Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall talks to C. Max Magee, founding editor of literary web magazine The Millions. With Jeff Martin, he’s co-edited The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, a collection of essays from such luminaries as Ander Monson, Reif Larsen, Michael Paul Mason, Jonathan Lethem, and David Gates about the next iteration of their medium, what the reading audience of today best engages with, and the relationship between the ever-evolving industrial capacity of text distribution and the artistic forms to which it gives rise.

Colin Marshall talks to Gabriel Josipovici, author of many novels and critical essays involved with the aesthetics and techniques of modernism. In his latest book, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, he traces modernism’s roots further back in history than perhaps any other scholar of modernism has done before. It’s all in the service of the titular question, which expresses a deep concern of anyone who enjoys modernist works today: how and why has the Western world so largely ignored the excitement and potential of modernist art, that is, art conscious of its own limits and responsibilities?

Colin Marshall talks to Jonathan Rosenbaum, former Chicago Reader film critic, advocate of international cinema, and author of books on Orson Welles, Abbas Kiarostami, and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. In his latest, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition, he examines the way serious engagement with film has changed over the decades, what new experiences it has brought to enthusiasts and critics, and what possibilities it has opened for cinematic artists.

Colin Marshall talks to critic Scott Esposito, blogger at Conversational Reading, editor of The Quarterly Conversation, and marketing coordinator at the Center for the Art of Translation. A lover and promoter of today’s most interesting fiction, Esposito writes about fiction at the intersection of the experimental and the international. This conversation took place at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2011 conference in Washington, D.C.

Colin Marshall talks to cultural journalist Saul Austerlitz, author of Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes and, most recently, Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy, which examines the careers of beloved U.S. comedy icons like Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers as well as more cultishly comedic figures like Albert Brooks as well as filmmakers not normally associated directly with comedy, like Robert Altman and the Coen brothers.

Colin Marshall talks to Luke Fischbeck, founder of Los Angeles experimental music group, art-creation unit, and engine of community Lucky Dragons at the 2011 Art Los Angeles Contemporary international art fair in Santa Monica. Alongside collaborator Sarah Rara, Fischbeck performs with conventional instruments, unconventional instruments, video, improvisation, incompatible technologies, and audience collaboration. The Wire calls their music "a celebration of ancient shared memory and introspective spirituality." Lucky Dragons perform at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum on Thursday, February 3 at 7:00 p.m.

Colin Marshall talks to David Edmonds, co-host with Nigel Warburton of the popular philosophy podcast Philosophy Bites. Edmonds and Warburton have also collaborated on a new book, Philosophy Bites: 25 Philosophers on 25 Intriguing Subjects. The text features conversations from the podcast, including Peter Singer on animal rights, Alain de Botton on architecture, Adrian Moore on infinity, and Barry Smith on wine.

Colin Marshall talks to Darcy Paquet, film critic and author of New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves. Since 1999, Paquet has maintained the web site Koreanfilm.org as the premiere destination for Anglophone lovers of Korean cinema, which has experienced an unprecedented explosion of creativity and artistry since the beginning of the decade. In his book and on his site, Paquet discusses such vital Korean filmmakers as Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Memories of Murder), Hong Sang-soo (Woman is the Future of Man, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors), Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, 3-Iron), and Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Joint Security Area).

Colin Marshall talks to book critic and former Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin. He’s also the editor of several anthologies of Los Angeles writing and the author of The Myth of Solid Ground. His latest book The Lost Art of Reading examines changes in his own and others’ style of engagement with books in the age of fragmented attention, always-flowing information sources, and countless outlets for on-demand media.

Colin Marshall talks to design philosopher, bookmaker, and man of aesthetics Leonard Koren. In addition to publishing WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing in the 1970s and providing consultancy on certain aesthetic matters, he’s created books like Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, How to Rake Leaves, and Undesigning the Bath. He takes on the very meaning of the term “aesthetics” in his latest title, Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean?: Ten Definitions.

Colin Marshall talks to conceptual artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats. In addition to his well-known projects like selling his thoughts, creating pornography for plants, and genetically engineering god, Keats writes about language for Wired magazine. His new book, Virtual Words: Language from the Edge of Science and Technology, collects his examinations of neologisms both failed and successful from our age, including qubit, crowdsourcing and bacn.

Colin Marshall talks to Nathan Rabin, head writer at The A.V. Club, the cultural magazine published by The Onion. There, he began a regular feature called My Year of Flops, in which he spent a year writing up movies that performed poorly at the box office and with critics, categorizing each as a “Failure”, “Fiasco”, or “Secret Success”. He continued the feature after a year, and has now collected pieces on Last Action Hero, Ishtar, Battlefield Earth, and more into My Year of Flops: One Man’s Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure.

Colin Marshall talks to Yunte Huang, poet, professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, and author of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. In the book, Huang combines a personal narrative of his research into American literature’s most beloved (and loathed) Chinese detective with the stories of E.D. Biggers, the writer who invented Charlie Chan, and Chang Apana, the real-life Chinese detective on the Honolulu Police whose exploits inspired him.

Colin Marshall talks to Kevin Kelly, co-founder of and “Senior Maverick” at Wired magazine. In addition to his copious online writing on technology and culture, he’s published such books as New Rules for the New Economy and Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, the Economic World. His latest book, What Technology Wants, explores the nature of what he calls the “technium”, that is, technology itself, considered as one big organism which grows, changes, and definitely wants something.

Colin Marshall talks to literature professor, psychotherapist, and cultural critic Mikita Brottman, author of The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. In the book, Brottman challenges a host of conventional wisdom and received ideas about the value of reading, especially the reading of "high" literature. This mission takes her through examinations of both her own history with reading and the nature of such species of the printed word as the gothic novel, the true-crime paperback, and the celebrity confessional.

Colin Marshall talks to documentary filmmaker Nicholas Sherman, director of Soundtracker: A Portrait of Gordon Hempton. Hempton, one of the world’s best-known field recordists, has dedicated his life to traveling the United States and the world to create “sound portraits” of distinctive places. In Soundtracker, Sherman follows Hempton’s road trip in his 1964 VW bus which becomes a quest to capture the sounds of a train and a songbird together.

Colin Marshall talks to film critic David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and former longtime critic at the Christian Science Monitor. Sterritt’s books, from titles on Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock to more recent ones on B-movies and even the television sitcom The Honeymooners, reveal cinematic interests that stretch from the avant-garde to the long and widely beloved to the ostensibly (but perhaps not actually) disposable.

Colin Marshall talks to John Rabe, longtime public radio personality and host of KPCC’s Off-Ramp, a weekly examination of Southern California and especially Los Angeles. The show’s interviews and field pieces provide, as Rabe puts it, a “pointillist” aural portrait of the city and its surrounding half-state, highlighting some of the most interesting people, places, and things there without attempting the futile task of precisely representing the massive amount and constantly changing composition of Southern California culture.

Colin Marshall talks to Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make magazine and co-founder the zine which has become the massively popular blog Boing Boing. His latest book, Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, is the story of his quest to fully customize his life by building, maintaining, and operating as much as possible with his own hands: hacking his espresso machine, making his own sauerkraut, building cigar-box guitars, brewing his own kombucha, and carving his own spoons, to name only a few of his eclectic set of pursuits.

Colin Marshall talks to blogger, entrepreneur, and liver of the unconventional life Chris Guillebeau. Having written his blog The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel for “a small army of remarkable people” since 2008, he’s now the author of a book which expands on his ideas and experiences, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World.