Notebook on Cities and Culture
363 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 9 years ago - ★★★★★ - 124 ratings(Formerly The Marketplace of Ideas.) A world-traveling interview show where Colin Marshall sits down for in-depth conversations with cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene about the work they do and the world cities they do it in, from Los Angeles to Osaka to Mexico City to London to Seoul and beyond.
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Episodes
Experimental novelist Todd Shimoda: seeking mono no aware in and with literary art
June 10, 2010 15:25 - 58 minutes - 53.7 MBColin 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...
Buddhist atheist Stephen Batchelor: the road to "belief"
June 03, 2010 15:25 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBColin 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.
Filmmaker Andrew Bujalski: the cinema of recontextualized relationships
May 27, 2010 16:39 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBColin 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.
Creative Nonfiction editor Lee Gutkind: Living it is writing it is living it
May 20, 2010 14:19 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBColin 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, transplan...
On breaking form and genre boundaries with David Shields
May 06, 2010 03:01 - 56 minutes - 51.6 MBColin 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 li...
On John Cage and 4'33" with composer, educator and new-music journalist Kyle Gann
April 22, 2010 15:04 - 50 minutes - 45.9 MBColin 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.
On the films of Michael Haneke with Peter Brunette
April 15, 2010 05:26 - 56 minutes - 52 MBColin 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 ...
Thinker, writer, and "Agent of Change" Seth Godin
April 01, 2010 14:41 - 57 minutes - 52.6 MBColin 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 organizati...
Chris Bohn, editor of The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music
March 25, 2010 05:37 - 55 minutes - 50.5 MBColin 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 ...
On Romantic music, poetry and philosophy with James Donelan
March 18, 2010 15:04 - 59 minutes - 54.1 MBColin 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,...
Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll on time's arrow
February 25, 2010 07:17 - 56 minutes - 51.5 MBColin 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 uni...
On the North Korean worldview with B.R. Myers
February 18, 2010 20:42 - 55 minutes - 50.5 MBColin 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 year...
Musician, artist, journalist and ex-blogger Nick Currie, a.k.a Momus
February 11, 2010 07:48 - 59 minutes - 54.2 MBColin 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, whic...
On the cinema of Errol Morris with journalist and curator Livia Bloom
February 07, 2010 19:11 - 56 minutes - 77 MBColin 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.
Economist, rationalist and blogger Robin Hanson
January 28, 2010 14:33 - 56 minutes - 77.6 MBColin 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 gro...
On advertising, marketing and narrative with Rob Walker
January 11, 2010 03:16 - 58 minutes - 39.8 MBColin 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...
Economist Steven Landsburg takes on philosophy
January 04, 2010 00:55 - 56 minutes - 38.5 MBColin 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 by...
On the Middle Ages with Chris Wickham
December 17, 2009 14:45 - 54 minutes - 37.8 MBColin 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 tod...
Mayan Cycle composer Jeremy Haladyna
November 17, 2009 06:39 - 59 minutes - 41 MBColin 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 Inn...
Documentarian of documentarians Pepita Ferrari
October 29, 2009 15:14 - 56 minutes - 39.1 MBColin 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...
On the badness of the legal profession with The Philadelphia Lawyer
October 22, 2009 15:15 - 57 minutes - 39.3 MBColin Marshall talks to The Philadelphia Lawyer, author of both the web site of the same name and the book The Happy Hour is For Amateurs: A Lost Decade in the World’s Worst Profession, which is now out in paperback. Combining Kafka-like tales of the gamesmanship and pedantry of the legal profession with vivid accounts of the intense debauchery required to counterbalance all that wasted time in the office, The Philadelphia Lawyer’s web presence has attracted a large, devoted audience of disaf...
Laurie Brown and Andy Sheppard of CBC Radio 2's The Signal
October 15, 2009 06:12 - 45 minutes - 31.4 MBColin Marshall talks to Laurie Brown and Andy Sheppard, host and producer, respectively, of The Signal on CBC Radio 2. Since debuting in March of 2007, the program has evolved to provide a highly distinctive listening experience that offers two skillfully-curated hours of late-night contemporary music to listeners across Canada — and, via the internet, the world — that’s neither predictable nor easily genrefiable. Brown accompanies Sheppard’s unusual sonic selections with commentary that’s lo...
