its podcast The Urbanist , and editor of its book The Monocle Guide to Better Living . They discuss how the London experience for a Monocle reader differs from that of others; how the magazine came to view the world through the framework of cities, and what they look for in a good city experience; the importance of aesthetics in all things, when aesthetics means stripped...
May 05, 2014•45 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Knightsbridge, London with Jacques Testard, founding editor of the quarterly arts journal The White Review . They discuss the re-issue of Nairn's Towns featuring past guest Owen Hatherley ; London's surprisingly small literary culture and what, before founding The White Review , he didn't see getting published; the "deeply stereotypical Williamsburg existence" he once lived in New York (in an apartment called "Magicland", no less); his path from his hometown of Paris ...
Apr 29, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down in London's West End with Melvyn Bragg, Lord Bragg of Wigton, host of Sky Arts 1's The South Bank Show and BBC Radio 4's In Our Time as well as the writer of many works of fiction and nonfiction including, most recently, The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible and his latest novel Grace and Mary . They discuss when he began seeing culture as a whole, unstratified entity; what he learned in his working-class northern upbringing; his brief days with h...
Apr 25, 2014•45 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Hackney, London with Iain Sinclair , author of numerous books, all rooted in London and all operating across the spectrum of fiction to nonfiction, including Downriver , Lights Out for the Territory , London Orbital , and most recently American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light . They discuss the momentarily impossible-to-define issue of Hackney's identity; the need to walk the neighborhood to know it — but to then do it your whole life; the re-making of the lan...
Apr 19, 2014•1 hr 10 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Winchester, England with PD Smith , author of books on science, literature, superweapons, and, most recently, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age . They discuss whether London has all the elements of the archetypally ideal city; the essential quality of "a place where you meet strangers"; the need to avoid writing only about buildings; the recent moment when half the world's population found itself living in cities; the factors that have made city life more possible t...
Apr 14, 2014•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down for bangers and mash in Woolwich, London, England, with writer on political aesthetics Owen Hatherley , author of the books Militant Modernism , A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain , A New Kind of Bleak , and Uncommon , on the pop group Pulp. They discuss the relevance of the combined sentiments of the Pet Shop Boys and the Human League to his critical mission; his sickness of "where's my jetpack"-type complaint; the new limits of the possible; whether one more eas...
Apr 06, 2014•1 hr 6 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Canterbury, England with Jack Hues, founding member of the rock band Wang Chung and jazz band The Quartet. Wang Chung's latest album Tazer Up came out in 2012, and The Quartet's next album Collaborations Volumes 1 & 2 comes out this fall. They discuss what makes the "Canterbury sound"; the differences between Wang Chung's "English" and "American" albums; what recording in another city or country, and drawing in its "vibe," gives a project; music as a language, and...
Mar 31, 2014•1 hr 10 min
Colin Marshall walks through Stratford, London with John Rogers, author of the blog Lost Byway book This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City. They discuss how one should approach one's first London shopping mall, a built phenomenon that has changed dramatically over the decades; his memories of playing soccer with rotten fruit in the older of Stratford's indoor shopping centers; whether knowing the "other" London requires you to first know the standard London; how "ramble books" got ...
Mar 20, 2014•1 hr 7 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Marseille, France, specifically in the Le Corbusier-designed Unité d'Habitation, with Jonathan Meades , writer and broadcaster on architecture, culture, food, and a variety of other subjects to do with place. In his latest film, Bunkers, Brutalism, and Bloodymindness , he looks at architectural styles once- and currently maligned. They discuss how much his residence in Marseilles has to do with his residence in the Unité d'Habitation, to which "caprice" brought him no...
Mar 07, 2014•1 hr 9 min
Colin Marshall sits down for a pint at Nelson's Retreat, a pub on London's Old Street, with Neil Denny, host of Little Atoms , a show about ideas and culture on Resonance FM. They discuss whether beer improves or degrades the quality of ideas discussed; how the show's concept has changed over time, differently involving notions of science, culture, atheism, the Enlightenment, and the left; how he began podcasting, and then had to stand out from the sudden morass of skepticism-themed podcast; the...
Mar 02, 2014•1 hr 5 min
Colin Marshall sits down in London's Tower Hamlets with composer and artist Robin Rimbaud, better known as Scanner . They discuss the usefulness of a new place's disorientation; the fun of grasping that new place's systems and making its connections; other skills in the set gained from a lifetime of travel; the "great change" he has observed living in east London for fourteen years, where he arrived in search of "light and high ceilings"; the value of his work's taking him to places he doesn't c...
Feb 23, 2014•1 hr 8 min
Colin Marshall stands around Hackney, London's "Tech City" with urban designer Euan Mills . They discuss how to tip in a London bar and how to cross a London street; when he realized he has become an urban designer, and what that entails; the hugeness and non-understandability of the spread-out, car-dependent, crime-fearing São Paulo, where he grew up hating cities; the development of his interest in people, not buildings, and cities as networks of people; how he came to London, a city of parado...
Feb 16, 2014•56 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo with Dan Kuramoto, founding member of the band Hiroshima who have now played for 40 years and recently released their 19th album, J-Town Beat . They discuss what he sees around him in the Little Tokyo in transition today as opposed to the one he grew up in 40 years ago; what it means to play "Los Angeles music" in this multi-ethnic city; how the band's koto player June Kuramoto learned her classical instrument while growing up in a Los Angele...
Feb 08, 2014•1 hr 20 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Copenhagen's Frederiksberg with Melanie Haynes, author of the blog Dejlige Days . They discuss the Danish national virtue of hygge (and the also important quality of dejlige); how she came to leave her native England for Denmark; the Copenhagen system of smiley-face food sanitation ratings; the Danish habit of both asking "Why are you here in my country?" and personally receiving her praise for the country; why she writes about festivals, eating, design, and "the rela...
Jan 28, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Copenhagen's Vesterbro with Per Šmidl, author of the bestseller Chop Suey , the essay Victim of Welfare , and the new novel Wagon 537 Christiania . They discuss the surprise foreigners, and especially Americans, feel upon discovering that a self-governing commune like Christiana has existed for over forty years in the middle of Copenhagen; how Christiana began as "a spiritual venture" and became "the last and greatest attempt Western man made to rid himself of the sha...
Jan 21, 2014•1 hr 8 min
Colin Marshall sits down in Copenhagen's Nørrebro with Louise Sand (and her baby daughter Alice), who teaches the Danish language on the Copenhagencast . They discuss why the Danes speak English so well, yet still feel shy about speaking it; her experience teaching Danish to classrooms of foreigners; her original studies to become a Spanish teacher; her inspirational friendship with Japanese-teaching podcaster Hitomi Griswold of Japancast.net ; how she learns one language after another, like a m...
Jan 11, 2014•58 min
Colin Marshall sits down in one of Copenhagen's many storied serving houses with Thomas E. Kennedy , author of the "Copenhagen Quartet" of novels In the Company of Angels , Kerrigan in Copenhagen: A Love Story , Falling Sideways , and the forthcoming Beneath the Neon Egg . They discuss whether one can truly know Copenhagen without knowing its serving houses; the drinking guide from which Kerrigan in Copenhagen takes its "experimental" form; his mission not just to know all of the city's serving ...
Jan 05, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Colin Marshall sits down at Copenhagen's Husets Biograf with Jack Stevenson, programmer of the theater and author of books on both Scandinavian and American film. They discuss Lars von Trier as the world's representative of Danish cinema; the difficulty of creating scandal within unshockable Denmark; revival theaters across the world as a nation of their own; the film education he drew from haunting the revival houses of Boston; his plan to serve ten White Russians during a screening of The Big ...
Dec 24, 2013•1 hr 4 min