Comic artist and comic journalist Peter Bagge
October 09, 2009 04:51 - 54 minutes - 37.6 MBColin Marshall talks to Peter Bagge, the comic artist behind the beloved series Hate as well as Apocalypse Nerd, Neat Stuff and Sweatshop. His new book, Everybody is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations, collects his stories originally written for the libertarian magazine Reason, works of comic journalism on such subjects as the Iraq war, gun control, the “War on Drugs” and Amtrak.
Treeless Mountain director So Yong Kim
October 02, 2009 15:01 - 53 minutes - 36.4 MBColin Marshall talks to So Yong Kim, director of In Between Days, winner of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision, and more recently Treeless Mountain, which is now available on DVD. The story of two very young sisters in Seoul left with their distant aunt while their mother searches for their absent father, the film belongs solidly to the realist tradition while evoking the scale, perspective and feel of childhood. The New York Times‘ A.O. Scott calls Tr...
On the craft of freeform radio with WFMU's Ken Freedman
September 24, 2009 18:53 - 56 minutes - 39.1 MBColin Marshall talks to Ken Freedman, general manager of Jersey City’s WFMU, the longest-running freeform radio station in the United States. Since the mid-1980s, Freedman and his staff have made WFMU’s name a byword for the modern freeform sensibility with a combination of, among other factors, early adoption of new distribution technology, avoidance of identity politics and pure, unadulterated unpredictability.
On French cuisine's decline with Michael Steinberger
September 20, 2009 16:57 - 54 minutes - 37.6 MBColin Marshall talks to longtime Slate wine columnist Michael Steinberger, author of Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine and the End of France. An ardent culinary Francophile in earlier decades, Steinberger has, along with much of the rest of the food world, come to realize that a malaise has fallen upon the cuisine that once led the world in taste, artistry, experience and sophistication. Steinberger’s book chronicles the history of French food, the recent developments that have forced it to f...
On Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left with Trevor Dann, Patrick Humphries and Peter Hogan
September 03, 2009 14:25 - 1 hour - 43.4 MBColin Marshall talks to three music writers who have written books on English singer-songwriter Nick Drake, whose debut album Five Leaves Left originally shipped on September 1, 1969. Joining the conversation to celebrate the record’s fortieth anniversary are Trevor Dann, former head of BBC Music Entertainment and author of Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake; Patrick Humphries, noted biographer of musicians and author of Nick Drake: The Biography, the very first book on th...
On religion and falsity with Joel Grus
August 20, 2009 14:57 - 55 minutes - 38.4 MBA conversation about religion and falsity with Joel Grus, humorist, atheist and author of Your Religion is False.
Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen on personal economies
August 06, 2009 14:24 - 49 minutes - 34.1 MBA conversation with Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and founding blogger of Marginal Revolution. Cowen's new book is Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.
On recorded music's history with Greg Milner
July 30, 2009 13:41 - 55 minutes - 37.9 MBA conversation with Greg Milner, who's written music and technology journalism for Spin, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Slate, Salon and Wired. His new book, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, tracing the evolution of music's capture from Edison cylinders to vinyl albums to waveform synthesis.
On Shohei Imamura with The Criterion Collection's Kim Hendrickson
July 23, 2009 07:04 - 30 minutes - 21.2 MBA conversation about the early works of filmmaker Shohei Imamura, who brought an entirely new irreverent aesthetic and sociological sensibility to the 1960s Japanese film scene, with Kim Hendrickson, executive producer at The Criterion Collection and producer of their new box set Pigs, Pimps and Prostitutes: Three Films by Shohei Imamura.
FORA.tv founder Brian Gruber
July 23, 2009 05:16 - 32 minutes - 22.1 MBA conversation about bringing intelligent video to the internet with Brian Gruber, founder and executive chairman of FORA.tv, the web's largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates from the world's top universities, think tanks and conferences.
Traveler and journalist Lawrence Osborne on Bangkok
July 16, 2009 14:45 - 59 minutes - 40.7 MBA conversation with novelist, journalist, memoirist and traveler Lawrence Osborne, author, most recently, of Bangkok Days.
On Brian Eno with David Sheppard
July 09, 2009 14:51 - 58 minutes - 40.2 MBA conversation about rock music's foremost intellectual "non-musician." producer and cultural theorist with David Sheppard, author of On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno.
On Hume and Rousseau's quarrel with John T. Scott
July 02, 2009 19:04 - 58 minutes - 40 MBA conversation about the dissolution of the friendship between two very different philosophers with John T. Scott, professor of political science at the University of California, Davis and co-author with Robert Zaretsky of The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding.
Philosophical journalist Alain de Botton
June 25, 2009 06:36 - 55 minutes - 38.4 MBA conversation with Alain de Botton, author of fiction, nonfiction, journalism and various hybrids thereof. Following treatises on Proust, philosophy, travel and architecture, de Botton's newest book of "philosophical journalism" is The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.
On the vinyl LP with Travis Elborough
June 18, 2009 19:02 - 1 hour - 45.5 MBA conversation about the rise, fall and rise of the long-playing album format both technologically and artistically with journalist Travis Elborough, author of The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again.
43Folders founder Merlin Mann
June 12, 2009 04:18 - 57 minutes - 39.6 MBA conversation with writer, speaker, blogger and student of the creative mind Merlin Mann. In 2004, Mann founded 43Folders, a blog and community focused on tips, tricks, tools and techniques designed to improve one's productivity, and in late 2008, he took the site in a new direction, toward the habits and thoughts of humanity's best creators and what can be learned from examining them.
On publishing with Richard Eoin Nash
June 04, 2009 07:05 - 52 minutes - 35.8 MBPart three of our ongoing series of conversations about the future of books and reading, this time with publishing consultant Richard Eoin Nash. Nash ran the widely-acclaimed Soft Skull Press between 2001 and March of this year.
Author and screenwriter Jon Raymond
May 28, 2009 05:33 - 54 minutes - 37.7 MBA conversation with Jon Raymond, editor at Plazm magazine and author of the novel The Half-Life and the new short story collection Livability. With filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Raymond co-adapted two of Livability's short stories into the critically-acclaimed feature films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.
Podcaster, blogger, critic and intellectual shock jock Edward Champion
May 22, 2009 02:41 - 1 hour - 41.6 MBA conversation with Edward Champion, critic, host and producer of the cultural interview podcast The Bat Segundo Show, blogger behind Reluctant Habits and all-around "intellectual shock jock".
Filmmaker Ramin Bahrani
May 14, 2009 16:40 - 58 minutes - 40.2 MBA conversation with filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, director of Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and the new Goodbye Solo. Roger Ebert calls Bahrani "the new great American director."
Electro-acoustic musician Ethan Rose
May 07, 2009 14:55 - 59 minutes - 40.5 MBA conversation about using old technology to craft modern sounds with electro-acoustic musician Ethan Rose, whose newest album Oaks was recorded with a vintage 1920s Wurlitzer organ found in the skating rink at Portland's Oaks Park. Two tracks from the record are included in this broadcast.
ZBS Foundation president Thomas Lopez
April 30, 2009 10:25 - 1 hour - 41.3 MBA conversation about creating radio fiction and humorously raising consciousness with Thomas Lopez, founder and president of the ZBS Foundation. This broadcast contains excerpts from the ZBS productions Dreams of the Amazon, Ruby and Two Minute Film Noir.
Electronic musician Tim Hecker
April 23, 2009 07:51 - 53 minutes - 36.6 MBA conversation about iterative creative processes, building music in layers and the history of loud sound with electronic musician Tim Hecker, whose latest album is An Imaginary Country, from which two tracks are featured in this broadcast.
Denis Dutton on aesthetics and evolution
April 16, 2009 17:31 - 56 minutes - 38.9 MBA conversation about aesthetics and evolutionary biology with Denis Dutton, professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, founding editor of Arts & Letters Daily and author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.
Novelist and journalist Ian Buruma
April 09, 2009 06:25 - 41 minutes - 28.4 MBA conversation with novelist, journalist, documentarian and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College Ian Buruma. His latest book is The China Lover, a historical novel examining the life and career of Manchurian-born Japanese actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi through the eyes of three different narrators.
Sound artist Lawrence English
April 02, 2009 07:25 - 1 hour - 44.1 MBA conversation about appreciating the seasons, collecting international field recordings and turning others on to sound art with composer, multimedia artist, critic and ROOM40 label head Lawrence English. Two tracks from English's latest record, A Colour for Autumn, are included in this broadcast.
Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt
March 19, 2009 06:19 - 1 hour - 42.6 MBA conversation about reading, writing and radio with Michael Silverblatt, who has hosted KCRW's Bookworm, the beloved forum for the discussion of fiction and poetry on public radio, for twenty years. [Marketplace of Ideas home]
Jesse Thorn, host of The Sound of Young America
March 06, 2009 03:23 - 59 minutes - 40.6 MBA conversation about the craft of interviewing and the state of public radio today with Jesse Thorn, host and producer of Public Radio International's The Sound of Young America as well as the principal of podcasting empire Maximumfun.org.